The Vatican Rip

CHAPTER 4

After the previous day's examination Miss McKim had given a little teaparty. All eighty of us stood about with little fingers hooking air, and trying to look as though we were in a rave-up. Miss McKim made a tearful little speech. We gave her a bunch of flowers and a book token. Hyacinth shook me by giving me a ruler which she had decorated in oils. In return I gave her a hair slide of brilliants in a bow-shaped setting, only 1870-ish but quite bonny. In the final farewells she whispered to me that she quite understood about Mrs Peck and me because after all it was Only Natural These Days, though I should be On My Guard Against Duplicity. I wish now I'd listened to her warning. She kissed my ear, her specs practically gouging my right eye out. Everybody shook hands with everybody while Jingo Hardy boomed a last speech full of jokes in bits of everybody's languages so we all understood two per cent. Old Fotheringay creaked out a farewell poem in Latin modelled on Catullus, while we applauded at the wrong place. We'd all clubbed for theatre tickets to give all our teachers. Then it was break up and goodbye.

* * *

Next day with Maria gone by eleven the cottage felt bare. It only looked the same. For a while I hung about and walked the garden, gave the robin his cheese and all that.

There was no trace of her anywhere. She might simply never have been there at all, never crooked her fingers in midair when we made love, never called exhortations against my neck, never uttered hoarse cries for the light to be switched on… Finally I couldn't stand it and walked through the drizzle to the pub.

Tinker brought the suitcase to the Queen's Head about one o'clock. It was there that I was called to the phone in the saloon bar and heard Arcellano's voice telling me he would be at the cottage by six. From the background noise I guessed he was at some airport or other.

My money used to come in an envelope simply marked 'Lovejoy'. I still had my final envelope, and snared the gelt with Tinker. I told him I'd be away a few days.

'With that bird with the big bristols, Lovejoy?' He nearly fell into his pint at this witticism, his only joke.

'Very droll, Tinker,' I said. 'Remember. While I'm away buy nothing. Just look out for musical boxes, William IV jewellery and anything that even smells of Nabeshima porcelain.'

'Christ.'

'And try for commemorative plaques, especially any with town names. There's word of some being unloaded in Coggeshall soon. And dancing automata. You'll find two already at Southwold, but don't touch them because they're crap. Somebody's subbed them.'

'Bastards.' Tinker spoke with feeling. 'Subbing' means to replace a few parts of an antique with modern bits. Do it often enough and you have all the spare bits for a genuine original. It is done most often—for this read always—in the field of watches and clocks, automata, early scientific instruments, and early printed books where it's done by dissecting pages. Dealers call this illegal process 'twinning', though that's illogical because you finish up with 'antiques' of different ages.

I drew breath to tell Tinker to keep an eye out for a rumoured Brescian miquelet-flint pistol but that made me think of modern weapons which made me think of revolvers which made me think of Arcellano so I shut up.

Tinker got the vibes. 'Want me to come wiv yer, Lovejoy?'

'No,' I said. 'I'm in enough trouble.'

He would have, though, if I said yes. What he didn't know was that he and the rest—

and maybe Maria too by now—were hostages.

* * *

'It's in the Vatican,' Arcellano told me, tilting back on the chair legs. He looked bigger than ever. His two animals were outside in his car. I'd insisted on that and to my astonishment he had agreed. It didn't make me feel any more secure.

'Whereabouts?'

'No idea. Finding out's your job. Listen, Lovejoy—'

'No,' I told him wearily. ' You listen, Mr Arcellano. You want me to pull a rip. You'll blame my friends if I don't. Okay, I'll do it. But what if I rip the wrong antique?'

'You got a photo.'

'It's useless. There might be ten, a dozen tables like this.'

The photograph had been taken by an instant camera, by someone riding a camel to judge from the blur. The lighting was abysmal, the angle atrocious. I'm no photographer but I could still have done better with a cardboard shoebox and a pin.

The table had the look of a rent table, standing against a wall by a window. It could have been anywhere on earth.

'What do I do when I nick it?'

He did his smile thing. 'You'll have a contact. Marcello. And you will obey the orders to the letter.' He was smoking a cigarette and gazed reflectively at the glowing tip with his humourless smile. 'And you will never use names. Not mine, not yours. I'll hold you to that, Lovejoy.'

He narked me. Threats are all very well, but it was me taking the risks. This vagueness just would not do. 'Do I get any help?'

He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. 'Not much. Remember you were carefully selected for the task because of your undoubted talents.'

Well, I'd tried. 'Which leaves the small matter of payment. I've no money to fly there.'

'So it does.' He rose and stubbed out his cigarette right on the surface of my wobbly table, the pig. Still, it wasn't on me this time. He took back the photo, careful man that he was. 'The travel agent in town has your tickets and flight bookings. You go tomorrow night.' He dropped a bundle of notes on the table. 'That will give you luxury for five days, or survival for twenty. Choose.'

'What if—?'

'No more questions, Lovejoy.' He moved to the hall. Mechanically he raised a hand to stop me switching the light on. A very cautious man, every gesture the subject of detailed planning. 'You have a job to do. Do it.'

'And this Marcello pays me?'

'You get ten times the going commerical value of the antique in question, plus expenses. And a basic weekly rate averaged on your past four weeks.'

I worked that out. As far as I was concerned it was a relative fortune. Once I'd pulled the rip I'd be able to eat until Christmas and still have enough left to give a turkey the fright of its life.

I stood at the door of the cottage and watched his big Merc leave. One of his nerks, a gross unpleasing man with the pockmarked face of a lunar landscape and bad teeth, wound down his window and bawled, 'Good luck—you'll need it!' I said nothing back because I could hear somebody laughing. The laughter continued until the closing windows sliced it off. Idly I wondered what the joke was. It couldn't have been Arcellano laughing because clearly he'd never learned how. I went inside to pack.