The Rich And The Profane (13 page)

‘I visited Tony’s office.’ I stopped spooning her soup, in terror. Secret meetings with the Plod? ‘Oh, dear! Is there too much coriander?’

I gaped. ‘You stupid—’ I lowered my voice to a loving whisper as heads turned across the restaurant. ‘You stupid cow. I thought you meant I was in trouble with the police.’ ‘Prince says you can fake anything.’

‘Anything can be faked,’ I said. ‘And I’m good.’

‘Why?’

That stopped me in my tracks. I noshed on, trying to work it out. Yes why, exactly? I’m possibly the best there is. Is it because I’m the most careful? Or is it because I know how the original antiques feel, in this sordid world of money where beauty is judged only in gelt? Or because I feel how the old craftsmen felt at their wondrous labour?

‘Maybe all of those, Lovejoy,’ Florida said, which worried me even more. I hadn’t known I was speaking aloud. Thoughts are private.

‘I forge things to be the same as the original, love.’

‘You just said that.’ Had I? ‘This Nicholas Brown bookcase-desk, Lovejoy. Millions upon millions?’

‘The original went for a king’s ransom in the USA, yes.’

She toyed with a spoon. Waiters sprang forth. She ignored them. They faded, in tears.

She said softly. ‘Darling, I bought Prince out. You’re now my partner. If?’

The main course came, some fish I’d never heard of. The spuds were really small, but there were tons, in butter. I like spinach, asparagus, and those eat-all peas - flat things; you eat them in their swads. I started, mutely apologizing. I can never quite work out what things need apologies. Burps, I can understand. But being hungry? Or wanting a woman? Or hoping she’ll leave her salmon if your own meal isn’t enough?

She hardly ate, but that’s the way women tackle a meal, hoping it’ll evaporate first. I slowed. Something was lacking. Ah, the rest of her sentence.

‘If?’ I prompted.

‘Just “if”, Lovejoy.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe it’s an illegal if.’

‘You mean ...’ She did. She meant what if I made the desk for her and she sold it as genuine.

‘Could that be done, Lovejoy?’

My meal just made it. I stared at her plate, a whale going to waste over there.

‘Don’t you want your salmon?’

‘Sewin, Lovejoy. Please help yourself.’ She made some signal. Waiters zoomed her meal to me. I could have done it in half the time, but didn’t want to spoil her fun, so sat with my hands politely folded. They brought more wine.

‘Selling fakes is done all the time, Florida. There are obstacles.’

Her eyes closed in bliss. I’d only seen her do that in other circumstances. I watched, enthralled. Was it a hint?

‘I haven’t finished yet, love,’ I said. ‘I’ll be quick.’

‘Take your time, darling,’ she said dreamily. ‘Tell me those risks!’

‘They’re not pleasant,’ I warned her. ‘Scary, sometimes.’ ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Lovejoy,’ she said.

Her hand reached under the table and stroked my thigh. I thought, What the hell am I to do now? I’d told the silly bitch I’d hurry up. Without pudding I’d not last the night. Starvation’s no fun.

‘Nark it, dwoorlink.’

‘Eat, Lovejoy. And tell me the risks. I love
risks'

Whatever Florida said, people who really do take risks don’t care for them. I mean, look at me. I used to be careless crossing the road. Now I gape, gander, dither before sprinting for the opposite pavement like a cartoon cat. No, risks are for TV tales. Risks, in short, are for those who never take them.

I told her lovely eyes, ‘Each obstacle represents several risks.’

‘Oooh,’ she moaned softly. ‘Do go on, darling.’

‘In antiques, there are thieves. Criminals. Blaggers. Delf-fers. Every kind of killer you’ve never dreamt of. The thuggery and sheer lethality in the antiques trade make Hollywood smash-trash epics look like Keats poems.’

She whispered, ‘I love it, darling.
Love
it!’

See? They’re different.

‘In the forgery game,’ I went patiently on, ‘are hundreds of thousands of rivals. They’re a homicidal bunch who will stop at nothing.’

‘Stop at nothing!’ She crooned the words. ‘Savages!’ ‘Then there’s security folk, with their own private honchos. They’re supposed to stay within the law.’

‘Yet they don’t?’ Her eyes glittered adoration. I thought, The woman’s off her frigging trolley.

‘Course not. They just seem legal.’

‘Anybody else, darling?’ Her fingers dug into my thigh. ‘Tell me there are more
brutes'.'

‘Yes,’ I said bitterly. ‘There’s a third rotten mob. The Plod.’

She came to, affronted. ‘But Tony’s in my husband’s club. He goes to our church!’

‘He’s the Old Bill, love,’ I said bluntly. ‘So he’s enemy of all he surveys. He surveys me. And, if you come in on the forgery game, you.’

She shivered deliciously. ‘I like the first two groups.’ ‘That’s the cast,’ I said rudely. ‘Now listen close, and I’ll tell you the scene.’

In antiques, there are three options, and no more. It’s a three-by-three problem.

There’s selling, honest or otherwise. There’s robbery, H or O. And there’s forgery, H or O. That’s it. The powers ranged across the board are the mobs, the guardians and the Plod.

Nothing to it. Living in the antiques trade depends on how you permutate the options and the mobs. See? Basically a three-by-three problem - but so is the maddening child’s game of noughts and crosses. Which is why the antiques game has got the globe’s police forces, every known artist living or dead, and every villain, government or businessman on Planet Earth in a flat spin. Now read on.

If you rob a bank, you get shot, arrested, hunted, and maybe end up penniless. But knock on any door, con some widow out of a wardrobe or a piece of jewellery, and maybe you’re an instant millionaire.

Silly legends abound. Like the Raffles tale, which assumes that any art thief is learned, professorial, an expert in Titian, knows the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, has brilliant insight into the art market. It’s all balderdash. Your art thief is like Gesso: quick, slick, and doesn’t know one ‘smudge’, as they call paintings, from another. He’s just told where to go, which wall it’s on, what alarms are installed, and which roadside caff to drop the ‘dodge’, i.e. the stolen antiques. It could be a roll of wallpaper for all he cares. Like the Longleat robbery in Wiltshire, when they nicked the Titian - what was it, eighty-eight seconds for the entire crash-smash-dash?

There’s another daft assumption, that famous paintings can’t be sold because ‘everybody will know it’s the famous stolen Goya, Turner, Constable’. Wrong. It’s barmy to think that crooks won’t know what to do with a famous painting/ vase/Queen Anne desk/necklace just because it once was legitimately owned by somebody else. They’ll sell it. Or barter it. Or hock it to some fence. Or use it as security for a loan. Or swap it for a house, yacht, even a lifelong pension paid monthly on the nail. In other words, use it just as you would if you’d been (legitimately!) left it in your great-uncle’s will.

‘Then there’s the ALR,’ I continued to Florida.

The Art Loss Register belongs to the insurance companies. Instead of working in modest sheds in poor disadvantaged Salford, the ALR has built itself expensive glamorous offices, centrally heated and air-conditioned, near Buckingham Palace - all at clients’ expense. There, some 100,000 stolen antiques are on computer file, with 20,000 more cascading on every year. The insurance companies say, eyes raised heavenwards in gratitude, that they finance the ALR themselves. They don’t, of course. They charge you for each antique you tell them has been stolen. Then they have the nerve to charge you a percentage if the antique is recovered with their help (so what the heck did you pay the ALR for in the first place?). They have offices in New York and Australia, for staff holidays.

Antiques trade newspapers have ‘Stolen’ sections, more for general gloom than anything, and some run data bases, just to make antique dealers suicidal. They give gossipers something to gossip about, nothing more.

That’s about it. Oh, almost forgot. The police.

Scotland Yard’s mighty Art and Antiques Squad (all four police officers), now merged with the Flying Squads, has lately become part of the new Organized Crime Group, OCG. They’ve not yet spotted the embarrassing ambiguity in this title. The Specialist Operations - like art and antiques - are called Focus Units and are all in one pool. Good, eh? Not really, no. For when you have so many names for so many units/groups/echelons/whatevers the soap clogs the funnel, if you follow, and nothing flows the way it should. Nowt more to say about them, except that there are fifty-five whole police forces in this creaking old kingdom of ours, and only eight have as much as even one single art/antiques bobby on their staff.

The final laugh at all this ineptitude? It’s the Scotland Yard Art and Antiques Squad’s very special, very secret and wondrously superb ACIS. It’s a brilliant data base, been designed by deep-thinking computer criminological taxonomists for national use! Really super-great. ACIS stands for Article Classification and Identification System, would you believe?

It gives everything about stolen antiques - any fingerprints, shreds of wool from burglars’ jackets, records of suspects, photographs from security cameras, all that jazz. Essential, vital, eh?

Well, not so’s you’d notice. Because ACIS isn’t on-line for the whole country. Police forces all over the kingdom may - if they’ve a mind - send information to it. Most, though, can’t be bothered, being far too busy, you see. So there’s this great computer weapon, built, installed, created, to be ignored by the majority of those who could, if moved to consult and use this engine, actually do something effective. Thank goodness, says I, because the Scotland Yard A & A Squad - as people still call it - isn’t mainly there to investigate particular thefts.

‘That’s about it,’ I concluded. I’d had a date pudding by then, keeping the wolf from the door. ‘Except for attitude.’ ‘Whose?’ She was in a drifty languid mood, almost as if we’d made something more passionate than talk. ‘Yours?’ ‘No. The police’s. The one thing they hate, all of them, is being made agents for the insurance companies. Documenting road accidents, making detailed records of stolen antiques, they see as being unpaid insurance clerks.’ I smiled. ‘They skimp it every chance they get.’

‘Lovejoy,’ Florida said huskily, ‘you’re a vicious beast of prey.’

‘Eh?’ I said. Some new tack?

She ground out her cigarette and rose. ‘Come, darling. Home time.’

‘Oh.’ Not a new tack at all. A very old one.

She left without signing anything, without paying. I thought only queens did that. In her Rolls, she told me that she’d joined Lovejoy Antiques, Inc.

‘What for?’ Maybe we should have gone to Woody’s nosh bar? She likes to go sordid.

She laughed, carolling, before she sobered. ‘Lovejoy. You really understand nothing. To
rob
, of course. What else?’

In the night, Florida kipping beside me with that fragile snore all women develop about two hours after midnight, I suddenly remembered the word I’d heard one of Charley’s men say as I’d said my so-long. It was Pral, my fellow exprisoner. They’d all said their
‘Rak tute',
take care, after me. But Pral shook his head and said,
‘Dinnelo.’
It means somebody touched in the head, even sinister. It’s also their word for a fool.

He meant me.

F
lorida left about
four o’clock. As I put the robin’s cheese and the hedgehog’s saucer out I tried to remember exactly what I’d agreed. She’d insisted it was really important. Connie, from down the lane, drops in and leaves some unspeakable meat for Crispin. I don’t look at it, just leave out a clean saucer every day. Where was I? Florida, leaving.

She’d pressed her face down on mine, me hoping she’d get gone so I could kip. I felt worn out.

‘It’s agreed, then, darling? I’ll be late tonight. Be ready.’

I hate women telling me what I’ve agreed. It’s a kind of polarized untruth.

Alone, I bathed. Florida wrinkles her nose up at everything in the cottage. She won’t eat here, won’t have a bath, only goes to the loo on sufferance, then complains about draughts, how I should mend the broken window - I’d once had to climb in because of bailiffs. She has no idea. At the start of our ‘relationship’ - God, how I hate that word; we use it only when we’ve really got none - Florida upbraided me because I didn’t have a single antique in the place.

She’d stunned me by saying, ‘I’d have thought you’d have a Sheraton bureau, Lovejoy.’ See what I mean? Florida, like all the rich, thinks profanity.

What had I agreed?

There were windfalls in the garden. I washed and sliced some apples, and fried them with bread. I’d washed my only other shirt. It was still damp and I’d no way to iron it, but put it on, shivering. If ever I get rich, I’ll have dry clean clothes every morning and somebody to rub my nape when I’m tired. Is there that sort of heaven out there? I combed my hair with a fragment of green plastic comb, then set out into a bright new day. I shouldn’t have. The robin ballocks me for not digging. I’ve got nothing against worms and told the cheeky little sod that, but he only chirped, angrier still. Omens were everywhere.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered much with Leach’s Auction Emporium at Little Henny, but it was the only normal one until weekend. I felt I’d been among troglodytes and asteroids for days. You can feel out of sorts for no reason. And I’d no barker, except the useless Freddy Foxheath. And where was he?

The auction was due to begin when I stepped off the Mount Bures bus. It’s three miles. Everywhere’s uphill when you’re in a hurry, so I was puffed out when I tottered in, Florida still making her nocturnal presence felt.

The lads were in. Big Frank from Suffolk - his home territory, this - was being modestly congratulated on his new wife. I waved, grinned, gave him the thumbs up. He changes wives every tide. I’m exaggerating, but it seems so, the rate he goes on. Big Frank has strong views on alimony. He’s currently suing his seventh ex-wife for maintenance. The week before, he’d tried to get me to sign a petition saying he was destitute - he was giving me a lift in his new Lagonda at the time. Margaret Dainty was also in, with Liz Sandwell. The former - and the latter too - is my favourite. She limps, has a husband vaguely around, but you don’t ask. She is an older, wiser woman, and my friend. I’m not sure if I’m hers. I try.