The Sleepers of Erin Read online

  ‘Like what, love?’ I asked blankly. She tugged at her hair in exasperation and I saw she wore a hooped thing to keep her hair in place, like the twins. It was gilt plastic. ‘You mean your headband?’

  ‘Alice band,’ she said with scorn.

  ‘Beautiful, love. Really great.’ I handed her over to her breathless mother, while Sinead was being all amused nearby. ‘. . . and a piece of an abacus, only seventeenth century but not to be sneezed at, and . . .’

  ‘Go on,’ Sinead was saying. ‘I’m loving all this.’

  ‘. . . and . . .’ I looked after the little girl. Then at the torc case. Then after the little girl. Then back.

  ‘What is it, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, third go, after a lot of throat clearing.

  But it was very definitely something. It’s called knowledge. I knew why we were all here in Ireland, why Joxer had been crisped. And about that phoney Slav they called Kurak – no more Slav than me. And why the Heindricks wanted – needed – me. Nobody else would do. No wonder Lena Heindrick had pulled out all the stops. No wonder. The hooped Alice band. The hoop of iron in the ash of Joxer’s shed. And the hoops of gold torcs in the cases around us.

  ‘No bloody wonder what, Lovejoy?’ Sinead was asking.

  ‘Eh?’ I must have spoken aloud. ‘Oh, nothing, love. Look. Can you give me a lift?’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘You drive. I’ll direct,’ I said, pushing through towards the exit and leaving her to hurry after.

  But I meant Kilfinney.

  Chapter 15

  Sinead’s car was gone. Nicked. I ask you.

  Broad daylight, peaceful old Dublin town, people everywhere, and Sinead’s car lifted by some drunken nerk. While Sinead rang the Gardai I perched on the wall outside and looked amiably about. Nobody I recognized, no big black Daimlers, and no sexy over-perfumed ladies with slightly foreign accents.

  While Sinead marched out to confront the Garda who motored up and resignedly let himself be harangued repeatedly – women love saying the same thing; they think it’s proof – I let my own mind drift back to the central problem of Kilfinney, poor dead Joxer, and now this business of Sinead’s stolen car. We were stuck, stymied. With the car-hire firms under the eagle eye of Kurak the phoney Slav, and possibly with Jason’s military brain ticking menacingly this side of the Irish Sea, a quick unperceived dash to Kilfinney was out of the question. The only good thing was that Lena and her strong-arm squad couldn’t simply zoom on ahead and hang about till I came, because Lena had no way of guessing I knew that Kilfinney was the place she had rigged the scam. My main aim, now I’d rumbled her, was not to let on. Uneasily I wondered if it might be my one card.

  Sinead was heatedly winding up her statement to the weary bobby. I felt sorry for him, but telling the truth would have made him wearier still so I said nothing. Sinead did a big finish, bleating about ruffians and Making Streets Safe For Ordinary Folk. Sundry aged birds nodded and tutted indignantly. One even joined in – exactly the same thing had happened three years ago to her sister’s boy’s motor over in Sligo, and what were the Gardai doing about that she wanted to know.

  I just sat and thought about Kurak cracking his fingers down in that courtyard.

  If I hadn’t been so slow I’d have sussed him long before. What was it he’d answered, driving me home from hospital? ‘Yooorr serffint fur life, modom.’ Yes, Kurak was your actual dyed-in-the-wool grovelling serf – but he’d said lo-iff. Only Cockneys can make two syllables out of a miserable titch of a word like life. I’d even thought of Keats misspelling that sea-spray bit. The smile started on my face, gradually creeping into the corners of me, then splitting into a wide hundred-per-cent grin. And sweat started trickling down my neck, but it was only relief. My whole body sagged. Suddenly I was on holiday, chirpy, restful and happy all at one go. Because I knew Kurak. He was that big knuckle-cracking Cockney bloke who now lived in the Midlands. And it was Northampton, that auction where he’d pulled the sleeper trick time after time. I remembered now.

  More than that, I even remembered who he really was. Maybe not his name, but I knew him right enough. They call him the Sleeper Man. Let me explain about sleepers for a second.

  * * *

  Antiques are everywhere, bliss-giving and beautiful. Right? But like I was telling Sinead in the museum, not all see the light of day. Some do, like the poet John Donne’s painting by Titian now in the undeserving Louvre, but some don’t ever turn up. Others, such as the vast antique wealth of the Mary Rose warship and Jawa the lost city of Jordan’s Black Desert, are still being discovered piecemeal. Still more get themselves mislaid, buried, hidden, nicked, pillaged, melted down, dismantled, lent, deposited in vaults, pawned, worn away, lost, horridly vandalized, horribly mended by bungling amateurs (or, worse, restored by alleged experts), purchased by city museums to lie in storerooms so nobody can enjoy them ever again, simply forgotten about, or sold to anonymous purchasers (such as our railways pension fund who secretly bought all that Regency English silver in 1979 as an inflation-proof investment, the callous sods). Or they get bank-vaulted as appreciating tax-free nest-eggs by stony-hearted cynics utterly incapable of love of any kind.

  Or they ‘go to sleep’. In the trade we call these antiques ‘sleepers’.

  Basically, a sleeper is an antique, usually of considerable value, which is not in general circulation among collectors and dealers. Oho, you say, immediately thinking of your Auntie Elsie’s valuable George III commode which is about to shatter all Christie’s records, oho. Your commode’s a sleeper, and it’s arrival will rock the London antiques world to its foundations. Well, not really. Your piece of furniture is really great, I’m sure, but it doesn’t merit the appellation of ‘sleeper’. There’s one important characteristic which a sleeper has above all others: its existence is deliberately concealed. In short, it is hidden from the cruel gazes and the jingling coins of the antique-dealer fraternity. And your Auntie Elsie’s commode is up for sale, remember? In fact, I’ll bet you are screaming about it from the rooftops, pleading with the auctioneer to advertise it for all he is worth. No, it’s no sleeper.

  A sleeper is the treasure of the twilight zone. It is a legend in its lifetime, an ephemeral antique which slips out of sight and vanishes from public attention like Cinders at the Ball. One minute listed in the cold light of somebody’s catalogue, and the next sinking into obscurity with only the odd rumour to mark its passing. Vague legends abound everywhere in the antiques game, of sleepers rare and priceless beyond measure. They exist in every country. A sleeper can be anything – coins, brooches, jewels, earrings, a valuable book, a miniature portrait. And there have been some notable near-priceless sleepers. But this hardly matters a damn unless you know where the sleeper is among the world’s collections of ordinary run-of-the-mill antiques, junk copies, rubbish, forgeries, and laid-aside heaps of dross. And if you don’t, then you’re the same as the poor rest of us, living in hopes, right?

  Yet one flaw remains in all this enduring ignorance. If you only pretend you know where a sleeper is, you have a very, very special kind of situation.

  You have what people call the con trick.

  I rose, mingled absently with the mob for a second, saw Shinny was still laying the law down, and slid across the road into a side street.

  Then I ran like hell.

  Chapter 16

  She was a long time coming, but I didn’t care. Women, basically unreliable, have one enduring characteristic: their conduct narks you endlessly, year after year. Irritating a bloke’s their natural pastime. Yet a woman’s a sort of necessary gout, especially if you’re an itinerant antique dealer, temporarily broke in a strange country, and on the run from one – or was it two? – teams of rich homicidal fraudulent con-merchants. I had a headache.

  The hall turned out to be a grand old place, everything I’d hoped. And a bonus, it was plonk in the middle of safe old Trinity College’s grassy swards. The library was so worn and real th
at the coldest heart would have responded to the loving warmth of those emanations. Not just the walls and the books, but the flooring and the ceiling – and the Book of Kells.

  One reason there’s so much crap about nowadays masquerading as ‘good’ antiques is that most folk are too silly for words, too greedy, and bone idle. I mean, go and look at the blindingly clever artistry of the Book of Kells (it’s actually in four ‘books’, but they put two on show usually) and you begin to appreciate the scale of the manuscript geniuses who created such illumination. Do the same with the British Museum’s Lindisfarne Gospels. Then try to copy a single inch of a single page of the complex decoration of either, and your education’s under way. (If you can’t afford the trip to see the real things, a postcard repro teaches you the same lesson.) That little try-out will only take ten minutes, but after it you will be ten – twenty – times harder to fool when some dealer offers you a ‘genuine mediaeval French page manuscript from a devotional Missal . . .’ It’s a very gratifying feeling to be able to look a fraud in the eye and say sweetly, ‘Thank you. It’s lovely. But do you have any genuine antiques, please . . . ?’ See what I mean about being bone idle? A little effort, and you get the true feeling of an antique. That feeling is love, true love.

  Apart from a couple of students reading on a central bench, an elderly geezer creaking among high shelves on a library ladder, and a pair of ladies blinking at such accumulated learning, the place was empty. I stood humbly before the open Book in its glass case, bathing in the unseen radiance of such a treasure.

  You’ve seen some oafs pretending they’re antique porcelain experts, by running a lead pencil round the rims of cups and saucers? Well, ask them why they do it and they’ll have no idea. Oh, they’ll say something like: ‘If it leaves a pencil mark, it’s genuine,’ which sounds okay and deeply knowledgeable until you demand, ‘Genuine what?’ and they’re stuck. As I say, too silly for words. The pencil-on-the-rim legend actually arose from the writings of a wise old Victorian character called Litchfield, who advocated this as a test for spotting Old Worcester porcelain, because its glaze often (not always!) shrank inside such rims leaving a faint crack. (Tip: let other people play at being experts. You just remember that a positive pencil test means only maybe; a negative pencil test does not necessarily mean no. It’s only one poor test, after all.) Yet even genuine Old Worcester doesn’t mean you should fumble for your cheque-book and pay through the nose. Much beautifully sparse Old Worcester was elaborately repainted and refired in Victorian days. The best scoundrel – and I therefore mean the worst – was Cavello, Italian chef to the Marquis d’Azeglio, Italy’s London Minister. Nowadays dealers and collectors get taken in and pay highest prices, but don’t you dare do anything so daft. Cavello’s Worcester pieces give themselves away by thicker, clumsier decoration, and his colours are more opaque. All it takes is one careful look at one virgin piece and a suspicious mind. The price should be about a third of the un-repainted porcelain . . . Somebody touched my arm and I leapt a mile.

  ‘What were you smiling at, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Er, hello.’ I clutched on to the glass casing to recover. My one and only helper had arrived, breathless, bonny and a bloody nuisance. Just thinking,’ I croaked. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘You saw me, darling. That stupid Garda.’ She linked my arm. ‘Then I hunted for you high and low till I remembered you saying to meet here if we got separated. Why did you vanish?’

  ‘They nicked your car so we’d be stuck, easier to follow. At least we’ve shaken them off now.’

  She was pulling me briskly towards the exit. I tried to drag back. ‘It’s closing time, Lovejoy,’ she pointed out. ‘We have to go.’

  Sure enough, the usher was edging people along the library. I hate women who’re logical. Things are bad enough normally.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, smiling. ‘I got Gerald.’

  ‘Erm, look, Shinny.’ More help was the last thing I wanted. I still hadn’t adjusted to her tagging along. She gave me a lovely beaming blast from her pale grey-blues.

  ‘Gerald’s different, Lovejoy.’ Her voice had that quality.

  I thought bitterly, oho, so we love this Gerald character, do we? Great. That’s what I needed. One more complication.

  Gerald was different all right. I’d never seen anything like him. Thin as a lath, bespectacled, bad teeth, and the longest bloke you could imagine. Long as opposed to tall because he had all these unexpected joints. Even as we approached along the pavement he was folding and bending in odd places for nothing. He seemed all hinges. I couldn’t help staring. He was my own age, and twice as shopworn as I felt.

  ‘Ah, you’ll be Sinead’s feller,’ he exclaimed, extending an arm like unfolding trelliswork.

  ‘Lovejoy. Er, hello, Gerald.’ We shook.

  A bus honked, its way blocked. Somebody had dumped a derelict van outside the college’s main gateway. Completely unconcerned, Gerald led the way to this decrepit horror and climbed into the driving seat, which was a wickerwork laundry basket nailed in place. There was nowhere for me or Shinny except a small mound of wood and some sacks. Gerald folded behind the wheel like some fantastic stick insect, all limbs and angles.

  ‘Will you be moving this wreck now?’ The bus driver descended and yelled in at us through where our rear doors should have been. An interested crowd was assembling. Cars were queuing.

  ‘Sure, how could I till I get the thing moving?’ Gerald bawled over his shoulder. We pulled away, me and Shinny jerking and rattling like peas in a drum. The bus driver shouted something after us, probably as logical as Gerald.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, darling,’ Shinny called into my ear above the din. ‘Everything will be fine now Gerald’s with us.’

  I managed a weak grin. I’d been hoping to flit silently out of Dublin like a night-stealing Arab. Instead I was leaving the city with all the stealth of a carnival, in the loudest, most open-air, least unnoticeable and most police-prone vehicle on the bloody island. Still, Shinny always seemed to know what to do. Hopefully, I wondered if Gerald was some secret Bond-type agent, but the wretched man dashed my hopes. He bawled questions to me over the van’s incredible din, wanting to know all about me, which was fair enough. The one that got me was what I did for a living.

  ‘Antique dealer,’ I yelled, clinging to Sinead.

  ‘Are you, now! I’m a poet.’ He swerved us illegally along a one-way street, tutting irritably when two cars tried to make it in the legitimate direction. One car panicked and hit a wrought-iron railing on the pavement. ‘Ah,’ Gerald enthused, unabashed, ‘isn’t haste the terrible modern disease! Where to, Lovejoy?’

  ‘North, please.’ Great. We need the SAS and get a lunatic bloody poet.

  ‘Anywhere particular you’ll be wantin’?’

  ‘Not too far north, please.’ Quickly reverting to my earlier plan, I realized I’d need to be near a sizeable town to ditch Gerald and Shinny. Until nightfall I was lumbered.

  ‘Ah. The old backtrack, is it!’ He flailed the van in a clumsy arc and bumped us across a traffic island while tyres screeched all around.

  Shinny cupped her hands and yelled, ‘Gerald. Somewhere nearby. Lovejoy’s all in.’

  ‘Caitlin’s,’ he called back. ‘Yes, Drogheda’s the place right enough!’

  My mouth into Shinny’s hair for secrecy, I asked, ‘What good’s a poet?’

  ‘You’ll see, Lovejoy.’ She turned and held me steady. It seemed natural for my head to fall on her shoulder.

  ‘Will you be marrying me this year, Sinead?’ Gerald bawled as the road straightened into the main N1.

  ‘Oh, whist, you terrible man.’

  ‘Poets pay no tax on the Auld Green Sod, Sinead.’

  ‘Nor have two pennies to rub together!’ Shinny gave back. My eyes had closed but I didn’t care. It was all too complicated. With the rain coming on and trickling down the van’s rusty interior, and Gerald’s bald tyres slithering us uncertainly northwards, there
was no chance of us reaching anywhere so what the hell.

  The world began to fade, taking that horrible cacophony of Gerald’s van with it.

  That night I slept a couple of hours with a strange lady called Eileen, after proper introduction of course. Or, rather, she slept with me. She was about eighteen months, and after nosh swarmed on to me as I dozed by the fire in Caitlin’s little house. Her bare feet were perishing. Despite her lack of years, she had that female knack of winkling her coldest extremities on to your belly and murmuring gratification while you gasp at the shock. I should have expected it. I’ve had a lifetime of women and never met a warm one yet.

  Caitlin was a vague relative of Gerald’s and Sinead’s and had that gorgeous Irish combination of gleaming jet hair and royal-blue eyes. She looked me up and down candidly, saying to Sinead, ‘Don’t you feed the man, for God’s sake?’ but it was only women getting at each other and Sinead sharply told her chance’d be a fine thing. The two of them had a high old time while they got some grub, talking of families and exclaiming at who’d moved where. Caitlin’s husband Donald, a pleasant grinning red-headed bloke who mended motors for a living, rigged up an outside lamp to have a crack at Gerald’s uncontrollable van. Gerald spent a sad hour discovering I knew next to nothing about the Movement poets, but Shinny rescued my reputation.

  ‘For heaven’s sake say you like Milton,’ she said sweetly, ‘or Lovejoy throws a car in your window.’

  ‘You did that?’ Gerald said in awe. ‘I saw it!’ His face broke into smiles of delight. ‘And no more than you’d deserve,’ he cried, opening some bottles of that horrible black stout.

  Caitlin and Shinny gave us one of those hyperfilling Irish meals with practically no veg, and tea strong enough to set. Then I joined the two old folk round the fire. Caitlin’s dad was disappointed I’d not fought in his regiment at the Second El Alamein, though I wasn’t, and Grandma was astonished I did not have the latest lowdown on our politicians’ secret home lives. She made up for my ignorance by giving me intimate family details of the Taoiseach, their prime minister. Dozily, I kept asking how you spelled local words, but in the end gave it up. Ireland’s the only place on earth with spelling worse than mine.