The Lies of Fair Ladies Page 13
I'd had to borrow a bit from her to pay Delia his earnest penny. Uncomfortably I totted up what Luna had paid for lately, and gulped. I always cut corners adding up what I owe.
“I’m sorry, Luna.” I was so sincere. If I’d not had to flog my phono I’d have put on hearts-and-flowers. "I honestly am. I'm not usually like this."
"That's not it, Lovejoy." Then why mention money? To lead into obligations, that's why. “I just don't know where I stand."
And miraculously the door thumped. I leapt, joyously reprieved, to welcome Big Frank. He entered, darkening the world for miles. Luna gaped, never having seen his like before in her august circles. First Gunge, our gungey giant. Now a clean one. Thank God he was smiling. I introduced them.
"Oh, you're the gentleman on the phone!" Luna was so pleased. "Miss Jenny was lovely. We had such a lovely chat. I'm so glad you and she—" She halted, stricken. She wasn't supposed to be glad about Big Frank's impending marriage, because he was still wed to Mrs. Big Frank.
"Thanks, missus. Silver, Lovejoy?"
"None, Frank." He sat on the divan so he could adjust his head to the vertical. Normally he stoops anywhere within twenty feet of any doorway.
"Lovejoy. I want you to help Jenny."
"What with, Frank?" More help? From me again?
Abruptly I too wanted to sit on the divan of a sudden, but there was no room. Already Luna was tilted high in the air from Big Frank's weight compressing the universe.
"She's got something really big on. I mean, really ginormous. Bigger than anything in the Eastern Hundreds, Lovejoy."
Another? My cottage was headache city. I've already explained that East Anglia isn't given to mega blitzes, nor scams of international proportions. We're more your actual one-offs. I cast about for the kettle, finally gestured for Luna to brew up. She smiled happily, as Big Frank gave it out.
"Lovejoy, she won't even tell me."
"She won't tell you? But you're going to be . . ."
"Husband and wife." The great goon's face melted into soppy fondness. If I hadn't been his best man so often, my own face would have melted too. "But she's right, Lovejoy. The sums are fantastic."
"Fantastic?" Now I really did slide down the wall and sit on the bare flagged floor. "Look, Frank ..."
The best dance of all, the exit shuffle. If it had been one silver chalice, fine. Big Frank could at least recognize some makers' marks, and knew to assay silver content. But that had taken him thirty years to learn, from birth. The silly loon was so infatuated with his Jenny that he was willing to step outside silver to serve her whim.
"No, Lovejoy. Straight up. She only needs a few more days, and it'll be England.'' He beamed at the image. "Then we can spend forever on antique Georgian silver."
His eyes glazed at the very thought of unimagined paradise. "England" is antique dealers' slang for perfection, the triumph of profit. Comes from the sailors' cry when leaving foreign ports on the journey homeward: "England, home, and beauty!" Meanwhile, my mind had gone dreamy too, wondering what on earth was possessing us all. Scams so huge, with money so vast, that the national debt would shrink if the chancellor could get his hands on the wadge? Barmy.
Luna brewed up while Big Frank and I thought our mutually excluding thoughts. I was helping Connie, from past love. I was also helping Prammie Joe, if you can call it that, from sorrow. I had the feeling somehow that I should be helping Rye Benedict— correction, please. Delete that. I ought to be helping myself. It was me that was broke, not his load of deadlegs.
"Help how, exactly, Frank?" As if I didn't know.
"Lovejoy. How many divvies are there?"
"Me," I said miserably. "I did hear there's an old dear near Saxmundham for porcelain—"
"One, Lovejoy." Frank's voice is so deep you sometimes have to actively listen out for it, like the deepest bell. "You. I want you to be there when Jenny accepts the antiques."
Plural. Plenty, again? "Frank. I'm pushed at the minute. How about a dollop broker? I've heard there's a really superb one around these days."
"Yes, she's great. Jenny'll be using her."
She again. Same one. Sooner or later I was going to have to think about this mysterious person, and tell Luna what a dollop broker actually is.
"If your Jenny's working up a dollop, and you know a dollop broker, then where's your problem, Frank?"
He stared at me sadly. "Tracing the seller, once the money's been handed over. That's the problem, Lovejoy."
So the vendor was foreign? Crikey. Jenny, soon to be his wife, wouldn't even tell him who was going to sell her all these valuable antiques? For a brief instant, as Luna dished out tea and biscuits, something occurred to me. Something wrong, but notably right, if you follow. I tried to hang on to it, but it was gone.
"It's sensible, Lovejoy.” I stood, to look out of the window and think a bit. Frank rumbled on. "I mean, who tells anybody?"
Except a fiancée wasn't just anybody, if she was going to be his eighth—ninth?—wife. Maybe that feeling I’d nearly had was the dawning realization that I was in greater demand than I’d ever been.
"About the old soldi, Lovejoy. I'll see you get a fee."
"You will?" Big Frank is quite a good payer. But never up front.
"Up front," he promised. Queererer and queererer.
"Right, Frank. I'll go and see her. If it's okay?"
"Any time, Lovejoy." He looked down into his tea and didn't grimace. "Your bird here will show you the way."
He left, politely thanking Luna for the hospitality. Which would have left me food for thought, if I hadn't been thinking what it was I’d almost been thinking about.
"A dollop broker?"
We were going to nosh in a restaurant, to celebrate Luna's first ever sale of an antique at auction. She'd got word from Wittwoode's that she'd made a week's wage on the bubby pot. Of course I threatened fire and slaughter if the lads dared to ring it. They'd thoughtfully stayed out of the bidding. I didn't tell Luna that I'd asked Jeff to bid it up. I didn't want Luna disappointed, first time out.
"Is it an antique dealer, Lovejoy?"
That was a laugh. "No, love. All they do is hide stuff for you."
"Hide? Not sell?"
"It works like this, love. If you're going to jail, or having to do a runner—that is, leave the country for any reason—you use a dollop broker."
It was dark. We were under the station bridge, queueing at the traffic lights so commuters could come staggering off the train in droves.
"There is none in the phone book." So she'd looked.
"They aren't legal, love. They store stolen antiques, any quantity, for you to recover when it's safe for you to come home. Or out of clink. Or when the statute of limitations has expired—in Japan it's only a short time. Give you an example. You pinch paintings, say, from France, anywhere. You give your dollop of stolen paintings to a dollop broker. He guards them until you come for them, maybe years hence, and gives you them back, against a fee. You take your stolen paintings, whatever, to Japan. And sell them."
"Why don't you hoard them yourself, where it's safe?"
I stared. Why can't people see the obvious?
"Well,” I explained as we started to move on the green. "Just think. You're inside jail, ten years for robbery, right? You have dolloped up—that is, given into the hands of a dollop broker—your loot, your valuable sculptures nicked from the British Museum. If you'd hidden them in Friday Wood, you'd have to wait until you got out. You'd be old, right? But with the loot in the hands of a dollop broker, why, you can sell the loot. To any other crook you wish to name. Bill of sale and everything. The loot is described somewhat differently than if they were coming up, say, at Christie's—in some code you've previously agreed with the dollop broker."
She drew breath as we started up North Hill. "Don't," I said quickly to forestall her saying but that was illegal. "It's done everywhere. All you need is to identify yourself to the dollop broker and he'll surrender your goods—"
"Until they get to Japan, or some other country where the statute of limitations is short. Then it's all legit. Out come your stolen Monets, Rembrandts, and you invest in Switzerland's holier-than-thou banking system, with the other mafiosi."
"I've never heard the like."
"You did it yourself, love," I pointed out quietly. "Today. You bought a bubby pot, a very valuable item, from an unsuspecting teacher for a fifth of the value it realized at auction."
"But that was legal, and fair, Lovejoy." She gave the woman's too-patient smile.
She was proud of that, but somebody had to tell her. "Will you send him the balance?"
"Of course not!" she cried indignantly, swerving in the traffic at the fork. "You're talking of hiding, well, stolen goods! Crime's ill-gotten gains!"
"If you say so."
Truce time. We arrived at the restaurant in the friendly silence armistice brings. But to me there's not all that much difference. I mean, on the one hand a bloke thieves some precious work of art and stashes it away in a dollop broker's shed or wherever, maybe gets caught, does his time. He then comes out and shifts it overseas and sells on the open market, possibly even at a famous multinational auctioneer's. And retires to blondes and a casino. On the other, you give a person a pittance, hoof it with his antique and keep the profit. The only difference is that one defrauds you of all the antique's value, and the other denies most of it. It's the sort of scandal everybody dreams of, you and me, kings and presidents. Oh, and antique dealers.
We dined, had a lovely candle-lit supper, becoming friendly and apologetic as the hours turned quiet and the town edged into slumber. She dropped me off at the cottage, and I went in to find my own brand of hell waiting.
At first I thought there was only one man waiting for me.
He was sitting on my chair. Bulky shadows behind the door told me he was well gooned.
Del Vervain's show is a scatty prattle-and-tune radio thing. Really boring, but so popular for so long that everybody knows his voice. It's interviews with the flighty and mighty. He does a written-out patter of mind-bendingly dull boyish wit. Every so often he ushers a new guest on, who grovels to set up Del's next punch line. He occasionally slips into the vernacular, you-and-me friendly, changes accents admirably. The standing joke is that Del's jokes are utter dross, lines deliberately wrong. Del tops them with infantile slickness. The audience is milked of every handclap. You've probably heard it. It's really crud.
"Lovejoy. Sit down." That magic accent.
I didn't, hoping a run was on the cards. In the corner of my eye a shadow stepped a yard. I stayed where I was.
"You recognize me, I'm sure." Del Vervain seemed about to make a quirky remark, then remembered I was the only audience. Odd to see him real, so familiar from the tabloid supplements. But threatening.
"Yes." I cleared my throat, tried it without falsetto. "Yes. You're on the wireless. Heaven With Vervain.”
"Bright, bright." Somebody snickered behind me. "You know my wife, Joan."
Flat statement, denial out of the question. "Yes."
"You've been fucking her ragged, Lovejoy."
Put that bluntly, my breath went away. "Well, I, er—"
"She's going to take you away from . . . all this." A casual look brought a roomful of snickers, snuff-snuff-snuff.
"Nothing definite's been arranged. Honest."
"No air tickets? No grand Rolls booked in Monaco? No marriage ceremony? No media notified? The banks?"
"She's talked of a, er, flight. But the rest is news to me."
"Honest?" He leant forward, smiling eyes questing over my face as if in wonderment. "Do you mean honest, Lovejoy?" Snuff-snuff-snuff. Two goons? Three?
"Well, yes.” My squeaky throat had gone again.
"'Honest' is a word you seem to use rather a lot, Lovejoy." He clicked on a hand recorder. It whittered and a snatch of my conversation came on, scratchy, but definitely me. I seemed to say "honest" every second word. It was me in Woody's, fixing up a chop on an item in Wittwoode's Auction.
"I’m an honest bloke."
He smiled then, with relish. Sickeningly I knew what was going to happen. He reached some letters off the table. They'd been opened.
"Here," I said indignantly. "Those are my—"
"Air tickets, Lovejoy. New lease, apartment in Monte Carlo. Bank accounts in your name. One account in joint names, you and . . . guess who?"
I groaned. The stupid, stupid cow had jumped the gun. Monte Carlo? I live here, for God's sake.
"I was going to talk her out of it," I whimpered. "Honest."
"There you go again, Lovejoy. All honesty, no reality. I gather you're famous for it."
"It's a mistake. I wasn't ever going away with her. Honest—er, truly."
He stuffed the letters into a pocket, dropped an embossed envelope on the table. Two nerks came into the light where I could see how very big they were. Their noses were crushed, their foreheads corrugated iron. Vervain went out as they started on me. First time he's left anywhere without an exit line, I bet.
They belted me silly.
Sometime later the phone rang. I dragged myself to it. Joan's voice came on, breathless with secrecy and urgency and, I daresay, confidentiality.
"Lovejoy? Darling? I want to warn you. Del is absolutely furious. We must go tonight. Be at Stansted Airport in three hours ..."
I went to soak my face. Little bruising on the features, though my ribs creaked and my skin was sore as hell. They must have punched me unconscious, because somebody had stolen four hours from the clock. I could hardly move my right thigh, swollen to a tree trunk. It stung every time I moved. The fancy envelope contained an invitation from Mr. & Mrs. T. E. Vervain to nosh at their Windsor home, days hence. My mind was in its ? mode. It required no reasons.
Another hour later, the answer phone bleeped to tell the county it was recording. A man's voice, old and querulous. "Is there a Lovejoy there, please? I have need to dispose of my son's antiques business. I wish to obtain guidance—for a fee, of course. Please ring Mr. Fairclough, South Corn Mart, Norwich, any time between— "
Fairclough?
I reached for my one glowing neurone and flicked it to snore.
Seventeen
There's something wryly humorous about being beaten up—when you see it on that inert cinema screen. When it's real, well, no. It hurts like hell. Quite as bad, the shame makes you vomit and shiver even when you're over the worst. In fact, you're never sure which is the worst. Bruises mend, after all. Skin heals over. But the degradation lingers, festers, a core of hatred that never ever leaves. Like, foxhunting must seem like poetry in motion—to the hunters. To the fox it's less than a giggle. I'll bet foxes never forget.
That morning I didn't answer the phone. I ignored sustained knocking. My curtains stayed drawn. Ignored the post girl's shower of catchpenny missives. Hermit Lovejoy. It was all of noon before I surfaced. I must say, superficially I looked pretty good. Not a mark, just a faint graze or two on the knuckles. I left the cottage—at a careful strolling pace, definitely not wincing at each step—as some bloody airport phoned, frantic about flight reservations. The messages could have a nice uninterrupted chat amongst themselves.
Delia welcomed me at St. Peter's Church at the top of North Hill. That is, he was waiting to cross at the traffic lights near the linen shop and ignored me. People like Delia have this strange skill of directional non-greeting, to call attention to one specific person even in a crowd. Before I'd realized, I was strolling slo-o-o-wly, thigh hurting like hell, up the alley to the theater coffee shop. The military figure in smart Savile Row clobber marched briskly ahead. Nobody goes there for midday nosh so there are crannies for people to meet.
"Bad, old bean?"
Delia hadn't glanced at me, but he knew all right. There must be something in Eton that tunes pupils in to the plights of others. Maybe so they can mostly ignore them, I shouldn't wonder.
"Wish I’d gone to Eton. Like Captain Hook." I rummaged in my useless labyrinthine memory. "Were you a contemporary of James Bond? Tarzan?"
Delia smiled. A waiter brought him coffee, none for me. He unfolded his Financial Times and absently started to read.
"Is it true you bounders literally used Shelley as a football?" Eton has this particular Wall Game. Nobody's scored since 1912.
The counter was vacated before he spoke. He hadn't risen to my jibes about Eton. "Rum friends you have, Lovejoy. You might have warned me about the snake."
Burglars have to take their chances, but I was ashamed.
"I did hint, Delia."
"Put the fear of God in me, old boy." He looked unruffled. I wondered if he wore his bowler hat on a job. "When I depart, Lovejoy, you'll find a folder under the table by the door. Only imitation leather, I'm afraid, these days."
"Oh, aye." His faint headshake made me refrain from looking. Had he accomplices, then? "What impressions?"
He read on a minute, tutting at some Share Index perfidy. "Rum thing, all those tiresome underwater photographs, Lovejoy. Some old boat. Amazing hobbies, people, what? He's taking too low a price on his market garden. By a mile." Tut tut tut.
He must mean Rye. "And T.G.M.?"
"You've got the lot, old fruit. Scan your folder."
Photocopies of all Veil's clients' records? I gulped at the price Delia'd charge. Class tells, on an invoice.
"Money, Delia."
He told me the bill. I would have gulped again, but I couldn't. Delia's sort are deceptively casual. Default would leave me permanently damaged, with plenty of reproach that I lacked principles. No anger, though. A sigh or two, then on to the next job. Delia knew I knew this.
"Right," I said heartily. "Ta, Delia. I'll leave the money with Sandy in two hours. That okay?"
"Fine. If he's closed, drop it through his letter box."
"But what . . . ?" If you can't get in, I was going to say, like an idiot. I rose with a whimper, having to push myself up with fists on the table.
"Er, Delia. I’m sorry I was narked about Eton. Jealousy.''