A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair l-21 Page 17
Some people can assimilate without effort. I'm like that, but can't for the life of me classify the stuff. It's haphazard osmosis. I'm no gardener, for example, but I'm in the happy position of being able to inform the world that a perfectly nourished tomato plant can attain a height of twenty feet, six whole metres. Further, those unable to sleep for wondering who was our very first car fatality can now nod off - it was poor Bridget Driscoll, a London lady in her forties, who in 1896 was watching a strange new horseless contrivance at Crystal Palace. See? No rhyme or reason.
But I did the best I could, with my head spinning and Sorbo everywhere. Despite lingering horror, I amazed myself. As I read, I calmed. With this many weird happenings, surely there was one way to hook a killer and then do what? I shelved the answer - do I mean the question? - and rummaged deeper.
Some scams leap like kids in class: me, teacher, me! The primo scam these days is always caches of antiques and Old Masters looted in wartime. I'd thought of this, but binned it as corny. I mean, walk down London's famed Duke Street, look up, and you'll be gazing at a window that conceals one such, the Menzel Mystery. Ten a penny but fascinating for all that.
Adolphe Menzel isn't really ancient or famed. It's been maybe a century since his passing. Worth considering, though, when a stranger drops in to sell half a dozen Menzel sketches, which is what truly happened. Imagine a dealer's horror when he later opens a rare book - and sees them illustrated among stolen sketches. This honest - no kidding - dealer zoomed them back to grateful old Dresden, which said, Ta muchly, but does anybody know who has the remaining 1,550, please? I pondered this contender, because that huge number includes Durer, Cranach, Altdorfer et al.
The mystery doesn't end there. The Soviets in 1945 hoovered antiques up - they returned over a million to Berlin in the fifties - and at least that many are still on the lamm. In round numbers, a million - except Dr Johnson says, 'Round numbers are almost always fake.' See the temptation? If Gluck the Greedy were offered a load of valuable paintings, sketches, whatever, I was sure he'd bite, even though they'd been looted from some Bavarian castle. It's the eternal question: If your Grampa left you a priceless sketch that he'd picked up in wartime, would you pop it in the post to somebody who claimed it was theirs? I don't wish to offend, but I suspect that maybe you might tell them to get lost and hug it to your bosom.
Continental museums sob that, okay, the German Statute of Limitations expires at thirty years, so you couldn't go to prison. I still think that maybe you'd cry, It's mine, all mine!
and let international relations go hang. Why shouldn't you? There's no reliable international law. Common European Market laws likewise stay silent. They know greed.
'No.' I spoke to myself. I was freezing. Cellars are cold. 'It's been done.'
I wanted an original scam that would hook Snob Gluck. He'd killed Arthur for a grand estate plus an antiques firm, missing out on the ancient lordship tide because of the existence of young Mortimer, whom he'd presumably not known about. And killed Sorbo over the intaglios I'd heard of. Gluck was desperately short of money. And murderously evil, but not dim. With the right scam, I'd protect Mort, and rescue Colette from her bag-lady hell.
An hour or so later, still surging on, I heard someone moving about in my cottage. I always pull the flagstone to when I'm down there, on account of debt collectors or rival dealers after money. Wisely I kept the candle burning - nothing's so pungent as a smoking candle wick - and stilled until they'd gone. It might have been Dosh, wanting answers at last. It might have been police. The cottage door lock never works, and anybody can wander in.
When my candle had guttered to a one-eyed glow, I gave up and cautiously crept into daylight. The place was empty, the door pulled to. There was a note: Dear Lovejoy,
The canal where you fell. Teatime. Sincerely, Mort.
That made me think about time. I hurried down the lane to Eleanor's house - I babysit for her Henry sometimes - and borrowed her bicycle. I set off to the carder man's house. I'd kill him if he wasn't in.
Ever since I realized that Eve's apple wasn't the whole story, sex has worried me. Not my own, you understand. I mean people's, like Saunty's. His activities would baffle the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He's a simple-looking bloke, listens to new orchestral music all day long. Once, he was deputy mayor somewhere. It's a famous local tale, how he was in an important council meeting, when to his own astonishment he heard himself go, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to announce that politics is crap.' And upped and offed. His wife divorced him, his shamed children marched out. He was left destitute but happy. A psychiatric nurse assigned to correct that wayward politician, please, arrived, and promptly moved in.
They 'behave abominably', say our local newspapers. Outraged people are forever ringing the police because Saunty and his nurse are yet again copulating in the garden.
The nurse, Yamta, tells magistrates that she and Saunty are a 'living sculptile'. I don't know what it means either. One wry magistrate asked coldly, 'Do you imply, madam, that this sculptile is for sale?' and fined her a hundred zlotniks. Rotten sports, magistrates. What harm do they do, sculpting away? Heaven's sakes, it's Saunty's own garden. And villagers who don't want to be outraged can walk down a different lane, but don't. Saunty's lane is a well-travelled thoroughfare. Everybody passes by, to be outraged some more.
Which is why I began ringing the bicycle bell two furlongs off. They were in the garden laughing at yet another court summons. I pulled my trouser turn-ups from my socks, and walked in trying to look like everything was normal. They were naked, having coffee and sloe sherry Yamta brews. Purple drinks always look Wicked Queen to me, but I accepted. I felt really odd sitting there fully clothed.
'Aren't you cold?' I asked, curious. It's my experience that women always feel a draught. Boil them alive, they'd still say shut that door it's freezing.
'You always ask that.' Yamta smacked me playfully. She's thirty-eight, bulbous with straggly hair. By comparison Saunty's like a stick insect, James Joyce minus the specs.
She sobered. 'We heard, Lovejoy.'
'Who from?' I wasn't taking any chances.
'Gaylord faxed me,' Saunty said. He looked dreamy. I noticed he was smoking a churchwarden. Yamta grows certain prohibited flora, to enhance spontaneous merriment.
It's their other scandal, but not on a par with frolics. 'Gluck's got to be stopped, Lovejoy.'
'Shall we get down to it, then?' Yamta said.
'Er…' I'm never sure what she means. Orgy's never far.
We went in. Saunty takes an hour to set up, computer, paper, tomes built up like a redoubt with him in the centre. Saunty can't think naked, so they both get dressed. I use this term loosely. It's only dressing gowns and slippers. Yamta put on some atonal orchestral music, quite pleasant with the proper side of your brain.
'Terms are ten per cent of the gross, Lovejoy,' Yamta said, 'payable a fortnight after the scam goes down. Even if you don't use Saunty's scheme.'
'Right.' I'd have agreed to anything. This is a standard carder man's fee, not cheap.
She brewed tea. We got chairs. By the time he began Saunty looked like a spud in a kiln, with stacks ringed about him. We had to peer over a parapet of documents. The last hour, Battle of Rorke's Drift.
'You want to restrict the scam to anything in particular, Lovejoy?'
'Anything, as long as it works.'
Yamta looked at me, spotting my desperation I suppose, and started flopping about lifting folders while Saunty clicked his PC.
'Mars meteorite fragments any good?' he suggested. 'Ever since they found primitive carbonate deposits in those polar ice-cap SNC chunks, even small fragments have shot up in value ten thousand times. No? I've blokes who only sell guaranteed Martian nitrogen isotopic signatures, with geochemical spectroscopic certificates. Proven pieces of Planet Mars.'
'No, ta. Everybody's doing it.' All museums were busy cashing in while scientists excitedly worked out extraterrestrial DNA.
'Mermaids, Lovejoy?' he offered. 'Good scam, that would be.'
'Have to be in Zennor in Cornwall, though.'
We have an ancient law: all mermaids caught in UK's territorial waters - or on land, if your luck's really in - belong to our Sovereign. Like swans on the Thames, and sturgeons. Only one mermaid actually doesn't. Every Evensong in Zennor's ancient church, she flops in from the sea and sits in the rearmost pew. She does this in penance for the village lad she enticed away one Sunday. Never seen again, poor lad.
Angry villagers carved her figure into the pew. Don't pinch her place, incidentally, or you're for it. There her fishy spirit lingers, safe from being snaffled as royal prerogative decrees. You can see her there any Sunday. The one that got away, so to speak. Gluck was no romantic.
'No, ta. It'd be another DNA job.'
'Or an ancient carving? Pillock's still in business, does mostly limewood carvings for Zurich, but he'd be keen to help. Or antique parrots?'
'That Aussie thing? Painted some birds' feathers?'
Saunty chuckled. 'Common green Aussie parrots, they were. He dyed them with cinnamon shampoo, sold them off as rare Indian Ringnecks for seven thousand quid a pair instead of the cost of a meal. Any good?'
'No, ta.'
'Them little Chinese monkeys?'
'What's this interest in biology, Saunty?' I was narked. Yamta's dressing gown had proved too warm. Busy among the files, she'd cast it off. So I had to suffer, thoughtless cow.
'The Chinese Ink Monkey was extinct,' Saunty rambled joyously on. 'Scholars trained them to fetch manuscripts and mix ink. They were rediscovered couple of years ago.
Priceless, an extinct species that made it back! Any good?'
'No, ta.'
'For a really big con,' Saunty said after a while, 'how about another Sheppard's?'
I hesitated. 'It's an idea, Saunty.'
It was the world's biggest recorded robbery ever. Astonishingly, it was a simple daylight mugging in, of all places, King William Street, in fair London town. Incredible to relate, a Sheppard's messenger strolled unguarded carrying nearly three hundred million pounds sterling, Treasury bearer bonds to be precise. A bloke with a knife threatened the messenger, who saw sense. Gone, quick as it takes to tell. Now, the City of London hardly ever has daylight muggings. The CID, Interpol, and FBI came into it, some Texan wheeler dealer died in Houston, people hid in Cyprus. It got really ugly.
'Of course,' Saunty continued blithely, 'they should have sent them straight to Indonesia, held them there for a twelve-month. Instead,' he said with scorn, 'they floated them in dribs and drabs - Cyprus, Miami, Glasgow. Nerks.'
'Didn't they try Liechtenstein?' Yamta wafted erotically by. 'I've always wanted to go there.'
'Just too stunned when they got away with it. Operation Starling, the plod called it.'
'No, ta. Antiques, please.'
'How about Manhattan Island, Lovejoy?'
'No, ta. Too many people called Edwards.'
Yet it wasn't a bad suggestion. It's founded in fact, which every good con trick should really be. In a gold bricker, at least the gold brick is genuine. Back in the eighteenth century Robert Edwards, a Welsh buccaneer from Pontypridd, was rewarded for bravely fighting wicked Spaniards. His present was seventy-seven acres, nice plot of land worth almost one hundred English pounds. It's now known as Lower Manhattan, and - be prepared - its value has risen somewhat! To trillions. Needless to say, where unclaimed wealth goes, can scams be far behind?
Not neglected, though. The trouble is it's claimed by the world and his wife, for who here doesn't have an Edwards in the family tree? Some eleven thousand have been claiming away for two hundred years. The tease is: prove you're Robert's direct descendant, and Lower Manhattan's yours. There's even an association of Robert's heirs, hard at it in Six Mile Run, Pennsylvania. Flourishing scams hover everywhere, advising would-be claimants to have a go. 'Use our cast-iron guaranteed genealogy services!!!' and all that.
'It's going to be a TV Revelation Documentary next year,' Yamta said.
'Forget it, Saunty,' I said. Just my luck to have a film crew interview Gluck just as I got to the sting.
'A public school find? Or a seminary jaunt?' Saunty was unperturbed. He loves this kind of thing, a chance to delve in his con tricks, testing himself.
'School? Like what?' I thought of Holloway and Shar. 'Isn't this music a racket?' Yamta asked fondly, toting and hauling files. Saunty whistled along with atonal violas.
'Wimborne!' he exclaimed. 'I'm longing for somebody to try it. This school had a copy of an ancient Assyrian bas-relief. The boys used to play darts near it, little buggers.
Turned out it was genuine frieze, King Ashurnasirpal II of Nimrud. Christie's I think got a record twelve mill US for it. You like, Lovejoy? Easy peasy. Tell Gluck you've found another, ha-ha. The school was once the stately home of the patron who financed the excavations at Nimrud. No?'
'Not bad,' I said. Close, and getting closer.
'Calcata? The Holy Foreskin? It's still missing.'
'I like this one,' Yamta said wistfully. 'Tea, Lovejoy?'
It came up on Saunty's screen. 'Christ's foreskin used to be in St John Lateran until Rome got sacked. It finished up in a casket in Calcata. Dozy little hill town north of Rome. I can give you directions. The reliquary was gorgeous. The parish priest kept it in a shoebox under his bed. Any good?'
'What happened to the reliquary?'
'Its gems drifted.' He chuckled. 'The Vatican forbade Catholics from talking about it, 1900 onwards, under pain of excommunication. I've details of fourteen other foreskins in Europe. The bit of Christ that didn't ascend to heaven, see?'
'Anything similar? Not Thomas a Becket, though.' I was still thinking reliquaries.
'Christ's manger any good, from Bethlehem? It's in the Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome.
It's not been used in con tricks lately.'
Pagans also have miracles, I told myself, as convincing as those of orthodox religions.
'No, ta.' Closer still, though.
Yamta set the tea tray down. I had to look away. Naked women are callous. No thought of the effects they're creating.
'Famous writer's lost manuscript?'
I guessed he meant Kipling's unknown play Upstairs, written late 1913 or so, that surfaced lately. I grimaced.
'Here's what you're looking for, Lovejoy. The Louvre!'
'Not another Louvre fraud.' They're a yawn, but I kept my I'm-still-interested smile so as not to offend.
'It's got museum curators sobbing into their ale, scared they'll never be able to buy again.' He wheezed in merriment, his poppy tobacco doing its narcotic stuff. 'It was them two women, and that lawyer.'
My ears pricked. Whatever anybody says, women are always more interesting. They can turn dislike into hate, hatred into vendettas, faster than wink.
'That rich French heiress, her collection of Old Masters. The nurse seems to've done a deal with lawyers, who did a deal with some Parisian curator of Guess Where, to buy The Gentleman of Seville. Spaniard called Murillo - ugly bastard, he was - did it. The French curator got done for receiving stolen goods. You like, Lovejoy?'
Saunty provides a sort of weird after-sales service -photographs, copies of court records, photos of the perpetrators, police names. He's good value.
'Nice one,' I said cautiously.
Saunty was pleased. 'I'd give it a go, for Gluck, Lovejoy. See, the heiress had a sensible sister - they didn't speak, hate each other. Her bulb lit. She sued for the paintings. I've photo transparencies if you want.'
'What's the curators' grouse?'
He snorted (I mean with scorn). 'It made the greedy bastards suddenly scared to buy anything. They want priceless antiques for a bent farthing, bring tourists, see? They're hand in glove with lawyers, and lawyers are crooked. Add curators and law, you've got a thieves' mucky midden.'
'Not bad. Museums are a gift.' I though
t museums.
'What about those old motors?' Yamta put in.
'Lovejoy hates engines.' Saunty laughed, digging files. A heap fell over. Yamta knelt to retrieve them. 'But that George Thingy in Surrey's the wizard. No?'
'It's got to be confidential.'
Saunty fell about laughing. Yamta laughed, quivering so much I had to think of Blackpool.
'Nark it,' I said, indignant. 'I want confidential, not another Piltdown.'
The Piltdown Scam is fabled in song and story, when Eoanthropus dawsoni, the infamous Dawn Man of Sussex, was excavated near Lewes in 1912. It's such an obvious scam I wonder they don't teach it in school. There are scores of books written about whodunit. Myself, I blame Smith Woodward of the British Museum. Saunty sobered.
'Never thought I'd hear you use a word like confidential, Lovejoy, especially when you're going to sink a rodent like Gluck. Know what confidential means nowadays? It means Scottish Water customers' "confidential" details turning up as wrappings on fireworks made in Ceylon. It means secret SAS manuals sold at a boot fair. It means MI5 security documents on a council rubbish tip. And medical patients' laboratory test details found in dustbins. I can list two thousand breaches of confidentiality, Lovejoy.
Want it?'
'No.' I struggled to think. 'It's got to be posh. He's a snob.'
Instant delight. Yamta crowed, hurtled into the stacks.
'Why didn't you say so, Lovejoy? We're home and dry!'
'We are?' I was too tired, scared for Mort.
'Snob means royalty, or rescue. Prestige, see?'
No, I didn't. He sat back.
'Listen, Lovejoy. There was a bloke in the fen country. Declared himself King of Upware, his village, nineteenth century. Renamed his pub Five Miles From Anywhere No Hurry.
Barmy. Guess what? People flocked.'
'That's not for me. I want fake, not flake.'
'Some bloke fifty years back declared his village independent, offered it for sale to the USA, Soviet Russia. No takers. He finally "donated" it to the Queen, ending the reign of King Len. I've scores of others.'