Ten Word Game Read online

  Gloria was on the stairs. “What time did I say?” she asked, smiling.

  “Noon, missus.”

  She looked at the clock. It was a minute to. “Come on, then.” I followed her heels upstairs, politely trying to look anywhere else and failing. I’m good at that.

  Chapter Two

  “Was I all right?”

  Here’s a basic truth: I can’t understand women. How come they all wonder the same thing? Gloria had been ecstasy, bliss, paradise. Yet there she lay, head on the pillow, frowning and giving me was she all right. Can you believe it?

  “Perfect. Heaven.”

  She propped herself up on an elbow, took hold of my face so I couldn’t look away with any sincerity.

  “Honestly?”

  “As God’s my judge. You were wondrous.”

  Her brow cleared. “I’ve never heard anybody tell me that before. Wondrous!”

  Like I say, this passion business is beyond me. What on earth did other blokes tell her? That she’d been so-so? Say to her, well, Gloria, you were really pretty average, something like that? I could see I’d have to be tactful.

  “You’re off your frigging trolley, love. If you’re stunning, what else is there?”

  She wouldn’t give in. “As good as the rest?”

  What rest? I worried for a second. Did she know anybody I knew? I finally guessed she was still anxious. “Blinding, love.”

  “Tez said you were taken poorly in the loading bay.” She smiled to herself.

  “Eh? Oh, just dizzy. Lifting the crates.”

  She drew a pattern in the sweat on my chest.

  “I like a man who sweats. It’s rewarding.”

  “What does Benjo say?” I was more worried than she. This job was protective colouration. If Benjo found out about me and Gloria, I’d have to vanish sharpish.

  “Benjo does as I say.” She glanced at the clock and lay back. “Time for more?”

  Where’s the choice? Women rule. It’s their world. We blokes only get by. It was definitely love, but listening for the warning clonk of the downstairs door’s Chiming Cowbell was frightening. Benjo was a giant.

  * * *

  I woke with my heart thumping, thinking I’d heard something. Gloria was in the bathroom. I tried to calm myself. My hair was drenched as usual afterwards. I thought of the crate that made me keel over in the loading bay.

  Antiques are all the rage nowadays. That’s because stocks and shares change with the weather. Hour by hour, something in Kyoto causes the dollar’s value to evaporate or double. There’s no escaping the evil erosion of gold prices or land investments, even the value of your own house for God’s sake. Everything is a shifting sand.

  Except antiques.

  Think of your Great-Aunt Faith’s alexandrite pendant, the one her spouse George brought home after the First World War. Its setting is now so unfashionable that youngsters wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole, right? The wretched thing is hardly worth a light, and no lady would wear it for a gold clock. The jeweller you take it to sneers (they’re really good at sneers) “There’s no call for this old Moscow jewellery, love. Too dated.” And he’ll offer a groat for it, to “take it off your hands.”

  Don’t believe a word. Here’s why:

  Once upon a time, there was no such thing as alexandrite. Okay, we all know it’s a gemstone and was there lurking in the ground these gillion years, but until Tzar Alexander the First lent his name to the lovely greenish stone it was never seen. Therefore an early Russian setting is valuable, simply by definition. Therefore the jeweller is fibbing, hoping you’ll sell it him for a song. The lesson is this: unless you’re a drug-pusher or a gun-runner or a Stock Exchange insider trader, you have no way of beating the system except honest work and frugality.

  But one magic wand outdoes Savings and Loan systems the world over. It leaves government Blue-Chip stocks standing. It outstrips gold, junk bonds, and investment corporations. Everybody knows it.

  It is a blindingly brilliant world in microcosm called antiques.

  Now, I’ve always had a flaw – two, if you count women. Antiques send me strange, very like a sudden attack of early flu. I’ve only to stop near a genuine Rembrandt and my breathing goes funny. My vision flickers and shifts, like seeing things underwater. A doctor I know says my blood pressure must fall like a stone, but much he knows. If I step away a minute or two I’m right as rain. Stand near an exquisite cabinet by Hepplewhite, a Sheraton desk or Chippendale bureau, and over I go again. In the antiques trade a person who does this is called a divvy.

  It doesn’t happen with fakes, frauds, forgeries, or anything modern. Because all things modern are crud and gunge, a divvy like me is a vital commodity. A divvy can tell if your antique is antique, or (horror of horrors) isn’t.

  When I opened that crate and shifted the packing – those expanded polystyrene squiggles nobody ever knows the name of – I saw instantly. It had looked like a strange wooden doll. (Incidentally, I’m not being blasphemous here, just trying to describe.) It resembled a squat truncated figure with its feet in a puddle. Its hair was swept in a racing-helmet shape. Its legs were shorter than legs have a right to be, and its arms were almost unshaped. Brass rings on its wrists, deltoids and neck, and no features to speak of. It stood on a little plinth.

  Worthless, right? Wrong. It was an ancient reliquary statuette, and worth three times your house plus your most valuable car plus all the clothes you stand up in. I’d guess it was the sort anthropologists call Fang Byeri, from Gabon. The little figure stood no taller than, say, ten inches (26cm if you’re a metric maniac) and shone with a black patina. Modern fakes are imported by the hundred, but they’re great tall things almost up to your shoulder – skilfully carved, but not worth a light. They’re what the trade calls firewood.

  Now, the brass on this little doll thing was merely brass, and the wood was only wood. But to an antique dealer it was money in the bank, especially if imported illegally. I gulped, remembering that smart Miss Lacy Trimble who’d bought some Bargain Line crud. Benjo was working an illegal scam, and the Excise plod were onto him. Definitely time to go.

  Something made me look up. Benjo was standing in the – his – bedroom doorway. I yelped, sweated more.

  “Iss okeh,” he said soothingly. “You okeh?”

  “Yes!” I whimpered, lying, because my last hour had come.

  “No!” he thundered. “Stay still! Get water. Water iss good, no?”

  “Yes!” I whined, crazy about water.

  “He fell over, Benjo,” Gloria said over his shoulder in that accusing tone women use when somebody’s not well. She was fully dressed, thank God. I wished I was. “He’s not been eating properly.”

  “Why you no eatings?” Benjo boomed, jabbing a finger at me.

  “I…” Why wasn’t I eating?

  I’m like a gannet. I’d had some fried eggs and toast in the doss-house that morning, two bananas, stale left-over cake and some sardines in chip paper. I couldn’t admit to Benjo I was a divvy, and had rumbled his smuggling scam just as the Customs woman had come a-hunting, could I? Actually I was hungry as hell. Making smiles with Gloria had left me famished. I could hardly tell him that, either.

  “Feedings!” Benjo yelled. “He iss on run, no?”

  Gloria gave that smile-without-smiling only women can do, and said, “Go downstairs, Benjo. I’ll get him back on his feet. Give me an hour.”

  “Good! I yev eem new job.”

  Gloria smiled and locked the door after him. We were alone.

  She came over and stood looking down. She undid the belt of her skirt, her eyes on mine. I honestly don’t know how women do it. They’re cool. If I tried to get away with half the things they do, I’d go to pieces. I suppose that’s why the best spies are female.

  I should have remembered that.

  * * *

  I wasn’t put out by Benjo’s machinations. I’m as honest as the next person (joke), and everybody’s at it, selling daftness as value.
I know a lass called Nina in Southwold who sells psychic powers. She says she can tell if your dog is a born hypnotist. Truly. She calls herself Queen of Hypno-Dogs, and charges you a week’s wage per dog, plus travelling expenses. She looks into your dog’s eyes, and gives you a certificate stating your dog is (or is not; I don’t know her figures) a hypnotherapist. Naturally, the dog hasn’t a clue, just wanting some tasty morsel. She dreamt the idea up two years ago and hasn’t done a day’s work since. And, just like Mr Cruft (yes, him) she hates dogs, loves cats.

  And a dealer who lives off a similar con trick. He’s called Aussie, lives in Brixton, and markets antique statues of the Virgin Mary. They’re made in Taiwan, cost eight zlotniks plus p&p. On Good Friday they’re supposed to weep tears, but only if you, the proud owner worshipping her on the mantelpiece, have been good during the previous year. Work out the chances of that in the average household. A sort of morals barometer, they sell like hot cakes. They never work. If the Virgin fails to weep, whose fault is that? You’ve been bad, see?

  Kellon’s another. He’s a Norfolk ticket tout at boxing arenas. On the side, he fakes (and sells and sells) Sir John Suckling’s one and only prototype cribbage board. It is Kellon’s only antique forgery, yet he makes a decent living. He turns out one every three months and advertises them on the internet. When that brave and elegant Cavalier poet Suckling invented cribbage (“the world’s greatest card game”) in the early 17th century, it took all England by storm, then Europe and the world. There are a million other scams, so many it makes you wonder if all money isn’t scammified. I like scams, as long as consters don’t con me.

  Ho Chi Minh’s flatmate’s private diary is another regular fake, very common in London this year. As a young bloke, that esteemed leader had digs in London, being a humble assistant pastry cook at the Carlton. Several of HCM’s mythical flatmate’s diaries come to the market every now and then, full of revealing details about his early years. People always buy them even though everyone knows they’re duds. Fake diaries aren’t all Hitler’s, Churchill’s, Shakespeare’s, or Queen Victoria’s. One I particularly like is the vaunted Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, 1764-1765, published in 1926. Back then it rattled through nine editions in a few weeks, to critical acclaim. It was in fact the fake dreamery of Magdalen, the Irish teenage daughter of Admiral Sir George King-Hall of the Royal Navy. Collectors still hunt first editions.

  In East Anglia alone, we are offered Jimi Hendrix’s last guitar at least once a month, properly smashed and burnt – fake, of course. The star destroyed his instruments, to the delight of all, on stage during performances. Most of these forgeries are pathetic travesties. I can’t understand fakers who go to endless lengths to buy and smash the correct make of guitar (Stratocaster, if you’re going for it) and even engrave it with his paratrooper’s red parachute and 101st Airborne, his mob, then mess the forgery up by offering you a manufacturer’s bill-of-sale dated 1971, when Hendrix actually died the year before. Crazy not to check details. The library’s free, for God’s sake. I hate sloppiness.

  If you’re a forger, at least get it wrong right, right?

  Cheapest and, I think, cruellest of all are the mysticism scams. Pottle Bott and his woman – in Archway, London – market “mystic triangles”, actually simple pieces of job-lot black silk. You buy one, put it on your forehead facing north-east (or any other way, I suppose) and it foretells your future. Unbelievably, Pottle sells over 1,000 every year, and there’s their next Mediterranean holiday.

  The laughable, weepable, thing is, when fakers get collared and clinked up for misleading the honest old public, they instantly pitify themselves. Indignant to the end, they always claim they were innocent, and say things like, “People are glad to be diddled, so where’s harm?” Most breathtaking fib of all, they claim the goods were genuine at the time they were sold, so must have been replaced by fakes – corrupt police in court, you understand.

  The problem is, where is the honest person who can swear blind they’ve never deceived a single soul in their lives? Not me, nor anyone else I know, either.

  * * *

  That afternoon – me even hungrier – Benjo outlined my new job.

  “I wann you go place,” he told me.

  I’d forgotten it was his sausage time. Three o’clock, he sent Frollie for some hot sausages as long as your arm. These he scoffed, slurping and belching, with the weirdest shaped pickles on earth. I don’t mind what people eat, honest, but I wished he’d wash his fingers instead of wiping them down his singlet.

  “Anywhere, Benjo. I’ll do anything.”

  The customer door clonked. I went to serve an elderly lady. She tottered in on crutches, breathing hard. I placed a chair for her and she subsided, smiling. Lot of smiling women today. I’ve no sense, so didn’t heed the warning signs.

  “I want two Giant Bonanza Garden Illuminators,” she said.

  Pleased at hearing I was being sent out to somewhere safe, I felt full of myself and said jauntily, “Say please, like a good girl.”

  “What?”

  She was astonished, then chuckled. Her spectacles wobbled and almost fell. They were the rimless sort pensioners get, and she had the dense grey hair that comes with old age. Her skin was fine, though, and you could tell she’d once been gorgeous. Her feet were narrow and neat, though I can’t for the life of me understand why old folk wear such thick material. This lady had on a dozen jumpers and a hat with a miniature lavender forest. You couldn’t see the old dear for warm clothes.

  “Please, then!”

  “Right.” Her glare made me grin. I liked her. “Hang on.”

  Benjo had no compunction about extortion. Instinctively I hated the thought of asking her Benjo’s price for the tat we sold. The Giant Bonanza Garden Illuminators were only garden lights on sticks. I was ashamed. Rubbish has its place, I know, but in a shop?

  “Oh, dear,” she said, dismayed at the price. “It’s my grandbaby’s birthday party.”

  She thought a second, then rummaged in her handbag. It was the size of a tram. Out came bundles of newspaper. She unwrapped a small porcelain and laid it on the counter.

  “Can I have them for this, dear?”

  “No, love. The boss says no exchanges. I’m sorry.”

  “But it’s valuable. I have three. Let me show you.”

  “They’re all fake, love,” I said sadly.

  “You haven’t even seen the other two!” She delved more, but I stayed her hand.

  “Look, love.” I felt really sorry for her. “Have the two Illuminators for your grandbab’s party on the house. I’ll pay.”

  “Then you shall have this Early Worcester jug as a gift!”

  I glanced about. I was alone with the old dear. “No, love. Take it back.” I shoved our G.B.G.I. dross into a bag and re-wrapped her fake porcelain.

  “Aren’t they genuine?” She was visibly upset. “Great-Aunt Bertha said they were her mother’s.”

  “They’re new, love. Some crook must have swapped them when you weren’t looking.” I didn’t tell her that crooks are often close relatives, so beware.

  “That can’t be true!” Her lips quivered. I sighed.

  “You want proof? Early Worcester has a scaggy unglazed ring round its underneath rim, see?” I inverted the little sauce jug and showed her. “They used wooden pegs to scrape the glaze off before they fired it. This hasn’t any.” I explained how she would sometimes see antique dealers run a sharpened pencil round, to see the graphite mark.

  “Is that good?”

  “No. Bad. Genuine Early Worcesters were all pegged that way. Just look at the damned thing, for God’s sake.” I held it up. “See the stuff it’s made of? Should be sort of greenish. It’s not.”

  Odd, but her eyes were shining as if she was pleased as Punch, thrilled by trade secrets. “You might be wrong.”

  Wearily I said, “I’m never wrong, love.” I could tell her the truth, because she was an old crone I’d never see again. “There are a good few
markers to tell genuine Early Worcester. That means before 1774.” I held the jug against the window light. “If it were real, there’d be small patches of what resemble pinpricks, by transmitted light. This has none. The trade calls it Worcester pepper.”

  “You’re very kind, young man.”

  She let me stow her gunge back into her voluminous handbag. I rescued her crutches and got her to the door.

  “One thing,” she said as I clonked the door ajar. “How did you know they were all fake?” I looked blankly at her. She had the old-age head-shake of Parkinsonism. Maybe she was deaf as well.

  “I just told you, love.”

  “No. You only saw one. I never showed you the other two. Yet you knew they were forgeries as well. I distinctly remember.”

  “Eh? Oh, just guessed.”

  “Au revoir,” she said, hobbling off down the pavement.

  “Tara, love. Don’t run!”

  I went back in, and reluctantly paid into the till the extortionate cost of the two Giant Illuminators I’d given the old crone, just as Frollie came back. Tez reappeared, slamming the loading bay door. Benjo emerged from the office, beaming. I was sure he’d been listening, no harm in it I suppose. Gloria was having another lie down. Tired from some exertion, I shouldn’t wonder.

  “Now!” Benjo said. “New job, yeh?”

  “Great,” I said. “Where?” I wondered if he’d let me use his motor. It was an old beat-up Hawker, but when the devil drives…

  “Sheep,” he said, guffawing as I gaped.

  “Ship? Me?” I looked across at the giant cruise vessel. It dwarfed Southampton.

  For one mad minute I hoped, before common sense flooded back. He must mean some glug-and-hop-it party on board, the cruise line ingratiating itself with local traders. I’d been on the run too long for false hopes. I’d have needed money, tickets, clothes…

  “It’s okay,” Tez said, grinning. “The boss gets temporary passes.”

  Such trouble for a wine-and-wad do? Why should I have to go?