The Judas Pair l-1 Read online

  The French had a crack at making them, and wonderful attempts they were. Some superb examples exist. I've had many with knobs on, gold inlay, silver escutcheons, Damascus-barreled beauties with delicate carving on precision locks that would melt your heart. And some beautiful Spanish miquelet pistols—a Mediterranean fancy of a strangely bulky style—are decorated to perfection. I admit that tears come to my eyes writing this, mostly because everybody else has them, not me. And Dutch too, though their taste for carving ugly ivory heads and figurines on the grips gives me the willies. All nations did their stuff on the flintlock, from the early snaphances and English doglocks to the final great explosion of exquisite functional murderous perfection in—you've guessed it—dear old peaceful Britain.

  Came the industrial boom days and an outburst of inventive genius which was to catapult these islands into wealth, prominence, and power. Don't think our armies won by unaided valor, though they had it in plenty. They used an improved flintlock, standardized by a thoughtful young English squire, Oliver Cromwell by name. And it fired faster, surer, and noisier than anyone else's, which was a blessing in war.

  From then the flintlock didn't look back. Inventors added devices you would hardly believe: flintlocks that fired under water (work it out), flintlock repeating rifles, flintlock revolvers, flintlock machine guns, ingenious safety catches that actually worked even if you forgot to slip them on, breech-loading flintlocks by the score, all the time edging toward a shorter firing time between pulling the trigger and sending regrets to your opponent's widow.

  And ladies were at it too—no more than you'd expect—in subtle little ways having a charm all their own. Muff pistols, made for folding away in their hot little hands, were their scene, but they also liked tiny collapsible guns built into their prayer-books—presumably in the Exodus bit. Church was more exciting in those days.

  By the 1770s dueling was in, and here comes the Judas pair. Or, rather, here they don't come.

  Be careful, O ye innocent purchaser of these valuable—I mean, and repeat, valuable—weapons. They should be Damascus-barreled (i.e., spiral-welded barrels) and, at their best, brown because of a veneer of faint rust skillfully applied to the metal by makers of genius. They should have walnut stocks, and usually be rifle-grooved. But if the barrel measures less than nine inches, utter a loud derisory snort and mentally divide the asking price by three, if not four, because you are being had by some dealer who is trying to pass off a pair of officer's holster pistols as genuine duelers. A sneer is useful at this stage. On the other hand, if, say, they have ten-inch barrels, try to keep cool and go on to the next step, which is to look for decoration. Almost any metallic decoration on the barrels or on the locks disqualifies, because dueling, remember, was naughty, and silver squiggles and gold inlays tended to catch the first gleam of light on Wandsworth Common and reflect it unerringly into the eagle eyes of London's annoyed watchmen. You are allowed one silver escutcheon plate on the butt. And even this displeases you, because the real flintlock geniuses of Regency London knew their onions. Somber perfection was their aim. They achieved it.

  Pick up a genuine Regency dueler. Hold it with your arm straight down. Now lift as if about to aim. Its weight makes it wobble in the strongest fist as it rises. Up it comes, wobbling and waggling, and you begin to wonder how they managed to hit anything with the long barrel waving in the breeze. Then, just about on level with your bottom rib, something so remarkable happens you won't believe me, but it's the truth—a genuine flintlock dueler begins to lift itself. Honestly. Try it. The weight evaporates. The wobble disappears. Up it goes, seemingly of its own accord, and all you need to do is point it right. Its perfect balance, its meticulous design, and the love and joy expended in its making have achieved the seemingly impossible. That's the genuine dueler—grim, somber, almost dull of appearance, lying with its identically matched partner in a wooden case with powder flask, bullet molds, flints, separate ramrod, and screwdrivers. It reeks of class. It screams of perfection.

  A pair of mint—that is, perfectly preserved—cased flintlock duelers would buy you a couple of new cars nowadays, minimum. A mint pair of them with a pedigree—belonging, say, to some hero, a famous dandy of the time, or perhaps some pal of Beau Brummell's or a member of the then royalty—will virtually buy you anything. If you discover such a pair of old pistols in a dirty old box upstairs, rush to the nearest church and light a candle in thanks to your Maker—Bate, Monlong, Murdoch, Pauly, whoever it turns out to be. Then retire for life in affluence.

  Finally, one point more. Just like Queen Anne silver, each weapon is, or should be, named on the lock. Don't throw value away. Your famous silversmith's monogram can double or treble the value of your fruit bowl. So your famous maker's name can send your find ever upward in value. The names are too many to give here, but Joseph Manton; John Manton; Wogden, who gave his name as a nickname to dueling (a "Wogden affair"); the brilliant Joseph Egg; Henry Nock the Great and his younger relative Sam that he had a terrible row with; Mortimer; Tatham, who blew himself to pieces on a cannon for reasons best not gone into; Freeman; the fashionable Rigby; the Reverend Alexander Forsyth, who invented the percussion system, which did away with flintlocks altogether and doubled the killing speed—they are some you should not lose on your way home.

  And last but not least, one "Durs" (nearly as bad as Lovejoy) Egg, flintlock maker to kings and princes, genius extraordinaire, maker—so they say—of the one and only Judas pair of flintlock duelers. Well.

  This young man came to London about 1770 to seek his fortune. With another Swiss, Pauly, he became interested in the science of pneumatics and air propulsion, and between them they produced a variety of odd but lethal air guns. In later years he lost a fortune by inventing a flying machine, the Flying Dolphin, which he kept in a hangar down Knightsbridge way, to London society's huge delight and derision. A genius whose habit it was to pattern the walnut stocks of his flintlocks with a curiously stippled star design, to aid in the grip. He signed himself always by his nickname, Durs.

  The legend is that he made twelve—only twelve—pairs of dueling pistols. The legend goes on to say that he privately made a thirteenth pair, when something terrible happened. What it was the legend fails to explain.

  That thirteenth pair, sinister weapons of ill-omen, were his last. They were never found or heard of except as obscure rumors. Any antique dealer worth his salt will laugh till he falls down if you ask after them. They don't exist, and everybody knows it.

  That thirteenth pair of flintlock duelers is the Judas pair.

  I drew breath.

  "I've bad news, Mr. Field," I managed to get out.

  "Bad news?"

  "The Judas pair. They don't exist," I said firmly, and rose to get my emergency beer. "They're a myth, a legend. The antique trade's riddled with myths."

  "Is it really?" He was oddly calm for somebody who'd just been put down.

  "Really," I told him. No use mucking about.

  He watched me splash the ale as I drove the truth savagely home. "Michelangelo's Goliath to match his David. Turner's mysterious set of portraits and industrial paintings. Napoleon's woodcuts done by his very own lily-white hands. Sir Francis Drake's poetry in two breathtaking volumes. Bill Shakespeare's latest play, King Penda. Robin Hood's diary. Czar Alexander's secret will. The Grail. Excalibur. Prince John's necklace from the Wash. Friar Bacon's perpetual clock. Leonardo's jeweled casket of secrets. Cleopatra's ruby ring. The Kohinoor's partner diamond, even bigger and better. Nazi treasure chests in those tiresome bloody lakes. Rembrandt's French landscapes. Chippendale's missing design books. All myths. Like," I added harshly, "the Judas pair."

  "Did Dill tell you how much I was willing to pay?" he asked.

  "Ten thousand," I said bitterly. "Just my luck."

  "Now I believe you, Lovejoy," he said, calm as you please.

  "Look," I said slowly. "Maybe I'm not getting through to you. Can't you understand what I'm saying? Ten thousand's too little.
So is ten million. You can't get something if it doesn't exist."

  "Before," he continued evenly, "I thought you were leading me on, perhaps pretending to be more honest than you really were. That is a common deception in all forms of business." I took a mouthful of ale to stop myself gaping too obviously. "Now I believe you are an honest man. A dishonest dealer, seeing I know little about the subject, would have exploited my ignorance."

  "It happens," I admitted weakly.

  "I accepted that risk when I came to you." Field stared thoughtfully at me.

  "So you knew about the Judas pair being legendary?"

  "From various sources."

  "And it was a try-on, then."

  "Yes."

  "Well, Mr. Field." I rose. "You've had your fun. Now, before you leave, is it worth your while to tell me what you do want?" I stood over him. To my surprise he remained unabashed. In fact, he seemed more cool as the chat wore on.

  "Certainly."

  "Right. Give." I sat, exuding aggression.

  "I want you to do a job."

  "Legal?"

  "Legal. Right up your street, as Dill would say." So he'd listened in on Tinker's phone call as I'd guessed. "You'll accept? It will be very lucrative."

  "What is it?"

  "Find me," he said carefully, "the Judas pair."

  I sighed wearily. The guy was a nutter. "Haven't I just explained—?"

  "Wrongly." Field leaned forward. "Lovejoy, the Judas pair exist. They killed my brother."

  It was becoming one of those days. I should have stayed on the nest with Sheila, somewhere safe and warm.

  Chapter 3

  Elizabethan ladies—the First, I hasten to add—had fleas. And lice. And gentleman suitors who came courting also suffered. If these heroes were especially favored, they were allowed to chat up the object of their desire. If they were really fancied, though, matters progressed to poetry, music, even handclasps and sighs. And eventually the great flea-picking ceremony. You've seen baboons do it on those unspeakable nature programs. Yes, our ancestors did the same, uttering rapturous sighs at all that contact.

  What I am getting at is this: If you see a little (one and a half inches maximum) antique box, dirty as hell, that should be neat and enameled to be a proper patch-and-comfit box and somehow isn't quite right, it can be only one of two things. The first is a battered nineteenth-century trinket or snuffbox, in which case you can generally forget it. The second—oh, dear, the second—is an Elizabethan flea and louse box. Don't shudder. Don't boil it to kill any remaining creepy-crawlies. Lock it carefully in the biggest safest safe you can find, swallow the key, and then scream with ecstasy. These little jeweled boxes were used by lovers for holding fleas and lice that they captured on their paramours' lovely chalk-powdered skin. It was an exquisitely charming pastime of those days. We don't advertise them as such, these boxes. We call them anything: "Early antique sixteenth-century lady's minute toiletry box, heavily inlaid, made by…" and so on.

  Remember Adrian? I spent part of the night cleaning the lumpy box—it was a genuine flea box. I kissed it reverently, drew all the curtains, doused my lamp, and rolled up the carpet. Underneath was the hinged paving stone. Down I went, eight wooden steps underground into my secret cave. Eight feet by eight, cold as charity, dry as a tinderbox, safer than any bank vault on earth. I laid the box on a shelf and climbed out, replacing the stone flag and making sure the iron ring lay in its groove. It wouldn't do to have a visitor tripping up over an unexpected bump in the carpet, would it? I smoked a Dutch cigar to celebrate, though they make me sleep badly, and went to bed. It was four o'clock.

  Field's brother was a collector, apparently. One of the indiscriminate kind. To his wife's dismay he filled the house with assorted antiques and semi-antiques and modern junk, a mixture of rubbish and desirable stuff. In short, a collector after my own heart.

  Somewhere, somehow, Field's brother found the Judas pair, so Field told me, not realizing they were anything more special than a pair of supreme antique flintlock duelers made by any old passing genius. He seems to have mentioned to all and sundry about his luck and I daresay let interested callers click the triggers—knocking guineas off their value at every click. Tender-hearted as I am, by this point in Field's narrative I was getting the feeling his brother might have got the same fate from me, but I suppressed it.

  Anyway, one night several months ago Field had a phone call from his brother, who told him very excitedly that the flintlocks were very special, unique in fact, if not world-shattering. He would bring them over next day, it being Saturday, and show him.

  "He never came, Lovejoy," Field told me.

  He was found by Field himself, at noon. Field drove over to see why he hadn't turned up. He was in his living room among all his clutter. Blood seemed to be everywhere. He seemed to have been shot through his eye, but the bullet was never found not even at the post-mortem.

  "Sorry about this," I said, "but did the pathologist say what bore?"

  "About twelve, but he wasn't sure."

  "Could be."

  Take a pound of lead. Divide it into twelve equal balls. They are then twelve-bore bullets for flintlock or percussion weapons. No cartridges, remember, for the period we're talking about. The impetus comes from your dollop of gunpowder and the spark. Flintlock weapons range from two-bore, or even one-bore monsters which throw a bullet as big as a carrot, to narrow efforts like the eighteen-bore or less. Duelers went with fashions, but twelve-bores were not unusual.

  "Where did he buy them?"

  "He never said." Wise man.

  "Nor how much he paid?"

  "No." Wiser still.

  "Were they cased?"

  "Cased?"

  "In a special box, the size of a small cutlery box, maybe up to two feet by one, maybe four inches deep."

  "There was a box that went with them."

  I stirred from desire. "And the accessories?"

  "As far as I remember, there were some small screwdrivers and a couple of metal bottles, and pliers," he said slowly, "but that's as much as I can recall." He meant a flask and mold.

  "So you actually saw them?"

  He looked surprised. "Oh, yes."

  "And… you didn't notice if they were of any extra quality?"

  "To me they were just, well, antiques."

  I eyed him coldly. You can go off people. "Did you notice the maker?"

  "Eric—my brother—told me. It's such an unusual name, isn't it? Durs. And Egg. I remarked on it." He grinned. "I said, I'll bet his mates pulled his leg at school."

  "Quite," I said, knowing the feeling well. "And of course you searched for them?"

  "The police did."

  "No luck?"

  "Not only that. They didn't believe me about them."

  No good looking for a gun—of any sort—if there's no bullet.

  "They said he'd been stabbed with a metal object."

  "Through the eye?" It sounded unlikely.

  "It's hopeless, as you no doubt see."

  "What theories did they have?"

  "Very few. They're still searching for the weapon."

  "Without knowing what sort of weapon it was?" I snorted in derision.

  He leaned forward, pulling out an envelope. "Here's five hundred," he said. "It's on account."

  "For… ?" I tried to keep my eyes on his, but they kept wandering toward the money in his hand.

  "For finding that weapon." He chucked the envelope and I caught it, so the notes inside wouldn't bruise. Not to keep, you understand. "My brother was shot by one of the Judas weapons."

  "The Judas pair don't exist." My voice sounds weak sometimes.

  "They do." For somebody so hopeless at pretending to be a collector he was persistent. "I've seen them."

  "They don't," I squeaked at the third try. It's funny how heavy a few pound notes can be.

  "Then give me the money back," he said calmly, "and tell me to go."

  "I could get you a reasonable pair for th
is," I said weakly. "Maybe no great shakes, not cased, and certainly not mint, but—"

  "Yes or no?" he asked. Some of these quiet little chaps are the worst. Never give up no matter how straight you are. Ever noticed that?

  "Well," I said gamely, feeling all noble, "if you really insist…"

  "If you've got a pen and paper," he said, smiling in a rather disagreeable way, "I'll give you all available details."

  I'd tried, hadn't I?

  Adrian brought Jane Felsham along. I handed him a check.

  "You're flush!" he exclaimed. "Come across a Barraud?" Barraud, a London watchmaker, about 1815 made some delicious flat-looking watches. Only the central sun decoration and the astounding nineteen-line movement and the sexy gold and enamel surface and the beady surround (pearls) tell you it's somewhat above average. The highest artistic imagination crystallized in a luscious context of brilliant science. I smiled, I think. People shouldn't make jokes. I'd once missed a Barraud by five minutes, late for an auction.

  "Steady progress," I replied.

  "Will it bounce?" He draped himself elegantly across a chair. Both he and Jane couldn't help glancing sharply around in case any of my recent finds were on display.

  "Don't you want it?" I brewed up to show we were still friends.

  "I must confess little Janesy and I were discussing whether you'd have the wherewithal, dear boy."

  "It was touch and go."

  "Business going a bit slow, Lovejoy?" Jane lit one of her long cigarettes and rotated her fag holder. "Not much about for the casual visitor to see."

  "I have these two warehouses…" They laughed.

  "That chap last night," Jane pressed. "A client?"

  "Trying to be," I said casually.

  "After anything we could help with?" from Adrian.

  "I doubt it." I rattled a few pieces of crockery to show I was being offhand.

  "A furniture man, I suppose." Jane waggled her fag holder again. A psychiatrist I sold a warming pan once told me something odd about women who habitually sucked fag holders. For the life of me I can't remember what it was.