The Vatican Rip Read online

  I was really peeved. ‘Why d’you believe Hyacinth and not me?’ Hyacinth’s only twelve but she always came top in Italian at the end-of-day test.

  Maria let the tea-lady pass with a loaded tray before accusing, ‘It’s antiques, isn’t it, Lovejoy?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re not.’ She was eyeing me as if for the first time, in serious puzzlement. ‘You’re a wreck and going downhill like a pining child.’ That was a real laugh. At my age.

  ‘It’s just I’m used to one way of doing things—’

  ‘Wait here,’ she said suddenly. ‘Learn the past perfect of essere. I’ll not be a minute.’

  I shrugged. She hared off, obviously in the grip of some vital decision, while I wheedled a ton of cake from one of the tea-women and sat noshing it while admiring the clip-handled jug. You can still get these little polychrome beauties for a song – almost. And when you think they are always older than two whole centuries, made with love and elegance by potters with all the gifts of God in their gnarled fingers, and less than a day’s average wage . . . I had tears in my eyes when finally Maria returned and jerked me back to reality.

  She was dressed to go out. ‘Get your coat, Lovejoy.’

  ‘I’ve got none.’

  ‘Sorry. I meant get ready.’

  ‘I’m always ready. Where are we going?’

  ‘Round the art galleries, antique shops and ruins of this fair town. Folk Museum. Minories.’

  My eyes misted and I reached for her, ignoring the delighted gaze of the canteen women. ‘Darling,’ I said. She was seeing things my way at last.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ she murmured, misty too. ‘There’s only one thing, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Eh?’ I drew back full of apprehension.

  ‘Everything in Italian, please. You know the rules.’

  Breathlessly but angrily I raced upstairs for my dictionary and the grammar, thinking of that sly bitch falling about laughing down in the porch. As I hurried I raged at myself, I’ll kill her one of these days, just see if I don’t.

  I wish I hadn’t thought that terrible thought now, but you can’t look into the future, can you? And honest to God none of this was my fault. None of it.

  That day was sheer torture. There was I, frantically trying to tell Maria about the engravings on the Jacobite drinking glasses in the town museum, and of the really serious need for ultraviolet light to distinguish between the fluorescence that demonstrates a glass’s origin, and there she was nodding encouragement as I ballsed up my declensions time and again. At the finish we both knew it was hopeless. I was the only known language learner with zero vocabulary, which is some handicap. I lost half a ton in sweat that afternoon.

  Maria dropped me off in the village at the end of a harrowing day. I had an idea she lived somewhere down on the estuary but didn’t dare ask. During the somewhat uncontrolled journey out of town – the snow was still about with the roads pretty grim – she hit on the idea of one particular item per day.

  ‘It’ll work, Lovejoy,’ she asserted confidently. ‘Pick a card.’

  ‘Illuminated manuscripts,’ I said. I’ve a real love for those.

  She glanced at me, oddly amused. ‘Fine. See you after midmorning break. We might as well go together in the car.’

  That night I worked in a maniacal fever, slogging like a mad thing to scrape together enough language to tell the stupid woman about the purity and complexity of style in the mediaeval illuminator’s work. Our town museum can only afford this one mediaeval Psalter, but there was so much to say. I was desperate to convert Maria’s moronic mind from materialism to a proper appreciation of love in human skills. The trouble is, nothing shuts you up like having no words.

  By dawn I was knackered, but capable of bleating a few short sentences about the most beautiful things on earth.

  Five weeks later I had worn out my first pocket dictionary and I kept going in grammar only by the neat trick of nicking Hyacinth’s text. I’m good at swapping flyleaves without trace so I could prove the book I’d pinched out of her satchel was mine. Anyhow, by then I was streets ahead of the rest. They were even leaving me out of the end-of-day tests. I out-smirked Hyacinth by miles, which served her right.

  It was that day too that Maria came to me for the first time. We were speaking in her language all the time now. Admittedly, I had to pause every minute or so for a feverish fumble through the book, but basically it was all progress. I’d discovered the most curious thing: learn one word and use it, and before long it somehow grows into two. Also, by then I wasn’t hungry any more and had started filling out. Maria bought me a secondhand overcoat and my wages were already sparkling with bonus gelt. Likewise Tinker had prospered, the parasitic old devil. Maria and I had taken to using our pub hour for revision, and Tinker would bob up in the Cups to cadge enough for five pasties and get paralytic drunk. I didn’t mind – though Maria presumably found him hard going – because when he’s sloshed his mental radar works best and he starts to find antiques.

  Just before everything closed one day Tinker found a small piece of pietra dura in Jeff Archer’s shop in the antiques arcade. We shot over, me blathering halting explanations to Maria. Jeff’s a pleasant bloke who lives with a young blind woman in Arlesford. He has the most phenomenal luck. I don’t actually believe in luck, but there’s a lot of it about.

  ‘Wotcher, Lovejoy.’ Jeff shoved a small gold box on the counter. Tinker took the quid I slipped him and faded like grinning mist, duty done. ‘Genuine Florentine, seventeenth century.’

  ‘Pietra dura.’ The lovely pictorial stone was beautifully laid on the box lid. ‘But Derbyshire, early nineteenth.’

  ‘Sure?’

  In raptures, I began to explain how the Duke of Devonshire’s fluospar mines actually made a continuous profit but the resultant craftsmanship never quite matched Italian work. You can’t help being enthusiastic.

  I came to feeling my smile dying on my face. Maria was looking at me. Shoppers were dwindling all around, pausing only for a glance on their way through the arcade to the bus station. Nothing seemed wrong, but there again was that wrong feel. As if she was comparing me with . . . with . . . ?

  I guessed, ‘Wrong declension?’

  ‘No, Lovejoy.’ She was holding my arm. ‘But I just can’t see it.’ She sounded helpless. ‘You have such potential. You could be doing so much—’

  I dragged her to one side. I’ve had all this before and you can’t let it get a hold of you. All this reasonable criticism can be very corrosive if it isn’t soldered shut. Fast. Jeff hastily busied himself in a corner.

  ‘You ever heard of love, Maria?’

  ‘Love?’

  ‘Yes. That stuff two people occasionally make.’ I saw her almost imperceptible nod. ‘Antiques are it. Love’s not a feeling, or a mystic dream. And sometimes,’ I finished brutally, ‘antiques are the only true pieces of love some people can ever find. So don’t knock them. Okay?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Shut it,’ I said savagely. I drew back then, looking at the ground because I could feel people staring, thinking we’d had a row. An elderly couple were going tut-tut.

  Maria thought. ‘I hope you’re wrong, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Women always do.’

  She was glancing round Jeff’s antiques with new eyes. ‘Which antique do you like best, Lovejoy?’

  ‘The next, love.’

  She looked back at me then, and asked sadly, ‘And is there no stopping?’

  I had the strange notion she was asking me something about herself. I hadn’t a notion what. Not then.

  ‘You mean relax?’ I snorted. ‘Sooner or later we relax for ever. What’s the point of starting early?’ My answer did not please her.

  She said abruptly, ‘I think that’s enough for today, Lovejoy.’ Jeff was relieved it hadn’t come to blows and took my promissory note for a deposit on the lovely box. He was glad to see the back of us.

  Maria walked with me through the church
yard to her car. She seemed morose, withdrawn for some reason, though I could have sworn I’d got the grammar more or less right. Her skin looked drawn and tired, her eyelids developing a faint crinkled texture as if she had begun to age. Normally she’d have been gunning verbs or rattling off sentences for me to construe, but she drove in silence right to my cottage garden. I got out in a bit of a huff because guilt makes you feel bad, especially if it’s someone else’s. I’ve always been able to get rid of my own pretty quick.

  ‘Look,’ I said miserably. ‘If it’s another bad report—’

  She averted her head and started to reverse. Just put the kettle on, Lovejoy,’ she ordered wearily. ‘While I bring my things.’

  I said, ‘Eh?’ but she simply drove off up the lane leaving me standing there feeling a pillock and wondering if I’d heard right.

  Then I went in with the dusk falling round the cottage like a huge coverlet, and frantically began tidying up before she came.

  That was how Maria and I really began. And I really loved her. I honestly mean that. We lasted until they gave me my final examination. I’ve already said how I screwed (I mean obtained) the result from Maria.

  Six next evening Arcellano came, dead on time.

  Chapter 4

  After the previous day’s examination Miss McKim had given a little tea party. All eighty of us stood about with little fingers hooking air, and trying to look as though we were in a rave-up. Miss McKim made a tearful little speech. We gave her a bunch of flowers and a book token. Hyacinth shook me by giving me a ruler which she had decorated in oils. In return I gave her a hair slide of brilliants in a bow-shaped setting, only 1870-ish but quite bonny. In the final farewells she whispered to me that she quite understood about Mrs Peck and me because after all it was Only Natural These Days, though I should be On My Guard Against Duplicity. I wish now I’d listened to her warning. She kissed my ear, her specs practically gouging my right eye out. Everybody shook hands with everybody while Jingo Hardy boomed a last speech full of jokes in bits of everybody’s languages so we all understood two per cent. Old Fotheringay creaked out a farewell poem in Latin modelled on Catullus, while we applauded at the wrong place. We’d all clubbed for theatre tickets to give all our teachers. Then it was break up and goodbye.

  Next day with Maria gone by eleven the cottage felt bare. It only looked the same. For a while I hung about and walked the garden, gave the robin his cheese and all that. There was no trace of her anywhere. She might simply never have been there at all, never crooked her fingers in midair when we made love, never called exhortations against my neck, never uttered hoarse cries for the light to be switched on . . . Finally I couldn’t stand it and walked through the drizzle to the pub.

  Tinker brought the suitcase to the Queen’s Head about one o’clock. It was there that I was called to the phone in the saloon bar and heard Arcellano’s voice telling me he would be at the cottage by six. From the background noise I guessed he was at some airport or other.

  My money used to come in an envelope simply marked ‘Lovejoy’. I still had my final envelope, and shared the gelt with Tinker. I told him I’d be away a few days.

  ‘With that bird with the big bristols, Lovejoy?’ He nearly fell into his pint at this witticism, his only joke.

  ‘Very droll, Tinker,’ I said. ‘Remember. While I’m away buy nothing. Just look out for musical boxes, William IV jewellery and anything that even smells of Nabeshima porcelain.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘And try for commemorative plaques, especially any with town names. There’s word of some being unloaded in Coggeshall soon. And dancing automata. You’ll find two already at Southwold, but don’t touch them because they’re crap. Somebody’s subbed them.’

  ‘Bastards.’ Tinker spoke with feeling. ‘Subbing’ means to replace a few parts of an antique with modern bits. Do it often enough and you have all the spare bits for a genuine original. It is done most often – for this read always – in the field of watches and clocks, automata, early scientific instruments, and early printed books where it’s done by dissecting pages. Dealers call this illegal process ‘twinning’, though that’s illogical because you finish up with ‘antiques’ of different ages.

  I drew breath to tell Tinker to keep an eye out for a rumoured Brescian miquelet-flint pistol but that made me think of modern weapons which made me think of revolvers which made me think of Arcellano so I shut up.

  Tinker got the vibes. ‘Want me to come wiv yer, Lovejoy?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m in enough trouble.’

  He would have, though, if I said yes. What he didn’t know was that he and the rest – and maybe Maria too by now – were hostages.

  ‘It’s in the Vatican,’ Arcellano told me, tilting back on the chair legs. He looked bigger than ever. His two animals were outside in his car. I’d insisted on that and to my astonishment he had agreed. It didn’t make me feel any more secure.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘No idea. Finding out’s your job. Listen, Lovejoy—’

  ‘No,’ I told him wearily. ‘You listen, Mr Arcellano. You want me to pull a rip. You’ll blam my friends if I don’t. Okay, I’ll do it. But what if I rip the wrong antique?’

  ‘You got a photo.’

  ‘It’s useless. There might be ten, a dozen tables like this.’

  The photograph had been taken by an instant camera, by someone riding a camel to judge from the blur. The lighting was abysmal, the angle atrocious. I’m no photographer but I could still have done better with a cardboard shoebox and a pin. The table had the look of a rent table, standing against a wall by a window. It could have been anywhere on earth.

  ‘What do I do when I nick it?’

  He did his smile thing. ‘You’ll have a contact. Marcello. And you will obey the orders to the letter.’ He was smoking a cigarette and gazed reflectively at the glowing tip with his humourless smile. ‘And you will never use names. Not mine, not yours. I’ll hold you to that, Lovejoy.’

  He narked me. Threats are all very well, but it was me taking the risks. This vagueness just would not do. ‘Do I get any help?’

  He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. ‘Not much. Remember you were carefully selected for the task because of your undoubted talents.’

  Well, I’d tried. ‘Which leaves the small matter of payment. I’ve no money to fly there.’

  ‘So it does.’ He rose and stubbed out his cigarette right on the surface of my wobbly table, the pig. Still, it wasn’t on me this time. He took back the photo, careful man that he was. ‘The travel agent in town has your tickets and flight bookings. You go tomorrow night.’ He dropped a bundle of notes on the table. ‘That will give you luxury for five days, or survival for twenty. Choose.’

  ‘What if—?’

  ‘No more questions, Lovejoy.’ He moved to the hall. Mechanically he raised a hand to stop me switching the light on. A very cautious man, every gesture the subject of detailed planning. ‘You have a job to do. Do it.’

  ‘And this Marcello pays me?’

  ‘You get ten times the going commercial value of the antique in question, plus expenses. And a basic weekly rate averaged on your past four weeks.’

  I worked that out. As far as I was concerned it was a relative fortune. Once I’d pulled the rip I’d be able to eat until Christmas and still have enough left to give a turkey the fright of its life.

  I stood at the door of the cottage and watched his big Merc leave. One of his nerks, a gross unpleasing man with the pockmarked face of a lunar landscape and bad teeth, wound down his window and bawled, ‘Good luck – you’ll need it!’ I said nothing back because I could hear somebody laughing. The laughter continued until the closing windows sliced it off. Idly I wondered what the joke was. It couldn’t have been Arcellano laughing because clearly he’d never learned how.

  I went inside to pack.

  Chapter 5

  On the whole I never like travelling much. It always seems to me a waste of al
l those places in between. No, for me a little distance goes a long, long way.

  Absence is great therapy, but during the journey to Heathrow Maria kept coming to mind. Her rather weary acceptance of me as a lover, those occasional remote silences like that time in the arcade with the Derbyshire pietra dura. And most of all those vivid flashes of apprehension – practically wild terror – so soon suppressed yet memorable as a gleam of gold in a lake. Twice I’d asked her outright if she knew Arcellano, describing him, and she said no. I believed her. Even though I can’t fathom women I think I know them pretty well. At least, I think I think.

  The previous night I’d tried contacting her, but realized I didn’t even know her address. She once told me she lodged somewhere down the estuary, but that was as far as I got. The phone people were unable to help. The school was closed.

  By a fluke Joan Culpepper was in when I’d phoned, and was able to get away to meet me that evening. We went back to the cottage for a farewell chat, which helped me to forget my worries. A little sublimation does you a power of good. The silly bitch laughingly refused to sell me her tassie ring, though – ‘to keep you interested, Lovejoy’. She asked with a great show of sweet innocence what I had done with Maria (‘. . . somewhere in the garden, I hope, Lovejoy . . .’) but I put a stop to that. One war’s enough.

  The flight to Rome wasn’t so bad, two hours ten minutes stuck in a reclining seat and fed to bursting by those girls who always look sterile. I may have missed Maria yesterday but would definitely see her once I got back. That notion pleased me so much I became quite eager to land and get on with the rip. It was bound to be dead simple. ‘Easy as stealing from a church’ is a saying in the antiques trade. As the plane banked in from the Mediterranean stack over Ostia I was even smiling. Maria would give me a hero’s welcome. I knew that.