Ringing home’s easy. Press the ship-to-shore button, and a mechanical voice says the call will cost you an arm and a leg. Dial, and presto!
“Hello?” I almost screamed. “Margaret?”
“Lovejoy?”
“It’s me! It’s me!”
“Where are you? The police are looking for you, and Hackney louts are asking at every auction. Tinker’s been arrested, and Belle’s disappeared.”
“Listen, love. I’m on a ship, and – ”
“The line’s funny, Lovejoy. Did you say ship?”
“Course I did, you stupid … er, sorry. Called Melissa, going to Russia. I want to get off.” I halted. What did I want her to do?
“Doesn’t it stop?”
I felt this was all her fault. “They’re keeping me on it.”
“Lovejoy.” I heard doubt. Women are all suspicion. “Who is she? You’ve gone walkabout with some tart, want me to lie you out of it.”
“Eh?”
She sounded bitter. “Like that American bitch from Wichita. Look, Lovejoy. I’ll help you when you come home, but not when you’re playing the fool. Incidentally, that David Buddy has hired Smarmy on North Hill as a scout. And my Norman’s home.”
“Don’t ring off!” I could tell she was going to. Norman is her husband. Smarmy’s an antiques dealer in a ruin he calls a shop. He’ll do anything for a groat. “Please, Margaret. It’s not a woman. They’re going to top me.”
The line burred in my ear. Gone. I looked at the receiver – how daft is that? – then tried to redial. The line was engaged. A third time, engaged. Ten minutes later, engaged. She’d blanked me off, the cruel bitch. See how women leave you in the lurch? I beg for help, and she reminds me of some bird I’d forgotten?
The affair honestly had been really innocent. An American dealer’s wife came a-calling at my cottage and stayed until next morning, honestly only to see some antiques. They didn’t arrive – honestly not my fault – so she stayed another night. The antiques never did turn up. Her husband cancelled a huge buy of seven eighteenth-century gaming tables. Two of the seven tables were genuine, the other five being forgeries made by me and Balk Haythorn from Weeley. I had sweated blood getting the ends of the folding-leaf tables exactly right (the rounded corner projections are for candlesticks, so card players would have enough light). They were beautiful. We would have made a king’s ransom. Margaret forked out money for the heart-wood, varnishes, certificates of provenance and similar grey areas, so she lost heavily when the Yank dealer had to be fobbed off with fables of where his wife had stayed. Margaret placated him with white lies – I begged, I begged – but the deal didn’t go through. Margaret and the others still blame me, which isn’t fair. I was honestly innocent.
The ship’s calendar on my cabin TV said people would still be wassailing on the Lido Deck at the swimming pools, but I went to bed and thought.
My mind’s a ragbag at the best of times. Like, Finland leads Europe in drinking coffee, the Greeks lead in bread consumption, and Russian women knot their headscarves to state their observance of marriage laws. India has 59% of the world’s remaining tigers. One in three of the world’s leaders – from Napoleon to the dimmest prime minister – lost a parent before they reached the age of 15. Wellington was known as the Iron Duke, not from military resolve, but because his house had iron-framed windows. King Francis the First of France bought the Mona Lisa to hang in his bathroom, and our Henry the Eighth was a tallish slim bloke, not the gross nerk of the movies.
Concentrating, I rummaged for facts about ships, and realised I knew nothing. Except 171 ships had been attacked by pirates in the past six months; the place for it is the Malacca Straits and, just like ram-raiders who drive a lorry through an antique shop window and nick specific antiques, so modern sea-borne pirates capture ships to order. Of course, it’s mostly massive cargoes – new cars, helicopter parts, aero engines, missiles and munitions, tankers carrying crude oil. No help there. Another datum: anybody aboard pegging out from natural causes is discreetly whisked off, or zoomed to hospital ashore by helicopter.
I’d already heard Millicent telling Ivy, “That’s why they stopped posting passenger lists. So embarrassing having to cross people off.”
Other facts? Oslo. I was stuck. And as if I hadn’t enough enemies, I’d alienated Margaret, the one person I trust. My loyal barker Tinker was arrested, God knows why. I’d added to my foes on board by earning the undying hatred of Lauren and her mentor the great antiques TV expert Henry Semper for exposing his rotten little scheme. Who on earth were the Hackney louts? I felt sick. The Marquis of Gotham must have hired some tankers, violent GBH blokes usually from Leeds. I gulped. North London hoods are as bad, and never give up. I thought, Goodnight diary, and slept.
* * *
The lecture theatre was really the cinema between movies. Henry Semper came limping out to loud applause. I sat at the end of a row. The place was crammed. I saw Fern and her friend Delia Oakley in the centre chatting amicably with a mob who all seemed to know each other. The antiques coterie? Fern turned round to scan the audience. Her eyes locked on mine. My fellow-diners came. They seized the front row and waved to pals.
Semper began by accepting a card from Lauren, who had so far unbent as to wear a faint trace of lipstick. She peered around the audience as Semper read out the successful person’s name.
“The value of the genuine silver Paul de Lamerie antique I showed round at dinner is …” He held the suspense, then stated a price that would buy a superb house in Dulwich, Hampstead Heath, or some other undesirable slum (joke). Amid scattered applause – nobody is pleased when somebody else wins – a gent went to get the prize, a Royal Copenhagen figure of lovers snogging on a rock above a faintly purple sea. Genuine, but less than twenty years old, so I scored it as pretty but yawnsome. Tip: Ignore anything antique dealers call “tomorrow’s antiques” – we’re all that, for heaven’s sake.
He began his talk. Lauren operated slides. It was a mundane sequence of antiques sold at London and international auctions. Gracefully he skirted Sotheby’s scandals, the price-fixing deals and the ghastly Impressionist fiasco that ripped off trusting buyers from Tokyo to Los Angeles. I almost dozed off from excitement. It grew especially dull when he talked of opportunities for investing in antiques. I shook myself alert. Money was really Semper’s subject.
“Tomorrow’s antiques are the thing to buy.”
Hello, I thought, here we go. He had a knack of speaking to secret cravings, and judged his audience with cunning. It’s the trick used by all con artists. I’d got his number.
“And why?” he intoned. “Because, dear friends, they are soaring in value! Inflation, deflation, the value of money, stocks and shares – all these things let you down. Antiques never will!”
He nodded to Lauren. She clicked. The screen showed a lovely Imari vase. This is a bulbous porcelain piece with a cover, a lovely style. The colours (remember them) are dark blue, a faint red, and slender black for outlines. The base rim had a faint greenish hue. On the picture it looked authentic, so I was pleased. He mentioned a value that set everybody gasping. I felt sure I’d seen its lookalike in the University of London’s porcelain museum, near Betjeman’s favourite church of Christ the King. (Easiest place to rob, incidentally, if you like Eastern porcelains – I mean the museum; the church has zilch.)
Then he uncovered a display stand, flinging the cloth aside with a magician’s theatrical gesture.
“And now, the real thing! Isn’t it exquisite?”
Heads bent as everybody talked animatedly of vases they had known, seen, just missed, turned down when they could have bought them for a penny. In the hubbub I saw Ivy, the quiet Wirral wife of Billy the showy ex-cop, her sad face illuminated in the glow. Her expression was woeful. You can always tell misery. She was three seats along my row. I shouldn’t watch other people. I’m always at it. It gets me into trouble. She caught my look and gave a feeble smile. I nodded, went back to watching the great TV impressario.
“This is of a slightly different date, but is the genuine Imari…” and similar balderdash.
Imari wasn’t a porcelain factory, though antique dealers pretend it was. It was simply the port through which Japanese porcelains were exported. The word porcelain’s supposed to come from a resemblance to a Cowrie shell, which is similar to cured pork skin, but wordsmiths never tell the same tale twice so we’ll never know. I listened to Semper wax eloquent.
The poor little fake pot stood there, its coloured slide projected up on the screen for all the world to sneer at. If it had feelings, as a genuine antique Imari has, it would have been ashamed. Semper was a demon for intangibles – the hallmark of a bamboozler getting into his stride. He kept saying things like, “The influence in a niello vanity case speaks of Russia’s nineteenth century…” and “The flavour of the design justifies the eloquence with which…” It’s all claptrap. It means you have to have seen a hundred genuine antiques before you can distinguish garbage from truth. Yet greedy people actually trust these charlatans, and spend their lives searching for china ware with a “hint of rococo” and pearls that feel “cooler than the average”. My tip: if you’re a beginner, learn to measure.
The expert was preaching about his vase. It was a brightish green. Tip: These modern Korean replicas are ten a penny in the Far East. Quite attractive, but two things give them away. Simply stand back, screw your eyes up so you can hardly see the leafy, curling design, and the pattern blurs into insignificance. Now do the same with the real thing and the pattern stays. It’s never wrong.
My second tip is measurement. The diameter of the cover’s outside rim is half of the width of the vase at its widest – so the cover’s width divided by the width of the bell is 0.5, a sum anybody can work out, because one over two is a half, right? The Korean fake’s ratio was 0.68, give or take a yard. There are other measures. I’m not knocking Korean replicas, note, because some from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries are crackers, really bonny. And of course the older ones count as antiques in themselves, so are worth finding. Koreans made them, as Chinese still tend to, in tributary devotion to ancient pottery masters. Fine. The only thing I don’t like is people being sold one as the other for a thousand times the price.
I don’t know what antique hunters have against measurement.
“Excuse me, sir,” said an American in the next seat. “Would you please stop muttering?”
“Sorry, sorry.” I keep doing that. It gets me into trouble.
“The expertise of a skilled antiques aficionado,” said Semper, aheming modestly so the audience knew he meant himself, “is beyond price. The risk is yours!”
He repeated his catchphrase and went on to the next series of projector slides. I asked the Yank’s pardon and edged out. I was fool enough to glance at the stage, and caught Lauren’s venomous glare. From being a winsome mousey creature, so meek and prim, she was transformed into a death ray. Her face was contorted in a snarl of fury as her gaze followed me. I slid from the cinema. Semper tried to cover my departure by a glib wisecrack.
“Somebody wants to get back to the bar!”
I made my way down to a bar lounge and sat listening to the band and a gorgeous woman crooner while folk danced. Above, the shops were on the go, one of them announcing a sale. Across, on the balcony of the second floor, people were selecting hand-made chocolates and exclaiming at new flavours.
“I thought you’d be at the art sale,” an American voice remarked. “It starts in thirty minutes.”
He sat beside me, signalled for a stewardess and ordered a highball. I declined his offer of a drink. I was relieved he hadn’t followed me out of Semper’s talk to black my eye. He was a giant.
“Sorry I spoiled your lecture.”
“Your grumbling was more interesting than Semper.”
He was one of these urbane, ultra-groomed transatlantics with perfect teeth and luxuriant silver hair. I didn’t doubt for one moment that he owned Nevada or somewhere and that he could buy the shipping line with pocket money. His patent leather shoes looked worth my cottage.
“Measure vases, though?”
That narked me. “I’ve already apologised. Sit somewhere else.”
He laughed. Two women glanced across, captivated by his film-star looks. Women adore power, whereas men worship form. There’s this theory, isn’t there, that men are instinctively guided by clues to supposed fertility – shape, waist-to-hip ratio, smooth youthful skin and curvaceous breasts, undulating walk. It only goes to show what gunge medical research is, because there’s a grace in older women you don’t find anywhere else, and every woman has her own beauty. As for women going for the masterful millionaire, I’ll never know.
“Pleased to meet you, sir.” He reached and shook my hand. “Victor Lustig, New York.”
“Lovejoy.” Odd name, but I should talk. I’d heard it before somewhere. Maybe one of those folk on the front of Time?
“I’d be obliged if you’d write me those criteria you were muttering about. Measurement proves authenticity?”
“I don’t know what people have against measurement. They want mystique, the idea of a sixth sense.” I quite liked the bloke, so I kept going.
There are loads of measurements you can take that might differentiate between a clear fake and a genuine antique. Like, acrylics weren’t known two hundred years ago, but that didn’t stop the forger Tom Keating from faking Samuel Palmer’s watercolours in ten-year-old acrylic paint. I saw them sold for the price of a new saloon motor car in galleries off Piccadilly, London, before he got arrested. He was a neighbour of mine, and I used to watch him do them. Acrylics shine on the paper in a way different from watercolours. So while some elegant salesman talks gunge about “perceptual style interrogating the natural world’s emotional stresses”, just carry the painting to the door where you can see how it sheens (or doesn’t!) in ordinary daylight.
Once I’d got going, sitting there while Lustig sipped his bourbon, I told him what beginner antiques hunters should carry with them.
“Assemble an antiques-buyer’s kit, to start out. It only costs a few coppers. Buy a tape measure marked in metric and imperial. Get a X 10 loupe (a higher magnification’s no use at all), and a little pair of old-fashioned brass weighing scales in a velvet case – complete with weights, it’ll cost you the price of a cup of coffee, because India exports them as trinkets. Then nick your wife’s eyebrow tweezers.”
With a twinge of sorrow, I remembered I usually nick my tweezers from Margaret Dainty.
“Then a solar-powered calculator – you get them free in Christmas crackers; a colour chart – free from art shops; I like Daler-Rowney because it folds small and there’s space to write the dates each colour came in. Then a midget plastic microscope for examining surfaces of furniture – also free in Christmas crackers; the battery is always dud. A pen-torch. A few carob seeds to remind you how heavy one ‘carat’ weighs.
“Make a small case for them all from the covers of a hard-back book, small enough to go in your pocket. I include a midwife’s spring balance. It’s the size of a pencil stub – not because I’m likely to leap into action and start delivering neonates, but for weighing Old Masters, porcelains, jewellery, any of those antiques that keep on coming round time after time in country auctions. If, say, a familiar painting’s suddenly twice as heavy as when you last saw it, it’s a clue that it’s a fake because age dries, right?”
He tried to interrupt but I was motoring.
“With that cheapo kit, you’ll save yourself from a whole series of blunders. I also carry a couple of small wooden rulers made up of different slices of polished heart-woods, all named. Ecology groups give them out free in village fêtes. They’re good for identifying woods when you’re new to the game. I always get American and Japanese oak wrong, dunno why.”
He listened, smiling. “You’ve been around antiques.”
“More fakes.” Especially on this voyage, I thought but did not say.
“I might market it! I’ll call it the Antiques Hunter’s Pack, price ten ninety-five!” His splendid evening suit expanded with his magnificent baritone chuckle. “Marketing’s what I do. Selling, buying. Otherwise, I’m only good at poker. Fancy a game?”
Graciously he allowed me to say no, ta. I didn’t tell him my job and didn’t ask his, because asking about jobs is nosey. He told me anyway.
“Dry goods, bulk buys and imports – as long as the Almighty Dollar stays out of intensive care!” More mellifluous laughter. The two women at the bar smiled and exchanged more glances. “Incidentally, Lovejoy, I shouldn’t ask that Lauren lady for the next dance! See the way she looked at you?”
“Didn’t notice.”
“Would you write me down those measurements for that Imari vase? I’d be obliged.”
Another person on the make. I felt tired, and it was only getting on for noon. Was it anxiety? I said no, left him and went to the main desk, asking if any messages had come for me.
“You’ll find them in your cabin, sir, or on your telephone.” I went round behind the band, and saw an odd thing, only coincidence but I’d had too many to like yet another. I saw Ivy enter the Atrium, give a quick glance round, then step forward and sit with Victor Lustig. You can always tell, can’t you, or have I already said that? I went to my cabin, to find one phone message.
“Lovejoy? Come to Suite 1133 immediately. It’s time you earned your keep.”
This, note, was the silly old bat I’d taken pity on in Benjo’s Emporium, now sounding like Napoleon. And I’d paid for garden lights for her grandbaby’s birthday, which was how I’d got myself into this mess. I made myself as presentable as I could, and headed for servitude. As I went, I thought of Napoleon, then France, then Paris. The train of thought helped me, because I suddenly remembered.
Victor Lustig was the name of a famous old conman, long since deceased. He’d once sold the Eiffel Tower.
Going upstairs, I thought well, well.