“Lovejoy?”
Blearily I came to. Bannerman stood next to my recliner. I’d just had a coffee by the Riviera Pool reading David Copperfield. I always feel so sorry for the poor little blighter. I used to fill up, reading the story to my gran, and so did Gran.
A beautiful woman stood beside him. I’d seen her before, at my talk and in the Purser’s Office. His wife?
“Eh?”
“This is Cynthia. Look.” He crouched down. “Final offer. We go halves, and I fund the legal business. Won’t cost you a penny. Cynthia’s taken a real shine to the idea. We’ll make a killing. You simply say your piece in court. How about it?”
The loonies had taken over. When that happens, pretend to be one. I glanced about in mute warning.
“Right. Say nothing more here. Give me your address when we leave the ship, okay? I’ll meet you in Southampton, fix the details.”
“Thank Christ for that. I thought I’d lost my touch.” He grinned at Cynthia. “This gooner drives a hard bargain. I like that in a man.”
“So do I,” said Cynthia, cool.
She smiled down. I peered up. Height gives a woman a distinct advantage, but they’re always unfair because they start at their legs and go on up.
“Any time you want to rehearse me, Lovejoy,” she said calmly, “just call.”
“Right.” I meant no.
They left. I went back to David Copperfield. He was in a worse state than me, but he gets out of his mess and wins through. Only in the story, though, only in the story.
* * *
As I came out of the swimming pool, I collected my towel and bag from my deck recliner, and found a note from Cynthia. I shrugged and thought oh, well. No harm done just to go and say hello. An hour later I was at the deck quoits match.
The excitement was out of all proportion to what was happening. People were shoving rope rings into marked squares. A breathless crowd of three had assembled to witness the gaiety.
Sports and me don’t mix. Frankly I think they’re dull. Ice hockey is beyond me. Rugby variants are as dire as each other, ever since that daft so-and-so William Webb Ellis in 1823 picked the ball up and ran with it at Rugby School and so started the game. Horse riding is fascist – those poor nags – and I’d sooner bottle smog than see a Formula One race. Good antiques abound, though, with sports themes, if you can get hold of any. Golfiana (sorry) has gone mad, up 200% in a year, item on item.
Cynthia Bannerman’s note said to meet at the Deck Quoits, so here I was. She was playing. Gripped by the tempestuous action, I went to a deck chair to nod off.
“Lovejoy? I won!”
I stirred. “Yippee.”
“Walk?” I stood, stretched, and we strolled the deck. People were reclining on loungers, having a smoke, sending for drinks.
“Your heart isn’t in the deception Josh suggests, is it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard for me.”
“Don’t be silly. You do it all the time.”
“Look, love. In a lifetime I’ve heard of hundreds of so-say divvies. Every cheap TV junk-stall presenter claims to have the knack, the gift. Antiques Road-Show experts all hint they posses the magic seventh sense for antiques. Every corner-street dealer says he has the divvy factor. Know the truth?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“I’ve only ever been sure of one other divvy bloke besides me.”
“One? Then it is rare!” She slipped her arm through mine. It felt marvellous, walking with a lovely svelte woman on my arm, and me a scruff. “You’ll be all the more convincing! It is so easy to pretend!”
“Ever seen anybody pretend to have the divvy shakes? They are so embarrassing it’s ridiculous. It’s a laugh. Even the phoney divvies know they look absurd. Pathetic.”
“You won’t do it?” She halted us.
“In court would be worse.”
“Not for me?” She fluttered her eyes.
“Look, love. Your bloke …”
“Not if I persuaded to the uttermost?”
I had already decided not to lie for Bannerman’s gain, so what difference would it make if I let myself be persuaded? It’s so easy to pretend. She’d said it. And my gran said it’s polite to agree with a lady.
“Very well,” I agreed, politely. “Where shall we go to talk it over?”
“I’ll think of somewhere,” she said, and we walked on.
The day passed in a blur. In a trice I was saying goodnight, wishing people wouldn’t leave the show and go to bed. Crowds thinned, the decks cleared as the black horizon showed more lights of Russia’s shoreline. Ships passed more frequently. I wanted to shout for everyone to stay awake. Nobody stays loyal when you need them – look at Margaret Dainty, my lifelong pal. I almost broke down as I realised the barman and two stewardesses were the only folk left in the Horizon Lounge. I felt sick, though I’d only had one glass of wine after supper. Lauren had gone, saying she’d try the ship-to-shore phone link, see if she could raise (her unfortunate phrase) Mr Semper. Some hopes. We used to say that as children, when games got forlorn, some hopes. The parrot in Les Renown’s joke knew about freezers.
The cabin seemed a small box when finally I turned in. I made tea, stared out of the porthole at the gathering lights, trying to visualise the captain and his officers looking into the night, their instruments telling them exactly where the ship was. Holly told me they had ways of knowing how many people were aboard. Did that include dead? I shut the curtain on Russia, and lay there. I only had Pride and Prejudice, so I lay back and thought of Ivy’s Hermitage catalogue. It had had no map, just prints of the Impressionist paintings. I supposed these were the ones we – meaning I – was to spot, then to snatch.
* * *
One thing about Russians, they know where they stand. Okay, ideologically they move about a lot and say they don’t, but they know whose side they’re on. In England, justice is a trick that possibly almost virtually nearly occasionally sometimes constantly must be seen to be done. In Russia, justice is in the eye of the beholder; it simply depends on whose eye is doing the looking.
Russia is there very like the USA. Not similar, but vast and impenetrable. They’re the same in one special way: if neither existed, the rest of us would have to invent both, just as we invent God and Satan. Which is which is up to the individual.
I knew little about Russia except the usual exotic fragments in my ragbag mind. Catherine the Great locked her hairdresser in an iron cage for three years, so he couldn’t reveal the ghastly truth that she’d contracted dandruff. Which country has most USA 100 dollar notes in circulation? Answer: Russia, outstripping America by a mile. What drug is used to abduct Russian moguls for ransom? Answer: heroin (the kidnappers inject it). And what Russian magnates get abducted most often? Oil tycoons. Russian jokes have made the satirical magazines in the West with quips like, How do they congratulate new deputy mayors in Novosibirsk? By giving him a new Kevlar vest (bulletproof, see?). And, how can you tell when a Duma deputy’s salary rises by one dollar? Answer: he buys another Rolls Royce. Yet isn’t politics the same the world over? My dad and uncles once played against the famed football team Moscow Dynamo yonks ago, and said how they’d suffered in wartime.
What else did I know? Nothing. I wondered what Ivy had given me that catalogue for. I’d scanned it, to no avail. I started Pride and Prejudice all over again. My trouble is I do exactly as women tell me. It didn’t work, so I tried to sleep.
A room is a room, nothing more. That cabin storing Lauren’s stock of antiques kept coming to mind. Lauren said Henry Semper wanted a bigger space, for maybe some genuine antique furniture for the passengers’ entertainment. Had June Milestone advised him? This room kept coming back, worrying me.
There’s my game. Ten Words Everything. Like I said earlier, I invented it, to teach myself clearer thinking. You have to describe anything in ten words. For instance, I knew a man who was wealthy. He bought a small French 1870s clock off me, good value. I ate for a week on the proceeds, really posh meals at my cottage, with a new sauce bottle and everything. I even brought out my saucer and bread-and-butter plate. You’d never seen such elegance. Guy met a woman who stayed with him and spent his money like a drunken sailor, then she met a richer bloke and took off. Guy went to pieces. In my Ten Word Game: She moved in, spent up, met another, moved on, desolation! That’s ten, and it says everything. Poor Guy has never been the same since.
How would I describe my plight? My ten words would be: Shanghaied, Russian robbery planned, two dead, frightened I’m next … That’s nine. But then what? Dead? Gaoled? Arrested? Missing? There was one decent word at the end, though. Escape. That would do me.
My mind flipped pages. Ivy’s book had talked of where the seventy-four priceless Impressionist paintings in the Hermitage Hidden Treasures exhibition came from, and their value to the world. Only two had ever been seen in public before. This means they’d be simple to sell, once nicked by enterprising thieves – say like an organised gang sailing in by cruise ship, and consisting of reliable officers, antiques experts, policemen.
My dozing mind went sideways. Hidden Treasures Revealed had a subtitle: Impressionist Masterpieces preserved by the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. I get narked. Is there anything more useless than a prologue, a preface, a foreword, or an introduction? If they’ve anything to say, I always think, get on with it and stop annoying us. The masterworks weren’t in doubt. Painted between 1827 and 1927, they appeared from the rubble at the end of the 1939-45 war, mostly undocumented. Earliest was Camille Corot’s Rocks, the latest Matisse’s Ballerina, a creative spread of 100 years.
You could dramatise the arrival of such masterpieces (actually in railway trucks) in the poverty and heartbreak of post-war Europe, as they were sent to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow or the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and simply stored there. Rights and wrongs seemed clearer back then. The Western and Eastern Bloc nations took up pejorative attitudes, name-calling the other. I ignore political terms and even words like Impressionist, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionist, because they interrupt my view of paintings by Vincent, Monet, Gaugin, and the rest. They’re for writers of prologues.
To me, it’s simple. The paintings were protected by good old Russia when destruction threatened, and were now brought out for everybody to see. Enough.
Or for people to sail into St Petersburg’s lovely harbour, in order to steal by arrangement, let’s say?
* * *
I thought I was sleeping soundly, having dismissed the Hermitage book Ivy lent me. Yet something lingered. Once the Introduction began, there were only three photographs. Black and white. All three were of rooms, small grainy snapshots showing old-fashioned … well, just rooms with carpets, pelmets, and careful furnishings. Oh, and paintings hung about the walls. Some you could identify, by Renoir, Courbet. Others weren’t so easy.
Underneath each blurry photo were the names of collectors who’d bought the paintings. The superb collection had been owned by three main buyers. Their names weren’t important to me, but are famous. I mean, Joseph Otto Krebs matters, not because he ran a steam-boiler factory, but because he liked artistic beginners known as Vincent Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gaugin and suchlike, and stuffed his house in Holzdorf with their art. He snapped up young Picasso’s works as well. Top marks to Joe, then, for perception.
Another German industrialist collector was Bernhard Koehler, who subsidised young artists like my favourite, poor August Macke – his 1913 charmer Zwei Frauen vor dem Hutladen has just gone for four million zlotniks in Sotheby’s even as I write, giving an idea of the gelt we’re tilting at here. Everything in modern art you see nowadays leads back to Bernhard of the big bucks. The story of what happened to the collections is fraught, leading through the carnage of the July Plot on Hitler’s life and subsequent executions, the bombings and ruination, and thence to the Hermitage.
The final major collection, Otto Gerstenberg’s, eventually joined the others in St Petersburg. He was a mathematician who turned to running an insurance company (the only blight on his life) in Berlin, and loved everybody from Constable, Reynolds, Goya, and the other famous names everybody knows.
The French masterpieces of these rich aficionados were the Hidden Treasures exhibition we were going to nick. Yeah, right, I thought in my doze. My mind saw rooms turning and shifting shapes and colours. Even asleep I found myself thinking about rooms, but why?
I woke, and it was bright daylight, half-seven. I looked out through the porthole. We were gliding up an enormous waterway towards a beautiful city. St Petersburg, golden amber in the morning sun. The steward knocked, summoned me to Suite 1133 in thirty minutes.
The faces were excited, enthralled like children before a seaside outing. I sat. They’d laid on breakfast, Lady Vee’s stewardess Marie providing an enormous buffet. I helped to scoff most of it, so she didn’t feel she’d wasted her time getting it ready. The others seemed too excited to bother with food.
“The Hermitage in St Petersburg,” Mangot said, doing his Napoleon-before-Waterloo. “Doubts, anxieties anyone?”
“St Petersburg!” Lady Vee exclaimed, eyes aglow. “Where Catherine the Great founded the Bolshoi! City of Pushkin, the dancers Nijinsky and Pavlova! Most of all, Dostoevsky!”
“Crime and Punishment?” I asked, lamely keeping up.
“His scribbles are incidental,” she cried in contempt. “Such a brilliant gambler! His infallible gambling system went missing after his death. Legend says a foreign lady will sail in one day and rediscover it! Don’t you see? The fable means me!”
“Aye, right,” I told the loony bint.
Mangot showed some sense by ignoring her, but less by ignoring me.
“This is the war council, everybody, so listen. The Hermitage is five immense linked buildings along the waterside, starting at the Winter Palace and ending in the Hermitage Theatre.”
He must have seen my expression change and said wearily, “What, Lovejoy?”
“Look,” I said through a mouthful of nosh. “It doesn’t sound much if you say it quick, except the Winter Palace alone houses over a thousand rooms and 117 magnificent staircases. And they know we’re coming.”
Mangot sounded strangled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Put the Crown Jewels in a tower, everybody knows everybody is coming. The world and his wife wants to nick them. Bound to be the same at the Hermitage. Armed guards. Dogs. Electronics. Every minute of every day, they’ll expect robbers.”
“We aren’t the robbers,” he said in exasperation. “It’s laid on. We are the good folk. We’re safe.”
“It won’t work. Somebody will get hurt.” I meant me, and I think they understood because they all turned to look at him, even June and Lady Vee. “If you’re bent on nicking the great Manchester clock in the Wyndham Franklin in Philadelphia, America, you’d need an army, not just a few dead-legs like us. Why? Because the bloody thing’s twenty-six feet tall and six feet wide. Victorians built things big in 1869.”
“And your point is…?”
“We should chose what we’re nicking.”
“We’re not nicking anything, Lovejoy,” now with ill-suppressed anger. “We’re doing a let’s-pretend.”
“Honest?”
The room held silence. I saw the golden sheen come off the sea through the balcony window. Quite like amber, I’d thought earlier in my own cabin. Our faces were golden. I wondered anew why Ivy had slipped me the book of the treasures we were going to steal. Then I wondered how on earth she’d known that fact. She wasn’t one of our group, never had been.
“You think we’re going to all this trouble for no reason, Lovejoy?”
“No.” And I didn’t.
“We pretend to thieve the Impressionist paintings in the Hermitage. How many times do I have to tell you? Seventy-four paintings.” He looked round the others. “Lovejoy will authenticate them on a routine visit, in the company of a hundred other passengers. Then we go for it.”
“How?” I asked Marie for some more toast. She looked at her table in disbelief, amazed it had all gone. I thought, for God’s sake, woman, eating is what toast is for. Toast isn’t a proposition by Wittgenstein.
“That isn’t your business. When the exhibition went on show, the whole world shrieked one question: Are they genuine? You’re here to tell us yes or no. Got it?”
“What if – ?”
“You just go in,” he shouted, losing his rag, “make sure they’re genuine masterpieces, and tell us. Then we set things in motion.”
“What things?”
“I have arranged that with the Russians.” He leant back. “Safe enough, Lovejoy?”
“Still no facts, though.”
“There!” Lady Vee said brightly. “We’ve all got to be in special places at the right time, haven’t we James?”
“Yes, Lady Vee.” He brought out a map of the Hermitage, several layers of the damned thing. They were marked with red crosses, each cross with a single letter in scarlet. “L is for Lovejoy,” he said, all sarcasm. “He simply goes into the Exhibition, picks out the duds, if any. Lady Vee is V, okay?”
“It’s really thrilling!”
He went over the list. Stairs were going to be awkward, because the lifts were sacrosanct and might be out of service.
“It’s the way things are here. We’re two days in St Petersburg,” he finished. “I’ve arranged excursions for us.”
Us? I didn’t like the thought of being on a trip with him. The less I saw of the murdering swine the better.
“We must stick to the times marked on the charts, follow the guides at the proper times, and all will be well.”
“Must I see every single painting in the collection we’re, er, not going to steal?” My heart was thumping. Marie brought a mingy three pieces of toast. I asked for more. She stumped out. See? Nothing to do all day except make a manky plate of toast, and she goes to pieces.
“Yes. Timing is critical. If you detect a fake among them, keep a list. They’re numbered and named.”
“Who gets my list afterwards?”
He looked exasperated. “For Christ’s sake, Lovejoy, shut the fuck up. It’s simple. Sensible questions, anyone?”
“Not me,” I said, wondering where his excursions were going to. I vowed not to be there when the trip went carousing off. I’d heard of folk who’d been there before. “No questions. Ta for the nosh.”
“Thank God,” he said, sinking back in relief. “Somebody open the door and let the cretin out.” As I made off he said, “Ten o’clock at the gangway, Deck Four. Be there.”
“Right, right.” I went for a proper breakfast, kippers, poached eggs and a decent stack of toast with proper marmalade. I don’t know what some women have against food. Marie should get a grip.
* * *
Estate agents – those who sell houses for extortionate prices and horrendous commission fees – have this saying: Three things decide price: location, location, and location. It’s similar in antiques: there’s three things decide what an antique is worth: provenance, provenance, and provenance. Everybody (including me) forever quotes the mythical Anglo-Saxon axe, that has only had three new heads and two new hafts since it was dug up. When somebody reminds you of that old crack, you’re supposed to smile knowingly and pretend you’ve never been taken in. Better, though, to think of some antique where provenance was authentic and the world of antiques is stunned by the mega-wealth involved. Think, for example, of Lord Nelson’s sword.
In 2002, this bloke wanders up to an ordinary antiques valuation counter, bringing a brooch. It happens to be diamond, authentic Georgian, anchor-shaped, with H and N giving clues to its long-dead possessor. The owner was a descendant of Horatio Nelson’s personal assistant. The man’s family also had a box containing scores of letters, account books, a blood-stained purse still holding Nelson’s twenty-one golden coins … and the great hero’s personal sword, actually his famed Turkish sabre. The scabbard was in the Greenwich Hospital. Amid excitement, the Turkish sabre was tried in the scabbard. Like Cinderella’s shoe, it fitted! A portrait of Nelson’s assistant painted by Arthur Devis in 1808 shows the same sabre in detail. Provenance reigned.
“The collection,” recorded the newspapers just before the 21st October, 2002, sale in London’s New Bond Street (anniversary of Trafalgar, incidentally, save having to look it up) “is totally new to the market and with a provenance that is second to none.” Everybody I know, including me, groaned with unrequited lust at the thought of all that beautiful provenance going to undeserving (meaning other) buyers. Needless to say, the Sotheby’s Sale Catalogue is now a collector’s item in its own right. See? To them that hath provenance shall be given. It’s in the Bible, or should be if it isn’t.
Now, I define antiques as the commerce of old items where lies are only rarely encountered but falsehood is the natural means of expression. Here on board the Melissa, St Petersburg clamouring for me to go ashore and gaze breathless upon the zillions of priceless antiques in the Hermitage, the reverse seemed the case; lies were endemic, and falsity merely there as background music in the plush lounges and luxurious trappings of day-to-day ship-board life. For instance, I didn’t know who Mangot’s famous team was, or who would pull off the robbery. Did he seriously think I’d believe this mob of duds was a swashbuckling league of Raffles lookalikes, who could even pretend to take on the entire Russian army?
Worse, I’d read about modern Russia. Oppose the tide of graft and corruption, you got lobbed from a roof or abducted and deliberately suicided in, or off, some hotel. They had an expression that’s been grafted into English: krisha is the word for roof, meaning a safety factor protecting you from adverse forces. So their politicians are merchants who provide a krisha to protect the criminals. The forces of law and order can likewise be a krisha if you bribe the right people with the right amount of zlotniks. They say it was worst of all in the free-for-all 1990s, but others say things are a hell of a sight worse now. It was into this mayhem that, this bright morning, I was going to step ashore and divvy a priceless collection of masterpieces.
Now, Germany, France, and other assorted nations with multo political and diplomatic clout, had tried to wangle the paintings back. It had been in the papers for half a century. They got nowhere. The Russian government itself was said to have displaced the old Russian mafia, using the time-honoured nudge-splash of the sailor’s elbow technique and usurping their street power. Law has evaporated, says rumour, and local authorities are merely the first layer of krishas. There’s a resistance, like in any occupation of any country; you can pay to have your opponents eliminated. Simple.
And if, say, somebody decided on an automobile accident as the means of choice, why, what could be simpler than bribing the authorities to delay/prevent/avoid/ignore investigations? Life has to go on, and by life is meant the level of corruption you can afford. Crime must flourish because it’s essential. Ask any government.
Mind you, I should talk. In our own country justice is a miscarriage; law is simply the description of how justice fails.
I tried thinking over the events of the cruise: Southampton, the Baltic, my attempts to escape. And the two deaths, Mister Moses and – probable, but unconfirmed as yet – Henry Semper. It had been good of Ivy, though, to give me the massive beautifully-produced catalogue of the Hermitage’s special exhibition. Good guess, Ivy.
Ten o’clock, I went to sit in the Atrium near the gangway exit on Deck Four, hoping I’d not be spotted. Amy and Les Renown caught me and hauled me off the ship, laughing.
“Here, Lovejoy,” Les said, choking with laughter. “Two psychiatrists meet. One says, ‘Morning Joe. You’re fine today. How am I?’ Get it? See, they’re psychiatrists!”
“Hilarious, Les,” I said gravely. Down the gangplank, into Russia.