'Countess. I accept that I was to blame, and acknowledge that your dismissal of me was perfectly just. I apologize.'
I'd worked out this tactic from TV. Half the soaps thrive on blokes apologizing to birds.
In fact there's no other plot on telly. What's the average number of 'Sorry-sorry' lines per thirty-minute soap? Four. Count them. TV scripters have one maxim: never mind logic, go for the grovel. The ratings will soar.
She smiled. 'You are correct. I do not accept, Lovejoy.'
I rose. 'Well, Countess. I'll leave. Thanks for the ... er.'
I'd already turned, when something really strange happened. She said, 'Stay. Sit.' I obeyed, which wasn't the oddity. It was that she'd changed her mind. Countesses don't.
'Do you see the painting?' she asked.
'Where?'
There in the corner was a portrait. It was at an angle in the top corner, exactly where people who can afford electricity and air conditioning site their gadgets. And like Russians anciently placed their icons of saints or the tsar. No vibes, so not a genuine antique. It was in shadow.
'Who is she?'
'Is not a woman a remarkable thing, Lovejoy?' the Countess mused. She sipped at a glass of white wine, offered me none. 'So exquisite, so fatal! She was Princess Zanaida.
Of course, her husband Prince Volkonsky was an animal. She only married him to hush up her affaire with Tsar Alexander, with Goethe, Pushkin, Rossini, Donizetti, others. Do I believe she took the pope as her lover? No!'
She screamed the denial so loudly I jumped.
'I don't either, Countess,' I said quickly. Princess who?
'Do you know why I know she was pure, Lovejoy?'
Pure? If she said so. 'Enlighten me, please, Countess.'
'Because she only fornicated with honest men! If that sordid pianist Liszt had wooed her, she would have had him beheaded. Why? Because he stole every composition he called his own.'
Well, everybody knows that Liszt was a thief. Hear a tune, he'd 'compose' it himself next day, like a certain modern English composer I could mention. She glared at me. I hurriedly smiled to prove I wasn't Liszt.
'Anyway,' she said with scorn, 'Franz Liszt was Hungarian. Can you get lower?'
She snapped her fingers and a youth appeared with a silver basket of sweets and chocolates. She selected one, inserted it into her mouth, and accepted a fresh glass.
The youth retired.
'You admired the silver basket,' she said with satisfaction.
'No, Countess.' To her withering glare I said candidly, 'Its handles had been clumsily removed. Your silversmith –is it still Yosh? He's losing his touch – hasn't concealed the marks very well. They catch the light.'
On safer ground, I added the really important detail that silver table baskets tended to get shallower as more and more people afforded them. They started about 1730.
Oddly, they were mainly a British thing. You find them made of clever silver wire, and in Sheffield plate, adorned with loaves and sheaves of corn. I suppose they were mainly decorative centrepieces. Fraudsters file the handles off to make fake silver trinkets for high prices, because then laboratory tests will reveal the trace elements of Georgian silver instead of crummy modern stuff. If you're ever offered an antique silver basket without handles, look at it in subdued light, to see if there are the marks left by missing original handles. It's sensible if you're a crook, because a handled basket will net you only a fraction more money than a handle-less one, whereas a few seemingly genuine artefacts made of ancient silver bring in a fortune.
'Have you got any old dies, Countess?' You need old silversmiths' dies for best forgeries, though possession of them in England is forbidden by law.
She suddenly laughed, white teeth on display, her cosmetic layers shivering into craquelure. I was stunned by her beauty. Women never lose it, do they? Her varicose veins were painted out. Real class.
'I really do miss you, Lovejoy! Antiques are the only things you remain honest about!'
She leaned forward confidingly. Her breasts moved. I was almost enveloped in her cleavage. Gold chains sagged against my forehead. Perfume almost asphyxiated me.
'Thank you, Countess.'
You even have to address her by her title in bed. (It got bizarre sometimes: 'Lie over me, doowerlink.') I suppose she insisted on it with all her blokes. There's grounds for a sociological survey on the subject, if any university out there is at a loose end. It would take time, though. There's plenty of us ex-Countess languishers about.
'You don't see the painting's resemblance, Lovejoy?'
'No, Countess.' I craned. Was it herself?
'You poor fool.' She didn't sound sympathetic, just a mite relieved.
'Have you got anything you want me to divvy?'
She seemed to wonder about laughing, decided I wasn't worth it.
'If I do another large shipment, Lovejoy, I'll send for you.'
'Thank you, Countess.'
I left then, no wiser. Odd, I thought, waiting for the bus home, that she'd commanded me to stay, when she'd only wanted to see if I could recognize a musty old portrait of a lady. I honestly couldn't. After confessing ignorance, I was banished among her cast-offs. Funny, that. I tried to forget her. If she summoned me to diwy one of her priceless frigging export shipments from Sotheby's or Christie's, I'd refuse, see how she liked it.
Actually, I'd come running. Like I say, pathetic. I waited by the bus stop, got hungry after a while, saw the village schoolchildren come out in droves. Saw the start of the village rush-hour, namely three motor cars, a farm cart and two bikes. No bus.
A car I'd seen before – but who remembers motor cars? – emerged from the Countess's antiques empire loading yard. A whiffler stood in the road to signal it out. An old Ford. I was too far off to see who was driving, but the driver had the look of Jules. Observation is overrated, I always think.
The bus was cancelled. I finally walked four miles to a neighbouring village to catch the shoppers' bus.
It rained.
17
BERNICKA WAS FURIOUS when I said she had to do the burglary with me.
'Why?' she demanded, in her grotty studio with that naming horse statue. It was worse than ever. 'You were going to do it on your own.'
'Look, love.' I smiled with great sorrow. 'Who knows Il Maestro? You.'
A woman can't resist being told that she excels in understanding love. She calmed.
'That's true.'
'How else could you have created this great, er, thing?'
'You're right.'
'How could I possibly detect the hand of the Master,' I said reasonably, 'in what I steal, unless you're there to give me proof?' I acted more sadness. 'I'm good at antiques, Bernicka, but we're talking of Leonardo's very own work. And he,' I concluded, my voice breaking with emotion, 'needs you, Bernicka.'
I tried to gaze adoringly up at the shambolic heap of gunge she'd splattered together, but couldn't manage it. She patted my shoulder.
'There, there. I understand.' Her eyes filled with tears. 'I didn't know you were so sensitive, Lovejoy. I'll come.'
Gone eleven o'clock, we hit the road in her motor and reached Tolleshunt D'Arcy just about midnight.
A great crime writer I used to know lived right in the village. We were friends, Marjorie A and me, despite her mangy blinking dog. Her husband was a sponging duckegg, tried to finish her uncompleted novels after she passed away, total failures of course. The house near the war memorial belonged now to Sir Jasper Haux. It has an enormous walled garden. I got Bernicka to park on a country road where manic anglers do night fishing, a mile from the village centre.
'You know what to do, Bernicka?'
'No.' She was nervous now she actually had to do something. She'd complained all the way, what am I doing here, I should be at home in bed.
'Wait forty minutes. I'll walk there, burgle the Haux mansion, find the Master's drawing.