At first, Dresden and Meissen were interchangeable names in England, seeing there's only a dozen miles between the two places, both in Saxony anyway. In January 1710
the factory started up. The first pieces look like they're trying hard to be pure white but never quite make it. They're unbelievably rare. But that doesn't mean they're not out there waiting for you. A faint fawnish hue is said to be most typical.
Look for the crossed-swords mark. It doesn't prove Meissen, but it's one clue. Some pieces, like the (genuine!) over-decorated 'Snowball type' flowery bottle-shaped vases, look ghastly and foolish though they still cost a king's ransom. Still, Meissen rules Continental hard-paste porcelain, whether or not pieces have the crossed-swords mark, with or without the dot, star, or pommel. In the figurines, I always look at the stripes on the maiden's skirt, which you've got to be a real cracker to fake right. Tip: a numbering system was brought in about 1763. The numbers were incised, like when you write on wet clay with a toothpick, so an overly neat stamped number suggests forgery.
Then there was the piece this killer American hadn't yet smashed to smithereens. It was a Sevres plate. These French pieces were soft paste, but so what? Their gilding is superb, and the enamel looks somehow about to sink into the glaze. The two crossed-letter L marks look like they're trying to make a bell shape. That's all, but they're beautiful. The flower decorations are unequalled.
Those are the two whales. The single tiddler is Vienna. Good stuff, to be sure, and worth a fortune now, but still a minnow in comparison to the two giants.
Odd how rascals and rogues abound in the story of porcelain. They thrived, especially in Vienna, where in 1717 folk began to hear of the wonderful events in Meissen. By bribery, Vienna procured a Meissen worker to nick all the manufacturing secrets. (Didn't pay him, of course.) The outcome was Vienna hard-paste porcelain and multo bad feeling. There are supposed to be lots of clues to its authenticity – the greenish tint to the thin glaze, the perspective of the painting and so on. Here's my only tip, unless you're an expert: every single feature of early Vienna porcelain looks copied from some other style. The square handles are phoney Oriental; the rims are Japanese ideas; the masked feet are copied from silverware of the period. It's a giveaway.
Beware, for the tiddler costs a fortune too.
'So it isn't all vibes,' the killer said in his best senatorial voice. 'It's knowledge as well?'
'No. It's the chimes.' I was torn between the Vienna piece and the Sevres. The French porcelain is always higher regarded in London's auction rooms, because the decoration is bonnier. They sat there amid the modern garbage – I meant us, not just the crockery. 'What bits you pick up – dates, names, tricks to tell other dealers – are just gilt on the gingerbread.'
'What dealers?' He barked the question so loudly I jumped.
'Whatever dealers will stump up for a meal.'
He ran his eyes over me slowly, like I was for sale. My frayed cuffs, my battered shoes worn down to the welts, my shredding collar.
'Broke, huh?' He seemed pleased. He shot Susanne a glance of approval. She almost purred. 'I'm glad he's a bum, Suse.'
'I've had a bad streak lately.' Pathetic to sound so defensive. Maybe when I got as fat as him I'd feel the same scorn for the impoverished. Until then I'd no choice.
'How about a retainer, Lovejoy? To divvy.'
Money, now? I must have looked astonished because he barked a laugh, a seal coughing offshore in a salmon glut.
'Suse, you picked a moron here.' He fixed me, finger pointing. 'Listen up, Lovejoy.
When the Antwerp High Council gets flak from do-gooders who whine that crooked African politicians are selling blood diamonds to finance some peanut war, you think it ends there? Hell, no. Somebody like me picks up the tab when the diamond market goes through De Beers' floor.
'And if Sotheby's and Christie's come unglued, everybody turns to me. When smuggled
"economic migrants" die in container lorries, or some ship gets impounded –you think the owners just smile and pay up? Shit, no. They turn to the insurers with their hands out. You know what they want? They want money. Every fucker insures against their own sins. The Church against their own perverts, inept footballers against losing.
Tobacco manufacturers insure themselves against the Feds in Raleigh, North Carolina, detecting their own tax-evading smuggling rackets. You with me at last?'
I surrendered and said resignedly, 'What do you want me to divvy? Where?'
He lit a cigar, though smoking wasn't allowed in the restaurant. Taylor Eggers beckoned me. I left. No tea, no grub, though it was all served ready for a hungry bloke like, say, me. No money either. Taylor still beamed. A cuckolded husband always smarts, even at the point of murderous revenge. Don't try telling me different. Taylor, however, smilingly walked me along the promenade to a stall. There we dined on pasties and hot spuds and tea thick enough to plough. He paid, thank God.
'D'you know where I'm to do the divvying, mate?' I asked him.
'Don't know what they're on about, Lovejoy.'
'Whose are those antiques?' I meant the Sevres and the Vienna piece. No good asking about the Meissen, requiescat in pace.
'Mine.'
I stared. He spoke in tones of faint regret. Not heartbroken, note. Merely a bit of hard luck, losing that priceless plate.
'My only three genuine antiques,' he said, like easy come, easy go.
'He's the consul, isn't he?'
'Don't, Lovejoy.' He stared out to sea. 'Hear no evil, speak no evil. Just go along.
There's no other way. The powers are too great.'
'Right,' I said. Then, 'Can I have some more tea?'
19
THE LADS WERE having a whale of a time reminiscing when I reached the Welcome Sailor in the teeming rain. Big Frank from Suffolk was especially creased. I went in grinning, hoping it wasn't the usual what-about-Joe-in-prison malarkey, got a pale ale on the slate from Unis, and sat by the fire to let my soaked jacket steam dry. My gran always said that's the way to catch a chill, but never did explain how to keep dry if you'd no raincoat.
'This bloke actually believed the rounder!' Big Frank howled.
Roars of merriment. Big Frank is always moving on to his next wife. Friends run a book on how long his new marriage will last. The longest is nine months (a significant duration). I honestly don't know why he keeps getting married. I tell him to just fall into romance, and so cut out the middleman. He says no, marriage is like flu, you can't stop it happening.
A rounder, incidentally, is a phoney antique that dealers know about and recycle through auctions. Do it often enough, the fake takes on a kind of allure, escalating as it goes from catalogue to catalogue. Everybody starts to think of it as nearly almost practically genuine. Sooner or later somebody buys it, for a high price.
'And he was the frigging auctioneer!' Peggy Price screeched, falling off her bar stool.
Peggy Price 'is to be admired', women say. She poisoned her bloke once (well, you can't do it more than once, can you?) who beat her savagely, put her in hospital. He was a junkie, drunkard, gambler, and idle. None of us liked him. The final straw, though, was when he stole the only genuinely real antique she'd ever had from her tatty little antiques shop down the sea wharf. He tried to sell it in Stepney.
A Minton fruit and nut dish might not sound much –to go and poison a whole bloke for, I mean – but it was true as a saint. I can see it now in my mind's eye: painted, not printed, those gorgeous florid colours of 1805 with Thomas Minton's interlinked stroke marks just like the Sevres device that Minton liked to imitate. Hearing about the dish, well, all the collectors and dealers in the Eastern Hundreds finally took Peggy's side.
'You can only go so far,' the lads sympathized. Our women dealers said things like,