"Instead of London?"
"Oh, I go up to the Smoke maybe once a week on average." And do the rest of the Kingdom as well, inch by bloody inch, once every quarter. On my knees mostly, sniffing and listening for my bell. I didn't tell him that, seeing I was supposed to be temporarily the big wheeler-dealer.
"To the markets?" he persisted.
"Yes. And some, er, private dealers that I know."
He nodded and drew breath. Here it comes, I thought. And it did.
"I'm interested in a certain collector's item," he said, as if he'd saved the words for a rainy day. "I'm starting a collection."
"Hmmm." The Lovejoy gambit.
"I want to know if you can help."
He sipped and waited. And I sipped and waited. Like a couple of those drinking ostriches, we dipped in silence.
"Er, can you?" he asked.
"If I can," I countered cagily. For an innocent novice, he wasn't doing too badly, and I was becoming distinctly edgy.
"Do you mean Dill didn't explain?"
"He explained you were interested in purchasing flintlocks," I said.
"Nothing else?"
"And that you had, er, sufficient funds."
"But not what it is I'm seeking?"
"No." I put down my cup because my hands were quivering slightly. If it turned dud I'd wring Tinker's neck. "Perhaps," I said evenly, "you'd better tell me."
"Dueling pistols."
"I guessed that." Flintlock duelers are the P. & O. line of weapons men.
"A very special pair."
"That too." I cleared my throat. "Which pair, Mr. Field?"
He stared at me across the darkened room. "I want the Judas pair," he said.
My heart sank. With luck, I could catch Tinker before Ted called time at the pub, and annihilate him on the spot for sending me a dummy. No wonder he'd been evasive when I asked him on the phone.
I gazed back at the poor misguided customer. "Did you say the Judas pair?" I said, still hoping I'd misheard.
"The Judas pair," he affirmed.
Digression time, folks.
Flintlocks are sprung iron gadgets which flip a piece of flint onto a steel so as to create a spark. This spark, at its most innocent, can be used to ignite a piece of old rope or other tinder and set it smoldering to be blown into a flame for lighting a fire, candles, your pipe. This is the standard tinder lighter of history. You'd be surprised how many sorts of tinder lighters there are, many incredibly ingenious. But these instruments are the humdrum end of the trade, interesting and desirable though they are. You see, mankind made this pleasant little system into the business bit of weapons for killing each other.
About the time of our Civil War, the posh firing weapon was a wheel lock. This delectable weaponry consisted of a sprung wheel spinning at the touch of a trigger and rubbing on a flint as it did so. (The very same mechanism is used in a gas-fueled cigarette lighter of today, believe it or not.) They were beautiful things, mostly made in Germany, where there were clock-and-lock makers aplenty. A ball-butted German wheel lock costs the earth nowadays. And remember, the less marked the better. None of this stupid business of boring holes and chipping the walnut stock to prove it's old. Never try to improve any antique. Leave well alone. Sheraton and Constable knew what they were doing, and chances are that you are as ignorant as I am. Stick to wiping your antiques with a dry duster. Better still, don't even do that.
These wheel locks were rifled for accuracy. Prince Rupert, leader of his dad's Cavaliers, had a destructive habit of shooting weathercocks off steeples as he rode through captured towns. However, they were somewhat slow, clumsy, heavy, and took time to fire. The reason was the spark. It plopped into a little pan where you had thoughtfully sprinkled black gunpowder. This ignited and burned through a small hole into your end of the barrel, where you'd placed a larger quantity of gunpowder, a small lead bullet about the size of a marble, and a piece of old wadding to keep it all in. Bang! If you knew the delay to a millisec, the shift of the wind, could control your horse, pointed it right, and kept everything crossed for luck, you were one more weathercock short. It asked to be improved.
The culmination in weapons was the true flintlock—faster, and quicker to fire again should you miss. This may not be important, but only if your enemies are all weathercocks. Once the idea caught on, the wheel lock was replaced and the true flintlock came onto the historical scene.
The French had a crack at making them, and wonderful attempts they were. Some superb examples exist. I've had many with knobs on, gold inlay, silver escutcheons, Damascus-barreled beauties with delicate carving on precision locks that would melt your heart. And some beautiful Spanish miquelet pistols—a Mediterranean fancy of a strangely bulky style—are decorated to perfection. I admit that tears come to my eyes writing this, mostly because everybody else has them, not me. And Dutch too, though their taste for carving ugly ivory heads and figurines on the grips gives me the willies. All nations did their stuff on the flintlock, from the early snaphances and English doglocks to the final great explosion of exquisite functional murderous perfection in—you've guessed it—dear old peaceful Britain.
Came the industrial boom days and an outburst of inventive genius which was to catapult these islands into wealth, prominence, and power. Don't think our armies won by unaided valor, though they had it in plenty. They used an improved flintlock, standardized by a thoughtful young English squire, Oliver Cromwell by name. And it fired faster, surer, and noisier than anyone else's, which was a blessing in war.
From then the flintlock didn't look back. Inventors added devices you would hardly believe: flintlocks that fired under water (work it out), flintlock repeating rifles, flintlock revolvers, flintlock machine guns, ingenious safety catches that actually worked even if you forgot to slip them on, breech-loading flintlocks by the score, all the time edging toward a shorter firing time between pulling the trigger and sending regrets to your opponent's widow.
And ladies were at it too—no more than you'd expect—in subtle little ways having a charm all their own. Muff pistols, made for folding away in their hot little hands, were their scene, but they also liked tiny collapsible guns built into their prayer-books—presumably in the Exodus bit. Church was more exciting in those days.
By the 1770s dueling was in, and here comes the Judas pair. Or, rather, here they don't come.
Be careful, O ye innocent purchaser of these valuable—I mean, and repeat, valuable—weapons. They should be Damascus-barreled (i.e., spiral-welded barrels) and, at their best, brown because of a veneer of faint rust skillfully applied to the metal by makers of genius. They should have walnut stocks, and usually be rifle-grooved. But if the barrel measures less than nine inches, utter a loud derisory snort and mentally divide the asking price by three, if not four, because you are being had by some dealer who is trying to pass off a pair of officer's holster pistols as genuine duelers. A sneer is useful at this stage. On the other hand, if, say, they have ten-inch barrels, try to keep cool and go on to the next step, which is to look for decoration. Almost any metallic decoration on the barrels or on the locks disqualifies, because dueling, remember, was naughty, and silver squiggles and gold inlays tended to catch the first gleam of light on Wandsworth Common and reflect it unerringly into the eagle eyes of London's annoyed watchmen. You are allowed one silver escutcheon plate on the butt. And even this displeases you, because the real flintlock geniuses of Regency London knew their onions. Somber perfection was their aim. They achieved it.