“Afraid so, love.” I watched her beautiful blues well up. “The stuff left in Tachnadray isn’t worth a dealer’s petrol for the journey. You made the wrong assumption. You couldn’t understand why so little money was coming in when one or two reproduction pieces were being sent off every month. And poor old Duncan is slogging his guts out to make enough copies, fakes, repros to keep Tachnadray fed. He and Michelle were too tenderhearted to tell Elaine the truth.”
I was up and dressing, keeping an eye out for that bloody great dog. If it ever learned I’d made Shona cry I’d be a chewed heap.
“Where are you going, Lovejoy?”
“Tachnadray. Elaine’s called a gathering tomorrow. I’ve to speak the plan out.” A naked man looks grotesque, so I was glad to be covered. Shona lay there, eyes dulled, pretty.
Nakedness looks good on a woman. “I can offer a reasonable scam, Shona. Only one-off, but it’d bring in a hell of a lot of gelt. If Elaine accepts, I’ll stay and do it. If not, there’s nothing to keep me here.”
“You’d leave? Because there’s no antiques?”
“I can knock up fakes anywhere, love. It doesn’t have to be in Tachnadray.”
For a few moments I dithered. I never know what to say when leaving a woman’s bedroom. You can’t just give a sincere grin and a “Thanks, love,” can you? And women are too distrusting to believe dud promises.
“Will Ranter let me pass?”
She smiled, cold, I thought. She uttered the slow words like a thumbs-down to an arena. “This once, darling.”
I gave her a sincere grin. “Thanks, love,” I said, and left.
« ^ »
—— 17 ——
Shut your gums, Tinker,” I said into the phone, frantic lest Mac’s lorry left without me on the home run. The gabby old sod was woozier than ever. He was in the Rose at Peldon, sloshed out of his mind. The Rose is a pub by the seamarshes, always heaving-full of antique dealers.
“Eh, Lovejoy?” he bawled. The background noise was Grand National Day. “I’m liss’nin’.”
“A month from now I’m doing a paper job. A mansion.”
“Us? Paperin’ a stately home?” Tinker yelled, coughing between syllables.
The distant pub’s racket silenced as if by magic. Some lunatic talking football was instantly throttled.
“Start enrolling the dealers, Tinker. Pass their names on to Margaret.”
“Is it secret?” he howled to the universe. Jesus.
“Not any more,” I said wearily. “Tell Margaret she can chit and chop for me. And get Antioch Dodd to collect the pots. Got that?” “Pots” are lorries, from rhyming slang: pots and pans, vans. It’d be quite a convoy. Chits are IOUs and receipts, chops the stamps of approval. It meant I’d honor whatever deals Margaret decided for me. I might murder her afterwards if she guessed wrong, of course, but fair’s fair.
“Right, Lovejoy. How much do we need?”
Tachnadray was, say, sixty rooms, of which two were still respectably furnished. The rest stood bare. A sixth of the rooms would have been servants’ quarters, say about nine.
“About fifty rooms, Tinker, assorted, but I split half and half.” In its heyday half would have been bedrooms, retiring rooms, and half reception rooms, libraries, smoking rooms, and that.
“Fifty? Bloody hell. Where is it?”
“Never you mind. I’ll phone down every fourth day.”
“Wait, wait! Lovejoy! Who’s to reff the stuff?” Reff, as in referee, to gain some slight assurance of authenticity for the antiques—real or fake’d hardly matter much—as they were loaded up.
“Who’ve you got there?” I could imagine two score dealers frozen in the pub, listening breathless at this news of the biggest scam to hit East Anglia all year.
“Here? Well there’s Harry Bateman, Liz Sandwell, Helen, Big Frank from Suffolk, Sven, Mannie, Jill…” His rubbled croak became inaudible in instantaneous pandemonium. The silly nerks had erupted, grabbed for the receiver to bawl their names and shouting offers, percentages, splits on the knock, part deals—
Click. Burr. I get fed up with other people’s greed when I’ve enough of my own.
It was coming on to rain when finally Mac’s lorry hove in. Somehow he’d heard, God knows how, of the furniture I’d left penciled notes for at the lumber yard. They were on his wagon under a tarpaulin in the back.
Robert met us at the crossroads, pushing a handcart. Mute, he transferred the two pieces without my assistance. I called thanks to Mac and in the driving rain followed the giant’s form along to Tachnadray. I felt a spare tool at a wedding.
This next bit’s about crooked money, and how you—repeat, you— will sooner or later be robbed blind. There’s no escape, so if you’re of a nervous disposition, I’d skip it.
A “paper job”, aka “papering a house,” is one of the commonest antiques tricks in the world. And make no mistake, everybody in the game tries it. Since the Great Antiques Boom, however, it has come to be a speciality of the world’s poshest auction houses. It works thus:
A householder dies, alas. In the ten seconds which elapse between the crusty old colonel’s last breath and his widow phoning the insurance company, several dealers will call, offering to sell the colonel’s personal effects. The widow sorts out what she wants to take to her daughter’s and signs a contract with a respectable auctioneer.
Now an auctioneer can do two things. Either all the auctionable stuff is vanned off by the auctioneer’s respectable vannies (they will be called assistants in the written contract) to the respectable auctioneer’s premises, or else the contents—furniture, cutlery, linen, carpets, the colonel’s campaign medals, paintings, porcelain—will be left in situ, and the house opened for a grand auction.
You can imagine that the final printed catalog might look a bit “thin,” as we say, if old Colonel, RIP, didn’t have much. But oh, how nice it would be, thinks our respectable auctioneer wistfully, if the deceased had a couple of handsome almost-Chippendale tallboys, or an oil painting possibly almost nearly attributable to Turner or Vermeer.
How sad a respectable auctioneer’s life is, he sighs.
Happily, sin slithers in to help out. Within hours of that respectable auctioneer’s naughty daydream, would you believe it but the house’s contents begin to swell, multiply, increase, until finally, on auction day, the colonel’s antiques overflow into the garden, where the respectable auctioneer has thoughtfully hired numerous elegant marquees for the purpose. Isn’t life great? Soon it gets greater.
The cataloger’s erudition helps the thing along. She (catalogers are normally female; more careful, you see) will say of some neffie portrait of a bog-eyed clergyman: “…once attributed to the immortal Gainsborough …” or some such. The fact that the daub was created in an alcoholic stupor by an incompetent forger now doing life on Dartmoor is regarded as a mere quibble, because the words as written are actually true. So Law condones the fraud: The portrait was once so attributed—by a crooked forger. See how it works?
Just as theaters are “papered”—i.e., crammed by the actors’ friends, who are given free tickets—so auctioneers swell their offerings at house auctions.
Innocent souls might ask: “But what’s the point? Who gains?” To answer this best, simply buy any item at such a sale, then try to sell it. An old Lowestoft jug, say. First, offer it just as it is. To your alarm, antique shops don’t want to know. Dealers spurn you and your jug. They see a dozen a day, so what’s one more? Tomorrow, however, take along the auctioneer’s lovely catalog. You can now show the dealer your jug’s handsome picture and precise printed description. He’ll be over the moon. Of course he’ll still haggle over the price. The point is he’ll want your jug. You’ve made a sale.
Good, eh?
The reason he now wants it is that magic thing called provenance. He can ascribe your jug, truthfully, as “from the famous sale at Nijgi-novgorod House …” and show your catalog as proof. Appearance, condition, and provenance—they’re the three great selling points in horses, cattle, bloodstock. And, oddly enough, people. Why not in antiques too?