“In the profession?”
“Yes. Not bang in the middle of the profession, of course. That’s for quite a different sort of chap. But something you can do very well, I should think. Better than anyone else available at the moment, certainly. I want you to work with Tancred Saraceni.”
“Is he—?”
“Most certainly not. And you must never let him think you are, or you’ll be in the soup. No; Saraceni is in a queer game of his own, which interests us at the moment, and could be important. By the way, quite a few people who believe in that sort of thing say he has the Evil Eye. I don’t completely dismiss that, so watch your step. You told me he had suggested that you might like to work with him? Learn his special trade, or craft, or whatever he calls it?”
“Yes, but I’m not really sure that’s what I want. I want to be a painter, not a craftsman who tarts up paintings that have been allowed to decay.”
“Yes, but what the profession wants is that somebody should be with Saraceni on the job he’s undertaking now. Do you know anything about the Düsterstein collection?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s not well known, though these people here at Duveen’s know about it, of course. It’s their business to know such things. It’s a lot of Renaissance and post-Renaissance and Counter-Reformation pictures—not all of them the best, I believe, but still remarkable—that are housed in Schloss Düsterstein in Lower Bavaria, about seventy miles from Munich. The owner is the Gräfin von Ingelheim, and she is interested in having her pictures put in A-l condition, with a view to sale. Not a vulgar sell-out, you understand; not an ‘Everything Must Be Sold To The Walls By The End Of The Month’ thing. No, a gradual, very high-class unloading that should bring in a great deal of money. We want to know where the pictures are going. She’s persuaded Saraceni to do the work of getting the stuff ready, rather on the quiet, without actually being secret. Saraceni needs an assistant, and we would like the assistant to be a member of the profession. And that’s you, my boy.”
“I’m to report to you? But what? And how?”
“No written reports to me, unless something totally unlikely happens. But you’ll come back to England now and then, won’t you? Don’t you want to see little Charlotte and find out how she is getting on? What kind of a father would you be if you didn’t? But there will also be another form of written report, and this afternoon you had better go to Harley Street, where Sir Owen Williams-Owen will see you, and take a look at your heart, and tell you how to report back to him on how it’s getting on.”
It was plain to Francis that Uncle Jack was enjoying being mysterious, and that his best course was to play straight man, and let his instructions come in due course.
“Williams-Owen knows all about hearts. He will give you a regimen of health that you must follow, which will include regular reports to him on how your heart is functioning. How many heartbeats after strenuous exercise—that sort of thing. But in actual fact it will be a key to observations we want you to make about trains.
“Schloss Düsterstein sits in a considerable estate, with some parkland and a lot of farms. Less than a mile from the house, or the castle or whatever it is, there is a branch of a railway, and that branch leads to a large compound—a concentration camp, as Lord Kitchener called them, to which freight and cattle cars are taken from time to time, not on any regular schedule but always late at night. You can tell how many cars there are because the train travels quite slowly—what they call a Bummelzug—and at one place it crosses an intersection point, and makes a characteristic sound with its wheels. If you keep your ears open, and count the times you hear that sound, and then divide by two, you can reckon the number of freight or goods vans that have passed over the point, and are thus bound for the camp. And that’s what you report to Williams-Owen, every fortnight, according to a scheme he will give you, in a letter in which you can whimper and play the hypochondriac as much as you please. He’ll see that the information gets to the right place.”
“It’s better than staying here and feeling sorry for myself, I suppose.”
“Much better. It’s your first professional job, and if you haven’t thought so already, you’re damned lucky to get it.”
“Well, but what about—oh, sod being a gentleman! Sorry to be sordid, Uncle Jack, but—am I paid anything?”
“As I told you, this is something of a sideline, and we haven’t any appropriation for it. But I think you may count on something eventually. Anyhow, you needn’t pretend to me that you need money. I’ve heard about your grandfather’s will. Your father mentioned it in a letter.”
“I see. I’m in training, as it were?”
“No; it’s a real job. But take my advice, Frank, don’t fuss about money. The profession is run on a shoestring, and there are lots of people fighting for a quarter-inch of the string already. When there’s anything for you, you can rely on me to let you know. But if there’s no money, I can at least offer you some information. We know where Charlie Fremantle is.”
“Is she with him?”
“I suppose so. He’s in a very hot place to be at the moment. If those two are counting on a peaceful old age, they’re out of their minds. Oh, and your friend Buys-Bozzaris is dead.”
“What? How?”
“Carelessness. Actually he was a futile agent, and his recruiting was a joke; Charlie Fremantle was the only fish he caught, and even Charlie—who is an idiot—managed to cheat him about some gambling money. So Basil found himself in what we might call an untenable position, and it looks as if he shot himself.”
“I don’t believe it. I doubt if he could hit himself—on purpose, anyhow.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps he had expert assistance—Well, anything more?”
“Just a matter of curiosity, Uncle Jack. These goods vans—these freight cars—what’s in them?”
“People.”
Your man was lucky to be quit of Ismay, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–My man was lucky to have known her, said the Daimon Maimas. She doesn’t show up well in Francis’s story: an unscrupulous little sexual teaser and a crook about money; if she had stayed with him, what sort of cat-and-dog life would they have had? They would have torn one another apart and quite soon she would have betrayed him with somebody. But she thought herself a free agent, and that always leads to trouble.
–Oh quite. She was really an adjunct of Charlie Fremantle; one aspect of his fate. Odd, isn’t it, that these adventurous, feather-brained fools like Charlie always have some woman who is ready to put up with anything to serve him and his folly? My records show it again and again.
–What lies before her in Spain? Scampering around from one squalid, endangered hovel to another, always under threat, often under gunfire, imagining she is serving the people’s cause—which neither she nor Charlie could have defined—but really just Charlie’s woman and slave. If pity lay in my sphere, said the Daimon, I think I should pity her.
–But pity is not in your sphere, brother. You don’t even pity poor Francis, who broke his heart over her.
–Certainly not. A heart is never really stout until it has broken and mended at least once. Francis might be grateful to me for finding him such an interesting heart-breaker. Lots of men break their hearts over women who are no more interesting than turnips.
–Yet he knew she was no good. Not to him, anyway. What was she to him?
–Surely you remember how, in his bedroom at Blairlogie, he used to posture in front of his mirror, rigged up as a sort of woman? Searching for the Mystical Marriage, though he didn’t know it; looking for the woman in himself, for the completion of himself, and he thought he had found it in Ismay. And he most certainly did find part of it in Ismay, for she was what he was not, she had qualities he would never possess, and she had the beauty and the sluttish irresistible charm to make him love her whatever she did, and whatever he knew about her. I think I did rather well in enlarging his life with Ismay.