Blaze Away

by Bill James

  ‘That’s what I was getting at.’

  Lamb said: ‘We have here an artist familiar with the rough ways of the world, who can bring us a coded glimpse of them through the manipulation of tints and particularly ochre. The ochre has its own rally-round, drumbeat eloquence.’

  ‘It’s the ochre that speaks to my centre, too,’ Harpur said. ‘I thrill to that drumbeat.’ He knew Jack prized this kind of ramshackle, barmy conversation. Lamb obviously thought it made Harpur a more or less happily enmeshed associate of Jack’s brilliantly prosperous, profoundly dodgy vocation as fine arts huckster, sales online or by appointment. Website business boomed, apparently. Jack had mentioned something by an American called Hopper that went for nearly ten million dollars online. ‘Heures Propices will sell for a six-digit sterling sum, and the first of those digits won’t be one and could be seven or eight,’ Lamb said.

  These visits to Darien, apparently to look at, and lunatically chat about, Jack’s most recent acquisitions, had another, unspoken side. Jack Lamb was the greatest informant Harpur had ever dealt with – might be the greatest informant any police officer anywhere had ever dealt with. Jack had, in fact, ended this arrangement not long ago; or, at least, put it into abeyance. He’d apparently come to feel there was something rotten and base about informing. Harpur could understand that attitude. There were a lot of deeply contemptuous terms for those who whispered into the ear of a detective – ‘stool pigeon’, ‘grass’, ‘tout’, ‘nark’. Although Jack had always confined his informing to crimes and criminals he considered especially disgusting, it was still informing, and his conscience had moved in lately and stopped him bringing prompts to Harpur. But Harpur kept contact, still followed his side of the bargain, because he felt indebted to Jack for what had happened previously. And because he couldn’t be sure whether Jack would have another change of mind in the future and resume his brilliant tip-offs. A further consideration gripped Harpur: although Jack might have stopped whispering in a good cause, there were still people locked up because of his arrangement with Harpur in the past. One or two or more of these would be getting out soon, and some of them might suspect they had been fingered by Jack and feel vengeful. Harpur believed he had a duty to look after Jack, as far as that could be done – not very far, most probably.

  The working connection between Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and Jack Lamb had been unusual in that no actual one-to-one dealings occurred, if ‘dealings’ signified Harpur bunging money to Lamb for information. Jack would have regarded that as a despicable, furtive, ignoble relationship, even then. What he did favour, though, in return for his exclusive, marvellously reliable tip-offs, was the benign, cultivated, bull-shitting involvement of Harpur in his high-priced, shady, ochre-graced trade. He seemed to believe this would come via thorough, cheerfully puffed-up wordy, vaporous commentary sessions such as this afternoon’s.

  But it had to be only a marginal, token involvement. Jack had wanted, and got from Harpur, a guaranteed, holy understanding that not too much aggressive poking and delving into the financial and more general aspects of Lamb’s bonny career would take place. Jack whispered prime information – meaning gloriously relevant information – though only to Harpur and to no other detective. Such whispers could be perilous – perilous for Jack. Villains didn’t like whisperers, hated and despised whisperers, in fact, and would try to torch their home, and/or maim or kill them and/or their families. In the Press not long ago, Harpur had spotted an example of how totally contemptible grassing was considered by career crooks. The multi-murderous Boston racketeer, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, didn’t bother to dispute at his trial that he’d killed many enemies, but angrily denied he had ever been an informant for the FBI. He claimed this would be grossly dishonourable and shameful under the gangster code he lived by, like the slaughter of women. He yelled ‘fucking liar’ when an ex-FBI officer told the court from the witness box that Bulger had been an informant. Of course, that might have been partly because he feared violence from other convicts when he was sent to jail if they thought him a snitch.

  Revenge against stool pigeons was regarded as an obligation, as well as a right. Harpur recognized that Lamb would naturally feel due some return, some quid pro quoism, from him. Jack was vulnerable in several areas: his plentiful skin, the grand house, a mother and a long-term live-in girlfriend. His mother spent most of the year in her condo not far from Jack’s sister and brother-in-law in San Francisco, but was over on one of her mouthy annual visits currently and was probably somewhere in Darien today. She had changed her name back to Lamb, though there had been a second marriage in the States. It lasted only months and, as Harpur had heard her put it, she ‘didn’t want to be tagged with any reminder of that sicko’.

  ‘And what about Amelia With Flask?’ Lamb had moved a couple of paces along. ‘Very famous, of course.’

  ‘The fame eminently deserved!’ Harpur said, joining him. So, was Amelia kosher, and, if she was, how exactly had she come to Lamb? Prospective buyers liked to know the ‘provenance’ of a painting, to establish authenticity. That is, its history, its proven history, right back to when the artist put his or her signature on it, and then a no-gaps record of all the subsequent owners. Harpur would have liked to know it, too. Naturally, Jack abominated, and bridled at, the word ‘provenance’. He refused to take part in that type of disclosure, regarding such curiosity as pettifogging and an insult – an insult not just to him and his company, which was hurtful enough, but to art in all its forms worldwide.

  Harpur assumed that some of the paintings had been stolen and given a name-change, like ‘Mrs Lamb’. He’d heard that for crooked international profitability art theft now held third place, just behind drugs and arms. And, as with drugs and arms, the money involved could lead to violence, killings included. Paintings might be relatively small, easy to hide and to transport. Harpur remembered a film on one of the TV movie channels, where without much trouble the hero nicks a hugely valuable water-scene classic from a New York museum. Stolen art could be used as more or less a currency-equivalent to buy a brilliant lifestyle. Or it might fund terrorism groups. Alternatively, it could have a sweet role in money laundering. That is, paintings might be bought with stolen loot, held for a while in the hope of a price rise, then offered to Jack, or someone not too legalistic, like him, to buy and sell on, in some cases to legitimate collectors; or possibly to other gangsters with their own laundering needs. Some paintings went on a kind of non-stop circuit. Occasionally, convicted crooks could bargain for a shorter sentence by offering to reveal the whereabouts of a missing picture or sculpture. There was more to art than hanging on a hook.

  For the sake of victims, auction houses and insurers, Interpol and national police forces, as well as private companies, ran databases and registers that aimed to keep track of stolen works. Successes were minimal. Rumour, and more than rumour, said that Belgium in particular maintained the fastest record for making thieved daubs conclusively vamoose. Some theft victims refused to report a loss, fearing this might mean it got buried even deeper in the underworld system; or because they didn’t want publicity that showed how poor security was on the rest of their collection.

  An experienced art expert might have been able to trace some recent ownerships in Jack’s present lot. But, of course, that would be possible only if the expert knew what Jack had at Darien. Harpur sensed this was the kind of information Lamb expected him to keep eternally quiet about, and he did. Inevitably, it compromised Harpur, turned him into a kind of see-no-evil accessory, if not a virtual partner; gave Jack a hold on him. That was a ticklish but essential feature of their relationship. Possibly, Lamb got more out of the arrangement than Harpur.

  Jack was very choosy about what information he gave. He would never identify his business customers or suppliers. Jack only whispered when a crime or possible crime appalled him; or when some crooked behaviour threatened seriously to disturb the basis of day-to-day existence in the city. Jack liked life to b
e nice and steady, no disruptions. Harpur respected his quirks – had to. Jack’s art, true or counterfeit, stayed private between them.

  Jack pointed at Amelia. ‘We’re talking real quality and proper money here. The “Dutch School”, as it’s known, seems always to impact directly, head-on with me. I couldn’t tell you why, Col.’

  ‘The unmatched flatness of Holland is a big plus for those artists,’ Harpur replied wholeheartedly. ‘Plenty of good, level ground to perch their easels on, no steep slanting that would cause paint to run and splotch. A “Darien School” is impossible. Too many peaks. God knows what tint the Pacific would come out as.’

  As for the counterfeits, there would naturally be no provenance for them, or no respectable provenance. They might have been turned out in someone’s garden shed a couple of weeks ago, possibly by the dozen. Of course, their creators would refer to them as ‘copies’, rather than ‘fakes’. Harpur gathered that in the art game there was an almost decent tradition of copying, even of Old Masters. He’d heard, though, that copying/faking Old Masters had become increasingly difficult to get away with because science could date a work pretty accurately by analysing the paint and canvas. Moderns were preferable.

  ‘I shall need to know the buyer reveres Amelia With Flask, and reveres it for all the right reasons. That’s the chief consideration, Colin, not the mere act of making a sale.’

  ‘Like insisting they’re going to “a good home” when getting rid of kittens,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘I want a purchaser who can see in a portrait such as this what is taking place, between, so to speak, the lines, as well as the obvious: there must be communion with its hinterland. This is the product of a particular society at a particular period. Due recognition should be given. Notice the graded shadowing on her eponymous flask, Col. This is perception. This is brush control. This is empathy with the very essence, with the very soul, of flasks. On the face of it, the flask is an inanimate article. The artist, though, shows its one-off identity, gives this object a distinctive personality to complement the distinctive personality of Amelia – a flaskish personality, yes, yet of a one-off, gloriously individual flaskishness.’

  ‘Its mojo,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Parting from Amelia will depress me. But that’s to sentimentalize. Unprofessional. Putting it baldly, Col, I am a merchant venturer, and merchant venturers exist to buy and to sell, not to disable themselves through intemperate affection for a particular work, however worthy of that intemperate affection a particular work might be. Rigour is essential, detachment. Always this dilemma in the art game – a spiritual side, certainly, a commerce side, also certainly. The critic and scholar Bernard Berenson’s life gives forceful examples of this, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Does it? Who?’

  ‘He loved pictures but also took nice and sometimes dubious cuts from art deals he middle-manned.’

  ‘Venturing always has its tricky side, Jack, especially when a flask is involved.’ Harpur didn’t object to taking part in this long-winded idiocy if it made Lamb feel more comfortable, more autonomous. Like everyone else, Lamb was entitled to a quota of self-deception. Life would be a bummer without it. He had to be indulged. So far. But, eventually, Harpur’s mind would refuse to put up with any further evasion and absurdity and, suddenly, now for example, when Jack was continuing to spout a fond, bonkers lecturette about the floral background of Amelia – ‘observe, Col, the implied argumentativeness of these hyacinths’ – Harpur would see for a moment on the canvas not Amelia, the flask and the cluster of chopsy flowers, but an image of Jack himself: Jack dead and with his throat deeply, ostentatiously cut, in the way grasses sometimes got their throats deeply and ostentatiously cut as a warning to others, grey eyes open, staring out at Harpur from that gargantuan face, full of agony and blame for failing to protect him; almost as if he believed Harpur had supplied the serrated knife and a diagram showing the between-chin-and-chest and ear-and-ear target region. The little pink hillocks, plateaux and dunes of the wound gave an easy-to-understand illustration of how flesh was constructed.

  Occasionally, Jack liked to dress up in military garments he hired from a costume shop or bought at some army-surplus car boot sale. In Harpur’s present vision of him he had on a John Wayne, US, green commando beret and a light-grey tunic with medal ribbons, possibly German SS officer gear from the Second World War. Death didn’t take sides. No blood from the havoc seemed to have stained the tunic, and the beret remained securely in place although there would probably have been a bit of a tussle when he was killed.

  ‘It’s a bold reversal of how I would normally think of hyacinths, but this is surely the function of great art, Col – to reappraise, to see eccentrically, to see, indeed, afresh.’

  ‘A daunting obligation, Jack.’ That vile hallucination Harpur experienced made him think not so much of John Wayne as a scene in The Sopranos, a TV gangster series, when Tony Soprano has a breakdown and believes fish displayed on a market stall are hectoring him in the voices of people he knows. Tony Soprano could go off and get wise treatment from his leggy woman psychiatrist though. Harpur had to cope on his own and fight his way back to full sanity and contentious hyacinths.

  Jack said in a big, jolly tone: ‘This one – Amelia – intrigues you, doesn’t it, Colin? I can tell – your fixed, sort of hypnotized gaze, like, probing it for detail.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘If you had a spare million or two about your person you’d be making me an offer for it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Harpur had sworn to himself never to use this word. It had been taken over by BBC news reporters on television replying to soft, feed questions from a colleague. Harpur realized he must have been pushed gravely sideways by sight of that cavernous injury.

  ‘You could hang it in your bedroom, and it would be a delight to wake up to in the morning, wouldn’t it?’ Jack said.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘You and your sweet, undergrad girlfriend, Denise.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘What is it that strikes you most tellingly about Amelia with Flask, Col?’

  The extreme artisan competence of the neck butchery, Jack. There’d be no need for you to shout, ‘Touché!’ like in fencing, to acknowledge a hit. In fact, you wouldn’t be able to shout anything, your voice-box severed. But Harpur actually said: ‘The Dutchness.’

  ‘Yes! Oh, yes!’

  ‘I can imagine those hyacinths growing alongside a canal, of which there are many in Holland, and possibly disputing with other flowers the right to adequate soil.’

  ‘This is why I say the purchaser must be capable of looking beyond the superficial. Hyacinths are all very well, obviously – are entirely valid Nature – but these are hyacinths that have been chosen to send out a theme, an intimation.’

  Harpur hurriedly turned his back on Jack with Incision and made for a large painting of cargo ships grouped in port as if waiting to join a convoy during the war. They looked utterly themselves, as ships ought to look – real, rust-prone, angular, ugly, U-boat sinkable, entirely non-Jack-like. But, even so, as Harpur approached, he thought he might see Lamb hanged at a yardarm for treachery, and still intermittently radiating that awful reproachfulness when his face came around every so often as his body caught the wind and spun.

  But, no, the masts stood proud, thin and empty, thank God. Harpur felt so relieved that he would have bought the painting to hang in his bedroom instead of Amelia, if he’d had the money, and so restore normality for him, and for Denise, who did sometimes sleep there. He would like her to sleep there more, instead of at her student hall of residence, but she probably wouldn’t if she awoke to find a fairly unfavourable picture of Jack Lamb in attendance.

  Harpur’s two daughters loved it, also, when Denise slept over and cooked breakfast. It seemed to make them feel they belonged to a proper family again, after the loss of their mother.1 This was another of those thoughts that Harpur kept to himself: Denise, a student at the c
ity’s university, hadn’t quite turned twenty yet. She wouldn’t want to be regarded as a sort of parent by two teenagers, thanks very much.

  Jack Lamb had moved again, away from the ships. ‘And now this gouache, Col,’ he cried, ‘cryptic, defiant, optimistic, feral. I don’t think “feral” is to overdramatize. Do you?’

  ‘From a gouache we might not be expecting a feral element, yet when one sees it now and ponders the overall effect, then “feral”, it can be stated, is a major characteristic, an inevitable characteristic, yet only inevitable on, as it were, reflection – on a kind of hindsight. It—’

  Jack turned towards the door. ‘Why, here are Mother and Helen! How opportune!’

  THREE

  Jack Lamb knew several people who regarded his mother as entirely charming, and he would be quite willing to name them, if they didn’t mind. Their attitude really pleased him, and they were definitely entitled to it. Tastes varied sharply, and life would be a lot duller if they didn’t. He, personally, could see quite a number of nice qualities in her, and he was always willing to put her up for a month when she came back to Britain from the United States on holiday each year.

  Jack believed it would hardly be natural for a son to refuse temporary lodgings to his mother, whatever she might be like. ‘Temporary’ was not an arbitrary, harsh term here, simply factual: she arrived for a break, a change, and a month would be just about right, all things considered. To her credit, Jack felt she sensed this and never tried to sneak an extra week, or weeks, on to her stay by feigning illness or terrible sorrow at having to leave Jack. Perhaps, despite what he would describe as her ‘all-weathers ego’, she had some occasional lapses into silent self-criticism and even suffered galloping spells of humility. His mother seemed to realize she had a flair for causing deep discomfort to those living close to her in the same house and, for a while, often very unexpectedly, she would become more or less completely tolerable – none of the worst-words swearing or loud belittling and sarkiness. She was tall, aquiline, regal, but, in Jack’s view, fairly clueless about fashion and quack-quack voiced when war-pathing. Her physical height meant she could get extra, downwards force into this mouth-blare if dealing with people smaller than herself. That didn’t include Jack, of course, nor Helen Surtees, Lamb’s live-in partner, who stood eye-to-eye with Alice, used softer tones and dressed better, sometimes repro-punkish, sometimes formal-severe. Helen would be twenty soon. She and Harpur’s student girlfriend, Denise, around Helen’s age, had met at ballet lessons in the town and stayed pals.