New Worlds
Page 30
It makes you glad to get back to Soho.
Not so long ago you would usually find me in the Princess Louise, Berwick Street, at lunch time, a few doors down from the Chinese chippy and just across from Mrs White’s trim stall in Berwick Market. It’s only a narrow door and is fairly easy to miss. It has one bottle-glass window onto the street. This is a public house which has not altered since the 1940s when it was very popular with Dylan Thomas, Mervyn Peake, Ruthven Todd, Henry Treece and a miscellaneous bunch of other Welsh adventurers who threatened for a while to take over English poetry from the Irish.
It’s a shit pub, so dark and smoky you can hardly find your glass in front of your face, but the look of it keeps the tourists out. It’s used by all the culture pros—from arty types with backpacks, who do specialised walking tours, to famous gallery owners and top museum management—and by the heavy metal bikers. We all get on a treat. We are mutually dependent in our continuing resistance to invasion or change, to the preservation of the best and most vital aspects of our culture. We leave them alone because they protect us from the tourists, who might recognise us and make us put on our masks in a hurry. They leave us alone because the police won’t want to bother a bunch of well-connected middle-class wankers like us. It is a wonderful example of mutuality. In the back rooms, thanks to some freaky acoustics, you can talk easily above the music and hardly know it’s there.
Over the years there have been some famous friendships and unions struck between the two groups. My own lady wife was known as Karla the She Goat in an earlier incarnation and had the most exquisite and elaborate tattoos I ever saw. She was a wonderful wife and would have made a perfect mother. She died on the A1, on the other side of Watford Gap. She had just found out she was pregnant and was making her last sentimental run. It did me in for marriage after that. And urban romance.
I first heard about London Bone in the Princess Lou when Claire Rood, that elegant old dyke from the Barbican, who’d tipped me off about my new tailor, pulled my ear to her mouth and asked me in words of solid gin and garlic to look out for some for her, darling. None of the usual faces seemed to know about it. A couple of top-level museum people knew a bit, but it was soon obvious they were hoping I’d fill them in on the details. I showed them a confident length of cuff. I told them to keep in touch.
I did my Friday walk, starting in the horrible pre-dawn chill of the Portobello Road where some youth tried to sell me a bit of scrimshawed reconstitute as ‘the real old Bone.’ I warmed myself in the showrooms of elegant Kensington and Chelsea dealers telling outrageous stories of deals, profits and crashes until they grew uncomfortable and wanted to talk about me and I got the message and left.
I wound up that evening in the urinal of The Dragoons in Meard Alley, swapping long-time-no-sees with my boyhood friend Bernie Michaud who begins immediately by telling me he’s got a bit of business I might be interested in. And since it’s Bernie Michaud telling me about it I listen. We settled down in a quiet corner of the pub. Bernie never deliberately spread a rumour in his life but he’s always known how to make the best of one. This is kosher, he thinks. It has a bit of a glow. It smells like a winner. A long-distance runner. He is telling me out of friendship, but I’m not really interested. I’m trying to find out about London Bone.
“I’m not talking drugs, Ray, you know that. And it’s not bent.” Bernie’s little pale face is serious. He takes a thoughtful sip of his whisky. “It is, admittedly, a commodity.”
I wasn’t interested. I hadn’t dealt in goods for years. “Services only, Bernie,” I said. “Remember. It’s my rule. Who wants to get stuck paying rent on a warehouse full of yesterday’s faves? I’m still trying to move those Glenda Sings Michael Jackson sides Pratface talked me into.”
“What about investment?” he says. “This is the real business, Ray, believe me.”
So I heard him out. It wouldn’t be the first time Bernie had brought me back a nice profit on some deal I’d helped him bankroll and I was all right at the time. I’d just made the better part of a month’s turnover on a package of theatreland’s most profitable stinkers brokered for a party of filthy-rich New Muscovites who thought Chekhov was something you did with your lottery numbers.
As they absorbed the quintessence of Euro-ersatz, guaranteed to offer, as its high emotional moment, a long, relentless bowel movement, I would be converting their hard roubles back into beluga.
It’s a turning world, the world of the international free market and everything’s wonderful and cute and pretty and magical so long as you keep your place on the carousel. It’s not good if it stops. And it’s worse if you get thrown off altogether. Pray to Mammon that you never have to seek the help of an organization that calls you a ‘client.’ That puts you outside the fairground forever. No more rides. No more fun. No more life.
Bernie only did quality art, so I knew I could trust that side of his judgement, but what was it? A new batch of Raphaels turned up in a Willsden attic? Andy Warhol’s lost landscapes found at the Pheasantry?
“There’s American collectors frenzied for this stuff,” murmurs Bernie through a haze of Sons of the Wind, Motorchair and Montecristo fumes. “And if it’s decorated they go through the roof. All the big Swiss guys are looking for it. Freddy K in Cairo has a Saudi buyer who tops any price. Rose Sarkissian in Agadir represents three French collectors. It’s never catalogued. It’s all word of mouth. And it’s already turning over millions. There’s one inferior piece in New York and none at all in Paris. The pieces in Zurich are probably all fakes.”
This made me feel that I was losing touch. I still didn’t know what he was getting at.
“Listen,” I say, “before we go any further, let’s talk about this London Bone.”
“You’re a fly one, Ray,” he says. “How did you suss it?”
“Tell me what you know,” I say. “And then I’ll fill you in.”
We went out of the pub, bought some fish-and-chips at the Chinese and then walked up Berwick Street and round to his little club in D’Arblay Street where we sat down in his office and closed the door. The place stank of cat pee. He doted on his Persians. They were all out in the club at the moment, being petted by the patrons.
“First,” he says, “I don’t have to tell you, Ray, that this is strictly double-schtum and I will kill you if a syllable gets out.”
“Naturally,” I said.
“Have you ever seen any of this Bone?” he asked. He went to his cupboard and found some vinegar and salt. “Or better still, handled it?”
“No,” I said. “Not unless it’s fake scrimshaw.”
“This stuff’s got a depth to it you’ve never dreamed about. A lustre. You can tell it’s the real thing as soon as you see it. Not just the shapes or the decoration, but the quality of it. It’s like it’s got a soul. You could come close, but you could never fake it. Like amber, for instance. That’s why the big collectors are after it. It’s authentic, it’s newly discovered, and it’s rare.”
“What bone is it?”
“Mastodon. Some people still call it mammoth ivory, but 1 haven’t seen any actual ivory. It could be dinosaur. I don’t know. Anyway, this bone is better than ivory. It’s in weird shapes, probably fragments off some really big animal.”
“And where’s it coming from?”
“The heavy clay of good old London,” says Bernie. “A fortune at our feet, Ray. And my people know where to dig.”
~ * ~
TWO
I had to be straight with Bernie. Until I saw a piece of the stuff in my own hand and got an idea about it for myself, I couldn’t do anything. The only time in my life I’d gone for a gold brick I’d bought it out of respect for the genius running the scam. He deserved what I gave him. Which was a bit less than he was hoping for. Rather than be conned, I would throw the money away. I’m like that with everything.
I had my instincts, I told Bernie. I had to go with them. He understood completely and we parted on good terms.
Sentimental fascism went out the window. Liberal-humanist contemporary relevance, artistic aspiration, intellectual and moral substance and all that stuff was somehow in demand. It was better than the sixties. It was one of those splendid moments when the public pulls itself together and tries to grow up. Jones’s Rhyme of the Flying Bomb song cycle made a glorious comeback. American Angels returned with even more punch. And Sondheim made an incredible comeback.
He became a quality brand-name. If it wasn’t by Sondheim or based on a tune Sondheim used to hum in the shower, the punters didn’t want to know. Overnight, the public’s product loyalty had changed. And I must admit it had changed for the better. But my investments were in Cats, and Dogs (Lord Webber’s last desperate attempt to squeeze from Thurber what he sucked from Eliot), Duce! and Starlight Excess, all of which were now taking a walk down Sunset Boulevard. I couldn’t even get a regular price ticket for myself at Sunday in the Park, Assassins or Follies. Into The Woods was solid for eighteen months ahead. I saw Passion from the wings and Sweeney Todd from the gods. Five Guys Named Mo crumbled to dust. Phantom closed. Its author claimed sabotage.
“Quality will out, Ray,” says Bernie next time I see him at the Lou. “You’ve got to grant the public that. You just have to give it time.” “Fuck the public,” I said, with some feeling. “They’re just nostalgic for quality at the moment. Next year it’ll be something else. Meanwhile I’m bloody ruined. You couldn’t drum a couple of oncers on my entire stock. Even my ENO side-bets have died. Covent Garden’s a disaster. The weather in Milan didn’t help. That’s where Cecilia Bartoli caught her cold. I was lucky to be offered half-price for the Rossinis without her. And I know what I’d do if I could get a varda at bloody Simon Rattle.”
“So you won’t be able to come in on the Bone deal?” said Bernie, returning to his own main point of interest.
“I said I was ruined,” I told him, “not wiped out.”
“Well, I got something to show you now, anyway,” says Bernie.
We went back to his place.
~ * ~
He put it in my hand as if it were a nugget of plutonium, a knuckle of dark, golden Bone, split off from a larger piece, covered with tiny pictures.
“The engravings are always on that kind of Bone,” he said. “There are other kinds that don’t have drawings, maybe from a later date. It’s the work of the first Londoners, I suppose, when it was still a swamp. About the time your Phoenician ancestors started getting into the upriver woad-trade. I don’t know the significance, of course.”
The Bone itself was hard to analyse because of the mixture of chemicals which has created it, and some of it had fused, suggesting prehistoric upheavals of some kind. The drawings were extremely primitive. Any bored person with a sharp object and minimum talent could have done them at any time in history. The larger, weirder-looking Bones, had no engravings.
Stick people pursued other stick people endlessly across the fragment. The work was unremarkable. The beauty really was in the tawny ivory colour of the Bone alone. It glowed with a wealth of shades and drew you hypnotically into its depths. I imagined the huge animal of which this fragment had once been an active part. I saw the bellowing trunk, the vast ears, the glinting tusks succumbing suddenly to whatever had engulfed her. I saw her body swaying, her tail lashing as she trumpeted her defiance of her inevitable death. And now men sought her remains as treasure. It was a very romantic image and of course it would become my most sincere sales pitch.
“That’s six million dollars you’re holding there,” said Bernie. “Minimum.”
Bernie had caught me at the right time and I had to admit I was convinced. Back in his office he sketched out the agreement. We would go in on a fifty-fifty basis, funding the guys who would do the actual digging, who knew where the Bone-fields were and who would tell us as soon as we showed serious interest. We would finance all the work, pay them an upfront earnest and then load by load in agreed increments. Bernie and I would split the net profit fifty-fifty. There were all kinds of clauses and provisions covering the various problems we foresaw, and then we had a deal.
The archeologists came round to my little place in Dolphin Square. They were a scruffy bunch of students from the University of Norbury who had discovered the Bone deposits on a run-of-the-mill field trip in a demolished Southwark housing estate and knew only that there might be a market for them. Recent cuts to their grants had made them desperate. Some lefty had come up with a law out of the Magna Carta, or whatever, saying public land couldn’t be sold to private developers. Now there was a court case disputing the council’s right to sell the estate to Livingstone International. This also put a stop to the planned rebuilding, so we had indefinite time to work.
The stoodies were grateful for our expertise, as well as our cash. I was happy enough with the situation. It was one I felt we could easily control. Middle-class burbnerds get greedy the same as anyone else, but they respond well to reason. I told them for a start-off that all the Bone had to come in to us. If any of it leaked onto the market by other means, we’d risk losing our prices and that would mean the scheme was over. Terminated, I said significantly. Since we had reputations as well as investments to protect there would also be recriminations. That’s all I had to say. Since those V-serials kids think we’re Krays and Mad Frankie Frasers just because we like to look smart and talk properly.
We were fairly sure we weren’t doing anything obviously criminal. The stuff wasn’t treasure trove. It had to be cleared before proper foundations could be poured. Quite evidently LI didn’t think it was worth paying security staff to shuft the site. We didn’t know if digging shafts and tunnels was even trespass, but we knew we had a few weeks before someone started asking about us and by then we hoped to have the whole bloody mastodon out of the deep clay and nicely earning for us. The selling would take the real skill and that was my job. It was going to have to be played sharper than South African diamonds.
After that neither Bernie nor I had anything to do with the dig. We rented a guarded lockup in Clapham and paid the kids every time they brought in a substantial load of Bone. It was incredible stuff. Bernie thought that chemical action, some of it relatively recent, had caused the phenomenon. “Like chalk, you know. You hardly find it anywhere. Just a few places in England, France, China and Texas.” The kids reported that there was more than one kind of animal down there, but that all the Bone had the same rich appearance. They had constructed a new tunnel, with a hidden entrance, so that even if the building site was blocked to them, they could still get at the Bone. It seemed to be a huge field, but most of the Bone was at roughly the same depth. Much of it had fused and had to be chipped out. They had found no end to it so far and they had tunneled through more than half an acre of the dense, dark clay.
Meanwhile I was in Amsterdam and Rio, Paris and Vienna and New York and Sydney. I was in Tokyo and Seoul and Hong Kong. I was in Riyadh, Cairo and Baghdad. I was in Kampala and New Benin, everywhere there were major punters. I racked up so many free airmiles in a couple of months that they were automatically jumping me to first class. But I achieved what I wanted. Nobody bought London Bone without checking with me. I was the acknowledged expert. The prime source, the best in the business. If you want Bone, said the art world, you want Gold.
The Serious Fraud Squad became interested in Bone for a while, but they had been assuming we were faking it and gave up when it was obviously not rubbish.
Neither Bernie nor I expected it to last any longer than it did. By the time we drew a line under our first phase of selling, we were turning over so much dough it was silly and the kids were getting tired and were worrying about exploring some of their wildest dreams. There wa
s almost nothing left, they said. So we closed down the operation, moved our warehouses a couple of times and then let the Bone sit there to make us some money while everyone wondered why it had dried up.
And at that moment, inevitably, and late as ever, the newspapers caught on to the story. There was a brief late-night TV piece. A few supplements talked about it in their arts pages. This led to some news stories and eventually it went to the tabloids and became anything you liked from the remains of Martians to a new kind of nuclear waste. Anyone who saw the real stuff was convinced but everyone had a theory about it. The real exclusive market was finished. We kept schtum. We were gearing up for the second phase. We got as far away from our stash as possible.
Of course a few faces tracked me down, but I denied any knowledge of the Bone. I was a middle-man, I said. I just had good contacts. Half-a-dozen people claimed to know where the Bone came from. Of course they talked to the papers. I sat back in satisfied security, watching the mud swirl over our tracks. Another couple of months and we’d be even safer than the house I’d bought in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. It had a rather forlorn garden the size of Kilburn which needed a lot of nurturing. That suited me. I was ready to retire to the country and a big indoor swimming pool.