Conman

by Richard Asplin

  I had a Best of John Williams on the dusty stereo, the theme from Star Wars rupputy-pumping tinnily from one working speaker, soggy trouser bottoms and the rest of the post worrying me on the cluttered desk.

  I’d had one customer already, a regular. He popped in most Wednesdays to tell me yes, he’d have a coffee if I was having one, sniff through any new posters that’d come in, do a crossword clue in my Empire magazine and challenge me to a game from the shelf. Downfall, Kerplunk, maybe a quick buzz at Operation. I kept a few faded dusty ones around to kill time with my few more intense regulars. It meant I had to sit uncomfortably close to them of course, smelling their lozenge breath and listening to their phlegm rattle, but on the plus side it meant I got a half hour’s silence without them whittering obsessively on about Bruces Banner, Lee, Wayne and Willis.

  The day would pick up of course. As the hands of the clock swept Presley’s quiff from his eyes, Mr Cheng would come and press his nose against the glass as always. But until then, I had just the post to worry me, which it was doing a very good job of.

  I filed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Timewaster in the bin along with the other three or four handwritten missives, mostly requests from private collectors for me to either take dusty rubbish off their hands or supply more dusty rubbish for them to annoy their wives with. Of the three ominous A4 envelopes, one turned out to be from the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre: my contract, a detailed map pointing out Stall 116, Loading Bay C, set-ups times and so on, which I filed away for next month.

  The other two – both solemn-looking buff things addressed to Mr Martin, c/o Heroes Inc – had me nauseous with nerves, an apprehension not entirely helped by the sick smell of rotten pulp floating up the cellar steps and John Williams who, having ra-pah-pah-pummed through Star Wars, was now sawing away ominously at the theme from Jaws.

  I was just thinking that I might let the envelopes wait a while and go and have another coffee when, with a ting of the bell and a well hey there, one unexpectedly arrived.

  “And what’s that monstrosity worth?” she said, motioning at the wall behind the desk.

  “Monstrosity? That, I’ll have you know, is the first original poster I ever owned. UK quad, cost me fifteen pounds. Had it on my wall at college. An absolute classic.”

  “Never seen it,” Laura shrugged, unloading her tray of coffee and a shiny bag of buns and croissants.

  Thankfully for my nerves, she was out of the cocktail dress and into work gear, but even that she managed to carry off with a moll’s worth of 40s’ vintage sass. She had a thin, flowery top on, low cut in a sheer material, her small white brassiere just visible through the fabric. A thick red belt with a large buckle beneath and a thin black pencil skirt. The heels were gone, replaced by small school plimsolls, the whole thing wrapped in one of those huge dark green coats with the furry hoods. She had her hair pulled back and piled high, but one thick glossy tousle fell across her face. The graze on her temple had faded to pink. Somehow, however, even decked out to distribute mochas to twitchy Soho-ites, she still had a disconcerting way about her. An old-fashioned thing. Hips, heels and cigarettes, all that stuff. You seen Gilda? No? 1946? Rita Hayworth, Glen Ford? Or what about Only Angels Have Wings? Hayworth and Cary Grant, 1939? Well, she looked like that. Like she’d have fluffy mules under her bed and a gun in her purse. Plus for someone who’d been hauled out of her car and dumped in the gutter by two ASBOs not twelve hours ago, she was holding it together.

  “You’ve never –” I repeated back in a stupid high-pitched voice, spilling a little latte. “It’s a classic. Redford? Shaw? Newman? Got that Joplin ragtime score?”

  Laura peered over the yellowing poster, eyes finally settling on the bottom right of the frame.

  “Six hundred pounds?” she yelped.

  “I know I know. But I’ve had it signed by the artist Richard Amsel, here see? And Shaw and the director. There’s another dealer who comes in for a drool over it almost daily. It should just be for display really but the way things are, I’m sort of hoping he’ll –”

  “And what’s in these?” Laura said. She slid a bun from a greasy paper bag and moved on to one of a dozen or so fat files on the counter among the post and the remains of the morning’s particularly heated Buckaroo.

  “Posters. Well, photos of posters. The originals are in tubes downstairs.”

  “Like a nerd Argos,” she said flapping past polaroids of Heat, Heathers and Heaven’s Gate.

  “Although, that’s now ruined,” I said, plucking Hellraiser out grimly. “And that. And that.”

  “Ruined?”

  “Like me,” I sighed. “Down here.”

  We moved behind the counter, through the arch and down ten rotten steps from the dull glare of the shop floor to the single-bulb gloom of the wet basement. There are in fact twelve rotten steps to the basement but as the concrete floor was still under nine inches of thick black water and Laura’s plimsolls seemed less than aquatic, I thought it best we remained poolside.

  “Ohmigod,” Laura said, hand over her nose. “It stinks. This is what you meant yesterday by –”

  “Quite.”

  “Where does that go?” She pointed across the dripping dungeon gloom to an iron door, purple with rust in the furthest wall.

  “Into next door’s basement. Antiquarian books. Fortunately for all his stock it’s rusted over and water tight.”

  “Christ. And what’s in all those boxes?”

  “Now? Vintage fist-fulls of mushy pulp. Likewise the bottom two shelves all along that wall and everything in those bin bags.”

  “Urgh, God. And it all used to be –”

  “Yep. Used to be.”

  There didn’t seem much more to add. Laura said it stinks a couple more times and I agreed a couple more times and that was pretty much that. I snapped off the basement bulb and we ascended to ground level, the furry smell clinging to my sopping turn-ups. Laura started up a new cigarette to cover the black odour, I told her she couldn’t smoke in the shop and she held up her cigarette to demonstrate that she could, look, when Mr Cheng arrived for his daily drool.

  “You be oh eBay?” Cheng said, door jingling, pulling his spectacles from his brown suit pocket and cleaning them on a pale brown hanky.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Ny Ac Com nuh fouh. Oh prih buh noh bah.”

  Mr Cheng never bothered to finish words once he’d started them. It had taken me a few months of conversation to be able to mentally fill in the blanks quickly enough to keep up.

  “You shouh looh. Cheh ouh,” he said, sliding on his specs.

  “I will check it out. Thank you.”

  Laura perched on the edge of the desk and took it upon herself to open the rest of my mail. I asked her kindly not to, at which point she offered me a withering feminine look – which as I explained, I never know what to do with so I busied myself with Cheng. I watched him crane his neck over my poster for The Sting, peering over the signatures behind the glass. He stepped back once in a while to take in the full image, and stepped back in just as quickly to watch the ink, as if he’d spotted it slithering across the faded paper.

  “Fye hundreh,” he said, as he did every morning.

  “Six hundred,” I said, as I did every morning.

  “My guy, he big colleck.”

  “Yes, so you keep saying.”

  “I geh hih thih, he buy loh moh. Buh he say whon pay moh thah fye.”

  I opened my mouth to administer the daily rebuttal but nothing came out. The words hovered apprehensively at the back of my tongue like stage-struck toddlers and for the first time, I allowed Cheng’s offer to ruminate seriously. Five hundred pounds. More than I made in a day. More than I made in a week. I looked down at my soggy turn-ups and shiny wellies. Thought about the stacks of bin bags beneath me. The rows and rows of sopping boxes. I thought about a Freshers’ Week fifteen long years ago, my hall-mate Andrew and I hanging the poster on the wall of my new room. Thought about what five hundred po
unds would do.

  “Let me think about it,” I sighed finally.

  Cheng blinked, removed his glasses and scuttled out.

  “See yoh tomorr.”

  “I expect so,” I said, and he closed the door behind him with a ting-a-ling.

  “Dear Mr Martin, in response to your letter of the fifteenth …” Laura said suddenly. I looked over. She had her cigarette perched between her lips and was unclipping a photograph from the letter in her hand. “Blah blah blah, without a viewing, we are unable to put an accurate valuation …”

  “Sotheby’s,” I said, reaching out for it.

  “Although,” she said, twisting around away from me, lifting the letter out of reach. “In line with Overstreet’s current price guide, we would estimate a value of –”

  “Can I take a –”

  “Holy shit, Mr Heroes Inc. I think your problems are over. You own this?” and she held out the Polaroid. I nodded sadly.

  “Don’t get too excited. I can’t sell it. It comes as part of the package when you have an honourable wife.” I took the letter grimly and read it through, chewing the inside of my cheek.

  “Honourable?”

  “My wife. Jane. Despite her appearance and her love of Tank Girl and Terry Pratchett, her dad is Edward, the somethingth Earl of whassitshire,” I explained. “Walsingham. No, Wakingham? Wakefordsham? One of those.” I dumped the Sotheby’s letter in my in-tray and picking up the final piece of ominous post, tore it open roughly. “Means he’s got a draughty old house in Suffolk that’s falling to pieces. Or is it Norfolk? One of the ‘folks’ anyway. A five-bedroomed whassit off the King’s Road, complains about income tax, thinks I’m a scruffy pleb and drags Jane off in a frock to stand in a field staring at ponies every summer. He likes his extravagant wedding presents of course. They’re designed to keep unworthy sons-in-law in his debt. To keep one in one’s …”

  My voice trailed off into a croak as I tugged out the flimsy yellow carbon paper from the final envelope, stomach rolling over and flopping out like a fat drunk on a guest bed.

  Shit.

  Laura was talking somewhere but her voice was thick and muted, like it was underwater. Like she was sunk. Sunk like me.

  I blinked at the final demand and refocused. Rod-o-Matic, Plumbing & Drainage.

  I recalled the man in overalls. The unpacking of gear. The pipes. The hours of juddering compressed air. The repacking of the gear. The apologies.

  “What about insurance?” Laura asked, snapping me awake. She was stubbing out her cigarette and popping the top from a coffee. “Doesn’t that cover burst –”

  She stopped at the sudden shutter-shuddering slam of the door.

  “You Hero? Hey, you?” a wide gentleman barked, barraging in, banging a brown evacuee suitcase against the displays. Draped in a ratty old coat, clearly tailor-made for someone else, a greasy wool hat pulled right down, his voice was muzzled by a spitty scarf.

  “You Mr Hero? I’ve got shit to shift. Right up your alley.” Waddling up the aisle, he heaved his battered case onto my photo files.

  “Can I help you?” I said, clearing some space.

  He flicked the case locks with grubby thumbs.

  “It’s me who’s ’elping you mate. What’ll you give me for this lot?”

  I put the invoice aside and wiped croissanty fingers on my jeans. Glad of the temporary distraction, I spent the next five minutes rootling through the cluttered contents of the old man’s musty suitcase. Despite everything – invoices and cellars and solicitors and intimidating café staff – I allowed my mood to momentarily lift, feeling the old hope tingle like warm electricity through my fingertips. I breathed it in: the fusty brown smell; the crackle of yellowing paper; the rustle of polythene and dull clink of thick porcelain. Boxes, bundles and bags, bulging with possibility.

  Forgive me.

  Long forgotten cases like these are the most enjoyable part of a dealer’s life. More than a ringing till, more than that first cappuccino. Not due to any rookie pipe-dream of a mythical priceless trinket mind you. Those ideas are pummelled out in the first six months by the fat fists of experience. In almost a decade of running Heroes Incorporated, not one of the hundreds of identical cobwebby suitcases has yet to give up more than a tenner’s worth of chipped pop-culture nick-nackery.

  No. What these moments give is a return. A chance, for the briefest moment, to remember, recapture, the few precious seconds of boyhood when our strange fascinations first took hold. For a frozen moment business is forgotten and I am back in short trousers and school shoes, eyes wide, breathing in the smell of burnt popcorn. I am stroking the rough primary pages of a borrowed comic, bathing in the tinny glow of a Saturday cartoon or picking cold fingers among the trestle-table tat in a freezing church hall jumble sale, my father beside me, slipping me a heavy fifty pence, the air bubbling with women’s voices, thick with the metal smell of orangey tea.

  I was jerked from memory by a loud voice. I looked up from the worthless case of trinkets and tat. The owner was taking a vocal stroll about the shop, letting fly with his expert advice. Ahhh, you wanna get rid of all this crap. This? This here? Worthless. These are on eBay for twenty pence. Market’s flooded with ’em. Crap, crap, crap, whassis one? Crap. On and on. Jolted by disbelief, I threw a look at Laura who dropped a matching jaw and threw the look back.

  And then if this wasn’t enough, the stranger, seemingly oblivious to buyer-seller etiquette, up-shifted a gear with a crunch and started getting personal. Gor dear, fuckin’ amateur hour this place. Got stuff worth more than this kickin’ around in my loft. New to the game are you Hero? He’s calling me ‘Hero’ the whole time for some reason. Hero, eh mate, new to this lark are ya? Bloody youngsters don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. Do ya. Hoy? Hero?

  Well I mean, really.

  I was this close to slamming his ratty case and asking him to take his bric-a-brac, business and body-odour elsewhere when, at the bottom of the case, beneath a yellowing stack of 2000ADs, my fingers curled around a thick roll of what felt like card. I tugged it loose.

  Black and white photographs. Publicity stills. Cracked and faded most of them, corners bent and orangey. A quick crackle through revealed a veritable who’s who of artists and writers from the thirties and forties – the Golden Age of the American comic book: Will Eisner, Bill Finger, Julio Raymond, each posed in shirt sleeves and fedoras, pipes in mouths, all sat chuckling around desks and easels. Shots commissioned no doubt by various publishers way back when. A quirky collection but nothing to get too excited over.

  I was already warming up a thanks-but-no-thanks when two familiar faces at the bottom of the photo pile caught the words in my throat.

  Could it … ?

  Was it … ?

  Holy.

  Heirloom.

  Batman.

  I swallowed hard and looked up. The man had got his coat caught on a rack and was cursing and tugging at it, postcards and lobby sets swooping to the floor.

  “Er, not really my sort of stuff to be honest,” I said, attempting to keep the wobble from my voice. “I mean I’d give you a fiver just coz I like this Dick Tracy mug,” and I waved a ceramic Warren Beatty. “But I’d be doing you a favour to be honest.”

  “Fuck off ya tosser, got some beauties in there,” the man said, yanking his coat free, the postcards falling around. “Them 2000ADs are mint. Hundred quid and it’s all yours. C’mon ya tight fucker. You’ll make double that.”

  “I’d be lucky to make half, to be honest. And would you mind controlling your language sir?”

  “Then give me a fuckin’ decent fuckin’ price, ya fuckin’ fairy. Seventy five,” and he waved a grubby paw at the large MGM posters on the wall. “You’d only spend it on more Judy Garland shit for your boyfriend.”

  “For my boyf – ? Oh for heaven’s sake.” In the corner Laura was concealing a smirk behind her cigarette. I really was going to have to butch the place up a bit. But until then, I needed to close this deal
sharpish. “Fifteen, and it’s my final offer.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You … Give it then,” he barked in a belch of boozy bitter, snapping his fingers. “An’ I want a receipt.”

  I began jabbing through the laborious temperamental quirks of my Jurassic till, the man spitting ’urry ups and fackin’ell mates, in your own time why dontchas. The till-drawer finally ground open, thin receipt chattering out noisily. I peeled off a couple of notes and handed them to him.

  “’Bout time, ya fuckin’ fruit,” he mumbled, upending the case to let the comics, photographs and nick-nacks tumble to the counter and floor in a flurry. He staggered around and clomped mumbling down the shop, lurching clumsily onto Laura’s toe. She yelled at him but with a thud and a clatter he was gone.

  “Jesus. What an arsehole,” Laura said.

  “And thank the Lord,” I said excitedly, riffling through the debris.

  “Otherwise I might have felt moved to give him the full market value for … where are you, where are you … here. Look at that!”

  Laura ambled up the aisle and peered at the photograph through her cigarette smoke.

  “And what is the market value,” she shrugged, “for a signed snapshot of two Brylcreem boys with their underpants outside their trousers?”

  “A great deal more than fifteen pounds,” I said, heart lifting. Maybe this was a sign? Maybe it was like my dad used to tell me – that luck came in streaks? Run of bad, a run of good.

  I caught a glimpse of the yellow plumber’s invoice atop my in-tray. Further down the pile, two matching yellow demands and a Beevers & Boatman letterhead peeked out a little.

  Christ, let my luck be changing.

  “Fur-mur fob-mim oof,” Jane said later that evening, to which I replied “Beg pardon?” for the obvious reason. “You robbed him?” she said, lifting her mouth up from the pillow a bit, and then added another small oof noise.

  “Robbed – I didn’t rob him,” I said. “It’s not like he – whoopsie – like he came in and I clunked him over the head with a cardboard Chewbacca and nicked his suitcase.”