From London Far

by Michael Innes

  And Properjohn spoke, lowering his voice as if the heather might have ears. ‘We gotta Titian,’ he said. ‘We gotta Giotto.’ He rubbed his hands and spoke now in a sort of boastful whisper. ‘Almost we gotta German nextpert, echter Kunsthistoriker, save us maybe thousands, knows hundred two hundred perhaps places fine valuable pictures hid about Germany, Holland, France. We sure almost got him, Vogelsang passes as Birtsong.’

  ‘Almost got him?’ said Meredith. ‘Did something go wrong?’

  ‘Shot.’ Properjohn was laconic. ‘All this too dam’ big organization, silly passworts and nobody hardly knows who. Some trouble in London I don’t yet get it just how.’ He shook his head despondently. ‘Same as I don’t quite get you. You know Bubear?’

  So here the awkwardness began. Yes or no – oranges or lemons? Meredith could see no principle on which to choose. ‘Oh yes,’ he said – and tried to make the utterance as meaningful and cryptic as might be – ‘I know Bubear.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Properjohn – apparently acquiescing in what he took to be Meredith’s tone. ‘And now Bubear lost his face.’

  ‘Lost his face?’ Meredith was horrified by this drastic issue of the swipe he had been obliged to take at Bubear with a revolver butt.

  ‘Lost his face in a crisis and blew up two three thousand pounds not so bad goods. But he did clear the Titian and the Giotto.’ Properjohn’s voice was again triumphant. ‘We gotta Titian and a Giotto better almost anything we sent through yet. And about this Vogelsang passed as Birtsong now shot we get the faks soon enough. Bubear comes here tonight.’

  VIII

  Duncan comes here tonight… But at Dunsinane, thought Meredith, this had been hard cheese on Duncan himself; whereas at Carron Lodge the victim would be a somewhat earlier arrival – one better seen in Martial and Juvenal than in the elementary precautions that should attend criminal investigation.

  Vogelsang, then, was not only dead, but known to be dead, and Jean’s sanguine calculations as to Bubear’s reticence and duplicity had been all awry. Moreover, the adventure was repeating itself with slight variations, much as if it were a fairy tale. In London Meredith had met Bubear and had been mistaken for somebody unknown – with that unknown’s imminent arrival threatening exposure. Now in Scotland he had met Properjohn and been mistaken for somebody else unknown – with Bubear’s imminent arrival threatening exposure. There was something peculiarly paralysing about having to play the identical hazardous farce over again. Moreover, he was now without any assistance equivalent to Jean’s prompting – and to this had to be added his sense that the real Properjohn, who lurked beneath the absurdities of the polyglot laird, was a more formidable adversary than Bubear had been.

  They drew near to Carron Lodge. It was, Meredith thought, an uncomfortably isolated spot. As locale for a trial of wits, or for another bout of slapstick hue and cry, he would prefer Bubear’s lately demolished warehouse every time. For one thing, Carron Lodge spoke of leisure and reflective quiet, which was just the sort of environment against which imposture could not hope successfully to stand. This time to carry off the necessary impersonation was utterly impossible – or at least it was so while the identity of the man to be impersonated was a blank. At any moment Properjohn might ask some simple questions which would end the matter.

  For a moment Meredith meditated ignominious flight. After all, he now definitely knew that Bubear, presumably convoying the Horton Venus and the Giotto, was to arrive tonight. To make good an escape and at once arrange a little reception by the military or the police was plainly the rational, as it was the only hopeful, course. But was flight possible? That he could run faster than Properjohn recent experiences made him judge likely enough. But the moor was wide and shelterless, and so desperate a character would certainly be armed. Before Meredith had made ten yards the situation would be clear to his enemy, and this meant that before he had made fifteen yards Properjohn would be taking aim at him. And at fifteen yards, Meredith knew, a revolver in any sort of practised hand scores no misses. Flight, in fact, would be an altogether injudicious resort.

  There were only two bright spots. The one was that Jean was for the moment out of it. The other was that he had not rashly claimed to be Vogelsang on the chance that Properjohn supposed him to be so. That would have been fatal indeed. It would have been fatal, he repeated to himself, frowning as he did so…

  And even as he frowned he stopped, and confronted Properjohn with a half turn. Not without some difficulty his heels clicked together in the soft heather. ‘Vogelsang,’ he said

  ‘Hey?’ Properjohn looked at Meredith with a startled eye. ‘What that you say about Vogelsang passed as Birtsong?’

  ‘I am Vogelsang, my good Herr Properjohn. And it seems to me that about this Bubear of yours we must have a little talk. Why should he direct me to that castle instead of to your known house? And why should he send you a fantastic story about my having been shot? There is much in this that I do not understand, my friend.’

  ‘Hey–’

  ‘And why do you not give the countersign?’ Meredith, now that there had been abruptly revealed to him the only course in which a possible safety lay, felt quite his old self. He looked sternly at Properjohn. ‘Shaftesbury,’ he said deliberately, and let a deepening suspicion gather on his brow.

  Properjohn raised both hands despairingly in air. ‘They mean nothinks to me, quarter, half, three-quarters these passworts! Always I–’

  ‘When the safety of other men is at stake,’ said Meredith silkily, ‘the forgetting of a password may be inconvenient – very inconvenient indeed, Herr Properjohn. Or sogenannter Herr Properjohn.’ And Meredith let his right hand steal in a sinister fashion towards a pocket.

  ‘But I am Properjohn!’

  The man was really rattled. Just so, Meredith reflected, must Higbed have made his own claim to identity on these very moors. But although Properjohn was rattled, he too was edging a hand towards the pocket of his country-gentleman’s jacket. And this might be awkward. Meredith therefore let his own hands drop to his sides. ‘Also, gut!’ he said soothingly, and wondered if it would be judicious and colourable to drop into German – a language which Properjohn had probably the same rather uncertain command of as English. ‘And perhaps you will prove it by explaining convincingly whom you took me for in the Schloss – the castle – of those old ladies?’

  ‘Natchly I take you for Signor Pantelli, big Italian dealer goes across tonight!’ Properjohn was indignant. ‘Goes across sell two three Giorgiones account clients thinks better leave Europe a while.’

  ‘Two or three Giorgiones!’ Meredith in turn could not restrain his indignation. Was it possible that even amid all the vastness of the United States there could be men at once so wealthy and so crazily depraved as to give large sums of money for stolen pictures which they could never do more than hide away?

  ‘But we gotta Titian.’ Properjohn, his pride evidently piqued by what he had misinterpreted as excessive admiration in Meredith’s voice, was boastful once more. ‘We gotta Titian, we gotta Giotto–’

  ‘And you’ve got a very treacherous and incompetent London agent.’ It would not do, Meredith had decided, to let Properjohn get up again on too confident a perch – or not until much more information had been extracted from him. They were now on a low terrace that ran before Carron Lodge; this sinister dwelling, tricked in all its abundant bunting of Hunting Stuart, was about to receive them. Meredith laid a finger on his host’s shoulder and brought him to a halt. ‘Yes, my friend! A very treacherous fellow whom we shall lay by the heels tonight. And I think it is this same Bubear who has let you suppose that I am responsible for losing the Mykonos Marbles to Marsden’s lot – hein?’

  Properjohn made a deprecating but guilty noise. ‘I get a code telegram Bubear that way,’ he said. ‘Same as I get a telegram Bubear shot Vogelsang and the place blowed up.’

  �
�The place is blown up. Make no mistake about that. But all the stuff he’ll tell you was destroyed there went into his own pocket long ago.’

  Properjohn let out a sudden wail, altogether inappropriate to a highland laird standing by his own threshold. ‘But, Herr Vogelsang, Bubear’s got the Titian, Bubear’s got the Giotto! He’s supposed bringing them himself tonight.’ Properjohn’s wail became a howl. ‘Almost we gotta Titian, almost we gotta Giotto. And now–’

  ‘I doubt whether it’s as bad as that.’ Here was a point, Meredith saw, at which caution and foresight were required. ‘Small pickings are what constitute Bubear’s line, and I don’t think he could handle a Titian. Perhaps you remember a little matter of an Aubusson carpet?’

  Properjohn stared. ‘Sure. But I don’t get how you know these thinks. Puttikly seeing–’

  ‘Well, the last time I saw Bubear he was standing on it. And I don’t doubt he told you it was lost in transit.’

  ‘Exak that.’ Properjohn was breathing heavily, and it was plain that he was much stirred by these revelations. ‘Once I only get Bubear here–’

  ‘But I dare say he’s merely been taking what he regards as a fair commission.’ Meredith, who was now well launched upon the part of a modern Iago, realized that the appearance of assuaging suspicion was here his most potent means of rousing it. ‘What is an Aubusson carpet, after all? Or even two or three thousand pounds worth of second-rate stuff supposed to have been destroyed in a basement? You and I, Herr Properjohn, need take small account of such trifles.’

  ‘Trifles! You call the Mykonos Marbles trifles?’ And Properjohn tugged in a sort of frenzy at his gentleman’s droopy moustache.

  ‘Come, come. I didn’t say he took the Marbles. I said you were a fool to believe his story that I was concerned in it. It is not possible greatly to admire the efficiency of your organization, my friend.’

  ‘Why, our organization has made all the biggest most importantest deals for gentlemen thinking leave Europe since almost Stalingrad or Battle of Britain back of that. And nobody ever criticized fine, efficient service we give before.’

  ‘Shaftesbury,’ said Meredith inexorably.

  Properjohn appeared much disposed to vary tugging his moustache with tearing his hair. ‘Passworts!’ he cried. ‘I tell you passworts isn’t efficient, is only kids’ acting. Most likeliest it was dam’ fool London’s-going Berlin’s-burning talk lost us those marbles to Marsden.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Meredith, massively oracular.

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘I suppose you weren’t even told that they had got hold of one of Marsden’s girls?’

  ‘Certain I was told. Most all importantest things is told to me at once. But Bubear reports last code wire this girl lost dead.’ Properjohn frowned. ‘Vogelsang lost dead and this girl lost dead. Fishlike, huh?’

  Meredith nodded. ‘Very fishlike, my friend. I begin to think that, after all, this Bubear must be playing for large stakes. He knew I was bringing the girl–’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘–whereupon he declares that we are both dead. And – mark you – he had carefully misdirected us to that castle. Do you think he meant us ever to leave it – or to leave it the way we came?’

  This last was a reckless shot in the dark. But then the whole piece of mystification upon which he was embarked was so nightmarishly tenuous, so vulnerable to the first effort of coherent thought that Properjohn should achieve that Meredith was convinced of its being only a matter of minutes till disaster overtook him. His dive back into the role of Vogelsang had been shrewd enough. The species of return from the dead which it posited had thrown Properjohn off his balance; and this Meredith had been able to follow up with a good deal of convincing information and reference. But the imposture started more hazards than it could possibly circumvent. All that could be done was to play for a little more time on the off chance that some favourable opportunity for a bolt would present itself. And meanwhile the more Meredith drew upon his fancy the better. He knew various bells that could be more or less effectively sounded in Properjohn’s head. On these he must ring the changes as rapidly as he could.

  ‘You gotta girl of Marsden’s?’ Properjohn had led the way into his incongruous domicile; now they were standing in a flashy veneer and chromium room before what Meredith conjectured to be a cocktail cabinet.

  ‘Certainly I have. Marsden’s best girl. Didn’t you see her?’

  ‘And her eating out of your fist?’

  ‘Of course.’ Meredith endeavoured to look like one before whose sexy charms an enemy’s retainers melted away. And this put him in mind of another bell that might be sounded. ‘And what about Higbed, my friend! It seems to have been a matter of Shaftesbury again, does it not?’

  ‘They let him get away for a bit, sure.’ Properjohn was abashed. But suddenly he looked at Meredith with bewilderment and supicion. ‘Say!’ he said. ‘Signor Pantelli, rather mean Herr Vogelsang, I don’t get how you up on Higbed, seeing Higbed is no more than little private insurance-cover idea of mine.’

  ‘I’m not up on him.’ Meredith spoke rather hastily. ‘I merely mean that it’s known all over this district that you have been pursuing an escaped madman called Higbed. It seems to me a matter which might cause gossip, and into which the police would inquire. Please remember that you are asking me to associate myself with your undertaking, Herr Properjohn. And all I meet is muddle, muddle, and again muddle! All over Europe I have note of hidden works of art of the first quality. Naturally, I expect an organization of the first quality to deal with them. Would you like six wax figures by Michelangelo–’

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘–or a large Leonardo cartoon? Would you like’ – and Meredith became at once specific and reckless – ‘the Van Eyk altar-piece from Ghent, the Mona Lisa–’

  ‘We gotta Titian. I hope we gotta Titian. But the Mona Lisa!’

  ‘–the Night Watch, the Burial of Count Orgaz–’

  ‘But hey! That burial of the guy Orgaz is certain almost–’

  ‘Never mind!’ Meredith raised a distracting hand and found Properjohn obsequiously pressing into it a luridly tinted decoction from his cocktail cabinet. ‘Never mind what you have been led to believe, my friend. I know. You have a customer wants an El Greco, a Velasquez, a Goya? I can point to the very spot where it can be procured – and with no more trouble than in shovelling the earth off a trapdoor to a cellar, or pushing past a bundle of hay in a barn. But I expect efficiency.’

  ‘Natchly, your Excellency.’ Properjohn was now bowing and bobbing after a fashion very uncommon in gentlemen in knickerbockers and Connemara cloth. ‘Please excuse shockink mistake take our importantest almost Continental connexion for small Wop dealer Pantelli goes across tonight with two three dud Giorgiones!’

  ‘Ah,’ said Meredith. ‘About this Pantelli. He may be turning up at any time?’

  Properjohn nodded. ‘Most any time. Which is why when I heard about a stranger being at the castle I thought well better call in case small Wop Pantelli gone direk there by mistake.’

  ‘I see.’ Meredith, having in a fit of high spirits hoisted Vogelsang to the bad eminence of one with whom plundered Leonardos and El Grecos were matters of everyday, was beating his brains for some further monstrous absurdity for which to barter small pocketfuls of time. So far nobody had appeared except Properjohn himself, and not five paces from where host and guest stood sipping their cocktails was a window giving almost directly on deserted moor. Would not his best course be to endeavour to catch Properjohn for a moment unawares, serve him as he had served the subordinate Bubear not long ago, and then bolt from Carron Lodge as quickly as he could? To do so would be to give an alarm which must inevitably send the whole organization to earth with a speed rivalling even that with which the London warehouse had been abandoned and blown sky-high. And as it would be hours before any effec
tive force could be summoned to these fastnesses, the final result might be unsatisfactory in the extreme. But was not even this better than the certainty of exposure either within minutes (as was still overwhelmingly probable) or hard upon the arrival of Bubear later in the evening?

  Meredith looked round for a weapon – and remarked that for the sanctum of one given to trading in Titians and Giottos this retreat of Properjohn’s was singularly devoid of traditional beauties. On the walls, it was true, were several excellent sporting prints, but these evidently went with the knickerbockers and the moustache as part of the build-up of the laird. The carpet showed a senseless design of squares and cubes in half a dozen impure colours, and the several objects reposing on it spoke equally of l’art moderne in the depressing form in which this percolates down to cheap furnishing concerns. Connoisseurship, it appeared, was something from which, in his off hours, Properjohn was pleased to escape. The only articles suggesting any pride of ownership were the cocktail cabinet and a large model galleon in full sail, entirely executed in chromium plating and silver wire. It was when Meredith’s eye fell on this last absurdity that his mind was made up. The shape was somewhat awkward and only the hull would be strong enough to do the necessary damage. Nevertheless, he was resolved. He would pick up the galleon and bring it down hard on Properjohn’s head. And then he would make a run for it.

  With this plan in mind Meredith edged towards the galleon – cautiously at first and then with a rapid swoop as he remarked Properjohn’s attention to be occupied with mixing another drink. He had reached out for it, indeed, when an entirely new thought struck him. Somewhere in this house was the unfortunate Dr Higbed – an unsound philosopher, it was true, but yet a fellow man and even, in a fashion, a fellow scholar. For reasons utterly obscure, he had been dogged by furniture vans, kidnapped, and subjected to various trials and indignities which had, it would appear, temporarily deprived him of his reason. If Meredith fled now would there be any substantial chance of rescuing the unhappy man before he was carried off to some more secure hiding-place? Meredith saw that he must first hit Properjohn on the head and then hunt for Higbed. This obligation would enormously decrease his chances of getting away. Yet only if he got away was there any substantial possibility of crushing the abominable organization through the channel of whose Flying Foxes some of the major art treasures of Europe were being conveyed to madmen far less innocent than the imprisoned psychologist. Here, in fact, was the old dilemma once more – the dilemma, not of Fénelon or the pretty maidservant, but of Higbed or the Horton Venus (and much else). And Meredith was so struck by the force of his predicament that he was actually standing in meditation upon it, and with his arms held out towards the galleon, when Properjohn turned round again holding a couple of glasses.