Monsieur Pamplemousse on Vacation

by Michael Bond

  ‘It’s got Henrik Wigstrom’s stamp all right. But there’s a national mark, rather than a regional one – a woman in a traditional headdress – which makes it after 1896.

  ‘How much is it worth?’ He shrugged. ‘How do you put a value on any work of art? As much as the market will stand, I guess. If it’s for real, this kind of thing is irreplaceable. Malcolm Forbes would know. He’s the multi-millionaire guy who runs Forbes financial magazine. At the last count he’d gotten himself almost as many as there are in the whole of the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Very tiny unadorned eggs currently fetch £4,000 – £5,000 in Switzerland,’ said Mr Pickering: ‘At the other end of the scale, a few years ago what was known as the Imperial Winter Egg was sold for just under £4,000,000.’

  ‘If it is possible to forge a complex miniature work of art like this,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, retrieving it, ‘then surely it is possible to forge the signatures?’

  ‘Bingo!’ said Todd. ‘Hole in one! It’s one of the scams the Russian Mafiya run. That’s how I got to know a bit about it. The story goes they’ve taken over a jewellery factory in Budapest specialising in the restoration of antiques – and that includes Fabergé eggs. The chances of an owner getting the original one back is something I wouldn’t like to take a bet on. It’s more likely to end up on the international market.’

  ‘Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery,’ broke in Mr Pickering, ‘it’s often the most lucrative, particularly if the original artist is dead.’

  ‘If all the Renoirs in Hollywood were laid end to end,’ said Todd, ‘it would be a hell of a long walk. Right? Vanity is on the forger’s side. No one likes to admit they’ve been taken for a ride – especially when their judgement is called into question.’

  ‘I’ve always understood that if you put a fake Fabergé alongside the real thing you don’t need to be all that much of an expert to tell the two apart,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘It’s a matter of attention to detail and the quality of the workmanship. The enamelling in a genuine egg has a translucency which only comes from the technique of using many layers. If there is any kind of wallpapering effect – a rippling – rather like the pattern left in the wet sand after the tide has gone out – then it will have been applied to one of the inner layers rather than on the surface.

  ‘If its original box were available that would be the best clue. The quality of the workmanship in those was superb too.’

  ‘Unless Pommes Frites has it,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse, ‘I’m afraid that is how it came.’

  ‘Like I say,’ broke in Todd, ‘if the Ruskies are involved, watch your step.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Mr Pickering lowered his voice, ‘As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m here on what you might call a working holiday. Mrs Pickering doesn’t really approve of my mixing business with pleasure, but the powers that be have decreed otherwise. How about you?’

  ‘I am what les journaux usually refer to as an innocent bystander,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘And that is the truth. I rarely mix business and pleasure with Madame Pamplemousse either.’

  ‘And I got no plans for going plural,’ said Todd.

  Seeing the waiter about to arrive with the petit déjeuner, Monsieur Pamplemousse slipped the egg back into his pocket, and moved his chair slightly so that there was room for Pommes Frites’ water bowl.

  ‘You can tell me to mind my own beeswax if you’d rather not open up,’ said Todd, when they were alone again. ‘On the other hand …’

  Taking Todd to mean what he thought he meant, Monsieur Pamplemousse brought the other two up to date, omitting nothing apart from giving an edited version of his last conversation with the Director. He wasn’t sure how news of Uncle Caputo’s involvement would go down with Todd.

  At the end of his story they sat in silence for a moment or two.

  Mr Pickering was the first to speak. ‘You think the egg may be the “work of art” you were supposed to collect?’

  ‘It is the most likely explanation,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘I can’t think of another.’

  ‘And for some reason our disarticulated friend who was supposed to deliver it fell foul of the Russian Mafiya on the way?’

  ‘I fear so.’

  ‘So how did your dog come by it?’ asked Todd.

  ‘I think something must have happened while my wife and I were at the school concert. In retrospect, when we came out he was very restless, and clearly from the way he behaved when what remained of the body was washed up, he evidently made some kind of connection in his mind.’

  ‘Criminal gangs everywhere have a vested interest in instability,’ said Todd thoughtfully, ‘but it’s a question of territories. You know what I mean?’

  ‘What about the Beaune Summit that happened a few years ago,’ broke in Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘The Heads of all the crime rings in the world are supposed to have met up and worked out a pact parcelling up the territories?’

  ‘When it comes to territory, no one wants to give up what they’ve already staked a claim to. That goes for the guy who gets shoved off his patch at a baseball game, or finds someone parked on his front drive when he gets back home, all the way up through Northern Ireland via Bosnia, to the Arabs and the Jews slugging it out in the Middle East. I’ll give you a dollar for every North America Indian you can show me who doesn’t still harbour a grudge.

  ‘There’s what you might call a certain amount of unrest amongst the natives over here. The French and Italian Mafia don’t take kindly to strangers muscling in. Maybe this was a warning shot on the part of the Ruskies, making the point that they want a part of the action. Right?’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘In this part of the world? Mostly drugs – although historically in France that’s Marseilles territory. Prostitution. Door to door insurance …’

  ‘The protection racket,’ added Mr Pickering, by way of translation.

  ‘Applied statistics …’

  ‘Another word for gambling,’ broke in Mr Pickering. ‘Carried out by “members of a career-offender cartel”.’ He gave a sigh. ‘And they used to say the French have a phrase for it!’

  Todd snorted. ‘Meaning no disrespect to our friend here. We’re in a country where they call female traffic wardens goddam “periwinkles”!’

  ‘Not officially,’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Officially the Conseil Supérior de la Langue, who are responsible for these things, have more important matters on their mind – such as whether or not we should do away with the circumflex accent.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Todd, ‘back home it’s a way of brushing problems under the carpet. Like we don’t have people being made redundant any more. They suffer an “involuntary career event” and get “uninstalled”. People don’t die in hospital; they endure “terminal living” leading to “negative patient care outcome”. It all comes down to the same thing in the end.’

  ‘So what is so different about the Russian Mafiya?’ asked Monsieur Pamplemousse.

  ‘What’s different about the Mafiya? I’ll tell you what it ain’t for a start. It ain’t anything like the Mafia as we used to know it. Right? The old-style Cosa Nostra was “family” in all senses of the word. It had its Godfathers and its hierarchy, but at least you knew where you stood. You knew each family’s territory, and they knew that you knew.

  ‘Jimmy “Jerome” Squillante had the New York garbage all sewn up until his car was put through a crusher and turned into a cube with him inside it. The Anastasio brothers looked after the waterfront. The Gambino family got a percentage of every load of mixed concrete in the Manhattan construction industry until they had to share it with three other families; the Genovese, the Colombos and the Luccheses.

  ‘Pinning it on them was something else again. In the end it was the IRS – the Inland Revenue Service – who got them for non-payment of taxes. Once the IRS latch on to something they never give up.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not doing a whitewash job. I’
m simply saying they’re predictable. You know where you stand. Right?

  ‘Everything is different about the Russian Mafiya. They got no rules; no disciplines. They’re like a bunch of unguided missiles. In the beginning they used to arrive in a country with a suitcase full of cash and a thousand ways of getting rid of it. Paying for everything on the spot: goods, services, the man who comes to do the garden.

  ‘The worst thing that happened to the Western world was when Russia lifted the Iron Curtain. Everyone wanted it to happen, but nobody had given any thought to the flip side of the coin.

  ‘They didn’t reckon on US aid money going straight into banks owned and run by the Mafiya. Wholesale robbery of their homeland took place during perestroika.

  ‘The government emptied their gaols of all the worst offenders and encouraged them to leave the country. Given the carrot, a lot of them looked around and saw that Israel has no extradition facilities in place, which made it a good bolt-hole, so they took blood samples and suddenly discovered they had Jewish ancestry. From there they moved on to other places; America first of all, then onward and outward.

  ‘Go to Brighton Beach, USA, and you could be in Odessa USSR. Instead of getting a few cents on every bag of cement shifted in New York, like the old style Mafia, they moved into oil. In the space of five years, bootlegging gasolene in the East Coast area was netting them a cool $8 billion dollars a year plus.

  ‘How did they get away with it? In one word – bureaucracy. There’s nothing like creating a lot of phoney paperwork to slow things up. They’ve gotten the best shysters in the business to set up strings of small companies that can go bankrupt overnight if need be. It’s what’s called daisy-chaining.’

  ‘Somehow I can’t see our own Brighton beach suffering the same fate,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘The landladies wouldn’t stand for it. They have strict rules.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse thought of the cargo ship he’d seen loading up with cement in Nice and wondered. It had been bound for Amsterdam. A consignment of drugs mixed in would probably never be found. It would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  ‘It could happen over here,’ said Todd, reading his thoughts. ‘How many French cops speak Russian? That gives them an edge to start with.’

  ‘And you think our friend is dipping his toes in the water …’

  ‘He’s no Dudley Doorite, that’s for sure. And he ain’t here to enjoy the sunshine. These boys don’t goof around. Right?

  ‘The ones that have already made the trip now have their dachas in the hills behind Cannes. The newcomers think nothing of renting a yacht with a full crew for $5,000 a day – cash down. Doors get held open for them.’

  ‘You are absolutely correct.’ Mr Pickering grew serious for a moment. ‘People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Money-laundering has become big business. At the last count the IMF estimate was that it runs to between $600bn and $l,500bn per year. And it isn’t just the criminal element. Big corporations do it, even governments get involved.’

  ‘I’m surprised you make the distinction,’ said Todd. ‘Remember Oliver North and the Iranian scandal? Remember the BCCI scandal in the UK? The biggest money laundering operation ever; and all under the benevolent eye of the Bank of England. I doubt if we’ll ever hear the truth of that one.’

  ‘And nobody throws the book at them?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Todd. ‘If you’ve spent time in a Russian Gulag nothing the West can throw at you is gonna hurt. The guys who run those places had their trade handed down from the time of the Revolution when hatred bred untold atrocities.

  ‘Besides, crime has infiltrated all levels of Russian society. The country is full of people who want to get rich quick and they don’t care how they do it. Guns are easy to come by. And not just guns. They have off-the-shelf helicopters, guided missiles, nuclear hardware – you name it.

  ‘They’ve even been known to ship a submarine complete with a full crew to their friends in Colombia.

  ‘People smuggling is big business. It’s the current growth industry and there’s no shortage of applicants. Bosnians, Chinese, Afghans, Iraqis – all prepared to pay any price to buy their freedom; Moscow has become a major part of the pipeline.

  ‘In some ways they are cruder than the old style Mafia; in others – like in electronics – they’re more sophisticated. Mixed in with the old, there is a new breed of criminal, born in an electronic age. They have the advantage of instant communication in real time and they’re into share dealing via the Internet in a big way. And I’m not talking straight dealing.

  ‘As for money-laundering. Take a look in the Guinness Book of Records. Worldwide, the Mafiya have control of over four hundred banks with a total annual profit of $250 billion. That gives them a hell of a lot of clout. We’re not talking peanuts.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse made the mental leap from Nice harbour to the school and its array of aerials. At least the Almighty had made sure they now had one less.

  ‘In real terms,’ said Mr Pickering, ‘it means that a relatively tiny group of people have it in their power to destroy a small country if they feel like it.’

  ‘And the bigger ones can do nothing about it?’

  ‘From time to time they try. Getting them together is the hardest job.’

  ‘I tell you something else,’ said Todd. ‘When you do get them all together what happens? Straight off you have an argument. Right?’

  ‘It’s as I was saying yesterday evening,’ broke in Mr Pickering. ‘Different countries have different standards. Some lean over backwards to encourage the investment of money. They don’t question where it comes from. The biggest mistake in the world is to assume we all see things in the same light or even have the same ground rules.’

  ‘It begins the moment you are born,’ agreed Monsieur Pamplemousse. ‘Take the simple matter of twins. In your country the first one to be born is considered to have started life first and therefore is the elder of the two. In France the second to emerge is considered to be the elder because it was conceived first.’

  ‘That’s the kind of concept lawyers grow fat on back home,’ said Todd.

  ‘It’s another way of looking at it,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘Your Gertrude Stein summed it up when she said the French are logical and the English are rational.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse was suddenly reminded of the conversation he’d overheard in the train.

  ‘I can give you a typical case in point. I have heard that breast feeding isn’t allowed in your Houses of Parliament on the grounds that it is forbidden to bring refreshments into the chamber.’

  ‘A non sequitur if ever I heard one,’ said Mr Pickering. ‘But it sounds authentic.’

  ‘Bring in a rule like that in the US,’ said Todd, ‘and the House of Representatives would be flooded with women baring their breasts as they bring their kids in for the morning break.’

  ‘Perish the thought!’ exclaimed Mr Pickering.

  ‘It’s the way the cookie crumbles,’ said Todd.

  Mr Pickering shrugged. ‘I haven’t heard that expression for years. It’s good to know some things don’t change.’

  ‘The world doesn’t change either,’ said Todd, ‘even if it does get a new coat of paint from time to time. Right?’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse brushed away his croissant crumbs. ‘In French schools,’ he said quietly, ‘children are taught that there are three alternatives for everything.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ asked Todd.

  ‘Either the Mafiya are left to get on with it, or it is a case of waiting until governments get together, which could take forever. The third alternative could be that the local families have some ideas of their own.’ He thought of the missing daughter. The truth was that in the short term, when push came to shove, he would be tempted to put his money on Uncle Caputo.

  Mr Pickering closed his guide book with a snap, jotted down an address on a scrap of paper, and handed it across the table.

 
; ‘That is the name of the restaurant I mentioned. If you do go there, give my regards to the Madame. And if you fancy a stroll afterwards, take a look at the fair down by the harbour. There, you will be able to see the Russian Mafiya at work.’ Reaching for his pipe, he made play of looking for some matches, then seemed to think better of it.

  ‘À bientôt. It’s time for my daily dip.’ With an absent-minded wave he was gone.

  ‘He’s a nice guy,’ said Todd when they were alone. ‘But have you noticed something? He never lights that fire-stick of his. He even has it in his mouth when he goes in the sea. I reckon he’s got some kind of electronic gear inside it.

  ‘Another thing … there’s something funny about that guidebook he carries around. Guess what date it was published? 1914! I asked him about it and you know what he said? “It is the 6th revised edition, old man!”.’

  Monsieur Pamplemousse wondered if Todd knew about the umbrella. ‘There is no knowing with the British what they are up to,’ he said. ‘Tell me about Antibes harbour.’

  ‘There’s this travelling fair. When it arrived for the summer season a few weeks ago it was run by Rumanians. Now the Mafiya get fifty per cent of the takings.’

  ‘Just like that?’ said Monsieur Pamplemousse.

  ‘Not just like that,’ said Todd. ‘I guess there would have been a little bit of leaning on the players beforehand. Talk of a torch job maybe. We’ll never know. Old style Omerta doesn’t just mean silence between members of the Mafia. It goes for the victims too. Threaten the lives of their families and they dry up like a clam. Accidents can happen – especially in a fairground. The body that was washed up the other night was either a warning or a statement – and not just to the antique trade.’

  ‘Is it worth it?’

  ‘You familiar with bunjee jumping?’

  ‘I have seen pictures.’

  ‘Wait until you see it for real, but in reverse. This is state of the art stuff. You can charge the earth for a go on the Human Slingshot Ride. People queue up to pay 150 francs to be strapped in an ejector seat and projected 150 feet into the air. For another 100 francs you get a take-home video showing what it’s like to experience 3g of acceleration followed almost immediately by free fall.