The Very Last Gambado

by Jonathan Gash

  “Leave it out, Lovejoy.” We went round and I showed him Sam’s bus.

  “Open it, but give me a shout, eh?” I don’t like watching Sorry work—his nose runs and he snuffles, blots it on his sleeve, snuffles, blots. Drives you mad.

  “Right.” He undid his coat despite the chill. It clinked with merry metallic sounds. I left him to it and went to brew up. He rejoined me before the kettle’d even boiled. “That all, Lovejoy?” "Already open? Let’s look.”

  “I’ll make the brew, Lovejoy.”

  See what I mean? Careful, a real pro. I went out alone and tentatively opened the bus’s rear door. Empty. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed, but for sure there was no dead Parson Brown slumped inside.

  When I say empty, I don’t quite mean empty as in hollow. I mean nobody was inside. I climbed in. A workbench ran along one wall, lights positioned above it. Ceiling windows added to the illumination. A mark showed where some fixture had been wrenched from the opposite wall. A safe? Shelving had been torn apparently from high above the benching. No drawers remained—I saw where they’d been ripped away. All was gutted. Bolts had been fixed to the bench. A solid little metal chair, a few filings in a crevice, a faint pungent aroma, and that was the end of Sam Shrouder.

  “Okay, Lovejoy?” Sorry found me in contemplation. He stayed outside, holding the tea mugs invitingly.

  "Aye, ta, Sorry. A good job. Can I lock this thing again?”

  “Yes. Want a key?”

  “Please, Sorry.” We chatted a bit. I paid him to let him go. "Oh, Sorry. If folk get onto you about an Iserlohn, act thick, eh?”

  “What’s an Iserlohn?”

  “That’s right, Sorry,” I said. “Keep it up.”

  The bus yielded very little: wood dust, a single dot of umber paint, oil, by the bench a few gleams of silver. I went over it with a magnet and got metal filings. A third time, and found a fragment of pale papery stuff stuck to the underside of the bench. It took me a whole hour to recognize it as parchment. A stain by the bench lip was possibly Sam’s homemade ink. Or maybe watercolor, burnt sienna? A three-pin power plug on the floor near the driver’s panel bulkhead was hardly a clue; presumably Sam carried some sort of electricity, maybe a transformer, batteries. Finding which garage supplied him with sizable batteries would be a needle-in-a-haystack job and anyway no use. I went inside to think.

  And at long last put two and two together. It was a tandem job. With the genuine antiques from Countess Natalia alone, Ben Clayton would make a killing (apology). That exhibition was reportedly attracting collectors like flies. But any profit would be blotted up by the film company’s mounting debts. He’d only get his measly dealer’s commission. So he’d doubled it up. He’d used Sam Shrouder’s fabled skills to swell the genuine antiques by an influx of fakes. The undoubtedly genuine stuff—backed by the Countess Natalia’s implied cast-iron provenance—would authenticate the whole. I’ll bet the plan was to auction off the entire exhibition afterward. Leaving Ben Clayton with a fortune. We call it a tandem job in the antiques trade—fakes plus genuine traveling on one set of wheels, as it were. And Ben had made Seg kill Sam, make it look like a possible accident, and ditch the bus where it wouldn’t be thought misplaced. The reason: Probably Sam got alarmed, realized he was in too deep. But this left me with a problem, for Sam was one of our greats. Faking was his job, his life. He’d certainly have loved doing the duplicates. A faker pulling a tandem job involving a single antique becomes famed in song and story. For pulling a tandem of an entire exhibition he’d become a legend.

  Why had they killed the greatest, most cooperative faker? Well, maybe Sam disliked his missus cohabiting with Meese, Parson Brown. A problem, but love lust creates these as it goes along, and needn’t detain Lovejoy, superlogician. No. Leave that little hiccup aside. I’d reasoned a long way toward a solution. I was pleased with myself.

  But.

  Why did my mind keep on going over the same logic, and ending up with that nasty word but? My neurons should sit back and rest, put a satisfying QED there. Instead I was a mine of buts and hang-about-there’s-mores. I went to Sam’s bus. I brewed up. I fed the robins. I filled the bluetits’ net sock with nuts. Did the bus. Checked the birds’ waterfront. I sat.

  And it came, that oddity. Here was I, whole and fit as a flea. Seg and Ben never did do me over on suspicion of the robbery. Had my alibi been that convincing? Even if it had been, they’d demolish me on suspicion alone—if the exhibition tvas the one true scam. But they’d exercised restraint, and let me be. Now, even I know that homicidal psychotics aren’t big on self-discipline. So

  Ben Clayton’s tandem gambit was not the one true gig. It was relatively minor.

  What, a fortune in antiques? Small fry? When Ben had topped Sam Shrouder? Probably topped Parson Brown too, all to protect it? Nasty instinct kept coming up with the cry, yes!—but the main scam must be somewhere in the movie, that drivel that was expected to gain Meese a hatful of Oscars. How? It was massively in debt, yet they believed it a box office supersmash. Even though it was dross.

  Time was drawing in. Barmy to feel my heart thumping harder, faster, when I was only sitting in a remote cottage sipping tea and lobbing a sparrow crumbs. At the final filming I would certainly be well protected, Bracegirdle’s security officers everywhere. The public would be on hand to ogle. A single close-up seemed to take a trillion technicians, who surely couldn’t all be in on it, could they? And every move in the museum would be monitored. And on film. Local police were already on triple tap, Footer’d said, on tippy-toes. And I wasn’t to go up in the balloon. I’d got that down in elevenplicate, no cable-swarming for Lovejoy.

  The only other thing I worked out was that Parson Brown, erstwhile lover of Mrs. Shrouder, had possibly been disappeared because he, what, proved dangerously superfluous? Discovered what was going on and foolishly tried blackmail? The more I thought it over the calmer I became, the more certain that I was safe as houses.

  In fact I was so sure that I can’t for the life of me understand why I went and got this gun.

  Y

  OU see, Ray.” I spoke quickly, while he was still sober. “It’s not that I’m greedy. I’m no crook, either. But being in a—no, the museum with the connivance of its security services is a sort of opportunity.”

  “Is it?” he said between wheezes. He shouted to Vance to get a move on.

  “Not for me, Ray. Good heavens, no. I mean, some crooks might see it like that.”

  We were on the top of London University’s Senate House. We’d arrived in daylight, and been busy doing nothing ever since. The stunt men were readying guy ropes, which sprouted from a structure hanging from a gantry. It was dark, eleven at night and windy as hell. Cold. Me and my oppos, Lofty and Nick, were waiting in our black outfits to go and look menacing standing by these ropes. This, I assure you, was what I’d been terrified of. It was down on the studio’s call sheet as Balloon Shooting/Senate House roof/9 P.M. There wasn’t a balloon in sight. They simply rigged up a wicker basket on a small skirt of balloon material, picked it up on one of those little automotorized gantry things, and pretended there was a whole balloon above us. When I’d tackled Lofty about it he rolled in the aisles. “Silly sod,” he told me affably. “They use a real balloon at the open-air balloon shoot. Not here, pillock.” "What about the story?” I’d complained to Max and Vance. "Oh, the story’ll look believable, Lovejoy,” they’d assured me. "It’s got to.”

  Got to. I was staying still, sipping coffee from a plastic cup and huddled down behind the wall out of the gale, when Ray Meese joined me and started this conversation. A trio of assistants hurtling to bring him vodka, gin, a selection of capsules. He consumed their offerings dismissively, sat to talk. He held a remote-button box, the auto gantry controls. Only Vance and he were authorized users. “How’re you enjoying being a star, Lovejoy?”

  "Do I get a psychoanalyst and a couple of sexy birds?” “Nope. Only egomaniac stars get that. Ego country.
” "Rather them than me.”

  He was bitter. “They’re Insecurity Inc., Lovejoy. Obsessed with how they look. Truly, truly. Status City. At my expense.” “Speaking of expense, Ray. How marvelous it would be to use all this legitimate expense for something . . . well, a little less legitimate.”

  “In what way?” No bitterness now. Just casual.

  "Only imagining, you understand. Not in real life.”

  "Oh, no. Truly not, Lovejoy.”

  That being understood, I spoke of opportunity. "Well. I mean, we’re in there legitimately. A few blokes would give their eye teeth for that chance.”

  "What d’you think they’d go for?” Cool.

  "Anything.” I could be as casual as him any day. "I mean, I suppose this Armenian exhibition itself is out, eh?”

  “Bracegirdle’s security people will be there, Lovejoy.” He looked at me, his face shifting as electricians moved the lights. “So who can steal anything?”

  “The Roman stuff on the floor above isn’t far off. And the Tapling Collection.”

  "Tapling?” I swear he’d never heard of it.

  “Stamps. It’s the only stamp collection formed in the nineteenth century that is still intact, as one.” I signaled right. "Come out of the Armenian place, dogleg into the king’s gallery. The big cases at the far end house it in great vertical window alcoves.” "Is it valuable?”

  "Covers 1840 to 1890, complete on all basic issues.” I groaned. “And stamp collectors are the most unscrupulous collectors on earth. Easy to dispose of, quick money.” Stamps aren’t my scene, though. Oddly, I was glad when he shrugged a disclaimer. I didn’t want his scam to be some rotten old stamp album, however grand.

  “Big cases, you say?”

  “Okay then. The bronzes upstairs are a possibility. Or the clocks? They’re a king’s ransom each. There’s silver. The Chinese gallery over the back door’s too far, though the Montague Place entrance has a circular vent where most of the Chinese stuff can be lowered. The Japanese netsukes and the rest of the Hull Grundy collection’s easily portable.” His expression hadn’t even flickered. Another piece for my jigsaw.

  “Interesting, Lovejoy.” He brooded a little. “Look, your business is your business. What I don’t see I don’t know about, but no monkey business. My movie must remain pure. Get it?”

  "Okay if I ask a little cooperation—accidental, like?”

  "Like what, Lovejoy?”

  "Like, say a prop—a genuine antique. To lend color, sort of, to the set? See, if I have an antique that has been in a famous movie, I could sell it for twice the price.”

  He pursed his lips. “Anything in particular?”

  “Well, yes. A Celtic cross.” We almost said it together. “Genuine. Just read of it in the paper. Been dug up somewhere. Look great on film, Ray.”

  “No comeback on us, Lovejoy?”

  “Good heavens, Ray,” I said piously. "What do you take me for?”

  "Okay, then. I’ll tell Lorane to clear it with Bracegirdle.” “I’m glad of that. I’m all for security. Hey, Ray. One thing.”

  I indicated the scene, cameras, surging assistants. “D’you like all this pretense? It’s a frigging yawn.”

  "Pretense?” He gave me a look I know so well. Seen it the world over. The addict, the obsessed. "It’s all there is, Lovejoy. What the camera sees is real. Everything else is myth.”

  Funny. I say the same about antiques.

  He rose, bawling reproach and unhappiness at people on the ropes, and moved off across the flat roof to the cameras.

  Well, well, I told myself. Odderer and odderer. A scam, and the main perpetrator cares not what scam it is? I started to do a little brooding myself.

  In a lull Renny, a props bloke, fetched an antique for valuation. He was the sort who dresses in colored tat because it’s trendy, and who goes at women simply because they're handy mammals. All the insight of a bandsaw. By now I was getting used to these impromptu antiques roadshows and took the little magnolia-colored statuette to a light. Soft paste. She was the Chinese goddess Kuan Yin, all serene.

  “Has it got the mark?” FF was incised at the back, which made it from the rare G.G. Rossetti factory in Italy about 1740. But the word TORINO in underglaze blue was inside the base edge. I almost fainted. There’s only one other of these known, and the British Museum’s got it. The two others with similar marks are small glazed busts on rather ugly little pedestals in the Palazzo Madama, in Turin.

  “Cherish it, Renny. It’s your heirloom.”

  "Really, Lovejoy?”

  I looked at him. Now, the one thing people don’t ever do is look dispirited when you break the happy news that they’ve suddenly collared a fortune for a groat. They’re over the moon, ecstatic. He wasn’t.

  Oh, he instantly put on a happy expression, told me some cock-and-bull tale of an auntie from the Far East bringing it home as a gift, the whole drossy rigmarole. But false. Probably not really his at all

  Things were looking up. We only had to wait three more hours, eight in all, before the cameras actually started up. Really breakneck.

  Lydia met me off the train, white-faced. I’d slept all the way in spite of some old dear telling me about some bulbs she’d just planted. Why can’t people leave gardens alone?

  “Lovejoy?” She didn’t drive off, so we just sat in the station car park. “What is this lawsuit?”

  I gave a horrified gasp. Well, I did my best, knackered as I was. “Lawsuit, love?”

  "The Building Society called. You’re to attend court on the sixteenth.”

  “Goodness gracious, Lydia!” I cried.

  “Not only that, Lovejoy.” She was trembling. “Hymie sent to ask the whereabouts of your old motor. He seems to believe it’s now his property.”

  “Hymie? Of all the nerve! Let him get his own—”

  “As do three other people, Lovejoy. Harry Bateman also called for some antique tobacco box you sold him.”

  “I’m sure there’s some mistake, love . . .”

  She sat there, pale. “Lovejoy. Are we in serious trouble?” We. So she wasn’t resigning. I was relieved. “Aye, love. I’m sorry. Especially as you’ve been so marvelous all along.” I brightened. “But we’ve got a gold samovar set.”

  “Solvency’s as much in the mind as in external reality, Lovejoy.”

  Eh? “Well put, love,” I said lamely. She’s a mine of forgettable aphorisms. “It’s just that I’ve landed in a tangle, trying to help the old countess.” Wisely I didn’t mention Agafia. The Lydias of this world don’t understand the problems of trying to survive in a malicious world. They simply can’t see evil. I sat unhappily in silence waiting her judgment.

  “I’m afraid I have been dilatory, Lovejoy,” she said quietly. “You have?” I was baffled.

  "I should have advised you better. I can see that now. We must take remedial action.”

  "Action, love?” I was apprehensive. More help?

  “I with your finances, Lovejoy. Until we are out of this.” She faced me in her seat, a lovely tempera painting, glossed with color. "Do you agree?” her luscious lips said, moving.

  “Anything you say, love.” I even sounded weak.

  “Very well,” she said decisively, starting the engine. “Now. There’s a small Queen Anne bureau at Asquith’s auction house. I suggest we acquire it on my credit, and ship it instantly to London for an increment of eighty percent. Your hand is on my knee, Lovejoy.” “Sorry. About the bureau?”

  “Well, it has a minor blemish . .

  She’s good on furniture, so I let myself be persuaded.

  Brad’s our gun man. That is to say he isn’t a gunman. He lives down in Wivenhoe by the water, our tidal navigation limit and all that nautical stuff. The reason I say he’s a gun man is that he deals in antiques. Ask him about Napoleonic weaponry and he’s fine. Civil War flintlocks are his home ground. Ask him about a new Belgian A101 SLR and his eyes glaze. He doesn’t know, nor does he want to. Guns ended when mass-produced
cartridges came in. And firearms started when guns ended.

  He was cleaning a Nock flinter when I arrived and told him I was desperate for a percussion handpiece, Barratt of Birmingham preferably.

  “How soon, Lovejoy?”

  “Now.” No wonder you get narked. I’m scared and the world’s suddenly laid back. “Immediate, forthwith, Brad.”

  He looked up, surprised. “I’ve eight or nine small arms upstairs. I’ll bring them down.”

  I waited respectfully. In two journeys he fetched his weapons and laid them on a blanket. A couple of Spanish pinfire pistols, a lovely cannon-barreled Queen Anne flintlock worth a small car, an officer’s holster pistol, three Tower service percussions (forget these; they’re very mundane), a relic—this only means derelict in the trade, nothing holy—flintlock barely clinging to its fractured walnut stock, and a pepperbox.

  This last is a precursor of the revolver. Imagine five or six barrels moulded into one cylinder and you have it. You stick a small percussion cap over the nipple of each barrel. The cylinder revolves when you pull the trigger. Of course you have to load each barrel separately beforehand, but that’s a cheap chore when you think of what you gain—a pistol that fires a handful of separate shots.

  I bought it after haggling over the price. I got Brad to accept the motor—Lydia’s mother’s—as pledge for the pepperbox. I signed, promising to hand it over as soon as I’d been to see my sick uncle. I also got a few ounces of black powder and a few spherical lead bullets, saying I wanted to demonstrate its firing mechanism to the customer. I left really pleased. You can’t be prosecuted if, as a bona fide antique dealer, you transport your wares. And a genuine percussion pepperbox handpiece is not a firearm within the meaning of the Firearms Act, so I could carry it about. This, for no reason I could think of, was an odd satisfaction.

  Later, I began reflecting on that exquisite eight-inch statuette of Kuan Yin. And totting up the number of antiques, real or alleged, which I’d been brought by the film crew. The 1860 dress. The Scottish dirk. The darning sampler. The revival clock. The others, some dud. But they mounted up. And at least a couple had carried marks or areas tacky to the touch. Had some come from auctions? Or all, even? I thought some more, and finally asked myself, were they sent from one source? Like, say, Ray Meese? Rotten question, but a worse answer.