Under the Hammer

by John Mortimer

  When Ben confessed he had no idea of Lady Wedensbury’s crime, Parsifal Mallows proudly produced a sheet of Brummel’s notepaper and, for the first time, he read of Bertie’s tragedy:

  Pamela, Lady Wedensbury, came from the Northampton branch of her husband, Bertie Wedensbury’s family. The Northampton Wedensburys fought for Cromwell in the Civil War, but the Wedensbury Park branch was devoted to the Cavaliers. Lady Pamela carried on the Puritan tradition of her relatives. She disapproved strongly of drinking, smoking and short skirts at Wimbledon, which, she said, had ‘become more of a strip-show than a decent sporting occasion’. Recently, she had the entire contents of the famous Wedensbury Park cellar thrown into the lake, where some great vintages of classic wines still lie ‘full fathom five’. She is survived by her husband, Lord Herbert ‘Bertie’ Wedensbury, who has never been known to object to drink and who had to witness the fate of an historic cellar.

  ‘That’s due to go in on Thursday.’

  ‘Has she died already?’ Ben wondered.

  ‘No, but it’s as well to be prepared.’

  In fact, Parsifal Mallows hadn’t wasted his time in the library at Brummel’s. Pamela Wedensbury died, having extracted from her husband a solemn promise not to touch strong drink after she had left him. Her funeral in Wedensbury church was attended by only a few relatives and a scattering of villagers. But Ben Glazier and Maggie Perowne might be seen in a pew at the back of the church and, later, at some distance from the grave.

  After his wife had been committed to the earth, Bertie, alone in his library, removed the brandy from its hiding place behind the books and poured himself a stiff one with soda. He was enjoying it when there was a knocking at the French windows which led out on to the terrace, and there stood Maggie and Ben, clearly anxious to talk. Displeased at the interruption, he let them in.

  ‘Lord Wedensbury’ – Maggie sounded particularly serious – ‘we’re from Klinsky’s, the auction house.’

  ‘We’d like a word with you on the subject of a serious wine fraud,’ Ben added, ‘before we go to the police.’

  ‘The police!’ Bertie was worried and then cheered up as he said, ‘Oh, I recognize you. You’re that fellow Glazier I met at Brummel’s who doesn’t like Puritans. I recommended my favourite watering-hole.’

  ‘You did that,’ Ben agreed. ‘And that’s why we’ve got to ask you some serious questions.’

  ‘Oh, have you, really? What a pity! I thought that after Pam died, I needn’t do anything serious again. But if you insist. Anyway, do sit down.’

  Bertie returned to his fireside. Ben and Maggie perched together on the sofa.

  ‘We’ve been asked to sell some wine as Petrus ’61,’ Maggie started.

  ‘At an astronomical price,’ Ben said.

  ‘We’ve discovered that the labels on the bottles were printed quite recently, Lord Wedensbury. We have reason to believe, good reason to believe ...’

  ‘Yes! Excellent reason’ – Ben chimed in – ‘that you put a large quantity of fine wines, including the Petrus, into our house for auction.’

  ‘Well, of course, I did!’ Bertie seemed quite untroubled. ‘I’d like to drink it all. Of course, I would. But, well, we live in hard times. The roof. And the home farm. Disaster. Terrible losses on the pigs.’ And then he asked Maggie, ‘You don’t know a decent pigman, do you?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ she had to confess.

  ‘Bloody hypochondriacs, pigs are,’ Bertie complained. ‘Finicky about their food. Malingerers, I call them. We had a pigman, but he left us to go into the church.’

  ‘Lord Wedensbury’ – Maggie returned to the matter in hand – ‘we believe you ordered a number of Petrus ’61 labels to be forged by a printer called Lenny Lockyer in London.’

  ‘Hang on a minute!’ Bertie looked deeply hurt. ‘Not forged. I wouldn’t say forged. I’d say, well, done artistically to look like the real thing.’

  ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Because the old labels got washed away, of course,’ Bertie told them. ‘They got washed off when Pam chucked the cases into the lake. She’ll be happy now she’s in heaven, along with all those bores drinking Diet Coke. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see your entire cellar, brandy as old as Napoleon, port that was offered to Edward VII, all chucked into the bloody lake! Drowned. I’d have rather seen Pam drown some of her ghastly relatives.’

  ‘The Puritan branch of the family?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Cromwell’s men and women. The women were the worst,’ Bertie said gloomily.

  ‘So I suppose you hired the Captain to dive for the booty?’

  ‘You know the Captain?’ Bertie frowned.

  ‘Rather too well,’ Ben remembered.

  ‘Chap I knew was in the Navy, Banjo Buckleworth. Banjo put me on to this frog feller. He’d been Banjo’s petty officer but he always called himself the Captain. Gave himself promotion. Bit of a chancer, in my opinion, but he got hold of some divers and they pulled the stuff out for me. While Pam the Puritan was asleep, you know. She never heard a sound from the lake. Terrible shame I had to sell most of the stuff.’

  ‘So what you sent to Klinsky’s was genuine Petrus ’61?’ Maggie was smiling with relief.

  ‘Of course, it was.’

  ‘Our man in the Wine department, Nick Roper,’ Ben asked, ‘did he know anything at all about the forged labels?’

  ‘Why should he?’

  ‘That’s exactly what we wanted to hear!’ Maggie was still smiling. ‘Isn’t it, Ben?’

  ‘What you wanted to hear, anyway.’ And Ben had something else to ask, ‘We’ve got sound reason to think that claret wasn’t the only precious thing the captain of the frogmen fished out of the water?’

  ‘Really?’ Bertie was puzzled. ‘Wine was the only thing he told me about.’

  ‘Oh, we’re sure of that. But we think he might also have found a piece of silver. A salt cellar.’

  ‘Valuable?’ said Bertie.

  ‘Oh, extremely,’ said Ben.

  ‘Well, go on. You do interest me.’

  ‘Has your family a habit of throwing valuable items in to the lake?’ Ben was curious to know.

  ‘Well, yes, now you mention it.’ Bertie gazed back into history. ‘Terrible lot, the Northampton branch of the family. My ancestor in good King Charles’s days married one of them, Lady Susannah. He had a famous bit of silver done by some Italian fellow. Very well known. Chap who murdered a few people and had lots of sex. Artists do, I suppose.’

  ‘Murder people?’ Maggie frowned.

  ‘Have all this sex.’ Bertie shook his head sadly. ‘Models and all that type of thing. Gives them the opportunity, of course. I’ve never gone in for all that. Well, this bit of silver. Mustard pot or some such thing.’

  ‘Salt cellar?’ Ben suggested.

  ‘You know a lot about it!’

  ‘I know a little,’ said Ben.

  ‘That old bloody God-bothering, Cromwell-loving Lady Susannah Wedensbury took exception to the starkers lady carved on top of it and chucked it in the lake. Beautiful girl, that silver one, from the drawing we’ve got of it.’

  ‘You’ve got a drawing?’ Maggie could hardly believe it. ‘Somewhere. Tucked away in the old archives. Of course, the thing’s gone forever now.’

  ‘Unless the Captain dragged it up from the bottom of the lake?’ Ben suggested. ‘Safe in its steel box?’

  ‘Good heavens! I thought he was a bit of a chancer.’ Bertie said.

  ‘Enough of a chancer to give it to a dealer called Owly Johnson to get rid of’ – Ben told the story – ‘and to have Owly beaten up when he hadn’t got it in his safe. As a matter of fact, he’d sent it to us. You’ll have to tell us what you’d like to do with it.’

  ‘Do with her? A silver lady, starkers?’ Bertie looked at them proudly. ‘Present to my old ancestor who died at Naseby from King Charles the Martyr. I say, do you think you could get a spot of cash for it?’

  T
he table in the Lord Chairman’s office was laid for a lunch party. The door was once again locked as he embraced the tender and yielding head of Modern British Paintings. And then the doorhandle rattled and the stern voice of Lady Holloway was heard without, calling, ‘Bernard!’

  ‘Muriel, is that you?’ The Chairman panicked easily. ‘It’s too early for lunch.’

  ‘Maybe it is. I got bored in Harrods.’ The answer came with alarming clarity. ‘What on earth are you doing in there?’

  ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing!’ And then, whispering fearfully, he once again begged Camilla to take refuge in his personal gents.’

  ‘Not again.’ she protested.

  ‘What else can we do?’

  When Camilla had vanished, he unlocked the door to a wife who asked him what on earth he was up to. ‘Just trying to work, Muriel, without interruption,’ he answered with dignity. And she looked at him with some fondness and said, ‘Bernard, what a funny little man you are!’

  Later the lunch party was held in honour of a respected customer, a Mr Wang Chai Ping, who had bought the Petrus. ‘It will be on my dinner table in Hong Kong,’ he said, ‘when some big Communist cheese from Beijing comes to dinner.’

  ‘And you might be inclined to bid for the Cellini salt cellar?’ Dorothy Entwhistle suggested. The glittering silver object was on the table and Ben told them its provenance.

  ‘A Puritan threw it in her husband’s lake because she didn’t approve of the naked goddess. Divers stole it. An antique dealer received it, knowing it was stolen, and passed it on to us to sell for his own profit. So he was beaten up. Crime, theft, violence and all because a lady in the seventeenth century had absurdly strict standards of morality.’

  ‘So it belongs to who?’ The Hong Kong client was not entirely clear.

  ‘Oh, old Bertie Wedensbury,’ Ben told him. ‘A fairly undeserving old cove.’

  ‘The wine came from his cellars too. It’s got a perfectly genuine pedigree.’ Nick looked at Ben and said quietly, ‘To your extreme disappointment, Ben.’

  Lord Holloway started to talk to Dorothy and the gentleman from Hong Kong was being charming to Muriel. ‘You mean, I’m disappointed that your wine department is actually honest?’ Ben asked Nick for clarification.

  ‘Of course you are,’ Nick told him. ‘So is Maggie, as a matter of fact. You like me to have a slightly dicey reputation, don’t you, Maggie?’

  ‘Slightly dicey, I suppose,’ Maggie admitted. ‘But not the whole game of backgammon.’

  ‘I do hope you’re right, Nick Roper,’ Ben told him. ‘I do hope we’ve proved you too virtuous to be interesting.’

  ‘Bernard’ – Lady Holloway said, much to her husband’s surprise – ‘I passed through that gallery of lovely old drawings. One was missing! The “Satyr Frolicking”.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Muriel’ – Holloway was on his best behaviour – ‘I saw the way you looked at it and –’

  ‘And what?’ Lady Holloway asked.

  ‘Well, we took it out of the public view. I thoroughly agree with you.’

  ‘Do you? I’m so glad!’ And Lady Holloway went on, surprisingly, ‘It was such a lovely, joyful thing. Nymphs and satyrs, thoroughly happy in the morning of the world. Even when we get middle-aged and a bit creaky and thoroughly, well, married! We can still enjoy such things, can’t we? Even if it’s only in pictures. Where did you put it, Bernard? I hope it’s somewhere where everyone can enjoy it.’

  ‘Well, not everyone,’ Ben whispered to Maggie. ‘Not the general public. Only the lucky few who happen to be caught short in the Chairman’s office.’ But, by then, Lord Holloway had promised to put the ‘Satyr Frolicking’ back on the open market. And Camilla, turning over the pages of the Connoisseur, as she sat on her hard seat, really felt inclined to stop frolicking for good and all.

  After Titian

  If you get simple beauty and naught else,

  You get about the best thing God invents:

  Robert Browning, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’

  New York. In ravines and crevices, between the glittering glass of tall buildings, and the casual mess of quick-food outlets, laundries, delis and cafes, where the customers and the piles of rubbish spilled out on to the pavement, the traffic was becalmed, sending up hoots of fury, wails of sirens and the throb of frustrated engines towards the distant sky. And in the back of one of a thousand yellow cabs, Maggie Perowne and Ben Glazier sat and gave up hope of reaching the New York branch of Klinsky’s in time for the day’s Old Masters sale.

  ‘Klinsky’s?’ the bearded Russian driver frowned and made a huge effort to remember. ‘That’s the big deli on Fifth and . . .?’

  ‘No,’ Ben told him, ‘not exactly.’

  ‘Restaurant, is it?’

  ‘It’s a place for selling pictures,’ Maggie explained.

  ‘Picture house?’

  ‘Auction house, as a matter of fact,’ Ben told him. ‘Gallery.’

  ‘It’s a way up past the Plaza Hotel.’ Maggie tried to help.

  ‘What makes you think he knows where the Plaza is?’ Ben tried to keep his voice down, but the taxi driver asked, ‘Where’s that located?’

  ‘Klinsky’s?’

  ‘No. What you said. Plaza Hotel.’

  At which, Maggie told Ben it would be quicker to walk and he said, ‘Have you completely lost your nerve? Are you suggesting I take exercise?’

  All the same, when they only inched towards Klinsky’s, Maggie made Ben get out and they did better, although he complained of being in constant danger of death from killer cyclists who reared up out of the traffic to terrorize the pedestrians.

  The Old Masters sale was beginning in a room which was lighter and glitzier than its London equivalent: the pictures were displayed on a turning rostrum and the auctioneer’s podium had KLINSKY’S, NEW YORK emblazoned on it in lights. If the handsome, sun-tanned and greyhaired auctioneer looked almost too English, that was his intention. With his Savile Row suit, his Turnbull & Asser shirt and tie, the Dunhill pipe in his pocket, and his accent which seemed quite English to Americans and quite American to the English, Charles B. Whiteside, known as Chuck since his Harvard days, was proud of his extreme anglophilia. He looked at the Sale Room, filling up with more shoulder pads and Dallas-style outfits than would be seen in London, patted the silk handkerchief in his top pocket and gave himself a cough sweet of the sort he always bought in London, rustically called a Fisherman’s Friend.

  Some late arrivals were still struggling into the Sale Room, giving their names to the girl at the reception desk and collecting the numbered paddles which they would raise to bid. Among them was a man who wore a shapeless grey suit and scuffed shoes. He carried his belongings – some books, a catalogue and a spectacle case – in a plastic shopping bag. He might, in fact, have been about the same age as Chuck, but he looked older, far less sure of himself, and he gave his name in a soft Southern accent. He was awarded a paddle by the girl who was too busy to pay much attention to him. All she said, without looking at him, was, ‘Duck? How are you spelling that, sir?’

  Once the sale started, Chuck Whiteside forsook his casual, Bostonian manner and his almost English accent. He sold rapidly, with great attack, and on each side of the room young henchmen in suits pointed to the bidders of the moment and shouted, ‘You!’ The battle for Old Masters was in full swing when Maggie and Ben arrived at the reception desk. Chuck’s assistant Gloria Shallum was waiting for them. She was a dark, willing girl in a plain black suit with glasses and scraped-back hair. Her intelligence and good spirits were always at war with her political correctness and the extreme seriousness with which she took her job at Klinsky’s, New York. Maggie greeted her, kissed her and said, ‘Terribly sorry we’re late, Gloria. Traffic.’

  ‘I know. You don’t have that in Britain, do you? Not traffic.’ Gloria started to lead them into the Sale Room.

  ‘You know Ben Glazier?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Of course I know Ben.’ Gloria smiled at him.
‘You came over with the Tintorettos, didn’t you? 1989? Chuck’s sure going to be glad you got here. We’re in dire need of you, Ben. Absolutely dire need.’

  As Ben and Maggie took their seats, a portrait of a young man in a helmet and breastplate came round on the revolving rostrum and Chuck fired off the news that it was ‘Lot 12. The Parmigianino portrait. Starting at twenty-five thousand dollars for it’.

  Ben, tilting his glasses to see the picture more clearly, said, ‘Rather a plucky attribution.’

  ‘Ssh!’ Maggie whispered. ‘Chuck Whiteside’s a splendid chap. He knows his business.’

  ‘But are we sure he knows Parmigianino’s business?’ And then Ben noticed an untidy, grey-haired man in front of him, who was struggling to his feet and, waving his paddle vigorously, called in a half-strangled Southern accent, ‘I want to tell y’all. ..’ A young man pointed to the bidder and said, ‘You!’

  As though the word had exercised some fatal magic, the man who had given his name as Duck clutched his chest and subsided slowly, turning his face in Ben’s direction as he collapsed. For a moment Ben had a curious feeling of recognition, but then it went. The people around him stirred. Gloria Shallum came quickly down the aisle with a porter, and the bidding moved elsewhere in the room. Ben got up and went to help, but Gloria calmed him, ‘It’s kind of hot in here, I’m afraid. Sure, he’ll be all right.’ She and the porter half-helped, half-dragged the unsuccessful bidder out of sight.

  There was the wail of an ambulance in the street and a youngish man with a pony-tail, wearing a red baseball cap and a T-shirt with Van Gogh’s self-portrait on it, was cycling rapidly towards Klinsky’s. His name was Peter Pollack. When he got to the auction house, he chained up his bike and, coming into the entrance hall, he saw the ambulance men carrying a stretcher on which lay, under a blanket and with a face the colour of putty, the elderly bidder whom he clearly knew, because he called out, ‘Don! For God’s sake!’