Ten Word Game

by Jonathan Gash

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll try to find out how he’s getting on. I’ll be in to dinner same as usual. I can speak Danish, you see,” I lied with dazzling inventiveness. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  We parted. She had to get ready for the Antique Collectors’ Club. I needed to think with whatever logic I could scrape up. I went for coffee in the Horizon lounge. No officers, just Ivy joining me as soon as I sat.

  “Your bag, Lovejoy. You left it in the chefs’ session. You don’t want to be taken by surprise, do you?”

  I hadn’t seen the bag before and drew breath to tell her so. It was one of those open canvas things with some stamped logo Antiques For Yonks, whatever that meant. I took it. She walked off. I didn’t look inside, just dropped it beside my chair as if it was unimportant. I saw her shoes as she turned away, and saw they were dark crocodile, false or real skin I didn’t know. And remembered the dappled sheen on the message woman’s heel as she’d slipped from Corridor F. Ivy, passing me that note to see Henry Semper in the hospital?

  The headache really swung in. I tried to reach oblivion in case it was an all-day banger. I might have made it, but Les came round the lounge doing card tricks. He was really good. He insisted on including me, and a crowd gathered. Imagine how pleased I was to see his sleight-of-hand pulling the Jack of Diamonds from some lady’s earring, if only my flickering vision would have let me see the damned thing.

  An hour later I tottered to an armchair in the ship’s library and looked in Ivy’s bag. It contained yet another catalogue, this time of the Hermitage’s latest exhibition. I could hardly read the title, so bad was my migraine by then: Hidden Treasures Revealed. I find some colours terrible to read at the best of times, but almost impossible in blue capitals on Van Gogh’s ochre and browns. I sat on the bag and tried to doze. Ivy, though? And on whose side? I wanted some Flash Gordon to zoom in, tell me who was Ming from Planet Mongo and, better still, who wasn’t.

  I came to with my side aching from a hopeless slumped posture, too late to join June Milestone at the next Antiques Clubber Talk. She’d give me hell for letting her down again. My head was almost back on, though, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. I looked about. Only two people clicking away in the nook reserved for Internet folk, and the occasional book browser along the shelves. I opened the catalogue of the State Hermitage Museum, and read.

  * * *

  Another note from that lunatic Bannerman was under my cabin door.

  Lovejoy,

  Okay, 30% of the gross. That’s as high as I can go. My wife Cynthia agrees. You write the script, and she’ll say exactly what you tell her to. We’ve watched you, and reckon you can do it good. Deal?

  Josh Bannerman

  I ditched it. One less complication.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Lovejoy?”

  Blearily I came to. Bannerman stood next to my recliner. I’d just had a coffee by the Riviera Pool reading David Copperfield. I always feel so sorry for the poor little blighter. I used to fill up, reading the story to my gran, and so did Gran.

  A beautiful woman stood beside him. I’d seen her before, at my talk and in the Purser’s Office. His wife?

  “Eh?”

  “This is Cynthia. Look.” He crouched down. “Final offer. We go halves, and I fund the legal business. Won’t cost you a penny. Cynthia’s taken a real shine to the idea. We’ll make a killing. You simply say your piece in court. How about it?”

  The loonies had taken over. When that happens, pretend to be one. I glanced about in mute warning.

  “Right. Say nothing more here. Give me your address when we leave the ship, okay? I’ll meet you in Southampton, fix the details.”

  “Thank Christ for that. I thought I’d lost my touch.” He grinned at Cynthia. “This gooner drives a hard bargain. I like that in a man.”

  “So do I,” said Cynthia, cool.

  She smiled down. I peered up. Height gives a woman a distinct advantage, but they’re always unfair because they start at their legs and go on up.

  “Any time you want to rehearse me, Lovejoy,” she said calmly, “just call.”

  “Right.” I meant no.

  They left. I went back to David Copperfield. He was in a worse state than me, but he gets out of his mess and wins through. Only in the story, though, only in the story.

  * * *

  As I came out of the swimming pool, I collected my towel and bag from my deck recliner, and found a note from Cynthia. I shrugged and thought oh, well. No harm done just to go and say hello. An hour later I was at the deck quoits match.

  The excitement was out of all proportion to what was happening. People were shoving rope rings into marked squares. A breathless crowd of three had assembled to witness the gaiety.

  Sports and me don’t mix. Frankly I think they’re dull. Ice hockey is beyond me. Rugby variants are as dire as each other, ever since that daft so-and-so William Webb Ellis in 1823 picked the ball up and ran with it at Rugby School and so started the game. Horse riding is fascist – those poor nags – and I’d sooner bottle smog than see a Formula One race. Good antiques abound, though, with sports themes, if you can get hold of any. Golfiana (sorry) has gone mad, up 200% in a year, item on item.

  Cynthia Bannerman’s note said to meet at the Deck Quoits, so here I was. She was playing. Gripped by the tempestuous action, I went to a deck chair to nod off.

  “Lovejoy? I won!”

  I stirred. “Yippee.”

  “Walk?” I stood, stretched, and we strolled the deck. People were reclining on loungers, having a smoke, sending for drinks.

  “Your heart isn’t in the deception Josh suggests, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s hard for me.”

  “Don’t be silly. You do it all the time.”

  “Look, love. In a lifetime I’ve heard of hundreds of so-say divvies. Every cheap TV junk-stall presenter claims to have the knack, the gift. Antiques Road-Show experts all hint they posses the magic seventh sense for antiques. Every corner-street dealer says he has the divvy factor. Know the truth?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “I’ve only ever been sure of one other divvy bloke besides me.”

  “One? Then it is rare!” She slipped her arm through mine. It felt marvellous, walking with a lovely svelte woman on my arm, and me a scruff. “You’ll be all the more convincing! It is so easy to pretend!”

  “Ever seen anybody pretend to have the divvy shakes? They are so embarrassing it’s ridiculous. It’s a laugh. Even the phoney divvies know they look absurd. Pathetic.”

  “You won’t do it?” She halted us.

  “In court would be worse.”

  “Not for me?” She fluttered her eyes.

  “Look, love. Your bloke …”

  “Not if I persuaded to the uttermost?”

  I had already decided not to lie for Bannerman’s gain, so what difference would it make if I let myself be persuaded? It’s so easy to pretend. She’d said it. And my gran said it’s polite to agree with a lady.

  “Very well,” I agreed, politely. “Where shall we go to talk it over?”

  “I’ll think of somewhere,” she said, and we walked on.

  The day passed in a blur. In a trice I was saying goodnight, wishing people wouldn’t leave the show and go to bed. Crowds thinned, the decks cleared as the black horizon showed more lights of Russia’s shoreline. Ships passed more frequently. I wanted to shout for everyone to stay awake. Nobody stays loyal when you need them – look at Margaret Dainty, my lifelong pal. I almost broke down as I realised the barman and two stewardesses were the only folk left in the Horizon Lounge. I felt sick, though I’d only had one glass of wine after supper. Lauren had gone, saying she’d try the ship-to-shore phone link, see if she could raise (her unfortunate phrase) Mr Semper. Some hopes. We used to say that as children, when games got forlorn, some hopes. The parrot in Les Renown’s joke knew abo
ut freezers.

  The cabin seemed a small box when finally I turned in. I made tea, stared out of the porthole at the gathering lights, trying to visualise the captain and his officers looking into the night, their instruments telling them exactly where the ship was. Holly told me they had ways of knowing how many people were aboard. Did that include dead? I shut the curtain on Russia, and lay there. I only had Pride and Prejudice, so I lay back and thought of Ivy’s Hermitage catalogue. It had had no map, just prints of the Impressionist paintings. I supposed these were the ones we – meaning I – was to spot, then to snatch.

  * * *

  One thing about Russians, they know where they stand. Okay, ideologically they move about a lot and say they don’t, but they know whose side they’re on. In England, justice is a trick that possibly almost virtually nearly occasionally sometimes constantly must be seen to be done. In Russia, justice is in the eye of the beholder; it simply depends on whose eye is doing the looking.

  Russia is there very like the USA. Not similar, but vast and impenetrable. They’re the same in one special way: if neither existed, the rest of us would have to invent both, just as we invent God and Satan. Which is which is up to the individual.

  I knew little about Russia except the usual exotic fragments in my ragbag mind. Catherine the Great locked her hairdresser in an iron cage for three years, so he couldn’t reveal the ghastly truth that she’d contracted dandruff. Which country has most USA 100 dollar notes in circulation? Answer: Russia, outstripping America by a mile. What drug is used to abduct Russian moguls for ransom? Answer: heroin (the kidnappers inject it). And what Russian magnates get abducted most often? Oil tycoons. Russian jokes have made the satirical magazines in the West with quips like, How do they congratulate new deputy mayors in Novosibirsk? By giving him a new Kevlar vest (bulletproof, see?). And, how can you tell when a Duma deputy’s salary rises by one dollar? Answer: he buys another Rolls Royce. Yet isn’t politics the same the world over? My dad and uncles once played against the famed football team Moscow Dynamo yonks ago, and said how they’d suffered in wartime.

  What else did I know? Nothing. I wondered what Ivy had given me that catalogue for. I’d scanned it, to no avail. I started Pride and Prejudice all over again. My trouble is I do exactly as women tell me. It didn’t work, so I tried to sleep.

  A room is a room, nothing more. That cabin storing Lauren’s stock of antiques kept coming to mind. Lauren said Henry Semper wanted a bigger space, for maybe some genuine antique furniture for the passengers’ entertainment. Had June Milestone advised him? This room kept coming back, worrying me.

  There’s my game. Ten Words Everything. Like I said earlier, I invented it, to teach myself clearer thinking. You have to describe anything in ten words. For instance, I knew a man who was wealthy. He bought a small French 1870s clock off me, good value. I ate for a week on the proceeds, really posh meals at my cottage, with a new sauce bottle and everything. I even brought out my saucer and bread-and-butter plate. You’d never seen such elegance. Guy met a woman who stayed with him and spent his money like a drunken sailor, then she met a richer bloke and took off. Guy went to pieces. In my Ten Word Game: She moved in, spent up, met another, moved on, desolation! That’s ten, and it says everything. Poor Guy has never been the same since.

  How would I describe my plight? My ten words would be: Shanghaied, Russian robbery planned, two dead, frightened I’m next … That’s nine. But then what? Dead? Gaoled? Arrested? Missing? There was one decent word at the end, though. Escape. That would do me.

  My mind flipped pages. Ivy’s book had talked of where the seventy-four priceless Impressionist paintings in the Hermitage Hidden Treasures exhibition came from, and their value to the world. Only two had ever been seen in public before. This means they’d be simple to sell, once nicked by enterprising thieves – say like an organised gang sailing in by cruise ship, and consisting of reliable officers, antiques experts, policemen.

  My dozing mind went sideways. Hidden Treasures Revealed had a subtitle: Impressionist Masterpieces preserved by the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. I get narked. Is there anything more useless than a prologue, a preface, a foreword, or an introduction? If they’ve anything to say, I always think, get on with it and stop annoying us. The masterworks weren’t in doubt. Painted between 1827 and 1927, they appeared from the rubble at the end of the 1939-45 war, mostly undocumented. Earliest was Camille Corot’s Rocks, the latest Matisse’s Ballerina, a creative spread of 100 years.

  You could dramatise the arrival of such masterpieces (actually in railway trucks) in the poverty and heartbreak of post-war Europe, as they were sent to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow or the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and simply stored there. Rights and wrongs seemed clearer back then. The Western and Eastern Bloc nations took up pejorative attitudes, name-calling the other. I ignore political terms and even words like Impressionist, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionist, because they interrupt my view of paintings by Vincent, Monet, Gaugin, and the rest. They’re for writers of prologues.

  To me, it’s simple. The paintings were protected by good old Russia when destruction threatened, and were now brought out for everybody to see. Enough.

  Or for people to sail into St Petersburg’s lovely harbour, in order to steal by arrangement, let’s say?

  * * *

  I thought I was sleeping soundly, having dismissed the Hermitage book Ivy lent me. Yet something lingered. Once the Introduction began, there were only three photographs. Black and white. All three were of rooms, small grainy snapshots showing old-fashioned … well, just rooms with carpets, pelmets, and careful furnishings. Oh, and paintings hung about the walls. Some you could identify, by Renoir, Courbet. Others weren’t so easy.

  Underneath each blurry photo were the names of collectors who’d bought the paintings. The superb collection had been owned by three main buyers. Their names weren’t important to me, but are famous. I mean, Joseph Otto Krebs matters, not because he ran a steam-boiler factory, but because he liked artistic beginners known as Vincent Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gaugin and suchlike, and stuffed his house in Holzdorf with their art. He snapped up young Picasso’s works as well. Top marks to Joe, then, for perception.

  Another German industrialist collector was Bernhard Koehler, who subsidised young artists like my favourite, poor August Macke – his 1913 charmer Zwei Frauen vor dem Hutladen has just gone for four million zlotniks in Sotheby’s even as I write, giving an idea of the gelt we’re tilting at here. Everything in modern art you see nowadays leads back to Bernhard of the big bucks. The story of what happened to the collections is fraught, leading through the carnage of the July Plot on Hitler’s life and subsequent executions, the bombings and ruination, and thence to the Hermitage.

  The final major collection, Otto Gerstenberg’s, eventually joined the others in St Petersburg. He was a mathematician who turned to running an insurance company (the only blight on his life) in Berlin, and loved everybody from Constable, Reynolds, Goya, and the other famous names everybody knows.

  The French masterpieces of these rich aficionados were the Hidden Treasures exhibition we were going to nick. Yeah, right, I thought in my doze. My mind saw rooms turning and shifting shapes and colours. Even asleep I found myself thinking about rooms, but why?

  I woke, and it was bright daylight, half-seven. I looked out through the porthole. We were gliding up an enormous waterway towards a beautiful city. St Petersburg, golden amber in the morning sun. The steward knocked, summoned me to Suite 1133 in thirty minutes.

  The faces were excited, enthralled like children before a seaside outing. I sat. They’d laid on breakfast, Lady Vee’s stewardess Marie providing an enormous buffet. I helped to scoff most of it, so she didn’t feel she’d wasted her time getting it ready. The others seemed too excited to bother with food.

  “The Hermitage in St Petersburg,” Mangot said, doing his Napoleon-before-Waterloo. “Doubts, anxieties anyone?”

  “St Peter
sburg!” Lady Vee exclaimed, eyes aglow. “Where Catherine the Great founded the Bolshoi! City of Pushkin, the dancers Nijinsky and Pavlova! Most of all, Dostoevsky!”

  “Crime and Punishment?” I asked, lamely keeping up.

  “His scribbles are incidental,” she cried in contempt. “Such a brilliant gambler! His infallible gambling system went missing after his death. Legend says a foreign lady will sail in one day and rediscover it! Don’t you see? The fable means me!”

  “Aye, right,” I told the loony bint.

  Mangot showed some sense by ignoring her, but less by ignoring me.

  “This is the war council, everybody, so listen. The Hermitage is five immense linked buildings along the waterside, starting at the Winter Palace and ending in the Hermitage Theatre.”

  He must have seen my expression change and said wearily, “What, Lovejoy?”

  “Look,” I said through a mouthful of nosh. “It doesn’t sound much if you say it quick, except the Winter Palace alone houses over a thousand rooms and 117 magnificent staircases. And they know we’re coming.”

  Mangot sounded strangled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Put the Crown Jewels in a tower, everybody knows everybody is coming. The world and his wife wants to nick them. Bound to be the same at the Hermitage. Armed guards. Dogs. Electronics. Every minute of every day, they’ll expect robbers.”

  “We aren’t the robbers,” he said in exasperation. “It’s laid on. We are the good folk. We’re safe.”

  “It won’t work. Somebody will get hurt.” I meant me, and I think they understood because they all turned to look at him, even June and Lady Vee. “If you’re bent on nicking the great Manchester clock in the Wyndham Franklin in Philadelphia, America, you’d need an army, not just a few dead-legs like us. Why? Because the bloody thing’s twenty-six feet tall and six feet wide. Victorians built things big in 1869.”

  “And your point is…?”