Riviera Gold

by Laurie R. King

  “Fine, then.”

  “But that was before Mary and Mr Holmes arrived.”

  “Would they have searched?”

  “I am quite certain they did, though I don’t know how closely. And they have no reason to know that they’re looking for three bon—”

  “Sst! We agreed the walls have ears. They are ‘three papers.’ ”

  “The papers, in the place—I know. Oh, Lillie, this is getting out of hand. Don’t you think I ought to tell the two of them?”

  “Not unless you want to let that man take control of you the rest of your days.”

  “They’re sure to figure it out eventually.”

  “Why? How many times have you and I met over the years without him so much as noticing? Clarissa Hudson, you have done no wrong. You have every right to make your own decisions and arrangements. A woman who plays by men’s rules is a woman who ends up in a cage.”

  “Or a coffin.”

  “Clara, we can do this. You know we can. It’s merely a matter of putting on that fearless face that you did when you first walked into a crowded ballroom.”

  “Dear friend, I’m not feeling very fearless at present.”

  “I know. But you will.”

  The two women listened to the buzz of cicadas for a moment, then the growl of a motorcar climbing the nearby road. Clara Hudson sighed. “I am grateful for your hospitality, but I’m going home tomorrow. I want my own things around me, for however short a time. After two nights on that gaol bed, I am feeling my entire lifetime of experience.”

  The two laughed, a touch sadly, and took their long decades of life inside to the cool.

  I looked around desperately for an invisible corner, dimly aware that whoever had just driven up to the fonderie was taking care to go unnoticed. I was tempted by the darkness behind the blacksmith’s anvil—but if they turned on the overhead lights, I would be as obvious as a beetle in a bowl.

  I trotted through the room to the hallway and pushed open the door to the first workers’ room, just far enough that I could slip inside if need be. But I stayed in the corridor, so I could eavesdrop on the foundry itself.

  The heavy outer padlock gave a ponderous rattle. The big door creaked as one side swung open, then shut. Footsteps and low voices came—speaking English, rather than French. “I don’t want to put on the main lights, they might see them from the house.” It was hard to tell, with the voice pitched so low, but I thought it was Rafe Ainsley. Definitely not an American.

  “You have a key?” This man’s low voice seemed to have an accent. Russian?

  “Yes, I had a copy made.”

  A torch went on, bright for a moment, before dimmed by a cupped hand.

  Two sets of feet crossed the floor. I retreated as the shadows danced closer—but they had no reason to come back here, where the dust said nobody had been for years. Surely they were headed to the locked room…and yes, the footsteps ceased. A sound of fumbling, then, “Hold this” as the light spun about and went still again. I eased my head sideways just far enough to see the two figures standing at the padlocked door. Rafe Ainsley, his hands working the key.

  And with the torch, Count Vasilev.

  The lock clicked, the door opened, and closed after them. Voices started up again—but I could not make out the words.

  Damnation.

  If I pressed my ear up to the door and it came open, I would be caught. Was it worth the risk? Or, perhaps there was another way…

  Back in the one-time living quarters, I aimed my shielded light at the wall. As I thought, there had originally been an opening, boarded off, rather than filled in. The old wood proved no barrier to sound—and, I noticed as I moved closer, I could even see a narrow sliver of the room beyond through the cracks.

  “—not meet in the town,” the Russian was saying.

  “Because I don’t think we want people to see us meeting any more than would seem natural, and who’s going to come here, in the middle of the night?”

  “You have them packed? All of them?”

  “They’re in the crates.”

  “I wish to see one, please.”

  “I don’t know why. You know what they look like. But—hold on, let me do it.”

  Noises followed, remarkably similar to those Holmes and I had made in the smuggler’s cave. Then: “Here—careful, it’s heavy.”

  “Yes. And rough.”

  “What, you expected me to send them to the patineur?”

  I moved my eye from one crack to another, until I found Count Vasilev. I couldn’t quite see what he had in his hands until he moved, and I glimpsed a dark, dull shape a foot or so tall. His arms were braced to hold it, confirming its solidity, and his left thumb was rubbing along the base.

  Then the other man’s hands came into view, taking the piece and turning away with it. The rustling sounds were followed by a tapping of nails. Not a lot of nails—just enough to discourage someone from idly lifting the lid.

  “You won’t have any problem, when you get them?” asked the Russian.

  “The first shipment arrived with no trouble at all, and I haven’t heard of any with the second. So, unless the ship goes down, which it won’t because we’re not at war these days, it should be fine.”

  “You think this is a joke?”

  “No, I don’t think it’s a bloody joke. What I do think is a joke is how you expect me to manage without your friend Niko. Unless you want to get your own hands dirty, I’m going to need another five thousand, to make up for doing it on my own.”

  “I will give you half that. And the other half when these are shipped.”

  “Fair enough, I suppose. Another week, ten days.”

  “Ten days? But these are ready now.”

  “And have to pay for another lot of shipping? It’s cheaper to wait till I’ve cleaned and packed up the pieces I’m doing tomorrow.”

  “Send these now. You can send your new pieces with the next ones.”

  “Next ones? You mean there’s more?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where the devil are you getting the stuff?”

  “That is of no importance.”

  “I know—none of my business. But if we’re doing this again, it’ll need to be in the next month, since I have to be in New York by the middle of September. And you’ll have to come up with another distraction like those fireworks, to empty out this place. Plus, I can’t do it without another Niko.”

  “I will consider a distraction. And I may have another man. One who can be trusted.”

  “I liked Niko. Poor bastard. I don’t suppose you know who shot him?”

  “They say it was the woman Hudson.”

  “I know what they’re saying, but she really didn’t strike me as the sort. More likely it’s some other criminal. I mean, if the fellow was carrying around stuff like that for you, God knows what he was doing for other people.”

  “It is true, Niko worked with criminals. Which is why it is better to ship this now, not wait.”

  “You may be right. Okay, I’ll put in another layer and then write the shippers, try and have them picked up next week. Assuming I have that second money.”

  “Fifty thousand francs if you ship them tomorrow.”

  “Make it Thursday—I have to finish packing them, and I’ll be too busy tomorrow. Speaking of which, can we go? I have to come in early to start the oven, and I’d like a few hours of sleep first.”

  The light went off in the crack. Footsteps, doors, the padlock. The men left the foundry; I heard the car start up and drive away. I waited for a time, in case they returned or Monsieur Ferrant came to investigate, but the only sound was mice in the rafters.

  The shiny padlock was a simple one, and I was soon inside the locked room, looking down at six very solid wooden crates. Two were empty. The othe
r four had their lids lightly nailed down. I prised up one of the tops.

  Under the excelsior shavings was a remarkably ugly bronze lump, the shape of a large head. As modern art went, it was, as the Count had said, rough—even cruder than the Caliban pieces I had seen in Rafe’s workshop. Still, there was a certain appeal in the deliberate bluntness of the thing, as if it was a matter of design rather than lack of care. Some of that crudeness might disappear in the finishing process, I thought—the octopus-leg sprues had been hacked off, leaving ugly little stubs, but the base-like pouring funnels were still in place. The dull surface still showed signs of the plaster mould, giving little hint of the bronze patina waiting beneath. I took the next one from the crate, and found it similar—no, not similar: identical, down to the marks of the carving knife in the original. So was the third, and all the rest in that layer, and the one beneath.

  That, I thought, was odd. Ten identical figures, squat and unlovely, with little detail and no finish work. Did that count as art? By a man who regarded a gallery as a necessary evil?

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t these primitive, mass-produced hunks of bronze. The conversation I had heard made it clear that Rafe and the Count were up to something criminal. And since it involved Niko, it was most likely smuggling, but of what—and how?

  The statues were statues: no seams, plugs, or openings that I could find. They were a lot heavier than the head of Sara, but then, they were nearly twice the height, and still had the bases attached.

  There could be no reason to smuggle mere lumps of bronze. I looked at the crate, built of hefty reinforced boards, and sighed.

  Forty minutes later, I decided that no, there was nothing in the crates but the boards, the nails holding them together, excelsior packing, and twenty identical bronze figures.

  The sculptures could, I supposed, have secret pockets within, but for what purpose? I doubted cocaine or diamonds would survive those temperatures. What was I not seeing?

  The piece, though crude, did resemble some modern sculptures, most notably those of the Spaniard Picasso. I’d seen the man’s studio, and privately thought his sculpting technique, like his method with oil paints, consisted of slapping and hacking at the medium for a few minutes and calling it done.

  Could that resemblance be the point? Could the two be planning to sell these as Picasso originals? The Spaniard’s name had become big enough to start attracting forgeries—especially if there were an ocean between the artist and the buyer. And Rafe had said these were headed for America.

  Open counterfeits did not fit my impression of Rafe Ainsley, whose ego was even greater than his talent. But odd jealousies and creative revenges were as rife in the art world as they were in finance or academia, and perhaps if the goal was to undercut the value of a genuine Picasso…

  I shook my head, and shoved statues and wood-shavings back into the crate. On my way out, I took another look at the small crucible Rafe hadn’t wanted me to touch, but it was just a crucible, unused and uninformative.

  I put it back, and decided that I simply didn’t know enough about bronze to tell what I was looking at. Perhaps tomorrow would remedy that.

  I reached the hotel without mishap, stowed the bicycle with its fellows, and managed to be seen only by a sleepy desk clerk, who seemed unsurprised by the arrival of a guest at that hour.

  My rooms were empty—which, while disappointing, surprised me not in the least. That they were still empty when the sun woke me was mildly unexpected, but after one glance at the clock, I had no time for speculation.

  I fought my way free of the mosquito netting and dove into clothing suitable for a demonstration inside a hot, dirty foundry; then trotted up the road towards Villa America. Before I reached the Murphy house, I spotted some familiar faces in a group about to board the Antibes tram, and put on speed to join them.

  I greeted Sara. She performed the introductions—in some cases, re-introductions—to the others, including some newly arrived on the Train Bleu: Luisa (a painter) and Tom (her visiting brother); Dos (a writer) and Scotty (another writer) with Zelda (Scotty’s wife); and Victor (Rafe’s gallery owner) and his friends Jacques and Bernadette and Louis; and the two Russian male dancers whom I never did learn to tell apart. The painter and writers all had the gleam of creativity in their eyes, at the chance to immortalise manly labour on canvas or page. The brother, wife, and dancers looked puzzled at the enthusiasm (and frankly apprehensive when they laid eyes on the foundry itself).

  The last member of the party was unexpected—at least, unexpected as a person one might meet on a rumbling French tram car. “And Mary, do you know Pablo?”

  “We met in Paris, a few months ago. Ça va, Monsieur Picasso?”

  Later in his life, all the world would know Pablo Picasso, but in 1925, few Oxford academics would have heard of him. He was a small, dark man in his middle forties, with close-cropped hair, heavily tanned skin, intense dark eyes, and a Catalan accent. We had met that spring as I passed through Paris and my artist stepson, Damian Adler, dragged me to the man’s studio. Picasso did not appear to remember my face, giving me a perfunctory shake of the hand as he braced himself against the shift and surge of the tram.

  Not wanting to remind him of who I actually was, I figured it was safe to ask him about his work. “Are you thinking of making more bronzes yourself, Monsieur Picasso? I saw one of your bronzes in Paris, a sort of death mask of a man with a broken nose.”

  “My picador,” said the Spaniard. “You think it a death mask? I suppose it could be.”

  I mentioned seeing the mask of Dante, and he asked if I had seen Bonaparte’s, and that took us into African masks and Cubist ideas in sculpture, with a side-track into the avarice and blindness of gallery owners, then a question about the joint benefits and drawbacks of bronze kept us happily arguing all the way to Antibes’ Place de la Victoire.

  As we were climbing down, he stood back to let me go first—but when our faces were very close, he lowered one eyelid, perilously close to a wink, as if acknowledging a private joke. Then he turned to Sara and asked if the children were well.

  * * *

  —

  The morning was still cool, in Riviera terms at least, and the foundry was little more than half a mile away, so we waved off the taxis—the same two decrepit machines that had met us the previous week—to walk through the town in changing groups of two here, three there, commenting on the flowers spilling from an upper balcony, the small boys crouched over a game of marbles, the artistic shadow cast by an abandoned piece of farm machinery. At each, the gallery owner and his pals would make some ribald joke, Dos and Scotty would study it briefly for potential inspiration, Luisa-the-painter would flip open her wire-bound pad to make furious sketches, and Picasso would stand for a moment in admiration, then return to the conversation—leaving one with the conviction that the flowers, the boys, the shadow had been etched into his visual memory forever.

  The furnace was already running when we trickled in and joined the half-dozen visitors there before us. Someone greeted a rotund figure as the mayor. A glance told me which of the remaining men were Rafe’s fellow sculptors and which was his pet gallery owner. The remaining figure was Count Vasilev, wearing another pale linen suit and Panama hat, looking as if he’d never met a smudge or broken a drop of sweat in his life.

  Someone had strung a length of rope across the room to keep everyone clear of the work area, although with the size of the space, a dropped crucible would leave twenty people scarred for life.

  I stayed near the door.

  Brother Tom and the two Russian dancers took one look at the set-up and decided to walk back into town, a trio handsome enough to pull Zelda and the young actress in their wake. Sara looked after them longingly, caught me watching her, and gave me a wry smile before moving over to salute the group who had been there when we came in. Young Luisa eagerly took out h
er sketch-book and pencils. Scotty lit a cigarette and started talking to Dos about a bullfight. Picasso’s dark eyes ate up the entire space, from the cobwebs overhead to the arrayed moulds on the floor, as he stood with his thighs against the hemp barrier.

  The working side of the room held three men. One was a very tall, very muscular boy of perhaps nineteen, with an unfortunate overbite and what I diagnosed as near-terminal shyness, since he stood to one side and refused to meet the eyes of any onlooker. Next to the furnace were Rafe and an older man who had to be Monsieur Ferrant himself. They had their backs to us, conferring over some dial. Even where I was, full in the faint breeze from the wide-open doors, the waves of heat were oppressive. That close, the men must have been baking alive, especially in the woollen trousers and leather aprons they wore. They had to shout over the roar of flames, but I could not make out what they were saying.

  Eventually, the grey-haired man tapped his nose at Rafe, who nodded. The older man then moved towards the equipment hanging on the wall, while Rafe turned towards his audience—and spotted Picasso. With a grin, he called to Monsieur Ferrant, urging him across the gritty stones to greet the famous artist. The old man finished shrugging on his burn-spotted leather coat and stuck out a huge hand to exchange manly greetings with the visitor. Picasso asked some technical question, but the older man made a gesture towards the furnace, a reminder that molten bronze was waiting.

  Rafe turned back to the job with a cockerel swagger—and, I noticed, a singular lack of leather overcoat. He seemed more eager to impress his Spanish colleague than his American gallery owner or his Russian patron, and I was concerned that his attention might be on his audience instead of the dangerous job at hand. However, though he scorned the coat, he did pick up a pair of heavy leather gauntlets, and the moment he drew them on, his awareness of an audience fell away, and he was all focus.

  There was no doubt that Monsieur Ferrant was in charge. The big lad was some kind of apprentice, there to provide a third set of hands and eyes. But this did not make Rafe a visiting dilettante: the Englishman knew what he was doing, making no moves without preparation, never taking his eyes from the task, and even following instructions with no hesitation.