The Sleepers of Erin

by Jonathan Gash

  A sparrow came to my feet full of hope, and went on its way. Not daft. It was going to where it had prospects.

  Prospects! Like being owed money? I remembered Jason’s promise of a genuine first edition from, where was it, that printer’s shop . . . near here. Fenner and something. I was owed! Therefore I too had prospects! At an antiquarian bookseller’s, not far from the park. Eagerly I rose and headed towards my own salvation.

  The place when I found it was off the main road near Phoenix Park. I was glad about that. The nearest bus stop was quite a few hundred yards away and nobody waiting. A tatty printing shop front leading directly off the pavement, but with a grand new Rover parked outside and a smaller white Ford further along. Surprised at its dinginess, I went in. An old shop doorbell clunked above. There was a long counter and two blokes chatting away behind it. An aroma of fag smoke mingled with the bland bite of printer’s ink. Untidy rows of books threatened a few desperate shelves. Founts of type were casually racked on trays all the way along the shop interior.

  ‘Fenner and Storr? Antiquarian booksellers?’

  ‘I’m one. He’s the other. And you’ll be . . . ?’ The stockier, shabbier bloke broke off and came to lean across the counter as if it were a taproom bar. He seemed pleasant and bright. I was glad about that for his sake, because I find people like being happy, even if it’s only for a short time.

  ‘Lovejoy.’

  ‘And from the sound of you you’ll be a book dealer from over the water,’ he chirruped. ‘Now, what’s your speciality?’

  ‘Paradise Lost,’ I said. The other bloke was nattier, county set in tweeds and twill with an elegant walking cane. He met my eye, nodded affably. I nodded back. No argument with him, only with this robber trying to flannel me across his flaky-paint counter.

  ‘Ah. Blessed Milton, of the sweet tongue! Well, you’re in luck there, sor!’

  I let him rummage among the shelves a full minute before speaking. ‘Two hundred and ten quid. Please.’

  That caught him. He was in the act of turning towards me, blowing dust off a small ancient-looking volume, when the words arrived home.

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘Two ten. Please.’

  The penny dropped with the other bloke first. ‘Lovejoy,’ he said softly. ‘That name, Michael.’

  ‘You’re Lovejoy?’ Michael the robber came slowly back, trying to judge my mood. ‘East Anglia?’ At my nod his jauntiness returned. ‘Some mistake happened. You ordered Paradise Lost, first edition. We posted it, registered. Why, this is the very book.’ He smiled and put it down between us. ‘The parcel was returned-to-sender, wasn’t it, Johno?’

  ‘I returned it.’

  ‘It hadn’t even been opened.’

  ‘But it had been paid for,’ I said gently. ‘Through Jason.’

  ‘So now you’ve called for it in person,’ Michael crooned. His stubble glinted in the sick light. ‘And right welcome y’are—’

  His voice choked off because my hand had his throat. I wedged the phoney book in his mouth and turned it till blood came.

  ‘You sent me a shammer. I’d paid the price you asked, for a genuine first edition.’

  ‘Hold your horses, Lovejoy.’ The smartish geezer called Johno was tapping me with a sword. Honest to God, a sword in this day and age. I heard the cane sheath fall. A swordstick. Michael rasped breath in as I let him go.

  ‘Glory be to God!’ he croaked.

  ‘Stand still, Lovejoy.’ Johno Storr was calm, watchful. Risking his swordstick was too much of a chance. ‘How do you know it was a shammer if you didn’t undo the parcel?’ His gaze cleared suddenly. ‘Only divvies can do that. Well, well, well. We’ve a real find here, Michael.’

  I said evenly, ‘No, thanks,’ slammed off out and went for a stroll.

  A few minutes later I was back and placing two bricks into position in the gutter outside the bookshop. A Rover’s a pretty wide motor so I had to measure it out with my feet. The car door wasn’t locked, which pleased me because it saved quite fifteen seconds, and I was busily wiring the starter up and revving the engine before Johno Storr and his grubbier sidekick came to see what the hell was going on. Johno lost his cool then. He came banging on the motor’s windows but I’d had the sense to lock all the doors and windows. Anyway, I was already moving, reversing across the street in the first bit of a three-point turn. Calmly I fastened the seatbelt while Johno yelled at Michael to phone the Gardai. He kept yanking at the handle my side. Michael Fenner had just gone in as I lined the big nose up with my two bricks and slipped the stick into first gear. Johno’s expression changed from fury to incredulity as he realized my intention.

  He screamed. ‘Stop him! Stop him! For Christ’s sake stop—!’

  The run-up was hardly thirty feet, but the motor boomed into speed across the road, and I kept my foot down. My mouth was scared dry as the wheels bounced up on to the kerb.

  The shop front abruptly filled the windscreen with a resounding slam. Glass shivered. Something thumped into my chest and the car burrowed into the shop in a hurtling nose-dive.

  I suppose the impact dazed me a minute or two before I recovered my senses enough to look around. Through the dust I could see the front bumper was level with the top of the counter, and Johno was yelling blue murder while trying to unwedge his mate from the far corner. He was trapped by a printing press that had been crushed across the floor as my – well, Johno’s – Rover stove the shop front in. I damned near sprained my ankle climbing out of a rear window, not realizing it would be so high off the floor. We were all three choking and spluttering in dust.

  Fenner was whimpering, ‘Help, for God’s sweet sake—’

  ‘Two hunded and ten, please.’

  Rubble and glass seemed everywhere. Like being in a war movie. A couple of faces peered in, but I was past caring. I lobbed a brick fairly gently at Johno because Michael was in no fit state for more shocks. He was ashen and bleeding a bit. For the first time Johno looked scared. ‘You’re out of your mind, Lovejoy.’

  Just in case, I broke his sword by swiping it on the edge of a press guillotine. Crummy modern crap. A genuine Georgian or William IV would have laughed at such treatment. Johno panicked then and fumbled out a wodge of notes a foot thick.

  ‘Remember the rate of exchange.’ That made him check and shakily restart his counting, but eventually the blissful feel of money warmed my digits.

  Michael Fenner was fainting away when I left. Climbing across the shambles, I picked up a small booklet of gold leaf, as a kind of Lovejoy-tax on the two rogues, though what I could do with it I had no idea, and these booklets cost surprisingly little on account of the gold’s thinness. A couple of elderly bystanders were outside admiring the unusual sight of a big Rover’s bum sticking out of a shopfront window, its wheels a clear yard off the pavement. I hadn’t realized till then how ugly cars are underneath. You’d think these car designers would at least try.

  Somebody up the street was shouting so I broke into a trot, still coughing. I couldn’t afford to get into trouble with the Gardai. The main road was fairly busy with cars. It was easy to slow to a brisk walk among the pedestrians – easy, that is, until Sinead stepped in front of me.

  ‘Er, hello, Shinny,’ I said brightly. ‘Fancy seeing—’

  ‘My car’s here.’ She had it parked by the kerb. For a second I dithered, but here was suddenly a free way out. A lift from Sinead, and as long as she got me away from the district pretty fast, I could ditch her and be on my own.

  ‘Why, thanks, mavourneen.’

  ‘And you can stop that.’ She was giving me the critical once-over as she slid into the driving seat. I must have looked as though I’d been in an accident, covered in dust with my knuckle skinned. ‘Where to, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Oh, anywhere. I’m in a hurry.’

  We drove past the street where folk were beginning to congregate to goggle at those grotesque rear wheels. Shinny slowed, but I ahemed in annoyance and she accelerated
past. I drew breath to make some cheerful crack about parking being such hell in Dublin, but thought better of it.

  ‘We can’t just drive anywhere, Lovejoy.’

  ‘The National Museum, then.’ That would be as good a place to ditch her as any. To show I honestly had no such intention in mind I said, ‘If we get separated, meet at the Book of Kells, right? And I’ll pay your entrance fee,’ I finished grandly, remembering I owed her from the pub the night Joxer got done.

  She shot me a mistrustful glance. ‘Are you all right for money?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied gravely. ‘Just been to the bank.’

  Chapter 14

  The museum didn’t look much, but its displays were out of this world. A uniformed bloke sold me catalogues and let us in. ‘Here, Shinny,’ I whispered, ‘did he get the prices right?’ Some of the costlier-looking booklets were priced absurdly low. Sinead told me to keep quiet or the civil servants would put them up double. ‘Got them here too, eh?’ I was commiserating, when we hit the Derrynaflan display. It occupied almost the whole of the central recessed floor, case after case of the fabulous treasure with comparison pieces from earlier finds. I should have said it hit me, because my chest banged and quivered at the sudden impact and the floor sailed from under.

  ‘Lovejoy!’ Sinead had hold of me, grunting with strain under my weight. ‘Thank you,’ she was saying, ‘thank you,’ to an attendant who came helping. My legs went funny again as I tried to struggle away towards that dazzling display but she hissed abuse in my ear and obediently I sat on one of the benches. An arrangement of Irish glass impeded my vision of the cases, but the vibrations thrummed out into my whole being. I was shivering like a newborn foal and sweating cobs. ‘He’s not long from hospital,’ Sinead was excusing to the attendants. ‘He only needs a minute or two.’

  ‘And not a drop in the place,’ the senior uniform soulfully deplored, obviously burned up about a longstanding issue. People all about nodded understandingly.

  ‘He’ll be fine. A quiet sit.’

  Heads shaking at this proof of an unmet need, they drifted and left us. While the museum resettled to torpor, Sinead delivered me a furious lecture in a suppressed hate-filled whisper. She called me callous, thoughtless, stupid, hopeless, bone-headed, selfish and ignorant. All I could do was sit there in the bliss-giving glow of that miraculous treasure find set in the glass cases.

  ‘And furthermore, Lovejoy,’ Sinead hissed into my poor old worn-out earhole, ‘you haven’t even asked how it is I’m here.’

  ‘How is it you are here, alannah? I thought you’d written me off.’

  ‘I’m sorry I called you all those things in the Priory ruins. The night sister told me later you’d rung up asking for me and she had refused to give my location.’

  ‘Then Tinker, I suppose?’

  ‘Tinker sent me to Lyn. The twins told me.’ She sounded close to tears.

  ‘Gabby little sods.’

  ‘And what’s between you and Lyn, Lovejoy?’

  ‘Help me up, love.’

  She did, but crossly. ‘You get five minutes gawping at this rubbish, then it’s eating quietly you’ll be for a while.’

  Well, five minutes was better than none.

  ‘It’s thankful I am to you, mavourneen.’

  ‘And you can just stop that.’

  I said gravely, ‘Would you be knowing where the other verbs are in Ireland?’

  Sister Morrison at last revealed her true colours. ‘Just shut up, Lovejoy,’ she said.

  * * *

  Irish nosh bars are as grotty as ours any day. We found this side-street one full of guitar-laden posters and stained tables, just like home. Beans inedible, bread soaked to extinction. Lovely. Sinead had tried to insist on a posher place but I won by pleading queer legs so we slurped together in unison, trying for silence.

  Then over a good cup of tea she asked me about the crowd in That Street, and wouldn’t be deflected when I tried my beam of dumb innocence. ‘That street with the car sticking out of the shop window,’ she added pointedly.

  ‘Really? Honestly, the sights these days.’

  ‘Fenner and Storr,’ she went quietly on. ‘Printers and antiquarians, near the park. You mentioned they owed you.’

  ‘I did? Ah well, I just dropped in.’

  Her eyes were on her cup. ‘You might have been killed.’

  If she’d seen me do it, what the hell. I explained how I’d sent them the money for a genuine first edition of Milton and been posted a shammer, a copy the two rogues had fake-printed themselves. The sheer absence of vibes had told me it was dud.

  ‘And you didn’t even need to look?’

  ‘Right.’

  She glanced out towards the museum and gave a shiver. ‘So your performance in the museum . . . ?’

  ‘Too many vibes all at once.’

  ‘It’s spooky.’

  Angered, I grabbed her coat with my good hand. ‘It’s nothing of the kind, Shinny. It’s detectable love, the love the craftsman had for his creation, the love instilled into an antique by its admirers over the centuries.’

  Her hand reached up and held mine, locked on her lapel though it was. She seemed suddenly shy, not furious at all.

  ‘Everybody else looks at antiques and sees only money, Lovejoy.’

  ‘That’s only their excuse. Money’s respectable, love’s embarrassing. So they say it’s investment. Deep down, they all know it’s love.’

  She had my hand in hers now. ‘Don’t trust your belief too far, darling, will you?’

  ‘Me? Trust? An antique dealer?’ I was still laughing at her innocence when we rose to go. Honestly, the blind folly of women.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ she said evenly. ‘Then you can tell me all about the Derrynaflan hoard.’

  Everybody must know of it by now. The real treasure, and the legends which have sprouted in so very short a time. Already there’s a million versions of the story. Here’s only one:

  Once upon a time, this angler goes fishing in County Tipperary. His son has one of these metal detector things for his birthday and gets a bleep. Naturally he shouts his dad, who comes to look. They dig down to an inverted bronze dish, which covers an enormous decorated chalice, a strainer, a communion paten and a circular stand. Okay, maybe the clear stunning similarities with the great Ardagh find a century back escaped our intrepid angler, and maybe the shattering artistic evocations of the Tara Brooch did not spring instantly to his mind that day, but he clearly knew his duty. He rushed to report – and legend has him variously hawking his news about all Saturday and Sunday trying to find some authority to tell, or forlornly going back to the field to sit on guard till some bureaucrat sleepily came to.

  Well, there’s no stopping Irish storymakers with such a plum. You can imagine the hilarious accounts that have been invented or passed on – how at last the penny dropped, the message got through and teams of archaeologists cavalcaded across Ireland to the monastic site of St Ruadhan of Lorrha and collared the lot. And how the Dublin papers grimly reminded everybody of recent notorious scandals where archaeological treasures had been flogged to the highest (and in the antiques game that usually means the quickest) bidder.

  Of course, the Derrynaflan hoard is almost beyond belief. Precious in its own right, it ranks high in the ranks of the discovered treasures anywhere.

  ‘Look at Gallows Hill,’ I enthused, my eyes misting at the thought of all thirty-three Roman silver spoons, the gold hinge-bow satyr buckle and the partially completed eight-stone rings, the engraved gems and the preciousmetal ring blanks, the emeralds, the silver strainers, the gold necklaces and bracelets, the garnets and amethysts. ‘A Roman goldsmith’s entire workstore.’

  We were back in the museum by then, among the museum’s crowd, me going on nineteen to the dozen about other finds even more weird and almost as wonderful. The little brass token in a box of rubbishy old buttons and scrap coins in North Yorkshire – which turned out to be a unique hammered gold Tudor Saint George
noble of Henry VIII’s reign, previously unknown except for a mention in a Flemish merchant’s sixteenth-century handbook. Everybody finds the bloody things but me.

  ‘You don’t have to dig for Troy, love,’ I said, husky from being in the vicinity of that breathtakingly lovely chalice, huge and embellished. ‘I’ve seen a Gujerat medal from a button jar. A valuable group of ojime – a Japanese bead to hang on the end of a cord which suspends an inro carrying box for seals or medicines – sewn on a school kid’s bean bag. And fortunes in old slung-out handbags on street barrows – a Saxon silver penny, a mint and valuable boxlet of ladies’ cheek patches straight out of Beau Brummel’s period, and gold buttons, gold necklets, gold toothpicks . . .’

  A little girl tugged at my trouser leg, lifting her arms to be hiked. Still prattling to the amused Sinead – though why women laugh at me like they do I’ll never know – I one-armed the infant up and let myself be steered through the press of crowds and cases. The little girl kicked her heels and imperiously pointed, one hand clutching my nape hair.

  ‘. . . an ancient Egyptian votive scarab, and not a crummy plastic Brit Muzz repro . . .’

  Actually, you have to smile. We wound up at one of the cases of Celtic gold torcs quite tastefully arranged, but they could have gone to a bit more trouble over the background.

  I was going on, ‘An Inca bead, two Benin dice—’

  ‘There!’ The little girl was triumphantly banging her tiny flat hand on the case glass. ‘Like mine! See?’