by Ben Tripp
“Yes, yes, all very interesting,” Sax interrupted, trying to sound as if he had something better to do. In fact, he was salivating.
“The present owner of the château is a lady of indeterminate age, Madame Magnat-l’Étrange. I am told she is ill. She is intestate. The contents of the property could fall to the hammer, but it is more likely the government will intervene and make a collection of it all.”
Sax detested when governments made collections of things. Sticking paper labels on beautiful objects and subjecting them to inventory inspections. Taking them permanently out of the market. Other sins. He felt the urgency of the situation. He had swallowed the hook and he didn’t care.
“Mmm,” he said, allowing himself the minimum expression of interest.
“Perhaps we can discuss the matter en mains propres,” the voice said.
Two hours later, Sax was on the Bordeaux-Périgueux-Paris train.
There were other advantages. Foremost, Paris was a suitable distance from his cottage in Dordogne. At first, it was primarily the distance he was concerned with—the Beat poets were past their prime, and this particular specimen, although beautiful in a wispy-bearded, postadolescent way, wrote miserable poetry. Worse, he read it aloud, interrupting himself to make scribbled revisions on scraps of paper. The escapade suggested by the voice on the telephone was riddled with omissions and lies; of that, Sax was perfectly aware. But the extended description of the Loire estate was convincing. If he got so much as a pair of good chairs out of the deal, it would pay for the trip. Sax tossed the house key at the poet and told him to clear out in a week if Sax didn’t come back. Then he cleared his own calendar for two weeks.
Once Sax was on the train for Paris, he could properly consider the odd assignation toward which he was rushing. You may bring confederates, the smoky voice had said. Accomplices, he meant. Sax had a few of those, and considered his options. Gander, his beefy assistant manager from Liverpool, might do for a start. The London branch was staffed primarily with willowy, oversexed shopgirls Sax recruited from Liberty, Laurent, and similar retailers, because they were attractive and hip. The real work, however, was done by the assistant managers.
There were others in Sax’s stable. Marco the Italian was strong and unscrupulous but prone to panic; this job seemed to have elements of a burglary about it, and Marco’s anxiety might get the better of him, regardless of how well he looked with his shirt open and that wealth of dark curls bursting out.
The Pole, Szczepan (whose name, disappointingly, was pronounced merely “Stefan”), was an immense, powerful man with a devious mind, but Sax didn’t trust him—Szczepan remembered too well the breadlines and hunger back in Poland. Sax didn’t doubt the man would take the prize for himself if he thought he could get away with it. Which he couldn’t. But he might try.
There were a couple of lads in London and the German Krunzel brothers, but Sax hadn’t seen any of them in a while. After some consideration, he settled on Gander. Nigel, an effeminate, cunning, hand-dry-washing buyer’s assistant, could keep the shop in Gander’s absence.
Gander looked like an apprentice butcher, with huge red hands and ears and a low forehead surmounted with blond, bristling brush-cut hair. He never seemed to blink, his small blue eyes peering out uncomprehendingly from a wealth of pink face. Appearances deceive. Gander was extremely intelligent. He had been a specialty furniture remover before Sax recruited him; Gander had spent several years standing by at auction houses, soaking up along with tea and cigarettes the details of period, quality, and style that defined historical objects. Gander’s mates didn’t care what they were moving. It was all weights and measures to them. Gander alone took note.
He knew something of art, furniture, and ceramics when Sax spotted him at a lythcoop, or estate auction, at a North Country mansion; since then, he’d learned a great deal more. Gander’s recent affinity for three-piece pinstriped suits with high lapels was ideal. He looked honest and disinterested to Sax’s customers, who expected to deal with someone effeminate and cunning who dry-washed his hands when he spoke. Consequently, Gander, who appeared incapable of haggling, could often realize prices that made Sax blush. In addition, he had heard Gander enjoyed tremendous luck with the willowy shopgirls. The brute was probably hung like a Brazilian pack mule.
At the dreary, cinder-blown gare in Poitiers, Sax descended from the train and found the bank of coin-operated telephones inside the station. He fed a pocketful of francs into an instrument and got the London shop; apparently, Gander was at the warehouse in Tilbury. Sax rang the warehouse and an unfamiliar cockney voice answered. Moments later, Gander was on the line. Sax outlined his plans, omitting certain details, and asked if Gander was available to assist. He was. Gander would meet Sax at a café in Boulevard St.-Germain, not far from the Sorbonne, the following afternoon.
“It might be a little risky,” Sax added. He thought Gander had agreed too quickly. Perhaps Sax hadn’t made the circumstances sufficiently clear. “Possibility of intervention by the gendarmes.”
“Right,” Gander said, and rang off.
Paris in 1965 was enjoying a jazz renaissance no less influential, within its sphere, than the rock and roll of London during the same year. Sax wasn’t particularly interested in music for its own sake. He went to a great many concerts of all kinds, but for him it was a social function, not an aesthetic one. He liked his arts to be durable, to occupy space. Music was something to fill the air around the artifacts. Still, he found he rather liked jazz. Not the big-band stuff, but the intimate trios, quartets, and quintets with their playful yet urgent interpretations of standards, the original compositions that leapt and flickered like fire. Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon, and Bill Evans—they were all in town that year, not to mention the bigger acts. Dizzy Gillespie had performed at the Olympia in November. Duke Ellington played the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
Besides finding the music tolerable, Sax also liked the men who liked jazz. They were usually older, more complex. The rockers wanted to get theirs and get out. The jazz aficionados tended to be filmmakers, writers, diplomats, and attachés, people with interests that extended beyond racketing about in the counterculture, taking amphetamines, and rogering each other. This crowd found Sax interesting, too. He was a curiosity on the scene, which trended toward narrow lapels and black neckties. It wasn’t easy to stand out in the circuslike Mod world; it was hard not to stand out amongst the deliberately understated jazz people.
Sax had the evening to himself. He would meet the voice on the telephone the following day at 1300 hours for a cup of coffee and a nice conspiracy. He decided to take the night off, enjoy a set of music in a club, and then, refusing any romantic engagements that might arise, he would dine alone and sleep in monastic solitude at L’Hotel, on the Left Bank.
This proved to be a difficult if virtuous plan. The first flaw in the strategy was L’Hotel. Sax knew the manager, Guy Louis Duboucheron. The place attracted flocks of the rich and famous. Guy planned to renovate it soon, and Sax’s furnishings figured in those plans. So whenever Sax was in Paris, Guy had a good room for him at half price. When Sax tiptoed down to the snug little bar, he was astonished to discover his recent acquaintance Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones sitting at the end, drinking Coca-Cola. The Stones were in town for a concert at the Olympia.
Things deteriorated from that point. Sax never made it to the jazz bar. He went with Charlie to a sort of artist’s cooperative instead, a hotbed of Trotskyites and radicals and bearded youths trying to overthrow the tyranny of the paintbrush by making dreadful pictures without it. Andy Warhol was there, amongst some other interesting people; he said he was going to retire from painting. There was a certain amount of drinking early in the evening, then smoking of grass, which always rendered Sax completely helpless. He spent at least an hour talking to a most extraordinarily beautiful woman with skin like porcelain, who knew all about a
ntiques and claimed to have the best private collection of Caravaggio paintings in the world, mostly studies and sketches, but including the lost masterpiece The Magi in Bethlehem.
She must have been as stoned as he was. Sax was under the impression he was talking to one of Warhol’s people, Edie Sedgwick or Baby Jane Holzer—he didn’t yet know the habitués of “the Factory,” although he would later spend a fair amount of time with them. Someone eventually told him the woman was a countess from Germany, the Gräfin von Thingummy Somethingorother, a title as long as Hindenburg’s pimmel, in any case. Events went by in a colorful, noisy rush. He met the real Edie Sedgwick, who rearranged his kerchief. Sax was content. He was in the middle of things again, a party to the happening, a happening to the party. Still, he was ashamed of himself. It was supposed to be a quiet evening.
The next morning (with five minutes to spare before the noon bells rang), Sax crawled out of bed and drew a lukewarm bath. If it was hot, he would fall asleep in it. He despised himself. The carousing he could live with. That was the price of being an attractive, interesting person with such notorious friends. What brought out the real, hundred-proof self-loathing was what had happened afterward. He’d picked up a young Arab in front of an all-night tabac; the lad, prodigious in his endowments, applied himself to his host avant et arrière until well after dawn, then stole the contents of Sax’s wallet on his way out of the room.
Despite a detour to the bank, Sax arrived at the café precisely on time. He was freshly dressed in a trim bespoke suit from Millings in Great Pulteney Street. Unfortunately he was trembling and greenish in the face, and the circles around his eyes looked like cigar burns. A more obvious hangover would have been hard to effect. Sax sat at a table on the sidewalk, placed several of the brand-new silver ten-franc pieces on the table to keep the service brisk, ordered a glass of tea, and begged a cigarette from the waiter. Business attended to, he sat and smoked and brooded on his own shortcomings with such concentration that he was startled to discover a man standing at the other side of his table. Sax rose.
“You look just like that actor,” the man said. He was broader than Sax, and shorter, with brief, iron-colored hair. The man’s suit was double-breasted, cut in the postwar style, the color of river water. Brown shoes. Trilby hat. He wore a cream cashmere scarf around his thick neck. The overall effect, Sax thought, was part gangster, part bank teller. In other words, he looked like a man who had spent time in prison.
“Thank you,” said Sax, entirely uninterested in which actor. He wanted to be ill on the sidewalk. Must resist that, if only for professional reasons. “Asmodeus Saxon-Tang,” he added, and held out his hand.
“You’ll pardon me if I identify myself only by my Christian name,” the man said. “Jean-Marc. I feel like I’m back in the Resistance, but there it is. Discretion is of the uttermost importance.”
Jean-Marc ordered a glass of wine and smoked foul SNTA cigarettes from Algeria. He said he had become addicted to them during his time there. He did not say what he had done in Algeria, besides smoke. There was little small talk in him.
“Allow me to describe the property first,” Jean-Marc said. “Property is my business in some ways. The château is built directly on the river Loire. There is a tunnel beneath the walls for boats, built in the nineteenth century. In this way, one can enter the château from the water. It makes a mockery of the fortifications, naturally. There is a gravel carriage path up to the front of the property, and a dirt track that leads along the river’s edge, interrupted by the structure itself.”
Warming to the subject, Jean-Marc began to diagram the house with his fingertip on the tabletop, an incomprehensible mass of strokes.
“It’s a bit like Château de Chenonceau, but the place doesn’t extend out into the water. Or Montreuil-Bellay, if you know it. A cross between the two. Medieval structure with Renaissance improvements. Riddled with secret passages and hidden rooms and tunnels. The château is built on three levels, exclusive of the cellars and attics. The main entrance is in the center, salons on either hand, dining and music rooms behind, kitchens beneath. Upstairs the usual bedrooms, parlors, suites, and so forth.”
“Monsieur,” Sax interrupted. “You describe the place as if we were planning a . . . What is the word. Christ. Un vol qualifié, if I have that right. A burglary.” Sax didn’t like the sound of this. He needed to know the prize before he learned the obstacles.
Jean-Marc broke off a small piece of a laugh and chewed on it. “How can I describe what is inside the place if you cannot imagine the place?” he asked.
“I am not sure you should describe what is inside.”
“Very well. You know it’s most valuable; I’ll skip to the meat of the matter. The property is owned—”
“By a lady of indeterminate age, Madame Magnat-l’Étrange. She is ill. She is intestate. I remember,” Sax interrupted.
Jean-Marc raised his glass. “My apologies. You are not the first I have approached. The speech has become a habit. You remain interested?”
“Strictly for conversational purposes.”
“Naturally. Madame Magnat-l’Étrange is a formidable character, by the way. Erase from your mind any image of an ancient, trembling skeleton in a bath chair. She is a mystery.”
“In what way?” Sax asked, and flagged a glass of beer from the waiter.
Jean-Marc rubbed his hands together as if to start a fire. “There’s no record of her existence.”
“Pardon?”
Jean-Marc tapped the tip of his own nose. “I have some interest in real estate, as I say. It’s all a matter of documents. There isn’t a patch of earth in all of Europe that isn’t carpeted with documents. Every bureaucrat has his little rubber stamp in the desk drawer next to the scissors and string and the gift for his mistress. He puts the little stamp on a document in the morning. He goes to lunch. He puts another little stamp on another document in the afternoon. Millions of bureaucrats for a thousand years have been doing this. And me? To get my feet on a single patch of honest dirt, I must first dig through a layer of documents as deep as oak leaves in the forest.”
Jean-Marc finished his wine and wagged the glass for a refill. Sax sipped his beer and tried not to look as interested as he was.
“Oak leaves,” Jean-Marc said again. “I was looking into the potential of just such a patch of ground two years ago for a little project near to my heart, and in the course of my investigations I noticed there was a lack of paperwork associated with the land across the river. By which I mean, not a single document had been filed in regards to Château Magnat-l’Étrange—although that is not its formal name—in over one hundred and thirty-five years.”
Jean-Marc pronounced thirty with an initial F, an accent Sax associated with Paris. Local boy, then. “The family hired solicitors,” Sax said. “They retreated behind a legal curtain for reasons of their own. Incorporated.”
Jean-Marc shook his head. “You’re not understanding me. When I say nothing, I mean that they have opened no permits to build, asked no permissions. Installed no gas. No water, wiring, or telephone. The taxes on the place are paid automatically by a blind trust, at a rate fixed in the year 1812. How can this be? What happened to the socialist government with all its”—here he made a swirling motion with his hands—“its redistribution of wealth? The twentieth century has frowned on entitlement, monsieur. How has she escaped it?”
“In the same manner her ancestors did, presumably,” Sax replied. “Kept her head down, left the place unimproved. It’s probably listed as a ruin in the local government’s books by now.”
“I said no records whatsoever, did I not?” Jean-Mark said curtly. “Two years, I searched. Listen to me. You must. There were no births, no deaths, no marriages. There has only been one name on the deeds to that château in all this time, never changing hands.”
“Surely you’re not saying this Magnat-l’Étrange woman is one
hundred thirty-five years old?”
“Of course not. I’m saying she died a century ago, or more. And since then, certain persons have been . . . We have the same word in French, it’s borrowed from the English. Squatters. Squatters illégaux. I suspect a local family discovered the original Madame Magnat-l’Étrange dead, or killed her, when they learned she was alone, and since then they have been living by cunning on the value of the property, perhaps selling pieces from it now and then for cash: bottles from the cellar, furniture, and so forth. For seven generations, they’ve been at it.”
“Incredible,” Sax said, meaning ridiculous. Surely the man didn’t believe this himself?
“Yes, incredible,” Jean-Marc said. He was caught up now, breathless with his enthusiasm. “I suspect the servants, myself. Their families. They found the madam of the house dead, they realized the next owner of the property would bring his own servants, and so they hid the tragic event. And with all the wars and chaos in Europe since then, they got away with it. Until now.”
“So what is your idea? Purchase the property by some kind of law of adverse possession?”
“No, that’s what these squatters have done. All statutes long since expired. They may very well be the legal owners now, in the strictest sense of the idea. But they can’t make any noise about it, or God only knows what sort of tax bill they could end up with. And the property is unimproved since a hundred years! It will be condemned.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“We walk in and take everything.”
II
There was genius in it, Sax had to admit. Gander sat beside him in the back of the prewar touring car, smelling of armpits and cologne in his old furniture-moving clobber of cloth cap, breeches, waistcoat, and shirtsleeves. He looked like something from D. H. Lawrence. Sax was wearing an army surplus coverall in denim and a shapeless Derby hat. Jean-Marc sat in the jump seat with his back to the engine, facing Sax. He was dressed in a much better suit than the one he’d worn in Paris, gray mohair with a seal topcoat, kid gloves on his blunt fingers, a silvery gray Eden hat resting on his knees. The bank teller look was gone, the gangster predominant; of prison, there was no indication. He appeared prosperous and unreliable. They all smoked continuously.
