Paid and Loving Eyes l-16

by Jonathan Gash

  Gerald and Lilian Sweet, of Glasgow. Travel concessionaires. I listened, prattled, watched the scenery drift by. Marimee would have been proud of the three of us. Not a word passed our lips about the mission we were all on.

  We stopped for nosh twenty kilometres short of the capital. I grinned, said I’d stretch my legs. As Gerald locked the motor with meticulous precision, Lilian took me in properly for the first time.

  “Are you short, hen?”

  “Had my stuff nicked, love. Pickpockets.” Stick to the pattern. Plenty of traffic about now, people have directional microphones these days. I could hear Marimee bark orders.

  “We’ll stand you a bite, won’t we, Gerald?”

  “Oh, aye.” He didn’t seem keen, though. Maybe Marimee checked their expenses. Lilian got her dander up and he surrendered. We went in this Disney-Gothic self-service for the loos. I was first out, and got collared by a flaxen-haired aggropath. He slammed me against the wall. My breath went shoosh! It was the sports-car maniac who’d bawled Gerald out on the road.

  “What’s the game?” he said, through gritted teeth as they used to say in boys’ comics.

  “Game?” I gasped, going puce. “Let me breathe for Christ’s sake! I wasn’t even driving!” Bog-eyed, I tried to point into the self-service. Let him throttle Gerald or Lilian. But not me.

  “Drop your two friends. Wait by my Alfa. Thirty minutes!”

  “Right! Right!” Quite mad.

  “An’ if you don’t…” His eyes were so near, so pale, watery yet clear. The opposition hired madmen. You humour madmen, then scarper. I tried to nod, managed a weak smile.

  “Kee!” The delectable blonde bird slipped up, nudged him.

  And they were gone, into a murky-lit grotto place with slot machines and winking screens. I went jauntily towards my own couple, smiling at the prospect of grub looming. Henceforth, I would stick to the Sweets like glue. That Marimee should have told me there’d be dastardly foes on route. Typical. Always half a story. No wonder Gerald Sweet was ultra-cautious.

  “Let’s see what sort of food they have, hen!” Lilian led the way in. “I hope they have a nice hot pasty!”

  Love flooded my heart for the dear beautiful woman. A pasty! She knew my desperate need. I caught her eye in the mirrors. She coloured slightly, but it may only have been the steam from the cooking. Gerald was anxiously checking his pockets, craning to see his motor wasn’t stolen. Lilian laughed self-consciously.

  “Gerald’s a real worrier, Lovejoy!” she told me. “Up all night phoning home to see the… the business hasn’t folded while we’re away!” Good. She was careful too.

  I cleared my throat. “Really,” I said. Then as Gerald turned at my tone, “Nothing wrong with being careful, is there?”

  “No, Lovejoy,” he agreed, and for half an hour gave me a lecture on how easy it was to get caught out in business. I noshed like a trooper, listening with half an ear. He was becoming more like Marimee every second. I promised to owe them the cost of the meal, got their phone number and address. They had it ready, to my surprise. Real pros, excellent cover.

  As soon as we hit the road, I showed true military-style initiative. I deflected us down a road soon after leaving the service station. We shook off the two gorgeous loons in their Alfa Romeo. I was so thrilled.

  The hotel was quite small, on the southern outskirts of Paris. I liked it, but maybe it was the relief of being back in a town, free of that terrible pretty countryside everywhere. There was a garden, a fountain thing, lights and tables outside. I’ve a theory that it’s the Continent’s weather that permits folk to be so laid back. In East Anglia you could never put awning umbrellas out, scatter romantic candlelit tables round an ornamental grove unless the weather gods freak out into a spell of sun. You’ve only to step outside for it to teem down.

  They said I should stay for the evening meal. Then, as Gerald was about to start on his phone marathon, Lilian suggested they lend me some money. They were only sticking to the pattern laid down by Marimee but I felt really touched. I accepted, with great anxiety and swapping of bank-account guarantors, and got a small room in the garret. A lot cheaper than our own hotels, I was astonished to learn.

  Supper, Gerald finally wedded himself to the phone, and I was left with Lilian. It was getting on for ten o’clock. It crossed my mind to tell her how I’d cunningly outwitted the opposition back at the pit stop but thought better of it. Was I expected to chat about everything that happened? Probably not.

  “He’ll be telephoning now until midnight,” Lilian said.

  She looked bonny. No specs now, earrings, a lace shawl that should have been Edwardian but was disappointingly repro. We were in the garden, looking down into the rock pool. Only three other couples remained, talking softly.

  “He works hard,” I said. I meant it as praise.

  “Och, nobody more than Gerald!”

  Well, I suppose Marimee was giving orders for tomorrow. Was the silver lift to be done in Paris, then? Or was that tale now to be discarded, as the cover story it undoubtedly was? I felt things were imminent, brewing up to action. Maybe Gerald had better be warned about the two aggressive enemy.

  “Look, love.” I glanced about. Any of these diners could be the opposition. “This is a bit public.”

  “Public?” She seemed to colour slightly, but I couldn’t really tell in the low glim. “What…?”

  “They’ll hear.” Through the lounge window Gerald was visible, nodding, reporting in, taking notes. “Even from inside the bar.”

  She looked towards the hotel, seemed a little breathless. “It’s risky, Lovejoy. I’m not sure if I know what —”

  “My room,” I suggested quietly. It was quite logical after all, the one place that had not been prearranged. They’d had difficulty finding me a nook.

  “Oh, Lovejoy.” She was worried, glancing at the building, the other diners, two waiters. “I’ve never… I mean, what if Gerald—?”

  Typical woman. A bloke’s got to take charge some time, hasn’t he? I had my arm through hers.

  “We’ve got time before Gerald’s done, love. It’ll be safe.”

  Which was how we entered my small single-bedded room together, in an ostentatiously non-clandestine way that probably announced skulduggery louder than a tannoy. Inside as I closed the door, she paused.

  “Lovejoy.” She was all quiet. I bent my head to hear. Very sensible in the circumstances. In those spy pictures a transmitting bug’s small as a farthing. The hotel could be riddled.

  “Yes, love?”

  “I… I don’t do this sort of thing.”

  What sort of thing? “I don’t either,” I whispered encouragingly. “We’re in this together, love. I’m discretion itself.” I decided to prove it. “I had a tussle with that blond motorist at the service station. I saw him off.” Well, it was nearly the way it happened.

  “You did, hen?” Her eyes grew even larger. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Gerald isn’t really very… ” More colour. “Well, physical, Lovejoy.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” I glowed in her admiration. Not much comes my way, so I have to glow where I can. “I can cope, love.”

  “Lovejoy.” Quieter still. I was stooped over her now, both of us standing there. We hadn’t yet put on the light. “I’m not quite as young as I was. I’d hate to disappoint you.”

  It’s one of my observations that women are more practical than us. But that only holds true for ninety-nine per cent of the time. Once in a hundred, their minds go aslant. They talk tangents. Here we were, spies doing our surreptitious best, and she starts on about age. Women’s tangents mostly concern numbers, I find. Years, hours, fractions of a penny for mandarin oranges, when little Aurora was actually born to the split second. Daft.

  “It’s the way I want it, love,” I whispered, all reassuring. “You’re exactly right.”

  “Oh, darling.” Her shawl fell as she put her arms round me. It’s not often my mouth gets taken by surprise, but this time it was
startled. Her breast was beautiful, though I stabbed myself on a brooch that made me yelp. Just shows how thoughtless modern women are. Edwardian ladies had amber beads to cap the points of their brooch pins, so that marauding mitts of amorous gentlemen didn’t get transfixed in a ration of passion—cunning, this, because a dot of blood on a white-gloved finger when reentering the ballroom meant suicides in the regiment.

  “Shhh!” she said, breathless still. I joined in the breathlessness as we made the bed and still I hadn’t managed to reveal my doubts about Colonel Marimee’s mission.

  “Dwoorlink,” I managed, as nature started to decide the sequence of events.

  “No, Lovejoy. Please. Say nothing…”

  I did as I was told. It’s my usual way. Sometimes it works out for the best, as now. She was lovely. And it’s any port in a storm, isn’t it.

  Love never comes without problems, but sometimes they come in a way that shows you’ve had no right to stay thinking. I mean,

  I ought to have said how attractive she was, this lovely woman. Maybe, it seemed to me in the instant before ecstasy engulfed the universe, I should have admitted I wasn’t much, just a bum wondering what the hell everything was all about, give her the option to pull her dress on and light out leaving me, as it were, standing. But I obeyed, said nothing, learned nil, and managed only bliss. If anybody from the opposition was actually listening, we fooled them. She was superb.

  An hour later I took her to her door, two floors down. She unlocked it. Gerald wasn’t in yet. She pulled me in, just far enough for a parting snog before shoving me gently away.

  “Will I see you again, Lovejoy?”

  “Eh?” Blank for a second, but she was right to stay in character. We were travellers with the hotel hots. “I couldn’t go on without that, love.” It was easier to say than usual. Her eyes filled. “It’s true, Lilian. You were magic.”

  We whispered a few more phrases, enough to convince any eavesdropper, then I stepped reluctantly into the corridor as somebody came upstairs.

  And I glimpsed something round Lilian’s neck that made my blood run cold. But I managed to keep smiling, nodding goodnight, as she put the door to and I went for a well-earned kip.

  God knows how I’d failed to notice it. Heat of the moment, I suppose. Only a small gold medallion, with a monogram. Its initials, SAPAR, round the periphery, struck into my brain and set my two lonely nerve cells clanging like clappers in a bell. Stolen Art and Purloined Antiques Rescue.

  But quite the most frightening was a single gold letter stencilled in the centre, larger than the others Letter H. Lying on my crumpled bed, I found myself shivering like in a malarial rigor, except this was much, much worse. I wondered for the first time who Lilian and Gerald really were. And the gorgeous golden maniacs in the posh racer. The world had unglued, to clatter all about me. Marimee would have me shot twice a day for a week. Paul, Almira, Troude, Monique, were on a dead loser. And me? I was in the worst-ever trouble of all.

  H stands for Hunter.

  Time to run.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  « ^ »

  About sexual emblems.

  They have a fascinating history. The antiques that have filtered down to us oftener than not go unnoticed. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that sexual antiques get shunned. Women, as with everything else on earth, hold the key.

  In every age, every fashion, sexual artefacts flourished. They do now, except we won’t admit it. My favourites are nipple jewels. Not merely studs in the nipple’s eye, but lovely pendants with question-mark supports for pierced nipples. All the rage late in Victoria’s reign, the ancient world’s fashion came round again. Breast lassies, some with erotic tails of hair, tiny whips, even fine blades, offered all kinds of fetishes for the woman who preferred to mount her own performance, so to speak. Merkins were natural, in an age of wigs, though very few survive. These flattish wigs made for the pubis —smallpox tended to denude your genital hair—mostly human hair in kid leather, were desirable enhancers. They came adorned with every kind of jewellery, including gold stitchery. Belly jewels, implanted precious stones actually surfacing through the skin, spectacular ornaments for the genitalia, they’ve all had their day.

  Because more boy babes died than girls in those past days, women outnumbered us. Superstitions ran rife about conception, a must for a woman to hold up her head. The more she produced, the better. With ineffable logic, they decided that the greater the arousal, the more certain the chance of fruition. They invented with ingenuity and skill. They called in seductive lady helpers of great beauty, who’d excite to passion—using any devices they could think up—then escape from between as husband and wife came together, to coin a phrase, with an almost audible clang. Hence the toy phalluses, images, statuettes, paintings, erotic prints from the Far East, precious gems (of course of the right birthstone significance, because you wouldn’t want your rival to benefit simply because you’d used emerald instead of ruby, right?). I’ve even seen one locket, made for some Victorian lady, which contained the beautifully carved miniature male genitalia of sapphire on one leaf, and the female sculpted of amethyst on the other. Conjures up the charming image of a demure lady praying in church, fingering her locket, which, being firmly closed, made the male and female jewels inside the locket unite in the most intimate manner. Presumably she was born in February, her lover in September—and note that astrological stones aren’t quite those of the calendar months. Semiprecious stones became a means of communication. Diamond, emerald, amethyst and ruby look rather rum in a linear gold mount, but they spell DEAR to the observant swain. I’ve seen a fairly modern platinum-mounted one of feldspar, a gap, then chrysoberyl, then kunzite—the gap standing for “unknown’. Incidentally, if you see kunzite—violet pink of different colour depths as you rotate it—in a brooch for its name, then the gem’s really not a genuine antique, for G.F. Kunz was an American at the end of Victoria’s reign…

  Where was I? The gold-lettered pendant on Lilian’s gold chain. Husbands give their ladies depictive jewellery showing occupations. Gerald was a SAPAR man. There’s only two grades in SAPAR’s organization: A for the admin, legal, research lot; H for the self-effacing, but ruthless, hunters.

  Escaping, that’s where I was. On the run from H for Hunter Gerald, the clever swine.

  First, nick a motor. Fifth car I tried, I got in, started up with ease. Reasonably modern, so it wouldn’t conk out and embarrass me. Hot-wiring a motor at a somnolent night town’s traffic lights attracts attention.

  Knowing what theft is exactly, is Man’s dilemma. I thought this abstruse quandary as I guided my new possession from the hotel car park and zoomed back the way we’d come.

  Stealing a car, possibly to save my life, was not theological or moral theft. The Church teaches that stealing bread to save your starving children isn’t. As the lights on the south-east road lit my reflection in the windscreen, I worried in case the Church didn’t teach any such thing. If it doesn’t, it ought. Naturally I felt sorry for the lady whose dawn would be clouded by her missing Peugeot, but I didn’t choose to be here, driving wrong-handed into gathering night rain. Everything simply wasn’t my fault. She looked quite smart, did Madame Jeanne Deheque in her photo snap, with her deliberate hair and long eyelashes. No credit cards, maps, nothing to help a stray escaper, the thoughtless cow. Typical woman.

  The memory of the service station on the main road was fresh in my mind. No passport, no knowing where I could find refuge. But I was pretty sure I could find the town, the car park, the cafe where Marimee had grilled me. From there, it would be easy to trek back to Almira’s house and the chalet by the lake. Thence filch my passport, and home. No speeding—French cops are death to dashers. I was the sedate motorist. Enough petrol to last a lifetime. I settled down to a steady night drive.

  Gerald had been pretty cool, all right. His cover, a travel agent looking for time-share accommodation, bonny homely wife along picking up the odd antique for the business premises. N
o wonder he spent hours on the phone. No wonder they exchanged glances when their casual hitchhiker knew an Astley Cooper chair and all of its off-key names. But a SAPAR hunter? Gulp.

  The Mounties get their man. Sherlock Holmes wins out. In antiques scammery, the SAPAR hunter’s the one to avoid. Whispers tell how two or three of them—there’s only ten, would you believe—have actually killed thieves who proved reluctant to disgorge the booty, before politely restoring the stolen antique to its grateful legitimate owners.

  Nowadays, antiques are the big—read mega-galactic—new currency. Drugs and arms sales are still joint leaders, but only just. Antique fraud is closing fast on the rails. Greed is powered by everybody—terrorists, politicians, Customs and Excise, Inland Revenue taxmen, governments, international auction houses, you, me. Most of all, though, it’s the absence of honesty. We all have eyes to love the delectable antiques they see, but they’re paid eyes. Paid but loving. And that means hired, because money cancels love. We pretend it can’t, but it does.

  Since every antique worth the name’s on the hit list, the world clearly needs seekers after stolen antiques. Scotland Yard’s Fine Art and Antiques Squad is largely impotent. Oh, statistics emerge now and then, to claim that three per cent of stolen antiques get recovered, but who knows? Answer: nobody. Even I get blamed for the world’s pandemic of antiques theft, for God’s sake. That’s really scraping the barrel for the lees of logic. You want the truth? Great Britain alone has 16,000 lovely Anglican churches—and lets one get battered, robbed, pillaged, every four hours! It can’t be me alone, right? You see, crime pays. Less than twenty per cent of our police forces have art and antiques fraud squads, so what chance has holiness? (Incidentally, that “squads” is a laugh—they’re mostly one bloke each in a dusty nook; Scotland Yard’s entire mob is two.)

  People place some reliance (note how carefully I worded that?) on the Art Loss Register. Others swear by LaserNet. I swear at both. You pay a fee to see if anybody’s reported as stolen that antique you want to buy. They collect records of antique thefts. Auction houses joke along with their Thesaurus system. Why joke? Well, you just try matching any ten catalogue descriptions with the objects they purport to describe, and you’ll finish up in tears of laughter, or worse. It’s hit or miss. Like the Council for the Prevention of Art Theft, they’re new and blundersome losers against impossible odds.