Ten Word Game

by Jonathan Gash

  He looked stricken, led me to join the lady and the head geezer and explained my query, politely switching to English.

  “I’m afraid I am just about to buy them,” the lady said. “Are you a collector? My husband works at the Hague, and I am decorating our entrance hall. We loved Indonesia. Don’t you think they will look absolutely superb?”

  “Only one is genuine, lady.”

  The world stopped. She glanced at the salesmen, back to me, the credit cards, cheque book, her elegant fountain pen.

  “One? But I am persuaded…”

  The lead man smiled with disdain. Nobody can show disdain like a con man in pursuit of money.

  “I promise you, sir, we have these items authenticated by the best international experts. Genuine provenance – ”

  Provenance is the paper trail proving where an antique comes from, legitimising every step of its journey from olden days into the modern world. Once, provenance was taken for granted. Now, it has become the biggest factor in authenticating an antique ever since forgeries became the modern epidemic. Provenance is a simple thing, but hard to establish. If you have your great-grandmother’s oil portrait showing her wearing her Wedgwood gold-mounted cameo necklace, made unique by her addition of a briolette (a drop-shaped gemstone covered with triangular facets for brilliance, and often added as a pendant), then antique auctioneers will fight at your door for the privilege of handling the sale. It would be virtually cast-iron provenance. Otherwise you’d need documents, bills of sales, perhaps even early letters describing your necklace, all to attest its authencity. Without it, the money you’ll make falls like a stone.

  The lady was listening to the salesman. She started to write the cheque. I ahemed.

  “Forged documents are everywhere these days, lady.”

  “We do not use unattested documentation,” he said frostily. I felt somebody take my elbow. They were going to evict me.

  “Don’t, missus,” I said to the lady. “The middle one’s genuinely old. The others aren’t.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s the truth. I’ll prove it.”

  She pursed her lips, judging the bronzes. “How?”

  That stopped me. I could prove it to myself, easy. But how could I tell these strangers I was a divvy? Most dealers think divvies are a myth, until they meet one. The middle bronze was already making me feel decidedly queer. I wondered if the odd figures and the weird geometrical designs made it worse. I’ve heard that ancient Egyptian tomb drawings send lots of people dizzy. Sweat was on my forehead and my knees were starting to go. Soon I’d keel over.

  “Bring an industrial chemist to take samples. Hire him. The middle one will have the right trace elements of ancient Indonesian bronzes. The other two will give modern readings.”

  “Out!” In a babble of Dutch I was ejected into the street. The door slammed behind me, its buzzer frantic.

  So much for honesty. No follow-person seemed to be hanging about, and no Mr Moses Duploy. So much for loyalty, and I was paying him a fortune in hiring fees – well, promising him, which was nearly almost virtually practically the same thing. It had been a mistake to speak to the lady. Try to help someone, see what happens.

  Darting from doorway to doorway like a cartoon cat, I made it to the corner – and bumped into the elegant lady.

  “Do come,” she said, smiling. “My car is at the end of the straat.”

  Dutch folk are always a yard taller. She however was tastefully kitted out, exuding wealth.

  “Er, look, lady,” I stammered. “I’m kind of busy. I have an appointment.”

  “No. Thank you. May I introduce myself? I am Inga Van Rijn. I own hotels. My husband is a diplomat. I ought to at least give you a lift, in return.”

  “Well…” Not a bad idea. Who’d think of looking for me in a posh car? “Thank you.”

  Walking with such a stylish woman, I felt so proud. She moved with grace, like all women, but she was specially wafty, never making way for anyone else. Even street hooligans and riff-raff edged out of her path. Traffic stopped to let her go even when the lights weren’t in her favour. Women have that effect. I sailed along, basking in her reflection. I wish this happened more often.

  A Bentley stood at the intersection, a uniformed driver leaping out to open the door. She beckoned me in as I hesitated. I joined her, and we drove off.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “To the, er… you know the railway station, please?”

  She told the driver in Dutch, and we sat back in luxury.

  “You knew the genuine one,” she said.

  “Yes.” No harm in admitting it to Mrs Van Rijn. I’d never see her again.

  “Divvy, is it not?”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were flecked with a sort of gold in the iris, her pupils the blackest on earth. I always like to think how I’d paint a woman’s face. The right light is vital.

  “It is a gift, something born within, is it not?”

  “Yes.” I’d have to use oblique lighting, cast from her left side. Painting a lady’s portrait by candlelight was “corny”, Tom Keating the great forger used to tell me, but I think he was wrong. Some faces scream out for a muted golden glow. This lady’s features were made for it.

  “You study my face?”

  “Yes, Mrs Van Rijn. It’s just that … Hang on. Your name. Are you related to…?”

  “Rembrandt Van Rijn? You guessed!” She laughed and clapped her hands softly. She wore genuine Berlin lace gloves, older than many of the streets. “Yes! He was my husband’s ancestor.”

  It took six deep breaths to say it. “I’m honoured, Mrs Van Rijn.”

  “Artists are always overcome,” she said. Her smile dazzled. “I am actually a descendant of another artist, a minor Impressionist, I’m afraid. You must be a portraitist yourself?”

  “Yes, when I’m…” What, free? Not being hunted? Not wanted for robbery, theft, forgery, by New Scotland Yard and David Buddy the bounty hunter? “When I’m home.”

  “You can paint me,” she suggested, “when you get back.”

  The massive saloon car had stopped. We were on the wharf, alongside a massive white ship. It was the Melissa. I looked at Mrs Van Rijn. She was smiling with a fondness that would normally have melted my heart. She made a sign. The door opened.

  “Greetings!” cried Mr Moses Duploy. He was wriggling in ecstasy, like a hound obeying orders. “Just in times! Sailings on seventeen hour!”

  Stupidly I looked from him to Mrs Van Rijn. If I didn’t know different, she seemed rather sad. I didn’t move for a second, then worked it out. Mr Moses Duploy had shoved me into the shop where Mrs Van Rijn and the three bronzes were.

  “You?” I said to him.

  He fell about laughing. It was a pantomime of a laugh. “Ho, ho, ho,” he went, literally holding his sides. “Yes yes! Follow-person is Mr Moses Duploy himself!”

  “Good luck, Lovejoy,” the lady said, still with that look of faint sorrow, but this time I wasn’t taken in.

  “With what?”

  “St Petersburg. I shall be thinking of you.”

  The words fell on me like hammer blows. The only people within earshot were Mr Moses, the driver, Mrs Van Rijn, and myself. I looked up at the rail. There was Lady Vee and June Milestone at their balcony, smiling and tapping their wrist watches as if to say hurry, hurry.

  I got out my I.D. plastic and showed it to the Ghurka on gangway duty. He waved me through, and I climbed the gangplank. Historians now say that, in the two-and-a-half centuries of sea-faring piracy, and despite all the stories about walking the plank, only one captive ever suffered that terrible punishment.

  Make that two.

  * * *

  On the good ship Melissa you could eat and drink all day. Worn out by Dutch treachery, I went up to the Lido Deck where the vast cafeteria called the Conservatory offered eternal tea, coffee and nosh. I sat at table looking out as the ship sailed from Amsterdam. I thought of robberies I had known and s
ome I admired.

  Fashions change (otherwise they wouldn’t be fashions, right?). Nothing has altered as much as theft. Think of it. If you wanted to nick a king’s ransom and get away, you’d not filch your neighbour’s motor. You’d not raid the nearest railway station’s ticket office or hot-wire the SAS’s wages van. You’d do what the really big thieves do these days – you’d steal stocks and shares, from within. Or you’d get yourself appointed Chief Executive Officer of some multinational corporation and fiddle away until, finally unmasked, you’d glide away in your valuable yacht to live the life of Riley. It’s the modern way, to steal so much money you could buy the best lawyers, plus the law, and get away scotage free.

  Think of it: exactly how many city gents ever serve time? Hardly any. And how much do they get away with? Millions, and all the marshmallows they can eat in their megabuck complexes in Bahamian suntraps, while the innocent investors languish in poverty. The TV news is full of them. Make no mistake: catching them is like knitting fog. Can’t be done. And if you somehow manage to find them, they’re still somehow immune from Law. Watch any news, and you’ll see.

  The trouble is, theft on such a scale is the privilege of those who dwell in grand offices and share titles like Vice-President or C.E.O. and have secretaries. It’s not for the likes of you or me. Like, Alfred Taubman, a Sotheby’s boss, got done for a $290 million price-fixing scam which almost ruined the world’s entire art/antiques system. The guilty bloke got gaoled for a year and a day. See? The posher you are, the less your punishment. I know pals who got longer terms of imprisonment for eating with their elbows on the table.

  So here we were, assembled to pull off a great scam, with no giant firm to smokescreen our sinister doings. Suppose it was just you and me up against it, and we were broke. What then?

  Here’s a fact: the easiest objects to steal are antiques. I include all art works. For a start, they are everywhere – country houses, museums, galleries, town halls, government offices, shops, auction houses, schools and old universities. Another fact: you can inspect most of them quite legitimately. In other words, you can suss the security, literally check the lie of the land exactly as I’d had my mate Skeggie suss out the Marquis of Gotham’s stately home before me and Belle did our stuff that landed me in this mess.

  A third vital point: the full value of the items is known to the whole wide world. Ask at your public library, and they’ll tell you quite openly, “Yes, madam, the cost of Lord Nerk’s silver collection is 13.9 millions, based on the pro-estimate of 2016. Do you want photographs? Unfortunately, the book is on loan this week, but next Friday…” and so on. Your only anxiety is that the other borrower might be some wicked thief nurturing the same idea as you. See what I mean?

  Now, the antiques trade has a series of maxims about stealing antiques/art. One goes like this: Nine-tenths of all stolen art/antiques that get returned are fakes, false, replicates, because the stolen originals don’t come back. The most famous is the Mona Lisa, of course, nicked before the Great War, later found in a railway Lost Property Office. The suspicion lingers yet: is the Louvre’s Mona Lisa the original? Legend says not.

  Another maxim: The greatest stimulus to art/antiques forgery is the theft of some famous antique. So a stolen Old Master will be copied a hundred times the instant the news breaks, and the replicas sold before the day’s out. Like, the Mona Lisa was copied and the fakes secretly sold to millionaire art collectors umpteen times – people say nine, others thirteen – before the “original” came to light and returned in triumph from Italy.

  Theft spawns illicit money. Rightly or wrongly, money grows, flows and shows when antiques are nicked, but you have to be careful and steal only the right thing. The Enigma code machine is an example of filching the wrongest thing imaginable. This encryption device was invented by several countries, including Germany, for use in World War Two. Their proto-Enigma was owffed by brave Poles and smuggled to London, saving countless lives. There are two Enigma machines. One was stolen from Bletchley Park and a ransom demanded. It was actually returned intact, and they say not a groat was paid over. The warning here is, don’t steal something of national importance unless you’ve got nerves of steel – and somebody to sell it to. This last point is vital, because where is the multitude of rich collectors who’d really want an Enigma machine? Nowhere.

  But where is the multitude of rich collectors who’d want a priceless Old Master? Answer: everywhere. They’re in London, New York clubs, in presidential mansions, in the World’s List of Moneyed Mavens. Immediately Rubens’ missing masterpiece The Massacre of the Innocents came to light, it became a candidate for greed of a different kind than the actual purchaser’s lust. An Austrian monastery had thought their old oil painting was by Jan van den Hoecke and worth a meagre ten million, until Sotheby’s decided it wasn’t quite so trivial and bragged it was Rubens at his 1610 best. I was at the auction, breaking my heart when it went to an undeserving billionaire.

  In the Top Ten paintings – scored by money, not merit – Picasso leads currently with four; Van Gogh has three, Cézanne one, Renoir one, and now that Rubens has joined this pricy elite. The whereabouts of all ten is precisely known. That means the identity of the guards, curators, visitors, the manufacturers of the electronic CCTV and alarm systems is instantly traceable. And that means crooks know everything too. If the paintings slumber in a gallery or museum, they can be visited and the invigilators sussed, just as Skeggie did for me before I robbed the Marquis’s humble abode. If a new owner selfishly gloats over his Old Master in some remote mountain castle or a Home Counties lair, ask yourself what on earth is Who’s Who published for? And it’s off to the public library again. They’re so helpful, when you’re planning anything from fraud to hijacking a new cruise liner.

  Rich honest people – if there are such – believe that thieves are thick idiots with the insight of a yak. Wrong, because robbers are often experts in chronbiology. Example: Theft has certain inflexible rules. A distinguished doctor at the Royal Society of Medicine in 2002 proved the human biological clock doesn’t adapt to night-shift work. Proof? Night dangers include Chernobyl’s nuclear catastrophe, Three Mile Island, the Exxon Valdez calamity, Apollo 13’s tribulations – all of which happened in the lantern hours. The biological trough occurs almost exactly at 3.30 a.m., which is when your John Constable heirloom will vanish.

  I don’t mean it’s easy to rob anyone of anything. Famous paintings are simply money in the bank, because everybody knows you can’t get a Turner oil for a few cents, not any more. And what’s easier to carry home in the dark hours than a picture sliced out of its frame and concealed round your middle with a string? Sometimes I think it’s strange that thieves don’t steal more successfully more often. Except thieves can go wrong.

  Like the couple of blokes who wanted to steal the wealth of a social club. They got a boat, crossed a lake, and hauled up the oxyacetylene gadget they’d purloined to cut open the clubhouse safe. After hours of hard labour they found that they’d absent-mindedly stolen a welding device instead, and had spent the whole night welding the steel safe more secure. Or like the Millennium Raiders, that famed London gang who tried to steal the giant Millennium Star, a dazzler on show in London’s ugly Dome. They’re supposed to have had ammonia sprays, smoke grenades, gas masks, sledge-hammers, body armour, scanners and other gadgets, and driven a great bulldozer thing inside to smash through to the Star and its attendant eleven blue diamonds. The police were everywhere, and took the prisoners to the Old Bailey.

  My point is this: the gang bought a farm, a speedboat – bobbing on the Thames to make a getaway – plus massive excavation gear, sundry fancy equipment. These things don’t come cheap. Robbery this grand needs multo blokes and training. Another antiques maxim is: You can always get enough backers to fund a heist. Secrecy is more uncertain, but if you plan a superb robbery and do your homework, you can get enough backers (wallets, the trade calls them) for your robbery in a fortnight, and that’s just in doz
y East Anglia. Imagine how quick it can be in the speedier areas of the kingdom.

  Manchester’s the fastest; they’ll fix up a robbery in a day. London comes second, with Glasgow and Leeds tying for joint third-quickest at about five days, though Glaswegians always want a deposit of a tenth of the expected moneys up front, and robbers don’t like leaving calling cards around town before pulling a job. And this, note, is to rob anywhere – Hallam House, Dublin’s art museums, or even your (that’s your) house.

  “Where’d you meet this lot, June?” I asked, still looking out of the window at the shifting seas and receding land. I saw her reflection in the glass. Her scent was the same. I’d known her so well, so I could be frank.

  “Hello.” I could tell she was smiling. “Whose limo was that?”

  “Mine,” I said rudely. “The coach was uncomfortable.”

  “And such a pretty lady!”

  “Whatever scam you’re on, it’s doomed, June. You know that.”

  “You don’t know the details.”

  The Conservatory was emptying now, folk drifting to prepare for dinner, the cinemas, casino, the vaudeville theatre. It seemed safe.

  “They don’t know we knew each other, right?”

  She was as bonny as before. She started to take out her gold cigarette case, then looked casually about and replaced it. We were on the wrong side of the ship, smoking only permitted on the port side. “I was the one who suggested you might be needed.”

  Might? I almost bleated it out. Might? I was abducted for a might, an if, or a maybe?

  “Look, June.” I felt insulted, and prepared to beg. “I’m in trouble back home. I was on the run. I’ll help you to pull a money scam, if you’ll drop me off somewhere. Okay?”

  “What money scam?”

  Infants do it all the time. Most women can still do it when they’re grown. It’s like their eyes wallop you across the bonce and send you dizzy. Her eyes met mine. I felt it. It isn’t passion, merely a sensation of another person’s eyes shafting into your skull and taking a quick shufti, checking round.