Ten Word Game (11 page)

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 dozy 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.

“You want one? I’ll offer you two, you’ll make a fortune.”

She sat back. “Go on, then.”

She wore a plain blue dress, with a Fair Isle cardigan in the thinnest wool. Her pearls were genuine, of course, earrings simple drop shapes. June Milestone always did scrub up well, as Cockneys joke, and look top cutlery. Her hair was different. I could remember when it had been sweat-soaked in a tent on an Oxford lawn – her lawn, of course, in the early morning. Her maid-servant brought us breakfast at half-seven. It had been raining, and it was our third-from-last encounter, but I’d forgotten all that, and I’m definitely never going to remember it.

“You’ve heard of the Vinland Map? Proved Vikings discovered the Americas before Columbus? Priceless, right?”

“Go on.” She was amused, doing that woman’s laugh-non-laugh that comes with the set.

“Yale University’s map, worth a mint. Well, I’ll do you one better. You could sell it.”

“Wasn’t it a forgery, though?”

“Course it was!”

I went over the facts. It was faked up by the Reverend (not quite so reverend) Joseph Fischer, a Jesuit from Austria who, mesmerised into forgery by political right-wingery in mid-1930s Germany, scrawled his Vinland Map to show it wasn’t slothful old Latins like Columbus but noble flaxen Aryans who discovered the Americas. Some folks claim Fischer was moved by nobler motives. Yeah, right. He used its “discovery” to add to his reputation as an exalted mediaeval scholar. Somehow, though, it came into dealers’ hands for less than US$4,000. They offered it to the British Museum in 1957, then a
charitable
Yank – the sort every antique dealer except me seems to know – bought it and gave it to Yale University. Sensation! Believers multiplied, and Bjarni Herjolfsson is famed in song and story for his A.D.985 landfall there. I don’t disbelieve in random intrepid Norsemen, or in Leif Eriksson who went touristing along in A.D.1002. I just disbelieve the map. The antiques trade calls such trifles
crappy-mappy
, and thinks them too good to be true. The trade’s right. Dealers make up comical poems.

“Fischer’s long gone,” I finished. “He used a
parchment
page from an old book, authentically 1440s or so, so it would test right under a microscope. Except the ink let him down. It contained some stuff called anatase, whatever that is, only in use since 1923.”

“And you?”

“I’d buy authentic parchment. But I’d have inks specially made, and work in a Class 100 laminar-flow laboratory. I’d invent a Portuguese navigator, pre-1300. Or an ancient Chinese bamboo book – they’re easier, and cheaper to get – and old Chinese inks, and depict the Californian coast as far as Oregon. You’ll have to find American buyers, just to shut the
international
press up. The media in USA would create mayhem,
saying China could claim Mexico to Vancouver as China’s first colony.”

“You’re a scream, Lovejoy.” She glanced about first, those eyes of hers, to check nobody was within earshot. “The second?”

“I’d fake Vicari, that modern painter. Money for jam, and the scam’d be dirt cheap. Cost a day’s wages, no more. Anybody could do it.”

“Are you joking?” She scanned the vast cafeteria, still wondering if she could get away with lighting a fag.

“He’s a modern artist, lives somewhere in Monte Carlo, probably owns the damned place by now. Charges the earth to paint your portrait, but only if you’re mega-famous, like kings, moguls, frightening dictators, untouchable gangsters.”

“And do what?”

“Paint what he would have painted. A collection of august royals, or some movie mighties, film stars.”

I was starting to get enthusiastic, the way ideas take hold when you’re on a roll.

“A load of fake Vicari paintings, and you’d pay
journalists
to talk them up as original?”

I remembered her smile like from yesterday, and found myself smiling back.

“I’d get some lads to nick the paintings in transit, then go to the mogul’s friends, movie studios, the royal house, the dictator’s hoods, whoever, and offer to rescue them unharmed, saving face all round and preventing scandal. Tah-tah-tah!” I made a fanfare of imagined success.

“Hasn’t that sort of thing been done?”

“Everything’s been done before, June.” I wanted to reach for her hand, but two of the ship’s officers were passing on their way to the Crystal Pool. Anyway, she probably still hated me, or she wouldn’t have landed
me in this mess.

“You always get one essential thing wrong, Lovejoy.”

“What?” I’d promised her an easy fortune.

“You forget, Lovejoy. We’re the good gang. The actual robbers, who we don’t yet know, are the
perpetrators
.”

“I only wanted to – ”

She rose, smiling hard. “That will do.” She moved away and gracefully joined the officers. One was the purser girl from Reception. Neither smiled my way.

It wasn’t too hopeless a meeting. I’d discovered a few things. First, I didn’t believe in her, or her good troupe. Who prepares a fake robbery to prevent one? June wasn’t just in it for the money alone. For
another
, I was expendable once we reached St Petersburg, but for some reason absolutely vital until then. And a third thing: she wasn’t the king wallet, the scam’s
principal
backer. Wealthy as she was, she was only along for some other reason, and that reason was probably me. I knew now I would have to die somewhere in Russia’s old capital city, once I’d served their task.