The Gondola Scam (20 page)

Well, with a reputation that formidable
against me, I'd have to fight fire with fire. And forgery is the only
skullduggery I know. Somebody had to knock on the door of the Palazzo
Malcontento. Old Ivan the Terrible had given me a good enough clue: The fancy
bloke from there had whisked Nancy away.

I thought. Right, you bastards. Here I
come.

The money I had left wasn't a fortune.
It'd have to do, though, because there wasn't all that much time. A sense of
urgency was coming on me.

By evening, I'd got a part-time job as
a kitchen helper washing up afternoons and evenings in a biggish nosh bar near
the docks, not far from a toolmaker's workshop I had my eye on. Day pay.

About a mile from the nosh bar I found
Signora Lamberti. She was one of those massive affable ladies who understand
every customer's need. To her, speech was a necessity, but only for purposes of
agreement.

"Is it quiet here?" I asked,
meaning were people of the district inclined to be nosy.

"
Certo
,” she bawled over the whistle of a passing train. "You
cannot even hear the station!"

''Molto
tranquillo
," I yelled in agreement, paying
her a day's advance for a tiny but clean room. She took down her vacancy sign
as I howled promises to fetch my nonexistent but voluminous luggage.

"At the signore's convenience!"
she shouted understandingly as a goods train rattled by. We smiled at the
fiction. Words are fine up to a point, her bustly attitude said, but don't let
them get in the way of money.

That was the easy bit. It took me two
whole days more to find the little piece of wood I needed. It was in a small
lumberyard, nothing more than a squat piece of sycamore with closer grain even
than usual, taken from some nineteenth-century furniture. None of those
distinct rays you sometimes see in sycamore wood, so I was happy. The driver in
the yard said I could have it for nothing. I told him ta, my warmth showing him
he'd done somebody a really good turn.

In case you don't know, sycamore's one
of the Acer genus. Like Mestre, it's a real pal. For a start it is a strong,
hard, pretty heavy wood. It can be artificially weathered by rotten crooks like
antique dealers to look much older than it actually is, if you know how (tell
you in a minute), and it stains up and polishes like an angel. The point of all
this is you can work it quickly and accurately and expect very little trouble
even if you're not expert. Its "comparative workability" is 3.0
(white pine, that corny old stuff you can carve practically with a bent pin, is
the basic 1.0).

You get the idea. Sycamore is faker's
wood. The wood of the forger.

The bloke slogging away in the
toolmaker's workshop looked up and saw me grinning at him on my fourth morning
in gorgeous old Mestre, and he said good morning. I'd passed by there and
paused on the third day, but he'd tolerated my presence in his doorway without
a word. He'd not once nodded or let his work be interrupted. Evidently he had
no helpers. His wife, a hurrying tub of breathless-ness, came out and gave him
a coffee, glanced across at me with curiosity, but said nothing.

I'd already decided this was my scene:
a man scratching a living, working a one-man show with no time to rest, crucial
orders due for delivery, and all that. Politely, that fourth morning I replied
good morning, still watching.

"Nice to have no work, eh?"
he said. I liked the look of him, a short and beefy baldish geezer who worked
without fuss and whose eyes were steady as his hands.

"I'm a hard worker, Signor
Gambello." The faded name was flaking off a plank nailed over the yard
door.

"But not this morning, eh?"
He had a ready if wry grin.

"My job is kitchen help. Over at
the trattoria."

"You, is it? I'd heard they got a
stranger as kitchen scivvy."

"Poverty is no disgrace,
signore."

''Certo.”

"But the mornings bore me."

"Looking for another hour,
eh?" He shook his head. He was lathe-turning short pieces of metal rod
about eighteen thou. "Not here, I'm afraid,"

"Tomorrow morning," I
suggested. "Free work."

"No pay?" That interrupted
his work all right. He leant away, cut the machine. "Why would anyone do
that?"

"For an hour's use of your lathe.
Private job."

He wiped his hands on a cloth, gauging
me. "What's the catch? Key for your employer's safe? An illegal gun
barrel?"

"Wood, signore. I want to make a
present for my auntie's birthday. A surprise."

'That's original." The bloke was
cynical too.

'You can watch me if you like. To
check."

He still eyed me. "Maybe I will.
What's the present?"

"Eh? Oh, only table mats."

“Very well. Tomorrow, right?"
"Agreed."

He watched me go, disbelieving. I left,
smiling again. I'd turn up if I had to crawl.

Our agreement was that I'd slog in
Gambello's yard from nine till eleven each morning. From then until noon I'd
have free use of those tools not in use.

His actual job was lathing cylindrical
metal rod into spindle-ended mini-shanks, and putting a screw thread partway
along it. God knows why. Something to do with engines. Signor Gambello had to
make six thousand before the end of that week. I tried explaining how much more
interesting the job would be if we rigged up a sapling gear like the
Benedictines used for furniture, but he only stared, mystified. So we did it
his way, on this shrill electric Woods lathe that turned his little metal
sticks out like shelling peas. Great, but bloody boring.

The first morning I just helped and
saved my own hour. Second morning I lathed for him while he did his books, and
then got out my sycamore dead on eleven. It took me forty minutes to turn my
piece to a perfect cylinder. First I needed a thin slice four inches across and
three-eighths thick. Ten minutes flat. Then a flat cylindrical box, perfectly
round, made to stand squat. That meant machining it in two bits so its lid
settled easily inside—never an external-sliding lid for Elizabethan table-mat
holders, remember.

There was an old tin in the yard. I
half filled it with pieces of bark I'd flaked off the elderly Quercus tree
standing near the eastern crossroad traffic lights, on my way in. An old brown
leather shoe I'd got from a dustbin, cut in slices, filled the tin; top up with
water, and set it boiling in a comer of the yard. Signora Gambello touchingly
brought me out a coffee and some
panino
breads with cheese. I explained I was only doing my own thing, that I'd really
finished the proper yard work at eleven, but she said to have it all the same.
I thought that was really kind.

Waiting for my stew to darken, I had
the nosh and then fetched out my pound of black grapes. I only wanted the seeds
and skins. It nearly killed me eating the pulp and sucking the skins clean, but
I did it after an hour. Added to the stewing mess with as much Chinese green
tea as it would take, and my tin ponged to high heaven. Twice I crossed the
yard to apologize to Signora Gambello. Before going to work at the nosh bar I
put the horrible mess to cool in the comer by the gate.

Next day my flat circular box and the
thin disc went in and out of the dark mess about ten times while I worked the
lathe between times. Gambello had a coke furnace for annealing wrought iron,
and he said it was all right if I dried my wood pieces on the flue between each
soaking. Neither of the Gambellos asked anything, but their curiosity was more
and more apparent as the phony Elizabethan place mat and its container became
increasingly warped and stained. A split developed in the thin disc about
noon—I worked on at the lathe unasked—and Signor Gambello was itching to point
this out, but still I pressed on. He'd want to weld it. Every few minutes both
pieces went into the tin of stain for a soak, then were warmed to dryness on
the furnace flue.

That noon I postponed my nosh to impose
coarser turning marks on the surface, using a coarse bastard file and setting
the Woods lathe to a laborious two hundred revs, then I had my colazione while
Gambello resumed the metal work in my place.

Next day at ten-thirty we knocked off
the last of his mini-shanks and got them boxed and loaded on his truck. That
gave me nearly three hours before I'd have to leave for my washing-up job.

The inscription I'd chosen was
something vaguely remembered from school. Old Benkie, our literature teacher, once
clipped my ear in a temper over forgetting a Chaucer quotation: 'The answer to
this lete I to divines." Which divines, and answer to what, was anybody's
guess, but the quotation was enough to fill the center of the disc if I
arranged a dot-and-vine-leaf pattern round the edge. At least it was the right
period. Ordinary red ink, diluted, for the inscription, and a tube of artist's
black acrylic paint for the pattern. The quill and steel with which the
Elizabethans wrote was a difficulty. The way out is to take the cap of a ballpoint
pen—use a Bic top for forging everything except parchment or paper
manuscripts—and file the projecting bit down to a sixteenth-of-an-inch tip. Cut
a part-thickness groove all the way along, and perforate the top to hold a bit
of doweling wood. Epoxy resin to fasten, and there's your Elizabethan pen. I
nearly spelled the inscription wrong like a fool, but at the finish held it up
proudly. One more fast dry to fade the ink (remember phony reds fade faster
than phony blacks) and . . . and . . .

Signore Gambello was watching me. Oho.

"Nice job," he said, coming
close to look. "You know,” he went on, examining my piece, "if I
hadn't seen you make it, I'd swear it was really . . . old."

"Good heavens," I said
evenly.

"
Certo
. It has that look." There was a pause. "I'm sure
your auntie will be very pleased."

"Eh?"

"Your auntie. It's her surprise
present,
non e vero
?"

I remembered. "Ah yes. Let's hope
so, signore."

There was a pause while we looked
around the workshop and out into the yard. Signora Gambello was listening, arms
folded, by the door.

"You will not work more, eh?"

"Just the trattoria. One more
day."

'Then thank you."

'Thank you, signore," I said
fervently. 'The debt is mine."

Next morning I left Signora Lamberti's
emporium—a bawled farewell over the racket from the shunting engines—and made
my special purchase. With the money I'd saved from washing-up I had enough.

Mestre isn't exactly bulging with
antiques. It had taken me a lot of searching to find something Venetian and
genuinely antique. The book itself was ordinary, a third edition Venetian
dialect dictionary, falling to bits. It contained a few scraps of paper,
though, on which people had doodled and drawn occasional shapes. This only goes
to show how you can pick up a fortune. I bought the book, went around the
comer, and chucked it away. One doodled-on paper I cherished: only a figure
study, pen with brown ink on a gray-blue wash. Even with four elementary
figures there was a lot of vigorous activity going on in swirly-clothed
classical tableau round a sprawling babe.

Art has a million mysteries. Many of
them occur in Venetian art, which was pre-eminent by a mile in the eighteenth
century. To me, one of the most fascinating of all an mysteries is the great
R.V.H. Mystery—R.V.H. for "Reliable Venetian Hand."

It must have been really miraculous in
those days. Walk around the comer in Venice and you met artists like Canaletto,
Tiepolo, Piazzetta, or Ricci, or bumped into musicians like the "red
priest" Antonio Vivaldi, already on his way to getting himself defrocked.
It was all happening in Venice then.

The tragedy is that artists die
unrecognized, obscurely in poverty. I mean, we don't know enough about Mozart
or Constable, while the discovery that Shakespeare's dad sold a few condoms,
"Venus gloves," on the side—quite customary for all glovemakers those
days—is treated as a major revelation. Not even collectors take enough notice
of artists, until the artists pass on and it's all too late.

But once upon a time one collector did.
Back there in that miraculous eighteenth century in Venice one collector bought
the doodles, sketches, plans, any little drawing he could afford, from the
original artists themselves. And he saved them, tidily, in complete safety
until the day he died. By then he—she?—had scores of them, and of course they were
dispersed to the four winds after that. But this collector did one last
inestimable service for Art. In lovely copperplate handwriting, he labeled each
tiny scrap with the name of the original artist. And he's always—
always!
—absolutely correct in his
attributions. Museums the world over reflexly search every old stray paper for
the names of Venetian artists in that precise elegant giveaway handwriting. We
don't know who the collector was, so we call him the Reliable Venetian Hand.
Now, promise you'll never go browsing in old junk shops again without a fervent
vow to remember old R.V.H. of blessed memory. And just occasionally light a
candle for him/her. He did a greater job for civilization and art than the lot
of us will probably ever do.