From London Far (3 page)

London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone – Meredith began to see some appositeness in these cryptic phrases. Toledo had gone – years ago and as a sort of curtain-raiser on chaos. That put a big question mark against most of the world’s El Grecos. Budapest had gone – which meant Caravaggios and Tiepolos. What had happened to the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, with its host of Rembrandts; to the Mauritshuis at The Hague, with the
Head of a Girl
, and the
View of Delft
? There were people whose business it was to collect information on such matters – but Meredith suspected that it was all pretty fragmentary as yet. And other things must be pretty fragmentary too: marbles, bronzes, terracottas, great paintings, rare books, unique manuscripts – enough of these lay in scraps, rubble, dust amid the still-smoking ruins of Europe. Experts and connoisseurs had followed the armies; and, doubtless, carefully constituted commissions timelessly inquired. But sufficient confusion must remain to afford scope to a small host of depredators and thieves. Had not the crowning achievement of Botticelli been discovered lying in a granary or a stable? Meredith shut his eyes at the thought of it. When he opened them again it was to find that he was no longer alone.

Standing beside him, in fact, was Mr Spackman of the Department of Antiquities in a large provincial museum. Spackman was well known to Meredith – indeed, they had been at college together – and a meeting with him was always mildly embarrassing. For Spackman, unfortunately, was never quite sober; with a man who is never quite sober learned conversation is virtually impracticable; and for conversation other than learned and impersonal Meredith had, with Spackman, no list at all. Civilities, however, must always be exchanged – and so Meredith, suspending for a moment the puzzling speculations into which his situation had led him, took off his hat. Meredith took off his hat (since this was a good academic custom and not to be abrogated even in a thieves’ kitchen) and said pleasantly: ‘Good afternoon, Spackman. How are you?’

But Spackman, who was muttering angrily to himself, appeared unaware of the greeting. He had been shambling forward and now stopped by a table where he proceeded to thrust into a Gladstone bag a massive and shiny object which Meredith at once identified as a something worse than mediocre Graeco-Roman bust. Spackman was trembling with irritation; the hinges of the bag kept shutting on his fingers; he swore under his breath in a fashion which Meredith found extremely distasteful. Nevertheless, Meredith advanced and took hold of the bag. ‘Let me hold it while you get the thing in,’ he said.

Spackman swung round scowling; then, as he recognized who it was that had addressed him, his expression turned to consternation and fear. The spectacle was far from pleasing; from an inebriate red, the man’s complexion turned to something like a cadaver blue – but Meredith viewed it with much the satisfaction of a chemist who achieves similar results with a scrap of litmus paper. For here was what might be termed experimental verification of a working hypothesis – to wit, that this underground retreat was the business premises of some particularly enterprising receiver of stolen goods. And Meredith tapped pleasantly on the Gladstone bag which Spackman had now shut with a snap. ‘Turned down?’ he said interrogatively. ‘Not a sufficiently high-class crib?’

This easy command of the jargon of larceny looked like being finally unnerving to Spackman. His mouth fell open and he swayed like one about to sag nastily at the knees. But suddenly his gaze fixed itself rigidly on a spot beneath Meredith’s left shoulder; he threw back his head and uttered a shrill, unsteady laugh; the laugh was followed by what could only be described as a confidential leer; he then picked up his rejected burden with an effort and staggered off down a side corridor which Meredith had not until this moment observed. With a nasty shock Meredith realized that what had arrested the attention of this old reprobate was his dispatch-case. Spackman had supposed it to be performing the same function as his own Gladstone bag.

And a yet nastier reflection followed. This abominable catacomb was fast becoming a sort of illicit annex of what is known in Nottinghamshire as the Dukeries. For there against the wall was the Duke of Horton’s
Venus
, plainly filched from its proper métier of affording a refined aesthetic delectation to an aristocratic few. And here, in this same luckless dispatch-case, was the Duke of Nesfield’s famous Juvenal manuscript, which a former Duke of Nesfield had astutely stolen from a monastic library in the Levant, and which appeared in the most present danger of being stolen anew. For Meredith was now aware of certain yet more disturbing facts of environment. He stood just where his corridor opened out into a species of lobby or ante-chamber scattered about which – and on chromium and plywood chairs which nicely combined a hint of opulence with the still dominant antisepsis – sat various displeasing persons clutching either bags, parcels, boxes, small crates, or even articles of
vertu
or connoisseurship frankly unwrapped. Clients evidently – and evidently there was quite a waiting-list. But this was not all. Hard by a farther door stood a heavily-built man in what had much the appearance of the type of sober livery favoured by banking establishments for their messengers and superior attendants: only this man (who was looking suspiciously at Meredith) visibly sported two impressive pistols in holsters on his hips. And hard by him, behind a simple but clearly expensive chromium and ebony desk, sat a young lady at once glamorous and severely secretarial. In front of her were two telephones, as also one of those box-like contrivances into which business magnates bark and snap and growl so impressively in Hollywood films. The young lady was flicking a switch on this instrument now, and evidently proposing to speak into it with the utmost haste. And her eye at the same time was fixed upon Meredith – upon Meredith and his dispatch-case.

Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay…

Dr Johnson and Juvenal had not been so far off it after all.

To be equal to such a situation as this, Meredith reflected, one has to think quickly. In romantic fiction, the hero invariably manages to do so; his mind – often extremely unnoticeable during other parts of the narrative – rises to the occasion and works like a flash. But unfortunately Meredith’s own thinking, although tolerably reliable, was on the slow side. Could he now successfully bid the machine do double time? The case was sufficiently urgent. For an organization which left Titians and Giottos lying about its outer corridors was evidently Big Business of the most unchallengeable kind, and it was unlikely to pack up its chromium furniture and house telephones and fade away because intruded upon by an unwitting scholar.

Rather, it would be the scholar who would fade away. The man like a bank messenger would simply draw his pistol – and subsequently disguise the body as a case of bullion and remove it in a taxi. Here – unlike Titian’s
Venus
– was something that Meredith had not encountered before: the prospect of being (as they say) taken for a ride. Or bumped off. And Meredith shook his head slightly – this because it occurred to him to doubt whether
to bump off
were any longer contemporary idiom.

As rapid thinking, this piece of philological curiosity was a bad start. But it had a marked and unexpected effect upon the young lady at the desk. For this abstracted shake of the head of Meredith’s apparently struck her as an authoritative and inhibiting gesture. She abandoned the motion of speaking into her box and looked at Meredith expectantly, as if asking for more. And now Meredith frowned and his mouth set grimly in a thin line. This was because he had once more recalled his custodianship of the Juvenal manuscript, and was confronting the fact that it would in all probability go down river in the same sack as the body – or would conceivably, were its value discovered, go the way of the Horton
Venus
. Here was a thought very dreadful to Meredith; it added to the fatal affair a sort of second death. And so Meredith frowned and looked grim. And this too had its effect upon the young lady. She blanched. And the man with the revolvers, who had been lounging against the frame of a closed door, straightened himself into a statuesque and formal pose.

It was the man’s movement that first caught Meredith’s eye. For a moment he judged it ominous, a sort of equivalent of that ‘on your marks’ position that preludes athletic action. And then – and it was decidedly a matter of a flash – Meredith realized the situation. These outer guardians of the establishment were as apprehensive of him as he was of them.

Did they take him to be a detective-inspector from Scotland Yard, some notable scourge of hi-jackers and Black Marketeers, who would presently put a whistle to his lips and summon an overwhelming force of heavily armed police? Meredith would have liked to think that it was so, but modesty assured him that members of the Athenaeum do not readily suggest such a figure. Moreover, the quality of the apprehensiveness in the persons before him subtly but decisively negatived this reading of the situation. Rather, they were like –

And Meredith paused to remember. Yes, they were like undergraduates just about to come before a board of examiners for some
viva voce
test. Aided by this comparison – or rather, thought Meredith, by this intuitive perception of illuminating analogy – it was possible to make a bold guess. He, Meredith, was being taken for one of the bosses of the concern. And here, plainly, thought for the moment stopped and action must supervene. Only action, decisive and even inspired, would ever get that manuscript back to poor Mr Collins at Nesfield Court. Even as he entertained these reflections, Meredith found himself striding confidently towards the telephones, and the box for snarling into, and the man who carried – or was it ‘packed’? – the guns.

Packed was indubitably correct – and even as Meredith reached this conclusion he heard a voice raised in harsh but not uncultivated reproof. ‘Get these people out of here,’ said the voice. ‘If they’re offering the same sort of rubbish as that fellow Spackman you’re all wasting your time. Clear them out, if you please. Trade’s over for the day.’ And Meredith – for the voice was Meredith’s very own – glanced round him in a menacing and authoritative manner. Anyone aware that this was the first occasion on which he had attempted to look menacing since leaving his private school would have been bound to admit that the learned pursuits to which he had given himself represented a sad deprivation in the annals of the legitimate stage.

And the effect was altogether satisfactory. The bank attendant jumped like a bullock stung by the gadfly in June and fell to circling the room with gestures of the largest menace. ‘Gettahelloutahere,’ said the bank attendant. ‘Scram.’ And the clients, who all seemed of a kind accustomed to being held of small account, picked up their inferior offerings and began an abject and obedient shuffling from the room.

The young lady at the desk looked helplessly from Meredith to her telephones and back again. ‘Of course, we know they’re a low lot,’ she said apologetically. ‘No class at all. It’s just that we try to clean up that kind at the end of the day.’

‘No doubt,’ said Meredith. And he looked at the young lady as nastily as he could. ‘As it happens, I’m feeling rather like a bit of clean up myself.’ He began to contort the muscles of his face into the semblance of a horrible scowl. Then, glimpsing an altogether more refined conception of his role, he transformed this into a sweet and – as he hoped – wholly spine-chilling smile. ‘A bit of clean up,’ he repeated softly; ‘just a little bit of straightening things out.’

The obscure displeasingness which Meredith contrived to insinuate into this simple metaphor spoke much for the vigorous tone of the most unpresentable regions of his unconscious mind. ‘Of straightening things out,’ he reiterated lingeringly. And the repetition, though indulged in after the manner of the political orator who requires time to think, was so effective that the man with the revolvers sank down upon a shiny chair and made gulping noises in his throat.

For the moment, Meredith judged, he dominated the room. Were he to order the gulping man to shoot the young lady dead the command would be unhesitatingly obeyed. Were he to order the young lady to stand up and sing the Jewel Song from
Faust
she would do so with the automatism of one in a heavy hypnotic trance. There was, in fact, only one thing that Meredith at this juncture had no chance of carrying off – and that was turning round and departing as he had come. For purposeful and aggressive advance was the essence of the part he had been driven to play, and were this to fail for a moment the illusion would snap. He would scarcely have passed the Giotto and the Titian before the end would come with a bullet in the back. His only safety – and the only safety of Mr Collins’ luckless loan – was to continue marching breast forward as he had begun.

Meredith therefore advanced. He advanced upon the door which it appeared to be the young lady’s function to guard, and as he did so he saw her hand hover over the switches of her box. ‘You needn’t announce me,’ he said drily. ‘We’ll just make it a little surprise.’

The young lady’s eyes widened in dismay. ‘Mr Bubear is in cahnference,’ she said – even in her consternation giving the right filmic intonation to this announcement. ‘Mr Bubear is in cahnference, Mr Birdsong–’

Meredith blinked. It was extremely valuable to know that he was Mr Birdsong: at the same time, and to one with mild feelings on descent and lineage, it had its disconcerting side. Birdsong at morning – he thought with one of his worst lapses into inconsequence – and starshine at night. It would be nice to be tolerably assured that he would ever know either one or other of these natural phenomena again… ‘Is he, indeed?’ said Meredith. ‘All the same’ – and his voice sank to an ecstatically sadistic whisper – ‘I think we’ll make it a
little
surprise.’

And Meredith threw open the door and took the second of his decisive steps into drama.