The Vatican Rip (11 page)

Twice during that long night I had to shuffle down into a small grove while police cars cruised past and their nasty beams probed the darkness searching for layabouts. I’m hardly ever cold but by dawn I felt perished and was certain I looked a wreck. Anybody that’s ever been unwashed and unshaven and unfed knows the feeling, especially when the rest of the world looks poisonously bright and contented. Rome’s favourite knack is appearing elegant. On this particular morning its elegance got right up my nose.

I was supposed to be at the antiques place by nine so I scrambled about, had a prolonged breakfast, a barbershop shave and a wash and brush up. Naturally I walked everywhere to harbour my dwindling gelt. Even so, I was early and stood among passing pedestrians at the window of the Albanese Antiques Emporium.

Piero the ape was first to arrive and unlocked the shop’s glass door with a proprietary flourish. Adriana herself arrived a minute later, coolly stepping out of a mile-long purple Rolls-Royce and doubtless stopping a few pacemakers among the peasants as she did so. She was blindingly beautiful. The only person blissfully unaffected by her sleek attractiveness was her other assistant, outrageous in a silver chiffon scarf and earrings, who came rushing in after her, complaining about the traffic on the Corso.

‘Morning,
tout le monde
!’ he crooned. ‘Like my new hairdo?’

He introduced himself as Fabio – ‘Fab as in fabulous, dearie!’ – but I wasn’t taken in. I’d once seen a really vicious knife artist with all Fabio’s exotic mannerisms.

‘Good morning, Signora Albanese,’ I said politely.

‘Come through.’ She swept past into the rear office.

Humbly I stood while she ripped through a couple of letters and checked the phone recorder. Seven messages out of hours, I noted with interest. A thriving business. As she settled herself I wondered about that chauffeur-driven Rolls. There had been a stoutish bloke with her, riffling paperwork in his briefcase. He had barely bothered to look up as she descended. I’d never seen such a distant goodbye. Presumably Signor Albanese.

She looked up at last. ‘Your story, please.’

‘Oh, er, I was on a tourist trip—’

‘Name and occupation?’

She appraised me, her eyes level and cold. First fag of the day lit for effect and radiating aggro. She really was something, stylish to a fault and straight in the
bella figura
tradition. Her smart pastel suit was set off by matching gold bracelets and a sickeningly priceless platinum-mounted intaglio that had seen Alexander the Great embark to conquer the world. I wanted her and her belongings so badly I was one tortured mass of cramp.

‘Lovejoy. Antique dealer.’

‘And you are in a mess.’

‘Temporarily, signora.’

She indulged in a bleak smile to show she thought my mess very permanent indeed.

‘Money problems?’

‘Yes, signora. I was dipped. I have to earn my fare home.’

‘So last night’s performance was a tactic?’

‘I admitted that, signora.’

She nodded and with balletic grace tapped ash into a rectangular porcelain ash trough. ‘What’s your speciality?’

‘Speciality?’ It was years since anybody had asked me this sort of stuff.

‘In antiques,’ she said as if explaining to a cretin.

‘None.’ And that was the truth.

She purred, about to strike. ‘Then let me put it another way, Lovejoy. Which of my antiques do you prefer? Even an imbecile like you must have
some
preference.’

I could be as vindictive as her any day of the week. ‘The genuine ones.’

‘
All
my antiques are genuine!’ She even stood up in her fury.

‘Balls,’ I said calmly into her face. ‘Half your stuff is crap, love. I’m a divvie.’

That shut her up. She made to speak a couple of times but only finished up standing and smoking. Behind me Piero cleared his throat. I heard Fabio whisper something. Both had evidently been attracted by Adriana’s outburst and come in to see the blood.

‘
Ask
him!’ I heard Fabio hiss.

She judged me then in a different way, blinking away from me, then glancing back several times. I knew the syndrome. Before, it was merely a question of using a scruffy bloke who seemed to possess a limited skill. Now it was a different question entirely. The problem was how much I’d want, because as far as her and her little antiques emporium were concerned I was the best windfall since penicillin. She drew a long breath and fumigated me with carcinogens.

‘You two get out,’ she said at last. Then to me, ‘Do sit down. Cigarette?’

Everybody’s a born dazzler – at something. You, me, the tramps padding among the dustbins, and that funny woman down the street. We are all the world’s greatest. The only question for each of us is the world’s greatest
what
.

I once knew a bloke who was the world’s worst everything – well, almost everything. If he drove a car it crashed. If he wound his watch up its hands fell off. If he dialled a friend the phone electrocuted somebody at the other end. He was a menace at work. Finally, in despair, his boss wrote him off and begged him, tears in his eyes, to get the hell off and out into premature retirement. Honestly, they actually paid him to do nothing. He was a brand new kind of national debt.

Then, doodling one day in the public library – which incidentally he’d accidentally set on fire the week before – he realized the singular pleasure he was deriving from simply copying the stylized scrawl of an early manuscript which was framed on the wall. I won’t tell you his name, but he is now the greatest mediaevalist calligrapher in Northern Europe, and official master copyist of manuscripts for universities the world over. Get the message? Even the worst of us is the best mankind has got – for something.

A ‘divvie’ is a nickname for somebody with the special knack of knowing an antique when he sees one. Some divvies are infallible only for genuine oil paintings, or sculpture, or first editions, or porcelain, or Han dynasty funereal pottery. Others like me – rarest of all – are divvies for practically any antiques going. Don’t ask me how it’s done, why a divvie’s breathing goes funny when he confronts that da Vinci painting, or why his whole body quivers to the clang of an inner bell when near that ancient pewter dish or Chippendale table. Like the old water diviners – from whom we derive our nickname – who go all of a do when that hazel twig detects a subterranean river, there’s very little accounting for these things.

If people ask me to explain, I say it’s just that the antiques’ love comes through and reaches out to touch me. And, since everything modern is rubbish, that’s QED as far as I’m concerned.

She was staring. ‘For
everything
antique?’

‘Yes. Except when it’s mauled into a pathetic travesty, like your mahogany occasional table out there.’

She flared briefly. ‘That’s genuine Georgian!’

‘It’s wood is that old,’ I conceded. ‘But it’s a hybrid made up of a pole screen’s base and a remade top.’

She was badly shaken. I wondered how much she’d been taken for. ‘Is that true, Lovejoy? I bought it as Cuban mahogany.’

‘The bit you are looking at is veneer.’ It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book: get an original piece of the right date, and simply remould it. Most commonly done with tables, bureaux, cabinets and chairs. Some of these hybrids have to be seen – or bought – to be believed. I hate them, because some beautiful original has been devastated just for greed. Greed, that horrible emotion which makes hookers of us all.

‘And you’ll divvie for me?’

I prompted, ‘For . . . ?’

‘You mean payment.’ Meeting an antiques man better than herself had rocked her, but money was home ground. She became brisk, her old poised and perfect self again. ‘How will I verify your accuracy? Of course, I can always give you a knowledge test.’

‘I might fail it.’ They always ask the same things. ‘Then where would you be?’

She blew a spume of smoke into the air, getting the point. Knowledge is only knowledge. I was on about the actual business of knowing, which is light years ahead. ‘Have you any suggestions?’

‘For proof? Yes. Stick your own price on any genuine antique, picked at random. I’ll work for it.’

She bowed like the Gainsborough lady but her eyes were focused on distant gold. ‘Instead of money? No other pay?’

I smiled at the caution in her tone. People are always stunned by somebody who backs his judgement to the hilt. I said, ‘There is no higher price than time, love. It’s all a person has.’

‘You’re hired.’

‘Lend me enough to see the week out, please.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘I thought—’

‘There’s no future in starving to death, love.’

‘That bad?’ She drummed her fingers on her desk, shook her head. ‘No. You might take off. If you are a genuine divvie, I need you here. Fabio!’

Fabio was into the office instantly, waving a notebook and agog with inquisitiveness. He’d been listening, of course.

‘Yes, Adriana.’ He struck an exasperated pose. ‘What’s the verdict? Hitch him to our star, or under a passing bus?’

‘Hitch.’

‘Ooooh, fantabulation!’ he squealed excitedly. ‘I wonder what he’ll say about that ebony
thing
you keep saying is an eighteenth-century Benin ceremonial mask prototype!’ He winked at me with grotesque roguishness. ‘She paid a fortune for it, dearie, been on tenterhooks ever since!’

I thought, oh dear. They make them near Dakar and have fooled the best of us. My expression must have changed because his eyes ignited with delighted malice. Adriana sensed the bad news and nipped it swiftly in the bud.

‘Fabio. See that Lovejoy receives
no
money, no expenses of any kind.’

Fabio fingered his amber beads and beamed. ‘Is it to be
entirely
a labour of love?’

‘And you can stop that. We’ve come to an arrangement. Lovejoy will be paid in antiques of
our
choosing – after he’s divvied them for us.’

‘I’ll book it in as payment in kind,’ Fabio whispered confidentially to me. Adriana’s lips thinned even more. I could see how Fabio could get on the calmest nerves.

‘His food will be provided by me,’ she coursed on tonelessly.

‘Must I book a table, dear?’ Fabio asked innocently, eyes on the ceiling.

She iced him with a look. ‘By that I mean under my supervision.’

He pencilled an ostentatious note, murmuring to himself, ‘Lovejoy to feed under Adriana,’ then asked briskly, ‘Anything else, dear?

She gave up and turned to me. ‘Have you a place to live?’

I thought swiftly. If she was this careful and I was fool enough to admit that I dossed in the park she’d probably stick me in some garret over her stables, with that businessman of hers counting the teaspoons every time I went for a pee.

‘Yes, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m fixed up.’

They both looked dubious at that but said nothing, and we went to work.

I’d found a nook. I was in with a chance of doing the rip. And doing Arcellano.

The Vatican walls seemed more impenetrable than ever when I photographed them that afternoon. Every gateway, the enormous doors in St Peter’s, the Museum entrance, every Swiss Guard in sight and the Angelica gateway, with me grinning and clicking away among droves of tourists all doing the same thing. I went about like someone demented. There wasn’t a lot of time.

Adriana had objected when I asked to use the camera. All known antiques firms – except Lovejoy Antiques, Inc, that is – have cameras of various sorts, though most dealers are too bone idle to use them much. She had finally let me borrow a cheap box camera that was hanging on hoping to become an antique, a century still to go.

‘Thanks, Adriana,’ I said. My last money would go on a film.

‘Signora Albanese to you.’

I grovelled. ‘Thank you, Signora Albanese.’

‘And that’s enough for a
rustica
.’ That meant eating on the hoof.

I asked what about food this evening. ‘That requirement will be met, Lovejoy,’ she intoned mercilessly.

The giant purple Rolls called for her just before two. We shut shop with Piero sourly giving me the once over in case I’d nicked a valuable Isfahan carpet or two, and with Fabio taking an age doing his eyes in a French early Georgian period swivel mirror.

Signora Albanese refused to allow the car to drive off until she saw me enter the pizzeria at the street corner and emerge with two chunks of scalding pizza in my hands. Only then did the Rolls glide away, with her businessman still doing his executive bit. He’d hardly looked up when Adriana got in, and I’d taken particular pains to notice, because . . . I wondered
why
I’d been so sly. I hardly notice anything except antiques, except when I’m scared, and then I behave like . . . like I was doing now, moving casually but watching Fabio and Piero and the Rolls reflected in every possible shop window.

I decided I was merely going through a paranoid phase, brought on by Marcello’s death and loneliness maybe mixed with apprehension at the thought of the rip. After all I’d done all the choosing, picked Adriana’s place at random.

The final agonizing choice came about half past three. To buy a tiny booklet on the contents of the Vatican Museum, or to enter the place to suss it out? I decided on the latter course and spent my last on a ticket. I hurtled up the wonderful ancient staircase (a double helical spiral that curiously is a better model of nucleic acid even than that flashy Watson-Crick mock-up in Cambridge). Adriana had said to be back by five, and the emporium was a good half-hour’s walk from the Vatican. There were seven photographs left in my camera, and I would need to shove the film in for developing on the way. It didn’t leave long.

The precious Chippendale piece was still there, sulkily supporting the weight of that horrible nature tableau. A museum guard was being bored stiff at the end of the gallery when I nipped behind a display case and clicked the view from the nearest window. Then the other way, with a complete disregard of lighting conditions. Then the length of the gallery. A couple of times I had to pause for small crowds of visitors – still sprinting as if they got paid mileage. But by the finish of my reel (who can ever work out when a film’s ended?) I guessed I had at least six good shots of the gallery. Then I crossed to feel again those lovely vibes of the true Chippendale, drawn like iron filings to a magnet.