PearlHanger 09 (2 page)

hold furniture, mostly Victoriana, and dress items. I tapped my watchless wrist twice, promising to be with her by two o'clock, and hurried on. She had a militia man's antique "housewife" I badly wanted—not a woman, but a tiny leather drawstring bag of threads, buttons, patches, and sewing needles. I'd heard that Mankie Holland, he of the phony catalogs and phonier eighteenth-century water- colors, had a buyer for one. Back to normality for that mighty antiques firm called Lovejoy Antiques Inc. The entire business is only me, but it's real honest-to-God living and that's more than you can say for any other form of existence. I trotted on to the auction, blissfully happy.

Seance indeed.

2

Bliss. I inhaled the grotty armpit-and-dust stench of your typical country auction. Except some days everything goes wrong.

In the doorway somebody barged into me. I swung angrily, saw who it was and grinned weakly. Big John Sheehan, with four homicidals. "Wotcher, John," I said. "Sorry."

"No harm done, Lovejoy," he pronounced forgivingly. His serfs shoved me aside. I was relieved. John's a hard man, and I'm not. Tell you more about him later.

Worse, the flaming picture I wanted had gone—been sold, left me alone and palely loitering. Some rich undeserving swine had actually bid. I entered Gimbert's auction rooms furious with blonds, seances, auctions, and auctioneers. I stormed through the crowd to where Margaret stood waiting for the good porcelain to come up. (In country auctions the best wine is always last; remember that tip and it'll save you money. The first couple of items are usually giveaway cheapo, as come-ons.)

"Who got it, Margaret?"

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every single time there's a Constable copy around East Anglia?
We're knee-deep in the sodding things . . ."

Doris trundled innocently back into the throng to report that I'd used that doom-word "copy." I breathed again. We were now in the space near the tea bar at the back. Margaret was curious, wondering what was going on. She's early middle-age, lovely, has a gammy leg from some marital campaign or other, and loves me. We've been intermittently close for years because of our unspoken agreement: I never ask after her husband, and she doesn't demand honesty from me. This is why older women are best by miles. I'd swap ten popsies for one thirty-plus any day of the week.

"Get somebody to bid for two hundred and twenty- eight," I muttered, still pretending anger for Jeb Spencer's benefit.

"Who?" Margaret knew better than glance back to where 228 lay. Idly I scanned the mob of dealers. God, but we look horrible in a group. Tinker was there, an old bloke milling about a cluster of overcoated dealers. He's my own barker, paid in solid blood to sniff out antiques, rumors of deals, any news at all, and sprint—well, totter—to me with the news. He's a filthy old soldier. His cough can waken the dead.

"Flag Tinker down. Tell him to get one of his old mates in from the betting shop, sharpish. His mate can have the rest of the job lot, but keep the Arita dish."

"Isn't it a bit Chinese for Arita?"

The big dish had the Dutch East India Company
"VOC"
mark among its stylized pomegranate designs—the O and C each bestriding one limb of the V in a central circle—all in underglaze blue. The Dutch wanted replacements for the Chinese porcelains they couldn't get after

12

Margaret Dainty turned calm blue eyes on me. "First, good day to you, Lovejoy. Secondly, if you mean that Constable sketch, Gwen bought it. And she paid the earth. Where did you get to?"

"Seance. Where's Gwen gone?"

"Home to Bernard for her special reward." Bernard and Gwen run a sex-encounter group, our current scandal. "Did you say seance?"

I picked up the old dish Margaret had been inspecting and grumbled audibly, "You should have bought that oil sketch instead of tarting around this gunge." Saying those words broke my heart and mentally I whispered an apology to the dish, but casually I replaced it on its job-lot pile. Lot
228.

"Silence during the bidding, Lovejoy," Wheatstone warbled from the rostrum. He's an import from Stortford, all chained spectacles and degrees in fine art, but at least he can read and write, which for an auctioneer is space-age stuff. He resembles all auctioneers the world over: pinstripe suit, slicked hair, and looks deep-fried.

"Shut your teeth, Stonie." I didn't even glance. Amid laughter and catcalls I nudged Margaret. We edged from the mob compressed round the podium. Jeb Spencer—antique jewelry, Regency fashions—and others were keeping an eye on me to see if my irritation about the Constable oil sketch was genuine.

"Silly bitch, Margaret. I told you to bid for it if I was delayed." I spoke loudly for Jeb's benefit. His barker— Doris, a rheumy old doxy with radar ears—was shuffling innocently nearby.

Margaret looked harassed, not sure if I was pretending. "You never said definitely, Lovejoy."

I kept up the gripe. "Bloody hell. Do I have to decide

11

every single time there's a Constable copy around East Anglia?
We're knee-deep in the sodding things ..."

Doris trundled innocently back into the throng to report that I'd used that doom-word "copy." I breathed again. We were now in the space near the tea bar at the back. Margaret was curious, wondering what was going on. She's early middle-age, lovely, has a gammy leg from some marital campaign or other, and loves me. We've been intermittently close for years because of our unspoken agreement: I never ask after her husband, and she doesn't demand honesty from me. This is why older women are best by miles. I'd swap ten popsies for one thirty-plus any day of the week.

"Get somebody to bid for two hundred and twenty- eight," I muttered, still pretending anger for Jeb Spencer's benefit.

"Who?" Margaret knew better than glance back to where 228 lay. Idly I scanned the mob of dealers. God, but we look horrible in a group. Tinker was there, an old bloke milling about a cluster of overcoated dealers. He's my own barker, paid in solid blood to sniff out antiques, rumors of deals, any news at all, and sprint—well, totter—to me with the news. He's a filthy old soldier. His cough can waken the dead.

"Flag Tinker down. Tell him to get one of his old mates in from the betting shop, sharpish. His mate can have the rest of the job lot, but keep the Arita dish."

"Isn't it a bit Chinese for Arita?"

The big dish had the Dutch East India Company
"VOC"
mark among its stylized pomegranate designs—the O and C each bestriding one limb of the
V
in a central circle—all in underglaze blue. The Dutch wanted replacements for the Chinese porcelains they couldn't get after

12

1658, and began their Japanese Arita shipments about then. A genuine one like 228 can keep you two months in sinful luxury.

"You women always bloody argue. Dutch
VOC
Arita's
supposed
to be Chinese Wan Li style. Japanese potters spent half a century perfecting the phony look."

"Did it feel genuine, Lovejoy?"

"Yes."

"All right." And from the way she spoke I knew she'd now arrange a serious bid. She trusts my divvying skill implicitly, though not much else. "Is Gwen's Constable sketch genuine?"

"Genuine old, not genuine Constable."

Margaret pulled a face. "People were saying it was a Tom Keating fake."

"I know." I knew because I'd started the rumor to lower the price. Tom was one of East Anglia's great modern success stories in fakery.

"Bernard will be pleased," Margaret pronounced sweetly. Gwen's husband gambles every groat Gwen brings home. It's quite an arrangement. Actually I like Gwen, but she gets on Margaret's nerves. "Seances, Lovejoy? Not Beatrice, I trust." Beatrice is our one antiquarian occultist and lives down on the wharf with a giant mariner. She and I used to, erm, before the navy arrived.

"No. Owd Maggie. Some bird wanting news of an overdue husband." I kept half an ear on Wheatstone's meanderings. "A ghost told her to hire me."

Margaret was interested. "Is he dead?"

"The ghost presumably; the husband hardly. Owd Maggie said he was living it up at the seaside."

"And you won't go?"

... 13

I shrugged. "Got fed up. No point. He's probably just shacked up some tart, keeping his head down and his ..."

"Lovejoy," Margaret reproved, taking my arm all the same. I shook free and gave her the bent eye. In antiques there's no time to be pally.

"They're at lot two hundred and three. Get a move

on."

She tutted in annoyance and moved over to the mob for Tinker. The old bloke was the right choice. Nothing daunts porcelain experts more than finding a scruff bidding confidently alongside. For a few pints Tinker'd bid serenely for the Mona Lisa. Probably had, in fact, more than once.

Pleased at having rescued the day from total waste, I ambled grinning to get a cup of tea and be ready for the fun. The other dealers were all suspicious. Helen lit a cigarette and eyed me sardonically, knowing something was up but having to guess exactly what. She's the shapeliest legs in the business and coughs in her sleep from so many fags. Patrick our most extravagant local was also suspicious. He looks and is decidedly eccentric, but he and Lily—a wealthy married lady he archly describes as his procuress—are a pair of formidably shrewd dealers. Big Frank from Suffolk, terror of local silver collectors and marriageable spinsters, feverishly rummaged through his catalog in case he'd missed something. He's our most-married dealer, seven on the trot plus one foreign bigamy on a Beirut package tour, though we'd all warned him not to go.

Cheerfully I sank back on a Windsor wheelback chair— modern copy, real gunge, not even a proper yew-wood hoop to grace its poor little back—and felt my spirits rising. What with a chipped cup of grotty peat-colored tea, a ware- houseful of antiques and junk, amid a mob of idiot dealers

14 . . .

and the scatterbrained old public, I felt able to reflect on the perfection of life.

"Here, Lovejoy. I've an old print covered in candle grease." Rudyard Mannering had sidled up from the intense mob of dealers. He's a bloke who always looks suspicious even if he's doing nothing wrong, although I like him. He's quite harmless. All he thinks of is old manuscripts. He hovered furtively, a bolshevik bomb-carrier if ever I saw one.

"Scrape it with a paper knife, then soak it in petrol a few minutes. Use BP Five Star. Have you a camel-hair brush?"

Absolute bliss.

My ecstasy ended exactly at lot 217, a Victorian chaise longue with faded upholstery and one leg missing, because Donna Vernon found me, like a whirlwind. See what I mean about women being really selfish? Just because her husband's gone missing she comes and interrupts my day.

From then on it was downhill to doom all the way, and

no turning back. God knows I tried.

»

Her abuse and threats came about half-and-half. Of course everybody. had a laugh at my expense, especially when Wheatstone had his whizzers—auctioneer's assistants, even more cretinous—bundle me and the blond into the glass-partitioned office. My mates kept grinning through the glass pulling flat-nosed faces.
Chris Bonnington, he's coins and Tudor domestic crafts, even opened the door to call some good-humored jest but by then I'd had enough and gave him one of my looks.
He left in silence.

15

No silence about Donna. She threatened me with subpoenas, writs, lawsuits, hate, poverty, and took a swing at me. I countered by shoving her into Wheatstone's one chair.

She yelped, squirming. "That's assault and battery! Chauvinist pig! I'll sue you!"

"Law's irrelevant to such as me, love." I kept her pinned down with lot 331, silver-headed walking cane, quite nice but a bit late with its Birmingham hallmark of 1883. Her belly was too soft to damage the tip so that was all right. "Just get somebody else."

"I'll see you never work again, Lovejoy!"

"Thanks." I've not done an honest day's work for years. Somebody on my side at last.

The door opened, and in wafted Lydia on a cloud of babble from the auction, her face screwed up to denote how sternly she was taking this spectacle.

"What's going on, Lovejoy?" She's only my apprentice, but you wouldn't think it from the way she goes on sometimes. She's a born nuisance, but great. Heart of sinner, soul of a nun. Martin Luther knew his stuff. This voluptuous maid wears morality like an erotic gym slip.

"You're a witness!" cried my blond. "Lovejoy attacked me."

I transformed instantly. "Mrs. Vernon wants me to go away with her, Lydia," I said meekly. "I don't want to go."

"Pull yourself together, madam," Lydia commanded, cold. "I will not have hysteria."

Mrs. Vernon stopped wriggling at the wintry tone. I'd chosen my phrases carefully. Ben, one of Gimbert's whizzers, rapped on the glass for the cane. Gingerly I relaxed pressure and passed lot 331 out of the door, spotting the relief on Big Frank's face. Women always like hearing

16 ...