Blaze Away Page 4

  More modern theft might also present special problems. Some collectors didn’t like reporting they’d been robbed. They feared that, if a police search were started, the work would get pushed further into hiding, to avoid detection, might even get destroyed, to be rid of evidence. Also, disclosing a loss could indicate poor security and bring more trouble.

  Liz knew how to get an abiding plus for the firm from all these various, gloriously helpful sources of doubt. She might have handled the sale of a painting to one of her friends, giving the impression, of course, that the transaction was totally pure and legitimate. But later, when Liz, perhaps, required some less pure and legitimate help from the friend, she would hint that, in fact, the life story of the piece or pieces in question was now known to be exceptionally dodgy, the sale possibly criminal/Hun tainted. Liz would also hint that, naturally, she wouldn’t be disclosing anywhere that the friend’s right to ownership could be dubious. And, oh, by the way, would this so-far reputable and apparently blameless friend mind doing Liz – the up-till-now ever so discreet, careful Liz – a minor favour by getting on the phone to another reputable and blameless collector, Jack Lamb, for instance, in his handsome, resoundingly named property, Darien, and vouch for the genuine, cash-backed interest of another friend who’d like to visit Darien with a view to adding to an already distinguished collection? In this fashion, Liz would apply her admirable flair.

  Justin had charm and persuasiveness but couldn’t just roll up at Lamb’s place and say he’d heard there might be some fine items on offer at Darien occasionally, and could he please have a dekko, if a selection were in house at present? Lamb would almost certainly know about all the shadowy and very hazardous factors in this kind of trading and would need some sort of assurance that Justin, or whatever he called himself for this operation, was of true, authentic standing, or, at least, not a cop or private investigator engaged by a victim to search for lost treasures. Liz created this status for him: perfect collaboration. As a matter of fact, Justin would possibly stick with his proper name, because nobody in this sort of potential double-cross on double-cross was going to complain to the police. Here was the essential element in Liz’s brilliantly productive fieldwork. She had a good degree in the history of art, but it was her instinctive tactical nous that made her such … well, such an artist herself, and one not easily copied, as some were. Dinnick had named the firm ‘Cog’, because of the way it helped the machinery of art commerce to function efficiently.

  FIVE

  Ralph Ember had been thinking quite a bit about art lately. Not any particular piece of art, but art in general. Everybody would agree this was some topic. He’d been thinking about art in what he would regard as a good and mature way, good and mature meaning here that he felt totally in favour of art. He wouldn’t describe himself as a fan of art, because the word ‘fan’ suggested half-daft, hysterical enthusiasm like screaming groupies for a pop star, not his kind of thoughtful, well-founded appreciation. What Ralph had, in his view, was a steady, quiet, unshowy reverence for art. Some of the amounts paid for paintings were bound to attract massive respect. The international rich had become hooked and pushed prices up and then further up. He’d read that a famed work called The Scream went for $120 million. Apparently, inside the art trade a battle was going on because certain auction houses would handle only stuff from established painters and sculptors, since that’s where the big, reliable loot was. Ralph could understand that attitude, but he did see the other side of it too – the unfairness to new, modern people. Regardless of whether a high quality painting had been around a while and given a tasteful frame, or still stood on the easel, Ralph was sure to delight in it. If he’d been asked, he would have replied that his appreciation was wide-ranging, very wide-ranging. Frames could do a good job, but they were not the essence, only a presentation gimmick, like pastel-shade silk knickers.

  One of his constant, major ambitions was to raise the quality of a social club he owned, The Monty, at present unquestionably a lovely building but, because of the membership, also unquestionably a scrap-heap, crap-heap. And, naturally enough, he considered one of the fine arts could help him bring change. He did what he could by other methods, also, to spruce up the club’s grubby character, but they didn’t really work. For instance, Ralph issued every member on joining with a booklet of Monty rules, as a positive and thoughtful guide towards reasonable behaviour, this to be renewed annually with any amendments. The first, most important, most prominent, most non-variable of these club laws stated that no weaponry ‘of any kind whatsoever. REPEAT – any kind whatsoever’ should be brought into The Monty. Page One carefully listed the banned items. Ralph wanted thoroughness and total clarity. Named in alphabetical order were: baseball bats, bayonets, bludgeons, finger-irons, grenades, handguns, knives, nail bombs, Samurai or any other type of sword, shot guns, sawn-off or not, skewers, tasers. He didn’t specify the make of handgun because some devious moronic sods in the membership would find a type of revolver or automatic not mentioned and pretend they assumed this particular piece must be OK. They’d turn a ban into a permit, a no-no into acceptable.

  Of course, some people ignored the booklet. They could read all right, the majority of them, but rejected even the most well-intentioned, sensible orders. Behaviour? They wouldn’t know what decent behaviour even looked like, and if by some momentary fluke they did, their immediate response would be to fuck it up somehow. Ember had witnessed several very unpleasant episodes in the bar featuring disallowed weapons. He recalled, especially, that disgusting use of a .38 automatic pistol by Basil Gordon Loam, the ‘Gordon Loam’ occasionally spoken as one surname, though not hyphenated.1 He was known also as Enzyme. His family – either the Gordon part or the Loam – used to add up to something an age ago, apparently, with a fortune in tea. Now, though, he scuttled about doing sleazy jobs for odd sleazy people and being casual and perilous with guns.

  As Ralph saw things, art – paintings, sculptures – obviously involved the creation of images. A wheat field in a painting was, plainly, not the wheat field, only a likeness of it, an image of it. That’s what art was all about – turning the real into what could be put on to canvas. But art also created a different, secondary kind of image, Ralph believed, and this could have a real impact on his attempt to get the club up towards at least respectability, and possibly eminence. He meant the image, the personal reputation, of whoever bought the picture or pictures or sculpture. As long as the work or works represented definite top rating, the individual they belonged to received a true boost to his or her personal image, reputation, by possessing them; the way owning a Rolls Royce or big diamonds, like that bonny ring Richard Burton gave Liz Taylor, brought someone notability. A collector of high-calibre art acquired not just the art but high public regard for (i) recognizing in a great item what in fact made it great; (ii) admiring, even thrilling to, this excellence; (iii) coming up with the oodles of boodle required to buy it.

  Ralph reasoned that if he could only get some of this distinguished, personal reputation, this notability, The Monty would inevitably share some of the hiked esteem and glory. Ralph had read somewhere about a famous hotel in New York which was originally of high reputation as a centre for an extremely worthwhile experiment in communal social living. But it was gradually taken over by druggies and petty crooks and lost all its prestige. Ralph aimed triumphantly to reverse this process in The Monty. He would brilliantly raise the quality of his club, not permit its sad moral collapse.

  However, possessing top-grade paintings didn’t guarantee absolutely that everyone thought the sun shone out of the owner’s art appreciation. Ralph naturally realized this. In the art game there was something called ‘provenance’, a very important something. It meant: where did the owner of this or that piece of art get it, and how? Was crime involved – that is, theft? Was violence involved – that is, brutality during the theft, gunplay, hijacking? Violence had often been associated with art in the past, such as when the painter Vincent
van Gogh cut off his own ear, as a bit of a saucy jape.

  Despite these questions, doubts and the ear outrage, though, Ember continued to believe very firmly in the beneficial side of art.

  What he wanted, and badly wanted, was some aid in bringing that licensed club he ran in Shield Terrace up to the kind of outstanding cultural level enjoyed by, say, The Athenaeum, in London, or Boodle’s. He’d admit his club certainly didn’t fall into this sort of category at present, too many members being dregs and/or arseholes. Ralph speculated, though, that if people heard he, individually, had become familiar with true and distinguished art and possessed renowned examples of it in respectable, tasteful, ungaudy frames, his own and the club’s status would certainly benefit. He and The Monty were powerfully, almost mystically, linked, like the Queen and her corgis.

  Once the club had begun to emerge in its new elite form, he might hang the pictures there now and then, as long as security seemed OK. Just to be credited with buying the art, though, would most likely be enough to hint at an alteration in The Monty’s standing. His next step then must be to block membership renewal for all lowlifes, all slags, all slappers, for Enzyme and those like him. That might seem cruel, perhaps snobbish, but Ralph felt it vital to his noble development plan, his quest, his unique mission. For too long The Monty had been a rubbish tip. He would transform it, this transformation to go much deeper and further than what might be called a fresh coat of paint. But, yes, he planned that paint should be involved, the fine pallet paint of old masters or mistresses, and their modern successors.

  In fact, Ember had already introduced an art element into the club, though of a minor form and not with complete success; to be honest, it was the cause of a disgraceful disaster. Owing to the grim, non-stop possibility that he would get shot dead, or, at least, permanently wheelchaired, or put into an eternal coma by business colleagues when sitting at his little accounting shelf-cum-desk behind the Monty bar, he’d had a rectangular steel barricade tailored and suspended tactically between pillars at the club so that nobody could draw a line on him just by stepping in through the main doors – set slightly higher than the bar – and letting go with a multi-round burst, then exiting fast. One main area of risk had been closed by this very original, made-to-measure fitment.

  But Ralph realized it gave a rather coarse, frightening, killing-fields impression of The Monty, and although that might, regrettably, be deserved in some aspects, it was blatantly not the kind of flavour – the kind of image, to recycle the term – not the kind of image Ralph sought for The Monty, whether in its future shape or now. It couldn’t be usual or desirable for a proprietor to fear having his chest and/or head smashed open by a pop-in visitor’s barrage. Hello, Ralph. Goodbye, Ralph.

  To disguise the life-preserver’s true, disturbing purpose, Ralph had turned to … had turned to a type of art, though not the out-and-out sort he’d been thinking about these last couple of months. He’d arranged for some enlarged illustrations from a famed work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by the poet William Blake, to be pasted on to the steel, giving, Ralph thought, an attractive and scholarly touch to the hovering bulwark, while not in any way impairing its actual anti-hitman readiness.

  But, naturally, there’d been members of The Monty who considered this literary reference a bit of aerial Ralphy swank. These retards wouldn’t even have heard of William Blake. Ralph had come across him during the Foundation Year of a mature student degree programme he’d begun at the university up the road, though he’d had to suspend the course because of increased business pressures, especially a brilliant, sustained boom in Charlie sales. Gordon Loam was banned instantly and for ever from the club in any of its forms following flagrantly imbecilic behaviour towards the Blake. He had opened fire with a Smith and Wesson handgun on the illustrations when pissed out of his skull one night, not on tea, causing what Ralph regarded as very unseemly damage to the beard of a figure in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.2 There’d been further acute hazards and breakages in the crowded club below, because the bullets ricocheted from that impenetrable, two to three centimetres thick metal comforter.

  Skilled, urgent repairs to the Blake were put in hand, without reference to the insurance company in case of delays and/or ribaldry, but Ralph had come to feel that, in a way, the contemptible, ill-disciplined volley carried a message for him. It was: to acquire art that scored in its own right, not merely as cover for something crudely, ominously practical, such as the elevated rampart, but wholly, genuinely, glorious itself. Great paintings had a fundamental, independent worth and one-off identity. For instance, Ralph thought it would be philistine to stand before, say, a Rembrandt or a Gauguin and exclaim, ‘This could do a great camouflage job in my club!’

  At the time of the Blake attack by Gordon Loam, Ralph had bellowed The Monty ban on him and added, to crush and punish him further, ‘I’m going to install real, wonderful art in the club, and I will not allow you ever to get near it.’ Ralph knew great pictures did get attacked at times by nutters. They were usually trying to publicize some selfish political point, about postage rates or wind farms. Gordon Loam, aka Enzyme, didn’t need that kind of motive. Downright malevolence was enough. He had plenty of it, probably brought on by permanent rattiness at the way his family had slid in wealth and position. He probably loud-mouthed to cronies that he’d turned The Marriage of Heaven and Hell into a shotgun wedding. The Smith and Wesson wasn’t a shotgun, of course, but someone as crude, insulting and bombastic as Gordon Loam wouldn’t let a need for basic accuracy stop what he’d regard as a hilariously witty jibe.

  Ralph was OK with that third requirement he’d listed for someone moving in on serious art – an ability to cough enough to pay for it. As a matter of fact, Ralph quite regularly had barrel loads of cash from his other business, much larger than the club. This was the supply of recreational substances on an expanding, big-city scale, chiefly Charlie and weed, but also all the rest. Ralph peacefully, beneficially, shared that trade with another local firm belonging to someone Ralph naturally knew very well, Mansel Shale. Their organizations were separate from each other, but mutually tolerant. This concord suited each of them and the police. Almost certainly, it would not be Manse or any of his people, or a gunman hired by Manse or by any of his people, who might slip into The Monty one day or night and try to see off Ember; but some jumped-up sod or sods who wanted to jump up higher and had decided that Ralph dead would make a great springboard. Or a pro hired by some jumped-up sod or sods. Or someone like Enzyme, enraged by the public humiliation of his ban and set on payback.

  Ralph had an idea that Manse disposed of some of his profits into art. Although he lacked refinement by the metric tonne and, speechwise, sounded as if education hadn’t been invented yet when he was a kid, Shale did have what seemed an authentic taste for Pre-Raphaelite works, usually young, skinny women with unchubby elbows, long ginger hair cascading down on to their neat breasts, bright, glossy, purplish dresses, and a look on their faces indicating plenty of the most gut-churning intensity about emotional problems. Ralph believed he could – even should – follow Manse Shale in the pictures aspect, though not specifically with Pre-Raphaelites, which Ralph found rather brash and samey. He felt pretty certain the models for those Pre-Raphaelite men artists got fucked.

  Probably quite a lot of UK business folk with earnings they could hardly tell the Revenue about did some serious laundering in the paintings and sculpture areas. Ralph knew Manse bought sometimes from a local dealer, Jack Lamb, who lived not far from Ralph. They both had ancient, modernized country manor houses. Ralph could feel a kind of neighbourly fellowship with Lamb because of their properties and, in addition, Ralph had discovered a further strange resemblance. Each had inherited from a previous owner – probably someone upper-crust and learned way back – a Latin quotation on a blue tablet fixed to the gates of each estate. Lamb’s said ‘Omnes eodem cogimur’, which Ralph had heard meant ‘we are all driven to the same end’. The maxim at Ralph’s hom
e, Low Pastures, read ‘Mens cuiusque is est quisque’, translated on the internet as ‘a man’s mind is what he is’. Ralph preferred his. He didn’t want to think of himself as ‘driven’. He was the driver, and by means of his drive he’d eventually manage a lift in rating for The Monty. His made-up mind on this was what he was, in Latin or any other lingo.

  These similarities would make an approach to Lamb much easier than it might have been. They’d talk in English, of course, not Latin. Ralph felt that because of their lovely, historic dwellings, grounds, paddocks and the classical mottoes, he and Lamb had become sort of squires hereabouts, though not via family succession. Jack had arrived at that position through the purchase and sale of items of true beauty, the bulk quite possibly genuine; Ralph through gifted, energetic marketing of the various well-known relaxing commodities, which he recognized had enemies, but which he knew would prevail: all sorts of top people, including Iles, the Assistant Chief Constable here, backed legalization.

  Ralph could fantasize about things a few centuries ago and imagine the local peasantry who had discovered the meaning of that Latin on the gate idolizing him and saying respectfully among themselves while harvesting the curly kale, ‘Squire Ember of the Big House, Low Pastures, has certainly got a mind, and that mind is what Squire Ember is, so if he didn’t have a mind he wouldn’t exist, and who would be in the Big House then?’ Unfortunately, people like those would have swilled back too much home-produced scrumpy cider over the years for their brains to cope efficiently with philosophical points.

  This morning, seated at his accounting desk behind the bar, as the first staff members turned up to start the day, Ralph glanced fondly around at the mahogany panelling and well-polished brass fittings and thought – as he’d often thought – that The Monty looked like a place of real, solid, traditional quality. It was the ropy membership who let it down. He knew now he should have been more careful when he first bought the club about the type of people he’d let join. But it was a mistake that could be corrected, thank God. He yearned for the time when the effects of that error had been reversed and the protective Blake was no longer needed – would, in fact, seem quaint and laughable. So far, that time had not arrived.