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?'
