“Here? Well there’s Harry Bateman, Liz Sandwell, Helen, Big Frank from Suffolk, Sven, Mannie, Jill…” His rubbled croak became inaudible in instantaneous pandemonium. The silly nerks had erupted, grabbed for the receiver to bawl their names and shouting offers, percentages, splits on the knock, part deals—
Click. Burr. I get fed up with other people’s greed when I’ve enough of my own.
It was coming on to rain when finally Mac’s lorry hove in. Somehow he’d heard, God knows how, of the furniture I’d left penciled notes for at the lumber yard. They were on his wagon under a tarpaulin in the back.
Robert met us at the crossroads, pushing a handcart. Mute, he transferred the two pieces without my assistance. I called thanks to Mac and in the driving rain followed the giant’s form along to Tachnadray. I felt a spare tool at a wedding.
This next bit’s about crooked money, and how you—repeat, you— will sooner or later be robbed blind. There’s no escape, so if you’re of a nervous disposition, I’d skip it.
A “paper job”, aka “papering a house,” is one of the commonest antiques tricks in the world. And make no mistake, everybody in the game tries it. Since the Great Antiques Boom, however, it has come to be a speciality of the world’s poshest auction houses. It works thus:
A householder dies, alas. In the ten seconds which elapse between the crusty old colonel’s last breath and his widow phoning the insurance company, several dealers will call, offering to sell the colonel’s personal effects. The widow sorts out what she wants to take to her daughter’s and signs a contract with a respectable auctioneer.
Now an auctioneer can do two things. Either all the auctionable stuff is vanned off by the auctioneer’s respectable vannies (they will be called assistants in the written contract) to the respectable auctioneer’s premises, or else the contents—furniture, cutlery, linen, carpets, the colonel’s campaign medals, paintings, porcelain—will be left in situ, and the house opened for a grand auction.
You can imagine that the final printed catalog might look a bit “thin,” as we say, if old Colonel, RIP, didn’t have much. But oh, how nice it would be, thinks our respectable auctioneer wistfully, if the deceased had a couple of handsome almost-Chippendale tallboys, or an oil painting possibly almost nearly attributable to Turner or Vermeer.
How sad a respectable auctioneer’s life is, he sighs.
Happily, sin slithers in to help out. Within hours of that respectable auctioneer’s naughty daydream, would you believe it but the house’s contents begin to swell, multiply, increase, until finally, on auction day, the colonel’s antiques overflow into the garden, where the respectable auctioneer has thoughtfully hired numerous elegant marquees for the purpose. Isn’t life great? Soon it gets greater.
The cataloger’s erudition helps the thing along. She (catalogers are normally female; more careful, you see) will say of some neffie portrait of a bog-eyed clergyman: “…once attributed to the immortal Gainsborough …” or some such. The fact that the daub was created in an alcoholic stupor by an incompetent forger now doing life on Dartmoor is regarded as a mere quibble, because the words as written are actually true. So Law condones the fraud: The portrait was once so attributed—by a crooked forger. See how it works?
Just as theaters are “papered”—i.e., crammed by the actors’ friends, who are given free tickets—so auctioneers swell their offerings at house auctions.
Innocent souls might ask: “But what’s the point? Who gains?” To answer this best, simply buy any item at such a sale, then try to sell it. An old Lowestoft jug, say. First, offer it just as it is. To your alarm, antique shops don’t want to know. Dealers spurn you and your jug. They see a dozen a day, so what’s one more? Tomorrow, however, take along the auctioneer’s lovely catalog. You can now show the dealer your jug’s handsome picture and precise printed description. He’ll be over the moon. Of course he’ll still haggle over the price. The point is he’ll want your jug. You’ve made a sale.
Good, eh?
The reason he now wants it is that magic thing called provenance. He can ascribe your jug, truthfully, as “from the famous sale at Nijgi-novgorod House …” and show your catalog as proof. Appearance, condition, and provenance—they’re the three great selling points in horses, cattle, bloodstock. And, oddly enough, people. Why not in antiques too?
Paper jobs are highly popular in the antiques game, because everybody profits: dealers, public, buyers, catalogers, auctioneers, the colonel’s widow, the bloke who prints the catalog… The only slight hiccup in it all is that it’s fraudulent. It has to be. Why?
Because if every house were ram-jam packed full of delectable antiques, there’d be no demand. It’d be like everybody suddenly being millionaires. So the “sets” of dining chairs aren’t sets at all; they’re made up from here, there, and everywhere. Vases reputedly brought back from Japan in 1890 were actually fired in Wapping last week.
The delicate Chinese porcelain pillows weren’t shipped home from Canton last century: They were a job lot in a Hong Kong package tour this Easter. The colonel’s campaign medals will be sold—and sold, and sold, and sold, for entire sets will be put together by every dealer in the country and sold as the colonel’s one genuine set. Which explains why the printed catalogs for important house auction sales are always sold out instantly—to market twenty sets of medals you need twenty catalogs, right? It’s cast-iron profit. It’s today’s favorite crime. All you need is a posh address, and you can make a fortune. The customers get diddled, but so?
That’s the paper job. All you need is care, skill, and a team.
After dinner I retired to formulate my paper job, promising Elaine to reveal it in all its glory at the morning gathering. Then, in the cascading rain, I went out for a sly walk.
The death simply wasn’t my fault. Honest.
The drive to the main gate was the only orthodox way off the Tachnadray estate. Stone walls rimmed the thirty or so acres of paddocks, outbuildings, lawns, with a few straggly hawthorn hedges infilling the tumbled drystone stretches. Behind the great house, vegetable gardens were busily reverting to weeds. Glass cloches sprawled higgledy-piggledy. Greenhouses shed panes. Huts flaked planks. Even the outbuildings had joined the disintegration wholesale and gone toothy by extruding stones. I’d asked Duncan why he didn’t grow stuff, market some produce. He’d waxed sarcastic: “I’ll get a dozen retainers in on it immediately.” The poor bloke was doing his best.
Hell of a place to hide, I grumbled inwardly as I drifted through the dark garden. Soon after Mrs. Buchan had blundered by admitting that Hector’s dawn patrol was on the hillside opposite to the main gateway, I’d sussed out a cracked path between lines of old bleached canes. It made stealth clumsy and full of din, but what could I do? The map showed a fairly smooth slope, then a few upland folds. And, in grand solitude two miles off, a cottage marked shooters in a narrow gully.
