The Great California Game

“Buy the grailer?” I suggested, trying the American shrug. I tried it again, gave up.

She stood at the window, fingers tapping her elbows. “How much is a grailer?”

“Depends on the amps.” Her head shook minutely so I’d explain. “Amplifying factors. They work to tell you the price of an antique, anywhere.”

I lifted a gilt silhouette sugar bowl from the low cornish. The poor phony thing was trying to be genuine Hausmaler work from Augsburg, about 1725. “This fake’s from Berlin—see how they tried to get the proper silhouette of these flying birds? They went mad for Chinese fashion in the eighteenth century. This doesn’t…” My words run out when I try to explain what happens. My chest should lighten and chime. I turned the lidded bowl over. Zilch.

“It’s an 1880s fake. Price? Only two months’ wages. If it was genuine, that counts one amp. If you’d got an original bill of sale from Augsburg, that’s provenance and counts another amp. And genuine counts a third. Rarity, four. Is it of special material or mint? Five. Signature of the master, Johann Aufenwerth? Six. Then there’s the grail factor, last of all. Like, say this was owned by Abraham Lincoln himself! Makes seven. Seven times two is fourteen. Hence the lowest price you can afford to sell it at is fourteen times the average monthly wage. See?” I replaced the chinoiserie carefully. She was listening, saying nothing.

“Some antiques have a base price—that’s only the same, but compounded of amps to get the unit. Pearls, say. Get the quality first, expressed as currency units. Our unit is one pound sterling. Say you’ve a pearl, right? You phone a jeweller: what’s this week’s unit base average for pearls, ma man?” I was embarrassed, caught out doing my dud accent. “He tells you it’s one. Before you do anything else, you weigh the pearl, in grains. It’s nine, a whopper.

The cost is exactly nine times nine, equals eighty-one quid that day. The price fluctuates. Like, next week’s average unit base price might be two. Then your pearl’s zoomed to eighty-one times two, see?”

I was suddenly conscious of a stirring behind me. Jennie and Nicko stood there. Malice was in the air.

With one woman I’ve always the feeling I’ve a chance. With two, and a criminally-minded lover of one who was also the husband of the first, I was in irons.

“You see what I mean, Nicko?” Gina asked, her job done. She went to her Victorian chaise longe, early repro but none the worse for that. She embellished it by just reclining. I envied it, quickly went back to being humble.

“He’s a risk,” Jennie said. I disliked Jennie. She always sounded so bloody cold. I’d reported to her not Gina, about Bill. Then Bill was killed. Then Gina sends Tye to duff me up for not reporting. Aha.

“Maybe worth taking,” Gina suggested.

“For what, though?” Nicko lit a cigarette. “I can’t have any slip, this late stage.”

“For the Game.”

Jennie’s sharp intake of breath endeared her to me even less. Nicko stilled her worry with a shrug.

“Where’s the gain?” he asked. He stared balefully past me with his black eyes.

“We know Moira Hawkins is fronting something with Denzie Brandau, Nicko. We don’t know what. Lovejoy here knows values. You heard him. Okay, so he’s stupid—”

“Just a minute, Gina.” They talked on over me.

“—but that doesn’t mean he can’t be used.”

I tried to look useful, effective, anything to prevent my being taken away pleading like Tony.

“Used how?” Nicko asked.

“Like I tried. A plant.”

Jennie couldn’t control herself. “You tried that, dear.”

Gina’s smile was cold. “I underestimated Lovejoy. He’s weird, but oddly effective. He’s latched onto the Sherlock thing.”

“He says, dear.”

Women can put malice into that innocent word. It splashed like malevolent oil.

“He said himself it might not be the right one. But it’s a superb effort without any resources.”

I liked Gina. She was brainy as well as beautiful.

“He’d have got close to Sophie if we’d funded him from the start.” I wanted to give Nicko a reproachful glance to remind him of his marked money business, but bottled out. “We take him on staff, tell Denzie openly that Lovejoy rides with them as our informant.”

“Have you thought of risks at all, dear?” from Jennie.

“Wait.”

Nicko sat staring into space. My attention wandered between the exquisite Gina and a piece of original Chelsea porcelain ceiling ornament above me. It was misplaced, of course, stuck there without any other decoration to support it on the walls, but it was exuding a lovely warmth that any genuine antique gives —

People were talking.

“Answer, Lovejoy,” Gina commanded. “What will you require?”

“A small sum to send for the sample page.” I explained I was getting it on tick. “And to know enough to stop being scared I’m making mistakes.”

That earned me a blast of black-eyed laser from Nicko’s eyes. To my disgust I found myself begging.