Paid and Loving Eyes

always me gets the headaches.

“Yes, Lovejoy. This is it.” She spoke French with vituperation. I looked about as Jacques parked the motor.

Some darkish children played, stood about. The filthy street wore debris like medals for indignity. The house fronts were frayed, no real paint. The doors looked battered. A couple of windows were patched with cardboard. The aroma of exotic cooking filled the air. It made me hungry as hell, but I had a sour feeling that more sickness lay just around the corner.

“This way, Lovejoy.”

It might have been a church hall, some sort of meeting place, that we found after a few hundred yards. Down steps, with a reinforced door to shut the world of staring children out. Two bulky blokes stood in bulky-bloke attitudes, suited for funerals. They knew Veronique, accepted me without a glance, but listened to Jacques. Paymaster?

We went through an arched doorway. Guy was jangling away, talking non-stop to Colonel Marimee, gesticulating, joking, a riot. The place was crammed with furniture, much covered in sheets. Note that small point: hardly any paintings, ceramics, and no display cases filled with antique jewellery.

The Colonel gave a terse instruction to Guy and stood watching us approach. We signalled our arrival with various degrees of subservience, all except Veronique, who perched provocatively on a polished surface. I swallowed. Montaigne said that however high the throne, we all still sit on our tails.

“Inspect these items and report, Lovejoy,” Marimee commanded. “You have thirty minutes.”

“Oui, mon commandant.”

He meant me. I avoided spewing on his brilliant shoes, and walked down the first line of furniture. The pieces were of a muchness. The larger of the two hulks preceded me unasked, flicking away the dust covers as I went. Jacques Dreyfus followed.

French furniture caught fashions from its neighbours. People say that, yet it’s a bit unfair, because France started a number of styles of her own. It’s always said that France filched Italian joinery in the Renaissance, Flemish marquetry in the seventeenth century, English mahogany styles in the eighteenth and so on. True, but don’t forget France’s flair. You have to see the originals—not this load of gunge I was being shown. In skill, France’s antique furniture is a front runner.

A tulipwood cabinet stopped me. Supposed to be 1775, it sported four plaques of Sevres porcelain set into the panels. Small, but a fortune at any auction, if you believed it. I bent down to the plaques. Plants, spring flowers. Carnations, three tulips, lilac, with that lovely apple-green border Mereaud loved. He was the highest paid of Sevres porcelain decorators, though of course he’d died two hundred or more years before these fake plaques were done. I knelt to look closer. The carnations were exactly right botanically. The tulips, being easier, also were. The lilac was wrong. I’ve a tree growing in my own unkempt garden, and have tried to imitate Mereaud and his equally skilled pal Leve often enough to know. Somebody had copied as best they could from an imperfect picture of the real thing.

That sickness made me giddy as I rose. I stumbled, fell on a nearby table. I withdrew my hand with an involuntary cry. I’d checked my fall mechanically, touched its surface. It burned me like a chimney from hell.

“Pardon, Lovejoy,” Dreyfus said, helping to steady me. I apologized profusely, saying it was too long since breakfast. Colonel Marimee curled his lip at my offshore weakness. I went with pretence of care, pausing now and then as if thoughtful, but the nausea was almost snaking me.

“Very good, mon commandant,” I said to Marimee. Almost all of it was sickening. I still wasn’t sure how much of the antiques game he understood. Nor did I know how much he was supposed to know. I could hardly see.

“Adequate? Yes or no?” he demanded.

“Adequate, mon commandant.”

“Bien.” And left, terse nods all round. There was no relaxation of the atmosphere.

“What about transport?” I asked Veronique. “I mean, do we have to arrange it, or will they call for it?”

“Who?” she asked back.

“Well.” I was thinking while I was still on my feet, holding the sickness at bay. “You said we can’t auction it here. Hasn’t it got to go to the Hotel Drouot to be sold?”

“Stupid,” she snapped, as I’d hoped she would. “We aren’t selling. We’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to… afford it. And it’s a fraction only.”

She was going to say buy, then didn’t. My throat cleared itself as I tried to stop it saying, “Is it all furniture? What else we got?” Don’t say tapestry, upholstery.

“Wall tapestries, mainly,” Veronique said, starting us off out of the storehouse. “And of course upholsteries. People say they’re more expensive than the furniture itself. True?”

“Always has been, love. Got papper mash stuff?” Don’t say yes.

“Sure,” she said. “Thirty papier mache pieces. Right, Jacques?”

“Good,” I said, meaning bad, bad, bad. They’d have paper filigree too, the bastards. I nodded a nod as good as the Commandant’s, then got driven back to the hotel, where I bade them a smiling so long, and with the relief of the afflicted was spectacularly and constantly sick in the minuscule bathroom. The image of those dark staring children watching us in that shabby street, with their blistered hands and old-young faces and blunted expressions was in my mind. Dr Johnson’s crack came at me: “Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish.” I thought, please help me. Come soon, pals. You can’t leave me to do this alone. My insides were empty, except for this feeling of murder. I saw only the lavatory bowl for half an hour.

The day was waning—all Paris seemed on the wane just then—when I left the hotel. I wandered brimming with nausea into the little square, sat on the seat beneath the tree, looked at the cobbles, put my head back hoping for cool. Clammy head, wet hands. The air felt heavy, muggy, too close to breathe. Somebody sat on the seat. I felt it nudge.