still say shut that door it's freezing.
'You always ask that.' Yamta smacked me playfully. She's thirty-eight, bulbous with straggly hair. By comparison Saunty's like a stick insect, James Joyce minus the specs.
She sobered. 'We heard, Lovejoy.'
'Who from?' I wasn't taking any chances.
'Gaylord faxed me,' Saunty said. He looked dreamy. I noticed he was smoking a churchwarden. Yamta grows certain prohibited flora, to enhance spontaneous merriment.
It's their other scandal, but not on a par with frolics. 'Gluck's got to be stopped, Lovejoy.'
'Shall we get down to it, then?' Yamta said.
'Er…' I'm never sure what she means. Orgy's never far.
We went in. Saunty takes an hour to set up, computer, paper, tomes built up like a redoubt with him in the centre. Saunty can't think naked, so they both get dressed. I use this term loosely. It's only dressing gowns and slippers. Yamta put on some atonal orchestral music, quite pleasant with the proper side of your brain.
'Terms are ten per cent of the gross, Lovejoy,' Yamta said, 'payable a fortnight after the scam goes down. Even if you don't use Saunty's scheme.'
'Right.' I'd have agreed to anything. This is a standard carder man's fee, not cheap.
She brewed tea. We got chairs. By the time he began Saunty looked like a spud in a kiln, with stacks ringed about him. We had to peer over a parapet of documents. The last hour, Battle of Rorke's Drift.
'You want to restrict the scam to anything in particular, Lovejoy?'
'Anything, as long as it works.'
Yamta looked at me, spotting my desperation I suppose, and started flopping about lifting folders while Saunty clicked his PC.
'Mars meteorite fragments any good?' he suggested. 'Ever since they found primitive carbonate deposits in those polar ice-cap SNC chunks, even small fragments have shot up in value ten thousand times. No? I've blokes who only sell guaranteed Martian nitrogen isotopic signatures, with geochemical spectroscopic certificates. Proven pieces of Planet Mars.'
'No, ta. Everybody's doing it.' All museums were busy cashing in while scientists excitedly worked out extraterrestrial DNA.
Files moved. The screen blinked, scrolled.
'Mermaids, Lovejoy?' he offered. 'Good scam, that would be.'
'Have to be in Zennor in Cornwall, though.'
We have an ancient law: all mermaids caught in UK's territorial waters - or on land, if your luck's really in - belong to our Sovereign. Like swans on the Thames, and sturgeons. Only one mermaid actually doesn't. Every Evensong in Zennor's ancient church, she flops in from the sea and sits in the rearmost pew. She does this in penance for the village lad she enticed away one Sunday. Never seen again, poor lad.
Angry villagers carved her figure into the pew. Don't pinch her place, incidentally, or you're for it. There her fishy spirit lingers, safe from being snaffled as royal prerogative decrees. You can see her there any Sunday. The one that got away, so to speak. Gluck was no romantic.
'No, ta. It'd be another DNA job.'
'Or an ancient carving? Pillock's still in business, does mostly limewood carvings for Zurich, but he'd be keen to help. Or antique parrots?'
'That Aussie thing? Painted some birds' feathers?'
Saunty chuckled. 'Common green Aussie parrots, they were. He dyed them with cinnamon shampoo, sold them off as rare Indian Ringnecks for seven thousand quid a pair instead of the cost of a meal. Any good?'
'No, ta.'
'Them little Chinese monkeys?'
'What's this interest in biology, Saunty?' I was narked. Yamta's dressing gown had proved too warm. Busy among the files, she'd cast it off. So I had to suffer, thoughtless cow.
'The Chinese Ink Monkey was extinct,' Saunty rambled joyously on. 'Scholars trained them to fetch manuscripts and mix ink. They were rediscovered couple of years ago.
Priceless, an extinct species that made it back! Any good?'
'No, ta.'
'For a really big con,' Saunty said after a while, 'how about another Sheppard's?'
I hesitated. 'It's an idea, Saunty.'
It was the world's biggest recorded robbery ever. Astonishingly, it was a simple daylight mugging in, of all places, King William Street, in fair London town. Incredible to relate, a Sheppard's messenger strolled unguarded carrying nearly three hundred million pounds sterling, Treasury bearer bonds to be precise. A bloke with a knife threatened the messenger, who saw sense. Gone, quick as it takes to tell. Now, the City of London hardly ever has daylight muggings. The CID, Interpol, and FBI came into it, some Texan wheeler dealer died in Houston, people hid in Cyprus. It got really ugly.
'Of course,' Saunty continued blithely, 'they should have sent them straight to Indonesia, held them there for a twelve-month. Instead,' he said with scorn, 'they floated them in dribs and drabs - Cyprus, Miami, Glasgow. Nerks.'
'Didn't they try Liechtenstein?' Yamta wafted erotically by. 'I've always wanted to go there.'
