Two for One Page 6

  A.K.A.

  Also Known As …

  “Interesting, most interesting.”

  Abruptly Holmes put his pipe in his pocket. Presumably an imaginary pipe can’t burn a hole in an imaginary suit?

  “Oh, and there was one other thing I noticed …”

  “Yes?”

  “Far be it from me to interfere with your present incarnation but really, Watson—‘Chick!’. ‘Honey!’ You were brought up to speak the language of Shakespeare, Keats, Macaulay, Trollope. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there …’ Hamlet,” he added.

  “And now, old fellow, I suggest we resume our quest for antiques. Like us, none of them are getting any younger …”

  And he gave that convulsive silent laugh that signified he had made and was enjoying a joke.

  Five

  I left with the feeling that my office had somehow turned into the concourse at Grand Central at rush hour. What had happened to that haven of peace, where on an average day—and there were plenty of them—I could sit and bet against myself as to which raindrop would reach the bottom of the window pane first? And then cheat if I lost.

  Where I could sit and commune for hours with my framed photograph of Raymond Chandler and crack wise back and forth out of the side of our mouths? ‘Ou sont les longeurs d’antan?,’ as he might have said—had he spent more time reading Georges Simenon. What I liked about the picture of Ray was that his expression said that he knew that I knew that he knew. And, frankly, I could do with a bit of that in my life.

  The lobby was a Chinese-free zone. The only clue to their having paid us a visit the fact that Troy was sporting a paper cap that looked suspiciously like the one the phoney delivery boy had been wearing and a white jacket folded on top of” Mrs. Plack’s pile of ‘things’.

  “Finders keepers, Mr. Watson,” she trilled merrily, when she saw me eyeing it. “It will do for my cousin’s youngest boy.” Having met her cousin’s youngest, I made a mental note to avoid any Chinese restaurant he decided to work in. The boy didn’t know his dum sim from his bok choy.

  Troy & Plack—now that’s not a bad name for an agency—had just given new meaning to ‘Chinese takeaway’.

  Quentin Mallory was the Thin Man. Not the Fat Man. Not the Tin Man. The Thin Man.

  He was all of seven feet tall and it was as if that Baby Giant had been at play again, only this time, instead of squashing his play dough, he’d decided to stretch it as far as it would go without snapping. This was the result. If he’d been any taller, Quentin Mallory would have needed oxygen to breathe up in that rarified atmosphere.

  So when I say that he looked down his nose at me when I introduced myself, I’m not making a value judgment—though he probably was. He struck me as being someone who didn’t suffer fools gladly and I suspected his definition was catholic with a small ‘c’.

  He was black silk Armani from head to pointed Gucci toe and Georgio must have stood on an assistant’s shoulders for the final fitting. Head was immaculately tousled silver and from the way he was constantly touching it and smoothing it, I guessed a rug. The second time I saw him I knew for sure.

  It didn’t even take all of my detecting skills to make the politically incorrect assumption that the guy was of an alternative sexual persuasion. Jesus, I can still remember when ‘gay’ meant cheerful and ‘fruit’ was something you ate. But that way madness lies …

  Mallory was certainly gay in both senses of the word. Now what could he do for me? A little bird—a sweet little white bird—had told him he might expect a visit from a gorgeous private detective. He held out a pale white hand. I shook it, projecting as much testosterone as I knew how.

  “Goodness, what have I done, Mr. Watson? Have I been a bad boy? Oh, I do hope so! Will it be handcuffs and leg irons? As long as they don’t leave a mark on my Armani. Take me—I’m yours!”

  And with that he threw up his hands in mock horror until they disappeared in low lying cloud. The eyes—pale poached eggs in a face that would otherwise have graced a Roman coin—turned heavenwards. Which was nearer for him than most of us.

  “Are you doing your stupid bitch act again?”

  It came from somewhere much nearer the ground. I looked around and then down to find a stature-challenged person, who now began to tug at Mallory’s trouser leg to get his attention. He must have been about three feet tall and seemed to have that concentrated aggression that I’m sure can easily come with being so—concentrated.

  While he was tugging, he turned a baleful eye on me.

  “Don’t even think it,” he said. “Don’t think ‘midget’, ‘dwarf,’ ‘little person’. Think ‘compact’—like in automobile. Think ‘condensed’—as in milk. Think ‘efficient performance’.”

  Mallory had now rejoined us. Having detached the new arrival from his trouser leg, he was anxiously smoothing out the creases.

  “I hate it when you do that. I know this is supposed to be ‘unstructured’ but there are limits, you little—thing, you. And I do object to ‘bitch’. If you must use a female appellation, you may refer to me as ‘Caesar’s wife’ who, as you know, was above reproach. Or in my case, perhaps beneath it!” He giggled girlishly. “Oh, yes, I think I’m safe in saying that, when it comes to gossip and secrets, I’m definitely beneath anything you care to name. Oh, dear, sometimes I’m so sharp I could cut myself.”

  Then, turning to me, he flashed a smile his orthodontist would have been proud

  “I see you’ve met my assistant, Petit. A royal pain in just about any part of the anatomy but a genius when it comes to shaping metal I managed to wean him away from Snow White, didn’t I? Heigh-ho, heigh-ho. No, but seriously, I rescued this poor little mite from the Hollywood scrap heap. He’d come here hoping they were about to remake The Wizard of Oz, and he wanted to be the Head Munchkin, didn’t you, sweet thing?”

  And with that he scooped up the—compact person and deposited him on top of a glass show case, where his little feet dangled dangerously above the ground.

  “Big giraffe!” screamed the little man.

  “Toadstool!” Mallory screamed back at him. “No—toad’s tool!”

  “Pencil dick!”

  “Runt features!”

  “Sperm crap!”

  “No such word!” Mallory exclaimed triumphantly. This was obviously their little domestic routine trotted out to entertain first time visitors—and I had no intention of interrupting its natural course, being a great believer in the sanctity of hearth and home—always assuming one had either.

  Petit looked pensive for a moment, then summoned up his best shot—

  “But if there were, you’d be it!”

  That seemed to satisfy both of them and Mallory lifted him gently down and ruffled his spiky hair, which is more that I’d have dared to do, since it had the approximate appearance of a porcupine. Mallory had certainly missed out on that one.

  While the boys had been entertaining each other, I’d been glancing around the showroom and I could see that Holmes had been doing the same. Mike, on the other hand, was totally fascinated by the sight of its owner’s bean pole legs. To him they must have seemed like the ultimate living lamp posts. His main dilemma was whether to christen them or to hump them. Fortunately, the indecision prevented him from doing either.

  The place was an Aladdin’s cave. It was as though Louis XIV had left him the entire contents of Versailles and then Chairman Mao had come along and said— “Look here, Quent, old man, we’re going a bit minimalist here in China, so would you mind taking all this Chinoiserie crap off my hands?”

  It was obvious where Kane’s interior designer had shopped to furnish Kane Towers.

  “Fun, isn’t it? All those heavenly MGM movie sets crammed into one. You almost expect Garbo and dear John Gilbert to emerge from behind that chiffonier and as for that couch—isn’t that pure Anna May Wong? Ah, what
it is to be a snapper-up of well-considered trifles!

  “I tell you, Mr. Watson—or may I call you Jack? I’m Quent to my friends and I feel we’re friends already. Well, Jack, if you were to lift off the roofs of all the houses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, you’d find them literally stuffed to the gills with Mallory antiques …”

  “And most of them would be Mallory fakes.” It was Holmes’s voice in my ear, even though he was the other side of the showroom. While I was being subjected to the cabaret performance, he had been wandering about abstractedly, peering at details of the furniture with a magnifying glass. He had now mastered the disconcerting art of dematerializing and then reappearing somewhere else when least expected. It did not make for a comfortable coexistence.

  “Mr. Kane has been one of our most regular customers. A gentleman of the most eclectic taste, Mr. Kane.” There was that ‘eclectic’ again. “But a little bird tells me you have come to discuss a little bird in the hand—or, as I hear, sadly no longer in the hand but in someone’s bush. Oops, what have I said? Please follow me to Santa’s workshop … Petit.”

  With that he gave the kind of bow and flourish totally appropriate to the court of the Sun King and ushered me through a door the little man was holding open.

  The room we entered was a complete contrast. Stark and functional, it was set out with benches, tool racks and what looked like miniature furnaces. One whole side of the room was lined with shelves and cupboards from floor to ceiling. Propped against them was a tall rolling ladder, presumably to enable Petit to gain access to the higher levels.

  Inside their private domain Mallory and Petit seemed to change, too. The outrageous behavior was set aside, as an actor sheds a role when he walks off stage. Petit hopped up on a counter and Mallory leaned against it like a tired stork, while I took the chair he indicated. Mike, his nose numbed by the cornucopia of varnish and paint smells, settled by my side. Holmes was doing his impersonation of the Invisible Man.

  Mallory spoke in a businesslike tone.

  “Mr. Kane has been a customer of ours for some years now. Since you are temporarily in his employ and he has sent you to me, I can be frank with you. He is living proof—at least for the time being—that money can’t buy you taste. And even though that sentiment sounds reminiscent of an old Beatles song, it is an axiom I have seen proved time and again.

  “Then one day he sent for me to that gothic monstrosity he calls home and there he showed me his pride and joy—the Borgia Bird. Could I—would I make him an exact copy, so that he could have his cake and masticate it in secret, so to speak? It is a malaise I have found to be quite common with the fanatical collector. The piece was complex but not impossible—not when you have a miniature Cellini, a fore-shortened Fabergé at hand, all packed into the person of my small but perfectly-formed friend here.”

  I am no judge of how a diminutive person looks when he blushes but I would have laid a certain amount on the fact that Petit was blushing now. Even his “Ah, he’s full of shit!” lacked true conviction. I realized that theirs was the surface badinage of an old married couple, a façade that kept the rest of the world at a distance. There was genuine affection between this oddest of odd couples. I rather envied them at that moment. After all, I had nobody at home to call me ‘Sperm crap’ except Mike and his vocabulary was a little limited.

  “Fetch the Bird, if you would be so kind, mon petit vieux …”

  Petit toddled over to one of the drawers and a moment later was back with two objects wrapped in velvet. His tiny fingers unwrapped the first with surprising delicacy and laid the contents on the counter top. There were the two halves of a mould into which metal would be poured.

  He did the same with the second parcel and now, gleaming in the light from a table lamp, was the Borgia Bird—or, at least, a sibling facsimile of the one Kane had shown me this morning. Was it only this morning?

  “Since I had gone to the trouble of hatching one for my client, I thought I would hatch another to keep it company on a need-to-know basis. And on this occasion I saw no reason why my client needed to know. He paid for what he got and now I have this pretty thing to keep me company on long winter evenings.”

  Mallory picked up the bird and stroked its feathers, as if they were real.

  “I may not have the original but I have something else that Mr. Kane does not …”

  “And that is?”

  “Knowledge, Jack—knowledge. Kane believes what he wishes to believe about the Bird’s provenance but / know—thanks to Petit here—that it is much older than he thinks. Show him, Petit.”

  The little man took the Bird from Mallory and brought it over to me, carrying it with the reverence a priest might show to communion wine.

  “It’s something you wouldn’t notice by holding the creature as you would hold a real bird—in the palm of the hand. But when you are examining it all over, as I had to do to make sure the copy was perfect, I noticed this …

  He turned the Bird on to its back and with his stubby index finger indicated the area under the neck. To me they were a tangle of feathers but, as I looked more carefully, I thought I could discern certain hieroglyphics interwoven. I became aware of Holmes peering over my shoulder.

  “Chinese characters, Jack, and very old ones at that,” Mallory chimed in. “I have done a little discreet research and that particular script comes from a region in the north of China and dates back—wait for it—about three thousand years. This little fellow was over two thousand years old before it became a toy for the Bloody Borgias. It is beyond price, my friend, beyond price.”

  That was the second time someone had told me that.

  “And what does it say?”

  “Ah, there we have unfinished business, I’m afraid. There are perhaps three scholars in the whole of the country who may be able to decipher the characters and they would certainly want to know why I wanted to know. Even to ask may give away the existence of the Bird and—who knows?—there may well be people out there with a genuine claim to it. And I am virtually certain that our friend, Osgood Kane—or whoever he really is—is not of their number. So there, for the moment, the matter must rest. Now, who was it who said that knowledge was power?”

  Whoever it was I was not to learn, for at that very moment a bell indicated the presence of someone in the showroom outside. Well, I say ‘bell’ but, in fact, it was another of those damn chimes. This time we were treated to “The hills are alive with the sound of music” played on a glockenspiel, which made me strangely nostalgic for “The Ride of the Valkyrie”.

  “Don’t you just love Julie Andrews?” Mallory levered himself into an upright position and made for the door. “As Larry King likes to say—‘Don’t go away, now’.”

  Petit busied himself rewrapping the birds and I was sitting contemplating what I had just been told, when I heard Mallory address whoever had arrived in the outer room… “Miss Kane, this is a pleasant surprise. Had I known you wished to see me, naturally I would have been happy to call upon you and save you this trouble …”

  Miss Kane! I caught Holmes’s eye and watched him shimmer towards the open door. To move myself would immediately alert Petit to my undue interest in the new arrival.

  Now I could hear a woman’s voice sounding tense and strained. Although I couldn’t make out what she was saying, I recognized the tonality I had heard earlier in the entrance hall at Kane Towers.

  Mallory was attempting to calm her.

  “As you requested, I have attempted to intercede with the party in question. Without success, I’m afraid. He professes to be totally ignorant of the matter. It does not appear to be a question of money. There is something about the merchandise that seems to stick to the fingers of those who come into contact with it. If you will permit me to suggest it, your own special powers of persuasion might more easily prevail—always assuming he is the one in possession of the artifacts in question. As
it happens, I have someone else making similar inquiries on behalf of your dear father. In fact, he is with me at this very moment …”

  He must have indicated the inside room, for there were sounds of someone leaving in a hurry and the sound of music was once again heard in the land.

  Mallory called out after her and did I detect a certain malice in his tone?

  “Mr. Perlman will find the usual consignment in the trunk of his car…”

  Moments later he was back.

  “Such a sad situation, especially after all the trouble Petit and I took. As we have mutual interests in this matter, I feel I can confide in you, Jack. Miss Kane is, shall we say, ‘romantically entangled’ with one Nicky Parmentieri, the proprietor of a certain night club …

  “Among others,” he added after a moment’s thought.

  “Birdland”, I added helpfully. It was about time I earned my detecting credentials.

  “Oh, you know it?”

  “Know of it.”

  “Well, it appears that on a whim—girls will be girls!—Miss Kane decided to transfer custody of the Bird from her father to someone else. To whom she refuses to say but an educated guess would suggest to Mr. Nick as a way of—shall we say?—cementing the relationship. Now she is exercising a lady’s prerogative to change her mind but the putative new custodian is failing to reciprocate and, since he is also an excellent customer … You see my dilemma? … Show Jack Mr. Nick’s toys, Petit.”

  Petit went over to another drawer and beckoned me over imperiously. We were on his turf now. He pulled it open and there lay row after row of ceramic birds. There were birds of paradise, parrots, bluebirds, doves, finches—and a whole row of miniature Borgia phoenixes.

  “Birds, birds, birds. A symbolic bird like the phoenix I can understand but as for the rest …” The long thin nose wrinkled in exaggerated disgust. “Nasty, dirty creatures. Poe had it right. ‘Nevermore’, quoth the Raven. My sentiments, precisely!”