Len Deighton - Spy Hook

'One hundred and fifty years,' he answered and wiped drink from his chin. 'And the walls are a metre thick, darling.'

Gloria laughed. 'Shall we go back inside?' she said. I suppose she was used to him.

He held tight to the balcony to get back in through the sliding door.

Even so, he collided with the fly screen and banged his head on the door's edge.

Despite all his shouting about it not being necessary, Gloria went in to the kitchen to wash the dishes. In an attempt to show him what a good-hearted and inoffensive fellow I was, I tried to follow her but he pulled me aside with a rough tug at my sleeve.

'Leave her alone, darling,' he said gruffly. 'She'll do what she wants to do. Zu has always been like that.' He poured more wine for me and topped up his tumbler of brandy. 'She's a wonderful girl.'

'Yes, she is,' I said.

'You're a lucky man: do you know that?' His voice was soft but his eyes were hard. I was on my guard all the time and he knew that, and seemed to enjoy it.

'Yes, I do.'

He went suddenly quiet. He was staring out through the glass door at the lights that wound up into the hills: orange lights and blue lights and sometimes the headlights of cars that shone suddenly and then disappeared like fireflies on a summer's evening. The wonderful view seemed to wreak some profound change upon him. Perhaps it has that effect upon people who spend most of their working days studying the same landscape, its colours, patterns and contradictions. When he spoke again his voice was soft and sober. 'Make the most of every minute,' he said. 'You'll lose her, you know.'

'Will I?' I kept my voice level.

He sipped his brandy and smiled sadly. 'She adores you of course. Any fool could see that. I could see it in her eyes as soon as you walked into the house. Never takes her eyes off you. But she's just a child. She has a life ahead of her. How old are you… over forty. Right?'

'Yes,' I said.

'She's determined on this university business. You'll not persuade her otherwise. She'll go to college. And there she'll meet brilliant people of her own age, and because they are at college they'll all end up sharing the same appalling tastes and the same half-baked opinions. We're old fossils. We're part of another world. A world of dinosaurs.' He swigged his brandy and poured more. There was a lot of spite in him. His friendly advice was really a way of hurting me. And it was a method difficult to counter.

I said, 'Yes, thanks a lot Dodo. But the way I see it, you are indisputably an old tyrannosaurus but I'm a young dynamic brilliant individual in the prime of life, and Gloria is an immature youngster.'

He laughed loudly enough to rupture my eardrums and he grabbed my shoulder to save himself from falling over.

'Zu, darling!' he shouted gleefully and loud enough for her to hear him from the kitchen. 'Where did you find this lunatic?'

She came from the kitchen wiping her hands on a tea-towel decorated with a picture of the Mona Lisa smoking a big cigar. 'Are you on some sort of diet, Dodo?' she asked. 'How can you eat three dozen eggs?'

For a moment words did not come but then he stammered and said that they were the finest eggs he'd ever eaten and a nearby farmer supplied him but he had to take a lot at a time. 'Have some,' he offered.

'I'm not that fond of eggs,' said Gloria. They are bad for you.'

'Rubbish, darling. Arrant rubbish. A newly laid soft-boiled egg is the most easily digested protein food I know. I love eggs. And there are so many delicious ways of cooking them.'

'They won't be so newly laid by the time you get through three dozen of them,' said Gloria with devastating feminine logic. She smiled. 'We must be leaving you, Dodo.'

'Sit down for a moment longer, darling,' he pleaded. 'I have so few visitors nowadays and you haven't told me the latest news of your parents and all our friends in London.'

For the next ten minutes or so they talked of the family. Small-talk of Gloria's father's dental practice and her mother's charity committees. Dodo listened politely and with ever more glazed eyes.

At 10.25 exactly – I looked at my watch to see the time – Dodo threw himself up to his full height, drank to the health of 'Zu and her lunatic' and having upended his glass, bent and fell full-length on to the floor with a horrifying crash. The tumbler broke, and there was a flare from the log fire as brandy splashed on the embers.

Gloria looked at me, expecting me to revive him, but I just shrugged at her. He groaned and moved enough to reassure her that he wasn't dead. Having stretched himself across the carpet before the fire, he began to snore heavily. Gloria's attempts to wake him failed.

'I shouldn't have brought the brandy for him,' Gloria said. 'He has liver trouble.'

'And I can understand why,' I said.

'We must try and get him on to his bed,' she said. 'We can lift him between us.'

'He looks comfortable enough,' I said.

'You're a callous swine,' said Gloria. So I got his boots off and carried him into his bedroom and dumped him on to his bed.

In his tiny bedroom one more surprise awaited us. A table had been hidden in here. It was laden with pots of colour, a kitchen measuring spoon, a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of linseed oil. Balanced on a jug there was a muslin strainer through which raw beaten egg had been poured, and in the rubbish bin under the table there were half a dozen broken egg shells. Propped against the wall there was another panel, unpainted but smooth and shiny with its beautifully prepared chalk gesso ground.

'What the hell is this?' I said, looking at the half-finished painting leaning against the table. It was quite different to anything we'd seen in the living room or the studio: a Renaissance street scene – a procession – painted on a large wooden panel about five feet long. The colours were weird but the drawings were exact. 'What strange colouring,' I said.

'It's just the underpainting,' explained Gloria. 'He'll put coloured glazes over that to create deep luminous colours.'

'You seem to know all about it.'

'I was an au pair girl in Nice. I used to come up here on my afternoons off. Sometimes I helped him. He's a sweet man. Do you know what it is?' Gloria asked.

'Egg tempera painting, I suppose. But why on long panels?'

'Renaissance marriage chests.'

'I don't get it.'

'He paints forgeries. He sells them through a dealer in Munich.'

'And buyers are fooled?'

'They are authenticated by international art experts. Often famous museums buy them.'

'And he gets away with that?'

'Now it's new… unfinished. It will be stained and varnished and damaged so that it looks very old.'

'And fool museums?' I persisted.

'Museum directors are not saints, Bernard.'

'And there goes another illusion! So Dodo's rich?'

'No, they take him a long time to do, and the dealers won't pay much: there are other forgers ready and willing to supply them.'

'So why…?'

'Does he do it?' she finished the question for me. 'The deception… the fraud, the deceit is what amuses him. He can be cruel. When you get to know him better, perhaps you'll see what makes him do it.'

The old man groaned and seemed about to wake up but he turned over and went back to sleep breathing heavily. Gloria bent over and stroked his head affectionately. 'The dealers make the big profits. Poor Dodo.'

'You knew all along? You were teasing him about the eggs in his refrigerator?'

She nodded. 'Dodo is notorious. He claims to have painted a wonderful " School of Uccello " marriage chest that ended up in the Louvre. Dodo bought dozens of coloured postcards of it, and used them as Christmas cards last year. I thought he'd end up in prison, but no one knows whether that was just Dodo's idea of a joke. Hungarians have all got a strange sense of humour.'