"The heavy clay of good old London," says Bernie. "A fortune at our feet, Ray. And my people know where to dig."
TWO
I had to be straight with Bernie. Until I saw a piece of the stuff in my own hand and got an idea about it for myself, I couldn't do anything. The only time in my life I'd gone for a gold brick I'd bought it out of respect for the genius running the scam. He deserved what I gave him.
Which was a bit less than he was hoping for. Rather than be conned, I would rather throw the money away. I'm like that with everything.
I had my instincts, I told Bernie. I had to go with them. He understood completely and we parted on good terms.
If the famous Lloyd Webber meltdown of 'O3 had happened a few months earlier or later I would never have thought again about going into the Bone business, but I was done in by one of those sudden changes of public taste which made the George M. Cohan crash of '31 seem like a run of The Mousetrap.
Sentimental fascism went out the window. Liberal-humanist contemporary relevance, artistic aspiration, intellectual and moral substance and all that stuff was somehow in demand. It was better than the sixties. It was one of those splendid moments when the public pulls itself together and tries to grow up. Jones's Rhyme of the Flying Bomb song cycle made a glorious come-back. American Angels returned with even more punch. And Sondheim made an incredible come-back.
He became a quality brand-name. If it wasn't by Sondheim or based on a tune Sondheim used to hum in the shower, the punters didn't want to know.
Overnight, the public's product loyalty had changed. And I must admit it had changed for the better. But my investments were in Cats, and Dogs (Lord Webber's last desperate attempt to squeeze from Thurber what he sucked from Eliot), Duce! and Starlight Excess, all of which were now taking a walk down Sunset Boulevard. I couldn't even get a regular price ticket for myself at Sunday in the Park, Assassins or Follies. Into The Woods was solid for eighteen months ahead. I saw Passion from the wings and Sweeney Todd from the gods. Five Guys Named Mo crumbled to dust.
Phantom closed. Its author claimed sabotage.
"Quality will out, Ray," says Bernie next time I see him at the Lou.
"You've got to grant the public that. You just have to give it time."
"Fuck the public," I said, with some feeling. "They're just nostalgic for quality at the moment. Next year it'll be something else. Meanwhile I'm bloody ruined. You couldn't drum a couple of oncers on my entire stock.
Even my ENO side-bets have died. Covent Garden's a disaster. The weather in Milan didn't help. That's where Cecilia Bartoli caught her cold. I was lucky to be offered half-price for the Rossinis without her. And I know what I'd do if I could get a varda at bloody Simon Rattle."
"So you won't be able to come in on the Bone deal?" said Bernie returning to his own main point of interest.
"I said I was ruined," I told him, "not wiped out."
"Well, I got something to show you now, anyway," says Bernie.
We went back to his place.
He put it in my hand as if it were a nugget of plutonium, a knuckle of dark, golden Bone, split off from a larger piece, covered with tiny pictures.
"The engravings are always on that kind of Bone," he said. "There are other kinds that don't have drawings, maybe from a later date. It's the work of the first Londoners, I suppose, when it was still a swamp. About the time your Phoenician ancestors started getting into the upriver woad-trade. I don't know the significance, of course."
The Bone itself was hard to analyse because of the mixture of chemicals which has created it and some of it had fused, suggesting prehistoric upheavals of some kind. The drawings were extremely primitive. Any bored person with a sharp object and minimum talent could have done them at any time in history. The larger, weirder looking Bones, had no engravings.
Stick people pursued other stick people endlessly across the fragment. The work was unremarkable. The beauty really was in the tawny ivory colour of the Bone alone. It glowed with a wealth of shades and drew you hypnotically into its depths. I imagined the huge animal of which this fragment had one been an active part. I saw the bellowing trunk, the vast ears, the glinting tusks succumbing suddenly to whatever had engulfed her.
I saw her body swaying, her tail lashing as she trumpeted her defiance of her inevitable death. And now men sought her remains as treasure. It was a very romantic image and of course it would become my most sincere sales pitch.
"That's six million dollars you're holding there," said Bernie. "Minimum."
Bernie had caught me at the right time and I had to admit I was convinced.
Back in his office he sketched out the agreement. We would go in on a fifty-fifty basis, funding the guys who would do the actual digging, who knew where the Bone-fields were and who would tell us as soon as we showed serious interest. We would finance all the work, pay them an upfront earnest and then load by load in agreed increments. Bernie and I would split the net profit fifty fifty. There were all kinds of clauses and provisions covering the various problems we foresaw and then we had a deal.
The archaeologists came round to my little place in Dolphin Square. They were a scruffy bunch of students from the University of Norbury who had discovered the Bone deposits on a run of the mill field trip in a demolished Southwark housing estate and knew only that there might be a market for them. Recent cuts to their grants had made them desperate. Some lefty had come up with a law out of the Magna Carta or somewhere saying public land couldn't be sold to private developers and so there was a court case disputing the council's right to sell the estate to Livingstone International which also put a stop to the planned rebuilding so we had indefinite time to work.
The stoodies were grateful for our expertise, as well as our cash. I was happy enough with the situation. It was one I felt we could easily control. Middle-class burbnerds get greedy the same as anyone else, but they respond well to reason. I told them for a start off that all the Bone had to come in to us. If any of it leaked onto the market by other means, we'd risk losing our prices and that would mean the scheme was over.
Terminated, I said significantly. Since we had reputations as well as investments to protect there would also be recriminations. That's all I had to say. Since those V serials kids think we're Krays and Mad Frankie Frazers just because we like to look smart and talk properly.
We were fairly sure we weren't doing anything obviously criminal. The stuff wasn't treasure trove. It had to be cleared before proper foundations could be poured. Quite evidently LI didn't think it was worth paying security staff to shuft the site. We didn't know if digging shafts and tunnels was even trespass, but we knew we had a few weeks before someone started asking about us and by then we hoped to have the whole bloody mastodon out of the deep clay and nicely earning for us. The selling would take the real skill and that was my job. It was going to have to be played sharper than South African diamonds.
After that neither Bernie nor I had anything to do with the dig. We rented a guarded lockup in Clapham and paid the kids every time they brought in a substantial load of Bone. It was incredible stuff. Bernie thought that chemical action, some of it relatively recent, had caused the phenomenon.
"Like chalk, you know. You hardly find it anywhere. Just a few places in England, France, China and Texas." The kids reported that there was more than one kind of animal down there, but that all the Bone had the same rich appearance. They had constructed a new tunnel, with a hidden entrance, so that even if the building site was blocked to them, they could still get at the Bone. It seemed to be a huge field, but most of the Bone was at roughly the same depth. Much of it had fused and had to be chipped out. They had found no end to it so far and they had tunnelled through more than half an acre of the dense, dark clay.