“Don’t take me up wrong,” he said, “but it certainly looks as if she done the dirty on you. But why? That’s the way we have to look at it. There’s always a reason, and it may not be one you’d ever think of. Why, would you say?”

“Because she loves another man,” said Francis.

“O Gawd; sod love!” said Jimsie. “You never know where you are with it. A great cause of trouble.” And as he went on to anatomize love, as it appeared to him both as a man and as a professional dealer in sexual satisfaction, it seemed to Francis that he heard the voice of Tancred Saraceni, explaining the Bronzino Allegory. The face that was clearest in the picture, as he thought of it, was the woman-headed beast with a lion’s claws and a dragon’s tail, who proffered the sweet and the bitter in her outstretched hands. The figure called the Cheat, or in Saraceni’s Latin explication, Fraude. He must have whispered the name.

“Fraudy? I should think it was fraudy, and rotten, too, walking out on you and the baby,” said the woman.

When at last Francis was fit to go, he offered the woman two ten-pound notes.

“Oh, no dear,” said she; “I couldn’t think of it. You never had your punch, you see. Not that I’d have blamed you if you’d really socked me.”

“No, that wasn’t the agreement,” said the man, taking the notes himself, swiftly but delicately. “You’ve got to consider time spent, and an agreement entered into even if not carried out. But I’ll say this, sir. This night does you credit. You’ve behaved like a gentleman.”

“Oh, sod being a gentleman,” said Francis, then regretted it, and shook hands with them both before running down the stairs into the Soho street.

The premises of Sir Geoffrey Duveen and Company were elegant and awesome; Francis would never have presumed to enter on his own volition, but it was here that Colonel Copplestone had said he was to meet him, and the wording of the message had suggested without actually saying so that it was a matter of importance. Something of importance was just what Francis needed. He had never felt so insignificant, so diminished, so exploited in his life since the days at Carlyle Rural. He was smartly dressed and punctual as he presented himself in the great London centre of art dealing and art exportation. The Colonel was in a small panelled room in which hung three pictures that made Francis’s eyes pop. This was the sort of thing that very rich collectors could afford, and that they looked to the Duveen Company to supply.

“But you have your degree. First Class honours; I saw it in The Times. Just remind me of what that degree implies.”

The Colonel seemed inclined to brush aside Francis’s story of his marriage and its outcome as something of secondary importance. How callous these old fellows were!

“Well, it’s called Modern Greats, but the formal name is Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I concentrated on philosophy, and having a Classics degree already I had a certain advantage over the men who worked with translations; you begin at Descartes, but it’s very useful to know what came before. And modern languages: mine were French and Geran. The politics is pretty much British constitutional stuff. I did as little economics as I could. Not my thing: I prefer my astrology without water.”

“Aha. Well, you didn’t waste your time at Oxford,” said the Colonel. “Don’t let the other thing bother you too much. Painful, of course, but I can offer you something that will make you forget it—or almost forget it.”

“In the profession?”

“Yes. Not bang in the middle of the profession, of course. That’s for quite a different sort of chap. But something you can do very well, I should think. Better than anyone else available at the moment, certainly. I want you to work with Tancred Saraceni.”

“Is he—?”

“Most certainly not. And you must never let him think you are, or you’ll be in the soup. No; Saraceni is in a queer game of his own, which interests us at the moment, and could be important. By the way, quite a few people who believe in that sort of thing say he has the Evil Eye. I don’t completely dismiss that, so watch your step. You told me he had suggested that you might like to work with him? Learn his special trade, or craft, or whatever he calls it?”

“Yes, but I’m not really sure that’s what I want. I want to be a painter, not a craftsman who tarts up paintings that have been allowed to decay.”

“Yes, but what the profession wants is that somebody should be with Saraceni on the job he’s undertaking now. Do you know anything about the Düsterstein collection?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s not well known, though these people here at Duveen’s know about it, of course. It’s their business to know such things. It’s a lot of Renaissance and post-Renaissance and Counter-Reformation pictures—not all of them the best, I believe, but still remarkable—that are housed in Schloss Düsterstein in Lower Bavaria, about seventy miles from Munich. The owner is the Gräfin von Ingelheim, and she is interested in having her pictures put in A-l condition, with a view to sale. Not a vulgar sell-out, you understand; not an ‘Everything Must Be Sold To The Walls By The End Of The Month’ thing. No, a gradual, very high-class unloading that should bring in a great deal of money. We want to know where the pictures are going. She’s persuaded Saraceni to do the work of getting the stuff ready, rather on the quiet, without actually being secret. Saraceni needs an assistant, and we would like the assistant to be a member of the profession. And that’s you, my boy.”

“I’m to report to you? But what? And how?”

“No written reports to me, unless something totally unlikely happens. But you’ll come back to England now and then, won’t you? Don’t you want to see little Charlotte and find out how she is getting on? What kind of a father would you be if you didn’t? But there will also be another form of written report, and this afternoon you had better go to Harley Street, where Sir Owen Williams-Owen will see you, and take a look at your heart, and tell you how to report back to him on how it’s getting on.”

It was plain to Francis that Uncle Jack was enjoying being mysterious, and that his best course was to play straight man, and let his instructions come in due course.

“Williams-Owen knows all about hearts. He will give you a regimen of health that you must follow, which will include regular reports to him on how your heart is functioning. How many heartbeats after strenuous exercise—that sort of thing. But in actual fact it will be a key to observations we want you to make about trains.

“Schloss Düsterstein sits in a considerable estate, with some parkland and a lot of farms. Less than a mile from the house, or the castle or whatever it is, there is a branch of a railway, and that branch leads to a large compound—a concentration camp, as Lord Kitchener called them, to which freight and cattle cars are taken from time to time, not on any regular schedule but always late at night. You can tell how many cars there are because the train travels quite slowly—what they call a Bummelzug—and at one place it crosses an intersection point, and makes a characteristic sound with its wheels. If you keep your ears open, and count the times you hear that sound, and then divide by two, you can reckon the number of freight or goods vans that have passed over the point, and are thus bound for the camp. And that’s what you report to Williams-Owen, every fortnight, according to a scheme he will give you, in a letter in which you can whimper and play the hypochondriac as much as you please. He’ll see that the information gets to the right place.”

“It’s better than staying here and feeling sorry for myself, I suppose.”

“Much better. It’s your first professional job, and if you haven’t thought so already, you’re damned lucky to get it.”