“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re bound to have one or two washouts.”

“He’s a demon!” she said.

“What did he do to you?”

“He’s a bull! He’s like a little brown bull!”

“Go on.”

“He was painting on a huge canvassy thing when I went in and he turned round and his eyes opened so wide they became circles and they were black and he shouted ‘Ole’ or something like that and then came towards me very slowly and sort of crouching as though he was going to spring. .

“And did he spring?”

“Yes,” she said. “He sprang.”

“Good Lord.”

“He didn’t even put his paint-brush down.”

“So you had no chance to get the mackintosh on?”

“Afraid not. Didn’t even have time to open my purse.”

“Hell.”

“I was hit by a hurricane, Oswald.”

“Couldn’t you have slowed him down a bit? You remember what you did to old Woresley to make him keep still?”

“Nothing would have stopped this one.”

“Were you on the floor?”

“No. He threw me onto a filthy sofa thing. There were tubes of paint everywhere.”

“It’s all over you now. Look at your dress.”

“I know.”

One couldn’t blame Yasmin for the failure, I knew that. But I felt pretty ratty all the same. It was our first miss. I only hoped there wouldn’t be many more.

“Do you know what he did afterwards?” Yasmin said. “He just buttoned up his trousers and said, ‘Thank you, mademoiselle. That was very refreshing. Now I must get back to my work.’ And he turned away, Oswald! He just turned away and started painting again!”

“He’s Spanish,” I said, “like Alfonso.” I stepped out of the car and cranked the starting handle and when I got back in again, Yasmin was tidying her hair in the car mirror. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but I rather enjoyed that one.”

“I know you did.”

“Phenomenal vitality.”

“Tell me,” I said, “is Monsieur Picasso a genius?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was very strong. He will be wildly famous one day.”

“Damn.”

“We can’t win them all, Oswald.”

“I suppose not.”

Matisse was next.

Yasmin was with Monsieur Matisse for about two hours and blow me if the little thief didn’t come out with yet another painting. It was sheer magic, that canvas, a Fauve landscape with trees that were blue and green and scarlet, signed and dated 1905.

“Terrific picture,” I said.

“Terrific man,” she said. And that was all she would say about Henri Matisse. Not a word more.

Fifty straws.

18

MY TRAVELLING CONTAINER of liquid nitrogen was beginning to fill up with straws. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Stravinsky, and Matisse. But there was room for a few more. Each straw held only one-quarter cc of fluid, and the straw itself was only slightly thicker than a matchstick and about half as long. Fifty straws stacked neatly in a metal rack took up very little room. I decided we could accommodate three more batches on this trip, and I told Yasmin we would be visiting Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, and James Joyce. All of them were living in the Paris area.

If I have given the impression that Yasmin and I were paying our visits more or less on consecutive days, that is wrong. We were, in fact, moving slowly and carefully. Usually about a week went between visits. This gave me time to investigate thoroughly the next victim before we moved in on him. We never drove up to a house and rang the bell and hoped for the best. Before we made a call, I knew all about the man’s habits and his working hours, about his family and his servants if he had any, and we would choose our time with care. But even then Yasmin would occasionally have to wait outside in the motor car until a wife or a servant came out to go shopping.

Monsieur Proust was our next choice. He was forty-eight years old, and six years back, in 1913, he had published Du Cóté de chez Swann. Now he had just brought out A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. This book had been received with much enthusiasm by the reviewers and had won him the Goncourt Prize. But I was a bit nervous about Monsieur Proust. My enquiries showed him to be a very queer duck indeed. He was independently wealthy. He was a snob. He was anti-Semitic. He was vain. He was a hypochondriac who suffered from asthma. He slept until four in the afternoon and stayed awake all night. He lived with a faithful watchdog servant called Céleste and his present address was an apartment at No. 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichet. The house belonged to the celebrated actress Réjane, and Réjane’s son lived in the flat immediately below Proust, while Réjane herself occupied the rest of the place.

I learned that Monsieur Proust was, from a literary point of view, totally unscrupulous and would use both persuasion and money to inspire rave articles about his books in newspapers and magazines. And on top of all this, he was completely homosexual. No woman, other than the faithful Céleste, was ever permitted into his bedroom. In order to study the man more closely, I got myself invited to a dinner at the house of his close friend Princess Soutzo. And there I discovered that Monsieur Proust was nothing to look at. With his black moustache, his round bulging eyes, and his baggy little figure, he bore an astonishing resemblance to an actor on the cinematograph screen called Charlie Chaplin. At Princess Soutzo’s, he complained a lot about draughts in the dining-room and he held court among the guests and expected everyone to be silent when he spoke. I can remember two incredible pronouncements he made that evening. Of a man who preferred women, he said, “I can answer for him. He is completely abnormal.” And another time I heard him say, “Fondness for men leads to virility.” In short, he was a tricky fellow.

“Now wait just a minute,” Yasmin had said to me when I told her all this. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to take on a bugger.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t be so stupid, Oswald. If he’s a raging hundred per cent fairy—”

“He calls it an invert.”

“I don’t care what he calls it.”

“It’s a very Proustian word,” I said. “Look up ‘to invert’ in the dictionary and you’ll find the definition is ‘to turn upside down.’”

“He’s not turning me upside down, thank you very much,” Yasmin said.

“Now don’t get excited.”

“Anyway, it’s a waste of time,” she said. “He wouldn’t even look at me.”

“I think he would.”

“What d’you want me to do, dress up as a choirboy?”

“We’ll give him a double dose of Blister Beetle.”

“That’s not going to change his habits.”

“No,” I said, “but it’ll make him so bloody horny he won’t care what sex you are.”

“He’ll invert me.”

“No, he won’t.”

“He’ll invert me like a comma.”

“Take a hatpin with you.”

“It’s still not going to work,” she said. “If he’s a genuine twenty-four carat homo, then all women are physically repulsive to him.”

“It’s essential we get him,” I said. “Our collection won’t be complete without fifty Proust straws.”

“Is he really so important?”

“He’s going to be,” I said. “I’m sure of it. There’ll be a strong demand for Proust children in the years to come.”

Yasmin gazed out of the Ritz windows at the cloudygrey summer sky over Paris. “If that’s the case, then there’s only one thing for it,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You do it yourself.”

I was so shocked I jumped.

“Steady on,” I said.

“He wants a man,” she said. “Well, you’re a man. You’re perfect. You’re young, you’re beautiful, and you’re lecherous.”

“Yes, but I am not a catamite.”

“You don’t have the guts?”

“Of course I’ve got the guts. But field work is your province, not mine.”

“Who said so?”

“I can’t cope with a man, Yasmin, you know that.”

“This isn’t a man. It’s a fairy.”

“For God’s sake!” I cried. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let that little sod come near me! I’ll have you know that even an enema gives me the shakes for a week!”