The Fifth House of the Heart (6 page)

1965

Europe

I

The new Canadian flag had just been introduced. Sax's gentleman friend at the British Museum described it as “
gules a pale argent, charged
a feuille d'érable,
” which seemed hilarious at the time, probably because Sax was at the zenith of his snotty phase and found all things Canadian to be parochial and dreadful.

Martin Luther King marched on Montgomery, Alabama; Malcolm X was assassinated in Manhattan. The Voting Rights Act had been proposed to Congress by President Johnson and a cosmonaut had walked in space.
My Fair Lady
was deadlocked with
Mary Poppins
to sweep the Oscars; Sax had wept openly at the premiere of
The Sound of Music
at the Rivoli theater in New York City, and two weeks later, on March 16, he saw a pop combo called the Rolling Stones perform at the Granada Theatre in Greenford, England, and struck up an acquaintance with the drummer, Charlie Watts. Sax knew their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, having sold him some good Regency pieces for the offices of Immediate Records, in addition to meeting him socially in the back of Mary Quant's shop. Meanwhile, 3,500 American combat troops had been deployed in Vietnam.

In those days, Sax was spending half his time in Manhattan and the other half touring the restless world in search of what he called sound articles. He traveled by ship and plane, depending on the destination and the extent of his purchases. His shops in London and New York did excellent business, as his particular taste happened to coincide with the newly wealthy youth culture's fascination with Victorian, Gothic, medieval, and Asian antiquities; he had a sure sense of the grotesque. He understood the power of symbolic imagery. He supplied George Harrison with Cambodian stone Buddhas, plied Grace Slick with ebonized mirrors adorned with demons and saints. Bob Dylan was photographed for an album cover sitting on an Art Deco settee belonging to Sax.

He was one of the fascinating people on the periphery of the Scene, someone who knew everyone, peppering his speech with amusing Polari slang he'd picked up in London's theater district. It didn't hurt that Sax had been dressing in Victorian velvet long before it was fashionable. And queer was in.

And at twenty-five, he was only just getting started.

That year, Sax left New York in March, then abruptly departed London in April, when his casual relationship with a gentleman at the British Museum turned serious for the gentleman but not for Sax. He fled to the South of France and his quaint pied-à-terre in the Dordogne Valley in the midst of a walnut orchard. There, much to his surprise, he found a young Beat poet he'd met in New York, a friend of Allen Ginsberg, waiting for him. This was back when Sax was virile and promiscuous, of course; he took such developments in stride, in those days. But the poet soon bored him. When the telephone rang, Sax eagerly answered the call, hoping it might be a summons to somewhere else.

“Saxon-Tang,” he said into the mouthpiece. The phone was in the front hall beneath a mirror. Sax checked the Look as he spoke. An open-chested ethnic vest in embroidered wool, a gift from his acquaintance
Givenchy; ruffled linen shirt with bloused sleeves; wine-colored velvet trousers; and black coachman's boots. Hair in his eyes and swept back on the neck. Well enough for getting on with, certainly. He escaped coming off as an utter ponce because of his rugged face, which was an accident of birth. Nothing to do with him, who slept on silk and got ten hours of sleep a night when he wasn't on the job. If only he could master walking like a proper man, with his elbow out instead of in! All of this went through his mind in an instant, and then a stranger's voice spoke on the other end of the line.

“We've met,” the voice said, narrowing the field to about half a million people. “I am told you are not averse to adventures.”

The voice was male, deep and dry. A smoker in his fifties, French. The meaning was clear enough, if one knew Sax at all: he could not resist an opportunity for enrichment, regardless of the peril or moral implications. He was known and hated for it amongst his rivals. They thought he had a taste for danger, a rare attribute in the business, and was a scoundrel as well (less rare). Both Sax and his ex-boyfriends knew he was, truth be told, an abject coward. What people took for bravery was in fact avarice so intense it overcame his keen sense of self-preservation. It was only his lust for acquisition that sent him into the literal and figurative jungles of the world.

“What sort of adventure?” Sax replied. He ought to make sure this wasn't just a lewd proposition, although he wasn't averse to those, either.

“There's a château on the Loire, entirely furnished in the original. Survived the revolution and both wars. Guests, verifiable by letters,
cartes de visite
, notes, and so forth, include Napoléons
une
et
trois
, Marie Antoinette, Cardinal Mazarin, several of the Frondeurs—”

“Yes, yes, all very interesting,” Sax interrupted, trying to sound as if he had something better to do. In fact, he was salivating.

“The present owner of the château is a lady of indeterminate age,
Madame Magnat-l'Étrange. I am told she is ill. She is intestate. The contents of the property could fall to the hammer, but it is more likely the government will intervene and make a collection of it all.”

Sax detested when governments made collections of things. Sticking paper labels on beautiful objects and subjecting them to inventory inspections. Taking them permanently out of the market. Other sins. He felt the urgency of the situation. He had swallowed the hook and he didn't care.

“Mmm,” he said, allowing himself the minimum expression of interest.

“Perhaps we can discuss the matter
en mains propres
,” the voice said.

Two hours later, Sax was on the Bordeaux-Périgueux-Paris train.

T
here were other advantages. Foremost, Paris was a suitable distance from his cottage in Dordogne. At first, it was primarily the distance he was concerned with—the Beat poets were past their prime, and this particular specimen, although beautiful in a wispy-bearded, postadolescent way, wrote miserable poetry. Worse, he read it aloud, interrupting himself to make scribbled revisions on scraps of paper. The escapade suggested by the voice on the telephone was riddled with omissions and lies; of that, Sax was perfectly aware. But the extended description of the Loire estate was convincing. If he got so much as a pair of good chairs out of the deal, it would pay for the trip. Sax tossed the house key at the poet and told him to clear out in a week if Sax didn't come back. Then he cleared his own calendar for two weeks.

Once Sax was on the train for Paris, he could properly consider the odd assignation toward which he was rushing.
You may bring confederates
, the smoky voice had said. Accomplices, he meant. Sax had a few of those, and considered his options. Gander, his beefy
assistant manager from Liverpool, might do for a start. The London branch was staffed primarily with willowy, oversexed shopgirls Sax recruited from Liberty, Laurent, and similar retailers, because they were attractive and hip. The real work, however, was done by the assistant managers.

There were others in Sax's stable. Marco the Italian was strong and unscrupulous but prone to panic; this job seemed to have elements of a burglary about it, and Marco's anxiety might get the better of him, regardless of how well he looked with his shirt open and that wealth of dark curls bursting out.

The Pole, Szczepan (whose name, disappointingly, was pronounced merely “Stefan”), was an immense, powerful man with a devious mind, but Sax didn't trust him—Szczepan remembered too well the breadlines and hunger back in Poland. Sax didn't doubt the man would take the prize for himself if he thought he could get away with it. Which he couldn't. But he might try.

There were a couple of lads in London and the German Krunzel brothers, but Sax hadn't seen any of them in a while. After some consideration, he settled on Gander. Nigel, an effeminate, cunning, hand-dry-washing buyer's assistant, could keep the shop in Gander's absence.

Gander looked like an apprentice butcher, with huge red hands and ears and a low forehead surmounted with blond, bristling brush-cut hair. He never seemed to blink, his small blue eyes peering out uncomprehendingly from a wealth of pink face. Appearances deceive. Gander was extremely intelligent. He had been a specialty furniture remover before Sax recruited him; Gander had spent several years standing by at auction houses, soaking up along with tea and cigarettes the details of period, quality, and style that defined historical objects. Gander's mates didn't care what they were moving. It was all weights and measures to them. Gander alone took note.

He knew something of art, furniture, and ceramics when Sax spotted him at a lythcoop, or estate auction, at a North Country mansion; since then, he'd learned a great deal more. Gander's recent affinity for three-piece pinstriped suits with high lapels was ideal. He looked honest and disinterested to Sax's customers, who expected to deal with someone effeminate and cunning who dry-washed his hands when he spoke. Consequently, Gander, who appeared incapable of haggling, could often realize prices that made Sax blush. In addition, he had heard Gander enjoyed tremendous luck with the willowy shopgirls. The brute was probably hung like a Brazilian pack mule.

At the dreary, cinder-blown
gare
in Poitiers, Sax descended from the train and found the bank of coin-operated telephones inside the station. He fed a pocketful of francs into an instrument and got the London shop; apparently, Gander was at the warehouse in Tilbury. Sax rang the warehouse and an unfamiliar cockney voice answered. Moments later, Gander was on the line. Sax outlined his plans, omitting certain details, and asked if Gander was available to assist. He was. Gander would meet Sax at a café in Boulevard St.-Germain, not far from the Sorbonne, the following afternoon.

“It might be a little risky,” Sax added. He thought Gander had agreed too quickly. Perhaps Sax hadn't made the circumstances sufficiently clear. “Possibility of intervention by the gendarmes.”

“Right,” Gander said, and rang off.

P
aris in 1965 was enjoying a jazz renaissance no less influential, within its sphere, than the rock and roll of London during the same year. Sax wasn't particularly interested in music for its own sake. He went to a great many concerts of all kinds, but for him it was a social function, not an aesthetic one. He liked his arts to be durable, to occupy space.
Music was something to fill the air around the artifacts. Still, he found he rather liked jazz. Not the big-band stuff, but the intimate trios, quartets, and quintets with their playful yet urgent interpretations of standards, the original compositions that leapt and flickered like fire. Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon, and Bill Evans—they were all in town that year, not to mention the bigger acts. Dizzy Gillespie had performed at the Olympia in November. Duke Ellington played the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Besides finding the music tolerable, Sax also liked the men who liked jazz. They were usually older, more complex. The rockers wanted to get theirs and get out. The jazz aficionados tended to be filmmakers, writers, diplomats, and attachés, people with interests that extended beyond racketing about in the counterculture, taking amphetamines, and rogering each other. This crowd found Sax interesting, too. He was a curiosity on the scene, which trended toward narrow lapels and black neckties. It wasn't easy to stand out in the circuslike Mod world; it was hard
not
to stand out amongst the deliberately understated jazz people.

Sax had the evening to himself. He would meet the voice on the telephone the following day at 1300 hours for a cup of coffee and a nice conspiracy. He decided to take the night off, enjoy a set of music in a club, and then, refusing any romantic engagements that might arise, he would dine alone and sleep in monastic solitude at L'Hotel, on the Left Bank.

This proved to be a difficult if virtuous plan. The first flaw in the strategy was L'Hotel. Sax knew the manager, Guy Louis Dubou­cheron. The place attracted flocks of the rich and famous. Guy planned to renovate it soon, and Sax's furnishings figured in those plans. So whenever Sax was in Paris, Guy had a good room for him at half price. When Sax tiptoed down to the snug little bar, he was astonished to discover his recent acquaintance Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones
sitting at the end, drinking Coca-Cola. The Stones were in town for a concert at the Olympia.

Things deteriorated from that point. Sax never made it to the jazz bar. He went with Charlie to a sort of artist's cooperative instead, a hotbed of Trotskyites and radicals and bearded youths trying to overthrow the tyranny of the paintbrush by making dreadful pictures without it. Andy Warhol was there, amongst some other interesting people; he said he was going to retire from painting. There was a certain amount of drinking early in the evening, then smoking of grass, which always rendered Sax completely helpless. He spent at least an hour talking to a most extraordinarily beautiful woman with skin like porcelain, who knew all about antiques and claimed to have the best private collection of Caravaggio paintings in the world, mostly studies and sketches, but including the lost masterpiece
The Magi in Bethlehem
.

She must have been as stoned as he was. Sax was under the impression he was talking to one of Warhol's people, Edie Sedgwick or Baby Jane Holzer—he didn't yet know the habitués of “the Factory,” although he would later spend a fair amount of time with them. Someone eventually told him the woman was a countess from Germany, the Gräfin von
Thingummy Somethingorother, a title as long as Hindenburg's
pimmel
, in any case. Events went by in a colorful, noisy rush. He met the real Edie Sedgwick, who rearranged his kerchief. Sax was content. He was in the middle of things again, a party to the happening, a happening to the party. Still, he was ashamed of himself. It was supposed to be a quiet evening.