by John Lawton
Shortly before the outbreak of war, Troy had been plucked from his East End station, promoted to sergeant, and installed at Scotland Yard on the Murder Squad under Stanley Onions—a man of whom it might be said: “a legend in his own lifetime.”
“Наряный. Impressive,” his father had said. “How long were you in uniform?”
“Three years. Hendon to Stepney and out.”
And it was impressive. So much so that most of Troy’s new colleagues at the Yard regarded him with suspicion. A bit of a tosser. And if education and a toff accent were not enough, he was also a “boy wonder.”
He’d slung his uniform in the back of the wardrobe, neither caring nor bothering to imagine that he might need it again.
Onions’s attitude to both “living legend” and “boy wonder” was the same curt two syllables: “Bollocks.”
“I chose you. Stand on that.”
Troy had solved a few murders that might have baffled ordinary coppers. He had garnered praise, and more suspicion. But tonight’s body baffled only the ordinary copper who’d called it in. Troy wished there’d been someone else available to take the case. He had far bigger fish to fry than this body on the pavement opposite Selfridges in Oxford Street. Just another black-out fatality. Unlucky enough to be dressed in black and hit by a car in the first dimness of dusk. Calling Troy out had been a waste of time.
Then the raid started.
Of late the Luftwaffe had switched from bombing RAF airfields to bombing cities, London and the East End in particular. Occasionally one or two bombers had strayed past Tower Hill, all but immune to anti-aircraft fire, to hit the City, Westminster, and Mayfair. Now, a month into the Blitz, all London was their target. This had produced not the mass panic predicted by the dystopian novelists of things to come—lurid tales in which whole cities were levelled like cornfields in a downpour—so much as mass caution. Anywhere that might provide bombproof shelter, from church crypts in the East End to the basements of the grander hotels up West. The deep-level tube stations on the Northern, Bakerloo, and Piccadilly lines might have been the logical choice, but London Transport still insisted on closing them after the last train—a state of affairs surely surviving on borrowed time? The Dorchester hotel was new, opened in 1931, and built of modern concrete; the Ritz, a generation older, had opened in 1906, its seemingly timeless façade wrapped around a steel skeleton … both had quickly come to be regarded as safe in an air raid, and it may be that they were, but the same reputation had spread without regard to age or structure to other hotels … the Savoy … Claridge’s …
Troy was crossing Mayfair when the sirens struck up their wail. The Luftwaffe would be swarming in, following the Thames like an AA road map. While night raids might be thought to be the worst, death raining out of darkness, the bombers could come at any time, day or night. You might die at noon as readily as midnight. Only the RAF stopped them bombing around the clock.
He cut through into Shepherd Market—a warren of alleys with a notorious reputation, just south of Curzon Street—heading for Piccadilly, and then home to Goodwin’s Court via Leicester Square and Cecil Court. The sky might flourish a bomber’s moon, but very little light penetrated to ground level in streets as narrow as Shepherd Market. Yet, prostitutes had cheated Darwin and evolution in a single leap and developed cats’ eyes. Twice, despite walking slowly and carefully, he bumped into a soft body, apologised, expecting a curt “mind yerself” to hear “Fancy a good time, dearie?” instead.
Troy did not fancy a good time.
Some confrontation was taking place in the doorway of a boarded-up barber’s shop near what he took to be the junction with White Horse Street. A torch was waving—Troy didn’t give a damn for the ARP and their self-righteous pronouncements—and voices were raised. Coming closer he could see the outline of the man with his back to him, a shape quite like no other—a London bobby, pointy hat, truncheon and all—and the torch was being shone in the faces of two men. The younger man was in tears, the older looked bored as though this sort of thing happened all the time and “could it all just be sped up a bit?” Troy didn’t know the young man, but the streets off Piccadilly were littered with pretty, young draft-dodgers, peddling their backsides, as commonplace as the tarts—Troy cared no more for the Vice Squad than he did for the ARP—but he knew the older man: Guy Burgess.
“May I be of some assistance?”
The copper turned, shone his torch on Troy.
“You’d assist me best by minding your own business.”
Troy held his warrant card in the beam of the torch.
The copper glared at him. He wasn’t about to offer any deference to rank.
“What’s the problem?”
“What does it look like? Queers.”
“Doing it in the street?”
“What?”
“Frightening the horses?”
“What bloody horses?”
“Let me put it another way: Did you see a lewd act, did you hear either one of these men proposition the other?”
The copper said nothing.
“Quite,” said Troy.
The younger man chose his moment to run for it, and the copper made no attempt to chase him. Burgess, far too casually to cause anything but offence, took out his cigarette case, offered his fags around, and finding no takers lit up.
The copper pocketed his torch, adjusted his chinstrap, muttered, “You should have better things to do” at Troy, and plodded off, cheated of his prey.
Burgess exhaled a cloud of smoke. Waited until the copper was out of earshot.
“It’s been a while, Freddie,” he said.
“Did you proposition that boy, Guy?”
“Of course I bloody did. He was up for it. We’d even agreed a price. He was cheaper than the boys in Hyde Park. Far cheaper than the painted dolls at the ‘Dilly. However, I’m not so stupid as to let a beat bobby hear me.”
“But you’d have let the boy suck you off in a shop doorway?”
“My, how a few years on the mean streets coarsens the tongue. Look, I feel I owe you a drink. Shall we go on somewhere and let Göring do his worst while we do our best?”
“I was just on my way home,” Troy said.
“In an air raid? We’re a hop and a step from the Ritz. Let’s nip into the basement bar for shelter and snifter.”
Troy had no idea why he was not simply brushing Burgess off, but he wasn’t.
“OK,” he said.
“Splendid,” said Burgess. “Simply splendid.”
They set off in the direction of Piccadilly. It wasn’t splendid, but curiosity, which killed many a cat, was the primary modus operandi of any detective worth his salary. The warrant card no more than a licence to be nosy.
“I see you made the papers,” Troy said.
“Oh, you mean the driving under the influence? The beak at Marlborough Street was very understanding, I pled the importance of the job—and of course the minute you mention war work, secrets and hush-hush in the same sentence …”
Troy could scarcely believe this.
“You’re in Intelligence?”
“I was. I was in a section that instructed chaps on sabotage and survival in occupied countries.”
“Hmm,” said Troy. “Do you know much about that kind of thing?”
“Of course not, but nobody in MI6 … or was it 5—I forget which is which most of the time—anyway no one in MI what-have-you thought to ask. I gather I’m considered knowledgeable about propaganda because I produced programmes for the BBC, but all that means is that our secret masters regard the BBC as being entirely propaganda. Even the shipping news is propaganda to them—they’re probably wondering about the German Bight even as we speak. They trust us and suspect us simultaneously. Mostly I gave lectures to the Home Guard about politics and unions and … stuff …”
Troy was uncertain how long he might be able to keep a straight face. Suddenly the “phony” in Phony War was all too resonant.
�
��Did the Home Guard need your stuff?”
“Not for a single moment. But … but all that came to an end in the summer. One department got rolled into another and I got rolled out.”
“So, no job.”
“Worse, no fucking Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. Thank God I was nicked while I still had the job. The next time it will be a bit harder to talk my way out of it.”
“You could try staying sober.”
“Freddie, for crying out loud, there’s a war on. Nobody’s sober!”
“Strapped for cash?”
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I go skint—there’s money in the family, although I imagine anyone looks poor standing next to a Troy—on the other hand, who couldn’t use a few more readies? However, the real problem with having no gainful employment is getting called up. It’s get a job, chase a commission, or let myself get stuck with an ill-fitting uniform and square-bashing till a Nazi bullet puts me out of my misery.”
“I could ask my father.”
“What? Back to book reviewing? It was fun for a while, but it feels like another lifetime and another Guy Burgess, so thanks but no thanks. I’ve a few irons in the fire and my Micawbers are riding high at the moment.”
“Something will turn up?”
“It had bloody well better.”
§9
The downstairs grill-room at the Ritz had become another world in the first year of war. Not that Troy would spot the difference. He had occasionally visited upstairs at Le Rivoli, but never downstairs to the bar-grill that had become La Popôte … a demotic—”the canteen”—rendered exotic in translation.
It was a descent into a circle of hell.
The walls had been lined with sandbags and wooden struts, so that it looked like a Great War trench writ large. Graffiti were scrawled everywhere, mostly obscene—”Jimmy J. sucks cock,” “Dennis takes it up the …”—and some, no doubt written in desperation or optimism, were just telephone numbers.
There were murals depicting both the last war—a panorama from the Western Front—and this one—the Siegfried Line, crude cartoons of Hitler and Mussolini—and there was a bar, a stage, a band, and a dance floor—and it was packed.
“How,” said Burgess, “can you tell there’s a war on?”
Troy had no idea what Burgess was driving at and said so.
“Alrighty. Let me put it another way. Take a look around. What is different in here, what is happening that might not have been happening in ‘37 or ‘38?”
Troy looked. It seemed at first sight to be the same old hectic toffdom. His own class at leisure with the added ingredient, fear. Another crowded, noisy London bar—and from his point of view utterly unappealing.
“Why not ‘39?”
“No. Last year there was trepidation. I hesitate to call it panic—it wasn’t, but the place would have been as empty as a cobbler’s curse. Think back to before the war.”
“I couldn’t say. I’ve never been here before.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. I’m not.”
“Never been in the Ritz bar? You’ll be telling me next you’re still a virgin.”
Troy hoped he wasn’t blushing. He wasn’t a virgin. He was, he knew, by the standards of a man like Burgess, inexperienced. He had lost his virginity in circumstances he would never disclose to anyone. Except that he had. Sasha had wormed it out of him, and his sisters had all but toasted his loss in champagne.
“You sound just like my sisters, Guy.”
“I’m flattered. But … you really should get out more. However, you are out and we are in, as it were. What’s different is the sense of urgency. Everyone you see is a bit drunker than they would have been in ‘38, a bit more desperate, a damn sight easier—at least in the sexual sense of easy—and a lot happier. Feeling everything more keenly for ‘39’s seeming brush with nothingness that turned out to be a brush with nothing much. It might well have been the same in the last war, of which I have scarcely more memory than you have yourself, but I doubt that somehow.”
The more he looked, the more Troy saw Burgess’s point, the more he looked, the more it struck him as parodic. Less a reality than a contrivance. A diminution of fear by embracing the fact of war whilst pretending it was all a joke. A celebration too loud, a jollity too forced, a hedonism too readily extolled. A scene from a silent Hollywood epic depicting the fall of the Roman Empire. The British Empire had been waiting years for this. All through the Great Depression, the farce that had been “National Government,” appeasement, the shabby years. Just what the doctor ordered, but delivered by the Führer—an excuse not to give a damn.
He thought he might be the only sober person in the room. And keeping a safe, yet friendly distance from Burgess, quite possibly the only body not to be wrapped around another.
“There’ll be fortunes made in this war,” Burgess was saying. “By arms manufacturers, but above all by hoteliers and publicans. I put my spare change into Rolls-Royce. Aero engines and such, and if I had a bob or two more to spare I’d stick it in a pub or in BSA. Did you ever wonder how many people riding their motorbikes even realise it stands for Birmingham Small Arms? But, I digress—”
Small arms draped themselves around Troy. Fingertips rustled his hair, and a voice husky with fags and booze said, “My my, Guy, you old rogue … you have landed yourself a pretty boy.”
She stepped to one side. A beautiful blonde in her late twenties in a backless, near arseless dress, blew him a kiss.
“You don’t know each other?” Burgess said. “The Hon. Venetia Maye-Brown—Frederick Troy.”
Troy did know Venetia and wished he didn’t. She’d been one of his sisters’ dissolute friends a few years back. It was obvious she didn’t remember him or hadn’t until Burgess made the introduction. Anything in trousers, he thought, probably didn’t include short trousers.
“Not the one who caused the scandal about five years ago?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Troy replied.
“Oh … silly me … not the same family … there was a Troy … you know, those Troys … Sasha’s younger brother … forget the name … but he joined the police. Imagine. A copper! A London beat bobby! Everyone was talking about it. Imagine, having a copper for a little brother … you’d have to hide the reefer every time he came round. Speaking of which, Guy, you don’t happen to have—”
Burgess cut her short.
“Venetia, George Brook-Benton’s waving at you from the bar.”
She turned.
“Oh God. I should never have let him buy me champagne. He’ll expect a fuck now. Still, let it not be said Venetia Frances Adelaide Maye-Brown does not pay her debts. See you later, boys.”
“If you were looking for proof … well, she’s no different from what she was before the war,” Troy said. “She had my pal Charlie when he was sixteen.”
“She’s a bit more blatant, you might agree. She’ll give George his way in the Ladies. But Venetia is a class act. Won’t do it in the Gents. Before the war she might well have insisted he book a room. And for all we know one or two other hopefuls might get lucky in the loo before the Ritz calls time.”
“Are women becoming men?”
“Dunno. And don’t much care. The voracious vamps and the todger dodgers don’t bother me. As long as men …”
Burgess paused, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.
“… Stay men.”
“What about all those women who dress as men?”
“Ever met one?”
“I might have. But not tonight.”
“Very coy. No Freddie, that one doesn’t wash for a simple, perhaps crude reason. Any man who mistakes a tweed-and-trousers hussie for a chap has no sense of smell.”
Troy looked around La Popôte again. Felt distinctly out of place. As though garbed in a police uniform invisible to all but him. Burgess was right. There were so many senses of the word in which he was still a virgin, on the outside of the party looking in.
&nbs
p; “Speaking of which.”
“Speaking of what?”
“Men. Of men … you’re in the minority here … La Popôte isn’t the only nickname—”
“I know. The Pink Sink.”
“Ah … so much for your much-vaunted innocence.”
“Guy … it’s the most notorious queer bar in London. And if you’re suggesting we wade farther in and meet a few ‘chums,’ the ones oblivious to Venetia’s charms … well, I can’t. I’m a serving copper.”
“But you’re not Vice. And you just saw off that prurient flatfoot in Shepherd Market.”
“That was … different. I hold no brief for Vice, and no brief for buggers either, but if a copper is to do his duty and abide by the law it is better that the blind eye he turns stays blind. Whatever you do in the Pink is of no importance to me … but don’t ask me to look any more closely than I have already.”
“Ah, blind. Blind as a bat, blind as a … What is the old adage? In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed trouser snake is king?”
“Goodnight, Guy.”
“We’ll keep in touch?”
“Of course we will.”
§10
Troy walked home alone. Piccadilly was far from deserted. People doing just what he was doing himself. Blundering on in darkness, eyes turned to the roaring, sparkling heavens, the pops, the starbursts, the snaking fiery trails, all but oblivious of danger, hypnotised by the illusion of their own immunity. At the Circus, more than fifty people sat by the hoardings, staring down Regent Street at the glow of Southwark burning.
On a level he did not care for, he found he shared the wantonness of La Popôte. He had no wish for sex with strangers or to be the spare prick at an orgy, but he could not deny that something in the way of restraint had been cast off like a winter overcoat with the onset of bombing. Even less did he care for Burgess being the one to awaken this knowledge in him.
§11
Friday, October 4, 1940
Troy had been in the wars. One war in particular had caught up with him. This one. His immunity had run out.
