Mystery Man

by Bateman, Colin

  13

  Monday morning, not long after opening, waiting for Jeff to come in so that I could work some more on the now reopened and intriguing Case of the Dancing Jews, I was idly observing the jewellery shop when I was stunned to see Alison waving at me from behind her counter. Panicked, I immediately dropped the binoculars and followed them under the counter. When I re-emerged three minutes later, and surreptitiously glanced across, she waved again. Then she stepped outside the shop and repeated the gesture. I therefore exited my own shop, taking just a moment to run a hand through my hair, and stood on the kerb opposite her.

  'Hello!' I shouted across. Traffic was heavy, and loud. I held up the binoculars. 'Just got a new pair – trying them out!'

  At exactly the same time she cupped a hand to her mouth and shouted: 'I wanted to apologise about Saturday. I shouldn't have . . .'

  And she made the universal sign for wanking.

  'No problem!' I also made the universal sign for wanking. 'It was quite funny!'

  She returned the sign again. 'I don't think yer man thought it was funny!'

  'Well, he is a bit of a . . .' And I repeated the hand movement.

  If a third person had been watching us from a vantage point equidistant between the two of us, and happened to be deaf, and was translating for a fourth party, he would have said that the conversation went like this:

  'Wanker!'

  'Wanker!'

  'Wanker!'

  'Wanker!'

  And thought we were demented.

  'Can I buy you a coffee?' Alison asked.

  Result!

  'Yes, please!'

  She pointed along the street. There was a Starbucks about a hundred yards up. She nodded behind her, then gave me a different hand signal. Five minutes. She returned to her jewellery store, and I returned to my bookshop, where all the books are chosen by me and not by a committee of accountants. Jeff arrived as I was brushing my teeth.

  'Look after things, I've been invited out for coffee.'

  'Really? Who by?'

  'Alison.'

  'Alison? Who's Alison?'

  'From the jewellery shop,' I beamed.

  'My God, how did you manage that?'

  I shrugged.

  'Is she your girlfriend?'

  'I'm just going for coffee.'

  'With your girlfriend.'

  I looked at him. 'While I'm gone, make yourself useful. I want you to Google ballet and Auschwitz together, see what you get.'

  I would have done it myself the day before, but I don't work on Sundays. I promised my father. He's in heaven now, but watching.

  'Ballet and . . . why?' Jeff asked.

  'Because,' I said.

  Jeff would have had a coronary if he'd known we were in Starbucks. He has marched against globalisation. I'm all for it. I'm all for uniformity of choice and familiarity. If I had my way there would be a No Alibis on every corner. I like the Starbucks menu. I start at the top and work my way through to the end. I never jump around. It takes me three weeks. Then I start over again. When they occasionally change their menu, it really fucks me up. Coffee is coffee to me, I don't mind what country it comes from, who picks it or under what conditions, and I really don't give a damn who serves it or what they're paid as long as they get it right. With Alison I'd gotten as far that month as a caramel frappuccino, served in a tall glass with a pink striped straw. She had a black coffee.

  'I used to collect comics,' I said, 'but my dad didn't approve, so I had to keep them hidden and only read them with a torch under the bedclothes. I suppose it made it quite exciting. I had a complete run of Sub-Mariner, a complete Avengers – though only the British weekly version. My two favourite comics of all time are Amazing Adventures 18 featuring "War of the Worlds" – you know, with Killraven, Gerry Conway wrote it, Neal Adams and Howard Chaykin drew it – and Astonishing Tales 25 featuring the origin of "Deathlok the Demolisher". Doug Moench wrote it, Rich Buckler drew it. And anything by Jim Starlin, he's a god.'

  'Jeez,' said Alison, 'you're a bit of a geek-boy, aren't you? I'm not really into superheroes.'

  'Oh,' I said.

  I stirred my coffee. I'd been working on my opening pitch during those eternal five minutes and was now uncertain how to continue.

  Alison stirred her coffee. 'The binoculars,' she said. 'Is that to do with your investigating? I was told that's what you do in your spare time.'

  'Yes, they are.'

  'You're a crime-fighter.'

  'Yes, I am.'

  'And is that idiot boy who works in your shop . . . ?'

  'Jeff? How do you know he's an idiot?'

  'Because every time I pop in he tries to persuade me to go to an Amnesty International meeting with him. He should take no for an answer and concentrate on selling books.'

  'I didn't realise you'd ever been in the shop.'

  'Oh yeah, stacks a times. You're never there. Lunchtimes is the only chance I get.'

  'Jeff never said.'

  'Why would he?'

  'Why would he indeed.'

  'Anyway, is he your crime-fighting sidekick?'

  'Well, I'm more like a PI, and PIs don't really have sidekicks. We walk these dark streets alone.'

  'Do you do a lot of that? Walking dark streets?'

  'Not really. I use the internet a lot.'

  'So no sidekick. That's a shame. I'd love to be a sidekick.'

  'It's not an absolute rule. In fact . . .'

  'Holmes and Watson. The most famous of them all.'

  'Famous isn't always good,' I said.

  'You don't like Holmes and Watson?'

  'Innovative, yes, inspirational, yes, their role in popularising detective fiction, of course. It's the, uhm, gay undercurrent.'

  'In Sherlock Holmes? How'd you work that one out?'

  'It was elementary.'

  She snorted.

  'You set me up for that,' she said.

  'Not at all, I really believe the books are rendered largely unreadable by . . .' And then I hesitated. 'You're not offended?'

  'By what?'

  'In case you're . . . you know.'

  'Would it make a difference?'

  'To what?'

  'To me becoming your sidekick.'

  'No. Not at all. So are you?'

  'Why do you ask?'

  'No reason.' I'm always aware when colour creeps up my face, and I'm certain that other people are too. It's like a petrol gauge. Starts around the neck and works its way up to my ears, then across my cheeks and up to my forehead. I changed the subject. 'Do you not like frappuccino?'

  'Never tried it. I just like . . . coffee.'

  'It's great, really.' I moved my glass forward and angled the straw towards her. 'Go on. Have a suck.'

  'No. No, thanks.'

  'You do know how to suck, don't you?'

  'Yes, of course.'

  'You just put your lips around the tip, and do what comes naturally.'

  She held my gaze for fully five seconds before suddenly tearing the straw out of the glass.

  'This,' she spat, 'would be a very skinny cock.'

  She stood, threw the straw at me, and stormed out of Starbucks.

  I sat for a while. I studied the menu board. Tomorrow I would have a cinnamon dolce frappuccino.

  14

  Whenever personal things get me down, I find great comfort in my work, either the continuing survival of No Alibis or my part-time investigations into cases of mystery and intrigue. For every misjudged disaster like Starbucks, there is the comforting knowledge that at the very moment where my life seems bleakest, there is someone somewhere clapping their hands together and thanking the Lord for my intervention. My purpose is not to waste time on short-term, no-return personal relationships, but to return light to shadowed lives. Sometimes there is some crossover, when I am forced to apply my Sherlockian skills to my own problems. For example, it was but a few weeks since I had investigated the cause of a quite distressing burning sensation in my armpit area. At firs
t I was convinced that one of my nemeses was attempting to poison me. Any other crime-fighter thus suffering would surely have alerted National Security and insisted on a radiation sweep, or at the very least rushed to the casualty department of their local hospital. But with the battery dead in the No Alibis van and my GP having explained to me on several occasions just how packed his appointment book was, I decided instead on a calm and rational analysis of the facts. I examined the situation, the circumstances and the timing, and after due rumination these led me to deduce that by not immediately donning my glasses when emerging from my shower each morning, I had not in fact been spraying deodorant on to my steaming body as I had thought, but Windolene.

  It is the little triumphs like this that get me through the difficult times.

  On this occasion, however, it was much more difficult. With my dreams of love, marriage, or even a girlfriend completely in tatters, the shop suddenly seemed particularly drab and unexciting. Jeff, never a comfort, was uncharacteristically smiley when he saw my downbeat look, and I knew why. I obviously did not tell him any of the details of my coffee with Alison. He didn't ask. He knew it had been a catastrophe. I was on the verge of sacking him for wilful deviousness. But then I remembered that old Maxim Jakubowski: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. I would keep the evidence of his attempted betrayal for another time, when it might have more value as a bargaining tool. Besides, he was cheap, and he could lift boxes of books where I couldn't, with my back. Sometimes you must make these dark moments work for you: The Case of the Dancing Jews was a sombre business, and I now had the perfect mood for it; and Jeff, being well used to wallowing in persecution at Amnesty International, was at least a sympathetic sounding board. He was the human equivalent of a squash-court wall; blank, but occasionally capable of throwing the ball back at interesting tangents.

  Jeff had Googled as instructed while I had been out making a fool of myself, but the results were rather meagre. The only dance-related reference was to a French-Jewish choreographer, René Blum, who had died at Auschwitz in 1942. There were no references to any dancers who had actually performed in the camp. So, for the meantime, all we had to go on was Daniel Trevor's rather vague account of how his wife came to uncover the fact that Anne Smith had been the principal dancer in a performance of the sentimental comic ballet Coppelia in the most notorious death camp in history.

  Daniel had explained that Rosemary made several visits to Anne Smith's home in Hillsborough to encourage her to complete her work on her autobiography. Anne was in her late eighties, not very well, and though Rosemary thought the manuscript was in reasonably good shape, the author had proved reluctant to part with it. Although described as an autobiography, it was just as much an official history of dance in Northern Ireland that then segued into Anne's own life story. She was a teacher at a Belfast secondary school when her choreography for a sixth-form show received such a good reaction that she was encouraged to nurture her ideas through her own dance classes, which gradually grew in scope and ambition to the point where she won Arts Council backing to establish a school for ballet and dance. It became a national institution. Daniel had read most of the manuscript himself and described it as 'not terribly interesting and not particularly well written'. However, on one of Rosemary's visits Anne was carrying in a tray of coffee when she stumbled and everything went flying. Anne reacted by swearing in fluent German. When Rosemary asked her where she'd perfected her accent, Anne surprised her by telling her that it was perfect because it was her native tongue, that she had grown up as a Jew in a German community in the Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia. Her real name wasn't Anne Smith but Anne Mayerova. As a teenager she had trained to become a professional dancer and enjoyed a meteoric rise and critical acclaim. Her last performance had been in Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire in 1939 at the National Theatre of Prague – and then she corrected herself . . . no, it wasn't quite her last performance . . . and became quite emotional.

  'When Rosemary asked what she meant,' I told Jeff, 'Anne responded by rolling up her sleeve and showing the number tattooed on her arm.'

  Rosemary was understandably shocked by this revelation – and also quite incredulous that Anne hadn't thought to chronicle it in her memoir. Anne was reluctant at first to talk about what had happened, but pretty soon it all started to come out. It was, Daniel reported, a tale of incredible courage and survival – and also one that was quite surreal, culminating as it did with her choreographing, rehearsing and dancing in a Christmas show in Auschwitz attended by both the prisoners and their SS guards.

  'Bloody hell,' said Jeff, 'Ticketmaster could have made a fortune out of that one. And she really hadn't mentioned any of this in her autobiography?'

  'She genuinely didn't seem to think that anyone would be interested.'

  'Meanwhile there were probably dollar signs flashing in Rosemary's eyes.'

  'Well, you can understand. And it does open some interesting lines of enquiry.'

  'How do you mean?' And then the penny dropped. 'You think it might have something to do with Rosemary's disappearance?'

  'Well, think about it. She goes to Frankfurt, she tells this German publisher that she has a book about a dancer with an interesting past, but she can't reveal too many details because she doesn't know them yet. She tells him what she can – perhaps Anne's real name and how she danced for the SS in Auschwitz – and somehow this means something to the publisher, and maybe he becomes determined to find out more. You know, like in The Odessa File – the journalist investigating the Holocaust turns out to be the son of the only good Nazi in history? Well, maybe there's some sort of personal connection here as well – but when Rosemary won't reveal what she really doesn't yet know in any detail, the publisher reacts angrily and murders her. Or he reports what she has discovered to the Odessa and they have her killed.'

  Jeff shook his head. 'You're the one always complaining about me having loony conspiracy theories. Have you heard yourself?'

  Perhaps he had a point. Nazi conspiracies had been briefly popular in the early seventies when many of them were still on the run. Now, although some octogenarian Nazis were undoubtedly still being hunted, it seemed unlikely that the Odessa still existed, or if it did, that it could be much of a threat to anyone. But it didn't mean that the publisher wasn't somehow involved with her murder, I just had no realistic possibility of proving it. And, of course, there was no body yet. Rosemary Trevor could still be living it up in that caravan in Bally castle.

  Intrigued as I was, as much of a crusader for justice and champion of the unjustly maligned as I was, I still had my business to consider. I was a bookseller, first and foremost, with a duty to promote and sell mystery fiction in a difficult market. I could not go running off to Germany to look for a missing woman, no matter how alluring she was. Nor could I close No Alibis temporarily – what were the good people of Belfast going to do for advice about what to read? It was okay to slip out for five minutes here and there to solve some of my other cases, but this was different. I certainly wasn't going to leave my pride and joy in the charge of a two-faced idiot like Jeff for days on end. It might have been different if there had been a personal angle to the case, but there simply wasn't. I wasn't Jon Voight investigating what had happened to his father. I wasn't missing a wife or a mother or even a distant cousin. What I did in my spare time was a hobby. I was free to adopt or reject cases as I chose. I owed Daniel Trevor nothing. There were new books to be ordered and a sales strategy that might entice more customers into the store to be determined. And Christ knows, if there really were Nazis conspiring out there, even if they got about on Zimmer frames, what would worrying about them do to my precarious health? I'd had ulcers over The Case of Mrs Geary's Leather Trousers and a bad asthma attack from paint inhalation during The Case of the Fruit on the Flyover. The Third Reich would probably finish me off.

  I thought about it some more after Jeff left and decided the best course of action would be to quietly withdraw from the
case. I would cite ill health. I was going to phone Daniel Trevor to tell him personally, but then I thought better of it because a sound argument or contrary opinion can easily win me round. So I sent him an e-mail instead. I also decided not to answer the phone for the rest of the afternoon in case he decided to call me about it.

  My e-mail was simple and succinct. I told him I had reviewed the evidence he had provided for me, and though it was far from certain that something dreadful had happened to Rosemary, in my opinion the police should be talking to Manfredd Freetz of the Bockenheimer publishing company about his pressing interest in I Came to Dance. I wished him all the best and assured him that I'd torn up his blank cheques and that I wouldn't be charging anything more than the going rate for my time.

  I'd only been open for ten minutes the next morning when I saw Daniel Trevor on the other side of the road, waiting for a gap in the traffic. There wasn't even time to lock the front door, let alone pull down the shutters and hide under the counter. In just a few moments he was across and entering the shop.

  Immediately I said: 'Daniel, how are you? I was thinking about my bill, and it's really quite ridiculous under such sad circumstances to charge you for my time, so let's just forget about it and in addition I'll make a donation to the charity of your choice.'

  I don't think he even heard me. He was visibly upset and breathing hard. He dabbed at his sweaty brow with a tissue.

  'I tried to call you!' he cried.

  'Yes, there seems to be a fault on the—'

  'Manfredd Freetz is dead! Murdered!'

  15

  Everything came tumbling out of him in an excited, terrified jumble, but all I could think about was that it had nothing to do with me any more, and please get out of my store. I stopped him mid-flow.

  'Daniel! Calm . . . calm down . . . it's truly awful . . . but let's just slow down for a moment. Daniel – listen to me. Do you still have the business card I gave you?'