A Dead Man In Trieste

by Michael Pearce

  Now here it was coming up again and in a form which had a particular acuteness for him. From what Kornbluth had hinted, there was a possibility that the currents Lomax had got himself involved with were nationalist ones.

  Nationalism, as it happened, was big in the Seymour household. Too big, and Seymour had always tried to steer clear of it. It was his grandfather’s over-enthusiasm for nationalism that had led to his having to leave Poland in a hurry. At least he had got out. Seymour’s other grandfather, in a different country, had not been so lucky. Seymour’s father had, partly in consequence, reacted strongly against politics in general and nationalist ones in particular, and Seymour had tended to follow him. Now here the issue was again coming back to haunt him.

  Seymour was able to clear up one other point to do with Lomax’s work: his empty appointments book.

  ‘He never used it,’ said Koskash.

  ‘What did he use?’

  He might have guessed it.

  Slips of paper.

  ‘I kept a separate book,’ said Koskash, ‘and would give him notes for the day.’

  Seymour thought he might have seen one in one of Lomax’s suits.

  ‘Rough scraps of paper?’

  ‘They didn’t start like that,’ said Koskash, pained.

  Seymour sighed.

  ‘What had he got against ordinary paperwork?’

  ‘He said it was on the side of government.’

  ‘On the side of government?’

  What was it with this man? Was he some kind of anarchist?

  ‘He said that it was paper that made bureaucracy possible and that there was too much bureaucracy in the world. In Trieste,’ said Koskash drily, ‘such a view is distinctly unusual.’

  From the separate book which Koskash had kept Seymour was able to reconstruct Lomax’s movements in the week that he had disappeared. As Koskash had said, they consisted largely of visits to the Port Authority or to the docks. The one exception was a visit to the Casa Revoltella.

  ‘Casa Revoltella?’ said Seymour. ‘What was that?’

  ‘It was a civic reception. A big one, the Governor was there. All the consuls were invited. The Casa Revoltella is a house in the Piazza Giuseppina. It used to belong to the Baron Revoltella. He left it to the city when he died. You should go there. You would find it interesting. You would see how the rich in Trieste used to live. And still live, for that matter.’

  The house was open to the public and that afternoon, when the city was quiet, Seymour went there. It was, as Koskash had said, an excellent example of the way of life of the old Trieste merchant, with velvet red plush and gilt everywhere. The Baron Revoltella had been one of those who had spotted the significance to Trieste of the opening of the Suez Canal. The Canal’s third entrance, they called Trieste.

  The house was full of reminders of the Suez connection, from broad canvases of the Canal itself to a very strange piece of art on the stairs called Cutting the Isthmus, which had a plaque of de Lesseps on one side of its plinth and a plaque of the Khedive Abbas on the other. The whole thing was lit up from time to time by a red bulb held in the fangs of a wrought-iron serpent.

  Money dripped from the large gilt chandeliers and showed itself in the thick pile of the carpet on the velvet- railed staircase up which, presumably, the guests had mounted a fortnight ago.

  Seymour asked the attendant about the reception. It appeared to have been a splendid occasion, graced by the Governor himself, and at which almost all the commercial and official worthies of the city had been present.

  ‘The flower of the city,’ said the attendant sentimentally.

  And among the flowers, the dandelion, perhaps, in the bouquet, had been Lomax. All the consuls, the attendant assured him, had been present. He produced some photographs of the occasion: of wondrously uniformed men and gorgeously dressed ladies, sashed and fanned. Seymour wondered if Lomax had worn a uniform, too. Did consuls have uniforms? He suspected they did. Especially if they were British.

  He wondered, too, how he had felt. Because he would not, surely, have fitted in. The superior people Seymour had encountered at the Foreign Office, yes, they would have fitted in. But Lomax? From what Seymour felt he had learned about him he would have gone with reluctance, arriving late and leaving early, knowing the people, perhaps, but less at ease in these formal surroundings than in the relaxed atmosphere of the cafe tables. Seymour looked for him in the photographs, asking the attendant to point him out, but they couldn’t find him. He was, as ever, the missing man.

  In one of the rooms was a large telescope trained on the bay, through which the Baron could watch his ships coming in. Seymour looked at the ships, too, and then idly adjusted the telescope and found himself peering down on the square outside. There was a statue in the middle of the square and a woman standing nearby. The statue - he could read the inscription through the telescope - was of the Archduke Maximilian, a fine figure, bald, bearded and, of course, this being Trieste, in uniform. The woman appeared to be working on it.

  Or, just a minute, was she? She had given it a red nose, large breasts with huge red nipples, and red drawers, into the seat of which she was fitting two large balloons.

  What the hell was this? Some kind of student prank?

  When he came out of the Casa Revoltella the woman was still there. She had added a cigar, stuck, somehow, into the statue’s mouth, and a fish, draped casually over the Duke’s ear.

  Amused, and slightly curious, he wandered over towards her.

  She stepped back to admire her handiwork.

  ‘For God’s sake, Maddalena!’ said a voice that Seymour recognized.

  ‘Alfredo, is that you? You have come at last. Have you brought it?’

  ‘Yes, but - ’

  ‘Please, Alfredo! What is art without the recording?’

  She draped herself beside the statue while Alfredo assembled an ancient camera upon a tripod. He disappeared for a moment beneath the cloth. Then his head appeared again.

  ‘Maddalena, is this wise?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘No, no. That you should appear in the photograph, I mean.’

  ‘You think that the artist should not show herself in her work but be somewhere else, indifferently paring her fingernails?’

  ‘I was merely thinking that offering too faithful a record might be to be unnecessarily helpful to the police.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right.’

  She removed herself from the statue.

  Alfredo suddenly noticed Seymour.

  ‘Maddalena, this is a friend of mine. A friend of Lomax’s too.’

  She came over to him.

  ‘A friend of Lomax’s?’

  ‘Well, not exactly a friend -’

  ‘He has just arrived from London.’

  ‘From London? You are a consul, too?’

  ‘No, no. Just a King’s Messenger.’

  She moved away.

  ‘Alfredo!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You disappoint me. First, you didn’t want to take my photograph, and now you are friends with kings!’

  ‘Messenger,’ said Seymour. ‘Just Messenger.’

  ‘Are you?’ said Alfredo. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘You should choose your friends more carefully, Alfredo. However, since he is also a friend of Lomax’s, I will forgive you this time.’

  ‘Thank you, Maddalena. And now may I get on with taking the photograph before the policeman gets here from the next piazza?’

  He put his head back beneath the cloth.

  ‘Alfredo.’

  ‘Yes, Maddalena?’ wearily.

  ‘A touch of mascara around his eyes, do you think?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Spoiling the ship, you think?’

  ‘I think the policeman will get here before I finish taking the photograph.’

  ‘How do you know he is coming?’

  ‘Because I can see him across the piazza.’

  On the other s
ide of the piazza there was a sudden shout and then a piercing blast on a whistle.

  ‘Maddalena - ’

  ‘There is no hurry. He is very fat and will take some time to get here.’

  Alfredo emerged hurriedly from beneath the cloth.

  ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He lifted off the camera and grabbed the tripod.

  ‘You run that way,’ said Maddalena, ‘and I will run the other way.’

  So this was Maddalena, thought Seymour. The woman, according to Koskash, who might have accounted for Lomax’s sudden enthusiasm for art and who had, perhaps, introduced him to the artists. Well, from what he had so far learned about him, she fitted pretty well with the picture of Lomax that Seymour was beginning to build up. An oddball woman to go with an oddball man.

  He could quite see, however, how a woman like Maddalena might appeal to a man like Lomax. He constructed for himself a mental picture of a staid single man who had spent all his life as a conventional diplomat and who had then, suddenly, run into a woman who was completely outside his range of experience, striking - she was beautiful, Seymour suddenly realized, in an odd, offbeat kind of way, he could quite see how an artist might want her to model for him - unconventional, disturbingly so, challenging Lomax (excitingly?) in all his conventional pores, vital - vital enough, perhaps, to pour new blood into a consul’s shrivelled-up veins and make him fancy he could lead a new life, start again in this sunny Mediterranean place, break free from the mould, kick over the traces -

  Run away? Walk out on a job that suddenly seemed stale and sterile to him? Run away with Maddalena and start again?

  Only he hadn’t run away. At least, not with Maddalena. She was still here. It was only he who had disappeared.

  And maybe the whole picture was false, anyway. Maybe she had not had an impact on him quite like that. Maybe he had indeed, for a moment, entertained the fantasy, put a foot over the traces, but then the ingrained caution of the diplomat had reasserted itself, telling him that though it was lovely it was not for him.

  He was going too far in his speculation, he knew. But something had happened to Lomax when he had come to Trieste. Something had changed him. (Because he couldn’t have been like this before he was posted to Trieste, could he? Surely they would have kicked him out?) No, he had changed after he arrived. That was what Koskash had said, hadn’t he? His passion for art hadn’t been there when he arrived, it had developed afterwards, after he had met Maddalena. No, something had changed Lomax on his arrival in Trieste, and that something looked very much like Maddalena.

  It was almost disappointingly simple. A single, middle- aged man, stuck in the groove for most of his life, had suddenly been jolted out of it by meeting a beautiful, disturbing woman and had stepped over the traces. It was an old story.

  But was it a true one? Seymour tested it again and felt, yes, that he would go for it in every particular.

  Except one. Where was Lomax? Set aside Kornbluth’s dark hints and the Foreign Office’s oblique ones, set aside speculation about currents nationalist or otherwise, and you were still left with the fact that a responsible man, a consul, had disappeared. Seymour would have to explain that, discover what had happened to him, before he could go home.

  But meanwhile he could enjoy the sun and all the diverse life of a great sea port. He could listen to all the different voices, of especial interest to him as a man who in a sense lived in languages. He could even hear, faintly, echoes of the languages of his childhood and of the languages of the East End and, more faintly still, echoes of the experience behind the languages.

  And he might even, he almost certainly would, meet Maddalena again. Seymour was no Lomax. He was, for a start, ten, fifteen, years younger. No mid-life crisis for him, not, at any rate, for some time yet. No urge to kick over the traces - he was very happy with the way things were, thank you. And there was no likelihood at all of his falling for what his mother would call a fancy woman.

  All the same, at the prospect of meeting Maddalena again, he felt his pulses quicken.

  That evening he went back to his hotel early to write his first report, an obligation the Foreign Office had laid upon him. Regular reports every three days. Empires, whether British or Austro-Hungarian, ran on paper. Lomax had been right about that.

  He didn’t find it easy. Kornbluth had been long on hints and short on the particulars of Lomax’s disappearance and Seymour knew little more now than he had when he arrived. And how far should he set down the details of Lomax’s al fresco style as Consul? Even to remark it might seem to the lordly people of the Foreign Office like . . . what was the phrase? Lèse-majesté. Taking the sovereign’s majesty lightly. And then that kind of detail didn’t fit too well in a formal report; not in the kind of report you wrote in Whitechapel, anyway.

  In the end he kept it brief and factual, putting in the times and dates that Kornbluth had given him and confining his account of Lomax to a few vague phrases: ‘slightly irregular style of life’, that sort of thing. It took him a long time, however, and he didn’t get to bed till late.

  In what seemed the middle of the night he was woken by Koskash and told that he should go down to the little harbour where the fishing boats docked.

  It was still dark as they went through the streets. Nothing was stirring even in the tiny piazzas where the markets were held. Seymour had half expected to find the ox-carts already coming in with their produce and no doubt they would be doing so later. He caught the raw sea smell as they drew near to the docks and felt the chill of the water on his face.

  Down by the harbour there was movement. Men were already standing at the edge of the quay ready to unload the fishing boats as they came in, and in a long shed set back from the water and lit only by a dim lamp women were waiting with their knives.

  A man detached himself from the dark huddle on the quayside and came towards them. It was Kornbluth. They shook hands.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  Out in the bay Seymour could see lights.

  The boats are coming in,’ Kornbluth said.

  The lights seemed steady at first but as they drew nearer they swayed and bobbed. He saw that they were attached to the tops of the masts and moved to the movement of the sea.

  It was getting lighter now and he could see more clearly the people standing waiting. Ox-carts were assembling near the shed, ready to take the fish up to the markets. Already there was a strong smell of fish in the air.

  The men on the quay began to stir. The first boat was coming in.

  It turned and nosed its way along the quay. Ropes were thrown and it came to a stop. Men at once jumped down into its hold.

  Kornbluth went to the edge of the quay and asked something. One of the fishermen jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  The other boats were coming in now. In the growing light Seymour could see their blunt prows more clearly and make out the cabbalistic symbols on their sides. As each boat tied up, Kornbluth went to it and said something. Eventually he came to one and stopped.

  He came back to where Seymour and Koskash were standing and said:

  ‘Over here.’

  They went up to the shed where the women were waiting with their knives. They had spread out along a grey, stone table.

  The first fish were tipped on to it and they set to work immediately. There was a lamp overhead and in its light the scales of the fish glinted. Where the lamp did not reach, the fish glowed in the darkness with a strange luminescence. Already the colours of the fish were fading.

  Outside, men were loading barrels on to the carts and the first cart had already set off.

  Kornbluth led them through to an inner room where there was another grey slab and some women were opening shellfish. They inserted the tips of their knives, twisted and prised the lips apart. Then, without taking the shells off, they dropped them into buckets at their feet.

  Kornbluth told them to stop and they shrugged their shoulders and moved away
.

  Fishermen brought in a plank on which something was lying. They tipped it on to the slab.

  Kornbluth said something testily and one of the men brought in another lamp, which he put down at the head of the slab.

  There was a reek of fish in the air and water dripped down on to the floor. Kornbluth removed some of the seaweed and threw it into a corner. Then he took the lamp and held it up above the face of the man who was lying there. He looked at it steadily for a moment and then nodded.

  Then he pulled Koskash forward and held him while he lifted the lamp and Koskash looked down.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  Chapter Four

  Seymour was sitting in Lomax’s apartment. On the table in front of him was a pile of ticket stubs, the ones he had noticed in the pockets of Lomax’s empty suits. He counted forty-seven of them. He knew now what they were: cinema tickets.

  Cinema? Seymour knew, of course, what cinemas were. He had even been to one, once. But they didn’t figure big in the East End. They didn’t figure that largely, as far as he knew, in the more prosperous districts further west. The one in the East End was above a billiards room and its grey, disjointed, flickering delights were intended to add to the appeal of the room below; as well as, Seymour suspected, enticing patrons on to further rooms upstairs in which ladies were waiting to encourage them to other forms of activity. It all seemed very dubious to Seymour.

  But here in Trieste cinema did not seem at all dubious! On the contrary, it seemed above board, thriving and very popular.

  ‘There’s the Excelsior, the Americano, the Edison, the Royal Biograph, the Teatro Fenice . . .’ Kornbluth said with pride. ‘Trieste,’ he said, ‘is the cinema capital of the world.’

  Seymour felt slightly put out. London, in his mind, was the capital of the world in almost everything: and now to come to a place like Trieste, which, let’s face it, no one had ever heard of, and find that it, too, had claims was mildly disconcerting. Of course, the claims were only to leadership in the seedy world of a dubious form of popular entertainment, but all the same . . . Seymour had already taken it for granted that the appeal of the cinema would flicker out in the same way as its jerky images were always threatening to do; or, at least, that cinema would not catch on. Could he have been wrong? Could this actually be in some way the shape of the future?