A Dead Man In Trieste

by Michael Pearce

  ‘And your husband? What about using him?’

  She looked at him hard.

  ‘That is something I have to work out for myself. Perhaps I shall go to them and say: “You have arrested the wrong person. Koskash is not to blame. I am the one you want.” However, that is no concern of yours.’

  She stood up.

  ‘I have come to ask you for something. It is this. Will you please go and see him in prison? They will agree because you come from the Consulate.’

  ‘I will certainly go and see him.’

  ‘Every day,’ she insisted. ‘While you are doing that they will not beat him up.’

  Seymour was left alone in the Consulate. It suddenly came home to him. He was the only member of the staff left.

  And he wasn’t even, strictly speaking, a member of the staff. A moment of panic seized him. Suppose someone came along wanting the Consulate to do something? Seymour wouldn’t be able to do it, that was for sure. He’d have to fob them off, say the Consulate was closed or something. In fact, he’d better put up a notice to that effect right away

  But - just a minute - could a Consulate be closed, just like that? Didn’t diplomatic representation sort of go on independent of hours? And, anyway, who was Seymour to close a Consulate down? Wait a minute, wait a minute, things were getting out of hand. Jesus, he had only just joined the Diplomatic Service and here he was wanting to close half of it down. Well, not quite half of it. Trieste wasn’t quite that important, but it was important, Schneider was not the only one who had said so. Suppose something major blew up? An international crisis or something? Look, hold on, he told himself, you’re just an ordinary policeman, you’re not the bloody Prime Minister, leave it for him to sort out.

  And at that moment there was a knock on the door.

  A small boy was standing there. Well, not a small boy, a youth, but dressed in uniform. Someone official, anyway.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you the Consul?’

  ‘Pretty nearly,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Message for you, sir,’ said the youth, handing him a letter.

  Seymour took it. The boy saluted smartly and moved away.

  Seymour looked down at the letter stupidly. It was addressed to him.

  But how could it be? It wasn’t from his mother or his grandfather and no one outside his family knew he was here. He turned it over and looked at the postmark. Manchester? But he didn’t know anyone in Manchester and certainly no one in Manchester knew him. He broke the envelope open. Violet Smethwick? He had never heard of anyone named Smethwick, let alone Violet. Why should anyone named Violet be writing to him? He turned over in his mind, a little uneasily, the various women he had met recently but couldn’t place this one.

  He started to read the letter and for a moment couldn’t make any sense of it at all. And then he realized. Violet. Auntie Vi. Lomax’s Auntie Vi!

  He stuffed the letter away in his pocket. He’d look at that later. Meanwhile there were more important things to do. He went back to being Foreign Secretary.

  No, the first thing to do was notify the Foreign Office in London and suggest they did something about it. The second was to modify the notice he had been planning to put up. Closed - He crossed that out and altered it. Temporarily Closed for all but Essential Business.

  And if any of that came along he would refer it to London. That was it! This was beginning to sound like Senior Management. Much more of this and he would declare himself Ambassador.

  He put the notice up on the door. If by any chance some business turned up he would make a careful note of it and leave it for someone else to sort out. And meanwhile, perhaps, he could get on with what he had come to Trieste to do, which was to find out what had happened to Lomax.

  First, though, there was a report to write.

  It was some time later that he remembered the letter he had stuffed in his pocket. He took it out now and read it through properly.

  It was indeed from Lomax’s Auntie Vi and a reply to the letter he had sent. She thanked him for writing. A letter had arrived from the Foreign Office that very same morning, she said, but it was not the same thing. Somehow on a thing like this it helped to hear from someone personally. Seymour had mentioned the pleasure which Lomax seemed to have found in his new posting. She said that something of that pleasure had come through in his letters home.

  She caught herself up. Well, she hoped it had been a home to him. He had come to them from Dublin as a boy of eleven when his mother, Auntie Vi’s sister, had died. He had been a shy, odd little creature, she said, who had found it difficult to settle in. For a long time his only interest had been stamps. He had been quite bright, though, and had done well at school. They had been surprised all the same when he had chosen to apply for the Consular service; and even more surprised when he had been accepted. Perhaps it was the stamps that had put it into his mind. No one in their family, which was a decent, honest one, had ever done anything like that before. His mother, Auntie Vi said, would have been proud of him.

  She said nothing about his father. He would have been Irish, perhaps? That might account for the Dublin. Died, possibly, like his wife? Or simply disappeared from the scene. Disappeared from Auntie Vi’s scene, anyway.

  She said that although they had not seen Lomax for some time, they would miss him. Not being blessed with a child of their own, they had always treated him as a son. He had in turn looked on them as his parents. He had written to them regularly from his various postings all over the world and had sent them little presents, souvenirs, really, which were all they would have of him now but which at least would be a constant reminder of him.

  She thanked Seymour again for his kindness in writing and said that if he was ever near Warrington he should call in; although she imagined that was not very likely. She expected he was always, like Lomax, in some other part of the world.

  Seymour had the sense of a decent family stricken. With his own acute sense of family, he could guess how they felt. He was glad he had written.

  He thought over what she had said. So Lomax had originally come from Ireland. He wondered if that accounted for his friendship with James and his helping him over the cinema business. Perhaps, too, it had stirred old loyalties and old attitudes, an old nationalism that went back to childhood, ever a romantic siding with the underdog which seemed suddenly relevant again when he came to Trieste.

  There was a knocking on the door. Someone was trying to get in. He had forgotten he had locked it. He went to the door and opened it.

  A man was standing there who seemed vaguely familiar. He clicked his heels.

  ‘Rakic,’ he said.

  Seymour remembered him now. He was the man who had talked to Marinetti about hiring the Politeama for his Futurist Evening. Someone to do with Machnich.

  ‘You are the Consul?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  The man corrected himself.

  ‘Of course not. Lomax was the Consul. And Lomax is dead. But you . . .?’ He seemed puzzled. ‘I thought they said that you - ’

  ‘No,’ said Seymour. ‘I am just here temporarily. Passing through. I am a King’s Messenger.

  ‘King’s . . .?’

  ‘Messenger. I carry messages. Diplomatic ones.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I see. And what, exactly, are you doing here?’

  And what, exactly, business was it of his, thought Seymour, reacting to the tone?

  ‘Carrying messages,’ he said, however. ‘I just happened to be here when Lomax was found.’

  ‘Ah, yes. So you are nothing, then.’

  ‘I wouldn’t quite put it like that,’ said Seymour.

  The man seemed to realize how he sounded.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, though only half graciously. ‘I meant, in the context of Trieste - ’

  ‘I am passing through,’ said Seymour. ‘And you?’

  He had had enough of this boorish questioning.

  ‘Machnich sent me.’

  A little unwil
lingly, Seymour showed him in. They sat down in the inner office. Rakic looked around curiously at the walls.

  ‘Decadent,’ he pronounced.

  ‘Out of the usual, definitely.’

  Rakic shrugged. The pictures did not really interest him.

  ‘You come from Machnich?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rakic studied him for a moment. ‘He has heard about Koskash,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It is of concern to him. Will you tell me, please, what happened?’

  Seymour hesitated. Why should he tell this man?

  Rakic evidently guessed what he was thinking.

  ‘Perhaps you do not know. Machnich is a Serb.’

  ‘Koskash is not a Serb.’

  Rakic made an impatient gesture with his hand.

  ‘It was to do with Serbs. Did they not explain that to you?’

  ‘Why should that matter to Machnich?’

  ‘Because he is a Serb, as I say. He is a big man in Trieste. The biggest Serb. And so the other Serbs look to him. When something happens that affects Serbs, they turn to him. And so he needs to know what happened yesterday.’

  Rather grudgingly, Seymour told him as much as he knew.

  ‘The two who came and asked for papers, they were Schneider’s men, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So Schneider knows.’

  It was a statement rather than a question and did not need answering. Seymour had a question of his own.

  ‘And Machnich knows, too, does he? About the escape route?’

  Rakic did not answer him directly.

  ‘Machnich looks after his own,’ he said.

  ‘The Consulate was being used illicitly,’ said Seymour coldly.

  Rakic gestured dismissal again.

  ‘Lomax knew.’

  He seemed to be thinking.

  ‘You will be staying here?’ he said. ‘Until someone else comes out?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Then you must go and see Koskash.’

  ‘I may well go and see him.’

  ‘See him. It is important. He is weak. His wife is strong, but he is weak. You must see him every day.’

  Seymour made no reply.

  ‘Every day!’ insisted Rakic.

  ‘Why is Machnich so concerned?’ asked Seymour.

  ‘As I told you, because this touches the Serbs.’

  ‘Not because it might touch him?’

  Rakic laughed.

  ‘That, too, no doubt,’ he said drily. It was the first time the obsessive single-mindedness had lifted. ‘However,’ he said, ‘that is not his only concern. He looks after his own, as I have said. And Mrs Koskash is a Serb.’

  He sat there looking at Seymour. He seemed to be weighing him up.

  ‘She must not be left on her own,’ he said.

  Then he seemed to make up his mind. He stood up.

  ‘Machnich wishes to see you,’ he said. ‘The Stella Polare at eleven. Tomorrow.’

  Chapter Ten

  There was a man waiting outside the Consulate the next morning when Seymour arrived. He turned round and smiled.

  ‘Signor Seymour?’

  ‘Si.’

  He bowed, in a formal, old-fashioned way.

  ‘Augstein. Mrs Koskash sent me. She thought I might be of use.’

  He had, he said, been the Consulate’s clerk before Koskash and had been retired for some years now.

  ‘However,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I do not expect things to have changed much. You will need some temporary help, and it will not be like getting in someone completely new to the job.’

  ‘Mrs Koskash sent you?’

  ‘Yes. She said she owed you something,’ said Augstein quietly.

  He was an elderly, grey-haired man, stooping slightly but still alert and active. When Seymour took him into the Consulate he looked around fondly.

  ‘Much the same,’ he said.

  He went to Koskash’s desk. It was locked.

  He went across to a shelf with a row of box files and felt between them.

  ‘We used to leave the key here. Ah!’

  He showed it to Seymour.

  ‘As I said, I don’t expect things have changed much. Mr Koskash is an orderly man and I, too, was orderly.’

  He sat down at Koskash’s desk and pulled the mail in the in-tray towards him. He glanced at some of the letters and then went to the files.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘we are almost up to date. It will not take long to catch up. Mr Koskash is most conscientious.’

  He took out some forms.

  ‘They are just the same,’ he said, with satisfaction.

  He took up a pen and began to write.

  Seymour hesitated. He could certainly do with the help. And yet he could not help feeling a little suspicious.

  He went into the inner office, wavered and then came back.

  ‘I would like,’ he said, ‘to consult the personnel files. The back files, please.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Augstein rose from his desk and in a moment had laid two files on Seymour’s desk.

  It was as Augstein had said. He had indeed been Koskash’s predecessor. He had worked in the Consulate for over thirty years, serving both of Lomax’s predecessors. There were his original references and here was a testimonial written at the point when he was handing over. It was in glowing terms: ‘thorough’, ‘conscientious’, ‘steady’, ‘reliable’. It was like an identikit version of Koskash.

  And yet Koskash had turned out not to be entirely reliable, at least, not from the Consulate’s point of view. And Seymour still had that fait accompli feeling. Perhaps there was nothing in it. Perhaps he was being too distrustful. Perhaps Mrs Koskash was merely trying to make amends.

  He turned back through the old references. Then he closed the file and went in to Augstein.

  ‘Everything seems to be as you said. I see you were indeed here before Koskash. And for a long time, too!’

  ‘Too long, perhaps,’ said Augstein, sighing. ‘But jobs like this were not easy to get, not for people like me, anyway.’

  ‘People like you?’

  ‘New immigrants. I was new, thirty years ago,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘And where did you come from?’

  ‘Belgrade.’

  ‘Serbia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But an Austrian father? With that name?’

  ‘Yes.’ Augstein smiled again. ‘Perhaps that is why they appointed me. It certainly made it easier in dealing with the authorities.’

  Another Serb, thought Seymour. Perhaps that didn’t matter. It was natural for people of a kind to stick together, he knew that from his own experience in the East End. It was perfectly reasonable that Mrs Koskash should send along someone she knew and that that person should be a Serb like her. Perhaps that was how Koskash had got the job in the first place. All the same, Seymour felt uneasy. He had the sense of a clan closing round him. Perhaps that was how it tended to be in the Balkans. An individual was never quite just an individual, as Maddalena had said. Perhaps that was the mistake Lomax had made. You helped an individual, or individuals, but you got drawn into a group; and where did the group’s loyalties begin and end?

  The Stella Polare was one of the old coffee houses of Trieste and as soon as Seymour went in he realized that up till now he had been missing something about Trieste. For this was the other side of Trieste, the part complementary to the tables in the outdoor cafes in the Piazza Grande, the Italian sparkle in the sunshine. If they were Italians, this was Austrian. Dark wood everywhere, low-beamed roofs, cosy corners. There were comfortable, horsehair-stuffed sofas in the recesses and newspapers on the tables. It was like the English Club but somehow heavier, solider, warmer. Gemütlich. The Austrian word popped up in his mind.

  Drifting out of the kitchen came the smells of Middle Europe: of the spicy, dumplinged broths of Budapest, the breadcrumbed schnitzels of Vienna, of venison and boar from the Bohemian forests, of pa
prika and rye bread and apple. The smells stirred memories of home for Seymour; not just his own home but the homes he had gone into in the East End with old Appelmann, immigrants’ homes still carrying with them culinary evidence of their roots.

  At this hour, of course, the predominant smell was that of coffee and that seemed different, too, from the coffees of the piazza or of the Canal Grande. This was coffee with cream, the coffee of Vienna.

  A man got up from a table in a corner and came towards him.

  ‘Signor Seymour?’

  ‘Signor Machnich?’

  They shook hands. Machnich led him back to his table.

  ‘You like the place, yes?’

  ‘One of the old cafes,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Old, yes.’ Machnich looked around with satisfaction. ‘This is the real Trieste,’ he said. ‘Where the real business of the city gets done.’

  Everyone here, and there were quite a few of them even this early in the morning, distributed about the recesses and corners, was wearing a suit. And a suit, not a uniform. This, he realized, was the commercial heart of the city: old, yes, as Machnich had said, older, perhaps, even than the uniforms.

  ‘When I first came to Trieste,’ said Machnich, ‘I put my head in here and said: no, this is not the place for me. But then I was just a poor shopkeeper. Now I know that if I did not come here they would think I was still just a poor shopkeeper.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not really care what they think. But if they see me here, where there is money, they will think I have money, and money breeds money. There is another thing. You see all this?’

  The sweep of his arm took in the solid tables and comfortable chairs and the heavy, opulent woodwork.

  ‘It is sound. And the people here are sound, or like to think they are. They belong to the old Trieste. The Trieste of old, safe money. The Trieste that even Austrians respect. And while I am here people will think that I, too, am sound. There are times,’ he said, ‘when that can be an advantage.’

  He sat back in his chair. He was a great bull of a man, with a thick, bull-like neck and alert unblinking eyes.

  ‘Like now?’ said Seymour.

  Machnich looked at him sharply. Then his face creased up into a smile.