Second Violin

by John Lawton

  Troy said nothing. He peered past Guildenstern to look at the body in the dim light. It was hunched. Almost foetal, as though Rabbi Adelson had curled up into a corner. He turned to the caretaker.

  ‘You found him?’

  ‘S’right.’

  ‘Exactly where he is now?’

  ‘More or less.’

  Troy looked at Guildenstern.

  ‘I turned him. Had to. Had to get at his chest. When I found him he was face down, against the floorboards.’

  ‘I see,’ Troy said. ‘Then he didn’t drop dead?’

  ‘Mr Troy, I’ve been a physician forty-odd years . . .’

  ‘He didn’t drop at all. He must have crawled in there.’

  Guildenstern looked a little flustered at this, but stood his ground, made a fussy display of repacking and closing his bag.

  ‘People do odd things when they’re frightened . . .’

  This was Troy’s point, but he saw no merit in spelling it out.

  ‘. . . And if there’s one thing you learn in my job, Mr Troy, it’s people.’

  ‘Frightened of what?’

  ‘Air raid. There was a false alarm last night. I know. I was awake half the night myself. I should think most of the East End was. We’ve been expecting it for weeks, months even. It can be terrifying. Until you hear the all-clear. You haven’t a clue whether they’re up there or not. If I’d been here maybe I’d’ve crawled into a corner too.’

  ‘But you were in a shelter?’

  ‘As it happens, I was. I’ve an Anderson in the garden . . .’

  Those that had gardens had Anderson shelters. Most houses in this neck of the woods didn’t have either.

  ‘And the rabbi?’

  The caretaker answered, ‘Rabbi has an Anderson too.’

  ‘Then I need to ask, why wasn’t he in it? If he felt the need to shelter, why here?’

  ‘I don’t think you do need to ask. A man’s found dead of heart failure after the sirens go off? I’ve no doubts. I’ve no suspicions. I’m happy to give the family what they want.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘A funeral today. I’m signing . . . natural causes.’

  Troy knelt down, looked at the hands and the face, at the chest where the doctor had exposed it. Took one wrist and felt for the extent of rigour.

  ‘Would you mind shining your torch again?’

  The caretaker flicked it on. Troy could see no signs of violence, no cuts or bruises, no tears in the clothing. Just dust and dirt from lying on the floor. He stood up again.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that just yet,’ he said, trying to make ‘no’ sound more than monosyllabic and more conciliatory than it was.

  Guildenstern shifted from flustered to angry, a broad band of colour spreading across his cheeks.

  ‘You’re not Jewish, I take it, Mr Troy?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘And you clearly know nothing about our traditions . . .’

  ‘I know enough to know the importance of the ritual cleansing, the watch over the body, the immediacy of a funeral, but you’re only going to get that if the law is satisfied it’s natural causes. Right now I am the law, and I want a forensic scientist down here to examine the body. If he agrees with you, you can sign off on the case. I’m not trying to create obstacles.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t agree?’

  ‘I’ll ask for a post-mortem.’

  ‘You’ll ask for a post-mortem! You’ll have him cut up? I suppose it’s too much to ask for a little respect?’

  § 134

  It would take Kolankiewicz more than an hour to get to Whitechapel from Hendon. Out of respect, Troy talked not to the widow, but to the sister-in-law.

  ‘Aaron always said he’d never use a shelter. He could be like that, stubborn as a mule. Said he hadn’t lived seventy-two years to run and hide from tinpot dictators like Hitler. After that first false alarm the day war broke out, that Sunday morning, he always said he’d take his chances. And, if God decided to take him, that was that – in the street, in his house, in the synagogue . . . but he wouldn’t be caught by his maker cowering from Nazis in a tin hut in the back garden. Said if God wanted him for a pilchard, he’d have been born a pilchard. There’ve been a few since, he ignored them all. I heard the siren about nine o’clock last night. No idea whether it was another waste of time, or whether this was really it. I mean, you never do know, until it is it. I went down the shelter with Sarah. The all-clear must have sounded about an hour and a half later – but by then we were settled, so we neither of us thought of coming out till gone seven. We got a few hours sleep. I expect a lot of people did. When we went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, Aaron wasn’t home. Only when we’d had a cup of tea did we think to wonder what had become of him.’

  ‘Did he disappear often?’

  ‘No . . . I wouldn’t say he ever disappeared. He walked a lot. He knew every street for miles around by the soles of his feet. But when he couldn’t sleep he’d often be in the synagogue. And I reckon that’s where he was when the alarm went up. So he stayed put. He read a lot at night, you see.’

  ‘And if he’d heard the alarm?’

  ‘If? He’d have had to be dead not to have heard it.’

  That, too, was a possibility, but Troy said nothing.

  ‘Would he have . . . panicked . . . hidden from it?’

  ‘I doubt he’d have so much as looked up. I’ve seen him read the paper right through the whole rigmarole – siren wailing, lots of running about, kids screaming, not knowing a thing, then that awful silence, then the all-clear . . . and Aaron hadn’t budged.’

  § 135

  The electricity was back on by the time Kolankiewicz arrived. Troy had the lights turned up full.

  ‘Troy do you not think we could let him have this one?’

  ‘The man’s a fool.’

  ‘Respect . . . not for the doctor but for the patient perhaps?’

  ‘I know what you’re saying, and if we can avoid a p-m we will. But I’m not releasing the body for burial until we’re sure we’ve nothing else to learn.’

  ‘It looks like heart failure to me. Given his medical history . . .’

  ‘Given that he’s the second dead rabbi in a matter of weeks . . .’

  ‘Ah . . . so we’re still chasing the ghost of Izzy Borg?’

  ‘Did you think I’d give up?’

  ‘No, my boy, I suppose not.’

  ‘This looks like heart failure. Borg’s death looked like a traffic accident. We both know it wasn’t.’

  ‘OK . . . so talk me through it.’

  ‘Look at the toecaps of his shoes, the knees, the palms of his hands. Then look at the scuff marks on the floorboards. Guildenstern thinks he dropped dead. I say he crawled twenty-five feet from the nearest aisle to get here. Guildenstern reckons he died of fright when the sirens went off at nine last night. I say he died nearer midnight. He wasn’t in full rigor when I got here, and he’s only just in it now. What do you say?’

  Kolankiewicz said nothing for more than a minute, working over the stiffening body with his hands and eyes.

  ‘Crawled? Yes. I agree. Dirt and dust consistent with having crawled on his hands and knees. The man’s clothes and shoes are otherwise immaculate. There are even splinters of wood in the hands to support your theory. Time of death. Between midnight and 2 a.m. If it were nine last night when he died he’d be set like concrete.’

  ‘Dead men do not crawl.’

  ‘The attack might not have killed him outright.’

  ‘Do men crawl after heart attacks?’

  ‘Troy . . . it’s perfectly possible this one did.’

  ‘But is it likely?’

  ‘No. I would tend to see it as immobilising. Literally a near-death experience – your instinct would be to lie still, wait for help.’

  ‘Not crawl into a corner where any help would be more than likely to miss you?’

  ‘Probably not.’

&nbs
p; ‘So, what do you say?’

  ‘I say I think we caused offence to the Borg family when we delayed old Izzy’s funeral, and I think we will now be doing the same to this lot . . . name as yet unknown to me . . .’

  ‘Adelson.’

  ‘. . . Particularly if you then do not say outright to the family that you do consider the death to be murder – you did not tell the Borgs, if I understand you aright?’

  ‘I asked the questions I had to ask and tried not to suggest one thing or the other.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell them as clearly as you would me or Onions that you were investigating a murder.’

  Thinking of all he’d said to Zette Borg, Troy chose his words with care.

  ‘Not all of them, no.’

  How neatly half-truths become half-lies.

  § 136

  As if to think of her was to summon her up by word magic, Aladdin’s genie sprung from the stage-trap. He knew the knock on his door could not be Kitty. He had given her a key, and it was Thursday – Kitty’s day on the all-night shift. On his doorstep in the fading light of day stood Zette Borg, wearing the chic black outfit she’d been wearing the first time he’d set eyes on her on the Monte Carlo train. She’d not done this before. Her summonses had been imperious. She’d never just turned up on him.

  ‘I called your office,’ she said. ‘You’ve been out all day.’

  ‘I . . . er . . .’

  ‘Hesitant again, Troy? Why not just ask me in?’

  Troy pulled the door wide.

  She walked in, turned full circle to take in the room in a single glance and finish facing him.

  ‘I heard. I heard there’s been another killing.’

  ‘News travels.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Is that what brought you all this way? After so long?’

  ‘Some,’ she said. ‘Some.’

  § 137

  ‘So it might have been an accident?’

  ‘No – not an accident.’

  ‘Troy you know what I mean . . . natural causes.’

  ‘It might. But I don’t believe that’s all there is to it and Kolankiewicz is holding his breath.’

  ‘And your boss . . . that Onions bloke?’

  ‘I gave him the gist over the phone. He’s sceptical.’

  ‘Sceptical?’

  ‘I can’t paraphrase for you . . . sceptical.’

  ‘Good God . . . how many dead rabbis does it take? Some bugger kills my father and now kills Aaron Adelson too. How much does it take?’

  Troy didn’t want to answer. In so short a time, in so few meetings, he’d seen Zette in moods that rendered her completely unpredictable. He didn’t know if this was one of them. It was. Rage gave way to tears. Almost the last thing he’d expected. And tears gave way to lust. First hers. Then his.

  Afterwards she said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The post-mortem revealed nothing out of the ordinary. He died of a heart attack.’

  ‘Died instantly?’

  ‘Kolankiewicz thinks so, but as I said he’s . . .’

  ‘. . . Holding his breath. So you released the body?’

  ‘I released the body, and I took an irate phone call from Adelson’s physician telling me I was young, ignorant, a disgrace to the force and that I had no respect. Well, I knew that. And then I told the family.’

  ‘Told the family what?’

  ‘That it seems to be natural causes.’

  ‘Seems? Seems . . . seems . . . seems! . . . I know not seems! How long are you going to go on telling lies of omission, Troy?’

  §

  Under moonlight,

  infectious moonlight,

  a madman dances,

  chanting numbers,

  two, three, five, seven, eleven.

  Smeared in excrement,

  naked as nativity,

  smeared in his own blood,

  wailing like a dog in pain,

  throat bared to heaven,

  mouth the perfect O,

  Lord Carsington dances.

  § 138

  It had been their first night in his bed, rather than hers, rather than the damp grass of the park. In the middle of the night he was wide awake. He was pretty damn certain she was too.

  ‘What did you mean about your father being a “would-be mystic”?’

  ‘He would not have said that himself. He’d have said he was a scholar.’

  Troy remembered the tributes at Izzy Borg’s graveside – gentleman and scholar.

  ‘Well . . . that rather went with the job, didn’t it?’

  ‘He didn’t just study the word of God – he studied Kabbalah.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s more numbers. There are actually idiots who believe that the Torah is a numerical code . . . sort of full of hidden clues from God . . . it’s called Gammantria, and when you work out what the numbers are you recite lists of numbers . . . the word of God reduced to a game of lotto and the first to yell ‘house’ gets . . .’

  ‘Gets what?’

  ‘That’s the bit I could never quite get. I suppose they think they will receive divine revelation or some such bollocks. Because, believe me Troy, it is bollocks. There were even rabbis who thought you could conjure up a golem with the right recitation. All I can say is, we’ve been in need of a few regiments of golem since 1933 and they’re not exactly thick on the ground, are they? The only thing Kabbalah has in common with anything meaningful like science or logic is the use of numbers. Although, I suppose, like quantum physics, it seeks meaning in the tiniest of things.’

  ‘God by numbers? God in numbers? I suppose the entire modus operandi of religion is to be able to extrapolate the big picture from the small . . . you know . . . the world in a grain of sand.’

  ‘Or . . . “we’re all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars”? It’s bollocks, Troy, it’s all bollocks. I gave up trying to talk sense to him long before he died. I know there are people in Stepney, people who knew me when I was a child, who think I’ve grown up snotty and aloof. Well, let any one of them try living with an assault on intelligence like my father’s hocus pocus. It shrinks the mind. I almost said shrivels the soul, but that would be playing right into the old man’s hands.’

  ‘You know . . . we met in a house of numbers.’

  ‘You mean the casino? Troy, there is as much meaning in the random dealing of cards at chemin-de-fer as there is in all the gobbledegook I ever heard in a synagogue or in my father’s study. I play because I like to see numbers unfold in front of me. I don’t pretend there’s a pattern. And the only meaning is in the exercise of my judgement, of my brain. Meaning means winning. I usually win. I no more believe in luck than I believe in God. If my father believed there is a God – and I don’t and nor do you – then surely that God gave him his brain to use?’

  Troy said nothing.

  Then.

  ‘I knew him, you know.’

  ‘You knew the affable old East End rabbi. A smile for everyone. Goyim and all. I knew the crank who rotted his own brain and tried to rot mine too.’

  Troy’s father was a crank too – Troy rather thought crankiness began in the adult male when its sperm finally met an ovum – he’d built an empire on the combination of his crankiness and his intelligence. But Troy would hate it if all that the world remembered about his father was the man eating Sunday dinner in his dressing gown while his daughters ran roughshod over his guests.

  ‘Tell me something good about him.’

  Zette was silent for a while. All he could hear was the depth of her breathing.

  ‘He . . . he believed in belonging. I’d like to say that even if he lost his faith, which is unimaginable, that the notion of belonging, of being a Jew would still have meant everything to him. I respected that. I can de-louse myself of faith – easy-peasy – I can’t de-louse myself of being Jewish, nor would I want to, and nor would society let me. I’d wear the yellow star with pride. My father was right, in his own
daft way, to be free you must belong.’

  ‘You know, my brother said something very similar in his last letter to me.’

  ‘Your brother “belongs”?’

  ‘It’s beginning to look that way.’

  ‘But you don’t, do you?’

  § 139

  Hummel was approaching the end of his lecture. Several amongst his audience had fallen asleep, one or two were sighing with exasperation.

  ‘I have always thought it fascinating that neither Descartes nor Darwin could ever relinquish the notion of God – indeed the struggle for Darwin must have been agonising. But neither of them were in a position to address the centrality of the matter – although it becomes central with Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum – the centrality of consciousness, for even now we have no science of consciousness. Consciousness alone is in the end what distinguishes us from the beasts, we are all of us self-aware and the crux of self-awareness is the awareness of our own mortality. We alone know we must die. The domesticated cat who deals in death every day has no notion of death, and no notion of its own death. It knows aggression and it knows fear. That is the cat condition. Our condition is this – to live until we die and to know the inevitability of that.’

  It wasn’t that Hummel wasn’t making sense, indeed Rod found his argument far easier to grasp than anything Kornfeld had to say, and at least fresher than anything Drax had said so far . . . but his mind had begun to wander . . . from Hummel to the leaded windows, from the windows to the lawn . . . and from the lawn to memories of cricket at school. He’d adored cricket. The perfect ritual in the perfect togs. White upon white with an optional cap in a silly colour. He even loved the sound of cricket, the soft thwack of willow on leather, the distant ripple of applause, like doves taking flight. He remembered the long holiday after his first year at Harrow – he’d tried teaching cricket to his brother on the south lawn at their father’s country pile, Mimram House in Hertfordshire. He didn’t think Freddie could have been much more than six . . . but it wasn’t so much his not getting it as his utter refusal to want to get it. Perhaps it was all to do with the boy being left-handed. At the end of a very frustrating afternoon the boy had asked of cricket, ‘But will it get me into heaven?’ It remained to this day the only question of faith he’d heard his brother ask . . . and remembering this brought him back off a lawn a world away, back through the leaded windows and back to Hummel.