Second Violin

by John Lawton

  At half past two the all-clear sounded. The streets would fill now. It might be that his suspect was out there somewhere, but far more likely that he wasn’t.

  He went back to Nader’s house, peeled off the beard and slept. He woke around six-thirty to find Nader bumbling around in his kitchen.

  ‘Are we downhearted?’ Nader said, grinning, slyly parodic.

  ‘You bet,’ said Troy.

  § 180

  Wednesday, 2 October 1940

  ‘I’ve phoned you before. I called you Sunday evening. Lindfors stood me up, I rather thought we could have got together!’

  ‘I was working.’

  ‘More dead Jews?

  ‘The same dead Jews. I put your theory to the test.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’ve been staking out Heaven’s Gate. Nader is my age and my height. We swapped jackets, I stuck on a fake beard with spirit gum, and I bumbled around a synagogue in half-darkness, trying to look as though I knew what I was doing.’

  ‘You mean you used yourself as bait?’

  ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘Were you armed?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Troy there are times I think you’re an idiot.’

  ‘Nothing happened. Nothing happened on the 23rd either. And if you’re right, nothing will now until the third.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t do this every night. I haven’t the resources. But I can wangle the shifts and the pattern of work enough to cope with the prime numbers. If it isn’t the right theory I’m stuffed because I can’t get my boss or Nader to take it seriously enough. But I told Nader I’d be back on the third.’

  ‘Why the third?’

  ‘Next prime number.’

  ‘Troy, you blithering idiot – you missed 1, which was the next prime number, and the next after that is 2!’

  ‘You never said anything about even numbers, I thought they were all odd?’

  ‘Just think for a moment, Troy. A number only divisible by itself and one must include both one and two. Two is the only even prime number. And October 2nd is the next prime date!’

  ‘Oh shit. That’s today.’

  §

  Under moonlight,

  infectious moonlight,

  a madman dances,

  chanting numbers,

  one, 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,

  face tilted to night,

  eyes wide open,

  eyes tight shut,

  a razor in his hand,

  Lord Carsington dances . . .

  Eleven, seven, five, three, two . . . one . . .

  § 181

  The raid had started just before 9 p.m. Troy had moved rubble around for a couple of hours, and was feeling the pointlessness of the pretence, and the irritation and foolishness of a fake beard.

  Part of his mind told him he had been foolish in the first place to seize on a theory handed to him by Zette as the only pattern perceivable in a chain of numbers. Part of his mind told him that a pattern as odd, as stripped of meaning as this might well be the fixation of a nutcase. Then the rest of his mind told him he was losing concentration and that that was precursor to losing the battle.

  The bigger battle raged overhead. Closer than the previous two nights – bombs raining down within half a mile to either side. Great, dull whumpfs taking out whole streets of Shadwell or Bethnal Green.

  Any sane man would be in a shelter. But as Trench had made disturbingly clear to him, there were people like Troy and Trench who would never go into a shelter – men, and they weren’t all men, too fascinated with the wonder and the risk to want to miss it.

  The moon was waning. In a week’s time he’d have to stop this farce – too little light would be coming in through the gaping holes in the roof. The interior of the synagogue would be black as pitch.

  It was close to midnight now. German planes directly overhead. The City of London about to cop it again. Troy had let his rules slip. He was staring up through a hole in the roof and had nothing that might serve as a weapon in hand.

  Out of nowhere there were hands at his throat, a voice and bad breath in his face.

  ‘You bloody fool! What do you think you’re playing at?’

  Troy caught him with a left hook to the cheek, knocked his hat off, sent him reeling away – and at a couple of paces distance realised this was far too small a man to be his man, and that it was Steerforth. Steerforth angry, Steerforth in a rage, Steerforth spitting fire.

  ‘What did I –’

  A hand seized Steerforth by the hair, and another passed quickly and surgically across his throat. The razor slit from ear to ear. A fountain of blood shot three feet into the air in spurt and splat. Steerforth crumpled and his life gushed to nothing in the dust and dirt.

  Troy stared at Zette, still clutching the open razor, still staring down at the twitching corpse. Feet and hands shaking like a man in a fit of palsy. Head nodding with every spurt of blood as though jerked on a string.

  ‘Oh my God, Zette. What have you done?’

  Now she looked at Troy.

  ‘“An eye for an eye”,’ she said so softly he could hardly hear her.

  ‘Oh God, Zette. He didn’t kill your father.’

  It was as though he’d slapped her.

  ‘He didn’t? Then who did?’

  And she turned to follow Troy’s gaze to the far side of the synagogue, to the street entrance, to the tall man, half hidden in the darkness, in and out of moon beams, walking slowly towards them with a revolver in his hand.

  ‘I rather think he did,’ Troy said.

  Troy had not counted on a gun. A gun was almost the last thing he’d expected. He had not handled a gun since basic training. He hated guns. He wished he had one now.

  He backed off slowly, blocking Zette’s body with his own, and as they backed off the man approached Steerforth’s body and stopped as though unwilling to step over it or step in blood.

  He looked down at the corpse. Spent now. Now he raised his arm, now he levelled the gun, now he was within range.

  Looking down the barrel of a gun, Troy had one vain hope, that the floor might open up and swallow this bastard, whoever he was.

  And it did.

  A high explosive burst in the street outside, caved in the east wall, set the solid floor rippling like the liquid surface of a pond, and then the floor opened up and swallowed him. A single shot, a single scream. The floor buckled, split and splintered – and he and the late Mr Steerforth vanished into the pit below.

  ‘Run!’ said Troy.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back,’ said Troy.

  ‘Back where? There’s no way out. It’s all coming down on us.’

  He seized Zette by the hand and ran for the back of the synagogue, towards the open doors of the ark.

  ‘Get in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the most solid thing in here, and it’s the only chance we have.’

  He bundled her into the velvet box and, as the roof gave way, he saw a silver shower of little thermos flasks tumble into the pit, then what was left of the roof fell in, the incendiaries ignited and a sheet of blue-white flame shot up from below like the roar of a dyspeptic dragon. He drew the doors shut. Fireproof, Nader had said, but he doubted Nader knew how fiercely magnesium burnt.

  ‘It’s pitch dark in here, we could suffocate!’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No we won’t, there are airbricks in the back. We have a chance.’

  ‘A chance?’

  ‘You’re the one that deals in mathematical probabilities.’

  ‘Then we’ll probably die together. All my life I have fantasized about with whom I might live not with whom I might die.’

  A crash to deafe
n them both as the west wall fell in, bouncing rubble off the oak doors – entombing them within the ark.

  ‘Change the subject,’ Troy said when his ears stopped ringing.

  § 182

  All the way out of London Hummel had read – nose deep into a J.B. Priestley novel. Coming into London, he watched with fresh eyes as London absorbed Nature. Villages turned to suburbs, suburbs to soot-caked cuttings carving their way into London’s clay from West Hampstead to Agar Town. Ploughed fields turned to streets, copses and knolls to half-glimpsed houses rushing by. London wrapped the green world in her grey winding sheet – a green thought in a grey shade – moss crept across the corrugated roofs of factories, willow-herb sprouted on embankments, and incongruous rows of flag irises and autumn cabbages gathered dust by the trackside in Cricklewood – buddleia, its purple blossom spent, dry and raggy on the stone ramparts. Into the deep, dark maw of a blackened St Pancras station. Jonah swallowed by a whale. In utter contrast to June, the station was almost deserted . . . ‘the pulse of London low and inaudible’.

  ‘Shouldn’t have any problem getting a cab. Eh?’ Billy said.

  All Hummel had was his carpet bag with a single change of clothes, his German-English/English-German dictionary, his portrait and Drax’s old fur coat.

  ‘Can you manage without me?’

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘I . . . I would prefer to walk.’

  ‘Walk? Hummer, it’s four miles. Maybe five.’

  ‘All the same, I would like to walk.’

  ‘Air-raids. There might be an air-raid.’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘OK, suit yerself. Kettle’ll be on when you get home.’

  Hummel smiled at the word.

  ‘Ja, Billy. Home.’

  It was like the descent into a dream. The descent from a dream. He would never be sure which. All his life, it seemed to Hummel that he had dreamt of Vienna. And that was all that remained of Vienna – a dream. But now there was London. As the ack-ack tore up the evening sky at the first sight of German bombers, a new dream opened up for him.

  § 183

  Zette slept.

  Troy heard the all-clear sound. Saw daylight at the end of the tiny tunnels of the airbrick. Heard sounds in the street. Called out. No one responded.

  A day passed.

  Having no choice, they pissed where they lay.

  Zette slept.

  A new raid began at a new dusk.

  What was left of the synagogue shook to another high explosive. Dust and rubble coming down on them, a piece of the ark’s roof glanced off Zette’s head and she passed out mid-sentence . . .

  ‘If we ever –’

  Troy moved her head to the airbrick, pressed her face against it, felt for the wound, wiped away a streak of blood, breathed clean air, waited for the dust to settle, saw night fall.

  Zette slept.

  Troy slept.

  Troy awoke to the sound of banging. Streaks of light in the airbrick. A furry creature at his throat. He flinched and scrabbled. Mouse or rat? Then he realised it was the fake beard that had slipped off.

  Banging directly on the ark doors. He tapped back with his fist.

  A voice said, ‘Hold on. We’re digging.’

  As if he could do anything else but hold on.

  He shook Zette. She woke groggily, complained of the pain in her head, the cramp in her legs, wrapped herself around him.

  ‘They’re digging us out,’ Troy said.

  ‘How long . . . how long have we been here?’

  ‘About thirty-two hours, I think. I’ve seen dawn twice.’

  Blinding light as the doors slid back, and a voice said ‘Gotcher!’

  Many hands were grappling to take his. There was George Bonham and Kolankiewicz and Elishah Nader and Walter Stilton and Billy Jacks and a big-eared bloke in a fur coat looking like the skinny man’s Bud Flanagan.

  ‘Ach, so,’ said Hummel. ‘Der andere Troy.’

  § 184

  Troy staggered out onto dust and rubble, shielding his eyes from the light and trying to see. Why was it so bright? And then he saw. There was nothing left of Heaven’s Gate. Nothing left but the brick ark from which they crawled. Nothing overhead but the bright blue, cloud-dappled sky with a nip of English autumn in the air.

  Zette slipped. Troy caught her in his arms. Found he could not lift her. She passed out again.

  ‘Zette, Zette!’

  Her eyes had closed, and the cut in her head opened up again.

  Bonham said, ‘’Ere – let me take her.’

  And scooped her up in one giant’s paw.

  Walter Stilton took his arm.

  ‘Steady, lad. You’ve been banged up nigh on two days. Bound to be a bit woozy.’

  ‘Walter? Walter!’

  ‘Aye, it’s me, lad.’

  ‘I . . . I need your car.’

  Troy lurched off across the rubble, got five paces towards Stilton’s Riley before Stilton restrained him.

  ‘Goin’ somewhere, were you? Don’t be daft. Come on now, you’re in no fit state . . .’

  ‘Chesham Place . . . got to . . .’

  ‘You want to go to Chesham Place?’

  ‘I have to go to Chesham Place.’

  ‘OK. I’ll drive you.’

  Stilton dumped him down in the passenger seat. Troy leaned back and closed his eyes. At the sound of the engine turning over, he opened them, looked out through the windscreen. There on the edge of the site, hands stuffed in the pockets of her police tunic, three bold stripes upon her arm, pale and sad, stood Kitty Stilton.

  § 185

  ‘Are we there?’

  ‘Almost,’ Stilton said. ‘We’re parked round the corner. You put your head on the block if you like. I’d rather not be seen, for all I know Steerforth might have a bloke watching Redburn’s house . . .’

  ‘He hasn’t.’

  ‘. . . And Carsington’s.’

  ‘He hasn’t, Walter. If he had, things might never have got this far.’

  ‘Maybe . . . all the same, just one bloke watching. You watch your step, if Steerforth . . .’

  Troy wasn’t listening any more. This wasn’t the time to tell Walter that Steerforth had watched the house in person. That he had followed Carsington in person all the way to Heaven’s Gate. This wasn’t the time to tell Walter Steerforth was dead. There’d never be a time to tell Walter Steerforth was dead.

  Troy all but leapt from the car. His own energy amazed him. Dead on his feet, and feeling he could kick the door in if he had to.

  A housekeeper in her seventies answered, frail and stooped but defiant.

  ‘The master’s not at ’ome.’

  Troy held up his warrant card and pushed past her, through the inner doors and into the hall.

  ‘Carsington!’

  He looked up the stairwell, iron railings wrapped around him in Piranesi loops all the way to the clouded skylight in the roof.

  ‘Carsington!’

  And the stairs fed back his own voice to him in a diminishing echo . . . ‘Carsington, Carsington, Carsington.’

  ‘I told yer. The master’s not home. He ain’t been home all night. I ain’t seen him since Wednesday morning. We getting ready to call the p’lice!’

  Troy could still hear his own voice. Waited for silence, for silence was his answer. The only answer he wanted to hear. Lord Carsington was not at ’ome. Lord Carsington never would be at ’ome. Lord Carsington was underneath a hundred tons of rubble at Heaven’s Gate.

  He caught sight of himself in a full-length mirror. He had not stopped to think what he looked like. Now he could see himself as Carsington’s housekeeper surely saw him. His jacket – Nader’s jacket – was ripped at the shoulder and his trousers at the knee. His hair was white with dust, the knuckles of both hands were bleeding. Standing next to him was a big, grim-faced man.

  ‘Freddie?’

  Troy looked at Onions’ reflection, then turned to look at the man himself.


  ‘He’s dead. It was Carsington.’

  ‘Freddie.’

  ‘I told you it was Carsington.’

  ‘Come with me, now. That’s an order.’

  ‘It was Carsington!’

  ‘Outside now!’

  They sat in Onions’ car.

  ‘Kolankiewicz called me. Said you were fit to do your nut.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Fine? For God’s sake, man. You’ve been buried alive for the best part of two days!’

  ‘I’ll be OK.’

  ‘OK, my arse. I’m taking you to hospital.’

  ‘No . . . if you have to take me somewhere, take me home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘I’ve broken no bones. It’s just cuts and bruises.’

  Onions started the car. When they rounded the corner Stilton had gone.

  ‘Kolankiewicz says they took the woman to the London Hospital. Head injuries or summat.’

  Troy said nothing.

  Onions said, ‘You going to tell me who she is and what she was doing there?’

  ‘She’s Izzy Borg’s daughter. And I don’t know what she was doing there.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Try telling me what happened.’

  Troy told him. Told him everything except Steerforth.

  By the time Onions pulled up his car in St Martin’s Lane he was saying, ‘You took a stupid risk.’

  And Troy was saying as little as possible. He was wondering if they would dig for the body. It would take precious resources. The job of rescue squads was to dig for the living. Would Onions ask for Heaven’s Gate to be dug out for the dead?

  ‘It’s Carsington down there. You know damn well it is.’

  ‘But you say you never saw his face? Just that he was a big bugger.’

  ‘They’re all big buggers. Trench and Carsington six foot or so, Lockett more like six four. But . . . Carsington’s missing. I think that says it all.’

  ‘Aye. Missing. He might be back. So . . . I’ve stuck a jack at Chesham Place . . . all the discretion of Primo Carnera at a midgets’ reunion . . . but he’s got his orders. I told him. Anything, anything at all, and he comes to me first. Now get inside, get cleaned up and get your head down.’