Funeral of Figaro

by Edith Pargeter

  A nice detail, but one she had not mentioned before; that might be mere chance, for the point was a small one, but there was not doubt she was quick at picking her way through thorns.

  He turned his attention to Hans, whose angry colour had not yet subsided.

  ‘Mr Selverer, do you wish to support this version?’

  ‘It is true,’ said Hans, and restrained himself from adding: ‘this time.’

  ‘Why did you not correct the previous one?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly!’ cried Hero reproachfully. ‘How could he, when I’d just told it in front of everybody? He never had a chance.’

  To everyone’s surprise, Hans shook her sharply by the arm, and said in a tone Johnny found himself envying: ‘Be quiet! You have made quite enough trouble for everybody.’ More surprisingly still, she said: ‘I know! Sorry!’ in a meek tone, and was quiet.

  ‘Did you leave the sword there, as she says?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And you didn’t see it again until after Chatrier was dead?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  And yet they could still be in collusion. One story had fallen down because of the accident of Inga’s intervention, they palmed another one with all the dexterity of old hands.

  ‘Did you get on well with Chatrier, Mr Selverer?’

  ‘I respected his gifts and his knowledge,’ said Hans stiffly. ‘Working with him was not easy, but it was rewarding. As a man I did not care for him so much.’

  ‘But Miss Truscott did?’

  ‘As Miss Truscott’s father,’ said Johnny peremptorily, ‘I strongly object to that question. And if you’ve finished with her now I’d like to send her home.’

  Musgrave smiled, cocking an eyebrow at his colleague; ‘Very well, I think we can let all the ladies go now.’

  Marcellina, the quiet one, rose with a quick, reassuring look at Johnny Truscott, and he nodded at her gratefully, committing his troublesome daughter to her care without a word.

  Hero kissed her father. ‘“Pace, pace, mio dolce tesoro!”’ she whispered placatingly in his ear, and went off stumbling and yawning to take off Cherubino’s finery.

  Once he was in the theatre, there was no way of getting him out. Wherever they turned, in the store among the sets, in the wardrobe, in the dressing-rooms, round the switchboard, down in the orchestra pit, there Musgrave would turn up, silent, still, and unbelievably obtrusive. The local man, though he took over the official business of statements and interviews, seemed to be able to go and come without creating those pregnant silences round about him, or drawing the deck crew prowling on his heels. The sergeant and his underlings who did the routine work of searching dressing-rooms and watching the comings and goings of the company were ordinary human beings, with whom casual communication was possible. But Musgrave did not so much visit the theatre as haunt it.

  ‘That man’s just about had this place to pieces already,’ said Dolly Glazier, polishing glasses in the circle bar before the evening performance of Alceste, three nights after the catastrophe of Figaro. There had been no pause in the activities of the Leander Theatre; one morning rehearsal had been cancelled to allow the exhausted Franz to sleep late, but that had been the only concession. ‘We’re a commercial undertaking,’ Johnny had said, magnificently if not strictly truthfully, ‘and we keep faith with the public’. Arabella had gone on according to plan on the night after the tragedy, and Don Giovanni the next night, with every man on his mettle. ‘What’s he after now,’ said Dolly, ‘that’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Keeping an eye on the lot of us,’ said Sam. ‘Thinks if he hangs around long enough, somebody’s going to lose his nerve and give himself away.’

  ‘But what’s he looking for, anyhow?’

  ‘A bit o’ ribbon,’ said the old man, soft-voiced, ‘off our kid’s sword-belt. That’s my guess, anyhow. That’s the only thing that went missing. Drop it in the furnace if you find it, girl, that’s what I say.’

  ‘Destroying evidence!’ said Dolly reprovingly. ‘Not that I’d go a step out of my way to help round up the one who knocked off that Chatrier fellow, that’s a fact. I don’t believe it was any of Johnny’s folks, mind you. But it’s a bit too close for comfort, all the same.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Stoker Bates heatedly, ‘if he’d stick to detecting, but he don’t. Takes on to learn me to scene-shift – me! Tells the old geyser how to conduct, very nearly. The other day, when Jimmy the One was in, blow me if this chap wasn’t telling him what was wrong with the casting, and who he should have signed up instead of half the company. And you know what?… He thinks Wagner’s better than Mozart!’

  ‘No!’ gasped Dolly, scandalised.

  ‘True as I’m standing here. I heard ’em at it yesterday. Mozart, he says – Figaro, he says – pleasant enough pastiche, he says. Now Tristan … Teutonic bluster, says Johnny. Not that he means it, not really, but what can you do with a bloke like that? Pastiche!’

  They looked at one another in mute decision, writing off Musgrave from that moment. A policeman has his job to do, they could have forgiven him that; even his unnerving ways of erupting under their feet were perhaps only the symptoms of an occupational disease. But a man who could prefer Wagner to Mozart was beyond the pale.

  ‘He’s here again,’ said Sam, putting his head in at Johnny’s office door on the sixth morning after the final exit of Figaro. ‘Siegfried without his helmet! Wants to see the maestro, he says. Right now he’s busy lousing up the piano rehearsal. I reckon if we don’t get him up here out of Mr Southall’s hair pretty soon there’s going to be more murder done.’

  ‘Damn!’ said Johnny, and rose to switch off the tape recorder. They were playing through their two-year-old production of Rosenkavalier, in preparation for planning the new one to take pride of place in their next winter repertoire, and to call a halt in the middle of the rising excitement of Octavian’s arrival, with the argument about Hero still far from settled, was frustrating, if not a kind of blasphemy. ‘Oh, well, must co-operate with the law, I suppose. Send him up.’

  Franz took his slippered feet off the desk, and fretted irritably at his silver mane. ‘I tell you the child can do it. If we can find her a Sophie who is young enough also, she can do it, and the work will gain.’

  ‘She isn’t ready,’ repeated Johnny. ‘She says she isn’t, and who am I to shove her into such a responsibility until she feels able to carry it?’

  Gisela rose and shook together the preliminary drawings for the costumes. ‘I’d better leave you to it. Personally, I’d love to see an Octavian who really was still in his teens. What do you say, Sam?’

  ‘Our kid?’ said Sam, divining the cause of this mild dispute. He flicked a gesture of confidence at them with thumb and forefinger as he walked out. ‘Do it on her head,’ he said scornfully, and rolled away down the stairs with his ungainly but nimble gait.

  Presently they heard Musgrave’s deliberate feet ascending.

  ‘No, don’t go, Gisela,’ said Johnny, drawing her back as she would have made for the door with the portfolio of sketches. ‘Maybe he won’t stay long.’

  ‘He seems to be practically a permanent resident,’ she said with a resigned smile; but she sat down again.

  Musgrave came in brisk and large as ever, the slight expression of superiority provoked by Franz’s belligerent deputy still on his precise features. He couldn’t resist commenting. If he came with a warrant for me in his pocket, Johnny thought sourly, he’d still have to stop and tell us we were taking the second act finale too fast.

  ‘You’ve put Figaro back into rehearsal, I see.’

  ‘It won’t be out of the programmes more than a fortnight,’ said Johnny, pushing the cigarettes and the desk lighter towards him.

  ‘Your substitute seemed to me to be doing very well.’

  ‘A lightweight,’ said Franz. ‘A small voice and no presence. He does his best, but it will be a travesty.’

  ‘Hm, I see Chatrier has at l
east one mourner.’

  He had not many, it seemed; his connections were professional only. A married sister in Colmar had written but not put in an appearance, and it had been left to his American agent to claim his body and set in motion the preparations for his funeral. But the musical critics of the world’s Press, at least, were weeping ink for him by the column.

  Musgrave settled his briefcase comfortably beside him, and leaned back in his chair.

  ‘I won’t keep you from your work long, Dr Hassilt, but I think you may be able to help me. The international musical world isn’t so big that artists of your calibre can revolve in it as long as you have without encountering most of the others of the same rank. And opera has always been your speciality. Tell me, did you ever hear of a baritone named Antoine Gallet? It would be some time ago, about the end of the war, or even during it.’

  Franz was regarding him narrowly from under knitted brows. ‘Yes, I have heard of him.’

  ‘Ever meet him?’

  ‘Once, in Vienna, in 1942. He sang at one of the last concerts I conducted before I left Austria.’

  He had left it, like so many others, just ahead of the axe. It was a long time ago, and he never talked about it. Probably he seldom even thought about it. Music is a present world, perpetually renewed.

  ‘I did not know him personally, apart from that.’

  ‘But you knew his reputation? It seems he was known as a collaborator. Born in Alsace, apparently, and he began to make extensive tours and to claw out a fairish living for himself after the Germans occupied France. Ditched his wife in the process, incidentally. They can’t have been married more than a couple of years. Divorced her and let her be herded off to a concentration camp. And later he seems to have been responsible for several similar incidents. The records tend to be blank, so much having been destroyed. But rumour says he got several musicians into trouble whle he was in Austria, including a certain conductor who ended up in Auschwitz. Died there, about a year later. Did you know all that about him?’

  ‘Not the details, no. Certainly not about his wife. I knew he was looked upon as – pliable, and that he was quick to extricate himself from any association that might compromise his own safety. People were expendable. Every man for himself. He was young and he was frightened. Frightened people are not at their best.’

  ‘And did you know that he went to America after the war, changed his name – though he seems to have changed it once or twice already, for that matter – and made quite a new life and reputation? I think you did. You seem to have welcomed him,’ said Musgrave, pouncing happily, ‘when he came here in his new identity to sing Figaro for you.’

  Franz leaned forward, his irascible old face constrained to lines of laboured patience.

  ‘Meester Musgrave,’ he said gently, ‘I am seventy-five years old. I no longer think I have the right to judge men and write them off for life, because in certain bad circumstances they have failed to behave like heroes. Gallet – that was twenty years ago, and what profit is it to harrow over it any more, if he is now another man? When Mr Clash cables that he has signed up Marc Chatrier I am simply glad, because now I have the best Figaro now alive, and my job is to get as near perfection as a man can. If he deserves only good of me now, good he shall have—’

  ‘And if not?’ said Musgrave quickly. ‘How if he turned out to be the same even when he wasn’t young and frightened? How if he began making hell all around him, for the people you like?’

  ‘If he made trouble I could deal with him. I could protect my friends and colleagues.’

  ‘I see. He got the benefit of the doubt, though you knew he was Gallet … You agree you did know that?’

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘—and if he made trouble, you would feel responsible for the security and peace of mind of your friends, and take steps accordingly.’

  ‘Such as with a sword, Franz, my boy,’ said Johnny bitterly. ‘Don’t put words into my musical director’s mouth, Mr Musgrave, you’ve got two independent witnesses here if you do. Motives don’t come much thinner than that.’

  Musgrave was smiling. ‘Thank you, Dr Hassilt, that’s really all I wanted. And now if I could just have a word with Mr Selverer before I leave you—’

  ‘I am going down,’ said Franz, ruffled and breathing hard, ‘I will ask Hans to come up to you.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather you stayed here.’

  An instant of sheer, uncomprehending surprise, and then Franz understood. He sat down again with a look of faint contempt, and Johnny, resigned, picked up the telephone.

  ‘Stoker, my apologies to Mr Southall, and would he mind asking Mr Selverer to come up here for a few minutes.’

  Hans came up flushed and preoccupied from rehearsal, and checked sharply in the doorway at sight of Musgrave. In his presence all faces were guarded, he was used to that, and accomplished at reading even between the lines they smoothed away. The young man came in with eyes full of reserve, in a face held very still. He looked aside once at Gisela, and she smiled at him. Was it imagination that the tension of his jaw and mouth eased a little?

  ‘I’m sorry to take you away from rehearsal,’ said Musgrave with all his deceptive mildness flowing like honey. ‘This won’t take a moment.’

  It sounded ominously like a dentist’s reassurance before the pouncing extraction of a tooth, and that was much the way it turned out. The question came briskly and brightly this time, before the boy had even settled himself in a chair.

  ‘Do you know the name Antoine Gallet, Mr Selverer?’

  Hans jerked up his head with a wild start that made an answer unnecessary. His hands gripped convulsively in the upholstery of his chair for a moment, and then with painful care relaxed their tension.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, I thought you might. Did you ever see him? Or photographs of him, perhaps?’

  ‘I never saw him in person. Photographs I may have seen, but I do not now recall it. It would be a very long time ago. Why do you ask me about him? Surely he is dead?’

  Musgrave’s particular smile, come and gone in an instant and leaving no ray behind, touched his grey countenance and fled. ‘Oh, yes – he’s dead! Tell me what you remember hearing about him.’

  Hans moistened his lips, and pondered the wisdom of complying, though the look in his ingenuous eyes suggested pure bewilderment and mistrust rather than any personal disquiet.

  ‘I know he was a singer who used to have a certain modest reputation during the war. I have heard my mother speak of him. But I have not heard the name now for many years.’

  ‘Yet you hadn’t forgotten it. Well, it seems I’m better informed than you. He had another kind of reputation, too, for taking care of his own career by all manner of questionable tricks. There was a case, for instance, involving a conductor who was already suspected of anti-Nazi sympathies, and Gallet chose to bolster up is own position by refusing to work with this man, and getting him thrown out of his job, and finally he died in a concentration camp. His name, it turns out,’ said Musgrave deliberately, ‘was Selverer. Richard Selverer.’

  He looked up into fixed blue eyes that were staring at him in detestation. ‘A coincidence, would you say?’

  ‘You know you are speaking of my father. If I did not choose to speak of this myself, it is because I did not and do not see what it has to do with you. I do not like this intrusion.’

  ‘You’ll see the application very soon. When Antoine Gallet came here a little while ago to sing Figaro in this new production …’

  Hans was on his feet, quivering. ‘What are you saying? I don’t understand. Are you seriously trying to tell me that Marc Chatrier was Antoine Gallet?’

  ‘My dear Selverer, are you seriously trying to tell me that you didn’t know?’

  ‘How could I know? I never saw him. I thought he was dead long ago, the name had vanished. It is only something I remember from a child. I never associated Chatrier with him. Why should I?’

&n
bsp; ‘Ah, but you see, there was someone here who could very well have told you. Doctor Hassilt knew.’

  ‘I have told him nothing,’ said Franz flatly and coldly, ‘and you will certainly never prove that I did. Sit down, boy, sit down and calm yourself. The man is trying to get you to incriminate yourself, and so far, I must say, he is failing. But ludicrously!’

  ‘And, for God’s sake!’ protested Johnny.’ The boy must have been about seven years old. How tenacious do you think a child can be?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not suggesting it’s been on his mind all this time as a filial duty, not at all. But when the man unexpectedly turns up here in the person of this great man Chatrier, right here on the spot, rubbing shoulders with the son daily as he once did with the father – well, you see there could be a powerful compulsion there.’

  Hans sat down slowly, and let out his breath in a fierce sigh. ‘I think there could,’ he acknowledged grimly. ‘But I tell you again, until you just told me yourself, I had not the least idea that Chatrier was Antoine Gallet.’

  ‘That may or may not be true, we have only your word for it. But the background is suggestive. Then there is also this added element of your rivalry with Chatrier over Miss Truscott.’

  ‘We are not rivals,’ protested Hans, flaming. ‘You have no right to speak so of Miss Truscott—’

  ‘—and there is the plain fact that you are the last person known to have handled the sword with which Chatrier was killed. Your prints are on both hilt and scabbard. The only other prints found on it are those of Miss Truscott and her father.’

  Hans frowned with distaste at the sturdy, well-shaped fingers which had supplied the sample prints to implicate him now more deeply. ‘I handled it, of course,’ he said. ‘But I left it there propped in Hero’s doorway, just as she told you, and I did not see it again until after the murder.’

  Gisela rose, crushing out her cigarette in the silver ash-tray beside her chair, and came forward to the desk. She had sat all this time in silence, only her eyes ranging from face to face as they talked, and once at least widening and flashing at Hans Selverer in what might have been either a reassurance or a warning. Musgrave had almost forgotten she was there; Marcellina was always the quiet one. He looked up in surprise to find her close at his elbow.