Gently Continental

by Alan Hunter

  GENTLY

  Miss Breske . . . can you hear what I’m saying?

  MRS BRESKE

  Ach, leave her alone, leave her alone!

  GENTLY

  I have no more questions at present. But I must repeat a warning I gave your daughter.

  MRS BRESKE

  Poor Frieda, poor Frieda. Ach, is the way of all Polizei. In every place, in every country, so it is with these Menschen.

  GENTLY

  Miss Breske, listen carefully. It is plain your father had a valuable secret. I don’t think the torturer got it from him, but your father may well have passed it on to you. If you know, then you may be in danger, because the people who want it are powerful and ruthless; also, you are running that risk unnecessarily, since we shall certainly learn the secret in the end. You have nothing to gain by keeping quiet.

  FRIEDA

  Go away from me. Go away.

  GENTLY

  Do you understand? You cannot profit by it.

  FRIEDA

  (Whispers.)

  Go away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GENTLY IS JOVIAL. He walks out of the parlour, where nothing and nobody is faintly jocund, smiling, or rather issuing smiles, and with the step of a man closing shop for the day. His smiles are peculiar. They seem to bubble up like the freshets of a stream in his humoursome eyes, and to play about his mouth, which pipe-free is wicked, with a thousand sunny, comic slants. You cannot nail him down to one smile. His smiling is Protean, first and last. From the merest glimmer and shadow of smile it proceeds, ever-changing, to silent laughter, a magnificent sunburst of unsuppressible delight. So that’s that, he smiles at Shelton, towing the local man down the hall. Nothing yet, he smiles at the newshawks, who leap up attentively from their gambling. But that smile lies, as Shelton knows, for Gently is stuffed with news-able matter, and a shame it will be if the nation’s breakfast-table is deprived of this rare intelligence. But nothing yet, the smile goes, one of that tremendous armoury, and the newshawks sink back to their cards and little piles and heaps of money. Could Shelton have smiled them off? Not he: they’d have been at his throat in a trice. But Shelton is not a smiling man: can grin a little, has no smile.

  So that’s that, Gently repeats, in the garden, still towing Shelton. Now all that remains is to watch and wait for that information from America. We cannot quite yet pull in our suspect because this link in the chain remains open and while it is open our suspect is suspect because one other suspect is also available. But the way is cleared, we are over the hill, another day, at most, should see us home. I could have put more pressure on Frieda Breske, but to save a few hours, it was not necessary. And he flicks skywards, a twirling saucer, the white-bladed head of a marguerite, which he has plucked in pure wantonness and now as wantonly casts away. But, frowning Shelton says, at what point did you guess Clooney’s identity? From the first, Gently says, who was more likely than the lady’s husband to be domiciled here? So when his accent changed – His accent? At first, it was native Bronx, Gently explains, then it became tinctured with European and at last settled towards Germany – this, together with his otherwise inexplicable choice of retreats, and the various attitudes towards him of the Breskes, strongly suggested who he was. Then finally Klapper, who you ably interrogated. His contribution was critical. For who would attract to himself such a nickname as Heifetz, unless, like Martin Breske, he was a fiddler? Heifetz applies to no other distinction, no racial, physical characteristic. Our intelligence from America gave confirmation. It was child’s-play then to pump the Breskes. Yes, child’s-play, Shelton agrees, and really believes it at that moment, with a picture of the obdurate Frieda beaten to the ground still fresh, still wondrous, in his eye.

  Gently casts another marguerite, giving this one a downward-skimming flight. Also from the first, he says, one thing bearing on another, I was looking for some family skeleton which Clooney could rattle. If indeed he were a stranger it were very strange that he could establish himself as an unpaying guest, yet if he were Breske was it less strange, unless he, Breske, had dangerous knowledge? How dangerous? What affecting? Immediately one thought of that inheritance. Then of Trudi, so unlike her sister, and of the photograph, so like Trudi. An interplay of genes? Yes, arguable; but how much simpler if Trudi were a Lindemann! And Mitzi Lindemann died, I was informed, at just that time when the Breskes fled. If all this were so, if Breske knew it, his wife and daughter were under his thumb; by opening his mouth he could bring tumbling hotel, prosperity, about their ears. Which Miss Frieda wouldn’t take lying down, Shelton says. But which, in its way, helps our understanding not much, Gently says. But Miss Frieda – Tush, Gently says (and he is a man who can say it with authority), however you set it up he was her father and for her to kill him would be parricide. There are parricides, but they are rare, and extremely rare when premeditated. I have never at any time been disposed to regard Miss Frieda as the killer. She, Shelton gasps, had opportunity! She couldn’t prove where she was all the time. Oh, Gently says, and oh! Can you imagine her overpowering her father? Shelton swallows and stares at a rosebed. Perhaps he can imagine such a feat of Miss Frieda. Gently downed her, but Gently aside, Shelton has a high respect for Frieda, Miss Breske.

  No, Gently says, the situation was unfortunate, but it could scarcely have led to what followed, unless you suppose that somebody tortured Breske to learn what hold he had on his family. But such a supposition is unproductive. It takes no notice of why Breske came to England. We have to understand why he vanished in New York and reappeared here with a false passport. He needed no desperate measures of this kind to come on a sponging trip to his family, and if he told his wife the truth, he was not in trouble with the police. Then with whom? Gently plucks a marguerite and, Buddha-like, raises it for Shelton’s enlightenment; but Shelton remains this side of beyond and greets the act with no comprehending smile. Yet the answer is simple. We don’t know, Gently says. We are hoping the New York police can tell us. Though, and this is purely a hunch, I shall not be surprised to learn it has to do with Pat, Toni and Abdul. With a criminal organization! Shelton flashes. Certainly that, Gently says. Perhaps, Shelton says, staring at the marguerite – which may yet put his feet in the way – an organization connected with the Nazis, with some big Nazi, as big as Eichmann. Perhaps, Gently says, also regarding the flower, though the names do not sound persuasively Aryan. But in their present state of adversity the ex-Nazi Party leaders may not be too rigorously doctrinaire. It could be Bormann, Shelton breathes, I read a book about him, nobody knows for sure he’s dead. He could be hiding in New York as well as anywhere else. Don’t they have a Nazi Party there? So I understand, Gently says. And what a spot it would be for him, Shelton enlarges, right at the centre, where he can play his games, make a new bid for world power. And it makes sense. Look what’s been happening. A liberal president popped off. Race riots tearing the country apart, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Moslems. And General Motors alienated, Gently says, but that’s taking us rather far afield. I don’t know, Shelton says, about General Motors, but the rest of it reads like Nazi strategy. And if Breske knew, knew about Bormann – I’d say Bormann was the most likely – that would account for him skipping, all right, and the false passport and everything. Which would give us a pointer, Gently says. Shelton nods eagerly. Israeli patriots! Have we many of them around? Gently inquires. Shelton glares at the flower. But his mind is buzzing.

  They stroll further. Gently retains the flower, which now somehow symbolizes the discussion, is a badge, a warning to all comers that the lairds are at their cracks. Shelton has it in his eye. Gently ponders it, daps the air with it. There is faint scent from the broken stalk, from the button of trumpets, scent. The scent is sweetish, sharpish, autumnal, though autumn is nowhere in the sky, not in the seasound, not in the witch-oak beneath which Trudi and Stephen sprawled. Yet autumn is somewhere about that spot, to evoke so strongly in the marguerite’s scent. It may be that dying Breske sent the season on before. You
meant what you told them, Shelton broods, about his death being an accident? Can you, Gently replies, interpret what happened in any other light? Breske escaped from his torturer, but in escaping ran over the cliff. By chance he ran over above the pill-box. No theory of intent can explain the circumstance. Neither can it: and Shelton once more feels the bruising weight of a superior vessel. For had not he himself, though without actually achieving it, come to the brink of this conclusion? He had worked for suicide, so hard! He had argued to it and at last beyond it. Then, left with murder, he had teased and wrestled the facts to understand how murder could be. And he’d reached the brink: had found he could explain neither of these ‘theories of intent’ – but left it there. Gently, at that point, had turned his back and walked on. Sad Shelton! He is not used to making these existentialist leaps, is at once alarmed, indignant, and cast down. How dare Gently proceed like this? Shelton seeks a loop-hole. It could still have been suicide! Only hitting the box need be accidental. Gently raises the flower, says, Occam’s Razor, and smiles. Occam’s Razor? Shelton is ignorant of this celebrated shaver, but he gathers the general tone of the smile, realizes Gently, in some way, has him.

  What follows from it, Gently says, sniffing the button of the marguerite (and thus further irritating Shelton, who begins vaguely to feel the flower is his enemy), is that Breske was chased, and hence had so far not revealed his information, because if he had revealed it the torturer would have done with him and he need not have been in such a panic. We assume here that the information relates to a criminal matter, which Breske could not reveal to the police, to whom thus he would not dare complain. A criminal matter, frowns Shelton. You mean, Breske himself is a wanted Nazi? The precise category of the criminal matter we wait to hear, Gently says. It is considerable, we know this, or Breske wouldn’t have skipped to England, nor would he have been pursued to such a distance, or be expecting such pursuit. The gentlemen who ate with Breske in Cassidy’s Restaurant, if they appear in this affair, do not seem by themselves a force adequate to mount a transatlantic manhunt. I expect to hear of an organization. The Nazis, Shelton says, everything points to it. An organization, Gently says, with, to put it no higher, international associates. It may be political, may be criminal, not unlikely is both, but however, is large. Breske was doubtful if he could hide from it. What a hell of a position, Shelton says, my God, to know they are coming for you. Not to be able to run anywhere where they won’t get you at last. Yes, Gently agrees, a hell of a position. It is living a posthumous existence. You died when the hunt was up but had no benefit of not being. I wouldn’t, Shelton says, have been in his shoes for all the tea in China. Yet it is just our position, Gently says, except his was short term, ours is long. Life’s Razor. Shelton stares. But damn it, he says, we can live with that. Perhaps he, too, could live with his, Gently says. And perhaps after all it is no evil.

  Shelton is silent, thinking of Breske, the body, X, (X) Clooney, sometime Stenke, the man, once a youth, once a boy, once a child: unimaginably cradled in that unimaginable city, amorphously known to Shelton, for the most part, as a name encountered in coach-tour literature, though not that either, entirely, since buried now by fretting time. What strange and tortuous ways brought little Martin to his dark tower? How many journeys, short and long, had he taken to reach that goal? Already his small feet tapping the pavement by the bright Rosenkavalier poster were trotting, trotting through Hapsburg Wien towards the concrete nugget, then unenvisaged. And the faltering bow, slowly mastered, squeaked and droned of his coming, and ten thousand phrases lodged in his brain to marshal him the road he went: and the eager kisses of Edith Tichtel, one more being one less, and the new sorrow of wrinkled Frieda, drove him on, on, on. Wars hurried his step, shrill revolution, women, smile melting in smile, streets, houses, stairs, beds, the thickening face his brush lathered: seasons, ever less-prosperous, hopes, never hugged home, pleasures, barely mantling boredom, sorrows, each with double-sting – march, Breske, march! Change the Old World for the New! Set your back to that lump of concrete and march on: till you meet it. Because you know, Martin Breske, you must hit that bugger head-on, and not the stars staying in their courses, not prayer like thunder, can alter that. The midwife’s slap sent you wauling to your brief pilgrimage, here. But why, why? Shelton asks, wide-eyed, fronting unreason with his indignation. Why not, Shelton? What’s in question? Doesn’t a man live till he dies?

  No, I wouldn’t have been him, Shelton shivers. What that poor bastard must have gone through. You should have seen his face. I’d have talked if someone worked me over like that. Perhaps he did, Gently shrugs, but that’s not my reading of the matter. His torturer could not conveniently be his executioner, though probably Breske was marked for killing. Somewhere else, more anonymously, shot, perhaps, from a passing car, would have been the end of Martin Breske, if he had talked, and not died as he did. We were not to be interested, yet. Breske killing himself was unfortunate. Because he did we have stepped in prematurely to the possible prejudice of someone important. So I read it. Then you know, Shelton says, you know the identity of the torturer. Why yes, Gently says, I can hazard a guess on the strength of your interrogations today. His interrogations! Shelton is dumbfounded, would wither the marguerite with his glare. In all that sweaty, grinding routine, where did he uncover a pearl of this price? But Gently says he has, and Gently is honourable, says not what he cannot make good: will make good, sans doubt, when next the American oracle speaks. Dare Shelton guess too? He casts about wildly, but cannot make his suspicion take root. And cruel Gently only raises his flower, against the blue sea, the bluer sea-sky.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NIGHT AGAIN.

  Shelton has gone, with his frowns and frustrations, setting inland the English grille of his English Oxford Mark 6; with him also, by his side, Walters, who knows well when to button his lip, and in the back Sally Dicks, nursing a fat folder of scribble. Gone, and silently gone: no comment passed during the journey: Shelton, Walters and Sally, dumbly proceeding in the Oxford: till twenty miles on they reach headquarters, home, the place where Shelton is Somebody, the hub of a world in his size and which, in his fashion, he knows to control. There somebody will say to him (in fact it is the duty sergeant, Godbold, who says it), What was he like, sir, the Big Fellow? Did you get on with him all right? And Shelton will thaw enough to admit, You can always talk to these big blokes, adding, You can sometimes learn a thing or two from them. It’s good to work with them now and then.

  Night again!

  Stody too has driven away in his modest heap, and even the newshawks, dined on a statement, have drawn off all their force but two. These two, having no beds, play a wicked game of brag in the hall lounge, till midnight breaks up the school and they seek a drowse on the settles. Gently, they know, sleeps above them – and tomorrow the world shall know it too; because he, the beloved of all their tribe, has laid his head on the dead man’s pillow; while (X) Clooney cools still in the mortuary, he, the Man, the avenger, warms (X) Clooney’s sheets: blankets, at all events: and of such stuff are captions made. And sleep he may: for has it not, somehow (and nobody quite knows how, whether Shelton was indiscreet, or Gently himself, in talking to the reporters, could not quite conceal it), got about that one more phone call will do the Great Man’s business for him, and that for this, this only he waits, before dropping his hand on the guilty shoulder? Indeed that message went into the grapevine. The strained, scared Breskes had obviously heard it. It flew round the guests, who all had it at dinner, and perhaps from them to the waiters and the kitchen quarters. The musicians knew it: they discussed it between numbers, played it as false notes in Lehar and Offenbach; Trudi knew it; Stephen Halliday knew it; it may even have reached the village via Stody and Brother Fred. So Gently may sleep, whoever else doesn’t, in that gone-to-bed building by the sea, though lying in the room, on the very mattress, of him who now sleeps to wake no more. Breske’s avenger, surely, is secure from Breske’s ghost.

  Night a
gain . . .

  Southwards the lights of the resort town wink out, gemmed lacework, visible from the cliff, the attic dormers of the hotel, winking suddenly, leaving black, though still supporting a glowing gloom, the stooping, heavy, promontorial outward swing of the coast. And a moon shows, a sickle moon, soon to charm up the herring. It stitches goldeny the scaly sea below the dewed furzes of the cliff. Where Clooney (he was Clooney then) went the hunting natterjacks run, but cannot see, as he could not, the moondull concrete under the cliff. Will his ghost walk here? Brother Fred doesn’t see it, nor does skinny Sid Balls, as they run their boat down the beach. The boat goes soft and even into the wash which is little more than a lakeshore fret, rocks them aboard, is poled out, rowed away, its one lamp swaying. And Brother Fred, if he thinks of Clooney (for Brother Fred is facing shorewards as he dips, hauls, dips, hauls, his arms of oak fresh and free), does so confusedly, his only image of him being of a chill corpse, not a man; So Am Not I, tending to be the line of thought of Brother Fred. And the lamp sways paler and the oars thud lighter and the boat grows dimmer in the dark sea, and at last a faint firefly, coming and going, is all a shore watcher may see of the fishermen. Sea-silence then, which is silence enough. A lisp and babble at the world’s edge. On the cliff, the lightest rustle as a natterjack darts, pounces. A manner of coolness or breathing in the air which has no direction, is not a breeze, will not stir or set murmuring the least filament of grass or ling. On such a night may not he walk, the man who here violently ended, and his squareset mouth again rupture the dim dome of heaven?