Chapter Nine
Another Message from London
“Mr. Pinkerstein,” I said, “I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure.”
He was just helping his wife into the saloon compartment of the motor, juggling with the door handle and an umbrella as well as handing her up. The correctly uniformed chauffeur sat stiffly at his controls in the open front section, ignoring the rain that was trickling down the collar of his tunic. This was obviously the new etiquette, the expert mechanic concentrating on things mechanical while the passengers have to fend for themselves.
“And this is my mother, the Countess von Morštejn.”
“Madam,” he replied, “we haven’t had the pleasure. My wife, Lili. And —”
“Countess von Falklenburg.”
He reached into his waistcoat pocket. There was a gold watch chain the solidity of which could have lifted anchors from the deep. Even the fatness of his fingers didn’t demand quite such heavy rings, surely? He fished out the silver case for his visit cards and handed me one.
“I presume it is business you wish to see me about?”
How quickly he had made the point. “Yes, could I call upon your office at three in the afternoon on Monday?”
“Certainly. I shall look forward to it. The directors of the Tontine Financial Association have informed me of the situation. I am so sorry about your great uncle.”
He tipped his top hat and climbed into the motor which — with the smoothness and ease that only well-oiled riches can buy — glided away towards the gates of the old fortress, its warning klaxon echoing in the vaults of the archways under the old ramparts.
I looked at the card:
Isidor Pinkerstein
Mikulášská 22
Prague Old Town – Josefov
Mamma was looking eagerly over my shoulder. She was impressed by class, but even more impressed by a surfeit of money. However, she would never admit this.
“That’s on the new avenue they’re building from the river to the Old Town Square, isn’t it?” she described rather than asked.
Indeed it was. But I just thought of it as a new street driven right through the heart of the old ghetto — just like the boulevards had been cut through the soul of Paris half a century or so ago. The ghetto may have been overcrowded, ramshackle, even insanitary, but it was a place of wonder and enchantment which somehow captured the mysteries of the teeming Orient on our own soil. I wondered if Pinkerstein cared about any of that.
“Beatrice, shall we eat at my hotel tonight? The Paris is so à la mode and the interiors are all in this Art Nouveau style — you must see it.”
I looked doubtful. I was beginning to reach saturation point.
“I mean, I thought you could enjoy, let’s say, a little home cooking?” — thus spaketh my mother with forked-tongue.
As we were walking towards the traditional carriages with living horses which were parked lower down for more turning room, Mamma’s curiosity, which I could feel itching me, was getting the better of her. For her disguised reference to my loss of Monsieur Yves I was determined to let her stew.
Finally it broke the surface.
“And who or what is the Tontine Financial Association?” she asked.
“Oh nothing, Mamma. Just something I’d said I’d look into for someone.”
And which could send me to prison or to be murdered or even make me rich, I could have added. But didn’t. It is the lot of parents to find out about the activities of their offspring by first reading about them in the newspapers.
***
That night, having succumbed to a disagreeable dinner at the Hotel Paris — disagreeable, that is, in its aftereffects — I couldn’t sleep. My poor stomach was trying valiantly to digest the truffles, the meats roasted in liqueur sauces, the rich chocolate and sugar confections of the desserts that Monsieur Yves had presented to our table. He seemed overjoyed at making me thoroughly ill, and as I had booked Mamma into the hotel in lieu of providing her a bed at home — and as the dinner was so graciously added to the room account — I even had to pay for the torture.
I had found the nerve — over braised asparagus — to simply ask her straight out: “Mamma, what do you honestly think of homosexuals?”
“Unspeakable, Beatrice. Perfectly unspeakable — at least that’s what I hope I drummed into you as a child. But you asked for my honest opinion? Well, for one thing they are the backbone of the British Empire. Think of all those far-flung outposts. They look absolutely tip-top in uniform and don’t fraternise with the natives, that is, marry the devils. They are quite content to fraternise amongst themselves. That’s why the French or the Italians will never have an Empire like ours — and I’m talking about our British blood now, of course. Can you imagine those Latin Lotharios colonising anywhere without impregnating the natives and causing heaven-knows-what imbalance in the natural order of things? I think not.”
I had looked surprised at this outburst.
“Yes, Beatrice,” she had gone on, “and it is all due to the British Public Schools System. It has devised a good method to nurture these people for the Empire, and yet, when duty calls, to be able to grin and bear it and sire children with their proper race and class.”
“But I mean, Mamma, doesn’t it disturb you — what they actually do — between themselves? I mean, with their ‘thingies’?”
“Thingies, my dear?”
“You know, their thingies, Mamma.”
“Oh, their thingies! My dear, men are simply beasts. They find they have to put their ‘thingies’ somewhere. If deprived of proper opportunity, they will put them anywhere. Nothing would surprise me, or even shock me. But it’s the kissing I can’t imagine.”
Her answer was far more forthright than I imagined it would be. I changed tack slightly, aiming more directly at home this time:
“Uncle Berty never had any children, did he?”
“What on Earth do you mean, my dear?”
I had let it go at that. I don’t think she could have possibly believed it in her own family. It was certainly strange that she had been in favour — in her own way — of homosexuals (I was beginning not to call them sodomites), but I could hardly have called her attitude liberal.
I would have slept very soundly as that day I had managed to catch the elusive solution to part of the mystery. None of the puzzle made sense without a motive. The “why” had been bugging me ever since old Alois had been found not to have been old Alois.
Looking at Aunt Ludmila had done it. If I had been her, I would have been furiously jealous to have my husband having affairs, even if they were with men. Either she didn’t know or she had got used to it over the years. Perhaps she was thankful that old Uncle Berty hadn’t strayed with other women. Or perhaps the terrible nature of his unfaithfulness had killed something inside her — for jealousy only comes from strong passion.
The postcard with its simple, frank message — daring anyone to see it: that was the kind of reckless, devilish behaviour born of a great passion — a terrifying jealousy. I could imagine the poor wife of this Vasily Pilipenko scratching out these desperate messages. One of his lovers, if love was the correct word, had been Uncle Berty, another Sir Emile Brodsky — perhaps this Duvalier had been one. Somewhere there was also a Grand Duke — and maybe a bishop or a priest as well. Certainly it began to draw the threads together. But it just seemed doubtful. Without the moderating influence of women, I was sure male love would be more predatory, but with such a string of lovers? There must be another explanation. These questions, churning about in my mind, did not in fact permit me to sleep.
I was counting the hours by the bell of St. Jindřich’s. At least I was sure I was until…until I awoke to find Müller opening the curtains and drawing the blinds and my breakfast tray being set down on the counterpane.
“And would Milady like my li
ttle egg and schnapps concoction to settle her stomach?” he was saying, very gently. What he was really saying, of course, was would I like something for my hangover?
The headache I had had the previous evening had been entirely caused by my mother. In any event, as every grown-up woman knows, the very best cure for a hangover is a glass of champagne on the breakfast tray the following morning.
***
The romance with which this architect Mocker had put exciting, turreted, gothic top hats onto Prague’s towers — despite his other failures — was continued by other romantic architects into Mikulašska Avenue as each of the new apartment blocks vied with the next for the fussiest, fairy-tale silhouette. Number 22 was a very new block standing amidst the partly demolished remains of the old ghetto. Opposite was the Jewish Town Hall which would be preserved, along with the principal synagogues and the old cemetery, as the sole remnants of a Prague that had virtually disappeared.
Prague was, of course, almost three distinct cities — the Czech, the German, and the Jewish. After their unanimous defeat in 1620 by the Hapsburgs it was prudent of those Czech aristocrats who had survived to pretend to be Austrian — which meant adopting German culture. But with the recent growing feeling of Czech nationalism, we von Morsteins had taken to spelling our name ‘Morštejn’. A tiny, but quite significant change. It was a signal and a plea not to burn down our property if there were to be a Czech nationalist revolution. We were one of “them.”
On Monday at the appointed hour I was waiting in the very elaborate ante-room of Mr. Pinkerstein’s offices. To create that temporal vacuum of waiting is the best trick that exists to unnerve the steeliest, and I was very far from steely. What courage I had possessed as I had picked my way over the little cubes of cobbles being hammered into the new pavements outside, or in the new lift with its gold trellised gates, was fast evaporating. I had been thinking of what my proposal to Mr. Pinkerstein would be all the weekend. It was important now that this matter seemed to me as nothing — a mere trifle, something so terribly inconsequential which I was only bothering with now simply to brush it away for the sake of a clean writing bureau.
I had ordered Sabine to polish my nails, adding a little rouge to the lacquer. Mamma — now thankfully returned to the decrepit splendour of Morštejn Castle — would have called this vulgar. If she had seen this room then she would have repeated the adjective more forcefully. There was what might be described as a wholesale quantity of green marble and gilded metalwork. If it had been possible to fashion as well the curtains and cushions from these materials, then I am sure they would have been thus executed.
Mr. Pinkerstein had a fearsome reputation, now that I had checked with my husband’s solicitor, fabricating, as I had to, some reason to pass the time of day with him on the telephone. He had told me an eye-opening story:
One of the Sternbergs — sorry, the Sternberks (they too had seen the value of a tiny concession to their Czech roots) — had been wanting to invest in a cattle ranch in Nebraska, in the United States. He was a younger son and his brother, only a year or two older, was fit and well — so he perceived his chance of inheritance at very little. It was said that Pinkerstein purchased the younger brother’s reversionary interest in an estate estimated at four million krone for a mere one percent of its value — the appropriate gambler’s odds at one hundred-to-one, so Pinkerstein had said, of the young man gaining the fortune. Within two years, however, the older brother had died in a hunting accident without having sired any children, and the one percent invested in Nebraska had dissolved into a lost dream. “The only winner was Mr. P.,” the solicitor had said.
“Come on in, Madam,” Pinkerstein said expansively on opening the double doors to his office. On closer inspection his flabbiness had that clean, soft, dumpling-like texture that comes from the Turkish baths in the Old Town Mills — or the mud treatments at Lázně Toušeň.
He offered coffee, mineral water, and little wafers made as in the spas. These things had been brought in on trays fashioned from yet more green marble with gilded sides and handles.
“And what can I do for you this bright, sunny afternoon?”
“Mr. Pinkerstein, we are the last two in the Tontine and I have come to make a proposal to you.”
“Which is?” (No small talk. I had been warned to expect none.)
“Neither of us knows when our nominee might pass from this Earth — it could be tomorrow, it could be much longer.”
“It might have been yesterday,” he said with a grin.
My heart nearly failed me. Did he know something of my real situation? He looked at my drained countenance, and felt sorry for his little joke. But he was also being serious:
“I mean…have you checked? Do you check every day? I certainly don’t, Madam.”
“So my proposal is this: we end the Tontine now and divide the capital equally. I am sure that this is within the rules or could be made so.”
He thought for a second. He had not expected this.
“Well the answer, I’m afraid, is no. It doesn’t really mean that much to me and I may as well wait until it is resolved by itself. I gambled a thousand guilders twenty years ago and I’ve got this far. I’ll keep my stake in. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you too much.”
But I couldn’t help but look disappointed. Apart from the immediate money it would bring it would save me from having to keep up the dishonest charade any longer — and it wasn’t even I who was keeping it up. I would have given anything to have settled it now. However, I had information to get as well. I cleared my throat and tried to sound as nonchalant as an impoverished countess could.
“Tell me, Mr. Pinkerstein, what does happen at the end of the Tontine?”
“The capital asset — that’s the theatre — gets given to the winner. It’s as simple as that.”
“And what would you do with it, if I may ask?”
“Kick those bloody actors out fast. When I put my money down twenty years ago, the Vinohrady area was then in need of a synagogue. It was my idea — if I had won much earlier — to have pulled the theatre down and given the site to our community here. For only a thousand guilders out of my pocket it would have made a very handsome gift. But I was younger in those days and couldn’t see that this would last twenty years or more. I had visions of daily reports of train crashes, more battles with the Prussians, epidemics. In fact, most people actually live out their allotted span, more or less.”
“And now?”
“The site is worth far more than the theatre’s rent for rebuilding as an apartment house — fine, good apartments with a fine view in a quiet and prosperous neighbourhood. But that wasn’t the plan of your great uncle. He was mad keen on the theatre and wanted to keep it going. No, if he had survived and his nominee had outlived mine, then he would have granted them a new lease, even with the unfortunate death of this Duvalier. But tell me, what will be your plans if you are the lucky winner?”
I replied honestly. “I simply haven’t thought. It seems a shame to close a theatre, but then all things are transient, are they not? People had a good time there — but now time itself has moved on.”
“That’s very wise, Madam. However, I am sorry to disappoint you on a compromise. We rich people like a bit of a gamble, don’t we? Who knows what the future will bring. I like that uncertainty, don’t you? It adds a little spice to the otherwise boring routine of accumulating wealth, don’t you think?”
***
The solution to the Tontine part of the mystery had been handed to me, so in that, I was happy at least. It was those managing the Fenix Theatre who were anxious to keep old Alois going — for while he lived the lease on the theatre was theirs. And if he could be kept alive long enough to outlive any other claimant, then the future of the theatre would be secure. That was all well and good insofar as the solution to the mystery went, but it did not assist at all in delivering me my str
ange inheritance. Who was master of the theatre now? When would they stop sending this impostor to take old Alois’ place?
I reasoned that the Fenix Theatre was certainly needed for a few weeks more, for the plot being hatched at Marienbad seemed to need the assistance of the Union of Servants — or, to stand this reasoning on its head, the Union of Servants, using the theatre, had probably been created especially for the execution of their scheme. I was safe for the time being. But I doubted that a character like Mr. Pinkerstein would take being cheated very kindly if it were to be discovered. I could envisage my own corpse being dragged out of the Vltava before the spring was out.
My carriage had crossed the Old Town Square and was heading down Celetná Street towards the Powder Tower. I would have to think of a way to find out more about this dancer Pilipenko. I would tell Müller to get our young men to watch the theatre day and night. He would come there at some time or other, without a shadow of a doubt. Through him I could find his wife. One or other of them must know the solution to much more of the puzzle, of that I felt sure.
***
It was my mother on the telephone. She rarely used the instrument. Müller held mine out straight for me as if we had to keep the wire taught between Morštejn and Prague like playing with tins on strings as a child.
“Ludmila is in a state. I have just spoken with her. She won’t ring you directly — you know what she’s like — but she would dearly like you to come round and help her sort out Uncle Berty’s study. Apparently there are drawers full of all sorts of things and she just doesn’t know where to start and you know how difficult it must be for her…Beatrice dear, are you there?”
“Yes, Mamma. I will send a note round by pneumatic so as not to disturb her. Of course I’ll go and help.” I was sounding simply dutiful but in fact I was dying to get a look at Uncle Berty’s papers.
“Now, Beatrice…” she continued. I knew that ominous note in her voice. “Now that I am a safe distance away, can you tell me? Whatever have you done to your hair?”
“It was a wig, Mamma.” I knew this would shock her.
The Countess of Prague Page 16
