Ha'penny

by Jo Walton

  “Something frightfully heroic in the war,” I said, sullenly. Devlin had used an enormous number of pans and spoons making dinner today.

  “Well, you know why he was in your war at all? He’s got an Irish passport and the Republic never got involved; he could have stayed safe at home.”

  This wasn’t what I’d expected him to ask. “For a bit of fun?” I suggested, attacking the rice pan.

  “That’s what he says now. But the truth is he was caught with a bomb, in the summer campaign of 1939, the IRA campaign in Britain that is, and because he is who he is, because of who his pappa was, like Siddy said to you, the judge gave him a choice of enlisting or going to jail, so he enlisted.”

  “Had you made the bomb?” I asked, as quietly and as calmly as I could.

  “I had,” Devlin admitted. “Loy and I go back a long way. But the reason he was caught with it, and probably the reason he got that medal too, is because he likes riding the thrill too much. He could have got the bomb in and got out of there quite safely, but that wasn’t good enough for him, he had to skirt the edge and feel the thrill, and get caught. Now I know Loy. There’s no risk he won’t take, and he’s Sir Aloysius when it comes to it, and he knows Lord Scott and Lord Scott’s promising us the moon and the stars for doing this job. I’d trust Loy to take any risk. What I wouldn’t trust him for is to do a job the safest surest way and avoid the risks. He courts risks. Like that flashy SS 300 he drives.”

  “Why are you doing this, Devlin?” I asked, putting the heavy rice pan on the draining board. “Uncle Phil’s doing it to get control of the country, and Siddy’s doing it for Stalin and the Dear Workers and Loy’s doing it for the thrill, and I’m doing it because you’re making me, but why are you doing it?”

  “Well, it’s not for what your uncle Phil is promising us, whatever he thinks,” he said. “And it’s not because I don’t know how to do anything else, which Loy threw in my face one time when I wouldn’t let him risk killing us all. I may be a professional, but I’ve never done a bombing I didn’t believe in. This time, Vi, this time may be the most important of all, and for Ireland as well.” He looked at me over by the sink as if I were a dog he was hoping to train. “I don’t know if you’ll understand, but there’s a thing it’s hard to give a name. It’s what we fought for in Ireland when you wouldn’t give it to us, and it’s what’s been lost on the Continent—I could call it freedom, or self-determination, but that’s too abstract. It’s the idea that one man’s as good as the next, before the law, whoever he is. It’s the idea behind the French Revolution, but it’s lost now in France, where old Petain licks Hitler’s boots. It’s the idea that built America, but they’re too frightened over there now even to elect old Joe Kennedy instead of Lindbergh with his talk of keeping down the Jews and the blacks.”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t going in, is it, love? You grew up in privilege and rebelled so far as to go into the world of the stage, a completely unreal world, but you’ve got no understanding of what I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, honestly enough. “I do care about individual liberty. I didn’t want what Mamma wanted for me and I didn’t do it, and I’ve paid my own way and worked hard since I left home. But I don’t think liberty is something you get by blowing people up. It seems to me something that comes along when you give people the choice.”

  Devlin leaned forward and took my hands. “When people have choices, yes, but that’s just what Hitler’s taken away, and Normanby wants to do the same here—and if he does it, you can bet that dear old Eamon de Valera will go down the same road in Ireland. Right now it’s choice for the Jews and the communists, and who knows whose choice he’ll be taking away next? In Germany you know, all the children join the Hitler Youth and are encouraged to denounce their parents. They do real military service, not like the feeble National Service you have here. The very idea of choice has been almost forgotten in fifteen years of Hitler—even without what’s going on with the Jews, which you might not believe but which I do. Siddy isn’t the only one who’s seen them. How long before we have camps here? How long before the Lord Chamberlain says you can’t put on a play not because it has too much bosom but because it says something against the government?”

  “There aren’t many plays that say things against the government,” I said, feebly.

  “That’s the pity of it, my dear,” he said. “Plays help people think, give them ideas. Think of your ordinary working chap up in the ha’pennies seeing Saint Joan and thinking there is more to life than his daily work, there are things worth fighting for.”

  I sagged against the sink. “Oh Devlin, please don’t go on about the Dear Workers, I can’t stand it.”

  “No? But it is those ordinary people who matter, their choices. Look at your friend Mollie. I like Mollie.” I was instantly jealous. He had never said he liked me, and I wasn’t sure he did. “She was modestly educated, she had no money of her own, she came to London and made her own fortune from her own God-given gifts. Who’d live in a country that said she shouldn’t do more than wash dishes?”

  I pulled my hands out of the dirty water. “I’m not sure she’d be any better off in Russia than Germany. I don’t think Stalin’s any better than Hitler,” I said.

  “He’s a lot further away,” Devlin said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And he at least pays lip service to the idea of equality, even if there are purges from time to time. I wouldn’t be very keen on the idea of a close alliance with Russia, and I wouldn’t want to live there, but for the time being we have goals in common. At least the Red Army are fighting Hitler, and they’re the only ones who are.”

  “They’re both tyrants if it comes down to it,” I said.

  “And that’s what Normanby’s trying to make himself, with all this hysteria about terrorists and the new laws. And you just swallow it, maybe with a little grimace, but down it goes like cough medicine. England is like a country of sleepwalkers, walking over the edge of a cliff, and has been these last eight years. You’re prosperous, you’re content, and you don’t care what’s going on the other side of the Channel as long as you can keep on having boat races and horse shows and coming up to London to see a show, or for the workers, dog races and days on the beach at Southend.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I said, almost frightened by his vehemence.

  He stood up. “It’s not your fault, no, love, but it is your responsibility, and that you can’t see that is your fault,” he said. He took two steps over to the sink and put his arm around me. “Bed now,” he said.

  “But I haven’t finished the dishes,” I protested.

  “They’ll wait,” he said, pulling off my rubber gloves. “Come with me now.”

  And I did.

  18

  The Siddons was a slightly shabby eighteenth-century theater on the Strand, opposite the Strand Palace Hotel, where Carmichael had once successfully apprehended a jewel thief. He didn’t think he’d ever been to the Siddons. It tended to show highbrow and slightly depressing plays. The facade was painted to be enticing, but in the full sunlight it looked a little overblown. “Have you ever been inside here, sergeant?” he asked Royston.

  “Saw a French thing about a miser here a few years ago with my Mrs.,” Royston said. “Very funny.”

  The front doors to the theater were firmly closed. There was a man up a ladder fixing letters on the theater’s marquee. “Ask him where we go in,” Carmichael instructed Royston.

  “Oy,” Royston called, and when he had the man’s attention, “how do we get inside?”

  “Theater’s closed for rehearsals,” the man called down.

  “We’ve an appointment with Mr. Bannon,” Carmichael said.

  The man peered down at them. “Oh. Well, go around the back to the stage door, then.”

  “Where’s that?” Royston asked.

  “The stage door,” the man repeated, more loudly, in the tone used for addressing idiots and foreigners. He pointed down
an alley.

  “After you, sergeant,” Carmichael said.

  The back of the theater was black, dingy, and run-down. Evidently all the attractions were kept for the front. The stage door was opened to their knock by a uniformed doorman.

  “We have an appointment to see Mr. Bannon,” Carmichael said.

  “He’s rehearsing,” the doorman said, dubiously, looking them up and down.

  “Tell him Inspector Carmichael and Sergeant Royston, of Scotland Yard,” Royston said.

  “Well, you’d better come in then,” the doorman said, ungraciously.

  “Did you know Lauria Gilmore?” Carmichael asked.

  “Seen her a time or two,” the doorman said. “And she wasn’t a communist, no matter what they’re saying. She used to tip well, and everybody knows communists don’t tip.”

  “So where do we go?” Carmichael asked.

  “Down the corridor, past all the doors, straight on through the pass door, and straight on again until you come to the other pass door at the end. Then go down the stairs. That’ll put you in the stalls. Mr. Bannon will either be there, or on the stage, depending if he’s acting or directing, and if he’s on the stage you can call up to him. But I wouldn’t if I were you. Jackie, that’s his assistant, she’ll be in the stalls. I’d have a word with her and she’ll pick her moment to interrupt.”

  “Thank you,” Carmichael said.

  As they walked down the ill-lit passage, he murmured to Royston, “Did you know that communists don’t tip?”

  “I’d heard it before, sir,” Royston admitted. “Apparently they see it as a sign of thinking people are below them. An insult to the worker, that kind of thing.”

  “So nobody tips in Red Russia?”

  “Ah. I heard that in Red Russia there’s a lot of outright bribing going on if you want to get things done. It’s communists here make a point of thanking people under them, but not tipping.” Royston pushed open the first pass door. “It doesn’t make them very popular, as you might imagine.”

  “Is it actually true?” Carmichael asked, going through into another dimly lit stretch of corridor. There was a strange smell compounded of greasepaint and sweat.

  “Now that I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never known any communists socially. If you really wanted to know you could go down to the Scrubs, where they’re keeping the communists they’ve rounded up recently, and try asking. No shortage of them. I hear they arrested another lot of them yesterday, ones who’d come around protesting about their paper being closed down.”

  “That’s not a crime, surely?” Carmichael asked mildly.

  Royston laughed.

  “I was just wondering what it said about Gilmore that she did tip,” Carmichael went on.

  Royston put his hand on the second pass door, and stopped. “Remember what Kinnerson said in the first place? She’d come up from underneath, she knew what it was like to struggle, she thought people ought to have a chance? Well then, even if she was a communist, she’d know how important tips are to people who need them.”

  “Let’s go through, sergeant,” Carmichael said.

  They both blinked when they came through the pass door. They were at the top of a flight of stairs that led down into the orchestra pit and the stalls. Beside them, the stage was brilliantly lit in lurid green, which changed a moment after to bright white, and then a brilliant gold. Someone shouted something, and it went to red, and then faded to pink.

  As they picked their way down the stairs, a woman hurried over to them. “Are you Scotland Yard?” she asked. “I’m Jackie, we spoke yesterday. Antony’s just working on the lighting before the rehearsal starts properly, but if you wouldn’t mind waiting a moment, he’ll come and talk to you.”

  “Would it be possible to talk to some of the other cast members who knew Miss Gilmore and who aren’t rehearsing at the moment?” Carmichael asked.

  “Well, yes, if you’re quiet,” Jackie said, with an anxious glance at the stage, which was now lit in mottled green and white. A dark-haired woman, illuminated, burlesqued a pose.

  “No, that’s for the ghost!” someone bellowed.

  “Oh dear,” Jackie said. “Now who—oh, here’s Pat. Pat, would you like to talk to these policemen about Lauria for a moment? I must go and calm Antony down.”

  Pat was a young man with pale hair cut strikingly in a fringe across his forehead and long over his ears. It wasn’t possible, in the strange light, to tell what color anything was. His face looked bilious, but he was smiling. “I’m Pat McKnight,” he said. “I knew Lauria, but not well. We were in Fallen Angels together.”

  This was a conversation Carmichael had had several times with different people over the last few days. He proceeded to sit in the front row of the stalls and have it again.

  After a while the light steadied and settled on white. Jackie came back, bringing with her a middle-aged man of what Carmichael thought of as an Italian type, wearing long green and gold robes trimmed with fur. Carmichael rose. “Mr. Bannon?” he asked. “I’m Inspector Carmichael, and this is Sergeant Royston.”

  “Inspector. I’m sorry you’ve had to wait.” Bannon had a plummy theatrical voice.

  “Let me take your robe, Antony,” Jackie said. “You don’t want to trail it in the dust down here.”

  “Take it to Bettina and get it shortened right away,” Bannon said, shrugging it off. Underneath he was wearing slacks and a pullover. Jackie left, carrying the robe casually over her arm, and Pat McKnight scurried off after her. Bannon flung himself down, and Carmichael sat beside him. “It’s an absolute madhouse here today. We’ve a week left before we open, and everything’s chaos.”

  “I’m sorry to take up your time when you’re so busy,” Carmichael said. Royston pulled out his notebook. “But I need to ask you about Lauria Gilmore.”

  “Wonderful actress. Terrible loss to the theater. We’ve replaced her with Mollie Gaston, who hasn’t a tenth of her talent.”

  “Had you heard she was building a bomb?” Carmichael asked.

  “Yes.” Bannon frowned. “I heard that, but I don’t believe it. I expect the evidence shows the bomb was inside the house, but is there anything to prove that the other man, the lieutenant, hadn’t brought it there with the intention of killing her? I think this talk of Jewish plots and communist plots has made everyone think, quite naturally no doubt, that every murder must be such a plot. I think perhaps the lieutenant was in love with Lauria, she agreed to meet him, he turned up with the bomb to threaten her, said he’d kill them both if she didn’t love him, murder-suicide. Perhaps she thought he was bluffing, or perhaps he wasn’t as expert with his homemade bomb as he thought he was.”

  How fantastic, Carmichael thought. “Why take a bomb when a pistol would do as well or better?” he asked.

  Bannon looked annoyed at having his theory questioned. “Perhaps he couldn’t easily get hold of a gun. Or perhaps he too had been influenced by all this hysteria about bombs in the press, and believed a bomb was the modern weapon of choice?”

  “Perhaps this will all turn out to be the answer,” Carmichael said, humoring him. “But for a moment, consider, from your knowledge of Miss Gilmore, if you can think of any circumstances in which she would have wanted to have made a bomb?”

  “None,” Bannon said immediately. “It’s ridiculous. No, I don’t have any idea why she might have been doing that.”

  “You invited her to lunch with you last Friday,” Carmichael said.

  “And she came, of course. Lunch at the Venezia. That was to offer her the part. Gertrude, of course.”

  One more theatrically obsessed actor, Carmichael thought. There probably wasn’t any more to be got out of Bannon than Gilmore’s other friends, though his denial was more severe than most. “You were probably the last person other than her servants and Marshall to talk to her. What mood was she in? What did you discuss over lunch?”

  “She was happy. Thrilled with the part. And of course we discussed the play. The rest o
f the cast. I had wanted Pamela Brown for Hamlet, but she was adamant she didn’t want to play cross-cast. Lauria and I discussed several other possibilities, and she helped me decide for sure on Viola Lark.”

  “Was that all you discussed?” Carmichael asked.

  “Well, I did confide in her one other thing, which I’m not sure I ought to tell you as it hasn’t been announced yet.” Bannon looked a little guilty.

  “You should certainly tell us,” Carmichael said. “Anything you said, that she said, could have bearing on her motives. It’s very important that you cooperate with us.”

  “Yes, Inspector,” Bannon said, licking his lips nervously. “It’s just I’d been told not to tell anyone, but I was so proud. You must have heard that Hitler’s going to be in London. He’s coming over to see Parsifal, and while he’s here he’s going to have meetings with the king and the Prime Minister, and he’s also going to come here, on first night, with the Prime Minister, to see Hamlet. It’ll be announced soon, the Fuhrer seeing English culture at its best, but I was asked not to tell anyone before the announcement.”

  “And you told Gilmore?” Carmichael could hardly believe it. He had told her, and she had immediately gone home to make an appointment with Marshall to begin building a bomb. He met Royston’s eyes, and Royston shook his head a little in incredulity.

  “I was so proud,” Bannon repeated. “They chose my play. My Hamlet. Anyone would be proud.”

  “Have you told anyone else?” Carmichael asked.

  “No,” Bannon said, in such a way that Carmichael was sure that at the very least the whole cast knew.

  “How did Gilmore react to the news about the celebrities coming to the first night?” Royston asked.

  Bannon peered past Carmichael and looked at Royston as if he’d forgotten he was there. “She seemed very pleased, very excited, just as I’d expect. She asked if the Fuhrer spoke English, and I said I didn’t think he did, and she said Shakespeare rose beyond language. She asked where they’d sit, and I told her it would be in the Royal Box.”