by Jo Walton
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Your brother is Dr. Grunwald, of Golders Green?”
“Yes . . .” Green licked his lips nervously. “He knows nothing about this.”
“We’ll find out what Dr. Grunwald knows,” Carmichael said.
“Why am I here?”
“You’re here specifically because the police stations are full, and you’re under arrest because of suspicion of complicity in the bomb Lauria Gilmore was building in her Hampstead house.”
Green shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and looked Carmichael full in the face. “Can we make a deal?” he asked.
“A deal? What kind of deal?”
“If I tell you everything I know, will you let Louise go? And the Levis? They’re all innocent. And I’ll serve a term in an English prison for what I’ve done, but you won’t send me back to Holland.”
“I don’t think I can agree to that, Mr. Green,” Carmichael said. “Conspiracy to terrorism is a capital charge.”
“Well then hang me if you must, but don’t send me back to the Reich. At least it would be a clean death, not like in the camps. At least you can’t send Louise there.”
“If you were deported to Holland your wife would go with you,” Royston said, unexpectedly.
Green’s eyes snapped to him. “But she’s British born!”
“I shouldn’t think that would make much difference,” Royston said. “If we sent you and Louise and the Levis off to a work camp in Poland or Czechoslovakia who would know the difference? You’re not in a position to make bargains, Mr. Green. But we might—might, I say—agree not to send her off and to hang you here, if you’re very cooperative.”
“What was the intended object of the bomb?” Carmichael asked, softly.
Green looked up, despair and defeat visible in the slump of his shoulders and the creases of his face. “Hitler,” he said, quietly, and swallowed. “She wanted to blow up Hitler when he came to her theater.”
“Well, that’s a good answer, it confirms what we already knew,” Carmichael said. “And who was involved in the conspiracy altogether?”
“Lauria, Peter Marshall, and myself,” Green said.
“Not your wife?” Royston asked.
“No. She knows now, I had to tell her, but she didn’t know anything at the time.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Carmichael said. “I doubt a jury would believe it unless you’re much more forthcoming than you have been. You offer us an absurdly small conspiracy, with everyone except you dead. And we already know some of the others. Lieutenant Nash, for instance.”
“You know about Bob?” Green looked surprised. “Well, Bob, yes. And if you know him you must know about Lord Scott, and Mr. Nesbitt, his secretary. Apart from them there’s an Irishman I only met once, Sir Aloysius, and his girlfriend, Siddy. I don’t know her proper name.”
Royston was writing rapidly.
“Is that the truth?” Carmichael asked.
“It’s the truth!” Green protested.
“And all these people were in favor of blowing up Hitler? Lord Scott? Sir Aloysius? Sir Aloysius what?”
“I don’t know. He’s Irish, tall and dark, he drives a sports car. He wears silk scarves and handmade suits. He talks in a sarcastic kind of way.”
“And what about his girlfriend?” Royston asked. He had caught up with his notes.
Green looked around at him wildly. “I said, I don’t know her name. She goes by Siddy, but that isn’t a girl’s name. She’s got short blonde hair and she smokes all the time and she’s got an expensive voice, a bray like they do.”
“How old?” Royston asked.
“I don’t know—twenty-five?” Green shook his head.
“And Sir Aloysius? How old?”
“Thirty-five, maybe older. He looks like a sportsman, fit but maybe getting a bit old for it.”
“And all these people were involved in the conspiracy, but your wife wasn’t?” Carmichael asked, as Royston began to write again.
“No! Louise didn’t know anything about it. She wouldn’t have approved.”
“And Miss Carl didn’t know about it?”
“Mercedes?” Green was startled. “Who would tell anything important to someone with more hair than wits?”
“Did you know Miss Carl’s parents were anarchists in the Spanish Civil War?” Carmichael asked.
Green blinked. “I knew they were something that had got her into trouble in Spain. Lauria told us that when she brought her home. I didn’t know they were anarchists. But Mercedes must have been just a baby.”
“She knew nothing of your conspiracy in any case?”
“Nothing at all,” Green confirmed. “She wasn’t even there. She had Friday off to see her young man. Lauria was always giving her time off, whatever she wanted. She was much too soft with her.”
“How did it work that Miss Carl and Mrs. Green didn’t know anything about it when you were all in the same house?” Carmichael asked. “There must have been a lot of coming and going of conspirators.”
“No, not really.” Green looked relieved. “Sometimes Lauria would call me in as if she wanted something and I’d stay to talk about it, that’s all.”
Royston looked up again. “How long did the conspiracy last?”
“It wasn’t really a conspiracy like you think.” Green held up a hand. “I know you mean in the legal sense it was a conspiracy, but it wasn’t like we were having secret meetings and passwords or anything. They were just friends of Lauria’s. She’d known them all for a long time, except for Sir Aloysius and his girl. She knew they thought the way she did, that’s all. When she came home from lunch with Bannon on Friday she called me in and said there was this wonderful chance. She told me to shut the door, and not to tell Louise. She knew Louise would panic. She told me she had a chance to kill Hitler, and she and Marshall were going to make a bomb.”
“On Friday after lunch?” Carmichael said, just to confirm. “That was the first you heard of it?”
Green nodded. “She’d just heard about Hitler going to the theater. It was all quite impromptu, you see.”
“An improvised bomb, not an organized terrorist group, you mean?” Carmichael asked, sympathetically, wanting to draw Green out.
“Yes. You don’t have to be a terrorist to want to kill Hitler.”
“So what did she want you to do?” Royston asked.
“She wanted me to make a case for it.”
“A case?” Carmichael asked, puzzled.
“A wooden case, like a strut, painted white so it would look like part of the box. I said I would, and she said I could start on Sunday, once she had the bomb made, and to make it look to Louise like part of my ordinary carpentry for the house.”
“Did you know how she was going to make the bomb?”
He looked uncomfortable. “No more she didn’t know herself. She asked them all round for dinner, to find that out. At first it was only going to be five; with Lauria, Lord Scott and Mr. Nesbitt, and Peter and Bob. Then she called me in again and said Sir Aloysius and his girl would be there too, so they were seven for dinner. Louise was fuming, she’d started preparing already.”
“So the conspiracy only had one meeting?” Carmichael looked at Royston, who was writing diligently.
“On the Friday night. They had dinner. Now we were supposed to be off after dinner, it being Friday night, but I asked Lauria if she wanted me to do anything on Saturday, and she said no, to go to the synagogue as usual.”
“Were you there when the rest of the conspiracy were eating their dinner?” Royston asked.
“I was there to serve them.” Green looked at Carmichael. “It really wasn’t like a conspiracy like you read in the papers. It was only because Lauria had this idea, and they took it up.”
Carmichael nodded. “What did they discuss at dinner?”
“Well, Lauria had told them about it on the phone. Bob had brought this old set of instructions, from the war, about
making bombs, and he and Peter were very keen to use it. Sir Aloysius said that was amateur and to wait until he’d got hold of a friend of his who knew all about it. Lord Scott said better not to involve more people than absolutely necessary. They agreed that Lauria and Peter and Bob would have a go at making the bomb on the Saturday morning.”
“Nash was there?” Royston asked.
“He was there when Louise and I went off at nine,” Green confirmed.
“Did they stay the night?”
Green looked shocked. “Certainly not. They went off home.”
“To Portsmouth?” Carmichael asked.
“No. Peter had a little London flat. We saw Bob and Peter frequently, they were friends of Lauria’s since the war. They’d often dine with her, or take her out somewhere.”
“Was she particularly close to one of them?” Carmichael asked. They were Kinnerson’s age, he remembered, rather old for lieutenants, but surely too young for Gilmore.
Green laughed. “They were particularly close to one another,” he said. “You get a lot of that in the theater, and Lauria didn’t mind.”
Royston tutted. Carmichael went straight on. “So what was the position with the conspiracy when you last spoke to them?”
“That Lauria and Peter and Bob were going to make a bomb, that I’d make a case for it, then Lauria was going to smuggle it into the theater and blow up Hitler and Mr. Normanby, and then afterwards Lord Scott would see that things went right.”
“By right, meaning the way you wanted them?” Royston asked, sarcastically.
“Meaning in the enviable tradition of British democracy,” Green said, with dignity, in his accented English.
“What was Lord Scott expecting to get out of this?” Carmichael asked.
Green shook his head. “I didn’t ask.”
“Was he a close friend of Miss Gilmore?”
“Not all that close. She went to his parties, he sometimes came to dinner, or took her out. They had known each other for a long time, since she was a pretty young actress. I think they might have been close, in your sense, meaning she might have been his mistress, a long time ago, but for years it has just been a friendship.”
“And what about Sir Aloysius?” Carmichael asked.
“I don’t know anything about him at all, other than his name and what he looks like, which I’ve told you. I never saw him before. I don’t think Lauria knew him either, because she called him by his title, which she wouldn’t with someone she knew well. Lots of lords and ladies and sirs she knew well enough to call by their names, but not him.”
“And you contend that this impromptu conspiracy sprang up on Friday afternoon and was ended on Saturday morning with the explosion?” Carmichael gave Green a hard stare.
“Yes. Yes, that’s the truth.” Green looked desperately at Royston, found no sympathy, and looked back at Carmichael.
“Why didn’t you seek their help when you ran?”
Green put his hands to his face. “I wanted to go to Lord Scott, but Louise wouldn’t have it,” he said. “She thought we should stay with our own sort. She didn’t think lords and sirs would want to be bothered with me, and likely enough she was right, even if that Siddy did shake my hand. What did it cost to shake your hand, Louise said, compared to hiding us and keeping us safe.”
“And what did you intend to do?”
“Get to Canada or Australia,” Green said. “Louise, she didn’t know anything about it, and she’s English—Jewish like me, but English—she doesn’t know what it can be like, how bad it can be. Let her go, sir, let her go back to her parents. She never did anything except hide in a few attics with me for a week.”
“You keep on cooperating, and we’ll see what we can do,” Carmichael said.
They asked him all the questions again, and everything else they could think of; they kept it up until Green was hoarse and Royston was running out of paper, but they didn’t get any more out of him and he didn’t change his story.
23
Monday morning, at rehearsal, in between endless attempts at getting our scene right, Mollie explained that she was worried about what I was going to wear to the reception. She’d brought me in the engraved invitation; it had arrived at the flat that morning. There was a swastika embossed into the card. We were rehearsing the bedroom scene, where I confront Gertrude about Claudius’s true nature and then accidentally kill Polonius, who is spying on us from behind an arras. I claim to think he’s a rat, and in fact think he’s Claudius. The emotions were all in the right places, but Antony kept stopping us so that he could rearrange the arras. It was a sort of screen, like a big fire screen, and he had it downstage at an angle so that the audience could see Polonius crouching behind it all the time. It persisted in not falling in the right direction when I stabbed through it. I had to repeat my “rat” line and stab about a hundred times, with pauses for Antony to call the stagehands and fuss with the stupid arras.
“What are you going to wear to this reception at the German Embassy?” Mollie asked, during one of these pauses. She was sitting up in bed, propped on pillows. Her hair had been trimmed and streaked silver in a way that suited her very well, the essence of mature but sexy. I thought she’d be a great hit. For the actual scene, she’d be wearing a revealing red and black nightdress, and I’d have a virginally white nightdress that covered me from my neck to my ankles and wrists. Antony wasn’t always subtle. For now, I was perched on the end of the bed in my usual rehearsal clothes.
I laughed. “You sound like Buttons fretting about Cinderella in a panto.”
“I do not!” Mollie said, in her deep voice. She had played in panto, starting off. With her silver-streaked hair, if she did it now she’d have to be a witch.
“Once more!” Antony called. Thinking about what I was going to wear to the Embassy reception, I spoke my line, again, leapt off the bed, again, snatched the fencing foil, again, and drove it through the arras, again. The arras fell, again on top of poor Tim.
“Back,” Antony called wearily.
“How about a curtain?” Tim asked. “We had a curtain when I played Polonius in Bristol.” We had all heard more than enough about the time Tim had played Polonius in Bristol by now.
“Curtains have been done,” Antony said, crisply and unarguably.
I got back onto the end of the bed. “So what are you going to wear?” Mollie asked.
I had decided during my sword thrust. “My turquoise Parisian dress.”
“But that’s three years old,” Mollie protested. “You should ask Antony for an hour and run out to Marshall and Snelgrove or Harvey Nichols and buy a new dress. Something new and fashionable. If you got black, or dark red, I could lend you my sea-green scarf, and you could fasten it with your pearl clip. You’d look like Lady Mary Romsey in this week’s Tatler.”
I sighed. I remembered Lady Mary when she was a pudgy five-year-old bridesmaid at Tess’s wedding. “It doesn’t matter what I wear, I can’t possibly compete. Siddy’s got a new Molyneux. Every woman there will have dresses made especially for them, from this year’s Paris collections, or by the court couturiers here in London. I can’t buy something today or tomorrow that wouldn’t look like cheap trash by comparison, no matter what I spend. With people like that, you’ve lost if you try to copy them. I may as well wear a three-year-old good dress as a new bad one. At least this way they might think I simply get terribly fond of my old clothes.”
Mollie didn’t laugh.
“It’s not as if I’m trying to meet someone,” I said.
“I wish you would. I think Devlin has bewitched you or something. I’ve never seen you like this about a man.”
“Again!” Antony called. “And this time, Viola, as you thrust, put your left hand on the edge of the arras and give it a little push leftwards.”
I went through the motions again, and this time the arras, which was on casters, went sailing off into the wings. I corpsed, and so did Tim.
“A little push, I said, not a gr
eat shove!” Antony screamed.
I went back to the bed as the stagehands started fussing with the arras again. “Devlin—” I started.
“Never mind Devlin,” Mollie said. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re ga-ga over him and that’s the end of it. But I’ve thought what to do about clothes. You could wear your first act costume. It was made for you. And while it isn’t in fashion, it isn’t out of it either, it’s timelessly Elizabethan. And I know it’s finished, because I saw you trying it on.”
My first act costume was a dark blue velvet gown trimmed with gold, high necked—all my Hamlet clothes were high necked—close fitting and embroidered to the waist, then flaring out below to give me room to do all the things I had to do. The only time I wore doublet and hose was at the end, because even Antony could see that I couldn’t fence in a skirt. “It would look awfully odd,” I said. It was a rich dark blue and this year’s colors were all beiges and pastels.
“It would advertise the play,” Mollie said. “It would remind people you’re Viola Lark, not just the Larkin sister who acts.”
“That’s true,” I said, struck by the thought. “I’ll have to ask Antony if I can take it out.”
Antony was raving at the arras.
“Catch him at a good moment and he’ll see how it’s almost as good for the play as Hitler coming,” Mollie said.
I went down to look at the dress when Antony gave us a ten-minute. It didn’t look quite as good close up as it would from front-of-house, but then it wasn’t meant to. It looked like a costume. I stroked the sleeve. It was cheap stuff, dyed too brightly, it wouldn’t wear. Still, it didn’t need to. There hadn’t been a play since the war that had run more than a year. Besides, I reminded myself, this play wasn’t going to run at all. The dress might as well get an airing. I went to find Antony.
Nothing else happened that day but a lot more rehearsing. I spent the night with Devlin, as usual, but we didn’t talk much. On Tuesday morning I had my hair trimmed and marcelled into the Mollie-lookalike cut. I almost didn’t recognize my face without my hair flying everywhere. I wondered as I looked at the mirror whether I’d have been happier with a wig, but it was too late. Antony loved it, anyway. When I got to the theater he said admiring things about the shapes of my earlobes.
