by Joseph Hone
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No. I had several shots at him, but he got away.’
‘Unfortunate. But then, of course, you are no intelligence officer. And even if you were – with this!’ He looked at the gun, shaking his head. ‘But remember, since his plan was to get you to Zagreb in any case, he may come on here himself anyway. Beware.’
‘He doesn’t want to kill me. Just the opposite: he thinks I can lead him to Phillips. They want to get him home, I suppose.’
Stolačka laughed. ‘They want to kill him, Mr Marlow – if what you say about him is true. Before his British friends get hold of him. A double agent for so long? He knows too much. Both sides must want him out of the way – for ever.’ He opened the door. ‘I’ll keep your passports, too,’ he added.
‘I didn’t know you had them.’
‘We are not so inefficient. And, by the way, I should not speak of our business – to the British Consulate here, for example.’
‘I’ll have to tell the two women.’
‘Yes. I suppose you will. Lies can come to nothing.’ He smiled, showing me out graciously, and I walked back to the hotel across the damp park, the grass steaming in the evening warmth, wondering what on earth the two women would make of it all.
They made very little of it, in fact, that evening over dinner in the hotel. They were numbed by the twisting course of events and tired by the strange travel – and without Klaus to support her, Rachel seemed almost acquiescent. Indeed, she was flippant about Stolačka’s plans.
‘I don’t know what the British authorities will say – digging up their graves like this,’ she said quietly.
‘They’re not going to know.’
‘It’s all the most awful, criminal nonsense,’ Madeleine had added. ‘Eleanor can’t be alive.’ She looked at me incredulously, as she had so often done before after my comments about Lindsay. ‘She’s dead, don’t you see? She must be. Lindsay would have told me otherwise.’ She paused, seeing the implications. ‘Why, he’d never have married me, if she had been alive. He couldn’t have done.’
Madeleine still believed in simple, straightforward answers – faithful as always to her whole life with Lindsay. I wished I could have supported her in this. But it was too late.
‘We’ve no alternative,’ I said – like a hanging judge, I suppose.
*
A police car called for me very early next morning, while it was still dark, and we drove through the silent streets up a long sloping avenue out of the city for several miles until we came to high walls and a great arched and columned gateway – like an Imperial fort from the Indian plains set down here on the hillside, with the city – a few winking lights in a creamy mist – just waking beneath us.
It was a vast place inside, too, like another city, with endless criss-crossed avenues stretching down the far side of the hill, back into the mists. Ornate tombstones and marble funerary groups lurked at every corner, granite violins, weeping angels and sad pet dogs cast in stone at Daddy’s spatted feet; great family mausoleums sprang up at us quickly, one after the other, out of the morning dark like blind houses on a real street as we drove down the main avenue.
Then, in a dell of land on the far side, we saw the floodlights shining through the mist, set round a van and piles of earth and shadowy figures moving carefully about the site like patient archaeologists. We walked the rest of the way down a winding cypress-bordered path and Stolačka emerged from a group – brisk and confident, like a sewage engineer in yellow oilskins and gumboots. His breath hung in wisps for an instant in the chilly air. ‘We’ve had no trouble. It was all clearly marked in the records.’
I saw the headstone then, lying on its side at the top of the gaping hole, where they were still digging – with the same brief legend chipped on it that I had seen on the window in Dunkeld church.
In Memoriam
Eleanor Phillips
1912 – 1937
‘When the day breaks,
and the shadows flee away …’
And I felt a shiver of awful disgust at this desecration of simple love which I had helped to bring about. Even the dead were not to be free of my inquisitions.
A spade struck a stone – or a skull, I thought, and I turned away, unable to look any longer, suddenly pierced with the morning cold and hatred at myself. The sun rose just then, climbing above the cemetery walls, and the morning flooded over us quite suddenly in a lovely white-blue light, the mist dissolving all round me. But still I could hear the spades scraping on something hard behind me, scooping up the bones – and I could bear it no longer. I turned and pushed my way back in among the circle of people. Stolačka was on the other side of the hole, bending down intently, hands on his knees, peering into the dark hollow.
‘Bricks,’ he said. ‘Nothing but bricks.’ A man below handed one up to him and he threw it across to me – a badly eroded red brick. And I saw a line of them now, like stepping stones, running the length of the grave beneath me, covered in scraps of rotten wood. I stood up, dizzy, my trousers damp with the grave soil. A first gold beam struck the hollow then, sloping over the walls like a spotlight illuminating the empty tomb.
My stories had come true. The vague ghosts I had conjured with throughout the last weeks had substance at last – and one, at least, had risen long before and might be out there, now, I thought, somewhere in the fresh blue morning, waking in the bright city beneath me.
‘You may be right.’ Stolačka came up to me. ‘Anyone who made such bother to arrange all this –’ He held a brick up. ‘Well, they must have had something big to hide. But where do we start – to look?’ We both gazed out over the wide city as the sun touched the Cathedral roofs far below us in the centre and the slates brightened slowly into a fiery mirror.
*
At first Madeleine and Rachel completely refused to believe what I had told them, back in the lobby an hour after – thinking I had become entirely malicious. It wasn’t until Stolačka himself came to the hotel in the middle of the morning and confirmed the details that they began to accept the truth of the matter. And it was a bad few minutes when they did – for now at last they were faced with the incontrovertible evidence of some great lie directly involving Lindsay. Their expressions changed. The places in their skin where they were confident and smiled entirely disappeared now, like a lost map of happy islands, and were replaced by grievous battle plans, lines of deep suffering. They were quite innocent victims, which made it worse – refugees caught in what seemed the most wicked machinations, a vast familial deceit which they were part of through inheritance and love, but which they could only attempt to explain quite blindly now, still trapped in their original faith.
‘Of course it’s possible that my husband knew nothing about her survival at all.’ Madeleine offered the rather limp excuse.
‘Well, at least we know now – he certainly didn’t push her under that tram,’ Rachel added, looking at me viciously – taking a small victory.
Stolačka was tactfully precise. ‘You mean, Mrs Phillips, that your husband really thought she was dead?’
‘Yes. He must have done.’
‘But he must have seen her, surely? That she was living, after the accident. Alive somewhere – either at the hospital or –’
‘Someone may have “arranged” her death,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘Without Lindsay knowing.’
‘Yes – certainly someone arranged it. And it would not have been too difficult in those Royalist days here: a good bribe for the hospital workers, the funeral people. But are you really thinking your husband did now know of it?’
‘I think it’s possible, that’s all. I didn’t know my husband at the time, you see.’
‘Of course. I understand. It must all be a very unhappy business for you, Mrs Phillips. I am sorry. But you will see – that we have to make our researches now.’
He stood up. ‘Before you go,’ I asked him. ‘Could you get hold of a list, a street directory perhaps, of the v
arious shops here before the war? The antique shops?’
‘We are doing that right now, Mr Marlow. Many of the street records are gone in the war. But there are people here who will remember. I will let you know.’
Stolačka left us then, courteous as ever, without any suggestion of keeping us under house arrest. We were free to go and do as we wanted. But what was there for us to do? To walk the streets and gaze at every face, to look in shops and cafés and restaurants, at tram stops and public gardens – looking for Lindsay and his ex-wife? We knew now that some great confidence trick had been played out between them, and with Zlatko too, almost certainly. But why? And were any of them still here? Or alive at all? Despite the bitter revelations we were no further on into any real truths.
Rachel was blazing angry. There was no help she would let me give her. Madeleine was stunned. I offered to get them a drink, but they refused. Rachel went to her room – retreating into one of those long moans of self-disgust and enmity, I supposed. Yet now she had real reason for her pain, I thought. And I wished she hadn’t. I wished once more that I had never set eyes on the Phillipses again, at the Chelsea Flower Show – and all for the sake of a set of new radials and a sherry bill. For I had lied too – the lies of omission, like Lindsay, which kill in the end far more painfully.
‘Look,’ I said to Madeleine, trying to absolve myself. ‘It doesn’t really matter what went on here forty years ago. All we have to do is to see if Lindsay’s here. That’s all. If he is, then I’m sure he’ll be able to explain everything.’
‘Yes,’ Madeleine replied vaguely. ‘I’m sure he will.’ But I wondered how any man could explain away a line of bricks, for his first wife, in an empty grave.
‘I think I’ll rest a bit,’ she said. ‘What will you do?’
It was midday. I was tired as well. But again I had a great urge to walk the streets, tempted by some truth which I was convinced lay out there – in an antique shop, or an old house on a hill. ‘I’ll take a look round outside,’ I said.
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know.’
Madeleine studied me for a moment, sadly. ‘Rachel is right in a way, you know,’ she said. ‘You have a kind of demon in you now, about Lindsay.’
‘Do I?’ I was annoyed, for this was partly true. But there were other parts – not daemonic at all – in my attitudes towards the man, which she seemed conveniently to deny now. ‘Remember,’ I went on, ‘you thought I could help find him. Are we to stop looking just because – unpleasant factors arise?’
‘Unpleasant?’ Madeleine seemed surprised.
‘Doubtful, then. But it’s ridiculous to expect perfection in any case. Surely you see –’
‘Yes, of course I see that. But all this about Eleanor is much more than “unpleasant” or “doubtful”. It changes everything, don’t you see? If it’s true.’
‘Yes, I see that. But it’s hardly my fault. Are you saying you’d prefer not to find Lindsay, rather than learn the truth about him?’
She didn’t answer directly. Instead she prevaricated: ‘The “truth” – is there such a thing?’
‘I think so. But I’m not moralising about it. As I said, what does it matter what he did in the past – if we can find out where he is now – if he’s alive?’
‘Of course,’ she agreed, and we left it at that. But I could see that what Madeleine feared was the final proof of Lindsay’s death, where these fearful truths would have emerged all the same, without his then being able ever to explain them to her. Perhaps, at worst, my inquisitive demon could save her from that silent fate.
*
Apart from Cairo years before, caught in the depths of its midsummer desert blaze, I had never seen a place so threatened by the sun as Zagreb that morning. The weather had become a dangerous event; a state of war had come down over the city and what few people were about darted quickly across the streets, from one shadow to another, like a beleaguered rearguard under fire.
The plane trees opposite the hotel in Strossmayer Square gave some cover but by the time I’d reached Republic Square up at the top, the main crossroads of the city, I was nearly done for. Trams jostled to and fro across the huge expanse of concrete, pushing through dancing spirals of heat, and people avoided the soft puddles of tar like minefields, going to ground wherever they could – beneath awnings, in shopping arcades and in the interiors of dark cafés.
Beyond the square the red-roofed medieval town rose steeply, a glimpse of watchtowers and greenery poking out high above the melting-pot beneath. Confusing steps and alleyways seemed to lead up to this terra-cotta haven. But further along I found a more inviting access to it – a little funicular, and for a penny I went up with it to the heights. And here was a different world – a village of tree-lined walks and parapets, where heavy chestnut leaves leaned right out over the city, stirring in a faint breeze, with minute squares behind and alleys which threaded their way back over the hill between shaky old houses and stately baroque buildings, small Venetian palazzos wreathed in tentacles of lime-green creeper, once the homes of a merchant aristocracy here, now restored as government offices, museums and art galleries.
There were no cars and it was almost silent up in this blazing summer perch, as families took their lunch in curtained rooms, bureaucrats scuttled along the shadowed side of lanes, back down the hill into the city, while a few sun-dyed tourists huddled in the cool of a church porchway. There were several shops – a state tourist office with curios and knick-knacks in the window, an old apothecary’s shop down a dark lane by a candlelit shrine, and a number of inviting little restaurants. But there were no antique shops. It was an impossible search, I thought then, as I crossed the square towards the tempting shadows by the tourist shop. I wiped my face and thought of a cold beer back in town, gazing vacantly at the thick, brightly painted Dalmatian pottery in the shop window There was some cut glass as well, and some little woody men with red elfin caps and feathers cleverly made out of pine cones and a row of nicely carved wooden boxes – cigarette boxes, I thought.
I was just moving away when the door opened, and someone came out, and for an instant I heard the music, the delicate tinkling of a music box, biting out some old polka inside. I forgot my cold beer then, stopping in my tracks and turning back into the memory of weeks before in Hyde Park Square where I had last heard such music.
The shop was empty apart from two middle-aged American women over by the counter with an assistant. They were examining what I had thought to be cigarette boxes – a row of them on the counter. I picked one up. They were little contemporary music boxes, I saw then, pretty modern things, hardly more than toys, latticed in matchwood on the sides, the lid roughly inlaid with a fairly cheap mechanism underneath.
‘Don’t you have any other tunes?’ the big American woman asked. She was dressed in what looked like a floppy winding-sheet which she hitched impatiently about her now while her companion fiddled with the key.
‘No,’ the Yugoslav girl smiled nicely. ‘Just those two: the Blue Danube and Imperial Polka.’
‘Well, I don’t know. 6000 dinars – that’s around ten dollars, isn’t it?’ Big patches of sweat had come beneath her arms, staining the sheet. She seemed rooted to the spot now, fatigue and indecision overcoming her impatience. ‘Play it again, Martha.’ Her companion set the music off once more, the sweet notes filling the room, a distant gracious age renewed.
‘Are they made locally?’ I asked the Yugoslav girl, turning my box over, looking for a marking.
‘Yes. Yes – here in Zagreb,’ the girl beamed.
‘You don’t know who makes them, do you? I’d like to – I’ll tell you: I specialise in these kind of things in London, you see. I’d very much like to meet the man – to see how they do it over here.’
‘Oh, I don’t know –’
‘Well, look – I’ll have this one in any case. And if you could give me his name. Or where you get them from …’
The girl melted a little. ‘I’ll a
sk my friend.’
The two Americans continued to ponder the quality of the merchandise against the financial outlay and the girl disappeared behind a curtain. A minute later she reappeared, with a piece of paper.
‘Is a wood shop near here. A wood …’ She searched for a better word.
‘A carpenter’s shop?’
‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘Is not quite a carpenter’s shop.’ She smiled awkwardly. ‘Is for pompes funèbres. You know? How you say? They make boxes for people as well.’
‘Coffins?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ She beamed hugely. ‘Coffins. Is near here.’
She gave me the name and address. ‘Gospodin Josip Radja. Is a little road going back to Republic Square: Radičeva.’ Then she found me a street map and pointed it out to me. Finally she wrapped up my box for me very neatly with a ribbon over coarse brown paper. She couldn’t have been more helpful and the place seemed only just round the corner. The only thing I missed when I came back out into the sun was my little silver revolver.
Of course, it was a remote chance – difficult too, for I had none of the language. But I had one of their music boxes to prove my bona fides and I thought I could bumble my way through a few sensible enquiries with a bit of French or German.
There was no sign above the shopfront in the narrow old street that twisted down back into the city – just grimy glass windows and a broad doorway – wide enough for coffins – and I could only identify the place by carefully checking the street numbers of the other small second-hand shops on either side of it: a furriers with a moth-eaten silver fox growling in the window – and a shop on the other side which seemed to sell nothing but old Ford gearboxes and mysterious refrigerator parts. The steep alleyway was a last bastion of private enterprise in the city – a shadowed place, covered by long eaves, where the sun hardly penetrated at all. And when I opened the door I came into an even darker world, a medieval workroom it might have been: a long narrow space, like a cave leading back into the hill, littered with drifts of sawdust and coffin sides and lids and brass fittings, the air cloudy with motes of wood and smelling of sharp new varnish. In the gloom they might have been making strange boats, little angular craft, golden-coloured bath tubs, specially designed to sink without trace.
