by John Lawton
She unfolded the scarf.
“Oh, Serge. I couldn’t. It must be worth a fortune!”
“It probably is. But try to think of it as portable property. In an emgerency, something you can raise money on.”
“It’s . . . it’s . . . beautiful.”
“I suppose it is. Never quite seen it that way myself.”
“I couldn’t . . .”
He folded her hands around the gift.
“You have. It’s yours. And I hope you never need it.”
She hugged him, arms around his neck, one hand clutching his gift, wanting a life with him that would never end and knowing it was now down to a matter of days and hours.
§79
London: April 1946
In the spring of 1946, Viktor Rosen finally prevailed upon Frederick Troy to come to him for piano lessons.
Troy dug around in the attic of his brother’s house in Hampstead, found the music case he had not used since childhood, and one fine evening late in April caught a tram down the King’s Road. He walked the couple of hundred yards to the Chelsea Embankment, where Rosen lived, directly opposite Battersea Park, with an uncluttered view over the Thames.
“Mansion block” was a term that could cover a lot of things. Referring as it did to a particular, turn-of-the-century exterior style—usually favouring glazed red tiles—and to the simple fact of purpose-built flats—it could mean anything from a poky two-roomer to a horizontal palace. Rosen had the latter.
As soon as Troy stepped through the door he wondered why any single man would want or need such space. And Rosen read his mind.
“I call this the rehearsal room,” he said, gesturing across a room so wide a full-sized Bechstein seemed all but lost. “It’s big enough to seat an octet and a small audience. It might seat a twelve piece—it’s just that I don’t know what the noun for that is.”
“Duodecicet?” said Troy.
“Doubt it,” said Rosen. “Sounds more like an intestinal disorder when you put it that way. However, my point is that it divides the public and the private space. See?”
He was gesturing behind him. The door through which Troy had entered had vanished. It was magic. It was trompe l’oeil. The door was there; it had just been painted to match the wall, and the dado rail that ran across the wall at hip height also ran across the door. Only the handle gave it away.
“And over here . . .”
Now Rosen was pointing at an identical door in the opposite wall.
“I think of them as frontiers. Beyond this door the public world, beyond that the private, and between them a room as private or as public as I choose to make it.”
What he had chosen struck Troy as little less than amazing.
Surely that was a Van Gogh hanging on the wall? A late Van Gogh from his time at Arles, one of those near-demented, lug’ole works in which his talent peaked only weeks or days before his suicide—crows, corn, and stars. And next to it, wasn’t that a Picasso sketch? A roundy, baldy, speccy sort of bloke. And next to that a Matisse—one of his blurry, sexy, bizarrely coloured women?
Troy was staring. The very thing his mother had nagged him not to do.
“You are curious about the Picasso?”
“Yes. Sort of familiar, and sort of not.”
“It’s the Spanish cellist, Pablo Casals. Picasso sketched us both on the same day, in Paris, in 1928. Casals has the one of me.”
He had always known Viktor was rich, but not this rich.
Put through his paces, Troy played his stock in trade. A selection from the two books of Debussy Préludes.
Rosen listened without interruption.
Troy finished on Des pas sur la neige.
Rosen said, “Is there any way I can make you practice more?”
“You might persuade me to resign from Scotland Yard.”
They swapped places. Rosen played the same pieces Troy had played, as Troy had from memory, imbuing every one with all that Troy had not. He felt embarrassingly incompetent, until Rosen finished and said, “With practice, you could be so very, very good. Now . . . show me something I don’t know.”
“Sorry, Viktor . . . I don’t quite . . .”
“Rod tells me you listen to the new American music.”
“Do you mean jazz?”
“I do.”
“Er . . . it’s not all that new . . . Debussy even used jazz rhythms in Children’s Corner. And I rather think I can hear them in that piano sonata of Prokofiev’s from about five years ago.”
“The seventh? Listen carefully and you will also hear the rattling parts of an old mangle falling through the greenhouse roof and two coalmen banging shovels together. No . . . a classical pianist using jazz is hardly jazz . . . I’d be more interested in hearing a jazz pianist use classical music.”
“You know, I might just be able to oblige you there.”
Art Tatum’s party piece had long been Massenet’s Elegy in F minor. He played it almost as often as he played “Sweet Lorraine” or “Flying Home,” and had a way of making it sound like something overheard in an Arab casbah—with a drumming left-hand and a right that played lightning arpeggios undreamt of by its composer. Years ago, Troy had regarded it as a challenge to master the sheer speed of the piece.
About three minutes later Rosen blinked and stared at him.
“Forget I spoke,” he said witheringly. Then, “How about Thursdays? Seven till eight? If Londoners can refrain from killing one another for an hour a week, we might yet make something of you.”
Troy stepped into the street. Looked at the sky. It might come on to rain later. Looked at his watch and realized he was already late for a meeting with his brother.
§80
She stood on the opposite side of the road, looking up at the first-floor windows, her back to the Thames, her bag at her feet, her cello case propped up against the embankment wall. She had persistently refused Viktor’s suggestions that he should meet her at Victoria Station. She hated railway stations. She had hated them since the day she’d been boarded up in a train at Vienna Nordbahnhof—and the difference between arrival and departure, greeting and abandonment, had long since elided.
She stood much as she had that day twelve years ago when she had arrived early at the apartment in the Berggasse—waiting simply for the time to be right.
A young man came out of the building. Short, dark—as dark as Serge. He was clutching a music case and she felt certain he had come from Viktor. He failed to notice her, glanced at the sky, glanced at his wrist-watch, and set off along the embankment towards Westminster.
She crossed over, tapping at the door of the gingerbread house once more.
§81
New York: April 1946
Szabo swapped his Charlie Parker British passport for one in his own name at the British consulate in New York. He had not been wholly certain they’d do it. But it was mailed to him with a hand-written note from the ambassador assuring him that he had been a citizen from the moment the Charlie Parker had been issued. Then he wrote to Arthur Kornfeld, as he had done regularly throughout the war.
6 West 73rd St.
New York
Arthur Kornfeld
Pembroke College
Cambridge
England
24.4.46
Dear Arthur,
This will be a quick note to say that I will be returning to England next month. They made me a citizen. Call it a reward. I won’t be returning to Cambridge. There’s a new place at Harwell (Oxfordshire somewhere?) to be devoted entirely to finding uses for nuclear fission. I am to be deputy director. Who knows, one day soon the lights on your Christmas tree could be lit by nuclear power? Or perhaps an atomic toothbrush?
I hope to see you in May or June. Your old friend, Karel Szabo
P.S. “Not with a whimper but with a bang?”
Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.
P.P.S. Eliot or Auden? I seem to have forgotten.
§
From S
tetin in the Baltic to Trieste in the
Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended
across the Continent. Behind that line lie all
the capitals of the ancient states of central
and eastern Europe—Warsaw,
Berlin, Prague, Vienna . . .
—WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
FULTON, MISSOURI, 1946
II
Austerity
ƒ
Observe in what an original world we are now living:
how many men can you find in Europe who have never killed;
or whom somebody does not wish to kill?
—TADEUSZ BOROWSKI, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable
of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
—VIKTOR FRANKL, Man’s Search for Meaning
§82
London: March, or even February, 1948
Battersea Park where they had sat so often or perhaps
Kensington Gardens, ah, no . . . Lincoln’s Inn.
The warmest spring in who-knows-when.
It had not been the hardest winter. That had been the previous winter—the deluge that was 1947. London like an iceberg, the Home Counties one vast undulating eiderdown of white, snowbound villages in Derbyshire dug out by German POWs many miles and years from home—a bizarre reminder that we had “won the war.” War. Winter. He had thought he might not live through either. He had. The English, who could talk the smallest of small talk about weather, had deemed 1948 to be “not bad” or, if feeling loquacious, “nowt to write home about.” But now, as the earth cracked with the first green tips of spring, the bold budding of crocus and daffodil that seemed to bring grey-toothed smiles to the grey faces of the downtrodden victors of the World War among whom he lived, he found no joy in it. It had come too late to save him. This winter would not kill him. The last would. And all the others that preceded it would.
He longed to sit in a rose-scented garden.
He tasted dust. In the middle of the square, sluggish workmen with sledgehammers were knocking down the concrete air-raid shelters that had stood squat, ugly, bestial since the winter of 1940.
He took a silver hip flask from his inside pocket and downed a little Armagnac.
“André, I cannot do this anymore.”
Skolnik had been pretending to read the Post, billowing pages spread out in front of him screening his face from the drifting gaze of passersby. He stopped, turned his head to look directly at Viktor.
“What?”
“I have to stop now.”
The newspaper was folded for maximum rustle. It conveyed the emotions André pretended long ago to have disowned in favour of calm, unrufflable detachment.
“Viktor. You cannot just stop. You cannot simply quit. What was it you think you joined all those years ago? A gentleman’s club? As though you can turn in your membership when brandy and billiards begin to bore you?”
Viktor took another sip of Armagnac, then passed the flask to André.
“Nineteen eighteen,” he said softly, as Skolnik helped himself to a hefty swig. “Nineteen eighteen.”
“What?’
“Nineteen eighteen—that’s when I joined. Were you even born then?”
“Not that it matters, but I was at school.”
The flask was handed back, the paper slapped down between them.
“You cannot stop just because it suits you to stop.”
Viktor sighed a soft, whispery, “Really,” of exasperation. “Why can I not stop?”
“Because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union simply doesn’t work that way.”
§83
London: July 1948
“I’d like you to meet my husband.”
A killer remark if uttered by a lover, but Anna wasn’t his lover. Anna was . . . Troy wasn’t sure what Anna was. But her request prompted him to remember when it was they’d first met and he couldn’t. She had been in pathology, working for Kolankiewicz in the forensics lab out at Hendon. Had it been ’40 or ’41? It seemed an age ago; it seemed like yesterday. Since the war ended she’d been a GP—a doctor to the living not the dead.
“He’s having a bit of a rough patch.”
“He’s been having those as long as you’ve been talking to me about him.”
“It’s his leg, you see.”
“His leg? The one he’s got or the one he hasn’t?”
“The one he hasn’t. Gives him gyp something awful. I’ve even had him on morphine, although he prefers whiskey. He seems to feel it, and it’s been gone seven years now.”
Angus’s leg had been lost during his time as an RAF pilot, one of the Brylcreem boys—except that far from slick: Angus’s hair stood up in bright ginger spirals like a demonic halo. And he had lost said leg not in combat but leaping from the walls of Colditz Castle in a bid to escape. Anna had told Troy that the British POWs had given the leg its own funeral, in its own little plot—and on liberation and repatriation the king had given Angus a medal, which he politely and utterly seriously had accepted “posthumously, on behalf of me leg.” Much to the amusement of reporters, he had left Buckingham Palace with his DFC pinned to his trousers over his tin leg.
“The stump can get very sore, you see. And when his leg aches he can’t sleep, and if he can’t sleep he gets sort of bonkers and picks fights with anyone who so much as looks at him and, worse, gets barred from all his favourite boozers.”
The latter, viewed as Troy was trying to view it from Angus’s point of view, was little short of tragic.
“And of course he loses clients. There’s nothing quite like telling a client to fuck off, is there?”
Quite, thought Troy. Hardly ambiguous. And from everything Anna had ever told him, chartered accountancy was quite the oddest profession a man like Angus could possibly choose.
“I have met him, you know.”
“Oh . . . but that was brief . . . a sort of nod and a handshake, wasn’t it? I mean really meet him. Troy, right now my old man needs pals and . . . and . . .”
“Yes?”
“He needs clients.”
“I don’t think I need an accountant. I doubt very much whether Scotland Yard coppers on salaries have accountants.”
“Please, Troy, do this. Do this for me. There must be some sort of dosh you could have him move around on a bit of paper for you. I mean, how many millions does your family have?”
It was because the Troys had millions that Troy never thought about money or its management. In the same way he never thought about his salary as a policeman. If it were all he had to live on, doubtless he would, but he didn’t. Money matters were all left to his brother or brothers-in-law. Troy never even saw the bill from his tailor. It went off to some chap who worked for “the family” and that was that. But Anna had a point. There was something to be said for taking responsibility or at least shuffling responsibility off onto a man of one’s own choosing. Troy was thirty-two. An inspector on the murder squad. A string of convictions behind him. Enough blots on his copybook to delight Professor Rorschach. A grown-up. High time.
“Okay,” he said. “When?”
§84
When the telephone rang again Troy was sure it was Anna calling to nitpick over details. It wasn’t. It was Charlie Walsh. Chief Inspector Charlie Walsh. The only copper in special branch who’d so much as give Troy the time of day.
“Day off, son?”
“Yes, sir. Just the one.”
“All right for some. So, you’re sayin’ you’ll be in tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir,” Troy said feeling slightly exasperated at the flat, northern, plain-bloke mask that Walsh habitually wore. “A normal working day.”
“How would you like it not to be a normal working day?”
Now, thought Troy, we are cookin’.
“Such as?”
“I’ve a nark. Name of Fish Wally. ’Appen you’ve heard of him?”
“Wasn’
t he one of Walter’s?”
“He was. Recruited just before old Walter copped it in ’41.”
Walter was the late Chief Inspector Stilton. Murdered on the job. Troy had been part of the investigation. He had solved the crime. Not that he could tell anyone. Off the record and out of the courts the killer had paid the price. For a while he and Walter had been friends. For a while he and Walter’s daughter Kitty had been lovers, and that had put paid to the friendship.
“I inherited Fish Wally. He was a godsend during the war. Mixing with all them refugees, speaking all them languages . . . but truth to tell the Branch hasn’t had a lot of use for him since. I’d like to place him where he’d be more use.”
“With me?”
“I reckon anyone in Crime could use him. There’s not a dive nor a cove in Soho and Fitzrovia Wally doesn’t know. I thought of you cos you and Walter were pals. You were with him when we rounded up all the Krauts and Wops in 1940, weren’t you?”
Rather than discuss an episode he would sooner forget, an episode in which Walsh had had to vet Troy for Security—not that Walsh would mention it now—Troy said, “I think the Murder Squad can afford Fish Wally.”
“Fine,” said Walsh. “He’s got a place in Marshall Street, round the back of Liberty’s. Tek down this number . . .”
§85
There might be a fashionable part of London in which to be an accountant—in much the same way stockbrokers had Gresham Street, tailors Savile Row, publishers Bedford Square. Wherever it might be, and Troy hadn’t a clue, he was certain it wasn’t an alley named Jockey’s Fields running along one side of Gray’s Inn. He was equally certain it wasn’t up three flights of stairs over a mews garage with a cardboard and crayon sign marked, “Ring twice and ask for Spike.”
It was typical of the character he had learnt to know from Anna’s tales that a one-legged man would have his office on the top floor. Arriving at the door Troy could just make out the syllables “Cha” and “Acc” on the frosted glass. The rest, including Angus’s name, were obscured by another cardboard sign reading “War Hero, Cripple, Skinflint & Piss Artist: Knock Once and Ask For Ginger.”
