A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “Someone shot him earlier this evening. On the Underground. At Camden.”

  “Isn’t this where you ask me if he had any known enemies?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Then your most likely suspect will be an art critic. Skolnik was a painter. A bad painter, an atrocious painter, an execrable painter . . . a man for whom Cubism was the pinnacle of culture and who couldn’t even draw a decent Mr. Cube for side of a packet of sugar. The Tate would never show him. Nor would Tate and Lyle.”

  “He didn’t live by his painting, then?”

  “He tried. He’d offer to sketch punters in the pubs, but that would have meant moving around a lot of pubs and Skolnik was too lazy for that. He taught some. There was a pretty young woman up in Hampstead as I recall. If the name comes to me before the bill comes to you I shall tell you. And when broke he would model nude—or as near nude as the law allows—for artists in all probability better than he was himself. You know Crisp? Ask Quentin Crisp—he got the work for Skolnik. Crisp laughingly refers to his role as being “a naked civil servant.” In a country in which every other person seems to be a civil servant it is not hard to see the joke. And . . . when utterly broke, Skolnik would scrounge. He would appeal to something like “Polishness.” And once or twice during the war I saw others scrounge for him—the hat got passed in the Fitzroy or the Wheatsheaf for “the starving artist,” as it did for half a dozen or so . . . for Gerald Wilde . . . for Gully Jimson . . . any one of them more deserving than Skolnik. And the penniless poets, prostitutes, arse-bandits, transvestites, and army deserters of Fitzrovia turned out their pockets and divvied up their threepenny bits for him. I never gave him a farthing.”

  “Why not?”

  Wally beckoned for a second cup of coffee.

  The waiter appeared almost instantly but the pause had been all that Wally needed to collect his thoughts.

  “Your family, Mr. Troy. Russians, I believe?”

  Oh fuck, thought Troy, please do not let this be an issue. Please do not let Fish Wally assume the Troys were White Russian refugees. Whatever it was that the Troys were, it was so much more complex than that.

  “Yes,” Troy said simply.

  “Can you spot a Russian across a crowded room?”

  “Sometimes. Usually I have to wait until he opens his mouth.”

  “Quite so. I can spot some Poles almost by the range of their facial expressions. By and large you look at the way a Pole holds himself, his shoulders mostly . . . a Polish shrug isn’t quite the same as a French shrug, although both do it rather a lot. I think in the end it was why Chopin felt at home in Paris. But . . .”

  A prolonged, tantalizing sip of coffee.

  “But . . . I could not see that in André Skolnik. And I looked for it often.”

  “Are you saying you don’t think he was Polish?”

  “Bear with me. I do not know for certain what he was. I give you the evidence of my eyes and ears and in the end of my instincts. The Fitzroy Tavern gets an odd mixture. It is Mitteleuropa with woolly English ale and soggy pickled onions. Once, I heard Skolnik talking with Russians. Merchantmen off a recently docked ship.”

  Troy began to see where this was leading.

  “Lots of Poles speak Russian.”

  “Quite. I’m not bad at it myself. But Skolnik wasn’t not bad, he was perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  “A good Moscow accent to his Russian.”

  Even more, Troy could see where this was leading.

  He spoke softly in Russian, “I speak with a Moscow accent. Simply because my parents did. And I’ve never even been to Moscow.”

  This brought a smile to Wally’s lips, the beginning of a chuckle.

  “You make your point very well. But as I said, after evidence comes instinct. Skolnik seemed to me to be a man whose knowledge of Poland was textbook. Too precise, and largely unfelt. As though he had been coached in being Polish. He claimed to be from Cracow, a refugee who washed up here as a very young man in 1926. Even allowing for an exile of such length, it seemed to me that his knowledge of Cracow—and I went there every summer as a boy, to stay with an aunt—had been schooled. It was less like listening to a native than reading a guidebook. He had a Polish skin to him, if you will, but no Polish heart.”

  “You think he really was Russian?”

  “I do. And you may forget my wisecrack about an art critic with a desire to rid the world of a third-rate painter.”

  It was not a thought Troy wanted in his head, but Wally had crammed it in.

  “You think he was hit?”

  “Is that the argot of the day for assassination? No. I don’t think he was “hit.” I merely suggest the possibility. Equally merely, I suggest that the late André Skolnik was, in the argot of the East End, a ringer—a fake planted here to do . . . whatever.”

  “I think the term is sleeper.”

  “Apt,” said Wally.

  “Tell me,” Troy said, “have you merely suggested this to Charlie Walsh?”

  “No. You know Charlie as well as I do, I’m sure. He is a pragmatist. A subtle and inventive pragmatist, but a pragmatist nonetheless. I could not go to him with a hunch or anything quite so intangible. I would have lost credibility.”

  “Yet you tell me? Am I not a pragmatist?”

  Wally smiled again, and Troy knew he’d walked into a trap. A trap of his own making.

  “Mr. Troy, you are a dreamer. You have stepped off Chekhov’s verandah and bade farewell to the sisters Prozorova only moments ago.”

  §91

  It was a short walk home. A network of alleys. Down one to cut into the Charing Cross Road, down a second to cross to St. Martin’s Lane, and into the third, in which Troy lived—Goodwin’s Court.

  Where the court bent, about as neatly as a bolt of lightning on a weather map, a whore stood waiting. Not waiting for Troy, just waiting.

  “’Allo, young Fred.”

  This took no account of the fact that he was older than she. Troy had known Ruby since she first appeared at the corner shortly before the arrival of the American forces during the war. He’d thought she was about twenty or twenty-one at that time, so she’d be no more than twenty-seven now, to his thirty-two—yet he’d aways been “young Fred” from the moment she’d got over the initial panic of finding out that she’d pitched her tent in the front yard of a policeman. Troy even thought it might be to her advantage so to do. Troy held no brief for Vice. He thought policemen should have better things to do than concern themselves with who fucked who at what cost, or who smoked reefer, but he would not put up with a pimp on his own doorstep and as a result Ruby might well be the only whore within the vicinity of Leicester Square to escape the attentions of that brutal trade—none of them thinking it smart to risk his intervention. He didn’t “protect” Ruby, but it was as well if the pimps thought he might. Once Ruby had grasped this they’d got along fine. She took a little convincing that he was not up for a “free one” and there were times he wished she’d show more discretion, but they got along fine. He’d almost learnt to accept her habitual flirting.

  “The lane’s dead tonight, Fred. I can’t give it away.”

  Banal chatter or a big hint? He could never tell.

  “It’s the light nights, Ruby. Yours is a trade of darkness.”

  She gazed up at the summer sky. Only days after the longest day—evening redness in the west.

  “You remember, VE Day?”

  Who could ever forget?

  “I mean . . . not just the night itself and the parties and that. I mean sort of the rest of that year. You know what got me? It was light. It was moving around in blazin’, dazzlin’ light after all them years in the blackout. War was over VE Day, ’less you bother about Japs an ’at, but it din’t come home to me till about October when you could walk from here to the ’Dilly in light, electric light. And then, this year, they turned all the adverts back on and lit up the ’Dilly itself. And it din’t matter that all they w
as doin’ was tellin’ you Guinness was good for you and stuff. It was like . . . getting washed clean. Washed clean in light.”

  She could do this to him. At the most unpredictable times she could utter something approaching poetry and just miss her target.

  Of course, she was right. “Now” contrasted with “then” in terms of light and darkness. Troy thought it was a world without colour—the khakis and deepening blues of the war had given way to the myriad greys and browns of the peace. The grey of Chief Superintendent Stanley Onions’ suit, the grey of the national loaf, the grey of fag ash. The brown of gravy, in which the national meal swam, or drowned, on the national plate. The nation of little ships had become the nation of gravy boats. Browning less evoked the name of one of our better poets, so much as presaged an unappetizing Sunday lunch. Brown, grey, brown. It left Troy, habitually in white shirt and black suit, craving colour. He thought it left England craving colour. He glimpsed it in his brother’s red tie and socialist socks, he soaked it up occasionally in the cinemas of the West End—transfixed by the Technicolor of The Wizard of Oz whilst simultaneously bored by its banality. And when summers came, and the summers of the Age of Austerity came long and clear, Anna would drag frocks from her prewar wardrobe and appear to be dressed in petals, to be dressed by Monet or Matisse—red, pink, and purple, yellow, orange, and green. And he took more delight in Anna’s frocks—invariably dismissed with, “oh, this old thing”—than he ever could in his brother’s socks. He doubted he would be washed clean in light, but he’d be dunked in colour.

  §92

  When Troy got into his office the next morning there was a paper bag of greying mashed potato sitting on his desk. It was soggy and it was leaking. He took a cellophane bag from his desk and dumped the mess inside. Cellophane was a “wonder product,” the sort of thing the papers were full of, the sort of thing that was going to transform our lives—or if not all our lives then the life of that much-anticipated figure of advertising land, the housewife known as “Mrs. 1950.” So far, this was the only use Troy had found for it. It kept evidence clean and dry and visible. He dropped the dirty, oily gun into a second bag. He’d get the morning’s work out of the way and take both over to Hendon for Kolankiewicz to examine.

  Jack came in carrying two mugs of tea and kicked the door to with his foot.

  Troy looked into the mug. The tea was grey and greasy, almost yellow.

  “Yesterday’s leaves,” Jack said. “I think that must be mug number eight off a single teaspoon. We’re the lucky ones. I hear rumors of a chap in Vice who’s learnt to make tea from sawdust.”

  “The last time you told me that tale it was rabbit droppings.”

  “Ah, but even they’re rationed now. Besides, where would I get rabbit droppings in the middle of London?”

  Troy set his tea down untouched. Glanced quickly at his in-tray, then settled himself behind his desk facing Jack. Jack pulled a face like a schoolboy downing a spoonful of castor oil and supped on his poverty brew.

  “You first,” Troy said.

  “101 Charlotte Street is split into flats. Some as small as bed-sitting rooms, all with shared bogs, none bigger than kitchen, bed, and sitting room—which was what André Skolnik had. On the first floor, front. Landlord not on site—the bloke in the flat below said he’d been there since 1934 and that Skolnik was already living there when he moved in. Skolnik was a painter, not very successful but well-known among what my mother would contemptuously call ‘the Bohemian set.’”

  “A bit of a bum, in other words?”

  “Quite. And I’d describe his standard of living, based on his flat and possessions, as austere . . . if that weren’t too overworked a word. Nah, I can do better than that . . . seedy . . .”

  “Threadbare?”

  “Yep. Just like the suit he died in and the spare jacket and trousers in the wardrobe. And the socks nobody bothered to darn for him. This was a bloke who lived close to the bottom of the heap. A man who kept a small pile of rusting razor blades on the side of the wash basin just in case he could squeeze one more shave out of them, and reheated the same pool of lard in the bottom of the frying pan to infinity regardless of the debris of previous meals matted into it.”

  Troy didn’t much feel like drinking scummy Scotland Yard tea in the first place. After that unappetizing description he’d tip it away as soon as he could. There might be another use for cellophane bags after all.

  “But as far as I can gather he didn’t much mind. The downstairs neighbor, Gibbs . . . left-leaning sort of bloke . . . works in Collet’s bookshop . . . used an odd turn of phrase . . . not one I’d ever thought of but it’s apt . . . ‘André dropped out years ago, that is, if he ever bothered to drop in in the first place.’ Lived hand-to-mouth quite happily as long as he’d known him.”

  “Did he say what Skolnik had done during the war? He was almost too old for conscription.”

  “Forty-four, you said yesterday. Born 1904? Then, yes, he was just too old for the call-up. Could have volunteered at that age, I suppose, but no, our Mr. Skolnik wore the tin hat of self-righteousness.”

  “I see. Air-raid warden.”

  Jack slipped into a grumpy Cockney mimicry, “’Ere, put that light out!”

  “In a Polish accent, Jack.”

  “No can do, old man. Gibbs was no help in the immediate sense. Hadn’t seen Skolnik for three or four days. Said there was no pattern to his social or working life. Friends came and went, sometimes weeks without a sound from upstairs, sometimes people tramping up and down the stairs half the night. And no, he couldn’t think of anyone in particular by name.”

  “Women?”

  “Not lately. Gibbs seemed to think Skolnik had had his flings and at forty-four wasn’t much of a catch. And I can’t imagine any woman putting up with the state of his kitchen or his bathroom. But what struck me, for all the mess . . . there wasn’t much evidence of painting considering he was a painter, so I asked Gibbs and he said Skolnik kept a studio in Rathbone Street. Top floor. Said something about a northern aspect. Painters seem to want northern light, dunno why. I went round there with the keys I found in Skolnik’s pocket but none of them fitted, so I’ve left it for now. If Mr. Gibbs doesn’t find the key in Skolnik’s flat by about 10 o’clock, I’ll go round there with a locksmith. Meanwhile, I have Constable Gutteridge watching the door.”

  It was Troy’s turn. He had wondered how much to tell Jack. He had wondered how much he might eventually have to tell his chief superintendent, Stanley Onions. Fish Wally had been right, one’s credibility mattered.

  “Does Onions know?”

  “He must do. He’ll have read the duty log, and even if he hadn’t, it’s in most of the morning papers. He’s prowling corridors right now. That’s why the door’s shut. But . . . there has been a bonus to releasing Skolnik’s name, to say nothing of releasing yours. I, as your dogsbody, took a call not fifteen minutes ago—”

  Jack reached into his inside pocket and flipped open a small black notebook.

  “—from one Laura Narayan.”

  “What kind of a name is that? Sounds sort of Indian.”

  “Dunno. When in doubt I always plump for Welsh.”

  “Did she sound Welsh?”

  “Absolutely not. As posh as you or I, posher if that’s at all possible, the epitome of a deb voice.”

  Class in England was never far away as an issue or a dilemma, and it bred suspicion. At last we were one nation under Socialism, the end of deference, but the suspicion lingered, the suspicion thrived on accent and emblem. Jack could on occasion be seen wearing his old Etonian tie. Troy’s brother Rod habitually wore his old Harrovian tie when not wearing his Labour MP’s near-obligatory red. Troy didn’t. He wore plain black—as Onions had remarked more than once to him, “You look like you’re going to a funeral, lad.” All the same, most of Scotland Yard referred to Jack and Troy collectively, suspiciously, as “the Tearaway Toffs.”

  “Laura Narayan of Fitzjohn’s Avenue,
Hampstead. She was very upset but through the tears managed to tell me that Skolnik had been with her yesterday afternoon until about four thirty. Appears she was one of his pupils. I think this is what we call a lead.”

  Troy listened, scribbled down the address as Jack spoke, then described loose circles in the air with his left hand and a pencil.

  “It fits,” he said. “Skolnik gets on the Underground at Hampstead, city-bound train . . . first place he can change to a West End train is Camden . . . gets out at Camden . . . crosses to the other line to board a train to Goodge Street . . . and gets shot as the train pulls in.”

  Jack was staring at Troy across the top of his mug, quizzically.

  “Why so precise?”

  “If you’re going to shoot someone you’d want as much noise as possible to mask the sound of the shot and, if, as you and I both surmise, you mean to walk away as cool as cucumber once you’ve done it, you want a rush of people heading for the exit to blend into . . . a human tide to carry you along.”

  “Smartarse.”

  The telephone on Jack’s desk in the outer office rang. He left to answer it. Troy heard a, “Yes, jolly good, half an hour? Fine,” and then Jack reappeared.

  “Gibbs. We have a key to Rathbone Street.”

  “I’ll take the gun and the mash to Kolankiewicz. And I’ll call on Miss, or is it Missis, Narayan—?”

  “Missis,” Jack said.

  “. . . on the way back.”

  Ten minutes later, as Troy passed Jack’s desk on his way out, Jack was on the phone again. He cupped a hand across the mouthpiece.

  “Freddie? I’ve just realized. You haven’t told me a bloody thing!”

  §93

  They began with the gun.

  “It’s filthy,” Kolankiewicz said. “Where did you find it?”

  “Between the tracks.”