by John Lawton
Troy took this away with him—that Skolnik’s fortune ebbed and flowed, which prompted him to think that Wally had only seen him in the down part of the cycle . . . and to wonder why the cycle was there at all, and who was funding it . . . and that a shining, buffed black Daimler parked in front of a house the size of a Venetian palazzo, in which someone struggled to get by with just the cook and one maid while someone else counted every last farthing, was far too symbolic of the England of 1948. He’d respect Laura’s privacy but he dearly wished he could explain to Rod the paradoxes of wealth and poverty, of standards still maintained, in the country he was working so hard to bring into being.
§96
Rod wasn’t even a quarter of a mile away. Thinking of him had given Troy an inkling to see him. He usually worked from home in the mornings and unless there was an afternoon session in the Commons he meant to attend, set off for Westminster somewhere around three. Besides, it was lunchtime, past lunchtime. Troy drove up the hill, into Heath Street, turned into Church Row, and parked. Parked in front of him was a car of a type he’d never seen before. It was ugly as sin—brown? green? greeny-brown? mud?—resembled a frog that had been run over in the road, and, alarmingly, it was right in front of his brother’s house. Rod had a thing about cars. He’d driven a nice little HRG 1100 during the war, replaced that with a longer, sleeker V8 Morgan—run with one carb shut down to eke out the petrol. This tally took no account of the Rolls, the Crossley, and the Lagonda left by their father—and Troy found himself hoping that this blob wasn’t the replacement for the Morgan.
He rang the bell. Since his father’s death almost five years ago Troy had always knocked. It wasn’t his childhood home anymore, it was his brother’s house. His sister-in-law Lucinda said plainly and often that this was “daft.” It was Lucinda who answered the door.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Late for what?”
“Oh . . . perhaps you weren’t invited . . . no matter, you know them all, you’d better join them—there’s pudding if you want but the chicken’s finished.”
“Cid . . . join who for what?”
“Oh, you know . . . Fat Billy . . . Skinny Joe . . . the talented Mr. Rosen . . .”
“Ah,” said Troy. “The Stinking Jews Reunion.”
“Yep. And all my efforts to persuade Rod to come up with a better name have come to nought. Go in, I’ll bring you coffee in a jiffy.”
In the summer of 1940, Rod had spent several weeks banged up with Billy Jacks, Joe Hummel, and Viktor Rosen. It had been called the internment of aliens. Rod, being less alien than most, had been let out in time to win the Battle of Britain for the nation and mankind at large. Over the ensuing weeks and months, more of his “cellmates” had emerged and just before Christmas that year Rod had staged the first reunion. As the releases progressed—Oskar Siebert to dig for the Pioneer Corps, Arthur Kornfeld to work subatomic wonders with quantum physics at Cambridge—so the numbers at the dining table grew and Rod switched the reunion to summer, when he could guarantee more for the table from his mother’s garden and off the ration. Troy could guess at roast chicken, the first spring greens, and new potatoes brought on under cloches—perhaps even an early pot of broad beans. Whether or not Troy got invited to the Stinking Jews Reunion always seemed, as now, to be a matter of chance.
He opened the door gently and quietly but still managed to stop the chatter of half a dozen voices. They all looked at him momentarily—there was not a face he didn’t know, and the only one he hadn’t mentally ticked off the list was Lou Spinetti, the pastry cook from Quaglino’s—then Rod rose, rich with bonhomie, smiling, a bit pissed, fraternally fulsome in a way that both pleased and annoyed Troy by making him feel smothered.
“Freddie! Brilliant timing, absolutely ace!”
The arm around his shoulder all but made his ribs crack, and then he found himself shoved into a chair next to Rosen, clutching a glass of champagne he didn’t much want.
“It’s been a while, dear boy,” said Rosen. “Are you practicing daily?”
“Of course,” Troy lied.
“I was hoping you might be here.”
Rosen reached into his breast pocket and laid two tickets in front of Troy.
“The Wigmore Hall, Saturday. Bring a friend.”
Troy quite liked the Wigmore. A depressing shade of brown marble inside, like a gents’ lavatory designed for the gods on Mount Olympus, but the acoustics were superb. He’d been there often with his dad in the twenties.
“What are you playing?”
“Big band stuff,” said Rosen. “Schubert Trio in E-flat before the interval, then we bring out the heavy guns for the Octet after.”
“And if they want an encore?”
When did audiences not want an encore?
“Four minutes of the B-flat sonata. Three if I get zippy on the ivories. It’s an all-Schubert evening. If they want Mozart they can whistle, and I do mean that literally.”
“Thanks,” said Troy, wondering who on earth he could ask to go with him. “I’ll be there.”
“Do you know the Octet?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Then I advise you to pee in the interval. It lasts the best part of an hour.”
Hummel said something to Rosen in German, a language Troy had sort of left behind when he left school. Rod was laughing with Siebert, Kornfeld, and Spinetti at some joke or other—and, happy or grumpy, Billy Jacks always scared the bejasus out of Troy. It was timely that Cid brought coffee when she did.
“When you’ve got moment, young Fred, I wouldn’t mind a couple of minutes of your time in the kitchen.”
“I’ll come now.”
Troy left his champagne untouched and followed Cid downstairs.
“I can’t get his nibs to pay the slightest bit of attention to this.”
She had spread out a dozen or more photographs of her children on the table—Alex, who Troy thought must be about twelve; the twins who were ten; and Nicki who was seven. They ran the gamut from shots so posed it was obvious one parent or another was just off-camera yelling “do this or else” to the utterly unposed, neck-twisting pseudojollity of polyfoto.
“I don’t know whether to get some of these enlarged and framed or simply to call in a photographer and have a new picture taken. I want something that captures them as kids before they’re much older. Alex is an adolescent—something that seems to escape his father—and before I know it he’ll be six feet tall and I’ll have to strain to remember him as he was.”
Troy looked at them. Rod’s omissions as a father were nothing compared to his own as an uncle.
“Have you considered,” he said. “Having a portrait painted?”
Cid turned the polyfoto this way and that with her fingertips.
“Hmm . . . it would mean them sitting still an awfully long time.”
“Not necessarily . . .”
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“Do you remember the Neames—just down the hill?”
“I never knew the family as such. I see the daughter from time to time when I’m shopping. Lorna or Laura wasn’t it? Married that Indian chap, the philosopher. Name escapes me.”
“I had occasion to call on her today. She paints.”
“A professional call, Inspector? Do I want a murderer painting my brattish offspring?”
“She’s just a witness, Cid. You should give her a call.”
“Perhaps I will. What has she witnessed, by the bye? Not the killing on the Northern line?”
Troy could see no point in secrecy.
“As a matter of fact, yes. That is the case. Looks as though Laura might have been the last person to see the victim alive.”
“You know,” Cid said, “you’re lucky you weren’t here an hour ago. Rod’s expecting questions in the house about it. ‘Is public transport safe for the public on the eve of the London Olympics? . . . blah blah blah’ . . . He thinks this is just the sort of publicity London doesn’
t need, at what he calls ‘an international moment’ . . . ‘the eyes of the world upon us’ . . . blah blah blah. He read the front page of the Post out to them all before lunch in a ‘what’s-the-world-coming-to’ tone of voice . . . It brought out the residual hang-’em-and-flog-’em in Billy and Lou, something I think Rod is prepared to beat out of them if he has to. Joe let go with one of his world-weary sighs and old Viktor went so pale I thought he was going to faint. If Rod had known it was your case . . .”
“Well, we won’t tell him. At least you don’t tell him until after I’ve gone.”
As Troy was leaving, Rod had gathered his guests on the pavement to show off for a bit. The blob-car was indeed his.
“This,” he said with a certain pride Troy took to be national, governmental even, on the part of the Undersecretary of State for Air, rather than personal, “is a Morris Minor, a 900cc, 62mph . . . 500 quid . . . people’s car.”
“Nah,” said Billy Jacks, “it’s just an ’orrible blob.”
“To me,” said Rosen, “it resembles nothing quite so much as a poached egg. If you want a people’s car why not just go the whole hog and call it a Volkswagen.”
“Because no one wants to be reminded of Hitler, that’s why.”
“Reminded? Who can forget him? Besides, the Germans are all ready to export the Volkswagen. For the first time since about 1910, I feel a shred of pride in my native land.”
“Well,” said Rod, his bonhomie beginning to evaporate, “it won’t sell here. Nobody will buy a car with a Nazi name. Volkswagen sounds like troop transport for the SS. They’ll buy this, the Morris Minor. Sounds as honest as the day is long.”
“No, it sounds like an unfortunate, put upon, and bullied fag at a third-rate public school,” said Troy. “More to the point, why have you bought the people’s car? Your English Volkswagen. You own a Rolls-Royce with cream paintwork and burgundy leather upholstery, and you want to drive a car that looks like a frog?”
“No, no,” said Rosen. “A poached egg, the poached egg of the damp British breakfast, floating in its own small pool of water and ruining the toast.”
This set Jacks and Hummel giggling, and turned Rod a little red in the face.
“It’s the future!” he said, to more giggles.
“Then give me the past,” said Rosen.
“The past did nine miles to the gallon.”
Rosen took the words out of Troy’s mouth and said, “Can we expect to see that in your manifesto?”
“Bollocks to you. Bollocks to the pair of you. And Freddie, you own half of that Rolls. If you want it all . . .”
Troy replied, “You know, brer, there’s no talking to you sometimes, and increasingly it’s when you’ve got your man-of-the-people hat on.”
Troy had no wish to provoke the Undersecretary of State for Air and instantly wished he hadn’t. For a moment it looked as though the Undersecretary of State might shove a Rolls-Royce with cream paintwork and burgundy leather upholstery right up his arse. But the gods favoured him, Cid appeared in the doorway saying, “Freddie. Telephone for you. Jack wants a word.”
Saved by the bell.
“I missed you at Mrs. Narayan’s. But she said you’d driven uphill, not down, so I sort of figured you’d be at Rod’s. Any chance you could come by Skolnik’s studio—you know, Rathbone Street?”
“I’ll leave now. Is it interesting?”
“Oh, yes, it’s that all right, but whether it’s also informative rather depends on you.”
§97
The building in which Skolnik had his studio ran between Rathbone Street and Charlotte Street. The front was on Charlotte Street, not quite a London boulevard, but home to shops and restaurants and caffs. If it were in Paris there would be tables on the pavements. If it were Rio, dancing in the streets. But it was in London. Rathbone Street was an alley with a pub. It was much more London.
Troy yanked at a peeling, green-painted door and stepped into a building that, while it had not taken a direct hit, had clearly taken some secondary bomb damage. A shock wave that had rippled across the street from somewhere. All the way up five brown and cream flights of stairs to the top floor, wooden beams the size of telegraph poles shored it up.
The studio was desirable space, spanning the building across the top floor, a storey or more higher than the building to the north on Charlotte Place, and hence free from the southern glare of summer light. It had the constancy that painters craved.
Jack was mooching around. Troy approached slowly, sideways along a wall of hanging, unframed canvases. Wally was right. Skolnik’s work was execrable. Endless Picassoesque poses, armpits, elbows, and skewed noses . . . a generation or more of cheerless demoiselles d’Avignon.
“Uplifting, eh?” said Jack.
“Hardly. And you didn’t get me here to tell you Skolnik was a tenth-rate Cubist.”
“Quite. I may not know much about art but I do know what I don’t like, and I think André Skolnik just went to the top of that list. No, I got you here to look at his work, but not the mainstream as it were . . . this one’s an oddity.”
Jack led him across the room to an easel with a canvas still on it.
“It’s this. It’s different. And while it looks finished, it’s fairly obvious that he was working on this until he died. Paint’s still a little tacky.”
Troy found himself gazing upon a wholly different style of painting. Just as derivative as Skolnik’s faux Cubism, but owing more to the Renaissance or to pastiches of the Renaissance. It was based on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. He’d pared it down to the central figure—no serving wench with a necklace of laurels and a red sheet to wrap the goddess in, no brace of angels puffing from the wings. The shape of the woman’s figure was identical, the off-centre posture that would topple her in anything “real,” the knees touching, the feet gently splayed, one hand not quite concealing her breasts, the other wholly concealing her quim with a tress of golden hair . . . only she rose not from a clam shell but from a cello case, and on her rib cage just below her breasts were two ƒ-holes, as though her body itself were a string instrument.
Troy said nothing.
Jack said, “He hasn’t signed it properly so I’m not wholly sure it’s a Skolnik, it’s just that that does seem logical—but he has left an inscription, see? There at the bottom right. Now, you see why I sent for you?”
“Quite,” said Troy, bending to look closely. “It’s in Russian.”
“Any chance you could translate?”
“It seems like a dedication, to a nameless waif, who—he would smudge the verb—but I think it’s ‘blinded,’ as in deceived. ‘You who blinded two countries, you deserve’—I think ‘deserved,’ actually—‘you deserved success, your audacious fraud maintained by deep and constant secrecy.’ And it’s signed AP.”
“Ah . . . I’d be useless at this sort of thing. I was thinking that ∏ might be a Russian way of writing S and hence A. Skolnik.”
“It’s a P, and I rather think it stands for Alexander Pushkin. I don’t know the play well, but I think it’s from Boris Godunov. It would fit. There’s a character in it, known as the Pretender, who cons both the Russians and the Poles into thinking he’s the heir to the Russian throne.”
“Sticky end?”
“Probably. Mussorgsky made an opera out of it. Name me an opera without a sticky end.”
“And does it help?”
Troy said nothing. He had put off telling Jack about Fish Wally’s suspicions until any other scrap of evidence pointed the same way. Quoting Russian verse and getting the rhyme right might be that scrap.
“May be,” he began. “May be. The new nark I met last night is a Pole named Fish Wally who’s worked for the Branch since ’41—for Stilton and then for Walsh. He knew Skolnik, didn’t much like him, which makes me allow something for bias, but he was pretty adamant that Skolnik was a Russian, not a Pole, and that he was a wrong ’un. A sleeper planted here by the Russians just after the Civil War.”
&n
bsp; “Oh, shit,” said Jack. “Here we go again.”
“Then let us pull up packing cases and be comfortable while I drop us in it one more time.”
Troy sat on the nearest, Jack sat opposite, rippling with concern.
“You’ve taken on an ex–Special Branch nark?”
“Yes. Charlie Walsh made me a present of him.”
“What does Onions say about this?”
“He doesn’t need to know.”
“Freddie, can I remind you of what he said to you this time four years ago, when I plucked you off a bomb site with a bullet in your gut. He said, ‘Don’t ever mess with the spooks again.’ ”
“Jack, don’t get me wrong. I’d’ve died without you that night. But that was a case Charlie Walsh handed me because his hands were tied.”
“And you picked it up, and Onions went ballistic.”
“Initially Stan was only too happy I did. I remember his words, too. ‘Nobody blows coppers away on the streets of London and tells me there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.’ And that was about an hour before I first called Charlie. I picked up a murder no one else was willing to look into. That’s what we do; that’s why they call us the Murder Squad.”
“Freddie, you went up against the Branch and MI5 and the OSS . . . you got shot . . . and the murderer is still at large!”
The murderer was not at large, the murderer was buried in her family plot in a small cemetery in Fermanagh. Diana Brack was dead, apart from the eternal life she seemed to have achieved in Troy’s dreams. Her . . . what was the word? . . . Svengali . . . Major Wayne, was still at large. That much he’d silently concede to Jack.
“Can’t win ’em all,” Troy lied.
Jack sighed. “Can I take it you’ll tell Onions about this?”
“I’ll tell him but not just yet. I’d like to be more convinced Wally’s right before I do.”
“What have you got? We’re pretty close to clueless at the moment.”
