A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “Freddie, you say ‘looks’ . . . ?”

  “A copper’s caution, Rod. Jack’s been looking into this for less than eight hours. We have nothing but the ostensible to go on. At the moment looks is everything. And, of course . . . I can’t think why Viktor should want to kill himself.”

  “And you have to ask me if I can?”

  “It can wait.”

  Rod sat down. Troy took the chair on the other side of the desk. Rod took a bottle and two glasses out of the bottom drawer and poured brandy for both of them. It was the same mark Viktor had used as Dutch courage.

  Rod sipped his in silence for a few moments, wiped each cheek with the back of his hand.

  “You know, I met him that day you saw me off at St Pancras in 1940. He was in the same compartment. Don’t think I noticed him for ages. Not sure he spoke until we’d passed Derby. Inauspicious beginning. I suppose all beginnings are. Cid swears I actually asked her to dance a second time without recognizing her from the first. And that’s the woman I’m spending the rest of my life with. I knew within a couple of weeks that I’d know Viktor the rest of my life . . . or his.”

  Rod downed the rest of his brandy, corked the bottle, and stood up.

  “It’s a day to get pissed, but not here. Knock that back and I’ll drive us home. Sooner or later you’ll feel like asking me questions and I’ll feel like answering them.”

  The drive to Hampstead was in Rod’s “blob” car.

  “Viktor was scathing about this,” Troy reminded him. “The poached egg.”

  “He was scathing about a lot of things,” Rod said. “If you knew Viktor, you had to learn to take the rough with the smooth.”

  §120

  Troy slyly declined Rod’s invitation to get drunk. Rod unearthed a bottle so old the label had perished. Only the date remained: 1926. Troy occasionally sipped half an inch off the top of the glass and obediently stretched out his arm for a top up when Rod flourished the bottle, and then the second bottle. Between the two, Rod had reminisced without interruption.

  “He was . . . a difficult man. Such a touchy bugger. Took a long time to get to know him.”

  Troy wasn’t at all sure he had got to know Viktor Rosen. They had stuck to the issue—music. And while music was what Viktor Rosen was “about,” it had taught Troy more about Troy than it had about Rosen.

  “He had . . . nothing . . . and he had everything.”

  Rod was pretty pissed by now, shoes off, tie at half-mast, hunched on the edge of the armchair, all odd socks and socialist-red braces, cradling his glass as though he could read the future in the crystal.

  “I don’t quite catch your drift,” Troy said as Rod’s silence simply added to the enigmatic nature of the remark.

  “He was one of the most successful performers of the century. Top of the . . . wotsit. And he was canny. Got all his stuff out of Germany when he saw Hitler coming. Made the mistake of staying too long himself and got nabbed . . . but he got out of Germany and he got out of Austria . . . and when he got here his money and his piano were waiting for him. As soon as we let him out of chokey . . . the Americans wanted him. He made a packet in the States just before the end of the war. And when it was all over, we gave him citizenship and the king offered him a knighthood . . . and we all smoothed things over when Viktor said no . . . didn’t go with the job of playing the piano he said. As if it could be just a job. And . . . you saw his place on the river, the Bechstein . . . a Van Gogh on one wall . . . Chagall on the other . . .”

  “I didn’t see a Chagall?”

  “Used to be next to the fireplace. Must have moved it. Anyway, where was I? Yes. He had . . . everything and . . .”

  The sentence trailed off, Rod rocked gently on his buttocks. Troy was not at all certain that he wasn’t about to topple backwards into oblivion.

  “. . . And he had . . . nothing.”

  “What nothing?”

  Rod had to think about this. For a few moments the glassy eyes tried to lock onto his, but the booze won and he stared into his glass once more.

  “No nothing. That’s about as much nothing as you can have. None. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Fuck all. Fuck nothing . . . heh . . . heh . . . Billy taught him that . . . ‘Fuck nothing’ along with ‘tickle the ivories,’ ‘the joanna’ . . . Viktor loved slang . . . he loved shocking people with it.”

  Troy remembered the “stick with me kid” that had so amused the audience at the Wigmore but he was none the wiser. He tried a different tack.

  “Did Viktor ever say there was anything . . . missing?”

  “Nope . . . not in his nature . . . that would be too . . . sentimental . . . not an overtly sentimental man . . . but it was obvious. Parents long dead. Brother killed in the First War. Sister . . . sister . . . well, he looked into that afterwards . . . I helped him . . . as far as we could ever tell . . . looks as though she died in Treblinka . . . he could never persuade her to leave Berlin. No, the nothing of which Viktor had plenty was . . . family.”

  Another long, wobbling pause, Rod teetering on edge of seat and sentence.

  “Of course. We were his family. Us ‘Stinking Jews’ . . . he was very fond of Joe Hummel and Arthur Kornfeld . . . and I think Billy and Oskar infuriated and amused him by turns . . . but the real family were his pupils . . . all those kids he got together . . . and he was fond of you, y’know . . . said you’d go far if you’d just concentrate on the piano and forget playing coppers . . . fond of all his pupils . . . they were his kids . . . they were his kids . . . do you know . . . do you know . . . ?”

  This surely was it? He’d never get to the end of this sentence.

  “Do you know, that young girl who plays the cello . . . Voytek . . . the Austrian girl . . . Viktor gave her the cello she plays . . . just . . . gave it to her . . . y’know what it is . . . ?”

  Troy had paid no mind to the cello at the Wigmore, he’d drunk in the music and he’d drunk in some of the player, but he’d scarcely noticed the instrument.

  “It’s not a Stradi . . . Stradivarius. But it’s some bloke like him . . . made in seventeen something or other. Now . . . whadya think that’s worth? Gotta be worth a packet hasn’t it . . . I mean . . . a Straddithingy . . . just gave it to her . . . children. Kids. His kids. They were his . . . his . . .”

  It was a minute or more before Troy realized that Rod was no longer seeking wisdom in the bottom of his glass of claret and had fallen asleep. He gently prised the glass from his fingers and went in search of Cid.

  They tumbled him into the marital bed.

  Troy tugged at one trouser leg, Cid at the other.

  “How long have I known you, Inspector Troy?”

  “Since you became engaged to Rod, Lady Troy. The summer of 1932.”

  “And how old were you, Inspector?”

  “I was sixteen, ma’am. A tad shy of my seventeeth.”

  “And how many times have us five-foot midgets tipped this six-foot drunk into bed, whipped off his socks and his trousers, and tucked him up for the night?”

  “I’ve lost track. But this isn’t like any other night. He lost friends in combat. To be expected in war, and Rod was at the sharp end. He lost our father, who took long enough in dying to bid the fondest farewell to us all. Viktor is different. Viktor’s death is different.”

  “No anticipation, no farewells.”

  “Quite,” said Troy.

  Cid said, “I’ve made up the bed in your old room. Stay for breakfast. I’m sure he’ll want to see you at breakfast.”

  §121

  At breakfast, Rod was nose down in the morning paper when Troy appeared. He folded it, tapped with his forefinger on the headlines, and shoved it across the table to Troy.

  “Spy Gave Secrets of Atom Bomb to Russia”

  Troy glanced at it and as Rod had said nothing, he didn’t, either. God knows, they’d all be bored rigid by this topic over the next few weeks. More public breast beating, more revelling in our rapid decline to the second rate. What was Profe
ssor Szabo’s crime? Giving our atomic secrets to the Russians, or telling us he’d done it?

  Troy shoved it back without a word.

  Rod whacked the top of his egg with his teaspoon and said, “I can’t remember. Did you ask me your question?”

  “No,” Troy replied.

  “Well . . . the answer is, ‘I don’t know whether Viktor had any reason to kill himself I would say, ordinarily, that he wasn’t the type. He could always laugh at himself and I tend to think that’s a saving grace.”

  “But?”

  “But I haven’t been through what Viktor went through. Being locked up by the British was nothing . . . a doddle . . . like being sent away to school except that the food was better and sport wasn’t compulsory. But that’s an Englishman speaking. I witnessed two suicides of refugees who’d been locked up by the Germans and would rather die than be locked up again by anyone. And there are plenty who chose to live who still found internment an ordeal far too reminiscent of what they’d been through at the hands of the Nazis. But . . . Viktor never seemed to be one of those . . . and for it to surface in him . . . eight years later . . . in such a dreadful way . . . well . . . it doesn’t seem plausible.”

  Troy wondered about the wisdom of what he had to say next, but Rod seemed to have shed the worst of his grief in his reminiscences last night. He was eating a hearty breakfast and showing no signs of paying for the night before with a hangover.

  “Tell me, did you ever see the back of Viktor’s apartment? The rooms beyond?”

  “No,” said Rod. “He was very private about that. That big room with the piano—the one he always called the rehearsal room—the bog off the hallway, the dining room, the small sitting room, but I’ve never seen the kitchen or the bedrooms. It was like a lost domain. Sort of ‘backstage.’”

  “I had to go backstage yesterday—as you would expect—and I went into Viktor’s bedroom. It was minimal. It seemed to me that he kept one room in his apartment to remind him of being locked up. He slept on a camp bed, read by candlelight, drank from a tin cup, and had an old orange box as his only furniture.”

  It stopped Rod midtoast. He was as surprised as Troy had been.

  “You know,” he said, after thinking for a moment. “ ‘Remind’ doesn’t seem the right word. That would suit a token of some sort . . . the memento mori . . . but what you’ve just described is Viktor reliving his imprisonment, still living his imprisonment, as though some part of him had never been set free. As though having hit rock bottom he could never live at any other level, whatever his means. It was always there, underlying everything. The money, the success . . .”

  “The Van Goghs, the Picassos, the Chagalls . . . sounds like a form of masochism.”

  “Well . . . you wouldn’t get me doing it. But I can see a sort of sense in it.”

  “Would you say imprisonment haunted him?”

  “No. I would have said it strengthened him. You might even say that rather than being something as crude as masochism it was more like a hair shirt. Suffering was part of the making of him. To be terribly corny, what is art, what is music, without suffering? Are a camp bed and a tin cup a form of torture or merely tolerable discomforts set against a life of luxury and success? Pricks to keep you on your mettle.”

  Cid came in and told Troy that Jack wanted him on the telephone.

  “What did Rod have to say?”

  “He’s telling me in convincing detail that Viktor wasn’t the type, and at the same time he doesn’t seem to have any doubts that it was suicide.”

  “Well . . . Kolankiewicz does. I think you’d better call him.”

  Troy called Hendon.

  “Ach . . . I have things to report. First the body. Single shot to the heart. Death was instantaneous. No marks to indicate restraint or coercion. The bullet I removed matches the Beretta.”

  “Then why is Jack telling me you have doubts?”

  “Fingerprints. The only prints on the gun are Herr Rosen’s. The only prints on the brandy bottle and the glass are Herr Rosen’s.”

  “So?”

  “The only prints anywhere in that room are Herr Rosen’s. Troy, someone wiped the place clean. How many suicides have you ever known to do that?”

  Troy went back to Rod. There was no way he was going to mention this.

  “I have to meet Kolankiewicz. Are you in a position to tell anyone who should be told before we tell the press? It’s been close to twenty-four hours now.”

  “I know. My fault. I should have been practical last night, not maudlin. Yes. I can tell them all. Not many. Just his students and his protégés—there are about a dozen of them. If you went to that last recital at the Wigmore you’ll have seen most of them on stage.”

  He slipped it in as an afterthought—the two of them standing on the doorstep on a fine late-summer morning—passed it off as routine.

  “And . . . do you know of anyone with a reason to kill Viktor?”

  “A routine question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I give you a routine ‘don’t be daft.’ ”

  §122

  Kolankiewicz met Troy at Rosen’s apartment.

  “Show me,” Troy said.

  “My guys did everything in this room. Everything that anyone might touch in the course of a crime. Anything that would bear the weight of a hand. The place is clean of prints. Yet, the person who found the body was the cleaner. Jack talked to her. She cleans twice a week. Yesterday was her day. The room should have been covered in prints. Even if Rosen had received no vistors in the three days before his death, think how many objects he would have touched, how many leant upon. See the bookshelf at hip height? By now it would have a fine sheen of dust on it. When my guys dusted it down it was spotless. It had been wiped that day, ahead of the cleaner.”

  “It’s too thorough, isn’t it?”

  The room—the rehearsal room—still had that odd feel to Troy. He’d been here dozens of times, perhaps close to a hundred over the last two years—and it was still as though he was seeing things for the first time.

  “Let us suppose for a moment that Viktor was killed. We have no motive in robbery. The first thing I’d take would be the Picasso—under my jacket and away. If I’d planned well, the Van Gogh fits in a suitcase. And then we have the problem of how to make it look like a convincing suicide. And it is convincing isn’t it?”

  “It is. The prints on the gun are quite consistent with Herr Rosen having loaded it himself, and with the grip he would have on it to point it at his own heart. Not as easy as pointing it at your head.”

  “Did you dust beyond this room?”

  “No. We had no reason to.”

  Troy led him backstage, into the foreign country. Kolankiewicz showed less surprise at the “cell” than he or Jack had. A Polish shrug seemed to say, “So what?”

  Down the corridor three of the four other bedrooms smelled of non-use. The last, the biggest, did not. Jack’s nose had deceived him. This room was in use. Troy could swear there was a trace of scent in the air but could not say what. It was a lavish room, quite the biggest bed Troy had ever seen; hand-printed, hand-trimmed wallpaper in a large Monet-inspired pattern; a large, French cherrywood wardrobe; a bergère sofa along the foot the bed; and over the bed an unframed Chagall that stretched from bed head to ceiling, and almost wall to wall—a dark painting, executed lightly, cobalt blue; navy blue; a deep, entrancing green; a bouquet of crimson . . . a girl: part girl, part what? Mermaid? Bird? Floating in midair . . . or was she borne aloft by the fiery, feathery thing above her?

  Kolankiewicz sniffed the air.

  “A woman,” he said. “Not a man’s room. It’s not a bedroom, it’s a boudoir.”

  He opened the wardrobe door, he opened the drawers in the tallboy but both were empty.

  “I still say woman.”

  “With not a knickknack in place, no mirror, no dressing table, no dresses, no knickers?”

  “Can you not smell it? Say it is an absen
ce of smell if you like. But it is in the air.”

  “Yes,” said Troy. “I can smell it. I’ll be in the other room if you need me.”

  Troy sat at the piano. Looked at the open score. Viktor had played the Mozart twenty-third at Carnegie Hall last year. Perhaps it was the sheer quality of his performance, perhaps it was the memory of the war years and how much Viktor had raised in U.S. war bonds, but the audience, to a man, to a woman, had stood and cheered at the end. Troy held his hands over the keys poised for the opening notes of the piano, hearing in the mind’s ear, rushing through, the long, two-minute string introduction. His fingers never touched the keys. He went back to Kolankiewicz.

  “Do you have a spare print kit?”

  Kolankiewicz pointed at his Gladstone bag on the floor and said, “In there. Somewhere.”

  Troy dusted outward from middle C an octave either way. And then octave by octave until he had reached the extremities of bass and treble. Keys he’d never touched on his own piano.

  Kolankiewicz returned.

  “The cell, as you put it, has prints in all the obvious places. On the door knob, on the tin mug, and smudged all over the reading glasses. They look like Rosen’s but I will need to check that to be sure. The other room, the boudoir, is spotless.”

  “So’s this,” said Troy. “Now tell me, what murderer, what assassin, would be so foolish as to play the piano before committing his crime and then have to wipe down every key?”

  §123

  About three in the afternoon, Rod called him and said, “I’ve talked to them all, Freddie. You can give it to the papers in time for the late editions.”

  But by then Troy had worked out the question that mattered most.

  “Rod, who was Viktor hiding?”

  §124

  Rod said, “I’m over the way. As we’re this close, why don’t I come to you, or you to me?”

  That was a nonchoice. Troy dashed out of his office, down the subway under Bridge Street to the iron gate that segregated the Palace of Westminster from the British public and the Circle and District Lines. A quick salute from the copper on duty, up the stairs, and into Rod’s office, not quite breathless.