by John Lawton
Troy turned to see Cid on the far side of the room. Laura turned at the sound of her voice, brush in hand, and smiled at him without speaking.
“I’m dodging awkward questions,” he said.
“And Alex is dodging being painted,” said Cid. “But he won’t get away with it. Now, are the boys happy up there?”
“I think so. But I also think that this might be the beginning of the end. The first death is inevitably the first rift.”
“Oh, bum. These do’s mean so much to Rod. It’s a life before parliament, a life outside parliament. He’d be devastated if they didn’t meet once in a while. Most blokes his age have their battalion or their squadron reunions. So does Rod, he goes to them and sometimes they all come here. But it doesn’t matter to him in the way this does. Rod has the blokes upstairs. While he has them he has the best of his war, his ‘good war.’ The Battle of Britain was a skirmish compared to what he thinks he went through with them.”
“Look at it this way,” Troy said softly to avoid the kids hearing. “Suicide is a stone dropped in a pond. The ripples are little short of infinite. There is nothing, and I have no better word than this, there is nothing natural about suicide . . . you don’t need to be religious, you don’t need to be Hamlet to recognize the canon ’gainst self-slaughter. It is a more disturbing death than murder. It can destroy a society beyond any healing.”
“I sort of see what you mean and I sort of don’t.”
“Well, let’s deal with Rod—the only mind we can read after all . . . I don’t know what makes Billy or Lou tick and I doubt even the Almighty has a handle on Joe . . . but Rod is dogged by Viktor’s death. Rod is asking why. And he may never get an answer.”
§130
The telephone was ringing.
“Troy? Is Voytek.”
Well . . . he had given her his card.
“Do you wish to walk out with me on Saturday night?”
It was such an old-world turn of phrase he could not be certain what she had in mind.
“Er . . . yes . . . why not?”
“I have two tickets for a music evening at Hampstead Library. They send them to Viktor ages ago, and Viktor give them to me.”
“Great. What time?”
“Seven thirty. I see you there.”
Hampstead Library held bad memories. In 1940 he had been a reluctant member of a team of coppers tasked with rounding up enemy aliens—people like Viktor Rosen. It left a bad taste in the mouth, doubly so since the chief inspector in charge had thumped Troy in the jaw for his disobedience that day.
He brushed the memory aside. Contemplated the banner hung above the door.
The Indian Music Circle
presents
Jaya Deva—Sitar
Rajan Angadi—Tabla
He’d no idea what a sitar was. Nor a tabla. Indeed, he’d no idea Hampstead had an Indian Music Circle.
Voytek appeared at his side.
“I’m baffled,” he said.
“Listen and learn,” she said.
Inside, a fat woman wrapped in an Indian sari greeted them in the plummy tones of the English upper classes. It was Laura Narayan. Laura Narayan in a sari, with a red spot painted just above the bridge of her nose.
“Oh, you should have told me you were coming!” she said to Troy. “And Miss Voytek. I loved your recital at the Wigmore in ’46. Simply wonderful.”
They were shown to seats at the front. Troy hated seats at the front if the object of the evening was unknown—made it all the harder to sneak out.
“What’s a sitar?” he whispered.
“Traditional stringed instrument. Not sure how many strings. Some fingered, some just drones. And to save you asking, a tabla is a drum.”
§131
He wasn’t at all sure he’d ever get used to music such as he’d just heard, and as he and Voytek walked back to his car he broke her contemplative silence and uttered an enquiring, “Well?”
“Give it time,” she replied. “I’ve never heard a sound like it. It is . . . unique . . . it has qualities you could never get from a western stringed instrument. We have nothing that uses drones—only bagpipes do that—and it adds something, a bedrock to the music, a core of . . . of humming . . . that’s not the right word . . . I cannot think of the right word in English.”
“But will it ever catch on?”
“What do you want, Troy? Predictions? All right—here’s a prediction. In ten or twenty years time it could be all the rage.”
Troy unlocked the car.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said.
Seated next to him as they drove down the Finchley Road, she said, “I needed to get out. I needed to get Viktor out of my thoughts, if only for an hour. If I stay at home I think of Viktor. And if I think of Viktor I find only questions without answers.”
Troy said, “I keep getting asked if Viktor was the type.”
“The type of what?”
“The type to kill himself.”
She was silent as far as Baker Street, as though working out the precise use of English in her head.
Then she said, “In Auschwitz I would hear of suicides, though there were fewer than you might imagine. A shot in the night usually meant someone had tried to reach the wire, and that was tantamount to suicide. I saw several women hurl themselves against the electrified wires, I saw their bodies in the distance, strung out like scarecrows until the Germans ordered them taken down. And I saw two suicides close up, in that they were women I knew, women who, against the odds, in a world without knives or razor blades had contrived to kill themselves . . . by hanging. I helped cut them down and remove the bodies from the hut in which I lived. We took suicide as a fact of life. We did not need to enquire about motives or types. However many or few of us did commit suicide, any one of us could have. That is what places like that did—they redefined what was normal.”
Troy said, “But you survived. Viktor survived. He survived . . . everything.”
From the tone of her voice Troy thought he might be being ignored. He wasn’t. The flat constancy of her delivery belied her subject.
“In Paris, after the war, I met, quite by chance, a ‘survivor.’ A Frenchman. A man who had been very good to me. Georges Pasdeloup. One night he followed me to a café. I had not asked for his company. Indeed, I had grown tired of it. Tired of being another ‘survivor.’ I wanted people with whom the bond was other—I wanted no part of a society of survivors. In the café, he produced a gun, put the barrel to his chin, and blew off the top of his head. I have no idea whether Georges was the ‘type’—given what he had been through it could not possibly have surprised me—it merely shocked me.”
“Merely?”
“Yes. Death retains the power to shock long after it has lost the power to surprise. If we knew what it was Viktor had survived, rather than simply being able to say that he had survived, then we, too, might fail to be surprised . . . we would not be asking pointlessly if he was the ‘type’ . . . we would merely be shocked. As I was and you surely were.”
Troy said, “And you weren’t surprised by Viktor’s suicide?”
“No, Mr. Troy, I was not.”
They had reached the corner of Dilke Street and Clover Mews. Evening had cooled into night.
“Come, Troy. Make tea once more and I shall play for you. I shall blow away the sitar and tabla that clearly did so little for you.”
She lit a wood fire in the iron stove while Troy boiled the kettle. As he set a cup of tea—black in the European fashion as she had requested—in front of her, she said, “You pick.”
“What if I pick something you don’t know?”
“Try me.”
“I have two recordings of the Bach suites. Pablo Casals’s . . . and yours.”
“Aha . . . which of the six.”
“The third I think.”
“Pick a movement. Something long enough for my tea to cool, short enough for it not to go stone cold.”
“This sounds
like Viktor choosing an encore . . . ‘how quickly can I get off the stage’ . . .”
“Just pick.”
“Sixth movement, the . . . er . . .”
“It’s a gigue, Troy.”
She took up her cello and played the piece from memory. Her touch was lighter than Casals—when he played Troy could hear darkness, could almost hear the strings bang on the neck—not that Casals was undance-like, but he felt that she gave it more the feeling of a dance, as the word “gigue” implied.
She came back to the fire, picked up her tea. “I used to play that for the commandant of Auschwitz.”
Troy must have looked surprised, as she said, “Don’t be surprised. It was in my repertoire long before I met him. I first played it for Viktor when I was a child. Auschwitz killed my taste for bells. Auschwitz killed my taste for “Kraut und Rüben.” And I find I have no fondness left for lice or scabies either. But nothing could kill my taste for Bach.”
§132
The weather turned at the end of the month. A wet Friday evening Troy was content to spend alone. Content but not happy. He had books—indeed he had started the new Graham Greene, Rod had given it to him, the one about some chap in Africa called Scobie who kills himself; and he had the new Somerset Maugham, Rod had given him that, too; and he had an oddity by some Russian bloke who wrote in English, whose name Troy had not grasped and whose book (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, about which Rod was enthusing madly . . . “it’s these two brothers who don’t really understand one another”) he had lost down the back of the sofa—but he felt like reading nothing, and certainly nothing about a suicide. It was an effort to let himself be drawn into a world of another’s making. He had music aplenty. Tatum, Ellington, Goodman . . . but no record lasted much longer than four minutes and if he was feeling relaxed or lazy it was a pain in the arse to get up and turn the record over. He had heard talk of a new format that used an unbreakable plastic as its base and, as it played at 331/3 rather than 78 rpm, could fit half a dozen songs to a side or a whole symphony over two sides. It might be real, but it smacked to him of those dire exhibitions at which improbable futuristic gadgets—the nostick frying pan, the telephone answering machine—were displayed as part of a future that seemed to be forever in retreat.
Now he was listening to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Christian. He had flipped three 78s and felt that at the end of this one he could just let the needle spin in the groove until the clockwork motor wound down.
He had, he had always told himself, a great capacity for being alone. Why then had he found himself contemplating his single life with a cup of tea and Dizzy on a night when he could be out roister-doistering, as he was almost certain Jack was? When they were younger, not long after they had met in the middle of the war, Jack had tried to take Troy with him on double dates but had soon recognized Troy’s innate uselessness at what Anna called “sociosexual chitchat,” but Jack neatly reduced to two syllables as “pulling.” He had turned thirty-three at the end of August. No great age. A bit biblical in its significance—an age at which, as Dizzy might say, you “get it together, man.” Thirty-three and single. Rod had been married . . . he had to think now . . . at twenty-six . . . by thirty-three he had three children. Troy had not even come close to marriage. There had been no significant relationship in his life until 1939—a trip to Monte Carlo with his father just after the outbreak of war, whisked into bed by Zette Borg. With hindsight he had merely glanced off Zette, she had flicked him away with such ease, no more than a fly upon a rhino’s arse. Zette had gone to the United States in 1940 at the height of the Blitz. Years later he thought to ask Kornfeld if he had ever heard of her, as they worked in the same obscure nook of subatomic physics. “I suppose there’s no way you would know,” Arthur had replied. “But she worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, with Oppenheimer. She is the fairy godmother of the atom bomb.” The Zette of Troy’s memory would have pushed the button in person. And it now occurred to him that to the name of Oppenheimer they could add that of Karel Szabo.
Then there had been WPS Kitty Stilton, who had dumped him for two-timing her with Zette, reappeared a few months later, two-timed him with an American army officer, and gone back to the States with him as what Troy was pretty certain was the first ever GI bride. He’d read in the Post only the other day that her husband was running for the senate. Which fact pretty well guaranteed they’d never meet again.
In 1944, at the height of the Little Blitz, he had fallen for a Wac, Sergeant Larissa Tosca. He had two-timed Tosca with the biggest mistake of his life—an affair with a witness in a murder case, Lady Diana Brack. The mistake being that Brack had turned out to be the culprit, not a witness, and in the unravelling mess she had shot him and he her. She had died, Troy had lived with her ghost ever since. Tosca had vanished, presumed dead—and somewhere in the deeper recesses of the unconscious mind Troy did not believe this.
The knocking at the door was too solid to be ghostly; it cut through the last blast from Dizzy and it saved him from the oppressive weight of the recognition of his own deceit.
A short, stout man in a fawn mackintosh and a homburg hat stood dripping on his doorstep. Kolankiewicz.
“Aach!”
Troy took the needle from the groove and said, “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“No,” said Kolankiewicz. “It is a night for booze. Do you still have Polish vodka?”
Troy kept a bottle just for him under the sink—110 proof and, as far as Troy was concerned, undrinkable—along with odd bottles of claret from the wine cellar that he and Rod had inherited from their father (rationing was meaningless when you’d inherited a cellarful of booze), and the 90 proof Russian vodka he kept for his Uncle Nikolai, and the cheap, blended scotch he kept for Onions.
Kolankiewicz had hung up his mac and hat, left his shoes to drip upon the doormat, plonked himself upon the chaise longue. He looked uncomfortable. Troy stuck the bottle and a shot glass in front of him, left him to pour as much as he wanted and settled himself back down. From the look on Kolankiewicz’s face this probably wasn’t a purely social call.
“I fucked up,” Kolankiewicz said.
Troy said nothing.
“You phoned me, when was it now? I forget. Seems like weeks.”
It was weeks. Troy had not seen or talked to Kolankiewicz in more than a fortnight.
“We agreed that there was no evidence that pointed to murder in the matter of Viktor Rosen. You asked me to release the body for cremation, you told the coroner you would be presenting no evidence to contradict a verdict of suicide, and because I was rushed off my feet, I fucked up.”
“Unlike you,” Troy said, trying to ease him into the facts and out of self-recrimination.
“Then . . . Tom Henrey asked me to go up to Lincolnshire . . . the matter of the ‘Lincolnshire Poacher’ as the papers have dubbed him . . . One murder in the woods, a very battered body, followed by another, and after the second Tom sends for me . . .”
Tom Henrey was Troy’s immediate superior on the Murder Squad—detective chief inspector. He was one of those vague, upper-crust, ineffectual Englishmen who Troy found he could tolerate without actually liking. His saving grace was that he was either too dim or too polite to notice or comment on the number of times Onions gave the tricky cases to Troy and that there existed a short circuit in the chain of command between Troy and Onions that cut him out.
“I go up to Lincoln, and I do the postmortem on the second corpse, and I tell Tom I will stay for the third. Tom says ‘what third?’ I say, ‘he’ll do it again, trust me.’ And sure enough, thirty-two hours later another body turns up and I do another postmortem on a battered body, only this one was battered after death, not to death, and I upset all Tom’s theories by telling him the victim was poisoned. So now Tom is looking for two killers not one and I sneak back to London and leave him to it. And when I get back I find one of my assistants—the skinny bloke with the prominent mole—has exercised his usual house-proud tale
nts and tidied me up. Believe it or not there is now a cupboard in the corridor outside my office labelled ‘Troy’—and inside it is all the evidence and all the junk that for one reason or another I have never returned to you. Cupboard? No. A mausoleum for my sins.”
Kolankiewicz knocked back his first shot of vodka, poured another to stand until the need arose and opened up his Gladstone bag, from which he produced an enamel mug.
Troy did not have to think about it.
“Rosen,” he said.
“Rosen. I took it away to compare prints. I was all but certain they were his and they are. But, you will recall, the bedroom, the boudoir as it struck me, had been wiped completely. And I became curious as to where he kept his personal possessions . . . his clothes . . . his shaving brush.”
Kolankiewicz set a shaving brush next to the mug.
“Badger-hair from Truefitt and Hill. This was in the nearest bathroom to his bedroom. It and the matching razor were the only items with prints. Both his. Then, in the long corridor at the back, I discovered two walk-in closets, disguised in trompe l’oeil like the door from the main room to the lobby to look like part of the wall. Hats from Locks. Shoes from Lobbs. It seems that he had a smattering of everything St James’ Street could offer the adoptive English gent.”
“It was his favourite street. Rod tells me he could get lyrical about things English. Adored the view from Primrose Hill. Euphoric about Norman churches. I never heard it myself.”
“And . . . I went through his coat pockets, and in the inside pocket of a Crombie winter overcoat I found this.”
Kolankiewicz set a leather and silver hip flask next to the mug and the shaving brush.
“I had meant to dust all these items. Then the urgency evaporated from the case, then I got dragged down to Lincoln . . . so it was only this afternoon when I returned to Hendon and found this new model order awaiting me . . . a cupboard with your name upon it . . . that I tested them. It is the perfectionist in me . . . sometimes I do not understand him. I call the skinny bloke with the mole every obscenity in two languages for messing with my stuff . . . but then I cannot just let it lie. I have to dust the flask. Mappin Brothers, Regent Street, prewar. Probably pre the other war. Crocodile and silver. The crocodile is not so retentive. The silver has held fingerprints very clearly. It has Viktor Rosen’s right hand upon it, and also the right hand of another individual. These are the only fingerprints I have found anywhere in that apartment that do not belong to Viktor Rosen. And they belong to André Skolnik.”
