by Simon Raven
‘So the Acting Governor turned his spies and informers on to the investigation. This was more difficult and prolonged than he had expected, as the Kommingi had covered their tracks with some skill. Indeed it was necessary to send to Venice itself and request the Venetians’ experienced assistance in the matter, which turned on issues too delicate and distant to be resolved by a mere Acting Governor of a small island in the Ionian Sea. It was at this stage – five days after the collected evidence had been sent, in the care of a special Commissioner, to Venice – that the Kommingi vanished. One and all, root and branch, lock, stock and barrel. One day they were living with every refinement in their magnificent house, which overlooked the harbour and three of their ships at anchor in it. The next morning the house was a shell and the ships were gone.’
‘Why hadn’t they been arrested? I mean, if the Acting Governor had got as far as sending the evidence against them to Venice, one would expect them to have been detained.’
‘Ah-ha. They were given a chance to slip away because that was what the Acting Governor really wanted. He wanted them out of the way, not volubly defending themselves in Courts of Law, where they would certainly have retailed at length his own motives for pursuing the investigations against them. A trial might have been the ruin of everyone, as both the Acting Governor and the Kommingi were sensible enough to see. As it was, a satisfactory solution had been reached. The Kommingi had departed South and East and would not be heard of again in Venetian territories whether for good or ill; while the Commissioner, who held the evidence against them, had been instructed not to make too much bustle about it in Venice – whither he had been sent only in order to delay the proceedings and give the Kommingi the time to gather up their effects and depart at leisure.’
‘I should have thought the Acting Governor would have liked them to depart hugger-mugger – leaving their effects behind for official confiscation.’
‘Why? The confiscated property would not have gone to him, since he was an honest man, but would have escheated to the state. He was not, furthermore, a man to bear animus. Although he may have disapproved of the Kommingi, he didn’t hate them. He had the one thing he ever wanted – the Virgil – and he wished everyone well, including the Kommingi, provided only he could be sure that they wouldn’t make injurious remarks, so to speak, in his own parish. The Kommingi were now gone – to Lycia, as he later learned – et voilà…’
‘All very interesting,’ Balbo said. ‘But as you must realize, what I want to know is not where they went after Corfu but where they came from before.’
‘I am coming to that, good Kyrie Blakeney. As I say, before the Kommingi departed the island inquiries had been made about them and evidence had then been sent to Venice. But never forget that the persons to initiate the inquiries were the Komiki. So it is at least possible that the Komiki discovered where the Kommingi had come from when they first arrived in Corfu, and that the information is available to this day in their family records.’
‘The Komiki never published it?’
‘Neither then nor ever. But they are still there on Corfu, the Komiki, and it is possible that their records of this affair are still there with them. But your approach to them would have to be delicate. I myself tried to win their acquaintance, at a time when I was as not dirty as I am now’ – he spread his fingers before his face – ‘but was spurned because I was not a gentleman. You, good Kyrie, they will know to be a gentleman, and so it could be easier for you. But do not count on that. They have some family secret or catastrophe – nothing to do with what we have been talking of but something that came to them much later – and this makes them wary of strangers.’
‘If the Komiki were not communicative,’ said Balbo, ‘there might be something to my purpose in the official records of the Island and City of Corfu, dating from when the Acting Governor of Corfu took over the inquiries from the Komiki.’
‘Which was a very long time ago. Wars, revolutions, plagues and massacres have intervened. It is not only the Library of Corfu which has been destroyed. Official archives and records have likewise perished from time to time. Fire has gutted them or damp has rotted them or the prudence of man has buried or sunk them. Besides, the abstract of the inquiry which the Commissioner took to Venice may well have been the only copy and may well have stayed there. I do not think you will find what you want in Corfu unless it be in the private possession of the Komiki.’
‘Who may not be willing to talk. What then?’
‘Then…Venezia will be your only chance. We know that the Special Commissioner appointed to carry the evidence thither was instructed not to be…officious…in the matter. However, it is possible that at some stage the report was actually handed over to the Venetians, and if so, whether or not anything was ever done about it, it may well still be in the official archives – since those of the Serene Republic are less vulnerable and more carefully preserved than those of Corfu – and it may well contain the information you wish.’
‘I.e.: where did the Kommingi live and operate before they went to Corfu.’
‘So there it is, good Kyrie Blakeney. You should proceed first to the Komiki in Corfu, whom you will find unwelcoming of strangers; then to the official archivists of the City, who will almost certainly be unable to help you; and last to the official archivists of Venezia, who can throw open to you, should they be in a good mood, miles and miles of corridors crammed to the ceiling with documents among which you may seek a hundred years for the ones you desire…only to find them useless.’
‘That’s about it I suppose.’ Balbo sighed. ‘Thank you, Stavros.’
‘And thank you for thanking me, good Kyrie Blakeney. But if you ask my advice, you will not trouble to do any of these things. You will cease to be a hunter of treasure…which you find exciting but upsetting, destructive of tranquillity and grating on the nerves…and you will become, like me, a dreamer at home.’
‘What home?’
‘My home. Here.’
Balbo looked slowly round the crumbling basilica, up at the gaps in the roof and down again at Stavros Kommingi as he sat by his side on the sedilia. The proposal was preposterous but not, somehow, embarrassing. Stavros was neither importunate nor grovelling; he was merely making a modest invitation and in the mildest manner. The only problem was how to refuse him with a good grace.
‘If you stay, I will find you drink,’ said Stavros. ‘I see that this is what you need, and I will find it for you. I am good at finding people what they need.’
‘How is it,’ said Balbo, temporizing, ‘that you speak such fluent and idiomatic English?’
‘I had an English friend. Here. Until not long ago. I found him in Corfu, when I was there reading in the Library of which I told you. Unlike you, he did not need drink, but he wished to be assured. He was travelling in search of assurance, and he thought that I might provide it.’
‘Assurance of what?’
‘He had been, for a time, a Franciscan Friar. Before that he had been a student. As a student he had witnessed something ugly – he never told me what – for which he was in part responsible. Although at first not much affected, he had been belatedly tortured by dormant remorse, and had fled from England. Eventually he had taken refuge with the Good Brothers in Italy, who at first calmed and soothed him by their gentleness and love of God’s creatures, but later annoyed and disgusted him by their naivety and ignorance.’
‘But what assurance did he seek that you could possibly provide?’
‘The assurance that he had been right to despise and desert the Good Brothers. He wished passionately to disbelieve in God, and he thought that this basilica – which I described to him one day – would help him. “Ah-ha,” he said when I spoke of it, “the mouldering coffin of God, cast amid thistles upon wasteland.” So he came here with me and seemed to derive satisfaction from the spectacle of this poor church and from our life here in its shadow. For myself, I did not care what his motive was, only so long as he stayed with me. Fo
r I loved him, in a sort, and my hands were not dirty then.’ He spread his hands before him. ‘If you stayed, good Kyrie Blakeney, I would make them clean again.’
‘What happened to your Englishman?’
Just perceptibly Stavros flinched before answering.
‘In time, he went. One morning I awoke and he was gone. It would be the same with you. You would be quite free to go, you see. So why not stay, just a little while, and try what dreaming can do? If only for one night…’
Balbo looked at the morose and degraded piebald dog, which had apparently returned to the sanctuary unnoticed while he was talking with Stavros and was now emerging from it once more through the hole in the screen. ‘It keeps its bones there,’ Stavros had said. And now it was carrying one of them out. Not without difficulty; for the bone, a shin bone by the look of it, kept getting stuck. Where, thought Balbo vaguely, would the dog have found a shin bone? Too long for a goat and too short for a cow. Balbo, though a biochemist, had once done a short course on the anatomy of mammals in preparation for his wartime duties, which had at first comprised other matters than plague rats; and so he could with confidence pronounce that the shin bone, which the dog was now at last carrying down the nave, was too long for a goat or a sheep, too short for a horse or a cow. The right length for a calf then? Perhaps… except that one slight bulge, just below where the shin would have fitted the knee joint, stirred Balbo’s distant memories of his wartime course and produced a flickering vision in his mind of an old man in a white coat who was pointing with a long, white wand at the knee joint of a human skeleton.
‘A man to see you,’ said Elvira Constable, poking her nose into her husband’s study and instantly withdrawing it.
‘What do you mean, “a man”?’ said Provost Constable of Lancaster College.
‘I mean, not a gentleman,’ said Lady Constable, prodding her nose through the doorway again.
‘I wish you wouldn’t make remarks like that. One of these days some wretched student will hear you and make trouble. What’s his name, this – er – man?’
‘I shouldn’t think it matters, should you? Anyway, he hasn’t really got one.’
‘Stop being silly, Elvira. Of course he has a name.’
‘I was speaking metaphorically. In fact his name is Jones, and here’s his card to prove it.’
Syd Jones, said the card; and unexpectedly added an address in Jermyn Street and a West End telephone number.
‘Ask Mr Jones to come in,’ said Lord Constable.
‘Go in,’ said Lady Constable at once, shooting her nose back and forth through the doorway like a woodpecker working on vacancy. A man, who must have been standing just behind her the entire time she was talking to the Provost, worked his way round her and through what was left of the entrance. Luckily he was a very small man.
‘That will be all, Elvira.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’
Lady Constable curtsied and withdrew.
‘My wife is rather eccentric,’ said Lord Constable to Mr Jones.
‘Just so long as she ain’t dangerous,’ said Mr Jones in a high-pitched and good-humoured Australian accent. ‘Nah then: you’re Lord Constable of Reculver Castle, life only, first and last; and you’re also Provost of this College…which means ye run the place?’
‘I do, sir. What do you want with me?’
‘Information, Lord Constable of Reculver Castle. I come from Jermyn Street, as my card states. Yer know what all that means?’
‘No. Why should I?’
‘Cos you’ve got a knowing sort of look. But since yer don’t…’
Mr Jones tapped the top of his ginger head with four fingers of both hands.
‘Intelligence,’ he said. He lifted the lapel of his coat and huddled behind it. ‘The old cloak and dagger game.’
‘Do you possess…rather more adequate means of identifying yourself than this card?’
‘No, Lord Constable of Reculver Castle. If yer doubt me – and I agree my Oz accent may strike yer funny – ring the number on my card. They’ll put ye straight. And then, ever when y’er ready, we’ll talk.’
‘Shall we indeed?’
‘Yeez,’ said the chipper little man. ‘Suit yerself whether yer ring the old firm first. Yer’ve forgotten to ask me to sit down, but I’m not a man to take offence.’
He perched his scanty bottom on a hard chair, took some notes from a briefcase, held them right up in front of his face, and began (presumably) to read them.
‘Why are you working for a department of the British Government,’ said Constable, ‘when you yourself are Australian?’
‘I’m not Australian. I went there to play cricket. I liked the accent and brought it home with me.’
‘Syd Jones,’ said Constable, reading from the card. He put it down and went on in a sing-song voice, like a big child telling over its lesson. ‘Otherwise Jones, S, of Glamorgan, capped in 1946 and retired in 1957, all-rounder, one tour of Australia and one of South Africa, best Test Match performances five wickets for seventy-three runs and a hundred and three not out, both in the same match – versus Australia at Lords in 1951.’
‘Good going, sport. You a cricketer chap yerself?’
‘No, but I have a passion for Wisden. I never played the game, not even at school, and I never watched it,’ said Constable; ‘but I have every extant volume of Wisden and one or other is always by my bed.’
‘What’s the attraction if yer don’t like the game?’
‘Figures. Records. Averages. Number of centuries scored, number of hat tricks taken. Aggregate of runs made by such or such a man (a) in Test Matches, (b) in First Class Cricket as a whole. To me,’ said Lord Constable, ‘there is fascination here. Like a rare and powerful drug. Wisden both soothes and stimulates me.’
‘Sounds a bit whacky from where I sit.’
‘I know, I know. There is a strain of madness here. I have never before confessed this taste to anyone. No one knows save my wife, who dusts the volume currently on my bed table. But since you yourself figure in that magic compilation, I can surely confide in you. I was reading of you only the other night. You made a nought in both innings –’
‘– A pair of ghoolies –’
‘– Against Derbyshire at Chesterfield in 1948. Oh, how infinitely satisfying those two chaste symbols appear with your name, twice in the same line of the page. Jones (S) caught and bowled Sligsby…nought. And then, in the column for the second innings but, as I say, on the same line: Jones (S) lbw bowled Bowles…nought. I think it is my favourite entry in the volume – if not in the whole great work.’
‘It wasn’t so bleeding lovely when it happened, I’m here to tell yer that.’
‘And so how is it, Jones, S, of Glamorgan, that you come to be doing…the very different work…on which you are now apparently engaged?’
‘I knew a chap who knew a chap who asked me to run a message to a chap in Jo’burg when I went there on the SA tour. Nasty complications but mission accomplished. Department grateful, see? Took me on when cricket left me off, and shunted me into the Jermyn Street branch, which means home affairs. Home affairs include dicey dons. One of yer dons is dicey.’
‘Which one?’
‘The one that’s gone straying off over Europe.’
‘That’ll be Doctor Jacquiz Helmut,’ said Constable with relish.
‘Never’eard of that bastard. Try again.’
‘None of my dons, except Doctor Helmut, has gone straying off over Europe.’
‘Pardon me, Lord Constable of Reculver Castle. What about a certain Balbo Blakeney?’
‘He is no longer one of my dons. Dismissed his post in the University and consequently deprived of his Fellowship of this College. For drink.’
‘He’s still on the list, sport.’
‘He won’t be on the next one. What do you want with him?’
‘Rats. During the war he worked with rats. Right?’
‘I dare say.’
‘And I do say.
Nothing much came of it, but he had a hand with rats. We think he knows something…which we’d rather like to know but don’t. Rats are back in fashion, see? Read me, do yer?’
‘I read you, Jones, S.’
‘Dinkum so far then. But you tell me this Blakeney number is a wayback boozer?’
‘Dismissed for it.’
‘That’s bad, him being a boozer. He may have forgotten what he knew. Where is he?’
‘As you said, Jones, S, of Glamorgan: straying over Europe.’
‘Please be more precise, Lord Constable?’
‘Why should I be? I had to dismiss Blakeney, but I bear him no malice. Why should I allow him to be badgered about by you?’
‘You don’t like me?’
‘I like you well enough, in so far as I know you. It’s your department I don’t trust. I don’t think your department is going to be very kind to Balbo Blakeney. He has plenty to endure just now without unkindness.’
Lord Constable was a hard and resourceful man who, in the interest of Lancaster College as he conceived it, would stop at nothing to get his way. In the interest of the College he would deceive and exploit (as he was presently exploiting Ivor Winstanley), he would lie, betray and cheat (as he intended to cheat Jacquiz Helmut), and he would crush without mercy (as he had recently crushed Balbo Blakeney). But once he had had his way for the College’s sake he bore no ill will for his own. His victims, once they had been so disciplined or disposed of that they could no longer fail or harm his College, could remain his friends, if they would, and, even if they would not, could expect from him nothing but courtesy and kindness. Lord Constable, so far from being vindictive, was of all men ceteris strictly paribus, the most considerate. He was therefore very sorry for Balbo and wished that Balbo might suffer no more than he had to; Balbo had been his man once, a bad man but his man, and in so far as he still could he would protect him now. And so, ‘Balbo Blakeney has plenty to endure,’ Constable repeated to Jones, S. ‘I want him left alone.’
‘He won’t be left alone. When the likes of me comes prying, no one we want is left alone. You know that, Lord Constable of Reculver Castle. We’ll find out where he is whether or not you tell us. And in the latter event we shan’t be very pleased with you.’
