A Dead Man in Trieste (4 page)

Or, just a minute, was she? She had given it a red nose, large breasts with huge red nipples, and red drawers, into the seat of which she was fitting two large balloons.

What the hell was this? Some kind of student prank?

When he came out of the Casa Revoltella the woman was still there. She had added a cigar, stuck, somehow, into the statue’s mouth, and a fish, draped casually over the Duke’s ear.

Amused, and slightly curious, he wandered over towards her.

She stepped back to admire her handiwork.

‘For God’s sake, Maddalena!’ said a voice that Seymour recognized.

‘Alfredo, is that you? You have come at last. Have you brought it?’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Please, Alfredo! What is art without the recording?’

She draped herself beside the statue while Alfredo assembled an ancient camera upon a tripod. He disappeared for a moment beneath the cloth. Then his head appeared again.

‘Maddalena, is this wise?’

‘I hope not.’

‘No, no. That you should appear in the photograph, I mean.’

‘You think that the artist should not show herself in her work but be somewhere else, indifferently paring her fingernails?’

‘I was merely thinking that offering too faithful a record might be to be unnecessarily helpful to the police.’

‘Perhaps you are right.’

She removed herself from the statue.

Alfredo suddenly noticed Seymour.

‘Maddalena, this is a friend of mine. A friend of Lomax’s too.’

She came over to him.

‘A friend of Lomax’s?’

‘Well, not exactly a friend –’

‘He has just arrived from London.’

‘From London? You are a consul, too?’

‘No, no. Just a King’s Messenger.’

She moved away.

‘Alfredo!’

‘Yes?’

‘You disappoint me. First, you didn’t want to take my photograph, and now you are friends with kings!’

‘Messenger,’ said Seymour. ‘Just Messenger.’

‘Are you?’ said Alfredo. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

‘You should choose your friends more carefully, Alfredo. However, since he is also a friend of Lomax’s, I will forgive you this time.’

‘Thank you, Maddalena. And now may I get on with taking the photograph before the policeman gets here from the next piazza?’

He put his head back beneath the cloth.

‘Alfredo.’

‘Yes, Maddalena?’ wearily.

‘A touch of mascara around his eyes, do you think?’

‘No.’

‘Spoiling the ship, you think?’

‘I think the policeman will get here before I finish taking the photograph.’

‘How do you know he is coming?’

‘Because I can see him across the piazza.’

On the other side of the piazza there was a sudden shout and then a piercing blast on a whistle.

‘Maddalena –’

‘There is no hurry. He is very fat and will take some time to get here.’

Alfredo emerged hurriedly from beneath the cloth.

‘Did you get it?’

‘Of course.’

He lifted off the camera and grabbed the tripod.

’You run that way,’ said Maddalena, ‘and I will run the other way.’

So this was Maddalena, thought Seymour. The woman, according to Koskash, who might have accounted for Lomax’s sudden enthusiasm for art and who had, perhaps, introduced him to the artists. Well, from what he had so far learned about him, she fitted pretty well with the picture of Lomax that Seymour was beginning to build up. An oddball woman to go with an oddball man.

He could quite see, however, how a woman like Maddalena might appeal to a man like Lomax. He constructed for himself a mental picture of a staid single man who had spent all his life as a conventional diplomat and who had then, suddenly, run into a woman who was completely outside his range of experience, striking – she was beautiful, Seymour suddenly realized, in an odd, offbeat kind of way, he could quite see how an artist might want her to model for him – unconventional, disturbingly so, challenging Lomax (excitingly?) in all his conventional pores, vital – vital enough, perhaps, to pour new blood into a consul’s shrivelled-up veins and make him fancy he could lead a new life, start again in this sunny Mediterranean place, break free from the mould, kick over the traces –

Run away? Walk out on a job that suddenly seemed stale and sterile to him? Run away with Maddalena and start again?

Only he hadn’t run away. At least, not with Maddalena. She was still here. It was only he who had disappeared.

And maybe the whole picture was false, anyway. Maybe she had not had an impact on him quite like that. Maybe he had indeed, for a moment, entertained the fantasy, put a foot over the traces, but then the ingrained caution of the diplomat had reasserted itself, telling him that though it was lovely it was not for him.

He was going too far in his speculation, he knew. But something had happened to Lomax when he had come to Trieste. Something had changed him. (Because he couldn’t have been like this before he was posted to Trieste, could he? Surely they would have kicked him out?) No, he had changed after he arrived. That was what Koskash had said, hadn’t he? His passion for art hadn’t been there when he arrived, it had developed afterwards, after he had met Maddalena. No, something had changed Lomax on his arrival in Trieste, and that something looked very much like Maddalena.

It was almost disappointingly simple. A single, middle-aged man, stuck in the groove for most of his life, had suddenly been jolted out of it by meeting a beautiful, disturbing woman and had stepped over the traces. It was an old story.

But was it a true one? Seymour tested it again and felt, yes, that he would go for it in every particular.

Except one. Where
was
Lomax? Set aside Kornbluth’s dark hints and the Foreign Office’s oblique ones, set aside speculation about currents nationalist or otherwise, and you were still left with the fact that a responsible man, a consul, had disappeared. Seymour would have to explain that, discover what had happened to him, before he could go home.

But meanwhile he could enjoy the sun and all the diverse life of a great sea port. He could listen to all the different voices, of especial interest to him as a man who in a sense lived in languages. He could even hear, faintly, echoes of the languages of his childhood and of the languages of the East End and, more faintly still, echoes of the experience behind the languages.

And he might even, he almost certainly would, meet Maddalena again. Seymour was no Lomax. He was, for a start, ten, fifteen, years younger. No mid-life crisis for him, not, at any rate, for some time yet. No urge to kick over the traces – he was very happy with the way things were, thank you. And there was no likelihood at all of his falling for what his mother would call a fancy woman.

All the same, at the prospect of meeting Maddalena again, he felt his pulses quicken.

That evening he went back to his hotel early to write his first report, an obligation the Foreign Office had laid upon him. Regular reports every three days. Empires, whether British or Austro-Hungarian, ran on paper. Lomax had been right about that.

He didn’t find it easy. Kornbluth had been long on hints and short on the particulars of Lomax’s disappearance and Seymour knew little more now than he had when he arrived. And how far should he set down the details of Lomax’s al fresco style as Consul? Even to remark it might seem to the lordly people of the Foreign Office like . . . what was the phrase?
Lèse-majesté
. Taking the sovereign’s majesty lightly. And then that kind of detail didn’t fit too well in a formal report; not in the kind of report you wrote in Whitechapel, anyway.

In the end he kept it brief and factual, putting in the times and dates that Kornbluth had given him and confining his account of Lomax to a few vague phrases: ‘slightly irregular style of life’, that sort of thing. It took him a long time, however, and he didn’t get to bed till late.

* * *

In what seemed the middle of the night he was woken by Koskash and told that he should go down to the little harbour where the fishing boats docked.

It was still dark as they went through the streets. Nothing was stirring even in the tiny piazzas where the markets were held. Seymour had half expected to find the ox-carts already coming in with their produce and no doubt they would be doing so later. He caught the raw sea smell as they drew near to the docks and felt the chill of the water on his face.

Down by the harbour there was movement. Men were already standing at the edge of the quay ready to unload the fishing boats as they came in, and in a long shed set back from the water and lit only by a dim lamp women were waiting with their knives.

A man detached himself from the dark huddle on the quayside and came towards them. It was Kornbluth. They shook hands.

‘I am sorry,’ he said.

Out in the bay Seymour could see lights.

‘The boats are coming in,’ Kornbluth said.

The lights seemed steady at first but as they drew nearer they swayed and bobbed. He saw that they were attached to the tops of the masts and moved to the movement of the sea.

It was getting lighter now and he could see more clearly the people standing waiting. Ox-carts were assembling near the shed, ready to take the fish up to the markets. Already there was a strong smell of fish in the air.

The men on the quay began to stir. The first boat was coming in.

It turned and nosed its way along the quay. Ropes were thrown and it came to a stop. Men at once jumped down into its hold.

Kornbluth went to the edge of the quay and asked something. One of the fishermen jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

The other boats were coming in now. In the growing light Seymour could see their blunt prows more clearly and make out the cabbalistic symbols on their sides. As each boat tied up, Kornbluth went to it and said something. Eventually he came to one and stopped.

He came back to where Seymour and Koskash were standing and said:

‘Over here.’

They went up to the shed where the women were waiting with their knives. They had spread out along a grey, stone table.

The first fish were tipped on to it and they set to work immediately. There was a lamp overhead and in its light the scales of the fish glinted. Where the lamp did not reach, the fish glowed in the darkness with a strange luminescence. Already the colours of the fish were fading.

Outside, men were loading barrels on to the carts and the first cart had already set off.

Kornbluth led them through to an inner room where there was another grey slab and some women were opening shellfish. They inserted the tips of their knives, twisted and prised the lips apart. Then, without taking the shells off, they dropped them into buckets at their feet.

Kornbluth told them to stop and they shrugged their shoulders and moved away.

Fishermen brought in a plank on which something was lying. They tipped it on to the slab.

Kornbluth said something testily and one of the men brought in another lamp, which he put down at the head of the slab.

There was a reek of fish in the air and water dripped down on to the floor. Kornbluth removed some of the seaweed and threw it into a corner. Then he took the lamp and held it up above the face of the man who was lying there. He looked at it steadily for a moment and then nodded.

Then he pulled Koskash forward and held him while he lifted the lamp and Koskash looked down.

‘Yes?’ he said.

Chapter Four

Seymour was sitting in Lomax’s apartment. On the table in front of him was a pile of ticket stubs, the ones he had noticed in the pockets of Lomax’s empty suits. He counted forty-seven of them. He knew now what they were: cinema tickets.

Cinema? Seymour knew, of course, what cinemas were. He had even been to one, once. But they didn’t figure big in the East End. They didn’t figure that largely, as far as he knew, in the more prosperous districts further west. The one in the East End was above a billiards room and its grey, disjointed, flickering delights were intended to add to the appeal of the room below; as well as, Seymour suspected, enticing patrons on to further rooms upstairs in which ladies were waiting to encourage them to other forms of activity. It all seemed very dubious to Seymour.

But here in Trieste cinema did not seem at all dubious! On the contrary, it seemed above board, thriving and very popular.

‘There’s the Excelsior, the Americano, the Edison, the Royal Biograph, the Teatro Fenice . . .’ Kornbluth said with pride. ‘Trieste,’ he said, ‘is the cinema capital of the world.’

Seymour felt slightly put out. London, in his mind, was the capital of the world in almost everything: and now to come to a place like Trieste, which, let’s face it, no one had ever heard of, and find that it, too, had claims was mildly disconcerting. Of course, the claims were only to leadership in the seedy world of a dubious form of popular entertainment, but all the same . . . Seymour had already taken it for granted that the appeal of the cinema would flicker out in the same way as its jerky images were always threatening to do; or, at least, that cinema would not catch on. Could he have been wrong? Could this actually be in some way the shape of the future?

Surely not. And yet Lomax has evidently embraced it wholeheartedly. More than wholeheartedly: extravagantly. Forty-seven tickets! The man must have been completely hooked.

Another not exactly normal thing to add to the apparently infinite list of Lomax’s eccentricities! But Seymour felt a little twinge of sadness. Was this all that Lomax’s stepping over the traces amounted to? Was going to the cinema the summit of the
dolce vita
? If it was, Seymour felt the need for a certain revisionism in his thinking.

And yet it looked as if this mild, slightly ridiculous, excess had had a part to play in whatever it was that had happened to Lomax. For in going through the pockets of the suit that Lomax had been dressed in, in the presence of Seymour as consular representative, Kornbluth had found a grey, smudged, almost dissolved ticket, just one, but which Kornbluth, looking at it, had thought could be for a performance on the night that Lomax had died.

‘I can’t be sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to put it to my people. But I think it’s for the Edison, and they changed the tickets just about that time. This is one of the new ones.’

There was nothing that Seymour himself could do with the tickets. It would have to await the verdict of Kornbluth’s people. He pushed the pile away and turned to making a list of Lomax’s effects. He would send it back to London and they, presumably, would forward it on to Lomax’s next of kin.

The thought sent his mind back to the letter from Lomax’s ‘Auntie Vi’ which had also been found stuffed in the pocket of one of his suits. Seymour took it out and read it through.

The big news it contained was that Lomax’s Uncle Sid had gone in to Manchester to have his teeth done. Seymour knew Manchester or, rather, of Manchester. It was another place where immigrants went. Some of the Jewish tailors he knew in the East End had relatives there. What they had told him of the poorer parts where they lived had not made him want to go there.

And yet for Auntie Vi Manchester had seemed an El Dorado. While Uncle Sid had been having his teeth done she had gone to ‘the big shops’ and she listed their names and her purchases with starry-eyed breathlessness. Seymour wondered what Warrington could be like.

Warrington, it appeared, was where Lomax had grown up too. The letter was full of ‘you will remember, of course’ and references to places and people’s names. Seymour wondered if Auntie Vi and Uncle Sid had been substitute parents. There was no mention of parents and the letter breathed a closeness which Seymour, used to family closeness, could recognize.

But if it breathed closeness, it also breathed narrowness. Lomax had travelled a long way to get from Warrington to Trieste. Seymour had learned enough about the Foreign Office now to realize that there was a considerable difference between a consul and the lordly figures he had encountered in London. A consul, he had worked out, was the journeyman of the Diplomatic Service, the man who conducted much of the humdrum business of ports and trade. He operated at a different level from the ambassadors and secretaries and, given the kind of institution that the Foreign Office seemed to be, that meant that he was usually recruited from a different social level. Going by the letter, that certainly seemed to be true in Lomax’s case. Coming from such a background, Lomax had done well to get where he had done. Trieste, Seymour was beginning to see, was a more important place than he had thought.

He read through the letter again and was struck by its warmth. The news of Lomax’s death would come as a shock. He hoped that the Foreign Office would break it gently. When he remembered the stiffness of the people he had encountered there, however, he didn’t think that was likely. Prompted by a sudden movement of sympathy, arising, perhaps, because the memory of Lomax lying there on the slab was so fresh in him, he wrote Auntie Vi a letter of condolence. He realized, of course, that it was not the sort of thing he should do: either as a policeman or as a member, if only temporary, of the Diplomatic Service.

‘If you or I disappear,’ Alfredo had said, ‘that is nothing. But if an official disappears . . .!’ And all the more so, apparently, if an official died in suspicious circumstances. Nobody had taken much notice of Lomax living; dead, he seemed to have become the centre of Trieste’s attention. A whole string of people came to the Consulate to express their condolences.

Mostly they expressed them to a slightly surprised Seymour.

‘Well, they wouldn’t express them to me,’ said Koskash. ‘I am just a clerk.’

‘Yes, but I’m not even – I mean, I’m not a permanent person here.’

‘You don’t have to be permanent, you just have to be British,’ said Koskash. ‘And vaguely official. A uniform would, of course, help.’

‘Well, I can tell you –’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Koskash kindly. ‘There just has to be some focus for symbolic diplomatic action. A donkey would do just as well.’

Seymour wasn’t sure if this made him feel any better. Anyway, the doyen of the consular corps was waiting outside so he pulled himself to attention, put on a sombre face, and told Koskash he could show him in.

Signor Caramelli was a distinguished-looking, grey- haired man who shook his hand sadly and then held on to it for longer than Seymour liked.

‘It is with deep regret. . . . I speak for the whole consular corps . . . So sad. Signor Lomax was a man much loved.’

But not, perhaps, much known; certainly not by Signor Caramelli, who got his name wrong several times in the conversation that followed.

Nor, perhaps, by Herr Stückenmeier, who came in afterwards.

‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘Deepest regrets. That such a thing should happen to so popular a figure as Mr . . . Mr . . . Lamberg? . . . comes as a shock to all of us.’

It was with some relief that Seymour heard an English voice in the office outside.

Its owner announced himself.

‘Barton,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m the Peninsular man here. Sorry to hear about Lomax. I suppose that goes for all of us, although most of us didn’t know him very well. He never had much to do with the Club.’

‘Club?’

‘The English Club. For people who work here. Only English, of course. Nothing against the Triestians, it’s just that if you’re with them all day, sometimes you want to get away.’

‘But you say that Lomax . . .?’

‘Wasn’t like that.’ Barton seemed puzzled. ‘Spent all his time in the piazza. With Italians! Could never understand that. The man who was here before him – Shockley, his name was – was in the Club all the time.’

‘Well, I suppose it take all sorts –’

‘Yes. I know. But a consul ought not to be spending all his time with locals. He ought to be a bit detached. That’s why it’s useful to have a place like the Club. You can get away from everybody, be with your own. I daresay you’ll find that.’

‘Actually, I’m only here temporarily –’

‘Just standing in? Well, at least they’ve got someone here quickly. And that’s important in a place like Trieste, where there are a lot of business interests. Look, you’re very welcome to make use of the Club while you’re here. Just sign yourself in. I’ll look after the sponsoring.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind of you.’

‘Not at all.’

Barton held out his hand.

‘I’ve got to push off, I’m afraid. Trouble at the docks again. Sorry about Lomax. Funny bloke. Can’t say I really got on with him. Could never make him out. All right at his job, I will say that. But you never knew where you were with him. Too much in with the locals. You began to wonder whose side he was on.’

When the stream had subsided, Koskash came in.

‘Schneider wants to see you,’ he said.

‘Fine, show him in.’

‘No, no. You go to him, he doesn’t come to you.’

‘Well, all right, if that’s the way it is. Where do I go?’

‘The police station.’

‘Police station?’

‘There’s a special part. Behind the main building.’

‘Well, all right. And I just ask for Schneider, do I? Will that be enough?’

‘Oh, yes. That will be enough.’

‘Look, who the hell is Schneider?’

Koskash considered for a moment.

‘In Trieste,’ he then said carefully, ‘there are two sorts of police.’

‘Yes, yes, someone else has told me that.’

‘The ordinary sort – Kornbluth is one of those. And – well, a different sort. The special police. They deal mostly with political matters.’

‘Well, I’m like that. Mostly.’

‘You are?’ Koskash looked at him evenly. ‘Well, then, you and Schneider should get on.’

* * *

Inside the room a man was sitting at a desk. He wore a general’s uniform and had close-cropped hair and a scar a duelling scar? – on his cheek.

‘Herr Seymour? From the British Consulate?’

He rose and shook hands.

‘I was very sorry to hear – we were all very sorry to hear. Please accept our profound regrets. You may assure London that we shall do everything we can to track down those responsible.’

‘Thank you.’

Schneider looked at him curiously.

‘You are not, I think, a regular member of the Consulate?’

‘No. It happened that I was on my way here when – when the incident happened. I am a King’s Messenger.’

‘Ah, a King’s Messenger?’ He looked at Seymour’s wrist and smiled. ‘So it’s true, then,’ he said, ‘about the watches? You people always wear two?’

‘Not always,’ said Seymour.

‘And that one is always set at British time, the other at Continental time?’

‘When it is important.’

Schneider laughed.

‘Do you know what that says? To me, at any rate. It says that British time is different from Continental time. That Britain is always out of step with Europe. That our interests are always, in the end, different.’

‘Why should our interests be different?’ asked Seymour.

‘Well,’ said Schneider – he seemed to be watching him, ‘take this matter of your Mr Lomax.’

‘Why should our interests be different there? The Austrian authorities are surely as anxious as we are to find out what happened to him?’

‘Yes, of course we have to find out. And if a crime has been committed, it must be solved. We can agree about that. But beyond that?’

‘Beyond that?’

‘There may, of course, be nothing beyond that. It may all be very simple. He goes out for the night with one of his drunken friends and gets knocked on the head down by the docks. The body is thrown in the water. A simple robbery: that is all. Anyway, London says, that is all there is to it and it ends there. But suppose Vienna says, well, no, we do not think that is all there is to it and we would like to know more. Well, then, you see, our interests may differ. British time is not the same as Vienna time.’

‘Why shouldn’t that be all there is to it?’

‘May I ask,’ said Schneider, ‘if you knew Lomax? Personally, I mean?’

‘No.’

‘I did. And I found him . . . surprising. At first when you meet him you think he is insignificant. You think there is nothing there. The sort of man you can walk over. And at first, when you do business with him, you do walk over him. But then, just when you think it’s all over and done with, up he pops again, with that slightly inane smile of his, polite, deferential – deferring, always deferring. Everyone else’s opinion is always better than his. Even when he is a drunken layabout. He defers even to the port officials and they think: this is an easy touch. No problem here. So they try to trick him. And they think they’ve got away with it. But no, suddenly it is not so easy. There he is popping up again. And in the end it is they who give way. It is almost exasperating. You could say, perhaps, that he is just very good at his job . . .

‘But lately I have been wondering about your Mr Lomax. So ignorable, so overlookable, and yet so good at representing his country’s interests. I have been asking myself recently where those interests end. There have been things, you see . . .

‘And then one day he disappears. Consuls do not disappear. Just like that. Now I begin to wonder very hard. Is there something I have missed in this most missable of men? Something to do, perhaps, with those interests beyond the usual interests? Is this, perhaps, a point at which British time becomes different from Viennese time? And then he is found dead. And then . . .’ Schneider paused. ‘. . . a King’s Messenger comes.’ He was suddenly looking at Seymour very sharply. ‘A King’s Messenger?’