Black Out (10 page)

‘I saw more of him. They sent me away to school later than any of the others. I was one of those sickly children. Always being told to wrap up well even in summer. But I doubt I knew him better than my brother. Rod at least knew him as an adult for fifteen years. I didn’t.’

‘Y’know it’s always puzzled me. Why did he accept that wretched title?’

Wretched? Did Driberg put the same question to the Sitwells? To Beaverbrook? Why wretched? Driberg adored title and ritual, from the imperial pomp of a coronation to the order of knives and forks on the table, so wickedly designed to intimidate the lower-middle classes. Troy recalled as a teenager watching the housemaid slap down the silver in no particular order, knowing full well that his father would eat a six-course meal with a wooden spoon and pass no comment, and later seeing Driberg surreptitiously arrange the implements at his own place into their proper lineage.

‘He didn’t accept it. He bought it from Lloyd George when I was four or five. I have absolutely no recollection of any of it. By the time I was old enough to ask I didn’t much care. After all, inheriting it was Rod’s problem not mine. I do remember Rod asking the old man a few times, and the answer was always the same. For a foreigner to be accepted in London society a little recognition was essential. Although to be honest I think he called it window-dressing. At the same time one couldn’t cross any of those very English invisible lines. A peerage slapped on to an unshakeable foreign accent would have been a mockery – he’d have joined the rich Jews of Westminster, ennobled for their wealth and despised for it too – or so he said – at the same time the only title worth having had to be hereditary. So a baronetcy it was. Result – as he would have it – no one thinks he’s muscling in on anything as privileged as the Lords, nor is he quite as parvenu as a knighted brewer. He is – or was – Sir Alexei Troy Bt., publisher, newspaper proprietor, Englishman and wog – and no one much minds. The power has a respectable coat to its back. Why? Why do you ask?’

‘I was curious about its part in the game. Whichever one your father happened to be playing at the time.’

Troy knew better than to be offended. He had seen the game first hand on so many occasions. Driberg had more acuteness in so phrasing it – and, Troy felt, if the truth be known it summed up his father better than any of the so oft applied words such as ‘mercurial’ or ‘unfathomable’. The elder Troy played not the game
of
English society but the game
with
English society. He had seen his father entertain the insufferably brilliant Sir Oswald Mosley – brilliant by the acclaim of his peers, insufferable because he knew it and abused it – the pompous, loud, but scarcely charmless Bob Boothby, fresh from his meeting with Hitler, and the shy, determined Harold Macmillan, son-in-law to the Duke of Devonshire, whom he had endeavoured to steer away from the Conservative Party at the depth of the Depression, when it became obvious that Macmillan was not prepared to toe the National Government line and accept poverty as an incurable fact of life that was beyond intervention. Alex Troy was nothing if not an interventionist. Most intervention came to little. Boothby and Macmillan never came again and, to the best of Troy’s knowledge, Mosley was never asked. Driberg was. The Troy household was one of those in which he could bank on meeting a vast cross-section of British political life, even if it lacked the Boothbys and the Mosleys. Where else could he find himself seated between the earnestness of A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader, and the banality of Chips Channon, Conservative MP and social butterfly? Where else could he appreciate the seeming inconsistency of a newspaper proprietor who had condemned Stalin right up to the Nazi–Soviet pact and then swung around to suggest in an editorial he wrote himself that all good men should bide their time, at precisely the time when the good men were burning their Communist Party membership cards, and the fellow-travellers were doing whatever fellow-travellers did to resign from an organisation to which they had never belonged? But, then, neither had Alexei Troy belonged – he had been some sort of Plekhanovite back in the old country, perhaps the only one, and had cut a course of his own choosing. He had seen circulation of the
Evening Herald
drop by twenty per cent after his editorial – yet had gone on arguing his case, and printing the letters of dissent, until the week before the invasion of Russia when he had written another leader saying it was time to
‘stand by our new ally the Soviet Union’. History had proved him right. Rather too quickly. The game continued. For the last year of his life he was once again a mercurial oddity. A titled wog no easier to pin down than a sprite. People came just to hear what he would say next. For a fellow-traveller, he travelled exceedingly well, and exceedingly well heeled. Bt., he was wont to joke, stood for better times.

‘I wondered, you see,’ Driberg was saying, ‘what he thought of you becoming a policeman. All his life – picking and pricking at order like a gnat on a dinosaur’s backside, and then you choose the law and with it the order he so despised. I think it must have hurt him deeply.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because,’ Driberg said, turning for the
coup de grâce,
’he never talked about it.’

Perhaps the man was right. Words flowed from the elder Troy. Anyone who spent the currency of language like an Irish sailor on a drunken roll surely had a damning reason for silence? He had, for example, never answered any questions about the origins of his fortune. What use would the truth have been – that he had looted more than a million pounds’ worth of jewellery back in 1905? Some gnat’s prick.

‘And I was wondering,’ Driberg continued, ‘whether this too wasn’t part of the game?’

Troy said nothing. He watched the slice of toast on the end of the fork burst into flames and topple off into the fire, heard Driberg mutter ‘bugger it’ and listened to the generous gush of red wine filling up a glass.

Alone in his office the following day Troy propped the photograph he had taken from Malnick – mentally avoiding the word stolen – against the telephone and contemplated it as the last light of afternoon slanted from the west to pick out the dead man’s face
and wink wickedly off the brass on the inkwell. A day to think, half of it spent driving Driberg back to London in pleasing, unstony silence, had left him with the beginnings of a pattern forming in his mind. He came into the Yard to find it peaceful and Saturdayish. No sign of Wildeve, and Onions was most certainly out on his allotment in a disused railway siding in Acton. Who these Germans were he had no idea, but he felt confident that the two crimes were related and that what they were was nestling just beneath the surface of the few facts he had. For a while it made sense to regard the two bodies as one – a two-headed creation from the castle of Baron Frankenstein. The phone rang.

‘I been thinking,’ said Kolankiewicz lazily.

‘So I heard.’

‘ ‘Bout trousers.’

‘Heard that too.’

‘And the beauty of trousers.’

‘Form and function in perfect harmony. Two holes exactly where your legs are.’

‘The beauty, the real beauty is in the turn-ups. Their capacity for capturing, storing and then yielding up to scrutiny the most surprising, the most overlooked items.’

‘What have you found?’

‘What would you want me to find?’

Troy looked at the scribbles he had made on the back of an envelope. The disparate parts of a whole that only existed in his guesswork.

‘I was wondering about the relationship between the bits we have. In particular what little forensics has revealed so far. Fragments of an alloy trapped by the fabric of the sleeve, you said. Acid burns, you said. And I was asking myself what’s missing that should be obvious in this time of death and glory?’

‘And?’

Troy paused, fearful of improvident word magic, as though utterance would invite divine denial. ‘Cordite,’ he said. ‘You found cordite in the late Herr Trousers’ turn-ups.’

‘I am sorry to have taken so long about it. When you see as many dead as I do they begin to blur into one colossal corpse. The
world-carcass. It came back to me about an hour ago. Some smell, something that came wafting to me across the next-door neighbours’ compost heap – and there it was, the memory of cordite, delicately overlaid by the black stench of Thames mud in which the poor sod was found. Twelve months old, as vivid to the nose as
petit madeleine
to the tongue. You know what I think we have? A munitions worker. Acid, metal, cordite. Put them together and they go bang.’

‘A German munitions worker? Two German munitions workers?’

‘OK. OK. That takes some figuring. I leave that to you.’

‘How far up Herr Cufflink’s sleeve did you look for these fragments of metal?’

‘Up as far as the arm went.’

‘Did you find anything after the first couple of inches?’

‘No. I told you that already.’

‘And the same on Herr Trousers?’

‘Ach – I’d be reading backwards from my present opinion. Settle for the cordite. That I am certain of. My nose tells the truth. I am the Proust of filth. The smell of a man’s rotten liver will find its way back to me years later. Makes it almost impossible to eat in a British restaurant, I can tell you.’

‘Very well. Look at it this way. A munitions worker wears an overall. He does not wear his best tweed jacket to the factory. What do you wear, most of the time?’

‘You know fuck well.’ Irritation was bringing out the Pole in Kolankiewicz once more. ‘You seen me hundreds of times. A white lab coat, for Chrissake.’

‘Which stops leaving two inches of cuff sticking out. Sod’s law. Toast always lands butter-side down on the carpet. Lab coats never fit. What we have here is a member of your own fraternity. Cufflink, probably Trousers too, was a boffin. Someone working above factory level in the bombs and bangs business. The sooner you put those fragments out for analysis the better.’

‘I’ve done it, but, take it from me, that alloy is nothing I’ve ever seen.’

‘You mean it’s … ’ Troy failed to find the word he wanted. ‘ … New … ?’

‘New? Troy, it’s from another planet! For all I know it fell off Flash Gordon’s rocketship.’

And suddenly Troy realised exactly what they had unearthed between them and how complex and how dangerous the ramifications of that knowledge might be.

Troy’s Uncle Nikolai always reminded him of a character from Edward Lear – a fitting subject for a limerick. But since none had fitted precisely he had made up his own at about the age of ten and had got as far as ‘There was an old man from Nepal, Whose face was incredibly small … ’ but no further. Of course Nikolai’s face was not incredibly small, it appeared so because it was buried by a mass of hair and a full beard, and, often, spectacles. Overall, small was somewhat appropriate. At five feet two he needed not one soapbox but two from which to harangue the crowd at Speakers’ Corner of a Sunday morning. Troy knew that he stood on tiptoe just for the extra couple of inches that allowed him to lean across the makeshift lectern and gesture at the crowd.

Troy had caught him mid-speech and mid-harangue, in a Leninish pose, left arm flush along the top of the lectern, the right sweeping across the crowd in a broad intaking motion that could imply open-handed inclusiveness, a commonality from which none could escape, or, as the palm closed to leave a pointing index finger, single people out as though his words were aimed solely at them.

‘ … And it is to the Britain of the post-war years that we must now turn. It is time to talk of many things—’

‘Of cabbages and kings,’ yelled a literate wag from the crowd.

‘Sod cabbages,’ replied a wittier wag, ‘I seen enough of the bleedin’ fings the last five years to do me a lifetime!’

Beneath the grey curls that wrapped around his face it was impossible to see whether Nikolai Rodyonovich was smiling or not.

‘After the last war we were promised—’

‘Whaddya mean “we”?’ came another voice from the crowd. ‘You’re about as English as frogs’ legs and sauerkraut!’

‘I am, as you know full well, Mr Robinson, a Russian. You yourself goaded me with this fact, as I recall, in the summer of 1938, in such abusive terms that a member of the London constabulary felt obliged to step in and restrain you!’

Troy had been the constable in question. Off duty but uniformed. Speakers’ Corner had seen too many incidents that summer of general Jew-baiting and wog-bashing. A small surge of xenophobia that was untypical of the British, and untypical of this war – Mosleyites excepted. Without telling the old man he had privately undertaken to afford him some measure of protection. It seemed curious to think that Nikolai drew a regular crowd, as though he had a personal following, year after year, but, as Troy recalled, Robinson, a Bill-Sykes lookalike with a fair, even hatred of all foreigners, had had his cake and eaten it by dubbing Nikolai a ‘Russky, Commie, thick-lipped, Jew-boy arsehole who had better bugger off back where he came from’. Nikolai had no such plans. In 1919 when Troy’s father, some ten years older than Nikolai, had raised the issue of naturalisation for the family, he had made the decision for his wife, his daughters and himself – his youngest son, after all, was British-born – but had merely urged it on his younger brother and his eldest son, both of whom he felt should decide for themselves. Neither had bothered. Hence Rod, thanks to his birth in Vienna as the Troys crossed Imperial Europe at a snail’s pace, had found himself an Austrian and a categorisable alien at the outbreak of war, and Nikolai had found it impossible to clarify his allegiance by becoming British – no one had been allowed naturalisation for nearly five years. Yet British was how he saw himself. Britain was his home. He loved it dearly. Troy doubted if this could ever be conveyed to the crowd, but why else did the old man get up on the stump week after week on the endless subject of Britain if not from love of country?

’We,’
he said with an italicised emphasis, ‘were promised homes fit for heroes. A promise we all knew to be hollow within a few short years. Now we are told it is different. This war has been total war, it has required such a degree of motivation on the part of the British that government has been obliged to inform and to educate
us almost as much as it has deceived us. And as the culmination of this new-found awareness of the basic fact of life on earth that if we do not pull together we shall most certainly sink together, they have come up with a notion that startles them, and they expect us to be startled by it too. Sir William Beveridge has spoken of a system, an organisation of our human resources that could offer us care, protection and education – from the cradle to the grave. And it goes by the name of the Welfare State. Who are we to believe? Are we to believe that Churchill will allow what he clearly believes to be a thief’s charter to become the way of the land, even the law of the land. Are we to trust the victor of Tonypandy?’