Second Violin (37 page)

‘Anything to sign?’

‘Leave it out.’

Then the soldier smiled at Rod, said a gentle, ‘Good luck, mate’ and walked back the way he had come. The reluctant gypsies stood at the gates of heaven.

‘Well, you gonna stand there all night or are you comin’ in?’

Their new guardian pulled the second gate wide and beckoned to them.

‘Straight down the drive, up to the porch, can’t miss it. Kettle’ll be on. I bet you blokes are parched.’

Rod said, ‘Are you not meant to escort us or something?’

‘No mate, it’s going to piss it down. I wanna be back in me box. You lot toddle off to Little Vienna.’

‘Little Vienna?’ Rod said, but the soldier had gone back in his box.

They shuffled through the gates, down the driveway lined with peeling plane trees, under a sky now heavy with the threat of rain.

Jacks drew level with Rod. ‘You know that thing you get in detective stories, when the bad geezer “lulls his victim into a” . . . a wotsit . . . “a false sense of
security”?’

‘Quite,’ said Rod.

‘I got that now. It’s like a tightness in yer bollocks.’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Rod.

Rod found himself thinking of the novels he’d read set in grand houses,
Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park
– more recently
Rebecca
– but soon settled on the image of his
father’s house in Hertfordshire, of the way the driveway had been shaped to create and withhold revelation – little twists and little turns that presented the house in fragments, a
window here, a glimpse of roof there, until the trees fell away and you arrived at a full view of the southern side of the crumbling Georgian pile in all its ramshackle glory.

Heaven’s Gate appeared to them as huge slate roofs, occasional turrets, high, narrow leaded windows, until the last bend in the drive, the last overgrown plane tree and the clear sight of
a Victorian mansion, clad in ivy – gloom and neglect registered so well in a single plant.

As Rod set foot on the porch, the first drops of rain pattered onto the roof above him, the door flew open and a disembodied, accented voice said, ‘My word, just in time. Such a capricious
summer. Come, come. Inside all of you. We were expecting you hours ago. You must all be starving!’

And they were.

‘
Mehr licht
,
mehr licht
!’

A chandelier high over their heads, missing half its bulbs, flickered on. Rod found himself facing a small, bright-eyed little man in his sixties, white hair and a goatee beard – every
inch the cartoon professor. If David Low had ever caricatured Trotsky and Einstein – and Rod could not remember one way or the other – this man would be the hybrid.

‘
Würden sie Deutschen oder Englisch bevorzugen
?’

Offering him a choice of languages in the same tone in which one said ‘Indian or China?’

‘I’m fine with English,’ Rod said, ‘although there may be one or two who . . .’

‘Quite, quite. Let us proceed in English until we learn of another necessity. Let me introduce myself. I am Maximilian Drax, of Berlin. Welcome to the Isle of Forgotten Men.’

‘And I’m Rod Troy . . . of Hampstead.’

‘It helps,’ said Drax, ‘and it will not detain us long, if we state for the record our city of origin.’

He gestured towards a chunky mahogany dining table that had been trundled in to serve as a desk. Behind it sat a young man in his late twenties, pen in hand, a notebook splayed on the table
before him, smiling benignly at them all. Smiling seemed to be the order of the day. On the far edge of the table sat a steaming, hissing urn of hot water and another man, back to Rod, bent over it
filling tea pot after tea pot, thoroughly preoccupied.

‘Arthur Kornfeld, of Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us not to . .
. not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will agree.’

Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had brought him here in the first place.

‘In that case,’ he said, perfectly willing to play the game, ‘I’m Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you’ll find more than a few of us are.’

Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod’s, beaming at him as though he’d found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say,
‘Billy Jacks, Stepney Green.’

Kornfeld said, ‘It won’t hurt, you know. And we’re all in the same boat.’

Billy shot a surly glance in Rod’s direction, looked back at Kornfeld.

‘OK, OK, whatever ’Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson, Danzig. Now, where’s me bleedin’ tea?’

The man at the urn turned with the deftness of a canteen lady in a cotton mill, splashed tea into half a dozen mugs at once, and said, ‘Right here, Danzig. Hot and wet, as they say in your
part of London.’

He handed a cup to Billy, picked up another for Rod and stared. Rod stared back. It was Oskar Siebert – Detective Sergeant of the Vienna Police HQ.

Before Rod could speak, Kornfeld did, ‘Forgive me, Herr Jakobson, but I ask this of everyone, do you play the violin?’

Jacks said, to Kornfeld’s bafflement, ‘Worked a few fiddles in me time, never actually played one.’

Kornfeld sought explanation in Rod’s eyes. Rod took his eyes off Siebert and said, ‘As a matter of fact
I
do.’

‘Oh marvellous,’ said Kornfeld. ‘We have been so lucky here these last few months – we have a good library, we have been able to set up a small printing press and an
active university and a patisserie, but our string quartet has always lacked a second violin. Herr Troy, would you care to be our second violin?’

Rod introduced a pause, looked at Siebert and said, ‘A patisserie? Are they kidding?’

‘No, Mr Troy, they are not. And you’ll find the coffee’s not bad either.’

A new face slipped in beside Kornfeld. Rod heard Hummel say, ‘Josef Hummel. Vienna. I play nothing.’

Then Kornfeld was waving at him.

‘Of course,’ Rod said. ‘Second violin. Why not?’

Herr Rosen stepped up to the table.

‘Viktor Rosen. Berlin. Piano. Sugar in my tea, if at all possible.’

Rod beckoned to Siebert. Other willing hands had appeared to man the tea, a new burble of voices and questions – ‘Anyone here from Hamburg . . . Berlin . . . Düsseldorf?’
They would find a corner to talk in. Away from the refugees’ tea party. Then he heard Kornfeld say, ‘Max, Max, do you see who we have here. Viktor Rosen. Viktor Rosen!
Mein
Gott
!’

Then Kornfeld too was on his feet, both hands extended to grip Rosen’s as Drax had gripped Rod’s.

‘I heard you play the Tchaikovsky First in 1932 with the Berlin Philharmonic. I have . . . I mean had . . . all your records.’

Siebert showed Rod to his billet on the second floor. A small room with four narrow cots, neatly folded blankets and clean sheets. It looked to Rod to be a pleasant, light
room, a panelled rectangle in pale oak and cream paintwork – high windows darkened only by the rain battering against them. It was all familiar.

‘It’s crowded, but better than dormitories. This place began as a nunnery, hence there tend to be small rooms, some absurdly small – I think you might even say cells –
rather than dormitories. I share with Kornfeld. Drax has his own room. This room is entirely empty. Pick who you wish, although I would advise against anyone over sixty-five. They tend to piss all
night and you get no sleep.’

Rod looked at the pegs on the wall next to the door, leftovers from the recent days when the house had been a girl’s boarding school – fading white labels in tiny metal windows
– ‘Rosalind Twist’, ‘Eleanor Twist’, ‘Margaret Mayes’. To which list he added his own name, seeing once again the row of pegs at his old school bearing the
names ‘Troy, R.A.’, and ‘Bentinck, J.P.Q.’ and half a dozen others. Bentinck J.P.Q. had the requisite three initials of an upper-class English public schoolboy, and had been
Rod’s best friend in a small world where best friends lasted forever. Rod had lost touch with him years ago.

It was all familiar enough to be reassuring.

‘Tell me,’ he began.

‘What am I doing here?’ Siebert said.

‘I’m sure the question applies to us both . . . but . . .’

‘Me first, eh?’

Siebert sat on the nearest cot, then stretched out with his hands clasped behind his head on the pile of blankets and pillows. Rod perched, less relaxed, on the edge of the next cot.

‘Well . . . you kept your word. Nothing you wrote about Kristallnacht mentioned me by name. All the same, the account you gave had in it a glaring gap that could only be filled by me. I
was not the favourite son of the Vienna police to begin with – a non-Nazi in what you rightly observed was pretty much a Nazi organisation to begin with. After Kristallnacht I was suspect.
They made no move against me, but I knew it all the same. In the January of ’39 we obtained an extradition order on a jewel thief who had fled to Zürich. It had been my case, naturally I
was the one to go and collect him. It was probably the easy solution for everyone. They knew I’d not come back. I abandoned my apartment . . . it was only rented . . . I abandoned all my
possessions . . . I crossed into Switzerland, with my extradition order, my warrant and my passport . . . and with the contents of my bank account wrapped around my waist in a money belt. Who knows,
perhaps you have heard a dozen stories like this in the last few days? The money belt has replaced clean underpants as the
sine qua non
of travel. I let a jewel thief go. I let myself go. I
was in England by March, and not without difficulties. Being a former policeman helped and did not help. It showed I might be honest, and implied I might be a Nazi . . . hence when the round-up
came I was one of the first. I’ve been here since October. Indeed, I count myself lucky not to have been shipped to the colonies, to Canada or Australia.’

‘Good Lord, are we . . . I mean they . . . doing that?’

‘Yes. That’s why Heaven’s Gate has room for you. They shipped out a couple of dozen only days ago.’

‘Poor buggers.’

‘Some were innocents, some were Jews, but mostly they were Nazis. An unpleasant crowd. They taunted the Jews, and only the fact that they were outnumbered stopped anything worse. Good
riddance was the general feeling. In fact, I rather wish they’d taken them all. We have one left, just the one, and with a bit of luck you’ll never need to have anything to do with
him.’

Siebert stretched and sat up again.

‘And you?’

Back at school, soaking up the imagery of his very English childhood – if only there were a cricket bat parked in the corner, a muddy football boot under the bed, or a dog-eared
Kennedy’s Latin Primer
on the windowsill – Rod found the phrase that had eluded him for ages now about to burst on his lips.

‘I am the . . . I am the ambiguous Englishman. The Home Counties, Harrow and Cambridge . . . a plum in my voice, a striped tie at my neck, the label of a Mayfair bespoke tailor on the
inside pocket of my suit . . . but born in Vienna as my parents passed through from Russia, to Paris . . . to London.’

‘Ah . . . I had not guessed. Stupid of me. But why were you not naturalised?’

‘That’s a long story,’ the ambiguous Englishman said.

Downstairs the lobby was full. The whole house had turned out at the news of new arrivals. He found Hummel listening intently as two men talked at him in rapid German,
oblivious to the fact that Hummel was saying not a word. Found Billy, standing on the sidelines, mug of tea in hand, munching on a flaky pastry.

‘They really weren’t kidding about the patisserie, then?’ Rod said.

‘Nope. I got me cake. In fact I’m on me third slice.’

Rod heard the silent ‘but’ and uttered it for him.

‘But it’s weird. Not just that I don’t speak German . . . I mean they seem to switch between German and Yiddish all the time . . . and my old dad brought me up to speak Yiddish
so . . . it’s just . . . I dunno.’

‘It’s just that all this . . . otherness, this Mitteleuropeanness, this . . . this Viennese picnic makes you feel English?’

Billy pulled a face at this as though it were a phrase too far in his thinking.

‘No. I don’t feel English. Maybe I’ll never feel English again. Maybe your brother kyboshed bein’ English for me when he and old Stilton come round to tell me I was
nicked for a wog. Maybe I never was English. Me with an accent like a gobful of whelks. Maybe the only thing you can be is you. Maybe the only thing to do is look after number one.’

Rod changed the subject.

‘I’ve been allocated a room for four. Are you and Hummel coming in with me?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘We’ll need a fourth.’

‘Not one of them old buggers. They piss all bleedin’ night!’

And Rod thought he’d snored through it all.

‘I meant . . . Spinetti or Rosen?’

‘Rosen. Spinetti talks too much. Bleedin’ wops never shut up.’

Stilton and Troy were dealing with stragglers now. Men so far down the list they were literally last, even if the list itself possessed no logic. Or men who had not been home
when they called or not reported when asked.

Ivor Kempinski fulfilled both categories and added a third by making a run for it when Stilton and Troy turned up at his home during his late evening meal. He had upended his boiled beef and
carrots over Stilton, ran for the back door with his napkin still tucked into his collar, clambered nimbly onto the roof of the outside khazi, leapt into the alley and vanished.

Troy yanked at the yard door, heard Mrs Kempinski say, ‘I wouldn’t bother, if I were you. Ain’t opened in twenty years.’

Stilton bumbled into the yard, brushing mashed potato from his jacket.

‘Legged it? Over the wall?’

‘Yep.’

‘How old do the notes say he is?’

‘Fifty-four.’

‘Fit for his age,’ Stilton said. ‘Well, he runs to fight another day. I’m not chasing him tonight. It’ll be dark in ten minutes.’