Second Violin (8 page)

Rod knew he’d never be able to shake this bloke off. He even thought that the man might be telling the truth – that he was here to protect him, and if he was . . . why not take
advantage of the fact?

‘I was thinking that perhaps I should be in the Jewish quarter, across the canal. I think I’ll just roll up the map and get in a cab.’

‘Not tonight you won’t. There’s such a thing as cabman’s instinct. I doubt you’ll find a cab on the streets tonight for love nor money. They’re all staying
home. However . . . I have my car outside, or I should say I have a car, my own does not have Polizei written on each door . . . but tonight will hardly be a night when discretion pays. Shall we
go?’

Outside in the Kärtnerstrasse Siebert led the way to a big, black Opel Super Six. Rod slipped in next to him. It was old and smelly and the springs in the seat were shot, and it was deathly
cold.

‘I found it in the car pool,’ Siebert said, almost by way of apology. ‘Regret to say the heater does not work, but we’ll be fine.’

Rod did not think they’d be fine. It was a clear starlit night. They’d probably freeze to death.

They crossed over the Danube Canal at the Franzens Bridge. Siebert had been right to choose a marked police car. The bridge was packed with SA men marching into Leopoldstadt by
burning torchlight, all brown shirts and black boots – so many Rod began to wonder if fascism hadn’t been started by an enterprising bloke in the clothing trade to shift several million
rolls of brown cloth. Faces flickering in the fractured light, half-glimpsed as though half-formed, hiding in the half-darkness. A few banged on the roof of the car – most thought better of
getting in the way of the police.

‘It’s bigger than I thought,’ Siebert said. ‘There’ll be some dead Jews by morning.’

Rod found his matter-of-factness alarming. But, then, coppers could be like that, and whilst he had refuted the notion that Siebert and his little brother might have a common bond in being
coppers, he had seen just the same near-amoral detachment in Frederick Troy. Not a blasé acceptance that such things happen, or that they cannot be prevented, but an apartness, a degree or
more of separation, a distinct lack of ‘there but for the grace of God . . .’

Siebert swung the car into a side street only a hundred yards or so past the bridge. Pulled up outside a small, brightly lit café – Bordoni Fratelli.

‘We’ll be alright here. They’re open all night, and only an illiterate would think it was a Jewish-run place.’

Rod thought it highly likely that the average Brownshirt – if anything like the ones he’d come across in Berlin – probably was close to illiterate. Instead, he said, ‘Why
do we need to be anywhere off the street? That’s where the action will be.’

Siebert pushed the glass door open and Rod followed. A man in a stiff off-white apron waved at him from behind the counter as though to a regular customer.

‘I mean . . . we have only to follow one of these gangs of –’

‘Trust me . . . you want action, you will get action.’

Rod was troubled by the simple truth buried in the statement.

‘Of course I don’t want action. I just –’

‘You just want to be there if . . .’

‘If what?’

‘Whatever. You want to see Jews beaten up? You will. You want to see shops looted in the name of politics? You will. Cheap thuggery dressed up as moral force? You will.’

‘I . . . I . . .’

‘Giuseppe . . . an espresso and a glass of Pellegrino for me. And for my friend?’

‘The same. Look, I feel I’m not making myself clear.’

Siebert had his hands cupped to his face lighting up another Asta. He waved out the match.

‘Now, Giuseppe here . . .’

The proprietor looked up from his hissing coffee machine – a gentle smile beneath the comic-book moustache.

‘Giuseppe here, he comes from a country in which fascism sees its first priority as being to make the trains run on time. What was wrong with Italian trains under the monarchy, I have no
idea. But this is what one hears about Italy. Until Abyssinia it was all one heard about Italy. Il Duce makes the trains run on time. No doubt he sees to this personally.’

Siebert had the old Italian smiling broadly now.

‘We, on the other hand . . . we Austrians . . . no I shall let Austria off the hook . . . we Viennese . . . it is a Viennese affair after all . . . have other priorities. What do our
fascists do? . . . they take the German disease of anti-Semitism and they nurture the virus like a beloved family pet, and, once the cage is opened by Anschluss, they let loose a beast that has
teeth and claws to terrify even Germany. Don’t worry Herr Troy – tonight the gutters of Leopoldstadt will run with Jewish blood. It is what we Viennese do best, we torment and we
torture Jews. All you have to do is listen for the first clap of doom. And do not let your conscience trouble you. We are both of us merely doing our job.’

At last Rod had found out what it was that united coppers across continents. An unflagging talent for razor sarcasm.

‘Tell me, Herr Troy. Shall we reach a gentleman’s agreement not to despise one another, and not to despise each other’s professions? Would that be
“cricket”?’

Siebert accepted his coffee, slapped down a couple of coins on the counter and took a tentative sip. Sipped, dragged on his Asta, sipped. Blew smoke with all the self-evident pleasure of a
self-confessed addict. Sip, drag, sip.

‘Mmmm . . . good. You should try it. Do not let it go to waste.’

Rod picked up his cup. Drinking coffee – and he had to admit that it was the best he’d had since his last meal in Soho, sharper than the Viennese taste – seemed like an
appropriate diversion. A good enough way of not answering a question he rather thought Siebert did not much expect an answer to in the first place.

‘Listen, you said. Listen for what?’

A boom like thunder rattled the coffee cups and blew the door open. A poltergeist had entered the room.

‘That,’ said Siebert.

Hummel’s mother had died when he was ten in the great flu pandemic that swept Europe towards the close of the Great War. His father had been a good father, a gentle
spirit who had never laid a hand on the young Hummel, but whose vocabulary was severely limited, both verbally and emotionally. He would have bought the boy anything he wanted, anything his young
heart desired, but the boy had to ask for it first – Old Hummel had not the imagination to know what a child might want without asking. Hence Hummel had found the nurture he lacked at his
father’s hand in books. He had been a word-child, forever with his nose in a book when other boys were out in the alley bouncing a ball off the back wall. He had, in so short a time, come to
prefer the company of fictional characters to real ones. Hence, while his verbal vocabulary greatly exceeded his father’s – so much so that neighbours used to joke that the boy had
‘swallowed a dictionary’ – his emotional vocabulary was as constrained as his father’s, a world of love and pain bent double, hairpinned into restraint, straitjacketed in a
tailored suit of good manners and long words and convoluted sentences. When the novels of adolescence had lost their fascination for him – he had ripped through Tolstoy and Stendhal and
Balzac, but found most pleasure in the work of Theodore Fontane, if only because he was reading the author’s work in the original German – he had turned to philosophy. As a young man in
his twenties he would while away long winter nights with Schopenhauer or Spinoza, subjects on which he could converse with no one.

In November 1933, about ten months after the accession to power of Adolf Hitler, Old Hummel had died, leaving young Hummel alone in the world, in full possession of a tailor’s shop that
thrived or not as the tide of tailoring ebbed or flowed, and the skills to run it. Social skills he had few, and, as Bemmelmann had remarked on his departure, young Hummel had been watched over by
his neighbours, his father’s contemporaries – each one baffled by the gangling, big-eared youth.

His father’s last words had been, ‘Joe, whatever will become of us?’ Hummel had taken this to be more a reference to the fate of Jews in general than to the tiny tribe of
Hummel.

So it was that each November, on the morning of the 10th, Hummel would go at first light to the Jewish cemetery on the far side of the Prater and sit at his father’s grave. It was a ritual
that began the night before. Hummel would take his father’s best suit from the wardrobe, his father’s best brown shoes and his father’s best grey herringbone woollen overcoat. The
only item that fitted remotely well were the shoes – the suit and the overcoat were far too big, and he looked, at thirty-one, as he had at eighteen, a boy masquerading as a man – a
scrawny youth in the baggy clothes of a long-dead father. Dressed in mourning.

He sat that evening, and into the small hours, cocooned in his father’s overcoat, gently rocking in his father’s rocking chair, re-reading Descartes, weighing up for the fourth or
fifth time that everything is mathematics and struggling to understand how Descartes could reach this conclusion and remain a deist. He had not read a newspaper of any kind for a week or more
– he was no more aware that Ernst vom Rath had just died than he was aware that Ernst vom Rath had ever lived. Had he been aware he might not have ventured out when, a few hours before dawn,
listening to the creaking silence of night, he had heard the biggest bang of his life. It rattled the windows, it shook dust down from the ceiling. A poltergeist had walked into the room and it
appeared to have come from the direction of Leopoldstrasse.

He slipped out of the door. The street was deserted, the curfew observed. But from the same direction came the sound of smaller explosions, and a red glare above the rooftops. He walked to the
end of the street. He’d been ready to break the curfew to sneak across the park to the cemetery, what would a peek into Leopoldstrasse matter? At the sound of running feet, he pressed his
back against the wall, and, invisible in the darkness of the alley, watched as three men of his own age, one in his nightshirt, ran past pursued by half a dozen Brownshirts.

He looked down Leopoldstrasse. Several buildings were on fire. He walked on – no more running, no more shouting, jeering Brownshirts. A small crowd had gathered. He approached their backs,
almost certain of what he would see. They’d been torching synagogues for weeks now. He rather thought this was the first time they’d blown one up with dynamite. And in so doing they had
wrecked the houses to either side.

He found himself standing behind an old couple in dressing gowns and carpet slippers. They wept, the man no less loudly than the woman. The air seemed full of confetti, dancing in the heat and
dust like autumn leaves caught in a breeze. Hummel held out one hand and a fragment settled – it reminded him of a game he had used to play with his father at just this time of year in the
park. His father would walk several paces behind him. The young Hummel would spot a crisp, brown autumn leaf swirling to earth and run ahead to catch it, cup it in his hands. His father would say,
‘Well done, Josef’ – that had been his contribution to the game.

It was not a leaf, it was a piece of the Torah. The holy word of the God of his ancestors, looted from the ark, shredded like yesterday’s newsprint.

The text was still legible, three words of Hebrew clear and distinct upon the scorched paper – a quotation Hummel recognised from Genesis, ‘brimstone and fire’, and he knew how
it ended . . . ‘brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven’ . . . and the destruction of Sodom followed. He thought it singularly inappropriate. This was Vienna not Sodom. This was
the work of man not God. He looked up, as though searching for someone with whom to share the thought. He was alone. All around had fled, and down the street came the same bunch of Brownshirts he
had missed going the other way. They had lost their quarry and were now lumbering up to him. Hummel’s first reaction to the cry of ‘Jew-boy!’ was a silent ‘Who me?’
And his second was to run.

Hummel ran, great flat feet slapping, the great grey overcoat flapping. Down Leopoldstrasse, around the next corner.

‘Get-’im-catch-’im-rip-’is-bollocks-off!’

The cries pursued him round the corner, through an alley and into the next main street. A man standing in a doorway took off after him, and for a second Hummel thought he was caught, but a
backward glance told him it was just another Jew in the same plight. Hummel turned left into another alley. The man ran straight on and the Brownshirts followed him instead of Hummel. Hummel
emerged at the other end of the alley – suddenly it was almost quiet. No noises on the street, but off the street, high up in the apartments, he could hear the shouts and the crashes as the
boot of the new civilisation met the flesh and culture of the old. He stepped back into a shop doorway as windows on a third floor burst outwards showering the street in broken glass. A woman
screamed, and just as suddenly stopped. Then Hummel heard grunts of exhortation and something very large appeared on the window ledge. A tallboy? A wardrobe? Hummel heard a jangling, a discordant
music, as though a cat had just run across the keyboard of a piano. Then he realised. It was a piano. A full-sized concert grand was pushed out and dropped into the street below. It seemed to
Hummel to land like some outsized creature in one of those American Disney cartoons he had occasionally seen at the cinema. The legs splayed like an elephant on ice, the belly of the beast hit the
cobbles, the lid shot up and the keyboard exploded in a roman candle of ebony and ivory.

Brownshirts appeared at the window, jostling each other for a view and laughing. They soon tired of the joke, their heads pulled back and the screams from within began again. Hummel emerged from
the shadows. The piano seemed to be humming rather like an aeolian harp, the wind across its strings. Hummel crept closer. The humming seemed less like an instrument and more human. He stood on the
remains of the lid and peeked in. There, on the metal frame of the piano, lay a short man of sixty or so – crucified . . . strapped down, tied into place with piano wire. He was naked, he was
drenched in blood, his chest was punctured where a rib protruded through the flesh, and he was indeed humming. One note might be groaning. Three was humming. It was not a tune Hummel knew.