A Dead Man in Trieste (3 page)

They were all walking in the same direction towards the seaward end of the huge piazza, where the lamps in the trees around the bandstand had come on too, and where, beyond the trees, rows of little lights indicated the positions of the liners in the bay.

And suddenly Seymour knew what this was. The word came floating up in his mind: the
passeggiatta
, that great Mediterranean ritual, the evening stroll to take the air.

Seymour had learnt the word from old Angelinetti, standing in the doorway of his shop back in the East End, looking out mournfully on the grey-green fog which came up from the docks every evening at that time of year. He had spat out the taste and then told Seymour, the young Seymour, about the
passeggiatta
. Seymour had caught some of the feeling that the word contained, the sense of release after the work and heat of the day, the communal taking of pleasure. Now his own experience caught up with the word.

Almost despite himself, despite his English stiffness, he felt a kind of inner easing. Had Lomax, too, he wondered, felt an easing when he came to Trieste? Some sort of reaction, perhaps, against the constraint and formality of life in the Foreign Office? Was that what had led him to stepping over the traces? If over the traces he had stepped.

The artists were still at the table. He hesitated a moment and then approached them. At once he was hauled into their circle, welcomed with embraces, plied with wine. He felt his reserve – and Seymour had plenty of reserve – melting.

A puff of wind came up from the sea front. It smelt of flowers and of the sea. In the bandstand the band was playing a waltz and beneath the trees people were dancing. Seymour could see bright dresses and the flash of gilt from the uniforms. He thought that perhaps he should go back to his hotel but found it difficult to move.

‘It will be big,’ Marinetti was saying.

He seemed to be talking about some event that he was organizing.

‘And noisy,’ he added with satisfaction.

‘Will there be drink?’ asked Lorenzo.

‘Oceans!’

‘Who’s paying?’ asked Alfredo.

Marinetti frowned.

‘There are some details yet to be settled,’ he said.

There was now a counter-flow to the movement down to the sea front. People had begun to make their way back. They dropped off into the cafés or into the side streets. Several turned aside to greet the group at Seymour’s table.

‘No James tonight?’ one of them said.

‘Not yet. I think he’s probably still at the police station,’ Alfredo said.

‘No, no. I saw him coming into the piazza.’

‘Well, where the hell is he, then?’

Another, hearing that Seymour was Lomax’s friend, came specially round the table to shake his hand.

‘How can it be,’ he said, ‘that someone can just disappear? In a place like Trieste?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Marinetti belligerently. ‘In the same way as James has disappeared.’

‘James has
not
disappeared –‘ ‘And Maddalena –’

‘Maddalena probably hasn’t either!’

‘In the same way as we’re
all
going to disappear,’ roared Marinetti. ‘They take us in and they let us out. Then one day they take us in and they don’t let us out. Not ever! Ever!’

He burst into tears.

‘Poor Lomax! The bastards!’

He collapsed, sobbing, across the table.

‘I think perhaps I’ll –’ began Seymour, starting to get up.

The others sprang up, too.

‘Your hotel –’

‘Do you know the way?’

‘We’ll show you –’

‘It’s all right, thanks.’

‘No, no! We’ll come with you.’

They all got up, apart from Marinetti, and began to accompany him across the piazza. As they were turning off into one of the side streets, they nearly tripped over someone lying drunk in the middle of the road.

‘Why, it’s James!’ Lorenzo said.

Chapter Three

Seymour was used to covert operations and that, he told himself, was all this was. But this was very different. In the East End he had been part of a team and there had been a certain sharing of information. Here he was on his own and although Kornbluth had promised to keep him informed he knew he could not rely on that in the same way. Yet Kornbluth was the man conducting the investigation and there were things he could do that Seymour couldn’t. He could openly question witnesses, for example, or people who might have witnessed something: Lomax leaving the piazza, for instance. But any information that Seymour gleaned would have to be gathered indirectly.

He was already beginning to find it frustrating. In England if he was starting on a case there were obvious things he would have done. Here he could do none of them. He would have to wait for Kornbluth to do them and then hope that he would tell Seymour about it afterwards. How did you begin if you were having to operate covertly but without the larger operation around you?

But perhaps he was being too impatient. What was it that the two men at the Foreign Office had said? That they had had doubts about Lomax because of the kind of man he was: and they had been afraid that he would involve himself too readily in ‘the situation’ out there in Trieste. Perhaps he ought to start there and, for the moment, leave what happened on the night that Lomax had disappeared to Kornbluth.

So far he hadn’t got much picture of Lomax the man and what he had seemed frankly out of place. There must be more to Lomax than that. He
must
, for a start, have done some work.

Oh, yes, said Koskash, slightly offended, Signor Lomax was very conscientious. He would never, he insisted, neglect his work.

What was this work? Well, of course, most of it was to do with the port. There were always English ships coming in and sometimes they had problems or they needed help with the paperwork. Or perhaps there was some problem with Customs or with the Port Authority which required Lomax to go down and sort things out. He was very good at that, Koskash said.

Seymour was relieved to hear it. Up till then he had been getting the impression that Lomax’s day consisted largely of sitting around and drinking.

No, no, said Koskash, or, at least, not entirely. That was where he sat, his base, as it were, where people always knew they could find him. After he had been down to the port, or wherever, he would come back there and that was where people would go if they needed his help. A little odd, perhaps, but this was Trieste and the Mediterranean and a lot of things were conducted outside, al fresco, so why shouldn’t a consul be al fresco too?

Why not, thought Seymour? Or a policeman. It seemed a good idea. But what exactly would people be coming to see him about? Could Koskash give an example?

Certainly, said Koskash obligingly. Take seamen, for instance. They were always coming to the Consulate for loans. They would be paid off at the end of the voyage and then spend all their pay in the tavernas or brothels. And then they would come to the Consul for a loan until they signed on again.

‘And he would give it them?’ said Seymour incredulously.

‘We would recover it when they signed on again. It was just a temporary loan. They would come to him at the café and he would make out an order to pay. Then they would bring it to me and I would pay them. Look, I will show you.’

He went away and came back with a pile of slips of paper.

‘But these are all bills from the Caffé degli Specchi!’

‘No, no.’ He turned them over. On the back of each one was written ‘Order to Pay’ and then a sum, together with a name, and Lomax’s signature.

‘Are you sure you didn’t pay for anything on the other side?’ said Seymour suspiciously.

‘Certainly not!’ Koskash was offended. ‘I would never do a thing like that. It would be quite improper.’

‘Well, yes, but would you call this’ – he held out a handful of bills – ‘exactly proper?’

‘It is unusual, I admit. But as an accounting system it is certainly proper. An order to pay for every payment. No payment without an order to pay – you can check the cash ledger if you like. The books are all in order.’

Seymour checked them. They were.

‘It’s hardly usual,’ he said weakly, handing the books back.

‘Well, no, and I was very concerned about it at first, when Signor Lomax introduced the system. But I had to admit that, accounting-wise, there was nothing wrong with it. And in fact it seemed to work very well.’

Seymour made a mental note to check Lomax’s bank account and see if Lomax’s talent for creative accounting extended further.

As Koskash began to gather up the slips of paper, Seymour turned them over and looked at the other side.

‘These sums are quite sizeable. If you are sure you didn’t pay, who did? Lomax?’

‘You can’t tell from the bills,’ said Koskash, ‘but I think that, as a matter of fact, he often did.’

That brought up another issue. What exactly was Lomax’s relationship to the artists? He was interested in art, yes, the pictures on the walls of his room were evidence of that. But he hardly spent any time in his room so possibly he didn’t look at them much. Wasn’t that odd, if he loved art so much?

Another thought, prompted by the sight of the bills, struck Seymour. Was Lomax, for some reason, their financial provider? Was that why he had bought the pictures? And was that why he had contributed, so generously, apparently, to their drinking bills?

But if he was their financier, then why? Love of art? Or was there some other reason? As, perhaps, Kornbluth had suggested.

‘These artists,’ he said: ‘can you tell me something about them?’

Koskash shrugged.

‘We have a lot of artists in Trieste,’ he said. ‘And people who think they are artists.’

‘And which category do these fall into?’

‘Marinetti is good. Preposterous, but good.’

‘And the others?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘But it did to Lomax?’

Koskash hesitated.

‘I don’t know how much it meant to him really. He didn’t seem to have this enthusiasm when he came. But then he suddenly developed it.’

‘After he met the artists or before?’

‘After he met Maddalena,’ said Koskash drily.

‘Maddalena? I’ve come across her name before.’

‘She hangs out with the artists. I think she acts as a model for them.’

‘And she introduced him to them?’

‘Or vice versa, I can’t remember which. But suddenly she was very important, and so was art.’

Well, it was another bit of the picture he was getting of Lomax: drinking, idling – all this al fresco stuff – and now sex! Seymour was hardly surprised that one day he had simply disappeared. It seemed in keeping.

But then there was this other side, this possible involvement in ‘currents’, the possibility that he had not wandered off but been killed.

‘What about these artists?’ he said. ‘What sort of people are they?’

Koskash shrugged.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’re artists. They don’t always behave like other people.’

‘They seemed to me, when I was speaking to them, to have got across the authorities.’

‘Yes,’ said Koskash. ‘They have a talent for that.’

‘Kornbluth seemed very down on them. With justification, do you think?’

‘That depends on how you see it,’ said Koskash cautiously.

‘Kornbluth seemed to see them as troublemakers. Political troublemakers.’

‘Political?’

‘Nationalist.’

‘Listen,’ said Koskash, ‘in Trieste,
everyone
is a nationalist.’

It ought to be easy to find that out, thought Seymour. The artists didn’t seem to hold things back. But then there was the question of Lomax’s own sympathies and how far he had allowed them to carry him. It might even be possible to find that out from them too. Or maybe he could talk to that girl.

He wasn’t altogether happy, though, about the direction in which his enquiries were leading him. In the Special Branch there was a political side and that was, in fact, the side to which he had naturally gravitated. Or, rather, his superiors had gravitated him, chiefly, he suspected, on the grounds that he was ‘languages’ and languages were foreign and political trouble – in their possibly not unprejudiced view – tended to come from foreigners. In the East End, with its high proportion of political refugees, it probably did come from ‘foreigners’; but, then, since there were so many ‘foreigners’ in the East End, that was true of the rest of the crime as well.

Seymour had never been entirely happy about his drift towards that side of the Branch’s activities. Partly that was because of his family’s unhappiness. With their history of falling foul of the police in their original countries, they hadn’t been happy about him joining the police at all. But to go into the Special Branch, and on to the political side, which was the side that tended to impact on them, seemed to them the heights, or depths, of eccentricity.

But Seymour had his own reservations, too. Some of these were psychological, the traditional immigrant distrust of getting involved in politics; but others were to do with principle. He retained sufficient of his family’s restiveness under government to feel uneasy about working for government himself. It was an issue he had still not resolved, was still debating with himself.

Now here it was coming up again and in a form which had a particular acuteness for him. From what Kornbluth had hinted, there was a possibility that the currents Lomax had got himself involved with were nationalist ones.

Nationalism, as it happened, was big in the Seymour household. Too big, and Seymour had always tried to steer clear of it. It was his grandfather’s over-enthusiasm for nationalism that had led to his having to leave Poland in a hurry. At least he had got out. Seymour’s other grandfather, in a different country, had not been so lucky. Seymour’s father had, partly in consequence, reacted strongly against politics in general and nationalist ones in particular, and Seymour had tended to follow him. Now here the issue was again coming back to haunt him.

Seymour was able to clear up one other point to do with Lomax’s work: his empty appointments book.

‘He never used it,’ said Koskash.

‘What did he use?’

He might have guessed it.

Slips of paper.

‘I kept a separate book,’ said Koskash, ‘and would give him notes for the day.’

Seymour thought he might have seen one in one of Lomax’s suits.

‘Rough scraps of paper?’

‘They didn’t start like that,’ said Koskash, pained.

Seymour sighed.

‘What had he got against ordinary paperwork?’

‘He said it was on the side of government.’

‘On the side of
government
?’

What was it with this man? Was he some kind of anarchist?

‘He said that it was paper that made bureaucracy possible and that there was too much bureaucracy in the world. In Trieste,’ said Koskash drily, ‘such a view is distinctly unusual.’

From the separate book which Koskash had kept Seymour was able to reconstruct Lomax’s movements in the week that he had disappeared. As Koskash had said, they consisted largely of visits to the Port Authority or to the docks. The one exception was a visit to the Casa Revoltella.

‘Casa Revoltella?’ said Seymour. ‘What was that?’

‘It was a civic reception. A big one, the Governor was there. All the consuls were invited. The Casa Revoltella is a house in the Piazza Giuseppina. It used to belong to the Baron Revoltella. He left it to the city when he died. You should go there. You would find it interesting. You would see how the rich in Trieste used to live. And still live, for that matter.’

The house was open to the public and that afternoon, when the city was quiet, Seymour went there. It was, as Koskash had said, an excellent example of the way of life of the old Trieste merchant, with velvet red plush and gilt everywhere. The Baron Revoltella had been one of those who had spotted the significance to Trieste of the opening of the Suez Canal. The Canal’s third entrance, they called Trieste.

The house was full of reminders of the Suez connection, from broad canvases of the Canal itself to a very strange piece of art on the stairs called
Cutting the Isthmus
, which had a plaque of de Lesseps on one side of its plinth and a plaque of the Khedive Abbas on the other. The whole thing was lit up from time to time by a red bulb held in the fangs of a wrought-iron serpent.

Money dripped from the large gilt chandeliers and showed itself in the thick pile of the carpet on the velvet-railed staircase up which, presumably, the guests had mounted a fortnight ago.

Seymour asked the attendant about the reception. It appeared to have been a splendid occasion, graced by the Governor himself, and at which almost all the commercial and official worthies of the city had been present.

‘The flower of the city,’ said the attendant sentimentally.

And among the flowers, the dandelion, perhaps, in the bouquet, had been Lomax. All the consuls, the attendant assured him, had been present. He produced some photographs of the occasion: of wondrously uniformed men and gorgeously dressed ladies, sashed and fanned. Seymour wondered if Lomax had worn a uniform, too. Did consuls have uniforms? He suspected they did. Especially if they were British.

He wondered, too, how he had felt. Because he would not, surely, have fitted in. The superior people Seymour had encountered at the Foreign Office, yes, they would have fitted in. But Lomax? From what Seymour felt he had learned about him he would have gone with reluctance, arriving late and leaving early, knowing the people, perhaps, but less at ease in these formal surroundings than in the relaxed atmosphere of the caf e tables. Seymour looked for him in the photographs, asking the attendant to point him out, but they couldn’t find him. He was, as ever, the missing man.

In one of the rooms was a large telescope trained on the bay, through which the Baron could watch his ships coming in. Seymour looked at the ships, too, and then idly adjusted the telescope and found himself peering down on the square outside. There was a statue in the middle of the square and a woman standing nearby. The statue – he could read the inscription through the telescope – was of the Archduke Maximilian, a fine figure, bald, bearded and, of course, this being Trieste, in uniform. The woman appeared to be working on it.