A Little White Death (62 page)

He decided to send it to the cleaner’s, and turned out the pockets. The left-hand pocket yielded a folded piece of notepaper. It was the letter from Tosca that Fitz had given him.
‘Come up and see me some time.’ He had completely forgotten that he had it.

He called Rod’s secretary. She booked all Rod’s foreign travel and had always offered to do the same for him if he ever again took to travelling. Half an hour later she phoned him
back and told him he was booked on the next afternoon’s Pan Am to Idlewild.

‘. . . And Rod had me book a car to take you to the airport.’

‘I’m quite happy with the coach,’ said Troy.

‘He insisted. His treat.’

At lunchtime the following day, he was packed and stuck in that expectant phase of the journey when all is ready, but the clock tells you ‘too soon’. He was sitting in his house, in
his topcoat, doing no more than listen to the clock tick.

Someone knocked at the door. His sister Sasha. Bright, busy and nosy.

‘I wondered if you were free for lunch?’

‘I’m not.’

She noticed the suitcase, upright by the hatstand, bound up with a stout leather strap, plastered with long-defunct hotel labels from the days when his father had globetrotted with it half a
century ago.

‘Where are you going?’

‘New York.’

‘New York?’

‘Why not?’

‘Perhaps a wee drinkie, then, before you leave, a little something to steady your nerves?’

It seemed to Troy that he might have to open the door and push her out. She wanted something. Probably, simply the doubtful pleasure of his company, and she wasn’t going to get it. Another
knock at the door spared him this. It was Tara Ffitch – defying the November weather in a simple, startling red Chanel two-piece. Her hair was still brown – perhaps she had renounced
the sins of the blonde? – and she was clutching a smudgy, inky newspaper galley.

‘I’ve not called at a bad time?’

‘None better,’ said Troy seeing relief from his sister in her presence. ‘Do come in.’

He made the introductions. Sasha beamed, seemed genuinely pleased to be meeting a ‘celebrity’.

‘I brought you the last instalment,’ said Tara. ‘This will run in the
Post
next Sunday. I don’t suppose you followed the story, did you?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t. I suppose I should have. The moral tale for our times?’

He had not meant to say this. It slipped out. He liked the woman. He had no wish to offend her.

‘If you like,’ she said, using one of his favourite phrases. ‘You know what morality is? It’s the great sideshow, beats bloody hell out of wireless and the telly, and
before wireless and the telly were invented it was all they had. It’s wonderfully simple. You set up your morality, your moral code that the dull, the lazy and the unimaginative will have no
difficulty with, and then when the rest of us, you and I, the few, break it – since it is not in our nature to do otherwise – the many – that is the unimaginative, the lazy and
the dull – have hours of endless fun tut-tutting and condemning, the vicarious fun of who fucks who and who does worse. And if we did not fuck and if we did not fuck up, then what would they
have to talk about? You see, they need us far more than we need them. In fact, we don’t need them at all. So, I’ll give them what they want. Or, since in this day and age everything has
its price, to be precise I’ll sell them what they want.’

‘Precisely,’ said Sasha. ‘Fuck ’em.’

‘Quite,’ said Tara. ‘Fuck ’em.’

It was a dreadful moment. Generations met, years rolled away. Troy knew from the twinkling hagshine in her black eyes that his sister had found her dark soulmate, realised that he had been the
unwitting midwife to a friendship cast in hell. That each had lost their twin – whether real or pretend – Masha lost to continuing marriage and motherhood, Caro to the joys and
struggles of illegitimacy and miscegenation – and had simply realigned, struck new liaisons, the elective affinity, the coven, the twindom wreathed in sulphur.

‘My dear,’ said Sasha, ‘we appear to be manless. May I buy you lunch?’

‘That’s just what I came to ask Troy. But he’s not coming out to play, is he?’

Troy watched them down the alley, Fox and Cat arm in arm, almost to the kink in the way that led under the buildings on St Martin’s Lane. Then Tara was running back to him. Her arms around
his neck, a smacking kiss.

‘Thanks for not giving me away.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘You know. You always knew.’

‘Knew what?’

‘Caro never testified in court. I couldn’t put her through that. Don’t you think I deserve an Oscar for my performance?’

Another smackeroo, and she ran to catch up with Sasha. It was, he had to admit, little short of brilliant, and it had almost worked. She’d seen that Blood meant to charge Fitz come what
may, felt first hand his mania to subvert justice and suborn witnesses and, knowing if it were not her it would be someone, she had set him up. Good girl, bad girl – and she had played both
parts. She’d pushed Mirkeyn almost to the limit with her ‘hysterical’ performance; she’d risked contempt and perjury and got away with both. She’d clouded his
judgement and but for his ultimately sharing Blood’s mania to convict, she could so easily have destroyed the case against Fitz. Troy sincerely hoped that she had just had the last word on
the case of Paddy Fitz. There was no more he wanted to hear.

He went back for his suitcase. It felt oddly light. He’d no idea how much to pack. No idea how long he’d be there. Five minutes later he followed the women, down Goodwin’s
Court, under the arch, out into St Martin’s Lane to wait for the hire car. A deepblue, wire-wheeled Morgan shot past him and braked just down the lane, between the Court and the Coliseum. A
woman opened the silly toy door and climbed out. It was just like Tereshkov’s car. For a moment he looked in double-take. They weren’t so common as to be unremarkable. The woman
straightened her black winter coat and came up the street towards him, smiling and waving. He did not recognise her. She was in her fifties, he thought. A looker for her age, but all the same he
did not know her. An open car in November meant hats and gloves and headscarves. She could see much more of him than he could of her. Only when she stopped less than five feet away and spoke his
name did he know her. It was Judy Leigh-Hunt, mother of the errant Charlie. And she wasn’t fifty, she was sixty-five or more – a looker all the same.

‘I thought I’d missed you.’

‘You almost have. I’m on my way to Heathrow.’

‘Then I’ll be quick. I’ve had a letter from Charlie. He’s written three or four times since February. Usually childish whinges about life in Russia, but by the last
letter I finally twigged. When he was a little boy he loved all those
Boy’s Own
and
Magnet
thingies, and he’d write me coded letters from school, pretending he was Richard
Hannay or Bulldog Thingie or somebody like that, until he got too big to want to bother. I realised he was using it again. I won’t bore you with the details, but there was a message for you
buried in his last complaint about borscht and fried tripe.’

She opened her handbag and fished out a piece of paper.

‘Haven’t a clue what it means, but when I got through the nursery code this is what he says: “Tell Freddie his old man was kosher, the real McCoy, the dog’s’”
. . . herrum . . . oh dear . . . “the dog’s bollocks. No need to worry.” Now does that mean anything?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy, wondering if it mattered any more. ‘Yes, it’s quite clear.’

Over her shoulder he could see the man in the driving seat of the blue Morgan twisting his neck to look at Judy. One of the blueblazered RAF types. He leant on the horn.

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘Oh, Barry, you mean.’

She coloured almost imperceptibly. Her right hand flapped once, sweeping away something invisible to the eye.

‘Well. Bloody hell I thought, when that Woodbridge thing blew up– all these blokes and all those young women – sauce for the goose, I thought. Young Barry – I say young,
he’s your age if he’s a day, darling – well, he’d been hanging around for weeks, and I thought, bugger the family, bugger the neighbours, bugger the village. You’re
only old once. Well, must dash. Toodle-oo.’

She took a few steps then turned back to him. Sizing him up.

‘Freddie. You shouldn’t, you know.’

‘Shouldn’t what?’

‘Worry about Charlie. He’s not worth it. Men like Charlie, men like Woodbridge, Fitzpatrick – they’re none of them worth a damn.’

The Morgan vanished into the snarl of traffic waiting to enter Trafalgar Square. Behind him a horn pipped. He turned and saw a Rolls-Royce at the kerb, a peak-capped driver waving at him. Trust
Rod to overdo it. To Heathrow in a Roller? Why not?

He got in the back. The driver looked at him and said, ‘’Eaffrow, guv’nor?’ And whipped off his cap. It was Alfie. Alfie from The Glebe Sanatorium.

‘Yes,’ said Troy, feeling he should explain, somewhat nonplussed to see the man again. ‘Yes. I’m on my way to New York.’

‘New York, Fred?’ Then he cackled like Tommy Trinder. ‘You lucky people!’

N
EW
Y
ORK

It was a fortress of a building, dwarfed now by the larger, vulgar developments of the post-war years, but still dominant on its site halfway up Central Park West. It was easy
to imagine it as it once was, standing alone on the edge of a virtually treeless Central Park, a mock-gothic castle in a sea of mud so far from the heart of fashionable Manhattan, at a time when
rich New Yorkers lived no further north than Union Square, that they said you might just as well live in the Dakotas as live at One West Seventy-Second Street.

It was remarkably like his father’s old town house in Moscow, the same pale brick, black with dirt, the same extravagant use of copper, weathered to a startling powder-green, the same tiny
turrets and dormers, islands in the sky. But this was the town house writ large, the town house on a monumental scale, ten or eleven storeys, the building running the length of a city block all the
way to Seventy-Third.

Troy walked along from the corner – a row of black Neptunes peered at him from the ironwork – and stopped by a blue-uniformed, peak-capped porter, who had just stepped from his
sentry box. The man pointed the way to the office. For a moment the fortress became a cathedral as he passed under a high vaulted ceiling, then up a flight of steps and into a small room to face
another man in uniform, perched in front of the massed spaghetti of an ancient telephone exchange. Whatever this place was it could not be cheap. Either Tosca had landed on her feet or . . . but
there was no end to the sentence, no speculation worth the thought.

‘Number 66, please,’ he said.

‘Mrs Troy?’

‘Yes.’

The man dialled. Troy could hear the phone ring and ring.

‘Nobody home.’

It was pointless asking to be let in. The look on the doorman’s face told him that this was not the sort of place that let you in on a bluff or a whim.

‘I’m her husband,’ he said, knowing how lame the line sounded.

The man nodded. ‘Sure, sure,’ said the look.

‘She could be gone a day or two, you know. Tends to do that.’

Troy checked into a hotel and killed two days walking the streets of the city. A wet, misty late November. It seemed to him that with the closing year he had reached the year’s antithesis.
Twelve months ago or thereabouts he had been in Moscow, the city without. Now New York, the city with.

His sense of the place, based on a single visit in 1928, was that they’d got round to finishing it. In 1928 it had struck him as being a construction site on an unimaginable scale. The
Chrysler Building at Lexington and Forty-Second almost built, 40 Wall Street, almost as high and almost as built – and the Empire State Building, webbed with scaffolding, half-built, like the
younger brother growing so fast it was all too evident he would soon outgrow his siblings. Troy searched for a metaphor. If Beirut had been London in the war, all black market and fiddles; if
Moscow had been London in the bleak years, all want and worry . . . what, then, was New York? At dusk on the second day he found himself at Radio City, on Sixth Avenue, the cross-street led
directly into the Rockefeller Center, rising topless from the concrete to vanish in the rain and mist, lit in lurid lilac by the floodlights. It looked hellish, supernatural, futuristic. A backdrop
for The Shape of Things to Come. That was it. New York was London in the future. He was not at all sure it was a future he wanted.

He headed back to the Upper West Side, a maverick route up Ninth Avenue until it became Columbus, past the bulldozed tenements of the Jets and the Sharks, a voice inside Troy singing, ‘I
like to be in Ameeerrriiika!’

At West Seventy-Second the same man said simply, ‘You can go up. She’s expecting you.’

He was admitted through the second gate, into the courtyard. The walls rose up around him like a keep. More than ever it resembled a castle. And right in front of him was a fountain. Little
fishes spouted water, arched their backs and spread their fins around the base of huge conch shells from which rose the same yellowy-white lilies that graced the iron gates of his father’s
house, spouting still more water. He began to wonder. All those years she had spent in Moscow. Had she made the same visit he had? A quick look at the closed gates of the Ministry of Agriculture,
Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley, then on to the guided tour of the Tolstoy house. Is that what attracted her to this Victorian monstrosity? Its very Russianness, its
seeming un-Americanness?

Yet another porter, a young woman in blue, wearing a pillbox hat, took him up in the lift, a marvel in mahogany, a plush confessional for the unrepentant, with its Neptunes now in brass, a brass
so shiny it must be polished every day.

The door of apartment 66 stood ajar. Darkness within. He pushed gently. A very fat tabby cat, a good eighteen pounds of furry beast, lay on its back on the carpet, barring the threshold, legs in
the air, head raised slightly so it could see who was coming in. He took a stepforward, expecting the cat to bolt. It didn’t.