Second Violin (27 page)

Steerforth roared, ‘Don’t ask them! Tell ’em!’

Troy walked out.

Five or six minutes passed, then the remaining bobbies lined up to form a corridor and thirty-odd men were hustled out of the library straight into Black Marias. As the first van moved off
Steerforth caught sight of Troy standing by the Riley and strode purposefully over.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

Troy said, ‘Mr Steerforth, what you did in there was disgusting –’

Steerforth punched him in the mouth. Troy tasted blood. Steerforth pulled back for a second blow and found his arm held by Stilton.

‘Remember what you told us, sir – nobody gets thumped while there’s witnesses.’

Stilton pointed back at the crowd they’d drawn. Steerforth shrugged him off, glanced quickly round at the staring faces on the pavement. But for them Troy was sure he’d hit him
again. Then the finger wagged in his face.

‘You ever . . . You ever disobey an order of mine again and I’ll see you busted back to pounding the beat.’

He turned his back on Troy and strode off.

Troy wiped the blood from his lip.

‘It was also illegal,’ he said to Steerforth’s back. Steerforth turned and ran at Troy. Stilton, almost twice his girth, got both arms around him and said, ‘For
Christ’s sake, sir. Not in public!’

Steerforth freed one arm and a finger to wag with.

‘Cross me again, son, and you’re through. Gettit? Through! You won’t be worth dogshit on the pavement!’

Stilton said nothing until the street had begun to chatter. Then, blending authority and civility, said, ‘Do you want to be a copper when you grow up?’

Troy looked down, spat blood onto the tarmac.

‘I’m right, Walter. This . . . this farrago is illegal.’

‘I’ve no doubt you’re right. You’re the educated one. But you work for Stanley Onions. I thought you’d have learnt by now that if there’s one thing brass
hates it’s a barrack-room lawyer and that’s just what you came across as to Steerforth. You waved a red rag at a bull. Worse, you just made a powerful enemy.’

An old woman stepped out of the crowd. Took a fancy, blue-edged hanky from her sleeve and pressed it to Troy’s split lip.

‘
Diese englische Polizei, ist nicht besser als die deutsche. Nur die braunen Hemden fehlen noch
.’

Troy understood little of what she’d said. ‘Police’ and ‘brown’, and not much else. He took the hanky from her, looked to Stilton for a translation.

‘You won’t like it. She thinks you’re the one we’ve nicked and told you coppers’re no better than the Brownshirts.’

‘Just thank her, would you, Walter? Don’t tell her I’m a copper. I think I’m ashamed to be one for once.’

Stilton obliged, and as she walked away said, ‘Well, at least we’re not locking up the women.’

‘Not yet,’ Troy said. ‘But Steerforth’ll have us doing that if we don’t get off this assignment.’

That night Kitty touched the scab on his lip, slipped a finger in his mouth to see if his teeth wiggled.

‘I can’t believe he did that.’

Troy said nothing but ‘mmm’ and sucked gently on the finger.

She pulled it out and said, ‘What did my dad say?’

Troy told her.

‘But you’ll report him – the bastard – won’t you?’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No I won’t.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘And have to call your father as a witness? Against Steerforth? He’d hate that.’

‘Yeah – he would. He’d absolutely hate it. Steerforth – I could just murder him!’

‘My experience with crimes of vengeance and murder – which is not inconsiderable – has led me to think that it’s far better to let someone else do the deed for you.
Murder Steerforth and who knows . . . It might land in my in-tray.’

‘What? You? Investigatin’ me?’

She kissed the injured lip, ruffled the injured pride.

‘I can twirl you round my little finger any time I want.’

So she did.

What does one do after the revolution? So long in coming, those who planned and achieved it have their roles mapped out from the first. The Second Under-Assistant Deputy Chief
Commissar for Internal State Security (East) has known what his role will be from the night when he and the comrades met in an attic over a butcher’s shop in an alley off a back street in
some nameless provincial town far from Moscow ten and more years ago. But what of those who did not plan the revolution, opposed it or simply had no idea it was coming? After the failed revolution
of 1905, Alex Troy, who had part-planned part-participated and part-exploited the event, scarpered. After 1917 – revolution or putsch? in either case Troy was not party – all he had to
do was stay put in London, run his newspapers, expand his publishing empire and wonder (not that he did) how to spend all the money. Admiral Wolkoff, the Tsar’s naval attaché in London
in 1917, had also chosen to stay put . . . but not owning any newspaper, let alone a string of them, what was he to do? His choice was an odd one. He opened a café-restaurant – he
called it a tea room, in fact quite specifically the Russian Tea Rooms, but café-restaurant it was – on the corner of Harrington Road and Thurloe Place in South Kensington, directly
opposite the Underground station (Circle, District and Piccadilly).

The Russian Tea Rooms appealed primarily to right-wing exiles known as Whites, of which there were plenty, several of whom had been all but blackmailed into pro-Bolshevik activity – but
for exiles of the Left it presented an irresistible, if often resisted, opportunity merely to drink tea from a samovar and to listen to the seductive susurrus of their native tongue. Troy
couldn’t give a toss. He liked to hear Russian spoken, but few things bored him more than a bunch of old Russians sitting around banging on about the old country (one to which he had never
been and to which he had no expectations of ever going). His Uncle Nikolai, youngest of his father’s brothers, twenty years younger than Alex himself, the only one to make the journey
westward, who had escorted Troy’s grandfather, Rodyon Rodyonovich, to safety after the death of his mentor Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1910, felt differently. He liked the place, politics
notwithstanding, and every so often badgered the young Troy into accompanying him.

Hence, the next day, the Saturday lunchtime, Troy found himself with a day off and emerging from the Underground station to see his uncle, short and stout and very Russian, waving at him from
the other side of the street.

‘Ah . . . dear boy . . . I smell the scents of Old Russia!’ Nikolai said.

‘Really?’ Troy replied. ‘I smell petrol fumes and the blocked drains of old Kensington.’

‘For that you pick up the bill.’

‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Lead me to it.’

Inside it was Saturday-packed, a sea of nodding, babbling heads. A liquid hubbub of Russian speech. At a corner table near the door, the stately figure of old Admiral Wolkoff himself, bushy
white beard, head turning slowly to look briefly at every newcomer. At the counter his daughter, Anna, a frumpish woman in her late thirties whom Troy thought charmless but whose familiar broad
slav features somehow put a twinkle in his uncle’s eye.

On a quiet day, and he hardly ever seemed to be there when it was quiet, Troy thought the Tea Rooms might even be a relaxing place to take tea – dark-panelled, highly polished, elegant in
its way and in winter often with a welcoming, roaring open fire. But they were too popular. People came in droves. It was said that the Tea Rooms served the best caviar in London. There were plenty
who probably came here just to try it, but, to Troy’s dismay, his uncle always opted for peasant fare, for food associated with his childhood. His favourite stank. Troy could not abide the
smell, but knew as he saw his uncle scanning the menu that he would settle on a disgusting soup made from kidneys and sour cream, called
roscolnick.
No matter what they did to it it always
reeked of offal.

Predictably, he lowered the menu, his eyes smiling at Troy across the top.

‘
Roscolnick
today!’

‘Really?’ Troy lied. ‘I hadn’t noticed. And to follow?’

Troy picked out the next most unpalatable item, and mentally placed a fiver on Nikolai opting for jellied halibut.

‘Oh . . . I think the jellied . . . sturgeon . . . no, no . . . the halibut. Yes, the jellied halibut.’

Troy would sooner eat snails.

‘You may pick the pudding.’

Anna Wolkoff set Russian tea in silver-cased glasses in front of them, and prepared to take their order.

‘We have not seen you in a while, Professor,’ she said.

‘War work, you know how it is,’ Nikolai said, coyly, and rattled off his order. ‘My nephew will choose the pudding.’

Anna paid attention to Troy for the first time.

‘Ah, your nephew the journalist?’

‘No, my nephew the Scotland Yard detective.’

Her head jerked up, she blinked. If there’d been a smile this remark would have wiped it from her face.

‘I’ll send a girl over when you’ve made your mind up,’ she said, and left without a second glance at Troy.

‘I do wish you wouldn’t just blurt out things like that,’ Troy said.

‘Why?’ Nikolai stirred honey into his tea. ‘You’re not ashamed to be the famous Scotland Yard detective, are you?’

‘No. I’m not ashamed. And I’m not famous either. It’s just . . .’

‘Just what?’

‘It’s a bit of a show-stopper.’

‘I didn’t see any heads turn. I saw no one pick up a bag marked “swag” and sneak out the back door.’

‘Well it got rid of her pretty sharpish.’

Nikolai shrugged this off – a gesture Troy himself had inherited.

‘Perhaps she has something to hide?’

Another waitress came and took Troy’s order for
gurevskaya kasha
, better known to former English public schoolboys as semolina pudding, but enlivened by the addition of nuts and
cream.

Troy did what a good nephew should throughout the first course, and answered all his uncle’s questions about the family.

What was Rod up to?

Writing a book about his time in Germany.

His father’s disposition?

He and Churchill were still not speaking.

The mood of his mother?

Still taking everything too seriously.

The antics of his wayward sisters?

While the cat’s away . . .

‘And you, my boy? What of you? Always we talk of the others. But they are all of them married now. Only you left alone. Is there no one? A fine-looking boy like you, surely there is a
girl?’

Troy looked at his fish rather than straight at his uncle. He would not answer this question if the old man shoved lighted matches under his fingernails.

‘I’m rather busy at work,’ he fenced.

‘Ah, so. Murder.’

‘If only. No . . . at the moment I’m rounding up German and Austrian nationals.’

Nikolai nodded, paused a little and asked, ‘Kornfeld. Arthur Kornfeld. Did you round up Kornfeld?’

‘No.’

‘Franz Neuberg?’

‘Yes. He was the first. Friend of yours?’

‘No, but doubtless we shall meet. I have been asked to review the internment of anyone who might be useful to the war effort.’

‘By our Military Intelligence?’

‘Naturally.’

‘You know it would make more sense if they’d asked you before they asked me to lock the poor buggers up.’

‘Well, my boy, you know what they say. Military Intelligence – the perfect oxymoron.’

‘Then we’re all doomed,’ said Troy.

As the prospect of jellied halibut sat before him, looking like something that had recently emerged from Moby Dick’s groin, he caught sight of Nikolai looking past him towards the
staircase that wound up just to the left of the door into what he presumed was an over-the-shop flat. He looked in the mirror behind Nikolai and saw in reflection what his uncle saw directly, the
frequency with which men were ushered up with a nod and a gesture from old Wolkoff, without any seeming contact with the rest of the restaurant. He had assumed on entry, as he always had, that the
old Admiral guarded the door, and did so with a mixture of proprietorial majesty and plain nosiness. Now he realised that it was this second, inner door he guarded. Not this room but the room
above. And his uncle’s remark began to seem more than casual, more than thrown out as banter. Perhaps Anna Wolkoff did have something to hide? He shifted his chair a little to show more of
the rest of the room in the mirror, let his uncle’s chatter wash over him, and spotted two men by the fireplace, sipping Russian tea with obvious distaste and clutching English newspapers
they only pretended to read. Like Nikolai they seemed more concerned with the comings and goings from the upstairs room.

Nikolai had finished the fish.

‘You haff hardly touched yours, my boy.’

Troy beckoned to the waitress for their bill.

‘Are you not staying for the
kasha
?’

‘No,’ said Troy softly. ‘And neither are you. You see those two blokes over by the fireplace. Coppers.’

‘You don’t say.’

‘I do. Not just coppers, but I’d bet a penny to a pound they’re Special Branch. You have only to look at the size of their feet. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but
something’s going on here and you with your insatiable kitten’s curiosity could not resist taking a peek. Fine. I don’t know what you’ve heard, what tip-off you’ve
received, but you’ve had your peek. We’re leaving before whatever it is is going to happen happens.’

‘Nonsense.’

Troy caught sight of a small boy in wire-rimmed glasses, ten or eleven years old, standing by the counter as he always seemed to be whenever Troy was in the café. He caught his eye and
the boy came over. Troy cupped a silver sixpence in his hand, and let the boy catch a glimpse of it, before bunching his fingers around it, and saying softly, ‘Len – those two by the
fireplace. Are they regulars?’

‘Nah. They was in yesterday as well, though. But I never seen ’em before yesterday.’

‘Do they order anything?’

‘Just tea, and they don’t seem to like that much. They keep looking at their watches like they was afraid of missing something. And they don’t seem to understand a word of
Russian. Goes right over their ’eads. Even I understand “please” and “thank you”.’