Chapter 1
Trieste was, so they had told him, the tinderbox of Europe: the sort of place where, at any moment, a spark might ignite the whole powder keg. And they were nearly right, only the spark came almost four years later, in 1914, and it wasn’t in Trieste but just round the corner, in Sarajevo, when the assassination of the Archduke set in motion the train of events which became the First World War. Might, if things had been different, the killing of Lomax have been that spark, Seymour asked himself later? Only that was after the powder keg had exploded, and he was asking himself among the hailstorm of shells and bullets that was the Battle of the Somme, when he wasn’t really in a condition to think clearly about anything.
On that earlier day, in Trieste, as he sat, newly arrived from London, in one of the cafés on the great central piazza, outside in the sun, all that was not just far away but totally unimaginable, so far beyond the reach of normal experience that you just, somehow, couldn’t even think it.
What, actually, he was thinking, as he sat there sweating, still in the hot, dark suit, quite inappropriate for the Mediterranean but which, as a poor policeman from the East End of London, was the only one he had, was that this was all right.
Only three days before he had been in the grime of the East End; except that you hadn’t been able to see the grime, in fact, you hadn’t been able to see anything, because there had been a real old peasouper of a fog, come up from the docks along with a seawater chill which had driven him indoors and kept him stoking the coals of the police station fire. That was where he had been when his instructions came.
And now here he was, under the great blue sweep of the Mediterranean sky, basking in the sun, looking out through the trees at the end of the piazza at the liners in the bay.
‘Very nice!’ the Inspector had said when he had finished giving him his instructions. ‘Sunshine. Palm trees. A holiday trip,’ he had said enviously.
‘Trieste?’ said Seymour. ‘Where’s that?’
The Inspector had held back at this point, but eventually – ‘Italy?’ he hazarded.
This, although he had not known it, was fighting talk in Trieste. At the time, though, Seymour had felt relieved.
‘That’s all right,’ he had said. ‘I can manage Italian.’
‘Ye-es?’ said the Inspector, who had always thought there was something funny about Seymour.
Before going along to the Foreign Office to be more properly informed of his responsibilities, Seymour had taken the trouble to look Trieste up in the atlas. It was about half-way along the coast between what Seymour thought of as the top of Italy and –
Well, the Balkans. A lot of little countries, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Herzegovina, who all got along like a house on fire. Actually, exactly like a house on fire.
Trieste, however, belonged to none of these. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which at that time covered most of the southern half of Central Europe, reaching down to the sea at only one point: Trieste. Through Trieste much of its trade passed. The port was therefore important to the Empire; too important to let go. On the map the Empire hung poised above tiny Trieste like a great bulk about to fall. And that was pretty much how it seemed to Trieste’s extraordinary diversity of inhabitants.
For that was the other thing about Trieste. Within its small confines there were Italians and Austrians and Greeks and Serbs and Croats, Montenegrins and Maltese, Slovenians and Slovakians, Bosnians and Herzegovinians, not to mention Germans and Spanish and French. It was the point at which many different peoples met, met and rubbed together. And where they met there was friction, and where they rubbed there was always the possibility of a spark. Trieste was Europe in miniature, a place where all its peoples were pressed uncomfortably together, like gunpowder pressed into a barrel, like gunpowder awaiting a spark.
Through the trees on the westward side of the square he could see ships. There was a pier just beyond the trees with a ship tied up alongside it. He could see the name of the line. It was written twice, in German and in Italian: Osterreicher Lloyd, and Lloyd Austriaco. He had noticed that before, on his walk down from the hotel. Everything seemed to be double here.
In the café most of the people were speaking Italian. He listened idly to the conversation, trying to get used to the language again.
But this was embarrassing. He had thought he had known Italian, told them that he had. That was why they had picked him. But this was different from the Italian he knew. Odd phrases crept in from other languages: German, he could understand that, Slovenian, he could make a shot at. But ‘sonababic’? It took him some time to work out that it was English: son of a bitch. The influence of the docks, he supposed.
Seymour knew about docks. He had been born and bred not far from London’s docks in the East End, had worked almost all his life, even when he had moved to the Special Branch, in London’s dockland. It was where immigrant families like his tended to settle when they first came ashore. Even when they moved, later, they didn’t move far. They tended to stay in the East End even if they weren’t working in the docks. They stayed with what they knew.
They came ashore in waves, the Jews at one time, the Poles, like his grandfather, at another. There had been others since. When you walked around the East End or went into its pubs and bars you would hear all kinds of languages. It was, although he did not know it, not so very different from Trieste.
It was a world, he thought, that, though foreign, the Foreign Office did not know. Lomax would not have known it. Maybe he would have known about it more than those people Seymour had met in the Foreign Office in London, because he was a consul and his work in Trieste would have taken him down if not into the docks, at least into the port. But he wouldn’t really have known because, from what Seymour had seen, Foreign Office people lived in a world apart.
When he had gone in he had found two people sitting behind a desk, an older man and a younger one. The older one had looked at him without warmth.
‘You know what this is all about, I suppose?’ he said, as if he doubted it. ‘Rather different, I imagine, from anything you’ve been used to.’
He turned to the younger man.
‘In fact, so different that I really wonder – do we have to?’ he asked.
‘Proceed? I’m afraid so. The Minister was particularly insistent.’
‘Yes, but – a policeman!’
‘They’re the ones who usually handle this sort of thing.’
‘Yes, I know, but that’s in the ordinary way. Surely this is a bit different?’
‘That is, of course, why we asked for someone from the Special Branch.’
‘Yes, but … You’ve never dealt with anything like this before, have you?’ He turned the papers in front of him. ‘Whitechapel. Is that where you have been working? Your …’ He seemed to pick up the word with tongs and look at it. ‘… beat?’
‘Not “beat”, exactly. In the Special Branch. But it’s where I’ve been working. The East End generally.’
‘The East End?’ It was spoken almost with incredulity. He looked at the younger man. ‘About as far, I imagine, as you can get from … well, the world he would be investigating.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the younger man. ‘Trieste, the docks.’
‘You know what I mean. Our world. The world of the Foreign Office. Paris, Vienna.’
‘This is just a consul.’
‘It’s still our world, though, isn’t it? And a very different one from the one this gentleman is acquainted with. He’ll be like a fish out of water. I don’t know why they sent him.’
‘Languages,’ said the younger man. ‘We stipulated languages.’
‘But has he got them? What languages, in fact,’ – the scepticism was evident – ‘do you have?’
‘French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish –’
‘But to what level?’ the man broke in. ‘A few words are all very well down in … Whitechapel’ – he spoke the word as if it was somehow unclean – ‘but you’ll need rather more if –’
‘Actually, the level of foreign languages expertise in Whitechapel is rather high,’ said Seymour, stung. ‘They’re all native speakers.’
The younger man laughed. ‘Immigrants, you mean?’ said the older man.
‘Yes.’
‘Hmm.’ He was silent for a moment, considering. Then he said: ‘And you yourself?’
‘My grandfather was Polish, my mother Hungarian.’
The older man looked at the younger man again.
‘Is that all right?’
‘Very helpful, I would have thought.’
‘No, I don’t mean the languages.’
‘When did your family come over here?’ asked the younger man.
‘My grandfather came in the early fifties.’
‘After the Year of Revolutions?’ said the younger man, amused.
‘That’s right.’
‘With the police after him?’ said the older man.
‘The Czarist police, yes.’
‘He was a revolutionary?’
‘I think in English terms he would have counted just as a liberal. Today he votes Conservative.’
‘And your father?’
‘Born here. As I was.’
‘Does he share your grandfather’s views?’
‘Which ones? The old ones?’
The man made an impatient gesture with his hand.
‘He runs the family business. It’s a timber business down by the docks. He doesn’t have much time for politics. Take that in any sense you wish.’
The younger man laughed. The older one looked at him with irritation.
‘This is important,’ he said.
‘It’s also sixty years ago,’ said the younger man.
‘I know, I know. But one has to be sure. The point is,’ he said to Seymour, ‘this is an investigation which has to be handled with extreme sensitivity. Diplomatic sensitivity. There are currents … One would need to be confident that the man we send out was not going to be drawn into them …’
‘Unlike, perhaps, the person whose death he would be investigating,’ murmured the younger man.
Lomax, the British Consul at Trieste, had disappeared. That much seemed to be certain, although much else wasn’t. The younger man, for instance, had said he was dead.
Dead?
‘It seems the most likely thing,’ said the younger man, ‘in the circumstances.’
‘Could you tell me about the circumstances?’
‘The immediate ones are that he was in the main piazza with some friends.’
‘Drinking,’ said the older man.
‘And then?’
‘He left. And hasn’t been seen since.’
Seymour waited, but it looked as if nothing was going to be added.
‘Is that all?’
‘All?’ said the older man. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘No body?’
‘Body!’
‘Not yet,’ said the younger man.
‘Or anything that suggests foul play? Apart from his having disappeared?’
‘This is Trieste,’ said the younger man softly.
‘But mightn’t he have just, well, gone somewhere?’
‘If you go somewhere, you usually come back,’ said the younger man.
‘Is it possible that he could simply have walked out?’
‘Walked out?’
‘On the job.’
‘Consuls do not walk out on their job,’ said the older man severely. ‘At least, British ones don’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Seymour doggedly, ‘but I still don’t see why you should presume that he is dead.’
The younger man and the older man looked at each other. The older man sighed impatiently.
‘It’s the kind of man he was,’ said the younger man.
‘Always getting himself involved,’ said the older man. ‘Quite improper! For a consul.’
‘And what we know of the situation out there.’
‘Involved in what? What is the situation out there?’
The younger man hesitated.
‘Hadn’t that better wait until you get out there? It will all make much more sense to you then.’
‘I doubt it,’ said the older man.
‘Oh, I think Mr Seymour will soon get a feel for things.’
‘A tinderbox,’ said the older man. ‘An absolute tinderbox. And that’s what we’re sending him out into. One fool after another!’
But nothing seemed less like a tinderbox, as he sat there in the sun, looking at the sea sparkling through the trees, and watching the seagulls swoop in to pick up the crumbs beneath the tables. That morning, after he had checked in at his hotel, he had gone first to the Consulate and then to the main police station. In the police station he had been taken to see a Mr Kornbluth, who, it appeared, was the officer in charge of the case.
Kornbluth was sitting behind his desk, big, heavy, stolid, unyielding, like a great block of masonry, or, perhaps, a pile of rubble. He looked at Seymour unblinkingly. He seemed to be working something out. Then he said, haltingly, in English:
‘You wished to see me?’
Seymour, going by the name, replied helpfully in German.
‘I am from the British Consulate,’ he said. ‘My government’ – that was a good start. He would soon get the hang of this diplomatic business – ‘is anxious to know the circumstances in which the Consul disappeared.’
He waited.
Kornbluth said nothing.
‘I wonder if you could tell me something?’
For a moment it appeared that Kornbluth could not, but then, almost reluctantly, he said:
‘He was reported missing on Wednesday, the 23rd.’
‘And?’ prompted Seymour, when it seemed that Kornbluth was going to stop there.
‘At 10.45 a.m.’
Was he merely obtuse? Or was he doing this deliberately? A word, a German word, rose up in Seymour’s mind: lumpen. That’s what Kornbluth was: lumpen.
‘Could you give me some more details, please?’
‘The last time he was seen was the evening before. In the Piazza Grande. He was with a bunch of layabouts.’
‘Layabouts?’
‘His friends.’ Kornbluth’s voice was heavy with disapproval.
Seymour was slightly taken aback. Layabouts? He would have to look into this.
‘Always he was with them.’
‘The layabouts?’
‘In the piazza. Drinking.’ Kornbluth shook his head. ‘For a consul, it was not seemly.’
‘Well, no. And that’s what he was doing that evening?’
‘As every evening.’
Seymour was beginning to get the picture.
‘And then he left?’
‘Si.’
‘At about what time?’
‘Nine thirty. Or so they say.’
He had slipped, apparently unconsciously, into Italian. Seymour followed him.
‘Have they any idea where he might have been going?’
‘They think he might have had an appointment. He kept looking at his watch.’
Now that he was speaking Italian, he seemed to talk more freely.
‘I have looked in his appointments book, however, and there is no mention of any appointment there. His clerk, Koskash, knows nothing about one. I have spoken to the port officials – there could have been a boat coming in. But there wasn’t. At the port they know nothing about it. Nor in the offices, nor in the banks.’
He paused.
‘There is, anyway, something wrong in all this.’
‘Something wrong?’
‘Appointment? Business? Evening?’ Kornbluth shook his head and suddenly appeared to twinkle. ‘In Trieste,’ he said, ‘no one does any business in the evening!’
He glanced at his watch.
‘Nor at lunchtime,’ he said. ‘How about an aperitif?’
Now that he was speaking Italian he seemed a different man.
‘I’m sorry I spoke in German,’ Seymour said. ‘I was going by the name.’
‘It is German,’ Kornbluth said. ‘Or, rather, Austrian. But that was a long time ago. My family have been here for, well, over a hundred years. Trieste born and bred, that’s what I am.’
‘And so you grew up speaking Italian?’
‘Not Italian,’ corrected Kornbluth. ‘Triestino.’
‘Ah!’ said Seymour. ‘That’s it! I’d been wondering why it was different.’
‘And the difference is important,’ said Kornbluth. He looked at Seymour curiously. ‘You can hear it? You speak Italian very well.’
‘But not Triestino,’ said Seymour.
Kornbluth clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But after a slivowicz or two, you will.’ . . .
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