Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

‘Thank you. That’s very kind of you.’

‘Not at all,’

Barton held out his hand.

‘I’ve got to push off, I’m afraid. Trouble at the docks again. Sorry about Lomax. Funny bloke. Can’t say I really got on with him. Could never make him out. All right at his job, I will say that. But you never knew where you were with him. Too much in with the locals. You began to wonder whose side he was on.’

When the stream had subsided, Koskash came in.

‘Schneider wants to see you,’ he said.

‘Fine, show him in.’

‘No, no. You go to him, he doesn’t come to you.’

‘Well, all right, if that’s the way it is. Where do I go?’

‘The police station.’

‘Police station?’

‘There’s a special part. Behind the main building.’

‘Well, all right. And I just ask for Schneider, do I? Will that be enough?’

‘Oh, yes. That will be enough.’

‘Look, who the hell is Schneider?’

Koskash considered for a moment.

‘In Trieste,’ he then said carefully, ‘there are two sorts of police.’

‘Yes, yes, someone else has told me that.’

‘The ordinary sort — Kornbluth is one of those. And — well, a different sort. The special police. They deal mostly with political matters.’

‘Well, I’m like that. Mostly.’

‘You are?’ Koskash looked at him evenly. ‘Well, then, you and Schneider should get on.’

Inside the room a man was sitting at a desk. He wore a general’s uniform and had close-cropped hair and a scar — a duelling scar? — on his cheek.

‘Herr Seymour? From the British Consulate?’

He rose and shook hands.

‘I was very sorry to hear — we were all very sorry to hear. Please accept our profound regrets. You may assure London that we shall do everything we can to track down those responsible.’

“Thank you.’

Schneider looked at him curiously.

‘You are not, I think, a regular member of the Consulate?’

‘No. It happened that I was on my way here when — when the incident happened. I am a King’s Messenger.’

‘Ah, a King’s Messenger?’ He looked at Seymour’s wrist and smiled. ‘So it’s true, then,’ he said, ‘about the watches? You people always wear two?’

‘Not always,’ said Seymour.

‘And that one is always set at British time, the other at Continental time?’

‘When it is important.’

Schneider laughed.

‘Do you know what that says? To me, at any rate. It says that British time is different from Continental time. That Britain is always out of step with Europe. That our interests are always, in the end, different.’

‘Why should our interests be different?’ asked Seymour.

‘Well,’ said Schneider — he seemed to be watching him, ‘take this matter of your Mr Lomax.’

‘Why should our interests be different there? The Austrian authorities are surely as anxious as we are to find out what happened to him?’

‘Yes, of course we have to find out. And if a crime has been committed, it must be solved. We can agree about that. But beyond that?’

‘Beyond that?’

‘There may, of course, be nothing beyond that. It may all be very simple. He goes out for the night with one of his drunken friends and gets knocked on the head down by the docks. The body is thrown in the water. A simple robbery: that is all. Anyway, London says, that is all there is to it and it ends there. But suppose Vienna says, well, no, we do not think that is all there is to it and we would like to know more. Well, then, you see, our interests may differ. British time is not the same as Vienna time,’

‘Why shouldn’t that be all there is to it?’

‘May I ask,’ said Schneider, ‘if you knew Lomax? Personally, I mean?’

‘No.’

‘I did. And I found him. . surprising. At first when you meet him you think he is insignificant. You think there is nothing there. The sort of man you can walk over. And at first, when you do business with him, you do walk over him. But then, just when you think it’s all over and done with, up he pops again, with that slightly inane smile of his, polite, deferential — deferring, always deferring. Everyone else’s opinion is always better than his. Even when he is a drunken layabout. He defers even to the port officials and they think: this is an easy touch. No problem here. So they try to trick him. And they think they’ve got away with it. But no, suddenly it is not so easy. There he is popping up again. And in the end it is they who give way. It is almost exasperating. You could say, perhaps, that he is just very good at his job. .

‘But lately I have been wondering about your Mr Lomax. So ignorable, so overlookable, and yet so good at representing his country’s interests. I have been asking myself recently where those interests end. There have been things, you see. .

‘And then one day he disappears. Consuls do not disappear. Just like that. Now I begin to wonder very hard. Is there something I have missed in this most missable of men? Something to do, perhaps, with those interests beyond the usual interests? Is this, perhaps, a point at which British time becomes different from Viennese time? And then he is found dead. And then. .’ Schneider paused. . a King’s Messenger comes.’ He was suddenly looking at Seymour very sharply. ‘A King’s Messenger?’

Seymour had had his doubts about the King’s Messenger bit right from the first. It was always tricky to work covertly and to work covertly abroad even more tricky; especially when it was in a field completely new to you, as foreign, in all senses, as the diplomatic world. He had been able to see the argument for doing so in this case, however, and had allowed himself to be persuaded. What he had been more worried by, at the time, had been the difficulty of explaining it to his family.

He had had enough difficulty, with their history of dissent from government in their original native lands and the normal immigrant suspicion of authority in their new land, in getting them to accept his original decision to become a policeman. Now this!

It was his grandfather, surprisingly, who had recovered first. Although fiercely anti-royalist, he was disposed to make exceptions for the country of his adoption and found a perverse satisfaction in thinking now that his family had made it in England to the extent of his grandson becoming one of the King’s courtiers, that, at last, one of his family promised to be on the inside of the power game. How wrong, thought Seymour, he was!

Seymour’s mother, who thought that to take on any post with a title was to stick your neck out, remained doubtful, and his sister, who was probably the only one with an idea of what a King’s Messenger actually was, was quietly dismissive.

His father stayed, as usual, silent. If his son was going to start travelling at the government’s expense, why couldn’t he go to the Baltic, where he might be able to do a useful bit of timber business on the side?

Now suddenly, almost as soon as he had got out to Trieste, to find himself under pressure on the covert side, was disconcerting. Schneider was sharp, no question about that. But what was he on about? He seemed to be hinting that Lomax might have played some other role in addition to that of consul. Just fancy, or was there something in it? Seymour was beginning to wonder if his briefing at the Foreign Office in London had been as full as it might have been.

He answered, however, neutrally.

‘King’s Messenger, yes. I was on my way here when it happened. Pure accident, of course.’

‘Of course. I just hope that another accident doesn’t happen.’

The artists, too, had heard the news and were in sombre mood at their table when he passed it that evening.