Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

He spoke in Italian but was not Italian. Nor was he English. This troubled Seymour but for the moment he couldn’t think why.

The man clicked his heels and bowed again, and Seymour let him out.

All day he had been listening to the voices around him: the women haggling in the markets, the men unloading the boats, the newspaper seller in the piazza, the barely comprehensible old woman behind her pile of melons; the little groups of men standing talking in the piazzas — they seemed to stand there all day; the housewives sitting in their doorway to catch a breath of air, calling back over their shoulder from time to time to someone inside, an elderly mother who would occasionally show herself, or a young daughter who would emerge indignant and passionate, holding an even younger child by the hand; the policemen at the police station with their Austrian bittes and the waiters in the Piazza Grande with their Italian pregos . All day he had been taking them in and now, sitting in the Edison, at the time that Lomax had sat there, waiting for the picture to begin, the picture that Lomax had waited for with James, he was listening to them still.

Seymour had an unusual ear for language. It was that that had brought him here, had made him what he was. Growing up in the East End and hearing its various languages he had sometimes mimicked them when he had gone home. Old Appelmann, visiting once, had noticed his facility and encouraged it. Occasionally he took Seymour with him when he was doing his work as the local interpreter, and had talked about the language after. Old Appelmann had once been a teacher and could not resist teaching now. Gradually, with his help, Seymour had acquired the languages of the East End.

Much of Appelmann’s work had been for the police and in that way they had got to know Seymour too. That had led first to his becoming Appelmann’s paid assistant and then to his joining the police force itself.

At first he had not liked the police and had thought about leaving. But acute superiors had spotted his talent, which was not confined to languages, and encouraged him to make use of it. In time he had settled and things suddenly became easier when, unusually for an ordinary constable, he had been transferred to the Special Branch. They had used him a lot in the East End, where so many languages were spoken.

Trieste, from that point of view, was a delight. It was like the East End only more so. It was Europe in miniature, Europiccola, as James had once said fondly, Europe with all its languages brought together in a small space.

Now, in the cinema, his ear trailed, as it were, lovingly over them; but all the time at the back of his mind he was hearing again the voice of the man who had come to the Consulate late to pick up his ‘papers’. Something about it continued to niggle at him.

A piano at the front of the cinema started to play. The show was about to begin. It was the picture that Lomax had seen on the night he died. Aladdin and the Magic Lamp . Seymour felt an anticipating thrill of excitement. This, at any rate, should be a treat.

When Seymour came out of the cinema he found his path obstructed by a line of men carrying placards. In the darkness he couldn’t quite see what the placards said. The men didn’t really attempt to block him. They parted and let everyone through.

‘Socialists!’ said a man beside Seymour, contemptuously.

In most parts of the East End uniformed policemen always went in twos. Seymour was usually not in uniform and, besides, knew the East End and was known in it, so he hadn’t normally bothered to. Nevertheless, he always, and especially after dark, walked carefully. He had developed a sense which told him when he was being followed.

It was telling him now. He stopped outside a shop and looked in, as if he was examining the strings of brightly coloured and variously shaped pasta, and glanced back along the street. A man in a trilby hat was hovering outside a taverna. He seemed to make up his mind and went in. Further along the street two men were talking unhurriedly. An ox-cart came down the street and stopped outside the taverna. The driver and his mate got down and began to unload the barrels.

Seymour walked on. If it hadn’t been for this he would have enjoyed the freshness of the morning, with its smells of baking and of coffee, the fresh smell of the water the shopkeepers were sprinkling on the dust they had just swept out of their shops, the freshness of the sea breeze creeping up into the tired, stale alleys.

After a while, as the feeling persisted, he turned aside into a small piazza where there was an open-air market. Fish gleamed on stalls, crabs hung from hooks, sea spiders glistened in shells. Seymour walked through the vegetable stalls loaded with aubergines and tomatoes and peppers of all colours, green, red and yellow, and then out on the other side to where melons were piled on the ground in mountains and where a mother was washing a small child’s face, not in water, because the pump was on the other side of the market, but in melon juice.

He doubled round, turned up a side street, and came out on to the road he had originally been on. He did not step out on to it, however, but hung back in the shadow.

A little later he saw the man in the trilby hat come quickly out of the market and look up and down the street. He spotted Seymour and walked, seemingly casually, across the street to the other side and studied the contents of the window of a gentlemen’s outfitter.

Seymour continued to be conscious of his presence behind. He never came close, however, so Seymour knew that this was a different kind of follower from the ones you got in the East End.

When he arrived at the Consulate Koskash handed him a large envelope from Kornbluth. It contained the preliminary medical findings on the body. He did not at once have time to read it, however, as two more people came to express formal condolence. They came from other consulates, of which there were, not surprisingly, a great many in Trieste. Seymour had been hoping, following the conversation with Maddalena yesterday, that someone else might come forward. Lomax had obviously had acquaintances from outside the diplomatic community. Where were they?

By the time he had got through the consular condolences it was late in the morning and the heat was building up. He decided to get away from the Consulate before anyone else came. He wanted to read in peace the material Kornbluth had sent him.

Koskash, ever polite, came with him to the door. Across the road, leaning apparently casually against a wall, was the man in the trilby.

Koskash laughed.

‘So you, too, have been honoured! You know what they say here? They say that in Trieste the sun is so bright that everyone has a shadow.’

So that was the kind of follower it was. Seymour was quite taken aback. Why should the authorities be watching him ? The thought came into his mind that perhaps, having mislaid Lomax, they did not wish to mislay him. But that seemed unlikely. From what Koskash had said, it was almost a matter of routine, the style of the place. But what sort of place was it where everyone had a shadow?

He found himself near the Canal Grande and on an impulse turned in towards it and walked along beside the boats to the cafe where he and Kornbluth had sat the other day.

There were people already at the tables, clerks from the big offices looking down on the canal having their midmorning coffee, storemen already three-quarters of their way through the day sitting down with the captains of the boats, discussing cargoes. In the boats themselves men were working hard on the loading and unloading. This was the time, before the sun got too high, to do the heavy work.