Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

‘You dumb idiot! You’re turning down the chance of a lifetime!’

The man laughed.

‘We’re pulling out of a big flop. You’ll never fill the Politeama. Not with what you’re planning.’

‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong. I’ve sent out invitations. And I’ve had replies. Dozens of them. Hundreds.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘The Governor — ’

‘Well, I can tell you that he certainly won’t be coming.’

‘Oh, yes, he will.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘His wife is on the organizing committee.’

The man stopped.

‘What?’

‘On our committee. She’s interested in art. Not like you, you philistine bastard.’

The man turned and came back.

‘Are you having me on?’

‘No, I’m not. You wait and see. Just wait till I tell her that Machnich says we must scrap the whole thing because he can’t keep his word!’

‘If you’re lying to me — ’

‘Lying? To the man who has Machnich’s ear? Would I do that? I’d sooner spit in it.’

‘I shall check this — ’

‘Check all you like, you dumb idiot!’

The man hesitated.

‘You’re sure about this? Really sure?’

‘As sure as I am that you’re a stupid, ignorant — ’

‘The Governor?’

‘And the consuls. And the Chamber of Commerce. Everybody. Everybody who’s anybody.’

‘If you’re having me on -

‘The Governor. His wife has promised. And if it’s the Governor, it’s going to be everyone else, isn’t it?’

The man hesitated.

‘If you like,’ said Marinetti, ‘I’ll go round and tell her now. I’m sorry, Frau Kruger, but Machnich says — ’

‘All right, all right. All right, you can have it. You can have the Politeama for the evening.’

Thank you. It’s so nice of you to keep your word. And surprising.’

‘Shut up!’ said the new man, wavering still. ‘The Governor? You’re sure?’

‘And his wife,’ said Marinetti, beaming.

‘The consuls? The diplomatic riff-raff? They’re the ones who matter. You’re sure about them?’

‘If the Governor is there, so will they be.’

He made up his mind, finally.

‘All right then. Don’t cock it up.’

‘Shall I send Machnich an invitation?’

‘Why not?’ said the man, smiling his thin smile.

‘What a bastard!’ said Luigi.

‘Who is he?’ asked Seymour.

‘His name is Rakic. He does things for Machnich.’

‘He seems pretty confident that Machnich will agree to whatever he says.’

‘I don’t know why he should be. He hasn’t been here five minutes.’

‘And the sooner he goes away again, the better.’

‘They say he was in the army.’

‘Well, it certainly sounds like it. Let’s have a drink. To take the taste out of our mouths. Giuseppi!’

Seymour was going to leave but they insisted that he have one too. Marinetti pulled up a chair. Seymour sat down next to him.

‘What’s this you’re putting on?’

‘Ah! My Evening. Well. .’ began Marinetti enthusiastically.

The others moved away. They had heard it, Seymour suspected, many times before.

‘The first Futurist Evening!’

‘Futurist?’

‘That’s what we call ourselves. The Futurists. Art must look forward. Not back.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure.’

‘Art.

Seymour began to wish that he had moved away too.

Seymour went back to the Consulate. Koskash was, as he always seemed to be, bent over his desk. He laid his pen down.

‘I would like,’ said Seymour, ‘to get a feel for the work of the Consulate. The kind of things Lomax did. The kind of things you do.’

‘Certainly!’ said Koskash enthusiastically. ‘I’d be glad to show you — ’

Seymour interrupted him hastily, fearing he was about to be exposed to another dose like Marinetti’s.

‘Something simple. Those papers you were working on the other night, for instance.’

‘Well, they are hardly typical. That sort of thing comes up only every so often.’

‘Never mind. They’ll do for a start. Now what exactly were you doing?’

‘Making out papers for seamen. Usually because they’ve lost them. Or had them stolen. That happens sometimes, usually when they’ve been to a brothel or a taverna.’

Seymour went through the process with him. It seemed a simple clerical matter, recorded meticulously in Koskash’s careful handwriting.

‘You keep a record, of course?’

‘Oh, yes. We have to. So that we can check up if the need arises. There’s a certain market in such papers.’

‘And you keep the record. .?’

‘Over there. In the files.’

A little of this kind of thing went a long way and Seymour soon thanked Koskash, saying that he would come back for enlightenment on another process.

‘The stationery inventory, perhaps?’ said Koskash enthusiastically.

‘Perhaps,’ said Seymour, backing off.

When Koskash had finished work for the day, almost regretfully, it seemed, he went off. Seymour remained at his desk, writing his report. After Koskash had left, he went over to the files and found the folder containing the duplicates of the seamen’s papers that Koskash had made out. There were, as Koskash had said, not many of them, but Seymour went back over several years, until a different Consul’s name appeared in the records.

As Seymour left the Consulate, he sensed, rather than saw, the man in the trilby hat falling in behind him. Was this the way it was going to be every time he went out? If it was, he didn’t like it. It made the place feel different, put a shadow over the sun. Why him? Why should he be singled out in this way?

And then Koskash’s words came back to him. Of course. He wasn’t being singled out. This was everybody. Perhaps not everybody, it couldn’t be. But enough people for it to be taken for granted. It was a permanent feature of the place, part of the landscape, part of the Trieste way of life. Almost something in the air you breathed. It had been there, he realized, all the time, behind the sunshine and the sparkling sea, behind the wine and the waiters and the tables in the great piazza, behind the liners at anchor in the bay. It was just that at first he had not seen it.

It had been there, he realized, in the soldiers at the entrance of every official building, in the policemen at every public place where people gathered; There in the inspectors present in every market, however small, and anywhere where things were done.

There, in the uniforms everywhere, with their precise, pretty distinctions, the different sorts of epaulettes, the cocked hats for one grade of functionary, the flat caps for another, in the subtly differential braid and the tightly prescribed brims.

In the prescribed sheets of paper, the ‘chancery double’, on which every official transaction or application, however trivial, had to be written, and which was available in every office and shop; in the forms he had to fill in at the hotel and in the ‘papers’ he had to present on countless occasions.

The night before he had left, when he had been packing his suitcase, at one point he thought he had lost his papers.

‘For God’s sake!’ his grandfather had cried in anguish. ‘What are you doing? Papers are important to these bastards. If you don’t have papers, they shut you up.’

‘That was the Tsarist police, Grandfather,’ his sister had murmured patiently.

‘The Hapsburg police are no different, are they, Else?’ He had appealed to Seymour’s mother.

‘The Hapsburg police are worse,’ she said firmly.

‘It’s all right, I’ve got them,’ Seymour had said, as his sister found them and threw them to him.

‘Then you see you keep them!’ thundered his grandfather. ‘No papers, no person! That is how it is with the Hapsburgs. You remember that! It is not like England.’