Michael Pearce: A Dead Man In Trieste

‘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.