Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

Pietro sat behind a small table, smoking.

‘You could try Paulo,’ he said.

Paulo was to be found down at the docks. Several other men, equally shabby, were to be found with him, sitting in the shade with their backs against a wall. Evidently the port’s prosperity had not extended universally.

‘Yes, I’m Paulo,’ he said defiantly. ‘And yes, I was on picket at the Edison.’

‘And so was I,’ said someone else. ‘And what has that got to do with you?’

‘It means you may be able to help me,’ said Seymour.

‘Why should we help you?’

‘What does it cost to help?’ asked Seymour.

It was a saying from the Triestino. They registered it but, coming from someone like him, it made them uneasy. ‘Who are you?’ one of them said.

Seymour thought for a second, then said:

‘I am English.’

There could be advantages, given the usual Trieste tensions, in not falling into the usual Triestian categories. They drew away from him however.

‘We cannot help you,’ one of them said.

They looked away with studied indifference.

Seymour, though, had grown up among docks people. He squatted down beside them with his back against the wall.

After a while, someone said:

‘Are you going to go away?’

‘No.’

The man shrugged.

‘Stay, then.’

It made them uncomfortable, however. He knew they wouldn’t be able to stay silent for long.

‘Aren’t you afraid you will dirty that posh suit?’ someone taunted him.

‘No.’

‘Look, why don’t you just push off?’

‘I need your help.’

‘Well, we’re not going to give it you.’

Seymour continued to sit there.

One of them got up and came and stood in front of him.

‘Bugger off!’ he said threateningly.

Seymour looked up at him.

‘When you have told me what I want,’ he said; watching the man’s boots, however.

‘Shall I kick his head in?’ the man asked the others.

‘What does it cost to help?’ Seymour said again.

‘This man’s getting on my nerves.’

‘He’s getting on all our nerves.’

‘Just who the hell are you?’

‘I’ve told you. I’m English. And I want some information about an Englishman who died.’

‘You’d better go to the police, then.’

‘Would you go to the police?’

There was a short silence and then, as Seymour had counted on, a general laugh.

‘Yes, but why come to us?’

‘I think you might be able to help me. You see, the Englishman went to the Edison the night he was killed. It was one of the nights you were picketing on.’

‘We don’t know anything about it.’

‘Well, I think you might. He went in with a friend. A tall Irishman. Now, what I want to know is what happened when they came out. I think you could have seen them.’

‘A lot of people came out.’

‘Two foreigners.’ He had a moment of inspiration. ‘Talking.’

There was a slight flicker of amusement.

‘Everyone talks,’ said Paulo, though.

‘Not like this. They were talking like professori . And they would have been talking in English.’

‘They shouldn’t have been there. What the hell do you think we go picketing for?’

‘They were foreigners. It wasn’t their business.’

‘Well, they’re not our business.’

‘A dead man is everyone’s business.’

It was another Triestino saying; and here, again, was the one he had used before.

‘What, after all, does it cost to help?’

‘What do you want to know?’ someone said.

‘What happened when they came out.’

‘Nothing happened. They talked, like you said.’

‘And then?’

‘The Irishman went away.’

‘We know the Irishman,’ someone said.

‘He teaches at the People’s University in the evenings.’

‘It’s the other one I want to know about. What did he do? Did he go off by himself? Did he meet someone? Was he going to meet someone?’

‘He didn’t need to.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘He didn’t need to go anywhere. The person he was meeting was inside.’

‘Inside the cinema?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Seymour. ‘Let’s get this clear. He came out of the cinema. With the Irishman. Are you saying he then went back inside?’

‘That’s right.’

‘After the Irishman had gone?’

‘After everyone had gone.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Everyone. Including the staff. We hang on for them especially. The bastards! They ought to be out with us.’

‘So who was he seeing, then?’

‘Oh, well. Who’s left when everyone else has gone home?’

It was, although he did not know it at the time, yet another Trieste saying. It had been offered offhandedly, as something that hardly needed saying, obvious to anybody. It wasn’t obvious to Seymour, however. Spotting that, they seized on it, glad of the opportunity to put the superior outsider at a disadvantage. They had been uneasy about him, unsure whether he was on the side of authority or not. Perhaps they had told him too much. Here, now, was a chance to put that right. They refused to say any more. He had asked for help and they had given it him. Now he had to make of it what he could That was fair, wasn’t it?

He walked up from the docks thinking about it. On his way he passed through the Piazza Grande. The man who had joined them the other day, the friendly one, Ettore, was sitting alone in the Cafe of Mirrors. He looked up at Seymour and smiled.

‘I know!’ he said. ‘I’m early. I ought not to be here till later. In fact, I am not here. It is an illusion created by the cafe’s mirrors. Really I am at work. However, the meeting finished early and on my way back to the office, smelling the coffee. .’

He was smoking, as, going by the other day, he seemed to do all the time. Seymour sat down to windward of him. Ettore noticed and waved a hand apologetically.

‘It is bad,’ he said, ‘I know. I am trying to stop. I have spoken to my analyst about it — did you know, I go to a psychoanalyst regularly? I said: “How can you claim to put the big things right when you cannot put the small things right?” “Who says they are the small things?” he replied.’

Seymour laughed.

‘For me, it is coffee,’ he said. ‘We all have our vices.’

‘For everyone it is coffee,’ said Ettore. ‘But in my case that is, too.’

Seymour asked him how he had come to know Lomax. Through James, Ettore said. One day after their English lesson he had brought Ettore to the table in the Cafe of Mirrors and Lomax had been there. They had not met through business. His father-in-law normally handled the foreign side. Seymour rather gathered the impression that in anything to do with work Ettore was dominated by his father-in-law. He suspected that part of the attraction for Ettore of opening a branch in England was the prospect of getting away from him.

They talked a little about life in England. It was the first time Seymour had had much of a talk with Ettore and he found him not just sympathetic but also vaguely comforting. It was a relief to find someone fairly normal at the artists’ table. Then he remembered that Ettore was himself an artist; at any rate, he wrote novels. He asked Ettore about that. Ettore said that his early novels had had such a hammering from critics, mostly on the grounds that, coming from Trieste, he couldn’t write proper Italian, that he had virtually given up.

Seymour had an idea.

‘Ettore, as a Triestian, could you give me some advice? It is about the meaning of what I gather is an old Trieste saying. Who is left behind when everyone else has gone home?’

‘Are you getting at me?’