Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

Mrs Koskash nodded.

‘Too weak,’ she said. ‘He liked everyone to think he was strong. The Big Man. He liked everyone to think that. Not just here but back where he came from. Perhaps that was even more important. He always had to justify himself in their eyes. Make them think that Machnich, the little boy from round the block, had made good. But, underneath, he was still just a little boy.

‘However, they believed him. When they came to Trieste, they would go to him, thinking that he would be able to fix things for them.’

‘Serbs?’

‘Not always. Mostly, yes. But sometimes others, who had been to Belgrade and heard that he was the man in Trieste to go to.’

‘Rakic?’

‘Perhaps. I do not know otherwise what he is doing here. Or why he should have attached himself to Machnich.’

‘You told me that there was a time when he was acting as go-between. Between Machnich and Lomax. You said that he seemed to be coming all the time.’

‘Yes, that is right.’

‘And then he stopped. And that was the moment when he started pressing Koskash over the two Herzegovinians.’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you tell me when that was? Exactly.’

‘Well. .’

‘Was it, for instance, before the reception at the Casa Revoltella — you remember the reception? — or after?’

‘He was definitely badgering Signor Lomax before. But the Herzegovinians — I think that was after.’

‘Herzegovina?’ said the newspaper seller. ‘Don’t get me started! Look, where do they stand? With us, or with the Bosnians? With the Bosnians. Well, that’s asking for it, isn’t it? All right, they’ve been with them for a long time. A few centuries. But what are a few centuries in the Balkans? Long enough to learn better. You would have thought.’

‘Where exactly is Herzegovina?’ said Seymour.

‘You don’t know? You really don’t know? Christ, what do they teach you in schools in England! Look, you know where Bosnia is? Don’t you?’

‘Roughly,’ said Seymour. ‘Very roughly.’

‘Go across the sea from the north of Italy and you’ll hit it. Roughly. Well, Herzegovina is sort of mixed in with Bosnia. Not clear? Well, it’s not really clear to the Herzegovinians themselves. And that’s part of the trouble. They never know where they stand. And nor do you.’

‘Well, no.’

‘I think of them as being part of Bosnia. So if Bosnia doesn’t like being taken over by Austria, they don’t like it, either. Of course, there are not many of them, not as many as there are of the Bosnians, so in a way they don’t matter much. But in my experience they’re always causing difficulty out of proportion to their numbers. We’ve had a couple of them lately, throwing their weight around.

‘Or, rather, we thought they were going to throw their weight around. We thought that bastard Machnich had brought them over to break the strike.’

‘Break the strike? Blacklegs, you mean? You’d want more than two of them to do that.’

‘Yes, I know. No, we thought he’d brought in a bit of muscle for the occasion. But actually it wasn’t that. He didn’t bring them in until we threatened to duff up that sidekick of his.’

‘Rakic?’

‘Yes, Rakic. You know Rakic? Well, so do we. Machnich sent him to talk to us about going back to work. Talk to us?’ He laughed. ‘Order us, more likely. That’s what it turned out to be. I’ve met his sort before. In the army!

“Here are your orders, my men. Now bloody get on with it.”

‘Well, of course, he got nowhere. “Go and stuff yourself up your Bosnian backside,” we said. And he got shirty. “You men need to watch out,” he said. Well, he took us seriously, or, at least, Machnich did, and brought in those two Herzegovinian apes to act as bodyguard.’

‘When was this?’

‘I’ve been telling you! When we threatened to duff him up.’

‘Yes, but when was that?’

‘During the strike, of course.’

‘Yes, but at what point during the strike? Was it — look, you know that big reception they had at the Casa Revoltella? For the Governor and such? Was it before that?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No. After. I remember that because it was just about that time that Mrs Koskash — she’s our chairman, you know — said we should start thinking about negotiating a settlement. I remember it clearly because there was a lot of argument about it. “We don’t want a negotiated settlement,” some people said. “We want the bastard to give in.” But she said no, and tried to arrange a meeting with Machnich. But he said he wouldn’t, he had this big reception on, and he sent Rakic along instead. And that was when we threatened to duff him up.’

Lately, Seymour had been thinking about his family. In particular, he had been thinking about his mother, which was not a thing the macho policemen of the novels usually did. He had been thinking about her because she came from Vojvodina. ‘Vojvodina?’ his grandfather would sometimes tease his mother. ‘Where the hell’s that?’ It was, in fact, at the top right-hand corner of Bosnia, lying immediately above Serbia, another of those Balkan countries which any reasonable individual could be unable to place. Like Herzogovina.

Like those countries it had a prickly, overdeveloped sense of its own identity and insisted passionately on its need for independence. ‘Independence?’ his grandfather would roar. ‘Vojvodina? It’s like the Isle of Wight demanding independence.’

But Seymour’s other grandfather, his mother’s father, had died in an Austrian jail for Vojvodina’s independence. And even his booming grandfather, who affected to deride petty nationalism, had been thrown out of Poland because of his devotion to it. It was part of their family history. Just as some families have a talent for gardening which crops up in different generations, so Seymour’s family had a talent — or, possibly, the reverse — for dissenting politics.

It was a talent, though, that since their move to England they had tried to suppress. Seymour’s mother never spoke about the past. His father wouldn’t have anything to do with politics. His sister had switched interest to a different, non-nationalist kind of politics. And even Seymour’s booming grandfather confined his interests these days to putting the world right with its newspapers every morning over the breakfast table.

Seymour had followed his father; and his avoidance of politics had been reinforced by his time in the police. For the average policeman, ‘politics’ was a dirty word. It was something those above were always involved in and best avoided. If in the course of your work you ran into it, you shied away. It closed off avenues, as it had done in Seymour’s case when he had been looking at possible royal dimensions to the Jack the Ripper case.

What Seymour had come to see, though, over the last few days, was that politics was not always something to be avoided. It was not always something you could or should avoid. It was too important. Suppose Schneider was right? Or if his testimony was too tarnished, what about Lomax? Lomax, who had at first seemed such a dilettante — the al fresco Consul! — but who had gradually shown himself to have an engagement with the world that was far from frivolous. Seymour was beginning to feel that he ought to know more about politics. Not to engage, no, but not to avoid, either. If politics was this important, you needed at least to be able to grasp what the hell was going on.

And what he was gradually coming to see, too, was that he did have a bit of a feel for such things. ‘He’ll be like a fish out of water!’ the man at the Foreign Office had said contemptuously. Well, maybe. At first. But, actually, these waters were waters that Seymour knew. He had grown up in them, unconsciously been steeped in them. He knew about them from the inside. His mother’s father had, after all, died in such currents. Some things you didn’t have to learn: you knew.