Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

‘I do not like that,’ said Luigi. ‘I worry when they have got her on her own.’

‘If Lomax had been here, we could have asked him to see what was happening.’

There was a little silence.

‘This is a friend of Lomax,’ said Alfredo, remembering suddenly that he had not introduced him.

‘Ah, a friend?’ They shook hands. ‘You have come to collect his belongings?’

‘No, no,’ said Seymour hurriedly. ‘I didn’t know until I had got here. It was a great shock.’

Lorenzo touched him sympathetically on the shoulder.

‘I am here on business,’ said Seymour. ‘I was going to deliver something to him.’

‘There is a clerk. Koskash.’

‘Yes, I’ve met him. Most helpful. However, I think I’d better wait until I get instructions from London.’

‘While you are here,’ said Alfredo, ‘make this your home.’

Seymour was drawn to them. He couldn’t help wondering, however, if these were the kind of friends a British Consul usually had.

An hour or so later he got up, shook hands all round, and left. The artists showed every sign of staying where they were.

Seymour went back to the Consulate.

The worried-looking clerk, Koskash, was still there, bent over his desk. Evidently, siestas were not for him. Seymour wondered how far he could take him into his confidence. So far he had not told him he was a policeman, merely said that he was here to enquire into the circumstances in which Lomax had gone missing. Koskash had, of course, guessed.

But perhaps they ought to agree on the question of Seymour’s formal status here. That seemed a suitable Foreign Office thing to do.

When he had discussed this at the Foreign Office he had found that there was considerable reluctance about him going out openly as a police officer. Might it not send the wrong signals? Imply scepticism about the ability of the local authorities to carry out a proper investigation? Suggest, too, to Vienna that London attached the wrong level of significance to the affair, more importance than Lomax, dead or living, merited? From Seymour’s point of view, too, they suggested, there could be advantages in going incognito.

But then what was he to go as? There was a long discussion about this, longer, in fact, than there had been about Lomax himself and his disappearance. The older man ruled out Seymour’s trying to pass as a diplomat, however junior. It was quite unthinkable. A manservant, perhaps? The younger man doubted whether Lomax had gone in for menservants. He was, after all, only a consul. A Consulate guard, then? Wasn’t it a little late for that, asked the younger man. And mightn’t that be to attach too little significance to the role? How would it look to the Minister?

In the end it was agreed that Seymour should go out to Trieste as a King’s Messenger, which sounded appropriately superior but was appropriately inferior.

Koskash listened carefully but looked doubtful.

‘We haven’t had a King’s Messenger here before,’ he said hesitantly. ‘Usually they just go to the embassies.’

‘Perhaps, then, no one here will know quite what to expect,’ said Seymour, ‘and that might be all to the good.’

Koskash continued to look doubtful but since it had already been determined, he had no alternative but to acquiesce.

‘What did you tell Kornbluth?’

‘Merely that I was from the Foreign Office and that London wanted to know about the circumstances surrounding Lomax’s disappearance.’

Koskash nodded.

‘All right so far,’ he said; but there was still a note of doubt in his voice.

Seymour went on through into Lomax’s room. Apart from the pictures it was sparsely furnished. There was just a desk and a few chairs. Files, presumably, were kept outside in Koskash’s room.

Seymour sat down at the desk and went through the drawers. They were practically empty. In one of them, stuffed away without interest, was a list of diplomatic representatives in the area, but that was all. On top of the desk were an in-tray and an out-tray, both empty. There was also an appointments book. That was empty, too.

The room felt as if it hadn’t been inhabited for a long time. Perhaps it hadn’t been, if Koskash hadn’t been exaggerating when he had said that Lomax spent all his time down in the piazza. But if that was the case, then where had he done his work? If, that was, he had done any.

Later in the afternoon Seymour got a key from Koskash and went to Lomax’s apartment. It was in a large, crumbling house. The rooms were high and dark, but that made them cool, a thing to be sought after in Trieste in the summer. For the same reason, perhaps, the furniture was mostly wickerwork. Again there wasn’t much of it: one or two chairs, a small table and a dressing-table. It looked as if Lomax hadn’t spent much time here, either.

In the bedroom there was a wardrobe with a few suits. Seymour went through the pockets and found only a letter from an Auntie Vi who lived in Warrington and a surprising number of ticket stubs. The bed was a large wooden one with a single sheet and a Continental bolster-like pillow. When Seymour bent over it he caught a faint whiff of a woman’s perfume.

Afterwards Seymour went back to the Consulate. Koskash had gone now and Seymour sat at his desk, in the darkening room, thinking.

He didn’t know what he had expected to find but this wasn’t it. He had been sent out to Trieste to find a man or at least to find out what had happened to him. But he hadn’t found a man, either here or in the apartment. Where was Lomax’s life?

In the piazza, apparently. That was what Koskash had said, what Kornbluth had said, and what the artists had said and Seymour seemed to have no choice now other than to accept it.

But. .

This was a consul, after all. Was that how consuls usually spent their time? One part of Seymour would have liked to think it; but the other part, the strict, conventional part which came originally from his family’s strongly Puritanical background on the Continent and then from two generations of life as a new immigrant, with all its pressures to keep your head down and not stand out, to make yourself invisible by observing the norms of your adopted society and becoming more English than the English, was faintly shocked.

Seymour was at heart a bit of a conformist; and Lomax didn’t seem to conform at all! How did that play in London, Seymour wondered? Not very well, if his own experience at the Foreign Office was anything to go by. And not very well with officialdom in Trieste, either, judging by what Kornbluth had said.

But Kornbluth had said something else, too, or, at least, had hinted at it. He had gone out of his way to link Lomax with that strange group of artists and the artists with. . what? Nationalistic activity of some sort? Political trouble-making? Had Lomax allowed his sympathies to run away with him and identified himself too closely with their preoccupations? And had that had something to do with his disappearance? Or death? Was that what Kornbluth had been hinting?

And was that, too, what those men at the Foreign Office, in their obscure, supercilious way, had been suggesting?

Were those the currents that they feared Lomax had allowed himself to be drawn into?

Later, Seymour walked down to the piazza. The lamps in the cafes were coming on. The tables were filling up. The space in the middle of the piazza, which had been empty when Seymour had been there earlier in the day, was now crowded with people. There were whole families, grandparents, parents and children, the children running on ahead or pushing themselves after on wheeled wooden horses, all out together; there were young girls arm in arm, young men, always apart from the girls, usually in groups, older couples turning aside from time to time to chat to people they recognized at the tables. There were uniforms everywhere. Was this a garrison town? But they didn’t look like soldiers. And then he suddenly realized what they were. Officials. Alfredo had said that there were a lot of officials in Trieste, and hadn’t Seymour read somewhere that in the Empire all officials, from the topmost civil servant to the bottom-most postman or clerk, wore uniforms?