Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

‘Certainly not!’ Koskash was offended. ‘I would never do a thing like that. It would be quite improper.’

‘Well, yes, but would you call this’ — he held out a handful of bills — ‘exactly proper?’

‘It is unusual, I admit. But as an accounting system it is certainly proper. An order to pay for every payment. No payment without an order to pay — you can check the cash ledger if you like. The books are all in order.’

Seymour checked them. They were.

‘It’s hardly usual,’ he said weakly, handing the books back.

‘Well, no, and I was very concerned about it at first, when Signor Lomax introduced the system. But I had to admit that, accounting-wise, there was nothing wrong with it. And in fact it seemed to work very well.’

Seymour made a mental note to check Lomax’s bank account and see if Lomax’s talent for creative accounting extended further.

As Koskash began to gather up the slips of paper, Seymour turned them over and looked at the other side.

‘These sums are quite sizeable. If you are sure you didn’t pay, who did? Lomax?’

‘You can’t tell from the bills,’ said Koskash, ‘but I think that, as a matter of fact, he often did.’

That brought up another issue. What exactly was Lomax’s relationship to the artists? He was interested in art, yes, the pictures on the walls of his room were evidence of that. But he hardly spent any time in his room so possibly he didn’t look at them much. Wasn’t that odd, if he loved art so much?

Another thought, prompted by the sight of the bills, struck Seymour. Was Lomax, for some reason, their financial provider? Was that why he had bought the pictures? And was that why he had contributed, so generously, apparently, to their drinking bills?

But if he was their financier, then why? Love of art? Or was there some other reason? As, perhaps, Kornbluth had suggested.

‘These artists,’ he said: ‘can you tell me something about them?’

Koskash shrugged.

‘We have a lot of artists in Trieste,’ he said. ‘And people who think they are artists.’

‘And which category do these fall into?’

‘Marinetti is good. Preposterous, but good.’

‘And the others?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t mean anything to me.’

‘But it did to Lomax?’

Koskash hesitated.

‘I don’t know how much it meant to him really. He didn’t seem to have this enthusiasm when he came. But then he suddenly developed it.’

‘After he met the artists or before?’

‘After he met Maddalena,’ said Koskash drily.

‘Maddalena? I’ve come across her name before.’

‘She hangs out with the artists. I think she acts as a model for them.’

‘And she introduced him to them?’

‘Or vice versa, I can’t remember which. But suddenly she was very important, and so was art.’

Well, it was another bit of the picture he was getting of Lomax: drinking, idling — all this al fresco stuff — and now sex! Seymour was hardly surprised that one day he had simply disappeared. It seemed in keeping.

But then there was this other side, this possible involvement in ‘currents’, the possibility that he had not wandered off but been killed.

‘What about these artists?’ he said. ‘What sort of people are they?’

Koskash shrugged.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they’re artists. They don’t always behave like other people.’

‘They seemed to me, when I was speaking to them, to have got across the authorities.’

‘Yes,’ said Koskash. ‘They have a talent for that.’

‘Kornbluth seemed very down on them. With justification, do you think?’

‘That depends on how you see it,’ said Koskash cautiously.

‘Kornbluth seemed to see them as troublemakers. Political troublemakers.’

‘Political?’

‘Nationalist.’

‘Listen,’ said Koskash, ‘in Trieste, everyone is a nationalist.’

It ought to be easy to find that out, thought Seymour. The artists didn’t seem to hold things back. But then there was the question of Lomax’s own sympathies and how far he had allowed them to carry him. It might even be possible to find that out from them too. Or maybe he could talk to that girl.

He wasn’t altogether happy, though, about the direction in which his enquiries were leading him. In the Special Branch there was a political side and that was, in fact, the side to which he had naturally gravitated. Or, rather, his superiors had gravitated him, chiefly, he suspected, on the grounds that he was ‘languages’ and languages were foreign and political trouble — in their possibly not unprejudiced view — tended to come from foreigners. In the East End, with its high proportion of political refugees, it probably did come from ‘foreigners’; but, then, since there were so many ‘foreigners’ in the East End, that was true of the rest of the crime as well.

Seymour had never been entirely happy about his drift towards that side of the Branch’s activities. Partly that was because of his family’s unhappiness. With their history of falling foul of the police in their original countries, they hadn’t been happy about him joining the police at all. But to go into the Special Branch, and on to the political side, which was the side that tended to impact on them, seemed to them the heights, or depths, of eccentricity.

But Seymour had his own reservations, too. Some of these were psychological, the traditional immigrant distrust of getting involved in politics; but others were to do with principle. He retained sufficient of his family’s restiveness under government to feel uneasy about working for government himself. It was an issue he had still not resolved, was still debating with himself.

Now here it was coming up again and in a form which had a particular acuteness for him. From what Kornbluth had hinted, there was a possibility that the currents Lomax had got himself involved with were nationalist ones.

Nationalism, as it happened, was big in the Seymour household. Too big, and Seymour had always tried to steer clear of it. It was his grandfather’s over-enthusiasm for nationalism that had led to his having to leave Poland in a hurry. At least he had got out. Seymour’s other grandfather, in a different country, had not been so lucky. Seymour’s father had, partly in consequence, reacted strongly against politics in general and nationalist ones in particular, and Seymour had tended to follow him. Now here the issue was again coming back to haunt him.

Seymour was able to clear up one other point to do with Lomax’s work: his empty appointments book.

‘He never used it,’ said Koskash.

‘What did he use?’

He might have guessed it.

Slips of paper.

‘I kept a separate book,’ said Koskash, ‘and would give him notes for the day.’

Seymour thought he might have seen one in one of Lomax’s suits.

‘Rough scraps of paper?’

‘They didn’t start like that,’ said Koskash, pained.

Seymour sighed.

‘What had he got against ordinary paperwork?’

‘He said it was on the side of government.’

‘On the side of government ?’

What was it with this man? Was he some kind of anarchist?

‘He said that it was paper that made bureaucracy possible and that there was too much bureaucracy in the world. In Trieste,’ said Koskash drily, ‘such a view is distinctly unusual.’

From the separate book which Koskash had kept Seymour was able to reconstruct Lomax’s movements in the week that he had disappeared. As Koskash had said, they consisted largely of visits to the Port Authority or to the docks. The one exception was a visit to the Casa Revoltella.

‘Casa Revoltella?’ said Seymour. ‘What was that?’