Michael Pearce: A Dead Man In Trieste

Trieste was, so they had told him, the tinderbox of Europe: the sort of place where, at any moment, a spark might ignite the whole powder keg. And they were nearly right, only the spark came almost four years later, in 1914, and it wasn’t in Trieste but just round the corner, in Sarajevo, when the assassination of the Archduke set in motion the train of events which became the First World War. Might, if things had been different, the killing of Lomax have been that spark, Seymour asked himself later? Only that was after the powder keg had exploded, and he was asking himself among the hailstorm of shells and bullets that was the Battle of the Somme, when he wasn’t really in a condition to think clearly about anything.

On that earlier day, in Trieste, as he sat, newly arrived from London, in one of the cafes on the great central piazza, outside in the sun, all that was not just far away but totally unimaginable, so far beyond the reach of normal experience that you just, somehow, couldn’t even think it.

What, actually, he was thinking, as he sat there sweating, still in the hot, dark suit, quite inappropriate for the Mediterranean but which, as a poor policeman from the East End of London, was the only one he had, was that this was all right.

Only three days before he had been in the grime of the East End; except that you hadn’t been able to see the grime, in fact, you hadn’t been able to see anything, because there had been a real old peasouper of a fog, come up from the docks along with a seawater chill which had driven him indoors and kept him stoking the coals of the police station fire. That was where he had been when his instructions came.

And now here he was, under the great blue sweep of the Mediterranean sky, basking in the sun, looking out through the trees at the end of the piazza at the liners in the bay.

‘Very nice!’ the Inspector had said when he had finished giving him his instructions. ‘Sunshine. Palm trees. A holiday trip,’ he had said enviously

‘Trieste?’ said Seymour. ‘Where’s that?’

The Inspector had held back at this point, but eventually — ‘Italy?’ he hazarded.

This, although he had not known it, was fighting talk in Trieste. At the time, though, Seymour had felt relieved.

‘That’s all right,’ he had said. ‘I can manage Italian.’

‘Ye-es?’ said the Inspector, who had always thought there was something funny about Seymour.

Before going along to the Foreign Office to be more properly informed of his responsibilities, Seymour had taken the trouble to look Trieste up in the atlas. It was about half-way along the coast between what Seymour thought of as the top of Italy and — Well, the Balkans. A lot of little countries, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Herzegovina, who all got along like a house on fire. Actually, exactly like a house on fire.

Trieste, however, belonged to none of these. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which at that time covered most of the southern half of Central Europe, reaching down to the sea at only one point: Trieste. Through Trieste much of its trade passed. The port was therefore important to the Empire; too important to let go. On the map the Empire hung poised above tiny Trieste like a great bulk about to fall. And that was pretty much how it seemed to Trieste’s extraordinary diversity of inhabitants.

For that was the other thing about Trieste. Within its small confines there were Italians and Austrians and Greeks and Serbs and Croats, Montenegrins and Maltese, Slovenians and Slovakians, Bosnians and Herzegovinians, not to mention Germans and Spanish and French. It was the point at which many different peoples met, met and rubbed together. And where they met there was friction, and where they rubbed there was always the possibility of a spark. Trieste was Europe in miniature, a place where all its peoples were pressed uncomfortably together, like gunpowder pressed into a barrel, like gunpowder awaiting a spark.

Through the trees on the westward side of the square he could see ships. There was a pier just beyond the trees with a ship tied up alongside it. He could see the name of the line. It was written twice, in German and in Italian: Osterreicher Lloyd , and Lloyd Austriaco . He had noticed that before, on his walk down from the hotel. Everything seemed to be double here.

In the cafe most of the people were speaking Italian. He listened idly to the conversation, trying to get used to the language again.

But this was embarrassing. He had thought he had known Italian, told them that he had. That was why they had picked him. But this was different from the Italian he knew. Odd phrases crept in from other languages: German, he could understand that, Slovenian, he could make a shot at. But ‘ sonababic’ ? It took him some time to work out that it was English: son of a bitch. The influence of the docks, he supposed.

Seymour knew about docks. He had been born and bred not far from London’s docks in the East End, had worked almost all his life, even when he had moved to the Special Branch, in London’s dockland. It was where immigrant families like his tended to settle when they first came ashore. Even when they moved, later, they didn’t move far.

They tended to stay in the East End even if they weren’t working in the docks. They stayed with what they knew.

They came ashore in waves, the Jews at one time, the Poles, like his grandfather, at another. There had been others since. When you walked around the East End or went into its pubs and bars you would hear all kinds of languages. It was, although he did not know it, not so very different from Trieste.

It was a world, he thought, that, though foreign, the Foreign Office did not know. Lomax would not have known it. Maybe he would have known about it more than those people Seymour had met in the Foreign Office in London, because he was a consul and his work in Trieste would have taken him down if not into the docks, at least into the port. But he wouldn’t really have known because, from what Seymour had seen, Foreign Office people lived in a world apart.

When he had gone in he had found two people sitting behind a desk, an older man and a younger one. The older one had looked at him without warmth.

‘You know what this is all about, I suppose?’ he said, as if he doubted it. ‘Rather different, I imagine, from anything you’ve been used to.’

He turned to the younger man.

‘In fact, so different that I really wonder — do we have to?’ he asked.

‘Proceed? I’m afraid so. The Minister was particularly insistent.’

‘Yes, but — a policeman!’

‘They’re the ones who usually handle this sort of thing.’

‘Yes, I know, but that’s in the ordinary way. Surely this is a bit different?’

‘That is, of course, why we asked for someone from the Special Branch.’

‘Yes, but. . You’ve never dealt with anything like this before, have you?’ He turned the papers in front of him. ‘Whitechapel. Is that where you have been working? Your

. ,’ He seemed to pick up the word with tongs and look at it. ‘. . beat?’

‘Not “beat”, exactly. In the Special Branch. But it’s where I’ve been working. The East End generally.’

‘The East End?’ It was spoken almost with incredulity. He looked at the younger man. ‘About as far, I imagine, as you can get from. . well, the world he would be investigating.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the younger man. ‘Trieste, the docks.’

‘You know what I mean. Our world. The world of the Foreign Office. Paris, Vienna.’

‘This is just a consul,’

‘It’s still our world, though, isn’t it? And a very different one from the one this gentleman is acquainted with. He’ll be like a fish out of water. I don’t know why they sent him.’