Andrew Crumey - The Secret Knowledge

Pierre grabs her waist again, one-handed, a gesture filled with bravado. “Let him find his key, then.”

She goes past him to answer the door, hurriedly drying her eyes. “We’ll say you just arrived.”

“It’s the truth.”

Klauer hears him enter, Jessie rapidly explaining to him the situation, but as soon as John comes into the sitting room there are other matters to discuss.

“So the strike’s definite?”

“I expect at least a hundred of us at the picket line, John. But we need more.”

“From the works?”

“Anywhere, it’s a general stoppage.” Pierre claps his friend’s shoulder as if trying to rouse him from sleep. “This is what you’ve been wanting, isn’t it?”

John’s dazed expression is not because of the strike; he’s wondering exactly how long Pierre has been here, what the two of them have been saying about him. He sits to collect his thoughts.

“If it’s a hundred on the first day it’ll be everyone on the second,” Pierre tells him. “By the end of the week the whole country will be in the grip of the workers. This is the moment of revolution.”

A frown crosses John’s childlike face. “This is about jobs for heroes, not revolt.”

“Call it whatever you wish,” says Pierre. “It’s out of our hands now, you can’t stop history. You’re not scared, are you?”

John shoots him an angry look. “Of course not.”

Jessie goes to her brother. “If there’s any sign of trouble, John, you keep clear of it, do you hear me?”

“Oh, there’ll be trouble,” Pierre assures her.

“Then leave John out of this. He has nothing to do with Russell, why should he picket?”

Both of them are talking over his head, John says nothing, until finally Pierre stares down at him. “Your father’s right, this is only a game to you.”

“Go to hell.”

In an instant the scene erupts; Pierre has grasped the other man round the neck, locking him where he sits, Jessie screams but her voice becomes strangled by terror, the gun has been pulled out and is held against John’s head, he pants with fear. Jessie manages to speak through the pain she feels. “It’s not loaded, John, he doesn’t mean it, for the love of God, Pierre, stop this madness.”

Pierre’s eyes are like lead. “It’s loaded, Jessie.”

“Have mercy!” John pleads, and at last Pierre frees him, slumped and weeping in his sister’s arms. Looking proudly at them both, Pierre raises the gun to his own head and defiantly squeezes the trigger, creating nothing but a snap of metal, a brief interruption to the others’ anguished moans. Then without a word he leaves them both.

It is some hours later when there is a knock at the door; Jessie’s eyes are still red from crying and she takes a moment to arrange herself in front of the mirror before opening, expecting a request for the doctor who is nevertheless still out. Instead it’s a policeman and a large, grim-faced man she recognises, Mr Scobie from the Russell factory. They tell her they’ve come about Klauer.

“A friend of the family, I understand,” the constable says, coming inside.

“Not any more.”

The men exchange a glance; John comes to see what’s amiss.

“I knew from the outset he was no good,” says Scobie. “This latest only confirms it. He’s been passing himself off with forged papers.”

“What do you mean?” Jessie asks.

The policeman explains. “I’ve checked the records and can’t find a trace of him anywhere. The man’s an impostor, a fraud. Whoever the devil he is, you can be sure he’s not Pierre Klauer.”

In face of the dictatorship of banality the choice becomes inescapable between conformism or resistance. Conroy is at home practising The Secret Knowledge when it occurs to him that he forgot to ask Paige what she thinks of that dickhead charlatan Paul Morrow.

Klauer’s music encapsulates the fraught opposition between autonomy and commodification that is the essence of bourgeois art. Already while Conroy plays, the programme note is writing itself inside his head, he can almost hear the flutter of its page from a distracted audience member at the concert premiere. What the crowd comes to worship is not music, but the money spent on admission. Hard to sustain a performing career with that sort of attitude, though. Conroy takes a break.

He tries to remember what exactly was Adorno’s phrase; not dictatorship of banality, he thinks, but banality of perfection, the demand that every musician become the flawless imitation of a recording. He’s about to go and look it up when he hears the doorbell, goes to answer and sees what appears to be a tradesman soliciting work. Strongly-built, closely cropped reddish-brown hair, casually dressed in a zippered black leather jacket and holding up some kind of identity card. It’s only when Conroy hears the word “police” that the interruption to his day makes sense. “You came about Laura?”

“Mind if I step inside?”

Conroy takes the plainclothes officer to the music room and invites him to sit on the couch. The policeman — Conroy didn’t catch his name — looks admiringly at the grand piano.

“You’re a teacher?”

“Concert performer. I also do some college teaching.”

Inspector something, Conroy thinks, this is what he mentally calls the tall man looking hunched and slightly crumpled on the sofa that seems rather too small for him. Conroy wonders if he should offer the inspector some tea but senses the need to go straight to the issue. “She simply vanished, took away everything that’s hers. I said it all on the phone, don’t know how much they told you…”

The police officer makes a cordial but dismissive gesture that silences Conroy. “I’m here about something else. There was some suspicious activity in the street last night. A resident saw two youths loitering, thought they might be trying to break into a house. She phoned and a patrol car came round but they’d gone. Turns out a gentleman at the end of the street has had his car vandalised. Did you hear any disturbance last night? See anything unusual? Lady reckons it must have been around one o’clock in the morning.”

Conroy would have been awake but remembers nothing, he’d had too much whisky by then. “I called yesterday about my partner Laura.”

“I know.”

“Shouldn’t we be discussing that?”

“It’s not really a police matter.”

“But she’s disappeared completely, took everything. Clothes, books, photos…”

“Then it was her own choice.”

“Her phone number’s no longer recognised. And strangest of all is the internet, not a sign of her. She’s a freelance journalist, it shouldn’t be hard to find someone like that, even if she’s closed down her online accounts.”

The officer looks penetratingly at Conroy. “Has it occurred to you that she might have decided to take anti-stalking measures?”

Conroy’s stunned. “I’m not a stalker, I’m her partner.”

“Not any more.”

“But how could she erase herself so quickly? Surely she’d need help…” Then, seeing the officer’s impassive expression, Conroy asks incredulously, “Would the police be involved in that?”

“Might be,” the officer says. “Though you can see that I wouldn’t be able to comment on it. I honestly don’t know what’s gone on in this instance, but it seems your ex has taken extreme steps to tell you it’s finished and you shouldn’t try finding her. Best leave it at that.” His eyes show a glimmer of pity. “Always hard when things break down. Just have to move on.” He gets to his feet, Conroy thinks he’s about to leave, but instead the policeman walks over to the grand piano and looks at the pages of the Klauer score. “My wife plays a bit. Nothing like this I expect. Doesn’t mean a thing to me, might as well be some sort of secret formula. You practise a lot?”