Second Violin (56 page)

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘No . . . truly it can . . . just hear me out. Looking after oneself requires interdependence. A notion of the common good. I can sum it up in the words of some revolutionary or another
– one of the Americans, I think . . . Franklin or Jefferson perhaps – when they said, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang
separately”.’

‘Hang. That’s like a joke, is it?’

‘It is called a pun . . . one word, two meanings.’

‘Hang together as in stick together. Like all for one and one for all?’

‘Exactly.’

And Drax knew from the look on Billy’s face that he had at last sown the seeds of doubt, but Jacks being Jacks he would undoubtedly change the subject now.

Billy stood up, hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, counting change or playing with his balls. Scuffing the floorboards with his feet – the recalcitrant in the playground.

‘Me and Hummer get out in a day or two. Trench told us today. John Bull needs tailors. My daughter wrote to our local MP, he got on to the Ministry of Supply. They wrote to the War Office,
the War Office wrote to the Home Office . . . and they rang Trench. Trench is only too glad to see the back of me. So we’re out . . . back to the old sewing machine. Uniforms for the
boys.’

‘John Bull? Suddenly you’re British?’

‘What? Me? Billy Bull? I should Chippin’ Campden.’

More scuffing the floorboards, more playing with his balls.

‘It will be cold in London,’ Drax said. ‘Almost autumn after all. Will you give Josef my fur coat? He is so thin I fear there is no fat to keep him warm.’

The coat was hanging on the back of the door.

Billy ran his fingers down the sleeve.

‘It’s seen better days.’

‘All the same, I would be grateful if you would give it to him. I doubt I shall have need of it.’

Missing the point entirely, Billy said, ‘What and have him go round Stepney looking like the skinny man’s Bud Flanagan?’

Hummel did not miss the point. It reminded him of inheriting his father’s coat, and that reminded him of losing his father’s coat on Kristallnacht. He accepted the coat and thanked
Drax profusely, knowing they would never meet again.

‘You would, of course . . .’ said Drax, stating the obvious, ‘be safer here. London is bombed every night now.’

‘It’s where I belong, Max.’

‘Really, Josef. So soon? And Billy where does he belong? And our absent leader, Herr Troy. Wandering Jews the both of them.’

‘One of them a Jew who knows nothing but Stepney and the other no Jew at all.’

‘Nevertheless, you take my point.’

‘Indeed I do, Max. But it is not a matter of where they belong, merely of when.’

As soon as the glue dried under his beard, Troy perched Nader’s spare specs on the end of his nose and crossed the road to the Heaven’s Gate Synagogue. The air-raid
was well under way the boom of bombs ripping through the air from the docks on the Isle of Dogs, and the street was deserted.

He had decided the last time to make himself useful. It was not yet dusk, but the light within seemed to change little with the time of day. Murky by day – by night the holes in the roof
let in moonlight shafts, the reflected glow of London burning, and the interior of the synagogue was a perpetual half-light. Troy sorted debris, built piles of what was salvageable and what he
thought was not. The trick, he had decided, was to do it quietly, to always have one ear cocked to the background sound, to filter the sound of mayhem for the one sound that mattered – and
almost always to have something in his hand which could be used to fend off an assailant. If needs be, he’d bash his brains out with a 2-by-4 or the ornamental brass base of an oil lamp.

Planes passed directly overhead just about midnight. The growl and grumble of a big cat. It was the re-creation of the fears of childhood, alone in a dark place, the sounds of chaos bursting in
the sky above and the knowledge of something, someone terrible just around the corner. For a moment he could feel himself as he was aged seven. He stopped, sat on an intact pew and waited. Heard
the bombing start up again a mile or more to the west in the City of London. He felt lucky, relieved. Bombs were not like lightning, they could and probably did strike twice. Looking at
Heaven’s Gate it was, all the same, difficult not to think that the worst had already happened.

At half past two the all-clear sounded. The streets would fill now. It might be that his suspect was out there somewhere, but far more likely that he wasn’t.

He went back to Nader’s house, peeled off the beard and slept. He woke around six-thirty to find Nader bumbling around in his kitchen.

‘Are we downhearted?’ Nader said, grinning, slyly parodic.

‘You bet,’ said Troy.

Wednesday, 2 October 1940

‘I’ve phoned you before. I called you Sunday evening. Lindfors stood me up, I rather thought we could have got together!’

‘I was working.’

‘More dead Jews?

‘The same dead Jews. I put your theory to the test.’

‘Eh?’

‘I’ve been staking out Heaven’s Gate. Nader is my age and my height. We swapped jackets, I stuck on a fake beard with spirit gum, and I bumbled around a synagogue in
half-darkness, trying to look as though I knew what I was doing.’

‘You mean you used yourself as bait?’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘Were you armed?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Troy there are times I think you’re an idiot.’

‘Nothing happened. Nothing happened on the 23rd either. And if you’re right, nothing will now until the third.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t do this every night. I haven’t the resources. But I can wangle the shifts and the pattern of work enough to cope with the prime numbers. If it isn’t the right
theory I’m stuffed because I can’t get my boss or Nader to take it seriously enough. But I told Nader I’d be back on the third.’

‘Why the third?’

‘Next prime number.’

‘Troy, you blithering idiot – you missed 1, which was the next prime number, and the next after that is 2!’

‘You never said anything about even numbers, I thought they were all odd?’

‘Just think for a moment, Troy. A number only divisible by itself and one must include both one and two. Two is the only even prime number. And October 2nd is the next prime
date!’

‘Oh shit. That’s today.’

Under moonlight,
infectious moonlight,
a madman dances,
chanting numbers,
one, two, three, five, seven, eleven.
Smeared in excrement,
naked as nativity,
smeared in his own blood,
wailing like a dog in pain,
throat bared to heaven,
mouth the perfect O,
face tilted to night,
eyes wide open,
eyes tight shut,
a razor in his hand,
Lord Carsington dances . . .
Eleven, seven, five, three, two . . . one . . .

The raid had started just before 9 p.m. Troy had moved rubble around for a couple of hours, and was feeling the pointlessness of the pretence, and the irritation and
foolishness of a fake beard.

Part of his mind told him he had been foolish in the first place to seize on a theory handed to him by Zette as the only pattern perceivable in a chain of numbers. Part of his mind told him that
a pattern as odd, as stripped of meaning as this might well be the fixation of a nutcase. Then the rest of his mind told him he was losing concentration and that that was precursor to losing the
battle.

The bigger battle raged overhead. Closer than the previous two nights – bombs raining down within half a mile to either side. Great, dull whumpfs taking out whole streets of Shadwell or
Bethnal Green.

Any sane man would be in a shelter. But as Trench had made disturbingly clear to him, there were people like Troy and Trench who would never go into a shelter – men, and they weren’t
all men, too fascinated with the wonder and the risk to want to miss it.

The moon was waning. In a week’s time he’d have to stop this farce – too little light would be coming in through the gaping holes in the roof. The interior of the synagogue
would be black as pitch.

It was close to midnight now. German planes directly overhead. The City of London about to cop it again. Troy had let his rules slip. He was staring up through a hole in the roof and had nothing
that might serve as a weapon in hand.

Out of nowhere there were hands at his throat, a voice and bad breath in his face.

‘You bloody fool! What do you think you’re playing at?’

Troy caught him with a left hook to the cheek, knocked his hat off, sent him reeling away – and at a couple of paces distance realised this was far too small a man to be his man, and that
it was Steerforth. Steerforth angry, Steerforth in a rage, Steerforth spitting fire.

‘What did I –’

A hand seized Steerforth by the hair, and another passed quickly and surgically across his throat. The razor slit from ear to ear. A fountain of blood shot three feet into the air in spurt and
splat. Steerforth crumpled and his life gushed to nothing in the dust and dirt.

Troy stared at Zette, still clutching the open razor, still staring down at the twitching corpse. Feet and hands shaking like a man in a fit of palsy. Head nodding with every spurt of blood as
though jerked on a string.

‘Oh my God, Zette. What have you done?’

Now she looked at Troy.

‘“An eye for an eye”,’ she said so softly he could hardly hear her.

‘Oh God, Zette. He didn’t kill your father.’

It was as though he’d slapped her.

‘He didn’t? Then who did?’

And she turned to follow Troy’s gaze to the far side of the synagogue, to the street entrance, to the tall man, half hidden in the darkness, in and out of moon beams, walking slowly
towards them with a revolver in his hand.

‘I rather think he did,’ Troy said.

Troy had not counted on a gun. A gun was almost the last thing he’d expected. He had not handled a gun since basic training. He hated guns. He wished he had one now.

He backed off slowly, blocking Zette’s body with his own, and as they backed off the man approached Steerforth’s body and stopped as though unwilling to step over it or step in
blood.

He looked down at the corpse. Spent now. Now he raised his arm, now he levelled the gun, now he was within range.

Looking down the barrel of a gun, Troy had one vain hope, that the floor might open up and swallow this bastard, whoever he was.

And it did.

A high explosive burst in the street outside, caved in the east wall, set the solid floor rippling like the liquid surface of a pond, and then the floor opened up and swallowed him. A single
shot, a single scream. The floor buckled, split and splintered – and he and the late Mr Steerforth vanished into the pit below.

‘Run!’ said Troy.

‘Where?’

‘Back,’ said Troy.

‘Back where? There’s no way out. It’s all coming down on us.’

He seized Zette by the hand and ran for the back of the synagogue, towards the open doors of the ark.

‘Get in.’

‘What?’

‘It’s the most solid thing in here, and it’s the only chance we have.’

He bundled her into the velvet box and, as the roof gave way, he saw a silver shower of little thermos flasks tumble into the pit, then what was left of the roof fell in, the incendiaries
ignited and a sheet of blue-white flame shot up from below like the roar of a dyspeptic dragon. He drew the doors shut. Fireproof, Nader had said, but he doubted Nader knew how fiercely magnesium
burnt.

‘It’s pitch dark in here, we could suffocate!’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No we won’t, there are airbricks in the back. We have a chance.’

‘A chance?’

‘You’re the one that deals in mathematical probabilities.’

‘Then we’ll probably die together. All my life I have fantasized about with whom I might live not with whom I might die.’

A crash to deafen them both as the west wall fell in, bouncing rubble off the oak doors – entombing them within the ark.

‘Change the subject,’ Troy said when his ears stopped ringing.

All the way out of London Hummel had read – nose deep into a J.B. Priestley novel. Coming into London, he watched with fresh eyes as London absorbed Nature. Villages
turned to suburbs, suburbs to soot-caked cuttings carving their way into London’s clay from West Hampstead to Agar Town. Ploughed fields turned to streets, copses and knolls to half-glimpsed
houses rushing by. London wrapped the green world in her grey winding sheet – a green thought in a grey shade – moss crept across the corrugated roofs of factories, willow-herb sprouted
on embankments, and incongruous rows of flag irises and autumn cabbages gathered dust by the trackside in Cricklewood – buddleia, its purple blossom spent, dry and raggy on the stone
ramparts. Into the deep, dark maw of a blackened St Pancras station. Jonah swallowed by a whale. In utter contrast to June, the station was almost deserted . . . ‘the pulse of London low and
inaudible’.

‘Shouldn’t have any problem getting a cab. Eh?’ Billy said.

All Hummel had was his carpet bag with a single change of clothes, his German-English/English-German dictionary, his portrait and Drax’s old fur coat.

‘Can you manage without me?’

‘Wot?’

‘I . . . I would prefer to walk.’

‘Walk? Hummer, it’s four miles. Maybe five.’

‘All the same, I would like to walk.’

‘Air-raids. There might be an air-raid.’

‘Almost certainly.’

‘OK, suit yerself. Kettle’ll be on when you get home.’

Hummel smiled at the word.

‘
Ja
, Billy. Home.’

It was like the descent into a dream. The descent from a dream. He would never be sure which. All his life, it seemed to Hummel that he had dreamt of Vienna. And that was all that remained of
Vienna – a dream. But now there was London. As the ack-ack tore up the evening sky at the first sight of German bombers, a new dream opened up for him.

Zette slept.