Second Violin (58 page)

‘Lunch.’

It was his brother, Rod. He’d never seen him in uniform. Never imagined him in uniform.

‘Lunch. I have a forty-eight-hour leave, and some people I’d like you to meet.’

Rod held out a hand and hoisted Troy to his feet.

‘Lunch?’

‘Yes. With friends. A reunion. Sort of.’

Troy followed him into the dining room. Three other men of varying shapes, sizes and ages were gathered there.

‘Let me introduce you. My little brother Freddie . . . this is . . .’

A stout bloke with a sour expression and a rogue’s twinkle in his eyes.

‘We met,’ said Billy Jacks. ‘Me and Constable Troy go back a ways, don’t we, young Fred?’

A skinny bloke with lugholes like the handles on the Football Association cup.

‘Josef Hummel,’ said Hummel. ‘Tailor of Stepney Green.’

A dapper bloke in late middle-age, riven with dignity.

‘Viktor Rosen. I play ze joanna.’

Everyone except Troy laughed at this.

‘Where d’you learn that?’ asked Jacks.

‘From you, Billy. I ascribe all my bad habits to several weeks sharing a room with you.’

‘I get it,’ Troy said. ‘You were all in the same camp.’

‘All in the same room,’ sighed Rosen.

‘So it’s the Heaven’s Gate Internment Camp Reunion?’

‘Nah, mate. We none of us got within a mile of heaven,’ Jacks said. ‘This is . . . the Stinkin’ Jews Reunion.’

Lady Troy seemed almost to have stripped her country home to provide this off-the-ration feast. Chickens had been slaughtered, potatoes unearthed, brassicas ripped bare.

Rod poured wine for them all, a Puligny-Montrachet ’34. Herr Rosen rolled it around his palate, Billy Jacks pulled a face and asked if there was any pale ale and Troy and Hummel knocked it
back pleasurably . . . and over lunch and a good bottle Troy learnt in snatches of the life they had led these last few months.

The dessert wine was more to Billy’s taste, Troy thought – Chateau d’Yquem 1898. He glugged it like Vimto.

‘Ninety-eight. Year I was born,’ he said approvingly.

And for a moment, in the mind’s eye, Troy could see the list of names, with Billy’s name and birthdate upon it, that he and Stilton had used to round up these men. And it seemed a
lifetime ago, and he was pleased to see that it seemed that way to Jacks too.

At the end of the meal Lady Troy came in and said, ‘Herr Rosen . . . before you leave, we have a Steinway in the red room. I wonder if you would be so kind . . .?’

It was just the touch Rosen needed, the continental charm that was the antidote to a long summer spent with a rough diamond like Billy Jacks. He pressed her hand to his lips and said, ‘My
dear lady, lead me to it. To tickle ze ivories would give me such pleasure.’

They all followed to the red room.

Troy heard Jacks mutter, ‘He’s takin’ the piss, ain’t he?’

Rosen played Debussy’s ‘Estampes’, ‘Pagodes’, ‘La Soirée dans Grenade’, ‘Jardins sous la Pluie’. Played them far, far better than Troy had
ever played them. It was a quarter hour of heaven. Troy closed his eyes, and let the music splash down onto him. A round of gentle applause made him open his eyes, to find his father sitting next
to him.

Afterwards, on the doorstep Hummel asked, ‘Are we to do this every year?’

‘Don’t see why not,’ Rod said beaming and slightly pissed.

‘Yeah. Why not?’ said Jacks, belligerent with bonhomie.

Rod and Troy watched them walk to the end of Church Row. Jacks turned, cupped his hands to his lips and yelled.

‘Chippin’ bloody Campden, eh, ’Ampstead?’

Rod yelled ‘Chipping Campden’ back.

Troy looked at him as though he thought him mad.

‘Every year?’ he said softly.

‘Oh yes. Friends for life. It’s the sort of thing creates ties, bonds . . . that sort of thing.’

‘To be free you must first belong.’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what you wrote to me in a letter about two months ago.’

‘I did? Well . . . I was right.’

‘And of course, to
betray
you must first belong.’

Rod thought about this.

‘Y’know,
brer
,’ he said at last, ‘you’ve grown awfully cynical since we last met. I am almost tempted to ask what has happened to you, but I won’t.
Instead I shall nip back inside and have a bit of a chat with that cheery old soul we call “Dad”.’

Days later Troy could still hear Rosen’s performance in the mind’s ear. He lifted the lid on his Bösendorfer upright, unused since the day the shifters had
lugged it into his parlour, and played the first chords of ‘Pagodes’. He was embarrassingly bad.

Only when he’d finished, limped to the end, was he aware of someone standing in the doorway.

Kitty tossed his front door key down onto the carpet.

‘You’re a sod, Fred. A right sod.’

‘You going to tell me why?’

‘My dad says you and that Borg woman was wrapped around each other like lovers.’

‘We were sheltering from the raid, Kitty.’

‘No! Like lovers was wot dad said, and I saw you with me own eyes when the two of you came out. You was like lovers! What was she doin’ there in the first place?’

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Can’t or won’t? You’ve been givin ’er one, ’aven’t you?’

Troy said nothing. It would have been more accurate he thought to say that Zette had been giving him one, but neither answer could possibly please.

Kitty came right up to him, bent down to him still perched upon the piano stool.

‘You gonna ’ave to choose. Who’s it to be? Her or me? Do I pick up that key or do I just bugger off? Who do you want, Troy?’

‘I want you both.’

The sigh was enormous, as loud it seemed as any bomb he’d heard lately and a thousand times softer.

‘Oh, Troy. You sod. You complete and utter sod.’

In the doorway, all but thrown over her shoulder, ‘Me mum was right. She told me that day you come to dinner. “Stick to your own kind, Kitty.” That’s what she told
me.’

On the following Monday passing Stilton in the corridors of Scotland Yard, Troy said ‘Hello Walter.’

Stilton said, ‘Call me Inspector Stilton, lad.’

He lifted the lid on the Bösendorfer again and tormented himself with Debussy.

History repeated itself. Another woman standing in his doorway – wearing what he thought of as her travel suit, the neat Chanel two-piece in black that she had worn on the overnight
sleeper from Paris to Monte Carlo.

‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

‘Goodbye?’

‘I have a new job.’

‘You do? Where?’

‘Initially at Columbia University in New York. After that wherever it takes me.’

‘That sounds . . . marvellous.’

‘Einstein read my last paper . . . asked that I be . . . I think “recruited” is the word. I’m splitting atoms again. This time for real, not just in theory.’

‘Sounds like a blast.’

‘If it works, Troy, it’ll be the biggest blast in history.’

‘More numbers?’

‘It’s always numbers.’

He was being dumped, and he knew it. ‘Don’t make plans’, she had told him, and instead he had built castles in the air, plan upon plan. He wanted to tell her this, but every
iota of intelligence told him not to bother.

‘What numbers did I recite to conjure you up as my own personal golem?’

Zette said, ‘9, 8, 6.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Body heat, Troy.’

She kissed him on the lips.

She walked out of the door and down the alley.

He never saw her again.

It had taken him too long to do this. Partly because he had forgotten, partly because he was fighting shy of it. But it was time Troy got in touch with Nader again. Time he
returned his jacket. He’d take it round to him, let him pick his own tailor for the repairs and the cleaning – the East End was full of tailors after all – and offer to pick up
the bill.

‘Have you called before?’ Nader said on the doorstep. ‘I have been away. My father is well enough to be moved and we have found a family in Essex to take him in. I have only
been back an hour or so.’

‘No. I have been . . . a bit busy. But I have your jacket here.’

He held it up.

‘I think it’s ready to be relegated to gardening and decorating.’

Nader beckoned him inside. Stuck the kettle on.

‘You know what happened, I take it?’

‘Oh yes. My would-be-assassin is buried under what remains of Heaven’s Gate. By the bye, which of your suspects was it?’

Now Troy was face to face with the moment he had tried so hard to put off.

‘None of them. I’ve no idea who’s down there. Some Jew-hater. Some nutcase obsessed with “the Controversy of Zion”.’

‘The what?’

‘It was left at the scene, at Friedland’s murder. A bible open at Isaiah . . . a list of plagues and disasters and the Controversy of Zion. Can’t remember the
chapter.’

‘Nor I, and that’s a professional failing, isn’t it?’

‘We may never know who it was.’

‘Perhaps when we dig out?’

Troy shook his head.

‘I saw a cartload of incendiaries fall into the pit. Magnesium burning will melt through steel. I’d be amazed if there’s anything more than charred bone.’

Nader shrugged. Began to go through the pockets of his jacket.

‘So long as he’s dead, eh? Ah . . . I have them. My spare specs. The jacket I could afford to lose, not the specs. And . . .’

He had one hand in the right inside pocket.

‘. . . You must be left-handed, Mr Troy, and this must be yours.’

Onto the oilclothed table Nader placed a cut-throat razor, a tortoiseshell sheath folded over a stained steel blade. Troy had no idea it was in the jacket. He had no idea he’d taken it off
Zette. But he must have done. The copper’s instinct to seize the murder weapon. And the stains – the stains were Chief Inspector Steerforth’s blood.

After tea, and promises that they would keep in touch, even though they both knew they would break them, Troy took a walk down by the Thames at Wapping Pier Head, in the shadow of Tower Bridge,
and flung the razor as far out into the river as he could. It was still well short of dusk and already the bombers were swarming up the Thames.

What Became of Them

Alex Troy died in the autumn of 1943.

Winston Churchill was voted out of office in 1945. He declined a dukedom, and while he was Prime Minister once more from 1951 to 1955 he was never so influential in public life again.

Wolfgang Stahl vanished during a Berlin air raid in April 1941.

Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by the Czech Resistance in May 1942.

Josef Trager, much against his own expectations, made lance-corporal before his career as a soldier ended. It ended, as for so many, with his death. He was one of the lucky ones who escaped
encirclement by Russian troops at Stalingrad, and one of the unlucky ones to be trapped in the retreat by a Russian winter that touched forty below. Forty below what does not matter, it is the
point at which Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet. Winter kills. His uniform proved inadequate. Hitler had never made proper winter provision for his troops, and Trager had taken to wearing the
trousers from the suit Hummel had made for him under his uniform. To defecate required him to drop both pairs. And that is how he died in the January of 1943 – frozen into a squat,
arse-naked, with his German grey trousers and his Austrian blue serge bunched around his knees. His last reported words were ‘Oh shit!’

Josef Hummel became a British citizen, opened his own shop in the West End of London, and with the lifting of clothes rationing became established as one of London’s most sought-after
tailors. Recognising the 1960s youth-quake for what it was he opened a shop in Carnaby Street in 1964, offering the latest fashions for the young, which soon became a nationwide chain under the
name ‘Vienna Joe’s Rags’n’Riches’, almost always referred to simply as ‘Vienna Joe’s’. He retired in 1977 at the age of sixty-nine and moved to
Eastbourne, where he still lives aged ninety-six, and where he studies for his doctorate in philosophy at the Open University. ‘Vienna Joe’s’ became part of the legend of
Swingin’ London, and is widely believed to be the origin of the name chosen by the British rock band Vinegar Joe, but as with so many legends in popular music, this is probably
apocryphal.

Hugh Greene was appointed Director-General of the BBC in 1960.

Oskar Siebert never went home. Released in March 1941, he served throughout the war in the Pioneer Corps. After the war he applied for British Citizenship and qualified as a barrister. He
achieved brief but pleasing fame as a member of the defence team in the political show trial Regina
v.
Oz, 1971.

Billy Jacks was elected Labour MP for Tower Hamlets in 1950. Always a rebel he never made it off the back benches and proved an irritant to every Labour leader from Attlee to Wilson. He spoke
memorably and movingly against the invasion of Suez, was a frequent Aldermaston marcher, and in the 1960s he campaigned vigorously for CND and against the war in Viet Nam. He was also a regular
guest on the BBC Home Service radio programme
Any Questions
, and was widely regarded as the authentic voice of working-class London. Jacks remained on good terms with Rod Troy (himself a
Labour MP from 1945), although they moved further apart politically with every year that passed. He died suddenly in 1968. There has been a petition to the Mayor of London requesting a blue plaque
to be placed on the building where his shop once stood and talk of a statue. The former seems likely, the latter does not.

Max Drax died at Heaven’s Gate, Port Erin, I.O.M., in November 1940, still a prisoner of the British.

Kurt Schwitters was released in November 1941. His greatest creation, his Hanover ‘Merzbau’, was destroyed in an RAF raid. He died in Ambleside in 1948.

Somewhere in Rod Troy’s attic, in the house he inherited from his father in Church Row, there is a small brown attaché case, reinforced at the corners, bearing the labels of hotels
in Stuttgart and Paris, containing all the possessions of the late Professor Klemper who died on Derby Station in 1940. Amongst them is a memoir of his time in Oranienburg Concentration Camp. A
time there was when Rod had considered seeking out any living relative of Professor Klemper and returning the case. The impossibility of this ruled it out. More times there were when Rod considered
seeking a publisher for the manuscript – but once the case was consigned to the attic by his wife, in the new year of 1946, Rod forgot about the manuscript and scarcely remembers it even
now.