by William Boyd
I met Munro at noon by the north-east lion at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It was a grey, cold day of intermittent rain and drizzle and we were both wearing rubberized trenchcoats, like a couple of tourists. A heavy shower had passed through ten minutes before and the paving stones were glossy and lacquered, the wet smoky façades of the surrounding buildings – the Royal College of Physicians, the National Gallery, St Martin’s – almost a velvety black. The brief sun was trying vainly to break through the thick grey clouds, managing only to illumine some breeze-blown interstices, and this, coupled with the gloomy effect of the heavy purpley mass of more rain coming up the Thames estuary, cast a curious gold-leaden light on the scene, making the vistas down Pall Mall, Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue seem lit by arc-lights, artificial and strange, as if the city blocks could be struck like stage scenery and re-assembled elsewhere. I felt uncomfortable and edgy, troubled by the weather and the curious light, almost as if I were in a theatre, acting.
MUNRO: Why are we meeting like this, Rief? All very melodramatic.
LYSANDER: Indulge me. I like public spaces at the moment.
MUNRO: We found ‘Andromeda’, of course, up on the heath, with your note on him. The police called us . . . Everything tidied up nicely. We’re grateful, I must say.
LYSANDER: He was very clever, Vandenbrook. Very.
MUNRO: Not clever enough. You caught him and dealt with him. I read your deposition – very thorough.
LYSANDER: Good. He was never being blackmailed, you see. That was the first of his clever ideas. He had everything prepared in case he was ever found out. There was no ten-year old girl, no genuine statement, no pearls. It gave him an excuse – and it might have saved him the hangman if he hadn’t shot himself.
MUNRO: Yes . . . How did you know it was him – in the end?
LYSANDER: I admit – I’d been completely convinced by his blackmail story. Then he gave himself away – just a little slip up. Even I didn’t notice it when he said it – it was something I remembered a few hours later as I was trying to get to sleep.
MUNRO: You’re going to tell me what it was, I’m sure.
LYSANDER: That night we all met at the theatre, Vandenbrook made a reference to the cover of Andromeda und Perseus.
MUNRO: Glockner’s source-text –
LYSANDER: Exactly. I mentioned it – the opera – and he said he had heard it was a ‘saucy’ opera. How could he know? He’d never seen it. But he had seen the libretto with its provocative cover because he’d stolen it from my mother’s office and used it as the master-text for the Glockner code.
MUNRO [thinking]: Yes . . . What was that meeting in the variety theatre all about?
LYSANDER: I wanted Vandenbrook to look you over – you, Fyfe-Miller and Massinger. See if he could identify you. I still believed he was being blackmailed at that stage.
MUNRO: Are you saying you suspected one of us?
LYSANDER: I’m afraid so. It seemed the obvious conclusion at the time. I was convinced it was one of you three – that one of you was the real Andromeda. Until he made his slip-up.
MUNRO: I don’t understand –
LYSANDER: When I was in Vienna I knew this Austrian army officer who had been accused of stealing from the officers’ mess. I’m sure now that he was guilty but there were eleven other suspects. So he hid behind a screen of other suspects and manipulated them very adroitly – just like Vandenbrook. And he got away with it. When there are many suspects the inclination is to suspect anyone and everybody – which means you probably never find the real suspect. It’s a very clever ruse. But I had this strong feeling that the whole business was connected to Vienna in some way. You had been in Vienna, Fyfe-Miller as well – and so had Massinger, apparently.
MUNRO: Yes, Massinger came to Vienna. And you were in Vienna, also.
LYSANDER: So I was. And Hettie Bull. And Dr John Bensimon. The only person who hadn’t been there was Vandenbrook. And that’s what gave him away. He hadn’t been there, yet he knew about Andromeda und Perseus. And, most importantly, what was on the cover of the Viennese libretto. Glockner’s Dresden libretto had no ‘saucy’ cover. Just plain black lettering on white. A tiny, fatal, error. But I was the only person who knew that. The only one.
Munro looked thoughtful, stroking his neat moustache with his middle finger in his habitual gesture. I sensed that he was desperate to find something wrong with my reasoning, some flaw in the logic – almost as a matter of intellectual pride and self-esteem, as if he was annoyed by the case I had built and wanted to bring it down, somehow.
MUNRO: All of the Glockner letters were posted in London.
LYSANDER: Yes.
MUNRO: So you’re saying Vandenbrook took them to a south-coast hotel. Left them there. Then had them picked up the next day by a railway porter and brought back to him in London. He then encoded them and sent them on to Geneva.
LYSANDER: It was part of his cover. He was unbelievably thorough. Everything was thought through. Everything had to fit his essential blackmail story – that there was another person controlling him. Another Andromeda, if you like. A more important one.
MUNRO: He certainly took pains.
LYSANDER: And they nearly paid off for him. By the way, how did you know the Glockner letters had London postmarks?
MUNRO: You told me.
LYSANDER: Did I? I don’t remember.
MUNRO: Then it must have been Madame Duchesne.
LYSANDER: Must have been . . .
MUNRO: How can you be sure that Vandenbrook was Andromeda?
LYSANDER: How can you be sure about anything? It’s my best guess. My most considered deduction. My most cogitated interpretation. Vandenbrook was very shrewd – and an exceptional actor, incidentally, far superior to me. I wish I had half his talent. And he had established an invisible layer of power above him that made him look like a victim, a dupe, a pawn. Don’t look at me, I’m small fry, he was saying – the real control lies elsewhere. I believed it for a while but it was a total fabrication.
MUNRO: Then why did he try to deliver the last letter?
LYSANDER: That was the beginning of the ruse. He saw I had come into the Directorate and he knew exactly what I was looking for – and that I might very well narrow the suspects down to him – so he put his escape plan into operation. Of course he encoded the Glockner letters himself. He had the master-text. But he had to cover himself in case I found him out. And of course I might never have come upon the last letter, but he couldn’t risk it.
MUNRO: Isn’t that a bit too subtle? Over-subtle? Even for Vandenbrook?
LYSANDER: This is your world, Munro, not mine. I think ‘too subtle’ or ‘over-subtle’ are its defining features, don’t you? The triple-bluff? The quadruple-bluff? The third-guess? The tenth-guess? Normal currency in my limited experience. Why don’t you ask an expert like Madame Duchesne? Ask yourself, come to that.
Munro frowned. He looked like a man who was still not convinced by the argument.
LYSANDER: You don’t look convinced.
MUNRO: Well, next summer’s offensives will give us a final answer, I suppose, as to whether the leak is staunched or not.
LYSANDER: I suggest you go and spend a few days in the Directorate of Movements and its associated departments. It’s all there. Mountains upon mountains of hard fact – so easy to read. It’s too big, Munro. The war machine is too gigantic and gigantically obvious – you can’t hide anything when it’s on that massive scale and when you’re as close as I was. Anyone could have been Andromeda – it just happened to be Vandenbrook.
Munro looked at me, quizzically, as if I were some fractious and rascally schoolboy who was forever disrupting his classroom.
LYSANDER: Think of our armies as cities. There’s a British city, and a French city and a German city and a Russian city. And then there’s the Austrian city, the Italian and the Turkish. They need everything a city needs – fuel, transportation, power supply, food, water, sanitation, ad
ministration, hospitals, a police force, law courts, undertakers and graveyards. And so on. Think how much these cities need on a daily basis, how much they consume, on an hourly basis. There’s a population of millions in these cities and they have to be kept running at all costs.
MUNRO: I see what you mean. Yes . . .
LYSANDER: And then there’s the final, unique ingredient.
MUNRO: What’s that?
LYSANDER: Weaponry. Of every imaginable type. These cities are trying to destroy each other.
MUNRO: Yes . . . It does make you think . . .
He was silent for a while and kicked out a foot at a pigeon that was pecking too close to his brilliant shoes. The bird flapped away a few feet.
MUNRO: Why did you kill Vandenbrook?
LYSANDER: I didn’t. He killed himself. When I confronted him with the evidence about the libretto. He drew a gun and shot himself. Search his house – you’ll find the vital clue. The Andromeda und Perseus libretto is the key to all this.
MUNRO: We can’t search his house. It wouldn’t do. Grieving widow, little weeping girls who’ve lost their father. Distinguished officer who took his own life, injured in battle, suffering from the awful pressures and stress of modern warfare . . . No, no. And his father-in-law would have something to say about us sending men in and tearing the place apart.
LYSANDER: Then you’ll have to take my word for it, won’t you?
Silence. We looked at each other, giving nothing away.
MUNRO: I was sorry to hear about your mother.
LYSANDER: Yes. It’s a real tragedy. She just couldn’t cope, I suppose. But it was something she wanted to do. I respect that.
MUNRO: Of course . . . Of course . . . What about you, Rief? What do you want to do now?
LYSANDER: I want my honourable discharge. No more army for me. My war’s finished.
MUNRO: I think we can arrange that. It’s the least you deserve.
We shook hands, said a simple goodbye and walked away from each other, Munro heading back down Northumberland Avenue to Whitehall Court and me strolling up the Strand to Surrey Street and 3/12 Trevelyan House. I didn’t look back and I assume Munro didn’t, either. It was over.
21. Shadows
It is a dark, foggy, drizzly night in London, near the end of 1915. The fog, pearly and smoky, seems to curl and hang – as if from a million snuffed candles – around the city blocks like something almost growing and sinuously weedy, blanketing and vast, seeking out doorways and stairways, alleyways and side streets, the levels of the roofs quite invisible. The streetlamps drop a struggling moist yellow cone of luminescence that seems to wane as soon as the light hits the shining pavement in its small hazed circle, as if the effort of piercing the engulfing murky darkness and falling there were all it could manage.
You are standing shivering in the angle of two walls in Archer Street, peering out, trying to discern the late-night world go by, your attention half-caught by the small crowd of enthusiastic theatre-goers waiting with their programmes for an autograph as the cast of Man and Superman leaves the stage door after the show. Exhalations of rapture, an impromptu smatter of applause. Eventually the people drift away as the actors come through, sign, chat briefly and leave.
The light is switched off but you see that the door opens one last time and a man appears with a raincoat and a hat in his hand. He looks up at the opaque night sky, checking on the dismal weather, and you will probably recognize him as Mr Lysander Rief, who is playing the part of John Tanner, the leading role in Man and Superman, by Mr George Bernard Shaw. Lysander Rief looks tired – he looks like a man who is not sleeping well. So why is he quitting the theatre so discreetly, the very last to leave? He puts his hat on and sets off and – vaguely curious – you decide to follow him, left into Wardour Street and then quickly right into Old Compton Street. You keep your distance as you watch him make his way home through the thickening condensations of the night. He pauses frequently to look around him and, as he goes, he takes an odd swerving course along the street, crossing and re-crossing the roadway, as if keen to avoid the bleary yellow circles cast by the streetlamps. You give up after a minute – you’ve better things to do – and you leave Mr Lysander Rief to make his erratic way home, wherever that may be, as best he can. Good luck to him – he’s evidently a man who prefers the fringes and the edges of the city streets, its blurry peripheries – where it’s hard to make things out clearly, hard to tell exactly what is what, and who is whom – Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.
A Note on the Author
William Boyd is the author of ten novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet and adapted into a BAFTA-winning Channel 4 drama; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection, and most recently the bestselling Ordinary Thunderstorms.
By the Same Author
A Good Man in Africa
On the Yankee Station
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
School Ties
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
Armadillo
Nat Tate: An American Artist
Any Human Heart
Fascination
Bamboo
Restless
Ordinary Thunderstorms
First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in January 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by William Boyd
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