Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  Troy said nothing.

  §24

  Diana Brack tumbled through his dreams, dragged out of her hiding place in some cupboard in Troy’s mind by her brother, yet again. He awoke to find himself with the beginnings of a foul mood, and to the Sunday papers on the mat.

  It was a rash promise. Only to himself, but one he could not keep. Well before noon Troy had begun to wish he had nabbed the paper boy and bought a News of the World off him. The Sunday Post lay upon the wicker table on the verandah, a fat unreadable wadge. He read the first paragraph of Comrade K’s message to mankind and yawned into his morning coffee. Guilt and salvation when what he needed was tit and titillation. Perhaps he would get out his bicycle and ride into the village for a copy of the News. On the other hand perhaps he’d just sit and yawn.

  He was still yawning on his second cup of coffee when his sister Masha appeared out of nowhere. He had not heard a car on the drive. Rod had scratched his weekend, driven up for morning surgery on the Saturday and gone straight back to a meeting in London. Troy had been looking forward to being alone, except for the Fat Man. It was his motorbike he had been listening out for. How had he missed a car, and what was the damn woman doing here today?

  ‘You bastard!’

  Troy blinked at her, not much interested in what it was he might now be supposed to have done. She threw her hat at him.

  ‘What have you been saying to Nikolai?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘The pair of you! You unconscionable bastards! I had him on the phone Friday and yesterday in one of his tizzes. What have you and Rod been saying to him?’

  Troy gathered his dressing gown around him. This was no way to spend his first Sunday morning off in six weeks. He picked up the Sunday Post, threw it towards her. She caught it with a little gasp, but didn’t look at it.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You read it. I can’t be bothered. And when you have, you go and talk to him about the fate of the little people. Of necessity and choice, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of apparatchiks and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. See if you can’t irritate him far more than I can.’

  He left her clutching the paper and went back to the kitchen to make more coffee. On the kitchen table was a note from the Fat Man. Thick pencil on lined paper.

  ‘Pig in Pudding Club. Your ole pal, . . .’ Then a long scrawl which Troy took to be his signature. All he could make of it was that it was indeed very long.

  Damn. He’d missed him. He must have come and gone before Troy was even up. ‘Pig in Pudding Club.’ Troy tried to work out the date. The gestation period of a pig is 117 days. That made it . . . September the . . . well, near enough the end of September. He’d have to remember that. It would be a shame to be in Aberdeen or Aberanywhere at that moment.

  On his way back out he heard the telephone ring in his father’s study. Then he heard Masha’s voice answer. She was cooing unctuously. She could only be talking to her husband. Then the penny dropped. A husband. Not hers.

  ‘Of course, darling. Of course. Well, I think Masha wants to take a walk through the woods this afternoon. I thought perhaps we’d make up some sandwiches and . . . what? No, he won’t come. He’ll stay at home with his blasted pig. I’ll call you about five, shall I? Bye, Hughdey darling.’

  Troy waited till she had finished and then crossed the room to the verandah. He did not care that she must know he had heard; he did not care what lies she told.

  Masha reappeared next to him as he sat down and reclaimed her hat.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘And don’t judge.’

  Which he certainly wasn’t.

  He heard Masha banging around in the house for another ten minutes or so, then he heard the scrunch of gravel as her car disappeared down the drive. He was just starting to wonder about the problem she had left him with if Hugh phoned back asking for Sasha, when the phone rang. If it were Hugh, he’d no idea what to tell the poor cuckolded sod.

  It was Rod.

  ‘Well, did you see it?’

  ‘I could hardly miss it. It weighs as much as a side of bacon. Whatever happened to paper rationing?’

  ‘No, not Khrushchev. Bugger Khrushchev. Page seven, bottom left. Got ’em! All I want now is the name!’

  Troy rang off and turned to page seven. Any subject but Khrushchev would do, but all the same he had no idea what Rod was on about. Then he saw it. A small piece buried between a bit of Khrushchev and an advert for Horlicks.

  ‘Sources close to Downing Street have revealed that Her Majesty’s Government will make a Commons statement early next week on the matter of the Frogman Spy, following several questions tabled over recent weeks by Sir Rod Troy (Lab.—Herts. South), the Shadow Foreign Secretary. It is believed that the Prime Minister will admit the error, and offer an unreserved and full apology to the Soviet leader and to the captain of the Ordzhonikidze. It is understood that while the purpose of sending out a naval frogman was to test new experimental underwater equipment, the exercise was open to the wrong interpretation and is to be regretted.’

  Fine, thought Troy and turned to Uncle Todger’s gardening strip at the back of the paper.

  ‘Aye up,’ said a bubble coming from the lips of a caricature northern bloke on his allotment behind the mill, waistcoat, muffler, cloth cap on head, string around the knees of his tatty trousers. ‘Did you know that now is the right time to make a second sowing of Cos lettuce so you can have lettuce right through the autumn? I thought not.’

  This was more like it. In the absence of tit and titillation, Uncle Todger was infinitely preferable to Khrushchev or the Frogman Spy. Rod could keep the spooks and spookery. This was the real world of rhizomes and tubers, of scab and blackleg, of pricking out and earthing up, and putting horsemuck on rosebushes. Not that Troy was entirely sure what a rhizome was. All the same, he took Uncle Todger at his word, and as soon as he had bathed and dressed went down to the kitchen garden, took up the rake and hoe and made a fresh sowing of lettuce.

  It was late afternoon before the telephone rang again. He was mentally striving for the last frame of Uncle Todger’s strip—of every strip, on every Sunday—the scene of pastoral reconciliation in which he sits upon a barrel and puffs gently on his pipe, while Nature blooms abundant all around him, fed and watered by his own hand . . . all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade. It was almost five, a sunny, moderately warm June afternoon, the height of the English summer, peaceful Sunday, blessed Sunday . . . bloody Sunday. He was not succeeding; the tooth and claw crouched waiting beneath the green and pleasant, and he was beginning to think that perhaps he and Uncle Todger were not cut from the same cloth. Where was Uncle Todger in the fury and the breaking thunder when it came to rage against the heavens? What price this Nuncle on the blasted heath? And—he was half expecting Masha to show up any minute and reinforce her sister’s alibi. He picked up the phone, wanting it not to be Hugh in his cuckold’s horns, and heard Jack’s voice.

  ‘I’m in the office.’

  ‘On a Sunday?’

  ‘Just clearing up a bit. Look, there’s an airmail letter turned up for you. It’s done the rounds a bit. It’s dated last Tuesday. It was addressed to “Sergeant Troy”, except that the “y”s been smudged. It’s ended up in your tray. Probably late yesterday. Shall I open it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It says “Hotel de l’Europe, Amsterdam. Till Thursday next week. Lois Teale.” You don’t know anyone called Lois Teale, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘I don’t.’

  §25

  Amsterdam is a city of concentric circles, of concentric canals. Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, Herengracht and, as near to the middle as dammit, the Singel.

  Troy had last been in Amsterdam as a child late in the 1920s. One of his mother’s musical grand tours. A little night music in Vienna, on to Hannover to hear Walter Gieseking—in the days before his dubious, disgraceful associa
tion with the Nazis—play the entire Debussy Preludes, with Estampes thrown in for an encore, and ending in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the full blast of Mahler’s Second. He had no recollection of the Mahler, it had merged with a dozen other performances over the years, but to this day he had only to close his eyes and imagine the sound of the third Etampe, ‘Jardins sous la pluie’, to see Gieseking’s huge frame and bald head bent over the keyboard, his giant’s hands somehow producing the most delicate music he had heard in his young life. And when he saw Gieseking he saw not Hannover, but Amsterdam.

  The war and occupation seemed to have left Amsterdam physically unscathed. A seventeenth-century mercantile city left intact by the blitzkrieg that destroyed Antwerp and Rotterdam, Coventry and Plymouth. It had none of the ambitious design of Hausmann’s Paris, a city reshaped to the military column—he could not imagine the Dutch marching in columns. Nor was it the mess with occasional concession to scheme that London was—a city in which no grand scheme had ever run more than a few streets without merging once more into the chaos that was natural to it.

  Tall, narrow houses, no two alike it would seem, squeezed each other for room on the canal banks—odd shapes, uneven heights, gables sharp as steeples, some tilting at precarious angles—the city seemed to Troy to loom over him, to wrap itself around him, to contain him and thrust him at its heart. Accordingly, he found himself on the innermost circle, the bull’s-eye, as it were, at a sharp curve in the Singel at about five in the afternoon, on the day following the cryptic airmail letter. He presumed a degree of secrecy and so did not telephone ahead. He presumed also that Lois Teale would be expecting him. He looked up at the outside of the Hotel de L’Europe, seven storeys of red brick, edged in white and topped by a Hollywood-scale sign, rising to a host of dormer points, St Pancras in miniature, hesitant, wondering what he might find. June light danced on the water of the Singel. It had been a blazing, blistering summer’s day, one of those days when the canals turned to glass and lit the city from below, creating a mixture of spotlight and shadow, a dappled city, revealing as much as it hid.

  He could leave now. He could turn right around, get on one of those creaking old trams and go back to the Central Station, the way he had come. He could pretend that he had never received the airmail letter. He could learn the lesson of youth, admit he had grown up a bit, and not get involved again.

  A flower-seller was pitching his wares from a wooden cart, only a few feet away. An eye-catching display of summer’s reds and yellows and blues, against the flaking Balmoral green of the old wagon. There had been one much like it on almost every corner. The flower-seller eyed Troy expectantly.

  ‘Why not buy her some flowers?’ the flower-seller asked in English. Two assumptions in a single expression, so put as to make Troy instantly self-conscious. Was he really so transparent? Did the look on his face say ‘woman’? Worse, did it say it in English? He had no idea what to buy. To buy tulips seemed nothing less than corny.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Roses. A dozen white roses.’

  As English a choice as he could make, a dozen York roses. Since, he was, it seemed, so recognisably English.

  He crossed the iron bridge to the other bank, a few feet nearer the heart, walked into the lobby of the hotel and asked for Miss Teale. Did he mean Mrs Teale? There was a Mrs Teale in 601. Yes, he was sure he did. An American lady? They would have to ring up. No visitor could be admitted unannounced. Mrs Teale had been quite insistent on the point.

  He tapped lightly on the door of 601. It opened at once, an inch or two of light showing, a face in shadow thrust to the crack, a brown eye peeking at him.

  ‘That you, baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I—er—I need a minute. And we’re right out of the hard stuff. Could you go round the block to a liquor store and get me a quart of Jack Daniels?’

  The door shut on him before he could argue a syllable.

  Back across the iron bridge, he asked directions of the flower-seller and two side streets away found a liquor store which had very expensive, imported bottles of Wild Turkey. It would have to do.

  He gave her a full quarter of an hour and tapped on her door again. Her voice answered faintly from inside.

  ‘It’s open. You can come in.’

  She stood between two double beds, facing him, back to the window, curtains half drawn to whittle down the daylight to a single shaft aimed at him, framed in the doorway, lit as by a natural spotlight. The room resolved into vision for him, and he saw that daylight was not the only thing aimed at him. The thing in her hand was a small automatic, a .25 Beretta or some such, the classic woman’s gun, tailor-made for the handbag.

  She was dressed in a neat Chanel deep-blue two-piece, oh-so-high heels, a nervous, flickering grin on her face, that failed to make the evolution to a smile, her blonde hair bobbed, her fathomless, fleckless brown eyes staring at him.

  ‘Long time no see,’ she said, lowering the gun.

  ‘Yes. It’s been a while.’

  ‘You can close the door now.’

  He kicked it to with his foot. She put the safety on and dropped the gun on the bed behind her.

  ‘Had to be sure. You see that, don’t you?’

  Troy was not at all sure what he saw. He felt encumbered, bourbon in one hand, flowers in the other, and neither seeming much to matter any more. He put them gently down on a chair and moved slowly round her in an arc towards the heavy brocade curtain. She turned as he moved. He grabbed the curtain with one hand, her arm with the other and pulled. The shaft of light became a flood and he drew her to him, cupped her face with one hand and rubbed his thumb across her cheek. He knew now why she had stalled him, why the curtains had been drawn. The cheek was thick with make-up. She squirmed and yelled but before she had pulled free he had seen the bruises, purple ringed in yellow. He caught the hand that came at him spread to slap. Two of the fingernails had been half torn off, the pulpy flesh beneath bright pink and swollen.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’

  She lurched across the room and picked up the first thing to hand. A dozen white roses hurtled at him, followed by the bourbon. He caught the flowers in his right hand and the bourbon neatly in his left.

  She flung herself at him, hands flailing. She caught him a couple of stingers round the ear. A clenched fist to the diaphragm almost winded him. He found himself encumbered once more, the flowers and the bourbon had simply changed hands. He drew her to him, smothered her anger in a clumsy half-embrace, like hugging someone in too many overcoats and outsize mittens.

  She kicked his shins, but he simply tightened his grip until she stopped moving altogether. It seemed to him that minutes passed, before she moved again. He had no idea how long. He could hear the sounds of traffic in the street, the occasional hoot of a barge on the canal, and when they were silent all he could hear was the thumping of her heart.

  ‘Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy,’ she said into his chest.

  ‘Tosca,’ he said, looking down at the top of her head. ‘Or do I call you Mrs Teale?’

  She wriggled, tilted her head up at him. One clear brown eye peeping out, a teardrop poised in the corner. Her voice rough and throaty, as New York as lox and cream cheese.

  ‘Tosca, schmoshca. What’s in a name?’

  §26

  It had been a wet night in the winter of 1944. The last bombs of the ‘Little Blitz’. His second meeting with M/Sgt Larissa Tosca WAC. The first counted for little. He remembered feeling sodden and miserable, on the verge of giving up, when he had caught sight of her, making her way from Ike’s Overlord HQ in St James’s Square to her billet in Orange Street. Not that he knew it was Orange Street, or he would not have tried to follow her, would not have wasted time, would not have had her turn on him, first accusing then challenging him.

  The challenge was sex—she assumed, she had told him, that he was following her because he fancied his chances. He had no way now of knowing whether this was true or not, and perhaps it
didn’t matter. He had tumbled willingly if clumsily into her bed less than half an hour later, and so embarked on a perilous course that had damn near cost him his life, and if the Yard had ever found out about his liaison with a witness, his job too.

  He had been seduced, in every conceivable sense of that word, by this pocket Venus, this pizza-toting, bourbon-guzzling, much-hyphenated Italian-American, a Manhattan moll born and brought up on Spring Street, wise-cracking, foul-mouthed, Bowery-brash and brassy—and utterly, completely, totally false.

  At the height of summer, almost exactly this time twelve years ago—8 or 9 June, he thought—she had vanished, leaving her Orange Street billet swamped in her own blood, and he had reported her dead. Jack had been with him, but when push came to shove, Jack was the most reliable person he knew, the best of lieutenants, and he knew to ask no questions.

  Then in the winter of 1948 M/Sgt Larissa Tosca WAC, Italian-American, had surfaced once again in a Berlin locked in Stalin’s iron fist—just when he needed a guardian angel—mysteriously transformed into the Russian-American Major Larissa Dimitrovna Toskevich KGB, NKVD? P&O? . . . or whatever initials the Cheka had had at that time. He could not keep track, and if there was one thing that characterised secret police all over the world it was that they were alphabetically mobile, changing initials at whim, it seemed.

  Tosca had helped him trap Jimmy Wayne, alias John Baumgarner, the most elusive criminal Troy had ever set his sights on. Christmas Day 1948, and from that day to yesterday, the Sunday Jack had read Lois Teale’s airmail letter out loud to him, he had heard not a whisper of her—Tosca, Toskevich, Teale—what, indeed, was in a name?

  §27

  Troy woke late in the morning, nearer eleven than ten. The heap in the bed opposite did not move. Larissa/Lois Tosca-Toskevich-Teale was sleeping soundly. Late the previous night she had pointed him to his own bed and said she was exhausted.