by John Lawton
He had spent weeks investigating the murder of several rabbis in the East End. The case had climaxed on an autumnal Wednesday in the middle of an air raid. He had spent two nights entombed in the remains of Heaven’s Gate synagogue, with a seductive killer who now lay in the London Hospital with a bad case of concussion. They’d been dug out on Friday morning.
The hospital had discharged him. He’d gone straight back to his investigation. To the house of his chief suspect in Belgravia. There, he’d had the rotten luck to encounter his boss, Stanley Onions.
“You’re on sick leave, go home,” Onions had said. “I’ll be round in the morning.”
And Troy had had no choice. Kicked off the case, he caught a cab home, dipped rather than soaked himself in the meagre warmth of a shallow bath, and tried to sleep away the day as he had been advised. His head hurt. Why would his head not hurt? His back ached. Why should his back not ache? But at least he was at home. Just as well. He couldn’t face Zette Borg right now. He could not face Zette, dead or alive. He wanted her to wake up and thanked God she hadn’t just yet. He didn’t mind that she had seduced him. He minded that he had got used to it. He minded that he had found her irresistible. The wicked woman a fortune teller had foreseen in his tea leaves. He didn’t mind that she was wicked, that her wickedness had turned deadly, only that he hadn’t seen it coming, for all the warnings in the tea leaves and for all the warnings she had given him herself—and his professional pride was bruised.
Kolankiewicz cared not a fig for wounded pride, only for his wounded head.
“I hear you took a knock, my boy. I need to give you the once-over.”
He stood on Troy’s doorstep in Goodwin’s Court. Utter darkness but for the sky overhead, criss-crossed by searchlights and tracers and the popping of ack-ack shells. Off to the east and west bombs whumpffed and bullets rattled. London was copping it, somewhere towards Mayfair, somewhere towards Clerkenwell, but St. Martin’s Lane was not.
“Why do you come out in the middle of a raid?”
“You let me in, and I won’t be in the middle of it.”
Troy closed the door behind him.
“Blackout curtains stop no bombs,” he said. “We’re still in it.”
“Of course not. It just feels that way. When I draw the blackouts at home, I feel safer. I feel wrapped up against the world. Much the same as wearing your favourite overcoat, or going to bed early on a wintery night with a hot water bottle. Who knows, I may never take them down. When this war is over I may still black out.”
“You’ll be the only man in England who does.”
Troy had little time for doctors, and any injury he usually referred to Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, senior pathologist at Hendon—a man more accustomed to dealing with the dead, but guaranteed to keep secrets, of which Troy had plenty.
Kolankiewicz examined his head, listened to his heart, said, “OK, smartyarse, so you’re immortal. Now … you got anything you want to tell me?”
Troy said nothing. Too many secrets. Ones he could never share with anyone.
Kolankiewicz would not wait for the all-clear—that could be after dawn—and bustled out as rapidly as he had bustled in.
Troy flicked out the light, opened the door to let him leave, and Kolankiewicz all but stepped on a man standing just outside the door. As Kolankiewicz muttered his apology, the man slipped in. Only with the door shut and the light back on did Troy have a clue who it was.
Burgess.
“I heard,” he said simply.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You called your sister, who called your other sister, who called Venetia Maye-Brown, who just told me … in the Ritz.”
“So, she finally figured out who I am?”
“Yes. And I fear she is after you, you’d better guard your virginity more closely.”
Troy thought of the ravages of Zette Borg. How she had roared through his veins. He had known all along that he would regret his relationship with her. Now she lay unconscious, he wanted nothing more than that she would wake up. Beyond that he could not see. He had invested too much in her—as he thought of it, he had built castles in the air on a relationship that began in the gutter. He could boast idly to Burgess about an affair of the heart that was so much an affair of the flesh. She hadn’t been his first. It just felt that way. But he owed himself no boast and he owed Burgess nothing.
A boom from hell cracked across the sky and set the windows rattling.
“If we’re going to sit this one out, Guy, I think we’re going to need a drink.”
“I’m a Scotch man, if you have …”
“I know. I heard.”
“Really? I’d no idea I was the object of so much gossip.”
“Yes, you have.”
Troy produced a couple of single malts. An Arran and a twelve-year-old Lagavulin. He also found a bottle of Johnnie Walker that he kept for Onions, who preferred blended whisky. He’d no idea for whose pleasure he had acquired the single malts, but it now appeared that both bottles had been expecting Burgess all along.
“There are people who think you have Scotch for breakfast.”
“Harrumph. Bloody cheek. I breakfast at the Ritz. Almost every day. I’m a scrambled-egg-and-bacon man. There for anyone to see. I dread the day eggs become scarce. Can’t go to work without a neggie. On a sloppy day you can read the history of breakfasts past on me ole school tie. And I daydream of breakfasts yet to come.”
“Then you start on the Scotch.”
“Never before ten thirty. Good God, Freddie. One has to have some standards.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Guy, my head hurts too much.”
He lay back. A glass of Armagnac in his hand. Closed his eyes. Let Burgess prattle. That was the dreadful thing about an air raid—you couldn’t just kick a bloke out when you’d had enough of him.
The lights went off. So familiar. Less than twelve hours after he’d been dug out and here he was again plunged into blackness thick as onion soup.
But now there was another danger. Alone in the dark with Burgess. If he makes a move, thought Troy, do I have the strength to deter him?
For several minutes all he could hear was the rasp of Burgess breathing. Then another piece of doom cracked overhead.
“Don’t you,” Burgess said, “find all this … a bit erotic?”
From somewhere Troy would summon enough energy to kick him in the balls if he had to.
“All what?”
“All this … Hitler’s own son et lumière.”
Troy did and was loth to admit it. Entombed in the synagogue, death a closer prospect than it had ever been, he and Zette had fucked like rabbits. He could tell himself it helped to pass the time, and what a colossal lie that would be. They had fucked to fuck. They had fucked to die and hoped to live.
“I suppose it is.”
“Not just me, then?”
“No. You, me, Venetia, and half London I should think.”
“I mean. Just imagine how much shagging is going on at this very moment.”
“I’d rather not.”
“London’s always been easy. But never as easy as it is now. There is just so much cock out there just … waiting for the chance to strut its stuff. And before you queer me on that … there’s an absolute ocean of quim too. Wet as a washday Monday.”
“Guy … the last time we met … you had propositioned that boy.”
“Of course.”
“Do you do that often?”
“No. Perhaps two or three times a week.”
“And how often do they say yes.”
“About two or three times a week.”
“And how often do you have to deal with a constable?”
“It’s happened once or twice. The blackout’s been a gift. They can’t see what’s going on under … don’t take this literally … their noses … on second thought, do take that literally, as I got blown by a beat bobby last March … but this one was a bit of a bastard. Normally, the
y’ll flick on their torches … got to be against regs hasn’t it? … I mean where are the bloody ARP when all you want is a quiet blow job in the dark … ‘Ere put that light out! Ere suck that cock!’ … they just check you both look over twenty-one and tell you to get lost. It’s a rare kind of bastard who really wants to nick you. They’d sooner thump you. It’s the war. Better things to do. Won’t last, of course.”
“Do you ever worry that one day you will get nicked?”
“I did get nicked a couple of years ago. Gents bog at Paddington. I’d done the circuit—”
“The what?”
“The circuit. There’s a gents bog at practically every station on the Circle Line, so you pay your two farthings and you go round, one way or the other, doesn’t matter which, and try the gents at each stop until you find someone else doing the same thing. I was going clockwise. Started out at Sloane Square. Rotten luck. Nothing at Gloucester Road, High Street Ken, or Bayswater, but I thought I’d scored at Paddington. Turned out I hadn’t and the plod was lurking.
But, I am nothing if not eloquent. After he heard me, the beak threw the case out in court. That means I have not a stain on my character—to say nothing of the clap, a dose of syph, and several cases of crabs, still I am spotless in the eyes of the law. But … on a lower level, beneath thought and most certainly beneath speech, every homo wonders about getting nicked. However … I have two things going for me, three if I count you turning up out of the blackout and blue … I’ve always felt I was a lucky sort of chap, I get out of scrapes as easily as I get into them, and you’d be amazed at how intimidating RP and the King’s English can be. Of course that copper the other night was having none of it. He’d have nicked the Duke of Windsor.”
It seemed to Troy that in a little less than a month the Blitz had divided Londoners into two types—shelterers and watchers. Both had sub-types. Frightened and not-frightened was not the line. It was closer to … the introvert shelterer, who stuck a mattress up against the window and hid under the kitchen table or, if better prepared, found one of the rare public shelters … or the extrovert shelterer, who looked upon being up all night as merely an extension of his habitual practices and regarded an air raid as an excuse for a party. Class and money had a lot to do with it. The watchers who worked … worked. They stayed on the surface, drove ambulances, put out fires, and lived or died along with those in their care. Troy saw himself as the other type of watcher. His job gave him a legitimate reason to be out, but he was no part of safety or rescue and so looked skyward more than those who were. And alongside him were the watcher-starers who were out in the blaze for no better reason than that they were fascinated by it. It was odd—falling just short of morbid. Only the job saved Troy from being such a starer. Burgess, Troy concluded, was an up-all-night subterranean reveller who’d really quite like to be a starer.
“Have you ever just gone out in a raid and looked up?”
“No. Spend most of my time looking down. Once the siren goes you can hear the fly buttons pop in every basement bar in London.”
“So you’ve never really seen Hitler’s son et lumière?”
“You don’t think you’re labouring the point a bit? It was a throwaway remark.”
“No it wasn’t. You want erotic. Follow me. I’ll show you erotic.”
Troy found a torch and led the way to the top floor.
Burgess followed. As they passed the bedrooms he said, “Am I reading this situation wrongly, Troy?”
“In all probability.”
He handed the torch to Burgess and slid the bolts on the roof hatch.
“We’re going to get a view from the gods. Put the torch out now.”
Troy climbed out onto the tiles, held out a hand and yanked Burgess after him.
“I might be a bit fat for this sort of caper.”
“You may well be. But look up and stop thinking about yourself for a moment.”
Troy wedged his back against the chimney stack. Burgess sat just below him, one foot wedged in the trapdoor. He had carried the bottle of Lagavulin up with him. Nothing, it seemed, and certainly not the Luftwaffe, would part him from his grip on it.
It seemed to Troy that the night sky was short on sky’s own colour—blue. Reds it had aplenty, from the bright, post-office-van scarlet of the flames that leapt heavenward from burning buildings to the colouring-book-and-wax-crayon carmine of tracers and the paintbox burnt orange of ack-ack shells popping uselessly among the beaten-metal pewter hue of the barrage balloons. Incendiaries burnt white to silver, and the searchlights sliced up the night with long fingers of pure, clear light. Rarely had he seen a plane hit, either ours or theirs, but when it happened every colour in the rainbow might burst forth.
He stared.
Let Burgess stare.
Cocooned in noise and light.
Burgess swigged Scotch, burped and sighed.
“You’re right. There is a most appalling beauty to it all. I am put in mind of Yeats … a terrible beauty.”
“I’m not. I don’t think this is what he meant.”
Three massive explosions shook the air around them … crump, crump, crump off to the east—buffeted by a giant hand.
Burgess sighed.
“Speaking of terrible beauty …” Burgess burped.
“… What will you do about the lovely Venetia?”
“Avoid her. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve managed to avoid her the last five years. Besides I have rather a lot on my plate at the moment.”
“A woman?”
“More than one woman, I’m afraid.”
“Ah … you have grown up, after all. Then I won’t mention your virginity again.”
“Good. I’d be grateful for that.”
A pause, in which man was silent and metal was loud.
Troy saw a glint of hot steel flash in the sky to the south of them, like sparklers in the giant’s hand, then a shower of ack-ack shrapnel hit the roof of the Coliseum theatre. He had no idea what happened in a theatre during an air raid—must the show go on? Did the show go on? What, after all, could be darker than a London theatre—designed to keep light out, they surely also kept it in?
A lull. The illusion of silence after so much noise. He could even hear the pop as Burgess took the Scotch bottle from his lips.
“Bloody hell. That was close.”
More swigging of Scotch. Then the pleasing non sequitur that alcohol found in his befuddled brain:
“What’s playing there at the mo’?”
“I believe it’s a revival of Chu Chin Chow.”
“Really? Pity it wasn’t a direct hit, then.”
“My brother rather liked it.”
“And where is he now?”
Troy pointed upwards.
“Really. You mean …”
“Not quite. He’s with a Hurricane squadron, Hampshire or Dorset way.”
“Shouldn’t that be secret?”
“No idea.”
“Any other secrets he shares?”
“He says we’re winning.”
The flash once more, the sweep of the giant’s hand, and fragments of shrapnel dashed a deafening clatter along the roof to stop only inches from Burgess’s left leg.
He dropped the Scotch bottle, sent it rolling towards the gutter, and his impulses sent him lurching after it, an arm outstretched to the bottle. Troy grabbed hold of the back of his coat and heaved, hoping he wasn’t so heavy that he’d pull both of them over the edge. Burgess slithered to a halt with his head in the gutter, Troy’s hands knotted in the hem of his overcoat, the bottle smashed in the yard below them.
For a few moments neither of them moved, Troy hoping that Burgess regained some control and shared the burden of his bulk, his live weight, before they both fell as dead weight.
“Bloody hell. I mean … bloody hell.”
“Guy. For God’s sake, just shut up and push.”
Then Troy felt the pull on his arms relax as Burgess used the flat of his hands to push himsel
f slowly back up the roof towards him.
“Did I say something about a near miss? Me and my big mouth.”
He stretched out on the tiles. His left leg twitching involuntarily, his chest heaving, his breath sounding like an approaching hurricane.
“Thank you. I think you might have saved my life.”
“As long as I don’t come to regret it.”
“Freddie, there are people even now who wouldn’t thank you.”
For some reason this induced a fit of giggles.
Troy could not think it odd, giggling in the face of death, because he could not think what normal might be. Was it normal to be stuck on a London rooftop in an air raid with a drunken and notorious homosexual, debating the erotic nature of war?
“Tell you what, Freddie. Let’s give thanks. I think we should pray.”
More self-perpetuating giggles of profanity.
“I don’t know any prayers, and I doubt you do either.”
“Or … how about a hymn? What was the one you played me out at your dad’s house … da da daaah!”
“It was Haydn’s ‘Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken’ … and if you recall my mother stopped us because it has the same tune as the German national anthem. I cannot think how you or I would explain to the nosy buggers in the ARP what we might be doing sitting on the roof serenading the Luftwaffe with ‘Deutschland Über Alles.’”
But Burgess was away with the fairies, humming softly to himself.
“Da da daaah da daaah da dada … I will glory in thy name … something something worldling’s pleasure … what’s a worldling? What on earth is a bloody worldling?”
“You are,” said Troy, and he began to tune Burgess out. A magenta and orange burst in the sky over Waterloo and he couldn’t hear him anymore.
§12
The all-clear sounded around four o’clock in the morning. It woke Troy. He wondered if he’d be able to go back to sleep. Ten minutes later he heard the front door close and knew Burgess had abandoned a night on the sofa for a few hours in his own bed.
Troy did not stir again until past ten.
He opened the front door to find a fine layer of ash covering everything. He blew it off the top of the milk bottle, and closed the door.