by George Sims
‘That’s a joke but seriously this is the place,’ Spiegl explained coming up the stairs. ‘Knowl Green—remember? You worried me with it, how Mr Weiss had left a list with my name and Knowl Green. We-ell.’ He pointed to the portrait. ‘Mr Ned Balfour, may I introduce Colonel Frederick Knollys Green. You see!’
‘You’re sure about this?’ Balfour queried, his slightly bemused mind trying to deal with the jumble of the possibilities contained in this pregnant sentence.
‘One hundred per cent. It’s too close to be a coincidence. Look. You tell me that Mr Weiss has died leaving a list with my name on it. Naturally I’m worried. It’s an eerie feeling, not knowing why. How would you like it? But you fooled me by saying that the other name was definitely a place, Knowl Green. I knew I’d never been to it. Then I remember this sale. And this is the clincher—Mr Weiss was here. I hardly said a word to him, I was in too much of a hurry, running round looking at all the goodies and sizing up the opposition, then deciding on my marks for the sale. But he was here.’
‘You still don’t remember anything to do with the other names on the list, Steiner and Quarry?’
‘Absolutely not. And I don’t know why he should have put my name down. Unless, it’s just possible, he wanted to ask me something about the sale. But if so, then what? I’ve been puzzled about that. Let’s face it. Mr Weiss was an amateur but he knew as much as I do. What could I tell him?’
Balfour caught sight of his own reflection in a dark tarnished mirror—he had a hungry ‘Bisto Kids’ expression. With one sentence Spiegl had upset his theory about Sammy’s death: it was as if he had been working on a crossword puzzle but had got a key-word wrong. Sammy had been seen brooding on a list of names and two of them were linked with this aborted sale. Did the other names stem from it as well, and the TERRIBLE DECISION?
‘On a purnt of order, Mr Chairman.’ Maurice Erskine was ascending the stairs, holding a bottle and a glass, doing his sinisterly accurate Senator McCarthy imitation. ‘If I may be allowed just one word here. I have the complete inside story.’ He took a good swig of wine then continued in McCarthy’s wearing, declamatory voice. ‘Gentlemen. This is indeed potent stuff, and I mean the scandal not the vino. I’ve just had all my suspicions confirmed by Mr Stanley Coote, well-loved auctioneer and fool entrepreneur. The “liberated” goods which added so much spice to this sale were, it seems, sent to Colonel Green, suh, by his son, also a member of the licentious soldiery, in 1945. Apparently they were on buddy-buddy terms at that time and the old man was not above harbouring stuff looted from the Krauts. Then, it appears, they had a real bust-up. Possibly something to do with the housekeeper who by then was sharing the Colonel’s bed? Anyway the split was final and the son even changed his name. The goods were left behind—perhaps they were the Colonel’s share of the proceeds? But when the sale was announced the son sent in his spies. Followed great activity behind the scenes. Son now very wealthy, prominent figure, extremely reluctant to be connected with these pillaged goodies and his solicitors therefore arrange they should be withdrawn on payment of an adequate, nay generous sum. And so gentlemen we are left with a sale in which the high-spots are the Colonel’s honest possessions, such as a Fred Sandys painting and a Binetto cabinet reed organ.’ He shook his head sadly and put a smeared wine-glass on a dark red plush chair. ‘Christ, I could do with both a cuppa coffee and a leak. Can such things be?’
Leo Spiegl was obviously excited by these revelations. ‘So it’s true these things were knocked off? Rumours—well, a suggestion—of this I heard before but to have it confirmed rocks me. How could it happen?’ He directed a slightly malicious glance at Balfour: ‘Were the Britishers allowed to loot? How else could they bring back all that booty?’
Erskine answered him: ‘Don’t fool yourself, Leo. It wasn’t a British monopoly. I was in Bad Salzemen, Magdeburg, and Shonebeck in April ’45 and saw plenty of “souvenirs” being taken by GIs. We had just heard about concentration camps like Ohrdruf, overrun by the Third Army under Patton. And don’t forget, we’d taken plenty of crap from the Krauts for nine months. I picked up some Zeiss binoculars in a pile of rubble in Barby. Do you think I went out and posted up a found notice? Believe me, to take a lot of Kraut goods then only two things were necessary—to be up front pronto after the fire-fights and to have transport. But I still haven’t come to the crunch of Mr Stanley Coote’s indiscreet confidences. Do you know who the Colonel’s “liberating” son turns out to be? Did you get the clue from the Colonel’s portrait?’
Balfour said, ‘No. An interesting face but it didn’t remind me of anyone.’
‘No resemblance to a noted man about town, a celebrated collector of all things beautiful? A rather opulent figure who drives a white Lamborghini Miura and has a Baglietto motor yacht at Cannes?’
Balfour shook his head with a wry expression: ‘This just shows we move in two different worlds.’
Erskine was reluctant to stop the game. He tried another clue as though convinced that Balfour and Spiegl could guess if they would only make more effort. ‘Flashes a fabulous Patek Phillippe watch.’ The wine he had drunk gave him some trouble with ‘fabulous Patek’ and he paused as though he was saying it over again in his mind. ‘No? Pity. More of a punch line if you knew him. Ah well—in 1945 the Colonel’s son was a comparatively humble Captain L. K. Green of His Majesty’s Army. Today none other than Mr Leonard K. G. Cato, captain of industry and financier extraordinary. It seems that after the bust-up he took his mother’s name…’
The denouement had a riveting effect on Balfour but hardly less on Spiegl—through the long anecdote and questions he had barely been able to contain his impatience. At one point he had deftly tweezered a long black hair from his right nostril as if unaware of what he was doing and then sneezed explosively. Now he banged Erskine’s arm to show that enough had been said. ‘What a pay off! The joker in the pack,’ he said excitedly. ‘A phoney. Through and through.’ He nudged Balfour: ‘Didn’t I tell you? Too big a man to see me, eh!’ He whistled significantly in a way which augured ill for Cato’s future reputation.
Erskine raised his eyebrows and asked Balfour: ‘So you do know Cato then?’
‘Only by name. Never seen him as far as I know. Certainly never had any dealings with him. But by an odd coincidence Leo was telling me only the other day that he’d tried without success to see Mr Cato at his impressive set-up in the City.’
Balfour felt incompetent to deal with this latest bit of information. Apart from the slightly numbing effect of the wine, it did not seem to fit into the puzzle. Finding that ‘Knowl Green’ did mean something had led him to believe that he might discover the other names on the list and their significance for Weiss, but Cato’s ‘crime’ of war-time looting seemed to be a dead-end. While Sam would have been interested to see the things that had come from Nazi Germany, it was very unlikely that he would have felt concerned about it—not while he still had deformed fingers and nails to remind him that he had once been strung up in chains for six hours at the whim of SS Oberführer Lorritz.
Spiegl nodded sagely, as if some inward discussion had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, then chuckled. ‘I had this queer dream about Mr Leonard Cato. Mixed up with that damn big clock they made me sit under. Cato—it was very queer ’cos I knew him but I’d never seen him—came to me on his knees and pleaded for forgiveness. On his knees yet.’ His bright pink tongue flickered out to touch his full lips and his eyes looked like shiny black stones. ‘And there’s the funny part. It could come true.’
The three men made their way slowly down the dark stairs. The joker in the hall had stopped fiddling with the gramophone and had set the cabinet reed organ in motion. Hesitantly, with long pauses during which it seemed to fail and recover, it played a faint rendering of ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ It was an appropriate farewell performance on these old premises which would soon be demolished. The plaintive, wavering tune captured th
eir attention for a moment and they stood in silence. Balfour looked at the other two and wondered if they were experiencing the same sensation of the impermanence of all things human.
The door to the large room opened and the deeply flushed face of Mr Stanley Coote appeared. He gestured disapprovingly at the Binetto organ: ‘That must be the last number I’m afraid. By request. A very valuable piece that, and the sale will be starting soon anyway.’ He opened the door wider to show the chairs set out round the green-covered table. ‘You see. We’ve made it look just like Sotheby’s for you, gentlemen.’ They ignored him and went on towards the continuing sounds of celebration coming from the kitchen.
Spiegl put his hand on Balfour’s arm. ‘See that small door? Steep steps down to the cellars. Now that’s where I saw Mr Weiss. Dashed down and up again in a few minutes. There were stacks of wine bottles and a few oddments, but mostly rubbish in wooden crates. Yes, Mr Weiss was definitely down there. Just let me think. With some dealers. Old nut-case Henry Parfitt was one of them.’
‘Our ’enry ’ere on 18th July?’ Erskine queried in a poor attempt at cockney. ‘Well I didn’t see him. Boy! I bet his heart was broken when the sale was called off. But you see he’s too wide to appear today. Got a tip-off I suppose. Crafty old sod. You know, I think I can truly say I’ve had a fair amount of experience in the funny old book world but ’enry Parfitt H’esquire is the only real bibliomaniac I’ve ever met. Just can’t imagine him doing anything besides gloat over books. Yet he must sleep and eat and drink I guess. Speaking of drink…’
Chapter XVI
BOOKS BOUGHT. A newly painted sign twelve inches high dominated Henry Parfitt’s bookshop in Market Row off the Clerkenwell Road. At the edge of a long decaying area the Row had once again become a busy thoroughfare and several of the shops had been, as Parfitt ruefully put it, ‘tarted up’. But his own premises still looked as if they had not been touched since they had suffered the effects of shock from a nearby flying bomb in 1944. It was rumoured that he had refused free repairs from the bomb damage people because he feared that the whole ramshackle premises, groaning under tons of books, might come tumbling down. The peeling black paint of his façade and the window full of dusty calf-bound volumes contrasted sharply with the Ionian white and gold of his neighbour’s china shop, but the sign BOOKS BOUGHT was touched up regularly. The buying of books as opposed to selling was the important part of business as far as Parfitt was concerned. He had told Balfour that he lived in hopes of ‘some old lady from the Shires spotting that sign. She’ll come toddling in one day, you’ll see. Just been left this whacking great library of folios but knows nothing about ’em. So she’ll need ’elp.’
When Balfour reached Market Row from Clapham it was nearly five o’clock. The light rain of the early afternoon had given place to a cold downpour and the sky was so dark it was hard to believe it was August and that in Calvi Bunty would still be broiling under a harsh sun. It was the kind of day when there appears to be a definite demonstration of how frail and brief summer’s hold is in England.
Balfour approached the shop aware that a cocoon of self-consciousness was already forming about him. He had little in common with Parfitt and always felt completely artificial in his presence, projecting the false persona of someone anxious to learn from the noted cockney scholar/ bookseller. Parfitt knew a fantastic amount about books and could have been quite interesting, but insisted always in putting his patter over in a series of rhetorical questions, interspersed with a good deal of complaining about how difficult it was to find worthwhile books.
When the door was opened Balfour stood still, faintly amused by the thought that he was under surveillance from the back room—if a suspicious character entered the shop Parfitt would scuttle across the floor at alarming speed to protect his stock. Balfour peered at the undusted shelves which went right up to the ceiling. The top ones contained out-of-date Whitaker’s Almanacks, children’s encyclopedias, histories of the 1914–18 War and other large tomes which were not touched from one year to another. Parfitt earned enough to live by selling novels to librarians and hiring out bindings to theatres and film studios—he hived off any valuable books into the rabbit warren of odd-shaped rooms above, where he lived with his ancient mother in miserly surroundings.
Parfitt made a ghost-like, silent appearance in the archway which led to his cluttered back room. He was thin and had a chalk-white face, long black hair, dark brown eyes and lashes which looked as if they had been made up or touched with coal dust. Dark patches under his eyes accentuated his resemblance to the silent film comedian Larry Semon.
‘Just been along to Cedars Road.’ Balfour often bought autograph letters from Parfitt but always felt compelled to give a reason for calling at the shop. ‘I heard you were there last month. Thought I’d let you know you didn’t miss anything by not turning out again. You were very wise not to bother. All the books and manuscripts were withdrawn.’
Parfitt grinned knowingly to show that this outcome had been foreseen, and patted himself all over until he doggedly discovered a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and began to smoke in a way which made it look like an experimental process—holding it in stiff fingers at arm’s length between puffs. He brooded with satisfaction on Balfour’s admission of defeat and then began to speak in a slow, self-important voice which had led to Spiegl referring to him as ‘’is bumship the Mayor’. He dealt, as always, arbitrarily with the letter ‘h’: ‘Yes, but you’d agree, wouldn’t you, that h’it’s only part of the general shortage of good stuff. H’it’s just bloody typical of the trend today.’ When he was not asking rhetorical questions Parfitt’s statements were masked by a dubitative tone, but he was as quick on his mental feet as he was in covering possible shop-lifters. His dark eyes flickered over Balfour’s face and he said ‘Great pity about Mr Weiss. H’it shook me h’I can tell you. Terrible. H’awful. Tragic…’
He stopped heaping on adjectives and shot Balfour a shrewd, judging look to see if he had been sympathetic enough and could get back, with relief, to the only subject that really interested him. Balfour was reminded of a sentence which Max Weber was fond of quoting: ‘Life has no moral, and the moral of art is that life is worthwhile without one’; life without a moral or any eternal significance was worthwhile for Balfour but art alone could not make it so, and he was out of sympathy with that view. Pictorial art was all-important for Max, Henry Parfitt was obsessed with books—while he might occasionally envy their great enthusiasms, Balfour found such single-mindedness bearable only in small doses.
‘Did you talk to Sam at the sale?’ Balfour asked. ‘I was wondering what it was that interested him there.’
‘Didn’t have a chance really. You know, h’I’m sure, that the catalogue was well and truly a compendium of h’errors. That Mr Coote, ’e didn’t know a book from ’is h’elbow. No, I saw Mr Weiss only for a moment, down in the cellar; ’e was rooting around there most of the time I think but I was very busy elsewhere. H’and all to no avail. What a farce h’it was…’
Some sound unheard by Balfour had attracted Parfitt’s attention and he broke off to move to the book-stacked stairs which led to ill-lit rooms above: ‘not yet, mother,’ he shouted. There was a muttered reply and he said, ‘H’I can’t come now, mother. Not for ten minutes at least,’ in a tart tone that made plain his irritation.
‘Mother,’ he said in explanation to Balfour. ‘Percy was with me,’ he added vaguely. ‘H’if you can spare a minute pop down and ’ave a word with ’im. H’it might be worthwhile. ’E stayed down with Mr Weiss in the cellar at Cedars Road while I was ’untin’ out the h’incunabula.’
‘Well, I think I will,’ Balfour said, moving to the well of the iron corkscrew staircase which led down to the basement where Parfitt’s old assistant Percy Dixon usually worked. ‘Is he down there? There’s no light.’
‘Ho yes, ’e’s there all right. Having a little nap you know. ’E does when ’e
’s finished the parcels, and dustin’ and sortin’. Well why not?’
Balfour waited at the top of the tortuous staircase until Parfitt rather reluctantly switched on the light in the basement. It was a narrow, cramping method of descent and one had to duck hastily at the bottom as the last step brought one immediately to a low doorway.
Percy Dixon was revealed asleep with mouth agape in a deck-chair between piles of books. He wore a black suit jacket with mole-coloured broad-waled corduroy trousers. A bowler hat was on a hook with his raincoat and grey apron. On the floor by his chair there was an emptied mug of tea and a tiny crumpled paper bag. A crumb of biscuit trembled on his Bruce Bairnsfather moustache. Balfour liked Percy Dixon and knew something of his life—that the highpoint of it appeared to be his time in the army in 1914–17, that he now lived with a sister in Islington, that his lunch always consisted of two sandwiches, one of Marmite and one of marmalade—and had once witnessed the old man’s difficult yet shameless tears over the death of his dog. Percy’s temperament was keyed low—it was as if he had been trounced by life and no longer had any expectations.
Balfour waited silently, glancing at the top volume of a tottering pile of bound numbers of The Boy’s Own Paper, not wishing to waken the old man. A loudly ticking kitchen alarm clock accentuated the passing of time and the lonely tedious hours Percy spent there. Suddenly he gave an incensed grunt as if a dream had ended unsatisfactorily, cautiously opened a blood-shot eye, and vigorously smoothed his quiff of iron-grey hair.
‘Hullo Mr Balfour. Nice to see you. Quite a stranger…’ He paused and shot a suspicious glance in the direction of the staircase. ‘Has that old toe-rag been going on about me again? He was blowing me up about the ablutaries. I arst you, what can I do. All the brick-work’s sodden and crumbling there. And dirt! It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta. Going on at me just because some posh American librarian was taken short here yesterday.’