by George Sims
Balfour had once had to use the dark, evil-smelling ‘ablutaries’ and sympathized about the daunting nature of keeping them clean. ‘No, Percy. He’s forgotten that by now. And he knows you do your work properly. I only wanted to inquire if you enjoyed your little outing to Clapham. The mystery sale that was postponed.’
Percy muttered something defensively as if he could not quite accept the rapid change of topic, but after a moment his eyes twinkled. ‘Oh yes. Coo we had a right time there. What a caper! Nobody knew what was what. And the porters had opened some bottles of the old vin blank. Everyone scurrying about in a right tizz-was. Me-self, I stayed in the cellar and polished off most of a bottle.’ Some obtrusive thought had plainly occurred to him—he tugged at a large wax-like ear and moved uneasily in his chair. ‘That was a real tragedy about your friend, poor little Mr Weiss. A really nice bloke. One of the old school.’
‘I was going to ask you about him. I wondered if he was on to something good in the cellar. Mr Parfitt and Leo Spiegl both said they had seen him busy down there. Did you spot anything unusual?’
‘No…Not specially…Not that I noticed.’ Percy did not look at Balfour so that his heavy dull face seemed somehow eyeless. There were gaps of strange silence and Balfour had the distinct impression that there was something Percy was reluctant to mention but was encountering in thinking about the sale. He pressed on with his questions, ruthless about the old man’s feelings in his keenness to make a discovery. ‘You did see something, didn’t you? I should be very grateful, Percy, if you’d tell me. Believe me, it’s not just idle curiosity. Mr Weiss was a very good friend of mine and I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing while I was away—anything which might have led up to…’
Percy sat perfectly still, leaning slightly forward in the deck-chair, his face expressionless so that Balfour wondered if he might not have taken in the rapid sentences or if he was suffering from aphasia. There was a long awkward silence then Percy sniffed, said quietly, ‘Trouble is,’ and then, ‘Has you-know-who said anything about you-know-what?’ He indicated the stairs with a stiff inclination of his head.
‘Nothing. He was too busy looking at the incunabula.’
‘Good. I’m not really surprised because he doesn’t take in much about other people, but he did pop down just—at a crucial moment and told me to gee-up, so I wondered…I can tell you I’ve been very puzzled about this, Mr Balfour. And I wouldn’t mention it to anybody else…There was a big portfolio of drawings laid out on a table in the cellar, you see. And Mr Weiss and another man I didn’t know got very excited about some of those drawings. They were gabbling away about them in German so of course I couldn’t understand, but their expressions were enough. Then—this is the real mystery. There were quite a few wooden crates full of odds and ends you see—all the personal stuff which was not included in the sale. The porters said the old girl, the housekeeper, a hard piece apparently, had sorted out anything that had no commercial value and it was all going to be taken away by the dustmen. Well, Mr Weiss and this other chap started looking through these boxes. Fair enough that, I suppose. But—I saw Mr Weiss pocket some of the papers. Shook me that did.’
‘You mean Mr Weiss stole something? You’re sure, because it would really be stealing if he took something from the house, worthless or not. That doesn’t sound like him.’
Percy winced slightly at Balfour’s sharp tone in response to the confidence, then said, ‘Do me a favour. ’Course I’m sure,’ in a peevish voice that implied he was tired of attacks on his failing powers. ‘I was just sitting in a corner with this bottle so I suppose they thought I had passed out or wouldn’t notice. But I saw Mr Weiss take a photograph. And some letters or papers.’ His false teeth clicked lightly over labials and he moved them into position with his tongue before he said vehemently: ‘On a stack of bibles! He slipped them into his pocket when he thought no one was looking. I couldn’t understand it then no more than you can believe it now.’
***
Sam Weiss’s house, No. 1 Paley Street, was crowded in at the end where it joined Cheyne Walk. A very narrow house, unlike its neighbours, it looked as if it had been added as an afterthought or had survived from an earlier row. Balfour walked boldly up to the front door and opened it with a key which had been in his possession since the previous year when Sammy had spent a long holiday in Israel.
Despite his bold approach Balfour was experiencing an unpleasant mixture of apprehension and guilt which became much worse once the door closed behind him. His right to enter the house was very doubtful even though he was the sole executor, but apart from the surreptitious entry of premises locked up by the police the atmosphere in the hall was strange and faintly repugnant to him. The white vinyl walls glistened with damp—being so near to the river the house required a daily airing—and there was an unpleasant stale odour, but it was the silence that was eerie and disconcerting. He stood quite still, straining to hear any voices that might come from the upper floors—he had the illogical conviction that at any moment the silence could be broken by Sammy playing something by Schumann on his cherished Bechstein, putting on a Duparc record, or appearing at the head of the stairs humming ‘Mondnacht.’
Balfour’s instinct was to turn on his heel and leave the house, but his always strong sense of curiosity had been fed by the odd Cedars Road set-up and the revelation that Sammy had taken some papers from the cellar. It seemed certain that the names on the list Garratt had remembered did link up somehow, but their connection with Knollys Green tended to demolish his previous theory about a smuggling ring. He could not believe it was possible that Leonard Cato’s looting incident in 1945 led on to the Victor Maddox gang in 1966, but he still wanted to see if he could find the papers stolen from Cedars Road. He knew the Paley Street house as well as his own flat and he could make a much more effective search than any policeman.
Balfour glanced quickly round the kitchen, sitting-room and the small dining alcove. There was a pile of unopened newspapers and a bottle of Eggnog on the kitchen table, otherwise everything seemed to be in its usual place.
It was on the second floor that Sammy had spent most of his time. The largest room in the house was practically bare of furniture but it contained a few prized paintings, the Bechstein, an elaborate hi-fi apparatus, and a very large collection of records in specially made cupboards. Balfour entered it just for a brief look round with a strong feeling that he was intruding, then went into the smaller book-lined room which looked out on to Paley Street. Apart from housing most of Sammy’s books, there were niches for a Renaissance green marble torso and a rare twelfth-century Khmer Buddha. From the window Balfour had a narrow, oblique view of the rain-drenched gardens which shielded Cheyne Walk from the incessant traffic along the Embankment, and the top half of the Carlyle statue.
All the papers in Sammy’s desk had been taken from the drawers and now stood in neat piles together with cheque stubs done up in bundles, old bills and letters. A few pages torn from an exercise book were held in place by a piece of incense-stained marble, glowing like tortoiseshell. They were notes Sammy had made about Dachau, beginning: ‘Some notable men in Dachau while I was there: General Werkmann, formerly secretary to Emperor Charles; Prince Ernest and Prince Max of Hohenberg (sons of Archduke Francis Ferdinand); the former consul-general Kleinwachter…’ Sammy had often talked of writing something about his experiences in Dachau, so Balfour was not surprised to come across these rather disjointed jottings which jumped from names of the Schutz-Staffe guards such as Lorritz, Kogl and Wagner to ‘some men wore armlets inscribed Blod (idiots)’, but he was puzzled to find a page in another hand headed: ‘Buchenwald. Near Weimar is Ettersberg where there once was a beautiful beech-wood—Buchenwald. Inscribed on the gate at the camp: “My country, right or wrong”…’ At the top of this page Sammy had scrawled in red ink: ‘Buchenwald. Check with Hermann Roth. April 1945.’ Balfour had never heard of Roth but he did know that Sam
my had not been in Buchenwald and thought it odd that he should be querying something that had happened there twenty years ago. He was struck once again by the difficulty of making sense of a dead man’s private affairs and papers. If he could not do it, what chance did Superintendent Hanson have?
There were two photographs on the desk. One was a silver-framed snapshot of the Weiss family taken in Vienna in 1913. It showed Sammy as a small child held up in his father’s arms in a shadowy square in front of a church; it was inscribed in red ink on the back ‘Franziskanerplatz’. Of the seven people shown there, three had left Austria before 1939 but Sammy’s other two sisters and both his parents had stayed behind to find death in Auschwitz, the extermination camp. Small wonder that Sammy’s bitterness about the Nazis had not abated at all with the passage of years, and that he was still liable to demolish arguments about their culpability by quoting the words ‘Reines Juden Fett’ that had actually been engraved on bars of soap. He did not bother to mention that he had once been thrown in a latrine at Dachau, and suspended from a chain so that his feet did not touch the ground. ‘Pure Jewish lard’ was enough.
The other photograph had been torn from a magazine. It showed a line of Jewish children led by a boy of about eight in clothes that were too big for him. They were being shepherded along against a background of barbed wire by Black Guards armed with sub-machine guns. The faces of the children seemed to be mainly eyes. Great dark eyes with haunting expressions. This was what it was all about. The photograph by itself refuted Olivia Phelips’ theory that war could never be justified.
Balfour slowly ascended the stairs to the third floor. He was continuing the search mechanically but it seemed as pointless as his feelings of guilt about the Jewish children. Weird and irrelevant ideas flooded his mind then left him in a depressed and tired mood. He stood by the window in the main bedroom which was covered by white Venetian blinds, looking at the dismal streets and car lights on Battersea Bridge, hardly aware of where he was. He fingered the blinds as if they were bars on a cell window: they had been fitted to shield Sam from the vertiginous view. He regarded the far prospect of the grey river, then glanced quickly down to the greasy pavement to induce the feeling of falling. Oscar Wilde had written, ‘It is what we fear that happens to us.’ If Sammy had indeed killed himself, how desperate he must have been to face death in an aspect that so terrified him.
Balfour picked up some old-fashioned jointed shoe-trees and reluctantly opened a wardrobe to put them away. He intensely disliked the idea that he would have to deal with all of Sammy’s personal belongings. On a small bedside table he saw there was a pile of books and some more notes on odd scraps of paper. Most of the jottings were trivial day-to-day memoranda, but it gave him a curious shock to come across his own name written on the back of an invitation to a Cork Street art gallery: ‘Ned. Part adult, part adolescent—who finds success “boring”, who has a charming wife and delightful children yet wants to throw all this away. Sad that it seems impossible to give advice, even to one’s best friend.’
Balfour sat still on the bed for some minutes in the semi-darkness pondering this verdict, then his eyes were taken again by the pile of books. From this angle he could see that a piece of paper projected from one of the books. It was a calf-bound first edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall that he had given to Sammy. When he opened it he found a small photograph and a piece of paper torn from a desk diary. He took them to the window as the light was so bad. The snapshot was of a group of men in battle-dress standing in front of an armoured car. At first he thought it was possible that Sammy might be one of the soldiers and peered closely at them all in turn. In June 1940 Sammy had seen a poster recruiting men for the Pioneers showing a foot treading on a swastika and the legend ‘Step on it’, and had joined up half an hour later when he was told that aliens were accepted. But as Balfour continued to study the photograph he saw that the soldiers wore Royal Armoured Corps berets, and one of the officers had a white webbing revolver holster of the kind issued to tank crews. He turned the photograph over and found a list of names including Captain L. K. Green, but it was another one which jumped out at him as if it had been printed in red capital letters: Sergeant Patrick J. Quarry. Excitedly he scanned the diary. There were a few elliptic notes in Sammy’s hand. ‘Monday, 18th July. After lunch to a sale at Clapham Common with Jake Steiner. Property of the late Colonel F. K. Green, D.S.O. Quite a lot of looted stuff from Germany(?). Mysterious find in the cellar—Mannheimer drawings. Papers lead me to believe that these were acquired –? but where—by the Colonel’s son who was a Captain in 1945. Duke’s Own Hussars. Found a letter to him from a man called P. J. Quarry who served with him. Quarry a rare name and probably easy to find—then I want to trace Captain Knollys Green of the Duke’s Own Hussars. Jake will check in Holland on the Mannheimer collection.’
Chapter XVII
Balfour woke from a tantalizing, vague dream to do with a locked door and glimpses of Ruth Connolly’s nacreous skin, in which time had been mixed up so that he was excessively young to cope with the sexual aplomb of Mrs Alec Connolly. So be it. If sexual frustration was to be his lot from now on he could expect to have quite a few dreams of this kind.
In a supernal deific state of mind the distant noises of the traffic below hardly impinged while he half-heartedly tried to reconstruct the dream to make some sense of Ruth Connolly’s appearance in a semi-maternal form, but he did hear a sharp rat-tat as the porter pushed his mail through the letter-box. Whatever fell on the mat made no noise at all. Sixth August, 1966: it seemed as though his forty-third birthday had aroused scant attention. When he went to the door he found three cards, all with seaside views. He made some coffee and then read the cards with mixed feelings of pleasure and self-irony.
There was one from his aunt in Torquay who had brought him up: she had never loved him but had always been just and usually kind. Now, looking back, he was inclined to view their relationship differently. Why should she have felt deep affection for her brother’s son, particularly as he had never been able to show much for her?
A prospect of the Citadel at Calvi and, on the other side, a scanty five-line message from Bunty confirming that, out of sight, he was practically out of mind. Somebody else must be continuing her lessons in water-skiing, skin-diving, and other pleasurable subjects. There had been plenty of replacements hanging around. Cosi sia.
It was by a happy stroke of timing that the birthday card from Prudence had arrived on the day it celebrated. It showed a view from Axel Munthe’s villa San Michele in Anacapri and Prudence inquired if he remembered the day when they had visited it together in 1963. Her card was nearly as brief as Bunty’s but something about it told him that the verdict might not be in, that possibly he might be able to patch things up. He decided to go round to Orme Square and see Barbara in the next day or so—he had the excuse of taking the presents he had bought in Corsica for Prudence and Toby.
When he got to his office he found the mail delivery there had been skimpy too—two sale catalogues, a statement from his bank and a handful of letters. Patricia Bowyer and Jane Lupton did not work on Saturdays, but there was a note on his desk from Patricia: ‘4.30 p.m. Friday. Superintendent Hanson phoned to say that the Inquest will be held at Westminster Coroner’s Court on Tuesday, August 9th, 10 a.m. He would like to see you there if possible, though it is very likely that after identification and the doctor has given cause of death the inquest will be adjourned.’
Balfour went through most of the letters quickly, but the printed heading of a bulky one on cream laid paper took his attention. There were two closely typed quarto pages headed ‘Jacob Steiner Old Paintings & Master-engravings’ with an address in P.C. Hooftstraat, Amsterdam.
4th August, 1966
Dear Mr Balfour,
I do not know if you have heard my name from Mr Samuel Weiss. I would not claim to be a close friend of his but he has been in the habit of visiting my sh
op over a period of years, occasionally taking coffee with us, and it was a great shock both for my wife Esther and myself to read the announcement of his death in The Times.
I have only recently returned here from a month’s buying trip. When I was in London Mr Weiss escorted me on a visit to some galleries in the St James area and pointed out your office in Jermyn Street. My reason for writing to you is that I am deeply concerned in case his death should be linked in any way with a mysterious occurrence that took place during my visit to England. I shall now relate the circumstances and inquire from you what action you think I should take.
On Monday, 18th July I attended an auction sale with Mr Weiss at Eagle House, Cedars Road, Clapham Common, London SW4. I have the catalogue of this sale issued by Messrs Haley & Coote Ltd before me as I write and will be glad to send it to you if you wish me to do so. Mr Weiss had been told that the house contained some interesting things and this proved to be the case. It was apparent to us that most of the valuable items had come out of Germany and (from certain small points such as coats of arms, dates and signatures in books, etc.) we shared the view that this material might well have been looted in 1944/45. But, and this is the vital point, in the cellar at Eagle House we came across some Mannheimer drawings—which very probably were looted by the Nazis!
Of course you may have heard of the famous collector Mannheimer, but I must give you all the information I have even if it proves to be superfluous. Fritz Mannheimer was an exceedingly astute and wealthy Jewish banker (born in Stuttgart in 1891); he left Germany because of the Nazis and joined the old-established firm of Mendelssohn & Co. in Amsterdam. He used his financial genius to fight the Nazis and was consequently marked down for their special attention. But apart from being a financial wizard he was a collector of fine art and crammed his mansion in Hobbemastraat with beautiful pictures and, later, at Vaucresson, near Paris, the Chateau Monte Cristo.