I walked back, a little crooked, a little drunk, to the house on Girard. I sat down on the porch for once—in the shade with four chairs, savoring my buzz and the falling evening. It was quiet. Really quiet.
Inside, tied up in the hall, where apparently he’d been all this time, lay Bjorn, my roommate. I looked at him: he shook his head. He didn’t make a sound.
I can’t say I minded seeing him trussed in yellow rope. Someone had done it expertly, efficiently—none of this eight-times-around-the-ankle shit you see on TV.
‘Hey, Bjorn, what’s going on, man?’ I said.
His red lip quivered, a warning. He pointed his head at the dining room.
One thing they say about the dead: they all belong. Ashes to ashes. I went in to face the music.
At the table sat my three roommates, quiet too, cuffed together, like three people at a séance, saying strange prayers. Over them stood Johnny Bronco—in a black suit today—casually turning something, which at first I took to be an oversized flashy corkscrew (the bridesmaids had had one with them) but then I recognized as a silver silencer on the tip of a large gray gun.
So this was how it would be. When the killing was all over, they’d say about me: And he was planning to move out that week. He’d even forwarded his mail.
‘Hello, Ice Cream,’ Johnny Bronco said.
‘Hello, Mr Bronco,’ I announced. ‘Curtisall suggested you might come by.’
Johnny Bronco said, ‘We expected you back a couple hours ago.’
‘I went out and had a few beers.’
‘I understand,’ Johnny Bronco said. ‘Say, I met your roommates. They’ve been sitting here waiting with me. And haven’t shit themselves, not a one of them. Commendable.’
My roommates glared. Rik had a gash, bleeding over one eye; Erik, a bloody nose. Henry was unmarked.
I shrugged. ‘How come Bjorn has to lie in the hallway all by himself?’
‘There aren’t enough chairs.’
‘Right.’ And then the courage that burned upon me was like the glory of an afternoon wind. I was twenty-two and ready for anything.
‘So, Mr Bronco, you come to shoot me? Because if so, let’s get it over with. Minneapolis-style.’
The eyes of my three roommates went left-right-left over the dinner table.
Johnny Bronco’s face lit up. ‘Shoot my best Ice Cream?’ He pointed the gun for the first time. At me. It was shiny and ancient at the same time. ‘Kid, there’s something you got to get straight. I wasn’t choking.’
‘It was my first week,’ I said. ‘I was overzealous.’
‘First you’re supposed to use,’ he said, and dropped his aim, stirring the air with the silencer until the right words bubbled up. ‘Back slaps. Back slaps first.’
‘They teach it different ways.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Johnny Bronco said. ‘Back slaps is what you’re supposed to use. If you’re following the directions.’
‘Next time,’ I said. ‘Let’s hope it’s never you.’
‘Let’s fucking hope,’ Johnny Bronco said. Then he put away the long, outlandish gun in the pocket of the black suit, which hid it perfectly, silencer and all.
I knew that talking with men for the rest of my life was going to be like this, like taking that first drink with my father. You had to throw it down fast and pretend you liked it, no matter how it tasted. You had to be ready to hurt each other, to be hurt. If you handed off money, do it with a slap. If you smashed one glass, smash the others.
‘I’m sorry, Johnny Bronco,’ I said. And I was. Not that I had saved his life, or embarrassed him. But I’d come in understanding nothing. Four years of college hadn’t taught me a goddamn thing.
‘Ice Cream, forget about it,’ he said.
He considered my roommates, and for a moment he eyed Henry, who was still unmarked.
‘You little pricks. This kid pay rent to you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Rik. ‘Two hundred a month. It’s due Friday.’
‘Was I talking to you? I’m talking to pretty boy here, with the white collar.’
Henry nodded.
‘Well, maybe I might look old, but I get to the point,’ said Johnny Bronco. ‘You baby fucks, you wet green little baby fucks without a spot on you, you can pay his rent. Work it out between you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Henry said.
In the kitchen, the telephone awakened, ringing ring after ring. But I didn’t care who it was, or if it was even for me.
Johnny Bronco turned to me. ‘Ice Cream. You want to get out of this place?’
I said, ‘It depends on what you mean.’
The Last Locked Room
Simon Brett
When I was growing up, I was very close to my grandfather. His name was Dietrich Gartner. I knew he was famous, but I didn’t at first know what he was famous for. It was much later I discovered that he had achieved fame in two distinct areas.
The time I am talking about was 1939. My name was then, as it is now, Barnaby Smithson, known later, in my professional career, as Barney. My father, Alec, was in the Navy, always away in other parts of the world on increasingly secret missions. My mother, having never really bought into the notion that charity began at home, was out of the house more and more, manically busy with charitable works. So I spent a greater amount of time in my grandfather’s company than many boys of seven would have done.
Dietrich Gartner, though more fluent in the language than many Englishmen, still had a marked German accent. His daughter had shed hers very quickly after marriage, just as she had adjusted her given name Rosa to a more conformable Rosemary. She now lived in England and consciously suppressed any nostalgia she might have had for her German background. In the same way, she denied that the family was Jewish, an attitude that pained her father, who was proud of his origins. But no, once the family had moved to Brighton, Rosemary Smithson wanted every new person she met to think of her as an ordinary, respectable married Englishwoman. Which was why she called her son Barnaby.
And why she gave Barnaby a very detailed list of things he should never say. He, too, should never admit that his mother’s family was Jewish. Had he known that he had been conceived in Hamburg, where his father was on another secret mission, and before his parents were actually married, he would have been forbidden to say that too. Above all, he should never say that his mother was German. Given the prevailing mood of the British people, Rosemary Smithson did not wish to give any ammunition to potential bullies at the boys’ prep school where her son, Barnaby, was being processed into an English gentleman.
Unaware of the implications of any of my mother’s proscriptions, I was happy to go along with them. In the cause of domestic harmony, I knew better than to argue with her. She was a woman of violent moods, particularly as my father began to be absent for increasingly long periods. I was never allowed to ask what my father actually did, but I knew it was something clandestine, and probably dangerous. That knowledge built up in me a fascination with secrecy and duplicity, a fascination which spending so much time with my grandfather did nothing to discourage.
Of one part of Dietrich Gartner’s fame I did have an inkling because of the rows of books with his name on the spine, which had pride of place in the sitting room of his mansion flat in Hove. At least, when I say his name, I am not being strictly accurate. The name on the books was Richard Treeting. And I still remember the excitement when my grandfather introduced me to my first anagram. ‘Richard Treeting,’ he explained to me, was made up from the letters of ‘Dietrich Gartner.’
I loved the beauty, the simplicity, the pure logic of the construction. It set me on a path of God knows how many hours wasted poring over the grids of crosswords. And led to endless frustration in boring school lessons as I tried to produce a meaningful anagram of my own name, Barnaby Smithson. Compared to the elegance of ‘Dietrich Gartner’
becoming ‘Richard Treeting,’ I knew that ‘Toby N. Brissanham’ didn’t really cut the mustard. I felt a level of resentment towards my parents for not having provided me with a more versatile name.
It was some years after my grandfather’s death that I found out how apposite his using a pseudonym was. The books he wrote under the name of Richard Treeting were crime novels, specifically in a subgenre very popular in the 1930s. They were ‘Locked Room Mysteries,’ in which murder victims were found in locations to which the perpetrator had no evident means of entrance or exit.
My grandfather did not push me to read his own books. He reckoned, quite rightly, that they were too grown-up for a seven-year-old. He did, however, encourage me towards Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, for which I developed an early and enduring addiction.
He also talked to me about how he wrote his books. ‘It is all logic, Barnaby,’ he said. ‘As with Sherlock Holmes, it is all based on logic. Every impossible puzzle eventually will yield to logic. It is only when there is no logic that everything else is lost.’
In my early teens, needless to say, I lapped up every available Richard Treeting novel, intrigued by the puzzles, trying to understand their logic, but also feeling that the books provided a link to my much-missed grandfather. And I felt proud of his reputation as a master of the Locked Room genre.
It was quite a lot later that I found out the other area of life in which Dietrich Gartner had found fame.
One of the things I loved about my grandfather was that he spoke in quotations. I don’t mean that he quoted from other people, but that many of his own utterances were so perfectly observed and perfectly phrased that I remember them to this day. Maybe speaking in his second language—and indeed writing in his second language—made him particularly careful about the way he composed his sentences.
To take an example, I remember an incident from early on in that summer of 1939. I was a day boy at my prep school and frequently, when lessons ended, I would go to my grandfather’s flat rather than to our family home. He, I knew, would be there, while my mother’s presence, depending on her charity commitments, was less reliable. I had keys to both places, and would let myself in, unannounced, at either of them. At the mansion block in Hove, I would scamper eagerly up the flights of stairs to the third floor, ‘one from the top.’
My grandfather always acted surprised, as if he was not expecting me, but his ready supply of bitter milk-free tea and pastries betrayed the preparations he had made for my arrival. He always referred to these delicious confections as kuchen. He got them from a specialist shop in Hove, and he always bought enough to give some to Mrs Blaustein, the widow who lived in the flat below his. ‘Mrs Blaustein likes her kuchen.’
My grandfather’s sitting room was wallpapered in dark green. His heavy furniture, dressers, tall chairs and yards of bookshelves, were made of solid, sombre wood. Once there, I always felt as though I was in an impregnable cocoon of safety. In winter, we would snuggle up close to the open fire, blazing in its almost-black stone setting; in summer, we sat in front of the vase of fresh flowers always placed in the empty hearth. My grandfather had no char to keep his home clean and tidy. He did everything domestic himself. Apparently, he had cultivated this independence ever since his wife had died of breast cancer in her early forties. But that had been back in Hamburg, long before I was born. He never spoke of his wife, nor did my mother ever mention her mother. For her it would have been a reference to the past she wanted to expunge from the records. I don’t know the reason for my grandfather’s reticence on the subject.
After my post-school hunger had been sated, we would then, according to the weather, play word games or go for a walk along the seafront. On our walks, when we reached the promenade, we always turned left, towards Brighton. Sometimes, once we got to the West Pier, we would part, I on towards the Palace Pier and the home I shared with my mother, he back to his flat. When, occasionally, I turned and watched his frail figure making its way through the crowds, I was aware of his age. While he was talking, Dietrich Gartner and I were contemporaries. When I could not hear his voice, he was an old man.
Those walks were precious times for me. My grandfather made no concession to my age; he talked to me like an adult. And his conversation ranged widely over literature, history, and science. But he never spoke about contemporary politics or the way the international situation was developing. It was not that he did not have an interest in such matters; he just did not talk about them to me.
On our walks, there were sometimes treats. In spite of being filled up with his delicious kuchen, I could never resist the offer of a stick of rock, which I would suck avidly, constantly intrigued by how the manufacturers made the word ‘Brighton’ stay in place all through its length. My grandfather gave me many explanations for this phenomenon, but since most of them involved forest-dwelling trolls, I knew he was teasing me.
That particular afternoon, probably June 1939, as we walked along the prom, we passed a man selling brightly coloured balloons, which he filled with gas from a tank behind his stall. There was an infinitely exciting hiss as each rubber neck was attached and removed. I did not ask, but my grandfather could read the envious look I cast towards the precious objects, and he bought me one. A yellow balloon, I remember, yellow like the sun.
‘Do not let it go, Barnaby,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should tie a loop in the string, then we put it around your wrist, so it will not fly away…?’
‘No,’ I said. I think my resistance was based on the fact that small children often had reins fixed around their wrists to stop them from straying. And I thought myself far too grown-up to need any such encumbrance. ‘I will hold on to it tightly.’
But of course, I didn’t. Within minutes, distracted by a small dog growling at its owner, I had loosened my grip, and could only watch as my yellow balloon lifted vertically until, caught in a cross-wind, it made steady, almost stately, progress out to sea.
I turned to my grandfather in dismay. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there go our hopes. They are as vulnerable as that balloon. We have just seen the last glimpse we will have of freedom for many years.’
That’s what I meant when I said he talked in quotations.
It was not long after that moment on Brighton seafront that my grandfather died. I later found out that the time of death was probably in the small hours. But in those days before mobile phones or excessive consideration of the feelings of the young, no message was sent to my school and it was the end of the day before I knew that something was wrong.
I went, as I so often did, straight to the flat in Hove, in greedy anticipation of black tea and kuchen. As I entered the main doors of the block—no security locks to negotiate back in those days—I felt, as always, into my grey flannel shorts pocket for my grandfather’s key.
But when I arrived on the third-floor landing, ‘one from the top,’ I found the closed door blocked by a stout uniformed policeman.
‘Can’t go in, sonny, I’m afraid,’ he said.
‘But I’m going to see my grandfather. That’s where he lives.’
‘Sorry. You can’t go in.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Don’t you worry about what’s happened, sonny. You go home to your mum.’
I tried further persuasion, but the policeman remained unmoving, both in bulk and argument. So, I followed his instructions and went home, where I found my mother in deep hysterics being looked after by one of her neighbours, whose expression suggested that she had had one too many such calls for emotional support.
I got little information about the circumstances of Dietrich Gartner’s death. Though in a state of deep shock, I sat dry-eyed through his funeral, and hardly heard the reassuring words spoken to me at the post-service reception in the Old Ship Hotel. One word that none of those hushed voices used was ‘murder.’
Surprisingly, I got more information from school. There w
as a boy in the class above me called Larkin (nobody possessed a first name at boys’ prep schools in those days). He had a habit of singling me out from the rest of my classmates. The way Larkin behaved towards me could not have been described as ‘bullying.’ ‘Taunting’ was nearer the mark. He saw me as someone at whose expense he could get cheap laughs. Some of these, though I did not understand the references at the time, were based on what he had somehow intuited was my Jewish heritage.
Larkin was not a boy to get on the wrong side of. For a start, as boys of ten can, he had suddenly had a growth spurt, and stood a head taller than the rest of his class. Even more impressive was the fact that his father worked for the Brighton Borough Police as a Detective Inspector. To me, fed on Sherlock Holmes stories and my grandfather’s conversation, that had to be the most glamorous profession in the world.
It was a few days after the funeral. Most of the boys in my class were playing an improvised game of cricket, using a tennis ball and a dog-eared school hymn book as a bat. I would have been with them, had I not been cornered behind the library by Larkin.
‘So, Smithson…’ He always started like that, elongating the vowels of my surname so that it sounded like something vaguely unpleasant. ‘It’s not everyone who can say his grandfather was murdered, is it?’
‘Are you saying that mine was?’ I asked uncertainly.
‘Oh, yes,’ he replied with great certainty. ‘My old man dropped a few hints about it.’ When Larkin had started at the school, he had referred to his father as ‘Dad,’ but he quickly learned to change that. A father who was a Detective Inspector, though impressive to my eyes, did not match up socially to most of the school’s line-up of parents.
‘Of course, he can’t really talk about his work at home—for professional reasons,’ Larkin went on rather pompously, ‘but occasionally he lets things slip.’
Ten Year Stretch Page 3