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.
On the small table in front of the sofa was a piece of paper that hadn’t been there last night.
It was a pen-and-ink sketch. A man, recognisably Troy, although far too Adonis-like in the body, was having intercourse with a woman, recognisably Venetia, although the body far too buxom, bent into the dog position, in front of the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. A policeman’s helmet lay discarded in the foreground. One of Troy’s hands rested on the curve of Venetia’s hip, the other held a truncheon upright, as if saluting, priapic, as if symbolising the hidden penis. And in the bottom right-hand corner … “Morituri te salutant.” Those about to die salute you. Petronius, Suetonius? Troy couldn’t remember. On the back Burgess had scribbled a note:
I think we agree. War was made for fucking. And, the complications of your life set aside for the moment, if I were you, if I could ever imagine the attraction of a woman, I think I’d fuck Venetia Maye-Brown under floodlights in the middle of a hundred-bomber raid. That’d show ‘em.
Yrs Ever,
Guy.
Show who? Troy wondered for a fraction of a second. But the answer all but preceded the question. Show them. Not the Germans. Not the ARP … them, the ubiquitous them that were not us. The real and imagined oppressors of Guy Burgess in the world Burgess had made for himself. What was troubling, but he’d hardly lose sleep over it, was that Burgess lumped Troy and himself together in this defiant, unarticulated us.
There was a knock at the door. Troy quickly stuffed Burgess’s sketch in his pocket. Opened the door to find Superintendent Onions on the step. He’d said he’d call. It had completely slipped Troy’s battered and Burgess-burdened mind.
“Tell me,” Troy said.
“Stick the kettle on,” Onions said.
Half an hour later Troy was no nearer a solution to the case that had led him from one dead rabbi to another to being walled up in the synagogue with Zette, but he had clearly, if silently, been told to file his report and drop it.
In an abrupt change of subject, on his feet ready to leave, Onions said, “London’s gone sex mad. The Commissioner’s getting reports from beat bobbies of people shagging in Hyde Park in broad daylight. Would you believe it?”
Troy would.
He’d done it himself.
Onions left the door open, light from the Indian summer sunshine reflecting off the far wall and into the otherwise gloomy sitting room.
Troy pulled out the sketch. It struck him as unbelievable cheek. It struck him as absurdly funny. Then a shadow took the light. A figure in the doorway again. What had Stan forgotten? But it wasn’t Stan. It was his mother. Quickly he screwed up the sketch and lobbed it deftly across the room into the wastepaper basket. If his mother ever saw it his life wouldn’t be worth living.