“We’ve touched nothing,” Jack said. “We waited for you.”
It was almost four o’clock when Troy arrived at the apartment on Chelsea Embankment. Jack had sent a car to meet him off the train at Paddington. A silent, almost rank-intimidated WPC had driven him across West London, through Hyde Park, and down to the river.
Touching nothing was a gesture of respect. Troy could not be certain whether it was respect for the dead (Rosen), or for the living (Troy). He could understand it, but it had also cost four hours. Kolankiewicz, too, had waited.
Standing in the hallway, just this side of the “magic” trompe l’oeil door, Kolankiewicz said, “You sure you want to do this?”
“Yes. I can be the formal identification, and then you can take the body away.”
Head shots were messy. Almost the first thing he’d had to get used to with gun killings was the sight of the inside of the human skull, of blood and bone, which were imaginable, and brains, which were not, plastered across the walls and furniture. Heart shots were wet. Few suicides pointed a gun at their heart. Few suicides would know its precise position.
Troy stared. Viktor had dressed for death. One of the immaculate suits he’d had tailored in America during the war. A neat knot in the dark blue tie, silver cuff links in his shirt; even the shoes were shined. He lay slumped in a high-backed wing chair, head down, torso upright as though the impact of the bullet had bounced him off the back of the chair and simultaneously knocked the gun from his hand. It lay on the carpet about eighteen inches from his right foot. A wartime Beretta. Every British Tommy who’d served in Italy had brought one home as a souvenir, or so it seemed. Every street corner spiv would sell you one, or so it seemed.
“Why the heart?”
Kolankiewicz said, “I have learnt over the years that it is the romantic’s way. Most of us desperate to die, most of us desperate pragmatists, blow our brains out. Romantics desperate to die still have their nature and their aesthetic to contend with. They aim for the heart.”
Troy knelt and looked up into Viktor’s face, pale and bloodless, eyes closed. To look for expression was meaningless—Troy thought those who pronounced the dead “peaceful” as idiotic as those who chipped “asleep” on tombstones—he did it all the same.
“Time of death?”
“Around midnight.”
Troy turned to Jack. “Anyone hear anything?”
“People above are holidaying in Cornwall. Chap below is very deaf.”
Troy stood up and looked around. Familiar objects rendered alien by the fact of death. The Bechstein piano, the score of Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto still open on the stand; a cello stood in the curve; the signed photographs of Toscanini and Furtwängler; the Picasso sketch of Casals, the walls lined with books in three or four different languages, the lithographs of eighteenth-century Vienna; the Matisse portrait he knew simply as “blue woman,” the Van Gogh of some waving cornfield near Arles.
Jack touched him on the arm. “Freddie, there’s something else you should see.”
Jack steered him gently to a door in the rear wall. Troy had never been beyond this point. It had always seemed a frontier of some sort. It led to a long corridor, with what Troy took to be bedrooms and bathrooms off—and he’d no idea how many of those there were.
“All this is new to me,” he said. “Viktor’s public rooms were very public, and his private very private. ”
“I think,” said Jack, opening the first door on the left, “that this has to be Viktor’s bedroom.”
Troy stood in the doorway, unbelieving.
“No, surely there are other rooms . . . ?”
“There are. In fact, there are four other bedrooms. All smelling a bit airless, all obviously guest rooms. This was Viktor’s room.”
Troy stepped in. A rectangular room about ten feet long and seven across. A narrow window looking out onto a brick wall. Torn and fading yellow wallpaper from some era late in the last century. In an apartment like this it was a box room or a maid’s room. An alarm clock showing the right time ticked softly on an upturned orange box, next to it a candle stub in a tin candlestick and a box of Bryant & May matches. The orange box stood by a camp bed, neatly made up in Spartan fashion. Coarse cotton sheets, coarser woollen blankets of the kind every army-surplus store in every town in the land had been selling off for the last couple of years. On the lower shelf formed by the box divider stood a cream-coloured enamel mug and a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses. On the bare, carpetless boards a hardbacked German book lay splayed—Doktor Faustus, by Thomas Mann.
There was nothing else.
“I’d no idea,” Troy said. “No idea at all.”
“Does it make any sense? I mean, there’s enough money hanging on the walls in the next room to offset the national debt. He spent more on his suit than he did on this room . . . and he lives like this?”
“Oh, yes, it makes sense. Of a kind. Doesn’t mean I know why he chose this. It’s a bit like a cell, isn’t it? Viktor was one of the first to be rounded up by the Nazis—a spell in Oranienburg in 1933. And then we added insult to injury by interning him on the Isle of Man for nearly six months in 1940. And it really was an insult to a man like Viktor. And, of course, it’s where he and Rod met.”
Uttering the name brought home the thought of his brother. He’d have to be the one to tell him.
“Freddie, I have to ask . . . was Viktor the kind of man to take his own life.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Troy said. “But I’ll ask Rod.”