At breakfast, Rod was nose down in the morning paper when Troy appeared. He folded it, tapped with his forefinger on the headlines, and shoved it across the table to Troy.
“Spy Gave Secrets of Atom Bomb to Russia”
Troy glanced at it and as Rod had said nothing, he didn’t, either. God knows, they’d all be bored rigid by this topic over the next few weeks. More public breast beating, more revelling in our rapid decline to the second rate. What was Professor Szabo’s crime? Giving our atomic secrets to the Russians, or telling us he’d done it?
Troy shoved it back without a word.
Rod whacked the top of his egg with his teaspoon and said, “I can’t remember. Did you ask me your question?”
“No,” Troy replied.
“Well . . . the answer is, ‘I don’t know whether Viktor had any reason to kill himself I would say, ordinarily, that he wasn’t the type. He could always laugh at himself and I tend to think that’s a saving grace.”
“But?”
“But I haven’t been through what Viktor went through. Being locked up by the British was nothing . . . a doddle . . . like being sent away to school except that the food was better and sport wasn’t compulsory. But that’s an Englishman speaking. I witnessed two suicides of refugees who’d been locked up by the Germans and would rather die than be locked up again by anyone. And there are plenty who chose to live who still found internment an ordeal far too reminiscent of what they’d been through at the hands of the Nazis. But . . . Viktor never seemed to be one of those . . . and for it to surface in him . . . eight years later . . . in such a dreadful way . . . well . . . it doesn’t seem plausible.”
Troy wondered about the wisdom of what he had to say next, but Rod seemed to have shed the worst of his grief in his reminiscences last night. He was eating a hearty breakfast and showing no signs of paying for the night before with a hangover.
“Tell me, did you ever see the back of Viktor’s apartment? The rooms beyond?”
“No,” said Rod. “He was very private about that. That big room with the piano—the one he always called the rehearsal room—the bog off the hallway, the dining room, the small sitting room, but I’ve never seen the kitchen or the bedrooms. It was like a lost domain. Sort of ‘backstage.’”
“I had to go backstage yesterday—as you would expect—and I went into Viktor’s bedroom. It was minimal. It seemed to me that he kept one room in his apartment to remind him of being locked up. He slept on a camp bed, read by candlelight, drank from a tin cup, and had an old orange box as his only furniture.”
It stopped Rod midtoast. He was as surprised as Troy had been.
“You know,” he said, after thinking for a moment. “ ‘Remind’ doesn’t seem the right word. That would suit a token of some sort . . . the memento mori . . . but what you’ve just described is Viktor reliving his imprisonment, still living his imprisonment, as though some part of him had never been set free. As though having hit rock bottom he could never live at any other level, whatever his means. It was always there, underlying everything. The money, the success . . .”
“The Van Goghs, the Picassos, the Chagalls . . . sounds like a form of masochism.”
“Well . . . you wouldn’t get me doing it. But I can see a sort of sense in it.”
“Would you say imprisonment haunted him?”
“No. I would have said it strengthened him. You might even say that rather than being something as crude as masochism it was more like a hair shirt. Suffering was part of the making of him. To be terribly corny, what is art, what is music, without suffering? Are a camp bed and a tin cup a form of torture or merely tolerable discomforts set against a life of luxury and success? Pricks to keep you on your mettle.”
Cid came in and told Troy that Jack wanted him on the telephone.
“What did Rod have to say?”
“He’s telling me in convincing detail that Viktor wasn’t the type, and at the same time he doesn’t seem to have any doubts that it was suicide.”
“Well . . . Kolankiewicz does. I think you’d better call him.”
Troy called Hendon.
“Ach . . . I have things to report. First the body. Single shot to the heart. Death was instantaneous. No marks to indicate restraint or coercion. The bullet I removed matches the Beretta.”
“Then why is Jack telling me you have doubts?”
“Fingerprints. The only prints on the gun are Herr Rosen’s. The only prints on the brandy bottle and the glass are Herr Rosen’s.”
“So?”
“The only prints anywhere in that room are Herr Rosen’s. Troy, someone wiped the place clean. How many suicides have you ever known to do that?”
Troy went back to Rod. There was no way he was going to mention this.
“I have to meet Kolankiewicz. Are you in a position to tell anyone who should be told before we tell the press? It’s been close to twenty-four hours now.”
“I know. My fault. I should have been practical last night, not maudlin. Yes. I can tell them all. Not many. Just his students and his protégés—there are about a dozen of them. If you went to that last recital at the Wigmore you’ll have seen most of them on stage.”
He slipped it in as an afterthought—the two of them standing on the doorstep on a fine late-summer morning—passed it off as routine.
“And . . . do you know of anyone with a reason to kill Viktor?”
“A routine question?”
“Of course.”
“Then I give you a routine ‘don’t be daft.’ ”