‘I would like,’ said Seymour, ‘to get a feel for the work of the Consulate. The kind of things Lomax did. The kind of things you do.’
‘Certainly!’ said Koskash enthusiastically. ‘I’d be glad to show you — ’
Seymour interrupted him hastily, fearing he was about to be exposed to another dose like Marinetti’s.
‘Something simple. Those papers you were working on the other night, for instance.’
‘Well, they are hardly typical. That sort of thing comes up only every so often.’
‘Never mind. They’ll do for a start. Now what exactly were you doing?’
‘Making out papers for seamen. Usually because they’ve lost them. Or had them stolen. That happens sometimes, usually when they’ve been to a brothel or a taverna.’
Seymour went through the process with him. It seemed a simple clerical matter, recorded meticulously in Koskash’s careful handwriting.
‘You keep a record, of course?’
‘Oh, yes. We have to. So that we can check up if the need arises. There’s a certain market in such papers.’
‘And you keep the record. .?’
‘Over there. In the files.’
A little of this kind of thing went a long way and Seymour soon thanked Koskash, saying that he would come back for enlightenment on another process.
‘The stationery inventory, perhaps?’ said Koskash enthusiastically.
‘Perhaps,’ said Seymour, backing off.
When Koskash had finished work for the day, almost regretfully, it seemed, he went off. Seymour remained at his desk, writing his report. After Koskash had left, he went over to the files and found the folder containing the duplicates of the seamen’s papers that Koskash had made out. There were, as Koskash had said, not many of them, but Seymour went back over several years, until a different Consul’s name appeared in the records.
As Seymour left the Consulate, he sensed, rather than saw, the man in the trilby hat falling in behind him. Was this the way it was going to be every time he went out? If it was, he didn’t like it. It made the place feel different, put a shadow over the sun. Why him? Why should he be singled out in this way?
And then Koskash’s words came back to him. Of course. He wasn’t being singled out. This was everybody. Perhaps not everybody, it couldn’t be. But enough people for it to be taken for granted. It was a permanent feature of the place, part of the landscape, part of the Trieste way of life. Almost something in the air you breathed. It had been there, he realized, all the time, behind the sunshine and the sparkling sea, behind the wine and the waiters and the tables in the great piazza, behind the liners at anchor in the bay. It was just that at first he had not seen it.
It had been there, he realized, in the soldiers at the entrance of every official building, in the policemen at every public place where people gathered; There in the inspectors present in every market, however small, and anywhere where things were done.
There, in the uniforms everywhere, with their precise, pretty distinctions, the different sorts of epaulettes, the cocked hats for one grade of functionary, the flat caps for another, in the subtly differential braid and the tightly prescribed brims.
In the prescribed sheets of paper, the ‘chancery double’, on which every official transaction or application, however trivial, had to be written, and which was available in every office and shop; in the forms he had to fill in at the hotel and in the ‘papers’ he had to present on countless occasions.
The night before he had left, when he had been packing his suitcase, at one point he thought he had lost his papers.
‘For God’s sake!’ his grandfather had cried in anguish. ‘What are you doing? Papers are important to these bastards. If you don’t have papers, they shut you up.’
‘That was the Tsarist police, Grandfather,’ his sister had murmured patiently.
‘The Hapsburg police are no different, are they, Else?’ He had appealed to Seymour’s mother.
‘The Hapsburg police are worse,’ she said firmly.
‘It’s all right, I’ve got them,’ Seymour had said, as his sister found them and threw them to him.
‘Then you see you keep them!’ thundered his grandfather. ‘No papers, no person! That is how it is with the Hapsburgs. You remember that! It is not like England.’
‘No, it is not!’ echoed his mother.
Seymour had caught his sister’s eye, in the complicit shrugging of shoulders that one generation had for another.
But now he suddenly thought that they might have been right. It wasn’t just a toothless bureaucratic fuss about paper, it was a bureaucracy with an edge of steel.
It was part of that other thing that was there, almost in the air, of Trieste; there in the very buildings, in the heaviness and grandiosity of the architecture, in the height of the official rooms, and the width of the staircases and the thickness of the carpeting, in the marble finishing and the walnut woodwork.
There, most of all, in the portraits of the Emperor, in his peaked military cap and white tunic, displayed in every official building and almost in every room, in Schneider’s office, for instance, and in Kornbluth’s, but also in every tobacconist’s shop and in every bar and hotel.
The day before, he had gone to the Maritime, the fine, classical building on the waterfront which housed the Ministry of Maritime Affairs. When Seymour had gone up the flight of stairs and into the marble-floored reception hall, what had struck him was the resemblance to the Foreign Office in London: the same confidence, the same air of superiority, the same grandiloquence.
It was, he realized now, the insignia of Empire. And it told of grip.
When he had entered the hall, Seymour, unused to such places, had stopped for a moment, slightly daunted. But then he had recovered. Was he not, after all, himself the representative of Empire? Even if not in proper person. He told himself wryly that his grandfather would have been proud of him.
Thinking about it now, however, he felt exactly what his grandfather would have felt: the tremor of rebellion.
That evening, going, as had now become as habitual to him as to the rest of the population of Trieste, to the Piazza Grande, he ran into Kornbluth, who invited him to join his table at the other end of the piazza.
As they walked down there, keeping time to the slow movement of the passeggiatta, Seymour thanked him for sending the medical report and asked him how he had been getting on that day.
‘Badly,’ said Kornbluth gloomily. ‘I have not found a single person who saw him after he came out of the Edison. I have asked everyone in the piazza, down to the dog in the taverna.’
‘I find — ’ began Seymour, and then shut up. He was not supposed to be a policeman.
Kornbluth did not seem to notice.
‘Of course, we shall go round again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And the next day. And probably the next. Spreading out.’
‘Have you tried the docks?’ said Seymour. ‘He must have been killed near the sea.’
‘We tried there first,’ said Kornbluth.
‘It might not have been the docks. Anywhere along the sea front. It could have been the bottom of the Piazza Grande.’
‘Tried there,’ said Kornbluth. ‘And the Molo.’
‘It’s a big area.’
‘And the red-light houses,’ said Kornbluth. ‘We’ve tried them too. You never know with these quiet people.’
He led Seymour to a table at which a plump, grey-haired lady was sitting. She smiled up at Seymour.
‘We always sit here,’ she said.
‘My wife likes the music. And the dance, too, yes, Hilde?’
‘And the dance, too,’ said Hilde. ‘Although preferably with someone lighter on his feet than my husband.’
‘She likes the bandmaster, too,’ said Kornbluth looking round roguishly. ‘Is Lehar here this evening?’
‘I hope so,’ said his wife. ‘Then at least we’ll get some decent waltzes.’
‘Hilde comes from Vienna,’ said Kornbluth ‘and thinks that only in Vienna do they know how to waltz.’