‘Inside the cinema?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Seymour. ‘Let’s get this clear. He came out of the cinema. With the Irishman. Are you saying he then went back inside?’
‘That’s right.’
‘After the Irishman had gone?’
‘After everyone had gone.’
‘Everyone?’
‘Everyone. Including the staff. We hang on for them especially. The bastards! They ought to be out with us.’
‘So who was he seeing, then?’
‘Oh, well. Who’s left when everyone else has gone home?’
It was, although he did not know it at the time, yet another Trieste saying. It had been offered offhandedly, as something that hardly needed saying, obvious to anybody. It wasn’t obvious to Seymour, however. Spotting that, they seized on it, glad of the opportunity to put the superior outsider at a disadvantage. They had been uneasy about him, unsure whether he was on the side of authority or not. Perhaps they had told him too much. Here, now, was a chance to put that right. They refused to say any more. He had asked for help and they had given it him. Now he had to make of it what he could That was fair, wasn’t it?
He walked up from the docks thinking about it. On his way he passed through the Piazza Grande. The man who had joined them the other day, the friendly one, Ettore, was sitting alone in the Cafe of Mirrors. He looked up at Seymour and smiled.
‘I know!’ he said. ‘I’m early. I ought not to be here till later. In fact, I am not here. It is an illusion created by the cafe’s mirrors. Really I am at work. However, the meeting finished early and on my way back to the office, smelling the coffee. .’
He was smoking, as, going by the other day, he seemed to do all the time. Seymour sat down to windward of him. Ettore noticed and waved a hand apologetically.
‘It is bad,’ he said, ‘I know. I am trying to stop. I have spoken to my analyst about it — did you know, I go to a psychoanalyst regularly? I said: “How can you claim to put the big things right when you cannot put the small things right?” “Who says they are the small things?” he replied.’
Seymour laughed.
‘For me, it is coffee,’ he said. ‘We all have our vices.’
‘For everyone it is coffee,’ said Ettore. ‘But in my case that is, too.’
Seymour asked him how he had come to know Lomax. Through James, Ettore said. One day after their English lesson he had brought Ettore to the table in the Cafe of Mirrors and Lomax had been there. They had not met through business. His father-in-law normally handled the foreign side. Seymour rather gathered the impression that in anything to do with work Ettore was dominated by his father-in-law. He suspected that part of the attraction for Ettore of opening a branch in England was the prospect of getting away from him.
They talked a little about life in England. It was the first time Seymour had had much of a talk with Ettore and he found him not just sympathetic but also vaguely comforting. It was a relief to find someone fairly normal at the artists’ table. Then he remembered that Ettore was himself an artist; at any rate, he wrote novels. He asked Ettore about that. Ettore said that his early novels had had such a hammering from critics, mostly on the grounds that, coming from Trieste, he couldn’t write proper Italian, that he had virtually given up.
Seymour had an idea.
‘Ettore, as a Triestian, could you give me some advice? It is about the meaning of what I gather is an old Trieste saying. Who is left behind when everyone else has gone home?’
‘Are you getting at me?’
‘No,’ said Seymour, surprised.
‘It is what my father-in-law is always saying to me. Pointedly. When I leave work at what I think is a reasonable time.’
‘Why? Who is left?’
‘The boss. It is a Trieste saying, I think a foolish one. However, it is very popular with small businessmen.’
If he remembered rightly, the boss at the Edison, from what James had said, was a man named Machnich. Who also happened to be the person James had had dealings with over the venture of starting up cinemas in Ireland, if that had actually happened. And also the person, if James’s rambling account could be trusted, to whom Lomax had given business advice. Seymour thought it was time he looked at those dealings a little more closely.
When Seymour got back to the Consulate, he asked Koskash if there was any record of the occasions on which Lomax had offered help to James Juice and also, possibly, to some Trieste businessmen, over setting up a cinema in Ireland.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Koskash, ‘there’s a big file.’
He brought it in and gave it to Seymour.
Seymour began to work through it. Lomax’s contributions appeared to be almost entirely technical and legal. He advised on Irish Customs regulations and on necessary licences and permits. On how to secure local banking facilities, on things to be borne in mind when renting premises, on employment law in Ireland. He seemed to know a lot about it; not just the theoretical requirements but how they were translated into practice on the ground. Reading it, Seymour was impressed. So far he had been inclined to dismiss Lomax as just an advanced nut. Going through what Lomax had written, however, he found a sharp, practical mind at work. It was a new side of Lomax that he was seeing. What was it that Koskash had said? That they had all said. That he was actually very good at his job.
And his role appeared to have been confined to giving advice. There was no hint that he had been involved in any other way, no hint of any personal financial involvement, for example, as Seymour had half suspected there might be. The actual financial side of it wasn’t, in fact, at all clear. But so far as James personally was concerned the financial arrangements were clear. They were contained in some separate pencilled notes. It looked as if as well as providing general advice to the group of Trieste businessmen behind the enterprise, Lomax had been giving James some private advice on the side. There was nothing underhand, just a few practical points, offered as a friend, that James should bear in mind. Advice probably much needed, thought Seymour.
It was beginning to fall into place now; a man with actually a good business idea — surprisingly — approaching a group of businessmen for backing. And then, gradually, the more astute backers taking over and the original visionary somehow getting lost to view. James, as he had said, had had the imagination; but not, Seymour suspected, any practical business or political sense at all.
Lomax had eventually had both of these and, reading between the lines, Seymour thought he could see him offering advice fairly to the Trieste businessmen but at the same time trying gently to see that James didn’t get taken for too much of a ride.
The principal backer appeared to be, as James had said, Machnich.
‘The owner of the Edison?’
‘That is right, yes,’ said Koskash. ‘And much else in Trieste besides. His principal business is a large carpet shop.’
‘What sort of man is he?’
‘What sort of man?’ Koskash grimaced. ‘A businessman of the Trieste variety. That is to say, at heart, small. His business is big now but he likes to run everything as if he was still running a small shop. He has to know everything, almost do everything, for himself. As soon as he can’t, he begins to get nervous. That, I think, may be why the Dublin venture never came to anything. He has a big idea and then the bigness of the idea frightens him.’
Even so, thought Seymour, the sort of man who would eat James alive. And Lomax too? Not if Schneider were to be believed and not on the evidence of the notes in this file. On this evidence, Lomax was a sharp customer.
When he had finished going through the file Seymour closed it and put it away in the out-tray and sat thinking. He thought for quite a while and then made up his mind. There was something he had to do and he might as well do it now.
He went into the front office where Koskash was at his desk working and then pulled up a chair and sat down exactly in front of him.