‘Yes?’
‘Are you the Consul?’
‘Pretty nearly,’ said Seymour.
‘Message for you, sir,’ said the youth, handing him a letter.
Seymour took it. The boy saluted smartly and moved away.
Seymour looked down at the letter stupidly. It was addressed to him.
But how could it be? It wasn’t from his mother or his grandfather and no one outside his family knew he was here. He turned it over and looked at the postmark. Manchester? But he didn’t know anyone in Manchester and certainly no one in Manchester knew him. He broke the envelope open. Violet Smethwick? He had never heard of anyone named Smethwick, let alone Violet. Why should anyone named Violet be writing to him? He turned over in his mind, a little uneasily, the various women he had met recently but couldn’t place this one.
He started to read the letter and for a moment couldn’t make any sense of it at all. And then he realized. Violet. Auntie Vi. Lomax’s Auntie Vi!
He stuffed the letter away in his pocket. He’d look at that later. Meanwhile there were more important things to do. He went back to being Foreign Secretary.
No, the first thing to do was notify the Foreign Office in London and suggest they did something about it. The second was to modify the notice he had been planning to put up. Closed — He crossed that out and altered it. Temporarily Closed for all but Essential Business.
And if any of that came along he would refer it to London. That was it! This was beginning to sound like Senior Management. Much more of this and he would declare himself Ambassador.
He put the notice up on the door. If by any chance some business turned up he would make a careful note of it and leave it for someone else to sort out. And meanwhile, perhaps, he could get on with what he had come to Trieste to do, which was to find out what had happened to Lomax.
First, though, there was a report to write.
It was some time later that he remembered the letter he had stuffed in his pocket. He took it out now and read it through properly.
It was indeed from Lomax’s Auntie Vi and a reply to the letter he had sent. She thanked him for writing. A letter had arrived from the Foreign Office that very same morning, she said, but it was not the same thing. Somehow on a thing like this it helped to hear from someone personally. Seymour had mentioned the pleasure which Lomax seemed to have found in his new posting. She said that something of that pleasure had come through in his letters home.
She caught herself up. Well, she hoped it had been a home to him. He had come to them from Dublin as a boy of eleven when his mother, Auntie Vi’s sister, had died. He had been a shy, odd little creature, she said, who had found it difficult to settle in. For a long time his only interest had been stamps. He had been quite bright, though, and had done well at school. They had been surprised all the same when he had chosen to apply for the Consular service; and even more surprised when he had been accepted. Perhaps it was the stamps that had put it into his mind. No one in their family, which was a decent, honest one, had ever done anything like that before. His mother, Auntie Vi said, would have been proud of him.
She said nothing about his father. He would have been Irish, perhaps? That might account for the Dublin. Died, possibly, like his wife? Or simply disappeared from the scene. Disappeared from Auntie Vi’s scene, anyway.
She said that although they had not seen Lomax for some time, they would miss him. Not being blessed with a child of their own, they had always treated him as a son. He had in turn looked on them as his parents. He had written to them regularly from his various postings all over the world and had sent them little presents, souvenirs, really, which were all they would have of him now but which at least would be a constant reminder of him.
She thanked Seymour again for his kindness in writing and said that if he was ever near Warrington he should call in; although she imagined that was not very likely. She expected he was always, like Lomax, in some other part of the world.
Seymour had the sense of a decent family stricken. With his own acute sense of family, he could guess how they felt. He was glad he had written.
He thought over what she had said. So Lomax had originally come from Ireland. He wondered if that accounted for his friendship with James and his helping him over the cinema business. Perhaps, too, it had stirred old loyalties and old attitudes, an old nationalism that went back to childhood, ever a romantic siding with the underdog which seemed suddenly relevant again when he came to Trieste.
There was a knocking on the door. Someone was trying to get in. He had forgotten he had locked it. He went to the door and opened it.
A man was standing there who seemed vaguely familiar. He clicked his heels.
‘Rakic,’ he said.
Seymour remembered him now. He was the man who had talked to Marinetti about hiring the Politeama for his Futurist Evening. Someone to do with Machnich.
‘You are the Consul?’ he said.
‘No.’
The man corrected himself.
‘Of course not. Lomax was the Consul. And Lomax is dead. But you. .?’ He seemed puzzled. ‘I thought they said that you — ’
‘No,’ said Seymour. ‘I am just here temporarily. Passing through. I am a King’s Messenger.
‘King’s. .?’
‘Messenger. I carry messages. Diplomatic ones.’
‘Ah, yes, I see. And what, exactly, are you doing here?’
And what, exactly, business was it of his, thought Seymour, reacting to the tone?
‘Carrying messages,’ he said, however. ‘I just happened to be here when Lomax was found.’
‘Ah, yes. So you are nothing, then.’
‘I wouldn’t quite put it like that,’ said Seymour.
The man seemed to realize how he sounded.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, though only half graciously. ‘I meant, in the context of Trieste — ’
‘I am passing through,’ said Seymour. ‘And you?’
He had had enough of this boorish questioning.
‘Machnich sent me.’
A little unwillingly, Seymour showed him in. They sat down in the inner office. Rakic looked around curiously at the walls.
‘Decadent,’ he pronounced.
‘Out of the usual, definitely.’
Rakic shrugged. The pictures did not really interest him.
‘You come from Machnich?’
‘Yes.’ Rakic studied him for a moment. ‘He has heard about Koskash,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘It is of concern to him. Will you tell me, please, what happened?’
Seymour hesitated. Why should he tell this man?
Rakic evidently guessed what he was thinking.
‘Perhaps you do not know. Machnich is a Serb.’
‘Koskash is not a Serb.’
Rakic made an impatient gesture with his hand.
‘It was to do with Serbs. Did they not explain that to you?’
‘Why should that matter to Machnich?’
‘Because he is a Serb, as I say. He is a big man in Trieste. The biggest Serb. And so the other Serbs look to him. When something happens that affects Serbs, they turn to him. And so he needs to know what happened yesterday.’
Rather grudgingly, Seymour told him as much as he knew.
‘The two who came and asked for papers, they were Schneider’s men, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So Schneider knows.’
It was a statement rather than a question and did not need answering. Seymour had a question of his own.
‘And Machnich knows, too, does he? About the escape route?’
Rakic did not answer him directly.
‘Machnich looks after his own,’ he said.
‘The Consulate was being used illicitly,’ said Seymour coldly.
Rakic gestured dismissal again.
‘Lomax knew.’
He seemed to be thinking.
‘You will be staying here?’ he said. ‘Until someone else comes out?’