‘Probably.’
‘Then you must go and see Koskash.’
‘I may well go and see him.’
‘See him. It is important. He is weak. His wife is strong, but he is weak. You must see him every day.’
Seymour made no reply.
‘Every day!’ insisted Rakic.
‘Why is Machnich so concerned?’ asked Seymour.
‘As I told you, because this touches the Serbs.’
‘Not because it might touch him?’
Rakic laughed.
‘That, too, no doubt,’ he said drily. It was the first time the obsessive single-mindedness had lifted. ‘However,’ he said, ‘that is not his only concern. He looks after his own, as I have said. And Mrs Koskash is a Serb.’
He sat there looking at Seymour. He seemed to be weighing him up.
‘She must not be left on her own,’ he said.
Then he seemed to make up his mind. He stood up.
‘Machnich wishes to see you,’ he said. ‘The Stella Polare at eleven. Tomorrow.’
Chapter Ten
There was a man waiting outside the Consulate the next morning when Seymour arrived. He turned round and smiled.
‘Signor Seymour?’
‘Si.’
He bowed, in a formal, old-fashioned way.
‘Augstein. Mrs Koskash sent me. She thought I might be of use.’
He had, he said, been the Consulate’s clerk before Koskash and had been retired for some years now.
‘However,’ he said cheerfully, ‘I do not expect things to have changed much. You will need some temporary help, and it will not be like getting in someone completely new to the job.’
‘Mrs Koskash sent you?’
‘Yes. She said she owed you something,’ said Augstein quietly.
He was an elderly, grey-haired man, stooping slightly but still alert and active. When Seymour took him into the Consulate he looked around fondly.
‘Much the same,’ he said.
He went to Koskash’s desk. It was locked.
He went across to a shelf with a row of box files and felt between them.
‘We used to leave the key here. Ah!’
He showed it to Seymour.
‘As I said, I don’t expect things have changed much. Mr Koskash is an orderly man and I, too, was orderly.’
He sat down at Koskash’s desk and pulled the mail in the in-tray towards him. He glanced at some of the letters and then went to the files.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘we are almost up to date. It will not take long to catch up. Mr Koskash is most conscientious.’
He took out some forms.
‘They are just the same,’ he said, with satisfaction.
He took up a pen and began to write.
Seymour hesitated. He could certainly do with the help. And yet he could not help feeling a little suspicious.
He went into the inner office, wavered and then came back.
‘I would like,’ he said, ‘to consult the personnel files. The back files, please.’
‘Certainly.’
Augstein rose from his desk and in a moment had laid two files on Seymour’s desk.
It was as Augstein had said. He had indeed been Koskash’s predecessor. He had worked in the Consulate for over thirty years, serving both of Lomax’s predecessors. There were his original references and here was a testimonial written at the point when he was handing over. It was in glowing terms: ‘thorough’, ‘conscientious’, ‘steady’, ‘reliable’. It was like an identikit version of Koskash.
And yet Koskash had turned out not to be entirely reliable, at least, not from the Consulate’s point of view. And Seymour still had that fait accompli feeling. Perhaps there was nothing in it. Perhaps he was being too distrustful. Perhaps Mrs Koskash was merely trying to make amends.
He turned back through the old references. Then he closed the file and went in to Augstein.
‘Everything seems to be as you said. I see you were indeed here before Koskash. And for a long time, too!’
‘Too long, perhaps,’ said Augstein, sighing. ‘But jobs like this were not easy to get, not for people like me, anyway.’
‘People like you?’
‘New immigrants. I was new, thirty years ago,’ he said, smiling.
‘And where did you come from?’
‘Belgrade.’
‘Serbia?’
‘Yes.’
‘But an Austrian father? With that name?’
‘Yes.’ Augstein smiled again. ‘Perhaps that is why they appointed me. It certainly made it easier in dealing with the authorities.’
Another Serb, thought Seymour. Perhaps that didn’t matter. It was natural for people of a kind to stick together, he knew that from his own experience in the East End. It was perfectly reasonable that Mrs Koskash should send along someone she knew and that that person should be a Serb like her. Perhaps that was how Koskash had got the job in the first place. All the same, Seymour felt uneasy. He had the sense of a clan closing round him. Perhaps that was how it tended to be in the Balkans. An individual was never quite just an individual, as Maddalena had said. Perhaps that was the mistake Lomax had made. You helped an individual, or individuals, but you got drawn into a group; and where did the group’s loyalties begin and end?
The Stella Polare was one of the old coffee houses of Trieste and as soon as Seymour went in he realized that up till now he had been missing something about Trieste. For this was the other side of Trieste, the part complementary to the tables in the outdoor cafes in the Piazza Grande, the Italian sparkle in the sunshine. If they were Italians, this was Austrian. Dark wood everywhere, low-beamed roofs, cosy corners. There were comfortable, horsehair-stuffed sofas in the recesses and newspapers on the tables. It was like the English Club but somehow heavier, solider, warmer. Gemütlich. The Austrian word popped up in his mind.
Drifting out of the kitchen came the smells of Middle Europe: of the spicy, dumplinged broths of Budapest, the breadcrumbed schnitzels of Vienna, of venison and boar from the Bohemian forests, of paprika and rye bread and apple. The smells stirred memories of home for Seymour; not just his own home but the homes he had gone into in the East End with old Appelmann, immigrants’ homes still carrying with them culinary evidence of their roots.
At this hour, of course, the predominant smell was that of coffee and that seemed different, too, from the coffees of the piazza or of the Canal Grande. This was coffee with cream, the coffee of Vienna.
A man got up from a table in a corner and came towards him.
‘Signor Seymour?’
‘Signor Machnich?’
They shook hands. Machnich led him back to his table.
‘You like the place, yes?’
‘One of the old cafes,’ said Seymour.
‘Old, yes.’ Machnich looked around with satisfaction. ‘This is the real Trieste,’ he said. ‘Where the real business of the city gets done.’
Everyone here, and there were quite a few of them even this early in the morning, distributed about the recesses and corners, was wearing a suit. And a suit, not a uniform. This, he realized, was the commercial heart of the city: old, yes, as Machnich had said, older, perhaps, even than the uniforms.
‘When I first came to Trieste,’ said Machnich, ‘I put my head in here and said: no, this is not the place for me. But then I was just a poor shopkeeper. Now I know that if I did not come here they would think I was still just a poor shopkeeper.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not really care what they think. But if they see me here, where there is money, they will think I have money, and money breeds money. There is another thing. You see all this?’
The sweep of his arm took in the solid tables and comfortable chairs and the heavy, opulent woodwork.
‘It is sound. And the people here are sound, or like to think they are. They belong to the old Trieste. The Trieste of old, safe money. The Trieste that even Austrians respect. And while I am here people will think that I, too, am sound. There are times,’ he said, ‘when that can be an advantage.’
He sat back in his chair. He was a great bull of a man, with a thick, bull-like neck and alert unblinking eyes.