Second Violin

John Lawton

• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781611855869
• eBook ISBN: 9781611859874
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Written by 'a sublimely elegant historical novelist as addictive as crack' ( Daily Telegraph ), t he Inspector Troy series is perfect for fans of Le Carré, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. 1938. The Germans take Vienna without a shot being fired. Covering Austria for the English press is a young journalist named Rod Troy. Back home his younger brother joins the CID as a detective constable. Two years later tensions are rising and 'enemy aliens' are rounded up in London for internment. In the midst of the chaos London's most prominent rabbis are being picked off one by one and Troy must race to stop the killer.

Contents

I

§1

§2

§3

§4

§5

§6

§7

§8

§9

§10

§11

§12

§13

§14

§15

§16

§17

§18

§19

§20

§21

§22

§23

§24

§25

§26

§27

§28

§29

§30

§31

§32

§33

§34

§35

§36

§37

§38

§39

§40

§41

§42

§43

§44

§45

§46

§47

§48

§49

§50

§51

§52

§53

§54

§55

§56

§57

§58

§59

§60

§61

§62

§63

§64

§65

§66

§67

§68

§69

§70

§71

§72

§73

§74

§75

An Interlude

II

§76

§77

§78

§79

§80

§81

§82

§83

§84

§85

§86

§87

§88

§89

§90

§91

§92

§93

§94

§95

§96

§97

§98

§99

§100

§101

§102

§103

§104

§105

§106

§107

§108

§109

§110

§111

§112

§113

§114

§115

§116

§117

§118

§119

§120

§121

§122

§123

§124

§125

§126

§127

§128

§129

§130

§131

§132

§133

§134

§135

§136

§137

§138

§139

§140

§141

§142

§143

§144

§145

§146

§147

§148

§149

§150

§151

§152

§153

§154

§155

§156

§157

§158

§159

§160

§161

§162

§163

§164

§165

§166

§167

§168

§169

§170

§171

§172

§173

§174

§175

§176

§177

§178

§179

§180

§181

§182

§183

§184

§185

§186

§187

§188

§189

§190

§191

§192

§193

I

Red Vienna

At 451 °F paper burns.

At 900 °F glass melts.

At 536 °F flesh will burst into flames.

At –40 °F Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet.

§

Under moonlight
a madman dances.

§ 1

12 March 1938
Hampstead, London

Yellow.

It was going to be a yellow day.

The nameless bird trilling in the tree outside his window told him that. He had learnt too little of the taxonomy of English flora and fauna to be at all certain what the bird was. A Golden Grebe? A Mustard Bustard? He took its song as both criticism and compliment – ‘cheek, cheek, cheek’.

Fine, he thought, if there’s one thing I have in spades it’s cheek. Do I need a bird to tell me that?

He watched its head bobbing, heard again the rapid chirp – now more ‘tseek’ than ‘cheek’, and was wondering if he had a yellow tie somewhere for this yellow day and whether it might sit remotely well with his suit, when Polly the housemaid came in.

‘My dear, tell me . . . what is this bird in the tree here?’

‘Boss . . . there’s bigger fish to fry than some tom tit–’

He cut her short.

‘There, do you see? In the cherry tree. The one with the yellow breast.’

‘Boss . . . I’m a Londoner. Born, bred and never been further than Southend. Sparrers is me limit. Just call it a yeller wotsit and listen to me.’

He turned. It was typical of her to be so casual in her dealings with him, untypical of her to find anything so urgent. It was as though she’d seized him by his lapels.

‘Yes?’

‘’Itler’s invaded Austria. It was on the wireless you know. The missis sent me to tell you.’

The missis was his wife. Time there was, and not that long ago, when he would have learnt of such things not by his wife sending in the maid, but by a phone call from his Fleet Street office at whatever time of day or night, deskside or bedside. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had told his editors, ‘History can now wait for me.’ Usually history waited until he had his first cup of coffee in his hand.

‘Do you want me to turn the set on in here, Boss?’

‘Yes, my dear. Please do that.’

It was indeed a yellow day. What other colour has cowardice ever had? It was all too, too predictable. Hitler had signalled his punches like a feinting boxer. He had had his editorial ready for a month now, ever since Hitler and Schuschnigg had met at Berchtesgaden in the middle of February for Schuschnigg’s ritual humiliation – ‘I am the greatest German that ever lived!’ . . . so much for Goethe, so much for Schiller, for Luther and Charlemagne, for Beethoven and Bach. He’d listen to the next bulletin on the wireless, and if nothing forced a change upon him, and he doubted that it would, he’d take the editorial out of his desk drawer and have a cab take it to Fleet Street for the evening edition. All it needed was his signature . . . a rapid flourish of the pen and, in the near-cyrillic of his handwriting, the words ‘Alexei Troy’.

§ 2

14 March
Vienna

The Führer took his triumphant time getting to Vienna. There was his hometown of Linz to be visited, embraced, captured on the road to Vienna. The town from which, as he put it himself, Providence had called him. He drove through streets gaily decked out with the National Socialist flag – red and black can be so striking in its simplicity – past cheering citizens, gaily decked out in green jackets and lederhosen.

In the second car SD Standartenführer Wolfgang Stahl, a fellow Austrian, wondered where they got it all from. As though some wily rag-and-bone man had been round the week before with a job lot of old coats and leather britches. It seemed to him to be parody, to be bad taste, to be Austria’s joke at its own expense. All this, all of it, would be at Austria’s expense. It was simply that Austria didn’t know it.

It was past lunchtime on the following day before the entourage rolled into Vienna. Hitler was in a foul mood. The motorcade had broken down. Not just the one vehicle but dozens had ground to a halt with mechanical failure. It looked half-arsed. And the trick to invading without a shot fired, to taking a country that was all too willing to capitulate, was to look wholly-arsed, as though you could have taken them by force if you so desired. The Wehrmacht was untested in the field. Any failure now sent out the wrong signal to the fair-weather friends of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The world was watching. That nincompoop Chamberlain was watching. Entering Vienna, they crossed a bridge that had been mined. Schellenberg had inspected the device personally, taken a gamble with their lives, thought better of telling this to Hitler, and mentioned it to Stahl only as a problem solved. It was just as well. The bad mood did not lift. Hitler accepted the adulation of the crowds in the Heldenplatz, scowled through the reception at the Hofburg Palace and flew on to Munich the next morning. Country captured, country visited, Secret Police installed. Next.

Stahl stayed. The SS was already rounding up suspects, tormenting Jews and murdering discreetly as a preamble to murdering indiscreetly. Neither was his job. Himmler and Schellenberg had flown in ahead of the convoy at first light. Heydrich, flash as ever, had flown in in his own private plane, meditating on his plans for Austria’s first concentration camp. They had gilded thugs aplenty, thugs in oak leaves, thugs in lightning, thugs in black and silver. Stahl was just an ornament. He’d been invited to Vienna, his native city, merely as part of the Führer’s sense of triumphalism. He’d been presented to the Viennese as a prodigal son, someone not quite called by Providence, which only had room for one, but touched by it. The hand of fate that had grabbed Adolf Hitler, had brushed the sleeve of Wolfgang Stahl. Others stayed on simply because the pickings were too rich – not simply what could be stolen, but what could be bought. The department stores of Vienna were so much better stocked than those in Berlin. Stahl had in his pocket a handwritten note from Hermann Göring – ‘Could you get me a dozen winter woollen underpants from Gerngross’s, waist 130 cm?’

Stahl stayed because Vienna fixed him, fixed him and transfixed him as surely as if it had struck out, stabbed him and pinned him to the wall. He could not help Vienna in her suffering, and at the same time he could not resist watching as she suffered.

§ 3

14 March
Berlin

TELEGRAMME : TROYTOWNLON

TO : TROYTOWNBER

ATT: ROD TROY

MY BOY, DO YOU NOT THINK IT TIME YOU CAME HOME?

THIS IS, DARE I SAY, A JACKBOOT TOO FAR.

DO NOT WAIT FOR WAR. COME BACK NOW.

COME BACK TO YOUR WIFE AND YOUR FAMILY.

YOUR LOVING FATHER,

ALEX TROY.

Rod showed the telegramme to Hugh Greene in Kranzler’s restaurant at lunchtime.

‘I can’t say I’m always getting them. But it’s not the first and it won’t be the last. Thing is . . . the old man never wanted me to come out in the first place.’

In 1933, when the Nazis had taken power, Rod had been just short of his twenty-fifth birthday and had been three years a parliamentary correspondent on his father’s Sunday Post. He begged his father for the Berlin posting. In the September the old man had finally agreed and Rod had presented himself to the Press Office of the National Socialist Workers’ Party and the British Embassy as the new Berlin Correspondent for the Troy Press. The Germans had looked askance at his authentication, but said nothing. The embassy had said in one of those subtle walls-have-ears tones, ‘You’re taking one hell of a risk, old boy.’

Greene echoed the line now, ‘Your father has a point. You don’t have the protection I have.’

Greene had come to Berlin, via Munich, for the Daily Telegraph the February after Rod. He was younger than Rod by nearly three years, and taller by more than three inches. They had been ‘absolute beginners’ together, often sharing what they knew. Rod revelled in the languid mischief that Greene seemed to exude, the nascent wickedness of the man. It reminded him more than somewhat of his younger brother. Much as he was loth to admit it, there were times when he missed his brother. Even more he missed his wife. She had joined him a few weeks after the posting and, like the colonial wife in Nigeria or Sierra Leone, she had returned home for the birth of their first child in 1936, and was home now expecting the second.

‘If I have to weigh that one up every time Hitler pushes the country to the brink, I might as well go home and become the gardening columnist reporting on outbreaks of honey fungus and the private life of the roving vole.’

‘Questing vole, surely?’ said Greene. ‘“Something something through the plashy fens goes the questing vole”.’

Rod ignored this.

‘What matters, what matters now is that I should be here. My father doesn’t see that. I should be here. So should you.’

‘Quite. Except, of course, that we should both be in Vienna.’

§ 4

15 March
Berggasse, Vienna

Martha showed every courtesy to the SS thugs who had burst into her dining room. Gesturing to the table, where she had piled up her housekeeping money she invited them to ‘help themselves’ as though it were a plate of sandwiches and they guests for afternoon tea. They stuffed their pockets like beggars at a banquet. Then they stared. They had probably never been in an apartment quite like this in their lives.

Could they feel the burden of dreams?

Martha’s daughter, Anna, sensing that they would not be satisfied with the best part of a week’s housekeeping, knowing that they undoubtedly subscribed to the Nazi notion that all Jews were misers and slept on mattresses stuffed with banknotes, went into the other room, beckoned for them to follow and opened the safe for them. ‘Help yourselves, gentlemen’ – to six thousand schillings.

Even this was not enough...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Historical Note
• Acknowledgements