Read Online Second Violin by John Lawton - Free Book Online Page B

espresso and a glass of Pellegrino for me. And for my friend?’
    ‘The same. Look, I feel I’m not making myself clear.’
    Siebert had his hands cupped to his face lighting up another Asta. He waved out the match.
    ‘Now, Giuseppe here . . .’
    The proprietor looked up from his hissing coffee machine – a gentle smile beneath the comic-book moustache.
    ‘Giuseppe here, he comes from a country in which fascism sees its first priority as being to make the trains run on time. What was wrong with Italian trains under the monarchy, I have no
idea. But this is what one hears about Italy. Until Abyssinia it was all one heard about Italy. Il Duce makes the trains run on time. No doubt he sees to this personally.’
    Siebert had the old Italian smiling broadly now.
    ‘We, on the other hand . . . we Austrians . . . no I shall let Austria off the hook . . . we Viennese . . . it is a Viennese affair after all . . . have other priorities. What do our
fascists do? . . . they take the German disease of anti-Semitism and they nurture the virus like a beloved family pet, and, once the cage is opened by Anschluss, they let loose a beast that has
teeth and claws to terrify even Germany. Don’t worry Herr Troy – tonight the gutters of Leopoldstadt will run with Jewish blood. It is what we Viennese do best, we torment and we
torture Jews. All you have to do is listen for the first clap of doom. And do not let your conscience trouble you. We are both of us merely doing our job.’
    At last Rod had found out what it was that united coppers across continents. An unflagging talent for razor sarcasm.
    ‘Tell me, Herr Troy. Shall we reach a gentleman’s agreement not to despise one another, and not to despise each other’s professions? Would that be
“cricket”?’
    Siebert accepted his coffee, slapped down a couple of coins on the counter and took a tentative sip. Sipped, dragged on his Asta, sipped. Blew smoke with all the self-evident pleasure of a
self-confessed addict. Sip, drag, sip.
    ‘Mmmm . . . good. You should try it. Do not let it go to waste.’
    Rod picked up his cup. Drinking coffee – and he had to admit that it was the best he’d had since his last meal in Soho, sharper than the Viennese taste – seemed like an
appropriate diversion. A good enough way of not answering a question he rather thought Siebert did not much expect an answer to in the first place.
    ‘Listen, you said. Listen for what?’
    A boom like thunder rattled the coffee cups and blew the door open. A poltergeist had entered the room.
    ‘That,’ said Siebert.

 
§ 28
    Hummel’s mother had died when he was ten in the great flu pandemic that swept Europe towards the close of the Great War. His father had been a good father, a gentle
spirit who had never laid a hand on the young Hummel, but whose vocabulary was severely limited, both verbally and emotionally. He would have bought the boy anything he wanted, anything his young
heart desired, but the boy had to ask for it first – Old Hummel had not the imagination to know what a child might want without asking. Hence Hummel had found the nurture he lacked at his
father’s hand in books. He had been a word-child, forever with his nose in a book when other boys were out in the alley bouncing a ball off the back wall. He had, in so short a time, come to
prefer the company of fictional characters to real ones. Hence, while his verbal vocabulary greatly exceeded his father’s – so much so that neighbours used to joke that the boy had
‘swallowed a dictionary’ – his emotional vocabulary was as constrained as his father’s, a world of love and pain bent double, hairpinned into restraint, straitjacketed in a
tailored suit of good manners and long words and convoluted sentences. When the novels of adolescence had lost their fascination for him – he had ripped through Tolstoy and Stendhal and
Balzac, but found most pleasure in the work of Theodore Fontane, if only because he was