The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (24 page)

‘And such an exquisite face! We ought to do something for her.’

Bernardo, wriggling on this unforeseen hook, asked what.

‘We could tell her she would be lovely if she took more care and exercise. Or is she pregnant?’

‘Not by me.’

‘As if I think you’d take a roly-poly pudding to bed unless you were drunk! And then a girl as sweet as that wouldn’t look at you. How like a man to live under the same roof and not ask questions!’

‘I can’t go asking strange girls if they are pregnant.’

‘But I can.’

This was the devil. He went up to Nadya’s room that afternoon and warned her that a—um—friend of his was likely to ask awkward questions.

‘She has, David.’

‘Already, you mean?’

‘Yes. You were still asleep and she was going out when I came in. So we talked and she came to my room.’

Bernardo suspected that Despina had not been quite so sure as she sounded about the roly-poly pudding, but she could not be accused of duplicity. She never said that she had not talked to Nadya, only that she intended to.

‘What did you tell her?’

‘What I tell everyone—that my bones are a little deformed. I don’t think she believed me because she asked if I was pregnant and if she could help.’

‘The darling!’ Bernardo exclaimed enthusiastically.

‘Yes, she is. I thought that when she came home with you she was just here for the night.’

‘You knew?’

‘Of course I knew.’

‘She might be here for some time, Nadya.’

‘She must love you very much.’

‘I don’t think so. Just a little.’

‘Then God does not like it.’

‘But I do.’

‘Do you want me to find somewhere else to live?’

‘Of course not! What for? This place is just made for you until you get your passport.’

He knew at once that he should not have mentioned ‘until’. Always in talking with her he tried to avoid any forecast of a future from which David Mitrani and his moral support, such as it was, might have to vanish without warning.

‘Are you going to marry her?’ Nadya asked. ‘If you marry her, I shall not lose you.’

That took a bit of working out until he saw what she meant. She knew very well that he was English and compelled for some reason to hide it. That lovely Romanian girl who could afford to be generous represented possible permanency. If there were anything which could settle him firmly in time and space it might be Despina.

Thereafter Bernardo’s home life continued in peace, though he heard Nadya’s laughter less often. When Despina, apparently seeing more of her than he did, repeated the sad story of her life, he observed that Nadya had given nothing away of her essential secrets, managing to slide without any perceptible break from the convent to the restaurant and keeping up a pretence of meeting Mr. Mitrani for the first time when he took the downstairs room. Bernardo had never suspected that she could use her angelic simplicity as an impenetrable cover, never complicating anything unnecessarily. She would have made a much better secret agent than he.

Despina had not forgotten her need of a partner. Bernardo made no effort whatever to find one for her but Stelian did, engaging—of all unlikely nationalities—a Norwegian known on the near eastern circuit for uninspiring competence and astonishing good looks. He had been dancing with a German girl in Athens when the partnership was broken up by a monumental row in which the lady had thrown a whole crate of empty bottles at his head, leaving the young martyr chivalrously passive but out of a job. Bernardo gathered from the reports that he was of arctic rectitude and not oversophisticated—in fact that it wouldn’t have much affected his intelligence if his partner had hit him with a sledgehammer. To judge by the manliness of his photographs he and Despina—if they could hit it off—would be an outstanding couple, compelling admiration however well or badly they danced.

Though the pair had no common language but bad French, Despina was delighted with Holgar Johannsen and had high
hopes of contracts in Vienna and Paris. He was put up at the Principesa where his manners and little formal bows created as favourable an impression as the Prince of the Rosicrucians. Bernardo was at first inclined to agree with Aunt Floarea that dancers were too open to temptation, but soon saw that he had no need to be jealous. Holgar was a model of correctitude with no secret Nordic passions which might break surface at the afternoon rehearsals.

He was even persona grata with his consul who had once turned up at the Alhambra. It was doubtful whether this dilapidated viking had ever been in a civilised cabaret before since he tried to take Despina on his knee and demanded beer. In view of his diplomatic status the maître d’ hotel had sent out a boy to get it for him and he had then disputed the bill. Holgar apologised for him, saying that he was a most worthy, clean-living man and a fine influence upon such Scandinavian seamen as found themselves stranded or in trouble in the Danubian ports. The consul had, Bernardo judged, the innocence of his native north plus the hearty, filthy mind which went with it.

Holgar of course did not sit at tables, but nor did he go home to bed at the Principesa. Still magnificent in his tails, he considered it his duty to keep an eye on Despina in case she were insulted, which she never was. Every excited admirer was always allowed to think that she was so overcome by his charm and champagne that he was ready to wait an hour for her at the front door when she had long since gone home with Bernardo from the back. Bernardo found this misplaced chivalry incredibly comic and encouraged Miss Lou, outwardly the other saint of the Alhambra, to invite him to take tea in her apartment. Stelian discovered the result, though the dressing-room knew nothing. Holgar had indignantly removed a slender hand. He was sure, he said, that it had strayed accidentally but told his few male acquaintances all the same.

It was a month or so after Holgar’s arrival that Bernardo
had a curious conversation with Stelian, who of course knew Bernardo’s background from his conversion on but had never shown any interest in his story that he had been taken to Morocco as a child. Stelian asked him to have a drink in his office before the first customers arrived and talked vaguely of opening up another establishment in the oil town of Ploesti.

‘You ought to speak German, dear Mitrani.’

‘I can learn if it’s worthwhile.’

‘It should be easy for you since you speak Yiddish.’

‘I don’t. My family was Spanish-speaking.’

‘Then how was it you were born in a village of Ashkenazy Jews?’

Bernardo was immediately wary. His boss was a pure Romanian from the west of Wallachia where there was only a scattering of Jews. He would certainly have picked up in cosmopolitan Bucarest the difference between those of Spanish and those of Central European origin, but he was unlikely to know that the former were uncommon in Moldavian villages.

‘Why not?’ Bernardo replied to see what he would say.

Stelian seemed to cover embarrassment by pouring out two more glasses. It was obvious that he did not know why not. So somebody else had put him up to asking the question and that somebody else had better be answered. Bernardo explained that after the Kishinev pogrom of 1907 refugees were all mixed up. Anyone who could emigrated to America. Others settled down in Moldavian villages. He had no idea whether there was any truth in the explanation but it would be difficult to deny.

The question smelt as if it had been prompted by the police. They liked to work discreetly. He himself had occasionally been asked to find out personal details of an artiste. This interest in his past was probably of no importance but should not be ignored. For some reason or other he had emerged from safe obscurity.

He asked Despina whether anyone had been showing curiosity about him.

‘Only chatter in the dressing-room.’

‘What do you tell them?’

‘Whatever comes into my head,’ she laughed.

‘Have you ever heard questions about Nadya? I don’t mean from the girls. They have never seen her.’

‘From Holgar I have. He has only met her once but she made an impression. Do Russians like Norwegians?’

‘Russians like everybody to start with. For God’s sake don’t try to fix them up! That fellow hangs around enough as it is.’

‘He only calls for me in the afternoon, David.’

‘And sits and sits.’

Bernardo loathed the partner. It was intolerable to watch Despina floating round the floor with half-closed eyes in the arms of such a spectacular half-wit. He could never resist returning Holgar’s little bows and heel-clickings with more of the same.

‘But you mustn’t tease him.’

‘He doesn’t see it. He thinks the vulgar Latin who takes you home is gradually picking up the manners of a gentleman.’

‘Worse than vulgar,
iubit
! You’re a bad influence and he would like to protect me. I am a beautiful shepherdess from the mountains in your evil grip.’

Well, that was all right. If the police were seriously interested, they would have put the screws on Despina and found that she could tell them no more than Stelian. A shopworn lot, the Bucarest police! They had the Slav enthusiasm for reporting vague suspicions, corrected by the Latin insistence on a complete dossier before action. The easiest way of combining the two for underpaid, underfed cops was inaction.

But the next little pointer was not long in coming. The Alhambra doorman handed him a letter which had been left for him, he said, by a fat, dark woman. They were both used to that. Half the prostitutes in town thought the
Alhambra was a show-room and wanted to be allowed to sit there. The note was anonymous and asked him to turn up at a café in the Calea Budesti about six o’clock—an invitation which he would have ignored if it had not been written in badly spelt French.

This was almost certainly a voice from the Crucea de Piatra. Since he had left only good will behind him—except for Susana—and he was not earning enough to be worth blackmail, it could do no harm to keep the appointment.

The place was the usual bar-cum-grocer’s, serving local residents of any class with good wine at a few bare wooden tables. It was too far away to supply the simple needs of the Crucea de Piatra, but near enough for varicosed legs off duty. He arrived early and sat at the table closest to the door. It was opened a quarter. Eva peered cautiously into the café, hesitated and joined him. She was even more appalling than he remembered her, in a sagging dress of royal blue velvet trimmed with so much decaying rabbit that she suggested a gamekeeper hung with cleaned carcases; yet her eyes were still magnificent and—so far as any thought was in them—kindly.

‘I did not recognise you, David.’

‘Another suit. That’s all. What will you take?’

White wine and red carp caviare and a vast grocer’s sandwich—all very cheap but enough to keep her going till some other irregular cheating of hunger.

‘I am always grateful, dear Eva. Tell me what I can do for you.’

‘Nothing. I am not for the Alhambra. I have come to tell you that you have an enemy. Perhaps you have taken a girl who belongs to some big man.’

‘No. There’s an old lady who is annoyed that her niece is a dancer.’

‘She should be glad! Well, if it’s her she must have friends in the police. One of them has been asking me when I first saw you. How should I know? One year is like another. Some time after Easter, I said.’

‘That’s right. Did he ask Susana too?’

‘Yes. She sent him to me. She has not forgiven you and would do you all the harm she can. So she said you had been living on women for years.’

‘What about our cop? He knew when I came.’

‘He’s dead. The sewer overflowed and he slipped on the ice and cracked his skull. Some of us went to the funeral. He was a good man. They get kind when they are too old for promotion.’

That was a bit of luck—God rest his soul! Susana, if she was believed, had proved his presence in Bucarest long before his real arrival, and Eva had put it four months too early.

‘Did the man ask what languages I spoke?’

‘Yes. I had forgotten that. We all said the same—that you spoke French and Spanish and bad Romanian and that was all.’

Bernardo went home uneasily considering what he had learned. The enquiry could not have anything to do with Giurgiu and Nadya, and was most unlikely to have been started off by Aunt Floarea. However unforgiving, she was too experienced an old bird to give Despina a bad reputation with the police. It had occurred to somebody that he could be David Mitrani.

There must be conflicting reports in the dossier. The evidence from the Crucea de Piatra, for what it was worth, clearly indicated that Mitrani did not speak English and had not crossed the frontier in September. On the other hand somebody must have repeated his weak story that he had landed in Galatz with a horse from Morocco. That could be checked with the port, though wrong dates would complicate the enquiry.

But meanwhile why not haul David Mitrani up to the headquarters of security police for a—to start with—friendly talk? Bernardo could make a disturbing guess at the answer. They might not be inefficiently shuffling papers; they might be leaving him at liberty inside a net that was closing. Bernardo
Brown, to be extradited to Spain on a charge of murder, was an ordinary, unimportant criminal. Bernardo Brown, forger of bank-notes for political motives, secret agent of Hungarians or Russians or both, was far more interesting. Mr. Mitrani had better get out of the country while the going was still good. But where to and how? To try to obtain a passport was hopeless. His application and the documents to be signed would force the issue and compel the police to act at once.

He had to run. Over which frontier? He dared not risk a return to Hungary. He was certain to be picked up, and if Kalmody was busy lying his way out of trouble he’d do his best to see that the awkward witness was slapped into Spain as soon as identified. Jugo-Slavia? Bulgaria? The Danube at least offered a slim chance, using his knowledge of shipping, to stow away and reach Istanbul.

It was hard to tear himself away from his proud and gentle Despina, but he knew it was not going to hurt as much as the parting from Magda. Anyway it had to be, and without a word. She was bound to be interrogated by the police and the less she knew, the better. She had never bothered about his past. He could not remember telling her anything much except fantasies of camels and palm trees and answering questions about the prospects for a cabaret dancer in Tangier.