The King's Commissar Read online

  'I grew up in Perm, but there is barely a trace. Usually I am thought to be from St Petersburg.'

  'Petrograd,' he growled at me.

  'Of course. I beg your pardon.'

  He glared at me. 'Your profession?'

  'I am an officer of the Royal Navy.'

  'Accustomed to command, eh?'

  'Yes.'

  He was silent then, staring hard at me. It is an old trick, to disconcert a man in that way. I simply stared back. At last he said, 'You have other languages?'

  'Some French. Fair German. English, naturally.'

  He nodded. 'And the language of the Revolution - can you speak that?'

  imperfectly, Comrade Commissar, but I am not wholly unfamiliar with the modes of expression. I have read Marx and Engels, and Comrade Lenin. And I learn quickly, when necessary.'

  'Then take my advice,' Sverdlov said, 'and do so. They are hotheads in the Urals Soviet. Do you know the name Yakovlev?'

  'No.'

  He favoured me with a look that was almost a smile, though in it there was a certain contempt, perhaps even pity. 'Familiarize yourself with the name Vassily Vassilievitch Yakovlev. And report back here tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock.'

  When I did so, I quickly learned why it had been so necessary to remember the mysterious name of Yakovlev. I also found myself arbitrarily placed in command of a force of one hundred and fifty horsemen.

  'The man must be mad,' Malory murmured. His ears heard the sound of his own voice and he grimaced. Talking to himself: softening of the brain. But by Jove, he wasn't the only sufferer! Extraordinary fellow, Pilgrim. Read something Sir Basil wanted buried, found it referred to Zaharoff himself, to the King, to Lenin, Sverdlov and Trotsky; read all that - and then took no notice! The document even mentioned fifty millions in arms and Pilgrim ignored it. Ancient history, indeed!

  The trouble was, of course, that Pilgrim had never met Zaharoff. Accordingly Pilgrim had no experience of the certitude which had characterized all Zaharoff s actions and dealings. Malory, knowing that certitude well, could feel it now, reaching to him across the years. Fifty of them, now, since the old man had stood here in this room - yet Malory could still sense his presence, could sense the will and even the words 'Find out. It's dangerous -' of the message which had earlier insinuated itself into his brain and was becoming ever more urgent. The words seemed to vibrate in his mind as he looked at the envelope which was paper-clipped to the last sheet of Dikeston's manuscript. Pilgrim had opened it, and then had apparently replaced the paper inside it.

  Malory took it out again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  -------------*♦•:--------------

  The House of Four Forks

  In the maroon-carpeted corridor Malory stopped outside the door of Pilgrim's office, knocked faintly and entered. Pilgrim, talking on the telephone, glanced up and nodded. Malory helped himself to coffee from the ever-hot gadget on the side table, and stared out of the window. In a moment he heard the phone replaced and Pilgrim's 'Yes, Horace?'

  He turned, Dikeston's narrative in his hand. 'We disagree, I think, about the importance of this.'

  Pilgrim shook his head. 'Nope. It could be important, I see it.' He laughed ruefully. 'Fifty thousand a year and no questions isn't the kind of thing you dismiss. I just have a block.'

  'A what?'

  'A block, Horace. This guy, Dikeston, he's a joker. He gives us part one, then sets us chasing part two. There's a whole trail laid and he's going to have us running our butts off. And then at the end - nothing. I can smell it.'

  'And the promised catastrophe?'

  Pilgrim leaned back in his chair. 'I can't make myself believe in it. Tell you why. Let's say this guy Dikeston has a big grudge against us, let's say that we foreclosed on his widowed mother's mortgage way back when, okay? She was turned out in the snow. He hates us. He's spent years muttering into his whiskers and plotting vengeance. Now listen - in 1918 he's already lieutenant-commander so he's rising thirty then. What is he now, ninety? No, he's dead. Everybody's dead. Dikeston's dead, Lenin's dead, Zaharoff's dead. Are you saying Dikeston spent half a century plotting a disaster he wouldn't live to see?'

  Malory said, 'Zaharoff seems to have agreed a payment in perpetuity. Of fifty thousand a year. Have you any idea how much that was in about nineteen-twenty?'

  'Sure. It was a crazy sum. So maybe Dikeston had something on Zaharoff. What else could this thing be but blackmail, anyway? Horace, think - Zaharoff died in nineteen-thirty-six.' •

  'You're saying, are you not,' Malory said, 'that Dikeston's grudge must have been against Sir Basil himself?'

  'Well, why not, Horace! It couldn't be much more personal, could it? Annual payments on Zaharoff's say-so, Senior Partner's Notes, don't even query it or catastrophe follows. There was a two-man game here. Zaharoff lost and we keep on paying. But I reckon we're now paying Dikeston's ghost, we have to be. And a few pages of manuscript with dust on them don't convince me otherwise. God, Horace, it's too melodramatic to begin to be true!'

  Malory looked at him steadily. 'There's one thing that isn't dead.'

  'Okay, what?'

  'Hillyard, Cleef.'

  'You think he can wreck the bank? Now - from the graveyard?'

  Malory shrugged. 'I don't know. Sir Basil seems to have feared something cataclysmic and he was not given to unnecessary panic, I do assure you. I feel we must find out-and quickly.'

  'I tell you one thing, Horace - it's going to be costly. We won't find much, but we'll pay a hell of a lot.'

  'Perhaps less costly than failing to find out?'

  Pilgrim fingered his chin. He shaved twice daily and Malory's eyes caught the faint rasp of the stubble. 'Horace, we're in a strange position, you and I. You were boss man. I'm boss man now. We have an understanding of sorts. You don't like some of what I do and maybe I don't like some of your ways over here. We can both live with it. There are even advantages. But my whole instinct is to forget this thing and to cancel the next payment. Yours is not.'

  'Most certainly it is not."

  'Based on what you know of Zaharoff?'

  'Principally, yes.'

  Pilgrim's fingers still rasped against his beard. 'That's what throws me, Horace. Somebody told me once you're a downy old bird - and you are! You're exactly that. Unsentimental, experienced, knowledgeable. Yet you're still hypnotized by that old man. Why?'

  Malory smiled. 'Because I knew him. Because I watched him work. Because he never in his life wasted a ha'penny. Because I know that an arrangement such as this one to pay an annual fifty thousand would never have been made except under the most extreme pressure and would have ended the moment an ending became possible. Yet it had already been paid for sixteen years when Sir Basil died. I promise you this, Laurence: there would not have been a day during those years when he did not give intense thought to the means of ending the payments. Since he didn't end them, it can only be because he couldn't.'

  'So you're saying we have no alternative but to follow Dikeston's trail?'

  'Pretty well that."

  'No matter where it leads or what it costs?'

  Malory nodded. 'On my say-so, perhaps? Old Malory must be crackers, you can say, but he's insisting.' He watched Pilgrim with some anxiety. Understanding of Pilgrim's reasoning had come to him, quite suddenly, as often happened while they talked. Pilgrim was Hungarian by birth, a child refugee in 1956, had been a brilliant student in America, had had a brilliant career very young on Wall Street in investment banking, and was head now of an important international house. But terrified of looking a fool. That was the clue of it.

  'If it goes wrong, Laurence, you can blame me entirely,' Malory went on. 'And I'll keep you informed all along the line. That way, well, I stay right out of your way, don't I? And I'm not exactly known for throwing money about, would you say?'

  Pilgrim frowned. 'Give me one more reason. If I'm not convinced I don't sleep nights.'

  'All right. How do you know that Hillyard, Cleef
was Zaharoff's bank?'

  'How? You told me, I guess.'

  Malory said, 'And Graves knows too, now. But there aren't six people in the City with that knowledge, now or any other time. Sir Basil moved very quietly.'

  'So?'

  'How did this man Dikeston know?'

  'So many years,' Pilgrim said. 'I feel as though it's archaeology I'm paying for.'

  'Let's hope,' Malory offered, 'That we can keep the mummy's curse safely in its tomb.'

  'Go ahead. Feel free. Use Graves, any time you want him.'

  'I'll remember. Thank you, Laurence.'

  Malory pottered back, satisfied at getting his own way, but feeling the burden of concern heavier on his shoulders. In his own room, where many times in making a decision he had said, 'What would you have done?' to the lurking shade of Basil Zaharoff, he now addressed the ghost another question. 'Why the payments?' Malory said aloud. 'Why?'

  The shade gave no answer. It never did.

  But as always, other voices clamoured. Busy departments at Hillyard, Cleef, accustomed to instant attention from the Partners, found that Malory in particular seemed distracted. Even to see him was difficult.

  A partner named Huntly, whose present task it was to advise one seed and fertilizer corporation in its struggle to take over another - a matter of seven or eight million pounds was involved - threw customary deference out of the window, stormed past Mrs Frobisher's defensive protests, and barged into Malory's sanctum with a cry of, 'It's absolutely vital, Sir Horace!'

  Malory gave him a longish look, but otherwise offered no comment. 'Sit down, Fergus.'

  Huntly sat. He was in his early forties, with aristocratic if impoverished Scottish connections and a reputation for dourness. But he burst out: 'The offer will have to be increased again!'

  'Then increase it,' Malory said. Huntly gaped at him. 'By how much?' Malory was renowned for fighting his takeover battles halfpenny by halfpenny.

  'By what's necessary, for heaven's sake!' Then Malory abruptly took another tack. 'Fergus, do you do crossword puzzles?'

  'Now and then, yes.'

  'Then tell me what you make of this.' Malory reached for a slip of paper and read: 'In a cavity in The House of Four Forks, a mile from the meridian.'

  'How many letters?' Huntly asked automatically, just as Mrs Frobisher opened the door to admit Graves.

  'It is a clue, Fergus, but not to a crossword puzzle. Any ideas?'

  'No. Can I think about it?' Huntly rose at Malory's nod. 'And I am to increase the bid price as I think necessary?'

  Malory nodded.

  At the door Huntly turned. 'The meridian has to be Greenwich, of course, house must be there, or in Black-heath. I'd get Mrs Frobisher to ask the local house agents.'

  Malory turned to Graves. 'Better if you do it. Find me The House of Four Forks.'

  With both men gone, Malory sat back in his chair. He could now pursue other thoughts along other paths. Who, exactly, had this fellow Dikeston been? And that Russian name - Yakovlev was it? - perhaps some trace of it existed somewhere. Who might know? The essence of banking, Horace Malory had always insisted to his juniors, lay in knowing how to find out that which you did not already know. He made two telephone calls: one to a retired admiral who held a couple of minor directorships under the Hillyard, Cleef umbrella; the second to the master of an Oxford College, who was a distant cousin of his wife's.

  As Graves's taxi crawled along a crowded Old Kent Road, Fergus Huntly was instructing his own secretary to hawk the clue around the company finance department. Prize for the solution: a bottle of whisky.

  The bottle was claimed within minutes by an infuriatingly smug young man named Nayland who grinned his way to Huntly's desk and said 'It's really just another advantage of Oxford, you know. We're talking derivations, of course. This one would be from the Latin quadrifurcus, which means four-forked, and became in Middle English car-fouk. If I may write it down for you?'

  'Please do.'

  'Carfouk - like that!' said Nayland. 'But the word had to undergo further metamorphosis into.. . .'He paused like a conjuror.

  'Into?' said Huntly with reluctance.

  'Carfax.'

  'Carfax? That's the place in the centre of . . .'

  Nayland grinned again and nodded. 'Centre of Oxford, you were about to say.'

  With a sense of relief, Huntly telephoned Malory and then retuned his attention to his fertilizer companies. 'Tell Mr Graves, when he telephones,' Malory told Mrs Frobisher, 'that he's looking for a house called Carfax.'

  Now for a while, all the enquiries began to inch forward. A history fellow from Oxford telephoned Malory on the instructions of the Master of his College, to offer to Hill-yard, Cleef his expert knowledge of the Russian Revolution - in which, as it later turned out, Yakovlev had played no part. The tame admiral, having consulted that fat rump of the old Admiralty bureaucracy surviving now within the Ministry of Defence, called to report that Admiralty Records pertaining to Lt-Cdr. Henry George Dikeston stopped abruptly with an entry in 1918 which read 'seconded to special duties.' Beyond that entry the file was blank.

  In an hour Jacques Graves stood with one foot on either side of a narrow strip of steel embedded immovably in stone, thus straddling the Greenwich meridian. One foot, his left as it happened, stood in the Eastern hemisphere and the other, in the Western. The thought gave him obscure pleasure, which disappeared at once when a schoolboy took his place, yelling the same thought aloud. Graves coloured a little and thought -

  Carfax. And one mile from here.

  Up or down? Greenwich lay below him, with Wren's superb buildings grey-white in the noon light. Up the hill lay Blackheath.

  For no good reason he walked down, and failed to find a convenient house agent. A policeman advised him to try Blackheath. 'Top of the hill, sir, then across the grass. That's where they are, sir. Where the money is.'

  Prosperity there certainly seemed to be, Graves thought as he walked up the stiff hill of the park and out on to the Heath. This was spick-and-span suburbia: old houses expensively restored, well-dressed young women walking with children on the grass. Everything tarted-up. Boutiques with canopies, an old Bentley car, driven by a boy in his early twenties.

  Finally: a house agent's premises.

  A variety of experiences that afternoon convinced him that the English were ill-served by their house agents. One fat young man said disagreeably through a haze of beer fumes that if Graves were not interested in buying property he shouldn't be wasting time in the place. Outside the premises Graves stood still for a moment waiting for the red mist of fury to clear. When it did, he found he was looking at a poster. 'Protect your environment,' it read, 'by joining the Georgian Society.'

  There was a telephone number. When he called, a steely female voice answered. The lady was, she said, Jessica Drummond, honorary secretary of the Society. Yes, he could call to see her that very afternoon - if he was quick about it.

  She lived in a terrace just beyond the railway station. A fat cat dozed upon the-bonnet of a car in the driveway. When Graves pressed the bell, the door was opened on the instant by a lady in a blue-and-white check skirt, white blouse, and blue cardigan. She had grey hair, and grey rims to her bifocals. She would be, he thought, about sixty-five.

  'Mrs Drummond?'

  'Miss Drummond. You telephoned about the Georgian Society?'

  'I did.'

  'Then come in. I haven't much time.' She marched him into an over-furnished sitting-room, pointed to a chair and said, 'You're resident, or new to the district, or what?'

  He smiled. 'Well, neither of those.'

  He took a visiting card from the pocket of his waistcoat and handed it to her. Miss Drummond pronounced his name aloud, with precision and in French. 'Oh, and you're a banker, Mr Graves? How may I help you?'

  'It's an odd little matter,' Jacques Graves said, 'concerning a client of ours, very long-standing, but just a little, well - eccentric. It was a habit of his to set us little pu
zzles concerning his instructions.'

  Miss Drummond looked disapproving. 'Rather foolish, surely. Was there not a danger of misunderstanding?'

  Graves waved a hand deprecatingly. 'There was, but these things go on. However, unfortunately the client has died and left us an unsolved puzzle. Part of it may, we think, concern a house in this area.'

  'Oh, really? How exciting!'

  'Miss Drummond, do the words Four Forks mean anything to you?'

  'Four forks, did you say?' He nodded. 'No, nothing. Four forks, how very odd!'

  'What about Carfax?'

  'Oh yes.'

  'It does?'

  'Oh certainly.'

  'What does it mean?'

  'Well, Carfax House, of course.'

  Graves smiled at her. 'Here in Blackheath?'

  'Not a quarter of a mile from this very spot!'

  'That's convenient, Miss Drummond. Can you tell me anything about the place?'

  'Oh, it's such a good thing you came to me. I mean, it hasn't been known by that name for years.' She was looking across at him, her face full of a rather girlish enthusiasm. Then suddenly her expression changed. Money, he knew it: T, er, suppose this is really quite important, is it, Mr Graves?'

  'Hardly that, Miss Drummond. It's just to tidy things up.'

  'Oh yes, but you're a frightfully well-known banking house, are you not - like Rothschild's?'

  'Well, not exactly like -'

  'And the Georgian Society is always chronically short of funds, d'you see. I mean, all the people who live in Blackheath, they love it, of course, but they're all mean and they won't give, and there's so much for the Society to do, and it's all so expensive nowadays. Even stamps, you know.' By now, she was looking at him implacably.

  'Well, I'm sure a donation could be -'

  'I was thinking,' said Miss Drummond, 'of five hundred guineas.'

  'You were what?’

  'Five hundred, I thought.' She gave an unlikely giggle.

  ‘Only the other day we had a bill for that very sum from a firm of solicitors, and they'd done almost nothing, I assure you. When I protested they said we must pay for their knowledge. So I thought to myself, Mr Graves is wearing a beautiful suit, His shirt is from Jermyn Street and his shoes are hand-lasted - you can always tell, can't you? - and he must be really quite an important man. So, I thought -' she giggled once more, - 'that I could be like those solicitors and sell my knowledge.'