The Marx Sisters

23

The next morning Brock received a call from Judith Naismith, who wanted to meet him. He said that he and Kathy would come to her hotel room at 10. Just as they were about to leave, a transatlantic call came through.

‘It turned out our Search Committee had actually considered Judith Naismith, David, so I have some information on her.’

‘Perfect timing, Nigel. Let’s have it.’

‘She got off to a very strong start at Princeton when she arrived here, mostly developing the areas she worked on for her Cambridge doctorate-a study of nineteenth-century women who had contributed to the development of economic theory. Her first five years-that’s ’77 to ’82-she had a dozen strong papers published in refereed journals, about the same number of conference papers, and a book. She was highly regarded, went on tenure track in ’80 and got tenure in ’83. Then things started to dry up. There’s been very little publication since, and the word is she’s lost her way. The advice of referees to our committee was that she was living on that early reputation. There was also a bit of scandal a couple of years ago about an affair with a student who took an overdose.

‘So, one way or another our people decided not to take it any further. I understand, though, that she has recently been applying for big funding from foundations-well, big for historians, anyway, six figures-but I don’t know what for exactly. So maybe she has some new project on the blocks. That’s about it.’

‘That’s terrific, Nigel. Most obliged. Fills us in nicely.’

‘Oh, by the way, that student who OD’d was a girl.’

Judith seemed slightly flustered when she opened the door to them. ‘You’re early,’ she said. The bed was unmade and articles of clothing scattered across the floor. ‘Would you mind sitting over there by the window? I’ll be a sec.’

They sat together on a grey settee and looked at the tastefully vapid lithographs in gold frames bolted to the wall, while Judith rapidly swept some order into the other end of the room. Finally she came over and sat in an armchair facing them. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and took a deep breath.

‘This is very difficult for me,’ she began.

‘I understand,’ Brock said. ‘You’ve talked things over with your friend?’

‘No. It’s not that.’ She frowned and flicked the ashless cigarette impatiently in the direction of the glass table. ‘You probably passed her in the corridor just now.’ She shrugged. ‘She was splitting up with her husband, anyway.

‘Look, supposing… supposing you had some case where there were industrial secrets involved. Something like that. You could understand, couldn’t you, how difficult it might be for someone involved to talk about it, without giving out information that might find its way to a competitor?

‘In a way, for me, source materials are a bit like that. I know a professor over here, an economic historian, who was walking home one afternoon thirty years ago, and he passed a site in South London where they were demolishing old buildings. He noticed a pile of old books scattered about on the floor of a half-demolished building and went in to investigate. They turned out to be the complete account books for the building company which had had its offices there for an unbroken period of a hundred and ten years. That find totally changed his life.’

She stared intently at them, willing them to understand.

‘His whole subsequent academic reputation and career grew out of his work on the nineteenth-century economy of South London based on the interpretations and computer analyses of the figures contained in those ledgers. They were his private gold mine, which he spent the rest of his life excavating. If somebody else had noticed them first, and another historian had got hold of them, he might now be just another embittered lecturer in a minor department, instead of the internationally revered father of studies in the economy of Victorian cities.’

‘And you’ve found something similar here?’ Brock asked.

‘Maybe. I’m not sure. If… if I tell you about it, is there any way I can guarantee it won’t get passed on…?’

‘To one of your academic competitors? Dr Naismith, if your information is relevant to this murder investigation, there’s no way you are going to be able to keep it to yourself.’

She nodded, took another shallow drag on the cigarette and flicked it.

‘It began with that letter that Bob Jones found.’

‘We were beginning to doubt its existence when it couldn’t be found in his flat.’

‘Oh, it existed, all right. I saw it. The mystifying thing is what it was doing there. You have to understand that when Marx died, all his papers and books were gathered together, and carefully preserved. They called the complete collection the Nachlass- you know, the Estate , almost like the shroud, or the grail, or the true cross or whatever. It was in the care of Engels at first, who continued working on his friend’s papers and preparing the second and third volumes of Das Kapital for publication in the period up until he died in 1895, twelve years after Marx. Now Engels gathered together the correspondence he had had with Marx over forty years, and, so we’re told, preserved all but a few excessively intimate letters from his friend. They take up nine volumes, each about four or five hundred pages, in the collected edition of Marx and Engels’ works.

‘How then had this one solitary letter gone astray? And was it in fact solitary? At first I thought it an amusing puzzle, but when we met Meredith and she showed me the books in Eleanor’s bookcase, I began to take it seriously. There were maybe ten or a dozen books that really interested me-I could give you most of their titles. The thing about them was that they all seemed to have belonged to Eleanor Marx, the youngest of Marx’s children, and his favourite. I am very interested in her. She was a significant figure in the development of socialism at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as being important for the work she did on her father’s manuscripts. Some of the books were hers, inscribed with her name, and some had been given her by her father with handwritten dedications from him to “Tussy”, the pet name he gave her.

‘I was intrigued by how these could have come into the possession of Eleanor Harper, who not only had the same first name as Eleanor Marx, and actually looked rather like her, but also had a picture of Eleanor Marx hanging in her living room.’

‘Her great-aunt,’ Kathy said.

‘That’s right. It took me some time to work it out, because the connection wasn’t through any of Marx’s six legitimate children. But in 1850 the Marxes’ maid, Helene Demuth, whom they called “Lenchen”, or sometimes “Nimm”, had a baby boy, Frederick Demuth, who was assumed at the time to be Friedrich Engels’ illegitimate son.’

‘Yes, he was born in Jerusalem Lane,’ Kathy said, recalling the account which Mr Hepple the solicitor had given of the history of the Lane.

Judith Naismith stared at her, astounded, ‘You know, then?’

‘Not everything,’ Brock interjected. ‘Please, go on.’

‘Well, the baby wasn’t brought up in the Marx household, and he became a manual labourer when he grew up. But just before Engels died, he revealed that Marx had been the father of the child, not himself. Eleanor was shocked that her beloved father could have first deceived her mother and then abandoned the child, but she got over it and became quite attached to her half-brother, and helped him in various ways before she died in 1898.

‘The year before that, Frederick Demuth married a young woman, Rebecca Jacobs, who was a friend and acolyte of Eleanor’s. They had a daughter, Mary, who married one George Harper, and they had three daughters, Meredith, Eleanor and Peg.’

‘So they were the great-granddaughters of Karl Marx,’ Kathy said.

‘Yes. Even so, it was puzzling that they should have inherited books and papers from Eleanor Marx. She didn’t have any children of her own, but still, there were others to whom she would have been more likely to have given things like that than to the labourer Frederick-her sister Laura, for instance. It was the other papers which Meredith gave me that made me begin to suspect the reason.’

Judith got abruptly to her feet and lit another cigarette. She strode over to the window and stood for a moment, arms folded, exhaling smoke. They waited, and after a while she said, without looking back, ‘Would you like a coffee or something? I wouldn’t mind one. There’s a kettle and cups over there.’

She made no move, and Kathy said to Brock, ‘Shall I?’

‘Would you mind, love?’ Judith said from the window, still not turning round.

Kathy glared at her back and got up. No one spoke until she returned to the glass table with three cups of black coffee, together with some small tubs of long-life milk and packets of sugar. Judith then sat down again and continued her account.

‘One of the pieces of paper Meredith gave me was another letter, this time from Engels to Marx, and dated a couple of years after the first one. The thing it had in common with the first was that it also mentioned the fourth and final volume of Das Kapital, and referred to it as das Endziel, that is, the final “aim” or “goal”. I thought at first that this was a term which Engels was using to describe the last volume. I couldn’t recall the word being used before at all. But then I looked at the second piece of paper that Meredith had given me. It was a page of a manuscript handwritten in Marx’s usual chaotic script, with corrections and insertions, like the draft of an essay. Written across the top, in a different script which I later identified as Tussy’s, was a message which read, “To my dearest Rebecca, this is our true Endziel. Treasure it. E.M.”

‘It was dated 31 March 1898-the day Tussy died.’

Kathy and Brock waited, still uncertain where all this was leading, while she lit another cigarette from the stub of the last.

‘You have to understand the circumstances then,’ Judith went on. ‘When Marx died, there was great concern and rivalry between the various socialist factions about his Nachlass, so much so that the German Social Democratic Party actually planted first a housekeeper, Louise Kautsky, and then a doctor, Ludwig Freyberger, in Engels’ household in order to make sure that when Engels died, everything would come to the German Party. The year before he died, Eleanor discovered that they had persuaded him to change his will so that the German Party would inherit all his books, manuscripts and letters, including all of Marx’s own books which Eleanor had given to Engels when her father died to help him with his work. Tussy was furious and had a terrible row with him, which eventually came to a head on Christmas Day 1894, when Engels promised to leave manuscripts in Marx’s handwriting to her, along with family letters.

‘But Tussy was still terrified that the Freybergers-the two spies had married by this stage-would persuade him to change his mind, or would appropriate manuscripts in his possession. They tried to prevent her having access to Engels’ house, and her suspicions were further heightened when there was an announcement in the paper of the German Party, Vorwarts, that volume four of Das Kapital, which she was actually working on, would not be issued. She even begged Engels to allow her to copy her father’s rough draft of volume four herself, or with her sister Laura, in order that it not be lost before she had completed the task of preparing it for a publisher.

‘Eventually it was published, after Eleanor was dead, under the title Theorien uber Mehrwert, but curiously, before she died, Tussy described it in a letter as being “ not in the ordinary sense the fourth volume, being only certain notes which the editor has to work from”. In other words it was very far from being the Endziel, or “the final volume which will assure our immortality and make all our fortunes”, as Marx wrote in that first letter in 1867.

‘I began to wonder if Tussy had herself appropriated documents from Engels’ house in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Freybergers-her father’s manuscript of the true Endziel, perhaps, and those letters from his correspondence with Engels which referred explicitly to it.’

Judith was talking now with total absorption, as if she were still struggling with the enormity of the theories which had grown in her brain.

‘It sounds absurd, doesn’t it-a whole book, the final and most important book written by the most influential thinker of our age, totally lost, its very existence unsuspected, lying in an attic in Jerusalem Lane.

‘I wondered if Tussy had been behind what had always seemed the unlikely match between her dedicated student Rebecca, a committed socialist and intellectual, and her half-brother Frederick-for this purpose, to provide a safe future home for the precious material. Frederick after all was twenty-five years older than Rebecca, and had been married to a woman who had left him years previously before Tussy took him under her wing, and got him to formalize his separation from that first wife in a divorce. At any rate that does seem to have been the route which the documents Meredith showed me had taken, from Tussy to Rebecca, and from her to her daughter Mary, and then to Mary’s daughters Meredith, Peg and Eleanor, each time passed on, a private Nachlass, down the female line of the family.’

She shrugged. ‘I guess I maybe got carried away. After all, there really was very little evidence for the existence of the Endziel I imagined. As you suspected, I did try to contact Eleanor and Peg after that abortive visit to Meredith. I phoned them from the States, and I came over again, around Christmas time, and tried to get them to talk to me about it. Actually they got quite short with me. I can’t blame them really. I guess I was pestering them. They said they knew nothing about further documents, and kind of suggested that I’d put pressure on Meredith to steal Eleanor’s books to sell to me, which wasn’t true.’

‘Did you come over this time to try to speak to them again?’

‘No, I’d more or less given up on them. I did try to call on them a couple of times at the beginning of the week, but they wouldn’t see me. But a few months ago I got a phone call from a book dealer in London, who said that the books Meredith had shown me had come into his possession, and were now for sale. I assumed Eleanor must have sold them, and I said yes, I wanted first refusal. He had a much more realistic idea of their worth, and was asking five thousand each. That’s pounds, not dollars. He sent me photocopies of the flyleaf of each book, with the handwritten inscriptions, and I set about trying to raise some funds in the States to buy the collection.’

‘Who did he tell you he was?’

‘He didn’t, and he said I couldn’t contact him, and this really presented a problem for me. You see, the chain from Marx forward to the present had been broken. I mean I could readily accept that an old inscribed book on the shelf of Karl Marx’s great-granddaughter would be genuine, but how could I be sure the same would be true of a book sold to me by a mysterious dealer who wouldn’t identify himself? The photocopies did look identical to those I’d seen in Eleanor’s room that day, but for all I knew he might have had half a dozen versions forged into ordinary copies of those books, which would be worth only a few hundred dollars, and be selling them to universities around the world. Ever since the Hitler Diaries fiasco we’ve all been paranoid.

‘The only way I could see of testing him was to tell him something about the manuscript of which Meredith had given me that first page. So the next time he called me I said that that was what I was really interested in, and if it was what I expected, it would be worth hundreds of thousands to my research sponsors. But I didn’t mention the word Endziel, or my theory about the fourth volume of Das Kapital , and I could see no way that anyone could work that out in order to forge something.

‘We arranged that I would come over to London this week to see the books and anything else he might have been able to get hold of, and he would contact me here at the Connaught. He never did, but when I saw a newspaper on Thursday saying that the second sister had been murdered, I took fright and booked out on the next available flight.’

‘You assumed he would have been responsible?’

‘Well, it was one hell of a coincidence if he wasn’t.’

‘If what you say is true, Dr Naismith, and the manuscript of your fourth volume does exist, and your mystery dealer doesn’t have it, then the remaining sister, Peg Blythe, is still very much at risk.’

‘Yes. I wish I could say that that was my reason for telling you all this now.’

‘But instead you just wanted to go home.’

‘Actually, no.’ She looked up at Brock defiantly. ‘The reason is that I realized that if the dealer, or anybody else for that matter, ever does get their hands on the manuscript, the thing that’s going to prove its provenance-its unbroken line back to Karl Marx-is your investigation. You may think that you’re trying to find a murderer, Chief Inspector, but to my mind you’re doing something much more important. You may find Karl Marx’s Endziel, and when you do, I’d like to be around.’