Rent A Lily of the Field

Synopsis

The book opens with a prologue set in a London park in 1948: two men named Viktor and Andre Skolnik are talking. Viktor wishes to be released from his service to the Communist party. Andre says this is impossible.

Back in 1934, in Vienna, 10 year-old Meret Voytek, daughter of a Hungarian theatre director, becomes a pupil of esteemed musician Professor Viktor Rosen, a Jew in exile from Germany. He becomes her mentor, educating her in politics and training her to be a concert-worthy cellist. In November 1937, aware that the Nazis are advancing, Rosen tells Meret he must leave Vienna for London. When Vienna quietly comes under Nazi rule, Meret witnesses the repercussions for the city's Jews, but when her orchestra becomes a division of the Hitler Youth, she complies and wears the uniform.

It is June 1940 and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist, has been interned in a camp on the Isle of Man, where other detainees include Rosen and an Englishman of Russian birth, Rod Troy. Szabo is transported to Canada and once there is contacted by the US government: they want him for the atomic program. He joins the team assembled by Leo Szilard, a physicist he knew in England, and begins a relationship with Zette Borg, another colleague. Over the years their work progresses.

In 1944, still in Vienna, Meret is taken prisoner when she is found in the company of a fellow musician who is a resistance fighter. She is taken to Auschwitz but is saved from death by an old friend, Magda Ewald, a fellow prisoner who says the concentration camp orchestra needs a cellist. When her cello arrives at the camp from her house in Vienna, she realizes her parents have been killed. As the Russians advance in 1945, Auschwitz is abandoned and Meret and Magda are found by a Russian commander, Major Larissa Tosca, who coerces Meret into becoming a Russian spy.

Szabo and his colleagues watch the first atomic bomb test in a desert in New Mexico. He tells Zette about the petition Leo's team has signed asking the government never to use the bomb.

Meret is transferred, via Poland and Vienna, to Paris where she is in the charge of a Russian artist - and spy - named Serge. She meets a Frenchman she knew from Auschwitz but he has not recovered and on a subsequent meeting commits suicide in front of her. Finally she journeys to London to meet Rosen, who previously has begun giving piano lessons to Rod Troy's younger brother, one Frederick Troy, a Scotland Yard detective.

Time moves forward to 1948 and the prologue is repeated: the man named Viktor is Rosen; he has been a Communist spy since 1918.

Troy is called to investigate the death of Andre Skolnik., whom Troy's colleague Fish Wally suspects was a Russian agent. Wally' suspicions are confirmed when Troy is approached by Milos Danko, a Czechoslovakian agent enquiring about Skolnik's death. MI5 want to close the case, but Troy is spurred on by the discovery that the gun used to shoot Skolnik once belonged to a Russian Princess. While holidaying with Anna, a love-interest, Troy gets a sudden phone call: Viktor Rosen has been found shot in his apartment. Troy is hesitant to accept the verdict of suicide. After Rod tells him of Rosen's affair with Meret, he interviews her, beginning a tentative friendship. Meanwhile, it is in the newspapers that Szabo has admitted passing information on the atomic bomb to the Russians.

Troy's colleague Kolankiewicz turns up a new clue linking the two deaths: Rosen's hip flask bears Skolnik's prints. When Troy hears a recording of Meret and Rosen playing on the radio, he discovers a code in their alterations to the piece. As he begins to piece everything together, he is visited again by Danko, seeking vengeance for Skolnik's death, and is forced to kill him and his henchmen in self-defence. Troy goes to meet Meret, who has also been visited by the Czechs, and confronts her about spying for the Russians. She admits everything, including that she killed Skolnik and outed Szabo in an attempt to allow her and Viktor to cut their ties. Meret leaves for Russia where she believes her high profile will keep her safe once she is publicly denounced and can no longer be used as a spy. She leaves Troy with a letter to give to the British press, along with the pawn ticket for her precious cello.

The newspapers carry the story of Meret and Rosen being spies, and Meret seems to have escaped in time. The book ends with two letters sent by Szabo from prison, one begging understanding for his actions, the other to Meret, who is revealed to be his cousin, promising that they will one day be free.

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