Thirty-three
FOR PETER, it wasn’t a week in this flat with Fritz and Yoska, it was a ditch-digger’s lifetime. It wasn’t refuge, it was incarceration. It was being locked inside a freight wagon on a train running night and day without ever pulling into a station. To his ears, their inane discussions weren’t made of words; the sounds coming from their mouths were monotonous metallic hiccoughs of wheels grinding over tired rails, bearing him down tracks that stretched away into the distance, without end. Peter lifted his head out of his hands. He caught Yoska’s answer to Fritz’s question (whatever it was), a sleepy lob aimed to antagonize.
“…then you don’t have to. I can go to the dog fights by myself. Go to Pitsea and rest my nerves, which is what you need to do.”
The blockheaded idea thudded home. Mouth gone slack, Fritz gave him a look of frozen disbelief. Then he said, “How much rest do you get, please, watching two poor animals tear each other to bloody pieces?”
“It’s entertainment.”
“Blood and fur all over the floor. Poor dogs yelping in pain. Idiot bastards betting money on which pup dies! Very entertaining and relaxing for you, Yoska. Why dogs, anyway? Why not orphans?”
“You like horse racing.”
“So what?”
“Horses are animals. So are dogs. Dog fighting is a sport.”
“Dog racing is a sport. At a horse race I don’t bet on which one’s going to get whipped to death by the jockey. Or,” Fritz added, “get his brains smashed out by another horse.”
“Sometimes a horse dies.”
“By accident!”
“In a steeplechase,” Yoska said. “They make the horses jump. I’ve seen it. It’s torture of horses.”
“You’ve never been to a steeplechase. Neither have I. If I haven’t, then, for sure, you haven’t.”
“In Scotland.”
“When were you one day in Scotland?”
“Tell me where it was, then.”
“It wasn’t any steeplechase. For sure, my friend.”
Yoska conceded nothing. “Anyway,” a fresh lob, “we can always come back to Betsy’s. No reason to stay in Pitsea.”
“Try not to talk like an idiot. It makes me nervous.”
“My opinion’s different. Does that mean I’m an idiot? No. It doesn’t. So forget I said anything.”
“I wish I could.” Followed by three seconds of silence. Fol lowed by Fritz standing up to shout at Yoska, “You can’t leave here!”
Yoska slowly lifted his heavy shoulders, let them drop again and said to Peter, “What do you think?”
“Me?” Peter replied.
“Did you hear what we were talking about?”
Peter nodded. “Every word.”
“All right,” Yoska said behind a shrug of his eyebrows. “In your opinion, is dog fighting a sport?”
Doom gathered in a single cloud directly above him as Peter lowered his head into his hands again and thought, Either they’ll murder each other or do something to get all three of us killed. What saved him from turning his groan into an articulate answer was Betsy Gershon’s coded knock—three quick, three quick. She arrived home with food, drink, and newspapers, and on her skin the temperature and smell of the street.
“I saw him,” she said. “It’s good.”
“How? In particular?” Peter said.
Yoska’s chief concern was Betsy’s straw bag. “Did you get a piece of whitefish?”
“Underneath the potatoes,” she directed him. “Fishmonger’s was the first place I went.”
“What are the police doing?” Fritz asked her.
“Betsy”—Peter grabbed her arm—“how is it good?”
Betsy pulled away and threw up her arms in self-defense against the questions from all sides. “You can read everything, so stop asking me. They put in something about it.” She dropped a copy of the Evening News on the table.
“Three men charged,” Peter read. “Tobacconist identified aliens as armed fugitives…”
“Who’s the tobacconist?” Fritz leaned in to see the headline.
“Somebody else you’re going to mark for death?” Peter teased him, without a smile.
“They charged them? How many?” Yoska said.
Peter read the report to himself. “It’s more than a week old, this paper.”
“I took it from the fishmonger before he wrapped Yoska’s whitefish with it,” Betsy said.
The questions, frets, complaints came pelting in on her again.
From Fritz: “Every day we ask you.”
From Yoska: “You can’t go to the corner and buy today’s newspaper?”
Her explanation was simple: “You know I don’t read it.”
From Peter: “You don’t have to read it, just bring it here.”
From Fritz: “How else do we know what’s going on?”
“I hear the news from people,” she said. “They know more than what’s in the papers.”
“Jacob’s charged with murder. Yourka also with murder,” Peter read. “Nina, conspiracy. Luba, too. And Rosie.” He read the single column twice over, the almost mocking descriptions of the prisoners, their shabby clothes and dirty, unkempt hair, their ignorance of English court proceedings. “Nothing about Rivka.”
“They’re still looking for her.” Fritz nudged Peter. “They think she’s with us.”
“Good thing you’re going, then. They won’t come here for you.” Betsy squeezed Yoska’s arm, then quickly let go. “He’s coming tomorrow. His cousin has a room.”
“It won’t be for free,” Yoska said.
“Extortion,” Fritz called it. “Did Perelman say how much?”
“Twenty pounds.”
“Extortion,” Peter calmly agreed.
“How much do you have, Betsy?” Yoska went to the sugar bowl on the kitchen shelf. “What can you give me?”
She grabbed the bowl and the coins Yoska took. “My money got spent on your whitefish!”
“We can’t go together.” Possibilities and risks were braiding into a plan as Fritz spoke. “One at a time.”
Yoska protested by slumping back onto the sofa. “Five minutes ago you said we can’t leave here at all. Why can’t we go to Pitsea, then? Nobody’s looking for us there.”
Fritz had to puncture the hope. “No, only at every train station.”
“Too bad we can’t take a train to America.”
“Australia’s better.”
“No.”
“It’s cleaner.”
“You can’t take a train to Australia, either,” Yoska argued. “You have to go on a boat.”
“That’s how to get to America. By boat.”
“But you got tickets to Australia.”
Still inside this freight wagon, skull rattling on this doom-bound train. Where is the necessity here? In three or one? Stand with Fritz and Yoska and face what’s coming, or leave them to it? With no credo to anchor him and separate a necessity from an opportunity, Peter carried on an imaginary conversation with his dead friend Karl—a familiar debate. The subject, Peter supposed all along, was political, fundamental to why they fought to tear down empires. Though the truth of it glistened now like a crystal in the sand: not political, no—sentimental. What is the necessity here? What’s necessary, Peter, is the good we do together, because we are together. A man who fights for himself is an exile. He exiles himself. No connections, no mutual joys or any chance of freeing himself from the pain of life by easing another’s pain. Providing. Defending. A name in common. We fight to be in each other’s care. How else does a man survive? Why should he?
Peter’s comrades in Sidney Street were in the grips of a debate that wasn’t so imaginary. “Ropes from a window in the back,” Yoska was proposing.
“With your rotten leg? And fat behind? Push you through a window, you’ll take the window with you.” Fritz went on, “That’s if they’re polite and they knock on the front door.”
“I’m not worried,” Yoska said. “We
can shoot our way out.”
THE ELONGATED, umbrella-shaped contraption sheathed in its waxy cloth cocoon and tenderly supported under the gent’s arm must have been his camera and wooden stand, though what use Betsy Gershon had for a photographer, her landlady couldn’t figure. She let him in at Betsy’s shouted request and studied his neatly tailored outfit, the Chester coat, the tweed leggings, and kept her eye on him until he trundled himself and his photographic paraphernalia around the first-floor landing.
Another flight up, at the second-floor landing, where Fritz and Yoska waited for him, Charles Perelman arrived out of breath. “Salvation,” he coughed, patting his chest.
“He’s going to take our photo,” Yoska joked. “For the wanted posters.”
Fritz wasn’t in a joking mood. “You didn’t say that. Don’t give us bad luck.”
A limp wave from Perelman. “They already know how ugly you are.”
In the warm kitchen, Betsy poured boiling water from an iron kettle to make tea, set out plates of bread and jam. “It’s cold outside today,” she sympathized.
“Second day of the year. Colder than the first. It keeps on that way, you’ll see ig-a-loos in Commercial Road by February.” Perelman spread out in his chair. “No tea. Coffee. You have coffee?”
“Deduct it from the twenty pounds,” Peter said from the kitchen doorway.
Perelman welcomed the sight of him with a broad smile. “There you are. The Scarlet Pimpernel. Red, anyway.” No one laughed at the bon mot, so Perelman drably went on: “Twenty pounds isn’t a fortune, especially for what you’re getting.”
“In Dalston?” Fritz asked him.
“Fifteen minutes from here. It’s a back room. It belongs to my cousin.” He leaned back, made room for Yoska to pour coffee from the saucepan into the saucered cup in front of him. “Careful of the grounds. Some went in.” A magnanimous second thought. “Doesn’t matter.”
“For how long?” Yoska said.
“As long as you want it. Is money a problem?” A plea from Perelman, honesty for honesty.
“Ask Fritz,” Yoska replied.
Fritz flourished the quartet of five-pound notes without handing them over. “Your cousin. Does he know who he’s renting to?”
“To me. As far as he knows. Or cares. Are you worried about supplies? I’ll bring them to you.”
A proposition that jerked a laugh out of Yoska. “How much extra, you old gouger?”
“No delivery charge. Special arrangement for customers hiding from the police.”
“Comrade landlord,” delivered with a pat on Perelman’s shoulder.
“Incidentally, Yoska, I wouldn’t count on doing any more trade with your friend Beron.” Perelman had the floor. “Police found him in Clapham yesterday.”
“They lifted him?” Peter said, taking a chair at the table.
“Found him. On the Common, in the bushes,” each revelation accented with a dramatic widening of his eyes. “Somebody beat his head in. And gave him two handsome dueling scars.”
“Dueling scars. All right.” Yoska’s laugh was weaker now.
“Like holes in a violin.” Perelman’s finger sketched an S shape in the air. “One in each cheek.”
Fritz called it by name. “Spiccan.”
“Who says he was a spy?” Peter challenged Perelman. “Where did you hear it?”
“It’s all they’re talking about in the Warsaw. Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“What else are they saying? Are they talking about us?” Fritz was breathing hard, pacing out of the kitchen and back in.
“Sure,” Perelman said, relaxed, stretching his arms. “Nobody knows anything.”
Fritz stopped pacing. He kicked over a chair. “We’re not leaving here.”
Betsy rushed to the upended chair as if it were her child Fritz knocked over. “My furniture! Think about somebody else! You’re not staying here! None of you! No more, no more!”
“Apologize to her,” Yoska ordered.
“Her furniture? Her fucking chair?” Fritz stalked over to Betsy. “My life, you cow!”
Yoska fell forward, off balance on his bad leg, and crashed into Fritz with the force of his demand. “Shut your mouth. Apologize to her.”
“He’s crazy! Keep him off me!” Betsy shrank from Fritz’s outstretched hand. He held his Mauser in it.
“Nobody’s leaving,” Fritz said.
“Keep him away from me, Yoskele!” She raced for the sanctuary of the storeroom, Fritz behind her with his gun, Yoska behind him with his.
The tilt of Perelman’s head, into conspiracy, invited Peter to agree that the two of them were the only sane people in the house. “I can’t stay,” Peter whispered.
“You’re the one with enough brains to understand.” Another tilt of his head. “What will you do?”
Peter leaned away from him, saying, “Is anybody talking about Rivka at the Warsaw?”
“I know something about her.”
“Tell me.”
“She didn’t come home. She was in Houndsditch, wasn’t she?” An exaggerated frown. “I could’ve helped her. I got Max out, but…” Perelman barred his lips with his finger. Then another confidence: “Don’t worry about him. He’s safe. In France.”
“I don’t care about Max.”
Perelman held the silence between them to show he was reading the single thought in Peter’s mind. “I know where she is.”
“There’s nothing in the newspapers, the ones I’ve seen. Did they arrest her?”
“No. Not yet. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“Rivka doesn’t know the streets.” Peter’s hand went to his brow, as if shading his eyes from the light. “Or who she can trust.”
“That girl of yours is plenty smart. She wants me to find out where you are. If you’re all right. I can tell her. We have a way to pass messages to each other.”
“Where is she, Charles?”
The shouting between Fritz and Yoska, and Betsy’s wailing in the storeroom, had died down to a low rumble. On guard, Perelman listened for a second, then quickly said, “At the Pavilion Theatre.”
Perelman wore the veneer of a liar, a trickster. He might have been born with it. Like the oil coating of a duck’s feathers, it was the lubricant that allowed him to glide in and out of complications led lazily by the promise of whatever benefited Charles Perelman. Underneath this slippery veneer lay what? Motives more despicable than selfishness? Or far less…His thin covering of bravado, possessor of secret information, fixer, obscured a depth of sincerity. An old player’s last throw. Not if I have anything to say about it. The two possibilities melted one into the other during the long moment before Peter let out a breath and said, “I’m not staying with them.”
“Bravo,” Perelman said, a fatherly congratulation for the sensible, the moral, decision.
“Tonight. They fall asleep around midnight.”
“Judge for yourself. Stay away till twelve noon. I have to make arrangements with her. Can you manage not to get arrested for twelve hours?”
Betsy dragged in ahead of Fritz and Yoska, the same parade that had marched off ten minutes earlier. Both men had put up their guns, Yoska’s mustache was frothed in shaving cream, and Betsy, stripped of her skirt, blouse, and shoes, stood barefoot in her bloomers. Fritz, panicky and grave, dealt out the explanation. “We’re all staying.”
Perelman objected. “You can’t. My cousin’s room, Fritz. I made arrangements.”
“We’ve been here too long already,” Peter said, still a comrade in this.
Fritz turned on him. “I listened to you and let you bring Karl back to my flat! If you listened to me, we wouldn’t have this trouble!” His Mauser was unholstered now, pointed at Peter’s chest for emphasis.
“You’re losing the chance to move,” said Perelman. “It has to be soon.”
But Fritz tore off in a different direction. He grabbed an envelope out of his jacket pocket and closed Perelman’s hand around it. “You
don’t have to stay here. I want you to go and post this letter. Can you read the address?”
Perelman glanced at the envelope and tucked it inside his coat. “I don’t have to read anything. The clerk will tell me the postage and I’ll pay what he says for a stamp.”
“Betsy doesn’t want us in her house anymore,” Yoska said, with a throb of sympathy.
Fritz’s agitation was a windstorm that suddenly blew itself out. “Where’s the room?” He meant the question for Perelman but he asked it haplessly to the empty air.
“Fifteen minutes to walk there. Nelson Street,” Perelman said.
“Not until it’s dark outside. Five or six…” Fritz concen trated on the shifting uncertainties of those fifteen minutes of broken cover. “Not tonight. Tomorrow. Later. Nine or ten is better.” Other dangers reared in his mind. “Or tonight. One at a time. When everybody is off the streets.”
“I’m not going until you’re in there safe,” Yoska decided.
Agreeing, Fritz said, “We need a code.”
“Three knocks, then three again.”
“Who knocks? Yoska, you? On Nelson Street?” Fritz said. “What if they lifted me and it’s the bogies inside?”
“Nobody knows you’re going there!” The idea was an insult to Perelman. “Decide when you’re going. Or do you want me to bring the key here?”
“Three-knocks-three-knocks is Betsy. It’s confusing,” Yoska said. “Send somebody here to knock two-knocks-two-knocks if Fritz is there safe.”
Fritz looked at him. “Send who?”
“I don’t know. A boy. You can pay a boy.”
“What boy?”
“A boy, I don’t know, in the street. Give him a shilling and tell him to come and knock.”
“Are you crazy?” Scrawled in choking frustration across Fritz’s face was the flabbergasting insanity of plucking a stranger out of the street, a nipper to entrust with their secret whereabouts and to dispatch on an errand whose success or failure would mean the difference between getting out alive and hanging dead by the neck at the end of an English rope. “A shilling, Yoska? To knock on a door?”
The bickering went on. Behind his hand, Perelman whispered to Peter: “They won’t know what happened to you.”
WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS? People wonder it to themselves and out loud to each other, sometimes to the empty air. Bewildered. Rattled. Disgusted. Crossed. Charles Perelman shouted it at his wife when she told him the details of her first adultery: Deborah’s “young gentleman” in the manager’s office, a ram so good at ramming, in the storage cupboard, the nook under the stairs. Pleasure at the tip of her beckoning finger. What’s the meaning of this? The shameless “clean breast” (her pornographic mea culpa), not the fornication. It meant that a sunken truth about his marriage had breached the surface. Perelman’s life as Deborah’s husband lost its enchantment; they both shed the wormy delusion at its core; everybody knew where everybody stood, and so the family rubbed along together.
A Storm in the Blood Page 27