Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  Wilderness said nothing to this, waited while Spoleto waved for the check.

  “You see the guys at the centre table?” Spoleto said as he counted out dollars.

  “The one on the left’s George Plimpton. Edits the Paris Review. Guy next to him is Lee Strasberg, runs the Actors Studio, y’know . . . Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Eli Wallach. The guy next to him . . .”

  “Is Norman Mailer. Frank, do you honestly think I wouldn’t recognise Norman Mailer? His first novel came out while we were all in Berlin. I read it. Eddie Clark read it. Didn’t you read it?”

  “Nah. I don’t want to read about the war. I never wanted to read about the war. Hell, I didn’t even go to see South Pacific. I was probably the only guy in New York who didn’t. Look over to your right. See the big feller, lots of dark hair. That’s the Broadway producer Arthur Cantor, one of the big wheels on the Great White Way. And do you know the woman he’s with?”

  Cantor was with two women, one of whom he most certainly knew. But he sensed that Frank had not recognised her and was referring to the other.

  Wilderness thought her face more than vaguely familiar—hair up, glasses, next-to-no makeup, the sense of a beauty contrivedly off-duty—but he didn’t.

  “C’mon. I’ll introduce you. Arthur and I go way back.”

  Spoleto pushed back his chair and threaded his way through the tables.

  Cantor got a Frank back-slap that jerked the linguine off the end of his fork.

  “Arthur, long time no see.”

  Cantor looked as though it had not been long enough and he might just be able to do without Frank for a year or two more, but good manners got the better of him.

  “Hello Frank. You know Ingrid?”

  “I never had the chance.”

  “Ingrid, Frank Spoleto—one of Madison avenue’s shnorrers. Frank, Ingrid Bergman.”

  Bergman nodded, a soft-spoken, “a pleasure” on her lips, but she was looking at Wilderness.

  Spoleto slipped in quickly, “And my old English buddy, Joe Holderness.”

  She held out her hand for Wilderness to kiss. He was not one to resist the irresistible.

  “And I believe you’ve met . . .”

  The other woman cut Cantor off with “Clarissa Troy.”

  She too held out her hand, the kiss to the fingers claimed as a right, then she winked hammily at him. And still not a flicker of recognition from Frank.

  “We were just making plans for The Cherry Orchard,” Cantor resumed.

  “You own a cherry orchard? Jeez Artie, the things I don’t know about you.”

  “It’s a play, stupid. Clarissa’s translating Chekhov for us.”

  “Are you in New York for long, Mr. Holderness?” Bergman asked.

  She was looking right up into his eyes now. It was a moment Wilderness would have strung out for ever if he could.

  “Probably not. I’ll be at the Gramercy for a day or two. All rather depends on Frank.”

  Frank drowned out the moment.

  “Say, Arthur, when am I going to get tickets for one of your plays?”

  “When you pay for the last lot, Frank.”

  All this earned Cantor was a hearty guffaw from Spoleto. He was lucky, Wilderness thought, to be spared a second slap on the back.

  Outside, under the yellow awning, Spoleto said, “I wonder what got into him. Fuckin’ skinflint. He’s known as one of the wittiest guys in New York.”

  “Perhaps you cramped his style, Frank.”

  “And what the fuck’s a shn . . . shn . . . shnucker?”

  “Shnorrer. You amaze me sometimes. How can you live in this city, work with men like Steve and not know a little more Yiddish? It means cheapskate.”

  “Cheapskate? He called me a fuckin’ cheapskate?”

  “If the cap fits?”

  Spoleto was on the metal kerb of the sidewalk looking out for a downtown cab.

  “Let’s walk a while, Frank.”

  “Eh, what?”

  But as Wilderness led off down Second Avenue, he was bound to follow or lose him.

  He zigzagged, down a couple of blocks, over a couple of blocks to Lexington. He stood on the corner and waited while Frank caught up with him.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Joe. Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I haven’t marched like this since I got out of the army.”

  “When was that exactly, Frank? When did you leave the Company?”

  “Fifty-eight, about six weeks after we last met.”

  “Aha.”

  “What the fuck does ‘aha’ mean?”

  “Frank, what are you up to?”

  “I thought I was trying to offer you a job and buy you dinner.”

  “You could have bought me dinner two nights ago.”

  “I was busy.”

  “Bullshit. You left me to drift around New York. You left me to get to like New York, you wanted me to taste New York. And maybe I did get a taste for New York. The Bronx is up, but I skipped that. The name alone could put you off. The Battery’s down and the view’s great. I even rode in a hole in the ground. But that’s exactly what you did Frank—you sent me out on the town. Dancing with Sinatra and Gene Kelly. And yes, I got the taste for New York—so damn good I could lick it. Then you sent your secretary round to fuck me. You dangled temptation in front of me. If Manhattan wasn’t enough there was Dorothy, and if Dorothy was not enough, there was dinner at Elaine’s. Tell me Frank, did you call ahead and see who had booked? Would we have gone somewhere else if Mailer and Ingrid Bergman hadn’t been in tonight? Would we have gone somewhere where you could be certain I’d taste the high life, where I’d be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars and best-selling writers? Because that’s what you’ve been doing. You’ve been dangling New York in front of me. Like a reward. One great big temptation.”

  “Well . . . you never could resist temptation.”

  “I did Frank. I was polite to Dorothy, but I sent her packing.”

  “Dorothy wasn’t part of it. OK? Nothin’ to do with it. Manhattan, what you call the high life . . . sure. Why the fuck not? But Dorothy acted on her own. You must have said something to impress her. It wasn’t that damn painting in the lobby was it? Piece of fucking shit Nat Carver spent thousands of dollars of company money on. Only he and Dorothy ever liked it.”

  Wilderness said nothing to this.

  “Tempting you with a taste of the high life? Of course I am. I’m trying to get you to see what life can be like with a little folding green in your pants pocket. I want you to take the job, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I haven’t said no yet, Frank.”

  “And you haven’t said yes. Think about it, Joe. It’s a big opportunity. A really big one. Think big. Think back to Berlin. That day in the summer of ’47, when we sat round the table at the Paradise Club—the day you introduced me to Yuri—you, me, and Eddie . . . who was it said ‘we have to think bigger’? Sure as hell wasn’t me. You did think big, Joe, you did. How many times in ’48 did you tell me not to panic? To stick with it, to sell when I should sell and buy when I should buy. Joe, you had an unerring instinct for the right thing to do in a crisis. When the Russkis were bouncing us around like we were made of fuckin’ India rubber, closing this, closing that, printing money that fell apart in your fingers, trying to pay us in dogshit and sawdust, you stood your ground. Nothing intimidated you. You were the man. You were going places, the world was your fuckin’ oyster . . . you were the man . . . but Joe, don’t tell me that life since then has gone the way you wanted it . . . I’m the one with the fuckin’ Cadillac and an apartment on Park Avenue. I’m the one drivin’ the fuckin’ Cadillac!”

  Sheer bluster seemed to exhaust him for a moment. He drew breath and resumed in a softer tone.

  “You’re different. That’s undeniable. You’re not the Gorblimey kid I met fifteen years ago. There’s a sophistication about you that’s more than skin-deep. But . . . I know you’re not happy, you’re not satisfied, you’re not rich, you inch
along with a blue-collar pride in your own independence, when you know damn well that without your wife’s BBC salary you’d be broke, and without Alec Burne-Jones looking out for you at every step you’d have had no career in the service after Berlin. And you know Joe, the real question is what career might you have had if you’d just blown him out, blown them all out after ’48 and taken your chances. I don’t know and you don’t know. The only time in your life you ever played safe. The only time you didn’t take a chance. All I’m saying is take one now.”

  Wilderness looked around him for a moment, getting his bearings by the street signs, gazing up as he began to speak and then levelling to look straight at Frank.

  “The Gorblimey kid, eh? Frank, as you’re so fond of adopting slang, let me ask you this. When was the last time you stood at the corner of Seventy-First and Lexington and had somebody knock you on your tuchus?”

  “Joe . . . I’m not saying you blew it.”

  “Oh, but you are.”

  “OK. Maybe you blew it. Maybe you didn’t. But look at it this way . . . Steve and I are giving you what so few of us ever get in life. A second chance.”

  “A second chance?”

  “Don’t make it sound like I tossed you a turd. This is big money.”

  “So far you haven’t mentioned money. Is that because you wanted me softened up first? Receptive to your shady deal and your greenbacks?”

  “Fuck you, Joe, you never asked till now. And this is twenty grand we’re talking about.”

  It was more, so much more than Wilderness had expected. It was more than he could earn in two years. And Frank had just taken the wind out of his sails.

  “You’re surprised, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And pleased?”

  “I could be.”

  “Joe, it says how much Steve wants his aunt out. You’re the guy to do this. I’ve told him that all along. I told him you don’t come cheap. The guys on the Brighton line might get you cheap, but this is New York. He’ll pay ten grand. Guaranteed. Cash. All he wants to hear from me now is that you’ll do it.”

  Down the avenue thirty blocks away, the western light was turning the Chrysler into a shimmer of beaten Krupp titanium, a shining spear of pure, impulsive folly a quarter of a mile high. It seemed to Wilderness that the skyscraper was female, a woman—it had to be—and she’d just winked at him. Folly to folly.

  “OK. I’ll do it.”

  “Great. Great, Absolutely fuckin’ great. It’ll be like old times. Berlin ’48 all over again. Only this time we don’t get caught!”

  “You didn’t get caught, Frank. I did.”

  §9

  He got back to the Gramercy late after another night at The Five Spot. Another note waiting for him at reception.

  “I’m in the bar.”

  No signature.

  “She’s been there awhile,” the desk clerk said.

  Wilderness could handle one more drink with Dorothy Shearer.

  It wasn’t Dorothy Shearer, it was Clarissa Troy.

  She’d worn well, scarcely a sign that she had aged in fifteen years, and he reckoned she must be getting on for fifty. Big eyes, big tits, and an habitual, kissable (not that he ever had) pout. All this in a five foot package—a pocket Venus.

  “What do I call you?”

  “Weeeellll kid, truth to tell I am Mrs. Troy. That really is my moniker. But you can call me Tosca—just like you used to.”

  “And Frank really doesn’t recognise you?”

  “Nope. That’s got to be the third time Arthur’s introduced us, and he’s never so much as blinked. He’s such a dumb fuck, which kinda brings me to the point. What the hell are you doing getting mixed up with Frank again?”

  “It’s different. This time it’ll be different.”

  “Joe . . . for fuck’s sake . . . you got caught . . . you damn near got killed. If it had been me I’d be crossing the sidewalk every time I saw Frank Spoleto heading my way.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Oh hell, kid. How much money has the bastard offered you?”

  II

  Another Novel “Without a Hero”

  If this is a novel without a hero,

  at least let us lay claim to a heroine.

  William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair

  1847

  §10

  London: May 1941

  His mother died much as she had lived. In a pub. A daylight raid on London in the spring of 1941 by the Luftwaffe had taken out the Blackamoor’s Head, Matlock Street, E14. It was half an hour after lunchtime closing and had the landlord closed on time, the death toll might have been less than total. When they dug through the rubble they found Lily Holderness upright at the bar, a large if dusty gin and lime in her hand, stone dead.

  Her husband, Harry, was training with the Fifth Battalion of the East Kent Regiment in Wales—a survivor of Dunkirk, an event he spoke of with neither pride nor optimism. He called it his post-debacle course or “how-not-to-fuck-it-all-up-twice.”

  Her son, John, was thirteen. He could have been a scallywag of the streets, using parental neglect as the perfect excuse to run wild in the violent, ragged freedom of war. He was at school. He would never admit it, but he liked school. He hated teachers. One of the few things father and son would ever agree on was that the only good teacher was a dead one, but he liked learning and adored knowing. He collected knowledge without system, but imposing some sense of system was the job of universities and boys of John Holderness’s class did not go to universities, and rather than a butterfly mind he might best be described as having a jackdaw mind. Not admitting any of this saved him many a playground kicking.

  The first he knew of his mother’s death was not when he got home to the empty flat in Maroon Street—that, after all, was the norm—but when she didn’t turn up to eat the meal he had cooked her before he went to bed.

  When the pubs closed—those that had survived another day in the Blitz—an ARP warden banged on the door to tell him through beery breath that his mum was dead.

  He ate her portion and went back to bed, only half-wondering if his dad would be recalled from Wales, and, if he was, how best to handle the bastard.

  In the morning, he dressed, ate the egg that Lily had set aside for herself, and was preparing to set off for school when his grandfather—his maternal grandfather, Abner Riley—let himself in.

  “The buggers only told me an hour ago,” he said.

  “I’m fine, Grandad.”

  “No, son. No, you’re not.”

  He sat down on the only armchair in the room, wedged between the cooker and the fireplace. Wilderness had no idea what the old man meant.

  “It’s the flat, d’ye see? Council-owned. They’re going to want it back. And given how many poor buggers got bombed out these last six months they’re going to want it back sharpish.”

  “But I live here. This is my home.”

  “Copper who banged on my door at first light this mornin’ sez you was like as not goin’ to a home. A hinstitution. On account as you was now a norphan. Bollox I tells him. The boy’s a norphan the day they nail me down in me box. So . . . you grab your things and you come back wi’ me.”

  Wilderness did not see how he could be an orphan while his father still lived, but knew that the verbal shorthand said how little the neighbourhood thought of his father. They could not forget him—he had thumped too many heads for that—but they might prefer to. Whilst preferable to a London County Council orphanage, the prospect of life with Abner Riley was not pleasing. Wilderness liked him more than he had liked his daughter—Lily had been an impossible person, and hence impossible to like with any sustained affection—but he was a complete rogue and an habitual criminal. The great-aunts out in Essex were his sisters, the very best of a very bad bunch—better because settled, their parents having given up the gypsy life with its caravans and petty theft for a fixed abode and more serious theft about the time of the old Queen’s jubilee.

&
nbsp; “’Ave yer much to pack, son?”

  Wilderness thought his grandfather, however well meaning, had little grasp of children. It had been woman’s work to men of his generation, and to their sons’ generation too. He could have said he’d pack his teddy and Abner would not have batted an eyelid. Instead, he stuffed his spare trousers into a cardboard suitcase along with a shirt, the rags that passed for underwear and the socks desperate for darning. He tied the laces of his football boots together and slung them around his neck. His books he bound up with a striped elastic belt with a snake-S buckle and stuffed under one arm.

  “OK,” he said.

  “Books, eh? You must take arter yer dad. No one on my side o’ the family ever cared much for readin’. Never learnt meself. Righty-ho, we’re orf.”

  Wilderness took a last look at the only home he had never known, and despite what he had said on the matter of “home” to Abner, he found no remnant of home than could even aspire to meaning. Two rooms, furniture that was scarcely better than matchwood, a khazi out in the yard, a single tap above the sink, wallpaper that peeled off in the damp, mouseholes in the skirting, black patches of mold in every cold corner. Two rooms that froze in winter, only to swelter in summer.

  He doubted too that Abner lived much better. He’d not been to his grandfather’s house since the last row between him and Lily sometime around 1936. It was a walk of only a couple of miles. He knew it by heart, by pace, by flagstone—he’d walked over from Maroon Street, Limehouse to Sidney Street in Whitechapel a hundred times without ever knocking on Abner’s door. If he passed Abner in the street, the old man—old? he was fifty-seven—would usually slip him a sixpence, ask after his mother and not listen to the boy’s answer. The gang to which he intermittently belonged had taken on one of the Sidney Street gangs half a dozen times in the last three years and had the shit kicked out of them every time. This time he trod their turf with impunity, escorted by the street’s hard man—Abner Riley, cracksman and burglar.

  The Sidney Street house was three storeys. A narrow blade of a house standing on a plot less than fifteen feet wide. A house, not a flat. A house with some sense of decoration, some substantial, heavyweight Victorian furniture and a sense of being lived in and looked after that his last home had always seemed to lack. A woman lived here. Not a drunken, life-incapable excuse-for-a-woman like his mother, but someone who bothered from time to time. No one had ever mentioned a grandmother. For all he knew, the faeries had brought Lily one day in 1908. Or more likely Abner had stolen her—but then, why would he keep her? No, Abner had a girlfriend. It seemed unlikely, but more plausible than a lodger. Lodgers didn’t go with Abner’s job. Abner had a girlfriend.