by Alan Isler
Poore-Moody followed Dolly into the lobby; Kraven at a safe distance followed Poore-Moody. Once inside, Dolly took the old man possessively by the arm, and together they climbed the stairs to the mezzanine, she towering above him. Kraven watched as Dolly bent over Poore-Moody and kissed him on the top of his head. Poore-Moody seized her hand, held it to his heart for a moment, then kissed it passionately, and at last, reluctantly, let it go. He went to the lift. She stood where he had left her, waving to him until the lift doors closed.
‘Dolly!’ said Kraven then, stepping forward.
She turned, looked at him myopically for a moment, then grinned. ‘Gee, look who’s here. Hi, Marty.’
‘So how’s the Big Time?’
She frowned. ‘Maybe not so hot.’
‘Not lost your angel, I hope.’
‘Nothing like that. You got a minute? I’m supposed to be meeting the girls inside. Come say hallo.’
Kraven looked at his watch. He was anxious to send off a telegram to Stella; on the other hand, he rather wanted to see Candy again. ‘Well, just for a minute.’
He accompanied Dolly to the bar lounge. At the entrance she paused and surveyed the room, which at that hour was quite full. Sugar Plum, seated at one of the tables, waved to her. Dolly waved back and ground her way across. The muted hum in the room ceased; all eyes, it seemed, followed her progress. She smiled and nodded unseeingly at her audience.
‘Candy not here yet?’ said Dolly. ‘Look who I found.’
‘Well hi, Marty.’ Sugar seemed no more surprised to see him than had Dolly. Perhaps such encounters were the norm in the show-business world.
‘Hi yourself.’
Kraven and Dolly sat down and the room’s hum resumed.
‘How’d it go? How’d you and Bobby make out?’ said Sugar.
‘No need to break out the champagne,’ said Dolly glumly. ‘I told you not to get your hopes up.’ She sighed.
‘Oh no, Dolly,’ said Sugar. ‘What happened?’
‘Bobby’s got these theatrical contacts over here, big shots,’ Dolly explained to Kraven. ‘That’s where we were today. Feeling them out, seeing if they’d bite.’ She turned to Sugar. ‘Not a chance,’ she said. ‘The Royal Shakespeare don’t wanna touch it, not even if Bobby agrees to take the loss. Y’know, at first they thought we was just kidding. “Remarkable sense of humour, old boy!” They said maybe somewheres in the boonies, like maybe Harrogate, maybe. In the off-season. Only maybe. Well, I’ll say this for Bobby: he’s loyal. He told them where they could shove it.’
‘Aw, gee, Dolly’ said Sugar.
‘I told Bobby maybe I should consider the boonies. I mean, what the heck. We have a hit up there, we can always open in London later. But you know Bobby. I open in the West End or I don’t open.’
‘So what now?’ asked Kraven.
Dolly shrugged. ‘We’re looking for a new vehicle. Find a vehicle, says Bobby, and he’ll take care of the rest. He says I’m a natural for musical comedy. Could be he’s right. He didn’t get to be a mult-eye millionaire just by whistling Dixie.’
Kraven fought to keep his eyes open.
‘I know Bobby don’t like me showing my whatsis around,’ Dolly was saying. ‘Men get kinda possessive, no offence, Marty. So maybe that’s why he’s talking musical comedy. I take his advice, that’s a factor I gotta consider.’
‘You ain’t giving up on the Follies, are ya, Dolly?’ wailed Sugar. ‘What about me?’ She turned to Kraven. ‘There’s this great number where all’s I’m wearing’s just these two itty-bitty snakes. Y’know, I’m this Egyptian queen?’
‘Antony and Cleopatra?’ said Kraven.
‘Yeah, that’s it, that’s the one. Dolly promised.’
‘Bobby’s doing his best,’ said Dolly. ‘He’s still got a couple a contacts.’
A gloom was beginning to settle, however. To Kraven, comfortably seated in the warmth of the Inn on the Park, the exhaustion of his hours-long London wanderings had returned. His eyelids were unbearably heavy. ‘Cheer up, girls,’ he said. ‘Bardic Follies is too big an idea to disappear. Someone will pick it up. Maybe Paris, West Berlin.’ He struggled to his feet.
‘You leaving?’ said Dolly. ‘Candy’ll be here any minute. Let’s have a drink.’
‘Candy thought you were really cute,’ said Sugar.
‘C’mon now, Sugar!’ admonished Dolly.
The news pleased Kraven, even excited him. But he had Underground miles to go before he slept. And there was still a telegram to be sent to Stella. ‘You’re staying here yet a while, aren’t you? Good. Tell Candy how sorry I am I missed her. I’ll be in touch. Please tell her that.’
‘See ya,’ said Dolly and Sugar.
* * *
DARLING STELLA, HAVE LOCATED ERRANT MONK IN COMPANY OF THREE, REPEAT THREE, UNFROCKED NUNS. FRA ROBERTO STAYING AT INN ON THE PARK, LONDON. SUSPECT HERESY. WIRE INSTRUCTIONS C/O AMEX, HAYMARKET. NICHOLAS.
* * *
KRAVEN FOUND IT DIFFICULT TO FALL ASLEEP. Aunt Cicely’s efforts to dry out the room had produced an equatorial climate, the Matto Grosso in the rainy season. The air was hot, humid, unbreathable; the room stank of jungle rot. He lay naked on the bed, turning now to this side, now to that, his body wet, a helpless surface for condensation.
Through the steaming jungle he now flew, flitting, darting, away, away, through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. The slap-slap-slap of slippers going past his door returned him to his sole self. The door to Fishbane’s room opened and closed. A bed creaked and creaked again. The unmistakable sound of soft flesh making violent contact with soft flesh announced itself.
The creaking, now rhythmical, began slowly but soon picked up speed. Grunts.
Kraven threw his pillow over his head.
A sharp cry.
‘O Percy, o Percy, o Perce-erce-erce-eeeEEE!’
‘Cock-a-doodle-doo! Cock-a-doodle-doo!’
Silence.
Kraven fell at last into a fitful sleep.
‘He forced me,’ Nimuë said bravely, ‘to engage in practices the vilest and the most perverse, acts that bring a blush in recollection to modesty’s fair cheek. What cared he for maidenly innocence? What cared he for ought but satisfaction of his cruel and bestial lusts.’
In the panelled courtroom cries of horror, cries of shock. A sob, ‘Alas, the poor, sweet child.’
His Lordship adjusted his wig and looked grave.
‘The wretch,’ said Princip, pointing an impassioned finger at Prisoner-at-the-Bar, ‘lured the young virgin into his iniquitous den under a shameful subterfuge, which was no other than to help her polish her already brightly shining verse. I submit for m’lud’s perusal and certain delight a not-untypical example of her exquisite poetry. M’lud will notice in particular the sentiment.’
His Lordship looked from the poem ‘Cousinhoodship IV’ to Prisoner-at-the-Bar. ‘Tsk-tsk.’
‘No sooner had she entered his rooms, this vestal of Apollo and the Muses, than he threw her upon his sybaritic couch and would have tried her à l’outrance.’
Cries of ‘No, no. Oh, the fiend!’
‘He would, I say, have tried her thus had I not rashly – and praised be rashness for it – burst in upon them. There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’
‘That is most certain.’ His Lordship frowned at Prisoner-at-the-Bar and turned again to the witness. ‘What prompted you so to burst in, as you say, upon them?’
‘Why, even in that was heaven ordinant. He had affronted me of late, had called me villain, plucked my beard and blown it in my face…’
‘Is’t possible?’
‘I had his phonic number in my purse. Here’s the transcription, read it at more leisure. I am not pigeon-livered.’
‘Most commendable. Next witness.’
The next witness swayed in the box. ‘The prisoner is a thief, a charlatan.’
‘The name of the witness?’
‘Alec Feibelman, traveler in l
adies’ personals, retired.’
His Lordship noted with compassion the venerable age and attendant frailty of the witness. ‘Bailiff, provide a sella, or in the base vulgar a chair, a seat, a stool, for his honorificabilitudinity.’
‘Thank you, m’lud. Know then that this vile rogue snatched from me my discovery of the Jewish Charlemagne and passed it current for his own.’
‘O, the wretch! For shame!’
‘Mine was not the good fortune of the fair and yet unspotted Nimuë.’ La Corombona settled herself in the witness box amid gasps from the thronged courtroom. Her cheeks and lips were carmined, her full breasts pushed against the laces of her bodice. ‘He took me in the blossom of my virginal innocence, an orphan whose only treasure was her untried virtue, rammed through the portcullis of an unmanned fort, and plucked the rose. What route through life was left me but the poxy way to Hell?’
Last came and last did go C.U.T. Quimby. ‘M’lud, it grieves me to report that the prisoner is not at all who he purports to be. In brief, he is an impostor!’
A sensation in the court.
‘Prisoner-at-the-Bar,’ said His Lordship, placing over his wig a black square of silk, ‘have you anything to say before I pass sentence?’
‘M’lud, I have been most notoriously abused.’
His Lordship sniffed.
‘M’lud, I am a human being.’
‘So say they all. Be so good as to wait outside.’
Kraven was woken again during the night by another crowing of the cock.
TEN
KRAVEN ROSE EARLY the next morning, despite his restless night, and he was frustrated in his desire for a tranquil start to the day by Percy Fishbane, who padded into the kitchen even as he was sitting down to a cup of tea. Fishbane was clad in a woolly tartan dressing-gown that touched the floor and beneath which the tips of tiny tartan slippers peeped out.
‘Morning,’ said Fishbane cheerily. ‘Ah, tea. Good-o.’
Kraven groaned.
‘No, don’t get up. Yours Truly will get his own cup.’ He disappeared into the scullery for a moment, returned with a mug marked with a florid letter P, and hopped on to a chair at the table. ‘Auntie likes to have a bit of an extra kip on the occasional morning, so me and you are going to have t’look after ourselves. How about some toast and jam, then?’
‘Thanks, I’d like that.’
‘Bread’s in the box, butter’s in the fridge, jam’s in the cupboard.’ Fishbane jerked his head in the several directions.
Mumbling to himself, Kraven set about preparing their breakfast.
‘I heard you getting up, not that you made much noise, but Yours Truly’s a light sleeper. Here’s an opportunity, Perce, says I, for me and him to have a little chinwag.’
‘I’m going to have to leave in a few moments. I’ve one or two things to take care of.’
‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Fishbane imperturbably. ‘However, you’ve still to have your tea and toast. Time in plenty for what Yours Truly has to say.’ He took a mouthful of tea and swilled it around noisly before swallowing. ‘What I’m going to tell you now your auntie knows nothing about, and until or unless I give the word I rely on you as a comrade in affairs of the heart to keep it that way.’ He searched Kraven’s face with his glittering eyes; Kraven nodded. ‘As you have already guessed, this is a matter of no small delicacy.’ He paused significantly; Kraven nodded again. ‘Hence, I have to spend a moment putting you in the historical picture.’ He spooned jam on to a corner of his toast and bit it off, chewed slowly, staring the while at the ceiling as if hoping there to find fit words. At last, he embarked upon his narrative.
To Fishbane’s account of his early years in America, his loneliness, his enthusiasm for the Brooklyn Dodgers, his futile attempts to awaken political consciousness in the masses – ‘it was like trying to incite the meek to inherit the earth’ – his hackwork for left-wing journals, his growing conviction that he was being watched by the FBI – to all of this Kraven paid scant attention. His mind was occupied with Poore-Moody and Stella. But some of Fishbane’s narrative penetrated his private thoughts.
‘Her name,’ said Fishbane with tremulous reverence, ‘was Miriam Pechvogel.’ His glittering eyes scanned the past. ‘She had other names, of a professional sort, but Miriam Pechvogel was what she was born.’
Tuning in and out, Kraven gathered that Miriam Pechvogel, ‘an artiste’, ‘a real swell dame’, was the first true love of Fishbane’s lonely life. Fishbane could not believe his good luck. What a woman of such opulent beauty could see in him he was unable to fathom. ‘She used t’call me her bantam cock.’ When he had met her, a little over a year before he was forced to flee the States, she already had two children out of wedlock by different men. ‘None of your booshwa petty morality about her. Philosophically, we were both advocates of free love.’
A shift in tone indicated that Fishbane’s tale was approaching its climax. Kraven paid closer attention. Such was the lovers’ passionate abandon that Miss Pechvogel in due course became enceinte. Percy Fishbane was to be a father. Meanwhile the FBI were snooping around, talking to the neighbours, even questioning Miss Pechvogel’s children in the schoolyard. ‘All I was was a harmless reporter, forty-five dollars a week, exposing the fascist government’s union-busting tactics. You’d a thought I was an expert in nuclear physics!’ A tip from a friend told of imminent arrests at the newspaper offices. Fishbane had put his passport in his jacket pocket and shipped out immediately, arriving in England with little more than the clothes on his back.
‘Here’s the point: I’ve a kid over there who must be in his twenties by now, who I’ve never met, and who I know nothing about. When I left New York, Miriam was in Chicago. She was in her fourth month, one of her last appearances before the public. In her line of work you can’t go on performing right up to the last minute, now can you?’ Fearful of wire taps and conscious of the need to move swiftly, he had been unable to get in touch with her. Later, the thought that he might jeopardize her career, that she might be blacklisted – ‘they were opening people’s fucking letters; they were coming down hard on people in show business’ – prevented him from writing to her. By the time the Senator from Wisconsin was no longer a threat and the hysteria in the country had died down, Fishbane had lost his sense of urgency. He had already picked up his life again in England.
‘Me and Miriam, that’s water under the bridge,’ he said. ‘Besides, I’m happily situated now, and I hope Miriam is too. I love your auntie, and I’ve come to appreciate the benefits of intellectual companionship and the refinements that come of a booshwa upbringing. Not that I’ve turned me back on old truths. But I now know that good manners sometimes reveal a good heart.’ He looked shrewdly at Kraven.
Kraven was not unmoved by Fishbane’s story, but he had problems of his own. He looked pointedly at his watch.
‘A little patience, that’s all Yours Truly asks,’ said Fishbane aggrievedly, ‘hear me out. Why don’t you have some more tea.’ He poured some into Kraven’s cup. ‘I’ve put a bit by over the years, took a leaf from the capitalists’ book. And why not? I’ve been a slave all me life. Whatever goes into my pocket don’t go into the pockets of those fuckers. The poor sodding peons’ll be trampled on regardless. So I’ve made the odd investment or two. Did quite well on Mexican silver, thanks to a tip from your auntie.
‘Well, who’m I going t’leave it to? Here’s where you come in. Undertake a few discreet inquiries for me in the Hew Hess of Hay. I can tell you where to start. Try and find Percy Fishbane’s son. Who knows what he’s up to? Given the sort of upbringing he’s likely to ’ve had, chances are he’s in bleeding prison. Miriam’s circles, as you can well imagine, were not the most elevated, all things considered. But don’t delay too long. Time and tide, you know.’
‘I’ll do what I can, of course. But my plans are rather unsettled at the moment. I don’t know when I’m returning to the States.’
Fishbane made a dismissive gestur
e. ‘It’s no emergency. You can stay here as long as you like, three days, four, five. No need to go off to an hotel, even, on my account. As Yours Truly is pleased to tell you, this is Liberty Hall. But once you do get back there…’ He looked up suddenly. ‘Morning, Ciss. Have a nice kip, did you?’
Aunt Cicely in a fashionable silk robe stood at the kitchen door. ‘There you are, you two. Who would like onions and eggs?’
‘Suit me a treat,’ said Fishbane. ‘Me and your nephew ’ve had a very nice chat, Ciss, very nice indeed. We’re better acquainted now, which was all that Percy Fishbane wanted.’
‘None for me, thanks. I’ve some things to do in town,’ Kraven told his aunt. ‘I’ll be back in mid-afternoon to get my bags.’
‘Off you go then,’ said Fishbane. ‘Don’t forget what I told you.’
‘What was that, Percy?’
‘Men-talk,’ said Fishbane blithely.
* * *
What might await him back at Mosholu Kraven preferred not to think. At the very least he would be required to reimburse the college for his air ticket. This cost might be offset, however, if the IRS could be persuaded that the trip was a legitimate professional necessity. Hence, he was off to the British Library to acquire one or two date-stamped book-request slips. He turned into the grand forecourt of the Museum. A banner athwart the grim façade announced a current exhibition of Michelangelo drawings. He would pop into the Reading Room, acquire his evidence, and then spend a pleasant hour at the exhibition.