He’s enjoying this, Abner thought. He’s telling this with such smooth ease — he’s told it often before. Suddenly Abner could bear it no longer and gave in to his irritation.
‘All this sounds very practised, Mr Brazel,’ he said, taking the risk boldly. He wanted information, but if all the man was going to do was trot out some sort of party piece, forget it. He needed the real stuff, the original feeling, something of the sort that David Lippner had given him. And as he thought of the man in his wheelchair, glaring at him from among the leaves and lilies in the garden room in Oxfordshire, a wave of affection rose in him that startled him. ‘Let’s get to the point,’ he went on sharply. ‘David Lippner told me you were one of this group of people who had to hide from the Germans in the sewers. He told me that you, together with other men of the group — ’
‘Men?’ murmured Brazel, still smiling. ‘Did you say men?’
‘Boys, then. Boys,’ Abner said a little impatiently. ‘He told me you were a food finder and that you knew how it was the group were betrayed to the Gestapo. That someone sold them for a bag of apples.’
‘Tell me all he told you. I really can’t give you all you need until I understand where the gaps are in your information, hmm?’ The smile didn’t waver and Abner felt growing dislike for this smooth creature crawling through his veins. Bluebottle, grinning, buzzing bluebottle.
‘He told me that you knew who it was. That you’d found his mother after you’d all got back here after the war — well, not all, but those of you who did — and told her the story and after she’d heard it she got very — I have the impression she became — obsessed with it.’
‘Wouldn’t you? If you’d had a child born in such a place who had suffered as that child did? If you yourself had suffered as Libby Lippner had suffered, wouldn’t you want to know about why it happened? About who made it happen? And wouldn’t you want to get your own back? Excellent reasons for an obsession, I would have thought.’ Brazel’s voice had sharpened with a sudden flash of fury, and it took Abner aback, though it vanished as fast as it had appeared.
‘Yes,’ Abner said after a long moment. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Well, that was how it was with Libby. However, her son, David, he was different.’ The man shook his head then and for the first time his attempt to replace the smile on his face wavered. ‘That child, that David, that staring, screaming object — he was like a tapeworm to that woman. He ate her alive. She could give no sustenance to anyone but him or he screamed obscenities for hours on end. If she sought respite for herself, again he screamed and shouted and — do you think she would have allowed them to take him from her, to put him in that school, if he hadn’t been so evil, so — ’
‘Evil?’ Abner’s brows had snapped down. ‘You call him evil? How can you — the man went to hell in a hand cart, for Christ’s sake! You sit here as sleek as a cat drinking your champagne in a place that obviously costs megabucks in anyone’s currency, and which you use like your own goddamned kitchen, and you tell me he was evil? That’s as wicked a — ’
‘Mr Wiseman, Mr Wiseman!’ Brazel lifted his hands. ‘You must contain your emotion, credit though it does you! You are here to make research, hmm? Do you want information for your script — or do you want confirmation of your own gut reactions, as you no doubt would call them? I tell you that the way that boy treated his mother was evil. She had a dreadful time, an unspeakably dreadful time, and when at the end of it all there was a possibility of happiness for her with me, what did he do? He pushed his own jealousy down her throat and screamed her to exhaustion and spoiled it all. She could have been happy in her last years. The twenty years of age between us was as nothing. I was the only one she knew, the only one who had known her in her good years — the only one who remembered her as she was and cared for her and would have gone on caring for her. But would he allow that? Would he give the poor woman any joy in her life? Not him.’
Brazel leaned back on his sofa now and stared at Abner with those great dark eyes over what were now red cheeks, so that for a moment he looked ludicrously like a painted Dutch doll, and Abner could almost have laughed. But, amazingly, pity welled up in him and took away the amusement and he could only say, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You should be. What can you know of what is true of that man? Yes, he has suffered too, I grant you this. Yes, dreadful things were done to him. But isn’t it still possible that somewhere underneath all that he was an evil person? To assume that all the people who suffered in Europe were good people, that they were innocent of any stain of any kind, is a nonsense. Yes, the Germans were wrong, God knows they were wrong and wicked and did devilish things. But not all the Jews who suffered were angels, my friend! They too were greedy and selfish and acquisitive, some of them. They too were abusers of opportunity, lacking in generosity, less than perfect, some of them. Many of them. You must not be sentimental if you are to make any sort of honest film of this story. And me, I value honesty so highly that I will not help anyone who does not intend to be as honest as it is in him to be. There is no such thing as complete and absolute truth — this any intelligent man knows — but as long as we attempt it, try to show the world itself as we believe it to be, then truth emerges. Don’t cover the Holocaust in tears of sugar, my friend — you insult all of us if you do that. I tell you that boy Lippner was born to be selfish and cruel and so he was, whatever happened to him later. His mother was a great deal nearer the angels than he was.’
‘And you loved her a great deal,’ Abner said, watching him, fascinated by the man’s smooth face and wide dark eyes, trying to see beyond the surface into his head. ‘This isn’t just a story — ’
‘Ah, faugh!’ Brazel looked as though he were about to spit, but instead took up his glass and drank again. ‘If you cannot see the reality of truth in me, how can I ever waste time on you or your film?’
Abner took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said after a long moment. ‘Yes, I believe you. You loved her. Though she was, surely, much older than you.’
‘I told you, twenty years. Ah, Mr Wiseman, you should have seen her as I first saw her! A ripe woman, so round and ripe — so lovely! She had the richest of yellow hair, even richer than her child’s, later on. And God knows he was beautiful enough. But she, with her eyes as darkly purple as plums in chocolate, and her hair in great sheets down her back — even in those sewers she bloomed. And her body so round, at first, so rich, until the hunger took over. But in those days when we first arrived down there, she was so — ’ And suddenly he lifted both hands and with the heels of his palms wiped his eyes, and Abner felt his own nostrils tighten with unshed tears.
‘I was sixteen and she was thirty-five,’ Brazel said then, ‘and I loved her so much I wanted to die for her. It was she I went out for with the others. Nothing else could have got me out of that dreadful manhole, into a great empty street, nothing else could have made it possible for me to go through those roads and into those warehouses and get what we had to get. I was sixteen, Mr Wiseman, a skinny boy! Sixteen — and she was warm and generous and still had room for me in the middle of all her horror and fears, still had it in her to see me weep in the night and take me close to her and make me know what it was to be a man. She was so good to me…’ He shook his head and now the wide smile had finally vanished to be replaced by a tremulous lower lip as he looked back down the bleak vista of forty-five years to the boy he had been and wept again for him. ‘Of course I loved her. I still do. Not the frightened old woman I found here, of course not. But the woman she had been in Cracow, I’ll love her for always and fight for her for always. Of this you can be certain.’
‘Yes,’ Abner said and didn’t know what else to say.
‘We need more champagne,’ Brazel said then, briskly, as though he had been speaking only of the weather. All traces of his emotion had vanished, and Abner watched a little stupidly as the man crooked an imperious finger and the waiter came scurrying across the wide lounge to fill the glasses from a b
ottle that had been standing just inches from his hand.
‘So, you wish to know of the boy with the apples,’ he said then as he lifted his glass again. ‘Ask and I shall be glad to tell you. I think that for all your occasional ineptitude you are an honest man. Honest enough, that is. I do not ask the completely impossible.’ And again the wide smile was back in place, as fixed and bright as ever.
‘Is it a true story?’ Abner said abruptly. ‘I first heard it second-hand from some woman Libby had told it to, before she died, and then again from David, but it sounds so ridiculous to me when I think about it. How could the people in the group — the Rats — know what happened? If he, whoever he was, had done such a thing he would hardly come back down the sewer and say to you all, “Here — get packed — I’ve made a deal with the Germans and they’re on the way. I got a bag of apples for telling ’em of you, by the way.” It’s ridiculous.’ He looked at Brazel very steadily then. ‘Unless of course it really was you and you’re telling the story now, afterwards, when it’s safe.’
Brazel lifted his brows. ‘Safe? When is safe? No one is ever safe, believe me.’ He laughed then, a soft fat little chuckle. ‘Ask Simon Wiesenthal if safe ever comes. Ask the dead soul of Eichmann. Ask any of the ones that were caught. It’s never safe. No, I was not the one. But I can tell you it’s true!’
And he laughed again, a louder sound, full of real humour and a sumptuous pleasure. ‘I’ve been living comfortably on that truth this past forty years. I have built of it my own comfort and that of many others. Of course it’s true.’
Abner frowned, and shook his head.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Why should you?’ Brazel said and drank again, watching him over the rim of his glass. ‘You are a good simple man, with no knowledge of these things of which I speak, you with your comfortable American life behind you, and your rich successful film-making life ahead of you — for believe me, you carry the stamp of achievement in your face — how can you understand?’
‘My parents were in the camps,’ Abner said, and his voice was loud and he didn’t care. He felt no guilt at saying it, no shame, only anger at the man’s assumptions. ‘I understand more than you know.’
‘Indeed,’ Brazel said easily. ‘Indeed? So you think this gives you understanding? You think it was like being there? Where did you first find love, first find the joy of a woman’s body? In a warm bed or in a rat-running sewer? You think you understand? Listen and learn, my friend, before you make such claims on others’ backs. Even those of your own parents.’
Abner felt his leg muscles tighten, was almost on his feet ready to hit the man first and get the hell out of this soft, rich place right afterwards, but Brazel, seeming to know, shook his head at him. ‘Such anger! Don’t be a fool, Wiseman. You need my story and I intend to tell it to you. But I warned you I am an honest man, and that means I say what I think. And I cannot care about the suffering of the children of those who survived the camps, whether they be people like David Lippner, or people like you. What does my scorn matter to you? Why should you care? Isn’t it the story you want, the story you’ve got to have?’
‘Damn you,’ Abner said softly and had no stronger words to use. ‘Oh, damn you.’
‘You think your curses can hurt me more than my own already have?’ Brazel said and the eyes glinted dark and deep and the smile returned to fix itself in place. ‘You flatter yourself.’
‘The hell with all this,’ Abner said roughly. ‘I can’t listen to any more of your fancy talk. I just need to know if it was true that there was a boy who did this. If so, I want the story. I want to know who he was and what happened to him afterwards, and — ’
‘As to who he was, that I am not at liberty to tell you. In detail, you understand. I can tell you he is here in England. He escaped with a whole skin as well as a reasonably full belly — he got more than apples, believe me — and came here. Now he is a respected successful man. He is comfortable, rich — not as rich as he would be if it were not for me, of course — but rich enough. And — ’
‘Not as rich as —?’ Abner said and stared at him and Brazel laughed.
‘You amuse me, Mr Wiseman, you really do. So innocent and so surprised by such obvious things! What do you think I have been living on these past many years but my memories of the boy with the apples? How do you think I have the finance to do all the things I do?’
‘You blackmail him.’ Abner said slowly and shook his head to try to clear the confusion that was there. ‘But — I don’t see how. Surely, surely he’d have found a way by now to stop you, to — ’
‘To get rid of me?’ Brazel shook his head. ‘Of course, he must have thought of it, prayed for it, but how can he dispose of me? He doesn’t know who I am, you see. We haven’t spoken of what happened since that last night in Cracow when I was there and saw what I saw and heard what I heard, and they sent the Gestapo down the manhole. He was outside and I was outside and me, I ran, God forgive me. I ran and left her there.’
His face suddenly distorted into a grimace of extraordinary pain and then smoothed almost immediately. ‘I ran and remembered. And when I got here to England at last I found him. I looked and I found him. I knew it was here he would go. Not America for him. A European in every way, he was.’
‘He doesn’t know you? But you know him and you get money out of him — ’
‘We communicate by bank account,’ Brazel said and giggled.
‘Yet you’re telling me about him? What’s to stop me discovering who he is and telling him that you’re the man who — ’
Brazel laughed again, with genuine amusement. ‘My dear Mr Wiseman, leaving aside the question of whether you would protect such a man against someone who suffered as a result of his actions more than was necessary, leaving aside the way you clearly feel about Mr David Lippner, who suffered even more, leaving aside your memories of what was done to your own parents, there is no way I am going to tell you who he is, is there? I can and will tell you the story — but I shall not yet say who it is about.’
He bent his head then and picked up his glass and after a moment looked sharply at Abner from beneath his brows. ‘But I will eventually.’
‘You will? — Well, why not now? If you’re ready to tell me at all — though I’m not sure I understand why — then what’s the point of — ’
‘Oh, there’s every point in the world,’ Brazel said. ‘I have nearly enough for my purposes, you see. I have had something in excess of a million pounds from him over the years — I am not greedy, you understand; I have left him with ample for his own needs — and I have used it well. Soon I shall, as it were, retire. I doubt I have many years left, you see. But I intend to enjoy my share of schadenfreude before I go. So I shall bring him down when I am ready. It won’t be long now, and that is why I am speaking to you. You are the piece of good fortune that shows me I am planning it all as I should.’
Abner shook his head, hopelessly adrift again, and Brazel sighed with a slightly theatrical patience.
‘Your film could help me in my plan to expose him, for heavens’ sake! The time will come when I will tell all I know of him, and he will stand there accused and no longer be able to hide himself behind his seemingly innocuous occupations. The time will come when all will know of all his ways and of all his evils, and I will have your film to show them. Because I will be part of it, part of the story you will tell. Hmm, Mr Wiseman? You agree I would be worth including? And you had better make sure it is a good film, Mr Wiseman. I need it, you see. And so far I’ve always got what I needed, one way or another.’
Twenty-five
‘I hardly slept, Dave,’ Abner said. ‘Would you have done with a story like that dropped in your lap, and you can’t get hold of the best part of it?’
‘I don’t see why the fuss,’ Dave said. ‘Listen, you ain’t some sort of detective, are you? You’re not here to dig out some guy and string him up. Leave that to the FBI or Scotland Yard, or whoever. You want to mak
e a movie, and you’re doing the research, OK. You’ve got a cracker of a story, love interest, the lot — and what love interest! A boy of sixteen and a luscious broad of thirty-five — it’ll grab ’em all by their excitable bits, that will, men as much as women. Like I say, why beat your brains out about who the guy is? He’s not the same one that did it anyway.’
‘What?’ Abner looked at him sharply. ‘You know something about this? Don’t hold out on me, Dave!’
‘Christ, you’re getting a real obsessive, you know that?’ Dave said and shoved a fist at his shoulder in a friendly but definite fashion, so that Abner had to subside again into the armchair. ‘Of course I don’t! I just mean, the kid who did this betrayal bit for his bag of apples, he was a kid, right? Sixteen, seventeen, whatever. A starving kid — and I have to say, to have a villain in a movie who’s as pitiful in his own way as the hero, that has to be a great stroke — anyway, that isn’t the guy this Brazel was talking about, was it? He’d be — what — sixty odd, now? A different man! Are you today what you were at sixteen? Am I?’
Abner grimaced. ‘Well, I know what you mean; but all the same — and anyway, yes, I am the same. Inside I’m not even sixteen, sometimes. Twelve, maybe.’
‘Sure, twelve years old and just starting to learn how to beat your meat. Come off it, Abner! Leave it alone already. You’ve got a good story, so use it and leave the revenge scenario to the sequel. Right now you have to raise the money for this project and you’ve got yourself an appointment with one of the guys in this business who might help you, and he ain’t a guy any one of us ever likes to play around with. He’s an impatient fella. You want to do business with him. And you have to do it in his time. So give me those car keys and get going, for Christ’s sake.’
He fielded the car keys that Abner threw to him and dropped them into the drawer of his desk and then leaned back and put his feet up on the edge of it. ‘So tell me, did you score? Get to see your pretty lady in — where was it — Oxford? You weren’t that far away.’
Postscripts Page 27