A Choice of Enemies

  Bella found Sonny in the living room. A slumping, disconsolate man with a head of shaggy red hair and a wart the size of a dime on his neck and a stiff drink of whisky in his hand. In all their twenty years of marriage Sonny, despite his tall talk, had never been unfaithful to her. He had laid money aside for her and the children. For as long as she had known him, he had never raised his hand to anyone. He had a reputation for being a hard, shrewd dealer – that was true – but otherwise he never would have survived. Sonny had given more than money to the Spanish Aid Fund. He had sat on platforms. His name had appeared on innumerable letterheads.

  Bella came up softly behind him and kissed his head. Sonny started. “O.K.,” he said miserably, “I’m a stinker. Maybe Norman should be trusted. Probably the talk is all crap. But why did he have to hit Horton? Tell me that?”

  “You’re not a stinker,” Bella said. “Norman is a fool.” A principled, cold-hearted fool, she thought, who thinks he’s too good for us. She saw Norman in the guise of an intruder, a threat to the whole structure of their happiness, for the first time. “He thinks that just because he’s been to Cambridge and all.… You’re good, Sonny. Don’t feel badly about what’s happened.”

  She hadn’t failed him, for that he was grateful, but somehow this only served to heighten Sonny’s resentment. Norman had got the better of him, he wasn’t sure how or why, but that Sonny would never forgive him.

  “Horton’s forty-five if he’s a day,” Sonny said. “Why in the hell does he have to go to youth conferences?”

  Bella went into the kitchen to see about lunch for her family.

  XII

  When Ernst got home around one o’clock his little black suitcase lay open on the bed. Nicky Singleton’s army identity papers were on the table. Sally was waiting.

  “Sit down, Ernst. I want to ask you something.”

  Ernst sat down on the bed.

  “Why did you tell me that Norman could never be your friend after we came home from the party at Winkleman’s?”

  “Don’t ask me questions like that. I have been questioned like that too many times before.”

  But her questions were not meant to be answered. She spoke out of a miasmal haze.

  “Why were you so ill that night?”

  “Don’t make me hate you,” he said. “Come to the point?”

  “Did you kill Nicky Singleton?”

  “Would you like to hear the story from the beginning?”

  “You killed him. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I tried. You wouldn’t listen.”

  “You couldn’t have tried very hard, then.”

  “I told you that I had killed.”

  “Yes. But those were like stories. I didn’t know them.”

  “I see,” he said, “it’s only wrong to kill somebody you know.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Ernst squeezed his hands together. He stared at her. “I was going to tell you the whole story this afternoon anyway.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “No,” he said, “of course not.” He leaped up. “Open your eyes, damn you, when I was thirteen I was already a soldier. What were your problems at that age?”

  Sally began to whimper.

  “Will you let me tell you how it happened?”

  “You killed him. The story doesn’t matter.… And Norman,” she said suddenly, “how could you – Oh, Ernst. Ernst, Ernst.”

  “You,” he shouted, “you haven’t even been born yet. What right have you got to judge me?”

  “There’s still such a thing as right and wrong, you know.”

  “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Laugh,” she said. “Laugh?”

  “A brother and sister in Munich distributed pamphlets against Hitler during the war. They were shot as traitors. After the war they were resurrected as heroes. Today they are traitors again.”

  “I’m not listening.”

  “When your Ike came into Germany and saw the camps he said we shall never forget this. Ten years later the same Ike said –”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t hear a word.”

  “There is no right or wrong. There are conditions, rewards, punishments, and sides, but that’s all.”

  Sally, her voice unnaturally thick, asked: “Are there many like you?”

  “Many.”

  “You’re perverse, Ernst.”

  “Oh, am I? What about you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You are not crying because I killed. You are crying because I killed Norman’s brother.”

  “Will you please, please, please shut up!”

  “You are no better than me, Sally, but you have had more privileges.”

  “No, Ernst. If circumstances meant that much there would be no sense in living.”

  “Is there?”

  Sally glared at him, like one insulted. “I can’t take any more just now,” she said. “I’m going out for a walk.”

  “O.K.,” he said. “I understand.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “You’ve had enough. The game is up. I’ll be gone when you get back.”

  “He understands.” She slipped into her mackintosh. “Perhaps I’m privileged. Maybe I’m still unborn.… Possibly you’re right about everything.… But I’m trapped, you see. There is no game. I can’t love you on and off. But, listen here, don’t you run away either. I expect you to be here when I get back.”

  XIII

  Charlie came home early that afternoon and found a note on the kitchen table:

  “Can’t make it for lunch. Sorry. But Bob L. called and asked me to do a rush type job for him as a favour. Please don’t forget to buy salad. N. coming for dinner at 7. Will be back 6 latest.

  J.”

  Charlie sat down in the living room, within reach of the phone, and poured himself a glass of beer. The least Ernst could have done, he thought, was to sweep up after he had finished work. He would have to speak to Norman about that.

  When Charlie had gone to see Sonny there had been no trouble – and trouble is what Charlie had anticipated – but, instead, a blue-bound copy of All About Mary. The hack, the other slob on the script, had completed his job. Sonny told him that a deal was being set up with a British studio and Charlie was going to get the sole film credit, more money when the film went into production, and a percentage of the producer’s profits. I’m on my way, Charlie thought. He opened another bottle of beer and began to read the revised script Sonny had given him. The changes that had been made astonished him.

  XIV

  Sally walked.

  It was a fine autumn day. Haverstock Hill was loud with Sunday afternoon strollers. Time out this was, reprieve, two hours’ liberty from the bed-sitters. Tomorrow the battle; this afternoon the sun was a fact. There was the Heath, Tynan’s column to read, and always the possibility that somebody might offer you a drive. Next week was plenty of time to start looking for a room where one could have guests after eleven. This evening at the Duke of York Beasley might turn up with the flyer he owed you. Later, if you were lucky, you might bring back a girl for tea and chocolate digestives.

  Sally joined the crowd working up the hill to Hampstead Heath. There were corduroy boys with girls nicer than candies. A bearded man with a red fez spoke against Christ in front of Mence Smith’s. Young-marrieds pushed prams before them. Thick, square Eastern Jews passed in groups of five and three. At every other corner a poky little man watched over a wide sweep of Sunday papers. Gilbert Harding will, for just a thruppence, tell you the most embarrassing incident of his life. Hitler’s valet reveals all for the same price. So will Sabrina. At the next corner a West Indian in a shapeless fedora knelt tenderly over his little girl and gave her a lick of vanilla ice-cream under an arrow which said: “To Keats’ House.”

  Sally stopped off at the Duke of York and ordered a whisky and soda. Ordinarily she and Ernst avoided this pub because of the people
who gathered there, but today Sally found the crowd reassuringly gay. She watched one group in particular, pretending to be one of them. There was a high man with a chalky British face and a silk scarf knotted round his neck who Sally was sure had contributed at least one poem to Time and Tide. He was talking to a girl who wore her hair in a pony-tail. Wendy was her name, and she had turned in a bloody good performance on I.T.V. last night. There were three others in the group. A squat red-faced bore, who, had he been Canadian would have been put down for an insurance salesman, but, being British, had probably won the M.C. for his part in organizing the partisans in lower Albania. The third man had obviously cultivated his Oxford stammer like a garden. The other girl, who had warned Dylan repeatedly that drink would be the end of him, was a spare blonde in toreador pants. All five pretended to abhor the pub and the people who frequented it. They gathered there, because like everyone else there, they found it droll to watch the others.

  Sally squeezed out of the pub and continued up to the Heath. She felt numb. Something was dying inside her. A hope, perhaps, or a child’s faith in the impossible. She watched for almost an hour as a man sailed an exact replica of the Queen Mary through the gales and lesser traffic of Hampstead Pond while his chauffeur leaned against the waiting Rolls Royce. The man, who sat on a canvas stool by the shore of the pond, controlled his ship by an electronic box. He often brought the Queen perilously close to the concrete shores before he made her turn sharply to the oohs and ahs of an apprehensive audience. Before long he shamed the adult owners of punier craft away from his sea. When Sally turned to go only the children’s sailboats were left to dispute with the Queen Mary.

  She descended into the Heath proper and counted all the boys with scarves and all the girls who wore glasses. She subtracted one sum from another, multiplied them by three and divided the new sum by two, and then she sank to the grass and wept long and bitterly. When she woke the first evening star was out. Walking down Haverstock Hill again she didn’t realize that her eyes were red and that many of the passers-by, particularly the older ones, eyed her with a not unkind concern. Running out on him, she thought, was a cowardly thing to do. Her steps quickened. But outside the house she experienced a moment’s grief. She could hear Norman typing. Sally lowered her head and tip-toed past his door. Her room was empty. The little black suitcase was gone.

  “Ernst!”

  Sally rushed out into the hall.

  “Ernst!”

  Norman came out of his room.

  “Ernst! No. No, Ernst!”

  Norman caught her as she began to sway and dragged her back to her bed. He slapped her cheeks. Gradually she came to.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Please don’t make a fuss.”

  He brushed back her streaky blond hair from her forehead. Sitting so close to her, longing to take her in his arms, he recalled once more the evening he had told her about Hornstein. “This is Europe,” she had said. “I want things to happen to me here that could never happen to me at home.” Yet again the phone robbed him of her embrace. “A telegram came for you,” Joey had said. Nicky, he thought. Nicky.

  “I had a quarrel with Ernst,” Sally said, “that’s all.… He stormed out of the house.”

  “I’m supposed to go to the Lawsons’ for dinner. But I can stay with you, if you like.”

  He came with gifts, Sally remembered, and a month in Spain had aged him so much. Norman was even greyer now. Nicky’s death, she thought, that’s what did it to him. And me, perhaps. “Norman, I … I don’t.…”

  He kissed her tenderly, soothingly, and then – unable to restrain himself – sympathy widened into passion. A hand on her breast, his other arm tight around her waist, Norman kissed her long and fierce. Sally succumbed, she responded with heat, and then remembering, alarmed, and even a little hysterical, she broke free of him. “Norman,” she whispered. “Please Norman. We mustn’t.”

  Norman withdrew, his embarrassment huge. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to … I’m sorry.”

  “Norman,” she began, “if you … if you did love me then why –” Her voice broke. “Never mind.”

  “No,” he said thickly. “Go ahead.”

  “Why didn’t you write me from Spain? I was all alone in London. All alone, Norman. I had no idea how you –”

  “I did write,” he said, “but I tore up the letters.”

  “But why?”

  “I was so much older than you. It seemed unfair.”

  “Norman, there’s something –” Norman, she thought, only Norman could advise her, and he was the only one she couldn’t turn to “– never mind. I’ll be all right. You’d better go,” she said. “You’ll be late for dinner.”

  He hesitated at the door. “I’ve got some good news for you,” he said. “I meant to keep it a secret, but – look, I’ve been on to an old friend of mine at Canada House. He’s going to see what he can do about getting Ernst into Canada.”

  Sally tried to control her voice. “Will there be some sort of check on him?” she asked.

  “Oh, I told Atkinson he’s here illegally. Everything’s unofficial so far. Atkinson’s O.K. He was in the RCAF with me.”

  “But there will be a check?”

  “The usual sort of thing, I expect. You’re not worried, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Would you like me to stay until Ernst gets back?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll try to sleep.”

  XV

  Ernst had begun to pack as soon as Sally left. He had only four pounds and some change, but his clothes were in good shape, his cough had all but disappeared, and his English was better than ever. He had planned to take the train to Liverpool, pick up a seaman, rob him of his papers, and sign on the first ship bound for Montreal. Later, perhaps, he would slip across the border to the United States.

  Outside, Ernst was overcome by his old sense of purpose. Again he was watchful. Again he no longer had to account to anyone for his actions. Passing Collet’s Bookshop on his way to the tube station he remembered that he had forgotten to pack his English-German dictionary. Let her keep it, he thought, I’m not a sentimentalist. But crossing to the tube station he found himself hoping that Sally would see him, that she would stop him, and take him home again. He ejected that thought from his mind like a splinter. That kind of life, he thought, is not for me. When he next recalled his interlude with Sally, this time as he got off the train at Liverpool Street Station, he was able to look on it as an adventure that had happened to someone else.

  The black station was thick with sandpaper faces. Searching for a likely victim in the crowd Ernst sensed that the pockets of those about him would probably yield nothing more than crumpled betting slips and ten shilling notes carefully folded into wallets between mildewy photographs. So he took the train to Leicester Square. The West End, it seemed to him, would yield better pickings, but once loose on the streets again Ernst was immediately struck by the brutalized faces of the spivs and whores who worked the different corners. Berlin, London, Paris, it was all the same: squalor under the winking neon. These were his people. Night squeezed them like blackheads out of the face of the city. In spite of his fine clothes nobody bothered to proposition Ernst. He recognized them; they recognized him. Another week, two at the most, and he would be coughing again. One of these days his luck would break and, like the rest of them, he would do his stretch in prison. Soon, he thought, I may have another murder to account for. Account for, he thought, what’s got into me? Damn her.

  Ernst sat down to rest on a bench in Soho Square, his hands bunched in his pockets and his eyes moist with remembrance.

  XVI

  Charlie was just going to phone Sonny to tell him what he thought of the script when Norman arrived.

  “I’m sorry,” Norman said. “I think I’m a little early.”

  “Come on in,” Charlie said. “Joey should have been here ages ago.” He was still carrying th
e script. “This is the last time I ever do business with Winkleman.” Charlie poured Norman a glass of beer. His round face reddened with anger. “I give him the most exciting comedy he’s seen in years. He puts it through the sausage machine and out it comes a hunk of crap. Wait till I get that bastard on the phone.”

  “Don’t phone him now,” Norman said.

  “Sure, sure. Maybe I should wait until the damn thing gets produced with my name on it. That would be the end of me here.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I wouldn’t even put Landis’s name on it. More I can’t say.”

  “There’s a lot of money in it. You can use the money.”

  “Sure, sure. I can use the money.”

  “If it’s your name you’re worried about why not use a pseudonym?”

  “There’s principle involved. I would know who wrote it.” Charlie stepped back from the phone. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ve never had a film credit before. You think I’d be crazy to jeopardize the deal. Look, darling, a lot of guys think I’m a bust, but I’ve got my pride too, huh? If my name is going to go on a script I want it to be my script. Whichever of Winkleman’s boys hacked this one up has changed my original so that nobody’d recognize it.”

  “But nobody’s seen your original. Nobody would know.”

  Charlie half-shut one eye and beat his fist against the palm of his hand again and again. “Of course, I could wait until the picture was made. If it was a success I could – I’m not that kind of worm. Sorry.” Charlie fixed that half-shut eye on Norman. “Besides, you’d know.… Sure, sure, I know. Norman is the quiet one.” Charlie flipped through the script thoughtfully. “It’s not that bad, you know. It might go. I mean whoever hacked it up was a pro. All the imaginative work is mine, of course.” He rolled up the script and tapped Norman’s shoulder with it. “You know my trouble’s always been that I’ve got too much vitality. My stuff overflows. Smaller guys, like you or Artie Miller” – Charlie laughed and winked – “have better control.” He unrolled the script again and read a page to himself. “This hack, whoever he is, knows his stuff. Maybe he cut a bit too much here and there, but –” Charlie frowned – “If it’s a smash, though, wouldn’t he want some credit too? I mean if after I let on that this was my script completely – and that’s true, you know – it would be pretty embarrassing if this hack turned up and.…”