A Choice of Enemies (5 page)

Two soldiers started after the man who had jumped out of Peggy’s window. After Ernst.

Inside, everybody was swiftly conscious that something had happened. Couples broke apart. The boys adjusted their ties and the girls fiddled with their hair. A fat girl began to whimper softly. Then, mercifully, the
M.P
.s burst into the room.

Peggy stared at the ceiling with tears in her eyes and prayed to God, please God, please, please he’s not hurt.

The lights were switched on at last. Upstairs, a girl screamed.

Malcolm started up the stairs. Two
M.P
.s followed, then four more. They had guns, but they were too late. Ernst was gone.

“I know his name,” Malcolm screamed. “It’s Ernst. Ernst Haupt. You’ve got to find the bastard. You’ve got to find the dirty bastard and kill him.”

Nicky had lost a lot of blood in his fight with Ernst. But they rushed him off to the hospital just in case something could still be done.

The following evening, in London, Norman went to Sonny Winkleman’s party. Sonny lived in a big red brick house in
Hampstead. The Americans who gathered there on Saturday nights were mostly blacklisted writers, directors, and producers from Hollywood and New York. Winkleman, who had been a successful producer in Hollywood, was a stout, middle-aged man with a head of shaggy red hair, a wart the size of a dime on his neck, and a somnolent manner. The manner was a ruse. For those heavy colourless eyes which seemed to see nothing were lit fiercely from behind and saw everything. Winkleman was always on the alert. He was a fortunate man. He had money and he had settled his accounts with the Home Office with a surprising
élan
.

The lesser producers, the acolytes, had a much harder time. Budd Graves, for instance, did not even have a passport. When the actors managed to get work permits they did well. So did the directors, although they often had to work without credits. The most gifted of the writers, Bob Landis, had had to struggle at first, but although he too wrote without film credits, he was once again earning big money.

Everybody came to the party at Sonny Winkleman’s. Even Karp, who had helped Sonny find a house, was there. Sally, a stranger to the group, was also there.

“Nobody gives a damn about the murders in Kenya,” Bob Landis said, “but when a shipload of horses bound for the slaughter houses of Holland suffer ill-treatment at sea the
Manchester Guardian
makes it front page stuff for days. British hearts have been touched.”

Somebody made a crack in Yiddish and Charlie, although he didn’t understand it, laughed happily. Charlie was a Roman Catholic but he was short and fat and better still his name was Lawson, possibly derived from Leibovitch, so many people believed him to be
O.K
. Charlie seldom corrected this sometimes helpful misunderstanding.

And tonight Charlie was happy. For the
émigrés
, Winkleman in particular, had considered Charlie bargain basement, a Monogram hack, in Hollywood; he had never really been accepted. That, of course, was before some of the brightest radical stars had paid for and printed their public confessions of error. That was when wit and
achievement had still been the criteria of acceptance, while here in London all that was asked was that you had acquitted yourself honourably before the committee.

Sally, provocatively pretty in a green taffeta dress, perched on the arm of Norman’s chair. He was excruciatingly conscious of her breasts, but her creamy smile was without guile. “What’s a ‘property’?” she asked. “Everybody seems to be talking about ‘properties’.”

“A ‘property’ is a script.” Norman eased away from her thigh a little. “This is a market place for scripts.”

“My father made me promise to look you up, Norman.”

Sally MacPherson’s father was a high school principal. Norman had known him in Montreal.

“Your father is a very gentle man.”

“Gentle men,” Sally said, “don’t shake the world.”

Her throat was very white. She smelled sweet, freshly washed. Norman laughed indulgently. At her age he had felt just about the same. Sally told him that she was going to teach school in London. She was twenty-four. She told him that too.

“I have a brother a little younger than you,” Norman said. “Nicky was twenty-one yesterday.”

Sally was slightly drunk. Norman attracted her. For the pursuit of whatever quality it was that made some men smoke pipes, and others grow beards, seemed inherent in Norman. He had no need for appendages.

“This crowd,” she said, “reminds me of my father in a way. He won’t buy South African sherry these days, but before he never kept sherry in the house at all.” She caressed his neck with her fingers. “Do they all belong to the Party?” she asked with a scythe-like sweep of her glass.

“Which party?” Norman asked.

Sally giggled.

Norman kissed her on the forehead and then went to replenish their drinks. He felt very good.

Charlie, in his corner, was stuck in a puddle of theatrical people. There was a producer who had no backers but a sensational script and a director who had no script but an option on a sensational theatre and a starlet whose husband was potentially a sensational backer and a sensational British gossip columnist who was under the pay of all except Charlie. So it was on Charlie that he focused his dulcifying gaze. “Glad to have you with us, Mr. Lawson. I’m rather keen on Americans myself.”

“You ought to be,” Charlie said. “Seeing how you’ve let this island become an American colony.”

Joey smiled apologetically, “He’s joking,” she said.

“I’m making anti-American propaganda,” Charlie said.

Karp, who had been contemplating the group like a meal, suddenly broke into the circle. “Ah, Mr. Jeremy,” he said to the director, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance to tell you how much I enjoyed your last picture.”

Karp had a peculiar physique. His face was round, but his limbs were so thin that his belly, sudden as it was huge, sprung forth as a surprise. Karp had a hurt flatulent face and protuberant eyes. With his pink little hands, like apples with fingers, he massaged the top of his cane.

Boris Jeremy shrunk from Karp’s small smile. “I have no pretensions about
Murder Monday Next,”
he said. “It was a piece of shit.”

Bob Landis clapped Jeremy on the back and grinned widely. “Don’t overestimate your own work,” he said.

Winkleman floated drowsily but watchful between his guests like a whale among smaller fish. He trapped Norman when he was on his way to the bar again.

“Charlie mailed me some scripts from New York, Norm. He’s waiting for me to speak to him.”

Norman looked to where Sally perched on the arm of his chair. He smiled at her. I wonder, he thought drunkenly, whether she’s wearing black underwear.

“Technically, they’re fine,” Winkleman said. “What are you smiling at?”

“Nothing,” Norman said. Blue, he thought. Blue would be nice.

“But they don’t spark me.”

Somebody was talking to Sally. Karp it was.

“That’s tough luck for Charlie,” Norman said.

“One of them is a comedy with a strong storyline. It’s set in New York. The dialogue is strictly from hunger. But if I buy it, Norm, will you – Hey, am I annoying you?”

“No.”

“Does this talk of money depress you?”

Norman laughed.

“If I buy it, will you work on it, Norm?”

Norman often thought that Winkleman and the others made deals and entered into publicized secret partnerships only to keep in practice, like generals disputing imaginary deads in a battle exercise. Sometimes, however, an imaginary battle yielded a real casualty. Only the odd deal materialized, but making one undoubtedly helped to keep the
émigrés
sane.

“Charlie’s very touchy; he wouldn’t like that.”

“I’m asking you a question. Tell me to buy it and I’ll buy it.”

“On one condition, Sonny. Pay him a good advance right now and he’s not to know that I had a thing to do with it. If the picture’s ever produced I want him to get the credit.”

“It’s a deal,” Winkleman said. “When can you start work?”

“Tomorrow.”

Winkleman grinned sleepily. “You ought to get married,” he said. “You don’t deserve to stay single any longer.”

“You’re a filthy old man.”

“I should hope so.”

“Charlie, try to understand,” Joey said, “all I’m saying is please don’t count on anything.”

“Sure, sure. But listen. I could
feel
that Winkleman just loved my script. Of course he couldn’t make me an offer right here. But he as much as told me that he wanted an option. He said my story sparks him – don’t forget that he was one of the biggest on the coast – he said that he may have to call in a hack to touch it up here and there, but.…”

“About Norman Price I have a different feeling,” Budd Graves said. “What do Sonny and Bella see in him anyway? He’s so cold he could freeze you with a look.”

Bob grinned affectionately. Though they were infrequent, he enjoyed his afternoon visits with Norman immensely. It gave Bob pleasure – as his own life came to be more and more dominated by the weekly Nielsen ratings – to stop and think of Norman writing calmly at his desk, sitting there each afternoon in a jacket with leather patches or in an old sweater, his walls bulging with well thumbed Oxford editions of the poets, copies of
Les Temps Modernes
the pages of which had been cut, and coffee stains and cigarette burns everywhere. In another age, he thought, Norman would have been a monk.

“That’s a lot of woman Norman’s got there,” Bob said.

“You don’t like Norman,” Karp said to Graves, “because he has dignity.”

Graves, who knew that Karp was a concentration camp survivor, did not want to argue with him, so he ignored him instead. “No, Bob, there’s something funny about Price. I think the war and all that time in the hospital loosened a few screws here and there. I mean if a guy suffers from attacks of amnesia and.…”

“He no longer suffers from amnesia,” Karp said.

“I wonder who she is.” Bob, grinning like a satiated panda, turned to Karp.
“A
Yiddish maidel?”

“I do not speak Yiddish,” Karp said emphatically. He glared, leaning belligerently on his cane. “One should not take it for granted that just because I – Ach!” Karp turned and walked away from them.

“Him,” Sally said. “That man over there. The corpulent one.”

Norman, reaching over Sally’s lap, put his drink down on the end-table. “Oh, Karp,” he said. “Well, if you’re renting a room from him we’ll be neighbours. I’m moving into his house tomorrow.”

“Why, that’s wonderful!” Sally leaned back and stretched her legs. “Why does Charlie’s wife hate him?”

That seemed to annoy Norman.

“God,” Sally said, “he gave me his play to read on ship. He’s a lousy writer, isn’t he?”

This time, when Norman reached for his drink again, he let his arm rest on her lap. He told her angrily that she had not earned the right to judge Charlie. Charlie was always a participant. His hands were dirty. He had never been one to be afraid of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world and that, Norman said, was saying plenty in times like these.

“Oh, no. Not coming from you. Look at them –” she indicated a huddle of long acquisitive faces with a wave of her arm – “They use Spain like a hormone conditioning cream.”

“And your father?”

“You know better than that. My father isn’t a socialist because everything else about him is too ugly to face. He’s a high school principal. He earns ninety-two fifty a week. God, if he ever met up with these people he’d have to stop admiring them. He’d have to give up sending badly needed ten dollar bills to ‘fighting funds’ and writing angry letters to the editor that never get printed anyway.”

“I count on these
phonies
for a living.” He laughed. “My kid brother also talks faster than I can keep up with.”

Winkleman joined Karp in the hall. “Going so soon?” he asked.

“Mr. Sonny Winkleman,” Karp said, “I find your friends obscene.”

Norman and Sally came out to get their coats too. Bella Winkleman was with them. She was a dark, graceful woman with black hair.

“This way, Sally,” Bella said. “The second door to your right.”

Karp took Norman aside. “Sally will be good for you,” he said.

Karp’s face wrinkled, his eyes squeezed shut. This smile of his always horrified Norman for he was afraid that once the face unsqueezed again the eyes would have been consumed by the flesh. He waited anxiously and at last the eyes reappeared as provocative as ever.

“I’ll see that you get the room next to hers,” Karp said.

Norman stiffened. He watched sadly as Karp, the sway of his back slightly feminine, retreated down the hall; his steps short and quick and angry, like bites.

“Horrible creature,” Bella said.

“Oh, no,” Norman said. “Don’t say that.”

They looked at each other, surprised. Then Bella smiled. Winkleman had left them to return to his guests.

“Sonny is thirteen years older than me,” Bella said, “and we’ve been happily married for more than twenty years.”

“Thanks,” Norman said sheepishly, “but, really, I just met the girl today.”

“Bring her around with you any time you like.”

“Thanks, Bella, but –”

“And I’ll make sure that Bob Landis keeps his distance.”

“Really, Bella, I just met the girl.”

Charlie and Joey came into the hall. They were leaving too.

“Hey,” Charlie said, “we’ll see you later, huh?” He winked.

Sally’s room was on the fifth floor of an hotel near Piccadilly Circus. Norman watched as she bent over a suitcase, looking for the whisky bottle.

“I got it on board ship,” she said. “It’s tax-free.”

Norman poured himself a drink and sat down in the armchair near the window. Sally curled up on the bed.

“Mr. Karp told me that if not for you he would still be a hospital orderly. He’s very grateful to you, you know.”

Norman didn’t want to talk at all. He just wanted to stare.

“Before the war Karp was a
GP
in a small Polish town. He – he’s one of the unlucky few who survived the camps.”