A Man Lies Dreaming (25 page)

‘Very amusing, yes. But no.’

‘Really!’ I could hear rustling sounds on the other end of the line. Imagined her rubbing her naked thighs against the sheets. Bit my lip, trying to concentrate. ‘You can’t manage on your own, Wolf?’

‘Let’s just say my previous attempt has not been a complete success.’

‘I can’t imagine why!’

‘Listen you horrid little bitch, don’t you—’

‘I love it when you talk dirty,’ she said. ‘And I’d be delighted to help – in fact, we may be able to help each other.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’d like you to come with me to a party.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s the event of the season!’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up, tomorrow, at six thirty sharp. Dress nicely, Wolf.’

‘What sort of party? Wait—’ but she had already hung up.

I sat there staring at the phone and cursing all Jews.

Wolf’s Diary, 16th November 1939

‘You look so dashing,’ she said. She was standing in my office smoking a cigarette through a silver holder. Her white dress shimmered as she moved around the room.

‘
Must
you smoke?’ I said.

‘Does it antagonise you?’ She grinned at me with her lovely white teeth and shimmied to me. Her hand reached down and grabbed me by the crotch, hard. She had no shame; no shame at all. She leaned her head into the crook of my neck, licked upwards. Her teeth nibbled my earlobe. ‘Why do I like bad boys so …’ she murmured.

‘You’re a harlot,’ I said. ‘A slut.’

She pulled away from me and slapped me, hard. ‘Fuck you, Wolf!’ Her eyes flashed. ‘Get on your knees,’ she said.

‘Get away from me, you whore.’

She laughed, a cruel high-pitched sound. ‘Get down on your
knees
,’ she said. She kicked me, suddenly, sweeping my legs from under me. I fell, painfully. ‘That’s better.’

I whispered, ‘Whore …’ My mouth was dry. She lifted up the hem of her dress. She wore nothing underneath. She grabbed me by the back of the head and forced my face between her thighs. My mouth was on her engorged lips as they rubbed against my face again. She made strange animal sounds; her intensity was building up too quickly, but then she stopped. She stepped away from me, holding the hem of the dress carefully so as not to stain it. ‘Turn over,’ she said. ‘I said turn over!’

Then she was kicking me, calling me names, terrible names, tearing at my trousers, pulling them down. My behind was exposed to the air and she slapped it, again and again, leaving angry red marks on the white flesh, and she was moaning: the room was a cacophony of animal sounds. I held myself in my hand, I felt her finger slide, coated in her discharge, suddenly and painfully into my anus. I screamed and came, spurting seed over my hands, but careful, careful not to stain the rented suit. She stood over me, breathing heavily.

‘We’ll be late,’ she said.

I stood up carefully, pulled up my trousers one-handed. Isabella wiped herself clean with a monogrammed handkerchief, quite unselfconsciously. I left her there and went to the bathroom down the hall and stared at my face, shining with her wetness, in the mirror. I washed my hand, watching my seed wash down the sinkhole. I washed my face. When I left I saw Martha at the end of the corridor. She watched me without expression until I turned away.

In my office Isabella Rubinstein was a model of decorum. Her cigarette holder was set between her teeth again. She blew out a cloud of smoke contentedly and smiled at me. ‘We don’t want to be late, do we,’ she said.

I followed her down the stairs when I remembered I had stashed the Jewish identity document behind the bins, after the fat prostitute’s attempted murder. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I went back down the road and retrieved it: it was still there, in a crack in the wall. Dried blood was still splattered, in dull patches, on the stone. I returned to Isabella. Her white Crossley Sports Saloon was parked outside the dirty bookstore, magnificent and shining like a beacon of wealth. Isabella drove. I sat beside her. The car was filled with the smell of her expensive tobacco and the musk of our hurried sex.

She drove with easy abandon, the way she did everything else. She was young, so much younger than me, yet something inside her was rotten and corrupt, and it withered her from within.

We drove with the windows open and a cold breeze wafting past and the smell of London, of salt and tar from the Thames and urine from the sewers and roasting chestnuts and exhaust fumes and dung from horse-drawn carriages. In what seemed like moments we were by the British Museum. Greek columns rose into the air and a thin drizzle of rain began to fall as Isabella parked the car. A glow of festive light came from behind the windows of Number 40, Museum Street.

I clenched my fists.

These were, after all, the premises of Allen & Unwin, the publishers.

People were spilling out of the open doors of the publishing house. They stood in clumps in the rain, smoking and drinking and laughing, an unruly crowd of artists, writers and painters and their hangers-on. ‘Oh, how
exciting
!’ Isabella said, weaving her arm through mine. We strolled up to the party; I felt conspicuous in my suit and hat amongst the mob of scruffy bohemians. And yet I was once one of them; I, too, was once a penniless artist, in Vienna, painting bright watercolours of the city’s architecture and scenes, selling them to the tourists for a handful of coins. It had felt to me then an honest way of making a living. But that had been before the war, before the blindness and the hospital, before my fate had been shaped to follow a different path: to lead, to rule!

At last, to Fall.

‘Managed to insult both of us in the same sentence!’ someone said.

‘Wolf? Are you with us?’ Isabella said.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Is that Evelyn Waugh talking to Cecil Forester?’

Isabella shrugged. ‘Are they painters?’

‘Writers,’ I said. Isabella went ahead of me, her arm slipping out of mine. She nodded and smiled, greeting people she knew. ‘Who is the Chinese-looking man?’ I said.

‘That? That’s Leslie Charteris!’ she sighed as though in ecstasy. ‘Don’t you just love
The Saint
?’

‘Charteris?’ I said. ‘I thought he was working in Hollywood.’

‘He is. There’s a company of them arrived in town for filming. But no one’s going to miss this party.’

We went inside.

‘Wolf!’

I turned to see, without much surprise, the big American, Virgil, bearing down on me, a glass of wine in each hand. He handed me one without asking. I held it without sipping. I abhor drink, always have. To me, a man must always be in supreme command of himself.

‘Virgil,’ I said; for a moment I felt like a gunslinger in one of Karl May’s westerns, facing a showdown. The feeling persisted.

He smiled at me but his eyes were hooded. ‘Have you thought further of my proposition?’ he said.

‘I have.’

He waited, but I said nothing more. He nodded, slowly and inexorably, the way a mountain moves in an earthquake. ‘Don’t think for too long,’ he said, softly. ‘Everyone can be replaced, Wolf. Even you.’

‘I have never liked Americans,’ I said, and he laughed. He had the coldest, hardest eyes of any man I’d ever seen. ‘Cheers,’ he said, clinking his glass against mine.

‘Are your people still following me?’ I said.

He sipped from his drink and shrugged. ‘Do they need to?’ he said.

‘Is that a yes?’

He shrugged again. One had the sense of contained physical threat in every gesture he made. ‘I hear you’re having troubles,’ he said, ‘with some prostitute murders.’

‘
One
prostitute murder,’ I said, ‘and I didn’t do it.’

‘You’re not a killer,’ he said, sympathetically. ‘You’re a soldier, like I was, like many of us will be again once war breaks out.’

‘You believe war will break out?’

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ he said. His glass was already empty. He looked at mine. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Not at all.’ He took it from me and drank as though he had been deprived of drink for months. ‘Yes,’ he said, after draining my glass. ‘War with Germany will come – war with Russia, I should say, and its proxy, Germany. A European war. Perhaps even another world war.’ He put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing. His rank breath blasted into my face, coarse with the fumes of cheap red wine. ‘You can help stop that,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see your country ravaged by war, destroyed by bombs? International socialism
must
be stopped, Wolf. Stopped before it is too late!’

The words sent a chill down my spine. Or perhaps it was the draught from the open door. ‘At what price?’ I said. ‘You want me to serve Germany by turning her into a whore, spreading her legs wide for America?’

He laughed. ‘Everyone needs must be a whore sometimes,’ he said. ‘Would you rather be fucked by the Russians, or us?’

‘I would rather my country slit its own throat than prostitute itself,’ I said.

‘Listen to me, Wolf.’ He was standing close, now, his hand on my shoulder reaching for my neck, almost choking me. ‘You do not say no to me. No one does. I am America, and America does not take no for an answer. Refuse us, and we will bomb the shit out of your country, kill your women and rape your dogs and burn your houses and piss on the embers. Do you understand me? I said, do you understand me!’

‘I understand you perfectly,’ I said. I gathered up phlegm and spat in his face. My aim was perfect. The mucus hit him in the eye and ran down his cheek. His face turned red in fury; his grip on my neck slackened. ‘And the answer is no.
Nein
. Never!’

‘You will regret this, you little shit stain,’ he said.

‘Get your fucking hands off me!’

‘Wolf? Who is this man?’

I felt rather than saw Virgil’s hand leave my neck. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. When he turned back his face wore a semblance of charm. ‘Just an old friend,’ he said. ‘I apologise if I was monopolising his time at your expense, Miss …?’

‘Rubinstein.
Excuse
me.’ She led me away, to a corner of the room. I felt Virgil’s glowering presence receding behind us. ‘Who
was
that ghastly man?’ Isabella said.

‘I … am not sure,’ I said. I had a bad feeling about Virgil: about the possible fallout from my refusal. Could the Americans be better allies than the Russians, in the long run? Could I still somehow use them to my advantage? And his mention of the prostitute murder – if they were following me, could they have inadvertently come across the real killer’s identity?

But I had no time to dwell, for at that moment I saw a figure I recognised, and all thoughts of such things fled from my mind. ‘Albert!’ I yelled. ‘Albert! It’s Wolf!’

I abandoned Isabella to her own devices and hared across the room. He turned slowly, with a smile of polite inquiry on his face, which disappeared when he saw me. ‘Ah, Wolf,’ he said, awkwardly.

Albert Curtis Brown was my literary agent
. He was originally an American journalist who had then settled and made his home in Britain. He was in his seventies, but still wiry and strong. ‘I wanted to discuss with you a sequel to
My Struggle
,’ I said.

‘Quite, quite. Mr Wolf. A sequel.’ Was it my imagination or did a fleeting look of distaste pass across his face like a cloud? But I did not care for Mr Curtis Brown’s approval; I cared for what remained of my literary career. ‘I have written to you repeatedly,’ I said, ‘
repeatedly
, in the past few months, regarding the manuscript I am in the process of preparing—’

‘Let me stop you there, Mr Wolf,’ he said. ‘I am no longer actively involved with the agency. My son is taking care of all outstanding contracts and the like. Now, if you’ll excuse me—’