Hot Properties (60 page)

Hans Gott looked like his photo. “There is little of the arrogant Nazi left, after years of being hunted,” David found himself writing mentally. The eyes glared at everything, as though each little evidence of life—a buzzing fly, the warm breeze rustling leaves—was an outrage. The world was disobedient, his face seemed to scold.

The arrangements had tortured them all. In the end there was simply no way to guarantee Gott that they weren’t really Nazi-hunters or hadn’t sold him out in one fashion or another; just as there was no long-distance way for him to prove definitively that he really
was
Gott. Finally, however, he must have wanted the money for the interview desperately, because after they met all of his precautions, driving to two different locations (presumably so he could watch them to see if they were followed), one a public park, the other a cafe, they were instructed (from a phone booth, just like in a movie thriller) that they could find him in the Hilton coffee shop. The voice on the telephone warned them that there were armed men hidden to deal with any surprises.

This was the first of the possibilities that arose for David to do the right thing. He could excuse himself abruptly (Chico would hardly risk blowing the interview by wasting time to argue that David must come along) and go up to his room rather than to the coffee shop. From there he could phone—what? the Israeli consulate? the local revenge group? the police? Gott, after all, had fled from Argentina fearful of extradition, and was in Brazil illegally. But David doubted any of those actions would succeed. Besides, he didn’t want to miss seeing Gott. And there was the suspicion that it was all some sort of practical joke. That there would be no one in the last booth of the Hilton coffee shop.

But the old man was there. He looked very similar to the file photos of Gott at his glory: starving children to death, injecting dye into their eyes, cutting off limbs without anesthetic to see how long it would take to bleed to death, and on and on in a list of horrors that boggled the mind, not simply because they were so brutal, but because they were done by a man in power, not by a serial killer in a plastic American suburb, not by a gurgling homicidal psychopath, but by a distinguished figure in a society that enthusiastically sanctioned his actions. Gott didn’t kill and torture from afar, phoning his orders for the millions to be gassed; he was there every day. hearing his victims’ screams, watching their bodies being mangled, looking into their faces while picking and choosing death or agony. Yes, the old man looked like the black-and-white photos, only now the eyes seemed disgusted by the rude world—the black fire of arrogance was gone.

There were knives on the table. Not sharp, but David could plunge one in quite thoroughly. He was a frail old man, and David would have time to strike his chest over and over, looking into his eyes to tell him: “I am a Jew, monster. I am a Jew. And I have paid you for all my brothers.”

He would be arrested. Or perhaps Gott’s threat wasn’t a bluff, and hidden supporters would appear, gunning David down, his body sagging, collapsing onto the knife handle only to drive it farther into the villain’s chest. There would be death or jail, but he would have triumphed, willed himself through the moral cheesecloth, free of the stale smell and gauzy fog. One pure simple action, ending everything. The nights of guilt would not come: for once, he would never have to wonder what he
should
have done.

Chico began the questions that were intended to help amplify the bona fides
Newstime
had insisted on. It was a shock to hear Gott’s German accent, his halting attempts to form grammatical sentences in English: he sounded a little bit like a Jewish immigrant. David couldn’t take his eyes off Gott. He peered at each liver spot, noted the constant slight tremble in his right hand, observed the gnarled swollen look of his knuckles, and stared into those eyes—the enraged middle-class man furious at the world for its bad manners and sloppy plumbing. He saw no fear or regret in them. The exchange of money and identification material took place. Gott let go of his folder filled with various passports and other private papers reluctantly, but he took the envelope with the bank check eagerly. He glanced at it and then held his hand up in the air—the thumb up in a signal of victory.

A middle-aged man dressed in a drab summer raincoat appeared next to the table seconds later. Gott handed him the check. David felt scared. He swallowed hard and began to worry that this Gott was more than merely a hunted old man—that he could still do harm. “He will dispose of the check as we talk,” Gott said while his associate walked away. “Until he returns I won’t be reassured enough to discuss important matters.”

Chico asked if he had had plastic surgery.

“I am myself,” Gott said. David wrote it down: good quote for an ironic last line. He began to feel some of the excitement that Chico had been full of—this was going to be a knockout story. The entire journalistic world would envy him his seat at the coffee table. Later he would come down and take notes on the decor—the details of its mediocrity would contrast nicely. “No one glancing into the hotel coffee shop and seeing three gentlemen hunched over their coffee would suspect that one of the great criminals in …”

“I don’t want to give details—dates and so on—of my recent movements,” Gott said. “Is this man your secretary?” he asked, nodding at David as though he were mute and couldn’t answer for himself.

“No,” Chico answered. They were both nervous that Gott would find out David was Jewish. It had been decided not to introduce themselves beyond first names, to let Chico ask all the prepared questions (David was to come in only if he felt Chico had missed an opportunity), and not to explain their positions at the magazine. “Why have you decided to tell your story now?”

“To get rid of the lies about me and Mengele!” Gott’s attempt to yell came out as a rasp of irritation. “They become more fantastic every day—the things they say we did. Ridiculous.”

“I thought the accusations had been consistent,” Chico said.

“Ah!” Gott said, waving his hand in disgust.

“In our files, we haven’t come across anything new.”

“The victors write history, my friend,” Gott said. “Files can be altered. Made to look consistent. Everybody does it. It is so easy, when a man is silent, to say what you like about him. But there is no proof! Everything is exaggerated.”

So it would be garbage, David thought, looking down, ashamed. His eyes fell on the partially serrated stainless-steel knife resting nude on the Formica table. Unable to question Gott at length, it was obvious they would be left with an interview that would consist of denials. Other than the pure sensation of having an interview with him, there would be no news in this story—nothing of real benefit to history. The fact of the event would be news, not what David contributed. I was there, he could say, and go on pompously about his feelings. The knife was there. In a moment it could be in the old man’s heart. That would be real news. History. Justice. Fulfillment.

But the knife was flimsy—probably it would bend comically, or its dull tip would fail to penetrate, and if he plunged hard enough, it might rebound and take out Chico’s eye.

He could decline to write the piece.

He could—

“Gott?” a woman’s voice asked. David glanced up and saw Gott’s small head turn to the side. Chico’s large body, leaning forward to ask questions, had cut off David’s view of her, but in her hand, emerging from a coat, he saw the long black nozzle of a gun.

“No,” he heard the rasping voice say.

She spoke in the language of the holidays, softly, like his mother reciting a prayer while she lit Hanukkah candles.

And then the world ended. Something splashed on his face. The noise was ghastly, screeching at the world, filling it with sound. The Formica table was streaked with elegant lines of blood. Gott’s head seemed to move on its own, trailing goo like a jet’s tailstream, disappearing under the table’s horizon.

Horror roared in David’s brain—he leapt up, his thighs banging hard against the table. Crowds shouted at him, and in his brain he was screaming for mercy. Chico seemed stuck in place. David pulled himself up onto the booth. She stood at the edge of the table, sweet and demure, and pointed the gun down at the fallen old man, firing into his already lifeless body. She spoke again, screaming this time, in Hebrew.

“I’m a Jew!” David shouted, crying to her like a frightened baby. “Don’t shoot me! I’m a Jew!”

Marion frowned at Fred. “What’s bothering you?”

“I told you. I’m making these guys a fortune!” He paused to see if this astonishing fact registered. She stared back stupidly. “A fucking fortune! And Bart turns down offers without telling me, sets up my next book with Bob and I’m barely consulted—”

“Why did you sign the contract, then?” She shook her head. “I don’t get it. You just got angry about this?”

“He doesn’t think I can write a book without Bob.” Fred said, admitting this to himself fully for the first time.

“Bart? Oh, come on.”

“He doesn’t. Because of the rewrite.” Fred closed his mouth, kneading his lips in and out. He wanted to shut himself off, stop talking about it. He was rich. Soon he would be famous. Shut up already.

“Everybody makes changes for their editor. I’m sure Bart thinks Holder is useful because of the marketing. He’s done a great job selling your novel—you have to give him that.”

“Goddammit. Can’t
you,
my wife, at least give me credit for writing a good book—”

“Fred!” Marion stood up. “I can’t take this. You’re not happy when you can’t sell a book. You’re not happy when you
do
sell a book. You’re not happy when you can’t write. You’re not happy when you
can.
You’re scared the book won’t succeed. And now you’re not happy when the book is a success? It’s insane!”

Fred laughed. She was right. “You know me so well.”

“That’s right. And you’re damn lucky to have me. ‘Cause from now on no one’s gonna tell you when you act like an idiot. You’re too successful to criticize.”

He carried her statement with him into the world, like a photo in his wallet, to remind him of home. Now when he went to Karl’s poker game, he was greeted enthusiastically. Karl. Tom, and even Sam Wasserman (who had once threatened to leave the game if Fred continued to attend) all asked him to read their works in progress. They stopped the game to listen to his account of having lunch with the Book-of-the-Month Club people, they asked if he planned to adapt his novel to the screen, and hooted down his honest reaction—that he doubted he would be asked to.

He took out Marion’s sentence and looked at it: they once despised me, he repeated over and over. Their performance of admiration and deference was so convincing, so seductive, that he found himself wondering: maybe when they read the book (he had had advance copies sent to them) they realized how wrong they were.

After the game, Sam Wasserman asked him if he wanted to share a cab since they were both going in the same direction. That had been true for the last two years, but Sam mentioned this geographical marvel as though it had only now occurred to him. Fred agreed and also accepted Sam’s invitation to come upstairs for a drink. They tiptoed past the bedroom (Sam’s second wife was asleep in there; his first now lived in Great Neck) into the study, where Sam poured cognac.

“Writers are so competitive,” Sam commented, staring at his snifter.

“Yeah—the game gets pretty loud.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of the game.” Sam drained his glass in a quick motion. “I was thinking of Tom Lear. You have to watch out for him. He fights dirty in the clinches.”

“Really? Tom’s always been great to me. Very supportive of my book before anybody else.” That was the closest Fred had come to chiding Sam for his earlier rejections.

Sam shook his head. “He’s smooth. You should be careful what you say to him.”

“Like what? You mean, ideas?”

“No, no. He’s not a thief. Tom hates other people’s success. I don’t know why. We writers aren’t in competition, right? I mean, it’s not like batting averages—there’s no such thing as somebody leading the league in writing. Just because
Anna Karenina
is a masterpiece, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to read
Crime and Punishment.”

“That’s true,” Fred said. It sounded all right, but it wasn’t true nevertheless. No doubt Dostoevsky had been sick and tired of hearing about how great Tolstoy was: he probably compared how many full-page spreads he got in the
Moscow Times Book Review
and fumed if Raskolnikov came up shy of Anna’s ad budget.

Sam nodded at Fred with great significance. “I don’t know why Tom feels another writer’s success has to be diminished for him to feel good about his work.”

Fred felt a headache coming on. Sitting in the stuffy room playing cards had wearied him, and the cognac seemed to go to his head. The lamp lights glared harshly. “I … I don’t see that in Tom. He’s … I’ve never heard him put down another writer’s work. I mean, he kids around with you—but that’s to your face.”

“He’s not kidding.” Sam stood up. “Do you want some more?”

“No thanks. I’d better be going.” Fred felt uneasy, almost trapped.

Sam picked up the bottle on his desk and started pouring more into his snifter. “Maybe he isn’t backbiting when he talks about your book. I just assumed he was lying.”

This is bullshit. Fred told himself. Sam was an asshole, he’d known that from the moment he met him. He couldn’t trust anything Sam might have to say about Tom—Sam was jealous of Tom’s more glamorous reputation and was often stung by his wit. “Lying about what?” Fred asked, emphasizing “what” in a challenging and skeptical way.

Sam shrugged. “He talks as if Bob Holder wrote the book.” He sucked on his teeth and went on casually: “Says he had you rewrite it almost page by page.” Now he looked Fred straight in the eyes. “Told me you gave him the first hundred pages to read before you submitted them to Holder. He says not one word of those pages is now in the book.”

Fred’s confidence that these must be lies constricted: he
had
given his original hundred pages to Lear; they were completely different now. Sam could have known about the pages only from Tom. There had to be some truth to this story. In a moment, all of Tom’s recent praise, social invitations, jokes about the careers of other writers—things he cherished, the one close friendship he had formed with a talented writer before success—they decayed in his heart, like the memory of an adulterous lover’s kisses and protestations of love, mocking him for his gullibility. To be unloved was enough of a burden—to be made a fool of as well seemed unendurably cruel.