St. Urbain's Horseman (9 page)

Come noon, Father Oscar Hoffman, A.F.A., A.A.I.A., breezed past, raining smiles like blessings, off to a two-hour business lunch at the White E.

– I'm told, Eisenthal says, his eyes watchful, that Triplex Tube is ripe for a takeover. What do you hear, Oscar?

– Bricks and mortar. Put it in bricks and mortar and you can't go wrong.

Harry, in a playful mood, invited the enormous Sister Pinsky to lunch, trying not to imagine how many pleats there were in her
stomach and what agony it must be to support such pie-size breasts. “Come away with me, Sandra, we'll pool our vouchers and have us an orgy.”

“Oh, you're a terror, Harry.”

A ton of flesh quaking away.

“Would you drop your knickers to pose for a magazine, Sandra? Like Nathalie Delon?”

“For me,” she replied, heaving, “it would have to be a double-page spread at least.”

Sister Pinsky was reading a biography of King Farouk, of all people.

“For me,” she said, “it symbolizes a classically misspent life.”

Oh, Sandra, give me Farouk's life, and I shall take his squalid death. Allow me thirty-room hotel suites, belly dancers, and beauty queens. Make me squander my nights gambling a hundred thousand pounds away. Let me know every call girl in Rome by name and pubis and you know what, darling, you can have my office to call your own. Everything in my building society account. My insurance. My pension scheme. My cameras. My past, my present, my future.

Back to his cell and the never-ending other people's bills and ledgers and fiddling.

It was three thirty before a merry Father Hoffman sailed past, tacking to say hello.

“Do you know who was sitting at the next table?”

Harry attended with a smile.

“Warren Beatty with a real sex pot. He breaks off a piece of bread, chews it, and slides it into her mouth with his tongue. Right in the restaurant. Rye bread.”

Finally Brother Bloom shuffled into Harry's cell with the revised accounts he had demanded. Harry flung them aside, saying, “We've got to get a computer in here one of these days, don't you think?”

“You're a born
momzer,”
Bloom said, knowing how it grated on Harry to be spoken to in Yiddish. Claimed. Especially if Miss Bailey was within range.

And then it was time to go and Harry pondered alternatives. He could squeeze in a session at the Graphic Arts Society or take in the new flick at the Cameo-Poly. Or see Ruthy. He opted for his digs and the telly, remembering to pick up his laundry first, and settling into the
Evening Standard
with his fried eggs and beans. When David Bailey goes shopping, he read, if the bill comes to ninety-and-something pounds, he hastily buys more items before making out his check, because he doesn't know how to spell ninety. David Frost is giving another breakfast party for thirty at the Connaught. Everybody who counts is in a dither about what to wear at Lady Antonia Fraser's masked ball next Wednesday. Forty-year-old Bernie Cornfeld, head of I.O.S. with a personal fortune of more than a hundred million, is accompanied on all his travels by at least four mini-skirted lasses of
Playboy
pulchritude.

Harry dialed the Savoy. “May I speak with Miss Lollobrigida, please?”

“Miss Lollobrigida is not accepting any calls. Would you like to leave a message, please?”

“You better buzz her, baby, and see if she will accept a call from … John Huston.”

“Yes, sir.” A pause, then, “She is unavailable at the moment, Mr. Huston. Would you mind calling back in ten minutes?”

“Haven't you got phones by the bathtubs there yet?”

A giggle earned.

“Well now, lemme see. I'm just leaving here. Could you please ask Miss Lollobrigida to stay right where she is. I'll be along with a towel and my riding crop in ten minutes.”

Sprawled on his bed, unzipped, Harry reached for
Mayfair
, “a wedding night tussle for Susan Strasberg and film husband Massimo
Girotti.” In the photograph she lies nude on the sheets, head arched back tensely, the hairy dago sucking her nipple. “Above right: see-through temptation fails to arouse her husband's ardor quite enough. Below: the result – the husband's cousin moves swiftly in.” She is spread on a bench, nude except for leather knee boots, and the cousin's head is buried busily in her crotch. Lapping it up.

Harry turned to another page, “Quest,” a survey on the sex life of single girls in London today.

Afterwards, Harry dipped his fingers in his seed and smeared Susan Strasberg's mouth and breasts with it, then he tore
Mayfair
to shreds, dressed hastily, and started up Haverstock Hill, toward the pub.

Harry paused at the corner of England's Lane, looking for a phone booth, his little book of ex-directory numbers in his breast pocket, when he noticed a Silver Cloud Rolls Royce parked down the street.
There was no driver in attendance. Drifting past, ostensibly without purpose, Harry opened the knife in his mac pocket and ran it the length of the Rolls, walking on some distance before wheeling around to slash the body paint on the other side, continuing back to Haverstock Hill. When he emerged from the pub and went to look for the Rolls, it was gone.

M
R. POUND TRIED TO SKEWER JAKE ON THE STAND
.

“Would it be correct to say that you, personally, find Germans abhorrent?”

“But – but – Mozart was a German,” Jake had ventured. “Beethoven. Why, even Karl M—— I mean, Kant was a German.”

“Even so, you abominate them. Is that right?”

“Why,” Jake had replied, seemingly appalled, “that would make me a racist, sir.”

Out there, he had thought, resuming his place in the dock. Out there, riding even now. St. Urbain's Horseman. Deprived of his Barnaby “International,” without his bespoke riding habit from Jos. Monaghan Ltd. of St. Stephen's Green, Dublin. Galloping, thundering. Over the olive-green hills of the Upper Galilee. Or possibly already in Paraguay. Out on the steaming flood plains of the Paraná, neck-reining his magnificent Pleven stallion with his bridle hand as he reaches into his goatskin saddlebag for his field glasses, searching the savannas below for the unmarked track that winds into the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López, where the
Doktor
waits, unaware.

Beware Mengele, beware, for it is the Horseman who once strode St. Urbain, bronzed as a lifeguard, trousers buckled tight against a flat stomach. Exhorting the men, mocking them, demanding vengeance.

How, Jake was asked again and again, as if it were perverse of him, could he still hate the Germans?

– Easily.

– Now look here, Nancy would reason sweetly, can you hate Günter Grass?

– Without any trouble whatsoever.

– Brecht?

– Unto the tenth generation.

Which Nancy, barely seven years old on V-E Day, could not comprehend.

And so how could he tell her, without seeming psychotic, about his Jewish nightmare, the terror that took him by surprise in his living room, striking only on those rare evenings when he brimmed over with well-being, a sense of everything having knit mysteriously together for once, his wife, the children they had made, so that he could even contemplate his shortcomings, his failures, his own rot and dying and, all things considered, it was tolerable.

If he attempted to explain it at all, he would have to begin with his living room and its commonplaces. Bourgeois commonplaces which, he had to allow, would have been anathema to him fifteen years ago.

It is a Friday night and although they didn't light candles or perform such ablutions that would enable them to welcome the sabbath like a bride, something remained, and on occasion it stirred within him. Most likely after a good dinner. Roast rib of beef and baked potatoes, salad, cheese and wine. He reclines on the sofa, freshly ground coffee set before him, brandy in a snifter; he is overcome with languor, but trying to grasp whatever script he is considering. Nancy's curled into an armchair, legs tucked under, listening to David Oistrakh play a Mozart concerto. Catching up on the Sunday newspapers at last, she tears out a recipe or an article on herbaceous borders made easy. Or she deliberates over the latest National Film Theatre program, knowing exactly what he wants to see. Curly-haired Sammy is lying on his stomach on the floor, fist
jammed against his chin, blue eyes pensive, contemplating his jigsaw puzzle. Crayoning, Molly frowns. Only Ben isn't there. He's adrift in his bassinet, stoned on mother's milk. Once the children have been tucked in for the night and should his lethargy pass, he will rouse Nancy, caressing her, and they will climb to the bedroom to make love, pausing by the maid's door to say good night. She will flatter him in bed and he does not feel comparison-shopped. They come together. Afterwards, they plan holidays. Shall it be the Costa Brava this summer or the Loire Valley? Other, less fortunate, marriages will be a subject for self-satisfied speculation. Friends will be forgiven their inadequacies.

Or, possibly, Jake will succumb on the sofa, drifting into snores. Boorish, but at home. Meanwhile, if he wants a peach or an ashtray brought nearer, or cherries on a saucer maybe, Sammy will bring it. If he decides on a cigar, Molly will fetch it.

Somewhere else, there is war and rape. Famine. Rats gnawing at the toes of black babies. Outside, bestiality. Fire raisers. Enemies. This is the shelter he has provided for his family. They use it well and are at ease. The shattered greenhouse window was Sammy's doing, a badly-placed goal. Nancy tends to the rose beds and tomato plants. He weeds. The persistent whirring from the kitchen is the nocturnal Mr. Shapiro, Molly's hamster, racing nowhere on his wheel. Jake's responsible for the stained wallpaper in the dining room, a champagne bottle's eruption. The sideboard was Nancy's folly. Her first auction. There's food in the larder, wine in the pantry, money in the bank. His wife is the woman he wants. He enjoys the children.

– So, Yankel. How are you doing?

– I can't complain.

Then there obtrudes the familiar photograph of a bewildered little Jewish boy, wearing a cap, a torn pullover, and shorts, his eyes aching with fear as he raises his arms over his head. There are other Jews huddled together on this narrow street in Warsaw. Wearing caps, supporting bundles. All of them, with arms raised. Behind
them, striking a pose for the unseen photographer, are four German soldiers. One of them casually points his rifle at the petrified little Jewish boy.

“Children scratched their arms and with their own blood would write on the barracks walls, as did my nephew, this child here, who wrote: ‘Andreas Rappaport – lived sixteen years.' ”

There is another photograph, this one of an astonishingly beautiful Jewess, squatting nude before a pit, the soldiers behind smirking. She is staring right into the camera without anger or reproach, but sorrowfully, attempting to conceal her pendulous breasts with her hands. As if it mattered. As if she wouldn't be dead within seconds.

“How many do you estimate were murdered in Auschwitz? You were in a position to know.”

Boger: “I believe that it was approximately the number given by Höss.”

“That is, two and a half million people?”

“Two million or one million,” Boger gestures. “Who can tell today?”

Then, in Jake's Jewish nightmare, they come. Into his house. The extermination officers seeking out the Jew vermin. Ben is seized by the legs like a chicken and heaved out of the window, his brains spilling to the terrace. Molly, whose experience has led her to believe all adults gentle, is raised in the air not to be tossed and tickled, but to be flung against the brick fireplace. Sammy is dispatched with a pistol.

“A terrible stench came out of the car, like the plague. These prisoners were loaded onto the trucks directly and dumped into the pits next to Crematory 11.”

“Were any of them still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Mengele cannot have been there all the time.”

“In my opinion, always. Night and day.”

F
RIDAY
.

After Thomas Neill Cream, following Lipski (the
Poilischer paskudnyak
), in the tradition of Dr. Crippen, the Seddons, Neville Heath, Christie and Stephen Ward … Jacob Hersh, former relief pitcher for Room 41, Fletcher's Field High (lifetime record, 2–7), stood in the dock of Number One Court, having been delivered thereto once again from the cells below to stand beside Harry, a taciturn prison officer posted on either side.

Number One Court was dominated by an enormous circular skylight. The walls were paneled in oak. The Sword of Justice which hung above the judge, a
very fayer and goodly sword well and workmanly wrought and gylded
, presented to the City by a cutler in 1563, was suspended hilt downwards. A fresh bouquet of posies and sweet herbs, the traditional antidote to gaol fever, the vicious stench that had once emanated from Newgate below, had been set before the plum-cheeked Queen's justice of Oyer and Terminer. The jury shifted from buttock to buttock on seats so obdurate as to surely make them surly, resentful, Jake feared.