Then We Take Berlin (5 page)

“Frank, I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me.”

“Never. I even brought an old army buddy for you to make a fuss over. Elaine, this is Joe Holderness. Elaine Kaufman . . . one of the Big Apple’s success stories. Open less than a year and already you have to queue.”

“Frank. I have never known you to queue for anything. All the same, any friend of Frank’s . . .”

“Delighted,” said Wilderness.

“Oh Frankie, you brought me an Englishman!”

Now Wilderness got hugged.

“Only he has no meat on his bones. My God, do they still have rationing over there?”

A table by the wall, seated at right angles to one another, so they both faced into the room, watching as the tables slowly filled up and the room began to swell with chatter.

“Everything’s good here. But whatever you have as a main course, don’t miss the cannoli when it comes to
dolci
. Out of this fuckin’ world.”

By the time they got to
dolci
, Spoleto had run the gamut of small talk and got to what Wilderness thought might be the point.

Spoleto said, “You were kind of coy with Steve. But that I understand. We both have things that we should be discreet about even now.”

“Of course.”

“You didn’t say how often you’d been back to Berlin.”

“A lot. Most years in fact. It would be quicker if I named the years I wasn’t there.”

“You ever see Nell Breakheart?”

Breakheart. Always Breakheart. Would he never drop the gag and pronounce her name properly?

“No Frank, I’ve never seen Nell.”

“When were we last there together?”

“Fifty-eight.”

“So it was. My God. Time doesn’t fly, it gets launched from Canaveral.”

“I didn’t go back at all between ’48 and ’51. In ’56 I was stuck in Tel Aviv monitoring traffic. Absolute waste of time. I damn near quit after that.”

“Monitoring Russian airwaves is never a waste of time.”

“This was Suez, Frank. A total cock-up, and I wasn’t monitoring Russian communications, I was monitoring yours.”

“Yeah, well I guess that was pretty much the low point in the special relationship.”

“From late ’58 to ’60 I was in Beirut. Now, that was fun. Pretending I was a stringer for
The Times
and eavesdropping on every indiscretion in the St. George’s hotel bar. Getting rat-arsed with Kim Philby. Each of us pretending we didn’t know. I don’t know how I kept a straight face. Regular trips home, the occasional hop to Athens or Rome. Cairo or Istanbul. Didn’t exactly restore my faith in the service, but it kept me on board for a couple more years. Then in ’61 I was back in Berlin for the last time.”

“Before or after the wall?”

“During. I flew out just a couple of days after they started putting up the barriers. In August. The British had me observe LBJ’s visit firsthand. I stayed on a month or so after that. When Steve mentioned the old lady hanging off the building in Bernauer Straße to us . . . well I was there. That was September ’61. I saw it happen. I saw her fall. Her name was Frieda Schulze.”

“But she lived, right?”

“Oh yes, she lived. But something in me died. It was watching her dangle, both sides tugging at her. I can’t translate it into precise words, but if ever there was a symbol, writ large, especially for me, that was it. It was then I knew it was all over. I went back home and put in my papers. They could hardly object. They’d called me up for two years in 1945 and got the best part of sixteen out of me.”

“And since then? You glossed over that too.”

“And I’ll gloss over it now.”

“Things ain’t been so good?”

“No, they haven’t.”

“The low-heeled life of a gumshoe in a high-heeled country where nothing much really happens? A country where no one carries a gun, and what’s a gumshoe without a gun?”

“You could put it like that.”

“Divorces. You do divorces?”

“Yes. I do divorces. I’m the guy who follows the errant lovers down to Brighton at a prearranged time and catches them in the glare of a flashbulb in a seaside hotel.”

“Crummy.”

“I can think of worse words for it. I can think of more accurate words for it, but yes, crummy will do.”

“And yet you hesitate when Steve makes you the best offer you’ve had since you left the service.”

Wilderness said nothing to this, waited while Spoleto waved for the check.

“You see the guys at the centre table?” Spoleto said as he counted out dollars.

“The one on the left’s George Plimpton. Edits the
Paris Review
. Guy next to him is Lee Strasberg, runs the Actors Studio, y’know . . . Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Eli Wallach. The guy next to him . . .”

“Is Norman Mailer. Frank, do you honestly think I wouldn’t recognise Norman Mailer? His first novel came out while we were all in Berlin. I read it. Eddie Clark read it. Didn’t you read it?”

“Nah. I don’t want to read about the war. I never wanted to read about the war. Hell, I didn’t even go to see
South Pacific
. I was probably the only guy in New York who didn’t. Look over to your right. See the big feller, lots of dark hair. That’s the Broadway producer Arthur Cantor, one of the big wheels on the Great White Way. And do you know the woman he’s with?”

Cantor was with two women, one of whom he most certainly knew. But he sensed that Frank had not recognised her and was referring to the other.

Wilderness thought her face more than vaguely familiar—hair up, glasses, next-to-no makeup, the sense of a beauty contrivedly off-duty—but he didn’t.

“C’mon. I’ll introduce you. Arthur and I go way back.”

Spoleto pushed back his chair and threaded his way through the tables.

Cantor got a Frank backslap that jerked the linguine off the end of his fork.

“Arthur, long time no see.”

Cantor looked as though it had not been long enough and he might just be able to do without Frank for a year or two more, but good manners got the better of him.

“Hello Frank. You know Ingrid?”

“I never had the chance.”

“Ingrid, Frank Spoleto—one of Madison avenue’s
shnorrers
. Frank, Ingrid Bergman.”

Bergman nodded, a soft-spoken, “a pleasure” on her lips, but she was looking at Wilderness.

Spoleto slipped in quickly, “And my old English buddy, Joe Holderness.”

She held out her hand for Wilderness to kiss. He was not one to resist the irresistible.

“And I believe you’ve met . . .”

The other woman cut Cantor off with “Clarissa Troy.”

She too held out her hand, the kiss to the fingers claimed as a right, then she winked hammily at him. And still not a flicker of recognition from Frank.

“We were just making plans for
The Cherry Orchard
,” Cantor resumed.

“You own a cherry orchard? Jeez Artie, the things I don’t know about you.”

“It’s a play, stupid. Clarissa’s translating Chekhov for us.”

“Are you in New York for long, Mr. Holderness?” Bergman asked.

She was looking right up into his eyes now. It was a moment Wilderness would have strung out for ever if he could.

“Probably not. I’ll be at the Gramercy for a day or two. All rather depends on Frank.”

Frank drowned out the moment.

“Say, Arthur, when am I going to get tickets for one of your plays?”

“When you pay for the last lot, Frank.”

All this earned Cantor was a hearty guffaw from Spoleto. He was lucky, Wilderness thought, to be spared a second slap on the back.

Outside, under the yellow awning, Spoleto said, “I wonder what got into him. Fuckin’ skinflint. He’s known as one of the wittiest guys in New York.”

“Perhaps you cramped his style, Frank.”

“And what the fuck’s a shn . . . shn . . .
shnucker
?”

“
Shnorrer.
You amaze me sometimes. How can you live in this city, work with men like Steve and not know a little more Yiddish? It means cheapskate.”

“Cheapskate? He called me a fuckin’ cheapskate?”

“If the cap fits?”

Spoleto was on the metal kerb of the sidewalk looking out for a downtown cab.

“Let’s walk a while, Frank.”

“Eh, what?”

But as Wilderness led off down Second Avenue, he was bound to follow or lose him.

He zigzagged, down a couple of blocks, over a couple of blocks to Lexington. He stood on the corner and waited while Frank caught up with him.

“Jesus H. Christ, Joe. Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I haven’t marched like this since I got out of the army.”

“When was that exactly, Frank? When did you leave the Company?”

“Fifty-eight, about six weeks after we last met.”

“Aha.”

“What the fuck does ‘aha’ mean?”

“Frank, what are you up to?”

“I thought I was trying to offer you a job and buy you dinner.”

“You could have bought me dinner two nights ago.”

“I was busy.”

“Bullshit. You left me to drift around New York. You left me to get to like New York, you wanted me to taste New York. And maybe I did get a taste for New York. The Bronx is up, but I skipped that. The name alone could put you off. The Battery’s down and the view’s great. I even rode in a hole in the ground. But that’s exactly what you did Frank—you sent me out on the town. Dancing with Sinatra and Gene Kelly. And yes, I got the taste for New York—so damn good I could lick it. Then you sent your secretary round to fuck me. You dangled temptation in front of me. If Manhattan wasn’t enough there was Dorothy, and if Dorothy was not enough, there was dinner at Elaine’s. Tell me Frank, did you call ahead and see who had booked? Would we have gone somewhere else if Mailer and Ingrid Bergman hadn’t been in tonight? Would we have gone somewhere where you could be certain I’d taste the high life, where I’d be rubbing shoulders with Hollywood stars and best-selling writers? Because that’s what you’ve been doing. You’ve been dangling New York in front of me. Like a reward. One great big temptation.”

“Well . . . you never could resist temptation.”

“I did Frank. I was polite to Dorothy, but I sent her packing.”

“Dorothy wasn’t part of it. OK? Nothin’ to do with it. Manhattan, what you call the high life . . . sure. Why the fuck not? But Dorothy acted on her own. You must have said something to impress her. It wasn’t that damn painting in the lobby was it? Piece of fucking shit Nat Carver spent thousands of dollars of company money on. Only he and Dorothy ever liked it.”

Wilderness said nothing to this.

“Tempting you with a taste of the high life? Of course I am. I’m trying to get you to see what life can be like with a little folding green in your pants pocket. I want you to take the job, for Christ’s sake.”

“I haven’t said no yet, Frank.”

“And you haven’t said yes. Think about it, Joe. It’s a big opportunity. A really big one. Think big. Think back to Berlin. That day in the summer of ’47, when we sat round the table at the Paradise Club—the day you introduced me to Yuri—you, me, and Eddie . . . who was it said ‘we have to think bigger’? Sure as hell wasn’t me. You did think big, Joe, you did. How many times in ’48 did you tell me not to panic? To stick with it, to sell when I should sell and buy when I should buy. Joe, you had an unerring instinct for the right thing to do in a crisis. When the Russkis were bouncing us around like we were made of fuckin’ India rubber, closing this, closing that, printing money that fell apart in your fingers, trying to pay us in dogshit and sawdust, you stood your ground. Nothing intimidated you. You were the man. You were going places, the world was your fuckin’ oyster . . . you were the man . . . but Joe, don’t tell me that life since then has gone the way you wanted it . . . I’m the one with the fuckin’ Cadillac and an apartment on Park Avenue. I’m the one drivin’ the fuckin’ Cadillac!”

Sheer bluster seemed to exhaust him for a moment. He drew breath and resumed in a softer tone.

“You’re different. That’s undeniable. You’re not the Gorblimey kid I met fifteen years ago. There’s a sophistication about you that’s more than skin-deep. But . . . I know you’re not happy, you’re not satisfied, you’re not rich, you inch along with a blue-collar pride in your own independence, when you know damn well that without your wife’s BBC salary you’d be broke, and without Alec Burne-Jones looking out for you at every step you’d have had no career in the service after Berlin. And you know Joe, the real question is what career might you have had if you’d just blown him out, blown them all out after ’48 and taken your chances. I don’t know and you don’t know. The only time in your life you ever played safe. The only time you didn’t take a chance. All I’m saying is take one now.”

Wilderness looked around him for a moment, getting his bearings by the street signs, gazing up as he began to speak and then levelling to look straight at Frank.