A Choice of Enemies (17 page)

Ernst had begun to pack as soon as Sally left. He had only four pounds and some change, but his clothes were in good shape, his cough had all but disappeared, and his English was better than ever. He had planned to take the train to Liverpool, pick up a seaman, rob him of his papers, and sign on the first ship bound for Montreal. Later, perhaps, he would slip across the border to the United States.

Outside, Ernst was overcome by his old sense of purpose. Again he was watchful. Again he no longer had to account to anyone for his actions. Passing Collet’s Bookshop on his way to the tube station he remembered that he had forgotten to pack his English-German dictionary. Let her keep it, he thought, I’m not a sentimentalist. But crossing to the tube station he found himself hoping that Sally would see him, that she would stop him, and take him home again. He ejected that thought from his mind like a splinter. That kind of life, he thought, is not for me. When he next recalled his interlude with Sally, this time as he got off the train at Liverpool Street Station, he was able to look on it as an adventure that had happened to someone else.

The black station was thick with sandpaper faces. Searching for a likely victim in the crowd Ernst sensed that the pockets of those about him would probably yield nothing more than crumpled betting slips and ten shilling notes carefully folded into wallets between mildewy photographs. So he took the train to Leicester Square. The West End, it seemed to him, would yield better pickings, but once loose on the streets again Ernst was immediately struck by the brutalized faces of the spivs and whores who worked the different corners. Berlin, London, Paris, it was all the same: squalor under the winking neon. These were his people. Night squeezed them like blackheads out of the face of the city. In spite of his fine clothes nobody bothered to proposition Ernst. He recognized them; they recognized him. Another week, two at the most, and he would be coughing again. One of these days his luck would break and, like the rest of them, he would do his stretch in prison. Soon, he thought, I may have another murder to account for.
Account for
, he thought, what’s got into me?
Damn her
.

Ernst sat down to rest on a bench in Soho Square, his hands bunched in his pockets and his eyes moist with remembrance.

Charlie was just going to phone Sonny to tell him what he thought of the script when Norman arrived.

“I’m sorry,” Norman said. “I think I’m a little early.”

“Come on in,” Charlie said. “Joey should have been here ages ago.” He was still carrying the script. “This is the last time I ever do business with Winkleman.” Charlie poured Norman a glass of beer. His round face reddened with anger. “I give him the most exciting comedy he’s seen in years. He puts it through the sausage machine and out it comes a hunk of crap. Wait till I get that bastard on the phone.”

“Don’t phone him now,” Norman said.

“Sure, sure. Maybe I should wait until the damn thing gets produced with
my
name on it. That would be the end of me here.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I wouldn’t even put Landis’s name on it. More I can’t say.”

“There’s a lot of money in it. You can use the money.”

“Sure, sure. I can use the money.”

“If it’s your name you’re worried about why not use a pseudonym?”

“There’s principle involved.
I
would know who wrote it.” Charlie stepped back from the phone. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ve never had a film credit before. You think I’d be crazy to jeopardize the deal. Look, darling, a lot of guys think I’m a bust, but I’ve got my pride too, huh? If my name is going to go on a script I want it to be my script. Whichever of Winkleman’s boys hacked this one up has changed my original so that nobody’d recognize it.”

“But nobody’s seen your original. Nobody would know.”

Charlie half-shut one eye and beat his fist against the palm of his hand again and again. “Of course, I could wait until the picture was made. If it was a success I could – I’m not that kind of worm. Sorry.” Charlie fixed that half-shut eye on Norman. “Besides, you’d know.… Sure, sure, I know. Norman is the quiet one.” Charlie flipped through the script thoughtfully. “It’s not that bad, you know. It might go. I mean whoever hacked it up was a pro. All the imaginative work is mine, of course.” He rolled up the script and tapped Norman’s shoulder with it. “You know my trouble’s always been that I’ve got too much vitality. My stuff overflows. Smaller guys, like you or Artie Miller” – Charlie laughed and winked – “have better control.” He unrolled the script again and read a page to himself. “This hack, whoever he is, knows his stuff. Maybe he cut a bit too much here and there, but –” Charlie frowned – “If it’s a smash, though, wouldn’t he want some credit too? I mean if after I let on that this was my script completely – and that’s true,
you know – it would be pretty embarrassing if this hack turned up and.…”

“It’s your script,” Norman said. “You said so yourself.”

Charlie began to bang his list into the palm of his hand again. “What would you do? In my position, I mean.”

“You need the money.”

Charlie stood pensively by the window again. “There are other things beside my pride. Joey, for instance. Maybe I should be practical for once.”

“I think so.”

“If you hadn’t come in when you did I would have been on the phone to Winkleman already. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes.”

“
O.K
. I’ll do it. I’m grateful to you, too, for the idea.”

“Stop worrying,” Norman said. “Where’s Joey? I’m starved.”

Charlie outlined two plots and an idea for a comedy series to Norman. “Hell,” he said. “I’ve got all the faults of genius. I’m poor like O’Casey. I’m dirtier than Balzac. I’m just as crazy about women as Byron ever was. Why, I’ve even got piles as bad as Marx ever had them, so why am I so emotionally unsuccessful?”

Joey arrived before Norman could reply. “Hiya,” she said, waving a bottle of whisky in the air. “Hiya.”

“I guess you and Bob have been working pretty hard,” Charlie said coldly. “You must be tired.”

Joey flopped into a chair and kicked off her shoes. “Pour me a big one, lover,” she said to Norman. “Pour yourself one too.” Then she turned to Charlie. “Let’s eat out tonight. Bob gave me a bonus for working late. I’m rolling.”

“I bought salad,” Charlie said. “You left me a note asking me to buy salad.”

“We can eat salad tomorrow,” Joey said, “for breakfast.”

“Big joke.”

“I think Joey’s got a good idea,” Norman said. “Let’s eat out.”

“We’re going to eat at home.”

“Home is where you hang yourself,” Joey said. “That’s one of Bob’s jokes. I typed it three times.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” Charlie said.

“Charlie darling,” Joey seemed genuinely surprised. “What is it?”

“The Winkleman deal went through. We’re sure of a production. I also sold a half-hour to Cameo today.”

“Aren’t you the big success,” Joey said ambiguously.

“I came rushing home to tell you and you weren’t here. I had intended to start work on my play this afternoon. Instead I had to go out and do the shopping.”

“Not another word. I’m going to make dinner.”

“We can eat out,” Charlie said. “We can celebrate.”

“Celebrate? No,” she said, “we’ll eat right here,” and turning to Norman she added, “with our patron.”

Charlie had a lot to drink at dinner. Always a gifted storyteller tonight he really shone. Norman and Joey did not see a fat balding man with foxy brown eyes before them. Once more they were in New York. Once more the cold-water flat and the hack work were, as Charlie put it then, fodder for the sensational autobiography he would write afterwards, like Sean O’Casey. They had believed him at the time because he had been laughing at himself when he had given his letters catalogue numbers. But when younger men had begun to make their reputations the jokes had ceased and, instead, when somebody wrote a hit play Charlie had asked, “How old is he?” Tonight, however, Charlie was happy and successful.

Norman, a little drunk himself, remembered the Charlie of the old days. Looking across the table he saw an angry young man shaking an empty Chase & Sanborn coffee tin, crudely labelled
“SPAIN,”
under the faces of first-nighters on Broadway, where someone younger than him had just opened with a smash.

“You’re good, Charlie,” Norman said. “Very good.”

Charlie wiped back his horseshoe of hair. “I’ve just made a decision,” he said. “No more hackery. First thing tomorrow I’m getting down to my play.”

“Wonderful,” Norman said.

“Wonderful. Sure, sure. You’re convinced I’ll never write it. You too, Joey. You don’t think I’ve got the talent. You think Norman is more intelligent than I am.”

Norman rubbed the back of his neck uneasily.

“We’ve known each other for nearly twenty years now,” Charlie said, “but we’ve yet to sit down and speak frankly. You wrote my wife love letters, but she preferred me to you. You’ve never forgiven me that. And you,” he said to Joey, “you’re probably sorry now. Take tonight, for instance. This will sound petty to you, I know, but it’s pretty significant. Norman’s steak was twice the size of mine. Go ahead, laugh. But you do that every time he comes here.”

“Please,” Joey said, her voice severe, “let’s not always make a spectacle of ourselves. If you –”

“Better this,” Charlie said, “than scrabble.”

“– if you must have this out, Charlie, let’s wait until we’re alone.”

“Look here, Miss Daily Worker Bazaar of 1932, Norman isn’t above patronizing a little Nazi thug for the sake of a girl, so I’m sure he won’t lose his virginity if he sits in on a quarrel which concerns him.”

“Charlie,” Norman said, precisely polite, “if you don’t stop this I’m going to get up and go. You won’t see me again, either.”

“You’re both afraid of the truth,” Charlie said, “that’s what.”

“Please, darling. We have more to thank Norman for than you know of.”

“And just what do you mean by that?”

Norman looked sharply at Joey.

“Nothing,” she said.

Charlie glared, he coughed, and then suddenly he smiled widely and winked. “I’m a choice son-of-a-bitch,” he said, “aren’t I? Trouble
is I should have been a great artist. A big, primitive power, like Agatha Christie. Instead.…” He got up and filled their glasses.
“All About Mary,”
he said, “is the most sensational property Winkleman ever mortgaged. Landis here, Landis there. I’m the guy who’s putting Rinky-Dinky back on his feet as a producer here.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Joey said.

“Why? Aren’t you pleased?”

“I’m thrilled,” Joey said coldly. “Honestly, darling.”

“Why that tone of voice, then?”

“Ask Norman.”

Norman’s face darkened.

“Go ahead. Ask him.”

“Joey’s making a joke,” Norman said, “and it’s not a very good one.”

“Well, she ought to be thrilled,” Charlie began meekly. “I told her on the ship coming over, Norman. London is going to be lucky, I said. I had that feeling.”

They drank some more. Joey moved to the arm of Norman’s chair and gradually, as though by accident, she slid on to his lap.

“There must be more comfortable –”

“Go ahead,” Charlie said with forced cheerfulness, “help yourself.”

“Joey,” Norman said. “Come on. You’re not that drunk. Get up.”

“One morning I’ll wake up and discover that Charlie’s only interested in young girls. Like you.”

“Joey!”

“Don’t ‘Joey’ me, brother.”

Charlie laughed desperately. “That would be a plot,” he said. “That would make a fine half-hour. Friend of the family cuckolds the –”

“It’s too corny,” Norman said sharply.

“The corny plots,” Joey said, “always sell. Ask Charlie.”

Joey embraced Norman.

“Hey,” Charlie said, “stop that. You’re humiliating me.”

Joey held on to Norman with a frightening force.

“I know this is only a joke,” Charlie began, “but.…”

Norman struggled with Joey. She was unmovable.

“Hey,” Charlie said, “hey.…”

Charlie seized Joey by the arm and pulled her off Norman. Joey stumbled.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Charlie said.

Joey banged against the wall and then sank like a wreck to the bottom of the room.

“I’m sorry.”

Charlie’s face was coming undone.

“Ask Norman about the script.”

“What’s going on here,” Charlie yelled. “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

“I was the guy who worked on the script for Winkleman,” Norman said wearily.

“Winkleman told Bob Landis that he never would have bought your script if Norman hadn’t promised to work on it. He overpaid you – that’s exactly what Winkleman said – because of Norman.”

Stuck again and again by their banderillas Charlie shook his head thickly, he glared, he coughed, but, even as the other two waited for his last long bellow, all he did was to sigh deeply.

“I want you to go, Norman,” he said in a small voice, “and never come back here again.”

Charlie’s pride, Joey thought – the fear bursting like a boil inside her – means more to him than I do. He never would have thrown Norman out because of
me
.

“I want to die,” she said. “I want to die.”

Charlie couldn’t resist it. “Go ahead and die,” he said.

Norman got up. His back ached where Joey’s fingernails had cut deeply.

“Now I know why you tried to talk me out of phoning Winkleman,” Charlie said. “You betrayed me.”

“Your wife’s forehead is cut. Why don’t you attend to it?”

Charlie’s laughter came out solid like a stone. “I should have guessed that you were a bum,” he said, “when you started running after Joey behind my back.”

“You should have, but you didn’t.”

“Before I even knew that it was you who had worked on the script didn’t I say that it had been ruined?”

“Joey’s going to be sick in a minute. Get her into bed.”

“My friend Norman.” Joey passed out.

“If you needed money so badly,” Charlie said, “couldn’t you have come to me instead of plotting with Winkleman behind my back?”