A Choice of Enemies (3 page)

“You act it,” Milly said.

“Touché,”
Malcolm said.

Big American cars, a casual proof of the conqueror’s affluence, were parked without care on either side of the Grunwalderstrasse. Looking out of the window, Nicky noticed the usual set of army wives, in pincurls and blue jeans, drinking beer morosely in the
gasthaus
garden. They struck him as a curiously touching group.

“Nicky’s brother sent him a hundred dollars for his birthday,” Frank said.

Nicky was skinny and tall and awkward with his fair hair clipped short and his eyes blue and brooding.

“Nicky’s brother is a square,” Malcolm said. “He can’t forgive cats our age for not having been killed in Spain and all.”

“Is your brother a commie?” Milly asked.

Nicky looked pained. “He’s a paraphrase writer,” he said.

“A what?”

“Tell her, Mr. Bones.”

“A paraphrase writer,” Malcolm said, “is a guy who can read a story in
Collier’s
, rewrite it, and then sell it to the
Saturday Evening Post
for more loot. Right?”

“Young man,” Nicky said, “you have just won a bar with a built-in Cadillac and your choice of three of the Philippine Islands. Would you like to try for sixty-four dollars?”

“For heaven sakes,” Milly said, “can’t you answer a question?”

“My brother,” Nicky said, “was an English lit. prof. until it was discovered that he was an agent of the Kremlin. A fact uncovered by close examination of his income tax returns. So he was fired. And just about then a publisher got after him for his confessions. But he refused. On that day in fact Norman Price made that now historic statement: ‘I’d rather be left than vice-president.’ ” Nicky puffed frantically at his cigarette. “ ‘So what happened next,’ laughed the pretty young crafts director. ‘He was deported to Canada,’ snarled the young soldier with the wrinkle in his eye. And from there he came to Europe where he is now otherwise employed as a witchhunt hunter. More specifically, honey-child, my brother is compiling a list of anti-communist front organizations for Hollywood-hacks-in-exile, Inc. The aforementioned hundred bucks is hush money. Moscow gold. I’m the Munich fingerman.”

“A hundred dollars is a lot of money,” Milly said. “Does Peggy know yet?”

“Peggy bugs him,” Malcolm said.

“Well maybe Peggy is getting just a bit tired of Nicky picking up stray Germans here and there. Maybe Peggy” – she turned to Nicky – “is beginning to find you just a bit too moody.…”

“Come on,” Nicky said as the bus came to a stop, “let’s see what’s doing at the American Way.”

Soldiers slumped in easy chairs in the immense lounge of the American Way Club and a juke box hillbilly hollered:

The three boys stopped before a cardboard figure of a hillbilly who advertised a barn dance. Pappy Burns’ Tune Twisters, the poster promised, would play on Friday night. Another poster, this one on the wall above the information desk, read:

The boys walked through the lounge into the snack bar.

“What’s happened to Nicky?”

Malcolm looked round. “He’s probably upstairs playing ping-pong.”

They looked, but he wasn’t there. They found him drinking beer with a German in a bar around the corner.

“Meet Ernst,” Nicky said.

Ernst had a lean, quiet face. His hard blue eyes were mindful. Vigilant. Had he been dressed differently he could have passed for a man who considered himself better than his job, but obviously he had none. Yet he did not seem cunning or squalid. That (the possibilities of true friendship) is what had attracted Nicky to him at first. For Nicky, more than the others, was conscious of the hatred evoked by his uniform. He yearned to be recognized as something more personal than just another occupation soldier.

Ernst wore a
G.I
. combat jacket that had been dyed blue and under it a strikingly clean white shirt opened at the collar. His baggy, cuffless black trousers had originated with some other army, probably the Russian, but his tan loafers were distinctly unmilitary.

“Ernst’s from East Germany,” Nicky said. “He’s on his way to Paris.”

“Who’s holding him back?” Malcolm asked.

“No money.” Ernst spoke softly, his accent was thick, but his American, just like his Russian and his French and his English, was incongruously colloquial. He spoke the language of soldiers. “And no papers.”

“That’s crazy, you wanting to get out of Germany,” Malcolm said, his thick neck reddening. “Real crazy.”

“Cut it,” Nicky said.

But Malcolm edged closer to Ernst. “My name’s Greenbaum,” he said. “
G-R-E-E-N-B-A-U-M.”

“All right,” Nicky said, “he was a kid when all that happened.”

“A kid, sure.” Malcolm turned to Ernst again. “Were you in the war?”

“Yeah. During the last weeks.”

Malcolm grinned triumphantly and afraid.

“And I’ll bet you come from a leading family of anti-Nazis.…”

Ernst averted his eyes. “I would like to be your friend,” he said. “I have nothing against –”

“Nothing against the Jews, huh? That’s very white of you.”

“I am not an anti-semite,” Ernst said.

“Shake with him,” Frank said to Malcolm. “Come on.”

“Over my dead body.”

“I was with the communist youth,” Ernst tried again. “They have lots of Jews.”

“If there’s anything I hate worse than an anti-semite,” Malcolm said, “it’s a commie.”

Frank walked away in disgust, put a coin into the juke box, and asked a heavily made-up girl, who had been sitting with three men, to dance with him. Malcolm ordered a round of drinks and then pulled Nicky into a corner. “I don’t dig the kraut,” he said. “I thought we were going to have us a ball, just the three of us, and then maybe later some
schatzies.”
A boil had burst on the back of his neck and Malcolm fingered the yellowing bandage tenderly. His quick black
eyes pleaded for assurances. “Be a pal,” he said, slapping Nicky on the back. “Let’s ditch him here and go to Peg’s party.”

“Nobody’s stopping you from going to Peggy’s party.”

“It’s your birthday but. The party’s for you.”

“Drink your beer, man. And try to be friendly.”

The bar, cheap but not quite a dive, smelled of cooking fat. The tinsel decorations over the mirror were covered with dust. There were many salesmen and office workers and small businessmen about. Men with uniformly spic faces. There were a few more girls, but no other soldiers. Frank held his girl tight and she giggled and pushed his hand away from her breast – and all the men heard and watched.

One of the men, a big one with cold little eyes, came up to Ernst and pressed his arm. Ernst tightened and slipped his hand into his jacket. Malcolm watched.

“Get them out of here,” the big man said. “The girl is with us.”

Ernst recognized the type, and he would gladly have started a fight but remembering that he had no papers, remembering the dreary Nissen huts and the drearier lectures on democracy in the refugee camp at Sandbostel – what he would have to return to if he were caught by the police – he decided that a fight would be foolish.

“All right,” Ernst said, “but let them finish their drinks first.”

So the four boys left. Frank and Malcolm walked ahead.

“The kraut’s packing a shiv,” Malcolm said.

“Do you think there’s going to be trouble?”

“Not if we warn Nicky.”

“You can’t tell Nicky anything. Don’t you know that yet?”

The four boys picked their way between bars and churches and brothels in the constricted grey streets of the old town and finally emerged into the broader twilight of the up-and-coming streets at the Marienplatz. For several years now men had been working day and night rebuilding what had been almost totally destroyed by allied bombings. Week by week Munich was being restored and pushed higher. A scaffolding came down here, another shot up
there. This changing of the face of the city day by day lent a certain excitement to the streets, but, as far as Nicky was concerned, it was difficult to believe in the boom. Everywhere there were busy bosses and busy workers, but the new shops of the Theatinerstrasse had the ephemeral quality of a carnival big top and one could never be sure that the circus would not be dismantled and pulled out of town during the night. Men of a certain age were scarce. The cafés were too thick with unaccompanied women. You could believe in nothing these days. Nicky sensed that, Ernst knew it. And as they crossed the Stachusplatz Ernst said, “In 1919 the Reds held this square against a whole regiment with only two machine guns and four men.”

“Are you a communist?” Nicky asked.

“I used to be. I was an official in the
FDJ
, but now –” Ernst hesitated; he would have liked to have said something sardonic about East and West “– now I have no politics.”

“Neither have I.” Nicky waited until Frank and Malcolm had turned the corner and then pulled a pile of papers out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, separating three twenty dollar bills from the other papers. “I know you’re broke. Pay me back when you have it.”

Ernst took the money, but he was puzzled.

“Come on.” Nicky felt hurt because Ernst had not thanked him for the money and yet he disliked people who were effusively grateful. “Let’s catch up with the others.”

Malcolm and Frank were waiting around the corner. “Let’s go to Peg’s party,” Malcolm asked for the tenth time.

“Look, man,” Nicky said, “if we go to Peggy’s party she’s going to want to know why I didn’t see her yesterday and the yesterday before yesterday. She bugs me, man. I want a swinging gal and she ain’t it.”

Frank suggested that they go somewhere where they could dance.

“That’s my boy,” Nicky said.

The
jazzkeller
had served as an air-raid shelter during the war. As the four boys descended the musty concrete steps a thick-lipped blues, washed up with the yellow smoke and laughter, slapped against
the stones. They picked their way through a dark winding passage, tripping over abandoned beer bottles, before they finally made it into the crowded anteroom.

“Maybe,” Malcolm said, confronting Ernst heatedly, “you’d like to buy a round for a change?”

“This happens to be my round,” Nicky said. But Nicky was ashamed. He watched sadly as Malcolm, conscious of his spilling belly again, hitched up his trousers sullenly. Nicky punched him affectionately on the shoulder. “We’ll go to Peg’s party from here.”

“If you don’t mind my tagging along,” Malcolm said.

Nicky pushed his way through the mob and back again with four bottles of beer. Then, with the others following after, he squeezed his way under a low door into the immense cellar. The arched ceiling was visible only where cigarette clouds parted grudgingly here and there. To Nicky’s right, long wooden tables faded away into the endless gloom. Bodiless heads and hands gripping beer bottles appeared through punctures in the eye-stinging haze. The din, whenever the music let up, was deafening. A girl was shoved against Nicky – they embraced. Then she was consumed again by the mob and his beer bottle was gone with her. Another girl swiftly took her place against him as though a body alone, like an open wound, was something to be quickly bandaged. Above them, the band played badly in a blaze of five hundred watt bulbs, and all at once Nicky and the girl were flung free into a clear space. Malcolm was there, watching, rubbing his damp yellowing bandage.

“Where’s Frank?” Nicky asked.

“Gone to the can with –” Malcolm pointed at Frank and Ernst approaching. “Here they are.”

Frank’s flaming hair was damp with sweat.

“He’s been sick,” Ernst said. “I think we should go.”

Outside, Malcolm caught up with Nicky. “Frank’s lost his wallet,” he said.

Nicky wiped his head with his arm.

“Frank’s lost his wallet,” Malcolm said, “and you and I both know who swiped it.”

“Don’t be crazy. One of the whores must have lifted it.”

“Yeah, some chance.”

“He didn’t steal Frank’s wallet.
He didn’t
. Why can’t you be nice to him? He didn’t shoot your
zeyda
or – Ernst’s probably had it tougher than either you or I can imagine. Give him a break, huh?”

“Will you lemme search him?”

“Go to hell, Malcolm.”

“I’ll bet you my next month’s pay against one lousy buck that Ernst’s got his wallet.”

Ernst and Frank were coming.

“You touch him, you just put your little finger on him, and I’ll break your neck.”

“Scared he did it, huh?”

“Why should I give a damn?”

“You tell me, man, I’m listening.
He packs a shiv.”

“Who?”

“The man in the goddamed moon, that’s who. Wow! Can I have the next dance, momma?”

“You remember what I said,” Nicky said as the two boys drew nearer.

“Some buddy you turned out to be. Jesus H. Christ.”

Nicky broke away and took Frank by the arm. “Feeling better?”

Frank, tall and awkward, grinned weakly. And Nicky wondered whether Frank’s brother, the one who they’d hanged, had been so tall, so gentle. He hoped not.

“I’m fine,” Frank said. “Honest I am.”

“We’re going to Peg’s party now. You’ll be able to lie down there.” Nicky hailed a taxi. “You two go ahead. We’ll follow.”

“You’re trying to get rid of us,” Malcolm said.

Nicky pushed the two of them into a taxi and turned to Ernst with a shy, hesitant smile. “Thanks for taking care of Frank,” he said.

Ernst reached into his pocket. “Here.” It was Frank’s wallet. “I saw one of the girls take it off him. Here.”

Nicky slipped the wallet into his pocket. “Let’s get a taxi,” he said, his voice unnaturally hoarse.

“You think I stole his wallet?”

Nicky felt as though he was going to be physically sick.

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“Yeah,” Ernst said. “It does.”

They got into a taxi.

“If you say you didn’t steal it then I believe you,” Nicky said.