Boxer, Beetle (8 page)

But there was no one at home to answer Berg’s call. He shrugged. ‘I will try again tomorrow.’

They talked about boxing for a little longer, and then Sinner said, ‘’Scuse me,’ and got up. Kölmel looked at Frink. When Sinner had gone for a piss earlier on Kölmel had waited outside the door of the lavatory, having already checked that it had no window big enough to climb out of. But now both men were sated and sluggish, so it wasn’t until four or five minutes had passed that Frink got up to check on Sinner. And by that time, the boy was almost on East Broadway.

On his way out he’d snatched Kölmel’s wallet from his coat, which had been hung up in Berg’s hall. In the wallet was twelve dollars. And he still had the watch, although he didn’t think he had much chance of pawning it at this time of night.

Before long he found a liquor store. They had real imported London dry gin but it was too expensive, so he bought a bottle of bourbon and some boiled sweets. Outside, he saw three chaffinches pecking at some cigarette butts. Did American birds eat ash? He hailed a cab.

‘Where to?’ said the driver.

‘259 West 70 Street,’ said his passenger.

Sinner was not the sort of drunk who made a sighing, squinting, groaning, chuckling performance out of how much he enjoyed his first pint of beer after a long day, and he was certainly not the sort of drunk who got shakes or sweats if he went without – and he had a lot of contempt for either of those failings. But there was still half a smile on his face as he sipped his bourbon.

‘West 70th.’

‘Yeah. Is Times Square on the way?’

‘If you want.’

‘Go through Times Square.’

The light in Times Square seemed like the light that would bleed out of any solid object in this world if you could somehow scourge away its surface. Sinner was astonished
by the light, and also by the number of men promenading around outside the bars and restaurants and theatres whose dress and gestures would have fitted in perfectly well at the Caravan. A gaunt old man was out walking his rabbit, which he picked up and held under his arm as he crossed the street, its leather leash over his wrist. Sinner had heard that now during the day they ran soup kitchens here out of the back of old army trucks, but even that temporary dreariness couldn’t dim this place. The taxi got caught in a clot of traffic, and spaced along the nearby pavement Sinner noticed three blokes in smart suits greeting everyone who walked past like an old friend.

‘What’s their game?’ said Sinner. ‘Pimps or something?’

‘Travel agents,’ the cab driver corrected him. ‘You want to go to Los Angeles, they find three other guys who want to go too, and then they find a guy who’s driving there anyway and they take a commission. Won’t cost you more than thirty dollars. Course, that’s if the guy driving don’t sneak off with everybody’s money and everybody’s baggage while you’re still eating lunch in a cafeteria in Newark. Or worse! I heard about one old lady—’

‘Los Angeles?’ Sinner interrupted.

‘Huh?’

‘Los Angeles for thirty dollars? Hollywood?’

‘Sure.’

‘Anywhere I can pawn a watch around here?’

‘Sure.’

‘Now?’

‘Sure.’

Sinner thought about that for a while.

‘What’s the matter?’ the cab driver eventually said. ‘You still want to go uptown or not?’

‘Yeah. Uptown.’ He could go to Los Angeles tomorrow.

They dodged between the trams at Columbus Circle and within ten minutes Sinner was paying the driver on West 70th
Street. He smoked a cigarette, drank some more bourbon, and then knocked on Balfour Pearl’s door.

Pearl opened it in shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. He smelt of sweat, being one of those rare men who could truly exert themselves alone at a desk.

‘You forgot your watch,’ said Sinner.

‘You stole it.’

Sinner shrugged.

‘I grew up in Manhattan,’ said Pearl. ‘Do you think I don’t know when a boy slips off my watch as he shakes my hand? Do you think I don’t have friends who could steal your underpants as they wave to you from across the street?’

‘Do you want it back?’

‘Yes, I want it back. Are you expecting a reward?’

‘I want some ice with my drink.’

‘I share this house with my wife and daughter.’

‘They’re on the long island,’ said Sinner. Pearl let him push past.

Most of the house was dark, but there was some weak light from up the stairs, so Sinner found his way up to the study, where typewritten papers were strewn across the desk beneath a green-shaded banker’s lamp as if exhausted by their struggles with the city planner.

‘You won’t find ice in there,’ said Pearl, behind him.

‘Get me some, then.’

‘Perhaps I’ll call the Rabbi and let him know you’re here. He must be concerned. Would you like me to do that?’

‘You can do what you like after you get me some ice.’

‘Once again, you seem to think your insolence will impress me, and once again, I remind you that I grew up in Manhattan. Talking of which, I remember your trainer said you were desperate to see Times Square – did you take the opportunity on your way?’

‘It was all right,’ admitted Sinner.

‘Better than Piccadilly Circus?’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘It’s best appreciated with a map to hand – the way it slashes through the grid. Have you heard of Oscar Gude?’

‘He the bloke who stole your underpants?’

‘Oscar Gude is Times Square. In 1879 Thomas Edison had the idea for the electric light bulb and in 1892 Oscar Gude had the idea for selling things with it: firstly property on Long Island – I’m sorry, “the long island” – and then Heinz pickles. By the end of the war there must have been ten or twenty thousand billboards in America with Gude’s name on them, including a hell of a lot in Times Square. They called him “the Botticelli of Broadway”. I met him once. He thought what he did was beautiful. Did you think it was beautiful?’

Sinner shrugged and sat down on top of the desk, his feet dangling off.

‘By the way, I’m sure you’re enjoying that brand of whiskey just as much as the average Appalachian hobo, but if you’d like to try something a touch more refined there’s a bottle in the bottom drawer. Yes, on the left. And glasses on the shelf. Now, to Gude, you must realise, art and advertising were two names for the same beast. I can’t imagine he’ll be the last person in New York to get rich off that thuggish notion, or the last person to think he was the first. Except he also understood that you can’t force people to look at art but you can force people to look at advertising if you put a hundred thousand light bulbs right there in the street. He liked that. He liked claiming his piece of the city. A form of conquest, really. I remember when he put up that Wrigley’s sign on Broadway. Huge. Hundreds of feet long. I came back from my first semester at Yale and no one was talking about anything else. To make people excited about the fact that you’re selling them chewing gum – that’s a hell of a thing. If there was even one man in the mayor’s office with that kind of genius there’d be no slums left in New York.’

As Pearl pontificated about lights, he still hadn’t switched on any more in the room itself. Losing interest, Sinner got down off the desk and wandered over to the open window of the study, outside which a black iron fire escape crawled like an insect up the rear wall of the house, dustbins clustered like eggs at its base. Beside Pearl’s desk he nearly stubbed his toe on a big cardboard box full of yellow printed forms. He bent down to look. They were all identical and blank. ‘What are these?’ he said.

‘A project of mine, from when I was working at the Civil Services Commission,’ said Pearl. ‘A failure. I offered them a true hierarchy of merit but of course no one wanted it. Do you understand that expression?’

Sinner shrugged.

‘Those forms were to grade the men,’ Pearl went on. ‘I spent a year cataloguing the functions and responsibilities of every job in New York government. And then I gave each function and responsibility a mathematical weight according to its relative importance. And then I gave out those forms so that every man could be precisely assessed according to how well he performed those functions and responsibilities, and according to his personality and morals and potential and so on. And once we had all those numbers we could have said exactly who was needed and who wasn’t, who was being paid too little and who too much, with no need for any “human factor”. But it never passed the Board of Aldermen. They weren’t interested in change. Now they use those forms to pass around racing tips.’

As Pearl continued to speak – and he clearly liked to hear himself speak – he reminded Sinner more and more of somebody he’d once met, and, after a minute of thinking, he remembered who it was: that posh cunt who’d followed him from Premierland to the Caravan, the one who wouldn’t shut up about how ‘unusual’ Sinner was. And at that moment of recollection Sinner was struck by an inexplicable rage, and
he began to gather up the yellow forms in his hands and fling them out of the open window. They fluttered away like dead leaves. ‘Cunts!’ he shouted. ‘You’re all cunts!’

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Pearl said, grabbing his shoulders. Sinner turned, cuffed Pearl’s face, bit his shoulder, bit his neck and bit his mouth. Pearl pulled Sinner away from the window and they both fell to their knees. Pearl, already panting, started to undo Sinner’s belt. Then someone was hammering at the door downstairs.

‘I know you’re there, Sinner!’ shouted Kölmel. ‘Come out! I know you’re fucking there! Or, er, otherwise, if you’re not, I’d like to offer you my sincerest apologies, Mr Pearl.’

‘Fuck!’ said Sinner. He got up, picked up his original bottle of bourbon, kicked the still-kneeling Pearl in the face and climbed out of the window on to the fire escape, which was now littered with the yellow forms. It was a warm night, and as he looked out over New York he felt like an ant crawling over a cinema screen. Running down the clanging iron steps, he nearly toppled off the edge – a week of abstinence and constant exercise had let him get drunk tonight even quicker than he’d intended. He jumped down to the pavement beside the dustbins and looked around. The street was empty but for a stray cat. He wanted to be submerged in glow again, but Times Square was a long way away, and on the corner opposite he saw a delicatessen, closed, and a little bar, still open. He ran across the street into the bar. And there, sitting on a stool with a beer, was Frink.

‘Come on, Sinner,’ said Frink, not looking surprised to see him. ‘Don’t know what you wanted with that wanker, but you’ve had your fun now.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Sinner.

‘Come on, Sinner,’ repeated Frink. He got up from the stool and made as if to put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. So Sinner smashed the bottle of bourbon on the edge of the bar and lunged with a grunt at Frink, who raised his hands to
defend himself and got a two-inch gash in his palm. Sinner was about to lunge again when the barman smacked him over the head with a wooden drinks tray and he lost consciousness. The last thing he saw was his trainer looking sadly down at him, blood streaming from his dirty fingertips. He hadn’t even eaten his sweets.

By the side of the road there was a heap of burnt wood like a badger’s funeral pyre. ‘What’s that?’ said Erskine as the cart rattled past.

‘A sort of shrine, I think,’ replied Gittins, and said something to the driver in Polish. The driver’s reply was so long that Erskine wished he had never raised the subject, but finally the driver did finish and Gittins translated.

‘A hundred years ago it seems there was a monk called Jakub, who lived in the monastery up in the mountains. One day he went into his abbot’s study to find him … well, doing something unspeakable with the daughter of the blacksmith from down here in Fluek, whose great-grandchildren still live nearby. Jakub, outraged, killed the abbot with a dagger, and then, stricken with guilt and panic, fled the monastery. Coming to this road, he dropped the dagger where that shrine is now, stole a horse and rode north towards Gdansk. Along the way, after witnessing evil and misery of all kinds and helping where he could, he met God in a tavern.’

‘I see.’

‘Jakub asked God why He allowed human brutality to go unchecked in all its awfulness. God replied that He merely gave human beings free will, which he could never take back. But Jakub argued that free will is a frail thing, always a slave to our animal instincts – if God wanted us to have real free will, why did he make men so hot-headed at the same time? God told Jakub that he had already heard these arguments from his angels, and he had ignored them then too. But at last, in frustration, God suggested to Jakub a pact, whereby any man
who wanted to murder another man would now get the chance to think it over without passion. Jakub would become the saint of repentant murderers: whenever one man killed another, Jakub would appear to that man, give him as long as he needed to consider properly what he’d just done, and ask if he regretted it. If he did, the man could take back the murder and it would be as if nothing had ever happened. If he didn’t, then at least he would have acted with true free will. And if the scheme were successful, it would be extended to all sin. Jakub would become the second-greatest redeemer that ever lived.’ In the distance Erskine spotted a thin plume of smoke above the darksome fir trees – they were nearing the village. ‘Jakub agreed, of course, but as soon as he did he realised that God had tricked him. He would go years at a time, coming upon thousands of scenes of carnage, before finding a single person who would not do just the same thing if given a second chance. People kill, Jakub realised, because it suits us to, and our baser urges are just an excuse. In the end, he saw that he had been lying even to himself: he was glad he’d killed the abbot, and wouldn’t change a thing about what had happened. He went to God and asked if he could give up the task, now that he had been shown how wrong he was about human nature and about his own. And God denied him his freedom, as a punishment for the abbot’s murder. Rather a striking fable, isn’t it? Now it seems that everyone who passes by throws a log or a stick on the pile, and every so often somebody sets light to it. The fire calls to Jakub, asking him to help the people of his village choose wisely in troublous times.’