The Prince of West End Avenue (13 page)

There he stood, wrapped in his elegant dressing gown of wine colored silk, his great girth shuddering with secret glee, the roguish expression on his thin face made all the more ridiculous by the globs of lather that still adhered to his cheeks.

"Finish shaving," I said. "We've much to talk about."

He waddled off to the bathroom, leaving its door open.

"We'll talk over breakfast," he called. "I'm starving. Country air, I suppose."

So that was it! No doubt after penetrating Hermione Perlmutter's final defenses, the old fool had proposed marriage. Ah, Hamburger, ah, Jumbo, Jumbo, so it was not the shifting of molars after all!

"Shave," I could not control my impatience. He turned on the hot water, and while he shaved, he sang the "Ah, how funny!" aria from Die Fledermaus. Then he gargled, long and loud, with a sound that rose and fell, recognizable after a while as the same aria transposed to a new medium.

He emerged from the bathroom clad only in his long Johns. "Ecce homo!" he said.

Now it was my privilege to watch a Beau Brummel de nos jours prepare for the day. He stood at the open closet door, pondering. This? That? Perhaps this other?

"What do you think of this tie, Otto?"

I closed my eyes.

"A moment, my dear sir, patience, the blink of an eye." And he began bum-bum-bumming his bathroom aria.

At last he was ready, resplendent, refulgent. "What d'you say this morning we go out for breakfast, my treat? Not Goldstein's, of course. Wherever else you say. Who knows, perhaps over a second cup of coffee I might have something of interest to tell you."

This was too much. " You might have something of interest? Ha! About your indecent weekend I can already guess, spare me the details. What is it with you, Hamburger? For days now I keep telling you I've something of considerable personal concern to discuss with you, something that touches me dearly, something—I don't exaggerate—that has driven me to distraction, and all you offer me is evasions: 'Sorry, I'm off to the

movies,' 'Too bad, I'm going to the Hampton's.' What is this? Perhaps it's time for Korner and his problems to go elsewhere." I had of course brought the charades with me, and now I shook them in his face. "Perhaps you haven't time to look at these. Of course not. Well, why should I be surprised? After all, you owe me nothing. Forget it, never mind, it doesn't matter. By the way, congratulations on your engagement."

Yes, to my eternal shame I went on at him like that. Poor Benno! I had pricked the bubble of his good cheer. Utterly bewildered by this unexpected and unfair assault, he dropped onto his bed—poof!—deflated, miserable.

"Forgive me, Otto, forgive me, old friend."

And so, having reduced him to sober and guilty attention, I told him about the stolen letter—at which news he took in sharply his breath—and handed him the charades.

As he read them, the color left: his cheeks. His jaw dropped, and a haunted look came into his eyes. "Oh, my God!"

"Who is it?"

Hamburger passed his hand over his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, uttered a shuddering sigh.

"Benno, who is it?"

"Give me your hand." His own was trembling. "I want your word of honor you will leave this for me to take care of."

"First tell me who stole the letter."

"No, first your promise. If I tell you, you will do nothing, you will say nothing, you will leave it up to me. In twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the most, you will have your letter. But your word of honor, Otto."

What could I do? "You have it."

We shook hands solemnly.

Once he told me the name, of course, the charades proved embarrassingly simple:

Whoever tries to mouth the culprit's name Must end in ordure to assign the blame.

Answer: mouth-ordure-lip-shits.

To give my first is sure to give offense, But may create a smile (in other sense). (1) Who does my second doubtless finds his ease, But even if a czar must bend his knees. (2)

Answers: (1) lip; (2) shits. The third was the easiest of the three:

The gap that stands in view twixt hip and tits Can soon be closed in rhyme by clever wits.

Answer: hip-tits-lip-shits. And of course the couplet of the sonnet tells the same story:

Look for the thief in Denmark's Elsinore; He's in the play, and dallying with his whore.

Answer: Lipschitz! Lipschitz!! Lipschitz!!!

Now, when more than ever I wanted to talk to him, Hamburger was anxious to be rid of me. Gone was the promise of a breakfast treat and a chat over a second cup of coffee.

"As you can imagine, Korner, I have much to do. And before I act, I must think." He hurried me out of his room. At the door he took my hand again, his expression woebegone. "Remember, I have your word of honor. And remember this, too: an accusation is no proof of guilt."

The door closed in my face before I could speak.

And so I sit here in tumult, waiting. And I am besieged by questions. Why should Lipschitz have stolen my letter? Of what value can it be to him? Can one suppose he has even heard of Rilke? Can Tosca Dawidowicz have prompted him, that harridan who rules him by a twitching of her skirts? Or was he

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motivated quite simply by his own malice? And the old question: who pointed the finger at him, however enigmatically? What was his motive? Also malice? Toward Lipschitz? Yes, it seemed so. Toward me? Who can doubt it? And what of Benno Hamburger, my true friend, my pillar of integrity? How mysteriously he is behaving! What does he know about all this? How does he propose to go about recovering the letter? And so on and on and round and round, until my head spins and I cannot find my breath.

a nurse, a cook, and a bottle-washer. Of the bedpans she would say nothing, save that hauling him onto them and rolling him off had brought a return of her old back problems. Now, even to pick up a piece of paper—here she demonstrated, picking up the list of solo-ambulants: "oy!"—was agony. Now Bernie was talking of retirement; he liked the easy life. "Who ever heard of a C.P.A. retiring?" Well, if he thought she was going to hang about catering to his whims, he had better think again. It was a relief to be out of the house.

Meanwhile, she had already caught up on the gossip of our little community. There really was nothing of interest I could tell her, but that did not stop her from telling me the latest tidbits, among them two stunning items whose significance she was as ill equipped to recognize as I was almost afraid to contemplate. Nahum Lipschitz is in the infirmary with a broken hip, a severely sprained wrist, and numerous cuts and abrasions! It seems that just before lunchtime he fell down a flight of steps in the fire stairwell. What he was doing in the stairwell, when the elevator was at his disposal, he refuses to say, but he claims that the "accident" was engineered, that he was pushed. By whom? "By person or persons unknown." These are serious charges, and the Kommandant has been summoned home from Jerusalem, where he has been attending the annual International Conference of Jewish Old-Age Home Directors. The last thing he wanted, said Selma, hinting at certain "irregularities" that she was not at liberty to divulge, was to have the police and (worse!) the newspapers sniffing around. As for her, she did not believe that Lipschitz had been pushed. A momentary dizziness, and voild! The man was eighty-one; at his age, such episodes were not unheard-of. And when had Nahum Lipschitz ever accepted the blame for anything? Meanwhile, he was lucky to be alive. His condition was grave: brittle bones, she explained.

The second item Selma had no reason to connect to the

first, and in fact she retailed it independently, while chatting about the warm reception she had received from residents and staff alike upon her return. It had done her heart good. Say what you like, there was still some good in the world. At any rate, shortly after one o'clock Benno Hamburger and Her-mione Perlmutter had passed her window on their way to the front door, without even turning in her direction or pausing to check out. They had looked grim as death; he was holding her firmly by the upper arm, and they were walking at a determined clip. Selma had rapped on the glass, but they had ignored her. The nerve of some people. They knew the rules. She had tried to run after them, but what with her poor back and all, by the time she got to the front door, they were gone, and a long gray limousine was just pulling away from the curb. Imagine that, she sniffed. They didn't even know she was back.

An attempt on Lipschitz's life! Hamburger and his moll on the run!

O Jumbo, what have you done!

The WORLD IS STILL FULL of surprises. The old analogies yet hold: "I am a little world made cunningly," said an English poet. Just so. And between the macrocosm and the microcosm stands the Emma Lazarus, racked by the same passions as heave the ocean on the shore, divide nations, and cause conflicts in the human soul. But surprise is merely the failure of perception, the myopia of a creature who, like Oedipus, runs from disaster only to encounter it, who sees his good turned to evil, his evil to good. In this sense, the figure for Purpose is less a ramifying tree than a spider's web of infinite complexity and total harmony, and in it we are caught, blinded from a vision of the whole by entanglement in a part. And the spider?

That, I suppose, is Time, which first traps us and then at length devours us.

These and such as these were my lugubrious thoughts during a sleepless night, with my foe struck down by my friend, and my friend fleeing the savage talons of the avenging Furies.

This morning the rains fell in torrents. On the bulletin board in the lobby was a terse notice: "Rehearsals canceled until further notice." When I entered the dining room for breakfast, it seemed to me that the voices hushed momentarily. I felt myself the cynosure of all eyes. La Dawidowicz ostentatiously cut me, turning her back. But soon the twittering resumed; the talk was all of Lipschitz and of the endangered play. At my table sat only Seiiora Krauskopf y Guzman. "Buenos dias, Dona Isabella," I said. She turned her magnificent, her passionate, black eyes up to me. "Twat twat twat," she said. "Jog jog jog, jog

j°g jog."

Eulalia brought me my modest breakfast: a bowl of porridge, a slice of dry toast, and a glass of tea. Scarcely had I begun on the porridge when I sensed a presence behind me. I turned. It was Hamburger—yes, yes, Hamburger! He was white-faced and grim, perhaps even angry. He still wore his overcoat, which glistened with raindrops, and under his arm he carried a slim rectangular parcel, in a neat wrapping of heavy, water-splotched brown paper. The shock almost killed me. Automatically I spooned some porridge into my mouth.

"Lets go," he said.

How could I get up? "I can't. I'm weak, I haven't eaten." My heart was thumping in its cavity. Surely he must have heard it.

He was pitiless. "Five minutes. Your room or mine?"

"Yours. No, mine. No, what does it matter? Sit down. Where have you been? What have you done?"

"My room. In five minutes." He turned on his heel and marched stiffly out.

I watched him go, my legs turned to water. As best I could, I fought the rising hysteria, the nausea, and tried to take some nourishment. It was no use. Making my apologies to the sefiora, I tottered from the table. Several times I had to pause and lean on the wall on my way to the elevator.

Hamburger's quarters are decorated in the manner of an English clubroom: polished wood, hunting prints, leather furniture, gleaming silver. He gestured impatiently to a chair, and I sat down. He went over to the window and stood for a moment with his back to me, looking down on West End Avenue. Suddenly he whirled.

"Nahum Lipschitz is in the infirmary," he barked.

"I know." I tried to keep the reproach out of my voice.

"Shit, shit, shit!"

To this triplicate of Hamburgeriana I could of course say nothing.

"He is innocent, completely innocent!"

"And what if he were guilty? Would that have justified violence?" I demanded.

"What pains me most, what I cannot forgive, is that you gave me your word."

I got up from the chair at this and stood before him. "He might have died; he might never recover. Do you know how serious this is? The Kommandant is on his way back from Jerusalem. 'Don't talk to him,' you said. I could have reasoned with him."

"Your word of honor, Korner. We shook hands."

"Ah, Benno, that you should think such an act would help me! Better I never saw the letter again."

"Too late for that now," he said bitterly. "At best it's a botched job. At worst. . . ? But don't worry, I'll not turn you

in." There were tears in his eyes. "As for me, I must prepare to shoulder my burden of guilt, an accomplice after the fact. You must deal with your own conscience."

His words were beginning to penetrate my understanding. " You won't turn me in? But I thought it was you, you who pushed him."

"Me? Are you mad? I knew he was innocent. I as good as told you so yesterday morning."

"Then you didn't. . . ?"

"No, and you, you didn't. . . ?"

"No."

The emotions of the moment were too great. We fell into one another's arms, thumping each other on the back, sobbing, swaying, holding each other up.

"Hamburger, old fellow."

"Korner, my friend."

When at last we grew somewhat calmer, I said, "If it wasn't either of us, then who?"

Mutual enlightenment; we answered as one: "The Red Dwarf!"

Yes, had he not hinted to me over the weekend that he was up to something?

"We must, of course, denounce him to the authorities, Otto."

"Not so fast. Let me remind you of a great man's words: An accusation is no proof of guilt.' '

"We'll talk to him first."

There was more. Hamburger retrieved the parcel from his bureau and handed it to me. "This is yours."

I unwrapped it. It was my letter, elegantly framed. I could not hold back my tears. Silently we read it together.

"I Frutti" Lago Como, June 7, 1914

Dear Mr. Korner,

I have read with great pleasure Days of Darkness, Nights of Light and congratulate you on a nicely turned-out little volume. One stands back in admiration of so precocious a talent, for an early spring promises an abundant harvest: "the roots dig deep."