Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  It wasn’t quite a skyscraper. It was thirty or forty floors. Bigger than anything London had to show. A long row of brass plates ran down each mock-classical column either side of the revolving door. The driver led Wilderness so quickly through the door and the lobby that he could take in next to nothing. They took the lift to the twenty-first floor, and as the doors opened a glass wall appeared, bearing the stencil “Carver, Sharma, and Dunn.”

  It was tempting to ask when or if Frank’s name would ever appear, but he didn’t.

  Reception was glass and leather. Glass-topped tables, Barcelona studded leather chairs, ashtrays on stilts that spirited fag ash away like a child’s spinning top at the press of a button. Furniture than defied suspension or the basic laws of physics to hang in space. It all screamed modern and it could scream all it liked. Wilderness was listening.

  What screamed loudest hung on the wall, filling a space about seven feet by three between the receptionist’s desk and the door to the inner sanctum. He would not have known what it was but for his wife, but then that was true of so many things. He knew what he knew because Judy told him. He had no shame about it. If she was a willing teacher he was a willing pupil and it had been that way since the day they met the best part of ten years ago.

  This, and he had no doubts, was a Jackson Pollock. The kind of painting, the kind of artist to be featured on a highbrow BBC arts programme like Monitor, on which Judy had often worked, and to be described by the critics as cutting edge or possibly postmodern (a phrase which made no sense to Wilderness) and as “looks like something my three-year-old would do” and “what a load of old bollocks” by the general public.

  Just below it on the wall was a small typed label: “Early Autumn. October 1955.”

  It was tempting to touch. The kind of thing that would get him thrown out of an art gallery, but this wasn’t an art gallery, this was . . . whatever it was . . . Frank’s office selling whatever it was Frank sold.

  He ran the index and big fingers of his right hand along a spinal cord of red, a raised weal that ran almost the length of the painting.

  “Tactile, isn’t it?”

  A very pretty young woman, in a starched white blouse and tight, grey skirt. He hadn’t noticed her emerge from the inner office.

  “Yes,” he said. “You can almost feel the energy he put into it, as though the muscle was kind of locked into the gesture and then into paint.”

  He knew he sounded a bit of a wanker, saying this, but sounding like a wanker really depended on who was listening.

  She stood next to him now, blonde, a foot shorter than he was, looking up at the painting, while he looked at eye level.

  “Never thought of it quite that way, but then I’ve never dared to touch. The temptation to pick at it like a scab would be too much. I might get fired. You won’t. I’m Frank’s secretary, by the way, Dorothy Shearer. And I’m here with an apology.”

  “Already?”

  Wilderness looked directly at her for the first time, first impressions well confirmed. This one was a looker.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Happens a lot with Frank. Never a deal going down, always a dozen deals going down. Now tell me he’s had to nip out to a meeting and won’t be back today.”

  “You’ve know Frank a long time, I take it?”

  “Since Berlin. Since 1947.”

  “Yes, he’s gone out to a meeting. He’s asked that, Greg—that’s your chauffeur—take you to the Gramercy. Frank will call you as soon as he’s free.”

  Greg hefted the suitcase.

  “What exactly is it Carver, Sharma, and Dunn do?” Wilderness asked.

  “Frank didn’t tell you?” Dorothy Shearer replied. “I’m surprised. We’re an advertising agency. You’ve just stepped into dreamland Mr. Holderness.”

  Going back to street level, Wilderness thought that it was probably where Frank was always going to end up. What better career for an ex-con-man than advertising? A profession dedicated to convincing you that shit is toothpaste. What kind of shit would Frank be trying to sell him now?

  It was not yet six, a light spring evening. Down Park Avenue, around the helter-skelter that circumvented Grand Central, and on 42nd Street Wilderness asked Greg, “Would you pull over? I think I want to walk a while. I’ve had eight hours of sitting down.”

  Greg parked the Cadillac, swung around in the seat.

  “I could take your bag to the hotel and you could walk from here, if you like.”

  “What are the chances of me getting lost?”

  Greg pointed down Lexington.

  “About zero. Just stay on Lex till it ends. Twenty blocks, not even twenty minutes.”

  “I can’t miss it?”

  “You can’t.”

  He found himself across the street from the Chrysler, looking up as it tapered away to infinity, at a jutting silver eagle that seemed to be a mile in the sky.

  He stood on the sidewalk of a new world. Hands in pockets, head back. Whatever he did next, wherever he went next, his first step would take him into dreamland.

  §4

  When he’d showered and changed and gone down to the lobby to look around, the girl on reception handed him a note.

  “I’ll be tied up all evening and most of the day tomorrow. Get out and see New York, kid. Remember to bring me the bill. FS.”

  He asked the Gramercy’s doorman—a tall, stout, fifty-ish black man in a big green coat with a row of medal ribbons across the left breast that told Wilderness the man’s war had been bloodier than his—how do you kill an evening in a city where being spoilt for choice left you helpless?

  “What would I do? I’m a jazz man, sir. I’d find me a jazz club, hope Monk or Coltrane turn up—and I’d belly up to the bar and get my ears filled.”

  “Are there any within walking distance?”

  “Sure. Across the square, down Third for about ten blocks. The Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place. Turn left off Third and you’re there. Won’t take you but fifteen minutes.”

  Wilderness didn’t think it was to his taste, but his taste was on the back burner. Neither Monk nor Coltrane turned up, but the posters on the wall told him they had on several other occasions. As Eric Dolphy alternated between flute and saxophone, between harmony and dissonance, the sound that really mattered was the voice in his head that said, “I’m in a jazz club in New York.” And the voice in his head that resisted saying, “It’s a long way from Whitechapel.”

  And then the band launched into “On Green Dolphin Street,” and harmony and dissonance folded into each other and Whitechapel melted away from mind and memory leaving New York draped across his arm, whispering its seduction in his ears, in and out of the sax riffs and the drum beats.

  §5

  He drifted all day. Over Fifth, across Washington Square and into Greenwich Village, the only Manhattan district he’d ever heard of apart from Harlem. He sat in coffee bars, he stood on street corners with his hands in his pockets and stared. He had lunch in an Italian restaurant at Carmine and Bleecker, drifted east again and decided to follow Broadway south just to see where it went. Where it went was down one side of Little Italy. Instinct told him to zigzag, onto Mulberry, down into Chinatown, back onto Broadway, past City Hall and out to Battery Park, the harbour and a distant view of the Statue of Liberty. He’d never imagined that it or she would be green. He found he was content with the distant view and had no desire to take a ferry out and look more closely. Proximity was not intimacy.

  Around five he asked a cabdriver to take him to a book store, and found himself in the Strand at Broadway and 12th. He’d almost finished King Rat. He was probably never going to finish The Ipcress File. If Frank was going to string him out another day he’d need a book.

  He checked in at the Gramercy an hour or so later. The desk clerk said a young woman was waiting for him in the bar.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yes, sir. Asked for Mr. Holderness.”

  In a booth on the L
exington side of the bar sat Dorothy Shearer, sipping at a white lady and smiling up at him.

  “He stood me up again, eh?”

  “Yep. But look at it this way. I could have just phoned in a message. But here I am.”

  “And here am I.”

  “And we’re on expenses. Manhattan, if not the world, is our oyster.”

  “Let’s order before Frank’s credit runs out.”

  “Unlikely, but since you ask . . . I’ll have another white lady.”

  The waiter was already at their table. They were the only people in the bar.

  Wilderness ordered and asked for a scotch.

  “Try harder,” Dorothy said. “Push the boat out. Experiment. Have something you wouldn’t have at home.”

  “Good point, but what?”

  “Waiter, please bring my friend a whiskey sour.”

  She noticed the bag of books he had placed on the table.

  “Show me. I can’t resist knowing what people choose in book stores.”

  Wilderness pushed the bag in her direction. She pulled out Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, a tatty Modern Library translation from the fifties.

  “I don’t know this book.”

  “I’ve been meaning to read it for years. An old friend once told me that if he’d read it at sixteen his life would have been totally different.”

  “Did you buy anything American?”

  “Keep trawling.”

  She pulled out Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

  “Indeed you did. In fact you may well have polarised the nation in a single bag. Frank thinks all these Beats and bums are pretty much the Antichrist. America in its decadence, heading for addiction and misery and death. To say nothing of homosexuality. I doubt there’s anything Frank hates more than faggots.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Oh . . . America looks at something it’s done so very very badly and . . . and manages to redeem itself. Childhood threatened, childhood challenged and somehow innocence restored. Huck Finn, revisited. The nigger didn’t do it and the boogeyman at the dark end of the street really isn’t the boogeyman. And the guy in that white suit is your father. We all think better of ourselves after we read it. Besides, I could believe anything Gregory Peck says. I’d vote for him for president. I’d vote for the guy in the white suit.”

  The waiter set down the cocktails. Wilderness sipped at his and asked her what was in it.

  “Mostly they just add lemon juice to whiskey, maybe a hint of sugar.”

  “Pure heresy in Scotland.”

  “That’s OK, they make it with Kentucky bourbon. Do you actually like it?”

  “Oh, I could get used to it. There’s a lot about New York I could get used to.”

  When it came to discussing a meal, each of them turned around and looked around.

  “We’re still the only people here,” Wilderness said.

  “It’s Wednesday. Let’s go somewhere where it isn’t Wednesday.”

  Outside, Dorothy’s hand up for a cab, Wilderness said, “Let’s take the subway. I’ve never been on the subway.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. It just didn’t feel right. I caught one cab today and for the rest I just walked. The subway felt like it needed a guide.”

  She steered him over to Park Avenue. To the subway station at 23rd, the IRT Lexington Avenue local to Brooklyn Bridge. It was like whiskey sour, he could get used to it. The rattle and the roar, the pure, shrill screech of metal on metal as the train pulled into Union Square.

  Walking down the side of the bridge, Wilderness began to think of New York as a city in the sky. Not simply the scale . . . more the perfection, although that was far from being precisely what he meant as he told her over dinner in a tiny restaurant boasting “the oldest bar in New York,” at the corner of Water Street.

  “London’s far older than New York, but . . . all the bomb damage. The rubble sat around for years. I thought we’d look that way for ever. London’s like a bad set of teeth. There are gaps, there are bad dental bridges just about holding on and there are rotting stumps that needed to be pulled ages ago.”

  “I’ve never been to London,” she said. “And I get the feeling I’m going to have difficulty holding on to the dream.”

  “I’ll try not to ruin it for you. But . . .”

  “But you will anyway?”

  He shrugged this off. It was a thought so hard-won it had to be uttered.

  “Now there’s new buildings—ugly, flat, featureless new buildings going up at a rate of knots. Paternoster Square, the district around St. Paul’s has gone from piles of rubble to a concrete nightmare. London lives with the old barbarism of the Blitz and the new barbarism of 1960s architecture fighting it out at street level. New York . . . the old and the new seem to sit together so much better. It seems like an American talent. One we don’t have back home. And I never realised New York would seem quite so old.”

  “You’re surprised to find New York is old?”

  “Nothing has surprised me more in the last two days.”

  “And you just fell for the bridge, right?”

  “And this afternoon I fell for the Statue of Liberty, and yesterday I fell for the Chrysler . . . I walked backwards down Lexington Avenue, just so I could keep it in sight.”

  She giggled, a broad, beaming grin and a row of very American teeth.

  “Backwards? Down Lex? You’re lucky you didn’t get arrested.”

  “I got called an ‘asshole’ a few times, but mostly people turned to see what I was looking at, and when they saw they lost interest. As though everyone who’s new in town does something like that. Gets bedazzled by one building or another.”

  “This sounds like the beginning of a fine romance. You and your new mistress.”

  “I think it is. I even fell for your office furniture.”

  A coy look from her, a swift hint that they both knew what they were talking about and then a turning away of the head.

  “Well, if I were you I’d take Manhattan. Not sure I’d bother with the Bronx and Staten. Great rhyme, boring place. But if you really have fallen for the Brooklyn Bridge, there’s only one thing to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We walk it. From the other side. It’s a nice evening. Not too cool. But no more subways. Cabs or nothing.”

  Walking back across the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk consummated the affair. He took Manhattan. Manhattan as it lit up for the night, Manhattan viewed through the pointed arches of the bridge, through the fishnet mesh made by the cables—it was like peeking in through the dressing room window as a nylon stocking was being rolled up from ankle to thigh.

  At the Gramercy, Dorothy let the cab go.

  “Anything else I can do for you, Joe?” she asked, blatant beyond a hint.

  Wilderness never wore a wedding ring. He didn’t mind signalling that he was married; he simply didn’t care for jewellery on a man. The only jewellery he possessed were cuff links, and he’d bought none of those, they had all been given to him by his grandfather—stolen from he knew not whom. Right now, a wedding ring might have helped.

  “I’m married,” he said, knowing it sounded lame.

  “So’s Frank. In fact I have a Rolodex just to keep track of the ex-wives. And another for the girlfriends.”

  “I meant happily married.”

  “You think Frank isn’t? Nah, forget I said that. It’s unfair to him and probably to you too. Just kiss me good night and try not to blame a girl for asking.”

  Afterwards, alone in his room, Wilderness wondered why he had added the “happily.” To say he was married was the unalterable truth. The “happily” pushed the statement not into lies, but into ambivalence. It implied permanence, which might be the case, and it implied fidelity, which had not been the case. The definition of happily married for John Holderness and Judy Jones, was that each believed in being faithful to the other and each lapsed. And why he was not l
apsing this warm Wednesday night was puzzling him. She was pleasant enough, her natural nosiness appealed to him. She was a looker, perhaps a little young for him—but something felt not quite right, and the something not quite right was Frank.

  §6

  The next morning Frank phoned while Wilderness was having coffee in his room.

  “Sorry about last night, kid. Y’know things just ran away with me. But today is fine. Come over to the office around six when the buzz starts to go out of the place and you can hear yourself think. Steve’s at his best when the office quietens down.”

  “Steve?”

  “Steven Sharma. My partner.”

  “What about Carver and Dunn?”

  “I bought Nat Carver out. Pays not to change the name though. And Lewis Dunn is not so much a sleeping partner as a sailing partner. Spends most of his time on his yacht in Oyster Bay. Turns up if we hit a crisis and that’s about it. It’s my show. I’m not just the token goy.”

  “What?”

  “They’re all Jews. Nat Carver had some Polish name so long I could never pronounce it. Steve Sharma was Thaddeus Stevens Scharmansky—jeez, you couldn’t make that up if you tried, like Abe Lincoln Cohen—and Lewis’s real name is Dunkelmann.”

  “But it’s Steve I have to meet?”

  “Yeah. Steve’s the one who wants to hire you.”

  And before Wilderness could ask any more Frank was off the line.

  He spent the day on the Upper West Side, visited a museum full of dinosaur skeletons, walked across Central Park to the Guggenheim, spiralled up, spiralled down, and ended up at Frank’s office on the dot of six.

  “A good day?” Dorothy Shearer asked.

  “A great day,” Wilderness replied.

  “Frank’ll be out in a minute. As you said, there’s always a dozen deals going down with Frank.”

  Frank’s office door was closed. Through the glass wall Wilderness could see the back of his head, lolling on the headrest of the swivel chair, a telephone cradled between his ear and his shoulder.

  For all Frank had warned him about the office being noisy, it wasn’t. The mechanical rattle of an electric typewriter, occasionally, like bursts of rather gentle machine-gun fire—half-heard conversations drifting by from open doors, the floating of the ad-idea. All the same the most he could hear of Frank’s conversation through the thick glass wall was a muffled burr.