As Time Goes By (31 page)

How do you save somebody who doesn't want to be
saved? How do you rescue a nation that doesn't want to be rescued? He had never felt much like a Jew, at least not a religious one, but now seemed like a good
time to start.
         

Where were the rabbis of his youth when he needed
them?
  

Then Rick remembered where he was at that mo
ment and why there were no rabbis for him to turn to.

In a flash, he saw his play. It was so simple, so beau
tiful, the way all the best plays were. It might even
work. With any luck, it would shield Ilsa and spare
Heydrich, with no one the wiser. "We'll let him know
he's going to be assassinated," he said. "He'll never
see it coming."

"What!" exclaimed Ilsa, as softly as she could.

"We've got to protect you, cover for you," he said.

"What about the operation?" she protested. "Victor will never agree to this!"

Oh yes: Victor. He had to put a plausible face on it,
at least as far as she was concerned. As for Victor, he
need never know.

"Don't worry," he said. "We're still going through with it." Before she could start to complain, he went
on. "Don't you see?" he said, excited now, seeing a
way out, seeing the way clear. "It's the oldest trick in
the book. You set a guy up by telling him exactly what's going to happen to him—and then you do it!"
He pounded his hand into his fist. "You've taken him into your confidence and lulled him to sleep: he thinks he's got you covered, and never sees it coming. Works
every time."

The look in her eyes plainly proclaimed her doubt.
"But he'll send his men looking for us," she objected.

"If what you say is true, Heydrich's men are already
looking for us. Don't you see, Ilsa, it's our only
chance."

How he hated lying to her! But they had to get the
message to Heydrich. Not just to protect Ilsa, although
she alone would have been reason enough, but because
Renault was right: no one could doubt that the price the
Czech people would pay for getting rid of Heydrich
would be terrible. Laszlo was willing to pay that price,
but he would have to pay it only once. The Czechs
would go on paying for the rest of the war.

Once they had warned Heydrich he would have to
change his route. Nobody was that stupid, not even a
Nazi.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Trust me," he said. "Tough guys
like
him never
believe it can happen to them."

"How do you know?" she asked him.

"I know," he said quietly, "because it happened to me once."

He reached for her hand, but he dared not grasp it.
This was strictly business now. "The most important thing is to protect you," he said. "Somehow, we'll get
word to him. I'll think of a way, we'll..."

He was nearly babbling, his words pouring forth,
when Ilsa calmly laid a hand on his arm. "Richard,"
she said, "I know just what to do."

He stopped and looked at her. She was no longer the
shy, vulnerable girl he had known in Paris, but a more confident, more assured, more deadly woman. "You
do?" he said.

She did. She had been worrying all afternoon about
how to bring up the subject of the
Č
ech
ů
v Most, about
how she was going to maneuver Heydrich back to the
original site. Now she didn't have to. She didn't have to confuse the issue, didn't have to alarm Victor and Rick, didn't have to tell them anything. On her infor
mation, Heydrich would be looking for assassins on the
Č
ech
ů
v Most; his security forces would be watching
for trouble there. He, meanwhile, would be motoring
blithely toward the Charles Bridge, and death. How fit
ting: the man for whom death was the solution for everything would find it the solution for him, too.

Her heart leaped as she replied, "Yes. I'll tell him myself. Tomorrow night. At the castle. He's giving a
party, and I'm to be the hostess."

"You can't! It's crazy." Now it was Rick's turn to
grab, to dig. The hell with propriety: he took her arm
and held it tightly.

Ilsa shook him off. "I'm going to tell him every
thing. Tell him I've learned of a plot to bomb his car when he rides to work the next day. Beg him to be careful. Plead with him to take another route. That's
what we need to do, isn't it? To get him where we want
him?"

"Yes," Rick said. "That's exactly what we need to
do. But why do you have to do it?"

"Because I am the one closest to him," she ex
plained. "Isn't that why you and Victor sent me here
in the first place? To get close to him, any way I could?
Heydrich trusts me."

"You can't do it," he muttered. "It's too dangerous."

"If what you've just told me is true, it may be our
only chance, the only way I can deflect suspicion from
myself and make sure our plan succeeds."

Rick was worried. He knew they were improvising
now, which was bad. Improvisation made things
messy. Improvisation made things dangerous. Improvi
sation made things go wrong, and when things went
wrong, they went wrong for everybody. What choice
did he have, though?

Ilsa was ecstatic. What had moments ago seemed a
tangled and perilous path had now been made smooth.
She
would tell Heydrich that for his own safety he must
cross the Charles, not the
Č
ech
ů
v, and he would drive right into the trap. Rick was right: he would never see
it coming; she would make sure of that. She hated
keeping information from Rick and her husband. What
choice did she have, though?

They were standing in front of her apartment build
ing on Sko
ř
epka, facing each other as if they were prac
tically strangers. "Back in Casablanca," she said, "I
asked you to do the thinking for both of us. I was a different person then. I didn't know what I wanted; I
didn't know my own mind. I do now. When we parted the last time, it was on your terms, Richard. Now, we
part on mine."

They said good-bye with a formal handshake and a
stiff bow. Then she was past the front door and inside, gone.

Rick walked down the cobblestone streets, thinking of Paris. Ilsa thought only of Prague.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
E
IGHT

New York, August 1935

As suddenly as she had left it, Lois Meredith came
back into his life. Three years was a long time to carry a torch, but he had been managing nicely.

Business was good. The newly legal Tootsie-Wootsie
Club had surpassed every other former New York
speakeasy in total volume and turnover. It had the best booze and the best music, and everybody knew it. Rick
Baline's place was the talk of the town. Even Damon
Runyon was keeping a regular table there, having
moved over from the Boll Weevil, which had closed.
Privately Rick thought Runyon was a lush and a jerk,
but he cultivated him just the same, for a mention in
Runyon's column for any of his ventures meant a doubling of business almost overnight.

On this particular evening, Rick was looking out
over the dance floor and counting the house. Life was
about as good as it could possibly be. He had moved to
an apartment in the San Remo on Central Park West.
To ease his conscience about never seeing her, he had
ensconced his mother in an elegant apartment building
on 68th Street between Madison and Park. He had
made peace with Salucci and Weinberg, although the
Italian was still trying, from time to time, to lean a little
on their policy rackets. Why anybody would care
about the policy rackets was beyond Rick. The nick
els and dimes collected from the people of Harlem,
which was almost entirely black now, were negligible
when set aside the money to be made in the legiti
mate nightclub business. Practically alone among the
darktown clubs, the Tootsie-Wootsie had survived the
end of Prohibition and flourished. The only problem
now was to keep the white people coming north of
125th Street.

As for Solly, he had pretty much retired. He still
lived above Mr. Grunwald's violin shop, although Mr.
Grunwald had died several years back and the violin
shop was now a colored grocery store. Rick had often
asked him why he didn't leave the neighborhood, but
Solomon always waved away the question.

"I should maybe move to Grand Concourse?" he
would ask. "As well you should ask me to move to the
Champs-
É
lys
é
es, which isn't as nice and is almost as
far away. It's okay for Mrs. Horowitz, but me—I'm too
damn old to "change now."

Rick didn't know Irma had moved to the Bronx.

"Pfui,"
said Solly. "Long time since. She loves
baseball, she can walk to Yankee games. But me, not
on your life. You should only shoot me first, I start
talking about the Grand Concourse. Day Solomon
Horowitz leaves Manhattan is day he grows tail and
sticks it between legs!"

That put an end to that discussion.

Still, all the talk about Mrs. Horowitz got Rick to
thinking about Lois, something he had trained himself
not to do. He had also trained himself to stop reading
the
Times,
except for the entertainment reviews, and
all the other New York papers. Even Winchell's column was censored for him; any references to Robert Meredith or his wife were carefully blackened out by Abie Cohen's kid Ernie, whom Rick was training as a
restaurateur. Ernie was dark haired and bright eyed, the
way he used to be, and he seemed to think the world was his oyster, the way he used to. Well, let the kid
think that; he would learn otherwise soon enough.

From time to time, Ernie goofed and Rick got to read
about the rise and rise of Robert Meredith. From law
yer to state senator to (it was widely speculated) the
next Republican candidate for governor of New York,
Meredith had soared. His wife, Lois, had ascended
along with him, her wardrobe ever more spectacular,
the accounts of her charitable work ever more fulsome.
If the press had any idea she was really the daughter of
a gangster, it never let on, just as it never let on about
the backgrounds of other prominent wives, such as the
one married to the senator from Louisiana, who had
been a high-class call girl, or the wife of the governor
of Ohio, who was addicted to cocaine, or the ...

Then he saw her. Even from a distance, the minute she walked in, he knew. He knew it by the way she
moved, by the cut of her clothes, by the supreme self-
confidence of her manner, well before he could see her
face. The face that was more beautiful now than even
he had remembered it.

She moved through the crowd, laughing the way he had remembered her, easily, as though she were danc
ing with Fred Astaire. Her hair was pulled back tight
into a bun, and at her gorgeous throat she wore a daz
zling diamond brooch that was not quite as big as the
Ritz, but close enough. Otherwise she was the same:
his Lois, before Meredith and O'Hanlon had taken her
away from him.

She was alone. No photographer's flash popped. A few people gawked at the famous Lois Meredith, the
future governor's wife, but in Rick's place they had
long since learned to keep their heads down and their
mouths shut. Preferred customers were always the qui
etest customers, and if you wanted to get a ringside seat
for Lunceford's band or Elena Hornblower's dancers
or, best of all, Sam Waters's piano, you'd best observe
the rules.

"Karl, table four," he commanded his maître d'.

"Right away, Rick," replied Karl. Karl was a recent
arrival in New York
,
having several months earlier fled
his home in Bad Ischl in Austria, where he had been
the
Oberkellner
of the famous White Horse Tavern. At
table four, a couple of aides to Mayor LaGuardia and
their girlfriends (Rick knew both their wives) were
mollified by a bottle of free champagne and switched to table eight, which wasn't Siberia.

"Good evening, Mrs. Meredith," he said.

"Hello, Rick," she breathed. Her breath was like the finest perfume. He could have inhaled it all night.

"Champagne for two," she told Karl.

"Are you expecting someone?" Rick asked her.

"
You
wouldn't let a girl drink alone, would you?"

"Not if I know what's good for me," he said, sitting
down.

"Maybe I'm what's good for you," she said.

"I used to think so," he said as Sam came on.

The lights dimmed, and then the spotlight hit the
piano. The club could have afforded the best Astoria
Steinway, but for some reason Sam preferred his old beat-up upright. "She's my baby, boss," he would ex
plain whenever Rick would offer to buy him a new one,
which was practically weekly. "I ain't going to leave
her and run off with some other gal." Rick didn't see why not, but he kept his mouth shut. Sam's love life
was his own business.

Sam started to play his signature tune, and the crowd
applauded. The tinkling of the ivories was the only
sound in the joint. Nobody was allowed to talk when Sam Waters played. Especially when he played "As
Time Goes By."

"Isn't it beautiful?" asked Lois when Sam had fin
ished. Rick agreed that it was. "It reminds me of the
old days. Just after my father put you in charge of the
club. How I miss those days. We were so young then."
She squeezed his hand under the table. "Have some
more champagne. I feel like celebrating!"

Sam was playing a Gershwin tune, "The Man I
Love."

"Rick, he's a monster," she said after they had
toasted something or other.

"No, he's a politician," corrected Rick; he didn't
have to ask who "he" was. "At least, that's what I read in the papers." He sipped his champagne. "Is he cheating on you?"

She nodded her head slowly.

"Why should you be any different? He cheats on all his constituents."

In just a couple of years the last vestiges of his youth
had been sloughed off, and Rick Baline looked at the
world purely as an angle to be played and a profit to be
made. In this he was a true son of Solomon Horowitz, who had taught him everything; but he was taking his
mentor's cynicism to a higher level. Did Solly care
about widows and orphans? Rick didn't. Did Solomon
sometimes distribute money to the neighborhood chil
dren, who laughed and called him "Mr. Solly"? Rick
didn't. Did Solomon keep his home in Harlem, even
now that Harlem had changed? Rick didn't. It was
nothing personal. It was just his way. In fact, he was
thinking about moving the Tootsie-Wootsie downtown,
closer to caf
é
society, like the rest of the surviving
clubs.

He had many acquaintances, some of them female,
but only one friend: Sam Waters. Having a black friend
wasn't easy, but it wasn't easy for Sam, either.

Sam was the best fisherman Rick had ever met. A
New York City kid didn't meet many great fishermen,
but Sam had grown up not far from the Ozarks, and if
there was one thing everybody did in the Missouri
Ozarks, it was catch and eat catfish. Sam could smell a catfish resting at the bottom of the lake, and he had the
patience of a saint. "Ol' Mister Cat gonna get hungry real soon, boss," he would say to Rick from the back
of a rowboat, his hat pulled down over his eyes to keep
out the sun. "And when he do, we be right here waitin'
for him." A few minutes later the catfish would be
reeled in, scaled, filleted, and put into the salt, there to
rest until that evening's dinner. Sam knew at least fifty
ways to cook a catfish, all of them delicious.

Fishing with Sam was one of Rick's few luxuries.
The rest of his life
was devoted to work. Officially the
club opened at four p.m. and closed at four a.m., but
that was a fiction. Rick was the first in the door at ten
o'clock in the morning, to make sure everything had
been properly cleaned up overnight, to work on the books, and to start planning the evening's menu with the chef. He was also the last one out at night, some
times not getting back to his place until the sun was
coming up. He didn't need much sleep, and when he felt the urge he could stop by Polly Adler's bordello
and visit with one or two of his favorite girls. Polly
and he had a reciprocal relationship. She and the best
looking of her girls were always welcome in his place,
and everything was always on the house. It was good
for business to have some of the prettiest women in
New York sitting unescorted at several prominent ta
bles. Even the homeliest chump could hope to get
lucky, for a price. In return, Rick was welcome at Polly's any time; except for his drinks, he paid as he went. He preferred it that way. So it was not unusual to see a
beautiful woman walk through the door of his gin joint.
Usually he was glad to see them. About this one,
though, he was not so sure.

"Rick, I don't love him anymore," Lois was saying.

"When did you ever?" he asked. He was trying to
keep one eye on the house, the way he always did, but
wasn't having much luck.

"Rick, darling, what shall I do?"