St. Urbain's Horseman (44 page)

Strangers regarded them with interest.

“Could I have a word with you … um … privately?”

They stepped aside, the inspector maintaining a steel-like grip on his arm.

“They're suppositories.”

“Would you speak up, please. The noise …”

“I suffer from piles. Like Karl Marx, you know.”

The rest of the trip was uneventful, but even more disastrous. The producer Jake was supposed to meet at the Carleton had been unable to wait and had flown to New York. Jake's hotel reservation had been fouled up and he had had to settle for an airless, mosquito-ridden cell in a backstreet pension. Hungover, his nerves frayed, he returned to London in the morning with only one thought in mind. The pleasure it would give him to murder Harry Stein.

Jake sought out Ruthy at the Swiss Cottage dress shop. “I must see your boyfriend urgently. Can you tell me where he works, please?”

Oscar Hoffman, Accountants.

“Oh, no.” He doesn't.

“Why not?”

Harry agreed to meet Jake for a drink at noon at the Yorkminster.

“I'm not going to hit you, Harry. I'm not going to break your teeth. I merely want to warn you that I'm getting a lawyer. I'm going to have you charged with attempting to extort with menaces.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“What if somebody on that plane had died of a heart attack?”

Harry shook his head, seemingly baffled.

“You twisted little fart,” Jake said, grabbing him by the collar.

“Possibly I'm the one who needs a solicitor,” Harry said, breaking free, “for it's clear to me what you need is psychological attention.”

“You're the mental case, Harry, not me.”

“I put it to you, you suffer from paranoid delusions.”

“Oh, you are cute,” Jake said, ordering another round. “You're not
ordinary twisted. I'm beginning to think you're very, very special. And now, my psychotic friend, tell me how long you've been with Oscar Hoffman?”

“Going on ten years.”

“That's where we met?”

“Yes.”

“You've seen my accounts and you know I'm not broke.”

“For the sake of argument, I'll concur with that statement.”

“Would you also happen to know I'm now being investigated by the inspectors of Inland Revenue?”

“No,” Harry replied, impassive.

“How much did you get for turning me in?”

“You're paranoid, mate.”

“Harry, you obscene little auto-didact, there's more to psychology than Penguin paperbacks …”

Harry's eyes filled with rancor.

“… now what are you getting for informing on me? Ten percent?”

“I refute your charges absolutely. If you care to make them formally you shall be hearing from my solicitors.”

“Stupid prick!”

“Speaking of intellectual ability, have you heard from Mensa yet?”

Jake fished into his pocket, extracted two flyers, and rammed them into Harry. “Here. Choke.”

“Now you only owe me another seven hundred pounds.”

“What do you mean,
I owe you?”

“You're knocking down a thousand a week for doing bleeding nothing –” Harry lowered his voice “– tax-free, my so-called socialist friend.”

Jake blanched.

“You're all men of principle, you film types.”

“I'm not a film type.”

“What are you, then?”

“All right, all right. You know it's blackmail, though.”

“I wouldn't call it that.”

“The money's not yours, anyway. It's Ruthy's.”

Harry ordered a round. “Pay her. Not me.”

“What do you want to marry her for? Has she got more?”

“It's your cousin, the fancy-man, who was after her lolly, not me.”

“I'm to take it you love her, then?”

“She's an attractive woman,” Harry said defensively.

“I should have thought a chap in the top two percent intellectually, one of the élite, as it were, handsome and well-read as you, could have done much better.”

“Don't you ever make the mistake of ridiculing me, Hersh. Don't you ever do that.”

“Not to worry. If I didn't respect you before, I learned to on the airplane. My God, how could you do such a thing?”

“We're back on that, are we?”

“Come clean, Harry. You phoned
BEA.”

Harry raised his glass. “Here's looking at you.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Tell me something else, then. How have you managed to stay out of prison all these years?”

“And who says I have?”

“No kidding,” Jake said, regarding him with fresh interest, even respect, “what did they put you away for?”

“I'd better be off now.”

“Come to lunch with me. Be my guest.”

Harry hesitated.

“We can charge it to expenses. After all, you're one of my financial advisers, aren't you, you bastard?”

“All right, then. If that's the way you put it.”

Riding too many large gins, flattered with wine, Harry revealed that he had first become entangled with the law in Lady Docker's England, when there was still rationing and Gilbert Harding, Ealing
comedies, Attlee, war in Korea; and Harry Stein, a beginning bookkeeper, read in the
News Chronicle
of the disappearance, possibly a kidnapping, of a particularly coarse and ostentatious lady, the wife of a merchant banker. The police beat the bushes of neighboring Putney Heath, they scoured the abandoned railway sidings, hoping for the best but awaiting a phone call with instructions. Or a ransom note.

Harry obliged.

Alas for Harry, the lady was discovered in a seaside hotel in Sussex on Wednesday afternoon, none the worse for a post-menopausal fit of amnesia, but Harry didn't know, he couldn't, and as he strolled past the Putney Vale gates on Wednesday evening at seven, the police pounced on him. Harry fervently denied everything, he didn't know what the police were about, but confronted with samples of his own handwriting, undone by stupidity, he then claimed it was all a joke. He had not, after all, kidnapped the lady, which was undeniably true, and he had intended to turn over the money to the defense fund for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Mr. Justice Delaney, at the Old Bailey, took a rather different view. While a family, stricken with anxiety and grief, had waited through seemingly interminable nights by the telephone for news of a loved one, this wretched young man, motivated by malice and greed, had
done his utmost to add to the family's considerable torment. Indeed, Mr. Watkins, who had suffered a coronary attack only two years earlier, had had to be put to bed with a sedative on receipt of Stein's abominable note.

“I am asked to take into consideration the accused's hitherto unblemished record, but the case is most repulsive, and all too symbolic of the decadent society in which we live today. Already one tenth of the population of this country is either physically or mentally deficient. It is unfit for citizenship of this great nation. It is, I say, a terrible result of the random output of unrestricted breeding. In my view, young men such as this are treated leniently at society's peril, turned loose only to prey on respectable citizens. This policy is unwise, most unwise. I intend to make an example out of you and my order is that you be sent to prison for three years.”

To which Harry, before being escorted below, smiled thinly and replied, “Thank you, my Lord.”

Staggering out of the restaurant, the pubs shut, Jake teased Harry into an invitation to his flat, insisting he needed another drink but actually determined to see how he lived.

The cry of birds from Regent's Park Zoo could be heard in Harry's three-room basement flat, comprised of a kitchen, sitting room, and bedroom, photographic equipment lying everywhere, the bathroom also serving as a dark room. The bed was unmade, the sheets unspeakable, a sticky jam jar, bread, and a knife on the bedside table. Stacks of dishes drifted in the kitchen sink. There was a poster of Che in the sitting room, as well as a nude study of Jane Fonda. Harry rinsed a couple of glasses and came up with a half-bottle of Scotch. Encouraged, he read Jake one of his poems:

Then he agreed to show him some of the photographs he had taken. Among them, one of an Oriental girl with enormous breasts, her arms upraised, the wrists knotted together by a rope, and hanging chains brushing against her.

“She's got goose pimples,” Jake said, finding it easiest to joke as he passed on to the next photograph.

In this one a heavy girl squatted, smirking at the photographer, legs opened wide as she tugged a serpent out from under her and held it to her mouth, her tongue flicking out for a kiss.

“Hershel, Hershel, what's to be done with you?” Jake asked.

Hours later they drained the bottle, sharing the last of the Scotch. Red-eyed drunk, dizzy but exhilarated, Harry talked endlessly. “You know I'm different, see. I'm only telling you this because you understand I'm no cipher. That I've read a book or two and been to a concert. I want you to know what it was like when I was in my twenties. I want you to imagine what I went through. I mean to say, shit, who wouldn't have had a breakdown, if that's what you want to call it? I had nothing, mate. Sweet fucking nothing and grand expectations of more sweet fucking nothing. And the years were slipping by. Only I knew it, see, not like the others. I knew what I was missing and that's always been my trouble. Not like the others. Terrified of getting the sack. Storing shillings in the post office account like hamsters. Out of their minds with joy for a ten-shilling rise. Not Harry. Harry uses his loaf and that's his trouble, isn't it? One day, listen to this, one day, this fat old geezer in a Bentley pulls up, he lowers his window and asks, ever so polite, would you know how I could get to Battersea Bridge from here? Actually, yes, you old fuck, I said, but first you tell me how much you'd pay to be my age again, because you're not long for it, are you, mate, with all your money. I thought he'd have his stroke right there. I went to the boat show. Did I tell you that one? About the boat show at Olympia? I went to the boat show, you see, 1960 it was, you can look it up in the newspapers if you think I'm lying. I went thinking I'll buy me a thirtieth birthday present. What a laugh! I picked one out for me (I've still got the pamphlets, you know), having the salesman on about the delivery dates. A thousand nicker all in it was. And I realized if I went without for the next ten years, I still couldn't afford it. I was never going to bloody have it. Any of it. No yacht. No
MG
. No weeks at Monte. Even though I'm among the top two percent of this country intellectually, and you've got the proof of it now, haven't you, mate? Even though I'm scientifically proven more intelligent than you and certainly any of that lot, I wasn't going to have anything. Because I'm an insect.”

And so, Harry went on to explain, laughing with fond remembrance, he had gone to a call box around the corner, put on his Latin accent, and warned them there was a bomb set to go off in thirty minutes as a protest against the government's Cuban policy.

“They took it seriously, you know. Old Khrushchev waving his shoe at the U.N. Castro in New York, raising hell. They didn't take any chances. Police cars. Fire trucks. The lot. And all those dignified cool bastards and their tarts, you should have seen them move. Spilling out of Olympia very smartly indeed. I watched from across the street, fit to be tied. Do you know they raked that place over from top to bottom. They turned Olympia inside out that night, looking for my time bomb. You look it up, if you don't believe me. Maybe I've still got the press cuttings.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING, AFTER DRIVING SAMMY TO
school, Jake sought out Ruthy at the dress shop. But she had not come in to work. Her eldest boy, David, had a temperature of 103.

“Oh, it's you,” she said, opening the door to Jake. “I had hoped it was the doctor. I should have known better.”

“Why?”

Ruthy explained that she had absolutely refused to bundle up David and take him to Dr. Engel's surgery. She had threatened Engel with a letter of complaint to the National Health Service if he refused to come to the house, and now she was terrified because she knew he would not call for hours, and that when he did finally show up he would be horrid. He was, she said, such a foul-tempered man any way. Almost as bad as Dr. West. When David had only been a baby, running a temperature of 102 and vomiting, Dr. West had grudgingly come to her flat to look at him. “You're fussing,” he had said, “fussing. He's teething, that's all.” But twenty-four hours later, with David's temperature still rising, she had bundled him up and taken him to the hospital, where they discovered he had bronchial pneumonia and put him in an oxygen tent.