The Entertainer and the Dybbuk (5 page)

T
he Crazy Horse was befogged with cigarette smoke. The showgirls, high kicking, arms locked like a chain of paper dolls, vanished one by one into the wings. There stood The Great Freddie, glum faced, waiting to go on.

The dybbuk had fallen silent since breakfast. He wasn't apt to show up. Freddie could
already feel the flop sweat; he'd be standing unmasked in the spotlight. He couldn't throw his voice without moving his lips—like a carp, the dybbuk had once remarked. The shtick was out. He'd have to cut the bottle of Perrier. Forget taping his lips. Once again, he was a so-so ventriloquist.

What choice do you have, Freddie? he asked himself sullenly. Can't let the dybbuk blackmail you into committing a murder. Not a chance. Nope. “But in the army, they taught you to kill,” the dybbuk had said at breakfast. “When you dropped bombs, do you think people didn't die?”

“That was war. You can't kill the German officer without a trial.”

“Did he give me judge and jury?”

With a decisive chop of his hand, Freddie had said, “I'm not going to be a bloody barbarian because he was a bloody barbarian. It's no deal.”

The dybbuk had fallen silent.

The walk-on music penetrated Freddie's thoughts. He left the safety of the wings and found himself blinded by the spotlight. The audience sat unseen in the dark. What shambles of the act did he have left? Who was the puppet to be now? A schoolboy?

“What do you like best about school?” the ventriloquist asked.

“When it's closed,” the dummy answered.

The laughs were polite. That was the kiss
of death, Freddie knew. He racked his brain for better material—any old stuff.

“Did you say you hate dogs?” he asked the wooden puppet.

“I didn't, but I do.”

“Why do you hate dogs?”

There came a pause. “You're forgetting. I was once a tree, Professor.” That wasn't Freddie himself throwing the punch line.

It was the dybbuk!

A big laugh broke from the audience, and a smile rose like a sunrise across Freddie's face. His partner, his friend, was back!

He picked up the pace, eager to steer the material to familiar terrain. “Why are you wearing short pants?” he asked.

“It's a long story.”

“Make it brief.”

“I'm a dybbuk.”

The Great Freddie was back in business.

“T
hanks, pal. Thanks, Avrom.” Freddie said once they were back in the dressing room.

“So now we're on a first name, huh?”

“I was dying out there.”

“I saw,” replied the dybbuk.

“But I haven't changed my mind about knocking off that German for you.”

Said the dybbuk, “And me? When I was a
kid, my mind was on an eye for an eye. Now I am bar mitzvahed. I am now a man. How would a mensch behave? So I changed my mind.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Drive him crazy. Leave it to me,” said the dybbuk.

Freddie offered up a smile. “I won't bet against you, Avrom.”

“Now, may I suggest—buy her flowers.”

“What?”

“So upset you were with me, you forgot to keep your date for lunch. Polly.”

Freddie picked out an armful of firecracker-red snapdragons and had them sent to Polly's hotel. The next day, he waited
at an outside table at Maxim's. She came clicking along on heels as tall as telephone poles.

He pulled back a chair. “Sit down,” he said.

She gave him an onionskin smile, thin and dry. “I won't ask you to tell me why you stood me up.”

“Good. Then I won't have to lie, because you'd never believe me.”

She sat down and crossed her legs. Now he could see the flames of a bonfire building up in her eyes. Before each word left her lips, she dipped it in a southern accent, thick as gravy. “I declare if you don't take me for a belle with boll weevils in her hair. Think I don't know B from buckshot? I
know when I'm being lied to, honey. What does a country girl like me need with a traveling man like you who doesn't level with her?”

Freddie stared at her, bewildered. “Do I know what you're talking about?”

“I got the goods on you. You fibbed to me. You lied. You're Jewish as a bagel. You should have leveled with me. What's wrong with being a Jewboy?”

“Sensitively put,” Freddie declared sharply.

“Then why don't you put me down? Where's your backbone?”

“I did level with you. I'm not Jewish.”

“Liar!”

“We had this out once before. You don't know B from buckshot.”

“Ha!” Her voice rose an octave. “Shut my mouth, or shut yours! I got wised up! You snuck into the synagogue and got that bar mitzvah thing done. You're lying in my face.”

He fumbled for something to say. His head spun. “That wasn't me, Polly!”

“You got a twin? One of the bit players from my film was there in the synagogue. He saw you.”

Freddie gazed at her. His mouth fell open like a hooked bass. There seemed to be no air in his lungs. How could he tell her he had only stood in for a dybbuk? That he was possessed by a demon? She'd take him for a
genuine nut. There was just so much that romance could bear.

He gazed at her a long time, and she waited. Finally he said, “Okay. You got me, Polly. I'm one of the chosen people.”

T
he Great Freddie was held over at the Crazy Horse for seven weeks. The dybbuk lost no opportunity while in the spotlight to pursue the German SS officer. He'd know the vulture even out of uniform.

“Can I tack up a wanted poster now?” asked the dummy.

Freddie was taken by surprise. “What
wanted poster? The Nazi child killer?”

“That's him.”

“But you said he changed his name.”

“Look for the number on his wrist—J117722. He probably hangs around stamp shows.”

“How do you know?” It never failed to surprise Freddie that audiences sat still for the dybbuk's broadsides.

“If you had trunks full of stolen stamps, where would you go? To church?”

Freddie was aware that the war had turned Germany into a country of muggers and housebreakers. Silver candlesticks, paintings off the walls, jewels—nothing the Jews owned was safe from grab-and-steal by
their fellow Germans, not even gold teeth.

“So your Colonel Junker-Strupp had an eye for grabbing stamp collections,” The Great Freddie remarked. “And if he's on the run, he'd need to raise cash by selling off rare stamps.”

“Aha!” exclaimed the dybbuk. “My plan exactly.”

“What plan?”

“To track down the stamp collector. Mr. Freddie, take my advice and hold on to your socks.”

“Why?”

“Because, what I got to say, you're going to jump out of your socks in front of the whole audience.”

“I doubt it.”

“You remember SS Colonel Gerhard Junker-Strupp? Maybe someone has seen him. I am offering a cash reward!”

“A what?”

Not only did Freddie come close to jumping out of his socks, but his glistening patent-leather shoes, as well. After a moment to collect himself, he said, “You don't have any money for a reward. Not a franc to your name.”

“But you do.”

The audience roared out a laugh.

 

Almost at once when they reached the dressing room, Freddie folded his arms. He gazed hard into the mirror as if he could see
the dybbuk through the glass. “So now I am to pay your reward if anyone actually finds the German.”

“Why not? Have I ever asked for a franc? A mark? A ruble? Am I slave labor?”

Freddie immediately felt on the defensive. “It never occurred to me that you needed money. Where would you keep your francs and marks and rubles? In my pocket?”

“Just don't get your pocket picked,” said the dybbuk, dismissing the matter.

At every performance, Avrom Amos refreshed the details. The former SS colonel had a nose as sharp as a meat cleaver. He bit his nails. He smoked Egyptian cigarettes. He had so many dueling scars, he looked as if he
had plaid cheeks. His eyes were a pale and ghostly blue.

If Freddie had resented the dybbuk's choosing to possess him, he had to hand it to the kid. The stage was Avrom Amos's billboard. He would spread the news, like a village crier, and he might find his murderer.

Might. While Freddie said nothing to discourage the dybbuk, he figured that a needle in a haystack would be easier to turn up.

Night after night, audience after audience, the needle was not found.

Meanwhile, Polly could generally be seen hanging on to Freddie's arm. She was already bubbling with plans.

“Of course we'll have a Jewish wedding,”
she said. “Don't you think we'll look heavenly under that canopy thing? And you'll have to stamp on the wineglass in a silk handkerchief. I wonder if it's filled with wine. We'll want a good year. Maybe a Lafitte Rothschild.”

“You've been reading up,” said Freddie, both amused and dismayed. He was feeling more and more like an imposter. How could he marry her with a dybbuk under his skin? She'd scream her southern head off if she found out there were three of them on the honeymoon. “No need to rush things,” he said.

“Of course, there is, you darling man,” she exclaimed. “Love? Have you heard of it?
We'll make a quick trip home to meet the family. Wait until my uncle Wimble in Mobile lays eyes on a Jew. He's the family Klansman. He'll have a heart attack! It'll do him good.”

I
t was while shaving that Freddie told the dybbuk for the first time that sometimes he could be heard crying in his sleep.

“It's against the law?” replied the dybbuk. He sounded surprised.

“I'm sure you have plenty to give you nightmares. Sulka was your sister, wasn't she?”

The dybbuk was slow to answer. “I spoke her name in my sleep?”

“Every night.”

“I saw how they killed her. Did I tell you?”

“No.”

“Why waste good German bullets on trashy little Jews, eh? The Nazis figured out a new way to rid Europe of us vermin. It was cheaper to rub poison on our lips, the lips of kids and babies.

“I saw it with my own eyes, on the road from Lvov, SS men on motorcycles chasing Sulka and me. We hid in a ditch and then burrowed like mice into moldy haystacks.”

“You told me.”

“Sulka had lost a shoe running in the mud and the vultures followed her one-shoe footprints. They pulled her from her hiding place and burst out laughing like shikkers.”

“Shikkers?”

“Drunks. They were SS child killers. They got a thick glass bottle from one of the motorcycle's leather bags. While one soldier held Sulka down, the other rubbed a liquid from the bottle on her lips. They forced her to drink water out of a canteen. She began to scream in pain. She died, screaming for me. Me. I couldn't rush out of hiding. I couldn't save her. I couldn't hug her. I dream about it.”

 

Freddie was dead wrong about finding a needle in the haystack. A glint of polished steel flashed up at the Thursday late show. A Swiss rare-stamp dealer was sitting in the audience at the cabaret. Just before noon the next morning, he turned up in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. Freddie came down in the elevator, and they took overstuffed chairs off the vast lobby.

“My name's Haim Galicia,” he said. “Maybe your Nazi murderer was in my shop in Zurich. He was trying to sell me valuable stamps. He said he had an Inverted Jenny.”

“A what, sir?”

“An American airmail stamp. Extremely rare, eh? Much sought after, yes? It shows an American airplane. A Jenny, it was called.
One sheet of stamps was printed upside down. So you have a great error. Only one hundred Inverted Jennies exist on the face of the earth. Can you imagine how expensive?”

“Very,” replied Freddie.

“More than very.”

“You bought it?”

“No,” said the stamp dealer. “I assumed it was stolen. I could see from the numbers on the man's wrist that he was a concentration-camp survivor. The first letter, the J, told me at once he was a Jew. So I began talking to him in Yiddish. He didn't even seem to know ‘nu' and ‘shlemiel.' I smelled a rat. I suspected he was trying to sell stolen stamps. I said I'd need time to raise such a great amount of money if I
chose to buy it. He said I'd better get busy, as he'd be leaving for New York in a few days, and he might sell it there.”

Freddie paused briefly. “Did he smoke Egyptian cigarettes?”

“Yes. What Jew after the war could afford Egyptian cigarettes?”

Freddie's stomach tightened. Or was that the dybbuk doing handsprings? He'd found his man!

“He was an SS officer,” said Freddie. “Do you know where he'll be staying in New York?”

“Me? No. But he won't be hard to find.”

“Really?” Freddie thought the dybbuk must be holding his breath.

“Two months later, the stamp was sold in
New York, big news in our world. The buyer was well known. Look up Dr. Jameson T. Wixson in San Francisco, yes? I have seen in the press that he continues to buy rarities from the counterfeit Jew. He undoubtedly knows your man's whereabouts.”

Freddie nodded, smiling. “Leave your card, sir. I'll make sure you receive a reward.”

“Feh,”
he said, a grin on his lips. “I'm not tempted by your reward. Give it to a Jewish charity, eh?”

Within an hour, Freddie had posted a cable to the doctor in San Francisco. The following evening he received a cable in return. The German dealer in rare stamps was standing trial for murder in Phoenix, Arizona.