William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (87 page)

It was a lively imitation of the harried little German—complete with baffled, cringing gestures. I found myself laughing uproariously. “Well, what then, Mason?” I said finally.

He seemed reluctant to add anything more; his face became sober and grave, and he guided the conversation around to the play he was working on, to Broadway, and to playwrighting. Yet I was subtly insistent: the intrigue and derring-do of espionage have always been fascinating to me, and I wanted to hear more. “Well, Peter, it’s not all you might have thought,” he said. “Like the Army or anything else it was mainly a matter of beastly—I mean, really incessant—boredom. Jesus, I’d like to have a nickel for each of the dead, dead hours I spent sitting on my ass doing nothing but waiting. In Cairo it got so bad, I swear to God, that I got to know every crack in the wall and every bump and every knothole in the bar at Shepheard’s Hotel. Waiting on your ass, waiting on your ass until Franklin and Winston cooked up a big deal—and you know it’s all based not on strategy, but on some lousy political nuance—a big deal to save some poor, half-strangulated partisan somewhere.” And so, since so much of the work of the Strategic Services had been paralyzed by inertia, he had managed to go on only one mission, parachuting along with a Serb-American Army corporal behind German lines in Yugoslavia in an effort to discover first-hand the extent of the partisan leader Mikhailovitch’s collaboration with the Axis forces. “It’s amazing,” he put in suddenly, “talking to people—I mean even, say, British G-2 officers who’ve done a lot of tough hush-hush stuff and should know better—how everyone thinks of the O.S.S. as filled with brawny supermen who speak seven languages and are adept at judo and are forever prowling some really terror-ridden landscape with a knife between their teeth. Honest to God, Peter, nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t mean to say that there wasn’t some risk. I mean simply parachuting out into black space at night is no joy. It was the only jump I ever made and by God you can
have
it. But otherwise, really, as far as the blood-and-thunder goes, practically all of it’s in the movies.”

And he described how, after floating to earth near the town of Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian Coast, he holed up in the seaside villa of a Serb named Plaja in the confidential pay of the Allies—“a terrific old barrel-chested guy,” Mason described him, “who’d been educated at Cambridge and had made an incredible fortune exporting slivovitz"—and there for a couple of months lived the life of a total idler, since inauspiciously at that moment Mikhailovitch had shifted his roving guerrilla headquarters to a point far up in the mountains to the east, where, because of the German troops interposed between, he was beyond reach. “We tried to make contact with the pro-Tito operatives we knew were working undercover with Mikhailovitch,” Mason went on, “but it just wasn’t any go. Stancik—that was Jack Stancik, my Serb corporal from Toledo, a wonderful little guy, hard as nails, who used to be a circus acrobat—Stancik and I tried to poke through the lines a couple of times but the Krauts were really out for blood and the place was hemmed-in like chicken-wire.” So, instead of establishing any sort of liaison with the Tito agents, Mason lolled in prodigal comfort at Plaja’s villa, drenched in the sunshine of the Dalmatian spring, swimming by night out to the cypress-groved islets which dotted the shore, and guzzling slivovitz, the plum-flavored brandy of which Plaja, its chief entrepreneur, served only the most succulent vintages. “Jesus Christ, Peter,” he suddenly burst out,
’that
was the part that was out of the movies. It was unbelievable. Nazis wandering around everywhere. Here I was literally yards from death, but having the time of my life. And then to cap everything, about five or six days after I’d been installed there, Plaja’s daughter came on the scene, this magnificent little black-haired dish—she was just fourteen—with these black saucy eyes and ripe red saucy lips set into a fabulous clear olive complexion that the Yugoslavians in that part of the country have. And these terrific hard little breasts like young melons, and a wonderful soft bouncy little tail to go along with it all. I almost blew my top just looking at her, after having subsisted—and I mean
subsist
—off these old fungusy Cairo whores for so long. She couldn’t speak a word of English but we got along in a sort of pig-French—anyway, to make that part of a long story short: we made goo-goo eyes for a while—old Plaja didn’t care; I think he approved of me handsomely, and besides he was always out falconing, which seems to be the favorite
divertissement
of flush Yugoslavians—and then one night after a lot of preliminary billing and cooing and bellyrubbing we swam out to this little island offshore. Honest to God, the smell of cypresses out there, and plum blossoms—it was heady and sexual enough to make you want to positively retch with excitement. Neither of us had bathing suits, so that when we came out dripping onto this moonlit beach we were as naked as a couple of goldfish. It was her first time, Petesy, but you’d never know it. She just gave a little whimper and melted. It was like taking ice cream from a baby.” And this idyll, he said, lasted for weeks. I was ravished by the picture he drew. So much so that I think I was hardly irritated by his childish descriptions of all the “specialties” he had taught her—they can be found in any marriage primer—or even disturbed, while he went doggedly on about “these little jawbreaking yelps of passion,” in my vision drawn straight from his eloquence, of looming threat, of plum blossoms and soaring falcons, and cypress-scented seas.

“God, Mason,” I breathed, “it’s unbelievable.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Of course I do.” (And didn’t I really? It must be remembered that, four years before Sambuco, I still possessed a larger streak of gullibility.) “It’s just that—it’s just that it’s so—so incredibly romantic. I mean, young Mason Flagg of Gloucester Landing, Virginia.”

“I know,” he said, musing. “It was really like something out of a book. Sometimes there I thought I was living in a dream.”

It was a dream shattered soon, however, for Mason found himself borne away from this beatific seclusion on the winds of violence. A servant in the villa betrayed their presence one night to the Germans. Only by a matter of minutes had he and Stancik managed to make their getaway: a brief fumbling embrace with the girl, a kiss, a farewell—and Mason was gone, together with Stancik, racing and floundering across fields, through olive groves, in a nightmare of confusion and indirection stumbling toward the rescuing British launch that awaited them on the shore, while like avenging and inescapable fury the Germans came on hotly after, inflaming the sky with the pitiless white light of their flares. “The flares were bad enough,” Mason said, “I think they must have been firing them out of knee-mortars, or maybe they were using riflegrenades. Anyway, we’d hear this loud crack! and this was the sign to get down—I mean
belly-down
—and stay down, without breathing. Then in about five or ten seconds we’d hear this little muffled report—
pootf
—way up in the sky, and suddenly, even though we were lying out in this filthy wet field, eyes closed tight, we could feel a tremendous hard brilliance floating down from the sky like brightest daylight, covering us. It was strange. Though I couldn’t really see it because my eyes were closed, I could actually
feel
this light stealing into my bones and I just waited there—praying, I guess—waiting for them to blast us. But as I say, that wasn’t the worst part, somehow. It was these goddam dogs they had. They had these goddam big Dalmatian dogs that they’d taken from the Serbs and trained as sort of bloodhounds. I’d seen them before, patrolling with the Krauts on the road in front of the villa—these great hungry beasts with red-rimmed eyes and liver-spots on their haunches. Anyway, that night they turned them loose after us. We could hear them snarling and groaning and howling in the hedgerows, trying to get our scent. And once when a flare lit up the field I peeked out under my arm and saw one of the bastards, way off but still close enough, standing at the edge of some woods beside some big Kraut with an automatic rifle. I swear I felt my blood turn to piss just looking at him: this great monstrous beast with his fangs glinting there in the light and these big round eyes shining like a couple of silver dollars. He was trained to kill, and he’d chop through your spinal cord like it was so much cottage cheese.”

Yet by the grace of heaven or by luck they managed to get away; at least Mason did, for his companion Stancik (they were on the beach by now, hiding behind boulders, sliding and slipping down sheer rock faces in one last foot-weary, bone-tired burst of desperation scrambling toward the Diesel launch whose signal, already seeming to flicker and dim as if with the hopelessness of their plight, beckoned to them from the shore’s edge), Stancik fell, slipping into a sort of crevasse in the rock and uttering a wild cry of pain which gave away their position. Mason said he could hear the snap of his leg bone as it broke and, turning to help the corporal, was confronted—with a feeling of despair such as he had never known—by the blinding glare of a Nazi searchlight shining full upon them. Pinioned there, helpless and in terrible pain, Stancik tried to stir, but his predicament was fatal. As Mason moved toward him in the excruciating light, a blast of machine-gun fire stitched across the rocks, scattering upon the wind a gritty debris of shale and limestone, sending a bullet through the corporal’s belly: Mason said he saw the fount of blood spurt forth like tar from some mortal arterial hemorrhage, heard the corporal sigh, or whisper, in one long last diminishing utterance of his identity and being, and then Mason tumbled himself, pierced through the calf of his leg with pain like a blade of fire. “Well, I dragged myself out of there to the boat,” he said. “I still don’t know how I did it. But Stancik, the poor sweet little bastard, he didn’t have a chance. All he whispered was, ’Go on, Lieutenant. Don’t tell anybody that this acrobat fell.’ And then he died.” Mason drew back one cuff of his jeans, revealing above his ankle an ugly round scar, bluish in hue and a little larger than a nickel. “So that,” he added, “is my memento of the war. To be frank, Pierre, I think I’m pretty lucky. And this is a nice little token to have around, because whenever it itches, which it does on damp, horrible New York days, I think of Plaja’s daughter and the sunshine and the blue water.”

“Wow, Mason,” I said, sincerely impressed, “that’s one
hell
of a story.”

“Yeah,” he said, in an offhand manner, “yeah, I suppose it does have all the dramatic elements about it.” He paused and looked at his watch. “Well, I guess you’d better get back to the party, dollbaby. Look,” he said, “I’m going to hang around back here for a while. I’m getting tired of all those freeloaders. If you want me, come on back.”

Since this was Mason during what I suppose you might call his Bohemian period, there were, to my intense disappointment, few movie people in evidence; he had gathered instead a curious and mingled crew. Solitary as ever, I took up my accustomed position, mooring myself in a windless alcove where with practiced hermitical eye I could watch the ebb and flow of the party. There were floaters of various sexes from the Village bars, including the Penny-packers, who cruised in later, giggling, fragrant with marijuana; several middling-to-prominent abstract expressionist painters; an editor of the
Hudson Review;
a famous playwright; a Broadway director whose wife, Mason had earlier breathed into my ear, was an incurable nymphomaniac; three rather hairy young literary critics from N.Y.U., who stood by the buffet and soberly stoked themselves with turkey; an art critic; a critic of jazz; a drama critic; half a dozen sleepy-looking jazz musicians; and a shoal of young and pretty models who zigzagged swishing about the room, or postured in corners, highball glasses clamped before their noses like smelling salts. A bright, frenetic sound of jazz boomed from some concealed source, buoying it all up: whenever the music paused, with a scratchy flutter, the young models seemed to pout ever so perceptibly, and they sagged in their chic spring dresses like wilting bouquets. “That Mason,” a hoarse voice spoke at my side, “now there’s a boy for you.” This proved to be a Mr. Garfinkel, a bald, corpulent small man who like myself was either ill-at-ease or neglected, and had dropped anchor in my alcove. He said he was “with Republic,” which I assumed was a steel company until he explained to me with strangled guffaws that he was connected with the movies. “No, my boy. I only been to Pittsburgh once in my life.” Then he repeated: “That Mason. Now there’s a boy for you. A genius. Figure everything he’s got. The eyes. The nose. The
expression.
Everything. It’s uncanny, I tell you. Just like his dad.” He paused. “Taller, maybe.”

“Did you know Mr. Flagg?” I asked.

“Did I know Justin Flagg? My boy, I
suckled
him. I was a mother to him. Hah!” He drew back his lips in a grin, revealing a row of mottled incisors. “It’s the Jew in me,” he said with a nudge. “In each Jew resides a frustrated mother.”

I began to fidget and looked around, and at this moment there passed by us one of the loveliest girls I had ever seen. She was a stunning girl with soft coppery hair: finely spun whorls of it made a fringe of halos around her head. And she had an inward warmth and gentleness that seemed to radiate from her as she moved. “Hello, Marty, having a good time?” she said to Garfinkel, briefly clutching his hand; it was definitely not a show-business voice, being devoid of flimflam and coming from some place other than her sinuses, her throat, to be exact, and with a warm and womanly intonation. Best of all, she didn’t call him “darling.”

“Hi, Celia,” said Garfinkel, as she moved off among the crowd, “where have you been, darling?”

“Who is that—” I started to say to Garfinkel, but again he was talking about Mason. “I see,” I said. “So you’ve known Mason for a long time?”

“Years. The boy’s a genius. Just like his dad. Only he’s going to be a genius in the field of playwrighting.” He was a nice little man, Garfinkel, with a look of stoical lonesomeness. For some reason, I saw him doing the mambo on countless Grace Line cruises to Brazil, with women forever taller than himself.