Then We Take Berlin (2 page)

“How did you know it was on expenses?”

“Would you even be thinking about it if it weren’t?”

Wilderness settled on the edge of the bath.

“I just thought . . . out of the blue after all this time . . .”

“It’s three or four years isn’t it? Can’t be much more. The two of you came back from Helsinki together.”

“I just thought . . . this wouldn’t have anything to do with Alec would it?”

“Get in the bath, Wilderness. You’ll feel better and you’ll sleep better.”

“Er . . .”

Just a grunt. Non-committal, out of nothing more than tiredness.

“Just get in. You know what you’re like when you’re too tired to sleep. Those nights when your legs twitch. You’ll feel better. Trust me.”

He slipped in at the blunt end, the rounded knobs on the taps cold against his back. Her toes found their way to his armpits. Her nipples peeked at him through the foam.

“Trusting you isn’t the problem. It’s trusting Frank.”

“And my father?”

“Nah, I was just asking. Alec’s been good to me—I didn’t mean . . .”

“Didn’t mean what? Pa’s been good to you. Of course he has. But do I detect a hint of too much of a good thing?”

It was a moment to sink beneath the water and blow bubbles at her, but only Hollywood had baths big enough for that.

She took the unspoken words from his silent lips. Pushed her breasts together and made an irresistible waterfall flow between them.

“Coochie coo,” she said, and he knew he was off the hook. Subject changed.

§3

He’d never flown the Atlantic before. He’d flown plenty of times. His years in the RAF had seen to that. He’d scrounged flights almost like hitching car rides. But he’d never done a long haul. It was the stuff of Sunday colour supplement advertising. “International” was a positive in the adman’s world. It implied you were beyond the pettiness of nations, that you were post post-war, that you moved in a world peopled by the likes of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, that you sat in the VIP lounge at airports, and had a bag emblazoned with the name of the airline. Things like that were coveted. It was chic to be seen with a cheap plastic hold-all marked BOAC, chic-er still to be seen with the one Wilderness now had bearing the Pan Am logo.

Frank hadn’t been mean with him. Whatever Frank’s faults—lies, tricks, half-truths, cheapness was not one of them. First class all the way. The hostess handed him a package as soon as he took his seat, saying “A present from Mr. Spoleto.”

Inside were two books and a note in Frank’s hand saying, “Don’t get too bored.”

He looked at the titles.
The Ipcress File
.
King Rat
. An hour out of Heathrow he abandoned the former in favour of the latter. Too damn difficult. Fifty pages into the steamy jungle of
King Rat
he fell asleep. Woke, read another fifty and napped again. When he awoke the second time, the plane was over Newfoundland. Canada, America . . . New York.

As the Fasten Seat Belt sign came on, the man sitting next to him spoke. Overweight, balding, brimming with bonhomie, capable—Wilderness thought—of rattling on for ages. But, they’d exchanged half a dozen pleasantries over the meal several hours ago, and then the man had slept the uninterrupted sleep of a seasoned traveller sedated on free champagne and Southern Comfort.

“First time?” he asked. A question left over from the simple pleasantries that he hadn’t asked first time around.

“Is it that obvious?”

“You get so you can tell. Just the way a guy looks around. The way he talks to the hostesses.”

“Too nervous?”

“Too polite. Too grateful. We paid for all the stuff they thrust at us.”

“Or,” said Wilderness. “Somebody paid.”

“Right. Who’d ever pay for their own ticket? Ought to be down as one of the rules in the game of life. Play it right and somebody else will always pay.”

It was a disappointment. For some reason, doubtless a stupid reason, he’d expected to be able to see skyscrapers the second they stepped out of the terminal. There were none, they were way out on Long Island in a big, flat nothing. Idlewild seemed to be the right name. He strained towards the western horizon, hoping at least for a glimpse of Manhattan.

He stood next to the fat man in the queue for Checker cabs. Every one that pulled up made him feel a mile nearer to the city. A fleck of deep, warm yellow somehow just blown his way. They were at least six places away from getting a cab, when a tall, black man in a grey suit approached and asked if he were Mr. Holderness.

“Sorry to be late, sir. An accident on the expressway. Mr. Spoleto’s car is waiting. We’ll have you in Manhattan in no time at all.”

Wilderness knew he should offer the fat man a ride, but he wanted to be selfish, to enter the city without the voice of experience jabbering in his ear. Manhattan was worth approaching in innocence. Find out for himself. He just shook his hand and said, “Thanks for the motto. I’ll treasure it.”

“Motto? What motto?”

“Play it right and somebody else will always pay.”

“Oh that.”

He was still chuckling at his own wit as the Negro picked up the suitcase and led Wilderness across the lane to a Cadillac. A big car. A ridiculous car. Low-slung, fat, covered in chrome and sporting huge rear fins. It reminded him of a beached shark. Cadillac Deville Sedan, the driver replied, when Wilderness asked.

“Frank’s car?”

“Frank’s car, this year. Frank’s car for now.”

“And next?”

“Whatever the boss takes a shine to. I driven five models in three years.”

“Does Frank like to drive?”

“Naw. Frank likes to be driven.”

Wilderness sat in the back, feeling he should have sat in the front, but the sense of protocol was palpable. The man drove, the man was paid to drive. The front seat was his. He doubted Frank ever sat in the front.

Manhattan loomed up so quickly it caught him unawares. Suddenly above the one-and two-storey buildings either side of the road there it was, shining pinnacles against a western sun, the sun all but eclipsed by the spire on the Chrysler Building, a corona of light sending the skyscraper into chiaroscuro. A black spike in a red sky.

Crossing the Queensboro Bridge he was entering something akin to a dream. He’d always dreamed of cities. He’d always fallen in love with cities—mostly because he’d never known anything else. Childhood trips to the seaside had palled before he was ten—how many sandcastles can you build for some bigger kid to knock down? And rarer trips out into the Essex countryside to visit great aunts—relics from another century, all aprons and safety pins, a generation and a gender that seemed always to be dusted with flour or wiping their hands—left him awkward and speechless, blushing as his resemblance to Uncle Harold or Cousin Alfred was rattled off, baffled as they wished for him a better fate than Cousin Tom—reduced to a red mist at Ypres—or Great-Uncle Brinsley—a petty thief, an incompetent burglar, his life wasted in and out of Queen Victoria’s prisons.

That was the beauty of a city. You entered anonymously. Who you were, with luck, with will, was who you could make yourself. You were not the sum parts, the flawed arithmetic of your own genealogy.

They crossed several avenues, Wilderness wound down the window trying to see the names, but they seemed to be only numbers. Then in rapid succession, they crossed Lexington, Park and swung right on Madison to pull into the kerb a dozen blocks further on.

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?