6

THE AGELESS, UNDYING STAR MAKER, ABOUT WHOM almost nothing was known, almost everything was rumor, vile rumor. Whose very sex had recently become a hotly debated issue. Some said he was a man, others insisted he was turning into a woman; a few, astoundingly enough, whispered that something even more sinister was in the offing. The Star Maker. Imagine, Mortimer thought, Oriole Press passing into such obscene hands.

Naturally the publishing scene, like everything else, had changed considerably since Mortimer had first come to London fifteen years ago. There had been failures, regroupings, and, above all, a plethora of American takeovers. But Mortimer had believed that Oriole Press, with its unequaled traditions, inadequate gas fires, antique filing system and tea rings, was inviolate. Now, without warning, the saintly Lord Woodcock had surrendered control, obviously to avoid death duties, Mortimer reflected, and overnight Oriole Press had become possibly the most insignificant unit in the Star Maker’s international business empire.

Horrifying. But on second thought Mortimer wondered if this was not another typically shrewd ploy by Lord Woodcock. The Star Maker, his interests global, swooped out of the sky one day to settle a strike on a Malayan opium farm and the next day flew on to Rome, perhaps, to fire the director on one of his multimillion-dollar film productions. His interests were so vast and all-embracing, taking in film and TV production companies, airlines, newspapers, diamond mines, oil refineries and gambling casinos, that he was bound to take no notice of Oriole Press. We’re no more than a bauble, Mortimer thought, feeling considerably better, a prestigious trinket. Our turnover is too pathetically small to interest such a Goliath.

Only an hour later the first of the Star Maker’s legendary idea men arrived. A team of efficiency experts had flown in from Frankfurt and Lord Woodcock, making one of his rare appearances at Oriole House, came round to introduce them. There was Herr Dr. Manheim and his three secretaries. Two of them were laconic men, obsessive note-takers who wore black leather coats. The third, Fräulein Ringler, was a rather comely young lady, even taking the dueling scar on her cheek into account.

Unfortunately the very first meeting with the efficiency team got off to a bad start.

Mortimer’s secretary, shy, unobtrusive Miss Fishman, who had worked at Oriole ever since shortly after the war when she came to England out of a displaced-persons camp, suddenly seized a letter opener and fell on Fräulein Ringler, scratching, biting, and stabbing. It took Mortimer and Hy to pull her off Fräulein Ringler and drag her into another office.

“Dear, dear,” Lord Woodcock said.

Lord Woodcock, Mortimer could see, was dismayed. Obviously. The saintly old man’s credo was “We must love one another or die”; and he lived by it. Soon after the war Mr. Woodcock, as he was then, had collected case histories and compiled a book, elegantly produced if necessarily slender, about all the charitable little acts done by Germans to Jews during the Nazi era. Here a simple but good-hearted sergeant offering spoonfuls of marmalade to Jewish children before they were led off to the gas chambers, somewhere else a fabled general refusing to drink with Eichmann or a professor quoting Heine right to a Nazi’s face.

“What is it, child?” Lord Woodcock asked,

“The necklace she’s wearing,” Miss Fishman said, still panting. “It’s my mother’s. Before that it belonged to my grandmother.”

Miss Fishman’s mother, who had been roasted in the ovens of Treblinka, as had every other member of her family, was not merely another dry Jewish statistic, altogether too horrific, as they say, for the ordinary imagination to cope with. Miss Fishman’s mother was in fact the one-millionth Jew to be burned, not counting half or quarter Jews or babies who weighed under nine pounds before being flung into the ovens. This made for a very, very special occasion, and in honor of it Miss Fishman’s mother was accorded treatment quite out of the ordinary. For her burning the furnace chambers of Treblinka were festooned with flowers and gaily colored Chinese lanterns. Just as today’s presidents and prime ministers will sign historical documents with as many as thirty pens, passing them out as souvenirs, so Mrs. Fishman’s gold fillings and other valuables were divided among extermination quota leaders from various concentration camps, who had been invited to Treblinka for the day. Thus, the burning of the one-millionth was one of the most ring-a-ding nights in the history of the Third Reich and to this day – the Star Maker himself assured Mortimer, once he got to know him – it is commemorated by survivors of that sentimental barbecue wherever they may be.

“The necklace belongs to my mother,” Miss Fishman insisted over and over again.

“But,” Lord Woodcock chided her gently, “Fräulein Ringler was merely a child at the time, and so even if the necklace did once belong to your mother, a dubious possibility, then she certainly can’t be considered culpable.”

“I don’t care, I don’t care,” Miss Fishman shouted, stamping her foot childishly. “Let me at her, the German bitch. I’ll kill her.”

“German bitch?” Now Lord Woodcock, not one to lose his temper, actually raised his voice and banged his cane against the floor. “What are you?” he demanded, appalled. “A racist?”

“No.”

“A grudgy type, then?”

Thus reproached, Miss Fishman began to sob brokenly.

“I’m afraid, child, that your outburst has reminded me of nothing more than Nazi ravings, both in tone and attitude.”

“I’m unworthy,” Miss Fishman moaned.

Lord Woodcock took her arm, the one with the number tattooed on it, and began to stroke it. “It was Nazi doctrine,” he continued soothingly, “wasn’t it, to assume national guilt, to assume that it pertains equally to all individuals, and to visit upon the young the presumed sins of their elders.”

“Forgive me,” she pleaded.

“Meditate, if you will, my child, upon the fate of the Canaanites and Amalekites, and you will see that the extermination of nations is not new. I especially recommend I Samuel 15:3: ‘and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.’ ” Still patting her arm he whispered, “so it is not for the Jewish people, beloved as they are to me, to cast the first stone or to judge. Is it, my child?”

Mortimer helped Miss Fishman out of her chair. “Thank you,” she said, smiling at him.

“You’re welcome,” Lord Woodcock said, and then he unlocked the office door, paused, and turned to smile beneficently on Miss Fishman, the light from behind illuminating his massive head. “Remember this too, child. Like you, Fräulein Ringler was born to die alone.”

Miss Fishman stared at Lord Woodcock’s retreating figure. “He’s a saint,” she said.

Yes, Mortimer thought, recalling his first deep conversation with Lord Woodcock. The time Mortimer had told him that when he had been with the Canadian army in Germany, immediately after the war, he had expected that they were in for a bloodbath. Mortimer had thought, he explained, that Jewish officers and men in the allied armies would run amok, shooting down Germans indiscriminately or at least hunting down former SS men and hanging them from lamp-posts, but in the western sector acts of vengeance had been scarce, Mortimer told Lord Woodcock, and he had not known of one that was Jewish-inspired.

Lord Woodcock had nodded; he had smiled. “It would not have done,” he explained, “for my Jewish brothers to respond to animal behavior with yet another obscenely animal act.”

Then he told Mortimer how after the war was done but still a festering wound, he and his followers, a number of saintly Jews among them, had traveled to Germany to demonstrate to the world how love, and only love, could conquer hatred. They had cleared the rubble from the bombed parks and filled in the shell-torn fields. They had planted acres of wheat and corn and orchards and botanical gardens, heedless of scoffing onlookers who had said nothing would grow where the old men and their students had sown. Nothing would grow, they had said, because these men, however well-intentioned, were totally lacking in agricultural acumen. Something else. They were sweetly bound by such reverence for life that they would not tolerate chemical fertilizers or sprays. But the gardens and fields and orchards bloomed, bloomed miraculously, flowers and fruit trees and wheat proliferating in such abundance that it seemed to some that God above must have blessed the seedlings. Of course the knockers said no; they rudely pointed out that underneath the meadows and parks of Germany there ran the most rare and nourishing of fertilizers – rivers of human blood and mashed bone and burned flesh. This fertilizer in fact was said to be so enduring that to this day, according to the experts, it accounted for the incomparably succulent asparagus of the Schwartzwald and the recent fecund years enjoyed by the vineyards of the Rhine, thereby bringing dividends to gourmets the world over, regardless of race, color or creed.