9

JAKE’S PAST, WHICH HE HAD ALWAYS TAKEN TO BE characterized by self-indulgence, soaring ambition, and too large an appetite, could at last be seen by him to have assumed nifty contours. A meaningful symmetry. The Horseman, Doktor Mengele, Harry, Ingrid, all frog-marching him to where he was to stand so incongruously, stupefied and inadequate, on trial in Courtroom Number One at the Old Bailey.

Yesterday the case against him had looked shaky, very shaky, but today, Friday, Harry was to be summoned to the stand for the first time. Harry, the idiot. And Jake, fear enveloping him, recalled their first meeting or, rather, what he had ruinously taken to be their initial encounter, the aggrieved Harry correcting him before leaving the house.

“You don’t remember having met me before, do you?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Not to worry. Very few people notice me. I’m used to it, don’t you know.”

But even then he hesitated at the door.

“You say you haven’t got the money, Mr. Hersh, and that even if you so desired you couldn’t spare it. A pity, that. For is it not a fact that at the moment you are being paid more monthly not to work than I take home in a year?”

“Who told you that?”

“I put it to you that you have lied to me.”

“Where have we met before, Harry?”

“I take it you are implying that we couldn’t possibly move in the same circles.”

“Inferring,” Jake said, the nastiness rising in him.

Harry’s cheeks bled red.

“Now tell me how come you know,” Jake asked, “or think you know about my private affairs?”

“If you lied to me about that, I say you are also prevaricating about your cousin. You know the present abode of Joseph Hersh. Or de la Hirsch,” he added snidely, “and you are protecting him.”

Standing in the dock, Jake, in his mind’s eye, conjured up Harry as he had struck him on his first visit to the house.

Sneering, ferret-like Hershel. A Londoner born, a Londoner bred. National Health had been enacted in time for the steel-rimmed glasses, but too late to mend the crooked tartar-encrusted teeth. Harry’s brown hair was thin and dry, his skin splotchy and almost as gray as his mac, and there were little tufts of hair spurting out of his ears. From the dampness, probably, Jake had thought at the time, like the shoots that grow in potatoes if they are abandoned under the sink.

Bony little Harry, a veritable bantam, wore a pullover under his jacket and a CND badge on his lapel. The badge was redundant, for his manner bespoke sufficiently of inherited discontent exacerbated by experience. Black, wintry experience. Jake immediately recognized in him the deprived man seething at the end of the bus queue in the driving rain. As he hurtled past in a taxi. It was Harry who called on his way home for a gallon of Esso Pink and lit the Aladdin before setting out the Birdseye frozen potato chips and Walls sausages for his solitary supper. While Jake upbraided the butcher at Harrod’s, demanding and getting a thicker, better-hung slice of Scotch rump. Harry who joined the Christmas club in July and endured tallymen and was not chagrined by the cutback in bank overdrafts. Or the waiting list for Jaguars. Or the ski conditions at Klosters. Or the punitive capital gains tax. Harry whom the world insulted. His gray eyes were perfervid and brimmed with rancor. When he settled into the new winged armchair from Heal’s, Jake couldn’t help noticing the shine on his trousers and the leather strips sewn into his cuffs.

“Nice. Very nice,” Harry said, taking in everything in the living room. “Ruthy would fancy a place like this.”

Ruthy who was still collecting points on the council waiting list.

“But she can’t afford it. Between you Yanks and Rachmanism the rents have been forced up everywhere.”

“I’m a Canadian.”

The world seemed especially ordered to tantalize Harry, mock and inflame him. Wakening, the morning after his first visit to Jake’s house, to light his smelly heater and wait for the kettle to whistle, he read on the front page of the Express of the latest goddess to descend on Heathrow, Gina Lollobrigida, snug in her coat of jaguar and silver fox. “In addition to the coat La Lollo the Magnificent wore on arrival, she brought another three – a tiger, a sable, and another jaguar. And security staff at the Savoy Hotel were guarding the star’s suite last night.” There was also a photograph of the latest in Avenger girls, stooping to reveal a deep enough cleavage to ram it into, given a chance. Then there was a picture of some Swedish bit, the wind billowing her mini high as her cunt. Oh, to stir it into a swamp, and plug it once and for all.

And Harry only had to flip the page, making a mental note to drop off his seed-stained sheets at the laundromat en route to the office, before other people’s good times obtruded.

Those stewardesses, Harry was well aware, were not picked for their language skills but were selected for tit size and enthusiasm for taking it from behind, driving it in themselves, impaled on the captain’s lap at thirty thousand feet while the plane was on automatic pilot. Which you could tell just sniffing it on them as they hobbled out of the flight cabin to the loo for a rinse, and if you so much as asked them if there were any cartons of fags or flasks on sale, even if this was the yabbo’s cheap midnight flight to Paris, they gave you the I-know-you’re-dirt look and said, “I’ve only got two hands, haven’t I?” And Harry knew what they’d just been at, tuppenny whore.

Harry, enjoined to begin his day with a pinta, end it with a Horlick’s. Whom Guinness Was Good For. Backing Britain. Because Labor had Soul. Harry, urged to go to work on an egg.

Into the crammed underground, old bastards gargling their phlegm (“We’re on our way, brothers!”) and mustachioed girls depositing their gum everywhere (Gala Is A Girl Like You), he was assailed again by posters of bikinied girls, their legs widespread for entry, enticing him to the beaches of Malta or Majorca. Girls clutching a bottle of sherry to their bare breasts, fondling it, beseeching him to “Drink …” Girls with the longest legs imaginable, lubricant girls, rolling nylons on like condoms. Girls snuggling into bras and rising from the bath, towel ready to drop, if only he’d hurry and join the queue outside the Old Compton or the new Windmill, unzipping and sliding his mac over his lap to whack off for the big scene.

Yes, yes indeed, everybody else, everywhere else, was getting his. Everybody with money that is.

Ascending at Oxford Street, squeezed into an escalator spilling over with tit and bum, with self-satisfied teenage girls in minis. Sleepy-eyed and no wonder. Grudging insolent shorthand/typists or shop assistants by day they were, but pill-crazed groupies by night, plaster casters maybe, the window ledges of their bed-sitters choked with the imprints of lumpenproletariat cocks. But with no time for Harry, born too late. Who didn’t strum the guitar badly or wear his hair down to his shoulders. Who just happened to prefer Beethoven to the Rolling Stones. Who had a social conscience.

Drawn to the newsstand, buffeted as he vacillated, Harry, unable to pass it by as he had yesterday and the day before, not buying Mayfair, snatched it in a rage this morning, if only to see what lies they were purveying now. THE NUDEST NATHALIE DELON. SUSAN STRASBERG STRIPS. SCRUMPTIOUS SALLY’S ALLEY IS A SENSUAL PLACE TO BE. Stuffing the magazine into his briefcase, Harry turned into Soho Square, then the lift, off at the fifth floor and right to his cell, where basketsful of other people’s prodigious expenses awaited his incomparable fiddling.

Come noon, Father Oscar Hoffman, A.F.A., A.A.I.A., breezed past, raining smiles like blessings, off to a two-hour business lunch at the White E.

– I’m told, Eisenthal says, his eyes watchful, that Triplex Tube is ripe for a takeover. What do you hear, Oscar?

– Bricks and mortar. Put it in bricks and mortar and you can’t go wrong.

Harry, in a playful mood, invited the enormous Sister Pinsky to lunch, trying not to imagine how many pleats there were in her stomach and what agony it must be to support such pie-size breasts. “Come away with me, Sandra, we’ll pool our vouchers and have us an orgy.”

“Oh, you’re a terror, Harry.”

A ton of flesh quaking away.

“Would you drop your knickers to pose for a magazine, Sandra? Like Nathalie Delon?”

“For me,” she replied, heaving, “it would have to be a double-page spread at least.”

Sister Pinsky was reading a biography of King Farouk, of all people.

“For me,” she said, “it symbolizes a classically misspent life.”

Oh, Sandra, give me Farouk’s life, and I shall take his squalid death. Allow me thirty-room hotel suites, belly dancers, and beauty queens. Make me squander my nights gambling a hundred thousand pounds away. Let me know every call girl in Rome by name and pubis and you know what, darling, you can have my office to call your own. Everything in my building society account. My insurance. My pension scheme. My cameras. My past, my present, my future.

Back to his cell and the never-ending other people’s bills and ledgers and fiddling.

It was three thirty before a merry Father Hoffman sailed past, tacking to say hello.

“Do you know who was sitting at the next table?”

Harry attended with a smile.

“Warren Beatty with a real sex pot. He breaks off a piece of bread, chews it, and slides it into her mouth with his tongue. Right in the restaurant. Rye bread.”

Finally Brother Bloom shuffled into Harry’s cell with the revised accounts he had demanded. Harry flung them aside, saying, “We’ve got to get a computer in here one of these days, don’t you think?”

“You’re a born momzer,” Bloom said, knowing how it grated on Harry to be spoken to in Yiddish. Claimed. Especially if Miss Bailey was within range.

And then it was time to go and Harry pondered alternatives. He could squeeze in a session at the Graphic Arts Society or take in the new flick at the Cameo-Poly. Or see Ruthy. He opted for his digs and the telly, remembering to pick up his laundry first, and settling into the Evening Standard with his fried eggs and beans. When David Bailey goes shopping, he read, if the bill comes to ninety-and-something pounds, he hastily buys more items before making out his check, because he doesn’t know how to spell ninety. David Frost is giving another breakfast party for thirty at the Connaught. Everybody who counts is in a dither about what to wear at Lady Antonia Fraser’s masked ball next Wednesday. Forty-year-old Bernie Cornfeld, head of I.O.S. with a personal fortune of more than a hundred million, is accompanied on all his travels by at least four mini-skirted lasses of Playboy pulchritude.

Harry dialed the Savoy. “May I speak with Miss Lollobrigida, please?”

“Miss Lollobrigida is not accepting any calls. Would you like to leave a message, please?”

“You better buzz her, baby, and see if she will accept a call from … John Huston.”

“Yes, sir.” A pause, then, “She is unavailable at the moment, Mr. Huston. Would you mind calling back in ten minutes?”

“Haven’t you got phones by the bathtubs there yet?”

A giggle earned.

“Well now, lemme see. I’m just leaving here. Could you please ask Miss Lollobrigida to stay right where she is. I’ll be along with a towel and my riding crop in ten minutes.”

Sprawled on his bed, unzipped, Harry reached for Mayfair, “a wedding night tussle for Susan Strasberg and film husband Massimo Girotti.” In the photograph she lies nude on the sheets, head arched back tensely, the hairy dago sucking her nipple. “Above right: see-through temptation fails to arouse her husband’s ardor quite enough. Below: the result – the husband’s cousin moves swiftly in.” She is spread on a bench, nude except for leather knee boots, and the cousin’s head is buried busily in her crotch. Lapping it up.

Harry turned to another page, “Quest,” a survey on the sex life of single girls in London today.

Afterwards, Harry dipped his fingers in his seed and smeared Susan Strasberg’s mouth and breasts with it, then he tore Mayfair to shreds, dressed hastily, and started up Haverstock Hill, toward the pub.

Harry paused at the corner of England’s Lane, looking for a phone booth, his little book of ex-directory numbers in his breast pocket, when he noticed a Silver Cloud Rolls Royce parked down the street. There was no driver in attendance. Drifting past, ostensibly without purpose, Harry opened the knife in his mac pocket and ran it the length of the Rolls, walking on some distance before wheeling around to slash the body paint on the other side, continuing back to Haverstock Hill. When he emerged from the pub and went to look for the Rolls, it was gone.