11
FRIDAY.
After Thomas Neill Cream, following Lipski (the Poilischer paskudnyak), in the tradition of Dr. Crippen, the Seddons, Neville Heath, Christie and Stephen Ward … Jacob Hersh, former relief pitcher for Room 41, Fletcher’s Field High (lifetime record, 2–7), stood in the dock of Number One Court, having been delivered thereto once again from the cells below to stand beside Harry, a taciturn prison officer posted on either side.
Number One Court was dominated by an enormous circular skylight. The walls were paneled in oak. The Sword of Justice which hung above the judge, a very fayer and goodly sword well and workmanly wrought and gylded, presented to the City by a cutler in 1563, was suspended hilt downwards. A fresh bouquet of posies and sweet herbs, the traditional antidote to gaol fever, the vicious stench that had once emanated from Newgate below, had been set before the plum-cheeked Queen’s justice of Oyer and Terminer. The jury shifted from buttock to buttock on seats so obdurate as to surely make them surly, resentful, Jake feared.
Jake wore his cheapest, most conservative suit, something gray with hire purchase, shiny with virtue. His drip-dry shirt, especially chosen to ingratiate him with the jurors, was an Arrow. He had deliberated for more than an hour before settling on a tie, just the trick, from the sales rack at John Barnes.
Only yesterday the astute Mr. Pound had summoned Ingrid to the stand. Ingrid, appropriately pale yet fetching in a severe black suit, the hemline cut just a hint above the knee.
“What is your occupation, Miss Loebner?”
“I work as an au pair girl. I am a student.”
In short order, the bewigged Queen’s Counsel established that Ingrid was twenty years old, had been in the country for seven months, and came of impeccable family, her father being a dentist in Munich. On the night of June 12, she had been to see the film at the Swiss Cottage Odeon and had then stopped for a coffee at The Scene on Finchley Road. A stranger had approached her table.
“He purported to be Jacob Hersh and said that he was a film director.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did you believe him?”
“He showed me an identification card and a newspaper review of his last film.”
“And then what happened?”
“He asked me if I was an actress.”
“And what did you reply?”
“No. But he seemed excited. In a nice way, you understand. And he said I was just the girl he was looking for.”
“And then what happened?”
“He asked me to come to his house, yeah, to read from a script. He wished to know if my English was good.”
“You agreed?”
“There seemed no harm in it. He said Elke Sommer was also an au pair girl in Hampstead when she was discovered.”
“Miss Sommer is a screen actress of German origin. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And are these the pages of script he asked you to read? Please examine them carefully before you answer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The girl in the script is said to be attired, I quote, in only a nurse’s cap, a bra, a corset, and high-button shoes. She wields a riding crop, unquote. Did you wear such a costume?”
“I read the lines for him many times first, yeah. He seemed very serious, sir.”
“Then what happened?”
“He asked me to wear the costume as described in the script.”
“And what did you do?”
“I did as he asked. I read the lines in my bra and panties. He had no nurse’s cap, but there was a riding crop.”
“I see. And who played the other part, as it were?”
“He was the General Montgomery.”
“If it please your lordship, I will now hand up some further pages of script to be proven at the proper time …”
Jake stared at his shoes, squeezing his hands together. Never apologize, never explain.
The next witness was the long stooping cop with the correct face who had come to arrest Harry.
“And then,” Sergeant Hoare said, “I asked him once more if his name was Harry Stein and he said this is not Germany and he would not tolerate Gestapo tactics.”
“He refused to tell you his name?”
“He said he had chums in Fleet Street and he was familiar with police brutality. His exact words were, ‘No Cossack is going to plant a bloody brick on me.’ ”
“I see. Go ahead, please.”
“Then I asked him yet again if he was Harry Stein and if he knew a young lady called Ingrid and he replied this was still a free country in spite of Polaris and the American bases.”
“He was wearing a CND button on his lapel. He tried to shut the door in my face.”
As the clerk brought Harry Stein the New Testament to swear on, the usher coughed and asked in a small, courteous voice, “Religion?”
Harry’s silence was not merely hostile. It scorched.
“Are you, ah, Jewish?”
Before Jake’s eyes the ruinously expensive legal advice, the cajoling, the rehearsals, the tranquillizers, all went up in smoke.
“For purposes of census, taxation, and pogroms,” Harry proclaimed in a swelling voice, his St. Crispin’s Day voice, to the somnolent court room, “I am a Jew.”
It’s the rope, Jake thought. It’s the rope for sure.
The bewigged Mr. Pound fixed Harry with his most piercing look. “When you forced the girl upstairs into Hersh’s bedroom,” he asked, “was Hersh –”
“I didn’t force her.”
“When you led the girl upstairs, was Hersh already undressed?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?”
“He had his underwear on.”
“Powder-blue underwear?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Powder-blue. The color.”
“Yes.”
Yes, yes. Sweat oozing from every pore, Jake forced himself to stop listening, already adjusting to prison life. He saw big goysy queens goosing him on the way to chow. Psychopaths calling him chicken because he wouldn’t join in the escape plan, maybe murdering him because he was unlucky enough to overhear the plot. No sitting in a centrally heated toilet with the avant-Guardian after breakfast; Instead a bucket fermenting in the corner of the cell all day and he too sensitive but agonizingly constipated. “Go ahead, dearie. I won’t look.” Depraved warders jew-baiting him. “You want smoked salmon? Chivas Regal? Monte Cristos? Matzoh-ball soup? Sure, Yankel. Just write your missus to send us a check on the numbered Swiss account.” And naturally he would fail to prove himself in the exercise yard. “There goes Hersh. Fainted at the carve-up. What a giggle.”