Establishment (14 page)

“Fifty thousand dollars!” Brodsky exclaimed.

“How do you say?” Lovazch smiled. “A pound of flesh, yes. We will load the planes tonight. You are to take off at dawn. You will tell your Jews in Palestine that we are good businessmen too. Because we are Marxists, it does not mean we don't understand capitalist techniques.” The general was putting the money back into the suitcases as Lovazch spoke. He had a penchant for neatness. He piled the bundles of bills carefully, caressing them with his long, thin, carefully manicured fingers. “I do not press you,” Lovazch continued. “Our country is in a state of revolution. I am a friend of the Jews. Others are not. So the sooner you get out of here, the better for you.”

“When will you start loading?” Bernie asked.

“In an hour.”

“We want to check what you load.”

“You don't trust me?”

“That's two million dollars,” Bernie said. “We want to check the loading.”

He shrugged. “As you wish.” He and the general rose, each picking up a suitcase. Lovazch smiled and nodded. “As you wish. I see you at the planes.” They turned and marched out of the room.

There was silence for a long moment after they left, then came an outburst from the airmen, a barrage of curses and epithets, until Bernie was forced to shout, “Will you all knock it off!”

“We've been had!” someone yelled.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. I want you to try to sleep. If we're taking off at dawn, you've got to get some sleep.”

“Where? On the floor?”

“On the floor. That's right. We never promised you a picnic. If today was bad, tomorrow will be worse. So get some sleep. And keep it down. If you can't sleep, maybe the next guy can.”

Kober was humming to the tune of “I've got sixpence, lucky, lucky sixpence.” Benash had taken a Colt forty-five out of his jacket pocket, and now he was checking the cylinder.

“Going to shoot your way out?” Bernie asked him.

“Maybe.”

“What do you think?” Brodsky asked Bernie.

“I think they'll deliver and load the planes,” Bernie said. “He wants us out of here in the morning because he's taken us like Grant took Richmond. But there's not a damn thing we can do about it except try to check him as he loads.”

“You're an optimist,” Kober observed.

“No. Look, Kober, he's running a scam. I don't know who else is in on it beside the general, but it stands to reason that if we make a fuss or if he does, it's going to louse up his take. We paid double for everything, but we still got a hell of a lot of stuff, and we got the nine Messerschmitts.”

“If he delivers.”

“We'll see.” He turned to Goodman. “You get some sleep, Herb. You're a navigator. The four of us, we're just passengers, so we'll check the loading. How about that?” he asked the others.

Benash put the gun back in his pocket. The four of them left the lounge and walked across the field. The place where the planes were parked was lit with portable lights. Two trucks, loaded with parts of the disassembled Messerschmitts, were already backing into the area. There were at least a hundred men there, half of them in uniform, the others in work clothes.

“Well,” Kober said, “it looks like our Lovazch is a man of his word.”

“That dirty anti-Semitic bastard,” Brodsky said.

“A fine way to show your gratitude.”

Lovazch appeared a few minutes later, and the loading went on almost until dawn. Kober and Benash remained with the planes. Bernie and Brodsky made their way back across the field to the lounge. It was predawn, a gloomy gray under a clouded sky that began to drizzle lightly. The airmen, unshaven and aching from their night on the floor, were ill-tempered and bitter.

“Come on, guys,” Bernie said gently. “We'll be in sunshine tomorrow. Soft beds, decent food, and you can spend the day lying on the beach.”

They filed back across the field through the rain. Sitting in the copilot's seat, next to Al Shlemsky, Bernie managed to stay awake through the takeoff. A few minutes later, even before they broke through the clouds into the sun-drenched sky, he was asleep. He didn't wake up until they were making their approach to the airport outside Tel Aviv.

***

The same day she received a cable from Bernie, informing her of his safe arrival in Tel Aviv, Barbara had lunch with Jean at Jack's on Sacramento Street. The wire from Bernie, in the few words it contained, fairly bubbled with satisfaction. “A great story for you and for Dan too. Kiss him for me. Back soon, and never another gripe about being a grease monkey.” But no word as to when, precisely, he would be back. That day, also, Barbara had a morning meeting with the board of directors of the Lavette Foundation and an afternoon session with Harvey Baxter, her lawyer.

Barbara was first at the restaurant, and when Jean entered, Barbara did not have to inquire about Dan. Jean was her old self, statuesque in a pearl gray Chanel suit of French mohair, her blouse a blue that matched both her eyes and the lining of her jacket. “Of course, daddy's much better,” Barbara said. And Jean agreed. “His old self. He pleaded with me to smuggle in a cigar. I told him he'd have to give them up forever, and he repeated that stupid, disgusting bit about a woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. He began as a hoodlum kid from the Tenderloin, and he's reverted. Perhaps it's lying in bed that makes him so tough. If men weren't so totally pathetic I could very easily despise them all. What on earth is that you're wearing, Bobby?”

“Just what it appears to be, mother. A sweater set and a skirt.”

Jean shook her head. “The sweater is practically falling apart, and that skirt is ancient. Will you ever learn to dress properly?”

“I doubt it. Do you want a drink?”

“I do. I want a stiff martini. I want to celebrate that I am not a widow, a hideous state. What have you heard from Bernie?”

“I do love the way your mind moves. I had a cable from Tel Aviv. He got there safely with the nine planes, mission accomplished. If one can judge from a cable, he's high as a kite.”

“Then we'll both have a drink and celebrate. You know, he is a remarkable man. How did you ever come to meet him, Bobby? You were never very clear on that.”

“Didn't I tell you?” She paused to order the drinks. “No, I don't suppose I ever did tell you. It's not the sort of thing one tells one's mother.”

“I don't know what you could possibly tell me that would shock me. It's the illusion of each generation that the previous one lived in a kind of childish innocence. Of course there are innocents in every generation, but I was not one of them. By the way, I saw Tom yesterday and told him about Dan's heart attack. I think it touched him.”

Barbara doubted that. It was not difficult for her to follow her mother's train of thought. It was easier to have a homosexual brother than a homosexual son.

“He's getting married, you know,” Jean said.

“I didn't know.” Barbara hesitated. There were things one could not discuss with one's mother. “Lucy Sommers, I suppose.”

“How did you know?”

“They've been around together. Do you know,” she said after a moment, “I can forgive Tom most things, but not to go around and make his peace with daddy now—well, that's unforgivable.”

“It takes two, and Dan hasn't helped.” The waiter came, and they were occupied ordering food; Jean tried to recall where the conversation had started.

“You were asking me how I met Bernie. Of course I can tell you. I can't believe I never did, but I was a good deal younger then. You know he worked for the Levys at the winery—”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“Long ago. Nineteen twenty-two or twenty-three. He was just a kid then. He kept in touch with them, and eventually he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He always had his own strange reasons for what he did. He went to work at the winery to learn to grow grapes, because he believed that one day he would grow grapes in Palestine. He was an orphan who created his own dream place where everything that had been wrong in his life would be put right. That place was Palestine. He studied agriculture because that would be his life in Palestine. He joined the brigade to learn how to fight. When the Levys wrote to me that they would be coming to Paris, they mentioned that Bernie was in the Lincoln Brigade. Of course, I hadn't met him then. It was just a name. But when Marcel, this French journalist I was in love with, was assigned by his paper to go to Spain and do a story on the Lincoln Brigade, I mentioned Bernie's name to him. Just as a contact. He found Bernie, and when the terrible retreat across the Ebro took place, Bernie saved his life—he swam the Ebro with him and practically carried him on his back for miles. Marcel wrote all this to me in a letter from the hospital in Toulouse. Before he died,” Barbara finished slowly. “I don't think I ever told you that either. His leg was badly mangled, and he wouldn't let them amputate until I got to Toulouse. I talked him into it. It was too late. He died of gangrene.”

“You don't have to talk about it.”

“I don't mind. I can talk about it now. Marcel was a beautiful man. Quite ugly, with a long bony face, but very beautiful. I never met anyone else like him. He was full of joy, and it was always joyful to be around him. He picked me up on the Champs-Elysées, saw me and followed me and insisted that if I walked out of his life, he would be utterly devastated. Well, that was only the beginning. We were together for a long time, and we were to be married. But I think you knew that?”

“I knew it,” Jean said softly.

“So different from Bernie. That's odd, isn't it? But you wanted to know about Bernie. Well, it was months later. The Spanish Civil War was over, and the international brigades were disbanded. Bernie walked over the Pyrenees into France, sold his rifle for a few francs, and hitched his way to Paris. To see Marcel, strangely enough. You see, Marcel had talked of nothing else but this wonderful American girl he was going to marry. Bernie didn't know he had died, and since Marcel was the only person in Paris he knew, he went to the offices of Le Monde, where Marcel had worked. They told him about Marcel and gave him my address. And there you have it. My doorbell rang, and when I opened the door, there was this enormous, hulking brute of a man, in a sweatshirt and blue jeans, with two days' beard on his face. Well, we talked, I took him to dinner, and then he came home with me and used my shower and shaved, and I washed his very dirty clothes, and then we went to bed. And that's it. I think I fell a little bit in love with him the moment I saw him at my door, so woeful and sad and inarticulate—or maybe I simply had a desperate need to love someone and to be loved by someone, or maybe he was all that remained of Marcel, or maybe his saving Marcel's life joined him to me in some way. He was so gentle and so kind. God, I needed someone to be gentle and kind to me. But that's it. That's how I met Bernie Cohen.”

The waiter brought their food. Jean toyed with hers. It occurred to Barbara that she had never actually seen Jean eat, certainly not with the gusto and pleasure that food brought to so many people. But that perhaps was the reason for her mother's slender figure, for the smooth, tightly drawn skin that covered the bones of her face.

“I was never clear about how long he was with you then,” Jean said.

“He was gone the next morning. Before I woke up. Left a note that he was broke, he loved me, and he didn't intend to sponge off me. And I didn't see him again until he turned up here one day more than six years later. He got to Palestine, where he joined the British army. Six years of it.”

“And you still loved him?” Jean asked.

“No, I loved a romantic dream I had. But then I got to know him. He's not hard to know. He's rather simple and very direct. And also terribly complicated. Not an intellectual; his complication is different.”

Jean nodded.

“I wish you would eat something. I wish you wouldn't sit there and just cut up your food. I'm hungry, and watching you fills me with guilt. Was I a fat child?”

“You never were. I hardly ever eat at lunch, Bobby.”

“There's a fat, guilty child somewhere inside of me. Have you ever seen a psychiatrist, mother? I mean, have you ever been psychoanalyzed?”

“What on earth ever gave you that idea? No.”

“Don't be upset. We are both being highly personal, aren't we? I was only thinking of how much you've changed.”

“Have I? I don't know. I've always been the spoiled daughter of a very rich man. When all that was going on in Spain, I had only the vaguest notion of what was happening. I was always concerned for myself. Even during the war, I was hardly involved.”

“Yet you can say that.”

“What?”

“I mean, you look at yourself. Whether you're right or wrong about what you are, you're making the judgment.”

“Is that a virtue?”

“I don't know,” Barbara said uneasily. “I keep trying to look at myself, but I can't get away from it. From me. As if something is missing from us. I keep asking myself, will I grow up and when?”

“You're very grown up,” Jean told her. “You're the most mature person I know.”

“That's a lovely illusion. I think it's remarkable to fool one's own mother. We're both of us the spoiled daughters of very rich men. Only you seem to have made your peace with it. I'm afraid I haven't.”

***

Irv Brodsky pleaded with Bernie to remain in Palestine and join the Haganah. “You don't know how much we need you. Since the UN declaration, the Arabs have gone mad, and the British aren't doing one damn thing about it. Just hands off and get ready to leave. They've killed more Jews in the past few months than in the past twenty years. Bernie, we prepared for this, both of us. There aren't ten men in Palestine who know what you do about tactics and modern war. How in hell can you walk out? How can you walk away from it? You remember Hyam Kadar?”