Then We Take Berlin Read Free Page A

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?
    “What would I do? I’m a jazz man, sir. I’d find me a jazz club, hope Monk or Coltrane turn up—and I’d belly up to the bar and get my ears filled.”
    “Are there any within walking distance?”
    “Sure. Across the square, down Third for about ten blocks. The Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place. Turn left off Third and you’re there. Won’t take you but fifteen minutes.”
    Wilderness didn’t think it was to his taste, but his taste was on the back burner. Neither Monk nor Coltrane turned up, but the posters on the wall told him they had on several other occasions. As Eric Dolphy alternated between flute and saxophone, between harmony and dissonance, the sound that really mattered was the voice in his head that said, “I’m in a jazz club in New York.” And the voice in his head that resisted saying, “It’s a long way from Whitechapel.”
    And then the band launched into “On Green Dolphin Street,” and harmony and dissonance folded into each other and Whitechapel melted away from mind and memory leaving New York draped across his arm, whispering its seduction in his ears, in and out of the sax riffs and the drum beats.
    §5
    He drifted all day. Over Fifth, across Washington Square and into Greenwich Village, the only Manhattan district he’d ever heard of apart from Harlem. He sat in coffee bars, he stood on street corners with his hands in his pockets and stared. He had lunch in an Italian restaurant at Carmine and Bleecker, drifted east again and decided to follow Broadway south just to see where it went. Where it went was down one side of Little Italy. Instinct told him to zigzag, onto Mulberry, down into Chinatown, back onto Broadway, past City Hall and out to Battery Park, the harbour and a distant view of the Statue of Liberty. He’d never imagined that it or she would be green. He found he was content with the distant view and had no desire to take a ferry out and look more closely. Proximity was not intimacy.
    Around five he asked a cabdriver to take him to a book store, and found himself in the Strand at Broadway and 12th. He’d almost finished King Rat . He was probably never going to finish The Ipcress File . If Frank was going to string him out another day he’d need a book.
    He checked in at the Gramercy an hour or so later. The desk clerk said a young woman was waiting for him in the bar.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Oh yes, sir. Asked for Mr. Holderness.”
    In a booth on the Lexington side of the bar sat Dorothy Shearer, sipping at a white lady and smiling up at him.
    “He stood me up again, eh?”
    “Yep. But look at it this way. I could have just phoned in a message. But here I am.”
    “And here am I.”
    “And we’re on expenses. Manhattan, if not the world, is our oyster.”
    “Let’s order before Frank’s credit runs out.”
    “Unlikely, but since you ask . . . I’ll have another white lady.”
    The waiter was already at their table. They were the only people in the bar.
    Wilderness ordered and asked for a scotch.
    “Try harder,” Dorothy said. “Push the boat out. Experiment. Have something you wouldn’t have at home.”
    “Good point, but what?”
    “Waiter, please bring my friend a whiskey sour.”
    She noticed the bag of books he had placed on the table.
    “Show me. I can’t resist knowing what people choose in book stores.”
    Wilderness pushed the bag in her direction. She pulled out Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir , a tatty Modern Library