Cheat and Charmer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dinah, but I’ll never forget that big calm man, with his intelligent, kind of amused-looking face. He was a lovely guy, a true mensch. Anyway, he was put in charge of these boys, told them their assignments, found them hiding places, helped them make bombs. He was a kind of Resistance scoutmaster, if that isn’t too grotesque a way of putting it, and carried out their actions with them. Through Willie Weil—”
    “I know Willie,” said Engel.
    “Ventura’d become a French citizen before he came out here, so he had a French passport, but he had an accent and a foreign-sounding last name, and—I don’t have to tell you—the other kind of passport, the one you get at your bris. So he was in real danger. They all were, really, and that includes Veevi. She was in on it from the beginning. I mean, she did fantastic things—carrying pipe bombs in her purse and handing them to one of the boys on the street, who would light the fuses and toss them into garbage cans just as Nazi officers were passing by on their evening constitutionals. Stefan and his boys did a lot of damage in Paris, and when it got too hot there and they went into the country they did railroad sabotage, blew up bridges—things like that. Heroic stuff—the real thing. Stefan hada feeling the Gestapo was closing in, and according to Veevi he wasn’t so sure about the Party higher-ups. But he had friends from the old days—from after Berlin but before Hollywood—and he made sure they got Veevi a phony French passport that made her the American widow of a French aristocrat, and she and her daughter moved back and forth between a château belonging to a countess who was also a Communist and a farmhouse belonging to friends of hers. She sweated out the war there, terrified that someone would remember her from her American movies. But they got Stefan.”
    “Who? The Gestapo?”
    “Who else? Of course the Gestapo.”
    “And?”
    “First they beat him up, then they tortured him, then they decided they hadn’t had enough fun, so they brought out another guy who’d been arrested with him, cut off their balls, tied their legs together, and told them to race each other in the snow. Then they shot them.”
    The words tore through the comfortable office, with its elegant appointments, like a savage smell, and Engel, always unshockable, never at a loss, swallowed, teared up, squeezed his eyes shut, and motioned with his hands for Jake to stop. “Please,” he said hoarsely. “I’m sorry I asked.”
    Jake thought, Always a line. Even now there has to be a ready-made line. He felt overwhelming—but brief—contempt for the man and the industry to which they both belonged. Jake watched as Irv tapped the bowl of his pipe upside down on a crystal ashtray, and shifted his tall, lean body in his chair as if he could not get comfortable. “I’m afraid my father never did realize what he had in this man. He was a great artist. His fate”—Oh God, thought Jake, here it comes, another Engel-logue—“and his”—he searched for the word—“
contribution
should be acknowledged and commemorated in some, ah, appropriate way one day by this studio, while at the same time our”—he dug his pipe into a Dunhill pouch, packing it with the tips of his delicate fingers. “Our—um, not—um—help me out here, Jake—”
    “Culpability?”
    “No. Our, uh”—he scratched his head, which was, Jake noted enviously, as full of hair as a toupeed evangelist’s—“
difficulties
in giving him the wide berth his talent, I mean, uh, genius, required, did, regretfully, play a role in his, uh, decision to return to Europe on the eve of war.” He glanced around, and Jake saw that he wasn’t finished. “But that decision was hisown, and I have to believe he made it with open eyes. Let’s face it, Jake,” he said almost in a whisper, as if there were somebody listening under the table. “Who in their right mind went
back
to Europe in 1939? The man had to be