A Choice of Enemies by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online

said.
    Karp’s face wrinkled, his eyes squeezed shut. This smile of his always horrified Norman for he was afraid that once the face unsqueezed again the eyes would have been consumed by the flesh. He waited anxiously and at last the eyes reappeared as provocative as ever.
    “I’ll see that you get the room next to hers,” Karp said.
    Norman stiffened. He watched sadly as Karp, the sway of his back slightly feminine, retreated down the hall; his steps short and quick and angry, like bites.
    “Horrible creature,” Bella said.
    “Oh, no,” Norman said. “Don’t say that.”
    They looked at each other, surprised. Then Bella smiled. Winkleman had left them to return to his guests.
    “Sonny is thirteen years older than me,” Bella said, “and we’ve been happily married for more than twenty years.”
    “Thanks,” Norman said sheepishly, “but, really, I just met the girl today.”
    “Bring her around with you any time you like.”
    “Thanks, Bella, but –”
    “And I’ll make sure that Bob Landis keeps his distance.”
    “Really, Bella, I just met the girl.”
    Charlie and Joey came into the hall. They were leaving too.
    “Hey,” Charlie said, “we’ll see you later, huh?” He winked.
VI
    Sally’s room was on the fifth floor of an hotel near Piccadilly Circus. Norman watched as she bent over a suitcase, looking for the whisky bottle.
    “I got it on board ship,” she said. “It’s tax-free.”
    Norman poured himself a drink and sat down in the armchair near the window. Sally curled up on the bed.
    “Mr. Karp told me that if not for you he would still be a hospital orderly. He’s very grateful to you, you know.”
    Norman didn’t want to talk at all. He just wanted to stare.
    “Before the war Karp was a GP in a small Polish town. He – he’s one of the unlucky few who survived the camps.”
    “How do you mean unlucky?”
    “The price of survival came high in Karp’s case.” Norman twisted his glass round and round self-consciously. “But let’s not talk about him.”
    “Why are you smiling?”
    “Am I smiling?”
    “You’ve been smiling without stop ever since we left Mr. Winkleman’s house.”
    Norman put down his drink and started towards her. “No,” she said, “please don’t. There’s something so sordid about hotel rooms.” He sat down again. “You’ve been looking at me like I was a meal ever since we got here,” she added. But then she rose to fill his glass and Norman circled her waist with his arm. He did that almost absently, giving her a chance to withdraw without embarrassment. She looked at him severely.
    “Your friends are so sharp and cruel and witty,” she said. “I don’t want them to make something dirty of us.”
    “My friends,” he said thickly, “have nothing to do with us.”
    “Don’t you see that I could do this just as well at home. Go to bedwith a man, I mean. This is Europe. I want things to happen to me here that could never happen to me at home.”
    Norman noticed with pleasure that her hair was not blond in the dry refulgent way a movie bad girl’s hair is blond. Sally’s hair was thick, healthy, and streaked with brown. Her calm, sensitive face, however, was not yet fully formed. Absent were the hard lines that made Joey so attractive.
    Sally, made uneasy by Norman’s stare, shifted her position on the bed. “Were you a pilot?” she asked.
    He wished people wouldn’t ask that question with such amazement. Maybe it was because he wore glasses. No, he thought, there’s more to it than that. They expect that I would have been something behind the lines. An interpreter, perhaps.
    “I was a fighter pilot. I didn’t wear glasses then.”
    Sally noticed for the first time that there was something odd about the lower lid of his left eye. It was a Tiersch graft, Norman explained. A layer of skin as thin as cigarette paper taken from the inside of his left arm. Luckily, however, his face had only been slightly scarred. Luckily, he said,