Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online Page A

designation “geniuses” delivered in italics, “happen to know the young woman seated in the shade there, second table to our left?”
    Young geniuses
. Boogie, that most perspicacious of men, couldn’t handle liquor, it made him sloppy, so he didn’t grasp that we were being patronized. Obviously Hymie, who was pushing forty at the time, felt threatened by the young. Clearly my manhood, if not Boogie’s, was in question, as I had never been bloodied in combat. Neither was I old enough to have suffered sufficiently through the Great Depression. I hadn’t cavorted in Paris in the good old days, immediately after its liberation, knocking back martinis with Papa Hemingway at the Ritz. I hadn’t seen Joe Louis floor Max Schmeling in the first round and couldn’t understand what that meant to a yid coming of age in the Bronx. Or caught Gypsy Rose Lee stripping atthe World’s Fair. Hymie suffered from that sour old man’s delusion that anybody who had come after him was born too late. He was, in our parlance, a bit of a drag. “No,” I said. “I have no idea who she is.”
    â€œToo bad,” said Hymie.
    Hymie, blacklisted at the time, was shooting a French
film noir
under a pseudonym in Monte Carlo, an Eddie Constantine flick, Boogie and I working as extras. He called for another Dom Perignon, instructed the waiter to leave the Courvoisier XO bottle on the table, and asked for olives, almonds, fresh figs, a plate of crevettes, some pâté with truffles, bread, butter, smoked salmon, and anything else you’ve got for nibbles there.
    The sun, which had been warming us, began to sink behind the olive-green hills, seemingly setting them alight. A donkey-drawn wagon, led by a grizzly old geezer wearing a blue smock, passed clip-pity-clop below the terrace’s stone retaining wall, and we caught the scent of its cargo of roses on the evening breeze. The roses were bound for the perfumeries in Grasse. Then a fat baker’s boy puffed by our table, one of those huge wicker baskets of freshly baked baguettes strapped to his back, and we could smell that too. “If she’s waiting for somebody,” said Hymie, “he’s shamefully late.”
    The woman with the gleaming hair seated alone two tables to our left appeared to be in her late twenties. Somebody’s gift package. Her fine arms bare, her linen shift elegant, long bare legs crossed. She was sipping white wine and smoking a Gitanes, and when she caught us sneaking glances at her, she lowered her eyes, pouted, and reached for the book in her straw shoulder bag,
Bonjour tristesse
, 11 by Françoise Sagan, and began to read.
    â€œDo you want me to invite her over to join us?” asked Boogie.
    Hymie scratched his purply jaw. He made a face, wrinkling his forehead. “Naw. I think not. If she joined us, it could spoil everything. Gotta make a phone call. Back in a couple of minutes.”
    â€œHe’s beginning to bug me,” I said to Boogie. “As soon as he gets back, I think we ought to split, man.”
    â€œNo.”
    Hymie, back soon enough, began to drop names, a failing I cannot tolerate. Hollywood manna. John Huston, his buddy. Dorothy Parker, big trouble. The time he had worked on a screenplay with that stool-pigeon Clifford Odets. His two-day drunk with Bogie. Then he told us how his commanding officer had summoned all the air crews to a briefing in a Nissen hut before they took off on their first mission. “I don’t want any of you girls faking mechanical trouble three hundred miles short of the target area, dropping your bombs on the nearest cow patch, and dashing for home. Gosh darn it. Holy smoke. You would be failing Rosie the Riveter, not to mention all those 4- F hymies raking it in on the black market stateside and fucking the girls you left behind. Better shit yourselves than try that story on me.” Then he added, “Three months from