Shadows of Berlin полностью

Rachel swallows. She knows that Leo actually means well with this question. What could she paint if not a masterpiece, right? So talented. But she cannot even manage a spurious response. The question pains her. “No, not at the moment” is her only response. “But I have a question for you, Leo,” she hears herself say. Honestly, she had no intention of bringing this up. No intention of trying to test Tyrell’s theory. Maybe it’s simply to deflect any further questions about masterpieces. Maybe it’s that she happens to notice the young, dark-­skinned man in the white busman’s jacket clearing a table of dessert dishes and coffee cups. “Do you have a policy about seating Negroes?”

Leo looks like she just started speaking to him in gibberish. “Do I got a what?” he asks.

“A policy,” Rachel repeat. “About seating Negroes.”

“What kinda policy? I don’t know what you’re asking me here, ketsl. ‘Policy’?” He smiles at the word. “What I gotta ‘policy’ for?”

“It’s simple. If a Black man comes through the front door and asks to be seated? Would you seat him?”

“Well.” Leo shrugs, frowns at the tablecloth, tugs his earlobe. A man trying to be diplomatic as well as evasive. “I don’t know where this is coming from, sweetheart. You think I have a policy about what if a colored guy comes in for a table?” He puffs his cheeks and gives a slow shrug, as if it hurts his shoulders. “I suppose, if it’s a private party, we take everybody in through the Forty-­Sixth Street entrance anyhow, so I would say, what’s the harm? One or two of the party members ain’t exactly Caucasian? I say, so what? It’s my place. I can do what I want.”

“But a Black man couldn’t get in through the Eighth Avenue door, if he and his wife, say, just wanted dinner before curtain time. Abe wouldn’t seat them.”

“Cognac and a slice of French apple cake for the lady,” Solly announces in a pleasant rasp as he sets the snifter and plate in front of Rachel.

“Sol, remind Abe, would ya? The Goodricks are my party this evening, if I forget to mention.”

“Will do, Mr. Blume,” says Solly, and he is gone.

Rachel inhales a breath and repeats herself. “Abe wouldn’t seat them.”

Leo frowns as he sips from his coffee cup, then sets it down with a clink on his saucer. “Look, ketsl,” he says. “You think I care about skin color? Black, white, yellow, purple? I don’t care. God made the universe, so he made the coloreds too, as far as I’m concerned. But you gotta understand.” And he says this carefully. As if he is cautious to put it in comprehensible terms. “It’s the public. The customers,” he explains. “Maybe I don’t care about black, white, or purple, but the public? They do care.

“So if I tell Abe to seat some colored boy and his wife, then you know what happens? Every table around them gets up and leaves—­fargreser a ayln out the door. And if I keep telling Abe to seat them, then pretty soon the colored boy and his wife are the only customers I got left, ’cause everybody else’s standing on line outside Sardi’s. Without the public, this room goes dark. Without this room, I’m on my way to the poorhouse, and everybody’s outta work. Including, God forbid, your husband.”

“All that,” Rachel says, “because a Black man sits down at a table for some salmon soufflé?”

A shrug. The way of the world. “I don’t make the rules. That I leave to God.”

“So it’s God who won’t seat Negroes? Wasn’t that the same thing the Nazis said about us? That God wanted to punish the Jews.”

“I don’t pretend to know, ketsl. I don’t pretend to know. All I can say is that I do what I do to keep a roof over everybody’s head.” A shrug slumping his body slightly, opening his hands. “You should take a taste of that cognac. It’s Courvoisier. Good stuff. Two bucks a pop.”

Rachel picks up the snifter and runs her finger around the rim. “Thank you, Leo,” she says. She gets it. Waste not, want not. Otherwise Solly’s going to have to try to pour it back into the bottle with a funnel. So she takes a large swallow. It burns smoothly, like heated licorice.

But Leo’s face has sagged. His expression is weighted, and the usual mask of gritty charm seems to have slipped as he leans forward carefully. His voice has gone low. “You gotta understand something,” he says, the normal bemusement in his eyes drained. “I can’t say what happened to you exactly. What you went through with the war and whatnot. I can’t say ’cause I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I was here busting my tuchus trying to get this joint on its feet. But I’ve heard the stories.