meant bigger fights, bigger titles,bigger purses. He might not have to return to England for months. The trip couldn’t have happened without Judah Kölmel, and Frink was so grateful that he would normally have gone along with anything he said, but this was too important; and if Frink was capable, once in a while, of defying Albert Kölmel, which very few men or women ever did, then he was certainly capable of disappointing Albert Kölmel’s half-brother.
‘All we got to do is watch him. You sit on his left, I sit on his right, and we follow him when he goes to take a piss.’ Kölmel’s false teeth were loose and they rattled as he spoke. He was rumoured to carry a small automatic pistol in his hip pocket at all times, and was a member of the New York Pangaean Club.
‘No. Absolutely not. We’re honoured by the invitation, Sinner and me, but absolutely not.’
So while Sinner washed and changed his clothes, Kölmel went into his office, telephoned Rabbi Berg and persuaded him not to serve wine at the dinner, achieving, in ten minutes, what thirteen years of Prohibition never had.
Out in the street the five o’clock sunshine seemed to rise up like dew from the cracks in the pavement. Sinner and Frink took a cab back down to their hostel on the Lower East Side next to the old Bialystoker Synagogue. Kölmel knew the owner, and Sinner had been put in a room with bars on the windows and a heavy lock on the door. Sinner drank a Dr Pepper – which he had never tasted before and found almost alarmingly delicious – flicked through a boxing comic called
The Abysmal Brute
– which despite the name made boxing appear as bloodless as cricket – and changed into a suit borrowed from a tailor friend of Kölmel’s – which was both too tight and too long in the legs. Then the two Englishmen walked over to Rabbi Berg’s house on Cherry Street.
Frink couldn’t pretend he didn’t feel guilty to be treatingSinner like this, to be dragging him around like a convict on remand, to be denying him a single moment’s unharnessed enjoyment of this extraordinary place. When Frink fought ‘for England’ in the war he had really fought for London, and yet he had to admit that New York felt like an even greater city. This was what he was stealing from Sinner, who would only be seventeen once. But to reassure himself, he only had to think of the times that the boy had turned up to prizefights drunk, or vomited during training, or disappeared entirely for days at a stretch – not to mention the more carnivalesque episodes, like the time he stole a police horse. Frink had known Sinner had that chaos in him ever since the day they met, but it had got worse and worse. And despite all the help Frink had given Sinner, with his jabs and his scabs and his dinners and his debts, he couldn’t do the first thing to help him with this. He desperately wanted to, but he couldn’t. Frink knew what it was like to want to drink sadness into the distance, and he knew the sadness that Sinner had, or some of it. But he often felt that Sinner wasn’t drinking because of sadness, but rather because he looked at drunkenness like he looked at almost everything else: as a territory to be conquered, an opponent to be tested, a lover to be used up. No gouging, no biting: those were the words spoken before every fight like a harsh grace. Gouging and biting, though, were both just ways of grabbing a little bit of something that wasn’t yours. And Sinner, if he could, if he wasn’t stopped, would try to gouge and bite until there was no world left. Or until there was nothing left of him but fingers and teeth. Or until there was nothing left of him at all. Which was why he had to be a prisoner, as guilty as it made Frink feel.
But actually, to Sinner, as they passed a shop window advertising ‘MOSHA 100% PURE PUMPERNICKEL’ which just at that moment was nearly smashed by a little boy kicking a tin can, this place didn’t seem all that different
‘All we got to do is watch him. You sit on his left, I sit on his right, and we follow him when he goes to take a piss.’ Kölmel’s false teeth were loose and they rattled as he spoke. He was rumoured to carry a small automatic pistol in his hip pocket at all times, and was a member of the New York Pangaean Club.
‘No. Absolutely not. We’re honoured by the invitation, Sinner and me, but absolutely not.’
So while Sinner washed and changed his clothes, Kölmel went into his office, telephoned Rabbi Berg and persuaded him not to serve wine at the dinner, achieving, in ten minutes, what thirteen years of Prohibition never had.
Out in the street the five o’clock sunshine seemed to rise up like dew from the cracks in the pavement. Sinner and Frink took a cab back down to their hostel on the Lower East Side next to the old Bialystoker Synagogue. Kölmel knew the owner, and Sinner had been put in a room with bars on the windows and a heavy lock on the door. Sinner drank a Dr Pepper – which he had never tasted before and found almost alarmingly delicious – flicked through a boxing comic called
The Abysmal Brute
– which despite the name made boxing appear as bloodless as cricket – and changed into a suit borrowed from a tailor friend of Kölmel’s – which was both too tight and too long in the legs. Then the two Englishmen walked over to Rabbi Berg’s house on Cherry Street.
Frink couldn’t pretend he didn’t feel guilty to be treatingSinner like this, to be dragging him around like a convict on remand, to be denying him a single moment’s unharnessed enjoyment of this extraordinary place. When Frink fought ‘for England’ in the war he had really fought for London, and yet he had to admit that New York felt like an even greater city. This was what he was stealing from Sinner, who would only be seventeen once. But to reassure himself, he only had to think of the times that the boy had turned up to prizefights drunk, or vomited during training, or disappeared entirely for days at a stretch – not to mention the more carnivalesque episodes, like the time he stole a police horse. Frink had known Sinner had that chaos in him ever since the day they met, but it had got worse and worse. And despite all the help Frink had given Sinner, with his jabs and his scabs and his dinners and his debts, he couldn’t do the first thing to help him with this. He desperately wanted to, but he couldn’t. Frink knew what it was like to want to drink sadness into the distance, and he knew the sadness that Sinner had, or some of it. But he often felt that Sinner wasn’t drinking because of sadness, but rather because he looked at drunkenness like he looked at almost everything else: as a territory to be conquered, an opponent to be tested, a lover to be used up. No gouging, no biting: those were the words spoken before every fight like a harsh grace. Gouging and biting, though, were both just ways of grabbing a little bit of something that wasn’t yours. And Sinner, if he could, if he wasn’t stopped, would try to gouge and bite until there was no world left. Or until there was nothing left of him but fingers and teeth. Or until there was nothing left of him at all. Which was why he had to be a prisoner, as guilty as it made Frink feel.
But actually, to Sinner, as they passed a shop window advertising ‘MOSHA 100% PURE PUMPERNICKEL’ which just at that moment was nearly smashed by a little boy kicking a tin can, this place didn’t seem all that different
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