Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

Riding down Fifth Avenue I was in a rotten mood watching this boy, not yet graduated from Harvard, nibble the ear of one of the world’s most desirable women. I mean, he hadn’t earned it, as far as I could see. Worse, this stripling’s room proved to be, in fact, the Carlyle’s best suite, with a panorama of Central Park beyond the balcony.

It was just going 2:00 A.M. when Marlene excused herself to “take off my face.” On her way she said, “Noël, Jack has a wonderful idea I think you should hear.”

“For a show?”

As Kennedy walked over to a little steel bar on wheels he said, “For a ‘production.’” He fixed us both brandies, which he brought over on a tray. “Mr. Coward…”

“It’s ‘Noël’. ‘Mr. Coward’ is, was, my father.”

“All right… Noël. It’s my father who’s the problem. As far as he’s concerned, Britain’s already lost the war, so he won’t lift a finger to help me. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be of any help, since the Prime Minister knows Dad’s a defeatist and refuses to see him. That makes me persona non grata as well.”

“I shouldn’t worry. A lot of people are non grata with Winston.”

“Well, my brother and I don’t share Father’s views. But the way things stand, this idea of ours will be dismissed out of hand.”

I was thinking the brandy was very good and did it come with the suite when I sensed he was waiting for me to ask, “What idea?” So I did.

“What idea?”

Kennedy stopped to swirl a single ice cube in his liquor before going on. “We’ve come up with a way, my brother Joe and I, possibly to prevent the invasion of the United Kingdom.”

He let that sink in before adding, “To be honest, most of the Irish over here think the fall of Britain is the best thing that could happen.”

“And you don’t?”

Right in the middle of his narration, Noël Coward sneezed. Not a little one either, but a great big honker. The recording clearly picked up the sound of a handkerchief being unfolded, used, and refolded again before the man continued speaking.

I apologize, Dear Listener. I must be allergic to telling stories for which I’m not being paid. Now, where was I? Oh yes, Kennedy was about to tell me why he and his brother Joe weren’t pulling for a German victory like the other Irish.

“Not if it means us here in America facing Hitler with all Europe behind him. So I thought… that is… well, I’ve heard you have the Prime Minister’s ear.”

I shifted a little in my chair. “A gruesome thought, young man. And even if I did, and even if your government will stop being so dashed neutral, any ships or guns wouldn’t get there in time.”

“I wasn’t thinking of arms. My idea is more of… a trick.”

I didn’t take his point. “Meaning… what, precisely?”

Kennedy looked into his glass and began. “Remember that story Marlene… Miss Dietrich… told, of being Hitler’s good luck charm? Of his getting a clairvoyant to predict the future? Well, what if someone prophesied that Hitler is going to conquer the Soviet Union within the year? And what if Hitler believed him? What would he do?”

I went along. “I don’t know. What?”

“We’re guessing he’d swing the Wehrmacht around and attack to the east.”

My internal cogitator seemed to be running slowly that evening. “And just who would predict such a thing? Don’t you remember… they killed the fortune-teller back in ’34.”

Jack leaned in a little, his eyes brighter than I had seen them before. “What if the greatest fortuneteller of all time said it would happen?”

“And who, exactly, is—”

“Michel de Nostradamus, a French prophet of the sixteenth century.”

Kennedy got up and moved over to the bookcase on the far side of the bar. It occurred to me, did the books, too, come with the room? The young man kept talking. “Before FDR took him on, Father was something of a movie producer. In the ’20s, he sank some money into a picture with Gloria Swanson that was shelved when talkies came in. The Swami. He bought these books on Nostradamus for background material. Here, look for yourself.”

He opened a small volume entitled The Prophecies of the Seer to a page with four-line stanzas running the length of it. Not poetry, exactly, and the English was rather stilted. I fancy myself something of an antiquarian, and I was more taken with the binding than the text. I do remember one bit: “The towers will be set ablaze and the river run red.”

Not knowing what to make of it I said, “His English is rather Biblical, no?”

The American flipped the pages back to the front. “See, it’s a translation. The original French is even more Biblical.”

Alcohol doesn’t usually muddle my brains, but I couldn’t see where the conversation was going. I bought some time by getting up to stretch my legs and look out the window at the park and the city beyond it, a sleeping city at peace. “And people believe such rot?”

“Some people do. The Greeks had their Oracle of Delphi. A seer warned Caesar to beware the Ides of March. Charlemagne and Napoleon… still, one person’s belief is all we need.”

I turned to face him. “But did this Nostradamus really write that Hitler would defeat the Sovs four centuries before there were any Sovs? Or a Hitler, for that matter?”

Kennedy looked down at his brandy. “Not in so many words. Not in any words, as a matter of fact.”

“Then how—”

“We’ll make it up. Create a false prophecy, make it look musty and old, like a prop in one of father’s movies. Don’t you see? That’s why I’m telling you. You make up things for a living, don’t you?”

By now it was after three in the morning and my tolerance for the harebrained had expired, so I decided to let the boy down gently. “I write comedies. Drawing room stuff. And patter set to music. This isn’t my cup of tea at all.”

Jack put down his glass on the metal tray with a rather loud noise for the middle of the night. “Noël, Marlene tells me you know everybody who is anybody over there and, most of all, you have access to Churchill. Couldn’t you at least produce this thing? I’m twenty-one; I have money in my own name now. Hire a writer, a scholar. Hire ten if you want and send me the bill. But it has to be done right away. Look at this.”

He thrust that day’s Herald-Tribune in my face. “There. PÉTAIN NAMED NEW FRENCH PREMIER. Father has been talking to him right along, says he’s about to make a separate peace with Hitler. That means, in days, Britain will be all alone.”

He took my silence for permission to continue. “Seriously, why couldn’t we? Right now, tonight, your country is just sitting there, with the Nazis twenty miles away, licking their chops. You think of yourself as a patriot, don’t you? I know if America was up against it and I could do what you can, I’d…”

I tried to set him straight. “Even if we could convince them it was genuine, why would the bloody Nazis give a fig what some medieval crackpot dreamed up?”

Instead of answering me, he lifted his eyes. For a moment I thought he was reconsidering the whole thing. Then, solemn as a mortician, he uttered the following words: “The young lion will overcome the older one/On the field of combat in a single battle/He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage/Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing.

Kennedy looked back at me. “In 1559, a vision came to Nostradamus in the bath. He wrote it down afterward and sent it off to the king in Paris. Eight months later, Henri II died an agonizing death in a jousting accident when a lance ran through his helmet, the ‘golden cage’, and broke off, piercing his eye in two places. Catherine de Medici, the king’s widow, brought the man who’d foreseen it to Paris and made him the court prophet.”