Riptide

§ 15

Across Regent Street at Mappin and Webb’s jeweller’s, down a dark alley-London had more than its fair share of those-along the side of a mock-gothic Victorian church and Cal emerged into a narrow Soho street of the kind he thought Reininger had meant. A couple of turns later and he stood in an alley off Carnaby Street facing the green, peeling shopfront of a fifty shilling tailor. Above the door in faded gold lettering…

Lazarus & Moses Lippschitz Bespoke Tailors

by app’t to

His Highness Duke Griswald of Transylvania

est 1891

and in the window in crayon on cardboard…

50/- a suit-You vant it ve gottit!

He pushed at the door. The pressure of his foot on the rubber mat triggered a bell somewhere in the deep recesses of the shop. Cal stood amid roll upon roll of dull, male-coloured cloth-the un-peacock hues of black, brown and grey, and the scarcely enlivening dark blue-the stripes of chalk and oxblood. Still the bell rang. Persistent to the point of annoyance. He stepped back onto the mat to see if a second step undid the effect of the first and out of nowhere a short, old, white-haired man in a yarmulke appeared at the speed of sound, pressed a button by the counter and the ringing stopped. The man smiled a small, fleeting, professional smile and looked over his shoulder.

‘Mo! Mo! Shmegege. The Yanks have landed! Mach schnelll’

He turned back to Cal. Looked Cal up and down, measuring him with the eye as only tailors and undertakers could do. Cal looked back. A tiny man, less than five foot four-the yarmulke held on to his thinning hair with kirby grips, a rim of close-cropped white beard, a tape measure slung around his neck, a grubby waistcoat on top of a threadbare cardigan, pins stuck in all over it and chalk dust smeared at the rims of its pockets.

‘Mo! Mo! Mach schnell, you momzer!’

Another man, identical in every respect to the first, scurried out from the back room. Eyed him up and down in the same way.

‘Vot? Just the one? You said Yanks. All I see is one Yank. Vot use you tink is one Yank?’

‘How should I know? All I said was come see. We gottem Yank. It could be 1917 all over again.’

The second tailor fixed Cal with one squinting eye, looking up at him.

‘And how many you boys are over here?’

‘I don’t know, a few dozen I guess.’

‘A few dozen! My Gott. Last time they sent whole regiments! How you expect to lick Hitler with just a few dozen?’

Cal did not want to say it. He was getting heartily sick of stating the obvious, but he said it all the same. ‘We’re not actually in the war, you know.’

‘Not in the war! Young man, everybody is in this war! You tink Hitler will stop at Irish Sea? You tink crazy Adolf stop at Atlantic Ocean? You tink the brownshirts turn around when they see Statue of Liberty? Scared off by big green woman mit the torch an’ the silly hat? Alla them Jews in Brooklyn-you tink the Nazis just gonna let ‘em be?’

‘Mo, Mo. Leave the boy be,’ said the first tailor. ‘Maybe he not here to invade France, maybe just want to buy a suit.’

‘So? Am I arguin’? I was only askin’.’

‘That’s right,’ said Cal, getting a word in edgeways.

‘Vot’s right? You here to invade France?’

‘No, I’d like to buy a suit.’

‘You want suit?’

‘If that’s at all possible,’ Cal said.

‘Gentleman wants suit!’ the first brother all but yelled in the other brother’s ear.

‘A suit you say? He wants suit?’

And then to Cal. ‘You want suit? You got coupons?’

Cal dug around in his pockets and found the clothing coupons Reininger had given him. Mo took them and riffled through them like a cardsharp, a glint of commerce in his eye.

‘Larry, the gentleman got coupons!’

Mo? Larry? Cal was beginning to find something chillingly familiar in this routine. There’d better not be a third brother.

‘Well, young man. You got coupons, the world is your oyster an’ we gottem pearls. Vot kind of suit you was wanting?’

Cal looked at the bewildering mass of rolls. One of the reasons he liked a uniform was that it saved a lot of decisions.

‘Er… what colour’s in this year?’

‘In?’ said Mo. ‘He wants to know vot is in. Khaki is in this year, that’s vot’s in!’

‘Khaki I got,’ said Cal.

Larry fingered the fabric of his battledress.

‘Khaki? I call it sea green mit a dash of chestnut-nice schmutter though. I think you look good in blue.’

‘Blue,’ said Mo, ‘with the double breasteds…’

‘And a nice pinstripe in pale grey,’ added Larry. ‘You look like a million dollars.’

‘Blue and grey?’ Cal queried.

‘Grey and blue,’ they answered, ‘Blue and grey…’ A head shook, another nodded, a hand equivocated in the air to express balance-six of one, half a dozen of the other.

‘OK.’

One tackled his buttons, the other zipped around behind him and they pulled off his battledress and flourished their tape measures.

‘Mit this measure I fitted out Duke Griswald mit his burial outfit in 1888,’ said Mo. Then Larry took up the tale and they alternated line for line in worst vaudeville.

‘Finest suit we ever make.’

‘Then the following year comes the pogrom, so we pack up the shop and come to England.’

‘You know vot-not one single royal customer do we get,’

‘We, who made suits for the Dukes of Transylvania!’

‘The Prince of Wales-votta snappy dresser.’

‘Does he come to us?’

‘Does he bollocks!’

‘So, I measure you mit the same measure I use on royalty!’

Cal tried to feel honoured and failed. 1888 was more than a lifetime away, Transylvania a nation that had ceased, if it ever had existed, to exist.

They both measured him. Two tapes around his chest.

‘Forty,’ said Mo.

‘Thirty-eight,’ said Larry, and each noted down his own figure.

Inside leg.

‘Thirty-six.’

‘Thirty-four.’

Waist.

‘Thirty.’

‘Thirty-two.’

And so it went on. When they’d finished on his sleeves Cal asked the obvious question.

‘Do you guys have a method?’

‘Method, schmethod. Sure we gotta method, we split the difference.’

Cal felt a slight frisson of misgiving. He could walk out of the shop now. He could walk right out and never look back.

‘Could I get some shoes too?’ he asked.

‘Shoes? Next door is shoes. Isaac Horwitz. He sell you nice pair of shoes. You got shoe coupons?’

‘No. Do I need shoe coupons?’

‘These days you need coupon to blow nose or break wind. No coupon, no shoes.’

Cal looked down at his army-issue, brown roundies.

‘Is no problem,’ said the brothers.

‘Nize blue suit.’

‘Nize brown shoes.’

‘Poifect!’

Somehow, Cal could not quite believe them, but it was too late now. Besides, who ever looked at your feet? He slipped his battledress back on.

‘When can I pick it up?’

‘You come by Friday,’ Mo said. ‘We have it all ready for you.’

‘Could you manage it any sooner?’

‘For Uncle Sam and his dozen brave buddies,’ Larry added, ‘we make it Thursday.’

‘Thanks,’ said Cal, glad another English moment had passed, even if this was the Transylvanian version translated loosely from the Yiddish.

Mo scribbled down his address as he dictated it, but in the end Cal could not resist the nagging question.

‘Mo, Larry? Where,’ he asked, ‘is Curly?’

Back home there would have been two possible reactions to this. The good-natured would smile or laugh, the sourpusses would tell you pointedly that this was the hundredth time they’d heard that joke this week, day or hour. The Lippschitz brothers looked at each other, more than slightly baffled, then they looked at him, then they looked at each other and shrugged, then they both yelled ‘Curly!’

And from the back room a gangly, spindly youth of fifteen or so, plastered with acne, beardless but ringletted about the ears, appeared pushing a broom.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t get yer knickers in a twist. Now, wossamatter wiv you two?’

‘Gentleman wants to see you.’

In the mind’s ear Cal heard a wooden mallet bashing against the side of a skull with a hollow report.

‘Thursday it is,’ he said, and ran for it.