For once the lobby television worked. Gray and whitish figures, unsteady on the vertical hold, wavered and fizzed. Sammler saw himself mortally pale on the screen. The shuddering image of an aged man. This lobby was like certain underground carpeted rooms in disused theaters--spaces to shun. It was less than two days ago that the pickpocket had forced him, belly-to-back, across this same brass-bolted rug into the corner beside the Florentine table.
Unbuttoning his puma-colored coat in puma silence to show himself. Was this the sort of fellow called by Goethe eine Natur? A primary force?
He stopped Emil from getting out of the car for him.
"I can work the door myself."
"We're off, then. Open the bar, pour yourself a drink."
"I hope the traffic will not be too thick."
"We'll go straight down Broadway."
"Turn on the TV."
"Thanks. No TV."
Again Sammler smelled the enclosed, fabric-scented air. He did not make himself comfortable. The tightness of heart was greater than before. It went on contracting; he thought it could not be worse, and then it was worse. The traffic was unusually heavy, jammed up at the lights. Delivery trucks were double-parked, triple-parked. The use of private cars in Manhattan had never seemed so irrational... swept by impatience toward the drivers of these large, purposeless machines but then the sweeping feelings swept beyond him. Conveyed in air-conditioned silence by the roarless power of the engine, he sat forward with his thighs upon the backs of his hands. Evidently Elya thought that he owed it to himself to maintain this Rolls. He couldn't have had much use for such a prestigious machine. It wasn't as if he were a Broadway producer, an international banker, a tobacco millionaire. Where did it take him? To Widick's law office. To Hayden, Stone Incorporated, where he had an account. On High Holy Days, he went to the temple on Fifth Avenue. On Fifty-seventh Street were his tailors, Felsher and Kitto. The temple and the tailors had been selected by Hilda. Sammler would have sent him to another tailor. Elya had a tall figure and wide stiff shoulders, too wide, considering the flatness of his body. His buttocks were too high. Like my own, for that matter. Sammler, in the sound-deadened cabinet of the Rolls, saw the resemblance. Felsher and Kitto made Elya too dapper. The trousers were too narrow. The virile bulge that appeared when he sat was inappropriate. He used matching ties and handkerchiefs by Countess Mara, and sharp, swaggering shoes which connected him less with medicine than with Las Vegas, with racing, broads, and singers in the rackets. Things equivocally related to his kindliness. Swaying his shoulders like a gunman. Wearing double-vented jackets. Playing gin and canasta for high stakes and talking out of the corner of the mouth. Detesting Kulturny physicians who wanted to discuss Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Real doctors had no time for that phony stuff. He was a keen spotter of phonies. He could easily afford this car, but had none of the life that went with it. No Broadway musicals, no private jet. His one glamorous eccentricity was to fly to Israel on short notice and stroll into the King David Hotel without baggage, his hands in his pockets. That struck him as a sporting thing to do. Of course, thought Sammler, Elya was also peculiar; surgery was psychically peculiar. To enter an unconscious body with a knife? To take out organs, sew in the flesh, splash blood? Not everyone could do that. And perhaps he kept the car for Emil's sake. What would Emil do if there no Rolls? Now there was the likeliest answer of all. The protective instinct was strong in Elya. Undisclosed charities were his pleasure. He had many stratagems of benevolence. I have reason to know. How very odd--astonishing, the desire to relieve and protect us. It was astonishing because Elya the surgeon also despised incompetence and weakness. Only great and powerful instincts worked so deeply and deviously, coming out on the side of things despised. But how could Elya afford to have rigid ideas of strength? He himself was a hooked man. Hilda had been far stronger than he. In the Mafioso swagger were pretensions of lawless liberty. But it was little Hilda with the rodlike legs and the bouffant hair and faultless hemlines and sweet refinements who was the real criminal. She had had her hook in Elya. And there had never been any help for Elya. Who was there to help him? He was the sort of individual from whom help emanated. There were no arrangements for return. However, it would soon be over. It was about to wash away.
As for the world, was it really about to change? Why? How? By the fact of moving into space, away from earth? There would be changes of heart? There would be new conduct? Why, because we were tired of the old conduct? That was not reason enough. Why, because the world was breaking up? Well, America, if not the world. Well, staggering, if not breaking.
Emil was driving more steadily again, below Seventy-second Street. The traffic had eased. There were no truck deliveries to impede it. Lincoln Center was approaching and, at Columbus Circle, the Huntington Hartford Building, which Bruch called the Taj Mahole. Wasn't that funny! said Bruch. At his own jokes he rolled with laughter. Apelike, he put his hands on his paunch and closed his eyes, letting the tongue hang out of his blind head. What a building! All holes. But that was some lunch they put down for only three bucks. He raved about the bill of fare--Hawaiian chicken and saffron rice. Finally he had taken the old man there. It was indeed a grand lunch. But Lincoln Center Sammler had seen only from the outside. He was cold to the performing arts, and shunned large crowds. Exhibitions, electrical or nude, he had attended only because it amused Angela to keep him up to date. But he passed by the pages of the Times that dealt with painters, singers, fiddlers, or play actors. He saved his reading eye for better things. He had noted with hostile interest crews wrecking the nice old tenements and greasy-spoons, and the new halls rising.
But now, as they were nearing the Center, Emil stopped the car and pushed back the glass slide.
"Why are you stopping?"
Emil said, "There's something happening across the street." He looked, wrinkling his face deeply, as if this explanation must really be heeded. But why, at such a time, should he have stopped for anything? "Don't you recognize those people, Mr. Sammler?"
"Which? Has someone scraped someone? Is it a traffic thing?" Of course he lacked authority to tell Emit to drive on, but he gestured, nevertheless, with the back of his hand. He waved Emil forward.
"No, I think you'll want to stop, Mr. Sammler. I see your son-in-law there. Isn't that him, with the big green bag? And isn't that Wallace's partner?"
"Feffer?"
"That fat kid. The pink face, the beard. He's fighting. Can't you see?"
"Where is this? In the street? Is it Eisen?"
"It's the other fellow who's in trouble. The young guy, the beard. I think he's getting hurt."
On the east side of the slant street a bus had pulled to the curb at a wide angle, obstructing traffic. Sammler could see now that someone was struggling there, in the midst of a crowd.
"One of those is Feffer?"
"Yes, Mr. Sammler."
"Wrestling with someone--with the bus driver?"
"Not the driver, no. I think not. Somebody else."
"Then I must go and see what it is."
The craziness of these delays! Almost deliberate, almost intentional, they were breaking down every barrier of patience. They got to you at last. Why this, why Feffer? But he could see now what Foil meant. Feffer was pinned to the front of a bus. That was Feffer against the wide bumper. Sammler began to pull at the handle of the door.
"Not on the street side, Mr. Sammler. You'll be hit." But Sammler, his patience utterly lost, was already hurrying through traffic.