Free The Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler Page A

feet, whining for mercy. 'Let's sound the others out,' says Kerensky over here. 'Let's hear from Pinsky and Minsky and Stinksky.' Let me tell you something: if you want the people to march on the Winter Palace, you have to shtup them in their backs with a rifle butt and fire a few bullets into the air." He crossed his legs under him on the easy chair and began to sway back and forth, his eyes closed, as if in silent prayer or ill with stomachache.

    "Perhaps if we'd gone right away to Scheisskopf," said Hamburger. He pulled at a long earlobe and slowly shook his head. His thin white face, gloomy at the best of times, was heavy with despair. "You don't happen to have a cookie, Korner? Perhaps a little schnapps?"
    "Wodka," said the Red Dwarf.
    I took some bottles and glasses from the cabinet and put oui the gingersnaps.
    "With such an attitude at Valley Forge," I said, "today we would be saluting the Union Jack and singing 'God Save the Queen.' "
    "Someoi us would," said the Red Dwarf.
    "I have always admired," said Hamburger, "the British sense of fair play." He bit into a gingersnap musingly.
    "Pip-pip," said the Red Dwarf. He put a hand behind his head before throwing it smartly back. Down his gullet went a half-tumbler of vodka.
    We were in obvious disarray.
    We pooled the results of our researches. Blum is with us in exchange for the role of Horatio. Salo Wittkower, our Claudius, is with us if we agree to play Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" for all his exits and his entrances—"a kind of leitmotiv," he says. (A small price to pay, even though the composition, I believe, was written for Edward VII.) Also Emma Rothschild, our costume designer (and third-floor chess champion), is with us, admirably, out of simple loyalty to Sinsheimer, whom Lipschitz, in her view, mocks by his directorship. Reynaldo and Polonius are undecided. The rest of the cast will accept whatever is decided for them.
    Neither hopeful nor hopeless: there is no consensus.
    "What is to be done?" asked Hamburger.
    "Chernyshevsky," said the Red Dwarf dreamily, round-shouldered, rocking back and forth.
    "Work more vigorously with the dramatis personae," I

    suggested. "Exploit their dissatisfactions. Reason with them. Try to bring together a majority."
    "It may yet not be too late," said the Red Dwarf, snapping upright. "But let me give you a warning in the form of a quotation: 'The great questions of the day are decided not by the votes and resolutions of majorities, but by blood and iron'—Comrade Lenin, 1916."
    "Bismarck," I said.
    "Lenin!"
    "Hamburger?"
    "Bismarck," said Hamburger wearily.
    "What difference?" said the Red Dwarf, and then, as if to cover his heresy, he took a quick drink of vodka, hand behind his head as before. "The revolutionary takes from the Black Hundred whatever is useful for the liberation of the masses."
    What would he say, this disciple of Lenin, if I told him that I met his hero in Zurich in 1916? Not even the Red Dwarf would have been impressed by him then. The champion of the people was far too busy trying to make his centimes last through the week.
    "It's late," I said.
    "What have we decided?" asked the Red Dwarf, now on his third half-tumbler of vodka and as a consequence growing teary-eyed.
    I glanced at Hamburger. He nodded. "Let's go, Poliakov. We don't have to decide anything tonight."
    The Red Dwarf sprang to the floor. "I've got it!" he announced, and stumbled through a little jig.
    "Tomorrow you'll tell us," said Hamburger.
    "It's simple, that's the beauty of it! You, Korner, you accept Lipschitz's offer. He makes the announcement: if anything happens to him, you become the director."
    "You don't know what you're saying," said Hamburger.

    "No, wait, listen. Once he makes the announcement, we take care of him!"
    "For God's sake, Poliakov!"
    "Don't you see?" said the Red Dwarf. Tears ran down his cheeks. "It's simple!"
    Hamburger took him firmly by the arm. "Tomorrow. Meanwhile, we'll think about it." He led the Red