Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  “Well, I’m on duty, you know,” the policeman said. “But one small slug …”

  I opened the register and pointed out the entry for room 602. The policeman slowly copied it out into his black book. The history of the city of New York, faithfully recorded in twenty thousand handwritten pages by the graduates of the police academy. An interesting archaeological discovery.

  I got out the bottle and uncorked it. “Sorry, I don’t have a glass,” I said.

  “I drunk out of bottles before this,” the policeman said. He raised the bottle. “Well, L’chaim,” he said, and took a long swig.

  “You Jewish?” I asked as the policeman gave me the bottle.

  “Nah. My partner. I caught it from him.”

  L’chaim. To life, I remembered from the song in Fiddler on the Roof. “I think I’ll join you,” I said, raising the bottle. “I can use it. A night like this can leave a man a little shaky.”

  “This is nothing,” the cop said. “You oughta see some of the things we run into.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. I drank.

  “Well,” the policeman said, “I gotta be going. There’ll be an inspector around in the morning. Just keep that room locked until he gets here, understand?”

  “I’ll pass the word on to the day man.”

  “Night work,” the policeman said. “Do you sleep good during the day?”

  “Fair.”

  “Not me.” The policeman shook his head mournfully. “Look at the rings under my eyes.”

  I looked at the rings under the policeman’s eyes. “You could use a good night’s sleep,” I said.

  “You ain’t kidding.” The man dug a knuckle into his eye, viciously. If thy eye offend thee… “Well, at least there ain’t been no crime committed. Be thankful for small mercies,” he said surprisingly. Unsuspected depths, a vocabulary that included the word mercy.

  I accompanied him to the front door, opened it politely.

  “Have a good day,” the policeman said.

  “Thanks. You, too.”

  “Hah,” he said.

  I watched the heavy, slow-moving man climb into the prowl car and wake up his partner. The car went slowly down the silent street. I locked the door and went back to the office. I picked up the telephone and dialed. I had to wait for at least ten rings before the connection came through. This country is in full decay, I thought, waiting; nobody moves.

  “Western Union,” the voice said.

  “I want to send a telegram to Chicago,” I said. I gave the name and address, spelling out Ferris slowly and clearly. “Like wheel,” I said.

  “What’s that?” The voice of Western Union was irritated.

  “Ferris wheel,” I said. “Amusement parks.”

  “What is the message, please?”

  “Regret to inform you that John Ferris, of your address,” I said, “died this morning at three fifteen A.M. Please get in touch with me immediately for instructions. Signed, H. M. Drusack, Manager, Hotel St. Augustine, Manhattan.” By the time the reply came in, Drusack would be on duty and I would be somewhere else, safely out of the way. There was no need for the family in Chicago to know my name. “Charges, please.”

  The operator gave me the charges. I noted them on a sheet of paper. Good old Drusack would put them on Ferris’ bill. I knew Drusack.

  I took another slug of bourbon, then settled down in the swivel chair and picked up the Bible. I figured I could get well into Proverbs before the day man came on to relieve me.

  4

  I TOOK A TAXI HOME AFTER telling the day man what had happened, or most of what had happened. I left the envelope for my bookie friend, as usual, with the note inside telling him I was betting five dollars on Ask Gloria at Hialeah in the second. For as long as possible it was wise to make it seem that today was just like every other day.

  Even in the East Eighties where I lived, muggings at all hours were not infrequent. The taxi was a luxury, but this was no day to be mugged. I had gotten the tube down from the shelf when the day man was busy in the front office. There had been no one in the lobby when I went out, and, even if there had been, there was nothing remarkable about a man carrying a cardboard tube wrapped in brown paper in broad daylight.

  My head was clear and I wasn’t in the least bit sleepy. Ordinarily, when the weather was good I would walk the thirty-odd blocks to my apartment, stopping for breakfast at a coffee shop on Second Avenue, before getting into bed and sleeping until two o’clock in the afternoon. But today I knew I couldn’t sleep, had no need of sleep.

  When I opened the door of the one-room apartment, its windows gray in the cold north light, I went to the refrigerator in the kitchenette and took out and opened a bottle of beer. I didn’t bother to take off my overcoat. Then, occasionally taking a sip of beer, I tore the paper from the cardboard tube. Using a knife, I managed to slit the tube down one side. It was stuffed from top to bottom with one-hundred-dollar bills.

  I took the bills out one by one, smoothed them, and arranged them in piles of ten on the kitchen table. When I finished, there were a hundred piles. One hundred thousand dollars. They covered the table.

  I stared silently at the bills spread out on the table. I finished the beer. I wasn’t conscious of feeling any emotion, not fear, or exhilaration, or regret. I looked at my watch. It was just eight forty. The banks wouldn’t open for another twenty minutes.

  I got a small bag from the closet and stacked the money in it. There was no one else who had a key to the apartment, but there was no sense in taking any chances. Carrying the bag, I went downstairs and walked to the avenue. There was a stationery store on the next block and I bought a packet of rubber bands and three thick manila envelopes, the largest in the shop.

  Then I went back to the apartment, locked the door, took off my overcoat and jacket, and methodically slipped the rubber bands around each batch of bills before putting it into one of the manila envelopes. I kept one thousand dollars, which I put in my wallet, for immediate use.

  I sealed the envelopes, grimacing at the taste of the glue as I licked the flaps: Then I took another bottle of beer from the refrigerator, poured the beer into a glass, and sipped at it, sitting in front of the table, in front of the neat pile of thick brown envelopes.

  I had taken the apartment furnished and only the books in the room were mine. And there weren’t many of those. When I finished a book, I usually threw it away. There was never enough heat and when I sat in the one frayed easy chair to read, I usually wore the padded ski jacket that hung on a hook on the back of the front door. This morning, while it was as cold as usual, and even though I was now in my shirt-sleeves, I felt perfectly comfortable.

  I knew that I was going to have to move out. And quit the job. And get out of the city. I had no plan beyond that, but I knew that one day or another somebody was going to appear, looking for one hundred thousand dollars.

  At the bank I had to write out two specimen signatures on separate cards. My hand was absolutely steady. The sealed manila envelopes with the money in them lay on the desk at which I was sitting, facing the young assistant manager who was serving me. He had the bland, sexless face of a seminarian. The conversation between us was short and businesslike. I’d shaved and was neatly dressed. I still had a couple of decent suits left over from the old days, and today I had put on a sober, quiet, gray Glen plaid with a blue oxford shirt and solid blue tie. I wanted to give the impression of being a solid citizen, perhaps not wealthy, certainly not wealthy, but modestly prosperous, a careful, industrious man who might have some bonds and some legal papers that were too valuable to leave lying around the house.

  “Your address, please, Mr. Grimes,” the assistant manager was saying.

  I gave him the address of the St. Augustine. If anybody got as far as the bank in the search for me, which was unlikely in any case, there would be no useful information to be found.

  “Will you be the sole person authorized to have access to the safety-deposit box?”
/>   That’s for sure, brother, I thought. But all I said was, “Yes.”

  “That will be twenty dollars for the year. Do you wish to pay by cash or by check?”

  “Cash.” I gave him a hundred-dollar bill. His expression did not change. Obviously, he thought that I looked like a man who might normally carry a hundred-dollar bill loose in his pocket. I took this as a good sign. The assistant manager smoothed the bill carefully, with a churchly gesture, went over to a teller’s window to break the bill down into smaller denominations. I sat relaxedly at the desk, touching one of the manila envelopes with the tips of my fingers. I hadn’t stuttered once all morning.

  The assistant manager came back and handed me my change and made out a receipt. I folded it neatly and put it into my wallet. Then I followed the man down to the vault. There was a hygienic, almost religious hush there that made you hesitate to speak above a whisper. Stained-glass windows would not have been out of place. The parable of the talents. The vault attendant gave me a key and led me down a silent aisle of money.

  With the three thick manila envelopes under my arm, I couldn’t help wondering how all the treasure lying in those locked boxes, the greenbacks, the stocks and bonds, the jewelry, had been accumulated, what sweat expended, what crimes enacted, through whose hands all those stones and all that luxuriously printed paper had passed before coming to rest in this sanctified, cold steel cave. I looked at the attendant’s face as he used the two keys, his and mine, and pulled out a box for me. He was an old man, pale from his underground existence. He didn’t look as though he had ever speculated about anything. Perhaps such people were chosen for their lack of curiosity. A curious man would go mad here. I followed the attendant back to a little curtained cubbyhole with a desk in it, and the attendant left me there with my box, respecting the privacy of wealth.

  I tore open the manila envelopes and laid the piles of bills in the box. I looked at the neatly stacked notes, trying without success to foresee what they finally would mean for me. It was like looking at a huge engine, quiet now, but capable of sudden, brutal force. I closed the box with a decisive little click. I tossed the envelopes into a wastepaper basket and went back along the row of safes with the attendant and watched him slide the box into my own slot. The attendant used both keys once more to lock the safe. I dropped my key into my pocket, said, “Thank you,” to the man. “Have a good day,” courteous as any policeman.

  “Hah,” the man said. He hadn’t had a good day since he was twelve.

  I went up the steps and out onto the sunny, cold avenue. Okay for today, I thought. Chemical Bank and Trust, with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

  I walked home briskly and packed. Beside the small bag I had carried the money in, I had a flight bag and everything I owned fitted in, with room to spare. I left the old parka hanging in the closet. Whoever moved in next would need it more than I. Then I wrote a note to the landlord saying that I was giving up the apartment. I had no lease and was on a month-to-month arrangement, so there wouldn’t be any difficulties there. I folded the note and stuck it in an envelope and dropped the key in with the note. Downstairs I put the envelope in the landlord’s mailbox. Carrying the two bags, I left the building without looking back. I wouldn’t ever again have to worry about keeping warm at that particular address.

  I hailed a cab and gave the driver the name of a hotel on Central Park West. It was a neighborhood I had never lived in and had only rarely visited. Even with my nighttime job and my reclusive habits, in my old neighborhood on the East Side there were bound to be people who had come to recognize me, my bookie, the bartender in the saloon around the corner I sometimes drank in, a waitress in a nearby Italian restaurant, others, who could point me out to someone who might come around making inquiries about me. Eventually, I knew, I would put a great deal more distance behind me, but for the time being crossing Central Park would have to do. But I didn’t want to flee blindly. I knew that I needed at least one day to think and plan.

  The hotel was a busy one, but middle class and commercial, and not the sort of place a man who had entered into sudden wealth would choose to celebrate in.

  I asked for a single room with bath, registered under the name of Theodore Brown, gave as my home address Camden, New Jersey, a city I had never visited, and followed the bellboy with the bags into the elevator. On the way up, I studied the man’s sullen, narrow face. He was young, but there was no trace of innocence in the guarded eyes, the tightly closed lips. It was a face designed specifically by nature for corruption. What wonders a man with a face like that could perform with a hundred thousand dollars.

  In the room, which overlooked the park, the bellboy put the big bag in a chair, turned on the light in the bathroom, ostentatiously earning his tip.

  “I wonder if you could do me a favor,” I said, taking out a five-dollar bill.

  The bellboy eyed the bill. “Depends on what the favor is,” the bellboy said. “The management don’t like whores coming in and out.”

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “I’d just like to make a bet on a horse and I’m new in town and …” I had entered a new life, but I was taking some baggage along with me. Ask Gloria cantered out of the stables of my past.

  The bellboy showed his teeth in what he imagined was an accommodating smile. “We have a house bookie,” he said. “I can have him up here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thanks.” I gave him the five-dollar bill.

  “Very good of you, sir,” the bellboy said. The bill disappeared. “Do you mind telling me what you’re going to play?”

  “Ask Gloria in the second,” I said. “At Hialeah.”

  “It’s a fifteen-to-one shot,” he said. He was a student of the sport.

  “So it is,” I said.

  “Interesting,” he said. There was no doubt about what he was going to do with my five dollars. Dishonest as he was, he would live and die a poor man.

  When he left the room, I loosened my tie and lay down on the bed, although I still wasn’t tired. Try money, I thought, grinning, for that run-down feeling, that midmorning sag. More and more, thinking these days is in the form of a television commercial.

  The house bookie appeared promptly. He was a huge fat man in a rumpled suit, with three ball-point pens clipped into the breast pocket of his jacket. He panted when he moved and spoke in a high, almost soprano voice, surprising coming out of all that bulk. “Hi, pal,” he said as he came into the room. He looked around the room swiftly, taking everything in. He was a man prepared for ambush. Although he performed in daylight, he lived in the same world as the cop in the prowl car. “Morris said you were looking for a little action.”

  “A little,” I said. “I like Ask Gloria for …” I hesitated for a moment. “For three hundred to win in the second at Hialeah. The morning line has her at fifteen to one.” I had a peculiar feeling of lightheartedness, as though I were in an open plane, without oxygen, and had suddenly climbed from the deck to twenty thousand feet.

  The fat man took a creased sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, ran a finger down it. “I can give you twelve to one,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I gave him three bills.

  The bookie took the bills, examined them closely, glanced briefly at me. I detected respect, a certain delicate wariness.

  “My name is …” I started to say.

  “I know your name, Mr. Brown. Morris told me,” the bookie said. He made a note with one of the pens on the sheet of paper. “I pay off at six o’clock in the bar downstairs.”

  “See you at six,” I said.

  “You hope,” the fat man said, without smiling. He placed the notes that I had given him on the outside of a roll of bills, snapped a rubber band deftly around it. He had small, fat, nimble hands. “Morris always knows where to find me, Mr. Brown,” he said as he went out.

  After that, I unpacked and started to put my clothes away. As I was taking my toothbrush and shaving things out of the kit, my razor fell to the floor and
skidded beneath the chest of drawers. I knelt to retrieve it, running my hand under the chest. Along with the razor and a small pile of dust, I brought out a coin. It was a silver dollar. I blew the dust off the coin and put it in my pocket. They don’t clean very thoroughly in this hotel, I thought. Good for them. Today, I was definitely ahead of the game.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. I picked up the telephone and gave the number of the St. Augustine to the operator. As usual, it was nearly thirty seconds before there was an answer. Clara, the operator, regarded all calls as wanton interruptions in her private life, which consisted, as far as I could ever tell, of reading magazines on astrology. She used delay as a means of protest and punishment for electronic interrupters of her search for the perfect horoscope, wealth, fame, a young and handsome dark stranger.

  “Hello, Clara,” I said. “Is Mr. Drusack there?”

  “He sure is,” Clara said. “He’s been on my neck all morning to call you. What the hell is your number anyway? I couldn’t find it anywhere. I called the hotel we have here as your address and they say they never heard of you.”

  “That was two years ago. I moved.” Actually, I had moved four times since then. A typical American, I had continually pushed toward new frontiers, always farther north. The wealth of the Yukon, by way of the East Eighties, Harlem, Riverdale, the frozen tundra. “I don’t have a number, Clara.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t have a number?”

  “I don’t have a telephone.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Grimes.”

  “You can say that again, Clara. Now give me Mr. Drusack.”

  “My God, Grimes,” Drusack said when he got on the phone, “you sure left me a mess. You better get right on down here and help me straighten it out.”

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Drusack,” I said. I tried to sound genuinely grieved. “I’m busy today. What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter?” Drusack was shouting now. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter. The goddamn Western Union called at ten o’clock. There’s no John Ferris at that address you gave them, that’s what’s the matter.”