by Irwin Shaw
But Tuesday night I stayed in my room, alone, watching television. On this last night in America there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks.
As a last gesture, I put a hundred and fifty dollars in an envelope with a note to the bookie at the St. Augustine that read,
“Sorry I kept you waiting for your money,” and signed my name. There would be one man in America who would vouch for my reputation as an honest man. I mailed the note as I checked out of the hotel.
I got to the airport early, by taxi. The attaché case, with the money inside it, was in the big blue bag with the combination lock. The money would be out of my hands, in the baggage compartment, while we crossed the Atlantic, but there was nothing to be done about it. I knew that every passenger was searched and his hand luggage opened and examined before boarding the plane, as a precaution against hijackers, and it would have been awkward, to say the least, to have to try to explain to an armed guard why I needed more than seventy thousand dollars for a three-week skiing trip.
Wales had been right about the overweight, too. The man at the desk never even looked at the scale as the skycap swung my two bags onto it.
“No skis or boots?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to buy them in Europe.”
“Try Rossignols,” he said. “I hear they’re great.” He had become an expert on equipment at a departure desk at Kennedy.
I showed him my passport, he checked the manifest list and gave me a boarding pass and the formalities were over. “Have a good trip,” he said. “I wish I was going with you.” The other people on the line with me had obviously started celebrating already, and there was a loud holiday air about the entire occasion, with people embracing and calling to each other and skis clattering to the floor.
I was early and went into the restaurant for a sandwich and a glass of beer. I hadn’t eaten lunch and it would be a long time before they served us anything on the plane and I was hungry.
As I ate and drank my beer, I read the evening paper. A policeman had been shot in Harlem that morning. The Rangers had won the night before. A judge had come out against pornographic films. The editors were firmly in favor of impeaching the President. There was talk of his resigning. Men who had had high positions in the White House were being sent to jail. The envelope Evelyn Coates had given me to deliver in Rome was in my small bag, now being stowed into the hold of the airplane. I wondered if I was helping to put someone in jail or keep him out. America. I reflected on my visit to Washington.
There was a pay telephone on the wall near where I was sitting and I suddenly had the desire to speak to someone, make one last statement, make one ultimate connection with a familiar voice, before I left the country. I got up and dialed the operator and once more called Evelyn Coates’s number.
Again, there was no answer. Evelyn was a woman who was more likely to be out than in at any given moment. I hung up and got my dime back. I was about to return to my table, where my half-eaten sandwich was waiting for me, when I stopped. I remembered driving down the street past the St. Augustine Hotel and nearly stopping. This time there would be no danger. I would be climbing into international jet space within forty minutes. I put the dime back into the machine and dialed the number.
As usual, the phone rang and rang before I heard Clara’s voice. “Hotel St. Augustine,” she said. She could manage to get her discontent and her irritation with the entire world even into this brief announcement.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Drusack, please,” I said.
“Mr. Grimes!” My name came out in a shriek. She had recognized my voice.
“I would like to speak to Mr. Drusack, please,” I said, pretending that I hadn’t heard her or at least hadn’t understood her.
“Mr. Grimes,” she said, “where are you?”
“Please, miss,” I said, “I would like to speak to Mr. Drusack. Is he there?”
“He’s in the hospital, Mr. Grimes,” she said. “Two men followed him in his car and beat him up with a pistol. He’s in a coma now. They think his skull is fractured and …”
I hung up the phone and went back to my table and finished the sandwich and the beer.
The seat belt and no smoking signs went on and the plane started the descent from the zone of morning sunlight. The snow-capped peaks of the Alps glittered in the distance as the 747 slanted into the gray bank of fog that lay on the approaches to Kloten Airport.
The large man in the seat next to mine was snoring loudly. By actual count, between eight and midnight, when I had given up keeping track, he had drunk eleven whiskies. His wife, next to him on the aisle, had kept her own pace, at the ratio of one to his two. They had told me they planned to catch the early train from Zurich to St. Moritz and intended to ski the Corvatch that afternoon. I was sorry I couldn’t be there to watch their first run down the hill.
The flight had not been restful. Since all the passengers were members of the same ski club, and a great many of them made the trip together every winter, there had been a good deal of loud socializing in the aisles, accompanied by hearty drinking. The passengers were not young. For the most part they were in their thirties or forties, the men seeming to belong to that vague group that goes under the label of the executive class and the women carefully coiffed suburban housewives who were damned if they couldn’t hold their liquor as well as their husbands. A certain amount of weekend wife-swapping could be imagined. If I had to make a guess, I would have said that the average income per family of the passengers on the plane was about thirty-five thousand dollars a year and that their children had nice little trust funds set up by Grandpa and Grandma, craftily arranged to avoid the inheritance tax.
If there were any passengers on the plane who were reading quietly or looking out the windows at the stars and the growing dawn, they were not in my part of the aircraft. Sober myself, I regarded my boisterous and boozy fellow-travelers with distaste. In a more restrictive state than America, I thought, they would have been prevented from leaving the country. If my brother Hank had been on the plane, I realized with a touch of sorrow, he would have envied them.
It had been warm in the plane, too, and I hadn’t been able to take off my jacket, because my wallet with my money and passport was in it and the wallet was too bulky to fit in my trouser pocket.
The plane touched down smoothly and I had a moment of envy of the men who piloted those marvelous machines, confidently at work on the flight deck forward. For them only the voyage mattered, not the value of the cargo. I made sure that I was one of the first travelers out of the plane. At the terminal building I went through the door reserved for passengers with nothing to declare. I was lucky enough to see my two bags, both blue, one large, one small, come out in the first batch. I grabbed one of the wire carts and threw the bags on it and rolled the cart out of the customs room without being stopped. The Swiss, I saw, were charmingly tolerant toward prosperous visitors to their country.
I got into a waiting taxi and said, “The Savoy Hotel, please.” I had heard that it was a good hotel in the center of the business district.
I had not changed any money into Swiss currency, but when we arrived at the hotel, the driver agreed to accept two ten-dollar bills. It was a few dollars more than it would have been if I had had francs, but I didn’t argue with the man.
While I was registering, I asked the clerk for the name and telephone number of the nearest private bank. Like most Americans of this age I had only the vaguest notions of just what Swiss private banks might be like, but had a firm belief, nourished by newspaper and magazine articles, in their ability to conceal money safely. The clerk wrote down a name and a number, almost as if that were the first service demanded of him by every American who signed in at his desk.
Another clerk showed me up to my room. It was large and comfortable, with heavy, old-fashioned furniture, and as clean as I had heard Swiss hotel rooms were likely to be.
While waiting for my luggage to come up, I picked up the pho
ne and gave the operator the number the clerk had given me. It was nine thirty, Swiss time, four thirty in the morning New York time, but even though I had not slept at all on the plane, I wasn’t tired.
A voice on the phone said something in German. “Do you speak English?” I asked, regretting for the first time that my education had not equipped me even well enough to say “Good morning” in any language but my own.
“Yes,” the woman said. “Whom do you wish to speak to?”
“I would like to make an appointment to open an account,” I said.
“Just a moment, please,” she said. Almost immediately a man’s voice said, “Dr. Hauser here. Good morning.”
So. In Switzerland men who were entrusted with money were doctors. Why not? Money was both a disease and a cure.
I gave the good doctor my name and explained once more that I wanted to open an account. He said he would expect me at ten thirty and hung up.
There was a knock on the door and the porter came in with my bags. I apologized for not having any Swiss money for his tip, but he merely smiled and said, “Thank you,” and left. I began to feel that I was going to like Switzerland.
I twirled the three tumblers on the combination lock of the big bag and pushed on the lever to open it. The lever did not budge. I tried once more. It still didn’t open. I tried again, with the same result. I was sure I was using the correct numbers. I picked up the small bag, which had the same combination, and twirled the tumblers and pushed at the lever. It opened smoothly.
“Damn it,” I said under my breath. The big bag had probably been handled roughly at one end of the flight or the other and the lock had jammed. I had nothing with me with which to force the lock. I didn’t want anyone else meddling with the bag, so I went down to the desk and asked for a big screwdriver. The concierge’s English vocabulary did not include the word screwdriver, but I finally got him to understand by the use of elaborate gestures what I wanted. He said something in German to an assistant and two minutes later the man reappeared with a screwdriver.
“He can go up with you,” the concierge said, “and assist you, if you want.”
“That won’t be necessary, thank you,” I said, and went back to my room.
It took five minutes of scraping and prying to force the lock, and I mourned for my handsome, brand-new bag as it broke open. I would have to get a new lock put on, if that were possible.
I lifted the lid. On the top of whatever else was in the bag there was a loud, houndstooth sport jacket. I had never owned a jacket like that in my life.
I had taken the wrong bag at the airport. One that looked exactly like mine, the same size and make, the same color, dark blue with red piping. I swore softly at the chain-belt system of manufacturing and selling in America, where everybody makes and sells a million identical copies of everything.
I let the lid drop on the bag and flipped the clasps on each side of the lock shut. I didn’t want to disturb anybody else’s belongings. It was bad enough that I had broken open the lock. Then I went down to the concierge’s desk again. I gave him back the screwdriver and explained what had happened and asked him to call the airport for me to find out if one of the other travelers on my plane had reported that a mistake had been made and, if so, where and how I could pick up my own bag.
“Do you have your baggage checks?” he asked.
I searched through my pockets while the concierge looked on condescendingly. “Accidents happen. One must foresee,” he said. “When I travel, I always paste a large colored etiquette with my initials on it on all my luggage.”
“A very good idea,” I said. “I will remember it in the future.” I didn’t have the baggage checks. I must have thrown them away when I went through customs and saw I didn’t need them. “Can you call, now, please? I don’t know any German and …”
“I shall call,” he said. He picked up the phone and asked for a number.
Five minutes later, after a good deal of agitated Swiss-German, interrupted by long waits which the concierge filled with rapid drumming of his fingertips on his desk, he hung up. “Nothing has been reported,” he said. “They will call you here when there is any news. When the passenger who has your bag gets to his hotel, he will undoubtedly discover that there has been an exchange and will make inquiries at the airport.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“For nothing.” He bowed. I did not bow back. I went up to my room.
When the passenger gets your bag to his hotel, the concierge had said. I had overheard some of the conversations on the plane. There were probably five hundred ski resorts in Europe, and from what I had heard my bag might even at that minute be on its way to Davos or Chamonix or Zermatt or Lech or …I shook my head despairingly. Whoever it was who had my bag might not try to open it until the next morning. And when he did, he probably would do exactly as I had done and break open the lock. And he might not be as fastidious as I had been about disturbing a stranger’s affairs.
I lifted the lid of the bag on the bed and stared down at the houndstooth jacket. I had a premonition that I was going to have trouble with the man who would wear a jacket like that. I knocked the lid back hard.
I picked up the telephone and gave the number of the bank. When I got an answer, I asked for Dr. Hauser again. He was very polite when I told him that I found that I could not come in today. A specialist in the fever regions of international currency, he was calm in the face of ups and downs. I said I would try to call him tomorrow for an appointment. “I will be in my office all day,” he said.
After he had hung up, I sat staring at the telephone for a long time. There was nothing I could do but wait.
Accidents happen, the concierge had said. One must foresee.
He had been a little late with his advice.
9
IN THE NEXT TWO DAYS I had the concierge call the airport half a dozen times. The conversation was always the same. No one from the ski club had reported having taken a wrong bag.
Pacing up and down in the gloomy room, my nerves twanging like overtuned guitar strings, I remembered the old saw—accidents go in threes. There had been Ferris on the floor, Drusack in the hospital, now this. Should I have been more wary? I knew I was a superstitious man and I should have paid more honor to superstition. The hotel room, which had seemed at first glance to be cosy and welcoming, now only added to my depression, and I took long random walks around the city, hoping to tire myself at least enough so that I could sleep at night. The climate of Zurich in the winter is not conducive to gaiety. Under the leaden sky, even the lake looked as though it had lain in a vault for centuries.
On the second day I recognized defeat and finally unpacked the suitcase I had carried away from Kloten. There was nothing in it to identify its owner, no address books, no checkbooks, no books of any kind, with or without a name on the flyleaf, no bills or photographs, signed or unsigned, and no monograms on anything. The owner must have been inordinately healthy—in a leather shaving kit, there were no medicine bottles that might have had a name on a label—just toothpaste, toothbrush, a safety razor, a bottle of aspirin, after-shaving talcum powder, and a bottle of eau de cologne.
I began to sweat. It was room 602 all over again. Was I going to be haunted forever by ghosts who slipped into my life for a moment, changed it, and then slipped out, eternally unidentified?
Remembering detective stories I had read, I looked for tailors’ labels on the jackets of suits. While the clothes were presentable enough, they all seemed to come from big clothing manufacturers who distributed to stores all over the United States. There were laundry symbols on some of the shirts. Perhaps, given time, the FBI would have been able to track them down, but I couldn’t see myself approaching the FBI for help.
There was a pair of crimson ski pants and a lemon yellow nylon lightweight parka. I shook my head. What could you expect of a man who would appear on the slopes looking like the flag of a small hot country? It was in keeping with the houndstooth jacket.
I would keep my eyes open for bright spots of color coming down the hill.
There was one clue, if it could be called that. Along with the two suits and the flannel slacks and the houndstooth sport jacket, there was a tuxedo. It might mean that my man had intended to spend at least part of his time at a plush resort where people dressed for dinner. The only place I had ever heard of like that was the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, but there probably were a dozen others. And the presence of the tuxedo could also mean that its owner intended to go to London or Paris or some other city where dress might occasionally be formal while he was in Europe. Europe was just too goddamn enormous.
I thought of calling the ski club office in New York, explaining that there had been an innocent mix-up at the Zurich airport and asking for a copy of the manifest with the names of the people on board my plane and their home addresses. For a little while I entertained the notion of sending letters to each and every one of the more than three hundred passengers with my story of the mistake about the luggage and asking the recipients of the letter to let me know whether or not they had lost theirs, so that I could return the bag in my possession to its rightful owner. But thinking about this plan for just a minute or two, I realized how hopeless it would be. After the two fruitless days, I was sure that whoever had my bag would not be inclined to advertise.
Trying to get some idea of what the thief (which was how I now described the man to myself) might look like, I tried on some of his clothes. I put on one of his shirts. It fit me around the neck. I have a sixteen-and-a-half-inch neck. The sleeves were about an inch too short for me. Could I carry a tape measure and invent some plausible reason for measuring the necks and arms of all the Americans in Europe for the winter? There were two pairs of good shoes, one brown, one black, size ten. Whitehouse & Hardy. Stores in almost every big city in the United States. No footprint there. I tried them on. They fit me perfectly. My feet would be dry this winter.
