by Irwin Shaw
The houndstooth jacket fit me well enough, too—a little loose around the middle but not much. No middle-aged paunch there, but then, again, the man was a skier and probably in good condition, no matter how old he was. The slacks were a little short, too. So the man was slightly shorter than I, say five foot ten or eleven. At least I wouldn’t have to waste my time on giants or fat men or midgets.
I hoped that the thief would turn out to be as thrifty as I intended to be and wear the clothes he had no doubt by now found in my bag, even though they would only fit him approximately, as his fit me. I was sure that if I saw a suit of mine go past I would recognize it. I realized I was grasping at straws—with seventy-thousand dollars in his pocket he was probably being measured at that moment by some of the best tailors in Europe. I had the same sense of pain that I imagined a husband might have knowing that at that moment his beautiful wife was in bed with another man. With anguish I realized I was married to a certain number of hundred-dollar bills. It wasn’t rational. After all, I was richer than I had been only two weeks before. But there it was. I was beyond rationality.
Meanwhile I had about five thousand dollars in cash on me. I had five thousand dollars worth of time to find a man with a sixteen-and-a-half-inch neck, thirty-four-inch arms, a size ten shoe, and no intention of returning seventy thousand dollars that had fallen, almost literally, from the heavens into his hands.
As I repacked the bag carefully, putting the gaudy jacket on top, the way I had found it, I thought, Well, at least there’s one consolation—I won’t have to spend any money on a new wardrobe to replace the one I had lost. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I don’t know what I would have done if the bag had been full of women’s things.
I paid my bill and took a taxi to the Bahnhof and bought a first-class ticket for St. Moritz. The only people I had spoken to on the plane coming over were the couple who were going to ski the Corvatch at St. Moritz. They hadn’t told me their names or where they were going to stay. I knew the chances of their being able to give me any useful information if I did find them were almost infinitesimal. But I had to start somewhere. Zurich had no further charms for me. It had rained the two days I had been there.
At Chur, an hour-and-a-half ride from Zurich, I had to change for the narrow-gauge railroad that mounted into the Engadine. I went down the first-class car until I saw an empty compartment and went in and put my coat and two bags on the rack over the seats.
The atmosphere on the new train was considerably different from the one on the express from Zurich, which had been businesslike and quiet, with solid, heavy types reading the financial pages of the Zurcher Zeitung. Getting into the toylike cars en route to the Alpine resorts, there were a lot of young people, many of them already in ski clothes, and expensively dressed pretty women in furs, with appropriate escorts. There was a feeling of holiday that I was in no mood to share. I was hurting and I wanted to think and I hoped that no one would come into my compartment to disturb me. Undemocratically, I closed the sliding door of the compartment, as a deterrent to company. But just before the train started, a man pulled the door open and asked, in English, politely enough, “Pardon me, sir, are these seats taken?”
“I don’t think so,” I said as ungraciously as possible.
“Honey,” the man called down the corridor. “In here.” A fluffy blonde, considerably younger than the man, wearing a leopard coat and a hat to match, came into the compartment. I grieved briefly for all prowling animals threatened with extinction. The lady was carrying a handsome leather jewel case and smelled strongly of a musky perfume. A huge diamond ring graced the finger over her wedding band. If the world were better organized, there would have been a riot of porters and any other workers within a radius of ten blocks of the station platform. Unthinkable in Switzerland.
The man had no luggage, just some magazines and a copy of the International Herald Tribune under his arm. He dropped the magazines and paper on the seat opposite me and helped the lady off with her coat. Swinging it up to put it on the rack, the hem of the coat brushed against my face, tickling me and swamping me in a wave of scent.
“Oh,” the woman said, “excuse, excuse.”
I smiled glumly, restraining myself from scratching at my face. “It’s a pleasure,” I said.
She rewarded me with a smile. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight years old, and up to now she had obviously had every reason to feel that a smile of hers was indeed a reward. I was sure that she was not the man’s first wife, maybe not even the second. I took an instant dislike to her.
The man took off the sheepskin coat that he was wearing, and the green, furry Tyrolean hat, with a little feather in the band, and tossed them up on the rack. He had a silk foulard scarf tied around his throat, which he didn’t remove. As he sat down he pulled out a cigar case.
“Bill,” the woman said, complaining.
“I’m on a holiday, honey. Let me enjoy it.” Bill opened the cigar case.
“I hope you don’t mind if my husband smokes,” the woman said.
“Not at all.” At least it would kill some of the overpowering aroma of the perfume.
The man pushed the cigar case toward me. “May I offer you one?”
“Thank you, no. I don’t smoke,” I lied.
He took out a small gleaming clipper and cut off the end. He had thick, brutal, manicured hands that went with his high-flushed, fleshy face and hard blue eyes and jaw. I would not have liked to work for him or be his son. I figured he was over forty years old. “Pure Havana,” he said. “Almost impossible to find back home. The Swiss are neutral about Castro, thank God.” He used a thin gold lighter to start the cigar and leaned back, puffing comfortably. I looked out the window morosely at the snowy countryside. I had thought I was going to be on holiday, too. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to turn around at the next station and start for home. Except where was home? I thought of Drusack, who was not going to St. Moritz.
The train went into a tunnel and it was absolutely dark in the compartment. I wished the tunnel would go on forever. Self-pityingly, I remembered the nights at the St. Augustine and thought, Darkness is my element.
Sometime after we emerged from the tunnel, we were in sunlight. We had climbed out of the gray cloud that hung over the Swiss plain. The sunlight was somehow an affront to my sensibility. The man was dozing now, his head thrown back, the cigar dead in an ashtray. His wife had the Herald Tribune and was reading the comic strips, a rapt expression on her face. She looked foolish, her mouth pursed, her eyes childish and bright under the leopard hat. Was that what I had thought money was going to buy for me?
She became conscious that I was staring at her, looked up at me, giggled coquettishly. “I’m a pushover for comic strips,” she said. “I’m always afraid Rip Kirby is going to get killed in the next installment.”
I smiled inanely, looked at the diamond on her finger, earned, I was sure, in honest matrimony. She peered obliquely at me. I guessed that she never looked at anyone straight on. “I’ve seen you someplace before,” she said. “Haven’t I?”
“Perhaps,” I said.
“Weren’t you on the plane Wednesday night? The club plane?”
“I was on it,” I said.
“I was sure I knew you from someplace before that. Sun Valley maybe?”
“I’ve never been in Sun Valley,” I said.
“That’s the wonderful thing about skiing,” she said, “you get to meet the same people all over the world.”
The man groaned a little, awakened by the sound of our voices. Coming out of sleep, his eyes stared at me with blank hostility. I had the feeling that hostility was his natural and fundamental condition and that I had surprised him before he had time to arrange himself for the ordinary traffic of society.
“Bill,” the woman said, “this gentleman was on the plane with us.” From the way she said it, it sounded as though it had been an extraordinary pleasure for us all.
&
nbsp; “Is that so?” Bill said.
“I always feel it’s lucky to find Americans to travel with,” the woman said. “The language and everything. Europeans make you feel like such a dummy. I think this calls for a drink-drink.” She opened the jewel case, which she had kept on the seat beside her, and brought out an elegant silver flask. There were three small chromium cups, one inside the other, over the cap, and she gave one to me and one to her husband and kept one for herself. “I hope you like cognac,” she said, as she poured the liquor carefully into our cups. My hand was shaking, and some of the cognac spilled over on it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. The reason my hand was shaking was that the man had taken off the foulard scarf around his neck and for the first time I saw the tie he was wearing. It was a dark red woolen tie. It was either the tie that I had packed in my bag or one exactly like it. He crossed his legs and I looked down at his shoes. They were brown, plain-toed, with gum soles. They were not new. I had had just such a pair of shoes in my bag.
“Here’s to the first one to break a leg this year,” the man said, raising his chromium cup. He laughed harshly. I was sure he had never broken anything. He was just the sort of man who had never been sick a day in his life and didn’t carry anything stronger than aspirin with him when he traveled.
I drank my cognac in one gulp. I needed it. And I was glad when the lady refilled my cup immediately. I raised the cup gallantly to her and smiled widely and falsely, hoping the train would be wrecked and both she and her husband crushed, so that I could search them and their baggage thoroughly. “You people certainly know how to travel,” I said, with an exaggerated, admiring shake of the head.
“Be prepared in foreign lands,” the man said. “That’s our motto. Say …” He extended his hand. “My name’s Bill. Bill Sloane. And the little lady is Flora.”
I shook his hand and told them my name. His hand was hard and cold. The little lady (weight one twenty-five, I figured) smiled winsomely and poured some more cognac.
By the time we reached St. Moritz we were a cosy threesome. I had learned that they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, that Mr. Sloane was a three-handicap golfer, that he was a building contractor and a self-made man, that, as I had guessed, Flora was not his first wife, that he had a son at Deerfield, who, thank God, did not wear his hair long, that he had voted for Nixon and had been to the White House twice, that the Watergate fuss would die down in a month with the Democrats sorry they had ever started it, that this was their third visit to St. Moritz, that they had stopped over in Zurich for two days so that Flora could do some shopping, and that they were going to stay at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz.
“Where’re you staying, Doug?” Sloane asked me.
“The Palace,” I said without hesitation. I certainly couldn’t afford it, but I was not going to let my new friends out of my sight at any cost. “I understand it’s fun.”
When we got to St. Moritz, I insisted on waiting with them until their luggage came out of the baggage car. Neither of them changed expression when I swung the big blue bag off the rack. “Do you know your bag’s unlocked?” Sloane asked.
“The lock’s broken,” I said.
“You ought to get it fixed,” he said, as we left the compartment. “St. Moritz is full of Italians.” His interest could mean something. Or nothing. The two of them might be the best actors in the world.
They had eight bags between them, all brand new, none of them the twin of mine. That again could mean nothing. We had to hire an extra taxi for the baggage, and it followed us up the hill through the busy, snowy streets of the town to the hotel.
The hotel had a tantalizing, faint, indefinable aroma. Its source was money. Quiet money. The lobby was like an extension of the bank vault in New York. The guests were treated by the help in a kind of reverential hush, as though they were ikons of great age and value, frail and worthy of worship. I had the feeling that even the small, exquisitely dressed children with their English nannies, who walked decorously along the deep carpets, knew I didn’t belong there.
Everybody at the reception desk and at the concierge’s desk shook Mr. Sloane’s hand and bowed to Mrs. Sloane. The tips had obviously been princely in the preceding years. Would a man like that, who could afford a wife like Flora and a hotel like the Palace, walk off with somebody else’s seventy thousand dollars? And wear his shoes in the bargain? The answer, I decided, was probably yes. After all, Sloane had confessed he was a self-made man.
When I told the clerk at the reception desk that I had no reservation, his face took on that distant no-room-at-the-inn look of hoteliers in a good season. He had pierced my disguise instantly. “I’m afraid, sir,” he began, “that …”
“He’s a friend of mine,” Mr. Sloane said, coming up behind me. “Fit him in, please.”
The clerk made an important small business of checking the room chart and said, “Well, there’s a double room. I might …”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“How long will you be staying, Mr. Grimes?” the clerk asked.
I hesitated. Who knew how long five thousand dollars would last in a place like that? “A week,” I said. I would skip orange juice in the mornings.
We all went up in the elevator together. The clerk had put me in the room next to the Sloanes. It would have been convenient if the walls had been thinner or I had been trained in electronic bugging equipment.
My room was a large one, with a great double bed with a pink satin spread and a magnificent view of the lake and the mountains beyond, pure and clear in the late afternoon sunlight. Under other conditions it would have been exhilarating. Now it merely seemed as if nature was being callous and expensive. I closed the blinds and in the gloom lay down fully dressed on the soft bed, the satin rustling voluptuously under my weight. I still seemed to smell Flora Sloane’s perfume. I tried to think of some way in which I could find out quickly and surely if Sloane was my man. My mind was flat and tired. The two days in Zurich had exhausted me. I felt a cold coming on. I could think of nothing except to hang on and watch. But then if I did find out that it was my tie he was wearing, my shoes he was walking around in, what would I do? My head began to ache. I got up off the bed and dug in the leather shaving kit for the tin of aspirin and swallowed two.
I dozed fitfully after that, dreaming disconnectedly. There was a man who appeared and disappeared at the edge of my dreams who might have been Sloane or Drusack, jangling keys.
I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was Flora Sloane, inviting me to dinner. I made myself sound enthusiastic as I accepted. I didn’t have to dress for dinner, she said; we were dining in town. Somehow, Bill had forgotten to pack his tuxedo, and it was being flown from America but hadn’t arrived yet. I said I preferred not dressing myself and went in and took a cold shower.
We met for drinks at the bar of the hotel. Sloane was wearing a dark gray suit. It was not mine. He had changed his shoes. There was another couple at the table who had been on our plane coming over and who were also from Greenwich. They had been out skiing that day and the wife was already limping. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. “I can just go up to the Corveglia Club every day for the next two weeks and just lie in the sun.”
“Before we were married,” her husband said, “she used to tell me how much she loved to ski.”
“That was before we were married, dear,” the woman said complacently.
Sloane ordered a bottle of champagne. It was finished quickly and the other man ordered a second one. I would have to get out of St. Moritz before it was my turn to reciprocate. It was easy to love the poor in that atmosphere.
We went to dinner in a restaurant in a rustic chalet nearby and drank a great deal more champagne. The prices on the menu were not rustic. During the course of the meal I learned more than I ever wanted to know about Greenwich—who was nearly thrown out of the golf club, what lady was doing it with what gynecologist, how much the new addition to the Po
well’s house cost, who was leading the brave fight to keep black children from being bussed into the town schools. Even if I had been guaranteed that I would get my seventy thousand dollars back before the end of the week, I wondered if I could endure the necessary dinners.
It was worse after dinner. When we got back to the hotel, the two men went to play bridge and Flora asked me to take her dancing in the Kings Club downstairs. The lady with the limp came along with us to watch. When we were seated at a table, Flora asked for champagne, and this time it was fairly and truly on my bill.
I never liked to dance, and Flora was one of those women who clutch their partners as if to cut off any possible movement to escape. It was hot in the room and infernally noisy and my flannel blazer was heavy and too tight under the arms and I was swamped in Flora’s perfume. She also hummed amorously into my ear as we danced.
“Oh, I’m so glad we found you,” she whispered. “You can’t drag Bill onto a dance floor. And I’ll bet you’re a great skier, too. You move like one.” Sex and all other human activities were clearly inextricably entwined in Mrs. Sloane’s mind. “Will you ski with me tomorrow?”
“I’d love to,” I said. If I could have chosen a list of people whom I could suspect of having stolen my suitcase, the Sloanes would have been far down at the bottom.
It was after midnight, with two bottles of champagne gone, when I finally managed to call a halt. I signed the check and escorted the two ladies upstairs to where their husbands were playing bridge. Sloane was losing. I didn’t know whether I was glad or sorry. If it was my money, I would have wept. If it was his, I’d have cheered. Aside from his friend from Greenwich, there was a handsome, graying man of about fifty at the table, and an old lady encrusted with jewelry, with a harsh Spanish accent, like the cawing of a crow. The Beautiful People of the International Set.
While I was watching, the handsome, gray-haired man made a small slam. “Fabian,” Sloane said, “every year I find myself writing out a check to you.”
