Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  She stood up and looked down at me. It was too dark in the room for me to see her face clearly, but I got the impression of the birth of suspicion. “You know,” she said, “a friend of mine picked up a young man on the slopes at Gstaad and they arranged to meet that night and, well … do it, and he broke his leg at three o’clock, but he didn’t let it stop him. By ten o’clock that night, they did it.”

  “Maybe he was younger than I am,” I said lamely. “Or he had a different kind of break. Anyway, the first time … with you, I mean … I wouldn’t like it to be anything but perfect.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Her voice was flat and unconvinced. “Well, I better be going. There’s a party tonight and I have to get ready.” She leaned over and kissed me chastely on the forehead. “If you want, though,” she said, “I can look in after the party.”

  “I don’t think it would be a wise idea, really.”

  “Probably not. Well, sleep well,” and she left the room.

  I lay back and stared once more at the dark ceiling and thought of the heroic young man at Gstaad. One more day, I thought, and I’m getting out of here, crutches or no crutches. Still, Flora Sloane had given me an idea. Without a key to my room, she had had the door opened. The floor maid …

  That evening I dined alone, late. I had seen Flora Sloane, in a blazing evening gown, at a distance, sweeping off to her party with a group of people, some of whom I recognized, some of whom I didn’t, any one of whom might have my seventy thousand dollars in the bank. If Flora saw me, she gave no sign. I took my time over dinner, and, when I went up to my floor, I deliberately avoided asking for my key at the desk. The corridor on which my room was located was empty, but after a moment I spied the night maid coming out of a room farther down. I stepped in front of the Sloanes’ door and called to the maid. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said, moving heavily toward the woman on my crutches, “but I seem to have forgotten my key. Will you let me in, please?” I had never seen her before.

  She took a key out of her apron pocket and opened the door. I said thank you and went in, closing the door behind me. The room had already been made up for the night, and the bed was turned down, two bedside lamps softly lit. The scent of Flora Sloane’s perfume was everywhere. Except for that, it could have been any room in the hotel. I was breathing heavily, moving with care. I went over to the big wardrobe and opened the door. Women’s clothes. I recognized various dresses, ski outfits. I opened the next door. A long array of suits, stacked shirts. On the floor six pairs of shoes. The brown shoes Sloane had worn on the train were the last in line. I bent down clumsily, nearly toppling, and picked up the right shoe. Then I sat on a little straight-backed chair and took off my right shoe. My left foot was encased in plaster. I tried to put my foot into the brown shoe. I could hardly get halfway in. It must have been two sizes smaller than mine—size eight. I sat there for a moment, holding the shoe in my hand, staring at it numbly. I had wasted almost a week, precious time, and a small fortune, on a false trail. I was sitting like that, in the softly lit room, stupidly holding the shoe in my hand, when I heard the rattle of a key in the door. The door opened and Bill Sloane, dressed for traveling and holding a small bag in his hand, came into the room.

  He stopped when he saw me and dropped the bag. It made a small, luxurious thump on the thick carpet. “What the hell …?” he said. He didn’t sound angry. He hadn’t had time to be angry.

  “Hello,” I said foolishly. “Hello, Bill. I thought you were in Zurich.”

  “I’ll bet you did.” His voice was beginning to rise. “Where the hell is Flora?” He switched on the overhead light, as though his wife might be lurking in the shadows.

  “She went to a party.” I didn’t know whether I ought to get up or stay where I was. Getting up presented problems, with the cast and my stockinged foot.

  “Went to a party.” He nodded grimly. “And what the fuck are you doing in here?”

  “I forgot my key,” I said, realizing as I said it how improbable the whole scene was. “I asked the maid to open the door to my room and I wasn’t looking …”

  “What’re you doing with my shoe?” Each question was an arc on a constantly rising curve.

  I looked at the shoe as though I had never seen it before. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. I dropped it to the floor.

  “The watch,” he said. “The goddamn watch.”

  I looked at it automatically. It was ten minutes past ten.

  “I know where you got that goddamn watch.” There was no mistaking the menace in his tone now. “My wife. From my stupid, goddamn wife.”

  “It was … well … a kind of private little joke.” Nothing in my life until then had prepared me for a situation like this, and I realized bitterly that my improvisations at the moment were far from brilliant.

  “Every year she gets a crush on some idiotic ski teacher and she gives him a watch. For openers,” he said. “Just for openers. So—this year, you’re elected. This is her year for amateurs. The St. Moritz Open.”

  “It’s only a watch, Bill,” I said.

  “She’s the shiftiest little bitch in the business,” Sloane said, looming over me. “And I thought, well, this year, finally, she’s out there with someone I can trust.” He began to cry. It was terrifying.

  “Please, Bill,” I pleaded. “Don’t cry. I swear nothing’s happened.” I wished I could explain to him that I hadn’t had the slightest twinge of sexual desire or the least hope of consummation in the last seven days.

  “You swear,” he growled, weeping. “You swear. They all swear.” With a surprisingly swift movement he bent and grabbed my arm and yanked at it. “Give me back that goddamn watch, you son of a bitch.”

  “Of course,” I said, with considerable dignity. I unclasped it and gave it to him. He glared down at it, then strode over to the window, opened it, and hurled the watch out into the night. I took advantage of his trip to get up and balance on my crutches. He wheeled and came back to me, very close to me. I could smell the whiskey on his breath. “I ought to hammer you into the deck. Only I don’t hit cripples.” He kicked my cast, not very hard, but enough to make me teeter. “I don’t know what the fuck you were doing in here and I don’t want to know. But if you’re not out of this hotel and out of this town by tomorrow morning, I’m going to have you thrown out bodily. When the Swiss police get through with you, you’ll be sorry you ever saw a mountain.” He swooped down again and grabbed my single shoe from the floor and swept across the room with it and threw it out the window after the watch. It was the weirdest act of revenge I’d ever heard of. He was still weeping. There was no doubt about the fact that, appearances to the contrary (all that telephoning in the morning and all that bridge), he was linked with a high and unusual passion, for a man his age and temperament, to his wife.

  He was seated, like a great tragic bear, his head bent into his hands, sobbing, as I left the room on my crutches.

  11

  THE NEXT MORNING, EARLY, I was on the train to Davos. Davos is a ski resort some two hours away from St. Moritz, famous for long runs that I had no intention of exploring. I had begun to hate winter and the sight of ruddy, happy faces, the sound of boots on snow, the tinkle of sleigh bells, the bright colors of ski caps. I yearned for the comfort of soft Southern weather, a climate where decisions could be put off until tomorrow. Before I bought my ticket at the railroad station, itself a loathsomely picturesque structure on the valley floor, I had played with the idea of surrender, of heading, for Italy, Tunisia, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, in one last destructive splurge. But the first train into the station was going in the direction of Davos. I had taken it as an omen and, helped by a porter, had clambered aboard. I was doomed for the winter to cold country.

  The train wound its way through some of the most magnificent mountain scenery in the world, soaring peaks, dramatic gorges, high spidery bridges across foaming streams. The sun shone brightly over it all in a clear blue sky. I appreciated none of it.


  When I reached Davos I got into a taxi and went directly to the hospital and had the cast taken off my leg, resisting all attempts by two doctors to have me X-rayed. “Just when and where, sir,” one of the doctors asked, as he saw me hop jauntily off the table, “was this cast put on?”

  “Yesterday,” I said. “In St. Moritz.”

  “Ah,” he said, “St. Moritz.” He and the other doctor exchanged significant looks. Obviously they would never choose St. Moritz for medical attention.

  The younger of the two doctors accompanied me to the cashier’s desk at the door to make sure I paid for the operation. One hundred Swiss francs. A bargain. The doctor watched me puzzledly as I opened the big bag that I had left at the entrance and took out a sock and a shoe and put them on. As I went out the door, carrying my bags, I was sure I heard him say, “Amerikanish,” to the cashier, as though that explained all eccentricities.

  There was a taxi at the door, discharging a child in a cast. I was in the zone of broken bones. It suited the mood I was in. I got into the taxi and, after a short struggle with the German language, managed to make the driver understand that I wanted to be taken to a reasonably priced hotel. Driving through the town, we passed one hotel after another, with large individual balconies for each room, which at other times had been used to air the invalids who had made prewar Davos the tuberculosis capital of the world. Now, the institutions had all been renamed sport hotels, but in my present circumstances all I could think of as we drove past these endless empty balconies was the vanished thousands of bundled figures, lying in rows in the cold sunlight, coughing blood.

  The chauffeur of the taxi drove me to a small place, owned by his brother-in-law, with a good view of the railroad tracks. The brother-in-law spoke English and our negotiations were amiable. The price of a single room with a bath down the hall was not exactly amiable, but after the ravages of the Palace it was friendly.

  The narrow bed was not covered in silk and the room was so small that there was no place in it for my big bag. The owner explained that, after I unpacked, I could leave it out in the hall, with whatever clothes would not fit into the tiny closet and the minute dresser. It would be safe, he said; there were no thieves in Switzerland. I did not laugh.

  I unpacked haphazardly, cramming the stranger’s suits into the closet. I left the tuxedo in the bag. I had worn it several times in St. Moritz, when necessary, and the memories associated with it were not of a nature to induce nostalgia. If a thief finally showed up in Switzerland and happened to take a liking to it, he would be welcome to it.

  I took a hot bath, scrubbing the shaved leg that had been in the cast. The leg had begun to itch. Back in my room, I put on a pair of the shorts I had found in the bag. They were made of silk and were pale blue and I had to fold them over at the top to keep them on me, but I had refused to send any laundry out at the Palace, and the few pieces of clothing I had had in my small bag all needed washing. The jacket I had worn across the ocean and in Zurich and St. Moritz, when I hadn’t worn the tuxedo, was crumpled. I hesitated for a moment, then picked the houndstooth jacket off the hanger and put it on, hoping nobody I knew would chance to be in Davos to see it on me. I put my wallet, containing all that was left of my fortune, into the inside breast pocket. There was a small crinkling sound as I did so. I reached down and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. It was rose colored and perfumed and was covered with a woman’s handwriting.

  My hands began to shake and I sat down heavily on the bed and began to read.

  There was no address or date on the luxuriously tinted sheet of paper.

  “Love,” the letter began, “Oh, dear! I hope you won’t be too frantically disappointed. I can’t make it to St. Moritz this year. …” I felt a tremor go through my body as I read this, as though an avalanche had dropped down the side of one of the surrounding peaks and shaken the foundations of the city. “Poor old Jock fell off his trusty steed hacking home from a hunt three days ago and broke his hip and has been in agony ever since. The local witch doctor, whose practice dates back to the Crimean War, just made pitiful little cries when asked for a diagnosis, so we’ve moved Jock down to London. The surgeons here are debating whether or not to operate and don’t seem to be able to make up their minds and meanwhile the poor old darling just lies there groaning on his bed of pain. Naturally, dear little wifey can’t go swinging off to the Alps while the drama is so hideously fresh. So I’m back and forth to the hospital, carrying flowers and gin and soothing the fevered brow and telling him he’ll be able to hunt again next year, which, as you know, is his chief and practically single occupation in life.

  “However, all is not lost. I have promised to visit my sweet old Aunt Amy in Florence, arriving on Feb Quatorze. The situation should have subsided by then and I’m sure dear old Jock will insist I go. Aunt Amy has a house full of guests, so I’ll be staying at the Excelsior. Which is just as well. Or even better. I’ll look for your beaming, welcoming face in the bar. Longingly, L.”

  I read the letter again, getting a clear and not very flattering impression of the lady who had written it. I considered it an affectation on her part not to put an address or a date on her letter, writing Quatorze instead of the honest English fourteen and signing it only with her initial. I tried to picture what she probably looked like. A cold, fashionable English beauty between thirty and forty, with lofty airs, and a manner that owed a great deal to the works of Sir Noel Coward and Michael Arlen. But whatever she looked like and however she behaved, I would be at the Hotel Excelsior in Florence to greet her, along with her paramour, on February fourteenth. St. Valentine’s Day, I remembered, anniversary for lovers and massacre.

  I tortured myself briefly with the thought that I might have brushed shoulders with the adulterer in the dining room of the Palace Hotel or on the slopes of St. Moritz and even thought for a moment of returning there. The idea of Madam L.’s friend squandering my money undisturbed in St. Moritz for another full week was harrowing. But if I hadn’t found him before, there was no reason to suppose that I could find him now. The only clue to his identity in the letter was that he was probably not married or at least was not accompanied by a wife on this trip to Europe, that he could count in French, at least up to fourteen, and that in the presence of his partner in sin he would be expected to have a beaming and welcoming face. It was information that was of no practical value at the moment. I would have to be patient and wait seven days.

  I left Davos, with its regiments of coughing ghosts, happy to be able to get out of the regions of snow. The train from Zurich to Florence passed through Milan, and I got off and spent the night there, using my time to go see The Last Supper, fading sadly into the past on its stone wall in the ruined church. Leonardo da Vinci helped me feel that there was an escape possible from comedy. Milan was covered in fog and I soaked myself in healing melancholy.

  I had one moment of uneasiness, when I was followed through the vaulted gallery which presides over the center of Milan by a swarthy youngish man in a long overcoat, who waited across from the door of a café I went into for an espresso. I had felt safe, although uncomfortable, in Switzerland, but here I couldn’t help remembering what I had read about the Italian connections to organized crime in America. I ordered another espresso and drank it slowly, but the man didn’t budge. I couldn’t wait in the café forever, so I paid and left the place, walking rapidly.

  The man in the long overcoat crossed the arcade swiftly and cut me off. He grabbed my elbow. He had one walleye, which somehow made him seem extremely menacing, and the grip on my elbow was like a steel clamp.

  “Hey, boss,” he said, walking along with me. “What’s a da hurry?”

  “I’m late for an appointment.” I tried to tug away, but it was useless.

  He put his other hand in his pocket and I feared the worst.

  “Wanna buy beautiful piece genuine jewelry?” he said. “Big bargain.” He let go of me then and produced something that clinked and was wrapped in tissue paper. “B
eautiful gift for lady.” He pulled back the tissue paper and I saw a gold chain.

  “I have no lady,” I said, beginning to walk again.

  “Interesting piece.” Now he was pleading. “You would pay twice, three times, in America.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  He sighed, and I left him rewrapping the chain and putting it back in his pocket.

  As I walked away, I realized that any hope I might have had of fading unnoticed into the populations of Europe was derisive. Wherever I went I would be picked out, by anyone who had the slightest interest in me, as an American. I considered growing a beard.

  The next day, feeling that perhaps I would never pass this way again, I took the rapido to Venice, a city that I believed, rightly it turned out, would be even sadder at that season than Milan. The misty canals, the sad hooting of boat horns, the black water and mossy pilings in the gray Adriatic winter light did much to restore the sense of my own dignity and erase the memory of the athletic frivolity of St. Moritz. I read, with satisfaction, that Venice was sinking into the sea. I lingered on, in a cheap pensione, visiting churches, drinking a light white wine called Soave in bare cafés along the sides of the Piazza San Marco and watching Italians, an occupation that I found I enjoyed. I avoided Harry’s Bar, which I feared would contain a hard core of Americans, even at that season. There was only one American I wanted to see and I had no reason to believe he would be found in Venice that week.

  The little excursion had done me a great deal of good. My nerves, which had been shattered in Switzerland, now seemed dependable. I arrived at the Hotel Excelsior in Florence on the evening of the thirteenth of February confident that I would handle myself capably when the moment of confrontation arrived.

  After an excellent dinner I wandered through the streets of Florence, stood awhile before the monumental copy of Michelangelo’s statue of David in the Piazza dei Signoria, musing on the nature of heroism and the defeat of villainy. Florence, with its history of plots and vendettas, its Guelphs and Ghibellines, was a fitting city in which to meet my enemy.