by Irwin Shaw
Other times.…
“Now,” she said, “I’ll call you a taxi.” They went into the salon and she dialed a number, spoke quickly for a moment, waited a little while, said, “Très bien,” hung up. “The taxi will be here in five minutes,” she said. Before she opened the front door for him they kissed, a long, grateful, healing kiss. “Good night, Rodolfo,” she said. She smiled, a smile he knew he would remember for a long time.
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The taxi was waiting for him when he got down to the street, its diesel motor making it sound like a launch waiting to put out to sea. Voyages.
“L’hôtel Negresco,” Rudolph said as he got in. When the taxi started, he looked back at the house. It was imperative for him to be able to find it again, to recognize it in his dreams. When they got to the Negresco he made sure he was not run down as he crossed to where his car was parked. Then, at the wheel of his rented car, he drove slowly and very carefully on the deserted road along the sea to Antibes.
When he reached the port he slowed down even more, then abruptly swung the car into the parking lot and got out and walked along the quay to where the Clothilde was berthed in the silent harbor. There were no lights to be seen on the Clothilde. He didn’t want to wake Wesley or Bunny. He took off his shoes and climbed down from the deck into the dory lying alongside, slipped the line, sat amidships and noiselessly put the oars through the locks. He rowed almost soundlessly away from the ship toward the middle of the harbor, then, pulling more strongly, toward the harbor entrance, the tarry smell of the water strong in his nostrils, mixed with the flowery fragrance from shore.
He had acted almost automatically, not asking himself why he was doing this. The pull of the oars against his shoulders and arms gave him a sober pleasure, and the sigh of the small bow wave against the sides of the dory seemed a fitting music with which to end the night.
The city of Antibes, looming shadows, with a light here and there, receded slowly as he headed toward the red and green lights that marked the channel into the sea. The rhythm of his body as he bent forward, then leaned back, satisfied him. How many times had these same oars moved in the hands of his brother. His own hands were soft against the smooth wood, polished by the strong hands of his brother. The thought that perhaps in the morning his palms would be blistered pleased him.
Being alone on the dark surface of the water was a benediction to him and the blinking lights of the harbor entrance comforted him, with their promise of safe anchorages. Grief was possible here, but also hope. “Thomas, Thomas,” he said softly as he went out into the sea and felt its gentle swell lift the dory. He remembered, as he rowed, all the times they had failed each other, and the end, when they had forgotten the failures or at least forgiven them.
He felt tireless and serene, alone in the dark night, but then he heard the coughing of a small fishing boat putting out to sea behind him, one small acetylene lamp at its bow. The fishing boat passed near him and he could see two men in it staring curiously at him. He was conscious of how strange it must look to them, a man in a dark business suit, alone, headed out to sea at that hour. He kept on rowing until they were out of sight, then let the oars dangle and stared up at the starlit sky.
He thought of his father, that enraged and pitiful old man, who had also rowed in darkness, who had picked a night of storm for his last voyage. Suicide had been possible for his father, who had found the peace in death he had never achieved in life. It was not possible for him. He was a different man, with different claims upon him. He took one long, deep breath, then turned the dory around and rowed back to the Clothilde, his hands burning.
Quietly, he tied up to the Clothilde’s stern, climbed the ladder and went ashore. He put on his shoes, a rite observed, a ceremony celebrated, and got into his car and started the engine.
It was past three in the morning when he got to the hotel. The lobby was deserted, the night concierge yawning behind the desk. He asked for his key and was turning toward the elevator when the concierge called after him. “Oh, Mr. Jordache. Mrs. Burke left a message for you. You are to call her whenever you get in. She said it was urgent.”
“Thank you,” Rudolph said wearily. Whatever it was, Gretchen would have to wait until morning.
“Mrs. Burke told me to call her when you got in. No matter what time.” She had guessed he would try to avoid her, had taken steps to make sure he couldn’t.
“I see,” said Rudolph. He sighed. “Call her, please. Tell her I’ll come to her room as soon as I look in on my wife.” He should have stayed the night in Nice. Or rowed till dawn. Faced everything in daylight.
“One more thing,” said the concierge. “There was a gentleman here asking for you. A Mr. Hubbell. He said he was from Time Magazine. He used the telex.”
“If he comes here and asks for me again, tell him I’m not in.”
“I understand. Bonne nuit, monsieur.”
Rudolph rang for the elevator. He had planned to telephone Jeanne, say good night to her, try to tell her what she had done for him, listen to the husky voice, with its rough, sensual shading, fall off to sleep with the memory of the night to take the weight from his dreams. He could forget that now. He shuffled into the elevator, feeling old, got off at his floor, opened the door to the suite as silently as he could. The lights were on, both in the salon and in the bedroom in which Jean slept. Since the murder she refused to sleep in the dark. As he approached her doorway she called out, “Rudolph?”
“Yes, dear.” He sighed. He had hoped she was asleep. He went into her room. She was sitting up in bed, staring at him. Automatically he looked for a glass or a bottle. There was no glass or bottle and he could tell from her face she hadn’t been drinking. She looks old, he thought, old. The drawn face, the dull eyes over the lacy nightgown made her look like a malicious sketch of the woman she would be forty years from now.
“What time is it?” she asked harshly.
“After three. You’d better go to sleep.”
“After three. The consulate in Nice keeps odd hours, doesn’t it?”
“I took the night off,” he said.
“From what?”
“From everything,” he said.
“From me,” she said bitterly. “That’s become quite a habit, hasn’t it? A way of life with you, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let’s discuss it in the morning, shall we?” he said.
She sniffed. “You stink of perfume,” she said. “Shall we discuss that in the morning, too?”
“If you wish,” he said. “Good night.”
He started out of the room. “Leave the door open,” she called. “I have to keep all avenues of escape open.”
He left the door open. He wished he could pity her.
He went into his bedroom through the salon, closing his own door behind him. Then he unlocked the door that led from his room into the corridor and went out. He didn’t want to have to explain to Jean that he had to see Gretchen about something that his sister thought was urgent.
Gretchen’s room was down the corridor. He went past the pairs of shoes left out by the guests to be shined while they slept. Europe was on the brink of Communism, he thought, but shoes were still shined by future commissars, budding Trotskies, between midnight and six each morning.
He knocked on Gretchen’s door. She opened it immediately, as though she had been standing there, alerted by the concierge’s call, as though she couldn’t bear to wait the extra second or two it would have taken her to cross the room and confront her brother. She was in a terry cloth bathrobe, light blue, the blue almost identical with the blue of the dress Jeanne had been wearing in the café. With her small pale face, dark hair and strong, graceful body, she bore a striking resemblance to Jeanne, he thought. Echoes everywhere. The idea hadn’t occurred to him before.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ve been so worried. God, where’ve you been?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “Can’t it wait till morning?”
“It can’
t wait until morning,” she said, closing the door. She sniffed. “You smell heavenly, Brother,” she said sarcastically. “And you look as though you’ve just been laid.”
“I’m a gentleman,” Rudolph said, trying to make light of the accusation. “Gentlemen don’t discuss matters like that.”
“Ladies do,” she said. She had her vulgar side, Gretchen.
“Let’s drop it, please,” he said. “I need some sleep. What’s so damned urgent?”
Gretchen fell back into a big armchair, sprawling, as though she were too tired to stand anymore. “Bunny Dwyer called an hour ago,” she said flatly. “Wesley’s in jail.”
“What?”
“Wesley’s in jail in Cannes. He got into a fight in a bar and nearly killed a man with a beer bottle. He hit a cop and the police had to subdue him. Is that urgent enough for you, Brother?”
CHAPTER 4
FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—
THERE’VE BEEN RIOTS IN BRUSSELS TODAY AND BOMBS EXPLODED. IT’S ALL ABOUT WHETHER KIDS FROM FLEMISH-SPEAKING FAMILIES SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE OR IN FRENCH AND HAVING THE STREET SIGNS IN BOTH LANGUAGES. AND THE BLACKS IN THE UNITS HERE ARE TALKING ABOUT MUTINY IF THEY AREN’T ALLOWED TO HAVE AFROS. PEOPLE ARE READY TO TEAR EACH OTHER APART ABOUT “ANYTHING.” WHICH, SAD TO RELATE, IS WHY I’M IN UNIFORM ALTHOUGH I HAVEN’T THE FAINTEST DESIRE TO DO THE LEAST BIT OF HARM TO ANYBODY AND AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED ANYBODY WHO WANTS TO CAN SPEAK FLEMISH OR BASQUE OR SERBO-CROAT OR SANSKRIT AND ALL I’D DO WOULD BE TO SAY, IT SOUNDS GREAT TO ME.
IS THERE SOMETHING LACKING IN MY CHARACTER?
I SUPPOSE SO. IF YOU’RE STRONG YOU WANT TO DOMINATE EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY AROUND YOU. IT’S HARD TO DOMINATE PEOPLE IF THEY DON’T SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE AND BEING STRONG YOU REACT ANGRILY, LIKE AMERICAN TOURISTS IN RESTAURANTS IN EUROPE WHO BEGIN TO SHOUT WHEN A WAITER CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS THEY’RE ORDERING, IN POLITICAL TERMS THIS IS TRANSLATED INTO RIOT POLICE AND TEAR GAS.
MONIKA SPEAKS GERMAN, ENGLISH, FRENCH, FLEMISH AND SPANISH AND SHE SAYS SHE CAN READ GAELIC. AS FAR AS I CAN TELL SHE IS AS PACIFIC AS MYSELF BUT BECAUSE OF HER JOB AS TRANSLATOR FOR NATO SHE GETS TO HURL THE MOST AWESOME THREATS, COMPOSED BY BELLIGERENT OLD MEN, AT OTHER BELLIGERENT OLD MEN IN THE OPPOSITE WING OF THE GREAT LUNATIC ASYLUM WE ALL INHABIT.
I SPENT THE DAY IN BED WITH HER.
WE DO THAT OCCASIONALLY.
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Dwyer was waiting outside the Cannes préfecture when Rudolph’s taxi drove up to it. The taxi, Rudolph had decided, was a wiser choice than his own car. He didn’t want to go charging into a French police station to demand his nephew’s freedom, only to be forced to take a breathalator test. Even in his heavy, dark blue seaman’s sweater, Dwyer was shivering as he leaned against the wall and his face was pale, greenish, in the watery light from the préfecture’s lamps. Rudolph looked at his watch as he got out of the taxi. Past 4:00 A.M. The streets of Cannes were deserted, all errands but his completed for the night or postponed until morning.
“God,” Dwyer said, “I’m glad to see you. What a night! Shit, what a night.”
“Where is he?” Rudolph asked, trying to keep his voice calm to take the edge off the hysteria that was showing in Dwyer’s face, in the way he was rubbing the knuckles of one hand against his other palm.
“Inside somewhere. In a cell, I guess. They wouldn’t let me see him. I can’t go in there. They said they’d throw me into the can, too, if I showed my face in there once more. French police,” he said bitterly. “You might as well talk to Hitler.”
“How is he?” Rudolph asked. Looking at Dwyer, hunched against the cold night air, he felt small shivers run down his spine, too. He was dressed for the day’s warmth, had neglected to grab a coat at the hotel.
“I don’t know how he is now,” Dwyer said. “He wasn’t too bad when they dragged him in. But he hit a cop and God knows what they’ve done to him since they got him in there.”
Rudolph wished that there was a café open, a lighted place with at least the semblance of warmth. But the street stretched away on both sides, narrow and dark except for the weak glow of lampposts. “All right, Bunny,” he said soothingly. “I’m here. I’ll see what I can do. But you have to fill me in. What happened?”
“I took him out to dinner in Antibes,” Bunny said. He said it defensively, as though Rudolph was accusing him, as though his innocence had to be claimed and confirmed before anything else was said or done. “I couldn’t leave the kid alone on a night like this, could I?”
“Of course not.”
“We drank some wine. Wesley drank wine with all of us, in front of his father, his father would pour it out of the bottle for him as though he was a grown-up, you forget that he’s just a kid … You know, in France …” His voice trailed off, as though the shared bottle of wine between the boy and himself in the restaurant in Antibes was another unjust charge against him.
“I know,” Rudolph said, trying not to sound impatient. “Then what?”
“Then the kid wanted a brandy. Two brandies. I thought, why not? After all, the day you bury your father … Even if he got drunk, we were right near the port, I could get him back to the ship with no trouble. Only he wouldn’t go back to the ship. All of a sudden he got up from the table and he said, ‘I’m going to Cannes.’ ‘What the hell do you want to go to Cannes for, this time of night?’ I said. ‘I’m going to visit a nightclub,’ he said. His exact words. Visit. ‘I’m going to visit the Porte Rose.’ God knows what the brandy, the day, everything, was doing to that kid’s head. I tried to reason with him, I swear to God I did. ‘Fuck you, Bunny,’ he said. He never swore at me before. He had a funny dead look on his face. You couldn’t budge him with a bulldozer. ‘Nobody’s asking you to come with me,’ he said. ‘Go get your beauty sleep.’ He was half out of the restaurant before I could get to him, grab his arm, at least. I couldn’t let him go to that goddamn place alone, could I?”
“No,” Rudolph said wearily. “You did the right thing.” He wondered if he would have done better or worse in Dwyer’s place. Worse, he thought.
“So we got a taxi and we went to the Porte Rose,” Dwyer rattled on, made garrulous by grief or fear or impotence. “He never said a word in the taxi. Not word one. Just sat there looking out of the window, like a tourist. Who the hell knew what he had in his mind? I’m not a psychologist, I never had kids, who knows what crazy things they think of?” The tone of innocence, not expecting the innocence to be believed or recognized was in the voice again. “So,” Dwyer went on, “I thought, Okay, he’s disturbed. Who isn’t today, a day like this one, he has some crazy notion maybe that he owes it to his old man to go and see the place where it all began. He saw the end, with the ashes floating out to sea, maybe he had to see the beginning, too.”
The beginning, Rudolph thought, thinking of the ferocious brother he had slept with in the same bed over the bakery store, the beginning was not in a nightclub in Cannes. You’d have to go back further than that. A lot further.
“Maybe even it was a good idea, I thought,” Dwyer said. “Anyway, one sure thing, the Yugoslav Tom had the fight with wasn’t going to be there—the police’ve been hunting for him ever since they talked to him the day after the murder and they ain’t found any trace of him yet. And I never saw the guy, anyway, and neither did Wesley, we wouldn’t know him from Adam, even if he was standing along the bar right next to us with a spotlight on him. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for me, but what’s the harm, a couple of drinks and then home to bed and a hangover tomorrow and that’s it?”
“I understand, Bunny,” Rudolph said, shivering. “You couldn’t do anything else, given the circumstances.”
Dwyer nodded vigorously. “Given the circumstances,” he said.
“How did the fight start?” Rudolph asked. Dwyer’s excuses for himself could wait until another day. It was four in the morning and he was cold and Wesley was inside the police station and maybe the cops were working him over. “Was it
Wesley’s fault?”
“Fault? Who ever knows whose fault it is when something like that happens?” Dwyer’s mouth quivered. “We were standing at the bar, not saying anything to each other, maybe after two, maybe three whiskeys, we were on Scotch now, Wesley wanted Scotch—he didn’t seem drunk—that kid must have a head like iron—and there was a big Englishman next to him, and he was drinking beer and talking loud. He was off some ship in the harbor, you could tell he was a seaman, he was saying something about Americans in English to the girl, I guess it wasn’t very complimentary because all of a sudden Wesley turned to him and said, quiet-like, ‘Shut your big trap about Americans, limey.’”
Oh, God, Rudolph thought, what a time and place for patriotism.
“It was something about how the Americans let the English fight their war for them—Wesley wasn’t even born then, what the hell did he care? Christ, his own father would never’ve had a fight in a bar if ten Englishmen said Americans were all yellow pimps and whoremongers. But Wesley was spoiling for a fight. I never saw him fight before—but Tom told me about him and I could see the signs and I grabbed his arm and said, ‘Come on, kid, time to go.’ But the Englishman, Christ, he must’ve weighed two hundred pounds, thirty, thirty-two years old, drinking all that beer, he said, ‘Would you repeat that, please, sonny?’ So, nice and calm, Wesley said, ‘Shut your big trap about Americans, limey.’
“Even then, it could’ve been avoided, because the girl kept tugging at the Englishman’s sleeve and saying, ‘Let’s go home, Arnold.’ But he shook her off and said to Wesley, ‘What ship you off, mate?’ and I could see him reaching, slow, toward the beer bottle on the bar. ‘The Clothilde,’ Wesley said, and I could feel all his muscles tensing up in his arm. The Englishman laughed. ‘You better be looking for another berth, sonny,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe the Clothilde is going to be a popular ship from now on.’ It was the laugh that got Wesley, I think. He reached out sudden and grabbed the beer bottle first and cracked it across the man’s face. The Englishman went down, blood all over him and everybody screaming all around and Wesley started stomping him, with the craziest expression you ever saw on a boy’s face. Where he ever learned to fight like that nobody’ll ever know. Stomping, for Christ’s sake. And laughing, crazy as a bedbug, with me hanging on him to pull him back and making no more impression on him than if I was a mosquito buzzing around his neck.
