Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “That family—the Jordaches—the old man a suicide, the brother murdered, and sainted Rudolph just about beaten to death in his own apartment. That would have been something for your mother, if he’d have knocked it off. Three for three. Two brothers and a husband. What a percentage! And the kid—Wesley—did I write you he came to Chicago and looked me up? He wanted me to tell him what I knew about his father—he’s haunted by his father—the ramparts of Elsinore, for Christ’s sake—I guess you can’t blame him for that—but he looks like a zombie, his eyes are scary—God knows how he’s going to end up. I never even met his father, but I tried to pretend that I’d heard he was a fine fellow and I laid it on thick and the kid just stood up in the middle of a sentence and said, ‘Thank you, sir. I’m afraid we’re wasting each other’s time.’

  “You’re half Jordache—maybe more than half—if ever a lady had dominant genes it was Gretchen Jordache—so you be careful, don’t you ever trust to inherited luck, because you don’t have it, on either side of the family tree.…

  “I’ll tell you what—you get through with the goddamn army and you come out to Chicago to work with me and I’ll swear never to touch a drop of liquor again in my whole life. I know you love me—we’re grown men, we can use the proper words—and you’re being offered a chance that very few sons get—you can save your father’s life. You don’t have to say anything now, but when I get back to Chicago I want to see a letter from you waiting for me telling me when you’re arriving in town. I’ll be there in a week or so. I have to leave for Strasbourg tomorrow. There’s a man there I have to see. Delicate negotiations for an old account of mine. A chemical company. I have to sound out this Frenchman to see if he’ll take a fee, an honorarium—not to mince words, a bribe, for swinging my client’s business to his company. I won’t tell you how much money is involved. But you’d gasp if I did tell you. And I get my cut if I deliver. It’s not the jolliest way to earn a living, but it was the only way I could borrow enough money to come over here to see you. Remember what I said about the consumer society.

  “And now it’s late and your girl is undoubtedly waiting for you and I’m deadbeat tired. If you give one little goddamn for the rest of your father’s life, that letter will be waiting for me in Chicago when I get there. And that’s blackmail and don’t think I don’t know it. One last thing. The dinner’s on me.”

  When he got back home after putting his father in a taxi and walking slowly through the wet streets of Brussels, with little aureoles of foggy light around the lampposts, he sat down at his desk and stared at his typewriter.

  Hopeless, hopeless, he thought. Poor, hopeless, seedy, fantasizing, beloved man. And I never did get the chance to tell him I’d like to buy him a new suit.

  When he finally went to bed, it was alone.

  Monika didn’t come in that night.

  She came home before he went to work in the morning, with the package he was to deliver to an address on the me du Gros-Caillou in the 7th arrondissement in Paris when he went to the capital of France with his colonel. The package was comparatively harmless—just ten thousand French francs in old bills and an American Army, .45-caliber automatic pistol, equipped with a silencer.

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  The .45 and the extra clips of ammunition were in his tennis bag as he got out of the taxi at the corner of the Avenue Bosquet and the rue St. Dominique at twenty minutes past three in the afternoon. He had looked at the map of Paris and seen that the rue du Gros-Caillou was a short street that ran between rue St. Dominique and rue de Grenelle, not far from the Ecole Militaire. The ten thousand francs were folded in an envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket.

  He was early. Monika had told him he would be expected at three-thirty. Under his breath he repeated the address she had made him memorize. He strolled, peering in at the shop windows, looking, he hoped, like an idle American tourist with a few minutes to spare before meeting his partners for their tennis game. He was still about thirty yards from the arched gate that led into the street, when a police car, its siren wailing, passed him, going in the wrong direction, up the rue St. Dominique and stopped, blocking the rue du Gros-Caillou. Five policemen jumped out, pistols in their hands, and ran into the rue du Gros-Caillou. Billy quickened his pace, passed the opening of the street. He looked through the arch and saw the policemen running toward a building in front of which there were three other policemen who had come from the other end of the street. He heard shouting and saw the first three policemen plunge through the doorway. A moment later there was the sound of shots.

  He turned and went back, making himself walk slowly, toward the Avenue Bosquet. It was not a cold day, but he was shivering and sweating at the same time.

  There was a bank on the corner and he went into it. Anything to get off the street. There was a girl sitting at a desk at the entrance and he went up to her and said he wanted to rent a safety-deposit box. He had difficulty getting out the French words, “Coffre-fort.” The girl stood up and led him to a counter, where a clerk asked him for his identification. He showed his passport and the clerk filled out some forms. When the clerk asked him for his address he thought for a moment, then gave the name of the hotel he and Monika had stayed at when they were in Paris together. He was staying at another hotel this time. He signed two cards. His signature looked strange to him. He paid a year’s fee in advance. Then the clerk led him down into the vault, where he gave the key to the box to the guardian at the desk. The guardian led him to a row of boxes in the rear of the vault, opened one of the locks with Billy’s key and the second lock with his own master key, then went back to his desk, leaving Billy alone. Billy opened the tennis bag and put the automatic, the extra clips and the envelope with the ten thousand francs in it into the box. He closed the door of the box and called for the guardian. The guardian came back and turned the two keys and gave Billy his.

  Billy went out of the vault and upstairs. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him and he went out onto the avenue. He heard no more shots, saw no more police. His father, it had turned out, had been needlessly pessimistic when he had warned him not to trust in inherited luck. He had just had ten minutes of the greatest luck of his or anybody’s life.

  He hailed a cruising taxi and gave the driver the address of his hotel off the Champs Elysées.

  When he got to the hotel, he asked if there were any messages for him. There were none. He went up to his room and picked up the phone and gave the girl at the switchboard the number of his apartment in Brussels. After a few minutes his telephone rang and the girl at the switchboard said there was no answer.

  The Colonel had given him the afternoon and evening off and he stayed in his room, calling the number in Brussels every half hour until midnight, when the switchboard closed down. But the number never answered.

  He tried to sleep, but every time he dozed off, he woke with a start, sweating.

  At six in the morning, he tried the number in Brussels again, but there still was no answer.

  He went out and got the morning papers, Le Figaro and the Herald Tribune. Over coffee and a croissant at a café on the Champs Elysées, he read the stories. They were not prominently featured in either of the papers. A suspected trafficker in drugs had been shot and killed while resisting arrest in the 7th arrondissement. The police were still trying to establish his identity.

  They are playing it cosy, Billy thought, as he read the stories—they’re not giving away what they know.

  When he went back to the hotel, he tried the apartment in Brussels again. There was no answer.

  He got back to Brussels two days later. The apartment was empty and everything that had belonged to Monika was gone. There was no note anywhere.

  When the Colonel asked him some weeks later if he was going to re-enlist, he said, “No, sir, I’ve decided against it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Coming in out of the bright seashore sunlight Wesley squinted in the shadow of the hallway as he followed his uncle into the house.
A woman was sitting at a table laid for two in front of a big plate-glass window that overlooked the dunes and the Atlantic Ocean. Her face was still a blur against the brilliance of the window, and for a moment he was sure it was his uncle’s ex-wife and he was sorry he had come. He hadn’t seen her since the day of his father’s death and he had spent a good deal of his time since then in trying to forget her. But then his eyes became accustomed to the light and he saw it was not Jean Jordache, but a tall woman with long, reddish-brown hair. Rudolph introduced her.

  The woman smiled at him pleasantly and got up and went into the kitchen and came in with a tray with a glass and some plates and some silver on it and set a place for him. The smell from the big crockery pot on the table, mixed with the warm aroma of newly baked biscuits, was tantalizing. He had been on the road, hitchhiking, since seven o’clock in the morning and had walked the mile or two from the main road to the beach and had not had lunch. He had to swallow to hide the fact that his mouth was watering.

  The woman was in a bathing suit and was deeply tanned and did not remind him of Mrs. Wertham. The clam chowder was delicious and he tried not to eat too fast. Alice fed him adequately, but she was so busy at the Time office that her meals were made up of odds and ends she picked up as she rushed home from work. The satisfactory memory of the feasts Kate used to prepare on the Clothilde was being engulfed in floods of tuna salad and cold roast beef sandwiches. He was grateful to Alice for her hospitality and he knew she worked hard both at the office and at her apartment, where she tapped away at her typewriter till all hours of the night, but her interests were not in the kitchen, and he couldn’t help thinking that she had better succeed with her writing as she would never earn any honors as a cook.

  When he finished the chowder, accompanied by four biscuits, dripping with butter, Mrs. Morison insisted upon filling his bowl again and getting some more hot biscuits out of the oven.

  “I guess I came at the right time,” Wesley said, grinning, as he finished the second bowl.

  His uncle didn’t ask him any important questions over lunch, just how he had come out to Bridgehampton and how he had found the house. Wesley did not volunteer any information. He would answer questions when they were alone.

  “We hadn’t planned on any dessert,” Mrs. Morison said, “but I think we can rustle up something from the icebox for a young member of the family. I have a son myself and I know about youthful appetites. I believe there’s some blueberry pie left over from last night and I know there’s some ice cream in the freezer.”

  Wesley decided that he liked the woman and wondered if his uncle would have been a different man if he had met her and married her long ago, before the other one.

  After lunch the woman said she had to be going and put on a beach robe. Rudolph walked out with her to her car, leaving Wesley alone in the house.

  “God, he’s a handsome boy,” Helen said as she got into her car.

  “Gretchen says he looks like a young prince in a Florentine painting,” Rudolph said. “She wants to try him out for a part in her movie.”

  “What does he say?”

  “I haven’t asked him yet,” Rudolph said. “That’s all we need in our family—a movie actor.”

  “He did come at the wrong time, though,” Helen said.

  “You’re right. The lunch was aphrodisiacal, as promised.”

  Helen laughed. “There’s always tomorrow,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with tonight?”

  “Busy,” she said. “Undermining the Republican Party. Anyway, I imagine the boy wants to have a long talk with his uncle. He didn’t come all the way out here just for lunch.” She leaned over and kissed him and then started her car. He watched thoughtfully as she drove off, a woman with a purpose. He wondered if he ever again would have a purpose, sighed and went back into the house.

  Wesley was standing in front of the big window, staring out to sea. “If ever I settle down,” Wesley said, “I would like it to be in a place like this—with a whole ocean in front of me.”

  “I was lucky to find this place,” Rudolph said.

  “Yeah,” Wesley said. “Lucky. Boy, that was some meal. She’s a nice lady, isn’t she?”

  “Very nice,” Rudolph said. The description of his relations with Helen Morison and an appraisal of her qualities could wait until later. “Would you like to go for a swim? People keep leaving bathing trunks around and I guess I could find a pair that would fit you.” He knew he was looking for ways to postpone whatever problem Wesley had brought along to present to him. “The water’s pretty cold, but you’ll have the whole ocean to yourself.”

  “That’d be great,” Wesley said. “A swim.”

  They went out onto the deck and down the steps under it to the cubicle where four or five pairs of trunks were hanging. Rudolph left Wesley to undress and went out onto the beach.

  When Wesley came out in the swimming trunks, with a towel slung around his neck, Rudolph walked with him to the edge of the water. Wesley dropped the towel to the sand and hesitated a moment before going in. He had sloping powerful shoulders, an athlete’s flat belly and long muscled legs. His face, Rudolph thought, was a refined version of his father’s face, but the body, although a little taller, was his father’s body. Maybe, Rudolph thought, as the boy suddenly started running toward the breakers, the water foaming around him, maybe Gretchen is right about him. He watched the boy plunge into a wave, then begin swimming easily through the waves and into the swell. Enid was still afraid of the ocean and only paddled cautiously near the shore. He had not tried to force her to be more enterprising. He was not going to be one of those fathers who, disappointed in not having a son, tried to make a daughter into one. He had known one or two of those overmuscled ladies and he knew that whatever they said about their fathers, they cursed them in their hearts.

  Wesley kept going farther and farther out, until his head was just a small dot in the glittering blue distance. Rudolph began to worry. Was it possible that the boy had come out to see him for the sole purpose of drowning himself in his presence? His old uneasiness with his nephew, the feeling that at any moment the boy was likely to do or say something unpredictable, dangerous or at least embarrassing came back to him. If he only could have more than a few hours at a time with the boy, perhaps he could get over the feeling that the boy was constantly judging him, measuring him against some private, impossible scale of values. He had to restrain himself from waving and calling to the boy to come in. Abruptly, he turned and went back into the house.

  Five hundred yards out, Wesley floated on his back, enjoying the sensual feeling of going gently up and down with the swells. He daydreamed, looking up at the unclouded blue sky, that Alice was there with him, that they sank under the surface, kissing, their bodies weightless and laced in the rolling water, to rise again to stare at each other’s faces, wet with the ocean’s tingle, their love announced on land and sea. The truth was that since the one kiss when he made her cry, they had not touched each other, and a new tension, a shy drawing back on both their parts, had changed their relationship, and not for the better.

  But now, rising and falling in the gentle sea, he thought of Alice with a longing he wouldn’t dare confess to her—or to anybody else.

  His father had told him that once when he was a young man he had made love to a girl while they were taking a bath together and that it had been an amazing experience. If it was amazing in a bathtub, what would it be like in the Atlantic Ocean?

  If it had been his father on the beach he wouldn’t have dared go out so far because his father would have bawled the bejesus out of him for showing off and taking a chance like that, all alone, no matter how good a swimmer he was. “Take chances,” his father had said to him, “only when they mean something. Don’t do anything just for show or to prove to yourself how all around marvelous you are.”

  He began to feel cold and turned and began swimming to shore. The tide was running out and he had to swim as hard as he could to
get to where the waves were breaking. He rode in on a wave, tumbling in the curl of foam. He pulled himself to his feet on the smooth sand and got up to the beach. He stood there, drying his face and torso with the towel, looking out at the ocean going off to the horizon, with not a ship in sight. Whatever I finally do, he thought, I am going to end up with the sea.

  Dry and dressed, after a shower in the cubicle, he went up to the deck and into the house, carrying his jacket over his shoulder. His uncle was talking on the phone in the living room. “… if he hasn’t swum all the way to Portugal by now,” he heard his uncle saying. His uncle smiled at him. “Wait a minute,” Rudolph said into the phone. “He’s just walked in. Looking a little waterlogged.” He extended the phone toward Wesley. “It’s your Aunt Gretchen,” he said. “She’d like to say hello.”

  Wesley took the phone. “How are you?” he said.

  “Busy,” said Gretchen. “I’m glad you finally turned up. I’ve been trying to reach you for months. Where’ve you been?”

  “Here and there,” Wesley said.

  “Listen, Wesley,” Gretchen said, “Rudolph’s driving into town early tomorrow and meeting me. Can you come with him? I’m dying to see you. He’ll explain why.”

  “Well …” Wesley said. “He hasn’t asked me to stay all night.”

  “Consider yourself asked,” Rudolph said.

  “Okay,” Wesley said. “I’ll try to make it.”

  “Don’t just try,” Gretchen said. “Make it. You won’t be sorry.”

  “Do you want to talk to Rudolph again?”

  “No time,” Gretchen said. “Good-bye, honey.”

  Wesley put down the phone. “You sure I’m not fouling up your evening?” he asked Rudolph.

  “On the contrary,” Rudolph said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “She said you’d explain something to me,” Wesley said. “Is there anything wrong?”

  “No. Sit down. Let’s make ourselves comfortable.”