Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Provoke what?

  He made himself remain absolutely still in front of the window, not shifting his weight by so much as an ounce, not moving a finger. He had taught himself this little trick of immobility a long time ago, for the times when he was tempted to lash out, to act rashly, to give way to anger or impatience. As a young man he had been violent and passionate. He had been thrown out of two preparatory schools and one college. He had avoided court-martial in the Army only through the unexpected benevolence of a Major he had grossly insulted. He had been a nervy, blind fighter, a quick maker of enemies, intolerant, sometimes brutal with men and women both. He had made himself over, slowly and with pain, because he had been intelligent enough to realize that he was skirting destruction. Or, rather, he had made over his surface, his behavior. He had known what he wanted to be like, what he had to be like to reach the goals he had set for himself. He was clear, at an early age, what those goals were. They included financial security, a reputation for probity and hard work, a loving, honorable marriage and decent children, and, later on, political power and a high federal judgeship. All these things, he knew, would elude him if he did not keep himself sternly in hand at all times. He had forced himself to act slowly, to swallow fury, to present to the world the image of a calm, balanced, judicious man. Even with Ginette he had managed, almost completely, to preserve that image. The cost was high, but until now it had been worth it. At his core, he still knew himself to be violent, sudden, ready for explosion, fatally ready to destroy himself for the satisfaction of a moment’s anger, a moment’s desire. The deliberateness of his movements, the softness of his speech, the formal air of privacy with which he surrounded himself were the calculated means by which he preserved himself. Looking like the safest of men, he felt himself continually in danger. Seemingly even-tempered and rational, he fought a daily battle within himself against rage and irrationality, and lived in dread of the day when the useful, admirable, sham character with which he masked his inner turbulence would crack and vanish.

  Provoke, provoke…

  Beauchurch shrugged. He took one last look at the tall, sensible, well-dressed reflection of himself in the window and turned toward the hotel. By now Ginette and the man had disappeared. Beauchurch covered the few yards to the hotel entrance rapidly, threw away his cigar, and went in.

  Ginette and the man were standing at the concierge’s desk in the lobby. The man had taken his hat off and was turning it slowly in his hands. As Beauchurch came up to them, he heard Ginette saying to the concierge, “Est-ce que Monsieur Beauchurch est rentré?” which was one of the few sentences he could understand in the French language.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” Beauchurch said, smiling, and carefully keeping his face normal. “Can I help you?”

  Ginette turned. “Tom,” she said, “I was hoping you were back.” She kissed his cheek. To Beauchurch she seemed strained and ill-at-ease. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. Claude Mestre. My husband.”

  Beauchurch shook the man’s hand. The fleeting contact gave him an impression of dryness and nerves. Mestre was tall and thin, with a high, domed brow and smooth chestnut hair. He had deep-set, worried, gray eyes and a long straight nose. He was a good-looking man, but his face was pale and seemed tired, as though he were overworked. He smiled politely as he greeted Beauchurch, but there was an obscure appeal buried in the smile.

  “You don’t have to go out again, do you, Tom?” Ginette asked. “We can sit down somewhere and have a drink, can’t we?”

  “Of course,” Beauchurch said.

  “I do not wish to spoil your afternoon,” Mestre said. His accent was strong, but he spoke slowly and clearly, pronouncing every syllable loyally. “You have so little time in Paris.”

  “We have nothing to do until dinner,” Beauchurch said. “I’d love a drink.”

  They went toward the bar, past a long alley where old ladies were taking tea. The bar was a huge hall, dark, almost deserted, with the tarnished gold-leaf and mahogany elegance of a nineteenth-century palace. Ginette squeezed Beau-church’s arm as they went through the door, which Mestre held open for them. Close to her, Beauchurch was conscious of the strong, pleasing scent of Ginette’s perfume.

  “How was your mother?” Beauchurch asked, as they traversed the room, toward the high windows which looked out on the Tuileries.

  “Fine,” Ginette said. “She was disappointed you couldn’t come to lunch.”

  “Tell her, next time,” Beauchurch said. They gave their coats to the waiter and sat down. Beauchurch handed the package containing the book of prints to the waiter, too, without telling Ginette what was in it.

  “This is rather sinister, this bar, isn’t it?” Mestre said, looking around him. “It is rather like a place for ghosts to come and drink.”

  “I imagine it was pretty gay here,” Beauchurch said, “in 1897.”

  The waiter came and they all ordered whiskey and Beauchurch was conscious again of Ginette’s perfume when she leaned toward him slightly to allow him to light a cigarette for her. He saw, or imagined he saw, a cool, speculative expression on Mestre’s face, as though the Frenchman was trying to judge the nature of the relations between the husband and wife across the table from him, in the moment in which they briefly approached each other over the flare of the lighter.

  There were two large Americans at the bar, their voices making a bass background rumble of sound in the room, with an occasional phrase here and there suddenly intelligible across the bare tables. “… The problem,” one of the men was saying, “is with the Belgian delegation. They’re sullen and suspicious. I understand perfectly why, but …” Then the voice sank back into a rumble again.

  “Claude is a journalist,” Ginette said, in her hostessy, introducing-the-guests-at-a-party voice. “He’s one of the leading journalists in France. That’s how I found him. I saw his name in the paper.”

  “I congratulate you,” Beauchurch said. “On being a journalist, I mean. Like everybody else in America, when I was young, I wanted to be a newspaperman. But nobody would give me a job.” Saw his name in a newspaper, he thought. I was right. She called him. It wasn’t any accidental meeting on the street.

  Mestre shrugged. “Perhaps I should be the one to congratulate you,” he said. “For not getting the job. There are moments when I consider the man who gave me my first job on a newspaper as a deadly enemy.” He sounded weary and disabused. “For example—I could never hope to dress my wife in the charming manner in which Ginette is dressed or afford a six-week tour of Europe in the middle of the Autumn like you.”

  That’s a damned envious, unpleasant thing for a man to say, Beauchurch thought. “Oh,” he said. “You’re married.”

  “Forever,” Mestre said.

  “He has four children,” Ginette said. A trifle too quickly, Beauchurch thought.

  “I am personally attempting to redress the demographic imbalance that Napoleon left as his heritage to France.” Mestre smiled ironically as he said it.

  “Have you seen his children?” Beauchurch asked Ginette.

  “No,” she said. She volunteered no further information.

  The waiter came and served their drinks. Mestre lifted his glass. “To a happy stay in this happy country,” he said, his voice still carrying the edge of irony. “And a quick return.”

  They drank. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “What’s your specialty?” Beauchurch asked, to bridge the silence. “I mean, is there any particular field that you write about?”

  “War and politics,” Mestre said. “The prize assignments.”

  “That’s enough to keep you busy, I imagine,” Beauchurch said.

  “Yes. There are always enough fools and brutes to keep a man busy,” Mestre said.

  “What do you think is going to happen here, in France?” Beauchurch said, resolved to be polite and keep the conversation going until he could find some inkling of why Ginette had wanted him to meet this man.

  “What do
you think is going to happen here?” Mestre repeated. “It is becoming the new form of greeting in France. It has practically replaced Bonjour and Comment ça va.” He shrugged. “We are going to have trouble.”

  “Everybody is going to have trouble,” Beauchurch said. “In America, too.”

  “Do you think,” Mestre fixed him with his cold, ironic glance, “that in America you will have violence and political murder and civil war?”

  “No,” Beauchurch said. “Is that what you think is going to happen here?”

  “To a certain extent,” Mestre said, “it has already happened.”

  “And you think it will happen again?” Beauchurch asked.

  “Probably,” said Mestre. “But in a more aggravated form.”

  “Soon?”

  “Sooner or later,” Mestre said.

  “That’s very pessimistic,” Beauchurch said.

  “France is composed exclusively of pessimists,” said Mestre. “If you stay here long enough, you will discover that.”

  “If it does come, who do you think will win?” Beauchurch asked.

  “The worst elements,” said Mestre. “Not permanently, perhaps. But for a period. Unfortunately, the period will have to be lived through. It will not be pleasant.”

  “Tom,” Ginette said, “I think maybe I’d better explain about Claude.” She had been listening intently to Mestre, watching his face anxiously as he spoke. “Claude works for a liberal newspaper here and it’s already been confiscated several times by the Government because of articles he wrote about Algeria.”

  “It is getting so that when an article by me appears and the journal is not confiscated,” Mestre said, “that I examine myself for signs of cowardice.”

  Self-pity, Beauchurch thought, combined with deep self-satisfaction. He liked the man less and less, the more he talked.

  “There’s something else, Tom,” Ginette said. She turned to Mestre. “You don’t mind if I tell him, do you, Claude?”

  “If you think it will interest him …” Claude shrugged. “Americans are not liable to take things like that very seriously.”

  “I’m a very serious American,” Beauchurch said, letting his annoyance show for the first time. “I read Time magazine almost every week.”

  “Now you are making fun of me,” Mestre said. “I do not blame you. It is my fault.” He looked around him vaguely. “Is it possible to have another drink?”

  Beauchurch signaled the waiter and made a circular motion with his hand, indicating another round for everyone. “What’s the something else, Ginette?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation from his voice.

  “The letters and the telephone calls,” Ginette said.

  “What letters and telephone calls?”

  “Threatening to kill me,” Mestre said lightly. “The letters are usually addressed to me. The telephone calls to my wife. Naturally, being a woman, she gets rather upset. Especially since there are periods during which she receives five or six a day.”

  “Who writes them?” Beauchurch asked. He wished he could disbelieve the man, but there was something about the way he was talking now that put the seal of truth upon what he said. “Who makes the calls?”

  Mestre shrugged. “Who knows? Cranks, elderly widows, practical jokers, retired army officers, assassins.… They never sign their names, of course. It is not terribly new. The anonymous letter has always played an honorable role in French literature.”

  “Do you think they mean it?” Beauchurch asked.

  “Sometimes.” Mestre looked up as the waiter came over with the drinks and didn’t speak again until the man had gone off once more. “When I am tired or depressed or it’s raining, I think they mean it. At any rate, some of them undoubtedly mean it.”

  “What do you do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Mestre said, sounding surprised. “What is there to do?”

  “You could go to the police, for one thing,” Beauchurch said.

  “In America one would undoubtedly go to the police,” Mestre said. “Here …” He made a grimace and took a long sip of his drink. “I am not on particularly good terms with the police at the moment. In fact, I am of the opinion that my mail is often opened and from time to time I am followed and my phone is tapped.”

  “That’s disgraceful,” Beauchurch said.

  “I like your husband,” Mestre said lightly, almost playfully, to Ginette. “He finds things like this disgraceful. It is very American.”

  “We’ve had times like that in America, too,” Beauchurch said, defending the level of venality of his native land. “And not so long ago, either.”

  “I know, I know,” Mestre said. “I do not mean to imply that I believe that America is a fairyland which is completely untouched by the special diseases of our age. Still, as I say, in America, one would go to the police.…”

  “Do you really think that somebody may try to kill you?” Beauchurch asked. Irrelevantly, he thought, This is a hell of a way to be spending a holiday, talking about things like this.

  “Not just now perhaps,” Mestre said calmly, as though he were surveying, with judicial impartiality, an abstract problem that had no personal relation to him. “But once the trouble starts, almost certainly.”

  “Just how do you think the trouble will start?” Somehow, after the weeks of enjoying the peaceful glittering city, with its overflowing shops, its air of bustling activity, its range of pleasures, it was impossible to believe that it would soon be given over to violence and bloodshed.

  “How will it start?” Mestre repeated. He squinted thoughtfully over Beauchurch’s shoulder into the mahogany depths of the bar, as though trying to formulate there some picture of the future that lay in wait for the city. “I am not in on the councils of the heroes, you understand,” he smiled slightly, “so I can only speculate. It depends upon the General, of course. On the state of his health—physical and political. On his powers of survival. At the moment, we are in a period of détente. The plotters are waiting. The murderers remain more or less under cover. But if the General is brought down—by failure, by overconfidence, by old age, by anything—then we can expect certain events to follow.”

  “What?” Beauchurch asked.

  “Perhaps an uprising of the troops in Algiers,” Mestre said, “a landing on the aerodromes, a movement among the police, the emergence of secretly armed and trained bodies of commandoes in various parts of the country, to take over the seats of government and the radio and television stations, the capture or assassination of certain leading political figures. The usual. There is no mystery any more about these things. Only the timing is problematical.”

  Beauchurch turned to his wife. “Do you believe all this?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do any of your other friends talk like this?”

  “Almost all of them,” she said.

  “And you”—Beauchurch turned back, almost accusingly to Mestre—“what do you intend to do if it happens?”

  “I shall offer my services to the government,” Mestre said. “That is, if I can find the government, and if it has not already locked me up somewhere by then.”

  “Christ,” Beauchurch said, “what a thing it is to be a Frenchman.”

  “It has its compensations,” Mestre said. “Some of the time.”

  “All right,” Beauchurch said to Ginette, “I’m briefed. Only I don’t know what for. Why did you want me to hear all this?”

  There was an exchange of glances between Mestre and Ginette, and once more Beauchurch had the fleeting sensation of being an outsider, conspired against.

  Mestre leaned over and touched Ginette’s hand lightly. “Permit me to explain, my dear,” he said. He lifted his glass and drank, like an orator playing for time. “Mr. Beauchurch,” he began formally, “your wife has been good enough to suggest that perhaps you would be willing to help me.…” He waited for Beauchurch to say something, but Beauchurch remained unhelpfully silent.

  “It is, unhappily,
a question of money,” Mestre said.

  Good God, Beauchurch thought, all this lead-up to ask for a loan! He was annoyed with Ginette for having gone along with this elaborate manipulation. He could feel his face settling into refusing lines as he waited for Mestre to continue.

  “If anything happens,” Mestre went on, looking uncomfortable, “as I believe it will, I may have to try to escape from France. Or at least, my wife and my children would be better off out of the country. In any event, I would feel considerably relieved if I had some money safely in another country, to tide me over at least some part of the period of exile that I foresee as a possibility for myself and my family. A numbered account in Switzerland, for example, that either my wife or myself could draw on without formalities.…”

  “I told Claude we were going to Geneva on Thursday,” Ginette said. There was a tone of defiance in her voice, Beauchurch thought, as she said this. “It would be the simplest thing in the world for us to do.”

  “Now let me get this straight,” Beauchurch said to Ginette. “Have you promised your friend that we would lend him a certain amount of money for—” Mestre looked stupefied as he listened, and Beauchurch stopped in midsentence. “Have I misunderstood something?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid you have,” Mestre said. He seemed embarrassed and angry. “There was never any question of a loan. What right would I have to ask a man I had never seen in my life to lend me even a hundred francs?”

  “Ginette,” Beauchurch said, “I think you’d better explain.”

  “A French citizen has no right to take money out of France,” Ginette said. “Or, anyway, very little. And since we’re going to Switzerland, I thought we could do it for Claude.”

  “As I understand it,” Beauchurch, “nobody has a right to take much money out of France, not even Americans.”

  “Two hundred and fifty new francs,” Mestre said.

  “But the customs people never bother Americans,” Ginette said. “They never even open your bags. And if they do happen to ask you how many francs you have on you, you say a hundred or so, and that’s the end of it.”