Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  Evening in Byzantium

  Irwin Shaw

  Contents

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  A Biography of Irwin Shaw

  Many thanks to my editor, Kathy Anderson, for her invaluable assistance and advice.

  To Salka Viertel

  Overture

  Dinosauric, obsolete, functions and powers atrophied, dressed in sport shirts from Sulka and Cardin, they sat across from each other at small tables in airy rooms overlooking the changing sea and dealt and received cards just as they had done in the lush years in the rainfall forest of the West Coast when in all seasons they had announced the law in the banks, the board rooms, the Moorish mansions, the chateaux, the English castles, the Georgian town houses of Southern California.

  From time to time phones rang, and hearty, deferential voices spoke from Oslo, New Delhi, Paris, Berlin, New York, and the card players barked into the instruments and gave orders that at another time would have had meaning and no doubt been obeyed.

  Exiled kings on annual pilgrimage, unwitting Lears permitted small bands of faithful retainers, living in pomp without circumstance, they said, “Gin,” and, “You’re on the schneider,” and passed checks for thousands of dollars back and forth. Sometimes they talked of the preglacial era. “I gave her her first job. Seventy-five a week. She was laying a dialogue coach in the Valley at the time.”

  And, “He brought it two and a half million over the budget, and we had to yank it in Chicago after three days, and now look at him, the pricks in New York say he’s a genius. Shit.”

  And they said, “The future is in cassettes” and the youngest of them in the room, who was fifty-eight, said, “What future?”

  And they said, “Spades. Double.”

  Below, on the terrace seven feet above sea level, open to the sun and wind, leaner and hungrier men spoke their minds. Signaling the hurrying waiters for black coffee and aspirin, they said, “It isn’t like the old days.”

  They also said, “The Russians aren’t coming this year. Or the Japanese,” and, “Venice is finished.”

  Under shifting clouds, in sporadic sunlight, the shifty young men carrying lion cubs and Polaroid cameras wound among them, with hustlers’ international smiles, soliciting trade. But after the first day the cubs were ignored except by the tourists, and the conversation flowed on, and they said, “Fox is in trouble. Big trouble,” and, “So is everybody else.”

  “A prize here is worth a million,” they said.

  “In Europe,” they said.

  And, “What’s wrong with Europe?” they said.

  “It’s a Festival-type picture,” they said, “but it won’t draw flies in release.”

  And they said, “What are you drinking?” and, “Are you coming to the party tonight?”

  They spoke in English, French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Rumanian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, on the subject of sex, money, success, failure, promises kept and promises broken. They were honest men and thieves, pimps and panderers, and men of virtue. Some were talented, or more than that, some shrewd, or less than that. There were beautiful women and delicious girls, handsome men and men with the faces of swine. Cameras were busy, and everybody pretended he didn’t know that photographs were being taken.

  There were people who had been famous and were no longer, people who would be famous next week or next year, and people who would die unknown. There were people going up and people going down, people who had won their victories easily and people unjustly flung aside.

  They were all gamblers in a game with no rules, placing their bets debonairly or in the sweat of fear.

  At other places, in other meetings, men of science were predicting that within fifty years the sea that lapped on the beach in front of the terrace would be a dead body of water and there was a strong probability that this was the last generation to dine on lobster or be able to sow an uncontaminated seed.

  In still other places bombs were being dropped, targets chosen, hills lost and taken; there were floods and volcanic eruptions, wars and the preparation for wars, governments shaken, funerals and marches. But on the terrace for two weeks in springtime France, all the world was printed on sprocketed strips of acetate that passed through a projector at the rate of 90 feet per minute, and hope and despair and beauty and death were carried around the city in flat, round, shining tin cans.

  THE plane bucked as it climbed through black pillars of cloud. To the west there were streaks of lightning. The seat-belt sign, in English and French, remained lit. The stewardesses served no drinks. The pitch of the engines changed. The passengers did not speak.

  The tall man, cramped in next to the window, opened a magazine, closed it. Drops of rain made pale, transparent traces, like ghostly fingers, along the Plexiglas portholes.

  There was a muffled explosion, a ripping noise. A ball of lightning rolled down the aisle, incredibly slow, then flashed out over the wing. The plane shuddered. The pitch of the engines changed again.

  How comfortable it would be, the man thought, if we crashed, how definitive.

  But the plane steadied, broke out of the clouds into sunlight. The lady across the aisle said, “That’s the second time that’s happened to me. I’m beginning to feel I’m being followed.” The seat-light signs went off. The stewardesses started to push the drink cart down the aisle. The man asked for a Scotch and Perrier. He drank appreciatively as the plane whispered south, high across the clouded heart of France.

  Craig took a cold shower to wake himself up. While he didn’t exactly have a hangover, he had the impression that his eyes were fractionally slow in keeping up with the movements of his head. As usual on such mornings he decided to go on the wagon that day.

  He dried himself without bothering to towel his hair. The cool wetness against his scalp was soothing. He wrapped himself in one of the big rough white terrycloth bathrobes the hotel supplied and went into the living room of the suite and rang for breakfast. He had flung his clothes around the room while having a last whisky before going to bed, and his dinner jacket and dress shirt and tie lay crumpled on a chair. The whisky glass, still half-full, was beaded with drops of moisture. He had left the bottle of Scotch next to it open.

  He looked for mail in the box on the inside of the door. There was a copy of Nice-Matin and a packet of letters forwarded from New York by his secretary. There was a letter from his accountant and another from his lawyer in the packet. He recognized the monthly statement from his brokers among the other envelopes. He dropped the letters unopened on a table. With the way the market was going, his brokers’ statement could only be a cry from the abyss. The accountant would be sending him unpleasant bulletins about his running battle with the Internal Revenue Service. And his lawyer’s letter would remind him of his wife. They could all wait. It was too early in the morning for his broker, his accountant, his lawyer, and his wife.

  He glanced at the front page of Nice-Matin. An agency dispatch told of more troops moving into Cambodia. Cambodge, in French. Next to the Cambodian story there was a picture of an Italian actress smiling on the Carlton terrace. She had won a prize at Cannes some years before, but her smile revealed that she had no illusions about this year. There was also a photograph of the president of France, M. Pompidou, in Auvergne. M. Pompidou was quoted as addressing the silent majority of the French people and assuring them that France was not on the brink of revolution.

  Craig dr
opped Nice-Matin on the floor. Barefooted, he crossed the carpeted, high-ceilinged white room, furnished for liquidated Russian nobility. He went out on the balcony and regarded the Mediterranean below him on the other side of the Croisette. The three American assault ships that had been in the bay had departed during the night. There was a wind, and the sea was gray and ruffled, and there were whitecaps. The beach boys had already raked the sand and put out the mattresses and umbrellas. The umbrellas trembled unopened because of the wind. A choppy surf beat at the beach. One brave fat woman was swimming in front of the hotel. The weather has changed since I was last here, he thought.

  The last time had been in the autumn, past the season. Indian summer, on a coast that had never known Indians. Golden mist, muted fall flowers. He remembered Cannes when pink and amber mansions stood in gardens along the sea front. Now the garish apartment buildings, orange and bright blue balconies flying, disfigured the littoral. Cities rushed to destroy themselves.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Entrez,” he called without turning, still judging the Mediterranean. There was no need to tell the waiter where to put the table. Craig had been there three days already, and the waiter knew his habits.

  But when he went back into the room, it was not the waiter standing there but a girl. She was small, five feet three, four, he guessed automatically. She was wearing a gray sweat shirt, too long and many sizes too large for her. The sleeves, which seemed to have been made for a basketball player, were pushed up from her narrow tan wrists. The sweat shirt hung almost halfway to her knees over wrinkled and faded blue jeans, stained with bleach. She wore sandals. Her brown hair was long and careless, streaked with sun and salt and hanging down in a mat below her shoulders. She had a narrow triangular face cut into a curious owl-like puzzle by huge, dark sunglasses behind which he could not see her eyes. An Italian leather pouch hung, brass-buckled and incongruously chic, from a shoulder. She slouched as she faced him. He had the feeling that if he looked down at her bare feet, he would discover that she had not bathed for some time, at least not with soap.

  American, he thought. It was the reverse of chauvinism.

  He pulled the robe around him. It had no sash, and it was not designed for social occasions. At the slightest movement everything dangled out.

  “I thought it was the waiter,” he said.

  “I wanted to be sure to get you in,” the girl said. The voice was American. From anywhere.

  He was annoyed that the room was so sloppy. Then annoyed at the girl for breaking in like that when he was expecting the waiter.

  “Most people call,” he said, “before they come up.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t see me if I called first,” she said.

  Oh, Christ, he thought, one of those. “Why don’t you start all over again, miss?” he said. “Why don’t you go downstairs and give the concierge your name and let him announce you and …”

  “I’m here now.” She wasn’t one of those smiling, oh-you-great-man type of girls. “I’ll announce myself. My name is McKinnon, Gail McKinnon.”

  “Am I supposed to know you?” You never could tell at a place like Cannes.

  “No,” she said.

  “Do you always barge in on people when they’re undressed and waiting for breakfast?” He felt at a disadvantage, gripping the robe to hide his private parts and with his hair still dripping and the graying hair on his chest visible and the room a mess.

  “I have a purpose,” the girl said. She didn’t move any closer to him, but she didn’t retreat. She just stood there wriggling her bare toes in her sandals.

  “I have a purpose, too, young lady,” he said, conscious of water dripping down from his wet hair over his forehead. “I propose to eat my breakfast and read my paper and silently and singularly prepare for the terrors of the day.”

  “Don’t be a drear, Mr. Craig,” she said. “I mean you no permanent harm. You are alone?” She looked meaningfully at the door to the bedroom, which was ajar.

  “My dear young lady …” I sound ninety years old, he thought, irritated.

  “I mean I’ve been watching you,” she said, “for three days, and you haven’t been with anybody. Any female body, I mean.” While she spoke, the dark glasses swept the room. He was conscious that her glance held for an extra fraction of a second when she saw the script on the desk.

  “What are you?” he asked. “A detective?”

  The girl smiled. At least her teeth smiled. There was no way of telling what her eyes were doing. “Have no fear,” she said. “I’m a kind of a journalist.”

  “There’s no news in Jesse Craig this season, miss. I bid you good morning.” He took a step toward the door, but she did not move.

  There was a knock, and the waiter came in carrying the tray with the orange juice and coffee, croissants and toast, and the little folding table.

  “Bonjour, m’sieur et ’dame,” the waiter said with one swift look at the girl. The French, Craig thought, can leer instantaneously and without the slightest change of expression. He was conscious of the girl’s costume, fought down an impulse to correct the leer. Shamelessly, he wanted to say to the waiter, “I can do better than that, for God’s sake.”

  “I sought zere eez on’y wan breakfast,” the waiter said.

  “There is only one breakfast,” Craig said.

  “Why don’t you break down, Mr. Craig,” the girl said, “and ask for another cup?”

  Craig sighed. “Another cup, please,” he said. He had been ruled all his life by his mother’s instructions about manners.

  The waiter set up the table and arranged two chairs. “Eeen wan moment,” he said, and left to get the second cup.

  “Please be seated, Miss McKinnon,” Craig said, hoping that the girl would realize that the formality was ironic. He held the chair for her with one hand while he clutched the robe closed with the other. She looked amused. At least from the nose down she looked amused. She dropped into the chair, placing her bag on the floor beside her. “And now, if you’ll forgive me,” he said, “I’ll go in and put on some clothes more suitable for the occasion.”

  He picked up the script and tossed it into the desk drawer, refused to collect his jacket and shirt, and went into the bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him. He dried his hair and brushed it back, ran his hand over his jaw, thought of shaving and shook his head. He put on a white tennis shirt and blue cotton slacks and stepped into a pair of moccasins. He looked at himself briefly in the mirror, not liking the opaque ivory of the whites of his eyes.

  When he went back into the living room, the girl was pouring coffee for both of them.

  He drank his orange juice in silence. The girl seemed in no hurry. How many women, he thought, have I sat at a breakfast table with in my life not wanting them to talk. “Croissant?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’ve eaten.”

  He was glad he had all his teeth as he bit into a piece of toast.

  “Well, now,” the girl said, “isn’t this friendly? Gail McKinnon and Mr. Jesse Craig at a relaxed moment in the wild whirl of Cannes.”

  “Well …” he said.

  “Does that mean I am to begin asking you questions?”

  “No,” he said, “it means I am going to begin asking you questions. What sort of journalist are you?”

  “I’m a radio journalist. Part of the time,” she said, holding her cup poised below her mouth. “I do five minute spots of people,” she said, “on tape, for a syndicate that sells them to independent stations in America.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “Interesting people. At least the syndicate hopes so.” Her voice was flat and slurred, as though she was impatient with questions. “Movie stars, directors, artists, politicians, criminals, athletes, racing-car drivers, diplomats, deserters, people who believe that homosexuality should be legalized or marijuana, detectives, college presidents … Want any more?”

  “No.” Craig watched while s
he poured him more coffee, the lady of the house. “You said part of the time. What do you do the rest of the time?”

  “I try to write interviews in depth for magazines. You’re making a face. Why?”

  “In depth,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Deadly jargon. You fall into it. It shall never pass my lips again.”

  “The morning has not been wasted,” Craig said.

  “Interviews like the ones in Playboy. Or that Falacci woman,” she said. “The one who got shot by the soldiers in Mexico.”

  “I read a couple of hers. She cut up Fellini. And Hitchcock.”

  “Maybe they cut themselves up.”

  “Should I take that as a warning?”

  “If you want.”

  There was something disturbing about the girl. He had the impression that she wanted something more than she was asking for.

  “This town,” he said, “is overrun at the moment by hordes of publicity-hungry folk who are dying to be interviewed. People your readers, whoever they are, drool for information about. I’m somebody nobody has heard from for years. Why pick on me?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time, Mr. Craig,” she said. “When we get to know each other better.”

  “Five years ago,” he said, “I would have kicked you out of this room ten minutes ago.”

  “That’s why I wouldn’t have interviewed you five years ago.” She smiled again, owl-like.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You show me some of the magazine pieces that you’ve done on other people, and I’ll read them and decide if I want to take a chance on you.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t published any.” She chuckled briefly, as though what she had said had delighted her. “You’ll be my first.”

  “Good God, Miss,” he said, “stop wasting my time.” He stood up.

  She remained seated. “I will ask fascinating questions,” she said, “and you will give such fascinating answers that editors will tumble madly over themselves to publish the article.”