Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  I hesitated only a moment. “Yes,” I said. “I meant that. If you need it.”

  “Don’t you want me to tell you what I’m going to do with it?”

  “Only if you want to tell me,” I said. I was sorry I hadn’t left town last night.

  “I want to tell you. It’s not only for me, it’s for both of us. It’s a …” he began, then stopped, as the waitress came over with my juice and coffee and toast. He watched her tensely as she poured him a second cup. When she’d finished and moved off, he gulped a steaming mouthful. I saw that he was sweating.

  “Here it is,” he said. “There’s an account I handle in the office. A small new company. A couple of very smart young guys. Two kids out of MIT. They’re on to something. Something that can be very big. Big, big. They’ve got a patent pending for a new system of miniaturization. For all sorts of electronic systems. But they’re just about busted. They need about twenty-five thousand to tide them over. They’ve been to the banks and they’ve been refused. I know their situation because I know their books inside out. And I’ve talked to them about it. I can buy in. With a little pushing, for twenty-five thousand I could have a third of the stock. And I could become an officer of the company, treasurer, to protect our interests. Once they go into production, they’d go on the board on Amex …”

  “What’s Amex?” I asked.

  “American Exchange.” He looked at me oddly. “Where the hell have you been all these years?”

  “No place,” I said.

  “There’s no limit to how high the stock would go. I’d take a third of the thirty-three percent and you’d get two-thirds. Does that seem unfair to you?” he asked anxiously.

  “No.” I had already kissed the twenty-five thousand good-bye. None of it was real to me anyway. Stacks of paper in a vault.

  “You’re noble, Doug, noble.” Henry’s voice was quivering with emotion.

  “Oh, cut it out, Hank,” I said sharply. I didn’t feel noble. “Can you be in New York Wednesday?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll have the money ready for you. In cash. I’ll call you at your office Tuesday and tell you where to meet me.”

  “In cash?” Henry looked puzzled. “What’s the matter with a check? I hate to carry that much cash around with me.”

  “You’ll just have to bear the burden,” I said. “I don’t write checks.” I could see his face working. He wanted the money—badly, badly—but he was an honest man and no fool and there was no doubt in his mind that whatever else the money was, it wasn’t honest. “Doug,” he said, “I don’t want you to get into trouble on my account. If it means …” He was pushing himself and I appreciated what it cost him. “Well, I’d rather do without it.”

  “Let me handle my end,” I said curtly, “You handle yours. Just be in your office Tuesday morning for my call.”

  He sighed, an old man’s resigned, weary sigh, honesty too difficult a position to maintain. “Baby brother,” was all he said.

  I was glad to get out of Scranton and back on the icy road to Washington. At the wheel, I thought of the poker game that night and touched the silver dollar in my pocket.

  I was stopped for speeding in Maryland, where the ice ran out, and bribed the cop with a fifty-dollar bill. Mr. Ferris, or whatever his name really was, was spreading the wealth all through the American economy.

  7

  IT WAS LATE IN THE AFTERNOON when I arrived in Washington. The monuments to Presidents, generals, justice, and law, all the ambiguous Doric-American pantheon, were wavery in a soft, twilight Southern mist. Scranton could have been in another climate zone, another country, a distant civilization. The streets were almost empty, and the few people walking there in the quiet dusk moved slowly, peacefully. Jeremy Hale had said Washington was at its best on weekends, when the mills of government ground to a halt. In the capital, between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, it was possible to believe in the value and decorum of democracy. I wondered idly what the blonde lady whose taxicab I had shared was doing with her holiday.

  There was no message for me at the desk of the hotel, and when I went up to my room, I called Hale at his home. A child answered, her voice bell-like and pure, and I had a sudden, unexpected moment of jealousy because there was no child to answer for me and to call, with uncomplicated love, “Daddy, it’s for you.”

  “Is the game still on?” I asked Hale.

  “Good,” Hale said. “You got back. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  It was only five o’clock and I played with the idea of calling Evelyn Coates’s number to see which one of the ladies was at home. But then what would I say? “Listen, I have two hours to spare.” I was not that sort of a man and never would be. So much the worse for me.

  I shaved and took a long hot bath. Lying there, luxuriously steaming myself, I counted my blessings. They were not insignificant. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” I said aloud in the clouded bathroom. I hadn’t stuttered once in five days and nights. In a minor way it was like being able to throw down your crutches and stride away from the spring at Lourdes. Then there was the money in the vault in New York, of course. Again and again, I found myself thinking of it, the neat stacks of bills lying in the steel box, laden with infinite promise. The twenty-five thousand dollars I was going to give Hank was a small price to pay for freeing me from the guilt about my brother that had lain somewhere in my subconscious for so many years.

  And Evelyn Coates …Old man, I thought, remembering the flaccid body in the corridor, you have not died in vain.

  I got out of the bath, feeling fit and rested, put on some fresh clothes and went down and had a leisurely dinner by myself, without liquor. Not before a poker game.

  I made sure I had the silver dollar in my pocket when Hale came to get me. If there ever was a gambler, dead or alive, who was not superstitious, I haven’t heard of him.

  Silver dollar or no silver dollar, Hale nearly got us killed driving to the hotel in Georgetown, where the weekly poker game was played. He went through a stop sign without looking, and there was a wild screech of brakes as a Pontiac swerved to avoid hitting us. From the Pontiac somebody screamed, incomprehensibly, “Goddamn niggers.”

  Hale had been a careful driver in college. “Sorry,” he said. “People drive like maniacs on Saturday night.” He must have smoked six cigarettes on the short trip. If gambling did that to me, I thought, I wouldn’t play. But I didn’t say anything.

  There was a big round table covered by a green cloth set up in one of the small private dining rooms of the hotel, and an array of bottles, ice, and glasses on a sideboard, all under a strong light. Very professional. I looked forward to the evening. There were three other men already in the room and one woman, standing with her back to the door fixing herself a drink as we came in. Hale introduced me to the men first. I found out later that one of them was a well-known columnist, one a Congressman from upstate New York, who looked like Warren Gamaliel Harding, white-haired, benign, falsely presidential. The last player was a youngish lawyer by the name of Benson who worked at the Department of Defense. I had never met a columnist or a Congressman before. Was I going up or down on the social scale?

  When the woman turned around to greet us, I saw that it was Evelyn Coates. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. “Yes,” she said, without smiling, as Hale started to introduce us, “I know Mr. Grimes. I believe I met him at a party the other night at your house, Jerry.”

  “Of course,” Hale said. “I must be losing my mind.” He did seem distracted. I noticed that he kept rubbing the side of his jaw with the palm of his hand, as though he had an intermittent itch there. I made a small bet with myself that he would wind up losing that night.

  Evelyn Coates was dressed in dark blue slacks, not too close fitting, and a loose beige sweater. Working clothes, I thought. Dyke? I dismissed the idea. Probably when she was younger she was one of those girls who played touch football with the boys on the block. I wondered if her roommate had told her
about me.

  She was the only one in the room who had a drink in her hand as we sat down at the table and started counting our chips. She piled her chips expertly, her long hands deft, pale fingers, pale polished nails.

  “Evelyn,” Benson said as the Congressman began to throw cards for the first ace to deal, “tonight you must be merciful.”

  “Without fear or favor,” she said.

  The lawyer, I noticed, seemed to have a special, teasing relationship with her. I put it out of my mind. I didn’t like his voice either, round and self-satisfied. I put that out of my mind, too. I was there to play cards.

  Everybody took the game very seriously, and there was almost no conversation except for the usual postmortems between hands. Hale had told me the game was a moderate one. Nobody had ever lost more than a thousand dollars on any one night, he said. If he hadn’t been married to a rich wife, I doubt that he would have called it moderate.

  Evelyn Coates was a tricky player, unpredictable and hard-nosed. She won the second biggest pot of the night on a pair of eights. In other days you would have said she played like a man. Her expression was the same whether she won or lost, cool and businesslike. It was hard for me to remember, as I faced her across the table, that I had ever been in her bed.

  I won the biggest pot of the night on a low straight. I had never had as much money to back me up in any of the games I had been in before, but, as far as I could tell, I played as I always did. My newfound fortune wasn’t reflected in my betting. I folded early a good deal of the time.

  The newspaper columnist and the Congressman were the eternal pigeons Hale had promised me. They played out of hope and optimism, and were around at the end of almost every pot. Inevitably, it made me doubt their wisdom in other fields. I knew I would read the columnist from then on with great reservations, and I trusted the Congressman wasn’t in on any important legislative decisions.

  It was a friendly game and even the losers were good-natured about their bad luck. I enjoyed playing poker again after the three-year hiatus. I would have enjoyed it more if Evelyn Coates hadn’t been there. I kept looking for a wink, a secret, conspiratorial smile, but it never came. I couldn’t help beginning to feel resentful. I didn’t let it affect my game, but I felt a little extra satisfaction when I took a pot away from her.

  She and I were the only winners at two o’clock, when we finished. While the Congressman, as banker, bent over the accounts, I fingered the silver dollar in my pocket. The go-ahead sign from Central Park West.

  A waiter had brought in some sandwiches, and we started on them while the Congressman worked at the table. I couldn’t help but think how pleasant it all was, a game that continued, in the same room, with the same friends, week after week, everybody knowing everybody’s telephone number, everybody’s address, everybody’s mannerisms and jokes. Whom would I be seeing next week, what numbers would I dare call, what game would I be playing? For a moment I was on the verge of saying that I would be available next week to give them all the chance to get back their money. Put down my roots in a deck of cards, in the mulch of government. How fast did I have to run? If Evelyn Coates had as much as smiled at me, I believe I would have spoken. But she didn’t even glance in my direction.

  To give her a chance to say a few words to me away from the others, I went over to a window at the far corner of the room and opened it, pretending I was warm and that the cigarette smoke was bothering me, but she still did not make a gesture toward me, didn’t even seem to notice that I had moved.

  The bitch, I thought, I won’t give her the satisfaction of calling when I get back to my hotel. I imagined her in her place with the young lawyer, smooth and tallow-faced, and the phone ringing and Evelyn Coates saying, “Hell, let it ring,” and knowing who it was on the other end and smiling secretly to herself. I wasn’t used to hard women. To any kind of women, if I wanted to be honest with myself. One thing, I decided, as I closed the window with a sharp little click, insisting on my presence, one thing I’m going to do from now on is learn how to handle women.

  The columnist and the lawyer began a long discussion about what was happening in Washington. The columnist accused the President of trying to destroy the American press, raising postal rates to drive newspapers and magazines into bankruptcy, jailing reporters for not disclosing their sources, threatening to lift the franchises of television stations that broadcast material which displeased the Administration, all stuff that I had read in his columns whenever I had happened to come across them. Even I, who barely read any newspaper but the Racing Form, was overexposed to all possible opinions. I wondered how anyone in that room, battered by arguments from all sides, ever managed to vote yes or no on anything. The Congressman, working on a scratch pad, his forehead sweating from the effort, never even looked up. He had showed himself an amiable man throughout the game, and I supposed he voted as he was told, his attention always on party instructions and on the next election. He had said nothing to indicate whether he was a Republican, a Democrat, or a follower of Mao.

  When Evelyn Coates brought up the subject of the Watergate break-in and said it meant grave trouble for the President ahead, the columnist said, “Nonsense. He’s too smart for that. It’ll all just be kicked under the rug. Mark my words. By May, if you ask anybody about it, they’ll say, Watergate? What’s that? I’ll tell you,” said the columnist, his deep voice and meticulous speech resonant with the assurance of a man who was accustomed to being listened to attentively at all times, “I tell you we’re witnessing the opening moves toward Fascism.”

  As he spoke, he munched on a corned beef sandwich, washed down with Scotch. “The skinheads are preparing the ground. I won’t be surprised if they’re not called in to run the whole show. One morning we’ll wake up and the tanks will be rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and the machine guns will be on every roof.” That hadn’t been in any of his columns that I had read. Come to Washington and get the real, authentic, scary dope.

  The lawyer didn’t seem to be at all ruffled by the charges. He had the calm, good-natured imperturbability of the pliant Company Man. “Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” he said. “The press is irresponsible. It lost the war in Asia for us. It churns up the public against the President, the Vice President, it holds up all authority to scorn, it’s making it more and more impossible to govern the country. Maybe putting the skinheads, as you call them, in control for a few years might be the best thing that happened to this country since Alf Landon.”

  “Oh, Jack,” Mrs. Coates said. “The true believer. The voice of the Pentagon. What crap!”

  “If you saw what passed over my desk day after day,” the lawyer said, “you wouldn’t call it crap.”

  “Mr. Grimes …” She turned toward me, a little cool smile on her lips. “You’re not in the mess here in Washington. You represent the pure, undefiled American public here tonight. Let’s hear the simple wisdom of the masses. …”

  “Evelyn,” Hale said warningly. I half-expected to hear him say, Remember, he’s our guest. But he let it go with the Evelyn.

  I looked at her, annoyed with her for taunting me, feeling that she was testing me somehow, for some not quite innocent purpose of her own. “The pure, undefiled representative of the American public here tonight,” I said, “thinks it’s all bullshit.” I remembered the speech she had made to me, naked, a glass of whiskey in her hand, sitting on the side of the big soft bed in the darkened room, about everybody in Washington being an actor. “You people aren’t serious,” I said. “It’s all a game for you. It’s not a game for me, the pure, undefiled etcetera, it’s life and death and taxes, and other little things like that for me, but it’s just a pennant race for you. You depend upon each other to have different opinions, just the way baseball teams depend upon other teams to have different color uniforms. Otherwise, nobody would know who was leading the league. In the end, though, you’re all playing the same game.” I was surprised at myself even as I spoke. I didn’t even know that I had
ever thought like this before. “If you get traded to another team, you’ll just take off the old suit and put on another one and you’ll go out there and try to boost your batting average so you can ask for a raise the next year.”

  “Let me ask you something, Grimes,” the lawyer said affably. “Did you vote in the last election?”

  “I did,” I said. “I got fooled. The papers printed the sports news on the editorial pages. I don’t intend to vote again. It’s an undignified occupation for a grown man.” I didn’t tell them that where I expected I’d be by the time of the next elections, there wouldn’t be a chance I’d be able to vote.

  “Forgive me, folks,” Evelyn Coates said, “I didn’t realize I had introduced a homespun political philosopher into our midst.”

  “I’m not absolutely against what he said,” the lawyer said. “I don’t see where it’s so wrong to be loyal to the team. If the team’s winning, of course.” He chuckled softly at his own joke.

  The Congressman looked up from his accounts. If he had heard a word of the discussion, or any discussion for the last ten years, for that matter, he didn’t show it. “Okay,” he said, “it all comes out even. Evelyn, you won three hundred and fifty-five dollars and fifty cents. Mr. Grimes, you won twelve hundred and seven dollars. Everybody else get out their checkbooks.”

  While the losers were finding out how much they owed, there were the usual jokes, directed at Hale, for bringing a ringer, me, into the game. Evelyn Coates made no jokes. There was no hint in the way anyone else talked that anything like an argument had just taken place.

  I tried to look offhand as I put the checks into my wallet. Luckily, they were all on Hale’s Washington bank. He endorsed them for me so that I wouldn’t have any trouble cashing them.

  We all left together, and there was a jumble of good-byes as the Congressman and the columnist got into a taxi together. The lawyer took Evelyn by the arm, saying, “You’re on my way, Evelyn, I’ll drop you.” Hale was inside getting a pack of cigarettes from the machine, and I stood alone for a moment watching the lawyer and Evelyn Coates walk off into the darkness of the parking lot. I heard her low laugh at something he had said as they disappeared.