by Irwin Shaw
Hale drove silently for a little while. “How long do you plan to stay in town?” he asked, as we were stopped for a light.
“Just until I get my passport. Monday, Tuesday …”
“Then where?”
“Then I’ll look at a map. Somewhere in Europe.”
He started the car with a jerk as the light changed. “God, I wish I was coming along with you. Wherever you’re going.” The intensity in his voice was disturbing. He sounded like a prisoner speaking to a man who was about to be freed in the morning. “This town,” he said. “Total swamp.” He turned a corner recklessly, the tires squealing. “That miserable, smooth molasses-talking Benson bastard …It’s a lucky thing you’re not in the government. …”
“What’re you talking about?” I was really honestly puzzled.
“If you were—in the government, I mean—by Monday night, somebody in your department—somebody higher in your department—would get a little poison in his ear about you.”
“You mean because of what I said about voting and changing uniforms, that stuff?” I tried not to sound incredulous, as though I were really taking him seriously. “Actually, I hardly meant it. I was joking, or anyway, half-joking.”
“You don’t joke in this town, friend,” Hale said somberly. “At least not in front of guys like him. I’ve been trying to get him out of the game for six months and nobody’s got the guts to do the job. Including me. You may have been joking, but he for sure wasn’t.”
“At one point in the evening,” I said, “I was on the point of saying I’d hang around till next Saturday.”
“Don’t. Blow. Blow as fast as you can. I wish to hell I could.”
“I don’t know how it works in your department,” I said, “but can’t you ask for an assignment someplace else?”
“I can ask,” Hale said. “That’s about as far as it would go.” He fumbled at a cigarette. “They have me pegged as unreliable in the service, and they’re making sure they can keep an eye on me twenty-four hours a day. …”
“You? Unreliable?” It was the last thing I’d ever guess anybody would think about him.
“I was in Thailand for two years. I sent you a letter. Remember?”
“I never got it, I’ve been moving around a lot. …”
“I wrote a couple of reports that didn’t exactly go through channels.” He laughed bitterly. “Channels! Sewers. Well, they yanked me—politely—and gave me a nice office with a beautiful secretary and a raise in salary and some memos to shuffle that you might just as well paper the walls with. And the only reason they’re being so kind to me is because of my goddamn father-in-law. But the message was clear—and I got it. Be a good boy or else. …God!” He laughed again, a harsh, croaking sound. “When I think that I celebrated when I found out I passed the Foreign Service exam! And it’s all so senseless—those reports I wrote …I was patting myself on the back—the intrepid truth-seeker, the brave little old truth-announcer. Christ, there wasn’t anything in those pages that hasn’t been spread over every newspaper in the country since then.” He scraped his cigarette out savagely in the ashtray on the dashboard. “We live in the age of the Bensons, the smooth poison-droppers, who know from birth that the way up is through the sewer. I’ll tell you something peculiar—a physiological phenomenon—somebody ought to write it up in a medical journal—I have days when I have the taste of shit in my mouth all day. I wash my teeth, I gargle, I get my secretary to put a bowl of narcissus on my desk—nothing helps. …”
“Jesus,” I said, “I thought you were doing great.”
“I put on a good act,” Hale said lifelessly. “I have to. I’m a dandy little old liar. It’s a government of liars and you get plenty of practice. Happy civil servant, happy husband, happy son-in-law, happy father of two. …Ah, Christ, why am I letting it all out on you? I imagine you have troubles enough of your own.”
“Not at the moment,” I said. “If it’s so bad, why don’t you quit? Go into something else?”
“Into what?” he said. “Selling neckties?”
“Something would be bound to turn up.” I didn’t tell him that there might be a job open as a night clerk in New York. “Take a few months off and look around and …”
“On what?” He made a derisive sound. “I haven’t a penny. You saw how we live. My salary’s just about half of it. My sainted father-in-law kicks in the rest. He nearly had apoplexy when I got sent home from Asia. He’d burn the house down over my head if I told him I was quitting. He’d have my wife and the kids back living with him in two months after I went out the door. …Ah, forget it, forget it, I don’t know why I suddenly went off the handle like this. That sonofabitch Benson. I see him multiplied by a thousand every time I come to work in the morning. What the hell—I don’t have to play in that poker game anymore. At least that’ll be one Benson I won’t have to talk to.” He laughed softly. “Maybe if I’d won tonight, I’d be telling you what a great life it is right this minute in this dandy little old town of Washington.” He was driving more and more slowly, as though he didn’t want to be left alone or have to go home and face the concrete facts of his wife, his children, his career, his father-in-law. I wasn’t so anxious to get to my hotel room either. I didn’t want to put on the light and look at the telephone on the bedside table and fight down the temptation to pick it up and ask for Evelyn Coates’s number.
“I wonder if you’d do me a favor, Doug?” he said, as we neared my hotel.
“Of course.” But even as I said it, I made strong mental reservations. After the conversation in the car, I didn’t have any inclination to get mixed up more than was absolutely necessary with the life and problems of my old college buddy, Jeremy Hale.
“Come out to dinner tomorrow night,” he said, “and somehow get onto the subject of skiing and say you’re thinking of going skiing in Vermont the first two weeks next month and why don’t I join you?”
“I don’t think I’ll even be in the country by then,” I said.
“That makes no difference,” he said calmly. “Just say it. Where my wife can hear it. I have some time coming to me and I can get away then.”
“You mean you have to make excuses to your wife if you want to …?”
“Not really.” He sighed, at the wheel. “It’s more complicated than that. There’s a girl …”
“Oh.”
“That’s it.” He laughed uneasily. “Oh. That doesn’t sound like me either, does it?” He said it pugnaciously, as though somehow he was accusing me of something.
“Frankly, no,” I said.
“It isn’t like me. This is the first time since I’ve been married …I never thought it would happen. But it did happen and it’s driving me crazy. We’ve just had a few times … a few minutes, an hour, here and there. Sneaking around. It’s killing both of us. In a town like this, with people snooping around like bird dogs after everybody. We need some time together—real time. God knows what my wife would do if anybody ever said anything to her. I didn’t want it to happen, I swear to God, but it happened. I feel as though the top of my head is going to blow off. I can’t talk to anyone in this town. It’s like living with a stone on my chest, day in, day out. I never knew I could feel like this about any woman. … You might as well know who it is. …”
I waited. I had the terrible feeling that the name he was going to come out with would be Evelyn Coates.
“It’s that girl in my office,” he said, whispering. “Miss Schwartz. Miss Melanie Schwartz. God, what a name!”
“Name or no name,” I said, “I can understand. She’s beautiful.”
“She’s a lot more than that. I’m going to tell you something, Doug—if it keeps going on the way it’s been going—I don’t know what I’m liable to do. We’ve got to get out of this town together … a week, two weeks, a night …But we’ve got to …I don’t want a divorce. I’ve been married ten years, I don’t want …Oh, hell, I don’t know why I should drag you into it.”
“I�
�ll come to dinner tomorrow night,” I said.
Hale didn’t say anything. He stopped in front of the hotel. “I’ll expect you around seven,” he said calmly, as I got out of the car.
In the elevator on the way up to my floor, I thought, Scranton isn’t all that far from Washington after all.
As I got ready for bed I kept away from the telephone in my room. I took a long time getting to sleep. I guess I was waiting for the phone to ring. It didn’t ring.
I couldn’t tell whether it was the telephone that awoke me or if I had opened my eyes just before it began to ring. I had had a nasty, jumbled dream in which I was hiding out, running, from unseen and unknown pursuers, though dark, forested country, then suddenly in glaring sunlight between rows of ruined houses. I was glad to be awake and I reached over gratefully for the telephone.
It was Hale. “I didn’t get you up, did I?” he asked.
“No.”
“Listen,” he said, “I’m afraid I have to cancel the dinner tonight. My wife says we’re invited out.” He sounded offhand and untroubled.
“That’s okay,” I said, trying not to let my relief show in my voice.
“Besides,” he said, “I talked to the lady in question and—” The rest of the sentence was muffled by a deep crescendo of sound.
“What’s that noise?” I asked. I remembered what he had said about phones being tapped in Washington.
“It’s a lion roaring,” he said. “I’m in the zoo with my kids. Want to join us?”
“Some other time, Jerry,” I said. “I’m still in bed.” After the outburst in the car after the poker game, I didn’t relish the idea of watching him play the role of the dutiful father devoting his Sunday morning to his children. I have never been expert at complicity and didn’t relish the thought of being used to deceive infants.
“See you in the office tomorrow,” he said. “Remember to bring your birth certificate.”
“I’ll remember,” I said.
The lion was roaring as I hung up.
I was in the shower when the phone rang again. Streaming and soapy, grabbing a towel to wrap around my middle, I picked up the phone.
“Hello,” the voice said. “I waited as long as I could.” It was Evelyn Coates. Her voice was half an octave lower on the phone. “I have to leave the house. I thought you might have been tempted to call last night, after the game. Or this morning.” Her self-confidence was irritating.
“No,” I said, leaning back, trying to keep the water from dripping onto the bed. “It didn’t occur to me,” I lied. “Anyway, you seemed somewhat preoccupied.”
“What are you doing today?” she asked, ignoring my complaint.
“At the moment I’m taking a shower.” I felt at a disadvantage trying to cope with that low, bantering voice, the water dripping coldly down my back from my wet hair and my eyes beginning to smart because I had gotten some soap in them.
She laughed. “Aren’t you polite?” she said. “Getting out of a shower to answer the phone. You knew it was me, didn’t you?”
“The thought may have crossed my mind.”
“Can I take you to lunch?”
I hesitated, but not for long. After all, I had nothing better to do that afternoon in Washington. “That would be fine,” I said.
“I’ll meet you at Trader Vic’s,” she said. “It’s a Polynesian place in the Hilton. It’s nice and dark, so you won’t see the poker rings under my eyes. One o’clock?”
“One o’clock,” I said. I sneezed. I heard her laugh.
“Go back to your shower and then dry yourself thoroughly, like a good boy. We don’t want you spreading cold germs among the Republicans.”
I sneezed again as I hung up. I fumbled my way back to the bathroom with my eyes smarting from the soap. A dark room would suit me, too, because I knew my eyes would be bloodshot the better part of the afternoon. Somehow, I was beginning to have the feeling that I would have to be at my best, physically and mentally, anytime I had anything to do with Evelyn Coates.
“Grimes,” she said to me as we were finishing lunch in the dimly lit room, watching the Chinese or Malayan or Tahitian waiter pour flaming rum into our coffee, “you give me the impression of being a man with something to hide.”
It came as a complete surprise to me. Until then our conversation had been almost absolutely impersonal—about the food, the drinks (she had had three enormous rum concoctions, with no apparent effect)—about the poker game the night before (she had complimented me on the way I played and I had complimented her)—about the various social strata in Washington and where the people of the night before fitted in, all the small, polite kind of talk with which a courteous and worldly woman might fill an hour to entertain a visitor from afar who had been asked to look her up by some mutual friend. She was dressed charmingly, in a loose tweed suit and a plain blue blouse, high at the throat, and had her dark blonde hair pulled back and tied with a blue ribbon in girlish fashion. I had spoken little, and if I wondered why she had bothered to call me, I hadn’t shown it. She hadn’t mentioned the night we had spent together, and I had made up my mind not to be the first to bring it up.
“Something to hide,” she repeated. My questions to her the night I had met her, I realized, had not been forgotten. Had been filed away in that sharp, suspicious mind for future reference.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. But I avoided her eyes.
“Yes, you do,” she said. She watched the waiter finish with his performance and place the mugs of hot coffee, smelling of rum and orange and cinnamon sticks, in front of us. “I’ve seen you three times now—and this is what I don’t know about you—where you come from, where you’re going, what you’re doing in town, what business you’re in, why you didn’t call me after the other night.” She sipped at her drink, smiling demurely over the rim of the mug. “Every other man I’ve ever seen three times in one week has regaled me with his complete biography—how his father didn’t communicate with him, how important he is, what stocks he’s bought, all the influential people he knows in town, what problems he has with his wife …”
“I’m not married.”
“Bravo,” she said. “I am in possession of a fact. Mind you, I’m not digging for information. I’m not all that curious about you. It just occurred to me all of a sudden that you must be hiding something. Please don’t tell me what it is—” She held up her hand as though to stop me from saying anything. “You might turn out to be a lot less interesting than I think you are. There’s only one thing I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind.” I could hardly say less.
“Are you staying in Washington?”
“No.”
“According to Jerry Hale you’re going abroad.”
“Eventually,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Soon. In a week or so.”
“Are you going to Rome?”
“I imagine so.”
“Are you prepared to do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
She looked at me consideringly, tapping a fingernail absently on the wood surface of the table. She seemed to come to some decision. “In the course of my duties,” she said, “I have come across certain private memorandums of considerable interest. I’ve taken the liberty of Xeroxing them. The Xerox is Washington’s secret weapon. No man is safe if there’s one in the office. I happen to have a small sampling of records of delicate negotiations that someday may prove to very useful to me. And to a friend—a very good friend. He used to work with me, and I’d like to protect him. He’s in the embassy in Rome. I want to get some papers to him—some papers very important to me and to him—safely. I don’t trust the mails here. And I certainly don’t trust them in Rome. My friend has told me he thinks his correspondence is being tampered with, both in the embassy and at his home. Don’t look so surprised. If you’d been in this city as long as I have …” She didn’t finish the sentence. “T
here’s not a soul here I really trust. People talk incessantly, pressures are applied, mail is opened, as I said, phones are bugged …I imagine your good friend Jeremy Hale intimated as much to you.”
“He did. You think you can trust me?”
“I think so.” Her voice was hard, almost threatening. “For one thing, you won’t be in Washington. And if you’re hiding something important of your own, as I believe …Do you deny it?”
“Let it pass,” I said. “For the moment.”
“For the moment.” She nodded, smiling pleasantly at me. “As I said, if you’re hiding something important of your own, why couldn’t you undertake a little secret errand for a friend? Something that wouldn’t take up more than a half hour of your time—and keep quiet about it?” She dug in the big leather handbag that she had on the floor under the table and produced a thick, business-size envelope, sealed with Scotch tape. She slapped it down on the table between us. “It doesn’t take up much space, as you can see.”
“I don’t know when I’m going to be in Rome,” I said. “Maybe not for months.”
“There’s no rush,” she said deliberately. She pushed the envelope a half-inch closer to me across the table with her fingernail. She was a hard woman to say no to. “Any time before May will do.”
There was no name or address on the envelope. She took out a small gold pencil and a notebook. “Here’s the address and telephone number of my friend,” she said. “Call him at home. I’d rather you didn’t deliver this at the embassy. I’m sure you’ll like him. He knows everybody in Rome and you might meet some interesting people through him. I’d appreciate it if you dropped me a line after you’ve seen him to let me know the deed’s been done.”
“I’ll write you,” I said.
“There’s a nice boy.” She pushed the envelope still closer to me. “From all indications,” she said evenly, “you would like to see me from time to time. Am I right?”