Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  I was feeling a little giddy from all the champagne, but I didn’t feel like sleeping. I took a sheet of the hotel stationery from the drawer of the desk and began to write on it almost at random.

  Stake, I wrote, 20,000. Gold—15,000. Bridge and backgammon—36,000 … Movie?

  I stared at what I had written, half-hypnotized. Before this, even when I was making a comfortable living at the airline, I had never bothered to add up my checkbook and certainly had not known within a hundred dollars what I was worth or even how much I had in my pocket at any given time. Now I resolved to keep an accounting every week. Or, with the way things were going, every day. I had discovered one of the deepest pleasures of wealth—addition. The numbers on the page gave me a greater satisfaction than I could hope to get from buying anything with the money the numbers represented. Briefly, I wondered if I should consider this a vice and be ashamed. I would wrestle with this at a later time.

  I heard an unmistakable sound from the next room and winced. How far could I trust Fabian? His attitude toward money, his own and that of others, was, to say the least, cavalier. And there was nothing in what I knew of his character and background that suggested an unwavering commitment to fiscal honesty. Tomorrow I would demand that we write out a firm legal document. But no matter what we had on paper, I knew I would have to keep him in sight at all times.

  When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my brother Hank, sad at his adding machines, working on other people’s money.

  In the morning we finally had a chance to talk. Lily was going to the coiffeur to get her hair done and Fabian said he wanted to take me to see the Maeght Museum at St.-Paul-de-Vence.

  We set out from Nice, with Fabian at the wheel of the rented car. There was little traffic, the sea was calm on our left, the morning bright. Fabian drove safely, taking no risks, and I relaxed beside him, the euphoria of the evening before not yet dispelled by daylight. We drove in silence until we got out of Nice and past the airport. Then Fabian said, “Don’t you think I should know the circumstances?”

  “What circumstances?” I asked, although I could guess what he meant.

  “How the money came into your hands. Why you felt you had to leave the country. I imagine there was some danger involved. In a way, now, I may be equally endangered, wouldn’t you say?”

  “To a certain extent,” I said.

  He nodded. We were climbing into the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes, the road winding through stands of pine, olive groves, and vineyards, the air spiced and fragrant. In that innocent countryside, under the Mediterranean sun, the idea of danger was incongruous, the haunted dark streets of nighttime New York remote, another world. I would have preferred to keep quiet, not because I wanted to hide the facts, but from a desire to enjoy the splendid present, unshadowed by memory. Still, Fabian had a right to know. As we drove slowly, higher and higher into the flowered hills, I told him everything, from beginning to end.

  He listened in silence until I had finished, then said, “Supposing we were to continue to be as successful in our—our operations—” he smiled—“as we have been until now. Supposing after a while we could afford to give back the hundred thousand and still have a decent amount left for our own use. …Would you be inclined to try to find out who the original owner was and return the money to his heirs?”

  “No,” I said. “I would not be inclined.”

  “An excellent answer,” he said. “I don’t see how it could be done without putting someone on your trail. On our trail. There must be a limit to wanton curiosity. Has there been any indication that people have been searching for you?”

  “Only what happened to Drusack.”

  “I would take that as fair warning.” Fabian made a little grimace. “Have you ever had anything to do with criminals before this?”

  “No.”

  “Neither have I. That might be an advantage. We don’t know how they think, so we won’t fall into the dangerous pattern of trying to outwit them. Still, I feel that so far you’ve done the right thing. Keeping constantly on the move, I mean. For a while, it would be wise to continue. You don’t mind traveling, do you?”

  “I love it,” I said. “Especially now that I can afford it.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that the people involved might not have been criminals?”

  “No.”

  “I read in the newspapers some time back about a man who was killed in an airplane crash and was found with sixty thousand dollars on him. He was a prominent Republican and he was on his way to Republican headquarters in California. It was during Eisenhower’s second campaign. The money you found might have been a campaign contribution that had to be kept secret.”

  “Possibly,” I said. “Only I don’t see any prominent Republican coming into the Hotel St. Augustine for any reason whatsoever.”

  “Well …” Fabian shrugged. “Let’s hope that we never find out whose money it was, or who was supposed to get it. Do you think you’ll ever see the twenty-five thousand dollars you loaned your brother?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a generous man. I approve of that. That’s one of the nicest things about wealth. It leads to generosity.” We were entering the grounds of the museum now. “For example, this,” Fabian said. “Superb building. Glorious collection, marvelously displayed. What a satisfactory gesture it must have been to sign the check that made it all possible.”

  He parked the car and we got out and started walking up toward the severely beautiful building set on the crest of a hill, surrounded by a green park in which huge angular statues were set, the rustling foliage of the trees and bushes all around them making them seem somehow light and almost on the verge of moving themselves.

  Inside the museum, which was nearly deserted, I was more puzzled than anything else by the collection. I had never been much of a museum-goer, and what taste I had in art was for traditional painters and sculptors. Here I was confronted with shapes that existed only in the minds of the artists, with splotches on canvas, distortions of everyday objects and the human form that made very little sense to me. Fabian, on the other hand, went slowly from one work to another, not speaking, his face studious, engrossed. When we finally went out and started toward our car, he sighed deeply, as though recovering from some tremendous effort. “What a treasure-house,” he said. “All that energy, that struggle, that reaching out, that demented humor, all collected in one place. How did you like it?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t understand most of it.”

  He laughed. “The last honest man,” he said. “Well, I see that you and I are going to put in a lot of museum time. You eventually cross a threshold of emotion—mostly just by looking. But it’s like almost any valuable accomplishment—it has to be learned.”

  “Is it worth it?” I knew I sounded like a Philistine, but I resented his assumption that it was my duty to be taught and his to teach. After all, if it hadn’t been for my money, he wouldn’t have been on the coast of the Mediterranean that morning, but back in St. Moritz, scrambling at the bridge table and the backgammon board for enough money to pay his hotel bill.

  “To me it’s worth it,” he said. He put his hand on my arm gently. “Don’t underestimate the joys of the spirit, Douglas. Man does not live by caviar alone.”

  We stopped at a café on the side of the square of St.-Paul-de-Vence and sat at a table outside and had a bottle of white wine and watched some old men playing boules under the trees in the square, moving in and out of sunlight, their voices echoing hoarsely off the old, rust-colored wall behind them that had been part of the fortifications of the town in the Middle Ages. We sipped the cold wine slowly, rejoicing in idleness, in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything, watching a game whose outcome would bring no profit or pain to anyone.

  “Do not dilute the pleasure,” I said. “Do you remember who said that?”

  Fabian laughed. “I do indeed.” Then, after a moment, “On that subject—let me ask you a question. What is your conception o
f money?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I never really thought about it. I don’t think I have a conception. That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

  “A little,” Fabian said.

  “If I asked you the same question, what would your answer be?”

  “A conception of money,” Fabian said, “doesn’t exist in a pure state. I mean you have to know what you think of the world in general before you can hope to have a clear notion about money. For example, your view of the world, from what you’ve told me, changed in one day. Am I right?”

  “The day in the doctor’s office,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that before that day you had one conception of what money meant to you and after it another?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t had any dramatic changes of outlook like that,” Fabian said. “A long time ago I decided that the world was a place of infinite injustice. What have I seen and lived through? Wars in which millions of the innocent perished, holocausts, droughts, failures of all kinds, corruption in high places, the enrichment of thieves, the geometric multiplication of victims. And nothing I could possibly do to alter or alleviate any of it. I am not a pain-seeker or reformer, and even if I were, no conceivable good would come out of my suffering or preaching. So—my intention has always been to try to avoid joining the ranks of the victims. As far as I could ever see, the people who avoided being victims had at least one thing in common. Money. So my conception of money began with that one thing—freedom. Freedom to move. To be one’s own man. Freedom to say, Screw you, Jack, at the appropriate moment. A poor man is a rat in a maze. His choices are made for him by a power beyond himself. He becomes a machine whose fuel is hunger. His satisfactions are pitifully restricted. Of course there is always the exceptional rat who breaks out of the maze, driven most often by an exceptional and uncommon hunger. Or by accident. Or luck. Like you and me. Well, I don’t pretend that the entire human race is—or should be—satisfied with the same things. There are men who want power and who will abase themselves, betray their mothers, kill for it. Regard certain of our presidents and the colonels who rule most of the world today. There are saints who will commit themselves to the fire rather than deny some truth that they believe has been vouchsafed them. There are men who wear themselves out with ulcers and heart attacks before the age of sixty for the ludicrous distinction of running an assembly line, an advertising agency, a brokerage house. I’ll say nothing about the women who allow themselves to become drudges for love, or whores out of pure laziness. When you were earning your living as a pilot, I imagine you believed yourself happy.”

  “Very,” I said.

  “I dislike flying,” Fabian said. “I am either bored in the air or frightened. Everyone to his own satisfactions. Mine, I’m afraid, are banal and selfish. I hate to work; I like the company of elegant women; I enjoy traveling, with a certain emphasis on fine, old-fashioned hotels; I have a collector’s instinct, which up to now I have had to suppress. None of this is particularly admirable, but I’m not running as an admirable entry. Actually, since we’re partners, I’d prefer it if we could share the same tastes. It would reduce the probability of friction between us.” He looked at me speculatively. “Do you consider yourself admirable?”

  I thought for a moment, trying to be honest with myself. “I guess I never thought about it one way or another. I guess you could say it never occurred to me to ask myself if I was either admirable or unadmirable.”

  “I find you dangerously modest, Douglas,” Fabian said. “At a crucial moment you may turn out to be a dreadful drag. Modesty and money don’t go well together. I like money, as you can guess, but I am rather bored by the process of accumulating it and am deeply bored by most of the people who spend the best part of their lives doing so. My feeling about the world of money is that it is like a loosely guarded city which should be raided sporadically by outsiders, noncitizens, like me, who aren’t bound by any of its laws or moral pretensions. Thanks to you, Douglas, and the happy accident that led you and myself to buy identical bags, I may now be able to live up to my dearest image of myself. Now—about you—Although you’re over thirty, there’s something—I hope you won’t take this unkindly—something youthful, almost adolescent—unformed, perhaps—that I sense in your character. If I may say so, as a man who has always had a direction, I sense a lack of direction in you. Am I unfair in saying that?”

  “A little,” I said. “Maybe it’s not a lack of direction, but a confusion of directions.”

  “Perhaps that’s it,” Fabian said. “Perhaps you’re not yet ready to accept the consequences of the gesture that you have made.”

  “What gesture?” I asked, puzzled.

  “The night in the Hotel St. Augustine. Let me ask you a question. Supposing you had come across that dead man, with all that money in the room, before your eyes went bad, while you still were flying, still were playing with the idea of marriage—would you have done what you did?”

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  “There’s one thing you can always depend on,” Fabian said. “The wrong man will always be in the wrong place at the right moment.” He poured some more wine for himself. “As for me—there never was a time in my whole life that I would have hesitated for a second. Well, all that’s in the past. We want to move as far away as possible from the original source, to cover it up, so to speak, with so much fresh capital, that people will never speculate about just how we started in the first place. Don’t you agree?”

  “In principle, yes,” I said. “But just how do you propose to do it? We can’t depend upon buying winning horses every day. …”

  “No,” Fabian said, “I must admit, we have to regard that as unusual.”

  “And you’ve told me you’re never going to play bridge or backgammon again.”

  “No. The people I had to associate with depressed me. And the deception I had to practice made me a little ashamed of myself. Duplicity is unpleasant for a man who, by his own lights, would like to have a high opinion of himself. I sat down every night with the cold intention of taking their money away from them and nothing more—but I had to pretend to be friendly with them, be interested in them and their families, enjoy dining with them. …I really was getting too old for all that. Money …” He pronounced the word as though it were a symbol for a problem in mathematics that had to be solved. “To get the most pleasure out of money, it is best not to have to think about it most of the time. Not to have to keep on making it, with your own efforts or your own luck. In our case, that would mean investing our capital in such a way as to ensure us a comfortable income over the years. By the way, Douglas, what is your notion of a comfortable yearly income?”

  “Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars,” I said. “Thirty, maybe.”

  Fabian laughed. “Come, come, man, raise your sights a little.”

  “What would you say?”

  “One hundred, at least,” Fabian said.

  “That’ll take some doing,” I said.

  “Yes, it will. And entail some risks. From time to time it will also take nerve. And no matter what happens, no recriminations. And certainly no more stilettos.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident of the future than I actually was. “I’ll go along.”

  “We share all decisions,” Fabian said. “I’m saying this as a warning to both of us.”

  “I understand. Miles,” I said, “I’d like something in writing.”

  He looked at me as though I had slapped him. “Douglas, my boy …” he said sorrowfully.

  “It’s either that,” I said, “or I’m getting out right now.”

  “Don’t you trust me?” he asked. “Haven’t I been absolutely honest with you?”

  “After I hit you over the head with a lamp,” I said. Tactfully, I didn’t bring up the subject of the six-thousand-dollar horse that had actually cost fifteen thousand. “Well, what’s it to be?”

  “Putting something in
writing always leads to ugly differences of interpretation. I have an instinctive distaste for documents. I prefer a simple, candid, manly handshake.” He extended his hand toward me across the table. I kept my hands at my sides.

  “If you insist.” He withdrew his hand. “In Zurich, we’ll put it all into cold legal language. I hope neither of us lives to regret it.” He looked at his watch. “Lily will be waiting for us for lunch.” He stood up. I took out my, wallet to pay for the wine, but he stopped me and dropped some coins on the table. “My pleasure,” he said.

  15

  “WELL, DONE AND DONE,” FABIAN said as he and I left the lawyer’s office and stepped out into the slush of the Zurich street. “We are now bound together by the chains of law.” The agreement between us had just been notarized and the lawyer had promised to have us incorporated in Liechtenstein within the month. Liechtenstein, I had discovered, which imposes no taxes and where corporate income and outlay are closely guarded state secrets, had an irresistible attraction for lawyers.

  There were to be two shares outstanding in the corporation—one owned by Fabian, the other by myself. There was a simple justification for this that I did not understand. For some reason which had to do with the intricacies of Swiss law, the lawyer had appointed himself president of the corporation. We had to choose a name for it and I had offered Augustine Investments, Inc. There had been no dissenting votes. Various fees had been paid.

  Fabian had gallantly volunteered to include in the agreement the clause guaranteeing me the right to withdraw my original seventy thousand dollars at the end of a year. We had been to the private bank where Fabian already had a numbered account, and we made it a joint one, so that neither of us could take out any money without the consent of the other.

  We each deposited five thousand dollars in our own names in an ordinary checking account in the Union Bank of Switzerland. “Walking-around money,” Fabian called it.