by Irwin Shaw
Henry let me into the apartment. I had caught him just as he was about to go out. He and Madeleine had tickets for the theater, but when I said he would have to wait for me, he said, “I’ll be here.” He looked worried as he opened the door. Madeleine was in the living room, dressed for her night out in New York. She, too, looked worried.
“Maybe it would be better if you and I talked alone, Hank,” I said.
But he shook his head. “I’d rather she stayed, if you don’t mind.”
“All right,” I said. “It won’t take long. I need a hundred thousand dollars, Hank. In hundred-dollar bills. I haven’t time to collect it from Europe and I don’t have it here. I have only three days. Can you get it for me in three days?”
Henry sat down suddenly. We had all been standing in the middle of the living room. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, in a gesture that was a hangover from childhood. “Yes,” he said, almost inaudibly. “Somehow. Of course.”
It only took two days.
I called Vance’s room from the lobby of the hotel. He was there. “I’m coming up,” I said. I held the heavy suitcase in one hand while I held the telephone with the other.
“Excellent,” he said.
I waited while he counted the bills. He did it slowly and carefully. I hadn’t asked Henry where he had found the money and he hadn’t told me. “That’s it,” said Vance, as he snapped a rubber band around the last bundle of bills. “Thank you.”
“You can keep the bag,” I said.
“That’s kind of you.” He escorted me to the door.
I drove fast. I wanted to look in at the hospital before it was too late for visitors. I had called at noon and spoken to Lily. Fabian was resting comfortably, she had said. I wanted to tell him that the man had come, as he had predicted, and asked for a hundred thousand dollars and that I had had it to give to him.
When I got to the hospital, the nurse at the front desk stopped me. “I’m afraid you’re too late, Mr. Grimes,” she said. “Mr. Fabian died at four o’clock this afternoon. We tried to reach you, but …”
“That’s all right,” I said. I was mildly surprised at how calm my voice sounded. “Is Lady Abbott here?”
The nurse shook her head. “I believe Mrs. Abbott has left town.” Even at that moment her American distrust of titles prevented her from saying Lady Abbott. “She said there was nothing more she could do here. She thought she could catch a night plane back to London.”
I nodded. “Very wise,” I said. “Good night, Nurse. I’ll be here in the morning to make the necessary arrangements.”
“Good night, Mr. Grimes,” she said.
I drove slowly toward East Hampton. There was no hurry now. I did not want to go home just yet. I drove to the barn, dark now, with the newly painted sign, The South Fork Gallery, in small, modest letters above the door. “Don’t neglect the shop.” Fabian had said. I took out my ring of keys and opened the door. I sat on a bench in the middle of the room, without turning on the lights, thinking of the joyous, dishonest, scarred, cunning man who had died that day, and who, by the terms of the contract we had signed that slushy day in the office of the lawyer in Zurich, now had left me free and absurdly wealthy. The tears came slowly.
I got off the bench and went over to the switch and turned on the lights. Then I stood in the middle of the room and looked at the paintings of the wanderings of Angelo Quinn’s father, glowing on the walls.
A Biography of Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the New Yorker to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.
Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.
“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the Dick Tracy radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play, Bury the Dead. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as The Big Game (1936) and The Talk of the Town (1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the New Yorker, he also penned The Gentle People (1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.
World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.
The Young Lions (1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, The Young Lions stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel Two Weeks in Another Town (1960).
Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) and Beggerman, Thief (1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries. Nightwork (1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain.
Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.
Shaw’s US Army record.
Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.
A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.
A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.
Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.
Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.
Shaw at home with Marian at Chalet Mia, Klosters, in 1958.
Shaw (center) skiing in Klosters in 1960 with (left to right) Noel Howard (an actor), an unidentified Hollywood producer, Marian Shaw, Jacques Charmoz (a French World War II pilot, cartoonist, and painter), and Jacqueline Tesseron.
Shaw in Klosters in 1960 with (from left to right) Kathy Parrish, her husband Robert Parrish (an Academy Award–winning film editor and director), and Peter Viertel (a screenwriter, novelist, and Shaw’s coauthor for the play The Survivors). Shaw’s friendship with Viertel started before the war, when they both lived in Malibu.
Shaw with Irving P. “Swifty” Lazar, the legendary talent agent who represented him, in Evian, France, in
1963.
Shaw playing tennis in Klosters in 1964.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1975 by Irwin Shaw
Cover design by Andrea Uva
978-1-4804-1330-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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