(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  Utterly baffled, Jacobsson made his way to the waiting cars. He was an old man who lived by plan. Everyone always said that his organizational ability could not be surpassed. This talent was one of his greatest gratifications. The last report, received hours before, had been that Craig was arriving by Scandinavian Airlines, in Copenhagen, at nine this morning. Flight 912, he remembered. The connection for Stockholm was to have been on this plane leaving Copenhagen at 11.20. Could Flight 912 have been delayed? He was certain that he would have been informed. This was a mystery, indeed. It was the first time, in memory, that he could recall a laureate’s not arriving as scheduled.

  He’ dismissed the second limousine, and then climbed into the first, taking the jump seat beside Krantz, determined not to worry the renowned Dr. Garrett and wife with his problem.

  But all the way back to Stockholm, he wondered what had happened to Andrew Craig.

  It was nearly 4.30 in the afternoon when Count Bertil Jacobsson had the answer to his mystery.

  Alone of the members of the reception committee, to which a Foreign Office attaché had now been added, he had been impatient during the slow lunch for the Garretts in the Grand Hotel. His anxiety centred on returning to his office at Sturegatan 14, and commanding the telephone, and locating the missing Nobel laureate.

  Now, driving his cane nervously into the green carpet of the Foundation reception corridor, he made his way to his telephone. The muffled thud of the cane heralded his arrival, and his secretary, Astrid Steen, materialized in the doorway of the reception office. She held aloft an envelope.

  ‘Telegram for you, sir.’

  He took it from her, tore it open, and held the message before him. The origin, he saw at once, was Copenhagen.

  He read the message:

  DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND CONTROL HAVE CANCELLED FLIGHT TO STOCKHOLM STOP MUST REMAIN IN THIS CITY ENTIRE DAY STOP AM TAKING NORD EXPRESS TONIGHT AND WILL ARRIVE WITH MY SISTER IN LAW AT EIGHT FORTY FIVE TOMORROW MORNING STOP SORRY IF I HAVE INCONVENIENCED YOU STOP BEST REGARDS ANDREW CRAIG

  He heard Mrs. Steen’s inquiry. ‘Anything wrong, sir?’

  ‘No—no—nothing. Mr. Craig has been delayed. He’ll be with us in the morning.’

  He went on into his office, removed his overcoat, and forgot to greet old King Gustaf on the wall.

  He settled in the swivel chair behind his desk, flattened the telegram on the ink blotter, and read it again. The mystery had been solved, and yet it was not solved at all. ‘Circumstances beyond control’ had made Andrew Craig cancel his flight. What circumstances? And what kind that were beyond control?

  What in the devil had happened to Andrew Craig, anyway?

  Count Bertil Jacobsson had the uneasy, indefinable feeling that things were not going as evenly this year as the last or, for that matter, the year before. The programme had not yet begun, and already it was out of line. Jacobsson did not like it. He did not like it at all.

  3

  * * *

  THE telegram that Count Bertil Jacobsson read in Stockholm at 4.30 had been sent almost five hours earlier, at 11.43 in the morning, from a Danish modern bedroom on the sixth floor of the Tre Falke Hotel in Copenhagen. Although it was signed by Andrew Craig, he had had no part in its creation. It was written and dispatched by Leah Decker, his sister-in-law.

  What awakened Andrew Craig from his slumber was Leah’s intense, high-pitched voice, in another room, reading the telegram aloud to someone unknown. She read the contents for approval, and the contents were approved. Eventually, Craig would deduce that the person unknown was Mr. Gates, the First Secretary of the United States Embassy in Copenhagen.

  Fully aroused from his sleep, Craig tried to familiarize himself with his surroundings. He lay on the black quilt of a divan, his feet dangling over the edge, in a strange, overwhelmingly citron-coloured room, surrounded by severely angled, teakwood furniture, obviously produced in a factory teeming with cubists. The room was efficient, spotlessly clean, lifeless. His suit jacket, he realized, had been removed, and his shoes, also. His head throbbed, and his tongue had the leathery consistency of the tongue of a hunting boot. He had been drunk, he supposed, and now he was not quite sober, but sobering badly, and he was thirsty.

  He listened to the two voices that came to him through the abbreviated hall connecting the next room.

  A page arrived, and was given the telegram, and instructed to send it off posthaste. Leah worried that, having cancelled the flight, they might not obtain a train reservation. Mr. Gates assured her that the train reservation would be forthcoming, and if it was not, there was always another flight. Leah did not want to risk another flight. It was too quick. It would not give her brother-in-law time to rest. He required rest above all else. She implored Mr. Gates to try the Central Railway Station again, and Mr. Gates obliged her. He reminded the reservation desk that he was a representative of the American Embassy, and that two compartments on the Nord Express were sorely needed. There were several pauses, half-uttered phrases, and then it appeared that the compartments had been obtained.

  The conversation next door was indistinct, and Craig did not strain to hear it. Suddenly, he heard light footsteps—Leah’s, he guessed—and he made an instant decision. He turned his face to the wall, closed his eyes tight, and feigned sleep. As a touch of realism, he simulated laboured breathing. Momentarily, he was aware of Leah’s unseen presence above him. He heard her sniff twice, clear her throat, and at last, he heard her leave.

  When the voices in the next room resumed, this time more distinctly, he opened his eyes once more and listened again.

  ‘He’s out cold,’ Leah was saying. ‘He’ll be out for hours.’

  ‘Then we can go?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s safe.’

  ‘Very well. We’ll pick up the tickets at the Central Station. Then we’ll lunch at Oskar Davidsen’s. If there’s time, we can drive out to Elsinore. It’s no more than two hours round trip. You’re sure Mr. Craig wouldn’t want to come along?’

  ‘He’s got to sleep this off. Nothing else concerns me. This afternoon, and tonight on the train, will hardly be enough. I just hope the Nobel Foundation won’t be put off by the delay.’

  ‘They’ll be delighted to have you both at any time.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  There was more indistinct talk, and finally movement, and the sound of the door opening and closing.

  Andrew Craig lay still. He would give them plenty of time to leave, he decided. Besides, he was too enervated to rise. He wanted the beating in his temples to cease. Given time, it would. Of course, the thirst was distressing. Nevertheless, he would display willpower. He would wait ten minutes. He tried to moisten his tongue against the roof of his mouth, but that was no good, and at last he did so by rubbing his tongue along the inner lining of his cheeks. Ten minutes. He waited.

  The couple of weeks in Miller’s Dam, before departure, were difficult to recall. The Nobel notification had caught him at the outset of his cycle. After Harriet’s death, when he had been recuperating, he had not drunk heavily, no more heavily than when she had lived. It was afterwards—all dressed up and no place to go—wasn’t that the old expression?—that whisky had made each day possible. In the first year, he had drunk blindly, all the time. When the pain had been replaced by conscious emptiness, he had fallen into the cycle. Lucius Mack had told him that it was a cycle. Or had it been Leah? Two weeks drunk and two weeks sober, well, mostly sober. In the last year, it had been three weeks drunk and one week sober, and he had added no more than twenty pages to the meagre pile that was entitled Return to Ithaca. He had been on his three-week drunk when the notification had come, and he was still on it, he guessed.

  It was impossible to recapture more than fragments of the past, no matter how recent, when you had been steadily drinking. The whisky bottle was the all-inclusive holdall. Into it you could stuff writing, and sex, and hope, and memory, and soak and dissolve them beyond recognition. From the night of the telegram t
o the morning when he had been driven to Chicago, he could remember almost nothing. Somehow, certain faces were visible, those of Lucius Mack and Jake Binninger, buffers between himself and the outside press; that of Leah, fussing, nursing, complaining; that of Professor Alex Inglis, down from Joliet College, mutely worshipful, mutely imploring.

  Yesterday morning—yes, yesterday—Lucius Mack had driven them to Chicago in his station-wagon. Leah had been in the best of spirits. She had worn a moss-green jersey suit, new, and the black broadcloth coat, new, that Craig had given her as a bon voyage gift and her due. (He had not actually bought it himself, but sat in a Milwaukee tavern while Lucius did the shopping and even laid out the money, an advance against the Nobel cheque.) Not the least of her good cheer was the promise Leah had extracted from Craig the night before, the promise that he would not drink, except socially, until the Nobel Ceremony was ended. These gifts, and the excitement, had served to relax Leah’s clenched, Slavic face, and her inflexible body. Her aspect was more feminine, and her pride in him—in the past he had resented it as a subtle pressure—gave him fleeting pride in himself, briefly, briefly, in the way that Harriet had so often given it to him.

  The lunch in the Pump Room had been a farewell feast worthy of Lucullus—steadily enlivened by Lucius Mack’s moody speculations on the advertising inches he must sell in Miller’s Dam to pay for each course—and afterwards they had driven to the airport and entered the Boeing 720 for New York City. What had made the two-and-a-half-hour flight bearable to Craig were the two drinks that he had been permitted in the Pump Room and the two more on the plane. Upon landing, they had been met by Craig’s publisher, his agent, and his favourite book-review-page editor, and whisked to a candlelit restaurant, an expensive celebrity haven, and Craig had been miserable. He had been interested neither in the literary talk nor in his future, but only in his desperate need for refreshment. He had been allowed one double Scotch-on-the-rocks, and the mechanics of the occasion made the necessary second and third drinks impossible to obtain. The conspiracy against him was enforced by a publisher who did the ordering and who was determined to see him turn over a new leaf, an agent who had ulcers, an editor who regarded one sherry as daring, and a sister-in-law who hovered over him like an Alcoholics Anonymous convert.

  The 7.30 night flight, on the Scandinavian Airlines System jet, the DC-8C, gave more promise of sustenance. Because Leah was satisfied and mellowed, she had joined him in one champagne over Canada and another over Newfoundland, and he had gallantly pressed a third on her (refusing a third himself, and disarming her completely) somewhere early over the Atlantic Ocean. She had taken it and immediately gone off to sleep in her reclining chair, and Craig was saved.

  Craig’s renown and his mission had preceded him to the aeroplane, and when he made his way to the lounge to converse and joke with the hostess, the maître de cabine, and several of the passengers, he was accepted as the party’s guest of honour. While the majority of the passengers slept, some fitfully, some soundly like Leah, Craig mounted the cycle. Waving aside the champagne—a come-on for tourists, he announced—he concentrated on Scotch. Through the joyous night, he drank. Into the dawn, come too soon, he drank. Over Scotland and England, he drank.

  The fullness of the new day, ashen and remorseful outside the fogged window, found him in his seat, blinds successfully drawn against Harriet and his art, ready for the welcoming oblivion of sleep. The intercom brought the plane, and Leah, awake. Leah hurried to the washroom, and returned with her hair combed back in place, her face stencilled in, and her jersey suit unwrinkled.

  When she sank down beside him, restored, she asked, ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘Won’erfully,’ he mumbled.

  She stretched her neck to the window. ‘That must be Denmark down there, through the clouds.’ Without turning from her country watching, she asked, ‘Isn’t it thrilling?’

  ‘Won’erfully.’

  When the stewardess announced that there would be no more smoking and that seat belts would be fastened, Craig lighted his pipe and forgot to lock his belt. No one noticed.

  They had landed—Leah congratulating herself that they were safe on earth again—and he was shuffling behind her to the plane’s exit. As he stepped out on the mobile platform, and tried to find the first step in descent, his jellied knees collapsed. He pitched against the rail, saved from a critical fall by Leah, blocking the way ahead of him, and the strong arms of two passengers.

  As she and another assisted him down the stairs, Leah smelt his breath. Her face hardened; the armistice was over.

  The rest was sketchy in Craig’s memory. Someone, dressed like a butcher on Sunday, had been there to meet them. Black coffee at a counter in the airport. A snatch of Leah’s dialogue to their host. ‘He never drinks. He’s not used to it. Everyone’s driving him crazy, wanting to treat, celebrating, he doesn’t know how to say no. It was too much.’ And again, at the cash register. ‘We can’t take off in two hours. I can’t let them see him in Stockholm this way. He’s not like this at all. It would be a disgrace.’ Then the phone booths, and the host emerging. He had found hotel rooms for them. They had ridden endlessly in someone’s automobile. A glossy hotel, with a curved driveway that took them to an entrance that resembled a carpark. A busy lobby reservation counter to the left, elevators to the right. Sixth floor. Right this way, please.

  All else, details, were bottled in alcohol. High spirits equal low recall, he told himself. Simple equation.

  He sat up on the divan. More than twenty minutes had elapsed since Leah had left him. He slipped on his shoes and tied them. He found the bathroom and doused his face with cold water, and wet his hair and combed it. He undid his tie and made it over again. He pulled on his dark grey suit coat and went into Leah’s room. It was an identical twin to his own. One suitcase was open and the rest, still strapped, on the floor.

  He returned to his room for his trench coat, and then realized that there was a note pinned to the chair beside the divan. He yanked it free and read it:

  ANDREW. In case you should wake up before I return, I have gone out for lunch with a man from the American Embassy. We had to cancel the aeroplane to Stockholm because you were drunk. We rented rooms in this hotel for you to rest, and are taking a train to Sweden tonight for the same reason. I’ll be back by five. Do behave. LEAH.

  He studied the letterhead. He was a guest of the Tre Falke Hotel, 9 Falkoner Alle, Copenhagen.

  He crumpled the note into a ball, dropped it into the wicker waste-paper basket, and went out to the elevator. After pressing the button, the wait was interminable. He took out his briar, and by the time it was smoking, the elevator door had opened. It was self-service and carried him downwards without a stop.

  He inquired of a page for the bar, and the beardless young man led him through the lobby, bearing left, and pointed. The curved horseshoe of a counter, before the dining-room, was uninhabited except for the blond, chinless young man, in black suit and white apron, behind it.

  As Craig approached, he saw the bartender watching him closely. He lifted himself onto a stool.

  ‘Double Scotch-on-the-rocks.’

  The bartender hesitated. ‘Pardon, sir. Are you Mr. Craig, Rooms 607 and 608?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir. I have strict orders not to serve you.’

  Craig was more surprised than angry. ‘How did you know me?’

  ‘Your wife described you, sir.’

  ‘She’s not my wife.’

  ‘The lady, then. She said you were seriously ill—beg your pardon—and the physician’s orders were—no drinks.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind? This is a public bar. I’m a public customer. I want a drink. Now, please oblige me.’

  The chinless bartender wavered, but stood fast. ‘We could be sued, sir, If you fell ill. The hotel rules allow us to serve guests at our discretion. It’s posted in your room, sir.’

  Craig’s fury was not with this fool but wit
h Leah. He wanted no argument. He wanted a drink. ‘Okay, buddy. I’m sick, and she was kidding you, but we’ll let it go.’ He stood up. ‘Make it one, then—one shot—for the road. No one’ll see.’

  The bartender hesitated. His only desire, obvious in his expression, was that his customer leave quietly. He nodded, pulled a bottle and a glass from under the bar, and filled the glass. ‘I shouldn’t,’ he said, and pushed the glass at his customer.

  Craig downed it in a single swallow. The fluid, moistening his mouth, burning his throat, heating his chest, revived him. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ He made his solemn joke. ‘Remember, you didn’t have a drink.’

  Craig smiled bitterly. ‘Best drink I never had.’ He slipped off the stool. ‘Where’s downtown?’

  ‘Twenty minutes away, sir. It’s called Raadhusplads. The middle of everything. You can’t miss it. You’ll find taxis in front here, or you can take the regular buses. Don’t forget to change dollars into kroner.’

  ‘Thanks, pal.’

  In the lobby, adjacent to the reception desk, he found the female money-changer with her adding machine. He gave her a twenty-dollar note, received a handful of kroner, stuffed the Danish money into his wallet as he studied the American, English, German, and French newspapers and magazines at the news-stand, and then went outside.

  The day had brightened, but the air was cold. He saw several parked cars in the area ahead, but not a single taxi. He waited, and then approached the doorman, who was busy conversing with a drably clothed porter.

  ‘Where’s the bus?’ Craig inquired.

  ‘Bus?’ echoed the doorman. ‘Ah yes, yes, the motor-coach.’ He pointed off. ‘There. It is soon to leave.’

  Craig thanked him and strode hurriedly to the large blue-and-white bus that stood in the driveway before a cavernous cinema. He climbed into the bus.