Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  It had to happen, she thought. Of course. We should have known. He probably knew. Maybe not consciously, but known just the same. All that violence could not have a nonviolent end. True son of his father, the blond stranger in the family, alien to the dark brother and the dark girl, although all from the same bed.

  « »

  The man was slim, too, a well-cared-for, aristocratic Yankee slim-ness, inherited from no parent, acquired by an act of will, now accentuated by the neatly cut, almost ambassadorial dark American suit. He was younger by two years than his sister and looked younger than that, a false, gentle echo of youth in the face and bearing of a man whose speech and movements were always deliberate and considered, a man who had known great authority, had struggled all his life, had won and lost, had taken on responsibility in all situations, had come up from penury and want to amass a considerable fortune, who had been ruthless when necessary, cunning when it was useful to be cunning, harsh with himself and others, generous, by his lights, when it was possible to be generous. The resignation that had been forced upon him was there in the thin, controlled mouth, the watchful eyes, was there to be discovered or guessed at. It was a face that could have been that of a youthful air force general whose command had been taken away from him for a failure in the ranks below him that might or might not have been his fault.

  He went alone, Rudolph Jordache was thinking; he came into the cabin where I was sleeping and closed the door softly and left alone. Left for what was to become his death, disdaining my help, disdaining me, disdaining my manhood or what he would think of, if he ever thought, as my lack of manhood, in a situation that required a man.

  Down below, Kate Jordache was packing her bag. It didn’t take long. On top of her other things she first put the white jersey with the ship’s name on it that had made Thomas laugh when he saw what her full bosom had done to the lettering, then the bright dress he had bought her for their wedding just eight days ago.

  She had nagged Thomas into marrying her. That was the word—nagged. They had been perfectly happy before, but then when she knew she was pregnant—Proper, bloody little well-brought-up, lower-class, obedient, English working girl … Here comes the bride. If there had been no wedding, that awful, twittery, smart-talking woman, that fancy wife of Rudolph’s, would never have had the excuse to get drunk, would not have gone off with a Yugoslav pimp, would have kept her expensive pink pants on her, would not have needed rescuing or a man fighting for her, and a man a lot better than her husband would be alive today.

  Enough of that, Kate thought. Enough. Enough.

  She closed the bag with a snap and sat down on the edge of the bunk, her solid brown body just beginning to show the swell of the child within her, her capable, quick hands folded quietly in her lap as she looked around her, for the last time, she had decided, at the cramped cabin with the familiar noise of the sea swishing past the open porthole.

  Thomas, she thought, Thomas, Thomas.

  “Who was Clothilde?” she had asked once.

  “She was a queen of France. She was somebody I knew as a boy. She smelled like you.”

  Absent from the small company of mourners on the vessel heading for the coast of France was Jean, Rudolph Jordache’s wife. She sat on a bench in the park of the hotel watching her daughter playing with the young girl Rudolph had hired to take care of the child until, as Rudolph had put it, she was in condition to handle Enid again herself. How long would that be? Jean had asked herself. Two days, ten years, never?

  She was dressed in slacks and a sweater. She had not brought along clothes suitable for a funeral. Rudolph had been relieved when she said she wouldn’t go. She could not bear the thought of stepping aboard the Clothilde again, of facing the silent, accusing stares of the wife, the son, the beloved friend.

  When she had looked at herself in the mirror in the morning she was shocked at what the last days had done to the small, pretty, girlish face.

  The skin of her face, her entire body, seemed to be stretched unbearably on some invisible rack. She felt as though at any moment her body would explode and her nerves erupt through the skin, snapping and crackling like wild lines of wire, crackling under fatal electrical charges.

  The doctor had given her some Valium, but she was past Valium. If it weren’t for the child, she thought, she would go down to the sea and throw herself off the rocks into it.

  As she sat there in the shadow of a tree, in the spicy fragrance of pine and sun-warmed lavender, she said to herself, Everything I touch I destroy.

  « »

  Hubbell sat over a coffee on the terrasse of a café in the main square, thinking over what the policeman had told him. The policeman obviously knew more than he was telling, but you had to expect that from the police, especially with an embarrassing unsolved murder on their hands. The sister-in-law might be able to help you more than I can, the cop had said. The sister-in-law. The naked lady, the wife of the promising young mayor. Definitely worth a couple of hundred words. The harbor could wait.

  He paid for his coffee and walked over to a parked taxi and got in and said, “The Hôtel du Cap.”

  Madame Jordache was not in her room, the concierge said, but he had seen her go out into the park with her child and the child’s nurse. Hubbell asked the concierge if there was a telex in the hotel and was told that there was one. He asked if he might use it that evening and after a moment’s hesitation the concierge said he thought that could be arranged. The hesitation Hubbell rightly interpreted to mean that a tip would be involved. No matter. Time Magazine could afford it. He thanked the concierge and went out to the terrace and the steps leading to the long avenue through the noble park down to the bathing pavilion and restaurant and the sea. He suffered a moment of envy as he thought of the small room in the noisy little hotel on the highway in which his wife was taking her siesta. Time Magazine paid well, but not well enough for the Hôtel du Cap.

  He went down the steps and into the fragrant park. A minute later he saw a little girl in a white bathing suit throwing a beach ball back and forth with a young girl. Seated on a bench nearby was a woman in slacks and a sweater. It was not the sort of scene that you would ordinarily associate with a murder.

  He approached the group slowly, stopping for a moment as if to admire a bed of flowers, then smiling at the child as he neared the group. “Bonjour,” he said. “Good afternoon.”

  The girl said, “Bonjour,” but the woman on the bench said nothing. Hubbell noticed that she was very pretty, with a trim, athletic figure, that her face was drained and pale, with dark circles under the eyes. “Mrs. Jordache?” he said.

  “Yes?” Her voice was flat and toneless. She looked up at him dully.

  “I’m from Time Magazine.” He was an honorable man and would not pretend to be a friend of her husband’s or of the murdered man or an American tourist who had heard about her trouble and wished, in his frank American way, to offer his sympathy. Leave the tricks for the young fellows fighting for by-lines. “I’ve been sent down to do a story on your brother-in-law.” A white lie, but permissible within his code. If people thought you were assigned to do a job, they often felt some small obligation to help.

  Still the woman said nothing, just stared at him with those lifeless eyes.

  “The chief of police said you might be able to give me some information about the affair. Background information.” The “background” had an innocuous ring to it, with its assumption that what would be said would not actually be published, but merely used as a guide for a responsible journalist who wanted to avoid errors in writing his story.

  “Have you talked to my husband?” Jean asked.

  “I haven’t met him yet.”

  “Haven’t met him yet,” Jean repeated. “I wish I hadn’t. And I bet he wishes I hadn’t.”

  Hubbell was taken aback, as much by the intensity with which the woman had spoken as by what she had said.

  “Did the policeman tell you why I could give you information?” the woman d
emanded, her voice harsh and rasping now.

  “No,” Hubbell lied.

  Jean stood up abruptly. “Ask my husband,” she said, “ask the whole goddamn family. Just leave me alone.”

  “Just one question, Mrs. Jordache, if I may,” Hubbell said, his throat constricted. “Would you be prepared to lay criminal charges against the man who attacked you?”

  “What difference would it make?” she said dully. She sat heavily on the bench, stared at her child, running after the beach ball in the sunshine. “Go away. Go away. Please.”

  Hubbell got out of the taxi and walked along the port. Not a fitting place to die, he thought as he went toward the port captain’s shack to find out where the Clothilde was berthed. The port captain was a weathered old man, sitting outside his shack, smoking a pipe, his chair tilted against the wall as he took the afternoon sun.

  The port captain gestured with his pipe toward the mouth of the port, where a white boat was slowly coming in. “There she is. They’ll be here for a while,” the old man said. “They chewed up their starboard propeller and shaft. You American?”

  “I am.”

  “It’s a shame what happened, isn’t it?”

  “Terrible,” Hubbell said.

  “They just buried his ashes in the sea,” the old man volunteered. “As good a place to be buried as anywhere else for a sailor. I wouldn’t mind it myself.” Even in midseason, the port captain had plenty of time for conversation.

  Hubbell thanked the man and walked around the port and sat down on an upturned dory near the place on the quay into which the Clothilde was being maneuvered. He saw the two figures in back at the stern, with the American flag rippling in the breeze behind them. He saw a short, tight-muscled man working on the chain forward and a tall blond boy spinning the wheel in the pilothouse as the ship slowly came in, stern first, with the engine now off and the blond boy running aft to throw a line to a sailor on the quay, as the man ran to the stern and jumped nimbly to the quay to catch a second line that the boy threw to him. When the two lines were secure, the man leaped back onto the deck and he and the boy manhandled the gangplank into place, practiced and skillful, no word between them. The two people in black had moved from the stern, out of the way, superfluous.

  Hubbell got up from where he was sitting on the dory, feeling clumsy and heavy after the display of sea-going agility, and started up the gangplank. The boy looked at him sullenly.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Jordache,” Hubbell said.

  “My name is Jordache,” the boy said. He had a deep, nonadolescent voice.

  “I believe I mean that gentleman over there,” Hubbell said, gesturing toward Rudolph.

  “Yes?” Rudolph came over to the head of the gangplank.

  “Mr. Rudolph Jordache?”

  “Yes.” The tone was short.

  “I’m from Time Magazine …” Hubbell saw the man’s face set. “I’m very sorry about what happened.…”

  “Yes?” Impatiently, questioning.

  “I don’t like to intrude on you at a moment like this …” Hubbell felt foolish, talking at a distance, blocked off by the invisible wall of the boy’s hostility, and now the man’s. “But I wonder if I could ask you a few questions about …”

  “Talk to the chief of police. It’s his business now.”

  “I have talked to him.”

  “Then you know as much as I do, sir,” Rudolph said and turned away. There was a cold, small smile on the boy’s face.

  Hubbell stood there another moment, feeling that perhaps he had been wrong in his choice of a profession, then said, “I’m sorry,” to nobody in particular because he couldn’t think of anything else to say or do and turned around and walked toward the entrance to the port.

  When he got back to his hotel, his wife was sitting on the small balcony outside their room in a bikini, working on her tan. He loved her deeply, but he couldn’t help noticing that she looked absurd in a bikini. “Where’ve you been all afternoon?” she asked.

  “Working on a story,” he said.

  “I thought this was going to be a vacation,” she said.

  “So did I,” he said.

  He got out his portable typewriter, took off his jacket and began to work.

  « »

  CHAPTER 2

  FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—

  THE TELEGRAM FROM MY MOTHER CAME TO MY APO NUMBER. YOUR UNCLE TOM HAS BEEN MURDERED, THE TELEGRAM READ. SUGGEST YOU TRY TO COME TO ANTIBES FOR FUNERAL. YOUR UNCLE RUDOLPH AND I ARE AT THE H—TEL DU CAP ANTIBES. LOVE, MOTHER.

  I HAD SEEN MY UNCLE TOM ONCE, THE TIME I HAD FLOWN FROM CALIFORNIA TO WHITBY FOR MY GRANDMOTHER’S FUNERAL WHEN I WAS A BOY. FUNERALS ARE GREAT OCCASIONS FOR FAMILIES TO GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER AGAIN. I WAS SORRY MY UNCLE TOM WAS DEAD. I HAD LIKED HIM THE NIGHT WE HAD SPENT TOGETHER IN MY UNCLE RUDOLPH’S GUEST ROOM. I WAS IMPRESSED BY THE FACT THAT HE CARRIED A GUN. HE THOUGHT I WAS SLEEPING WHEN HE TOOK THE GUN OUT OF HIS POCKET AND PUT IT AWAY IN A DRAWER. IT GAVE ME SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT DURING THE FUNERAL THE NEXT DAY.

  IF AN UNCLE HAD TO BE MURDERED, I WOULD HAVE PREFERRED IT TO BE RUDOLPH. WE WERE NEVER FRIENDLY AND AS I GREW OLDER HE SHOWED ME, VERY POLITELY, THAT HE DISAPPROVED OF ME AND MY VIEWS ON SOCIETY. MY VIEWS HAVE NOT CHANGED RADICALLY. JELLED, MY UNCLE WOULD PROBABLY SAY, IF HE TOOK THE TROUBLE TO EXAMINE THEM. BUT HE IS RICH AND THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN SOME MENTION OF ME IN HIS WILL, IF NOT OUT OF ANY FONDNESS FOR ME THEN OUT OF BROTHERLY LOVE FOR MY MOTHER. THOMAS JORDACHE WAS NOT THE TYPE OF MAN TO LEAVE A FORTUNE BEHIND HIM.

  I SHOWED THE TELEGRAM TO THE COLONEL AND HE GAVE ME TEN DAYS OF COMPASSIONATE LEAVE TO GO TO ANTIBES. I DIDN’T GO TO ANTIBES, BUT I SENT A TELEGRAM OF CONDOLENCE TO THE HOTEL AND SAID THAT THE ARMY WOULDN’T LET ME OFF FOR THE FUNERAL.

  MONIKA GOT TIME OFF FROM HER JOB, TOO, AND WE WENT TO PARIS. WE HAD A MARVELOUS TIME. MONIKA IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF GIRL YOU WANT TO HAVE WITH YOU IN PARIS.

  « »

  “I’m afraid the time has come,” Rudolph said, “to discuss a few things we’ve avoided up to now. We have to talk about what we’re going to do next. The legacy. Painful as it is, we’re going to have to talk about money.”

  They were all in the saloon of the Clothilde, Kate in a dark dress that was obviously old and now too tight for her, with her scuffed, imitation-leather suitcase on the floor next to her chair. The saloon was painted white, with blue trim and blue curtains at the portholes and on the bulkhead old prints of sailing ships that Thomas had picked up in Venice. Everybody kept looking at Kate’s suitcase, although no one had said anything about it yet.

  “Kate, Bunny,” Rudolph went on, “do you know if Tom left a will?”

  “He never said anything to me about a will,” Kate said.

  “Me, neither,” said Dwyer.

  “Wesley?”

  Wesley shook his head.

  Rudolph sighed. Same old Tom, he thought, consistent to the end. Married, with a son and a pregnant wife, and never took an afternoon off to write a will. He himself had drawn up his first will in a lawyer’s office when he was twenty-one years old and five or six later ones since then, the last one when his daughter Enid was born. And now that Jean was spending more and more time in drying-out clinics he was working on a new one. “How about a safety-deposit box?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Kate said.

  “Bunny?”

  “I’m pretty sure not,” Dwyer said.

  “Did he have any securities?”

  Kate and Dwyer looked at each other, puzzled. “Securities?” Dwyer asked. “What’s that?”

  “Stocks, bonds.” Where have these people been all their lives? Rudolph wondered.

  “Oh, that,” Dwyer said. “He used to say that was just another way they’d figured out to screw the workingman.” He had also said, “Leave stuff like that to my goddamn brother,” but that was before the final reconciliation between the two men and Dwyer didn’t think this was the time for that particular quotation.

  “O
kay, no securities,” Rudolph said. “Then what did he do with his money?” He tried not to sound irritated.

  “He had two accounts,” Kate said. “A checking account in francs at the Crédit Lyonnais here in Antibes and a dollar savings account in Crédit Suisse in Geneva. He preferred being paid in dollars. That account is illegal, because we’re French residents, but I wouldn’t worry about that. Nobody ever asked.”

  Rudolph nodded. At least his brother hadn’t been totally devoid of financial sense.

  “The bankbook and the last statements from the Crédit Lyonnais and the checkbook are in the drawer under the bunk in the cabin,” Kate said. “Wesley, if you’ll go in there …”

  Wesley went forward toward the captain’s cabin.

  “If I may ask, Bunny,” Rudolph said, “how did Thomas pay you?”

  “He didn’t,” Dwyer said. “We were partners. At the end of the year, we split up what was left over.”

  “Did you have any kind of papers—a contract, some kind of formal agreement?”

  “Christ, no,” Dwyer said. “What would we need a contract for?”

  “Is the boat in his name or in your joint names, Bunny? Or perhaps in his and Kate’s name?”

  “We were only married five days, Rudy,” Kate said. “We didn’t have any time for anything like that. The Clothilde is in his name. The papers are in the drawer with the bankbooks. With the insurance policy for the ship and the other papers.”

  Rudolph sighed again. “I’ve been to a lawyer …”

  Of course, Gretchen thought. She had been standing at the doorway, looking aft. She had been brooding over Billy’s telegram. It had been a brief message from a polite stranger, with no feeling of grief or attempt at consolation. She didn’t know the army all that well, but she knew that soldiers got leave, if they wanted it, to attend funerals. She had written Billy, too, about coming to the wedding, but he had written back saying he was too busy dispatching half-tons and command cars through the streets and roads that led through Belgium to Armageddon to dance at half-forgotten relatives’ weddings. She, too, she thought bitterly, was included among the half-forgotten relatives. Let him wallow in Brussels. Worthy son of his father. She focused her attention on her brother, patiently trying to disentangle tangled lives. Of course, Rudy would have gone immediately to a lawyer. Death, after all, was a legal matter.