Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  It was not the Old Army, the Colonel sometimes said, but you had to keep up with the times. While the Colonel was his commanding officer there was no danger that Billy would be sent to Vietnam.

  Billy knew that it was through his Uncle Rudolph’s good offices in Washington that he had been spared the unpleasant sound of hostile fire and one day he would show his gratitude. Right now, he had in his pocket a letter from his uncle which contained a check for one thousand dollars. Billy’s mother had run dry as a source of funds, and Monika, to whom Billy had spoken about his rich uncle, had pushed him into writing for money. She had been mysterious about why she needed it, but Billy had long ago resigned himself to the fact that she was a mysterious girl. She never told him anything about her family in Munich or why she had taken it into her head at the age of eighteen to take a degree at Trinity College in Dublin. She was always going off on secret appointments, but except for that, most of the time was extremely agreeable to live with. That had been the condition on which she had moved into his cosy little flat off the Place. He was to ask no questions when she said she had to be away for an evening or sometimes a week. There were some delicate meetings among the delegates to NATO that could not be talked about. He was not a curious young man when it came to matters that did not concern him.

  Monika was not really pretty, with her black, tangled hair and low-heeled shoes and sensible stockings, but she had large blue eyes that lit up her face when she smiled and a lovely small figure. The small was important. Billy was only five feet six inches tall and slightly built, and he didn’t like the feeling of inferiority taller women gave him.

  If he had been asked on this evening what profession he intended to follow he would most probably have said that he was going to reenlist. Every once in a while, Monika would get angry with him and denounce him for his lack of ambition. With his engaging youthful athlete’s smile, he would agree with her that he had no ambition. The melancholy darkness of his eyes, fringed by heavy black lashes, gave his smile an extra value, as though he had made a special sad effort at gaiety for its recipient. Billy knew enough about himself not to turn the smile on too often.

  Tonight was one of the times Monika had a mysterious appointment. “Don’t wait up for me,” she said as they gazed at the spotlit gilt magnificence of the Place’s walls and windows. “I may be late. Maybe all night.”

  “You’re ruining my sex life,” he said.

  “I bet,” she said. Trinity College, plus the troops of NATO, had given her an easy command of both the English and American languages.

  He kissed her lightly and watched her get into a cab. She sprang into it as if she were doing the running broad jump at a track meet. He admired her energy. He couldn’t hear the address that she gave the driver. It occurred to him that every time he put her in a cab, he never heard where she was going.

  He shrugged and strolled toward a café. It was too early to go home and there was nobody else he especially wanted to see that night.

  In the café he ordered a beer and took out the envelope with the check and his uncle’s letter in it. There had been an exchange of letters, quite cordial, since Billy had seen the item in Time Magazine about Tom Jordache’s death and the awful photograph of Rudolph’s wife naked that they’d dug up somewhere. He hadn’t mentioned the photograph in the letter to Rudolph and had been sincere, or as sincere as he could be, with his condolences. Uncle Rudolph had been chatty in his letters, with all the family news. He sounded like a lonely man who didn’t know quite what to do with himself, and he had written sadly, if reticently, of his divorce and the claiming of Cousin Wesley by the lady from Indianapolis. He had not mentioned the police record of Wesley’s mother as a common prostitute, but Billy’s own mother had not been sparing in details. His mother’s letters tended to be stern and admonitory. She had never forgiven him for his refusal to keep away from the army—she would have enjoyed playing the honored martyr, he felt resentfully, if he had gone to jail instead. Everyone to his or her principles. For himself, he preferred playing tennis with a forty-seven-year-old colonel and living in comparative luxury with a bright, shapely, multilingual, and—admit it—a beloved fräulein in the civilized city of Brussels.

  His letter to his uncle asking for a loan had been graceful and rueful rather than importunate. There had been some unlucky poker games, he had hinted, an expensive automobile breakdown, the necessity to buy a new car … Rudolph’s letter, which had arrived that morning, had been understanding, although he had made it clear that he expected to be repaid.

  Monika wanted the cash the next morning and he would have to go to the bank. He wondered what she might need it for. What the hell, he thought, dismissing the subject, it’s only money and it’s not even mine. He ordered a second beer.

  In the morning he discovered what she wanted the money for. She woke him up when she came in at dawn, made him a cup of coffee, sat him down and told him the thousand dollars was to be used to bribe a sergeant at the Army arms depot, so that the people she was working with, whom she wouldn’t name or describe, could go in with a U.S. Army truck, which he, Billy, was expected to supply from the motor pool, and lift an unspecified number of guns, grenades and rounds of ammunition. He himself was not to be involved in the deal. Only to the extent of driving the truck out of the pool one night, with authentic orders, and delivering it half a mile down the road to a man who would be dressed as a U.S. Army MP lieutenant. The truck would be back before dawn. She said all this calmly, while he sat in silence, sipping his coffee, wondering if she had been on drugs all night. In the course of her explanation, given in the same even tones she might have used back in Trinity at a seminar on an obscure Irish poet, she also explained that he had been picked as her lover because of his job at the motor pool, although she admitted that she had become fond of him, very fond, since then.

  He tried to control his voice when he finally spoke. “What the hell is all this stuff going to be used for?”

  “I can’t tell you, darling,” she said, stroking his hand across the kitchen table. “And you’ll be better off never knowing.”

  “You’re a terrorist,” he said.

  “That’s a word like any other,” she said, shrugging. “I might prefer the word idealist, or a phrase like seeker after justice or an enemy of torture or just plain lover of the ordinary, traumatized, brainwashed common man. Take your pick.”

  “What if I just went to NATO and told them about you? About this crazy scheme?” He felt silly sitting there shivering in a small, cold, bourgeois kitchen, dressed only in an old bathrobe that was half open, with his balls hanging out, talking about blowing people up.

  “I wouldn’t try that, darling,” she said. “First of all they would never believe you. I’d say that I had told you I’d leave you and this was your weird way of getting revenge. And some of the boys I know can be very nasty customers indeed.…”

  “You’re threatening me,” he said.

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  By the look in her eye he knew that she was deadly serious. Serious was exactly the word. And deadly. He felt cold and frightened. He had never posed as a hero. He had never even had a fistfight in his life. “If I do this, this once,” he said, trying to keep his voice from quavering, “I never want to see you again.”

  “That’s for you to decide,” she said evenly.

  “I’ll tell you at noon,” he said, his mind racing, searching for a way he could get out of the whole thing, fly to America, hide out in Paris, London, escape the whole insane, surrealist plot in six hours.

  “That will be time enough,” Monika said. “The banks are open in the afternoon. But I must tell you, for your own sake—you will be watched.”

  “What the hell kind of woman are you?” he shouted, his voice out of control.

  “If you weren’t so superficial and frivolous and self-satisfied,” she said, without raising her voice, “you’d know by now, after living with me as long as you’ve done.”
<
br />   “I don’t know what’s so frivolous and self-satisfied about not wanting to kill people,” he said, stung by her description of him. “Don’t be so goddamned smug.”

  “Every day,” she said, “you put on a uniform. In the same uniform, thousands of young men your age go out every day to kill hundreds of thousands of people who never did them any harm. I consider that frivolous.” As she talked, her eyes finally were darkening with anger.

  “And you’re going to stop that?” he said loudly. “You and five or six other murderous thugs?”

  “We can try. Among other things that we will try. At least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that we tried. And what satisfaction will you have?” She sneered at him, her mouth an ugly grimace. “That you played tennis while it all was happening? That there isn’t a single human being alive who has any respect for you? That you sat idly by while the men whose boots you lick morning, noon and night are plotting to blow up the world? When everything goes up in the final explosion, are you going to be proud of yourself as you die because you ate well and drank well and fucked well while it all was being prepared? Wake up! Wake up! There’s no law that says you have to be a worm.”

  “Rhetoric,” he said. “So what’ll you do—hijack an Israeli plane, break some windows in an embassy, shoot a policeman while he’s directing traffic? Is that your idea of saving the world?”

  “First of all, this has nothing to do with the Israelis. We—my group and I—have varying opinions on that subject, so don’t worry about your Jewish friends—my Jewish friends, for that matter.”

  “Thank you,” he said sardonically, “for your German forbearance of the Jews.”

  “You bastard.” She tried to slap him across the table, but he was too fast for her and caught her hand.

  “None of that,” he said. “You may be wonderful with a machine gun, but you’re not a boxer, lady. Nobody’s going to get away with hitting me. You’ve yelled at me and yelled at me and threatened me and asked me to do something that might get me killed or land me in prison for life and you haven’t explained anything yet.” Recklessly, he went on, raving now. “If I’m going to help you, it’s not going to be because you’re scaring me into it or bribing me or anything like that. I’ll make a deal with you. You’re right—there’s no law that says I have to be a worm. You convince me and I’m with you. You sit down and keep your goddamn hands and your goddamn threats to yourself and calmly explain. Otherwise, no soap. You understand that?”

  “Let go of my hand,” she said sullenly.

  He dropped her hand. She stared at him furiously. Then she began to chuckle. “Hey, Billy boy, there’s something there after all. Who would have guessed that? I think we need some fresh coffee. And you’re cold. Go in and get dressed and put on a sweater and we’ll have a nice little talk over the breakfast table about the wonder of being alive in the twentieth century.”

  In the bedroom, while he was getting dressed, he started shivering again. But even while he was shivering, he felt crazily exhilarated. For once he hadn’t backed down or slid away or evaded. And it could be a matter of life and death, he was sure of that. There was no sense in underestimating Monika’s toughness or passion. The papers were full of stories of hijackings, bombings, political murders, theatrical massacres, and they were plotted and carried out by people who sat at the next desk from yours, who stood by your side in a bus, who went to bed with you, ate dinner with you. It was his tough luck that Monika was one of them. As she had said, he should have guessed something. Her insults had wounded him: it was one thing to know that you were worthless, it was another to be told by a woman whom you admired, more than that—much more—loved, who acted as though she loved you, that you had no value.

  The chuckle in the cold, dawn-lit kitchen had been a gift of respect and he accepted it gratefully. In Monika’s eyes now he was a worthy opponent and had to be treated accordingly. Until now he had let the world go its own way and had been satisfied to find a snug, government-issue corner for himself. Well, the world had caught up with him and he had to deal with it. He was involved, whether he liked it or not. From one moment to another, almost instinctively, he had put a new price on his existence.

  The hell with her, he thought, as he put on a sweater. Loss is the risk of breathing. The hell with all of them.

  Monika was heating a fresh pot of coffee when he went back into the kitchen. She had taken off her shoes and was padding around in her stockinged feet, her hair a dark mess, like any housewife newly risen from the marital bed to make breakfast for her husband on the way to the office. Terror in the kitchen, bloodshed over a hot stove, victims designated among the clatter of pots and pans. He sat down at the scarred wooden table, rescued from some Belgian farmhouse, and Monika poured the coffee into his cup. Efficient German hausfrau. She made good coffee. He tasted it with relish. She poured some coffee for herself, smiled at him gently. The woman who had told him that he had been selected as her lover because he happened to run a motor pool from which trucks could be obtained for deadly errands had disappeared. For the time being. For ten minutes on a cold morning, he thought, as he drank the scalding coffee.

  “Well,” he said, “where do we begin?” He looked at his watch. “It can’t take too long. I have to be at work soon.”

  “We begin at the beginning,” she said. “The state of the world. The world’s in a mess. The Fascists are everywhere.…”

  “In America …?” he said. “Come on, Monika.”

  “In America it’s still disguised,” she said impatiently. “They can still afford to disguise it. But who gives them the arms, the money, the smoke screens, finally, the real support? The fat cats in Washington, New York, Texas. If you’re going to insist on being naive, I won’t bother talking to you.”

  “You sound as though it all comes out of a book.”

  “Why not?” she said. “What’s wrong with learning from a book? It wouldn’t do you any harm to read a few books, either. If you’re so worried about your beloved native land, you’ll be relieved to hear that we’re not operating in America now, not the people I’m with anyway, although I’m not saying there aren’t some who do. There’re bombs going off in America, too, and there’ll be more, I promise you. America’s at the base of the pyramid and in the end it will be the prime target. And you’re going to be surprised how easily it will crumble in the end. Because the pyramid is shaky, it’s based on lies, immoral privileges, stolen wealth, subjugated populations; it’s based on sand that’s hollow beneath the surface.”

  “You sound more like a book than ever,” he said. “Why don’t you just get it out of the library and I’ll read it myself.”

  Monika ignored his gibe. “What we have to do,” she went on, “is show that it’s vulnerable as well as evil.”

  “How do you plan to do that with a few crazy gangsters?”

  “Don’t use that word,” she said warningly.

  “Whatever you want to call them. Gunmen. Assassins. Whatever.”

  “Castro did it in Cuba with eighteen men.”

  “America’s not Cuba,” he said. “And neither is Europe.”

  “They’re near enough. Both of them. The attacks will multiply. The men in power will get uneasy, uncertain, finally frightened. They’ll act out of fear, make one mistake after another, each one worse than the last. They’ll apply pressure. They’ll make disastrous concessions which will only make people realize that they were close to defeat and only inspire more incidents, more cracks in the walls.”

  “Oh,” he said, “turn off the record, will you?”

  “A bank president will be assassinated,” she chanted, rapt in her vision, “an ambassador kidnapped, a strike paralyze a country, money lose its value. They won’t know where the next blow is coming from, just that there will be a next blow. The pressure will build up, until the whole thing explodes. It won’t take armies.… Just a few dedicated people …”

  “Like you?” he said.

  “Like me,�
� she said defiantly.

  “And if you succeed, then what?” he said. “Russia takes the whole pot. Is that what you want?”

  “Russia’s time will come,” she said. “Don’t think I’m fool enough to want that.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “I want the world to stop being poisoned, stop being headed to extinction, one way or another. I want to stop the warriors we have now, the spies, the nuclear bombers, the bribed politicians, the killing for profit.… People are suffering and I want them to know who’s making them suffer and what they’re getting out of it.”

  “All right,” he said, “that’s all very admirable. But let’s speak practically. Supposing I get you the truck, supposing you put your hands on a few grenades, plastic, guns. Just what, specifically, are you going to do with them?”

  “Specifically,” she said, “we are planning to blow in the windows of a bank here in Brussels, get some explosive inside the Spanish embassy, wipe out a judge in Germany who’s the biggest pig on the Continent. I can’t tell you more than that. For your own sake.”

  “You’re ready to do a lot of things for my sake, aren’t you?” he said. He bowed sardonically. “I thank you, my mother thanks you, my colonel thanks you.”

  “Don’t be flip,” she said coldly. “Don’t ever be flip with me again.”

  “You sound as though you’re ready to shoot me right now, dear little gunlady,” he said, mocking her, pushing himself to courage, although he was shivering again, sweater and all.

  “I’ve never shot anybody,” she said. “And don’t propose to. That is not my job. And if your scruples are so delicate, perhaps you’d like to hear that we plan to operate in such a way here in Belgium that nobody will get killed. What we do is merely unsettle, warn, symbolize.”