by Irwin Shaw
“That’s Belgium,” he said. “What about other places?”
“That doesn’t concern you,” she said. “You don’t have to know anything about it. Later on, if you are convinced and you want to take a more active part, you will be trained, you will be in on the discussions. Right now, all you are to do is go to the bank and cash your uncle’s check and make a truck available for a few hours one night. Christ,” she said fiercely, “it’s nothing new to you, with your bribes—don’t think I don’t know how you live so high on a sergeant’s pay—with your black market gasoline.…”
“My God, Monika,” he said, “do you mean to say you can’t tell the difference between a little petty larceny and what you’re asking me to do?”
“Yes,” she said. “One is cheap and distasteful and the other is noble. You’ve been leading your life in a trance. You don’t like what you are, you despise everybody around you, I’ve heard you talk about your family, your mother, your father, your uncle, the animals you work with … Don’t deny it.” She put up her hand to stop him as he tried to speak. “You’ve kept everything narrow, inside yourself. Nobody’s challenged you to face yourself, open up, to see what it all means. Well, I’m challenging you now.”
“And hinting that something very nasty will happen to me if I don’t do as you want,” he said.
“That’s the way it goes, laddy,” she said. “Think over what I’ve just said as you work this morning.”
“I’ll do just that.” He stood up. “I’ve got to get to the office.”
“I’ll be waiting for you at lunchtime,” she said.
“I bet you will,” he said, as he went out the door.
The morning in the office passed for him in a blur. As he checked out orders, requests, manifests, operation reports, he made dozens of decisions, each one over and over again, each one discarded, the next one reached and discarded in turn. Three times he picked up the phone to call the Colonel, spill everything, ask him for advice, help, then put the phone down. He looked up the schedule of the planes flying out of Brussels to New York, decided to go to the bank, cash his uncle’s check and get on a plane that morning. He could go to the CIA in Washington, explain his predicament, get Monika put behind bars, be something of a secret hero in those secret corridors. Or would he? Would those men, deft in murder and complicated underground maneuvers and the overthrow of governments, congratulate him and secretly, in their own style, scorn him for his cowardice? Or even worse, turn him into a double agent, order him back to join whatever band Monika belonged to, tell him to report weekly on their doings? Did he want Monika behind bars? Even that morning, he could not honestly tell himself that he didn’t love her. Love? There was a word. Most women bored him. Usually he made an excuse, after copulation, to jump out of bed and go home. With Monika the night’s entwining could never be called copulation. It was absolute delight. To put it coarsely, he told himself, I can come five times a night with her and look forward eagerly to seeing her naked and rosy in bed at lunchtime.
He didn’t want to be killed. He knew that, just as he knew he didn’t want to give up Monika. But there was something titillating, deeply exciting, about the thought that he was daring enough to make love to a woman, make her gasp in pleasure and pain, at six in the morning and know that she was ready to order his execution at noon.
What would it be like to say to her, “I’m with you”? To slide in and out of shadows? To hear an explosion somewhere nearby while he was playing tennis at the immaculate club with the Colonel and know that he had scheduled it? To pass a bank on whose board his Uncle Rudolph sat and stealthily deposit a bomb that would explode before the bank opened its doors in the morning? To meet fanatics, who flitted from one country to another, who would be heroes in the history books, perhaps, a century from now, who killed with poison, with their bare hands, who could teach him their mysteries, who could make him forget he was only five feet six inches tall?
In the end, he did not call the Colonel, he did not cash the check, he made no arrangements at the motor pool, he did not go out to the airport.
What he did was drift, dazed, through the morning and when the Colonel called and said there was a game on at five-thirty that afternoon, he said, “Yes, sir, I’ll be there,” although he felt that there was a good chance he’d be dead by then.
She was waiting for him when he came out of the office. He was relieved that she had combed her hair, because the other men streaming past to go to lunch all looked at them speculatively, leers suppressed, mostly because of his rank, and he didn’t like the idea of their thinking he consorted with a slob.
“Well?” she said.
“Let’s have lunch,” he said.
He took her to a good restaurant, where he knew the other men who wanted a change from the food in the Army mess were not likely to go. He wanted the reassurance of crisp tablecloths, flowers on the tables, attentive waiters, a place where there was no suggestion of the world tottering, desperate plotters, crumbling pyramids. He ordered for them both. She pretended not to be interested in what she ate and couldn’t bother with the menu. Meanly, knowing at least that much about her, he understood why she tossed the menu aside. She had to put on thick glasses to read and was vain enough not to wish to be seen in public with them on. But when the food came she ate heartily, more than he did. He wondered how she kept her figure.
They ate quietly, talking politely about the weather, a conference that was to start tomorrow at which she was to act as translator, about his date for tennis with the Colonel at five-thirty, about a play that was coming to Brussels that she wanted to see. There was no reference to what had passed between them that morning until the coffee came. Then she said, “Well, what have you decided?”
“Nothing,” he said. Even in the overheated, cosy restaurant he felt cold again. “I sent the check back to my uncle this morning.”
She smiled coldly. “That’s a decision, isn’t it?”
“Partially,” he said. He was lying. The check was still in his wallet. He hadn’t known he was going to say it. It had come out mechanically, as though something had pushed a lever in his brain. But even as he said it, he knew he was going to mail the check back, with thanks, explaining to his uncle that his finances had taken a turn for the better and there was no need at the moment for help. It would prove useful later on when he really needed something from Uncle Rudolph.
“All right,” she said calmly, “if you were afraid that the money could be traced, I understand.” She shrugged. “It’s not too important. We’ll find the money someplace else. But how about the truck?”
“I haven’t done anything about it.”
“You have all afternoon.”
“No, I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“We can handle that, too, I suppose,” she said. “All you have to do is look the other way.”
“I’m not going to do that, either,” he said. “I have a lot of thinking to do before I decide one way or another. If your friends want to kill me,” he said harshly, but keeping his voice low, because he saw their waiter approaching with more coffee, “tell them that I’ll be armed.” He had had one morning’s practice with a .45, could take it apart and reassemble it, but had had a very low score when he had fired at a target for the record. Gunfight at the Brussels OK Corral, he thought. Who was it—John Wayne? What would John Wayne have done today? He giggled.
“What’re you laughing about?” she asked sharply.
“I happened to think of a movie I once saw,” he said.
“Yes, please,” she said in French to the waiter who was standing over her with the silver coffeepot. The waiter filled both their cups.
After the waiter had left, she smiled at him strangely. “You don’t have to pack a gun. Nobody’s going to shoot you. You’re not worth a bullet.”
“That’s nice to hear,” he said.
“Does anything ever make an impression on you, touch you?”
“I’ll make out a list,” he said
, “and give it to you the next time we meet. If we meet.”
“We’ll meet,” she said.
“When are you moving out of the apartment?” he asked.
She looked at him in surprise. He couldn’t tell whether the surprise was real or feigned. “I hadn’t intended to move out. Do you want me to move out?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But after today …”
“For the time being,” she said, “let’s forget today. I like living with you. I’ve found that politics has nothing to do with sex. Maybe with other people, but not with me. I adore going to bed with you. I haven’t had much luck in bed with other men. The orgasms are few and far between on the New Left—at least for me—and in this day and age ladies have been taught that orgasms are a lady’s God-given right. You’re the answer to a maiden’s prayer for that, darling, if you don’t mind my being a little vulgar. At least for this particular maiden. And I like good dinners, which you are obliging enough to supply. So—” She lit a cigarette. She smoked incessantly and the ashtrays in the apartment were always piled with butts. It irritated him, as he did not smoke and took seriously the warnings of the magazine articles about mortality rates for smokers. But, he supposed, you couldn’t expect a terrorist who was constantly on the lookout for the police or execution squads to worry about dying from cancer of the lungs at the age of sixty. “So—” she said, exhaling smoke through her nostrils. “I’ll divide my life, while it lasts, into compartments. You for sex and lobster and pâté de foie gras, and others for less serious occupations, like shooting German judges. Aren’t you glad I’m such a sensible girl?”
She’s cutting me to pieces, he thought, little jagged pieces. “I’m not glad about anything,” he said.
“Don’t look so mournful, laddy,” she said. “Everybody to his or her own talents. And now, I have most of the afternoon off. Can you sneak away for an hour or two?”
“Yes.” He had long ago perfected a system of checking in and out of the office without being noticed.
“Good.” She patted his hand. “Let’s go home and get into bed and have a perfectly delicious afternoon fuck.”
Furious with himself for not being able to stand up, throw a bill on the table for the check and stalk out of the restaurant, he said, “I have to go back to the office for ten minutes. I’ll meet you home.”
“I can’t wait.” She smiled at him, her large blue eyes lighting up her Bavarian-Trinity face.
CHAPTER 2
FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—
THIS WILL BE THE LAST ENTRY IN THIS NOTEBOOK FOR SOME TIME.
I HAD BETTER NOT WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT MONIKA ANYMORE.
THERE ARE SNOOPS, AND AUTHORIZED BURGLARS EVERYWHERE. BRUSSELS ABOUNDS IN THEM.
MONIKA EDGIER THAN EVER.
I LOVE HER. SHE REFUSES TO BELIEVE ME.
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Sidney Altscheler was standing at the window of his office high up in the Time and Life Building, staring gloomily out at the lights of the buildings around the tower in which he worked. He was gloomy because he was thinking of all the editorial work ahead of him over the weekend.
There was a discreet knock on the door and his secretary came in. “There’s somebody called Jordache here who wants to see you.”
Altscheler frowned. “Jordache?” he said. “I don’t know anybody named Jordache. Tell him I’m busy, let him write me a letter.”
The secretary had turned to go when he remembered. “Wait a minute,” he said. “We ran a story five, six months ago. About a murder. The man’s name was Jordache. Tell him to come up. I’ve got fifteen minutes free before Thatcher comes in with his rewrite. Maybe there’s a follow-up on the Jordache story we can use.” He went back to the window and continued being gloomy about the weekend as he stared out at the lights in the surrounding offices, which would be dark tomorrow because it was Saturday and the vice-presidents, the clerks, the book-keepers, the mailboys, everybody, would be enjoying their holiday.
He was still at the window when there was a rap at the door and the secretary came in with a boy in a suit that was too small for him. “Come in, come in,” he said, and seated himself behind his desk. There was a chair next to the desk. He indicated it to the boy.
“Will you need me?” the secretary asked.
“If I do, I’ll call you.” He looked at the boy. Sixteen, seventeen, he guessed, big for his age. Thin, handsome face, with disturbing intense eyes. Trained down like an athlete.
“Now, Mr. Jordache,” he said briskly, “what can I do for you?”
The boy took out a page torn from Time. “You did this story about my father.” He had a deep, resounding voice.
“Yes, I remember.” Altscheler hesitated. “Which one was your father? The mayor?”
“No,” the boy said, “the one who was murdered.”
“I see,” Altscheler said. He made his tone more kindly. “What’s your first name, young man?”
“Wesley.”
“Have they found the murderer yet?”
“No.” Wesley hesitated. Then he said, “That is—technically no.”
“I didn’t think so. I haven’t seen any follow-up.”
“I really wanted to see whoever wrote the article,” Wesley said. “I told them that downstairs at the desk, but they telephoned around and found it was by a man named Hubbell and said he was still in France. So I bought a copy of Time and I saw your name up in front.”
“I see,” Altscheler said. “What did you want to see Mr. Hubbell for? Did you think the article was unfair or mistaken?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Is there any new development you think we ought to know about?”
“No. I wanted to talk to Mr. Hubbell about my father and my father’s family. There was a lot about all that in the article.”
“Yes. But Mr. Hubbell couldn’t help you. That was done here; the material came from one of our researchers.”
“I didn’t know my father well,” Wesley said. “I didn’t see him from the time I was little until just a couple of years ago. I’d like to know more about him.”
“I can understand that, Wesley,” Altscheler said kindly.
“In the article you seemed to know a lot more than I ever did. I have a list of people who my father had something to do with at different times in his life and I put Time on the list, that’s all.”
“I understand.” Altscheler rang for his secretary. She came in immediately. “Miss Prentice,” he said, “will you find out who did the research on the Jordache article? If I remember correctly it was Miss Larkin; take the young man to her office. Tell her to do anything she can for Mr. Jordache.” He stood up. “I’m afraid I have to go back to work now,” he said. “Thank you for coming to see me, Wesley. And good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.” Wesley stood, too, and followed the secretary out of the office.
Altscheler went back to the window and stared out. Polite, sad boy. He wondered what he would have done if his father had been murdered and he himself had been sure he knew who had done it. They did not consider these questions at Yale, where he had earned his B.A.
The researcher had a little office without windows, lit by neon tubes. She was a small young woman with glasses, carelessly dressed, but pretty. She kept nodding and looking timidly at Wesley as Miss Prentice explained what he was there for. “Just wait a minute right here, Mr. Jordache,” she said, “and I’ll go into the files. You can read everything I dug up.” She flushed a little as she heard herself using the phrase. “Dug up” was not the sort of thing to say when you were talking to a boy whose father had been murdered. She wondered if she ought to censor the files before she let the boy see them. She remembered very well working on the story—mostly because it was so different from anything she herself had experienced in her own life. She had never been on the Riviera, in fact had never been out of America, but she had been a hungry reader in the literature courses she had taken in college and the south of France was firmly
fixed in her imagination as a place of romance and tragedy—Scott Fitzgerald driving to a party or from a party on the Grand Corniche, Dick Diver, desperate and gay on the blazing beaches, with all the trouble ahead of them all when everything collapsed. She had kept her notes, which she didn’t usually do, out of a vague feeling of being connected to a literary geography that she would one day explore. She looked at the boy—who had been there, had suffered there, now standing in her office in his clumsy suit—and would have liked to question him, discover if he knew anything of all that. “Would you like a cup of coffee while you wait?” she asked.
“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said.
“Would you like a copy of this week’s magazine to look through?”
“I bought a copy downstairs, thank you.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” she said brightly. Poor little boy, she thought as she went out of the office. So handsome, too. Even in the ridiculous suit. She was a romantic girl who had read a great deal of poetry, too. She could imagine him, dressed in flowing black, twin to the young Yeats in the early photographs.
When she came back with the file the boy was sitting hunched over on the straight chair, his arms resting on his thighs, his hands hanging between his knees, like a football player on the bench.
“Here’s everything,” she said brightly. She had debated with herself about whether or not to take out the photograph of Jean Jordache naked, but had decided against it. The picture had been in the magazine, after all, and he must have seen it.
“Now, you just take your time,” she said. “I have some work to do.” She gestured toward the pile of clippings on her desk. “But you won’t bother me.” She was pleased to have him in the office. It broke the routine.
Wesley looked down for a long time at the file without opening it, as Miss Larkin busied herself at her desk, using scissors and making notes, occasionally looking at the boy, until he caught her at it, which flustered her. Still, she thought, excusing herself, he’d better get used to girls looking at him. They’re going to be doing it in droves.