Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  The first thing she saw him take out of the files was a photograph of his father in boxing trunks, with his fists cocked. He looked fierce and young. To Wesley, he hardly looked older than he himself was now. Every muscle stood out in his arms and torso. He must have scared the wits out of the guys he was going to fight.

  Miss Larkin had looked at the picture, too, when she took it out of the files. She thought the fighter looked like a handsome ruffian, somebody it would be wise to stay away from. She preferred men who looked like intellectuals. She studied the boy frankly now, since he was paying attention only to the photograph in his hand. He looked surprisingly like his father, but there was nothing ruffianly about him. He must be at least nineteen, she thought; maybe it would be nice to invite him downstairs for a drink. These days, she thought, nineteen can be very mature for a boy. She was only twenty-four herself; you couldn’t call it an impossible gap.

  The photograph had been cut out from Ring Magazine and there was a little article about Tom Jordan pasted to the bottom of the picture. “Tom Jordan, promising middleweight, undefeated in fourteen bouts, 8 k.o.’s, on his way to London to fight Sammy Wales, contender for British middleweight championship, at Albert Hall. Arthur Schultz, Jordan’s manager, predicts that with another four or five matches under his belt, Tommy will be ready for anybody in his division.”

  Clipped to the photograph, there was another sheet of paper with typing on it. Wesley started reading again. “Won fight in London by knockout. Fought René Badaud three weeks later in Paris. Knocked out in seventh round. From then on, record spotty, slipped down in class. Hired as sparring partner Freddy Quayles, Las Vegas, Nevada (date). Quayles leading challenger middleweight title. Incident between Quayles and Jordan. L.V. stringer reports rumor fight in hotel room over Quayles’ wife, later small-part actress Hollywood. Witness claims to have seen Quayles in hospital, badly battered. Quayles never regained form, quit ring, now works as salesman sporting goods store, Denver, Col. T. Jordan disappeared from Las Vegas, warrant out for his arrest, auto theft. Has not surfaced since.”

  And that was it. A whole life in a few lines, all summed up in four words—“Has not surfaced since.” He surfaced all right in Antibes, Wesley thought bitterly. He took out his pen and a piece of paper and wrote, Arthur Schultz, Freddy Quayles.

  Then he stared once more at the photograph of his father, the left hand out, the right hand up under the chin, the shoulders bunched, the fierce, confident young face, ready, according to authority, after four or five more matches, for anybody in his division. Not surfaced since.

  Wesley looked up at Miss Larkin. “I don’t think I’d recognize him if he came in through the door right now looking like this.” He laughed a little. “I’m glad he didn’t believe in hitting kids, with those shoulders.”

  Miss Larkin saw that Wesley was proud of the hard body, the confident pugnacity of his father when he was just a bit older than the boy was now.

  “If you want the picture,” she said, “I’ll put it in a big envelope for you so you won’t crease it.”

  “You mean that?” Wesley said. “I can really have it?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s really great,” Wesley said, “having the picture, I mean. I don’t have any picture of him. I had some, but they were all taken later.… He didn’t look like this. He looked okay,” he said hastily, as though he didn’t want Miss Larkin to think that he was running his father down or that he had turned into a fat, bald, old man or anything like that. “He just looked different. The expression on his face, I guess. I don’t suppose you can go through life always looking about twenty years old.”

  “No, you can’t,” Miss Larkin said. She searched for wrinkles around her eyes every morning.

  Wesley dug in the file and brought out a biographical note that Miss Larkin had prepared on the members of the family.

  Wesley went through the notes quickly. There was very little in them that he didn’t already know, his uncle’s early success and the scandal at the college, his aunt’s two marriages, the outlines of his father’s career. One line he read twice. “Rudolph Jordache, when he retired in his mid-thirties, was reputed to be a millionaire many times over.” Many times over. How many times would his father have had to fight, how many seasons on the Mediterranean would he have had to serve even to be a millionaire just one time over?

  He looked curiously at the pretty girl with glasses working at her desk. Just by accident she had been chosen to learn so much about his family. He wondered what she would say if he asked what she really thought about the Jordaches. In her notes she had written that Rudolph’s was the standard American success story, poor boy makes good in a big way. Would she say of his father, poor boy makes bad in standard American way?

  He made a funny little noise, almost a laugh. Miss Larkin looked over at him. “That’s about all there is,” she said. “I’m afraid it isn’t very much.”

  “It’s okay,” Wesley said. “It’s fine.” He didn’t want the nice young lady to think he wasn’t grateful. He gave her back the file and stood up. “Thank you very much. I better be pushing along now.”

  Miss Larkin stood up, too. She looked at him strangely, as though she was making up her mind about something. “I’m just about finished here for the day,” she said. “I was wondering if you’d like to go downstairs with me and have a drink?” She sounded as though she was appealing to him, but he couldn’t tell for what. “I have a date later …” Even he could tell she was lying. “And I have an hour to kill …”

  “They won’t serve me a drink at a bar,” Wesley said. “I’m not eighteen yet.”

  “Oh, I see.” She flushed. “Well, thanks for the visit. If you ever come by again, now you know where my office is. If I can help in any way …”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  She watched him go out of the office, the big shoulders bulging in the tight jacket. Not yet eighteen, she thought. Boy, am I dumb.

  She sat staring at the papers on her desk for several minutes. She had a peculiar feeling that something strange was happening to her or was going to happen to her. She reread everything in the file. Murder, a rich brother, an intellectual sister, a brawling prizefighter done to death, the mystery unsolved. A beautiful son, still little more than a child, with strange, tragic eyes, looking for what—revenge?

  The novel she was trying to write was about a girl very much like herself, growing up in a broken family, lonely, imaginative, her crushes on teachers, her first love, her first disillusionment with men, her coming to New York from a small town. She thought of it now with disdain. Written a thousand times.

  Why wasn’t the boy’s story a novel? After all, Dreiser had started An American Tragedy after reading an article in a newspaper. Nobody in Dreiser’s family had been murdered, he hadn’t known anybody who’d been murdered, but he’d written a great novel, just the same. Sitting in the same room with her just a few minutes ago was a handsome, complex boy, carrying the burden of remorse and sorrow on his shoulders almost visibly, nerving himself, she thought, shuddering deliciously, for the inevitable act. Hamlet as an American child. Why not? Revenge was among the oldest of literary traditions. Turn the other cheek, the Bible said, but also an eye for an eye. Her father, who was a rabid Irishman, cursed whenever he read what the English were still doing in Ireland, and there was a portrait of Parnell in the living room when she was a child.

  Revenge was as much a part of all of us, she thought, as our bones and blood. We liked to pretend we were too civilized for it in the twentieth century, but the man in Vienna who spent his life tracking down Nazis who had killed Jews was honored all over the world. Her father said he was the last hero of World War Two.

  She wished she had had the sense to ask the boy where he could be found. She would have to find him, study him, bring him to life on the page, with all his anger, his doubts, his youthfulness. It was cold-blooded, she told herself, but you either were a writer or you weren’t. If he eve
r came into the office again, she would make sure that she’d find out all about him.

  Feeling elated, as though she had come upon treasure, creative juices flowing, she carefully put all the papers back in the file and went out to where the master files were kept and put it back into place.

  She could hardly wait to get back to her apartment and throw the sixty pages she had written on her novel into the fire.

  CHAPTER 3

  Rudolph was sitting at the little upright piano, trying to pick out the melody of “On a Clear Day,” when he heard the bell ring and Mrs. Burton come out of the kitchen to answer it. He saw her pass in the hall on the way to the front door. She had her hat and coat on. She only came in during the day as she had to go home each evening to feed her own family in Harlem. From the kitchen he heard the laughter of Enid, who was having her supper with her nurse there. Rudolph wasn’t expecting anyone and he kept working on the melody. Getting the piano had turned out to be a good idea. He had originally bought it because the new nurse he had hired had a sweet voice and he had overheard her singing softly to Enid. She said she could play the piano a bit and he thought it would be useful for Enid to listen to someone actually making music in her own home. If it turned out that Enid had any talent it would be better for her than just hearing it from a box, as though Bach and Beethoven were as commonplace as an electric light, to be turned on or off by pushing a switch. But when the piano had been in the house for a few days he had found himself sitting down at it himself and fooling around with chords, then melodies. He had a good ear and he could pass hours amusing himself and not thinking of anything but the music at his fingertips. Whatever distracted him, even for a few minutes at a time, was so much profit. He had almost decided to take formal lessons.

  He heard Mrs. Burton come into the living room. “There’s a young man at the door, Mr. Jordache,” Mrs. Burton said, “who says he’s your nephew. Should I let him in?” Since Rudolph had moved to the two top floors of a brownstone, without a doorman, Mrs. Burton had been nervous about burglars and muggers and always kept the door chained. The neighbors, she complained, were careless about the front door and left it unlocked, so anyone could prowl the staircase.

  Rudolph stood up. “I’ll go see who it is,” he said. In the letter from Brussels the week before from Billy, Billy hadn’t said anything about coming to America. From the letters Billy had been writing him he seemed to have grown up into a nice, intelligent young man and on an impulse Rudolph had sent the thousand dollars Billy had asked for. Now he wondered if Billy had gotten into trouble with the army and deserted. That would explain the request for money. As for Wesley, there had been no word from him since Nice, and that was almost nine months ago.

  Mrs. Burton followed him down the hallway. Outside the partially opened door, across the chain, Wesley was standing in the dim light of the ceiling bulb.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Burton,” Rudolph said. He slipped the chain free and opened the door. “Come in, Wesley.” He put out his hand. After the slightest of pauses Wesley shook it.

  “Will you be needing me any more tonight?” Mrs. Burton asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Then I’ll be moving along home. Have a nice weekend, Mr. Jordache.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Burton.” He closed the door behind her when she had left. Wesley merely stood there, his face thin, pale and expressionless, the ghost of his father as a boy, hostile and alert. He was in the same suit he had worn when he had left the jail in Grasse and it was smaller on him now than it had been then. He seemed to have grown and broadened considerably since their last meeting. His hair, Rudolph was happy to see, was not too long, but cropped at the neck.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Rudolph said as they went into the living room. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “A beer would be nice,” Wesley said.

  “Make yourself comfortable.” Rudolph went into the kitchen where Enid was eating with the nurse. The nurse was a solid woman of about forty, with a marvelously gentle way of making Enid behave.

  “Your Cousin Wesley is here, Enid,” Rudolph said as he got a bottle of beer out of the refrigerator. He was about to tell her to come into the living room and say hello to Wesley after she had eaten, but thought better of it. He didn’t know what Wesley had come for. If it was because of some emotional problem or dramatic adolescent disaster, it would only complicate matters to have Enid in the room. He kissed the top of her head and went into the living room with the beer and a glass. Wesley was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room just where Rudolph had left him. Rudolph poured the beer for him.

  “Thank you,” Wesley said. “Aren’t you having anything to drink?”

  “I’ll have some wine with dinner. Sit down, sit down.” Wesley waited for Rudolph and then sat in a chair facing him. He drank thirstily.

  “Well,” Rudolph said, “how’re things? What brings you to New York?”

  “I went to the wrong address,” Wesley said. Rudolph noted that the boy didn’t answer his question. “The doorman didn’t want to tell me where you’d moved to. He wouldn’t believe I was your nephew. I had to show him my library card.” He sounded resentful, as though Rudolph had moved four blocks farther north just to avoid him.

  “Didn’t you get the letter I sent you?” Rudolph said. “I wrote you my new address the day I rented this apartment.”

  “I didn’t get any letters.” Wesley shook his head. “No, sir, no letters.”

  “Not even the one about how the estate would probably be finally settled and how much your share will be?”

  “Nothing.” Wesley drank again.

  “What happens to your mail?” Rudolph tried to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  “Maybe my mother doesn’t approve of my getting mail. Anyway, that’s my guess.”

  “Did you eat dinner yet?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you over dinner what was in the letter I sent you.”

  “I didn’t hitchhike all the way from Indianapolis to talk about money, Uncle Rudy,” Wesley said softly. “It’s a—well, I guess you might say it’s a social visit.”

  “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  Wesley shook his head. “We’re not on very good speaking terms, my mother and me.”

  “You didn’t run away from home, did you?”

  “No. It’s the Easter vacation. I left a note saying I’d be back in time for school.”

  “That’s a relief,” Rudolph said dryly. “How’re you doing in school?”

  “Okay. I’m a hotshot in the French class.” He grinned boyishly. “I teach my friends all the dirty words.”

  “They can come in handy,” Rudolph said, smiling. “At times.” Then more seriously, “Why did you have to hitchhike?”

  “Money,” Wesley said.

  “Your mother gets quite a nice sum each month for your support for the time being,” Rudolph said. “There’s certainly enough for bus fare once a year to New York.”

  “Not a red cent,” Wesley said. “I’m not complaining. I work after school. I get along.”

  “Do you?” Rudolph said skeptically. “Is that the only suit you have?”

  “Like a whole suit—yeah. I got some sweaters and jeans and stuff like that for school and work. And there’s an old mackinaw I wore in the winter that belongs to Mr. Kraler’s son, he’s a soldier, he’s in Vietnam, so I don’t freeze.”

  “I think I’ll have to write your mother a letter,” Rudolph said. “She’s not allowed to use your money for herself.”

  “Don’t make waves, please, Uncle Rudy,” Wesley said carefully, putting his glass down on the floor beside him. “There’s enough crap going on in that house without that. She says she’ll give me every cent of the money she’s supposed to if I go to church with her and Mr. Kraler, like a decent Christian.”

  “Oh,” Rudolph said, “I’m beginning to get the picture.”

  “Some picture, eh?” Wesley grinned boy
ishly again. “The Spanish Inquisition in Indianapolis.”

  “I think I’ll have a drink after all,” Rudolph said. He got up and went over to the sideboard and mixed himself a martini. “You want another beer, Wesley?”

  “That’d be nice.” Wesley picked up the glass from the floor, stood up and handed it to Rudolph.

  “Enid’s in the kitchen. Would you like to say hello to her?” He saw Wesley hesitate. “Her mother’s not in there with her. I wrote you we were divorced.” He shook his head annoyedly. “I don’t suppose you got that letter, either.”

  “Nope.”

  “Damn it. From now on I’ll write you care of General Delivery. Didn’t you ever think it was queer that nobody wrote you?”

  “I guess I never thought much about it.”

  “Didn’t you write Bunny or Kate?”

  “Once or twice,” Wesley said. “They didn’t answer, so I gave up. Do you hear from them?”

  “Of course,” Rudolph said. Dwyer sent him a monthly report, with the bills from the Clothilde. Dwyer had had to be told that Rudolph had bought the ship. The court-ordered official appraisal of the value of the boat had been a hundred thousand—Dwyer had been correct about that—but no other buyers had offered anything near that price and Dwyer had taken the ship for the winter to Saint-Tropez, where it was berthed now. “They’re fine. Kate’s had a baby. A boy. You’ve got a brother. A half brother, anyway.”

  “Poor little bastard,” Wesley said, but the news seemed to cheer him. The blood survives, Rudolph thought. “When you write to Kate,” Wesley said, “tell her I’ll drop in on her in England someday. Kids. That makes my old man the only one in the family with more than one kid. He told me one night that he’d like to have five. He was great with kids. A couple would come on board with the worst little spoiled brat you ever saw and in a week my old man’d have him saying sir to everybody, standing up when grown-ups came on board, hosing down the decks in port, minding his language—everything.” He fiddled with his beer, uncomfortably. “I don’t like to boast, Uncle Rudy, but look what he did for me. I may not be much, even now, but you should have seen me when he grabbed me out of school—I was spastic.”