Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “What are you going to say to him?” Ida asked anxiously.

  “Some impolite home truths,” Gretchen said. “For starters.”

  “Be sensible,” Ida said, worriedly. “After all, no matter what else he is to you, he’s still your boss.”

  “Ida,” Gretchen said, “has anyone ever told you that you have a sick respect for authority?”

  “I wouldn’t say sick.” Ida was hurt.

  “What would you say then? Exorbitant, slavish, adoring?”

  “I’d say normal, if you must know. Anyway, let’s get off me for a while. Just what are you going to tell him?”

  “I’m going to tell him that the picture we’re working on stinks. That’ll be the overture,” Gretchen said.

  “Oh, please, Gretchen …” Ida put her hands up as though to stop her physically.

  “Somebody ought to buy you some rings,” Gretchen said. “You have pretty hands and rings would set them off nicely. Maybe we’ll spend the afternoon looking for rings for you if we can’t find that bastard, Kinsella.”

  Ida looked around worriedly. The restaurant had filled by now and there were two men sitting near them. “People can hear you.”

  “Let them hear,” Gretchen said. “I want to spread the good word around.”

  The waiter was at the table and expertly carving their duck. The wine was in a cooler. “No olives for me, please,” Ida said. “Give them all to the lady.”

  Gretchen watched admiringly as the waiter deftly sectioned the duck. “I bet he doesn’t drink during working hours,” she said. Kinsella had been known to do that, too, from time to time.

  “Ssh,” Ida said. She smiled at the waiter, apologizing for her eccentric friend.

  “Do you?” Gretchen asked the waiter.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. He grinned. “But I would if it was offered.”

  “I’ll send around a bottle the first thing in the morning,” Gretchen said.

  “Gretchen,” said Ida, “I’ve never seen you like this before. What’s come over you?”

  “Fury,” Gretchen said. “Just plain old healthy fury.” She tasted the duck, “Mmm,” she said and drank heartily of the wine.

  “If I were you,” Ida said, nibbling at her food, “I’d wait until after the weekend before you did anything.”

  “Never postpone fury. That’s an old family motto in my family,” Gretchen said. “Especially over the weekend. It’s hard to be furious on Monday morning. It takes a whole week to get into the proper frame of mind for fury.”

  “Kinsella will never forgive you if you go on at him like this,” Ida said.

  “After the overture,” Gretchen said, disregarding Ida’s interruption, “we go into the full performance. About how I only consented to work on the piece of junk he’s making because I wanted to continue to enjoy the favors of his pure white body.”

  “Gretchen,” Ida said reproachfully, “you once told me you loved him.” In her spinster heart romance held a prominent place.

  “Once,” Gretchen said.

  “You’ll infuriate him.”

  “That’s exactly my intention,” said Gretchen. “To continue—I will tell him that I’ve read the script he told me to send back to the agent and I find it original, witty and too good for the likes of him. However, since he’s the only director I happen to be half living with at the moment, and certainly the only director I’m intimate with who can raise money for a picture on the strength of his name, I will tell him that if he has the brains he was born with he’ll buy it tomorrow, even if he’s doing it only because I’m asking him to.”

  “You know he’ll say no,” Ida said.

  “Probably.”

  “Then what will you do? Burst into tears and ask for his forgiveness?”

  Gretchen looked at her in surprise. Ida was not ordinarily given to sarcasm. Gretchen could see that the whole conversation was disturbing her. “Ida, darling,” she said gently, “you mustn’t let it worry you so. After all, I’m the one who’s going to do the fighting.”

  “I hate to see you get into trouble,” Ida said.

  “There’re times when it can’t be avoided, and this is one of the times. You asked me what I will do if he says no.”

  “When he says no,” Ida said.

  “I’ll tell him that I’m walking off the picture as of that moment.…”

  “You have a contract.…” Ida cried.

  “Let him sue me. He can also go to law to get me back into his bed.”

  “You know that if you quit, I’ll quit, too,” Ida said, her voice quivering at the immensity of what she was saying.

  “In a war,” Gretchen said harshly, “sometimes you have to sacrifice the troops.”

  “This isn’t a war,” Ida protested. “It’s just a moving picture like a thousand other moving pictures.”

  “That’s exactly the point,” Gretchen said, “I don’t want to spend my life working on pictures that are just like a thousand others.” She saw that Ida was near tears, her soft dark eyes getting puddly. “You don’t have to pay for my peculiar notions, Ida,” she said. “There’s no reason you have to quit if I do.”

  “I won’t talk about it,” Ida said.

  “Okay,” Gretchen said. “The matter’s closed. Now finish your duck. You’ve barely eaten a bite. Don’t you like it?”

  “I … I … love it,” Ida blubbered.

  They ate in silence for more than a minute, Gretchen helping herself to more wine. She could see Ida making an effort to compose her soft, gentle face that could have been that of a chubby child, and for a moment was sorry that she had given Ida the script to read, burdened her with her own problems. Still, with her experience of Ida’s stony integrity and purity of taste, she had had to have confirmation of the value of the script. Without it, she would never have been sure enough to confront Kinsella. Evans Kinsella, she thought grimly to herself, is in for a rough afternoon, if he’s home, Ida Cohen or no Ida Cohen. If he’s home.

  Finally, Ida spoke. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, her voice almost timid. “There’s another way of going about it. You don’t have to do everything head-on, do you?”

  “I suppose not. I’m not good at doing things slantywise, though.”

  Ida chuckled. “No, you’re not. However—maybe this one time you’ll listen to me. You know and I know he’ll never say yes. Especially if you argue with him.”

  “How do you know him so well?” Gretchen asked with mock suspicion. “Have you been having a nasty little affair with him behind my back?”

  Ida laughed aloud, her spirits restored. “How could I?” she asked. “He’s not even Jewish.”

  They both laughed together. Then Ida’s face became grave. “My idea is this—finish cutting the picture—”

  “Oh, God,” Gretchen said.

  “Hush. Listen to me for a minute. I listened to you, didn’t I?”

  “You certainly did,” Gretchen admitted.

  “Don’t even mention the script to him again. Pretend you’ve forgotten all about it.”

  “But I haven’t forgotten about it. It’s haunting me already. Even now I can see shot after shot …”

  “I said pretend,” Ida said crossly. “Get someone to put up option money and buy it yourself.”

  “Even if I could get the money,” Gretchen said, thinking immediately of poor Rudy, “then what?”

  “Then,” Ida said triumphantly, “direct it yourself.”

  Gretchen leaned back in her chair. Whatever had been in Ida’s head, she hadn’t expected this.

  “My heavens,” she said, “what an idea.”

  “Why not?” Ida said eagerly, forgetting once more to eat. “In the old days most directors came out of the cutting rooms.”

  “The old days,” Gretchen said. “And they were all men.”

  “You know I don’t like talk like that,” Ida said reprovingly.

  “Forgive me. For the moment I forgot. But just for fun, Ida, give me the names of twenty-f
ive women directors.”

  “In the old days there weren’t twenty-five women in the army, either.” The meetings she attended gave a solid base to Ida’s arguments and she was making the most of it. “You won’t go to meetings, you won’t even read the pamphlets we put out—but you could do us a lot more good by coming along with a beautiful movie than if you went to a million meetings. And if you have any doubts about whether you could pull it off or not, let me tell you, you know more about movies than Evans Kinsella ever did or ever will.”

  “It’s an idea,” Gretchen said thoughtfully, “now that the first shock is over, it’s an idea.”

  “It’s not an expensive picture to make,” Ida went on quickly. “A small town, mostly location and easy indoor shots, a small cast, kids mostly; you couldn’t find name actors for the parts even if you had the money to spend. I know some people who put money into pictures. I could go to them. You could go to your brother …”

  Poor Rudy, Gretchen thought again.

  “How much did Evans Kinsella’s first picture cost?” Ida asked.

  “One hundred and twenty-five thousand,” Gretchen said promptly. Kinsella was constantly boasting that his first picture, which had had a huge commercial success, had been brought in for peanuts and he always announced the exact sum.

  “A hundred and twenty-five thousand,” Ida said. “And now they give him three and a half million.”

  “That’s show business,” Gretchen said.

  “Times have changed,” Ida said, “and a hundred and twenty-five is impossible these days. But I bet we could do this one for no more than seven hundred and fifty thousand. Most of the actors’d work for scale, and with parts like these the leads would defer their salaries and take percentages. All the money would be on the screen, no place else.”

  “Dear Ida,” Gretchen said, “you’re already beginning to talk like a movie mogul.”

  “Just promise me one thing,” Ida said.

  “What’s that?” Gretchen asked suspiciously.

  “Don’t call Kinsella today or tomorrow. Think everything over at least until Monday.”

  Gretchen hesitated. “Okay,” she said, “but you’re depriving me of a lovely fight.”

  “Just think of what Kinsella’s face will look like when the movie comes out, and you won’t mind giving up the satisfaction of telling him what a jerk he is.”

  “All right, I promise,” Gretchen said. “Now let’s order a gorgeous, gooey French dessert and then we’ll indulge ourselves to the full the rest of the afternoon. Tell me—how many times have you seen Bergman’s Wild Strawberries?”

  “Five times.”

  “And I’ve seen it five times,” Gretchen said. “Let’s play hooky this afternoon and make it an even half-dozen.”

  « »

  Driving home through the Sunday-afternoon traffic, in the rear of the Continental, with Johnny Heath at the wheel and Elaine in front beside him, Rudolph reflected upon the weekend. It had been a success, he thought. Jean’s house had been cosy, as she had promised, and the view of the ocean glorious. The masseuse did not seem to be a lesbian and turned out to be a very good cook indeed. There had been no orgies, no nude clambakes on the beach, despite Johnny’s prediction, but there had been long walks on the hard sand left by the ebbing tide, all of them together, with Enid holding her mother’s hand. The two of them had been delighted with each other, and without saying anything about it, Rudolph had thought that it might be a good idea for Enid to stay with her mother and go to a small country school rather than face the perils of the streets of New York. He could always see the child on weekends and school holidays. Of course, if he was to take Johnny’s wild idea about Nevada seriously there would be complications. Anyway, it wouldn’t be tomorrow or next week, probably not even next year.

  Jean had looked healthy and fit. She and the masseuse did Spartan exercises each morning and Jean wandered for miles each day along the shore looking for subjects to photograph. She seemed happy, in a dreamy, reticent way, like a child who had just wakened after a pleasant dream. She had been pleased to see the Heaths and content to spend the short weekend in a group. Neither she nor the masseuse, whose name was Lorraine, had attempted to get him off for a private conversation. If Jean had any friends in the neighborhood, they did not appear either on Saturday or Sunday. When Rudolph had asked to see her photographs, she had said, “I’m not ready yet. In a month or so, maybe.”

  Sitting in the back of the comfortable car, speeding toward the city, he realized, not without a touch of sorrow, that Jean had seemed happier that weekend than at almost any time since their marriage.

  There had been wine on the table, but no hard liquor. Jean had not reached for the bottle and Rudolph had caught no warning looks to her from Lorraine.

  She has come to terms with herself, Rudolph thought. He could not say as much for himself.

  Coming into New York over the bridge, he saw the buildings rearing like battlements against the melodrama of the sun sinking in the west. Lights were being turned on in windows, small, winking pinpoints like candles in archers’ loopholes in a stronghold at twilight. It was a view and a time of day that he loved—the empty Sunday streets through which they passed looked clean and welcoming. If only it were always Sunday in New York, he thought, nobody would ever leave it.

  When the car stopped in front of his brownstone, he asked the Heaths if they wanted to come in for a drink, but Johnny said they had a cocktail party to go to and were late. Rudy thanked Johnny for the ride, leaned over and kissed Ekine on the cheek. The weekend had made him fonder of her than before.

  “Are you going to be all alone tonight?” Elaine asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you get back into the car and have the evening with us?” she said. “We’re going to Gino’s for dinner after the party.”

  He was tempted, but he had a lot of thinking to do and he felt it would be better to be alone. He did not tell her that he felt uncomfortable these days with a lot of people around. It was just a passing phase, he was sure, but it had to be reckoned with. “Thanks,” he said, “but I have a pile of letters to answer. Let’s do it during the week. Just the three of us.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Johnny said, “when I get the Nevada pilgrimage arranged.”

  “I’ll be in all day,” Rudolph said. As he watched the car drive away, he was sorry he had said it. He was afraid that in the car, one or the other of the Heaths was saying, “He’ll be in all day because he doesn’t know what to do with himself.”

  Carrying his bag, he went up the steps. He didn’t have to use the key to open the front door. The people downstairs again. He would have to talk to them. As he went into the darkened hallway a man’s voice said, “Don’t move and don’t make a sound. I’ve got a gun on you.”

  He heard the front door slam behind him.

  “Which apartment is yours, mister?” the voice said.

  He hesitated. If Enid had been upstairs, he wouldn’t have answered. He thanked God she was safely with her mother, more than a hundred miles away. And the nurse was in New Jersey. There was nobody upstairs. He felt what might have been a gun jabbing him roughly in the ribs. “We asked you a question, mister,” the voice said. He was conscious of a second man, standing next to him.

  “Second floor,” he said.

  “Climb!” the voice commanded. He started up the steps. There was no light coming through the crack at the bottom of the door of the downstairs apartment. Nobody home. Sunday evening, he thought, as he went mechanically up the stairs, with the sound of two pairs of footsteps heavy behind him.

  His hands trembled as he got out his keys again and unlocked the door and went in. “Turn on a light,” the same voice said.

  He fumbled for the switch, found it, pushed at it. The lamp in the hallway went on and he turned to see the two men who had been lying in wait in the vestibule downstairs. They were young, black, one tall, one medium-sized, both neatly dressed. Their faces wer
e lean and tense and full of hatred. Hopheads, he thought. The tall man was holding a gun, pointing at him, blue-black, gleaming dully in the light of the lamp.

  “Into the living room,” he said.

  They followed him into the living room and the second man found the light switch. All the lamps went on. The room looked comfortable and clean, the drapes drawn across the windows. The nurse had tidied up before they left the morning before. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly. He saw that it was five-thirty. “Let’s have your wallet,” the tall man said, “and no funny business.”

  Rudolph dug into his jacket and took out his wallet. The man with the gun grabbed it roughly and tossed it to the other man. “See what’s in it,” he said.

  The second man rifled the wallet. “Thirty dollars,” he said, holding the bills in his hand.

  “Shit,” said the man with the gun. “What’ve you got in your pants?”

  Rudolph took out his money clip and two quarters. The second man put his hand out and grabbed the clip and the change. “You can say shit again, brother,” he said. “There’s only eight bucks here.” He let the two quarters drop to the rug.

  “You got the nerve to drive up here in a Lincoln Continental and only have thirty-eight bucks on you?” the man with the gun said. “Smart, aren’t you? Afraid of being mugged, aren’t you, Mr. Rockefeller?”

  “I’m sorry,” Rudolph said. “That’s all I have. And those credit cards.” The credit cards were strewn on the floor now.

  “This institution don’t accept credit cards, does it, Elroy?” the man said.

  “It sure don’t,” Elroy said. They both laughed hoarsely.

  Rudolph felt remote, as though it weren’t happening to him but to a tiny, numb figure far off in the distance.

  “Where do you keep the money in the house?” the man with the gun demanded. “Where’s the safe?”

  “I don’t keep any money in the house,” Rudolph said. “And there’s no safe.”

  “Smarter and smarter, ain’t you?” the man said. With his free hand he slapped Rudolph, hard, across the eyes. Rudolph was blinded momentarily by tears and he stumbled back. “That’s just to truthen you up a little, mister,” the man with the gun said.