Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  He had not been favorably impressed with William Abbott, who pretended to know a lot more about Thomas Jordache than he really knew, and Wesley left as soon as he could.

  The next two days he tried to get a job at two or three supermarkets, but they weren’t hiring people at supermarkets that week in Chicago and people kept asking him for his union card. He was low in funds and he decided Chicago was not for him. He called his Uncle Rudolph in Bridgehampton, collect, to warn him he was coming there, because he didn’t know where else to go.

  Rudolph sounded funny on the phone, uneasy, as though he were afraid somebody who shouldn’t be listening in was listening in.

  “What’s the matter?” Wesley said. “If you don’t want me out there, I don’t have to come.”

  “It’s not that,” Rudolph said, his voice troubled over the wire. “It’s just that your mother called two days ago to find out if you were with me. She has a warrant out for your arrest.”

  “What?”

  “For your arrest,” Rudolph repeated. “She thinks I’m hiding you someplace.”

  “Arrest? What for?”

  “She says you stole a hundred and fifty dollars from her household money, the money she kept in a pitcher over the stove in the kitchen, the night you left. She says she’s going to teach you a lesson. Did you take the money?”

  “I wish I had,” Wesley said bitterly. That goddamn Healey, he thought. The army had taught him how to live off the land. Or even more likely, that cheese-faced Doris.

  “I’ll straighten it out,” Rudolph said soothingly, “somehow. But for the time being I don’t think it would be wise to come here. Do you need money? Let me know where you are and I’ll send you a money order.”

  “I’m okay,” Wesley said. “If I get to New York I’ll call you.” He hung up before Rudolph could say anything else.

  That’s all I need, he thought, the jug in Indianapolis.

  Then he decided he’d go to New York. Rudolph wasn’t the only person he knew in New York. He remembered the nice girl at Time saying that if he needed help to come to her. Nobody would think of looking for him at Time Magazine.

  He was on the road the next morning.

  « »

  CHAPTER 2

  He did not talk to his uncle for almost two months after the telephone call from Chicago.

  When he got to New York he went directly to Alice Larkin’s office. He must have looked pretty awful after his days on the road, because she gasped as though someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over her when he came into her cubicle. He had had almost nothing to eat in days and had done his sleeping in truck cabs; he needed a shave, his collar was frayed, his pants were stained with grease from helping a driver change a tire on the big semitrailer outside Pittsburgh; and he had forty-five cents in his pocket.

  But after the first shock, Miss Larkin seemed happy to see him and insisted on buying him lunch downstairs even before he could tell her what he was there for.

  After he had eaten and was feeling like a human being again he had told her just about everything. He tried to make it sound unimportant, and joke about it, because he didn’t want that nice girl to think he was an overgrown crybaby. She was easy to talk to, looking across the table at him intently through her glasses, her small, pink-cheeked face alert, as he explained why he had left Indianapolis and about the warrant for his arrest and the division of the estate, everything.

  She didn’t interrupt him as he poured it all out, just sighed or shook her head every once in a while in sympathy and indignation.

  “Now,” she said, when he had finished, “what’re you going to do?”

  “Well, I told you, the other time I was here,” he said, “I sort of have the feeling that I’d like to look up the people who knew my father and get an idea of what he seemed like to them—you know—different people, different times of his life. I knew him less than three years.” He was speaking earnestly now, not trying to sound ironic or grown up. “I feel as though there’s a great big hole in my head—where my father ought to be—and I want to fill it as much as I can. I guess it sounds kind of foolish to you …”

  “No, it doesn’t,” she said, “not at all.”

  “I told you I had a list of people …” He took his wallet out of his pocket and put the worn, creased sheet of paper with the names written on it onto the table. “The magazine seems to be able to find just about anybody they want to,” he said, “and I thought, if it wasn’t too much trouble for you, maybe in your spare time …”

  “Of course,” Miss Larkin said, “we’re not as omniscient as you might …” She stopped when she saw the puzzled look on his face. “I mean as all-knowing as you might think, but we’re pretty good at hunting down people.” She looked at the list. “This is bound to take some time and there’s no guaranteeing I can turn them all up, but …” She looked at him curiously. “Will you be staying in New York?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Where?”

  He moved uncomfortably in his chair. “I haven’t decided on any place yet. I came right here.”

  “Wesley,” Miss Larkin said, “tell me the truth—how much money have you?”

  “What’s the difference?” he said defensively.

  “You look like a scarecrow,” she said. “You ate as though it was your first meal in a week. How much money have you got on you?”

  He grinned weakly. “Forty-five cents,” he said. “The heir to the Jor-dache fortune. Of course,” he said hastily, “I could always call my uncle and he’d stake me, but for the time being I’d rather not.”

  “Do you mind if I take this list with me?” Miss Larkin said. “You’ll have to tell me just who they are and where you think they might be found, of course.…”

  “Of course.”

  “It might take weeks.”

  “I’m in no hurry.”

  “And you expect to live for weeks on forty-five cents?” She sounded accusing, as though she were angry with him.

  “Something’ll turn up,” he said vaguely. “Something always does.”

  “Would you be offended if I told you that something has turned up?” Unaccountably, she blushed.

  “What?”

  “Me,” she said, louder than she realized. “I’ve turned up. Now listen carefully. I’ve got two rooms and a kitchenette. There’s a perfectly comfortable sofa on which you can sleep. I’m not much of a cook, but you won’t starve.…”

  “I can’t do that,” Wesley protested.

  “Why not?”

  He grinned weakly again. “I don’t know why not.”

  “Do you have any other clothes?”

  “I have a clean shirt and a pair of socks and some underwear. I left them downstairs at the desk in your building.”

  She nodded primly. “A clean shirt,” she said. “As far as I can tell, these people on the list are scattered all over the country.…”

  “I guess so. My father moved around some.”

  “And you expect to travel all over the United States and go into people’s homes and ask them the most intimate questions with one clean shirt to your name?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it much,” he said defensively.

  “You’d be lucky to get past the dogs, looking like that,” she said. “It’s a wonder they let you come up to my office.”

  “I guess I haven’t looked in a mirror the last few days,” he said.

  “I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do with you,” she said, sounding more certain of herself than she actually felt. “I’m going to have you stay with me and I’m going to lend you some money to buy some clothes and …”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Of course you can,” she said crisply. “You heard me say ‘lend,’ didn’t you?”

  “God knows when I’ll ever get my money.”

  “I can wait,” she said.

  He sighed deeply. She could see how relieved he was. “I don’t know why you want to be so nice
to me,” he said. “You hardly know me.…”

  “I know enough about you to want to be nice to you,” she said. Then she sighed, in her turn. “I have to be honest with you and tell you something. I’m not doing this out of random charity. I have an ulterior purpose. You know what ulterior means?”

  “I’ve read a book, Miss Larkin,” he said, a little hurt.

  “Alice.”

  “I’m not as stupid as I look is what I meant to say.”

  “I don’t believe you’re stupid at all. Whatever,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I have my own private, selfish reasons for doing what I’m doing and you might as well know them now as later. I just hope you won’t be hurt.”

  “How can I be hurt if somebody wants to give me a place to live and dress me up like a decent human being?”

  “I’ll tell you how,” she said. “When you left my office last time—No. Let me go back further than that. Like just about everybody else on the magazine I want to be a writer. I think of myself as a novelist. I had sixty pages of a novel done when I met you. When you left I went home and burned them.”

  “Why’d you do that?” he asked. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “It’s got everything to do with you. After doing the research and then hearing your story I decided what I was writing was junk—flat, worn-out, repetitive junk. I decided I wanted to write a story about a young boy whose father had been murdered.…”

  “Oh,” Wesley said softly. Now he eyed her cautiously.

  “The young boy,” she went on, avoiding his glance, looking down at the table, “wants to find out several things—who did it, why it was done, what his father’s life was like—He didn’t know his father, his parents had been divorced when he was a small boy and his father had wandered off. If it worries you, let me tell you that the murder doesn’t take place in Europe—I don’t know anything about Europe, I’ve never been there. But the plan, in general, isn’t so different from what you’re doing.…”

  “I see.”

  “So you can see what my ulterior purpose is.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have you right under my nose, I’ll be able to study you, I’ll be helping you to find all kinds of people. In a way, it could be considered a fair exchange. Would that bother you?”

  Wesley shrugged. “Not necessarily,” he said. “I don’t quite see myself as a character in a book, though.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Miss Larkin said. “You’ll be a character in my head and I’ll take what I need and what I can use and hope for the best.”

  “What if you find out I’m not worth the trouble?”

  “That’s the chance I take.”

  “How does the book turn out?” Wesley asked curiously. “Does he find the murderer?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “Then what does he do?”

  “He takes his revenge.”

  Wesley chuckled sourly. “Pretty easy in a book, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t intend to make it easy,” she said.

  “And what happens to the kid?”

  She took another deep breath. “He gets killed,” she said.

  Wesley drummed absently on the tabletop, without looking at her. “That sounds logical,” he said.

  “It will be fiction, of course,” she said.

  “Some fiction,” he said.

  “If you get mixed up with writers,” she said seriously, “or even somebody like me who thinks she’s a writer, that’s the chance you take. They’ll try to steal a part of your soul.”

  “I didn’t know I had one,” Wesley said.

  “Let me be the judge of that,” Alice said. “Look—if the whole thing seems awful to you—or absurd—you don’t have to go along with it.”

  “Will you write the book anyway?”

  “Yes, I’ll try.”

  “What the hell.” He grinned. “If I do have a soul I guess I have enough to spare for a few pages in a book.”

  “Good,” she said briskly, although her hands were trembling. She dug in her pocketbook. “I have to go back to work. But here’s my charge account card at Bloomingdale’s. It’s on Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue.” As she spoke she scribbed on a sheet of Time stationery. “You take this note along with my card so they’ll know I authorized you to use it. You go into there this afternoon and buy yourself a couple of shirts and some flannel pants. Have them sent here, so they know it’s my order. You can’t go around looking like this. Then come back here about six o’clock and I’ll take you home. Oh, and you’ll need some money for bus fares and stuff like that.” She dug in her bag again and gave him five dollars in singles and change.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Remember—whatever you give me is only a loan. I’m due to get about thirty thousand bucks when I’m eighteen.”

  “I’ll remember,” she said impatiently.

  “Write it down,” he insisted. “Five dollars and the date.”

  She made a face. “If you want.” She took out a pen and her notebook and wrote in it. She pushed it across the table at him. “Satisfied?”

  He looked at the page of the notebook gravely. “Okay,” he said.

  She put the notebook back in her bag.

  “Now that I’m a character in a book,” he said, “do I have to behave in any particular way? Do I have to watch my language or save maidens in distress or anything fancy like that?”

  “You just behave any way you want,” she said. Then she saw that he was grinning and that he had been making fun of her. She laughed. “Just don’t be wise beyond your years, boy,” she said.

  He was on his way to Port Philip. Might as well start at the place where it all began, he had said, when Alice had found out that Theodore Boylan was still alive and still living there. Wesley’s father had told him something about Boylan’s connection with the family and it was just a couple of hours by train from the city.

  He was neatly dressed now in flannel slacks and a sports jacket and good brown shoes from Bloomingdale’s and Alice had insisted on trimming his hair, not too short, but neat. She seemed glad to have him around the small apartment on the West Side, near the park. She said she was beginning to feel melancholy living alone and that she looked forward to seeing him there when she got back after work. When young men called to take her out she introduced him as her cousin from the Midwest who was staying with her for a few weeks.

  While waiting for Alice to come up with the information he had asked her for, he enjoyed wandering around the city. He went to a lot of movies and investigated things like the Radio City Music Hall and the United Nations building and the garish carnival of Broadway. At night, sometimes, Alice took him to the theater, which opened up a whole new world for him, since he had never seen a live show before.

  When they were alone together in the apartment he tried to keep out of her way while she tapped away at the typewriter in her room. She never offered to let him read anything that she was writing and he didn’t ask her any questions about it. Sometimes, he felt strange, sitting reading a magazine in the living room and listening to the typewriter and knowing that someone was in there writing about him or inventing somebody who might conceivably be him. Occasionally, she would come out and stare at him silently, a long time, as though she were studying him, trying to get inside his head, then go back into her room and start at the machine again.

  Whenever she took him to the theater or bought him a meal he made her put the amount of the tickets or the dinner in her notebook.

  The train rattled north along the Hudson River. It was a clear sunny day and the river looked bright and clean and he thought how nice it would be to have a small boat and sail up its broad reaches, past the green cliffs, the small drowsy towns, and tie up at night and see what the life was like in them.

  He saw the big, forbidding pile of Sing Sing at Ossining and felt a pang of kinship with the men pent up there, with the great free river just below their barred windows, counting off the yea
rs. Never, he thought, never for me. Whatever else happens.

  When he got to Port Philip, he got into a taxi at the station and said, “The Boylan mansion.” The driver looked at him curiously through the rearview mirror as he started the motor. “I don’t reckon I’ve had a fare there for more than ten years,” the driver said. “You going to work there?”

  “No,” Wesley said. “It’s a social visit.”

  The driver made a sound. It was hard to figure out whether it was a cough or a laugh.

  Wesley stared out the window as they drove through the town. It was shabby, the streets unkempt, as though the people who lived there, long ago, in the certainty of defeat, had given up the last attempt at civic beautification. In a funny way it reminded Wesley of bums lying on park benches, who, when aroused, spoke in good, college-educated accents.

  The gates at the entrance to the Boylan grounds were broken and off their hinges, the gravel road leading up the hill toward the house was full of potholes and the lawns were overgrown, the wild hedges untrimmed. The house itself looked like a smaller version of Sing Sing.

  “Wait a minute,” he told the driver as he got out of the cab and paid him. “I want to see if they let me in.” He pushed at the bell at the front door. He didn’t hear any sound inside and he waited, then pushed again. He looked around as he waited. The weeds were almost waist high on the lawns and there were wild vines crawling over the garden walls.

  A couple of minutes went by and he was about to turn back to the taxi and return to town when the door opened. A bent old man in a striped butler’s vest stood there, peering at him. “Yes?” the man said.

  “I’d like to talk to Mr. Boylan, please,” Wesley said.

  “Who should I say is calling?”

  “Mr. Jordache,” Wesley said.

  The old man peered at him sharply, leaning forward to get a better look. “I will see if Mr. Boylan is in,” he said and closed the door again.

  The taxi driver honked his horn impatiently.

  “Wait just a minute, will you?” Wesley called.

  Thirty seconds later, the door opened again. “Mr. Boylan will see you now,” the old man said.

  Wesley waved to the driver to go and the taxi spurted around the potholed circle in front of the house and sped down the hill.