Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  The old man led Wesley down a long dark hall and opened a door. “If you please, sir,” the old man said, holding the door open for him.

  Wesley went into a big room, which was dark, too, because of the heavy drapes, although it was sunny outside. A man was sitting in a big winged leather chair, reading a book. At a table near one of the tall windows that let out onto the terrace, where there was some sunlight, two young women were sitting across from each other playing cards. They looked at him curiously as he came into the room. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, they were dressed in nightgowns, with frilly robes over them.

  The man in the leather chair slowly stood up, carefully putting the book he had been reading facedown on the wing of the chair. “Ah,” he said. “Mr. Jordache?” His voice was thin and dry.

  “Yes, sir,” Wesley said.

  “Jordache,” the man said. “I know the name.” He chuckled thinly. “I’m Theodore Boylan. Sit down.” He indicated an identical winged chair facing the one he had been sitting in. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He had bright blond hair that had to be dyed, over that lined, quivering old face, the nose sharp, the eyes milky.

  Wesley sat, feeling stiff and uncomfortable, wishing the two women weren’t there, conscious of their staring at him.

  “Whose pup are you?” Boylan asked, seating himself again. “The merchant prince’s or the thug’s?”

  “Thomas,” Wesley said. “Thomas Jordache was my father.”

  “Dead now.” Boylan nodded, as if with approval. “Not long for this world. In the cards. Murdered.” He addressed the women at the window. “In a pretty part of the world.” He squinted maliciously at Wesley. “What do you want?”

  “Well,” Wesley said, “I know you knew my family …”

  “Intimately,” Boylan said. “All too intimately.” Again he spoke to the women at the window. “The young man’s aunt was a virgin when I met her. She was not a virgin when she left me. Believe it or not, at one moment I asked her to marry me. She refused.” He turned on Wesley. “Has she told you that?”

  “No,” Wesley said.

  “There are many things, I’m sure, they haven’t told you. Your aunt and uncle used to take great pleasure in coming to this house. It was in better condition then. As was I.” He chuckled again, a raucous little noise. “I taught them many things when they were young and hungry. They learned valuable lessons in this house. They have not been back to visit the old man for lo, these many years. Still, as you see, young man, I am not without company.…” He waved carelessly at the two women, who had gone back to playing cards. “Youthful beauties,” he said ironically. “The advantages of wealth. You can buy youth. They come and go. Two, three months at a time, selected for me by a discreet madam who is an old and valued acquaintance of mine in the great city of New York and who is constantly surprised at what she hears from their ruby lips about the indomitable appetite of the old man.”

  “Oh, come off it, Teddy,” one of the women said, shuffling the cards.

  “My dears,” Boylan said, “I would appreciate it if you would leave the men to their conversation for a while.”

  The woman who had spoken sighed and stood up. “Come on, Elly,” she said, “he’s in one of his goddamn moods.”

  The other woman stood up and they both went out, swinging their hips, their high-heeled mules making a clacking noise on the polished floor.

  “There is one great advantage to paying for labor,” Boylan said when the women had left the room, closing the big door behind them. “The employees are obedient. When one gets old one values obedience above all other virtues. So—young man—you are curious about the noble roots of your family.…”

  “Actually,” Wesley said, “it’s my father mostly that I …”

  “I was only acquainted with him by his deeds,” Boylan said, “but Gretchen and Rudolph I knew all too well. Your Uncle Rudolph, I’m afraid, suffered, from an early age, from a prevalent American disease—he was interested only in money. I attempted to guide him, I showed him the way to eminence, an appreciation of the finer things of life, but the almighty dollar was raging in his veins. I warned him he was laying waste to himself, but he suffered from the Jew’s deformation …” Boylan rubbed his middle finger against his thumb. “The clink of coin was heavenly music in his ears. Not content with the fortune he could amass himself, he married great money and in the end it did him in. He was foredoomed and I warned him, but he was deafened by the harps of gold.” He laughed gleefully. Then he spoke more soberly. “He was a man who lacked the essential virtue of gratitude. Well, he’s paid his price and I, for one, do not mourn for him.”

  “Really, Mr. Boylan,” Wesley said stiffly, “what I came for was …”

  “As for Gretchen,” Boylan went on as though Wesley had not spoken, “prettiest girl in town. Ripe as a peony, blooming on a slag heap. Demure, she was, eyes downcast and modest. In the beginning. Not later. She could have had a life of ease and respect, travel; I was ready to offer her anything. I once bought her a bright red dress. When she came into a room shimmering in red, every man in the place felt anguish clutching at his throat.” He shrugged. “What I offered she spurned. She wanted cheap young men, quick with false words, into bed, out of bed. She destroyed herself with her unbridled sensuality. If you see her, please remember my words and repeat them carefully to her.”

  Gaga, Wesley thought, absolutely gaga, with a crazy gift of gab. He tried not to think of his Aunt Gretchen walking into a room in a red dress bought for her by this loony old man. “What I’m trying to get at,” he said doggedly, “is what my father …”

  “Your father,” Boylan said contemptuously, “was a criminal and an arsonist and belonged behind bars. He came here to spy on his sister and he burned a cross on the hill outside because on one of his marauding raids he discovered that his sister was upstairs in my bed and he saw me naked in this very room fixing her a drink. A burning cross. Symbol of bigotry and ignorance.” Boylan spat out the words, still outraged after all the years by the flaming insult on his doorstep. “All this came out many years later, of course—the boy who was his accomplice—Claude Tinker by name, now a respectable citizen in this very town—confessed everything to me over a splendid dinner in my own dining room. Your father.” Boylan wrinkled his long, thin, old man’s reddened nose. “Good riddance, I’d say. I followed his career. As was to be expected, he failed at everything, even at keeping alive.”

  Wesley stood up. “Thank you very much, Mr. Boylan,” he said, hating the man. “I believe I’ve heard enough. I’ll be going now.”

  “As you wish,” Boylan said carelessly. “You know the way to the door. I thought you might be interested in the truth—at your age the truth is often a useful guide for your own conduct. I’m too old to lie or cosset random young scum because once I was kind to a relative or two.” He picked up his book from the wing of the chair and started reading.

  As he went out of the room and walked quickly toward the front door, Wesley thought, My old man shouldn’t have just burned a cross, he should have set fire to the whole goddamn place. With that sonofabitch in it.

  He walked the few miles down the hill and to the station and was lucky because a train was just pulling into the station as he reached it.

  When he got to the apartment Alice had dinner waiting for him. She saw that his lips were tight, his jaw tense, and they ate in silence. She didn’t ask him how it had gone in Port Philip.

  « »

  Dominic Joseph Agostino, who in his fighting days in the twenties and thirties had been known as Joe Agos, the Boston Beauty, and who had been in charge of the gym at the Revere Club when Thomas Jordache had worked there, was still alive, Alice told Wesley, and still working at the Revere Club. Tom Jordache had told Wesley that Agostino had been good to him, had saved his job once when he was suspected of rifling the members’ lockers and had even persuaded him that he was good enough to start in the amateurs. All things considered, Thomas had told
Wesley, he was glad he had had his fling at the fight game, even if in the end he had wound up as a bum. “What the hell,” Thomas had said, “I enjoyed fighting. Getting paid for it was so much gravy. For a while, anyway.” There was one wonderful thing about Agostino, Thomas had said, he had been as polite as a lady’s maid with the members of the club with whom he sparred and full of compliments about how good they were and how they were improving in what he called The Art, but had managed never to let on for a minute that what he really would have liked to do was blow up every one of them, along with the building itself, with its fancy rooms and oil portraits of the old aristocracy of Boston on the walls.

  “He was a model of deportment,” Thomas had said admiringly, “and he taught me a lot.”

  Wesley took the shuttle to Boston from LaGuardia—thirty-six dollars round trip, as he wrote in the notebook he now kept for himself, to make sure that Alice wasn’t slyly cheating herself about the money she advanced him. The trip would have been enjoyable, except for the exparatrooper who sat next to him, who started sweating as soon as the plane began taxiing and digging his nails into the palms of his hands and kept saying, once they were in the air, “Listen to the sound of that port engine. I don’t like the sound of that port engine, we’re going to crash, for Christ’s sake and those guys up front don’t give a damn.”

  The more you knew about anything, Wesley thought, the less you liked it.

  The plane didn’t crash and once they were on the ground the ex-paratrooper stopped sweating and looked like any other passenger as they got off the plane.

  At the Revere Club, the old man at the front desk looked at him queerly when he asked if he could speak to Mr. Agostino.

  “I’m Mr. Agostino,” the man said. He had a husky, whispery, hoarse voice and he was small and skinny, with his uniform hanging loosely around his bones and his big Adam’s apple moving up and down in his stringy neck.

  “I mean the one who used to work in the gym,” Wesley said.

  “That’s me.” The man eyed him suspiciously. “I ain’t worked in the gym for fifteen years. Too fucking old. Besides the arthritis. They made me the doorman. Out of the goodness of their hearts. What’d you want to see Agostino about?”

  Wesley introduced himself. “Tommy Jordan’s son,” Agostino said flatly. “What do you know? I remember him. He got killed, didn’t he? I read it somewhere.” There was no emotion in the whispering, hoarse voice, with the flat South Boston accent. If the name stirred any pleasant memories in the balding head, decorated by a few wispy gray hairs, he kept them to himself. “You looking for a job?” His tone was accusing. He eyed Wesley professionally. “You got a good built on you. You planning to go into the ring or anything like that?”

  “I’m not a fighter,” Wesley said.

  “Just as well,” Agostino said. “They don’t box anymore in this club. They decided it wasn’t a sport for gentlemen. All those niggers and all. Now, when they have to settle a difference of opinion, they sue each other.” He laughed, his breath whistling through the gaps in his teeth.

  “I just wanted to talk to you about my father for a few minutes,” Wesley said, “if you have the time.”

  “Your father. Umm. He could punch, your father, with his right. You might just as well have tied his left hand behind him, all the good it did. I saw him fight pro once. I saw him knock the bum out. But after the fight I told him, ‘You’ll never go to the top,’ I told him, ‘until you get yourself a left hand.’ I guess he never did. Though the way things are now, he might of got himself a couple good paydays, being white and all. He wasn’t a bad Kid, your old man. Had a streak of larceny in him, I suspected; not that I blamed him, with the wall in this joint practically papered with dollar bills. There were all sorts of stories after he left. Somehow the word got around that he blackmailed one of the members, a lawyer, for God’s sake, for five thousand bucks. The guy’s father got wind of it and let it be known that his poor little son was sick, he was a kleptomaniac. Money kept disappearing all over the place, and I guess your old man caught the guy at it once and made him pay to keep quiet. Your father ever tell you any of this?”

  “Yes,” Wesley said. “He said it was his lucky day.”

  “That’s a nice chunk of dough,” Agostino said, “five big ones. What did he do with it?”

  “He invested it,” Wesley said. “Or rather his brother did it for him. He finished with a yacht.”

  “I read that, too, in the magazine,” Agostino said. “A yacht. Shit. I wish I had a brother like that. A young punk like that winding up with a yacht!” He shook his head. “I got along with him okay, bought him a couple of beers from time to time. I wasn’t too surprised he got killed. Yeah, I’ll talk to you, if that’s all you want.…” Now he sounded suspicious. “I’m not going to contribute to any Tom Jordan Memorial Fund or anything like that, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “All I want to do is talk awhile,” Wesley said.

  Agostino nodded. “Okay. I get a fifteen-minute break in a few minutes. The headwaiter from the dining room takes the desk for me. There’s a saloon about five doors down. I’ll meet you there. This time you can pay for the beers.”

  A portly gentleman in a black coat with a velvet collar came up to the desk and said, “Good afternoon, Joe. Any mail for me?”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Saunders,” Agostino said, bowing a little. “It’s nice to see you in the old place again. You out of the hospital for good now?”

  “Until the next time,” the portly gentleman said and laughed. Agostino laughed with him, wheezing.

  “Age, you know, Joe,” the man said.

  “Isn’t it the sad truth?” Agostino said. He turned and was reaching into the pigeon hole with S printed over it as Wesley went out of the club.

  “The thing I remember best about him,” Agostino was saying over the beers at the end of the dark bar, “was the day I was sparring with one of the members, big guy he was, young, twenty-five, twenty-six, old fucking Boston family—” the hatred was plain in his voice, in the still-fierce, coal-black, Sicilian eyes, “—won some sort of crappy intercollegiate championship, pretty boy by the name of Greening, I remember the name to this day, Greening, thought he was hot shit with the gloves, light heavyweight, me I was still one thirty-six, one thirty-eight at the time, he never changed that cold, superior look on his face, the sonofabitch caught me one on the chin, an uppercut, all his weight behind it, I thought he’d broke my goddamn jaw. I had a bad cold that day, I couldn’t breathe, sparring in the gym, for Christ’s sake, you didn’t dare tap one of the members any harder than you’d stroke a pussy, you’d be out on your ass before you could say boo if you drew two drops of blood from their beautiful Beacon Hill noses and this sonofabitch knocked me down, my teeth loose and my mouth all bloody, not being able to breathe, something to laugh about at the bar later with the other fancy pisspots, sucking the blood of the poor, the bastards.” Agostino shook his head, the wisps of hair floating on the bald pate, his hand up to the bony jaw, as though he were still feeling to see if it was broken, the grating, furious old voice quiet for a moment. Looking at him, Wesley found it almost impossible to imagine him young, moving lightly around a ring, giving and receiving blows. One thing I’m sure of, he thought, watching Agostino noisily slurping his beer, I don’t ever want to get that old.

  “After that,” Agostino went on, “it was pure pleasure. Greening was miffed, he hadn’t gotten his day’s exercise, he said it didn’t hardly pay for him to have undressed and he asked your father if he wanted to go a round or two. I gave your old man the sign and he put on the gloves. Well, boy, it was a treat to the eyes. That good, old, intercollegiate, straight-up stance didn’t mean balls to your father, though he took a couple of real hard ones to the head before he caught on the shit meant business with him, too. Then he just massacred the guy, they didn’t stop for rounds or anything polite like that, they just tore into each other. For a minute there I felt that boy there was making up to me
, personally, for my whole lousy life. Finally your father caught him a beauty and the old Boston family went glassy-eyed and started moving in circles like a drunk comedian and Tom was ready to put the crusher on him, but I stepped in and stopped it. I wasn’t worried about Tom, he knew what he was doing, but I had my job to consider. Mr. Greening, sir, came back to the land of the living, blood smeared all over his fucking Harvard Quadrangle face and just walked off with never a thank you. Your old man didn’t have any doubts. ‘There goes my job,’ he says. ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘It was worth it. For me.’” Agostino cackled merrily at the memory of the far-off golden moment. “Four days later I was told I had to fire him. I remember the last thing I told him—‘Never trust the rich,’ I told him.” He looked at the clock above the bar. “I better be gettin’ back. Nice of you to come and visit, son. Thanks for the beers.” He picked up the visored uniform cap he had placed on the bar and put it on his head, very straight. It was too large for him and under it his pale, bony face looked like a starved child’s. He started to leave, then turned and came back. “Tell you something, son, there’re a lot of people I’d have liked to see killed before your old man.”

  Then he shuffled, bent and arthritic, out the door to take up his post at the front desk of the club, where he would hand out the mail and laugh obsequiously, full of Sicilian dreams of vengeance and destruction, at the jokes of the members until the end of his days.

  « »

  When he got back to New York that evening Alice could see that he was in a different mood from when he had returned from the visit to Boylan in Port Philip. “That fellow Agostino,” he told her as he helped her prepare dinner in the kitchen, which consisted mostly of putting out plates and cutlery, “is a marvelous, weird old man. He sure was worth the trip.” Then he told her as well as he could remember everything that the old boxer had said. She asked him to repeat sentences …“in the man’s own words, if possible, Wesley,” over and over again, as though she was trying to memorize them and get the exact tone of the man’s voice, the rhythms of his speech and a picture of what he actually looked like.