Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  Today, she saw, Richard Sanford was not going to be friendly, not friendly at all. He would go a long way in California, would Richard Sanford.

  Beware young men, Gretchen thought, looking at the two young men. Although at the age of thirty-three, Evans Kinsella, with what he had learned, copied and stolen, could hardly be considered a young man. She should have brought Ida Cohen with her to balance the company, but it would have been like bringing along a small volcano just waiting to erupt. She had not yet told Ida about Kinsella’s call. Time enough for that.

  “Would you like a wee drop?” Kinsella gestured toward the table on which the bottles were neatly placed, with glasses and ice. There must be a single waiter in hotels like this one, Gretchen thought, expert in his field, who rushes from room to room, distributing bottles in strict formal arrangement as soon as the telex comes announcing the impending arrival of the nabobs of the new aristocracy—the abundance and quality of the arrangement depending upon the current importance of the particular nabob in the manager’s files. Gretchen saw, with some malice, that the display on Kinsella’s bar was merely medium. His last picture had been a flop and the hotel manager’s private Almanach de Gotha reflected it. “Our young genius and I have been regaling ourselves,” Kinsella said. “In a modest fashion. To get into the proper festive mood for your arrival. What’s the lady’s pleasure?”

  “I’ll skip it, thank you,” Gretchen said. “It’s a little early for a working girl.” She was going to keep the tone light and calm, even if it meant bursting a blood vessel. “Young genius,” she said, smiling blandly at the boy. “Evans must have changed his mind about you, Richard.”

  “I happened to reread the script,” Kinsella said hastily. “I must have read it the first time on a bad morning.”

  “As I remember,” Gretchen said, her voice honeyed, “you told me it was a load of shit.” One assassination deserved another. She saw with pleasure that Sanford flushed as he put his glass down and stared at Kinsella.

  “Artists make mistakes all the time, Dick,” Kinsella said. Gretchen noted the familiar diminutive. “There’re always a thousand people pulling you every which way. Atonement is possible.” He turned his attention, smiling with difficulty at Gretchen. “Among other reasons for this little conference,” he said, “is that Dick and I have talked the script over and we’ve agreed on some changes that would be helpful. Rather drastic changes. Haven’t we, Dick?”

  “Yes,” Sanford said. He was still flushed.

  “Two days ago,” Gretchen said to the young man, “you told me it was ready to go, you didn’t want a word changed.”

  “Evans pointed out a few things to me that I’d missed,” Sanford said. He sounded like a little boy who was being stubborn and knew he was going to be punished for it. The conspiracy went back weeks, perhaps months.

  “Let’s be honest, Gretchen,” Kinsella said. “With two million in the pot, Sanford is going to get a guarantee about three times what you’ve offered him. He’s not a rich man, as you know. He has a wife and a young child to support …”

  “Maestro,” Gretchen said, “will you play the violin, tremolo, with that line?”

  Kinsella scowled. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be poor and struggling for each month’s rent, my dear. With your rich brother you’ve always had a big fat cushion to fall back on. Well, Dick hasn’t any cushion.”

  “What I’d like you to forget, Evans,” Gretchen said, “is that I have a brother. Fat or skinny or any shape whatever. And what I’d like you not to forget, Richard …” She emphasized his name. “… is that you have a contract with me.”

  “I was coming to that,” Kinsella said. He was speaking smoothly again now. “I in no way want to shut you or your little friend Ida Cohen, the Jewish Joan of Arc, out of the project. It was always my intention to ask you to come on as associate producer with full perks, of course. And promote Ida to head cutter. There—” He beamed. “What could be fairer than that?”

  “I suppose, Richard,” Gretchen said, “you agree with Evans in all this? I’d like to hear it in your own words. You also are pleased, no doubt, to hear Ida Cohen, who has slaved to get your script on the screen, described as a Jewish Joan of Arc?”

  Sanford flushed again. “I don’t go along with that part of it, no. But I do go along with the idea that you can make a better picture with two million dollars than with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And before you called me up, I’ll be honest with you, it never occurred to me that a woman could do this picture.…”

  “And now …?”

  “Well …” The boy was flustered. “I know you’re smart and I know you’ve had a lot of experience—but never as a director. It’s my first picture, Gretchen, and I’d just feel better if a man like Evans Kinsella, with all his hits and his reputation …”

  “His reputation stinks,” Gretchen said flatly. “Where it counts. Like with me. If he does one more picture like the last, he won’t be able to rent a Brownie in California.”

  “See, Dick,” Kinsella said, “I told you she’d turn female and vindictive. She was married to a director who she thought was Stanislavski come again, although I’ve seen his pictures and I could have lived without them, to say the least. Since he died, she wants to get even on something, anything, everybody, every director, and she’s become the great deballer of the twentieth century. And old Polish Ida, the flower of the ghetto, who couldn’t get a man to touch her with a ten-foot pole, has puffed her up to think that she’s been elected to lead womankind into an Academy Award.”

  “You awful, conspiring, despicable man,” Gretchen said. “It would serve you both right if I gave you the picture and let you turn it into the load of shit you said it was in the first place.”

  “When I hired her,” Kinsella went on, all constraint lost, “a friend told me, never hire the rich. Especially a rich woman. And don’t screw her. She’ll never forgive you the first time you look at another girl. Get out of here, you bitch.” He was screaming shrilly. “I’ll come to your opening and have a good laugh.”

  “Gretchen …” Sanford said piteously. He looked appalled and sorry he had ever touched a typewriter. “Please …”

  “Richard,” Gretchen said calmly, feeling wonderfully cleansed and dizzily free, “when we start shooting you’re most welcome to come or not come, as you please. Good day, gentlemen,” she said and swept grandly out of the beflowered, bebottled, becursed salon.

  In the elevator she smiled and she wept, without worrying about the other passengers. Wait till I tell Ida about this morning, she thought.

  But on the street she made a resolution: no more younger men. No matter how bright their eye, how white their teeth, how brimming their vitality, how promising their promise, how clear their skin, how sweet their smell. From now on, if she chose any man he would be older than she and grateful for her and not expect her to be grateful for him. She didn’t know how that fit in with Ida Cohen’s philosophy and she didn’t care.

  « »

  They were in the middle of lunch, the clam chowder and hot biscuits that Helen had prepared, and Helen had just said, “I love cooking for a man who doesn’t have to watch his weight,” when the doorbell rang.

  Helen said, “Damn.”

  The lunch had been interrupted once before by a telephone call from Gretchen. Gretchen had taken fifteen minutes to tell Rudolph what had happened between Kinsella and herself that morning and had said that she was sure Rudolph would have approved. He was not as sure as she thought he would be.

  Now it was the doorbell. Rudolph got up from the table and went to the door and opened it. Wesley was standing there, in the oceanic September sunshine, neatly dressed in slacks and a sports jacket, looking a bit gaunt, his cheekbones prominent, his hair cut and neatly combed, neither long nor short, his eyes, as always, old and veiled.

  “Hello, Wesley,” Rudolph said. “I knew you’d turn up sooner or later. You’re just in time for lunch. Come in.”


  CHAPTER 4

  Billy watched with interest as George, which Billy knew was not the man’s real name, carefully worked at the table on the timing device. Monika, whom George addressed as Heidi, stood on the other side of the table, her face in shadow, above the sharp vee of light the work lamp cut over the table. “Are you following this closely, John?” George said in his Spanish-accented English, looking up at Billy. John was the name assigned to Billy in the group. Monika called him John, too, when members of the group were around. It reminded him of the hocus-pocus of secret societies he had started in the yard of the progressive school in Greenwich Village when he was a small boy. Only George wasn’t a small boy and neither was Monika. One laugh, he thought, and they’d kill me.

  There were only two other associates of George and Monika-Heidi whom Billy had met, but they were not present this afternoon in the small room in the slum section of Brussels where George was working on the bomb. Billy had never seen George in the same room twice. He knew from various references in George’s conversation that there were cells like the one he had joined in other cities of Europe, but so far he had no notion of where they were or what exactly they did. Although for his own safety he was not particularly anxious to know any more than he was told, he could not help resenting the fact that he was still treated as an untested and scarcely trusted outsider by the others, even though he had twice supplied them with a half-ton from the motor pool and had driven the car in Amsterdam the night George had bombed the Spanish tourist office there. He didn’t know what other bombings George and Monika had been in on, but he had read about explosions in a branch of an American bank in Brussels and outside the office of Olympic Airways. If Monika and the man he knew as George had been responsible for one or all of them, Monika was keeping her promise—no one had been hurt either in Amsterdam or Brussels.

  “Do you think you could put this together yourself, if necessary?” George was saying.

  “I think so.”

  “Good,” George said. He always spoke quietly and moved deliberately. He was dark and small, with gentle sad eyes and looked totally undangerous. Regarding himself in the mirror, Billy couldn’t believe that anyone could imagine that he was dangerous, either.

  Monika was a different story, with her tangled hair and her eyes that blazed when she was angry. But he lived with Monika, was frightened of her, and loved her more than ever. It was Monika who had said he must reenlist. When he said that he couldn’t face any more time in the army, she had turned furiously on him and had told him it was an order, not a suggestion, and that she would move out if he didn’t do as she said.

  “Next time we meet,” George said, “I’ll let you put together a dummy, just for practice.”

  George turned back to his work, his fine, small hands moving delicately over the wires. Neither he nor Monika had told Billy where the bomb was going to be used or when or for what purpose, and by now he knew that it would be useless to ask any questions.

  “There we are,” George said, straightening up. “All done.” The small plastic charge with the clockwork attachment and detonator lay innocently on the table under the harsh light. “Lesson over for the day. You leave now, John. Heidi will remain with me for a while. Walk to the bus. Take it in the direction away from your apartment for eight blocks. Then get off, walk for three more blocks and get a taxi. Give the driver the address of the Hotel Amigo. Go into the hotel. Have a drink at the bar. Then leave the hotel and walk home.”

  “Yes, George,” Billy said. That was about all he ever said to the man. “Will I be seeing you for dinner tonight?” he asked Monika.

  “That depends on George,” she said.

  “George?” Billy said.

  “Don’t forget,” George said. “At least ten minutes in the Hotel Amigo.”

  “Yes, George,” Billy said.

  Sitting in the bus going in the opposite direction from the house where he lived, surrounded by women going home after a day’s shopping to prepare the family dinner, by children on the way home from school, by old men reading the evening newspaper, he chuckled inwardly. If only they could guess what the small, mild-looking young American in the neat business suit had just been doing on one of the back streets of their city.… Although he hadn’t shown it in front of George and Monika, while he was watching the bomb being assembled he had felt his pulse race with excitement. Coldly, now, in the everyday light of the rumbling bus, he could call it by another name—pleasure. He had felt the same weird emotion racing away from the tourist office in Amsterdam, hearing the faint explosion six blocks behind him in the dark city.

  He didn’t believe, as Monika did, that the system was tottering and that a random bomb here and there was going to topple it, but at least he himself was no longer just an insignificant, replaceable cog in the whole lousy inhuman machine. His acts were being studied, important men were trying to figure out who he was and what he meant and where he might strike next. The disdain of his comrades in arms for him as Colonel’s pet was now an ironic joke, made juicier by the fact that they had no notion of what he was really like. And Monika had had to admit that she had been wrong when she had said he was worthless. Finally, he thought, they would put a weapon in his hand and order him to kill. And he would do it. He would read the papers the next day and would report meekly to work, filled with secret joy. He didn’t believe that Monika and George and their shadowy accomplices would ever achieve their shadowy purposes. No matter. He himself was no longer adrift, at the mercy of the small daily accidents of the enlisted man who had to say, “Yes, sir,” “Of course, sir,” to earn his daily bread. Now he was the accident, waiting to happen, the burning fuse that could not finally be ignored.

  He counted the blocks as the bus trundled on. At the eighth block he got off. He walked briskly through a light drizzle the three blocks that George had told him to cover, smiling gently at the passersby. There was a taxi at the corner of the third block, standing there as though it had been ordered expressly for him. He settled back in it comfortably and enjoyed the ride to the Hotel Amigo.

  He was just finishing his beer at the dark bar at the Amigo, the small room empty except for two blond men at a corner table who were talking to each other in what he took to be Hebrew when Monika walked in.

  She swung up on a stool next to him. “I’ll have a vodka on ice,” she said to the barman.

  “Did George order you to come?” he asked.

  “I am having a social period,” she said.

  “Is it Monika or Heidi?” he whispered.

  “Shut up.”

  “You said social,” he said. “But it isn’t. You were sent here to see if I followed instructions.”

  “Everybody understands English,” she whispered. “Talk about the weather.”

  “The weather,” he said. “It was rather warm this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

  “Rather,” she said. She smiled at the barman as he put her drink in front of her.

  He nursed the last bit of his beer at the bottom of the glass. “What would you do,” he asked, “if I were sent back to America?”

  Monika looked at him sharply. “Are you being shifted? Have you been keeping something from me?”

  “No,” he said. “But the Colonel’s been getting restless. He’s been here a long time. Anyway, in the army, you never can tell …”

  “Pull wires,” she said. “Arrange for someplace in Germany.”

  “It’s not as easy as all that,” he said.

  “It can be done,” she said crisply. “You know that as well as I do.”

  “Still,” he said, “you haven’t answered my question. What would you do?”

  She shrugged. “That would depend,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On a lot of things. Where you were sent. What kind of job you got. Where I was needed.”

  “On love, perhaps?”

  “Never.”

  He laughed. “Ask a silly question,” he said, “and you get a silly answer.”<
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  “Priorities, John,” she said, accenting “John” ironically. “We must never forget priorities, must we?”

  “Never,” he said. He ordered another beer. “There’s a chance I’ll be going to Paris next week.”

  Again she looked at him sharply. “A chance?” she asked. “Or definitely?”

  “Almost definitely. The Colonel thinks he has to go and he’ll put me on orders to accompany him if he does go.”

  “You must learn not to spring things like this suddenly on me,” she said.

  “I just heard about it this morning,” he said defensively.

  “As soon as you know for sure, you let me know. Is that clear?”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, “stop sounding like a company commander.”

  She ignored this. “I’m not talking idly,” she said. “There’s a package that has to be delivered to Paris next week. How would you go? Civilian plane?”

  “No. Army transport. There’s an honor guard going for some sort of ceremony at Versailles.”

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  “What will be in the package?”

  “You’ll know when you have to know,” she said.

  He sighed and drank half the fresh beer. “I’ve always been partial to nice, uncomplicated, innocent girls.”

  “I’ll see if I can find one for you,” she said, “in five or six years.”

  He nodded dourly. In the corner the two blond men were talking more loudly, as though they were arguing.

  “Are those two men speaking Hebrew?” he asked.

  She listened for a moment. “Finnish,” she said.

  “Are they close? Hebrew and Finnish, I mean?”

  “No.” She laughed and kissed his cheek. She had decided to be Monika now, he saw, not Heidi.

  “So,” he said, “business hours are over.”

  “For the day.”