by Irwin Shaw
“Thank you,” Rudolph said wearily. Whatever it was, Gretchen would have to wait until morning.
“Mrs. Burke told me to call her when you got in. No matter what time.” She had guessed he would try to avoid her, had taken steps to make sure he couldn’t.
“I see,” said Rudolph. He sighed. “Call her, please. Tell her I’ll come to her room as soon as I look in on my wife.” He should have stayed the night in Nice. Or rowed till dawn. Faced everything in daylight.
“One more thing,” said the concierge. “There was a gentleman here asking for you. A Mr. Hubbell. He said he was from Time Magazine. He used the telex.”
“If he comes here and asks for me again, tell him I’m not in.”
“I understand. Bonne nuit, monsieur.”
Rudolph rang for the elevator. He had planned to telephone Jeanne, say good night to her, try to tell her what she had done for him, listen to the husky voice, with its rough, sensual shading, fall off to sleep with the memory of the night to take the weight from his dreams. He could forget that now. He shuffled into the elevator, feeling old, got off at his floor, opened the door to the suite as silently as he could. The lights were on, both in the salon and in the bedroom in which Jean slept. Since the murder she refused to sleep in the dark. As he approached her doorway she called out, “Rudolph?”
“Yes, dear.” He sighed. He had hoped she was asleep. He went into her room. She was sitting up in bed, staring at him. Automatically he looked for a glass or a bottle. There was no glass or bottle and he could tell from her face she hadn’t been drinking. She looks old, he thought, old. The drawn face, the dull eyes over the lacy nightgown made her look like a malicious sketch of the woman she would be forty years from now.
“What time is it?” she asked harshly.
“After three. You’d better go to sleep.”
“After three. The consulate in Nice keeps odd hours, doesn’t it?”
“I took the night off,” he said.
“From what?”
“From everything,” he said.
“From me,” she said bitterly. “That’s become quite a habit, hasn’t it? A way of life with you, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let’s discuss it in the morning, shall we?” he said.
She sniffed. “You stink of perfume,” she said. “Shall we discuss that in the morning, too?”
“If you wish,” he said. “Good night.”
He started out of the room. “Leave the door open,” she called. “I have to keep all avenues of escape open.”
He left the door open. He wished he could pity her.
He went into his bedroom through the salon, closing his own door behind him. Then he unlocked the door that led from his room into the corridor and went out. He didn’t want to have to explain to Jean that he had to see Gretchen about something that his sister thought was urgent.
Gretchen’s room was down the corridor. He went past the pairs of shoes left out by the guests to be shined while they slept. Europe was on the brink of Communism, he thought, but shoes were still shined by future commissars, budding Trotskies, between midnight and six each morning.
He knocked on Gretchen’s door. She opened it immediately, as though she had been standing there, alerted by the concierge’s call, as though she couldn’t bear to wait the extra second or two it would have taken her to cross the room and confront her brother. She was in a terry cloth bathrobe, light blue, the blue almost identical with the blue of the dress Jeanne had been wearing in the café. With her small pale face, dark hair and strong, graceful body, she bore a striking resemblance to Jeanne, he thought. Echoes everywhere. The idea hadn’t occurred to him before.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ve been so worried. God, where’ve you been?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “Can’t it wait till morning?”
“It can’t wait until morning,” she said, closing the door. She sniffed. “You smell heavenly, Brother,” she said sarcastically. “And you look as though you’ve just been laid.”
“I’m a gentleman,” Rudolph said, trying to make light of the accusation. “Gentlemen don’t discuss matters like that.”
“Ladies do,” she said. She had her vulgar side, Gretchen.
“Let’s drop it, please,” he said. “I need some sleep. What’s so damned urgent?”
Gretchen fell back into a big armchair, sprawling, as though she were too tired to stand anymore. “Bunny Dwyer called an hour ago,” she said flatly. “Wesley’s in jail.”
“What?”
“Wesley’s in jail in Cannes. He got into a fight in a bar and nearly killed a man with a beer bottle. He hit a cop and the police had to subdue him. Is that urgent enough for you, Brother?”
A Biography of Irwin Shaw
Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the New Yorker to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.
Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.
“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the Dick Tracy radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play, Bury the Dead. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as The Big Game (1936) and The Talk of the Town (1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the New Yorker, he also penned The Gentle People (1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.
World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.
The Young Lions (1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, The Young Lions stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel Two Weeks in Another Town (1960).
Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) and Beggerman, Thief (1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries. Nightwork (1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel The Magic Mountain.
Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.
Shaw’s US Army record.
Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.
&
nbsp; A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.
A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint-Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.
Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.
Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.
Shaw at home with Marian at Chalet Mia, Klosters, in 1958.
Shaw (center) skiing in Klosters in 1960 with (left to right) Noel Howard (an actor), an unidentified Hollywood producer, Marian Shaw, Jacques Charmoz (a French World War II pilot, cartoonist, and painter), and Jacqueline Tesseron.
Shaw in Klosters in 1960 with (from left to right) Kathy Parrish, her husband Robert Parrish (an Academy Award–winning film editor and director), and Peter Viertel (a screenwriter, novelist, and Shaw’s coauthor for the play The Survivors). Shaw’s friendship with Viertel started before the war, when they both lived in Malibu.
Shaw with Irving P. “Swifty” Lazar, the legendary talent agent who represented him, in Evian, France, in 1963.
Shaw playing tennis in Klosters in 1964.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this book appeared in PLAYBOY in a slightly different form.
Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Irwin Shaw
cover design by Andrea Uva
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
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Also Available from Open Road Media
Beggarman, Thief,
the sequel to Rich Man, Poor Man
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