Acceptable Losses

by Irwin Shaw

  It had been a long day. The shooting had taken place a little after three-thirty in the morning, and it was now seven P.M. First some other detectives had questioned Damon while Weinstein had been on the operating table and then Schulter had come down and taken over. Mercifully, the police had kept all newspapermen out of the hospital, but Damon could imagine what the front pages had been like. He hadn’t been able to call Sheila until one o’clock, but she was on her way down from Vermont and was due to arrive any minute now.

  Schulter had been surprisingly gentle and had insisted upon sending for some sandwiches and coffee for Damon as he asked him over and over again to describe every movement everybody involved in the shooting had made. There was a trail of blood, Schulter told Damon, from the spot where the gun that Zalovsky had used had been found to the gates and onto the curb on Waverly Place. A witness had seen a man throw himself into a car that had been parked there and drive off. Unfortunately, the witness had not noted the license number of the car. Even more unfortunately, Damon could give no description of the assailant, except that he seemed of medium height, was heavy set, very strong, and had staggered and nearly fallen when he had been shot, but had managed to recover and stumble off. The bullet must have gone into his right side or his right arm because he had been holding his gun in his right hand and had dropped it immediately after he had been hit.

  “He won’t get too very far with a big hole in him,” Schulter said. “And sometime soon—very soon—he’ll have to get hold of a doctor to patch him up, and we’ll be right on his ass ten minutes after he leaves the doctor’s office or the hospital.”

  “I wish you the best of luck,” Damon said. “And me, too.” He did not feel as confident as Schulter.

  Weinstein had been hit in the knee, which had been shattered. He had quickly lost a great deal of blood, and Schulter marveled that even so, he had been able to get a shot off and hit his man in the wavering pale light. Schulter casually dismissed the death of the man who had been singing “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along” at the Fifth Avenue entrance to Washington Mews. It was the sort of thing that happened every day in New York, Schulter said. “The law of averages,” was the phrase he used. It was obvious that Schulter considered onlookers as a normally endangered species.

  Damon didn’t say so, but felt that the actuarial scales by which Schulter judged the chances of anybody’s survival varied greatly from his own. In his case the law of averages for the past two weeks had been monstrously broken. It was true that the early-morning singer was the first person with whom he had had anything to do as he made his way to the rendezvous with Zalovsky, if passing a drunk on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the night could be described in those terms, but Schulter’s statistics did not include those other victims on Damon’s list, such as Maurice Fitzgerald, Melanie Deal, Elsie Weinstein, Julia Larch, and Sheila’s mother, as well as Manfred Weinstein himself. Damon knew that he was being neurotic and morbid, but he couldn’t help but feel that if you were in any way connected to Roger Damon, you could be a victim without actually being killed on the spot or in the past two weeks.

  The man who had been shot had been identified. His name was Bryant and he had come to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a conference of insurance executives. Damon remembered Maurice Fitzgerald’s speech about acceptable losses and wondered if Schulter would include the luckless Mr. Bryant among them.

  Weinstein lay pale and still on the hospital bed, drainage and transfusion tubes attached to him by intravenous needles. His cheeks were shrunken, and his inert figure under the sheet seemed also to have been diminished, but his eyes, now deep in their sockets, were alert. He was the only patient in the room.

  “How goes it?” Damon asked him, keeping his voice low.

  “I’m breathing,” Weinstein said faintly.

  “The doctor tells me you’re going to be all right.”

  “I bet he tells that to all the girls.” Weinstein tried a small smile.

  “Anyway, you’re going to be able to walk in a couple of months,” Damon said.

  “Where to?” Weinstein said. “Now, how about you?”

  “Fine,” Damon said. “Untouched.”

  “The luck of the Irish.” Weinstein put his hand to take Damon’s. The pressure was feeble. “I was worried about you. The sonofabitch got away, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Not far, Schulter thinks. You hit him. He can’t do much running.”

  “I should’ve dropped him with the one shot. That goddamn third beer,” Weinstein said bitterly. “And then you started running toward me, and you covered him and I never could get off a second one. Then I suppose I passed out. Some bodyguard. Amateur night in Dixie.”

  “Anyway,” Damon said, “you saved my life. If that’s any comfort to you.”

  “Comfort.” Something that may have been a laugh issued from the pale lips. “I heard one of those guys who were singing behind me yell. Was he hit, too?”

  “He’s dead …”

  “Oh, Christ.” Weinstein groaned. “Did you at least learn anything? Who the bastard is? What he wants?”

  “Nothing,” Damon said. “He was suspicious, he thought those two men who were singing were backing me up, and then he saw you …”

  “It’s always the things there’s no way of figuring on …” Weinstein said, his voice croaking. “Two guys coming home from a party just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Luck.” He withdrew his hand from Damon’s. “I’m sorry, I can’t talk anymore. They got me full of stuff, I think they want me to drift for two weeks. Just take care of yourself. And don’t worry about me. I’ll be …” He closed his eyes and relapsed into drugged sleep.

  Damon was relieved to get out of the Intensive Care Unit, with its hushed air of tension, its watchful nurses monitoring the screens on which electrical impulses made erratic bright lines which described the lives and deaths of the grotesquely bandaged bodies plastically linked to sighing machines which he glimpsed through the open doors of the other rooms. Mortality, he thought as he passed the rescued debris of humanity in the unit, is the trade here.

  Sheila was waiting for him, with Oliver, now paler than ever. She had called Oliver from Vermont and he had gone to the airport to meet her. Her bag was on the floor at her feet and anxiety had bitten deep into her face. She put her arms around Damon when he came into the room and held on to him silently.

  There was nothing more they could do for Weinstein that night, and Damon was stumbling from fatigue; so with a last word to the doctor that if there were any crises during the night to call them at Oliver’s apartment where Oliver had persuaded Sheila they should stay, they followed Schulter through the maze of corridors to a small back door to avoid the reporters at the front entrance. Now that Schulter had the evidence of one murdered man and two badly wounded, his air of boredom with Damon’s problem had been replaced by an almost paternal solicitousness, and there was no talk of cranks making ten thousand obscene telephone calls a night in New York. He insisted upon getting into the taxi with them for the drive uptown to Oliver’s apartment and helped Damon get out as though Damon was an invalid. “Don’t worry,” he said as they parted at the front door of the building, “that individual won’t be in any condition to bother you anymore. If you need me for anything or there’s something you think I ought to know, you have my number. There’ll be some depositions to sign in the next few days, but that’s all. Nobody’s going to make a federal case out of it.” Then to Sheila, “Mrs. Damon,” he said, “take good care of your husband. He’s a pretty brave man and he’s had a rough day.” He tipped his ridiculous hat, got back into the taxi and drove off.

  Doris Gabrielsen was a small, plump, fair-haired woman with a lilting little inflection of speech that made all her sentences go up at the end. It was an affectation that at other times had annoyed Damon, but now her obvious concern about what had happened to him and the warmth of her welcome made Damon feel grateful. There were flowers arranged for them in the guest bedroom and all
newspapers were tactfully hidden from view. She had laid out a spread of cold cuts and cheese and potato salad on a buffet and gave Damon a Scotch, with not much soda, before they sat down to eat. She served drinks to the others and took one herself, and before drinking she raised her glass and said, “To better days. And to Mr. Weinstein’s health.”

  “Amen,” Oliver said.

  The whiskey burned as it went down Damon’s throat but in a minute or two the effect hit him, a pleasant feeling of remoteness, dreaminess, a feeling that was comforting and relaxing, a sense that he was no longer responsible for himself, that he was in other, safe hands and that he was freed from the necessity of making decisions for himself.

  He was not hungry, but he ate dutifully, like an obedient child, and drank the cold beer that Doris poured for him thirstily.

  After the meal, Damon said, “I hope you’ll excuse me. I’m completely bushed. I have to lie down for a while.”

  “Of course,” Doris said.

  Sheila followed him into the guest room and knelt to take off his shoes as he sat on the edge of the bed. She had hardly spoken since she had embraced him in the hospital, as though afraid that a few words would unleash a dark torrent of emotion that until now she had locked inside her.

  “Rest, dear,” she said after throwing a blanket over him. “And don’t think about anything. You’ve got loving friends. I’ll go downtown with Oliver and pack a bag with the things you’ll need.”

  He reached out and took her hand and brought it to his mouth and kissed it. Her whole body seemed to shudder, as though she was torn by one bone-shaking sob, but there were no tears. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “Sleep well,” she said, and put out the lamp and left the room.

  Damon closed his eyes and almost instantly fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

  When he awoke he did not know for a moment where he was, but he saw Sheila sitting beside the bed, staring down at him, lit by a thin stream of light that came in through the door, which was slightly ajar. There was no sound in the apartment. He felt sick. There was a burning sensation high up in the middle of his chest, and he knew he was about to throw up. He pushed himself up from the bed with difficulty. “Excuse me,” he said thickly, his tongue still heavy with sleep, “I’m going to be sick.”

  Sheila helped him out of bed and started with him toward the guest bathroom, whose door was open and which was softly lit. He waved Sheila back and stumbled into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He threw up his entire dinner, along with most of the sandwiches and coffee he had had throughout the day. He rinsed his mouth, brushed his teeth with the toothbrush and paste Sheila had arranged for him on the shelf above the basin, then washed his face with ice cold water. Feeling better, he went back into the bedroom.

  “I guess potato salad doesn’t agree with me,” he said to Sheila.

  She laughed dryly. “How about murders?” she said.

  Despite himself, he almost laughed, too. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Two-thirty A.M.”

  “Time to take off these clothes. For you, too.” As he took off his clothes, the smell of stale sweat, fear, the lingering medicinal odor of the hospital assailed his nostrils. He threw everything he had been wearing into a pile under the open window and got into bed naked. He noticed that the twin beds in the guest room had considerately been pulled together by Doris, who had visited the Damons often and had noticed that they slept together. Suddenly, unbelievably, he felt a great desire to make love, and when Sheila came out of the bathroom in a nightgown, he said, “Take that thing off. And come close.”

  They didn’t need the second bed until late the next morning when they both awoke.

  He did not leave the Gabrielsen apartment for a week. He felt he could not face a reporter, a stranger, answer a telephone call, read a contract, decide for himself what he wanted to eat in a restaurant. Sheila, who had to go back to work, also managed to visit Weinstein in the hospital every day and came back each evening with reassuring news of his recovery. Oliver took care of the office, but aside from telling Damon that everybody he had ever known kept calling the office daily to find out how he was and wishing him well, he said nothing about whatever business he was conducting. He also lied loyally when asked where Damon was staying and told one and all that he didn’t know. “It’s surprising,” he said, “how easy it is to drop out of sight in New York.” In Damon’s eyes he seemed to have aged visibly in the past few days, and Damon thought he could detect some gray in Oliver’s pale blond hair.

  Nobody brought a newspaper into the apartment and Damon was grateful for that. He hoped his mood would eventually change but for the time being he had no interest in discovering how the world was faring, what the President had said in his most recent speech, in which country a new revolution had broken out, what new crime the CIA had been accused of, whose play had opened on or off Broadway, how the interest rate was climbing, or who had died the morning before.

  Luckily, the baseball season had opened, and he watched the games by the hour, in a kind of bleacher trance, not rooting for any particular teams, satisfied to see such abundant evidence of quick, youthful skill and American vitality on the small screen. When the news came on, he turned the set off.

  The others pretended they, too, had no interest in what was going on in the world and never turned the television set on casually. He accepted their solicitude numbly, like a sick child. When he was not looking at the ball games, he would sit for hours holding a book open in front of him and never turning a page. Doris, who at the beginning had tried to be bright and cheerful and talkative, soon accepted the fact that all Damon wanted was to be left alone and crept silently and unobtrusively around her own house. During the day, when the others were out, she served his meals to him on a tray so that he could eat alone. Quickly she learned that it was useless to ask what he wanted for lunch or dinner and made up the menus herself, putting a single rose in a small vase and a half-bottle of wine on the tray for him, along with the food. For the first two or three days he sipped at the wine, but the burning sensation in his stomach that accompanied the wine made him leave the bottle alone.

  He said nothing about what he now considered a psychic ailment to Doris or Sheila, and although Oliver had stocked the small bar in the living room with Damon’s favorite whiskey, never touched the ranged bottles. Sheila made no comment on his sudden abstinence.

  If he dreamed at night or during the long naps he took each afternoon, he did not remember them when he awoke. He slept each night in the small bed with Sheila in his arms, like an animal seeking warmth in the body of its sibling in the depth of winter. After the first week, Sheila told him that it looked as though Weinstein would be able to leave the hospital, on crutches of course and in plaster, in about two months. She had become very fond of Weinstein, she said, in the long conversations she had with him daily, and couldn’t bear the thought of his going home to live alone, with no one to take care of him in the big empty house. She had told him that when he was ready to leave the hospital she would drive him, with Damon, to the house in Old Lyme, where he could convalesce, and Damon wouldn’t have to face the questions and sympathies of his friends and the demands of the office. At first, she told Damon, Weinstein had said he wouldn’t hear of it; he’d been taking care of himself for years and he didn’t want to be a burden on them just because he had flubbed the job of protecting Damon so badly. But Sheila had told him that the job was not yet over—Weinstein could bring along his gun, just in case Zalovsky had friends who might be anxious to avenge him, or even if Zalovsky himself might appear, despite Schulter’s confidence that alive or dead Zalovsky would be in no condition to do any more damage.

  Sheila did not ask Damon if he approved or disapproved of her plan, and Damon asked no questions and made no suggestions. Neither did he ask how Sheila’s mother was. He was encased in a cocoon of invalid’s selfishness, and although he knew eventually he would have to take up the reins of his life once
more, the time was not yet.

  Sensitively, Sheila did not try to rouse him from his hermetic lethargy or attempt to cheer him up. His nerves, he realized, and he supposed she did, too, were scraped ragged; and he could not escape his ghosts, in the silent days and dark nights, or his multiple dead and wounded. Although he tried to seem as serene and agreeable as possible, he alone knew the effort it cost him and how one wrong word would make him erupt in either tears or rage. He did not tell Sheila that he was haunted by a feeling that nothing had been concluded, by a foreboding of evil, a sense that everything that had happened up to then was an overture, a hint, enigmatic and sardonic, of catastrophe, doom, in the future.

  Nor did he tell Sheila that more and more frequently now he found himself vomiting after the meager meals he managed to get down. He was sure that Doris, who kept out of his way religiously, did not suspect that her boarder was suffering from more than the effects of the shock he had experienced.

  One thing at a time, Damon thought dully. When I get up the energy to leave this apartment, I’ll go secretly to a doctor, tell him that my blood and bones are collapsing, that I am finally in need of the certitudes of science.

  It happened sooner than he expected and there was no chance of silence.

  On the morning of the eighth day after the shooting, he woke early, in the grip of a crippling pain in his stomach. Laboriously, trying not to wake Sheila, he crawled out of bed and, bent double, his knuckles touching the floor to keep himself from falling, he started toward the bathroom. Involuntarily, a groan escaped him. He wavered into the bathroom, but did not have the strength or the will to close the door behind him. He did not look up when he felt Sheila’s hand on his forehead, supporting him and heard her say, “It’s all right, dear, I’m here.”

  Soon after, Oliver was in the bathroom. Damon was ashamed of his own nakedness and couldn’t look up to see if Sheila had a robe on or not. Oliver’s voice was far away as though echoing in a bare corridor, as he asked, “What’s the number of your doctor?”