Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  But now he found himself regarding his body with approval. Remembering how well it had served him that afternoon, he looked at his naked reflection with new eyes. Not so bad, he thought, with an inner smile for his vanity, the monopoly of youth is not complete—after all, a body is made to wear for a long time and not all the changes of maturity are for the worse. Take off ten pounds, he thought, staring critically at his waist, and it wouldn’t be too bad at all. Anyway, there’s no paunch yet, and the important lines are still flat.

  He got into the deep old-fashioned bathtub and lay there for a long time, luxuriously adding hot water every two or three minutes, feeling the cleansing sweat run down his forehead. Lying there, he saw the big lipstick V on the mirror above the basin, now misted over with steam, and he wondered how he could prevail upon the maid to leave it there, for the whole two weeks of his stay.

  Later, getting dressed, he decided that he felt too good to go to a cocktail party. He went downstairs and told the doorman to tell his driver he wouldn’t need him that night. Then he went into the bar and ordered a martini, pleased at being alone and at the prospect of solitude for the evening. The same group of young Italians who had been in the bar the night before were there again, but this time Jack suffered them benignly, without jealousy.

  He finished his drink and left the hotel and strolled slowly down the tree-lined avenue, looking in at the windows, his coat thrown open, despite the dark nip in the air. Half by accident, he found himself walking toward the theatre where The Stolen Midnight was playing. When he reached the theatre he stood in front of it and looked at the stills of himself curiously, but without emotion, without regret. He looked at the pictures of Carlotta and wondered where she was now and what she was like after all the years and how he would feel if she were to come into a room in which he happened to be. For a moment, he was tempted to go in and see the picture again, to study his ancient self in the covering darkness and try to find out just what it was about him twenty years before that had captured Veronica. But he decided against it, feeling he had indulged himself in enough narcissism for one day.

  He had dinner quietly, in a small, deserted restaurant. Remembering the ten pounds, he ate no bread or pasta. After dinner, he walked down toward the Forum, stopping, in for an espresso and a glass of sweet Italian brandy. The Forum, locked for the night behind its gates, was deserted and shadowy in the pale light of a quarter moon, and a freshening wind made him button the collar of his coat tight around his neck.

  Standing there bareheaded in the winter wind, he had a happy feeling of being disconnected, private to himself. At that moment, nobody in the whole world knew where he was. No matter what claims anybody might have on him, no matter how much anyone might want or need him, he was, for the time he stood there, unreachable, his own man. I am in the heart of Europe, at the roots of the continent, alone, he thought, secret among the ruins.

  He remembered a few lines of one of Cicero’s orations that had been spoken in this place, reverberating among these stones. O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit, consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? Immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consili particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum. High-school Latin and the scrawled-in pony on his desk at home when he was fifteen years old. What an age! What morals! The senate knows these things, the consul sees them. Yet this man lives. Lives, did I say? Nay, more, he walks into the senate, he takes part in the public counsel. He singles out and marks with his glance each one of us for murder. Then they strangled Cicero, far from the scene of his triumphs, after the applause had died down. Poor old man, how he must have regretted his gifted tongue when they came to get him.

  I am a Roman, he thought, playing a game he had indulged in when he was a child, when he would close his eyes in bed at night and say to himself, I am an Eskimo, my igloo is warm, the seals are barking across the ice, or, I am Nathan Hale, they are coming to hang me in the morning, or, I am Jubal Early, on a black horse, riding around the Union lines. I am a Roman, he thought, and Christ has just been born and just been crucified, although in my lifetime I will not hear of either event. I have had my dinner, and the wind from the Apennines is heavy with winter and I have drunk a little too much wine and heard a man from Athens play on the flute, accompanied by a boy on the lyre. The silence and the darkness in front of the Senate steps is doubly welcome now because of all this. Tomorrow, they say, Augustus will make an appearance, and there will be games, and the gladiator with the net and trident will be matched against an African lion. You can hear the roars of the beasts even now, locked in their stone pens beneath the Colosseum floor. The man with the net and trident, you imagine, is quiet for the moment, mending his net, making sure of the knots, sharpening his long fork, contemplating the next morning.

  Roman, you stroll alone in the cold midnight air, surrounded by the tall marble pillars, thinking of the violent, merciless men, the astute voluptuaries in togas who throng the place in daylight and you feel how permanent and indestructible it all is, how this stone seed grows and flourishes, days without end, on these low, central hills.

  He heard steps in the distance and he saw, outlined against the light of a lamppost, the figures of two policemen. The policemen stopped and looked at him and Jack could guess at the everlasting policemen’s suspicion in their eyes as they surveyed him, waiting for him to make one false move, scale a wall, bend for one marble fragment, pocket one crumbling shard of history.

  The policemen Americanized him, took away his ghostly Roman citizenship. Eyes were upon him; he was no longer unreachable; the world once more put its claims upon him; he was subject to search and seizure and could be forced to announce his identity. The noise of chariot wheels drummed away to a whisper in the distance, the lions fell silent and their pens were open to the moon in the stripped arena; the music heard far off came from a bar and it was a record playing “Trumpet Rag.” No pipes, no lyres under the policemen’s eyes, and the Vespas coughed in the streets under their control. Christ and Cicero were dead a round two thousand years and only the night wind coming from the mountains to the north was the same.

  Jack made his way along the wall, looking down at the uneven paving below (blood, sandals, bronze wheels). The policemen watched him, thinking, If necessary, we will get him another night.

  He’d walked enough and he found a cab and rode back toward the hotel. He went across the street from the hotel to the newspaper kiosk, lurid with plump movie beauties on the covers of magazines. He bought the Paris Tribune and looked at the stacks of bright, paper-covered books in English that were banked all along one side of the kiosk. One book caught his eye because of the sobriety of its cover among the shiny reclining ladies and the gentlemen with pistols who advertised the literature being offered for sale in English that year in Rome. He picked up the dark book and saw that it was the poems of Catullus, translated by an English poet. After the revery in the Forum, Jack felt Catullus was a fitting discovery, and he paid for the book and crossed the street and entered his hotel.

  When he got his key from the concierge, he felt a flicker of disappointment because there was no message for him in his box. Well, he thought, getting into the elevator, tonight I’ll make do with Catullus.

  He was sitting in the salon, with his jacket and shoes off and his collar unbuttoned, reading, Look, where the youths are coming, Lightly up they spring, and not for nothing, hark! it’s good to hear them sing. Hymen O Hymenaeus Hymen hither O Hymenaeus, when the phone rang. He let it ring twice, pleasantly anticipating the sound of the voice he would hear when he picked up the receiver. Then he reached over for the phone and said, “Hello.”

  “Mr. Andrus,” a man’s voice said.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know me,” the voice said. “My name is Robert Bresach. I wonder if I could see you for a moment, Mr. Andrus.” The voice was polite, educated American, and sounded young.

  Jack looked at his watch. It was after midnight. “Couldn’t
it wait until morning?” he said.

  “I’m a friend of Mr. Despière’s,” the man said. “It really is rather urgent.”

  Jack sighed. “All right,” he said. “Room six fifty-four.”

  He hung up the phone, annoyed. It was just like Despière to have friends who insisted upon seeing you in your hotel room at twelve o’clock at night.

  Jack put Catullus in the bedroom. He felt a little embarrassed about leaving it lying open on a table, the only book in the room, aside from a 1928 Baedeker he had found on a bookstall along the Seine and had brought with him on the chance he might have some time for sightseeing. If the man were observant and reported the presence of Catullus to Despière, Despière would be sure to think Jack had stage-managed it that way, to impress visitors.

  There was a knock on the salon door and Jack crossed the room and opened the door. A tall figure in a khaki duffel coat stood there.

  “Come in,” Jack said and stood to one side to allow the man to go through the small foyer into the salon. Jack closed the door and followed him. In the living room, the man turned around and faced Jack. He was young and had dark blond hair, cut short and he was very handsome, with the same kind of knifelike, intense, bony good looks as Jack’s son, Steven. He stood there, staring curiously at Jack, through rimless glasses, his face grave, his blue eyes intent and serious.

  “I’m going to kill you, Andrus,” he said.

  8

  HE SAID SOMETHING ELSE, Jack thought, standing there, smiling puzzledly at the blond boy in the duffel coat, but it sounded like, I’m going to kill you.

  “What did you say?” Jack asked.

  The boy had his hands in the deep pockets of the coat. Now he took his hands out of the pockets. In his right hand there was a clasp knife. There was a click and Jack saw the long ugly blade, heavy, dull steel, reflecting the light off the chandelier. The boy’s hand was shaking and the reflection on the steel kept changing and trembling. He didn’t say anything, but merely stood there in the middle of the room, tall and bulky in the big coat, his face rigid, his eyes fixed on Jack’s face, with an expression that was somehow appealing and touched with beggary.

  This is it, Jack thought, this is what it was all about—the blow, the blood, the dream, the premonition, the sense of being warned, the recapitulation of the dead. The knife was behind it all.

  “Put that godamn thing away,” Jack said roughly. The door behind him that led to the corridor was closed and no matter how quickly he could turn and run, the boy would have him before he could wrench the door half-open. And the door opened inward, into the room, to make it worse.

  The boy remained still, only the minute trembling of the knife in his hand showing what pressure he was under. His mouth was opened slightly, and he took in air with a small, regular sighing noise. He was making a conscious effort to breathe calmly. There was no other sound. The closed windows, the drawn drapes, the heavy doors and thick walls of the old hotel cut off all noises of any life outside the room. If he called for help, Jack thought, even if he could keep the boy from his throat for a minute or two, there was almost no chance that anyone would hear him.

  In two or three of the movies in which he had played, long ago, there had been scenes like this—Jack, unarmed, facing a man with a knife who was out to kill him. In the movies, Jack had always escaped, making a sudden lunge at the murderer’s wrist, cleverly throwing a lamp and disconcerting the attacker, knocking over a table with a kick and plunging the room into darkness. In seeing the scenes later, on film, the action had always seemed quite reasonable. But what was going to happen here, tonight, was not going to be on film later and the knife, with its quivering reflections, was steel and not prop rubber, and was not going to be pushed aside with the flick of a scenario writer’s wrist.

  “Where is she?” Bresach asked. “Is she in there?” He motioned toward the bedroom, with a stiff, spasmodic gesture of the knife.

  “Where is who?” Jack asked.

  “Don’t kid me,” Bresach said. “I didn’t come here to have anyone kid me.” His voice was deep, baritone, with a pleasant, clear timbre, not made for threats. “Veronica.”

  “No,” Jack said, “she’s not in there.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “Go in and see for yourself,” Jack said, carelessly. He knew that he couldn’t afford to show the boy that he was afraid.

  The boy looked uncertainly at the doorway to the bedroom. His mouth twisted and Jack saw a muscle working in his jaw. His face was thin and the bones were prominent and sharp, making triangular shadows in his cheeks.

  “All right,” Bresach said. He took a step nearer Jack. “You go in ahead of me.”

  Jack hesitated for a moment. Here, in the living room, with only space between him and Bresach, he was at the mercy of the knife. In the bedroom, with a little luck, he could get the bed between them, move innocently near a lamp, perhaps even pick up the heavy leather bag that was on a stand there, to use as a shield or weapon. He turned and walked quickly into the bedroom, with Bresach close behind him.

  Only the bed-table lamp was on and the room was in shadow, the shadow slashed by the white light from the bathroom that poured in past the half-opened door. As Jack went into the room, he saw one diagonal of the crimson V Veronica had scrawled on the mirror over the basin. Jack moved away from the bathroom door, toward the giant wardrobe that filled one side of the room. Bresach followed him closely.

  “Stop moving,” Bresach said.

  Jack stopped. He didn’t have the bed between him and Bresach, but the leather bag was only two feet away now, and if Bresach started toward him, there was a chance he could grab the bag in time. Bresach was standing next to the big double bed, now made up for the night, with the blankets and the sheet folded down in a neat triangle on one side. There were two pillows, side by side, neatly plumped out.

  “So, this is where it happened,” Bresach said. He touched the bed with his knee. He wavered a little and his head rolled slightly from side to side as he spoke, and for the first time Jack realized that he had been drinking. “Did you have an enjoyable afternoon, Mr. Andrus?” he asked, harshly, his mouth twisting down to one side again in what looked like a habitual, disfiguring tic. “She’s a great lay, isn’t she, our little Veronica?” With an abrupt movement, he tore back the covers of the bed with the knife. “Right here, in this bed,” he repeated. “In this bed.” His eyes filled with tears, and the tears, instead of reassuring Jack, made the boy seem more dangerous than before. “Not a bad sight for a man to see in his bed, is it?” Bresach demanded, “Veronica, with her legs apart.”

  “Stop that,” Jack said, but without hope that his words would have any effect on the weeping boy. “What good does it do to talk like that?”

  “A lot of good,” Bresach said. Now he waved the knife aimlessly, in a stiff oratorical gesture. “I want to get the picture, see? The exact picture. I’m interested in the girl and I like to know exactly what’s happening to her. When you put it in her, did she whisper, ‘Oh, God’? Did she? Am I being a cad when I tell you, she always does it with me?” He grinned crookedly, weeping. “It’s her strict Catholic upbringing. Sanctifying the union.” The grin, the tears, broke into a tortured laugh. “Did she? Did she say, ‘Oh, God’?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you,” Jack said, steadily, “until you put that damn knife away.”

  “I’ll put the knife away when I’m good and ready.” Bresach waved it again, crazily. “And I know where I’ll put it.” He leaned down and ran his left hand caressingly over the creased sheet of the bed. “Right here,” he whispered, “right here.” He raised his head, fixing the swamped blue eyes on Jack. “Did she put her tongue in your ear while you were doing it to her? Do you know the word for fuck in Italian? Where is she?” Now he was shouting. “She’s left me, where is she now?”

  He moved closer toward Jack, the handsome bony face wet with tears, and Jack took a half step backward and put his hand on the handle of t
he leather valise, prepared to grab it and swing it.

  “You must have been awful good in there this afternoon,” Bresach said. “You must be a godamn wonder, because she couldn’t wait to get her clothes on and come home and start packing her bags to leave me. She couldn’t wait…” he whispered. “What are you, you bastard, a bull, a stallion? You pick up a girl at lunch and you give her a casual roll because you have an hour to waste in the afternoon, and it changes her whole life. Love, she says, love, love, love. What’ve you got in there?” The knife suddenly dropped below belt level and Jack could feel his testicles pulling up in tight, electrical spasms. “It must be a wonder, the godamned eighth wonder of the world. Open your pants; I want to see it, I want to pay homage to the eighth wonder of the world.” Bresach was gasping for breath now and his lips were pulled away from his teeth in an animal-like snarl and his whole arm was shaking and he kept half opening his hand and then closing it convulsively, so that the knife jumped erratically.

  Jack tightened his hand on the grip of the valise. He kept his right arm crooked in front of him protectively and his eyes on the knife. If the boy moved, he was going to go into him, swinging the bag and trying for the wrist of the knife hand with his own right hand.

  “Listen,” Jack said soothingly, “you’re all upset now, you don’t know what you’re doing. Give yourself a little time to think about it, and then…”

  “Where is she? Where’re you hiding her?” Bresach looked around him wildly. With a violent movement, he threw open the door of the big wardrobe, as though a sudden conviction had hit him that the girl was secreted there. Jack’s suits swung on their hangers. “Come on, Andrus,” Bresach said, pleading. “Tell me where she is. I’ve got to know where she is.”

  “I don’t know where she is,” Jack said. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. Not while you’re waving that knife at me.”