Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  “There’s no sense in talking to you,” Bresach said, thickly. He took off his glasses and wiped his wet eyes with the sleeve of his coat. The stiff cloth made a grating noise against his forehead. “I don’t know why I bothered this long. Why do I waste my time? I should’ve jabbed you the minute I came through the door. Well, it’s never too late.” He smiled convulsively. “Never too late for a good deed.”

  Here it comes, Jack thought. His hand on the grip of the valise was slippery with sweat. He waited tensely, waiting for the boy to start his move.

  Then the telephone rang.

  They both stood there, motionless, the sound freezing them.

  The phone rang again. The boy looked uncertainly at it. He’s had no practice at murder, Jack thought, inconsequentially. Like me. We’re two novices. This is no job for amateurs.

  “Answer it,” Bresach said finally, his voice trembling. “It’s probably her. Tell her to come up. ANSWER IT!”

  Jack moved over toward the bed table, past Bresach. He picked up the phone, holding it close to his ear, so that Bresach wouldn’t be able to hear the voice on the other end. “Hello,” Jack said. He was surprised at the calmness of his voice.

  “Delaney,” Maurice’s voice said. “Where the hell have you been all night? I thought you were coming to the party.”

  “I couldn’t make it,” Jack said, conscious of the boy’s eyes ranging him suspiciously. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is it her?” Bresach whispered.

  Jack hesitated. Then he nodded.

  “Tell her to come up. Right away,” Bresach whispered.

  “Listen,” Delaney was saying, “there’re some people I want you to meet. We’re down in the lobby. You got anything to drink up there?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “Come on up…” He looked across at Bresach. “Darling.”

  “What? What did you say?” Delaney asked irritably and Jack was afraid that the loud voice could be heard in the room, even though he was pressing the instrument tight against his ear.

  “I said come on up. You remember the number of the room,” Jack said clearly. “Six fifty-four.” He hung up and turned to face Bresach.

  “Now,” he said calmly, sounding much more confident than he felt, “now, maybe we can settle this like sensible human beings.” He brushed past Bresach, standing irresolutely next to the bed, the knife dangling loosely in his hand, and walked collectedly into the salon. Bresach jumped after him and ran toward the door leading to the corridor, blocking it. “No tricks,” he said.

  “Oh, shut up,” Jack said wearily. He sat down in the easy chair next to which his shoes were lying. He put on his shoes slowly, having difficulty because they fitted snugly and he didn’t have a shoehorn. The back of the right shoe kept bending over and it took him almost a minute, scraping his finger, to get the shoe on. He tied the bows neatly, tight, and stretched low in the chair, regarding the shoes, which were heavy, with double soles, and which might prove useful later on. A well placed kick with those thick shoes would take the fight out of any man.

  “Take a drink,” Jack said, carelessly waving to the table near the window, where there was a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of bourbon. “It might help your nerves.”

  “Don’t worry about my nerves,” Bresach said, sounding like a belligerent and uncertain schoolboy. “There’s nothing wrong with my nerves.”

  “You’re crazy,” Jack said. “You know—if you go around behaving like this, they’re going to come for you and take you away and lock you up as a certifiable lunatic. Even in Italy,” Jack said, beginning, surprisingly, to enjoy himself, “even in Italy, there’re limits.”

  The boy sighed. He looked tired and drained and the stiff coat seemed too big for him, as though it had been designed for a larger man. “Ah, Christ,” he said in a low voice, “ah, Christ.” He looked down at the knife in his hand, uncertainly. Then he closed it slowly and put it in his pocket. “Give her back to me,” he whispered. “Please give her back to me.”

  There was a knock on the door and before either of them could make a move toward it, the door was pushed open and there was a confused rumble of voices and Delaney came into the room with two women in fur coats and three other men. One of the other men was wearing a pale gray sombrero with a narrow tan band.

  “Put on your coat,” Delaney was saying. “In the elevator the girls decided they wanted to go dancing.” He stopped and stared at Bresach. Bresach stood facing the group, his hands away from his body, the fingers spread, as if bracing himself against the possibility that they were going to tackle him en masse. His mouth was twitching again and he looked disappointed and pitiful, and he kept peering near-sightedly over the women’s shoulders into the hall, as if somehow there must have been some mistake, and one more visitor, the one he expected, was even then making her appearance in the doorway. Delaney was still looking curiously at Bresach, as Jack stood up and smiled at the group. “Say, Jack,” Delaney said, still looking at Bresach, “did you call me darling over the phone?”

  “Yes, I guess I did,” Jack said. “At the moment I was feeling very affectionate toward you.”

  Bresach twisted his head bitterly in Jack’s direction. “You bastard,” he muttered. Then he plunged toward the door through the mink. Jack could hear the sound of his steps fading away as he ran down the hall.

  “Say, who the hell is that?” Delaney asked.

  “An old friend,” Jack said. “I’ll be right with you. I just want to freshen up a bit. There’re the bottles.” He waved toward the table near the window and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him, leaving his visitors under the living-room chandelier.

  He went into the bathroom and looked at his face in the mirror. His forehead was covered with beads of sweat and his cheeks were drawn with fatigue, as though he had just run a mile uphill. His hands trembled as he turned the faucets of the basin, and he doused his face and hair with icy water, again and again, coughing into his wet hands in nervous spasms. He dried himself roughly, rubbing color back into his cheeks, then combed his hair carefully, adjusted his tie, his face framed in the mirror by the two wings of the routed V. In the bedroom he put on his jacket, hearing the sound of women’s laughter in the next room. Before going into the salon, he pulled the covers up over the bed, noticing that Bresach had ripped the sheet with his knife. That’s something for the old lady to figure out tomorrow morning, Jack thought, when she comes in to make up the room. Look for hidden American daggers.

  Catullus lay open, face down, on the bureau. Look where the youths are coming…

  He went into the living room to be presented to his guests.

  9

  THE NIGHT CLUB WAS dark and decorated like a Renaissance palace, with tapestries on the walls and candles in gilt sconces throwing a soft glow over the crowded tables. It occupied the top floor of a sixteenth-century building near the Tiber. On the ground floor there was a small bar with a Negro pianist. On the second floor there was a restaurant, with a string trio, and on the top floor, there was another bar through which you had to pass to get to the night club proper. At this bar Jack recognized some of the glossy-haired young men he had seen two nights running at the bar of his hotel, still, so late at night, unwearied, youthful, avid, corrupt, a continuing thread of color through the Roman night.

  Jack sat at the table in the corner, in shadow, listening to the music of the band, well into his third whisky and grateful for it, feeling pleasantly remote from the people around him. One of the women in mink was Barzelli, the star of the picture Delaney was shooting. She was sitting next to Delaney at the other end of the table, drinking champagne and gently and methodically stroking his thigh under the table, a look of blank boredom on her noble and beautiful dark face, as though after working hours she could not take the trouble to speak or to understand English. Next to her sat the other woman in mink, a thin blonde of about forty-five, with dyed hair and a girlish, lacy dress, also drinking champagne. Her name was Mrs. Holt and she was a l
ittle drunk. From time to time, looking at the dancers swaying in and out of the amber beams of the baby spotlights cleverly concealed around the room, Mrs. Holt would wipe away a tear with an enormous lace handkerchief.

  Across from her sat Tucino, the producer of the picture. He was a small Neapolitan-eyed man who would have been handsome enough to play the lead in his own pictures, if he had been four inches taller. He spoke a quick, rough brand of English, and was leaning over the table, speaking violently to Delaney, oblivious of what was going on under the table.

  At Jack’s end of the table was another Italian, by the name of Tasseti, a squat, square man, with the face of a sad gangster, who was Tucino’s bodyguard or attendant or prime minister and who occasionally turned in his chair and scanned the room with a liquid, dangerous eye, on the lookout for assassins, creditors, or unwelcome applicants for roles among the shadowy guests of the night club. He spoke no English, but sat there patiently, not unamused, from time to time saying a few words to Jack in primitive Sicilianized French.

  The other man was the one who wore the sombrero. He was the husband of Mrs. Holt and he came from Oklahoma and every once in a while he said, in the friendliest tones possible, “Boy, you can’t beat Italy.” When he saw his wife wiping away her peculiar tears he would smile widely and lovingly at her and raise his hand to the level of his eyes and signal her gaily with his fingers. He was about fifty years old, wrinkled and weatherbeaten and spare, like a veteran foreman on a dust-bowl ranch. In between the times he said, “Boy, you can’t beat Italy,” he told Jack that he was investing in Delaney’s picture and was thinking of setting up a company to make three more pictures in Europe with Delaney and Tucino. It turned out that Mr. Holt owned an oil company and that he had interests in fields in Texas and on the shores of the Persian Gulf, as well as in Oklahoma. He spoke slowly, with an almost shy, farmboy politeness, and whenever the level of Jack’s or Tasseti’s glass lowered a bit, he insisted upon pouring them more whisky from the bottle the waiter had left for them on the table.

  Ordinarily, Jack would have fled from such a gathering, with its mixture of sex, investment, intrigue and drunkenness. But now, after what had happened to him that night, smiling mechanically once a minute at Mr. Holt, saying “Oui, vous avez raison” or, “Non, c’est exacte,” to Tasseti, enjoying the Etruscan beauty of Barzelli without the necessity of talking to her, vaguely moved by the sight of the beautiful women in floating gowns who drifted darkly over the dance floor, the combination of the people, the place, the hour, was relaxing, reassuring. There was no weeping revengeful boy here, and no bed to be ripped with a knife. On his third whisky, in the melodious Renaissance night, Jack would have been content to sit there, a removed, untouched spectator, until daylight grayed the windows. If he was the prey of pity now, it was only for Delaney’s wife Clara, alone in a rented baroque bedroom, her claims on Delaney skillfully being caressed into oblivion by the famous, practiced peasant hand on her husband’s leg.

  It had been Jack’s intention, when he heard Delaney’s voice on the hotel phone, to enlist his aid in handling Bresach. Delaney was an expert at scandal, like all men who had ever been powerful in Hollywood, and would be useful as an adviser. But now, lulled by the music and the alcohol, Jack decided he would take care of it alone. Bresach was becoming shadowy, improbable, a grotesque, fleeting apparition, a night figure, who, weeping and foolishly armed, would disappear as suddenly as he had come. It was impossible for Jack to believe, in the low of whisky and Cuban music, that just one hour ago his life had been at stake. Morning would arrange all. Probably, he thought, tomorrow Veronica would repent her impulsiveness and take her bags back to the apartment she had shared with the boy, beg forgiveness, and so it would end. For the moment, Jack contemplated it without emotion. I’m not twenty-five years old, he thought, I do not die for jealousy. Mine or anyone else’s.

  “I didn’t do this without advice, you understand,” Holt was saying to him. “I’m not like some people. I don’t pay a high-priced New York lawyer a hundred thousand a year and then say, Go hump yourself. I pay a man and I listen to him. And he showed me, black on white, I could put up a half a million a year for five years, even if I lost it all, and still come out ahead. There’s one thing about the government—they pay some poor little feller ten thousand a year to figure out a way of taxing our money away from us, without figuring that we’re paying one hundred thousand to some feller to save it for us. Now, it stands to reason—who’s gonna do better?—a hundred-thousand-a-year brain or a ten-thousand-a-year brain?”

  “Of course,” said Jack, thinking, I am paying too high for this whisky.

  “You want to live in Europe with your missis, this shyster says,” Holt went on, in his flat, agreeable Oklahoma drawl, “the thing to do is find a way to live in Europe where it don’t cost you a cent. It stands to reason, don’t it?”

  “Of course,” Jack said.

  “Naturally,” Holt said, “me and Mother don’t want to live all year round here. Six, seven months, in the good weather, you understand. Well, sir, the most important thing in this day and age is to live deductible. Legitimate and deductible. Food, drink, travel, servants, entertainment—all on good old Uncle Sam. Now, you tell me, sir, what’s more legitimate than making movies in Rome with an honest to God Italian movie producer like Mr. Tucino, there? A brilliant man, Mr. Tucino.” Holt smiled, in a blaze of flawless false teeth, at the back of Mr. Tucino’s head, pleased with Tucino for permitting him to have such a high opinion of him. “Do you know that in 1945 he was peddling American Army surplus from a donkey cart on the streets of Naples?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Jack said.

  “Shoes, blankets, canteen cups, C-rations, a junkman, to be honest about it. But a junkman with vision. I like men with vision,” Holt said, in the solemn tones of a board chairman at an annual meeting. “I like men with enterprise, who’ve made theirselves with their own two hands. I can look them in the eye and they can look me in the eye. Of whatever race, Mr. Andrus, of whatever race. He’s an Eyetalian, Mr. Tucino, but look what he’s done with himself. Not like these degenerate counts you meet in these parts.” Holt surveyed the dance floor coldly, the puritanical American set of his mouth showing that he suspected a high ratio of degenerate counts among the men on the dance floor.

  “That’s the nice thing about the movie business, sir,” Mr. Holt went on gaily. “The type of interesting people you meet.”

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Jack said. “The type is interesting.”

  “Mr. Delaney, for example. Where would you meet a man as interesting as Mr. Delaney?” Holt gave the award of his smile to Delaney, as he had to Tucino. Delaney sat talking to Tucino, unaware of the flood of approval surging in his direction from the other end of the table, his thigh under the ringed, soft hand of his leading lady. Jack looked at Delaney, too, but with less approval. Ten years ago, Delaney wouldn’t have sat there, fatuously pleased with that secret, calculated caress. Ten years ago, he would have grabbed the hand angrily and plumped it up on top of the table for everyone to see and he would have told the woman to stop making a fool of herself in public.

  “And that beautiful young girl,” Holt said, indicating Barzelli with a reverential nod of his head. “You see movie stars on the screen and you never think they could be simple, kind-hearted people like her. And grateful.” Holt rapped the table sharply with his knuckles for emphasis. Like most men who had many favors to dispense, he ranked gratitude high on the list of virtues. “Why, it’s almost pathetic, how grateful that girl is to Mr. Delaney. She has told me in confidence that he is the only director who ever understood her. Why, she’s told me she’d appear in his next three pictures for nothing, just for the opportunity of working with him.”

  I bet, Jack thought, regarding the bored, languid face of Barzelli. For nothing. Wait till her agent comes in with the contract.

  “Mother is just crazy about her,” Holt said.

  “What’s that?
” Jack asked, feeling he had missed a link somewhere. “Sorry.”

  “Mother,” Holt said. “Mrs. Holt.”

  “Oh,” Jack said, hoping to get off the movies onto another subject, “you have children?”

  “No,” Holt said. He sighed. Mrs. Holt was dabbing at her eyes again at the same time that she was draining her sixth glass of champagne, and Holt pursed his mouth cooingly, and wiggled his fingers at her, like a nurse amusing a child in a carriage. “No,” he said, “we do not have children. This is wonderful for her. I mean living here in Rome. She’s in all the museums every day. There isn’t a church she hasn’t visited. She’s a Catholic, but she’s very artistic besides that. She was a piano teacher in Tulsa when I married her. Why, back home, we have two grand pianos. We live in a palazzo here—that’s a palace in Eyetalian—but the piano doesn’t work. The Germans occupied it during the war.”

  Maybe, Jack thought, I ought to get up from here and go back to the hotel and get hold of Bresach again. The conversation was more amusing, knife or no knife.

  “Mother is most anxious for me to set up a company with Mr. Tucino and Mr. Delaney. A three-picture deal,” Holt said, savoring the technical language of this magic world. “Aside from living abroad in a palazzo deductible. She has a brother—well you know how brothers sometimes are—” He smiled apologetically. “Younger, you know, not a bad boy, but he’s never found just the right spot for his talents. I had him in with me for a couple of years, but finally my partners laid down the law. What we’ll do with him here is make him associate producer, that’s a feller who—”

  “I know,” Jack said.

  “He costs me twenty, twenty-five thousand a year now, hard money, after taxes,” Holt said. “But if he’s associate producer he can pull down fifty thousand a year and it won’t cost me hardly a penny. It’ll make Mother very happy,” Holt said gently.