Two Weeks in Another Town

by Irwin Shaw

  “What’s that?” Veronica asked, surprised.

  “Yesterday evening,” Jack said soberly, “when you left me, when I was sleeping in the hotel, you went back to the place you were living and you packed your bags and you moved. Where are you now?”

  Veronica looked at him, startled. “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  Then he told her about Bresach’s visit, leaving out nothing, describing the knife, the tears, the raving in the bedroom. As he talked, Veronica’s face became harder, pitiless, full of scorn.

  “Il cafone,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  She shrugged. “Many bad things all mixed up,” she said. “Stupid, cowardly…”

  “How did he know about me?” Jack asked.

  “I told him,” Veronica said. “Why? Do you object?”

  “Well,” Jack said, mildly, “at this moment I don’t object. But there were a couple of seconds last night, when he was waving that knife around…”

  “Well, if you must know…” There was a hint of a pout in the way she pursed her mouth. “That was the only way he would let me out of the house. Otherwise, he would have made a big scene, he would have followed me. He promised me if I told him whom I’d been with, the name of the man, just the name of the man, he would let me go. And he promised he would not bother whoever it was.”

  “Maybe he thought putting a knife into a man’s ribs in the middle of the night doesn’t come under the heading of bothering him,” Jack said.

  “Don’t joke,” Veronica said. “He is capable of doing it.” She laughed harshly. “And I thought, I am getting a nice American boy, I am getting away from all that crazy Italian jealousy.”

  “Who is he?” Jack asked. “What’s he doing in Rome? What’s his connection with you?”

  Veronica opened her mouth, then closed it, cutting off speech. She looked down at her hands. The pretty, insensitive face took on a look of slyness, cunning, as she turned over the questions in her mind and decided whether or not to tell the truth. “Why do you have to know all that?” she asked, postponing.

  “If a man tried to kill you,” Jack said, “wouldn’t you like to know as much as possible about him?”

  “He has been here in Rome nearly two years,” Veronica said. “He has some sort of small pension from the American Army. He tells me his family is very rich, but they don’t seem to send him very much money. He says he came here to learn about the movies. He’s crazy about the Italian movies. He wants to be a director or a producer or something. It’s account of him I went to see that movie you were in.” She smiled mischievously. “He said I had to see your performance. Well, I saw your performance, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, God,” Jack said.

  “He does translations from the Italian into English,” Veronica went on. “He makes some extra money that way.”

  “Does he have any talent?” Jack asked curiously.

  “He thinks so,” she said. “According to him he has more talent than anyone else in Rome.”

  “Does anybody else think he has any talent?”

  “Oh, he goes around with a whole group of starving young actors and writers and people like that, that have never been heard of, and they keep telling him he’s a genius.” She laughed scornfully. “They hate everybody else. The only people they like are other people like themselves that nobody has ever heard of, either. He’s written a script that he can’t get anybody to buy, but when his friends talk about it, they make it sound as though he’s just written The Divine Comedy.”

  “What do you think?”

  “If that’s what geniuses are like,” she said, “let them find other women. Not me.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “About a year,” Veronica said.

  “How long have you been living with him?”

  She hesitated, balancing once more, Jack could see, between truth and falsehood. “Only three months,” she said. “He kept after me and after me. He is very handsome,” she said, excusing herself.

  “Yes, he is,” said Jack.

  “I told him I did not love him,” Veronica said, her voice whining a little, unpleasantly, her eyes shifting uneasily and falsely, as though she weren’t talking to Jack now, but to her deserted lover, explaining herself, blaming him. “I told him I insisted on being free, going out with other men when I wanted to. He said, of course, but once he had me—” She shrugged. “Just like an Italian,” she said bitterly. “If I as much as said hello to a man on the street. Tragedia. No wonder he likes Rome, that one. He is an Italian at heart. And now this with the knife…” She made a scornful little hissing sound. “I would like to tell him a thing or two. What does he want me to do—sleep with him if I am in love with another man? And I thought Americans had pride.”

  “Did you tell him you were in love with me?” Jack asked, disbelievingly.

  “Of course I did.” Veronica’s soft, long, plump hands played erratically with the catch of her bag.

  “What did he say to that?” Jack asked.

  “The usual.” Again she made the scornful hissing sound. “He called me a whore. I’m telling you, they ought to make him an honorary Italian citizen.”

  “Did he threaten you, too?”

  “No. Not yet,” Veronica said carelessly. “That will come.”

  “What’re you going to do?” Jack demanded. He had an unpleasant vision of Veronica lying in a pool of blood, and the newspapers, and the testimony at the trial. At least, he thought, with all this, I should be able to tell her I love her. At least a little bit.

  “What am I going to do?” She shrugged. “Nothing. I won’t tell him where I live and he won’t find me.”

  “He’ll go to the place you work,” Jack said.

  “He’s already been there,” Veronica said. “This morning. They called me. I have a friend there and he called me. I will take a vacation. I will not work for the next two weeks.” She smiled softly at him. “I will devote myself to you. I need a vacation, anyway. It would be nice…” She covered his hand with hers and played softly with his fingers. “It would be nice if we could go away somewhere for two weeks.”

  “It would be nice,” Jack said, not really meaning it, not enjoying the prospect of two weeks alone with her. “Only I can’t take the two weeks. I have to stay here. He knows where I am. Even if I move, he’ll be able to find me in ten minutes.”

  “What I think,” Veronica said, “is you should go to the police. Tell them he has threatened you with a knife. They’ll lock him up for two weeks and we won’t be bothered with him.”

  Jack took his hand away deliberately. “What did you say your name was, lady?” he asked, “de’ Medici? Borgia?”

  “What?” Veronica said, puzzled. “What did you say?”

  “No,” Jack said, “for the time being, let’s forget the police.”

  “I was just trying to be practical,” Veronica said, sounding aggrieved.

  “Let me ask you another question,” Jack said. “What’re you going to do when the two weeks’re up and I leave?”

  “I will worry about that later,” she said simply.

  Jack sighed. God damn Despière, he thought irrationally. He had to say hello to everybody on the Via Veneto yesterday afternoon. “There’s one other thing we could do,” Jack said. He swallowed and spoke in a flat voice. “We could quit.”

  She looked like a punished child. “Do you want to do that?”

  Jack hesitated. Whatever he answered would not be the truth. “No,” he said.

  Veronica smiled, and licked the corner of her mouth with her tongue. Eventually, Jack thought, if I get to know her well enough, I’m going to make her stop that.

  “I didn’t think you did,” she said. “Ah, well”—briskly, she brushed some crumbs from the front of her skirt—“I will write him a letter and tell him to behave like a man. I will write him such a stiff letter. Maybe that will cool him off.”

  “Maybe,” Jack said doubtfully.
Suddenly, now that the decision, such as it was, had been made, he wanted her enormously. Sitting there, holding her hand, looking at the smooth olive throat rising from the open V of her sweater, the memory of the afternoon before swelled up in him overpoweringly. “Let’s go back to my hotel,” he said.

  Veronica shook her head. Oh, God, he thought, now she is going to coquette. That’s too much.

  “No,” she said, “he is liable to be there, watching. The pig.”

  “Well, let’s go to your place, then,” he said.

  Again she shook her head. “We can’t. I’m in a little family hotel. They won’t let you up. It’s full of German priests, they are very moral.”

  “What do we do, then?” Jack asked. “Wait until it’s dark and find a quiet bush in the Borghese Gardens?”

  “Tomorrow,” Veronica said, “I am moving in with a friend. She goes to work all day and the apartment’s empty.”

  “What do we do until tomorrow?” Jack asked.

  Veronica chuckled. “You can’t wait?”

  “No.”

  “Neither can I.” She looked at her watch. “I am busy another two hours. I will be at your room at five o’clock.”

  “I thought you said he’s liable to be there—at my hotel. Watching,” Jack said.

  “Not at five o’clock,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “At five o’clock every day,” Veronica said, gathering her things together and rising, “he goes to his analyst. Nothing ever stops him. Don’t worry. He will not be there.” She leaned over and kissed him. “Let me go out first,” she said. “You wait five minutes. Just in case.”

  He watched her walk toward the door, her long dark hair swung back over one shoulder, her hips swaying a trifle more than usual because Jack was watching her, because two waiters were watching her, her narrow feet in their high-heeled pointed Roman shoes making a rhythmic provocative tapping on the mosaic floor.

  My dear God, Jack thought, as the door closed behind her and he settled back to wait the cautionary five minutes, what have I got myself in for? And is it worth it?

  When he left the restaurant, Jack told Guido to drop him at the Embassy, and then take off until eight o’clock that evening. Curiously, he asked Guido what he would do with his free time. “I will go home,” Guido said soberly, “and play with my three children.”

  “I have three children, too,” Jack said.

  “It is the meaning of life,” said Guido, and drove off sedately.

  The marine guard at the door was young and tall and reminded Jack of high-school graduation classes. He wore decorations from the Pacific and from Korea and the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. He had rosy cheeks and smiled warmly and innocently at Jack and looked too young to have been in either war and too healthy ever to have been wounded. There was something about his size and pinkness that made Jack remember Bresach. What betrayals do you suffer off duty, Jack thought, as he passed into the building, what doors do you guard on your own time, when do you visit your analyst?

  Jack gave his name to the girl behind the reception desk and told her whom he wished to see and two minutes later he was in the press office, in a rattle of typewriters, seated across the desk from Hanson Moss, a young man who had been in Paris for several years before being transferred to Rome.

  Italian food was putting weight on Moss and he looked comfortable, rumpled, and unambitious behind the desk piled high with Italian newspapers. After five minutes of civilities in which they exchanged information about their families, and Jack explained that he was in Rome on a short vacation, and Moss complained that the Italian newspapers attacked American policy every day just the way the French newspapers did, only in worse prose, Jack told him why he had come to visit him. “There’s a man I know,” Jack said, “name of Holt. From Oklahoma. He owns an oil company. Maybe a couple of oil companies.”

  “The Foreign Service,” Moss said gravely, “will split its last gut for an oil company. Every Italian knows that. What’s his problem? Did they catch him changing a five-dollar bill on the black market?”

  “He wants to adopt a baby,” Jack said.

  “What does he want it for?” Moss asked. “A souvenir of his trip to Italy?”

  Jack explained, as briefly as he could, some of Holt’s problems. He didn’t think it necessary to tell Moss about the six years in Joliet. “There must be somebody here who’s equipped to handle things like this,” Jack said. “I thought you might tell me.”

  Moss scratched his head. “I guess Kern, over in the Consulate, is the man you want. Do you know him?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jack said.

  Moss picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Mr. Kern,” he said, “this is Moss in the press attaché’s office. I have a friend of mine here with a problem. Mr. Andrus. NATO in Paris. He’s here on a short visit. Could you see him right away? Thanks.” He hung up. “I’ve greased the wheels,” he said. “Tell your friend if he has a little old oil well he doesn’t have any use for, I’ll be only too happy to look after it for him.”

  “I will,” Jack said. He stood up.

  “Say, wait a minute…” Moss was ruffling through the papers on his desk and came up with an embossed card. “Samuel Holt,” he said. “Is that the feller?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m invited to a cocktail party at his house tonight.” He peered at the card. “Palazzo Pavini. Chic, eh? You going?”

  “Yes,” Jack said.

  “Good,” Moss said. “I’ll see you later. Be circumspect with Kern. He’s a sod.”

  Kern was a large, mournful man with sparse hair, a big nose, and the complexion of a man who was having trouble with his stomach. His suit was black and diplomatic, his collar starched, his desk rigorously neat, with an In basket and an Out basket in which the papers were geometrically arranged. He had sad, suspicious, yellow-rimmed eyes, and he sat behind his desk with the air of a man who terrorized his secretaries and who gave visas for entrance to the United States only with the greatest reluctance. In Jack’s years of dealings with governmental agencies, he had seen faces like Kern’s many times, and the owners of the faces had always been people who regarded all foreigners as real or potential enemies of America. He knew the facts behind alliances, Kern’s face announced, and they were not savory. He heard the real tones under the honeyed voices of applicants, he saw the duplicity and self-interest in their hearts.

  “What is your interest in this affair, Mr. Andrus?” Kern asked, when Jack had finished explaining about who the Holts were and why they wanted to adopt a child. The question, and the tone in which it was put, made the clear insinuation that whatever interest Jack had in it was probably corrupt.

  “No interest, really,” Jack said. “It’s just that Mr. Holt is a friend of mine…”

  “Ah,” Kern said. “A friend. You’ve known him a long time?”

  “No,” Jack said. He couldn’t say that he had met Holt for the first time that midnight. “I just thought that perhaps a personal word might help—maybe speed things up a bit—”

  “A personal word.” Kern made the phrase sound like the offer of a bribe. “I see. Actually, while we don’t have any set policy, we are not too happy about transactions like this. Children, religious differences…” Kern spread his hands carefully and ominously on his shining desk. “There’re always liable to be unpleasant repercussions. Still, if he’s a friend of yours, and you’re a friend of Hanson Moss…Between you and me, of course—there are several people on the Italian side I might approach.”

  “That’d be very kind of you,” Jack said, anxious to leave.

  Kern looked consideringly across the desk at Jack. “You would be willing to vouch for the character of your—of the applicants, of course?”

  Jack hesitated. “Naturally,” he said.

  “That might weigh in the balance,” Kern said sonorously. He opened a drawer and took out a dossier and put it squarely in front of him. “Actually,” he said, “
the case has already reached my desk. The preliminary papers.” He opened the dossier and studied them for a full minute, in silence. “There are certain conditions the applicants must fulfill. First—the medical requirements.”

  “I’m sure they’re perfectly healthy,” Jack said hastily.

  “The Italian government,” Kern said, his eyes lowered, reading from the sheets in front of him, “demands that the husband of the couple making the request for the child must be over fifty years of age and present a certificate from an Italian physician, duly witnessed, that the husband is incapable of having a child of his own. In other words—one-hundred-percent sterile.” Kern smiled yellowly across at Jack. “Do you believe your friend is capable of obtaining such a certificate?”

  Jack stood up. “If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Kern,” he said, “I think I’d like to ask Mr. Holt to come in and talk to you himself.” He was prepared to do a great deal for Maurice Delaney, but he felt his obligations stopped short of guaranteeing the absolute sterility of millionaires.

  “Very well,” Kern stood up, too. “You will be hearing from me.”

  As Jack walked back toward his hotel, he had an absurd feeling of relief at having finished with Kern and having left the man’s office behind him. Government offices, he thought, with distaste, remembering his own. They are the real breeding ground for rebellion and anarchy.

  11

  HE WAS OPENING THE door to his suite, when he heard a noise in the deserted corridor. A door leading to a servant’s pantry twenty feet behind him swung open, and as Jack turned, he saw Bresach hurrying out of the pantry, advancing swiftly on him from his ambush among the sinks and coffee pots, his duffel coat open and billowing around him.

  “Oh, God,” Jack said, angrily, moving toward Bresach, holding the heavy key on its plastic plaque in his fist, like a weapon. “Don’t start anything.”

  Bresach halted. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, blinking his eyes nervously behind his glasses. “I’m unarmed. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. Honest. I haven’t got the knife.” His voice was pleading. “I swear to God I haven’t got the knife. You can search me. I just want to talk to you. Honest.” He put his hands up over his head. “Search me. You’ll see.”