by Irwin Shaw
“Ever since Max moved in here,” Bresach said, “the place has been ringing with childish laughter. Max is a Hungarian, and everybody knows that Hungarians are noted for their gaiety. We’re saving up to buy him a violin, so we’ll have it with music. He left all his violins in Budapest when the Russians brought up the tanks.”
“Bresach,” Jack said, “why’ve you stopped going to see Gildermeister the last three days?”
“Huh?” Bresach made a nervous, twitchy movement with his shoulders, and he stubbed the almost unsmoked cigarette out in an ashtray on the table. “What’re you talking about?”
“I called the doctor,” Jack said. “That’s how I got your address. He’s worried about you.”
“He is?” Bresach said flatly. “Well, I’m worried about him. There aren’t enough lunatics in Italy to keep a psychiatrist alive. I’ve promised him that when my godamn old man dies and leaves me his money I’ll pay his passage to the States. Fifty dollars an hour I promised him. On Park Avenue.”
“Why haven’t you been to see him for three days?” Jack repeated, watching the boy closely.
“What the hell is it to you?” Bresach said. “Look—I’m busy. I’m translating a six-hundred-page book from the Italian and my Italian stinks. I promised it in four weeks. Leave me alone.”
“Where’s Veronica?” Jack asked softly. “What’ve you done with her?”
“Me?” Bresach said. “What’re you talking about?”
“Where is she?” Jack stood up. He would have loved to take the grinning, sardonic boy by his skinny throat and strangle the truth out of him. At that moment he understood, for the first time, the passion of policemen who beat prisoners to obtain confessions.
“How do I know where she is?” Bresach said. “I haven’t seen her since the day she walked out of here.”
“Why did you stop seeing Gildermeister?”
“What the hell is it to you?” The nervous tic pulled at the corner of his mouth. “If you must know, I got tired of the old man. He was beginning to play God. I’ve had enough of that. I felt it was about time to give my poor old psyche a rest for a while.” He jumped up suddenly and flung the window open. “Ah, it stinks in here,” he said. “All this smoke.” He peered out over the rooftops. “Try to find anybody in this city,” he said bitterly. He turned on Jack. “If anything bad has happened to her,” he said, “you’re going to pay for it. I swear it. The next time you won’t get away.”
“Robert,” Max said softly.
“I was trying to forget the whole godamn thing,” Robert shouted at Jack. “I tried everything else, and now I was trying that. Now you come and start all over again. What do you want from me?”
Unless Bresach was the best actor in the world, Jack decided, he had had nothing to do with Veronica’s disappearance. It was reassuring; it almost eliminated the possibility of violence; but Veronica was missing just the same. Now Jack’s feeling of responsibility for the girl was mingled with irritation. If she weren’t dead, she could have sent some sort of message. Unless…Unless what? Ex-lovers were not the only danger that young women risked in Rome, or anywhere. There were the melodramatic dangers to consider, like kidnapping and murder, and the prosaic dangers, like being run over by an automobile or suddenly falling ill. If Veronica were lying at this moment, unconscious, in a hospital, there would be no reason for the authorities to notify Jack or Bresach. Whatever had happened to her, Jack knew that he couldn’t leave the city without finding her.
“I asked you a question,” Bresach shouted. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to help me find her,” Jack said.
Bresach stared at him somberly. Then he laughed. The laugh sounded more like a strangled cough than a laugh. “Christ,” he said, “that’s a twist, isn’t it? What makes you think I’d want to help you find her?”
“Because,” Jack said, “if we don’t find her, you’ll lose all hope of ever getting her back.”
The tic pulled erratically at Bresach’s mouth. His eyes were cold and crazy as he stared at Jack. At that moment, Jack realized how close Bresach had come to using the knife on him the first night, how little it would take to drive Bresach to use it now.
“Okay,” Bresach said hoarsely. “Okay, you miserable, reasonable bastard, I’ll help you.”
“Good,” Jack said calmly. “Now—you know her friends. Let’s start calling them.”
Bresach sat down wearily. His energy seemed to come in sudden nervous spurts, in an irregular rhythm. “I’ve called them all,” he said. “Ten times. They don’t know where she is. Or if they do, they won’t tell me.”
“Anyway, we can try,” Jack said. “How about her family? You told me they live in Florence and she visits them every weekend.”
“Her mother and sister live in Florence,” Bresach said. “With the sister’s husband. But it isn’t the weekend.”
“Do you have her mother’s telephone number?”
“Her mother doesn’t have a telephone,” Bresach said. “I never could call her.”
“Well, we’ll send a telegram,” Jack said. “And after that we’ll start making the telephone calls.”
They went to a small hotel nearby to send the telegram. Max came along with them. Jack was grateful for his presence now, as a buffer between Bresach and himself. Bresach had put on his duffel coat over his shirt and Max, who didn’t have an overcoat, had merely wound a red wool scarf around his throat and put on a fuzzy, faded green hat. The clerk behind the desk was busy with two Swiss tourists in black leather overcoats, and there was plenty of time to compose the telegram.
“If I sign it,” Bresach said, “and Veronica’s there or if they get in touch with her, they’ll never answer me. They don’t like me, anyway, even though they’ve never met me, because I’m a dirty heathen or because I have designs on Veronica or whatever, and they’ll be delighted at a chance to baffle me. If you sign it…” He stared thoughtfully at Jack. “Do you think Veronica would have said anything to her family about you?”
“I doubt it,” Jack said.
“No, girls don’t go home and tell their God-loving mothers that they’re sleeping with somebody else’s husband. So if you signed it, just like that, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Also, we don’t want to get the family alarmed and running to the police, do we?” He grinned maliciously at Jack. “And have them asking, ‘And just exactly what were your relations with the young lady, Mr. Andrus?’”
“We’ll go to the police if we have to,” Jack said. He thought for a moment. Then he took a telegraph blank from the desk and wrote, “A friend of your daughter, Jean-Baptiste Despière, has told me that she is interested in working for a travel bureau in Paris. The bureau with which I do business is looking for a young woman who can speak Italian, French and English. Could you wire me your daughter’s address and telephone number so that I can get into contact with her.” Then he signed his name and wrote the name of his hotel under it.
“I think this will do it,” he said, handing the sheet to Bresach. “Better translate it.”
Bresach read the message. “She speaks Spanish, too,” he said.
“Put that in, too.”
“Missing in four languages,” Bresach said. He shook his head. The flipness and bravado were gone now and he seemed helpless and sad. He translated the message and gave it to the man behind the desk and refused to let Jack pay for it. “I’m more interested than you in finding her,” he said stubbornly. “No matter what you say.”
Jack and the Hungarian were standing at a little neon-lit, chrome bar with a huge gilded espresso machine. The telephone was at the back of the bar, and they could see Robert putting in one token after another and patiently dialing, patiently explaining, resignedly hanging up and starting all over again in his round of calls to Veronica’s friends. Jack was drinking brandy and the Hungarian vermouth. Across from the bar there was an American pinball machine around which a group of young men were standing watching the
players. The pinball machine made a grinding, gearlike noise and bells clanged when the ball hit the posts.
“He is a warm-hearted gentleman,” Max said, indicating Robert. “It is not often that you find such sweetness of soul in a man so young. I have known him for over a year, since I first came here, and he has fed me and clothed me, and now he has taken me in. Even though we have to share the same bed. But he knew that I was living in the same room with four other people and I was sleeping on the floor. I must confess, he has made me revise my estimate completely of Americans.”
“Be careful,” Jack said, drinking his sweetish brandy. “Not all Americans are like that.” Then he added, “Thank God.”
“He is a boy who is born to sorrow,” Max said softly. “So he is gentle with the sorrow of others. It is too bad about the girl. He loves her so much. Too much. That is no doubt why she left him. Even if one loves that much, one must hide some of it. For self-preservation. He wanted to own every minute of her life. That, one does not do. One must drink the wine of love, but one must leave a little in the glass, too.”
Jack regarded the man with curiosity and respect. What Max had said seemed, at the moment, one of the sanest things he had heard on the subject of love in a long time. “Tell me,” he said, “how does it happen that you speak English so well?”
Max smiled. “I am fifty years old,” he said. “When I was a boy my family was rich. When you were rich in those days, you had an English nanny. And I went to school in England for two years, besides.”
“Were you in Hungary during the war?” Jack asked curiously. It was a question he found himself asking all Europeans whose countries had been on the German side between 1940 and 1945.
“Which war?” Max asked.
“World War Two,” said Jack. Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to him that a Hungarian might call the few bloody days of the Budapest uprising a war.
“No,” said Max. “I was not in Hungary for all of World War Two. I got out in 1943, when it was still possible to move around Europe a little. I got into Austria, and then, one night, I crossed the border into Switzerland secretly.”
“Was it as easy as that?” Jack asked incredulously.
“Not quite. I bribed a railroad guard and he locked us in a baggage wagon.”
“Us?” Jack said. “How many of you were there?”
“Seven,” Max said simply. “My wife and my sister and her husband and their three children. I gave the guard at Buchs a bottle of cognac and half a package of cigarettes. That was all we had.”
Seven lives, Jack thought, for a bottle of cognac and ten cigarettes. The price has gone up since then.
“The Swiss were admirable,” Max said, defending Europe. He smiled wryly. “It is true that my firm still had some assets in the country and we could pay our way. They permitted me to choose our place of internment. I chose a ski resort. I became quite a good skier by the time the war was finished.”
“Then you went back to Hungary?”
“Of course,” Max said. “It was very hopeful there—for a while. We had two large factories—woolen factories—and I got them back. For a time. Then, when the Communists took over, I stayed on as manager.”
“How was it, working for the Communists?” Jack asked.
Max laughed softly. “Not so bad. In the beginning. Then they began to crack down. They would give us impossible norms to produce. In the beginning, you could argue with them. Then, later on, if you didn’t meet the quota, you would be put in jail for sabotage. What most people did was say that the men under them were responsible for sabotage. Then those men would blame the men under them. And so on. Finally, it would get down to two or three men at the machines, who would be sent to jail. Then there would be peace for a month or two. Then the whole process would be repeated again.”
“Oh, Christ,” Jack said. He watched Bresach drop his tenth token into the telephone at the back of the bar. “How can people live like that?”
Max shrugged, swishing his vermouth thoughtfully around in his glass. “People live the way they can,” he said. “After all, half the world is living like that now.” He smiled apologetically. “I could not really do it,” he said. “I could not send people to prison to keep out of prison myself. Perhaps it was all those years with the English nanny. I knew I had to get out. So when the Revolution broke out, I crossed the border. It is not so bad. I have always adored Italy.”
Jack shook his head, thinking of the multiple exiles of the twentieth century, the borders crossed and recrossed under the guns, the modest, recurrent escapes. “Is your wife here in Rome with you, too?” he asked.
“No,” Max said. “She died five years ago. In Hungary. I am quite alone.”
“What do you think is going to happen in Hungary?” Jack asked.
“Nothing,” said Max. “That is, it is going to get worse. And, eventually, of course, when they feel they are strong enough, the Russians are going to drop the bomb. On everybody.”
“You don’t see any other way out?”
Max smiled gently. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, thinking, Maybe Steve ought to come over here and talk to this man before he writes any more letters. “It is important to be optimistic.”
“It is easier for Americans, perhaps. To be optimistic, I mean,” Max said. “Of course, you had your chance and you missed it. Right after the war, you should have dropped the bomb.”
“We couldn’t have done that.”
Max shrugged. “I suppose you must have had your reasons,” he said. “Still, it was the only thing that could have saved you.”
Bresach came back to the bar from the telephone booth. “Nobody has seen her,” he said. “Now what?”
“Have a drink,” Jack said. “You look as though you need it.”
This time they all had brandy. It was past eight o’clock. Jack looked at the other two, the stooped, scholarly-looking, gentle-voiced man with the red wool scarf, adrift in Europe, and the exhausted, tortured boy. He felt tied to them, responsible to them. Suddenly it seemed terribly important to him that they should not leave each other. And, besides, he knew he had to stave off the inevitable hour when he would be alone in the night. “I have an idea,” he said. “It’s time to eat. Let me take you to dinner.”
Max looked inquisitively at Bresach. “Why not?” Bresach said. “Why shouldn’t you feed us? It’s the least you can do. Take us to a good restaurant.”
They had another brandy and then went off to dinner.
17
BRESACH CHOSE THE RESTAURANT. He had never been there before but he had heard Veronica speak of it once. Veronica had said she hadn’t liked it and wouldn’t go there again. On the assumption that if Veronica were still in Rome she would avoid the places where she had been with either Bresach or Jack, Bresach fixed on this one restaurant which he had heard her condemn.
She was not there.
It was a nondescript little trattoria and the food was no better and no worse than might be found in a hundred other trattorie of the city, and Jack had to agree with Bresach that Veronica must have had some ulterior reason for having kept Bresach away from it.
They had had two carafes of red wine and Bresach’s face was flushed and he was talking all the time. Both he and Max, Jack noticed, devoured their food voraciously. Although it was warm in the restaurant, Bresach was still in his duffel coat, because he wasn’t wearing a jacket.
“When I got out of the army,” Bresach was saying, “I told my father to go to hell. I had a fifty-dollar-a-month pension and I met a man who was trying to make a documentary movie in New York and…”
“Why did they give you a pension?” Jack asked, puzzled. “What war were you in?”
“No war,” Bresach said. “I’m not the stuff that heroes’re made of. I got blown up in rehearsal. That’s more my style. A mortar exploded in training and my knee nearly was torn off. They did a good job on it, though. I only limp when it rains. My father was furious. He wrote ever
ybody. He felt the country wasn’t showing him the proper respect, letting his son get blown up like that. He was even nice to me for two weeks. He gave me seventy-five dollars to take a vacation on Cape Cod. But I used most of it to pay a month’s rent on a room on West Fourth Street, and then I broke the news to him that I wasn’t going into his godamn business.”
“What business is he in?” Jack asked.
“He makes paper cartons. He’s the paper-carton king,” Bresach said. “He regards paper cartons with a religious light in his eye. As far as he’s concerned, the ability to make paper cartons is what distinguishes man from the beasts. When I told him I wouldn’t go to work for him, it was like a bishop’s son telling his father that he didn’t believe in the existence of God. We had an all-night scene. He said I wanted to fiddle with the movies because I was too lazy to work and only wanted to hang around with cheap women and pansies. He told me he wouldn’t ever give me a cent again and he’d cut me off in his will. My father’s idea of a father goes back to the tribes of Israel. He and Mr. Barrett would’ve been the greatest buddies of all time. My mother sat around wringing her hands and weeping. Evenings in our house came right out of Stella Dallas. In the middle of his biggest speeches, I couldn’t help busting out laughing. Every time I did that, he’d turn on my mother and yell, ‘See what you’ve done?’ Then my mother’d bawl all over again. I think my poor mother must hold the all-time record for female tears shed in America. What about your father?” he demanded. “What did he say when you told him you wanted to be an actor.”
“He said, ‘Be a good actor,’” Jack said.
“I told you, the last time I saw you,” Bresach said bitterly, “you’re a born lucky man. You even have a father like that.”
“Had,” Jack said. “He’s dead now.”
“Even more luck.” Bresach poured himself some wine. The tablecloth in front of him was red with the wine he had spilled earlier in the evening.
“How did you happen to come to Italy?” Jack asked. He didn’t want to talk about his father.