by Irwin Shaw
Barber sat up abruptly. “Smith,” he said. “Come in.”
“I don’t want to disturb—”
“Come in, come in.” Barber got out of bed and, barefooted, went over to the window and threw back the curtains. He looked out at the street. “By God, what do you know?” he said, shivering and closing the window. “The sun is shining. Shut the door.”
Smith closed the door. He was wearing a loose gray tweed overcoat, very British, and a soft Italian felt hat, and he was carrying a large manila envelope. He looked newly bathed and shaved, and wide awake.
Barber, blinking in the sudden sunshine, put on a robe and a pair of moccasins and lit a cigarette. “Excuse me,” he said. “I want to wash.” He went behind the screen that separated the washbasin and the bidet from the rest of the room. As he washed, scrubbing his face and soaking his hair with cold water, he heard Smith go over to the window. Smith was humming, in a soft, true, melodious tenor voice, a passage from an opera that Barber knew he had heard but could not remember. Aside from everything else, Barber thought, combing his hair roughly, I bet the bastard knows fifty operas.
Feeling fresher and less at a disadvantage with his teeth washed and his hair combed, Barber stepped out from behind the screen.
“Paris,” Smith said, at the window, looking out. “What a satisfactory city. What a farce.” He turned around, smiling. “Ah,” he said, “how lucky you are. You can afford to put water on your head.” He touched his thin, well-brushed hair sadly. “Every time I wash my hair, it falls like the leaves. How old did you say you are?”
“Thirty,” Barber said, knowing that Smith remembered it.
“What an age.” Smith sighed. “The wonderful moment of balance. Old enough to know what you want, still young enough to be ready for anything.” He came back and sat down and propped the manila envelope on the floor next to the chair. “Anything.” He looked up at Barber, almost coquettishly. “You recall our conversation, I trust,” he said.
“I recall a man said something about twenty-five thousand dollars,” Barber said.
“Ah—you do remember,” Smith said gaily. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, do you want to make it?”
“I’m listening,” Barber said.
Smith rubbed his soft hands together gently in front of his face, his fingers rigid, making a slight, dry, sliding sound. “A little proposition has come up,” he said. “An interesting little proposition.”
“What do I have to do for my twenty-five thousand dollars?” Barber asked.
“What do you have to do for your twenty-five thousand dollars?” Smith repeated softly. “You have to do a little flying. You have flown for considerably less, from time to time, haven’t you?” He chuckled.
“I sure have,” Barber said. “What else do I have to do?”
“Nothing else,” Smith said, sounding surprised. “Just fly. Are you still interested?”
“Go on,” said Barber.
“A friend of mine has just bought a brand-new single-engine plane. A Beech-craft, single engine. A perfect, pleasant, comfortable, one-hundred-per-cent dependable aircraft,” Smith said, describing the perfect little plane with pleasure in its newness and its dependability. “He himself does not fly, of course. He needs a private pilot, who will be on tap at all times.”
“For how long?” Barber asked, watching Smith closely.
“For thirty days. Not more.” Smith smiled up at him. “The pay is not bad, is it?”
“I can’t tell yet,” Barber said. “Go on. Where does he want to fly to?”
“He happens to be an Egyptian,” Smith said, a little deprecatingly, as though being an Egyptian were a slight private misfortune, which one did not mention except among friends, and then in lowered tones. “He is a wealthy Egyptian who likes to travel. Especially back and forth to France. To the South of France. He is in love with the South of France. He goes there at every opportunity.”
“Yes?”
“He would like to make two round trips from Egypt to the vicinity of Cannes within the next month,” Smith said, peering steadily at Barber, “in his private new plane. Then, on the third trip, he will find that he is in a hurry and he will take the commercial plane and his pilot will follow two days later, alone.”
“Alone?” Barber asked, trying to keep all the facts straight.
“Alone, that is,” Smith said, “except for a small box.”
“Ah,” Barber said, grinning. “Finally the small box.”
“Finally.” Smith smiled up at him delightedly. “It has already been calculated. The small box will weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. A comfortable margin of safety for this particular aircraft for each leg of the journey.”
“And what will there be in the small two-hundred-and-fifty-pound box?” Barber asked, cool and relieved now that he saw what was being offered to him.
“Is it absolutely necessary to know?”
“What do I tell the customs people when they ask me what’s in the box?” Barber said. “‘Go ask Bert Smith’?”
“You have nothing to do with customs people,” Smith said. “I assure you. When you take off from the airport in Cairo, the box is not on board. And when you land at the airport at Cannes, the box is not on board. Isn’t that enough?”
Barber took a last pull at his cigarette and doused it. He peered thoughtfully at Smith, sitting easily on the straight-backed chair in the rumpled room, looking too neat and too well dressed for such a place at such an hour. Drugs, Barber thought, and he can stuff them …
“No, Bertie boy,” Barber said roughly. “It is not enough. Come on. Tell.”
Smith sighed. “Are you interested up to now?”
“I am interested up to now,” Barber said.
“All right,” Smith said regretfully. “This is how it will be done. You will have established a pattern. You will have been in and out of the Cairo airport several times. Your papers always impeccable. They will know you. You will have become a part of the legitimate routine of the field. Then, on the trip when you will be taking off alone, everything will be perfectly legitimate. You will have only a small bag with you of your personal effects. Your flight plan will show that your destination is Cannes and that you will come down at Malta and Rome for refuelling only. You will take off from Cairo. You will go off course by only a few miles. Some distance from the coast, you will be over the desert. You will come down on an old R.A.F. landing strip that hasn’t been used since 1943. There will be several men there.… Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.” Barber had walked to the window and was standing there, looking out at the sunny street below, his back to Smith.
“They will put the box on board. The whole thing will not take more than ten minutes,” Smith said. “At Malta, nobody will ask you anything, because you will be in transit and you will not leave the plane and you will stay only long enough to refuel. The same thing at Rome. You will arrive over the south coast of France in the evening, before the moon is up. Once more,” Smith said, speaking as though he was savoring his words, “you will be just a little off course. You will fly low over the hills between Cannes and Grasse. At a certain point, you will see an arrangement of lights. You will throttle down, open the door, and push the box out, from a height of a hundred feet. Then you will close the door and turn toward the sea and land at the Cannes airport. Your papers will be perfectly in order. There will have been no deviations from your flight plan. You will have nothing to declare. You will walk away from the airplane once and for all, and we will pay you the twenty-five thousand dollars I have spoken of. Isn’t it lovely?”
“Lovely,” Barber said. “It’s just a delicious little old plan, Bertie boy.” He turned away from the window. “Now tell me what will be in the box.”
Smith chuckled delightedly, as though what he was going to say was too funny to keep to himself. “Money,” he said. “Just money.”
“How much money?”
�
�Two hundred and fifty pounds of money,” Smith said, his eyes crinkled with amusement. “Two hundred and fifty pounds of tightly packed English notes in a nice, strong, lightweight metal box. Five-pound notes.”
At that moment, it occurred to Barber that he was speaking to a lunatic. But Smith was sitting there, matter-of-fact and healthy, obviously a man who had never for a minute in all his life had a single doubt about his sanity.
“When would I get paid?” Barber asked.
“When the box was delivered,” Smith said.
“Bertie boy …” Barber shook his head reprovingly.
Smith chuckled. “I have warned myself that you were not stupid,” he said. “All right. We will deposit twelve thousand five hundred dollars in your name in a Swiss bank before you start for the first time to Egypt.”
“You trust me for that?”
Fleetingly the smile left Smith’s face. “We’ll trust you for that,” he said. Then the smile reappeared. “And immediately after the delivery is made, we will deposit the rest. A lovely deal. Hard currency. No income tax. You will be a rich man. Semi-rich.” He chuckled at his joke. “Just for a little plane ride. Just to help an Egyptian who is fond of the South of France and who is naturally a little disturbed by the insecurity of his own country.”
“When will I meet this Egyptian?” Barber asked.
“When you go to the airfield to take off for your first flight,” Smith said. “He’ll be there. Don’t you worry. He’ll be there. Do you hesitate?” he asked anxiously.
“I’m thinking,” Barber said.
“It’s not as though you were involved in your own country,” Smith said piously. “I wouldn’t ask a man to do that, a man who had fought for his country in the war. It isn’t even as though it had anything to do with the English, for whom it is possible you have a certain affection. But the Egyptians …” He shrugged and bent over and picked up the manila envelope and opened it. “I have all the maps here,” he said, “if you would like to study them. The route is all marked out, but, of course, it would be finally in your hands, since it would be you who was doing the flying.”
Barber took the thick packet of maps. He opened one at random. All it showed was the sea approaches to Malta and the location of the landing strips there. Barber thought of twenty-five thousand dollars and the map shook a little in his hands.
“It is ridiculously easy,” Smith said, watching Barber intently. “Foolproof.”
Barber put the map down. “If it’s so easy, what are you paying twenty-five thousand bucks for?” he said.
Smith laughed. “I admit,” he said, “there may be certain little risks. It is improbable, but one never knows. We pay you for the improbability, if you want to put it that way.” He shrugged. “After all, after a whole war you must be somewhat hardened to risks.”
“When do you have to know?” Barber asked.
“Tonight,” Smith said. “If you say no, naturally we have to make other plans. And my Egyptian friend is impatient.”
“Who is we?” Barber asked.
“Naturally,” Smith said, “I have certain colleagues.”
“Who are they?”
Smith made a small regretful gesture. “I am terribly sorry,” he said, “but I cannot tell you.”
“I’ll call you tonight,” said Barber.
“Good.” Smith stood up and buttoned his coat and carefully put the soft Italian felt hat on his head, at a conservative angle. He played gently and appreciatively with the brim. “This afternoon, I will be at the track. Maybe you would like to join me there.”
“Where’re they running today?”
“Auteuil,” Smith said. “Jumping today.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“Perhaps,” Smith said. “There is a mare who is doing the jumps for the first time. I have spoken to the jockey and I have been told the mare has responded in training, but I’ll hear more at three o’clock.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good,” Smith said enthusiastically. “Although it is against my interests, of course, to make you too rich in advance.” He chuckled. “However, for the sake of friendship … Should I leave the maps?”
“Yes,” said Barber.
“Until three o’clock,” Smith said as Barber opened the door. They shook hands, and Smith went out into the corridor, a rich, tweedy, perfumed figure in the impoverished light of the pallid hotel lamps.
Barber locked the door behind him and picked up the packet of maps and spread them on the bed, over the rumpled sheets and blankets. He hadn’t looked at aerial maps for a long time. Northern Egypt. The Mediterranean. The island of Malta. Sicily and the Italian coast. The Gulf of Genoa. The Alpes-Maritimes. He stared at the maps. The Mediterranean looked very wide. He didn’t like to fly over open water in a single-engined plane. In fact, he didn’t like to fly. Since the war, he had flown as little as possible. He hadn’t made any explanations to himself, but when he had had to travel, he had gone by car or train or boat whenever he could.
Twenty-five thousand dollars, he thought.
He folded the maps neatly and put them back into the envelope. At this point, the maps weren’t going to help.
He lay down on the bed again, propped against the pillows, with his hands clasped behind his head. Open water, he thought. Five times. Even that wouldn’t be too bad. But what about the Egyptians? He had been in Cairo briefly during the war. He remembered that at night the policemen walked in pairs, carrying carbines. He didn’t like places where the policemen carried carbines. And Egyptian prisons …
He moved uneasily on the bed.
Who knew how many people were in on a scheme like this? And it would only take one to cook you. One dissatisfied servant or accomplice, one greedy or timid partner … He closed his eyes and almost saw the fat, dark uniformed men with their carbines walking up to the shiny, new little plane.
Or suppose you blew a tire or crumpled a wheel on the landing strip? Who knew what the strip was like, abandoned in the desert since 1943?
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
Or you would think you were making it. The box would be on the seat beside you and the coast of Egypt would be falling off behind you and the sea stretching blue below and ahead and the engine running like a watch—and then the first sign of the patrol. The shimmering dot growing into … What did the Egyptian Air Force fly? Spitfires, left over from the war, he supposed. Coming up swiftly, going twice as fast as you, signalling you to turn around … He lit a cigarette. Two hundred and fifty pounds. Say the box alone—it would have to be really solid—weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. How much did a five-pound note weigh? Would there be a thousand to a pound? Five thousand multiplied by a hundred, with the pound at two-eighty. Close to a million and a half dollars.
His mouth felt dry, and he got up and drank two glasses of water. Then he made himself sit down on the chair, keeping his hands still. If there was an accident, if for any reason you failed to come through with it … If the money was lost, but you were saved. Smith didn’t look like a murderer, although who knew what murderers looked like these days? And who knew what other people he was involved with? My colleagues, as Smith called them, who would then be your colleagues. The wealthy Egyptian, the several men at the old R.A.F. landing strip in the desert, the people who were to set out the lights in the certain arrangement in the hills behind Cannes—How many others, sliding across frontiers, going secretly and illegally from one country to another with guns and gold in their suitcases, the survivors of war, prison, denunciation—How many others whom you didn’t know, whom you would see briefly in the glare of the African sun, as a running figure on a dark French hillside, whom you couldn’t judge or assess and on whom your life depended, who were risking prison, deportation, police bullets for their share of a box full of money …
He jumped up and put on his clothes and went out, locking the door. He didn’t want to sit in the cold, disordered room, staring at the maps.
He walked
around the city aimlessly for the rest of the morning, looking blindly into shopwindows and thinking of the things he would buy if he had money. Turning away from a window, he saw a policeman watching him incuriously. Barber looked speculatively at the policeman, who was small, with a mean face and a thin mustache. Looking at the policeman, Barber remembered some of the stories about what they did to suspects when they questioned them in the back rooms of the local prefectures. An American passport wouldn’t do much good if they picked you up with five hundred thousand English pounds under your arm.
This is the first time in my life, Barber thought curiously, walking slowly on the crowded street, that I have contemplated moving over to the other side of the law. He was surprised that he was considering it so calmly. He wondered why that was. Perhaps the movies and the newspapers, he thought. You get so familiar with crime it becomes humanized and accessible. You don’t think about it, but then, suddenly, when it enters your life, you realize that subconsciously you have been accepting the idea of crime as an almost normal accompaniment of everyday life. Policemen must know that, he thought, all at once seeing things from the other side. They must look at all the shut, ordinary faces going past them and they must know how close to theft, murder, and defaulting everyone is, and it must drive them crazy. They must want to arrest everybody.
While Barber was watching the horses move in their stiff-legged, trembling walk around the paddock before the sixth race, he felt a light tap on his shoulder.
“Bertie boy,” he said, without turning around.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Smith said, coming up to the paddock rail beside Barber. “Were you afraid I wouldn’t come?”
“What’s the word from the jock?” Barber asked.
Smith looked around him suspiciously. Then he smiled. “The jockey is confident,” Smith said. “He is betting himself.”
“Which one is it?”
“Number Five.”
Barber looked at No. 5. It was a light-boned chestnut mare with a delicate, gentle head. Her tail and mane were braided, and she walked alertly but not too nervously, well-mannered and with a glistening coat. Her jockey was a man of about forty, with a long, scooped French nose. He was an ugly man, and when he opened his mouth, you saw that most of his front teeth were missing. He wore a maroon cap, with his ears tucked in, and a white silk shirt dotted with maroon stars.