Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

“See you at six,” I said.

“You hope.” the fat man said, without smiling. He placed the notes that I had given him on the outside of a roll of bills, snapped a rubber band deftly around it. He had small, fat, nimble hands. “Morris always knows where to find me, Mr. Brown,” he said as he went out.

After that, I unpacked and started to put my clothes away. As I was taking my toothbrush and shaving things out of the kit, my razor fell to the floor and skidded beneath the chest of drawers. I knelt to retrieve it, running my hand under the chest. Along with the razor and a small pile of dust, I brought out a coin. It was a silver dollar. I blew the dust off the coin and put it in my pocket. They don’t clean very thoroughly in this hotel, I thought. Good for them. Today, I was definitely ahead of the game.

I looked at my watch. It was almost noon. I picked up the telephone and gave the number of the St Augustine to the operator. As usual, it was nearly thirty seconds before there was an answer. Clara, the operator, regarded all calls as wanton interruptions in her private life, which consisted, as – far as I could ever tell, of reading magazines on astrology. She used delay as a means of protest and punishment for electronic interrupters of her search for the perfect horoscope, wealth, fame, a young and handsome dark stranger.

“Hello, Clara,” I said. “Is Mr. Drusack there?”

“He sure is,” Clara said. “He’s been on my neck all morning to call you. What the hell is your number anyway? I couldn’t find it anywhere. I called the hotel we have here as your address and they say they never heard of you.”

“That was two years ago. I moved.” Actually, I had moved four times since then. A typical American, I had continually pushed toward new frontiers, always farther north. The wealth of the Yukon, by way of the East Eighties, Harlem, Riverdale, the frozen tundra. “I don’t have a number, Clara.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have a number?”

“I don’t have a telephone.”

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Grimes.”

“You can say that again, Clara. Now give me Mr. Drusack.”

“My God, Grimes,” Drusack said when he got on the phone, “you sure left me a mess. You better get right on down here and help me straighten it out.”

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Drusack,” I said. I tried to sound genuinely grieved. “I’m busy today. What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” Drusack was shouting now. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter. The goddamn Western Union called at ten o’clock. There’s no John Ferris at that address you gave them, that’s what’s the matter.”

“That’s the address he registered under.”

“You come and tell that to the police. They were in here for an hour this morning. And there were two characters in here asking for him, and if they weren’t packing guns I’m Miss Rheingold of 1983. They talked to me as if I was hiding the sonofabitch or something. They asked me if the guy left a message for them. Did he leave a message?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, they want to talk to you.”

“Why me?” I asked, although I knew why.

“I told them the night man found the guy. I told them you’d be in at eleven pm, but they said they couldn’t wait that long, what was your address. Grimes, do you know that nobody in this goddamn hotel knows where you live? Naturally, those two fuckers wouldn’t believe that. They said they’re coming back here at three o’clock and I’d better damn well produce you. Scary. They weren’t any small-time hoods. Short hair, dressed like stockbrokers. Quiet. Like spies in the movies. They weren’t kidding. Not at all kidding. So you be here. Because I’m going to be out on a long, long lunch.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Drusack,” I said smoothly, enjoying a conversation with the manager for the first time since I started working for him. “I called to say good-bye.”

“What do you mean, good-bye?” Drusack was really shouting now. “Good-bye, good-bye, who says good-bye like that?”

“I do, Mr. Drusack. I decided last night I don’t like the way you run your hotel. I’m quitting… I have quit.”

“Quit! Nobody quits like that. For Christ’s sake, it’s only Tuesday. You got things here. You got a half bottle of bourbon, you got your goddamn Bible, you…”

“I’m donating it to the hotel library,” I said.

“Grimes,” Drusack roared. “You can’t do this to me. I’ll have the police bring you in. I’ll…”

I put the telephone gently down on its cradle. Then I went out to lunch. I went to a good sea-food restaurant near Lincoln Center and had a large grilled lobster that cost eight dollars, with two bottles of Heineken.

As I sat there in the warm restaurant, eating the good food and drinking the imported beer, I realized that it was the first moment since the whore had come running down from the sixth floor of the hotel that I had time to think about what I was doing. Everything up to now had been almost mechanical, act following act unhesitatingly, my movements ordered and precise, as though I had been following a program learned, assimilated, long ago. Now I had to make decisions, consider possibilities, scan the horizon for danger. Even as I was thinking this, I saw that something in my subconscious had made me choose a table where I could sit with my back against the wall, with a clear view of the entrance to the restaurant and of everybody who came in. I was amused by the realization. Given half a chance, every man becomes the hero of his own detective story.

Amusement or not, the hour had come to take stock, think about my position. I could no longer depend on simple reflexes or on anything in my past to guide me for the future, had always been completely law-abiding. I had never done anything to make enemies. Certainly not enemies like them two men who had frightened Drusack that morning. Naturally, I thought, men who came to a hotel where they expected to receive a hundred thousand dollars in cash from someone who was registered most probably under a false name and certainly with a false address might very likely be carrying guns or at least look like men who were in the habit of carrying guns. Drusack might have been a little hysterical that morning, but he was no fool and he had been in the hotel business a long time and had a feeling about who meant trouble when he arrived at the front desk and who didn’t. Drusack couldn’t possibly know just what trouble the two men represented and in all probability would never know.

One thing was sure, or almost sure – the police wouldn’t be brought in, although an individual crooked policeman here or there might be in on it. So I wouldn’t have that to worry about. There was no possibility that the man who had registered under the name of John Ferris and the two men who had come to meet him at the hotel were engaged in a legal business transaction. It had to be bribery of some sort, a payoff, blackmail. This was when the scandals of the second Nixon administration were just beginning to surface, when we all discovered that perfectly respectable people, pillars of the community, had developed the habit of secretly carrying huge sums of money around in attaché cases and stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars in office desks, so it didn’t occur to me, as it could have later, that I might have stumbled on an amateurish and comparatively undangerous political technique. What I had to deal with, I was sure, was grim professionalism, men who killed for money. Like spies in the movies, Drusack had said. I discounted that. I had seen the body.

Gangsters, I thought. The Mob. Despite the occasional movies and magazine pieces about the underworld I had seen and read, like most people, I had only the vaguest notion of what was meant by the Mob and a perhaps exaggerated respect for its omnipotence, its system of intelligence, its power to seek out and destroy, the lengths it was likely to go to exact vengeance.