Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

Wales had been right about the overweight, too. The man at the desk never even looked at the scale as the skycap swung my two bags onto it.

“No skis or boots?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to buy them in Europe.”

“Try Rossignols,” he said. “I hear they’re great.” He had become an expert on equipment at a departure desk at Kennedy.

I showed him my passport, he checked the manifest list and gave me a boarding pass and the formalities were over. “Have a good trip,” he said. “I wish I was going with you.” The other people on the line with me had obviously started celebrating already, and there was a loud holiday air about the entire occasion, with people embracing and calling to each other and skis clattering to the floor.

I was early and went into the restaurant for a sandwich and a glass of beer. I hadn’t eaten lunch and it would be a long time before they served us anything on the plane and I was hungry.

As I ate and drank my beer, I read the evening paper. A policeman had been shot in Harlem that morning. The Rangers had won the night before. A judge had come out against pornographic films. The editors were firmly in favor of impeaching the President. There was talk of his resigning. Men who had had high positions in the White House were being sent to jail. The envelope Evelyn Coates had given me to deliver in Rome was in my small bag, now being stowed into the hold of the airplane. I wondered if I was helping to put someone in jail or keep him out. America. I reflected on my visit to Washington.

There was a pay telephone on the wall near where I was sitting and I suddenly had the desire to speak to someone, make one last statement, make one ultimate connection with a familiar voice, before I left the country. I got up and dialed the operator and once more called Evelyn Coates’s number.

Again, there was no answer. Evelyn was a woman who was more likely to be out than in at any given moment. I hung up and got my dime back. I was about to return to my table, where my half-eaten sandwich was waiting for me, when I stopped. I remembered driving down the street past the St Augustine Hotel and nearly stopping. This time there would be no danger. I would be climbing into international jet space within forty minutes. I put the dime back into the machine and dialed the number.

As usual, the phone rang and rang before I heard Clara’s voice. “Hotel St Augustine,” she said. She could manage to get her discontent and her irritation with the entire world even into this brief announcement.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Drusack, please,” I said.

“Mr. Grimes!” My name came out in a shriek. She had recognized my voice.

“I would like to speak to Mr Drusack, please,” I said, pretending that I hadn’t heard her or at least hadn’t understood her.

“Mr Grimes,” she said, “where are you?”

“Please, miss,” I said, “I would like to speak to Mr Drusack. Is he there?”

“He’s in the hospital, Mr Grimes,” she said. “Two men followed him in his car and beat him up with a pistol. He’s in a coma now. They think his skull is fractured and…”

I hung up the phone and went back to my table and finished the sandwich and the beer.

The seat belt and no smoking signs went on and the plane started the descent from the zone of morning sunlight. The snow-capped peaks of the Alps glittered in the distance as the 747 slanted into the gray bank of fog that lay on the approaches to Kloten Airport.

The large man in the seat next to mine was snoring loudly. By actual count, between eight and midnight, when I had given up keeping track, he had drunk eleven whiskies. His wife, next to him on the aisle, had kept her own pace, at the ratio of one to his two. They had told me they planned to catch the early train from Zurich to St Moritz and intended to ski the Corvatch that afternoon. I was sorry I couldn’t be there to watch their first run down the hill.

The flight had not been restful. Since all the passengers were members of the same ski club, and a great many of them made the trip together every winter, there had been a good deal of loud socializing in the aisles, accompanied by hearty drinking. The passengers were not young. For the most part they were in their thirties or forties, the men seeming to belong to that vague group that goes under the label of the executive class and the women carefully coiffed suburban housewives who were damned if they couldn’t hold their liquor as well as their husbands. A certain amount of weekend wife-swapping could be imagined. If I had to make a guess, I would have said that the average income per family of the passengers on the plane was about thirty-five thousand dollars a year and that their children had nice little trust funds set up by Grandpa and Grandma, craftily arranged to avoid the inheritance tax.

If there were any passengers on the plane who were reading quietly or looking out the windows at the stars and the growing dawn they were not in my part of the aircraft. Sober myself, I regarded my boisterous and boozy fellow-travelers with distaste. In a more restrictive state than America, I thought, they would have been prevented from leaving the country. If my brother Hank had been on the plane, I realized with a touch of sorrow, he would have envied them.

It had been warm in the plane, too, and I hadn’t been able to take off my jacket, because my wallet with my money and passport was in it and the wallet was too bulky to fit in my trouser pocket.

The plane touched down smoothly and I had a moment of envy of the men who piloted those marvelous machines, confidently at work on the flight deck forward. For them only the voyage mattered, not the value of the cargo. I made sure that I was one of (he first travelers out of the plane. At the terminal building I went through the door reserved for passengers with nothing to declare. I was lucky enough to see my two bags, both blue, one large, one small, come out in the first batch. I grabbed one of the wire carts and threw the bags on it and rolled the cart out of the customs room without being stopped. The Swiss, I saw, were charmingly tolerant toward prosperous visitors to their country.

I got into a waiting taxi and said, “The Savoy Hotel, please.” I had heard that it was a good hotel in the center of the business district.

I had not changed any money into Swiss currency, but when we arrived at the hotel, the driver agreed to accept two ten-dollar bills. It was two or three dollars more than it would have been if I had had francs, but I didn’t argue with the man.

While I was registering, I asked the clerk for the name and telephone number of the nearest private bank. Like most Americans of this age I had only the vaguest notions of just what Swiss private banks might be like, but had a firm belief, nourished by newspaper and magazine articles, in their ability to conceal money safely. The clerk wrote down a name and a number, almost as if that were the first service demanded of him by every American who signed in at his desk.

Another clerk showed me up to my room. It was large and comfortable, with heavy, old-fashioned furniture, and as clean as I had heard Swiss hotel rooms were likely to be.

While waiting for my luggage to come up, I picked up the phone and gave the operator the number the clerk had given me. It was nine-thirty, Swiss time, four-thirty in the morning New York time, but even though I had not slept at all on the plane, I wasn’t tired.

A voice on the phone said something in German. “Do you speak English?” I asked, regretting for the first time that my education had not equipped me even well enough to say “Good morning” in any language but my own.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Whom do you wish to speak to?”