Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

The train went into a tunnel and it was absolutely dark in the compartment. I wished the tunnel would go on forever. Self-pityingly, I remembered the nights at the St Augustine and thought, darkness is my element.

Sometime after we emerged from the tunnel, we were in sunlight. We had climbed out of the gray cloud that hung over the Swiss plain. The sunlight was somehow an affront to my sensibility. The man was dozing now, his head thrown back, the cigar dead in an ashtray. His wife had the Herald Tribune and was reading the comic strips, a rapt expression on her face. She looked foolish, her mouth pursed, her eyes childish and bright under the leopard hat. Was that what I had thought money was going to buy for me?

She became conscious that I was staring at her, looked up at me, giggled coquettishly. “I’m a pushover for comic strips,” she said. “I’m always afraid Rip Kirby is going to get killed in the next installment.”

I smiled inanely, looked at the diamond on her finger, earned, I was sure, in honest matrimony. She peered obliquely at me. I guessed that she never looked at anyone straight-on. “I’ve seen you someplace before,” she said. “Haven’t I?”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Weren’t you on the plane Wednesday night? The club plane?”

“I was on it,” I said.

“I was sure I knew you from someplace before that. Sun Valley maybe?”

“I’ve never been in Sun Valley,” I said. “That’s the wonderful thing about skiing,” she said, “you get to meet the same people all over the world.”

The man groaned a little, awakened by the sound of our voices. Coming out of sleep, his eyes stared at me with blank hostility. I had the feeling that hostility was his natural and fundamental condition and that I had surprised him before he had time to arrange himself for the ordinary traffic of society.

“Bill,” the woman said, “this gentleman was on the plane with us.” From the way she said it, it sounded as though it had been an extraordinary pleasure for us all.

“Is that so?” Bill said.

“I always feel it’s lucky to find Americans to travel with,” the woman said. “The language and everything. Europeans make you feel like such a dummy. I think this calls for a drink-drink.” She opened the jewel case, which she had kept on the seat beside her, and brought out an elegant silver flask. There were three small chromium cups, one inside the other, over the cap, and she gave one to me and one to her husband and kept one for herself. “I hope you like cognac,” she said, as she poured the liquor carefully into our cups. My hand was shaking, and some of the cognac spilled over on it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. The reason my hand was shaking was that the man had taken off the foulard scarf around his neck and for the first time I saw the tie he was wearing. It was a dark red woolen tie. It was either the tie that I had packed in my bag or one exactly like it. He crossed his legs and I looked down at his shoes. They were not new. I had had just such a pair of shoes in my bag.

“Here’s to the first one to break a leg this year,” the man said, raising his chromium cup. He laughed harshly. I was sure he had never broken anything. He was just the sort of man who had never been sick a day in his life and didn’t carry anything stronger than aspirin with him when he traveled.

I drank my cognac in one gulp. I needed it. And I was glad when the lady refilled my cup immediately. I raised the cup gallantly to her and smiled widely and falsely, hoping the train would be wrecked and both she and her husband crushed, so that I could search them and their baggage thoroughly. “You people certainly know how to travel,” I said, with an exaggerated, admiring shake of the head.

“Be prepared in foreign lands,” the man said. “That’s our motto. Say…” He extended his hand. “My name’s Bill. Bill Sloane. And the little lady is Flora.”

I shook his hand and told them my name. His hand was hard and cold. The little lady (weight one twenty-five, I figured) smiled winsomely and poured some more cognac.

By the time we reached St Moritz we were a cosy threesome. I had learned that they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, that Mr. Sloane was a three-handicap golfer, that he was a building contractor and a self-made man, that, as I had guessed. Flora was not his first wife that he had a son at Deerfield, who, thank God, did not wear his hair long, that he had voted for Nixon and had been to the White House twice, that the Watergate fuss would die down in a month and the Democrats sorry they had ever started it, that this was their third visit to St Moritz, that they had stopped over in Zurich for two days so that Flora could do some shopping, and that they were going to stay at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz.

“Where’re you staying, Doug?” Sloane asked me. “The Palace,” I said without hesitation. I certainly couldn’t afford it, but I was not going to let my new friends out of my sight at any cost. “I understand it’s fun.”

When we got to St Moritz, I insisted on waiting with them until their luggage came out of the baggage car. Neither of them changed expression when I swung the big blue bag off the rack. “Do you know your bag’s unlocked?” Sloane asked.

“The lock’s broken,” I said.

“You ought to get it fixed,” he said, as we left the compartment. “St Moritz is full of Italians.” His interest could mean something. Or nothing. The two of them might be the best actors in the world.

They had eight bags between them, all brand new, none of them the twin of mine. That again could mean nothing. We had to hire an extra taxi for the baggage, and it followed us up the hill through the busy, snowy streets of the town to the hotel.

The hotel had a tantalizing, faint, indefinable aroma. Its source was money. Quiet money. The lobby was like an extension of the bank vault in New York. The guests were treated by the help in a kind of reverential hush, as though they were ikons of great age and value, frail and worthy of worship. I had the feeling that even the small, exquisitely dressed children with their English nannies, who walked decorously along the deep carpets, knew I didn’t belong there.

Everybody at the reception desk and at the concierge’s desk shook Mr. Sloane’s hand and bowed to Mrs. Sloane. The tips had obviously been princely in the preceding years. Would a man like that, who could afford a wife like Flora and a hotel like the Palace, walk off with somebody else’s seventy-thousand dollars? And wear his shoes in the bargain? The answer, I decided, was probably yes. After all, Sloane had confessed he was a self-made man.

When I told the clerk at the reception desk that I had no reservation, his face took on that distant no-room-at-the-inn look of hoteliers in a good season. He had pierced my disguise instantly. “I’m afraid, sir,” he began, “that…”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Mr. Sloane said, coming up behind me. “Fit him in, please.”

The clerk made an important small business of checking the room chart and said, “Well, there’s a double room. I might…”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“How long will you be staying, Mr. Grimes?” the clerk asked.

I hesitated. Who knew how long five thousand dollars would last in a place like that? “A week,” I said. I would skip orange juice in the mornings.

We all went up in the elevator together. The clerk had put me in the room next to the Sloanes. It would have been convenient if the walls had been thinner or I had been trained in electronic bugging equipment.

My room was a large one, with a great double bed with a pink satin spread and a magnificent view of the lake and the mountains beyond, pure and clear in the late afternoon sunlight. Under other conditions it would have been exhilarating. Now it merely seemed as if nature was being callous and expensive. I closed the blinds and in the gloom lay down fully dressed on the soft bed, the satin rustling voluptuously under my weight. I still seemed to smell Flora Sloane’s perfume. I tried to think of some way in which I could find out quickly and surely if Sloane was my man. My mind was flat and tired. The two days in Zurich had exhausted me. I felt a cold coming on. I could think of nothing except to hang on and watch. But then if I did find out that it was my tie he was wearing, my shoes he was walking around in, what would I do? My head began to ache. I got up off the bed and dug in the leather shaving kit for the tin of aspirin and swallowed two.