Irwin Shaw: Nightwork

My luck began to change in New York and with the onset of winter I knew that I would have to look for some kind of job if I wanted to continue eating. Then the night man at the St Augustine was held up for the second time.

I put the last of the 15 January bills in the file. It was now three hours into 16 January. Happy Anniversary. I got up and stretched. I was hungry and I got out my sandwich and the bottle of beer.

I was unwrapping my sandwich when I heard the sound of the door from the fire emergency stairs opening into the lobby and quick woman’s footsteps. I reached for the switch and the lobby was brightly lit. A young woman was hurrying, almost running, toward the desk. She was unnaturally tall, with those thick soles and exaggerated high heels which made women look like so many displaced Watusis. She had on a white, fake fur coat and a blonde wig that wouldn’t fool anybody. I recognized her. She was a whore who had come in just after midnight with the man in 610. I glanced at my watch. It was just after three o’clock. It had been a long session in 610 and the woman looked it. She ran to the front door, pushed futilely at the broken buzzer, then clattered over to the desk.

She knocked sharply on the glass over the desk. “Open the door, mister,” she said loudly. “I want to get out of here.”

I took the key from the drawer under the desk in which the pistol was kept and went through the little room next to the office where there was a huge old safe against the wall, lined with safety-deposit boxes. The safety-deposit boxes were relics of a richer day. None was in use now. I unlocked the door and stepped out into the lobby. The woman followed me across the lobby toward the front door. She was gasping for breath. Her profession didn’t keep her in shape for running down six flights of steps in the middle of the night. She was somewhere around thirty years old, and by the look of her they hadn’t been easy years. The women who came in and out of the hotel at night made a strong argument for celibacy.

“Why didn’t you take the elevator down?” I asked.

“I was waiting for the elevator,” the woman said. “But then this crazy, naked old man popped out of the door, making all kinds of funny noises, grunting, like an animal, and waving something at me…”

“Waving wh … wh …, what?”

“Something. It looked like a club. A baseball bat. It’s dark in that hall. You bastards certainly don’t waste much money on lights in this hotel.” Her voice was whiskey-hoarse, set in city cement, praising nothing. “I didn’t wait around to see. I just took off. You want to find out, you go up to the sixth floor and see for yourself. Open the goddamn door, will you? I have to go home.”

I unlocked the big, plate-glass front door, reinforced by a heavy, cast-iron grill. For a shabby old hotel like the St Augustine, the management was nervously security-conscious. The woman pushed the door open impatiently and ran out into the dark street. I took a deep breath of the cold night air as the clatter of heels diminished in the direction of Lexington Avenue. I stood at the door another moment, looking down the street, on the chance that a prowl car might be cruising past. I would have felt better about going up to see what was happening on the sixth floor if I had a cop with me. I was not paid for solitary heroics. But the street was empty. I heard a siren in the distance, probably on Park Avenue, but that was no help. I closed the door and locked it and walked slowly back across the lobby toward the office, thinking, am I going to spend the rest of my life ushering whores to and from anonymous beds?

“Praise him with stringed instruments and organs”. In the office I took the pass-key out of the drawer, looked for a moment at the pistol. I shook my head and shut the drawer. Having the pistol there wasn’t my idea. It hadn’t helped the other night man when the two junkies came in and walked off with all the cash in the place, leaving the night man lying in his blood on the floor with a bump the size of a cantaloupe on his head.

I put my jacket on, somehow feeling that being properly dressed would give me more authority in whatever situation I would find on the sixth floor, and went out into the lobby again, locking the office door behind me. I pushed the elevator button and heard the whine of the cables and the elevator started down the shaft.

When the door creaked open, I hesitated before going in. Maybe, I thought, I just ought to go back into the office, get my overcoat and my sandwich and my beer, and walk away from here. Who needs this lousy job? But just as the door began to slide shut, I went in.

When I reached the sixth floor, I pushed the button that kept the elevator door open, and stepped out into the corridor. Light was streaming from the doorway of the room diagonally across from the elevator, number 602. On the worn carpet of the corridor, half in and half out of the light, was a naked man, lying on his face, his head and torso in shadow, old man’s wrinkled buttocks and skinny legs sharply, obscenely illuminated. The left arm was stretched out, the fingers of the hand curled, as though the man had been trying to grab at something as be fell. His right arm was under him. He lay absolutely still. Even as I bent to turn him over, I was sure that nothing I could do and nobody I could call would do any good.

The man was heavy, with a big loose paunch, that belied the thin legs and buttocks, and I grunted as I pulled the body over onto its back. Then I saw what the whore had said the man had been waving at her, that might have been a club. It wasn’t a club, but a long cardboard tube tightly wrapped in brown paper, the kind artists and architects use to carry rolled-up prints and building plans. The man’s hand was still clutching it. I didn’t blame the whore for being frightened. In the dim light of the corridor, I’d have been frightened, too, if a naked man had suddenly sprung out waving the thing menacingly at me.

I stood up, feeling a chill on my skin, nerving myself to touch the body once more. I stared down at the dead face. The eyes were open, staring up at me, the mouth in a last tortured grimace. Grunting animal sounds, the whore had said. There was no blood, no sign of a wound. I had never seen the man before, but that was not unusual with my working hours, coming in after guests had checked in for the night and leaving before they came down in the morning. It was a round, fat, old man’s face, with a big, fleshy nose and wispy gray hair on the balding skull. Even in the disarray of death, the face gave the impression of power and importance.

Fighting down a rising feeling of nausea, I knelt on one knee and put my ear to the man’s chest. His breasts might have been those of an old woman, with just a few straggles of damp white hair and nipples that were almost green in the bare light. There was the sour, living odor of sweat, but no movement, no sound. Old man, I thought, as I stood up, why couldn’t you have done this on somebody else’s time?

I bent down again and hooked my hands under the dead man’s armpits and dragged him through the open doorway into room 602. You couldn’t just leave a naked body lying in the corridor like that. I had been working in the hotel business long enough to know that death was something you kept out of the sight of paying guests.

As I pulled the body along the floor of the little hallway that led into the room proper, the cardboard tube rolled to one side. I got the body into the room, next to the bed, which was a tangle of sheets and blankets. There was lipstick smeared all over the sheets and pillows. The lady I had let out around one o’clock, probably. I looked down with some-tiling like pity at the old body naked on the threadbare carpet, the flaccid dead flesh outlined against a faded floral pattern. One last erection. Joy and then mortality.