Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

“The way I take you.”

He had been going in and out of the bedroom through all this, coming out with various articles of clothing that he stowed in one bag or another. Now he emerged with the pretty blue Tyrolean jacket. “This would look very good on you, Douglas,” he said. “It’s a little large for me. Would you like it?”

“No, thanks. I’ve had my skiing for the year,” I said.

He nodded soberly. “I understand. What happened today took the edge off Alpine joys a bit.”

“I never wanted to come here in the first place.”

“Sometimes you have to do things to please the ladies,” Fabian said. “Apropos of that. Do you want to tell me why Eunice decamped?”

“Not particularly.”

“I regret you didn’t see fit to take my advice,” Fabian said. “It was good advice.”

“Oh, come on, now. Miles! Enough is enough. She told me everything.” Somehow, the sight of this handsome, completely composed man, every hair in place, his trousers and shirt fitting him perfectly, his shoes with a high mahogany shine, deftly packing his array of bags, the perfect traveler for the jet age, suddenly infuriated me. “All about you. Or at least enough about you.”

“I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about, old man.” He tucked a half-dozen pairs of socks neatly into a corner of a suitcase. “What in the world would there be to about me?” “She’s in love with you.”

“Oh, dear,” he said.

“You had an affair with her. I’m not in the business of accepting hand-me-downs.”

“Oh, dear,” he said again. “She said that?”

“And more.”

“Ever since I’ve met you,” he said. “I’ve worried about your innocence. You have a terribly low threshold of shock. People have affairs. It’s a fact of life. People you’re associated with. More or less permanently. Good God, man, have you ever been to a wedding at which the bride hasn’t had an affair with at least one of the guests?”

“You might have told me,” I said, knowing it sounded foolish.

“What good would that have done? Be reasonable. I suggested her to you with the best intentions in the world. For both you and her. I can vouch for the fact that she’s a marvelous girl. In bed and out, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“She wanted to marry you.”

“A passing whim. I’m much too old for her, for one thing.”

“Oh, come now, Miles. Fifty’s not all that old.”

“I’m not fifty. I’m long past that, if you must know.”

I looked at him incredulously. If he hadn’t told me when we first met that he was fifty, I’d have found it hard to believe that he was much over forty. I knew he found it easy to lie, but I couldn’t see why he would pretend to be older than he was. “How much past?” I asked.

“I’ll be sixty next month, old man.”

“You must tell me your secret.” I said. “Someday.”

“Someday.” He snapped a suitcase shut decisively. “Women like Eunice have no sense of the future. They look at a man they’ve taken a fancy to and they see only their lover, ageless with passion, not an old man sitting by the fire in slippers a few years from then. There’s no need to tell anyone what you’ve just learned, of course.”

“Does Lily know?”

“Not on your life,” he said briskly. “So, you see, I rather thought I was doing both you and Eunice a good turn.”

“It didn’t quite work.” I said.

“Sorry about that.”

I almost told him about Didi Wales lying naked on my bed, but realized in time that it would not increase his esteem for me appreciably. “Anyway,” I said, “I think it’s better for all concerned that Eunice went home.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “We’ll never know, shall we? By the way, is there anybody you’d like me to call or see while I’m in America? Any messages?”

I thought for a moment. “You might telephone my brother in Scranton,” I said. I wrote down his address. “Ask him how he’s doing. And tell him all is well. I’ve found a friend.”

Fabian smiled, pleased. “You certainly have. Anybody else?”

I hesitated. “No,” I said finally.

“I look forward to it.” Fabian put the slip with Henry’s address on it in his pocket. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have to do my yoga exercises before my bath. I imagine you’re going to change for dinner?”

Yoga, I thought, as I left the suite. Maybe that’s what I ought to take up.

I watched the big plane take off from Cointrin, the Geneva airport, with Fabian and Lily and the coffin on it. The sky was gray and it was drizzling. I had said nothing would please me more than being left alone for a few days and I had thought that I would be relieved at seeing them finally on their way, like a schoolboy at the beginning of a holiday, but I felt lonely, depressed. I had a slip of paper with Mr Quadrocelli’s address and telephone number in my wallet and the addresses of the tailor and shirtmaker in Rome and a list that Fabian had made out for me of good restaurants and churches that I was not to miss on my route south. But it was all I could do to keep from going over to the ticket counter and buying passage on the next plane to New York. As the plane disappeared westward, I felt deserted, left behind, the only one not invited to the party.

What if the plane crashed? No sooner had I thought of it than it seemed to me to be probable. Otherwise, why would I have thought of it? As a pilot I had always taken a macabre professional interest in crashes. I knew how easily things could go wrong. A stuck valve, unexpected clear air turbulence, a flock of swallows … I could almost see Fabian calmly dropping through the deadly air, imperturbably drowning, perhaps at the last moment, before the ocean swallowed him, finally telling Lily his correct age.

I had been involved in two deaths already since the beginning of my adventure – the old man in the St Augustine and Sloane, now flying to his grave. Would there be an inevitable third? Was there a curse on the money I had stolen? Should I have let Fabian leave? What would the rest of my life be like without him? If there had been any way I could have done it, I would have had the plane recalled, run out to greet it, all reticence and reason gone, before it even rolled to a halt.

In the gray weather, Europe seemed suddenly hostile and full of traps. Maybe, I thought, as I walked toward where the Jaguar was parked, Italy will cure me. I wasn’t hopeful.

On the trip down from Geneva to Rome, I dutifully visited most of the churches on the list that Fabian had given me and ate in the restaurants he had suggested, the slow drive south a confused mingling of stained glass, madonnas, martyred saints, and heaped plates of spaghetti à la vàngole and fritto misto. There had been no reports of any planes falling into the Atlantic Ocean. The weather was good, the Jaguar performed nobly, the country through which I drove was beautiful. It was just the kind of voyage I had dreamed of since I was a boy, and I should have savored every moment of it. But as I entered Rome and drove across the broad reaches of the Piazza del Popolo, I realized that for the first time in my life I was miserably lonely. At the end, Sloane had had his revenge.

Using a map, I drove slowly toward the Grand Hotel, another of Fabian’s choices. The traffic seemed insane, the other drivers wildly hostile. I felt that if I made one wrong turn I would be lost for days in a city of enemies.

The room I was given in the Grand was too large for me, and, although it was sunny outside, dark. I hung up my clothes carefully. Fabian had told me that Quadrocelli was traveling and didn’t expect to be back in Porto Ercole until the weekend. It was only Monday. I had four days to enjoy Rome or despair in it.