Irwin Shaw - Nightwork

At the bottom of my overnight bag, as I cleared it, I saw the thick envelope Evelyn Coates had given me to deliver to her friend at the embassy. I had his name and address and telephone number in a notebook. I looked it up. Lorimer, David Lorimer. Evelyn had asked me not to call him at the embassy. It was just past one o’clock. There was a chance he would be home for lunch. I had been alone for almost a week, walled off from all but the most primitive communication by the barrier of language. I hoped Mr Lorimer would invite me to lunch. The contented unsociability of my nights at the St Augustine had vanished. I missed Fabian and Lily, I missed the sound of voices speaking English, I missed a lot of other things, many of them vague and indefinable.

I gave the number to the operator. A moment later, a man’s voice said, “’Pronto”

“This is Douglas Grimes,” I said, “Evelyn…”

“I know,” the man said quickly. “Where are you?”

“At the Grand,” I said.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Do you play tennis?”

“Well…” I wondered if he were speaking in code. “A bit.”

“I was just leaving for my club. We need a fourth.”

“I haven’t any stuff with me…”

“We’ll find gear for you at the club. And I have an extra racquet. I’ll meet you in the bar. I have red hair. You can’t miss me.” He hung up abruptly.

The lanky man with red hair came into the bar, his stride loose and energetic. His hair was quite long, at least for a diplomat, his face craggy, with thick bushy eyebrows, also red, and a bold nose. As he had said, you couldn’t miss him. We shook hands. He seemed about my own age. “I found an old pair of sneakers,” he said. “What size do you wear?”

“Ten,” I said.

“Good. They’ll fit.”

His car, a sleek little blue, open, two-seater Alfa Romeo was parked just outside the hotel, constricting traffic. A policeman was standing beside it, a look of pain on his face. The policeman remonstrated gently with Lorimer, his voice musical, as we climbed into the car. Lorimer waved him off good-naturedly and we headed into the traffic. He drove zestfully, like his fellow Romans, and we nearly scraped fenders a dozen times before we reached the tennis club, situated on the banks of the Tiber. Driving, especially at his speed, seemed to require all his attention, so there was no conversation. He spoke only once. “This is the Borghese Gardens,” he said as we turned into a green park. “You ought to look in at the museum.”

“I will,” I said. By now I had acquired a small addiction to museums. It would please Fabian when I reported that I had been to the Borghese. He, too, had told me to visit it. “Pay special attention to the Titians,” Fabian had instructed.

When we swung through the gates of the club, Lorimer parked the car in the shade of some poplars. There were other cars parked along the road, but nobody to be seen. I started to open the door on my side, but Lorimer put out his hand and touched my arm to stop me.

“Have you got it?”

“Yes.” I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled out the bulky envelope. I handed it to Lorimer. Without examining it, Lorimer stuffed it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“Evelyn told me you’d turn up eventually,” Lorimer said. “Thanks for not calling me at the embassy.”

We got out of the car, Lorimer reaching in for a battered old tennis bag. As we walked toward the clubhouse, he said, “I’m glad you could come. It’s hard to arrange games at this hour. I like to play before lunch and Italians like to play after lunch. Fundamental differences in two civilizations. Never to be reconciled. We call to each other from opposite sides of an abyss.” He saluted two small dark men who were playing on one of the courts. “In a minute,” he shouted.

The two men were only rallying, but they looked pretty good. “I’m afraid I’m going to slow down your game a bit,” I said, watching them. “I haven’t played in years.”

“Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “Just keep moving up to the net. They crack under pressure.” He grinned. He had a nice, friendly, wolfish grin.

The sneakers fit me comfortably and the shorts and shirt approximately, flopping around me a bit, but playable.

“Take your valuables with you to the court,” Lorimer said. “You could leave them at the desk, but there have been incidents. And don’t leave your passport lying around anywhere, or one day you will be surprised to read that a Sicilian by the name of Douglas Grimes has been arrested for smuggling heroin.” I saw that along with his wallet and loose change and his watch, he also took Evelyn’s envelope out to the court with him.

I doubt that the two men we played with ever heard my name. Lorimer introduced us, but spoke in mumbled Italian, and I never got their names.

I enjoyed the game more than I thought I would. The Skiing I had done that winter had kept me in shape and my reflexes were still there. And as Dr Ryan had promised, my eyes were adequate for the sport. Lorimer loped all over the court, blasting everything. He was wild, but intermittently very effective. We split the first two sets with the Italian gentlemen, who, as Lorimer had predicted, cracked under pressure. I developed a blister on my thumb in the third set and had to quit. The blister was a small price to pay for the pleasure of playing in the balmy Roman sunshine alongside the river which Shakespeare had insisted Caesar had swum with all his armor on. It had been a dry season and the river looked small and innocent and as though I could have swum it, too.

While we were dressing, after our showers, the Italians invited us to lunch, which they were having at the club, before going back to their offices. “Tell me, partner,” Lorimer said to me, “is this your first time in Rome?”

“First day,” I said.

“We won’t eat here then. We’ll go to a tourist place. The Tre Scalini in the Piazza Navona.” I nodded. That was on Fabian’s list, too. “Whenever anybody comes to Rome,” Lorimer said, “I tell them not to pretend to be anything else but a tourist. Do and see all the standard things. The Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, the Castel Sanl’-Angelo, the Moses, the Forums, etcetera. They haven’t been put in guidebooks for hundreds of years for nothing. Later on, you can pick your own way. For reading, I suggest Stendhal. Do you read French?”

“No.”

“Pity.”

“I wish I could go back to school all over again.”

“Don’t we all?” he said.

“How do you like your lunch?” Lorimer asked. We were sitting out on the terrace looking across at the great fountain, with the four enormous carved feminine figures of the Rivers. It was certainly a better idea than having a sandwich and a beer at the bar of the tennis club.

“I like it fine,” I said.

“Don’t spread it around,” Lorimer said. “In certain high-toned circle it is accepted doctrine that the food is inedible.” He grinned. “You’ll be marked as a crude yokel for life and you’ll only get to meet a principessa with difficulty.”

“Well. I can say I liked the view, can’t I?”

“Say you just happened to be strolling through the Piazza Navona by accident. At night. If the subject comes up.” He stared thoughtfully at the fountain. “Dwarfing, isn’t it?”

“What’s dwarfing?”

“Those big girls. That’s one of the reasons I prefer Rome to New York, say. Here you’re dwarfed by art and religion, not by the steel and glass fantasies of insurance companies and stockbrokers.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Not long enough. And the sons of bitches are trying to move me out.” He tapped the bulge in his jacket made by the envelope I had given him. He had taken it out, slit it open, and glanced through the pages hastily while we were waiting to be served. When the first course and the wine appeared, he had jammed the pages back into his pocket without comment. “That’s what this is all about,” he said, tapping the jacket for the second time. “They’re after me. I know it and they know I know and we’re all waiting for someone to make the wrong move. I sent along some recommendations that were not received – ah – with enthusiasm in certain quarters. I pushed through some contracts. Evelyn was in on it, too, in Justice and her head is on the block, too. We tried to get the money to the right people in this beautiful, lamentable country, with its desperate inhabitants, not the wrong people. A difference of opinion. Possibly fatal. Don’t boast that you know me. There’re spies everywhere. When I get back to my desk, the papers will have been moved. Do I sound paranoid?”