Irwin Shaw - Rich Man, Poor Man

He had learned a few words of French and Italian and Spanish, enough to go through harbour-master formalities and do the shopping, but too little to get into arguments. Dwyer picked up the languages quickly and could rattle away with anybody.

Thomas had sent a photograph of the Clothilde, spraying through a wave, to Gretchen and Gretchen had written back that she kept it on the mantelpiece of her livingroom. One day, she wrote, she would come over and taken a trip with him. She was busy, she wrote, doing some sort of job at a movie studio. She said that she had kept her promise and had not told Rudolph where he was or what he was doing. Gretchen was his one link with America and the times when he felt lonely or missed the kid, he wrote to her. He had asked Dwyer to write his girl in Boston, whom Dwyer still said he was going to marry, to try to go down to the Aegean Hotel when she had the time and talk to Pappy, but the girl hadn’t replied yet.

Some year soon, no matter what, he was going to go to New York and try to find his kid.

He hadn’t had a single fight since Falconetti. He still dreamed about Falconetti. He wasn’t sentimental about him, but he was sorry Falconetti was dead and the passage of time hadn’t persuaded him that it wasn’t his fault that the man had thrown himself overboard.

He finished with the winch and stood up. The deck was promisingly warm under his bare feet As he went aft, running his hands along the newly varnished mahogany-coloured rails, the hammering below stopped and Kimball’s flaming red hair appeared, as he came out of the saloon and on to the deck. To get to the engine-room, you had to pick up sections of the floor from the saloon. Dwyer appeared after Kimball. They were both wearing oil-stained green overalls, because there was no keeping clean in the confined space of the engine-room. Kimball was wiping his hands on a piece of waste, which he threw overboard. That ought to do it, mate,’ Kimball said. ‘Why don’t we give it a spin?’

Thomas went into the pilot house and started the engines while Dwyer and Pinky cast off from the dock and clambered forward to bring up the hook, Dwyer working the winch and cleaning off the harbour muck from the chain with the hose before it dropped into the well. They had a lot of chain out, for stability, and the Clothilde was almost in the middle of the harbour before Pinky gave the sign that they were clear and helped Dwyer bring the hook on board with the gaff.

By now Thomas was skilled at handling the ship and only when he was coming into a very crowded harbour, with a bad wind blowing, did he hand over the wheel to Dwyer. Today, he turned the bow towards the harbour entrance and, keeping the speed down until they were outside, chugged beyond the

fishermen with their rods at the end of the rampart and around the buoy before he increased speed, turning towards the Cap d’Antibes, leaving the fortress of the Vieux Carre on its hill, behind them. He watched the gauges of both engines and was relieved to see that the port engine wasn’t heating up. Good old Pinky. Through the winter he must have saved them at least a thousand dollars. The ship he was on, the Vega, was so new and so pampered that there was almost nothing for him to do when they were in port. He was bored on it and delighted to be able to putter about in the Clothilde’s cluttered, hot, engine-room.

Kimball was a knotty Englishman whose freckled face never got a tan, but remained a painful hot pink all summer. He had a problem with the drink, as he put it. When he drank he became pugnacious and challenged people in bars. He quarrelled with his owners and rarely stayed on one ship more than a year, but he was so good at his job that he never had any trouble finding other berths quickly. He only worked on the very big yachts, because his skill would be wasted on smaller craft. He had been raised in Plymouth and had been on the water all his life. He was amazed that somebody like Thomas had wound up the owner-skipper of a ship like the Clothilde in Antibes harbour, and was making a go of it. ‘Yanks,’ Kimball said, shaking his head. ‘They’re fucking well capable of anything. No wonder you own the world.’

He and Thomas had been friendly from the beginning, greeting each other as they passed on the quay or buying each other beers in the little bar at the entrance to the port. Kimball had guessed that Thomas had been in the ring and Thomas had told him about some of his fights and what it was like and about the win in London and the later two dives he had had to take and even about the last fight in the hotel room with Quayles in Las Vegas, which had especially delighted Kimball’s belligerent heart. Thomas had not told him about Falconetti and Dwyer knew enough to keep quite on that subject

‘By God, Tommy,’ Kimball said ‘If I knew I could fight like that I would clean out every bar from Gib to Piraeus.’

‘And get a knife between your ribs in the process,’ Thomas said.

‘No doubt you’re right,’ Kimball agreed. ‘But man, the pleasure before!’

When he got very drunk and saw Thomas he would pound the bar and shout, ‘See that man? If he wasn’t a friend of mine, I’d drive him into the deck.’ Then looped an affectionate

tattooed arm around Thomas’s neck.

Their friendship had been cemented one night in a bar in Nice. They hadn’t gone to Nice together, but Dwyer and Thomas had wandered into the bar, near the port, by accident. There was a cleared space around the bar and Kimball was holding forth, loudly, to a group that included some French seamen and three or four flashily dressed but dangerous looking young men of a type that Thomas had learned to recognise and avoid - small-time hoodlums and racketeers, doing odd jobs along the Cote for the chiefs of the milieu with headquarters in Marseilles. His instinct told him that they were probably armed, if not with guns certainly with knives.

Pinky Kimball spoke a kind of French and Thomas couldn’t understand him, but he could tell from the tone of Kimball’s voice and the grim looks on the faces of the other patrons of the bar that Kimball was insulting them. Kimball had a low opinion of the French when he was drunk. When he was drunk in Italy, he had a low opinion of Italians. When he was drunk in Spain, he had a low opinion of the Spanish. Also, when he was drunk, he seemed to forget how to count and the fact that he was alone and outnumbered at least five to one only spurred him on to greater feats of soornful oratory.

‘He’s going to get himself killed here tonight,’ Dwyer whispered, understanding most of what Kimball was shouting. ‘And us, too, if they find out we’re his friends.’

Thomas grasped Dwyer’s arm firmly and took him with him to Kimball’s side, at the bar,

‘Hi, Pinky,’ he said cheerfully.

Pinky swung around, ready for new enemies. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I’m telling these maquereaux a few home truths for their own good.’

‘Knock it off, Pinky,’ Thomas said. Then, to Dwyer. ‘I’m going to say a few words to these gentlemen. I want you to translate. Clearly and politely.’ He smiled cordially at the other men in the bar, arranged now in an ominous semicircle. ‘As you see, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this Englishman is my friend.’ He waited while Dwyer nervously translated. There was no change in the expressions of the faces lined up around him. ‘He is also drunk,’ Thomas said. ‘Naturally, a man does not like to see a friend damaged, drunk or sober. I will try to prevent him from making any more speeches here, but no matter that he says or has said, there will be no trouble here tonight I am the policeman tonight in this bar and I am keeping the peace. Please translate,’ he said to Dwyer.

As Dwyer was translating, haltingly, Pinky said, disgustedly, “Shit, mate, you’re lowering the flag.’