Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Self-pity, Beauchurch thought, combined with deep self-satisfaction. He liked the man less and less, the more he talked.

“There’s something else, Tom,” Ginette said. She turned to Mestre. “You don’t mind if I tell him, do you, Claude?”

“If you think it will interest him …” Claude shrugged. “Americans are not liable to take things like that very seriously.”

“I’m a very serious American,” Beauchurch said, letting his annoyance show for the first time. “I read Time magazine almost every week.”

“Now you are making fun of me,” Mestre said. “I do not blame you. It is my fault.” He looked around him vaguely. “Is it possible to have another drink?”

Beauchurch signaled the waiter and made a circular motion with his hand, indicating another round for everyone. “What’s the something else, Ginette?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation from his voice.

“The letters and the telephone calls,” Ginette said.

“What letters and telephone calls?”

“Threatening to kill me,” Mestre said lightly. “The letters are usually addressed to me. The telephone calls to my wife. Naturally, being a woman, she gets rather upset. Especially since there are periods during which she receives five or six a day.”

“Who writes them?” Beauchurch asked. He wished he could disbelieve the man, but there was something about the way he was talking now that put the seal of truth upon what he said. “Who makes the calls?”

Mestre shrugged. “Who knows? Cranks, elderly widows, practical jokers, retired army officers, assassins.… They never sign their names, of course. It is not terribly new. The anonymous letter has always played an honorable role in French literature.”

“Do you think they mean it?” Beauchurch asked.

“Sometimes.” Mestre looked up as the waiter came over with the drinks and didn’t speak again until the man had gone off once more. “When I am tired or depressed or it’s raining, I think they mean it. At any rate, some of them undoubtedly mean it.”

“What do you do about it?”

“Nothing,” Mestre said, sounding surprised. “What is there to do?”

“You could go to the police, for one thing,” Beauchurch said.

“In America one would undoubtedly go to the police,” Mestre said. “Here …” He made a grimace and took a long sip of his drink. “I am not on particularly good terms with the police at the moment. In fact, I am of the opinion that my mail is often opened and from time to time I am followed and my phone is tapped.”

“That’s disgraceful,” Beauchurch said.

“I like your husband,” Mestre said lightly, almost playfully, to Ginette. “He finds things like this disgraceful. It is very American.”

“We’ve had times like that in America, too,” Beauchurch said, defending the level of venality of his native land. “And not so long ago, either.”

“I know, I know,” Mestre said. “I do not mean to imply that I believe that America is a fairyland which is completely untouched by the special diseases of our age. Still, as I say, in America, one would go to the police.…”

“Do you really think that somebody may try to kill you?” Beauchurch asked. Irrelevantly, he thought, This is a hell of a way to be spending a holiday, talking about things like this.

“Not just now perhaps,” Mestre said calmly, as though he were surveying, with judicial impartiality, an abstract problem that had no personal relation to him. “But once the trouble starts, almost certainly.”

“Just how do you think the trouble will start?” Somehow, after the weeks of enjoying the peaceful glittering city, with its overflowing shops, its air of bustling activity, its range of pleasures, it was impossible to believe that it would soon be given over to violence and bloodshed.

“How will it start?” Mestre repeated. He squinted thoughtfully over Beauchurch’s shoulder into the mahogany depths of the bar, as though trying to formulate there some picture of the future that lay in wait for the city. “I am not in on the councils of the heroes, you understand,” he smiled slightly, “so I can only speculate. It depends upon the General, of course. On the state of his health—physical and political. On his powers of survival. At the moment, we are in a period of détente . The plotters are waiting. The murderers remain more or less under cover. But if the General is brought down—by failure, by overconfidence, by old age, by anything—then we can expect certain events to follow.”

“What?” Beauchurch asked.

“Perhaps an uprising of the troops in Algiers,” Mestre said, “a landing on the aerodromes, a movement among the police, the emergence of secretly armed and trained bodies of commandoes in various parts of the country, to take over the seats of government and the radio and television stations, the capture or assassination of certain leading political figures. The usual. There is no mystery any more about these things. Only the timing is problematical.”

Beauchurch turned to his wife. “Do you believe all this?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do any of your other friends talk like this?”

“Almost all of them,” she said.

“And you”—Beauchurch turned back, almost accusingly to Mestre—“what do you intend to do if it happens?”

“I shall offer my services to the government,” Mestre said. “That is, if I can find the government, and if it has not already locked me up somewhere by then.”

“Christ,” Beauchurch said, “what a thing it is to be a Frenchman.”

“It has its compensations,” Mestre said. “Some of the time.”

“All right,” Beauchurch said to Ginette, “I’m briefed. Only I don’t know what for. Why did you want me to hear all this?”

There was an exchange of glances between Mestre and Ginette, and once more Beauchurch had the fleeting sensation of being an outsider, conspired against.

Mestre leaned over and touched Ginette’s hand lightly. “Permit me to explain, my dear,” he said. He lifted his glass and drank, like an orator playing for time. “Mr. Beauchurch,” he began formally, “your wife has been good enough to suggest that perhaps you would be willing to help me.…” He waited for Beauchurch to say something, but Beauchurch remained unhelpfully silent.

“It is, unhappily, a question of money,” Mestre said.

Good God, Beauchurch thought, all this lead-up to ask for a loan! He was annoyed with Ginette for having gone along with this elaborate manipulation. He could feel his face settling into refusing lines as he waited for Mestre to continue.

“If anything happens,” Mestre went on, looking uncomfortable, “as I believe it will, I may have to try to escape from France. Or at least, my wife and my children would be better off out of the country. In any event, I would feel considerably relieved if I had some money safely in another country, to tide me over at least some part of the period of exile that I foresee as a possibility for myself and my family. A numbered account in Switzerland, for example, that either my wife or myself could draw on without formalities.…”

“I told Claude we were going to Geneva on Thursday,” Ginette said. There was a tone of defiance in her voice, Beauchurch thought, as she said this. “It would be the simplest thing in the world for us to do.”

“Now let me get this straight,” Beauchurch said to Ginette. “Have you promised your friend that we would lend him a certain amount of money for—” Mestre looked stupefied as he listened, and Beauchurch stopped in midsentence. “Have I misunderstood something?” he asked.

“I’m afraid you have,” Mestre said. He seemed embarrassed and angry. “There was never any question of a loan. What right would I have to ask a man I had never seen in my life to lend me even a hundred francs?”