Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Barber put the map down. “If it’s so easy, what are you paying twenty-five thousand bucks for?” he said.

Smith laughed. “I admit,” he said, “there may be certain little risks. It is improbable, but one never knows. We pay you for the improbability, if you want to put it that way.” He shrugged. “After all, after a whole war you must be somewhat hardened to risks.”

“When do you have to know?” Barber asked.

“Tonight,” Smith said. “If you say no, naturally we have to make other plans. And my Egyptian friend is impatient.”

“Who is we?” Barber asked.

“Naturally,” Smith said, “I have certain colleagues.”

“Who are they?”

Smith made a small regretful gesture. “I am terribly sorry,” he said, “but I cannot tell you.”

“I’ll call you tonight,” said Barber.

“Good.” Smith stood up and buttoned his coat and carefully put the soft Italian felt hat on his head, at a conservative angle. He played gently and appreciatively with the brim. “This afternoon, I will be at the track. Maybe you would like to join me there.”

“Where’re they running today?”

“Auteuil,” Smith said. “Jumping today.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“Perhaps,” Smith said. “There is a mare who is doing the jumps for the first time. I have spoken to the jockey and I have been told the mare has responded in training, but I’ll hear more at three o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Good,” Smith said enthusiastically. “Although it is against my interests, of course, to make you too rich in advance.” He chuckled. “However, for the sake of friendship … Should I leave the maps?”

“Yes,” said Barber.

“Until three o’clock,” Smith said as Barber opened the door. They shook hands, and Smith went out into the corridor, a rich, tweedy, perfumed figure in the impoverished light of the pallid hotel lamps.

Barber locked the door behind him and picked up the packet of maps and spread them on the bed, over the rumpled sheets and blankets. He hadn’t looked at aerial maps for a long time. Northern Egypt. The Mediterranean. The island of Malta. Sicily and the Italian coast. The Gulf of Genoa. The Alpes-Maritimes. He stared at the maps. The Mediterranean looked very wide. He didn’t like to fly over open water in a single-engined plane. In fact, he didn’t like to fly. Since the war, he had flown as little as possible. He hadn’t made any explanations to himself, but when he had had to travel, he had gone by car or train or boat whenever he could.

Twenty-five thousand dollars, he thought.

He folded the maps neatly and put them back into the envelope. At this point, the maps weren’t going to help.

He lay down on the bed again, propped against the pillows, with his hands clasped behind his head. Open water, he thought. Five times. Even that wouldn’t be too bad. But what about the Egyptians? He had been in Cairo briefly during the war. He remembered that at night the policemen walked in pairs, carrying carbines. He didn’t like places where the policemen carried carbines. And Egyptian prisons …

He moved uneasily on the bed.

Who knew how many people were in on a scheme like this? And it would only take one to cook you. One dissatisfied servant or accomplice, one greedy or timid partner … He closed his eyes and almost saw the fat, dark uniformed men with their carbines walking up to the shiny, new little plane.

Or suppose you blew a tire or crumpled a wheel on the landing strip? Who knew what the strip was like, abandoned in the desert since 1943?

Twenty-five thousand dollars.

Or you would think you were making it. The box would be on the seat beside you and the coast of Egypt would be falling off behind you and the sea stretching blue below and ahead and the engine running like a watch—and then the first sign of the patrol. The shimmering dot growing into … What did the Egyptian Air Force fly? Spitfires, left over from the war, he supposed. Coming up swiftly, going twice as fast as you, signalling you to turn around … He lit a cigarette. Two hundred and fifty pounds. Say the box alone—it would have to be really solid—weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. How much did a five-pound note weigh? Would there be a thousand to a pound? Five thousand multiplied by a hundred, with the pound at two-eighty. Close to a million and a half dollars.

His mouth felt dry, and he got up and drank two glasses of water. Then he made himself sit down on the chair, keeping his hands still. If there was an accident, if for any reason you failed to come through with it … If the money was lost, but you were saved. Smith didn’t look like a murderer, although who knew what murderers looked like these days? And who knew what other people he was involved with? My colleagues, as Smith called them, who would then be your colleagues. The wealthy Egyptian, the several men at the old R.A.F. landing strip in the desert, the people who were to set out the lights in the certain arrangement in the hills behind Cannes—How many others, sliding across frontiers, going secretly and illegally from one country to another with guns and gold in their suitcases, the survivors of war, prison, denunciation—How many others whom you didn’t know, whom you would see briefly in the glare of the African sun, as a running figure on a dark French hillside, whom you couldn’t judge or assess and on whom your life depended, who were risking prison, deportation, police bullets for their share of a box full of money …

He jumped up and put on his clothes and went out, locking the door. He didn’t want to sit in the cold, disordered room, staring at the maps.

He walked around the city aimlessly for the rest of the morning, looking blindly into shopwindows and thinking of the things he would buy if he had money. Turning away from a window, he saw a policeman watching him incuriously. Barber looked speculatively at the policeman, who was small, with a mean face and a thin mustache. Looking at the policeman, Barber remembered some of the stories about what they did to suspects when they questioned them in the back rooms of the local prefectures. An American passport wouldn’t do much good if they picked you up with five hundred thousand English pounds under your arm.

This is the first time in my life, Barber thought curiously, walking slowly on the crowded street, that I have contemplated moving over to the other side of the law. He was surprised that he was considering it so calmly. He wondered why that was. Perhaps the movies and the newspapers, he thought. You get so familiar with crime it becomes humanized and accessible. You don’t think about it, but then, suddenly, when it enters your life, you realize that subconsciously you have been accepting the idea of crime as an almost normal accompaniment of everyday life. Policemen must know that, he thought, all at once seeing things from the other side. They must look at all the shut, ordinary faces going past them and they must know how close to theft, murder, and defaulting everyone is, and it must drive them crazy. They must want to arrest everybody.

While Barber was watching the horses move in their stiff-legged, trembling walk around the paddock before the sixth race, he felt a light tap on his shoulder.

“Bertie boy,” he said, without turning around.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Smith said, coming up to the paddock rail beside Barber. “Were you afraid I wouldn’t come?”

“What’s the word from the jock?” Barber asked.

Smith looked around him suspiciously. Then he smiled. “The jockey is confident,” Smith said. “He is betting himself.”

“Which one is it?”

“Number Five.”

Barber looked at No. 5. It was a light-boned chestnut mare with a delicate, gentle head. Her tail and mane were braided, and she walked alertly but not too nervously, well-mannered and with a glistening coat. Her jockey was a man of about forty, with a long, scooped French nose. He was an ugly man, and when he opened his mouth, you saw that most of his front teeth were missing. He wore a maroon cap, with his ears tucked in, and a white silk shirt dotted with maroon stars.