Nightwork

14

“I think it is time we thought of Italy,” Fabian said. “What do you think of Italy, dear?”

“I like it,” Lily said.

We were sitting in a restaurant called the Chateau Madrid, high up on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean. The lights of Nice and the coastal settlements far below us twinkled in the lavender evening air. We were waiting for our dinner and drinking champagne. We had also drunk a considerable amount of champagne on the Train Bleu down from Paris the night before. I was beginning to develop a taste for Moet & Chandon. Old man Coombs had been with us on the train and most of the afternoon. After more than two weeks of workouts, Rêve de Minuit had finally told the trainer he was ready to run. And run he had. He had come in first by a neck that afternoon in the fourth race at Cagnes, the track outside Nice, where they had a winter meeting. The purse had been a hundred thousand francs, about twenty thousand dollars. Jack Coombs had lived up to his reputation for picking appropriate races. Unfortunately, he had had to fly back to Paris immediately after the race, so we were denied the pleasure of his company at dinner. I was curious to see just how many bottles of champagne, interspersed with shots of cognac, the old man could down in one full day.

We had also bet five thousand francs on the nose of Rêve de Minuit, at six to one. “For sentiment’s sake,” Fabian had said, as we went to the window. In New York I had been gambling for my life with every two-dollar bet. Obviously, as a guiding principle, sentiment was more profitable than survival at a racetrack.

When we had gone back to our hotel in Nice to change our clothes for dinner, Fabian had called Paris and Kentucky. From Paris he had learned that The Sleeping Prince had finished shooting that evening and that, after a showing of the incomplete rough cut the night before, representatives of distributors in West Germany and Japan had already put in substantial bids. “More than enough,” Fabian told me with some satisfaction, “to cover our investment. And with the rest of the world still to go. Nadine is ecstatic. She is even contemplating starting on a clean picture.” As an afterthought, he mentioned to me that the price of gold had gone up five points that day.

His friend in Kentucky had been impressed with the news of Rêve de Minuits victory, but wanted to consult a partner before making a firm offer. He would call back later, at the restaurant.

The champagne, the view, the triumph of the afternoon, the price of gold, the news from Nadine, the prospect of a splendid meal, the company of Lily Abbott, sitting between us in all her beauty, made me feel an enormous friendliness toward the entire world, with an especial warmth toward the man who had stolen my bag at the Zurich airport. Enemies and allies, I was discovering, as in the case of the German and Japanese movie people, were interchangeable entities.

If Rêve de Minuit hadn’t won, I suppose I would have been ready to toss Fabian over the cliff into the sea a thousand feet below. But the horse had won and I looked across the table fondly at the handsome, mustached face.

“Did you mention a possible price to Kentucky?” I asked.

“I said in the neighborhood of fifty,” Fabian said.

“Fifty what?”

“Thousand dollars.” He sounded annoyed.

“Don’t you think that’s a little steep for a six-thousand-dollar horse?” I asked. “We don’t want to scare him off.”

“Actually, Douglas,” Fabian sipped appreciatively at his glass, “he’s not a six-thousand-dollar horse. I have a little confession to make. I paid fifteen thousand for him.”

“But you told me…”

“I know I told you. I just thought at the time that it might be wiser to lead you along gently. If you doubt me, I can show you the bill of sale.”

“I no longer doubt you,” I said. It was almost true.

“How about the fifteen thousand for the picture? Were you leading me along on that, too?”

“On my honor, old man.” He raised his glass. “To Rêve de Minuit.” We all clinked glasses happily. I had grown attached to the animal in the time that it took him to come from dead last at the turn, and then go on to lead the pack in the final three strides, and I told Fabian I hated to see him go.

“I’m afraid you have the instincts of a bankrupt, my friend,” Fabian had said. “You are not yet sufficiently rich to love horses enough to hold onto them. The same, I may say, goes for ladies.” He looked meaningfully at Lily. There had been a noticeable tension between them in Paris. He had had three or four business conferences too many at odd hours with Nadine Bonheur. For myself, I had carefully avoided going to the studio where the movie was being shot and had not seen any of the people involved in it again. The busy signal on the telephone still tolled its message to me.

“What we’ll do,” Fabian was saying, “is buy a car. Do you have any objection to Jaguars?”

Neither Lily nor I had any objection to Jaguars.

“A Mercedes might be too flashy,” he said. “We do not wish to appear nouveau riche. Anyway, I like to do what I can for the poor old Brits.”

“Hear, hear,” Lily said.

The waiter came with the caviar. “Just lemon, please,” Fabian said, waving away the platter with chopped hard-boiled eggs and onion on it. “Let us not dilute the pleasure.”

The waiter spooned mounds of grayish pearls on our plates. This was only the fourth time in my life that I had tasted caviar. I remembered the other three times clearly.

“We will fly to Zurich,” Fabian said. “I have a little business to do in that fair city. Well pick up the car there. I think the only honest automobile dealers in the world can be found in Switzerland. Besides, there’s a first-class hotel there I’d like Douglas to see.”

Baby, I thought, if they could see good old Miles Fabian back in Lowell, Massachusetts, now. Or if Drusack could see me. Then I was sorry I had thought of Drusack. Fabian had not yet asked me how I had come to be carrying seventy thousand dollars in my suitcase and I hadn’t told him. Actually, there were many things we had to talk about. In Paris Fabian had spent most of his time around the movie set. Watching the shop, as he put it, while I wandered around sightseeing, sinking blissfully into the city. When we were together. Lily was almost always present and neither of us, I was sure, wanted her to hear about the details of our partnership, as I now thought of it. As for her, if she considered it odd that her lover of one night in Florence had turned up promptly in another country as the close friend and associate of her lover of some years, she gave no sign. As I was to find out, as long as she was fed and admired and taken to interesting places, she asked no questions. She had an aristocratic disregard for the machinery behind events. She was the sort of woman you could never imagine in a kitchen or an office.

“I would like to bring up a delicate subject,” Fabian said, expertly loading a portion of caviar on his toast, not losing a single egg. “It is a question of numbers. Three to be exact.” He looked first at Lily, then at me. “Do you get my drift?”

“No,” I said.

Lily said nothing.

“It is the wrong number for traveling,” Fabian went on. “It can lead to division, subterfuge, jealousy, tragedy.”

“I see what you mean,” I said, feeling a hot flush begin at my collar.

“I suppose you agree, Douglas, that Lily here is a beautiful woman.”

I nodded.

“And Douglas is a most attractive young man,” Fabian said, his tone paternal and kindly. “And will become more so as he becomes accustomed to wealth and after we supply him with a fresh wardrobe, which I intend to do as soon as we reach Rome.”

“Yes,” Lily said. She looked demurely down at her plate.

“We must face the truth. I am an older man. I hope nobody is going to contradict me.”

Nobody contradicted him.

“The chances of mischief are plain,” Fabian helped himself to more caviar. “If there is a lady you have in mind as a fit traveling companion, Douglas, why don’t you get in touch with her?”

The image of Pat came immediately to my mind, in a wave of tenderness, mingled with regret. I had rarely even thought of her during the years at the St Augustine. The protective, icy numbness that had come over me that last day in Vermont was melting fast in the company of Lily and Fabian. I had to recognize that, like it or not, I was once again exposed to old emotions, old loyalties, to the memories of distant pleasure. But even if Pat were free, I couldn’t imagine her accepting my relationship with Fabian, whatever it was or turned out to be, or his blatantly high style of living. The girl who donated a portion of her small salary as a schoolteacher to the refugees of Biafra could hardly be expected to approve of the man sitting at the table spooning up caviar. Or of me, for that matter. Evelyn Coates was a more likely candidate for our little group and would be an interesting match for both Lily and Fabian, but who knew which Evelyn Coates would turn up – the surprisingly gentle woman of the last Sunday night in my hotel room or the abrasive Washington operator and business-like rapist I had met at the Hales’ cocktail party? I also had to consider the possibility that, one way or another, Fabian and I might eventually be exposed. It would hardly do her career as a government lawyer any good if one day she was publicly branded as the consort of a pair of thieves.

“I’m afraid there’s nobody I can think of at the moment,” I said.

I thought I detected the ghost of a smile pass across Lily’s face.

“Lily,” Fabian said, “what is your sister Eunice doing these days?”

“Going through the Coldstream Guards in London,” Lily said. “Or the Irish Guards. I forget who’s on duty at the palace.”

“Do you think it would amuse her to join our party for a while?”

“Indeed,” Lily said.

“Do you think that if you sent her a wire she’d be prepared to meet us tomorrow night at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich?”

“Very likely,” Lily said. “Eunice travels light. I’ll send the wire when we get back to the hotel.”

“Is that okay with you, Douglas?”

“Why not?” It seemed terribly cold-blooded to me, but I was in cold-blooded company. When in Rome. Caviar and circuses.

The maître d’hôtel came over to our table to tell Fabian that there was a call for him from America. “What do you say, Douglas?” Fabian asked as he got up from the table. “How low are you ready to go? How about forty, if necessary?”

“I’ll leave it up to you,” I said. “I’ve never sold a horse before.”

“Neither have I.” Fabian smiled. “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

He followed the maître d’hôtel off the terrace.

The only sound was the crunching of Lily’s teeth on her toast, ladylike, but firm. The sound made me nervous. I could feel her looking speculatively at me. “Were you the one,” she asked, “who broke the lamp on Miles’ head?”

“Did he say I did?”

“He said there’d been a slight misunderstanding.”

“Why don’t we let it go at that?”

“If you say so.” There was more crunching. “Have you told him about Florence?”

“No. Have you?”

“I’m not an idiot,” she said.

“Does he suspect?”

“He’s too proud to suspect.”

“And where do we go from here?” “To Eunice,” Lily said calmly. “You’ll like Eunice. Every man does. For a month or so. I look forward to our holiday.” “When do you have to go back to Jock?” She glanced at me sharply. “How do you know about Jock?”

“Never mind,” I said. She had hurt me with her debonair assignment of me to her sister and I wanted to get a little of my own back.

“Miles says he’s never going to play bridge or backgammon again. Do you know anything about that?”

“I have a general idea,” I said.

“But you’re not going to tell me what it is.”

“No.”

“He’s a complicated man, Miles,” she said. “He has an abiding fondness for money. Anybody’s money. Be careful of him.”

“Thanks. I shall be.”

She leaned over and touched my hand. “I had a lovely time in Florence,” she said softly.

For a tortured moment I wanted to grab her and plead with her to get up from the table and flee with me. “Lily…” I said thickly.

She withdrew her hand. “Don’t be oversusceptible, love,” she said. “Remember that.”

Fabian came back, his face grave. “I had to come down,” he said as he took his seat. He helped himself to more caviar. “All the way to forty-five.” He grinned boyishly. “I think we need another bottle of champagne.”

I was at the big, carved, oak desk in my room at the hotel. I had said good night at my door to Lily and Fabian. They had the suite next to me. We both overlooked the Mediterranean. Lily had kissed me on the cheek and Fabian had shaken my hand. “Get a good night’s sleep, old boy,” he had said. “I want to do some sight-seeing in the morning before we take off for Zurich.” I was feeling a little giddy from all the champagne, but I didn’t feel like sleeping. I took a sheet of the hotel stationery from the drawer of the desk and began to write on it almost at random.

Stake, I wrote, 20,000. Gold – 15,000, Bridge and backgammon – 36,000 … Movie?

I stared at what I had written, half-hypnotized. Before this, even when I was making a comfortable living at the airline, I had never bothered to add up my check-book and certainly had not known within a hundred dollars what I was worth or even how much I had in my pocket at any given time. Now I resolved to keep an accounting every week. Or, with the way things were going, every day. I had discovered one of the deepest pleasures of wealth – addition. The numbers on the page gave me a greater satisfaction than I could hope to get from buying anything with the money the numbers represented. Briefly, I wondered if I should consider this a vice and be ashamed. I would wrestle with this at a later time.

I heard an unmistakable sound from the next room and winced. How far could I trust Fabian? His attitude toward money, his own and that of others, was, to say the least, cavalier. And there was nothing in what I knew of his character and background that suggested an unwavering commitment to fiscal honesty. Tomorrow I would demand that we write out a firm legal document. But no matter what we had on paper, I knew I would have to keep him in sight at all times.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my brother Hank, sat at his adding machines, working on other people’s money.

In the morning we finally had a chance to talk. Lily was going to the coiffeur to get her hair done and Fabian said he wanted to take me to see the Maeght Museum at St-Paul-de-Vence.

We set out from Nice, with Fabian at the wheel of the rented car. There was little traffic, the sea was calm on our left, the morning bright. Fabian drove safely, taking no risks, and I relaxed beside him, the euphoria of the evening before not yet dispelled by daylight. We drove in silence until we got out of Nice and past the airport. Then Fabian said, “Don’t you think I should know the circumstances?”

“What circumstances?” I asked, although I could guess what he meant.

“How the money came into your hands. Why you felt you had to leave the country. I imagine there was some danger involved. In a way, now, I may be equally endangered, wouldn’t you say?”

“To a certain extent,” I said.

He nodded. We were climbing into the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes, the road winding through stands of pine, olive groves, and vineyards, the air spiced and fragrant. In that innocent countryside, under the Mediterranean sun, the idea of danger was incongruous, the haunted dark streets of night-time New York remote, another world. I would have preferred to keep quiet, not because I wanted to hide the facts, but from a desire to enjoy the splendid present, unshadowed by memory. Still, Fabian had a right to know. As we drove slowly, higher and higher into the flowered hills, I told him everything, from beginning to end.

He listened in silence until I had finished, then said, “Supposing we were to continue to be as successful in our – our operations” – he smiled – “as we have been until now. Supposing after a while we could afford to give back the hundred thousand and still have a decent amount left for our own use… Would you be inclined to try to find out who the original owner was and return the money to his heirs?”

“No,” I said. “I would not be inclined.”

“An excellent answer,” he said. “I don’t see how it could be done without putting someone on your trail. On our trail. There must be a limit to wanton curiosity. Has there been any indication that people have been searching for you?”

“Only what happened to Drusack.”

“I would take that as fair warning.” Fabian made a little grimace. “Have you ever had anything to do with criminals before this?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. That might be an advantage. We don’t know how they think, so we won’t fall into the dangerous pattern of trying to outwit them. Still, I feel that so far you’ve done the right thing. Keeping constantly on the move, I mean. For a while, it would be wise to continue. You don’t mind traveling, do you?”

“I love it,” I said. “Especially now that I can afford it.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the people involved might not have been criminals?”

“No.”

“I read in the newspapers some time back about a man who was killed in an airplane crash and was found with sixty thousand dollars on him. He was a prominent Republican and he was on his way to Republican headquarters in California. It was during Elsenhower’s second campaign. The money you found might have been a campaign contribution that had to be kept secret.”

“Possibly,” I said. “Only I don’t see any prominent Republican coming into the Hotel St Augustine for any reason whatsoever.”

“Well…” Fabian shrugged. “Let’s hope that we never find out whose money it was, or who was supposed to get it. Do you think you’ll ever see the twenty-five thousand dollars you loaned your brother?”

“No.”

“You’re a generous man. I approve of that. That’s one of the nicest things about wealth. It leads to generosity.” We were entering the grounds of the museum now. “For example, this,” Fabian said. “Superb building. Glorious collection, marvelously displayed. What a satisfactory gesture it must have been to sign the check that made it all possible.”

He parked the car and we got out and started walking up toward the severely beautiful building set on the crest of a hill, surrounded by a green park in which huge angular statues were set, the rustling foliage of the trees and bushes all around them making them seem somehow light and almost on the verge of moving themselves.

Inside the museum, which was nearly deserted, I was more puzzled than anything else by the collection. I had never been much of a museum-goer, and what taste I had in art was for traditional painters and sculptors. Here I was confronted with shapes that existed only in the minds of the artists, with splotches on canvas, distortions of everyday objects and the human form that made very little sense to me. Fabian, on the other hand, went slowly from one work to another, not speaking, his face studious, engrossed. When we finally went out and started toward our car, he sighed deeply, as though recovering from some tremendous effort. “What a treasure-house,” he said. “All that energy, that struggle, that reaching out, that demented humor, all collected in one place. How did you like it?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t understand most of it.”

He laughed. “The last honest man,” he said. “Well, I see that you and I are going to put in a lot of museum time. You eventually cross a threshold of emotion – mostly just by looking. But it’s like almost any valuable accomplishment – it has to be learned.”

“Is it worth it?” I knew I sounded like a Philistine, but I resented his assumption that it was my duty to be taught and his to teach. After all, if it hadn’t been for my money, he wouldn’t have been on the coast of the Mediterranean that morning, but back in St Moritz, scrambling at the bridge table and the backgammon board for enough money to pay his hotel bill.

“To me it’s worth it,” he said. He put his hand on my arm gently. “Don’t underestimate the joys of the spirit, Douglas. Man does not live by caviar alone.”

We stopped at a cafe on the side of the square of St-Paul-de-Vence and sat at a table outside and had a bottle of white wine and watched some old men playing boules under the trees in the square, moving in and out of sunlight, their voices echoing hoarsely off the old, rust-colored wall behind them that had been part of the fortifications of the town in the Middle Ages. We sipped the cold wine slowly, rejoicing in idleness, in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything, watching a game whose outcome would bring no profit or pain to anyone.

“Do not dilute the pleasure,” I said. “Do you remember who said that?”

Fabian laughed. “I do indeed.” Then, after a moment, “On that subject – let me ask you a question. What is your conception of money?”

I shrugged. “I guess I never really thought about it. I don’t think I have a conception. That’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Fabian said.

“If I asked you the same question, what would your answer be?”

“A conception of money,” Fabian said, “doesn’t exist in a pure state. I mean you have to know what you think of the world in general before you can hope to have a clear notion about money. For example, your view of the world, from what you’ve told me, changed in one day. Am I right?”

“The day in the doctor’s office,” I said. “Yes.” “Wouldn’t you say that before that day you had one conception of what money meant to you and after it another?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t had any dramatic changes of outlook like that,” Fabian said. “A long time ago I decided that the world was a place of infinite injustice. What have I seen and lived through? Wars in which millions of the innocent perished, holocausts, droughts, failures of all kinds, corruption in high places, the enrichment of thieves, the geometric multiplication of victims. And nothing I could possibly do to alter or alleviate any of it. I am not a pain-seeker or reformer, and, even if I were, no conceivable good would come out of my suffering or preaching. So – my intention has always been to try to avoid joining the ranks of the victims. As far as I could ever see, the people who avoided being victims had at least one thing in common. Money. So my conception of money began with that one thing – freedom. Freedom to move. To be one’s own man. Freedom to say, screw you, Jack, at the appropriate moment. A poor man is a rat in a maze. His choices are made for him by a power beyond himself. He becomes a machine whose fuel is hunger. His satisfactions are pitifully restricted. Of course there is always the exceptional rat who breaks out of the maze, driven most often by an exceptional and uncommon hunger. Or by accident. Or luck. Like you and me. Well, I don’t pretend that the entire human race is – or should be – satisfied with the same things. There are men who want power and who will abase themselves, betray their mothers, kill for it. Regard certain of our presidents and the colonels who rule most of the world today. There are saints who will commit themselves to the fire rather than deny some truth that they believe has been vouchsafed them. There are men who wear themselves out with ulcers and heart attacks before the age of sixty for the ludicrous distinction of running an assembly line, an advertising agency, a brokerage house. I’ll say nothing about the women who allow themselves to become drudges for love, or whores out of pure laziness. When you were earning your living as a pilot, I imagine you believed yourself happy.”

“Very,” I said.

“I dislike flying,” Fabian said. “I am either bored in the air or frightened. Everyone to his own satisfactions. Mine, I’m afraid, are banal and selfish. I hate to work; I like the company of elegant women; I enjoy traveling, with a certain emphasis on fine, old-fashioned hotels; I have a collector’s instinct, which up to now I have had to suppress. None of this is particularly admirable, but I’m not running as an admirable entry. Actually, since we’re partners, I’d prefer it if we could share the same tastes. It would reduce the probability of friction between us.” He looked at me speculatively. “Do you consider yourself admirable?”

I thought for a moment, trying to be honest with myself. “I guess I never thought about it one way or another. I guess you could say it never occurred to me to ask myself if I was either admirable or unadmirable.”

“I find you dangerously modest, Douglas,” Fabian said. “At a crucial moment you may turn out to be a dreadful drag. Modesty and money don’t go well together. I like money, as you can guess, but I am rather bored by the process of accumulating it and am deeply bored by most of the people who spend the best part of their lives doing so. My feeling about the world of money is that it is like a loosely guarded city which should be raided sporadically by outsiders, non-citadins, like me, who aren’t bound by any of its laws or moral pretensions. Thanks to you, Douglas, and the happy accident that led you and myself to buy identical bags, I may now be able to live up to my dearest image of myself. Now – about you — Although you’re over thirty, there’s something – I hope you won’t take this unkindly – something youthful, almost adolescent – unformed, perhaps – that I sense in your character. If I may say so, as a man who has always had a direction, I sense a lack of direction in you. Am I unfair in saying that?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe it’s not a lack of direction, but a confusion of directions.”

“Perhaps that’s it,” Fabian said. “Perhaps you’re not yet ready to accept the consequences of the gesture that you have made.”

“What gesture?” I asked, puzzled.

“The night in the Hotel St Augustine. Let me ask you a question. Supposing you had come across that dead man, with all that money in the room, before your eyes went bad, while you still were flying, still were playing with the idea of marriage – would you have done what you did?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“There’s one thing you can always depend on,” Fabian said. “The wrong man will always be in the wrong place at the right moment.” He poured some more wine for himself. “As for me – there never was a time in my whole life that I would have hesitated for a second. Well, all that’s in the past. We want to move as far away as possible from the original source, to cover it up, so to speak, with so much fresh capital, that people will never speculate about just how we started in the first place. Don’t you agree?”

“In principle, yes,” I said. “But just how do you propose to do it? We can’t depend upon buying winning horses every day…”

“No,” Fabian said. “I must admit, we have to regard that as unusual.”

“And you’ve told me you’re never going to play bridge or backgammon again.”

“No. The people I had to associate with depressed me. And the deception I had to practice made me a little ashamed of myself. Duplicity is unpleasant for a man who, by his own lights, would like to have a high opinion of himself. I sat down every night with the cold intention of taking their money away from them and nothing more – but I had to pretend to be friendly with them, be interested in them and their families, enjoy dining with them… I really was getting too old for all that. Money…” He pronounced the word as though it were a symbol for a problem in mathematics that had to be solved. “To get the most pleasure out of money, it is best not to have to think about it most of the time. Not to have to keep on making it, with your own efforts or your own luck. In our case, that would mean investing our capital in such a way as to ensure us a comfortable income over the years. By the way, Douglas, what is your notion of a comfortable yearly income?”

“Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars,” I said.

Fabian laughed. “Come, come, man, raise your sights a little.”

“What would you say?”

“One hundred at least,” Fabian said.

“That’ll take some doing,” I said.

“Yes, it will. And entail some risks. From time to time it will also take nerve. And no matter what happens, no recriminations. And certainly no more stilettos.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident of the future than I actually was. “I’ll go along.”

“We share all decisions,” Fabian said. “I’m saying this as a warning to both of us.”

“I understand. Miles,” I said, “I’d like something in writing.”

He looked at me as though I had slapped him. “Douglas, my boy…” he said sorrowfully.

“It’s either that,” I said, “or I’m getting out right now.”

“Don’t you trust me?” he asked. “Haven’t I been absolutely honest with you?”

“After I hit you over the head with a lamp,” I said. Tactfully, I didn’t bring up the subject of the six-thousand-dollar horse that had actually cost fifteen thousand. “Well, what’s it to be?”

“Putting something in writing always leads to ugly differences of interpretation. I have an instinctive distaste for documents. I prefer a simple, candid, manly handshake.” He extended his hand toward me across the table. I kept my hands at my sides.

“If you insist.” He withdrew his hand. “In Zurich, we’ll put it all into cold legal language. I hope neither of us lives to regret it.” He looked at his watch. “Lily will be waiting for us for lunch.” He stood up. I took out my wallet to pay for the wine, but he stopped me and dropped some coins on the table. “My pleasure,” he said.