Nightwork

16

Our business done in Lugano, we set out the next morning in the new dark blue Jaguar for Gstaad. I drove this time and enjoyed the sweet performance of the purring machine as we made our way back over the mountains and then sped through winter sunshine through the gentle rolling hills between Zurich and Bern. Fabian sat beside me, contentedly humming a theme that I recognized from the Brahms concerto we had heard a few nights before. From time to time he chuckled. I imagine he was thinking of Herr Steubel in the Lugano jail.

The towns we passed through were clean and orderly, the fields geometrically precise, the buildings, with their great barns and sweeping, slanted eaves, witnesses to a solid, substantial, peaceful life, firmly rooted in a prosperous past. It was a landscape for peace and continuity, and you could not imagine armies charging over it, fugitives fleeing through it, creditors or sheriffs scouring it. I firmly shut out the thought that, if the policemen we occasionally passed and who politely waved us through the immaculate streets knew the truth of the history of the two gentlemen in the gleaming automobile, they would arrest us on sight and escort us immediately to the nearest border.

Since there was no possible way Fabian could risk any more of our money while we were on the road, I was freed, at least for the day, from the erratic nervousness, that fluctuation between trembling hope and taut anxiety that came over me whenever I knew that Fabian was near a telephone or a bank. I hadn’t had to take an Alka-Seltzer that morning and knew that I was going to be pleasantly hungry at lunchtime. As usual, Fabian knew of a beautiful restaurant in Bern and promised me a memorable meal.

The gliding, steady motion of the car, as it so often does, set up agreeable sexual currents in my groin, and as I drove I rehearsed in my mind the gentler moments of my night in Florence with Lily and remembered with pleasure the soft voice of Eunice awaiting me at the end of the day’s journey, the childish freckles across her tilted British nose, her slender throat and nineteenth-century bosom. If she had been at my side at the moment, instead of Fabian, I was sure I would not have hesitated to drive into a courtyard of one of the charming timbered inns that we kept passing, with names like Gasthaus Loewen and Hirschen and Hotel Drei Koenig, and take a room for the afternoon. Well, I comforted myself, pleasure delayed is pleasure increased, and stepped a little harder on the accelerator.

As I glimpsed snow on fields high up from the road, I realized that I was even looking forward to skiing again. The days in the heavy atmosphere of Zurich and the dealings with lawyers and bankers had made me long for clear mountain air and violent exercise.

“Have you ever skied in Gstaad?” Fabian asked me. The sight of the snow must have set his thoughts going along the same track as mine.

“No,” I said. “Only Vermont and St Moritz. But I’ve heard it’s rather easy skiing.”

“You can get killed there,” he said. “Just like anyplace.”

“How do the girls ski?”

“Like English,” he said. “Once more into the breach, dear friends…” He chuckled. “They’ll keep you moving. They’re not like Mrs Sloane.”

“Don’t remind me of her.”

“Didn’t quite work out, did it?”

“That would be one way of putting it”

“I wondered what you bothered with her for. I must say, even before I knew you at all, I didn’t think she was your type.”

“She isn’t. Actually,” I said, “it was your fault”

Fabian looked surprised. “How was that?”

“I thought Sloane was you.” I said.

“What?”

“I thought he’d taken my bag.” I explained about the brown shoes and the red wool tie in the train from Chur.

“Oh, you poor man,” Fabian said. “A week out of your life with Mrs Sloane. I do feel guilty now. Did she stick her tongue in your ear?”

“More or less.”

“I had three nights of that, too. Last year. How did you find out it wasn’t Sloane?”

“I’d rather not say.” As far as I was concerned the story of Sloane’s discovering me, with a cast on my perfectly sound leg, trying to put my foot into his size eight shoe and throwing my shoe and Mrs Sloane’s watch out into the Alpine night was going to die with me.

“You’d rather not say.” Fabian sounded pettish. “We’re partners, remember?”

“I remember. Some other time,” I said. “Perhaps. When we both need a good laugh.”

“I imagine that time will come,” he said softly.

He was silent for a while. We sped along through admirably preserved Swiss pine forests.

“Let me ask you a question, Douglas,” he said finally. “Have you any ties in America?”

I didn’t answer immediately. I thought of Pat Minot, of Evelyn Coates, my brother Hank, of Lake Champlain, the hills of Vermont, room 602. As an afterthought, of Jeremy Hale and Miss Schwarz. “Not really,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Frankly,” he said, “because of Eunice.”

“What about her? Has she said anything?”

“No. But you must admit – to say the least – you’ve been most reticent.”

“Has she complained?”

“Not to me anyway,” he said. “But Lily has hinted that she’s puzzled. After all, she flew all the way from England…” He shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

“You do like girls, Douglas?”

“Oh, come on, now.” I thought of my brother in San Diego and took a turn in the road more sharply than necessary.

“Just asking. These days one never knows. She is an attractive girl, don’t you think?”

“I think. Listen, Miles,” I said, more hotly than I would have wished, “as far as I understand, our partnership doesn’t include my hiring out to stand at stud.”

“That’s a crude way of putting it.” Surprisingly, he chuckled. “Although, I must confess, in my own case, from time to time I haven’t been averse to the practice myself.”

“Christ, Miles,” I said, “I’ve only known the girl a few days.” Even as I said it I mourned for the hypocrisy into which he was forcing me. I had only known Lily four hours before I had gone to her room in Florence. As for Evelyn Coates …

“If you must know,” I said, “I don’t like the role of public fucker.” Finally, I was approaching the truth. “I guess I was brought up differently from you.”

“Come now,” he said. “Lowell, Massachusetts, isn’t all that different from Scranton.”

“Who’re you kidding, Miles?” I snorted. “They wouldn’t find a trace of Lowell in you if they went in with drills.”

“You’d be surprised,” he said softly. “You really would be surprised. Douglas,” he asked, “do you believe me when I tell you that I’ve grown fond of you, that I have your best interests at heart?”

“Partially,” I said.

“To put it more cynically,” he said, “especially when they coincide with my best interests?”

“Ill go along with that,” I said. “Part of the way. What are you driving at now?”

“I think we ought to put you in the marriage market.” His tone was flat, as though it was a decision that he had worked over and had come to after hard thought.

“You’re missing a lot of beautiful scenery,” I said.

“I’m serious. Listen to me carefully. You’re thirty-three, am I right?”

“Right.”

“One way or another in the next year or two you’re bound to get married.”

“Why?”

“Because people do. Because you’re fairly good-looking. Because you’re going to seem like a rich young man. Because some girl will want you as her husband and will pick the right moment to make her move. Because as you’ve told me, you’ve had enough of being lonely. Because you’ll finally want children. Does all that sound reasonable?”

I remembered, painfully, the sense of deprivation, jealousy, loss that I had felt when I had called Jeremy Hale’s home and his daughter had answered the phone and the pure young voice had called, “Daddy, it’s for you.”

“Reasonable enough,” I admitted.

“All I’m suggesting is that you shouldn’t leave it to blind chance, as most idiots do. Control it.”

“How do you do that? Will you go out and arrange a match for me and sign a marriage contract? Is that the way it’s done in the Principality of Lowell these days?”

“Make your jokes if you want to,” Fabian said placidly. “I know they come out of a sense of embarrassment and I forgive them.”

“Don’t be so goddamn superior. Miles,” I warned him.

“The key word, I repeat, is control.” He ignored my little outburst.

“You married for money, if I remember correctly,” I said, “and it didn’t turn out to be so god-awful wonderful.”

“I was young and greedy,” he said, “and I didn’t have a wiser, older man to guide me. I married a shrew and a fool because she was rich and available. I would do everything in my power to prevent you from making the same mistake. The world is full of lovely, lovable girls with rich, indulgent fathers, who want nothing better in life than to marry a handsome, well-mannered, and well-educated young man who is obviously wealthy enough not to be after their money. In a word, you. Good grief, Douglas, you know the old saw – it’s just as easy to love a rich girl as a poor one.”

“If I’m going to be as rich as you say,” I insisted, “what do I have to bother with the whole thing for?”

“Insurance,” Fabian said. “I am not infallible. True, we have what seems to you like a substantial sum to dabble with at the moment. But in the eyes of men of real wealth, we’re paupers. Paupers, Douglas, playing in a penny-ante poker game.”

“I have faith in you,” I said, with just a little irony. “You’ll keep us both out of the poorhouse.”

“Devoutly to be wished,” he said. “But there are no guarantees. Fortunes come and go. We live in an age of upheaval. Just in my own lifetime…” Contemplating his lifetime in the speeding car, he shook his head sorrowfully. “We are caught in cycles of catastrophe. Perhaps right now we are in the lull before the storm. It is best to take what small precautions we can. And without wishing to harp on ugly matters, you’re more vulnerable than most. There’s no way of being sure that you’ll be able to go on forever unrecognized. At any moment, some extremely unpleasant chap may present you with a bill for one hundred thousand dollars. It would be cozier if you could pay it promptly, wouldn’t it?” “Cozier,” I said.

“A wealthy, pretty wife from a good family would be an excellent disguise. It would take a leap of imagination on anyone’s part to guess that the well-mannered young man, moving easily in the cream of international society and married to solid old English money got his start by swiping a packet of hundred-dollar bills from a dead man in a sleazy hotel in New York. Do I make sense?”

“You make sense,” I said reluctantly. “Still – you were talking about mutual interests. What’d be in it for you? You wouldn’t expect me to pay an agent’s commission on my imaginary wife’s dowry, would you?”

“Nothing as crass as that, old man,” Fabian said. “All I’d expect would be that our partnership wouldn’t be allowed to lapse. The most natural thing in the world would be that your wife would be pleased if you would relieve her of the burden of handling her money. And if I know women, and I believe I do, she’d much prefer to have you do it than the usual gaggle of brokers and trustees and hard-eyed bankers women usually have to depend on.”

“Is that where you come in?”

“Exactly.” He beamed, as though he had just presented me with a gift of great value. “Our partnership would continue as before. Whatever new capital you brought in would of course still be reserved to you. The profits would be shared. As simple and as equitable as that. I hope I’ve proved to your satisfaction that I am of some use in the field of investments.” “I won’t even comment on that,” I said. “The workman is worthy of his hire,” he said sententiously. “I don’t think you’d have any trouble explaining that to your wife.”

“That would depend on the wife.”

“It would depend on you, Douglas. I would expect you to choose a wise girl who trusted you and loved you and was anxious to give substantial proof of her devotion to you.”

I thought back over my history with women. “Miles,” I said, “I think you have an exaggerated notion of my charms.”

“As I told you once before, old man,” he said, “you’re much too modest. Dangerously modest.”

“I once took out a pretty waitress in Columbus, Ohio, for three months,” I said, “and all she ever let me do was hold her hand in the movies.”

“You’re moving up in class now, Douglas,” Fabian said. “The women you’re going to meet from now on are attracted by the rich, so inevitably they are surrounded by older men, men who are engaged almost twenty-four hours a day in great affairs, who have very little time for women. Along with them there are the men who do have time for women but whose masculinity very often is ambiguous, to say the least. Or whose interests are transparently pecuniary. Your waitress in Columbus wouldn’t even enter a movie house with any of them. In the circles in which you’re going to move now, any man under forty with an obvious income of his own and who shows the slightest evidence of virility and who has the leisure to have a three-hour lunch with a lady is greeted with piteous gratitude. Believe me, old man, just by being your normal, boyish self, you will be a smashing success. Not the least of the benefits I mean to shower on you is a new conception of your worth. I trust you will ask me to be the best man at your wedding.”

“You’re a calculating bastard, aren’t you?” I said.

“I calculate,” he said calmly, “and I intend to teach you to calculate, too. It’s absurd that the perfectly good verb, to calculate, should have a bad reputation in the modern world. Let schoolgirls and soldiers wallow in romance, Douglas. You calculate.”

“It all seems so – so immoral,” I said.

“I had hoped you would never use that word,” he said. “Was it moral to abscond with all that money from the St Augustine Hotel?”

“No.”

“Was it moral for me to hold onto your suitcase when I saw what was in it?”

“I should say not.”

“Morality is indivisible, my boy. You can’t select certain chunks of it, as though it were a pie waiting on a table to be cut up and served. Let’s face it, Douglas, you and I are no longer permitted the luxury of morality. Let’s understand each other, Douglas; it wasn’t morality that made you run from Herr Steubel – it was a huge reluctance to share a cell with him.”

“You’ve got a fucking argument for everything,” I said. “I’m happy you think that,” he said, smiling. “Let me present some further arguments. Forgive me if I repeat myself in assuring you that whatever I suggest is in your best interests. I haven’t hidden from you that your best interests are my best interests. I am thinking of the quality of life that you and I are eventually going to lead. You agree, I imagine, that, no matter what we do, we will have to do it together – that we will always have to be close together. Just like partners in any enterprise, we will have to be in constant communication. Practically on a day-to-day basis. You do agree, don’t you?” “Yes.”

“For the moment, except for the little disagreement in Lugano, it has been quite pleasant to wander about as we’ve been doing.”

“Very pleasant.” I hadn’t told him about the Alka-Seltzers and the tightness around my waist.

“Eventually, though, it will begin to pall. Going from hotel to hotel, even the best ones in the world, and living out of a suitcase is finally dreary. Traveling is only amusing when you have a home to return to. Even at your age…”

“Please don’t make me sound as though I’m ten years old,” I said.

He laughed. “Don’t be so sensitive. Naturally, to me, you seem enviably young.” He became more serious. “Actually, our differences in age are an asset. I doubt if we would be able to continue for long if we were both fifty or both thirty-three. Rivalries would develop, differences in temperament would arise. This way you can be impatient with me and I can be patient with you. We achieve a useful working balance.”

“I’m not impatient with you,” I said. “Just scared shitless from time to time.”

He laughed again. “I take that as a compliment. By the way, has either Lily or Eunice asked you about what you do for a living?”

“No.”

“Good girls,” he said. “Real ladies. Has anybody asked you? I mean, since the happening in the hotel?”

“One lady. In Washington.” Good old Evelyn Coates.

“What did you answer?”

“I said my family had money.”

“Not bad. At least for the time being. If the question arises in Gstaad, I suggest you tell the same story. Later on, we can invent a new one. Perhaps you can say you’re a managerial consultant. It covers a multitude of murky activities. It’s a favorite cover for CIA agents in Europe. It won’t do you any harm in most circles if that’s what people believe. You have such an honest face, no one will be inclined to doubt anything you say.”

“How about your face?” I asked. “After all, people will be seeing us together all the time. Finally we’ll be held responsible for each other’s faces.”

“My face,” he said reflectively. “Quite often I study it for hours on end in a mirror. Not out of vanity. I assure you. Out of curiosity. Frankly, I’m not quite sure I know what I look like. Moderately honest, perhaps. What’s your opinion?”

“Aging playboy, maybe,” I said cruelly.

He sighed. “Sometimes, Douglas,” he said, “frankness is not the virtue it’s cracked up to be.”

“You asked me.”

“So I did. I asked you,” he said. “I’ll remember not to ask you again.” He was silent for a moment. “I’ve made a conscious effort through the years in a certain direction.”

“What direction?”

“I have tried to make myself look like a semi-retired, English gentleman farmer. Obviously, at least as far as you’re concerned, I haven’t succeeded.”

“I don’t know any retired, English gentlemen farmers. We got very few of them at the Hotel St Augustine.”

“Still, you didn’t guess that I was an American by birth?”

“No.”

“A step in the right direction.” He smoothed his mustache gently. “Have you ever thought of living in England?”

“No. Actually, I haven’t thought of living anyplace. If my eyes hadn’t gone wrong, I suppose I’d have been happy staying in Vermont. Why England?”

“Many Americans find it attractive. Especially in the country, perhaps an hour or so away from London. A polite, uninquiring race of people. No hustle or bustle. Hospitable to eccentrics. First-class theater. If you like horses or salmon fishing…”

“I like horses all right. Especially since Rêve de Minuit.”

“Brave animal. Although I wasn’t thinking in exactly those terms. Eunice’s father, for example, rides to the hounds three times a week.”

“So?”

“He has a handsome estate which happens to be just one hour from London…”

“I’m beginning to catch on,” I said flatly.

“Eunice is quite independent in her own right.”

“What a surprise.”

“For myself,” he said, “I find her extraordinarily pretty. And when she isn’t under the dominating influence of her sister, a lively and intelligent girl…”

“She’s barely looked at me since she arrived,” I said.

“She’ll look at you,” he said. “Never fear.”

I didn’t tell him about the lascivious thoughts that had crossed my mind, with Eunice as target, as we drove steadily through the neat countryside. “So,” I said, “that’s why you asked Lily if she thought Eunice would join us?”

“The notion might have flickered through my subconscious,” he said. “At the time.”

“And now?”

“And now I would advise you to consider it,” he said. “There’s no great hurry. You can weigh the pros and cons.”

“What would Lily have to say about it?”

“From what she’s let drop here and there, I would say that on the whole Lily would react favorably.” He slapped his hands briskly together. We were approaching the outskirts of Bern. “Let’s say no more about it. For the time being. Let us say we’ll allow matters to take their natural course.” He reached forward and took the automobile map out of the glove compartment and studied it for a moment, although wherever we went he seemed to know every turn in the road, every street corner. “Oh, by the way,” he said offhandedly, “did Priscilla Dean slip you her telephone number that night, too?”

“What do you mean, too” I nearly stuttered. “She did to me. I’m not vain enough to suppose she was all that choosy. After all she’s an American. Unfailingly democratic.”

“Yes, she did,” I admitted. “Did you use it?”

I remembered the busy signal. “No,” I said, “I didn’t.” “Lucky man,” Fabian said. “She gave the Moroccan the clap. You turn right at the next corner. We’ll be at the restaurant in five minutes. They make excellent martinis. I think you can indulge yourself in one or two. And have wine with lunch. I’ll drive the rest of the afternoon.”