Nightwork

8

I got my passport the next day. Mr. Hale was not in his office, but he had left all the necessary instructions. Miss Schwartz aid. I was fairly certain that Mr. Hale was not in his office because by the end of the weekend he had come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be comfortable seeing me again. Not in the presence of Miss Schwartz. It was not the first time that a man had regretted in daylight the dark confidences of midnight.

Miss Schwartz was as beautiful and melodious as ever, but I didn’t envy Jeremy Hale.

I cashed the checks from the poker game, and with the bills in my pocket went to a department store and bought two strong, but lightweight suitcases. They were handsome pieces of luggage, dark blue with red piping, one large, the other an overnight bag. They were expensive, but I was looking for security, not bargains, at the moment. I also bought a roomy leather attaché case, with a sturdy lock. The case fitted snugly into the larger of the two bags. I was now armed for travel, Ulysses with the black ships caulked and a fair wind behind him, unknown perils beyond the next promontory.

The salesman asked what numbers I wanted to put into the combination. “It’s advisable,” he said, “to use a number that means something to you, that you won’t forget.”

“Six-O-Two,” I said. It was a number that meant quite a bit to me and I doubted that I ever would forget it.

With the new bags in the trunk of the rented car, I was on my way toward New York by three o’clock in the afternoon. I had called my brother and told him to meet me outside my bank at ten o’clock the next morning.

I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Trenton for the night. I wasn’t going to stay in New York any longer than I had to.

Knowing that I was doing the wrong thing, accumulating regrets for the future, I called Evelyn’s number in Washington. I didn’t know what I could say to her, but I wanted to hear the sound of her voice. I let the phone ring a dozen times. Luckily, there was no one home.

When I drove through the New York City traffic up Park Avenue, toward the bank, I was stopped at a light at the corner of the cross street on which the St Augustine was located. On an impulse, when the light turned green, I turned down the street. I could feel the skin on the back of my neck prickling as I drove slowly past the falsely impressive canopied entrance, and I even played with the idea of going in and asking for Drusack. It was not a case of nostalgia. There were some questions that he might be able to answer by now. And his predictable rage would have brightened my morning. If there had been a place to park, I think I would have been foolish enough to go in. But the whole street was solidly blocked and I drove on.

Hank was huddled down into his overcoat, with the collar turned up, looking cold and miserable in the biting wind, when I walked up to the bank. If I were a policeman, I thought, I would suspect him of something, a small, mean crime, petty forgery, abuse of widow’s confidence, peddling fraudulent jewelry.

His face lit up when he saw me, as though he had doubted that I would ever arrive, and he took a step toward me, but I didn’t stop. “Meet me at the next corner uptown,” I said as I passed him. “I’ll only be a minute.” Unless someone had been, standing near and watching closely, it couldn’t have seemed that there was any connection between us. I had the uncomfortable feeling that the city was one giant eye, focused on me.

In the vault, the same old man, paler than ever, took my key and, using his own along with it, opened my safe and handed me the steel box. He led me back to the curtained cubicle and left me there. I counted out the two hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills and put them in a manila envelope that I had bought in Washington. I was becoming an important consumer of manila envelopes and was no doubt giving a lift to the entire industry.

Hank was waiting for me at the corner, in front of a coffee shop, looking colder than ever. He eyed the manila envelope under my arm fearfully, as though it might explode at any instant. The plate-glass window of the shop was steamed over, but I could see that the place was almost empty. I motioned for Hank to follow me and we went in. I chose a table in the rear and put the manila envelope down and took off my coat. It was suffocatingly hot in the restaurant, but Hank sat down opposite me without taking off his coat or the old, sweat-stained gray slouch hat he was wearing, set squarely and unfashionably on his head. His eyes behind the glasses that dug into the sides of his nose were leaking tears from the cold. He had an old commuter’s face, I thought, the kind of face, weathered by years of anxiety and stale indoor air, that you see on men standing on windy station platforms on dark winter mornings, patient as donkeys, weary long before the day’s work ever begins. I pitied him and could hardly wait to get rid of him.

Whatever happens, I thought, I am not going to look like that when I’m his age. We still didn’t say a word to each other.

When the waitress came over, I asked for a cup of coffee. “What I need is a drink,” Hank said, but he settled for coffee, too.

Against the partition at the end of the small table, there was a small slot for coins and a selector for the juke box near the entrance. I put in two dimes and jabbed the selector at random. By the time the waitress came back with our coffees, the juke box was playing so loudly that nobody could have heard me at the next table unless I shouted.

Hank drank his coffee greedily. It did not smell of cinnamon or rum or oranges, “I puked twice this morning,” he said.

“The money is in there.” I tapped the envelope.

“Christ, Doug,” Hank said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So do I,” I said. “Anyway, it’s yours now. I’ll leave first. Give me ten minutes and then you can go.” I didn’t want him to see my rented car and note the license number. I hadn’t planned any of this and didn’t believe it was really necessary, but caution was becoming automatic with me.

“You’ll never regret this,” he said.

“No, I won’t,” I said.

With a crumpled handkerchief he wiped at the cold-tears streaming from his eyes. “I told the two fellows that I was coming up with the money this week,” he said. “They’re delirious with joy. They’re going for the deal. They didn’t say boo.” He opened his overcoat and fished past an old gray muffler that hung around his neck like a dead snake. He brought out a pen and a small notebook. “I’ll write a receipt.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I know I gave you the money and you know you got the money.” He had never asked for a receipt for any of the sums he had lent me or given me.

“Inside of a year you’ll be a rich man, Doug,” he said.

“Good,” I said. His optimism was forlorn. “I don’t want anything on paper. Not anything. As an accountant, I imagine you know how to arrange to check off whatever may be coming to me without any records being kept.” I remembered what Evelyn Coates had said about Xeroxes. I was reasonably sure there were Xeroxes in Scranton, too.

“Yes, I imagine I do.” He said it sadly. He was in the wrong profession, but it was too late now to do anything about it.

“I don’t want the Internal Revenue Service looking for me.”

“I understand,” he said. “I can’t say I like it, but I understand.” He shook his head somberly. “You’re the last man in the world I’d…”

“That’s enough of that, Hank,” I said.

The first record on the juke box ended with an ear-shattering climax, and the voice of the waitress giving an order to the counterman sounded unnaturally loud in the lull. “Eggs and bacon, up. One English.”

I took another gulp of my coffee and got up, leaving the envelope on the table. I put on my coat. “I’ll be calling you. From time to time.”

He smiled up at me wanly as he put his hand on the envelope. “Take care of yourself, kid,” he said.

“You, too,” I touched his shoulder and went out into the cold.

The flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until eight Wednesday night.

On Wednesday afternoon, at two-thirty, I left a hundred-dollar bill in the safety-deposit box and walked out of the bank with seventy-two thousand, nine hundred dollars in the attaché case I had bought in Washington. I was through with manila envelopes. I couldn’t have explained, even to myself, why I had left the hundred dollars behind. Superstition? A promise to myself that one day I would come back to the country? In any event, I had paid in advance for the rental of the box for a year.

This time I was staying at the Waldorf Astoria. By now, anybody who was looking for me must have decided that I had left the city. I went back to my room and opened the attaché case and took out three thousand dollars, which I put into the new sealskin wallet I had bought for myself. It was large enough to hold my passport and my round-trip charter ticket. At the Christie Ski Club office on Forty-seventh Street, where I had gone after I left Hank in the coffee shop, I had asked for Wales’ friend Miss Mansfield, and the girl had filled out my application form and predated it automatically. She told me I had been lucky to come in just then, as they had two cancellations that morning. Offhandedly, I asked her if the Waleses were also making the flight. She checked her list and to my relief said that they weren’t on it. I still had plenty of cash from my winning on Ask Gloria and the Washington poker game. Even without the money in the attaché case and after the expenses of the hotels in Washington and Scranton and what it had cost me when I returned the rented car, I still had more money on me than I ever had carried at one time in my whole life. When I checked in at the desk at the Waldorf, I didn’t bother to ask what the room cost. It was a pleasant experience.

I gave Evelyn Coates’s address in Washington as my residence. Now that I was completely alone, all my jokes had to be private ones.

There had been very little opportunity for any kind of laughter at all in the last few days. Washington had been a sobering experience. If, as so many people believed, wealth made for happiness, I was a neophyte at the job. I had made a poor choice of companions in my new estate – Hale, with his blocked career and nervous love affair, Evelyn Coates, with her complex armor, my poor brother.

In Europe, I decided, I was going to seek out people without problems. Europe had always been a place to which the American rich had escaped. I now considered myself a member of that class. I would let others who had preceded me teach me the sweet technique of flight. I would look for joyful faces.

On Tuesday night I stayed in my room alone, watching television. On this last night in America there was no sense in taking unnecessary risks.

As a last gesture, I put a hundred and fifty dollars in an envelope with a note to the bookie at the St Augustine that read, “Sorry I kept you waiting for your money,” and signed my name. There would be one man in America who would vouch for my reputation as an honest man. I mailed the note as I checked out of the hotel.

I got to the airport early, by taxi. The attaché case, with the money inside it, was in the big blue bag with the combination lock. The money would be out of my hands, in the baggage compartment, while we crossed the Atlantic, but there was nothing to be done about it. I knew that every passenger was searched and his hand luggage opened and examined before boarding the plane, as a precaution against hijackers, and it would have been awkward, to say the least, to have to try to explain to an armed guard why I needed more than seventy thousand dollars for a three-week skiing trip.

Wales had been right about the overweight, too. The man at the desk never even looked at the scale as the skycap swung my two bags onto it.

“No skis or boots?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to buy them in Europe.”

“Try Rossignols,” he said. “I hear they’re great.” He had become an expert on equipment at a departure desk at Kennedy.

I showed him my passport, he checked the manifest list and gave me a boarding pass and the formalities were over. “Have a good trip,” he said. “I wish I was going with you.” The other people on the line with me had obviously started celebrating already, and there was a loud holiday air about the entire occasion, with people embracing and calling to each other and skis clattering to the floor.

I was early and went into the restaurant for a sandwich and a glass of beer. I hadn’t eaten lunch and it would be a long time before they served us anything on the plane and I was hungry.

As I ate and drank my beer, I read the evening paper. A policeman had been shot in Harlem that morning. The Rangers had won the night before. A judge had come out against pornographic films. The editors were firmly in favor of impeaching the President. There was talk of his resigning. Men who had had high positions in the White House were being sent to jail. The envelope Evelyn Coates had given me to deliver in Rome was in my small bag, now being stowed into the hold of the airplane. I wondered if I was helping to put someone in jail or keep him out. America. I reflected on my visit to Washington.

There was a pay telephone on the wall near where I was sitting and I suddenly had the desire to speak to someone, make one last statement, make one ultimate connection with a familiar voice, before I left the country. I got up and dialed the operator and once more called Evelyn Coates’s number.

Again, there was no answer. Evelyn was a woman who was more likely to be out than in at any given moment. I hung up and got my dime back. I was about to return to my table, where my half-eaten sandwich was waiting for me, when I stopped. I remembered driving down the street past the St Augustine Hotel and nearly stopping. This time there would be no danger. I would be climbing into international jet space within forty minutes. I put the dime back into the machine and dialed the number.

As usual, the phone rang and rang before I heard Clara’s voice. “Hotel St Augustine,” she said. She could manage to get her discontent and her irritation with the entire world even into this brief announcement.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Drusack, please,” I said.

“Mr. Grimes!” My name came out in a shriek. She had recognized my voice.

“I would like to speak to Mr Drusack, please,” I said, pretending that I hadn’t heard her or at least hadn’t understood her.

“Mr Grimes,” she said, “where are you?”

“Please, miss,” I said, “I would like to speak to Mr Drusack. Is he there?”

“He’s in the hospital, Mr Grimes,” she said. “Two men followed him in his car and beat him up with a pistol. He’s in a coma now. They think his skull is fractured and…”

I hung up the phone and went back to my table and finished the sandwich and the beer.

The seat belt and no smoking signs went on and the plane started the descent from the zone of morning sunlight. The snow-capped peaks of the Alps glittered in the distance as the 747 slanted into the gray bank of fog that lay on the approaches to Kloten Airport.

The large man in the seat next to mine was snoring loudly. By actual count, between eight and midnight, when I had given up keeping track, he had drunk eleven whiskies. His wife, next to him on the aisle, had kept her own pace, at the ratio of one to his two. They had told me they planned to catch the early train from Zurich to St Moritz and intended to ski the Corvatch that afternoon. I was sorry I couldn’t be there to watch their first run down the hill.

The flight had not been restful. Since all the passengers were members of the same ski club, and a great many of them made the trip together every winter, there had been a good deal of loud socializing in the aisles, accompanied by hearty drinking. The passengers were not young. For the most part they were in their thirties or forties, the men seeming to belong to that vague group that goes under the label of the executive class and the women carefully coiffed suburban housewives who were damned if they couldn’t hold their liquor as well as their husbands. A certain amount of weekend wife-swapping could be imagined. If I had to make a guess, I would have said that the average income per family of the passengers on the plane was about thirty-five thousand dollars a year and that their children had nice little trust funds set up by Grandpa and Grandma, craftily arranged to avoid the inheritance tax.

If there were any passengers on the plane who were reading quietly or looking out the windows at the stars and the growing dawn they were not in my part of the aircraft. Sober myself, I regarded my boisterous and boozy fellow-travelers with distaste. In a more restrictive state than America, I thought, they would have been prevented from leaving the country. If my brother Hank had been on the plane, I realized with a touch of sorrow, he would have envied them.

It had been warm in the plane, too, and I hadn’t been able to take off my jacket, because my wallet with my money and passport was in it and the wallet was too bulky to fit in my trouser pocket.

The plane touched down smoothly and I had a moment of envy of the men who piloted those marvelous machines, confidently at work on the flight deck forward. For them only the voyage mattered, not the value of the cargo. I made sure that I was one of (he first travelers out of the plane. At the terminal building I went through the door reserved for passengers with nothing to declare. I was lucky enough to see my two bags, both blue, one large, one small, come out in the first batch. I grabbed one of the wire carts and threw the bags on it and rolled the cart out of the customs room without being stopped. The Swiss, I saw, were charmingly tolerant toward prosperous visitors to their country.

I got into a waiting taxi and said, “The Savoy Hotel, please.” I had heard that it was a good hotel in the center of the business district.

I had not changed any money into Swiss currency, but when we arrived at the hotel, the driver agreed to accept two ten-dollar bills. It was two or three dollars more than it would have been if I had had francs, but I didn’t argue with the man.

While I was registering, I asked the clerk for the name and telephone number of the nearest private bank. Like most Americans of this age I had only the vaguest notions of just what Swiss private banks might be like, but had a firm belief, nourished by newspaper and magazine articles, in their ability to conceal money safely. The clerk wrote down a name and a number, almost as if that were the first service demanded of him by every American who signed in at his desk.

Another clerk showed me up to my room. It was large and comfortable, with heavy, old-fashioned furniture, and as clean as I had heard Swiss hotel rooms were likely to be.

While waiting for my luggage to come up, I picked up the phone and gave the operator the number the clerk had given me. It was nine-thirty, Swiss time, four-thirty in the morning New York time, but even though I had not slept at all on the plane, I wasn’t tired.

A voice on the phone said something in German. “Do you speak English?” I asked, regretting for the first time that my education had not equipped me even well enough to say “Good morning” in any language but my own.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Whom do you wish to speak to?”

“I would like to make an appointment to open an account,” I said.

“Just a moment, please,” she said. Almost immediately a man’s voice said, “Dr Hauser here. Good morning.”

So. In Switzerland men who were entrusted with money were doctors. Why not? Money was both a disease and a cure.

I gave the good doctor my name and explained once more that I wanted to open an account. He said he would expect me at ten-thirty and hung up.

There was a knock on the door and the porter came in with my bags. I apologized for not having any Swiss money for his tip, but he merely smiled and said, “Thank you,” and left. I began to feel that I was going to like Switzerland.

I twirled the three tumblers on the lever to open it. The lever did not budge. I tried once more. It still didn’t open. I tried again, with the same result. I was sure I was using the correct numbers. I picked up the small bag, which had the same combination, and twirled the tumblers and pushed at the lever. It opened smoothly.

“Damn it,” I said under my breath. The big bag had probably been handled roughly at one end of the flight or the other and the lock had jammed. I had nothing with me with which to force the lock. I didn’t want anyone else meddling with the bag, so I went down to the desk and asked for a big screwdriver. The concierge’s English vocabulary did not include the word screwdriver, but I finally got him to understand by the use of elaborate gestures what I wanted. He said something in German to an assistant and two minutes later the man reappeared with a screwdriver.

“He can go up with you,” the concierge said, “and assist you, if you want.”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you,” I said, and went back to my room.

It took five minutes of scraping and prying to force the lock, and I mourned for my handsome, brand-new bag as it broke open. I would have to get a new lock put on, if that were possible.

I lifted the lid. On the top of whatever else was in the bag there was a loud, houndstooth[8] sports jacket. I had never owned a jacket like that in my life.

I had taken the wrong bag at the airport. One that looked exactly like mine, the same size and make, the same color, dark blue with red piping. I swore softly at the chain-belt system of manufacturing and selling in America, where everybody makes and sells a million identical copies of everything.

I let the lid drop on the bag and flipped the clasps on each side of the lock shut. I didn’t want to disturb anybody else’s belongings. It was bad enough that I had broken open the lock. Then I went down to the concierge’s desk again. I gave him back the screwdriver and explained what had happened and asked him to call the airport for me to find out if one of the other travelers on my plane had reported that a mistake had been made and, if so, where and how I could pick up my own bag.

“Do you have your baggage checks?” he asked.

I searched through my pockets while the concierge looked on condescendingly. “Accidents happen. One must foresee,” he said, “When I travel, I always paste a large, colored etiquette with my initials on it on all my luggage.”

“A very good idea,” I said. “I will remember it in the future.” I didn’t have the baggage checks. I must have thrown them away when I went through customs and saw I didn’t need them. “Can you call, now, please? I don’t know any German and…”

“I shall call,” he said. He picked up the phone and asked for a number.

Five minutes later, after a good deal of agitated Swiss-German, interrupted by long waits which the concierge filled with rapid drumming of his fingertips on his desk, he hung up. “Nothing has been reported,” he said. “They will call you here when there is any news. When the passenger who has your bag gets to his hotel, he will undoubtedly discover that there has been an exchange and will make inquiries at the airport.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“For nothing.” He bowed. I did not bow back. I went up to my room.

When the passenger gets your bag to his hotel, the concierge had said. I had overheard some of the conversations on the plane. There were probably five hundred ski resorts in Europe, and from what I had heard my bag might even at that minute be on its way to Davos or Chamonix or Zermatt or Lech or … I shook my head despairingly. Whoever it was who had my bag might not try to open it until the next morning. And when he did, he probably would do exactly as I had done and break open the lock. And he might not be a fastidious as I had been about disturbing a stranger’s affairs.

I lifted the lid of the bag on the bed and stared down at the houndstooth jacket. I had a premonition that I was going to have trouble with the man who would wear a jacket like that. I knocked the lid back hard.

I picked up the telephone and gave the number of the bank. When I got an answer. I asked for Dr Hauser again. He was very polite when I told him that I found that I could not come in today. A specialist in the fever regions of international currency, he was calm in the face of ups and downs. I said I would try to call him tomorrow for an appointment. “I will be in my office all day,” he said.

After he had hung up, I sat staring at the telephone for a long time. There was nothing I could do but wait.

Accidents happen, the concierge had said. One must foresee.

He had been a little late with his advice.