Nightwork (20 page)

Not unnaturally, I slept badly and was up before the light of dawn broke over the swollen Arno beneath my window.

Even before I had my breakfast I questioned the concierge about the schedules of flights from London to Milan and the most convenient rail connection from Milan to Florence. By my calculation the lady would arrive at five thirty-five.

I would be in the lobby of the hotel at that hour, strategically placed so as to be able to observe any female who signed in at the reception desk. And any man, slightly shorter than myself, who might accompany her or move to greet her.

I drank a great deal of black coffee all that day, but no alcohol, not even a beer. Out of a sense of duty to my role as a tourist, I wandered through the Uffizi Gallery, but the glorious display of Florentine art spread through the great halls made no impression on me. I would come back at another time.

I made one purchase, at a little souvenir shop, a letter opener, shaped like a stiletto, with a chased silver hilt. I refused to think of the exact reasons for the purchase, and pretended to myself that I had merely taken an idle and innocent fancy to it when I had happened to see it lying in the display window.

Late in the afternoon I bought the
Rome Daily American
and installed myself in one of the ornate chairs in the hotel lobby, not too ostentatiously close to the entrance and the reception desk, but with a clear view of the critical area. I was wearing my own clothes. I didn’t want to warn anyone off with the houndstooth jacket or any of the brightly striped shirts that had come along with it.

By six o’clock, I had read the newspaper over twice. The only arrivals at the hotel had been an American family, stout, loud father, weary mother in sensible shoes, three lanky, pale children in identical red, white, and blue anoraks. They had driven up from Rome, I overheard; the roads were icy. By an act of will, I restrained myself from going over to the concierge to ask him to find out if the train from Milan was running late.

I was reading the column of social notes, which I had skipped before, and learned that in Parroli someone I had never heard of had given a party for someone else I never had heard of, when a hatless blonde woman of about thirty came through the door, followed by a quantity of expensive-looking luggage. I made a conscious effort to control my breathing. The woman, I noted automatically, was pretty, with a long, aristocratic nose and a bright slash of a mouth and was wearing a heavy wraparound brown cloth coat that was, even to my inexperienced eye, beautifully tailored. She strode over to the reception desk with the air of a woman who had been used to five-star hotels all her life, but just as she was about to give her name to the clerk behind the desk, two of the three American children, who had remained in the hall, broke into a loud argument about whose turn it was to go up to their room and take the first bath. So I couldn’t hear the name that the lady gave the clerk. If I ever had children, I thought grimly, I would never travel with them.

I sat glued to my chair while the lady signed the hotel registration card and threw down her passport. I could not see its color. Finished at the desk, the lady didn’t go toward the elevators, but strode directly into the bar. I touched the silver coin in my pocket and stood up and started toward the bar. But just as I reached it, she came out. I stepped back to let her pass me, and made a little hint of a polite bow, but she paid no attention to me. I could not tell what the expression on her face meant.

I sat in a corner of the bar and ordered a Scotch and soda. The bar was empty and dark. There was nothing I could do for the moment but wait.

I was still there at seven o’clock, when she came back. She was wearing a severe black dress with two strands of pearls looped around her throat and was carrying her brown coat. Obviously she intended to go out. She stopped at the door and scanned the room. The American family was seated around a table, the mother and father drinking martinis, the children Coca-Colas, the father from time to time saying, “For God’s sake, will you kids stop yelling?”

An elderly English couple was seated across the room from me, the gentleman reading a three-day-old copy of the
London Times
, the woman, in a billowing flowered print, staring vacantly into space.

An Italian group near the bar itself chattered continuously, and I could make out the word “disgrazia” which they had been using over and over again, with great intensity, ever since they had sat down fifteen minutes before. There was no way of my telling who or what was disgraceful.

No one but myself was sitting alone.

A little grimace twisted the generous red mouth of the woman at the door. Her skin was pale, with a delicate pink flush over the prominent cheekbones. The eyes were dark blue, almost violet, the figure, frankly revealed by the sober dress, willowy, the legs slender and finely shaped. I decided she was not pretty, but beautiful. Just the sort of woman a man who was bold and shameless enough to steal seventy thousand dollars at the Zurich airport would be likely to take away on an illicit holiday from an adoring and crippled husband.

She noticed me looking at her and frowned slightly. Frowning became her. I lowered my eyes. Then she came across the room and sat down at the table next to mine, throwing her coat over the other chair at her table and dragging a pack of cigarettes and a heavy gold lighter out of her bag.

The waiter on duty hurried over to her and lit her cigarette. She was the sort of woman who is served immediately on all occasions. The waiter was a handsome, dark young man with the soft, watchful eyes of a fighting bull, and he showed splendid teeth in a wide smile as he bent gracefully over the lady’s table to take her order.

“A pink gin,
per favore
,” she said. “No ice.” British.

“Another Scotch and soda, please,” I said to the waiter.

“
Prego
?” The smile on the waiter’s face vanished as he faced me. He had not questioned me when I had ordered before.

“
Ancora un whiskey con soda
,” the lady said impatiently.

“
Sì
,
signora
.” The smile appeared once more. “
Molto grazia
.”

“Thank you for helping out,” I said to the lady.

“He understood you perfectly well,” she said. “He was just being Italian. You’re American, aren’t you?”

“I guess it sticks out all over,” I said.

“Not to be ashamed,” she said. “People have a right to be American. Have you been here long?”

“Not long enough to learn the language.” I felt my pulse quickening. Things were going along infinitely better than I had dared hope. “I just arrived last night.”

She made an impatient gesture. “I mean here in the bar.”

“Oh. For about an hour.”

“An hour.” She had a clipped manner of talking but the voice was musical. “Did you by any chance see another American gentleman wander through? A man of about fifty, though he looks younger. Very fit. A little gray in the hair. Perhaps with a questing look in his eyes. As though he was looking for someone.”

“Well, let me think,” I said craftily. “What would his name be?”

“You wouldn’t know his name.” She looked hard at me. Adulteresses, even British ones, I had just discovered, weren’t anxious to broadcast the names or exact locations of their lovers.

“I wasn’t paying any particular attention,” I said innocently, “but I seem to have noticed somebody who might answer to your description at the door. Around six thirty, I would guess.” I wanted to keep the conversation going at any cost, and I wanted to keep the lady in the bar as long as possible.

“What a bore,” she said impatiently. “The mails these days.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, touching the letter in my pocket, “I didn’t quite get that. I mean, what about the mails?”

“No matter,” she said. The waiter was putting the drink on the table in front of her. I would not have been surprised if he had knelt to do so. My own drink was put before me without ceremony. The lady raised her glass. “Cheers,” she said. She plainly had no girlish prejudices against talking to strangers in bars.

“Are you here for long?” I asked.

“One never knows, does one?” She left a lipstick stain on her glass. I longed to ask her name, but something told me not to rush matters. “Beautiful old Firenze. I’ve been in gayer towns.” As she talked, she kept turning her head toward the door. A German couple came in and she frowned again. She looked impatiently at her watch. “You’re sunburned,” she said to me. “Have you been skiing?”

“A little.”

“Where?”

“St. Moritz, Davos.” It was a small lie.

“I adore St. Moritz,” she said. “All those amusing cheap people.”

“Have you been there?” I asked. “This season, I mean.”

“No. Disaster intervened.” I would have liked to ask her about the health of her husband, to keep the conversation going on a friendly basis, but thought better of it. She looked around her with distaste. “This place
is
gloomy. They must have buried Dante in the front hall. Do you know of any brighter spot in town?”

“Well, I had a very good meal in a restaurant called Sabattini’s last night. If you’d care to join me tonight I’d be …”

At that moment a page came in, calling, “Lady Lily Abbott, Lady Lily Abbott …”

Longingly, L.
, I remembered, as she crooked a finger at the page. “
Telephone per la signora
,” the page said.

“
Finalmente
,” she said loudly and stood up and followed the boy into the lobby. She left her handbag on the chair, and I wondered how I could manage to look through it while she was busy on the phone without being arrested for theft. The German couple kept staring at me. Oddly, I thought. They would certainly report all suspicious activities to the proper authorities. I didn’t touch the bag.

She was gone about five minutes, and, when she came striding back into the bar, her expression could have been described as peevish if it had been on the face of another woman. On her it was noble displeasure. She slumped down in her chair, her feet sticking out straight under the table.

“I hope it wasn’t bad news,” I said.

“It wasn’t good.” She sounded grim. “Absent me from felicity awhile. Rearrangements of schedules. Someone will suffer.” She slugged down her gin and began to stuff her cigarettes and lighter into her bag.

“If that means you’re free …” I began. “What I was saying, when you were called to the phone, Lady Abbott …” It was the first time in my life that I had called anybody Lady Anything and I nearly stuttered over the words. “Well, I was about to invite you to have dinner with me at this very nice …”

“Sorry,” she said. “That’s sweet of you. But I’m not free. I’m taken for dinner. There’s a car waiting for me outside.” She stood up, gathering in her coat and bag. I stood up gallantly. She looked hard at me, squarely in the eyes. A decision was made. “The dinner will be over early,” she said. “All the poor old dears have to go beddy-bye. We can have a nightcap, if you’d like that.”

“I’d like it very much.”

“Shall we say eleven? Here, in the bar?”

“I’ll be here.”

She swept out of the bar, leaving waves of sensuality quivering in the air behind her, like the reverberations of the last notes of an organ in a cathedral.

I spent the night in her room. It was as simple as that. “I came to Florence all primed to sin,” she said as she undressed, “and sin I shall.” I don’t believe she even asked my name until about 2:30
A.M.

Despite her imperious manner, she was a gentle and charming lover, undemanding, grateful, and pleasantly lacking in chauvinism. “There is a large, untapped reservoir of sexual talent in America,” she said at one point. “The New World to the aid of the diminishing Old. Isn’t that nice?”

I was happy to discover that my fears about impotence, nourished by the dreadful Mrs. Sloane, were unfounded. I did not think I had to mention to Lady Abbott that my pleasure in her company was heightened by perverse overtones of vengeance.

She was the least curious of women. We talked little. She asked me no questions about what I did, why I was in Florence, or where I was going.

Just before I left her room (she insisted I get out before the help started stirring about), I asked her if she would lunch with me that day.

“If I don’t have a telephone call,” she said. “Kiss the lady good night.”

I bent over and kissed the wide, dear mouth. Her eyes were closed, and I had the impression that she was asleep before I went through the door.

As I went through the baronial halls of the hotel to my room, I felt a surge of optimism. Through Zurich, St. Moritz, Davos, Milan, and Venice, nothing good had happened to me, no voice had spoken to me reassuringly. Until this night. The future was far from certain, but there were gleams of hope.

Sweet St. Valentine’s Day.

Exhausted by the fitful wakefulness of my first night in Florence and my recent exertions, I fell into bed and slept soundly until almost noon.

When I awoke I lay still, staring at the ceiling, enjoying the feel of my body, smiling softly. I reached for the phone and asked for Lady Abbott. There was a long pause and then I heard the voice of the concierge. “Lady Abbott checked out at ten
A.M.
No, she left no message.”

It cost me ten thousand lire and a lie to extract the forwarding address of Lady Abbott from one of the assistants behind the concierge’s desk. Lady Abbott had left word that, while she wanted messages sent on to her, she did not want the address given out. As I slid the ten-thousand-lire note across to the man, I intimated that the lady had left a piece of jewelry of great value in my room and that it was imperative that I return it to her in person.

“
Bene
,
signore
,” the man said. “It is the Hotel Plaza-Athénée, in Paris. Please explain the special circumstances to Lady Abbott.”

“I certainly shall,” I said.

I was in Paris, checking in at the Plaza-Athénée the next day at noon. Before I had time to ask the price of the room, I saw Lady Abbott. She was coming through the lobby on the arm of a hatless, graying man with a bushy British moustache who was wearing dark glasses. They were laughing together. I had seen the man before. It was Miles Fabian, the bridge player from the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz.