Nightwork (26 page)

“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 checkbook 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, sad 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 nighttime 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 Eisenhower’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 café 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.”