Two Weeks in Another Town (32 page)

He drove on the Italian theory. As soon as he got behind the wheel, he assumed that all other drivers were cowards and all pedestrians as agile as gazelles, so that he hurled the green Fiat with all the speed he could command at intersections and other cars, trusting that the other drivers would jam on their brakes in panic or veer off. He plunged down on all pedestrians, even one-legged men on crutches and old women leading babies, as though confident that they would somehow, miraculously, leap out of the way at the last moment. He had told Jack, proudly, that in all his years of driving, he had never as much as scratched the fender of a car. Like other absurd principles in Italy, Guido’s seemed to work most of the time.

“When I read the newspapers,” Guido went on, “and I read about the troubles that France is having, I am terribly sad. Especially in Algeria. I am sad for them and I am sad because in the Italian papers it is easy to see that the journalists are thinking, ‘We have been kicked out of Africa, we have had our Mussolini, now it is your turn, your Mussolini is on his way. Now we will lecture you.’”

At the moment, Jack was sorry that Guido had ever learned to speak French.

“They cannot win in Algeria,” Guido went on. With the job he had, with the long hours of waiting for his clients, he had ample opportunity to read all the newspapers and reflect upon the state of the world. “It is a guerrilla war, and to win a guerrilla war you must be prepared to use terror, to stamp out everything. The French use terror, of course, but they are too civilized to go all the way, so of course they will lose. Only the Germans and the Russians would be capable of not losing. But who would want to be a German or a Russian?”

“Do you belong to a political party?” Jack asked, interested, despite himself.

Guido laughed musically. “I work day and night,” Guido said. “When could I have time to belong to a political party?”

“But you vote, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Guido.

“What party do you vote for?”

“The Communist party,” Guido said promptly. “Naturally. If you earn sixteen hundred lire a day, what party can you vote for?” The car was stopped at a traffic light and he turned to Jack. “No offense meant,” he said politely. “Actually, it is a sign of my respect for you, Monsieur Andrus, my telling you. When other Americans ask me for whom I vote, I always say the Monarchists. The Americans seem to like that better. But you have lived in France, you understand Europe, even though you are a rich American. There is no reason I cannot tell you the truth.”

He turned back to his driving. At the next light, he swung around again. “Of course, I am not a Communist,” he said. “I only vote to show my contempt.”

When they got to Veronica’s hotel, Jack went into the lobby, half expecting to see the night porter still sitting facing the mirror, adoring himself. But there was a severe-looking old man with concierge’s keys on the collar of his uniform who was behind the desk now. He spoke no English or French and all he kept saying when Jack gave him Veronica’s name was,
“La signorina è partita.”

Jack’s Italian was not up to finding out any more than that, but a German priest who came down the steps took pity on him and said he spoke some English and offered to act as translator.

“I understand,” Jack said to the priest, “that Signorina Rienzi has left. Will you be good enough to ask if she has left a forwarding address?”

He watched the concierge shake his head when the priest translated the question.

“Ask him,” Jack said, “what time she left?”

“Alle dieci,”
the concierge said.

“Ten o’clock,” Jack said to the priest “I understand.” His throat was beginning to feel very dry. “Ask him if she left alone, or if there was a gentleman with her.”

In heavy, Teutonic Italian, the priest translated. The concierge now seemed annoyed with the interrogation, and began to make notations on a series of cards on the desk.
“Si,”
he said.

“Ask him if he knows what the gentleman looked like. Was it a young American with glasses, wearing a kind of khaki-colored overcoat?”

When the priest translated the question, the concierge glanced coldly at Jack. There was no doubt about what the concierge felt concerning aging foreigners who pursued young Italian virgins with such persistence. He spoke to the priest with a rising, cutting inflection in his voice.

“The concierge sayss he hass a multitude of osser ssinks to do, besides taking desscriptions of vissitors to the
albergo,”
the priest said. The phone rang then and the concierge began to talk fretfully and at length to whoever was on the other end of the wire. Jack waited for a moment, then knew there was no satisfaction to be gained there. He thanked the priest, who beamed at him, to show that he was glad to be of service and that he held no ill-will against Jack for having won the war, and Jack went out to the little square in front of the hotel, where Guido was polishing the Fiat’s headlights with a rag.

Jack stayed in his room all afternoon, cursing himself for not having extorted from Veronica the address of the friend with whom she was supposed to be staying. There was no call from anybody all afternoon, and by six o’clock, he was sure that something dreadful had happened to her. He reread the insane note that Bresach had slipped under the door during the night, and a shiver of apprehension chilled him. He found it ominous that Bresach was now avoiding him. If I don’t hear from her by tomorrow afternoon, he decided, I’m going to go to the police.

That night he was awakened again and again by the ringing of telephone bells. But when he opened his eyes, the room was silent, no bells were ringing.

In the morning he knew that he would have to find Bresach. But the only people he could think of who knew where Bresach lived were Veronica and Jean-Baptiste Despière. And Veronica was gone and Despière was in Algeria, atrocity-hunting, address unknown. Before leaving for the studio, Jack went downstairs to the lobby and looked, without much hope, in the Rome telephone book. There was no Bresach. He hadn’t expected there would be.

The morning held a surprise for him. Without warning, he suddenly felt confident and easy, and he did very well with the scenes he was dubbing.

“You have been touched by the spirit, boy,” Delaney said, beaming. “You’re fine. I told you all you needed was a good night’s sleep, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “you told me.”

That afternoon he went to the Embassy to see if anyone there knew where Bresach lived or whether he had left his address there, as Americans’ living in Rome for more than three months were supposed to do. But he didn’t have much hope of that, either. Bresach was not the sort of boy who would bother with the American Embassy.

When he was coming out of the Embassy he ran into Kern. Kern was dressed in dark gray, and as usual, he had the air of a man who has just spoken on an equal basis with the head of a powerful state. He stopped and smiled his slightly unpleasant smile at Jack. “I have been working on the case of your friend,” he said.

“What’s that?” Jack asked, confused. He had been thinking so concentratedly about Veronica that it was only with a wrench that he could make himself try to understand what Kern was talking about

“Your friend Holt,” Kern said. “He was in to see me and I told him I would take what steps I could.”

“Oh, good,” Jack said. “Thanks.” He had forgotten all about Holt and his attempts to adopt a child. So much had happened since his conversation with Kern that it all seemed remote, blurred by time.

“I had been waiting for you to call me,” Kern said, slowly and portentously nodding his yellowed head. “I thought we might get together for a drink.”

“I’ve been meaning to,” Jack said, wanting to get away. “But I’ve been terribly busy.”

“I’m having some people in after dinner tonight, at my place,” Kern said. “It might be interesting for you. All Italians. I don’t imagine you know many Italians, do you?”

“Too many,” Jack said, annoyed with the man for the smug offer of Italians, like a hunter who invites you to his house to dine off the pheasant he has just shot.

“I imagine you’re joking,” Kern said.

“Yes.”

“I always make a point of centering as much of my social life as possible around the people of the country I’m stationed in,” Kern said, making it sound like a rebuke to Jack and others like him, who, Kern implied, frivolously wasted their time on mere Americans. “Even in the Middle East, where it was considerably more difficult, I kept to it. Would you like to come?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tonight,” Jack said.

“In any event…” Kern reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and produced a card. “Here’s my address. Try and make it if you can. Well be there until quite late.”

“Thanks,” Jack said, pocketing the card. “I’ll try. Well, so long. I…”

“I found out a curious thing about your friend,” Kern said. “I wonder if you knew.”

“What’s that?” Jack asked impatiently.

“He was a felon,” Kern said. “He served time in prison. Did you know that?”

Jack hesitated, uncomfortable under the saffron, sardonic stare. The hell with it, he thought, he’s not going to make me lie. “Yes,” he said. “I knew it.”

Kern nodded with a kind of mournful pleasure. “And yet you didn’t think it necessary to tell me?” he said. “You were prepared to allow me to vouch for him to my Italian friends in this extremely delicate affair?”

“Oh, hell, Kern,” Jack said impatiently, “he was in prison when he was twenty years old. It’s all ancient history. He’s a pillar of respectability now. How important is it?”

“You have a peculiar notion of what’s important and what isn’t important, Andrus,” said Kern.

“Did Holt tell you himself?”

“No.” Kern smiled with gloomy satisfaction. “I found out myself. In the course of my inquiries.” He peered mistrustfully at Jack. “I wonder if there’s any other pertinent information in your possession, Andrus, that I ought to have, before I go any deeper into this.”

His wife’s a dipsomaniac, Jack thought. That’s pertinent. But I’ll be godamned if I’ll tell you. Find it out for yourself in the course of your inquiries, brother. “He’s got a kind and generous heart,” Jack said. “Is that pertinent?”

Kern sniffed. “Hardly,” he said. He extended his hand. “Try and make it tonight, if you can. The view from my apartment is the best in Rome.” He went gravely, ambassadorially, into the Embassy.

Jack hurried off, anxious to avoid meeting anyone else who might waste his time. He kept calling his hotel, asking if there were any messages for him, but there never were any messages, and finally the telephone operators, recognizing him, turned sullen when they heard his voice. He drank innumerable cups of coffee, sitting outside Doney’s on the Via Veneto, although it was chilly and raw, because he hoped that Miss Henken, whom he had met there at the same time with Veronica, might appear and give him the information he was looking for. But Miss Henken didn’t appear.

It was while he was sitting there, at the little table, sipping his tenth coffee of the afternoon, and feeling almost drunk from all the concentrated caffeine he had imbibed that he thought of Dr. Gildermeister.

“At five o’clock every afternoon,”
he remembered Veronica’s saying,
“he goes to his analyst.”
And, at another time, on the beach at Fregene—
“Dr. Gildermeister. An Austrian from Innsbruck. ‘I must warn you, young lady, Robert is a very finely balanced mechanism.’ That was news. Hot from Innsbruck.”

Jack jumped up and put a five-hundred-lire note for his coffees under a saucer on the table to keep it from blowing away. He went inside to the telephone booth and waited impatiently while a young man in a leather wind-jacket ruffled through the pages of the directory there, making notes of names and addresses in a greasy little black notebook. Uncharitably, Jack thought that he looked like a professional housebreaker making up a list of victims for his next year’s haul. Finally the man in the windbreaker was through and Jack turned to the G’s. It was true that in Europe you almost never could find anybody in the telephone directory of any city, but a doctor, even a psychoanalyst, must have his name and number and address available for the public. Jack was surprised to feel his hands shaking, and when he finally found the name, the print seemed to blur before his eyes in the bad light, and he had to lean way over, close to the page, to read Gildermeister, Dr. J. C, and an address on Via Monte Parioli, and the telephone number.

He started to dial the doctor’s number, then stopped. He looked at his watch. It was three fifteen. Five o’clock, every afternoon, Veronica had said. He hesitated, then decided to wait till five o’clock, so that he could talk to Bresach himself.

On his way back to his hotel, he was nearly run over by a man on a Vespa, who smiled gently and forgivingly at him as Jack leaped back onto the sidewalk. In Paris, the man almost certainly would have snarled,
“Sal con,”
at him, after a similar incident. There were advantages to being in Italy after all.

There was an air-mail letter waiting for him at the desk, from his son. He opened the letter as soon as he entered his rooms, and read it, standing next to the open window, with the sunlight streaming in on the typewritten pages.

“Father,” the letter began, “I’ve just read the letter you wrote me from the airplane, and there’s no sense in dissembling what I feel about it or trying to be polite about it.

“I detest it.

“What’s more, I detest the whole way of life that makes it possible for a father to write a letter like that to his son.”

Oh, Christ, Jack thought, not today! For a moment he contemplated crumpling the letter and throwing it away. Then he made himself read on.

“First of all—about Miss McCarthy. I assure you that if we marry, we will make it stick. I do not need the advice of a cynical sensualist who has led a blatantly promiscuous life to guide me in matters of love. Don’t think that because you’ve hardly ever bothered to see me that I am completely uninformed about you.”

Jack grinned painfully as he read this. His mother has told him the facts of life, he thought. My life. If he only knew what it’s really been like. Maybe I’ll write him the truth—that it is not the promiscuousness I regret, but the occasions, all too many, of abstinence. See what the Puritan has to say about
that.