Beggarman, Thief (39 page)

“I suppose so. Don’t worry,” he whispered. “And come back tonight. No matter what time. I promise still to be horny.”

She chuckled, kissed his cheek and went out the door. He sighed, inaudibly, fixed a smile on his face and went back into the living room. His father was pouring himself another drink, not a small one this time.

“Interesting girl,” Abbott said. His hand was no longer shaking as he poured the soda into his glass. “Does she ever comb her hair?”

“She’s not concerned with things like that,” Billy said.

“So I gathered,” Abbott said as he sat down again in the easy chair. “I don’t trust her.”

“Oh, come on now, Dad,” Billy said. “After ten minutes. Why? Because she’s German?”

“Not at all. I know many good Germans,” Abbott said. “I say that, although it isn’t true, because it is the expected thing to say. The truth is I don’t know
any
Germans and have no special feeling about them one way or another. Although I do have special feelings about ladies, a race I know better than I know Germans. As I said, she gave me a most peculiar look when she passed me coming into the house. It disturbed me.”

“Well,” Billy says, “she doesn’t give
me
any peculiar looks.”

“I suppose not.” Abbott looked judgingly at Billy. “You’re small—too bad you took after me and not your mother in that respect—but with your pretty eyes and manner, I imagine you arouse a considerable amount of female affection.”

“Most of the ladies manage to contain themselves in my presence,” Billy said.

“I admire your modesty.” Abbott laughed. “I was less modest when I was your age. Have you heard from your mother?”

“Yes,” Billy said. “She wrote me after you told her I was going to re-enlist. I didn’t know you kept in such close touch with her.”

“You’re her son,” Abbott said, his face grave, “and you’re my son. Neither of us forgets that, although we manage to forget many other things.” He took a long gulp of his whiskey.

“Don’t get drunk tonight, please, Dad.”

Abbott looked thoughtfully at the glass in his hand, then, with a sudden movement, threw it against the small brick fireplace. The glass shattered and the whiskey made a dark stain on the hearth. The two men sat in silence for a moment. Billy heard his father’s loud, uneven breathing.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Abbott said. “I’m not angry at what you said. On the contrary. Quite the contrary. You have spoken like a dutiful and proper son. I’m touched by your interest in my health. What I’m angry about is myself.” His voice was bitter. “My son is on the verge of making what I consider a huge and perhaps irrecoverable mistake. I borrowed the money for the voyage from Chicago to Brussels from the last man in the world who can occasionally be prevailed upon to lend me a dollar. I came here to try to persuade you to … well … to reconsider. I walked around this town all day in the rain marshaling arguments to get you to change your mind. I managed not to order even one drink on the plane across the ocean, because I wanted to be at my best—” he smiled wryly “—which is not a very handsome best at best—for my meeting with you. I have antagonized you about your girl, whom I don’t know, as you pointed out, because of a peculiar look on a doorstep, and I have begun the proceedings by pouring a double Scotch, which is bound to remind you of painful weekends with your father when your mother lent you to me for paternal Sabbath guidance. Willie Abbott rides again.” He stood up abruptly. “Let us go to dinner. I promise not to touch another drop tonight until you deposit me at my hotel. After that I promise to drink myself into oblivion. I will not be in glorious shape tomorrow, but I promise to be sober. Where’s the John? I’ve been standing in the rain for hours and my bladder is bursting. For the sake of you and the United States Army I didn’t want to be caught pissing on the good burghers of Brussels.”

“Through the bedroom,” Billy said. “I’m afraid there’s a lot of stuff lying around. Monika and I have to get to work early in the morning and most of the time we don’t get back until dinner.” He didn’t want his father to think that Monika was a slob, although he occasionally complained to her about the mess they lived in. “There’s nothing in Marx or Mao or Ché Guevara,” he had said recently to her, “about good revolutionaries having to leave their underwear on the floor.” “We clean up on the weekends,” he said to his father.

“I will make no remarks, Billy,” Abbott said, “about the life-style of you and your lady. I am not the neatest man in the world, but paradoxically consider neatness in a woman a useful virtue. No matter. We make do with what comes along.” He looked searchingly at Billy. “You’re not in uniform, soldier. How is it if you’re in the noble and necessary army of the United States Army you’re not in uniform?”

“Off duty,” Billy said, “we can wear civilian clothes.”

“It was different in my day,” Abbott said. “I didn’t wear civilian clothes for four years. Ah, well, wars change.” He walked steadily out into the hall on his way to the bathroom. As he went out, Billy thought, That suit must be at least ten years old. I wonder if he’d let me buy him a new one.

«  »

His father said a lot of things over dinner, on a variety of subjects. He insisted upon Billy ordering wine for himself but turned his own glass over when the waiter poured. He said the food was first-rate, but just picked at it. By turns, he was expansive, apologetic, regretful, cynical, optimistic, aggressive, self-denigrating and boastful.

“I’m not through yet,” was one of the things he said, “no matter what it looks like. I have a million ideas: I could eat up the field of public relations like a dish of whipped cream if I stayed off the booze. Ten of the top men in the field in Chicago have told me as much—I’ve been offered jobs in six figures if I joined Alcoholics Anonymous—but I can’t see myself making public confessions to a group of professional breast-beaters. If you’d forget this crazy idea of sticking with the army—I can’t get over that, I really can’t, a smart young man like you, with your education, not even an officer—what the hell do you do all day, just check out cars like a girl in a radio taxi office? Why, if you came out to Chicago with me, we could set up an agency—William Abbott and Son. I’ve read your letters—I keep them with me at all times—the first thing I pack when I move from one place to another is the box I keep them in—I’ve read them and I tell you you can write, you really can turn a phrase with the best of them. If I had had your talent, I tell you I just wouldn’t have a pile of unfinished plays in my desk drawer, no sir, not by a long shot. We could dazzle the folks, just dazzle them—I know the business from A to Z, you could leave that end of it to me, we’d have the advertisers knocking the door down to beg us to take their accounts. And don’t think that Chicago is small time. Advertising
started
there, for God’s sake.

“All right, I have a pretty good idea of what you think of the advertising business—the whore of the consumer society, all that crap. But like it or not, it’s the only society we have and the rule of the jungle is consume or be consumed. Trade a couple of years of your life and you can do whatever you damn well please after it. Write a book—write a play. When I get back to Chicago I’ll have your letters Xeroxed and send them to you, you’ll be amazed at yourself reading them all at once like that. Listen, your mother made a living, a damn good living, writing for the magazines, and just the things you dash off to me in a few minutes have more—what’s the word I’m looking for?—more
tone,
more spirit, more sense of what writing is about than she had in her best days. And she was highly thought of, let me tell you, by a lot of intelligent people—the editors were always after her for more—I don’t know why she quit. Her writing was good enough for the editors, for the public, but not for her. She has some insane idea of perfectionism—be careful of that—it can finally lead to molecular immobility—there’s a phrase, my boy—and she quit. Christ,
somebody
in the family ought to finally make it. She complains to me you almost never write her. I’m pleased, of course, you write me as often as you do, but after all, she’s your mother, it wouldn’t kill you to drop her a line from time to time. I know I was shitty to her, I disappointed her, I was a lousy husband. The truth is, she was too much for me—in every department—physically, intellectually, morally. She swamped me, but that doesn’t prevent me so many years later from appreciating her quality. There’s no telling how far she could have gone, with another man, with better luck.… Colin Burke being killed.

“That family—the Jordaches—the old man a suicide, the brother murdered, and sainted Rudolph just about beaten to death in his own apartment. That would have been something for your mother, if he’d have knocked it off. Three for three. Two brothers and a husband. What a percentage! And the kid—Wesley—did I write you he came to Chicago and looked me up? He wanted me to tell him what I knew about his father—he’s haunted by his father—the ramparts of Elsinore, for Christ’s sake—I guess you can’t blame him for that—but he looks like a zombie, his eyes are scary—God knows how
he’s
going to end up. I never even met his father, but I tried to pretend that I’d heard he was a fine fellow and I laid it on thick and the kid just stood up in the middle of a sentence and said, ‘Thank you, sir. I’m afraid we’re wasting each other’s time.’

“You’re half Jordache—maybe more than half—if ever a lady had dominant genes it was Gretchen Jordache—so you be careful, don’t you ever trust to inherited luck, because you don’t have it, on either side of the family tree.…

“I’ll tell you what—you get through with the goddamn army and you come out to Chicago to work with me and I’ll swear never to touch a drop of liquor again in my whole life. I know you love me—we’re grown men, we can use the proper words—and you’re being offered a chance that very few sons get—you can save your father’s life. You don’t have to say anything now, but when I get back to Chicago I want to see a letter from you waiting for me telling me when you’re arriving in town. I’ll be there in a week or so. I have to leave for Strasbourg tomorrow. There’s a man there I have to see. Delicate negotiations for an old account of mine. A chemical company. I have to sound out this Frenchman to see if he’ll take a fee, an honorarium—not to mince words, a bribe, for swinging my client’s business to his company. I won’t tell you how much money is involved. But you’d gasp if I did tell you. And I get my cut if I deliver. It’s not the jolliest way to earn a living, but it was the only way I could borrow enough money to come over here to see you. Remember what I said about the consumer society.

“And now it’s late and your girl is undoubtedly waiting for you and I’m deadbeat tired. If you give one little goddamn for the rest of your father’s life, that letter will be waiting for me in Chicago when I get there. And that’s blackmail and don’t think I don’t know it. One last thing. The dinner’s on me.”

When he got back home after putting his father in a taxi and walking slowly through the wet streets of Brussels, with little aureoles of foggy light around the lampposts, he sat down at his desk and stared at his typewriter.

Hopeless, hopeless, he thought. Poor, hopeless, seedy, fantasizing, beloved man. And I never did get the chance to tell him I’d like to buy him a new suit.

When he finally went to bed, it was alone.

Monika didn’t come in that night.

She came home before he went to work in the morning, with the package he was to deliver to an address on the me du Gros-Caillou in the 7th arrondissement in Paris when he went to the capital of France with his colonel. The package was comparatively harmless—just ten thousand French francs in old bills and an American Army, .45-caliber automatic pistol, equipped with a silencer.

«  »

The .45 and the extra clips of ammunition were in his tennis bag as he got out of the taxi at the corner of the Avenue Bosquet and the rue St. Dominique at twenty minutes past three in the afternoon. He had looked at the map of Paris and seen that the rue du Gros-Caillou was a short street that ran between rue St. Dominique and rue de Grenelle, not far from the Ecole Militaire. The ten thousand francs were folded in an envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket.

He was early. Monika had told him he would be expected at three-thirty. Under his breath he repeated the address she had made him memorize. He strolled, peering in at the shop windows, looking, he hoped, like an idle American tourist with a few minutes to spare before meeting his partners for their tennis game. He was still about thirty yards from the arched gate that led into the street, when a police car, its siren wailing, passed him, going in the wrong direction, up the rue St. Dominique and stopped, blocking the rue du Gros-Caillou. Five policemen jumped out, pistols in their hands, and ran into the rue du Gros-Caillou. Billy quickened his pace, passed the opening of the street. He looked through the arch and saw the policemen running toward a building in front of which there were three other policemen who had come from the other end of the street. He heard shouting and saw the first three policemen plunge through the doorway. A moment later there was the sound of shots.

He turned and went back, making himself walk slowly, toward the Avenue Bosquet. It was not a cold day, but he was shivering and sweating at the same time.

There was a bank on the corner and he went into it. Anything to get off the street. There was a girl sitting at a desk at the entrance and he went up to her and said he wanted to rent a safety-deposit box. He had difficulty getting out the French words,
“Coffre-fort.”
The girl stood up and led him to a counter, where a clerk asked him for his identification. He showed his passport and the clerk filled out some forms. When the clerk asked him for his address he thought for a moment, then gave the name of the hotel he and Monika had stayed at when they were in Paris together. He was staying at another hotel this time. He signed two cards. His signature looked strange to him. He paid a year’s fee in advance. Then the clerk led him down into the vault, where he gave the key to the box to the guardian at the desk. The guardian led him to a row of boxes in the rear of the vault, opened one of the locks with Billy’s key and the second lock with his own master key, then went back to his desk, leaving Billy alone. Billy opened the tennis bag and put the automatic, the extra clips and the envelope with the ten thousand francs in it into the box. He closed the door of the box and called for the guardian. The guardian came back and turned the two keys and gave Billy his.