Beggarman, Thief (9 page)

“God,” Dwyer said, “I’m glad to see you. What a night! Shit, what a night.”

“Where is he?” Rudolph asked, trying to keep his voice calm to take the edge off the hysteria that was showing in Dwyer’s face, in the way he was rubbing the knuckles of one hand against his other palm.

“Inside somewhere. In a cell, I guess. They wouldn’t let me see him. I can’t go in there. They said they’d throw me into the can, too, if I showed my face in there once more. French police,” he said bitterly. “You might as well talk to Hitler.”

“How is he?” Rudolph asked. Looking at Dwyer, hunched against the cold night air, he felt small shivers run down his spine, too. He was dressed for the day’s warmth, had neglected to grab a coat at the hotel.

“I don’t know how he is
now,”
Dwyer said. “He wasn’t too bad when they dragged him in. But he hit a cop and God knows what they’ve done to him since they got him in there.”

Rudolph wished that there was a café open, a lighted place with at least the semblance of warmth. But the street stretched away on both sides, narrow and dark except for the weak glow of lampposts. “All right, Bunny,” he said soothingly. “I’m here. I’ll see what I can do. But you have to fill me in. What happened?”

“I took him out to dinner in Antibes,” Bunny said. He said it defensively, as though Rudolph was accusing him, as though his innocence had to be claimed and confirmed before anything else was said or done. “I couldn’t leave the kid alone on a night like this, could I?”

“Of course not.”

“We drank some wine. Wesley drank wine with all of us, in front of his father, his father would pour it out of the bottle for him as though he was a grown-up, you forget that he’s just a kid … You know, in France …” His voice trailed off, as though the shared bottle of wine between the boy and himself in the restaurant in Antibes was another unjust charge against him.

“I know,” Rudolph said, trying not to sound impatient. “Then what?”

“Then the kid wanted a brandy. Two brandies. I thought, why not? After all, the day you bury your father … Even if he got drunk, we were right near the port, I could get him back to the ship with no trouble. Only he wouldn’t go back to the ship. All of a sudden he got up from the table and he said, ‘I’m going to Cannes.’ ‘What the hell do you want to go to Cannes for, this time of night?’ I said. ‘I’m going to visit a nightclub,’ he said. His exact words. Visit. ‘I’m going to visit the Porte Rose.’ God knows what the brandy, the day, everything, was doing to that kid’s head. I tried to reason with him, I swear to God I did. ‘Fuck you, Bunny,’ he said. He never swore at me before. He had a funny dead look on his face. You couldn’t budge him with a bulldozer. ‘Nobody’s asking you to come with me,’ he said. ‘Go get your beauty sleep.’ He was half out of the restaurant before I could get to him, grab his arm, at least. I couldn’t let him go to that goddamn place alone, could I?”

“No,” Rudolph said wearily. “You did the right thing.” He wondered if he would have done better or worse in Dwyer’s place. Worse, he thought.

“So we got a taxi and we went to the Porte Rose,” Dwyer rattled on, made garrulous by grief or fear or impotence. “He never said a word in the taxi. Not word one. Just sat there looking out of the window, like a tourist. Who the hell knew what he had in his mind? I’m not a psychologist, I never had kids, who knows what crazy things they think of?” The tone of innocence, not expecting the innocence to be believed or recognized was in the voice again. “So,” Dwyer went on, “I thought, Okay, he’s disturbed. Who isn’t today, a day like this one, he has some crazy notion maybe that he owes it to his old man to go and see the place where it all began. He saw the end, with the ashes floating out to sea, maybe he had to see the beginning, too.”

The beginning, Rudolph thought, thinking of the ferocious brother he had slept with in the same bed over the bakery store, the beginning was not in a nightclub in Cannes. You’d have to go back further than that. A lot further.

“Maybe even it was a good idea, I thought,” Dwyer said. “Anyway, one sure thing, the Yugoslav Tom had the fight with wasn’t going to be there—the police’ve been hunting for him ever since they talked to him the day after the murder and they ain’t found any trace of him yet. And I never saw the guy, anyway, and neither did Wesley, we wouldn’t know him from Adam, even if he was standing along the bar right next to us with a spotlight on him. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for me, but what’s the harm, a couple of drinks and then home to bed and a hangover tomorrow and that’s it?”

“I understand, Bunny,” Rudolph said, shivering. “You couldn’t do anything else, given the circumstances.”

Dwyer nodded vigorously. “Given the circumstances,” he said.

“How did the fight start?” Rudolph asked. Dwyer’s excuses for himself could wait until another day. It was four in the morning and he was cold and Wesley was inside the police station and maybe the cops were working him over. “Was it Wesley’s fault?”

“Fault? Who ever knows whose fault it is when something like that happens?” Dwyer’s mouth quivered. “We were standing at the bar, not saying anything to each other, maybe after two, maybe three whiskeys, we were on Scotch now, Wesley wanted Scotch—he didn’t seem drunk—that kid must have a head like iron—and there was a big Englishman next to him, and he was drinking beer and talking loud. He was off some ship in the harbor, you could tell he was a seaman, he was saying something about Americans in English to the girl, I guess it wasn’t very complimentary because all of a sudden Wesley turned to him and said, quiet-like, ‘Shut your big trap about Americans, limey.’”

Oh, God, Rudolph thought, what a time and place for patriotism.

“It was something about how the Americans let the English fight their war for them—Wesley wasn’t even
born
then, what the hell did he care? Christ, his own father would never’ve had a fight in a bar if
ten
Englishmen said Americans were all yellow pimps and whoremongers. But Wesley was spoiling for a fight. I never saw him fight before—but Tom told me about him and I could see the signs and I grabbed his arm and said, ‘Come on, kid, time to go.’ But the Englishman, Christ, he must’ve weighed two hundred pounds, thirty, thirty-two years old, drinking all that beer, he said, ‘Would you repeat that, please, sonny?’ So, nice and calm, Wesley said, ‘Shut your big trap about Americans, limey.’

“Even then, it could’ve been avoided, because the girl kept tugging at the Englishman’s sleeve and saying, ‘Let’s go home, Arnold.’ But he shook her off and said to Wesley, ‘What ship you off, mate?’ and I could see him reaching, slow, toward the beer bottle on the bar. ‘The
Clothilde,’
Wesley said, and I could feel all his muscles tensing up in his arm. The Englishman laughed. ‘You better be looking for another berth, sonny,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe the
Clothilde
is going to be a popular ship from now on.’ It was the laugh that got Wesley, I think. He reached out sudden and grabbed the beer bottle first and cracked it across the man’s face. The Englishman went down, blood all over him and everybody screaming all around and Wesley started stomping him, with the craziest expression you ever saw on a boy’s face. Where he ever learned to fight like that nobody’ll ever know. Stomping, for Christ’s sake. And laughing, crazy as a bedbug, with me hanging on him to pull him back and making no more impression on him than if I was a mosquito buzzing around his neck.

“It didn’t take long. There were two cops in plainclothes at a table and they jumped him, but he got one good punch in on one of the cops and the cop went down to his knees. But the other cop got out a billy and clouted him on the neck and that was the end of the match right there. They hauled Wesley away and into a police car outside and they wouldn’t let me come with them, so I just ran to the police station and an ambulance went by full speed with the lights full on and the siren going and God knows what sort of shape that Englishman is in right now.” Dwyer sighed. “That’s about it,” he said breathlessly. “Just about it. Now you know what it’s all about, why I called your hotel.”

Rudolph sighed, too. “I’m glad you called,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’d go in with you,” Dwyer said, “but they hate the sight of my face.”

Rudolph settled his shoulders into the jacket of his suit and went into the police station, the sudden light glaring in his eyes, but the warmth, even on this errand, welcome. He was conscious that he needed a shave, that his clothes were rumpled. He would have felt more confident if, in Gretchen’s words, he didn’t look as if he had just been laid. He was still conscious, too, of the musky fragrance of perfume that still clung to him. You are not dressed or properly deodorized for the occasion, he told himself as he went toward the high desk behind which sat a fat policeman with blue jaws, scowling at him.

Travel, he thought, as he smiled, or hoped he smiled, at the policeman, travel broadens one’s horizons; one visits cathedrals, the beds of the wives of continental military men, one sails over the hulks of ships sunk in many wars, one becomes familiar with foreign customs, strange foods, police stations, crematories …

“My name,” he said to the policeman behind the desk, in slow French, “is Jordache. I am American …” Did the policeman know of Lafayette, the Marshall Plan, D day? Take a chance on gratitude. A long chance. “I believe you have my nephew Wesley Jordache here.”

The policeman said something rapidly in French which Rudolph couldn’t understand.

“Speak slowly, please,” he said. “I am not good in French.”

“Come back at eight o’clock in the morning,” the policeman said slowly enough so that Rudolph could understand him.

“I would like to see him now,” Rudolph said.

“You heard what I said.” The policeman spoke with exaggerated slowness and held up his two hands, with eight fingers extended.

Rudolph decided that the policeman had not heard of Lafayette or D day. “He may need medical attention,” he said.

Again, with mocking slowness, the policeman said, “He is getting excellent medical attention. Eight o’clock in the morning. French time.” He laughed.

“Does anybody here speak English?”

“This is a police station,
monsieur,”
the policeman said. “You are not at the Sorbonne.”

Rudolph would have liked to ask about bail but he didn’t know the word for bail. There must be fifty thousand American and English tourists each year in Cannes, you’d think at least one of the bastards could take the trouble to learn English. “I’d like to talk to your superior officer,” he said stubbornly.

“He is not here at the present time.”

“Somebody.”

“I am somebody.” Again the policeman laughed. Then he scowled. The scowl was more natural to him than laughter. “You are invited to leave,
monsieur,”
he said harshly. “This room must be kept clear.”

For a moment, Rudolph thought of offering a bribe. But he had made the mistake once that night of offering money in the wrong place. Here it would be considerably more dangerous.

“Get out, get out,
monsieur.”
The policeman waved a thick hand impatiently. “I have work to do.”

Beaten, Rudolph left the room. Dwyer was still hitting the knuckles of one hand against the palm of his other hand outside. “Well?” Dwyer asked.

“Nothing doing,” Rudolph said flatly. “Not until eight o’clock in the morning. We might as well go to a hotel here. There’s no sense in going back to Antibes for just a couple of hours.”

“I don’t like to leave the
Clothilde
alone,” Dwyer said. “There’s no telling, what with the way things are …” He left the thought unfinished. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

“Whatever you say,” Rudolph said. He felt as though he had run for hours. In the morning, early, he would call the lawyer in Antibes. He remembered old Teddy Boylan, whose family owned the brickworks in Port Philip, where Rudolph was born, and who had befriended him, if that was the word, and had, in a way, educated him. Teddy Boylan, who had advised him to go to law school. “Lawyers run the world,” Boylan had said. Good advice perhaps for men who wanted to run the world. He had once been one of them. No longer was. If he had taken the advice, been admitted to the bar, would the blue-jowled policeman inside have laughed at him and kicked him out? Would Wesley be behind bars now, at the mercy of a cop he had knocked down in a brawl? Would Tom be alive or at least have had a neater death? Four-o’clock-in-the-morning thoughts.

He trudged through the empty streets, cleared now of whores and gamblers and ambulances, toward the Hotel Carlton, where he could get a room for a few hours’ sleep and Dwyer could find a taxi to take him back to the
Clothilde.

«  »

This is the way my father must have felt a hundred times in his life, beat up and aching, not wanting much to move, Wesley thought as he lay on the bare board that pulled down from the wall of the cell into which he had been thrown. The thought somehow comforted him, made him feel closer to his father, as the prayer the afternoon before had not. He felt quiet now, relaxed, not caring about anything, at least not just yet. He was glad they’d pulled him off the Englishman and he hoped he hadn’t killed the son of a bitch.

If the son of a bitch didn’t die, his Uncle Rudy would get him off. Little old Mr. Fixit, Rudy Jordache. He had to smile, even though it hurt to smile, when he thought this.

The smile didn’t last long. He hadn’t known his father long enough. He didn’t know how long was enough, but he knew that the time he’d had wasn’t it. There wouldn’t be any more of those long conversations in the darkened wheelhouse. Makeup time, his father used to call it, filling in the blanks, making up for the years when his mother had run away with him, had shuffled him off to one miserable school after another, telling him his father had deserted him, had run off with a cheap tart, was probably dead, the life he led, drinking, whoring, gambling, fighting, throwing his money away, everybody’s enemy. His mother had a lot to answer for.

For that matter, he had a lot to answer for himself. If he had been a little more alert, had seen or sensed the sunken log they’d hit, and they hadn’t had to come back to Antibes for repairs, they’d all be along the coast of Italy now, Portofino, Elba, Sicily, his father talking in that low, rough voice with everybody sleeping below, telling him about Clothilde Deveraux, the woman the boat was named for, the servant in Tom’s fat, German Uncle Harold’s house, scrubbing him down naked in the bathtub, feeding him gigantic meals, making love to him. His first real love, his father had said sadly, there for a while and then gone.