Beggarman, Thief (6 page)

The demise of Thomas Jordache was going to be even more complicated than usual, the consul warned; it could not be solved overnight. Rudolph had gone out into the gathering dusk feeling hopeless, trapped in a dark web of legalisms which would entangle him ever more tightly with every move he made to free himself. Trapped once more, he thought, self-pityingly, in other people’s necessities.

What did they do, Rudolph wondered as he left the consulate behind him, in the old days in the American wilderness when the leader of the tribe was killed in battle? Who got the wampum, the wives, custody of the children, the tepee, the warbonnets, the eagle feathers, the lances and arrowheads? What clever nonwarrior, what shaman or medicine man, took the role of administrator and justifier?

He had left his car along the shore, in front of the Hôtel Negresco on the Promenade des Anglais because he hadn’t wanted to risk getting lost in the streets of the unfamiliar city and had taken a taxi to the consulate. On foot now, not knowing exactly where he was going, not caring, he went in the general direction of the Negresco, not paying attention to the people around him hurrying home to dinner. Suddenly he stopped. His cheeks were wet. He put his hand to his eyes. He was crying. He had been crying without knowing it as he walked blindly toward the sea. Oh, God, he thought, I had to come all the way from the Hudson River to Nice to cry for the first time since I was a boy. None of the passersby seemed to notice his tears; there were no curious stares. It could be that the French were used to seeing grown men walking weeping through their streets; maybe it was a national custom. Perhaps, he thought, after what their country had gone through since Louis the Sixteenth, there was plenty to cry about.

When he reached his car it was already dark. He had wandered through back streets, changed direction aimlessly.
Bella Nizza,
he remembered. The Italians had taken it back in the Second World War. Briefly. In the Italian equivalent of the Pentagon there probably was a plan for recapturing it at some belligerent future date. Good neighbors. They were growing jasmine and roses for the moment on all battlefields, waiting for the next war to come along. Poor, hopeful, doomed Italian generals. Not worth the trouble, not worth the bones of a single Calabrian peasant. It wasn’t
Bella Nizza
anymore, it was a modern, junked-up commercial city, a peeling jumble of tenements, with rock music blaring from the loudspeakers of music shops, promoting its past loveliness in fake tourist brochures. All things became worse.

The lamps of the Promenade des Anglais were lit, reflecting off the roofs of the endless stream of cars, twinkling in the polluted sea murmuring against the meager strip of gravelly beach. In his conversation with the consul the man had said that Nice was a good post in the Foreign Service. The consul must know something about Nice that was not evident to the naked eye. Or perhaps he had been stationed in the Congo or Washington and even Nice would look good after that. Rudolph wondered if he had passed his brother’s murderer somewhere between the consulate and the sea. Entirely possible. Murderers were constantly being arrested by the police in Nice. He speculated about what he would do if a man sat down next to him in a café and recognized him and said, calmly,
“Bonjour, monsieur,
you may be interested to know that I am the one who did it.”

He opened the door to his car, then stood there, not getting in, thinking of the night ahead of him, going back to the hotel in Antibes, having to explain to Jean that they would have to plan on staying on in the place that had become a horror for them, having to explain to Kate and Wesley and Dwyer that nothing was settled, that everything was in abeyance, that they were tied indefinitely to death, that there was no way of knowing when they could get on with the business of living.

He closed the door of the car. He could not face what was ahead of him in Antibes. As unattractive as Nice was it was better this evening than Antibes. At least he had stopped crying.

Careful in the traffic, his nostrils assailed by the fumes the scientists of his country had assured him were deadly to the human race, he crossed to the other side of the Promenade des Anglais, bright with illuminated storefronts and the lights of cafés. He went into a café, seated himself at a table on the
terrasse,
ordered a whiskey and soda. Time-hallowed cure, palliative, nepenthe, transient unraveler of knotty problems. When the whiskey came, he drank slowly, glad that Jean was not with him, since he could not drink in her presence. Sometimes he felt he could not breathe in her presence—a condition to be dealt with at another time. He took another sip of his drink.

Suddenly, he was ravenously hungry. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast and then only a croissant and coffee. The body had its own rhythms, made its own uncomplicated, imperative claims. His hunger drove all other thoughts from his mind. He sat back in his chair sipping his whiskey, luxuriously composing the menu for the evening meal. Melon with a dash of port to begin with, then fish soup, he decided, specialty of the region, with garlicked croutons and a sprinkling of grated cheese, steak and salad, slab of Brie, strawberries for dessert. A half bottle of
blanc de blancs
with the soup and a half bottle of heavy red wine of Provence with the steak and cheese. The evening stretched out ahead of him in gluttonous splendor. He never had to worry about getting fat, but he knew that he would have been ashamed to order so self-indulgent a meal at a time like this if he were not alone. But he knew nobody in Nice. The mourners were in another town. He paid for his whiskey and went along the promenade to the Negresco and asked the concierge for the name of the best restaurant in Nice. He walked to the address he was given, striding out briskly, his eyes dry.

The best restaurant in Nice was lit by candles, decorated with glowing bouquets of pink roses, with just the right faint aroma of good cooking from the kitchen. There were not many diners, but they looked prosperous and well-fed. The room was quiet, the atmosphere fittingly serious, the headwaiter a smiling Italian gentleman with brilliant teeth who spoke English. Perhaps, Rudolph thought, he is a spy for the Italian Army, goes home every night to draw up plans of the harbor to be microfilmed by an accomplice.
Bella Nizza.

Seated at a table with a gleaming white tablecloth, breaking a crisp roll and spreading butter over it, Rudolph felt that perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that the town was not worth the bones of a single Calabrian peasant. He knew no one in Calabria.

To put an even keener edge to his appetite he ordered a martini. The martini came to the table, pale and icy cold. He fished out the olive and nibbled at it. It tasted of juniper and Mediterranean sunlight. He waved away the menu that the headwaiter offered him. “I know what I want,” he said.

The meal, when it came, did justice to the concierge’s estimate of the restaurant’s cuisine. Rudolph ate and drank slowly, feeling newly restored with every bite of the food, every drop of the wines. Sometimes, he thought, the best of holidays can be fitted into only two hours of your life.

When he had finished with the strawberries he asked for the check. He wanted to take a stroll, replete, nameless, unencumbered, sit at a café table and watch the evening traffic on the promenade while having his coffee and a brandy. He tipped the maitre d’hôtel and the waiters grandly and sauntered out into the balmy night air. He walked the few minutes to the beach. Oldest sea. Ulysses had survived it. Strapped to the mast, his sailors’ ears stopped by wax against the songs. Many brave men asleep in the deep. Tom now among them. Rudolph stood on the stony strand a few yards from where the gentle waves slid into France in a small lace of foam. It was a moonless night, but the stars were brilliant, and along the curve of the dark coast thousands of pinpoints of light made jeweled strings against the hills.

He breathed deeply of the salt air. Even though there was the mumble of traffic behind his back he felt beautifully alone, the beach deserted except for him, with nothing before him but the dark expanse of water. Tomorrow, he knew, would be a day of guilt and turmoil, but that was tomorrow. He leaned down and picked up a smooth round stone and threw it, skipping, along the surface of the sea. It skipped three times. He chuckled. If he had been a younger man, a boy, he would have sprinted like a halfback down the beach, along the water’s edge, dodging the irregular ebb and flow of the waves. But at his age, in his black suit, it did not seem advisable, even in his mellow after-dinner state, to draw attention to himself from the strollers on the walk above the beach.

He went back to the promenade and entered a brightly lit café, seating himself so that he could watch the crowded pavement, the sauntering men and women, their day’s work done or their tourists’ duties performed, now just enjoying the climate, the momentary exchange of glances, the opportunity to walk, unhurried in the soft night, arm in arm with a loved one.

The café was not crowded. At a table, just one removed from his, a woman was reading a magazine, her head bent so that he could not see her face. She had looked up when he came in, then quickly gone back to her magazine. She had a half-full glass of white wine on the table in front of her. She had dark hair, nice legs, he noticed, was wearing a light blue dress.

He was conscious of another, unspecific hunger.

Don’t spoil the evening, he warned himself.

He ordered a brandy and coffee from the waiter, in English. The woman, he noted, looked up again when he spoke. He detected, or thought he detected, a momentary glimmer of a smile on her face. She was not young, in her late thirties, he would have said, somewhere around his age, carefully made up, eye shadow. A little old for a prostitute, but attractive just the same.

The waiter put down his coffee and brandy and the little stamped check and went back toward the bar inside. Rudolph took a sip of the coffee, strong and black. Then he lifted the small glass of brandy and sniffed it. Just as he was about to drink, the woman raised her glass of wine to him. This time there was no doubt about it. She was smiling. She had a full red mouth, dark gray eyes, black hair. Politely, Rudolph raised his glass a little higher in salute, drank a little.

“You’re American, aren’t you?” She had only a slight accent.

“Yes.”

“I knew as soon as you came in,” she said. “The clothes. Are you here on a pleasure trip?”

“In a way,” he said. He didn’t know whether he wanted to continue the conversation or not. He was not easy with strangers, especially strange women. She didn’t look like the prostitutes he had seen prowling the streets of New York, but he was in a foreign country and he wasn’t sure how French prostitutes dressed and spoke. He was not used to being accosted by women. There was something forbidding about him, his friend and lawyer, Johnny Heath, had said, austere. Johnny Heath was accosted wherever he went, on the street, in bars, at parties. There was nothing austere about Johnny Heath.

From adolescence Rudolph had developed an aloof, cool manner, believing that it gave him the air of belonging to another class than that of the boys and men he had grown up among, with their easy comradeship, their loud, plebeian conviviality. Perhaps, he thought, looking at the woman at the other table, I have overdone the act.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” the woman asked. Her voice was husky, with a certain harshness in it that was not displeasing.

“Moderately,” he said.

“Are you in a hotel here in Nice?”

“No,” he said. He supposed that there was a certain set routine ladies such as this one went through. He guessed that she was one of the higher paid members of her profession, who did not get to the point immediately but flattered a man by pretending that she was interested in him, putting the eventual transaction on a level that was not merely physical and commercial. “I’m just passing through,” he said. He was beginning to think, Why not? Once in my life, he thought, why not see what it’s like? Besides, he had been continent for a long time. Too long. He had not slept in the same room with Jean since she had had her miscarriage. More than a year. Sometimes, he thought, you must remember you are a man. Bare, forked animal. Even he. He smiled at the woman. It felt good to smile. “May I offer you a drink?”

He had never offered a drink to a stranger before, man or woman. About time to begin. What have I been saving myself for, what have I been proving? In the one city of Nice itself, at this moment, there were probably thousands of men tumbling with women in joyous beds, regretting nothing, grasping the pleasure their bodies were conceived for, forgetting the day’s labors, the day’s fears. What put him above common humanity? “I’m alone,” he said daringly. “I don’t really speak French. I would enjoy some company. Somebody who speaks English.” Always the saving, modifying hypocritical clause, he thought.

The woman looked at her watch, pretended at decision. “Well,” she said, “that would be very nice.” She smiled at him. She was pretty when she smiled, he thought, even white teeth and nice little wrinkles around the dark gray eyes. She folded her magazine and picked up her handbag and stood up and took the three steps to his table. He stood up and held the chair for her and she said, “Thank you,” as she sat down. “I like to talk to Americans whenever I get a chance. I was in Washington for three years and I learned to like Americans.”

Gambit, Rudolph thought, but keeping his face agreeable. If I were Swedish or Greek, she’d say she liked Swedes and Greeks. He speculated on how she had spent her three years in Washington. Entertaining lobbyists, subverting congressmen in the bedrooms of motels for pay?

“I like some Americans myself,” he said.

She chuckled, a small, ladylike chuckle. She was definitely not a sister to the prowling, gaudy savages of the streets of New York, regardless of the bond of their profession. He had heard that there were well-mannered whores in America, too, who charged a hundred dollars or more for an hour’s visit, and who could only be ordered by telephone, out-of-work actresses and models, elegant housewives working on a mink coat, but he had never met any of them. In fact, he had never spoken more than three words to any prostitute: “Thank you, no.”