Short Stories: Five Decades (96 page)

Richardson grinned. “That’s the first bit of luck I had all day.”

Down below, in front of the stands, the riderless mare was swerving and trotting off down the track to avoid a groom who was trying to grab the torn reins.

Barber kept the glasses on the two men who were carrying the jockey. Suddenly, they put him down on the grass, and one of the men bent down and put his ear against the white silk racing shirt. After a while, he stood up. Then the two men started to carry the jockey again, only now they walked slowly, as though there was no sense in hurrying.

Barber gave the glasses back to Smith. “I’m going home,” he said. “I’ve had enough of the sport for one day.”

Smith glanced at him sharply. He put the glasses to his eyes and stared at the men carrying the jockey. Then he put the glasses into their case and hung the case by its strap over his shoulder. “They kill at least one a year,” he said in a low voice. “It is to be expected in a sport like this. I’ll take you home.”

“Say,” Richardson said. “Is that fellow dead?”

“He was getting too old,” Smith said. “He kept at it too long.”

“Holy man!” Richardson said, staring down the track. “And I was sore because I came too late to bet on him. That was some tip.” He made a babyish grimace. “A tip on a dead jock.”

Barber started down toward the exit.

“I’ll come with you,” Richardson said. “This isn’t my lucky day.”

The three men went down under the stands without speaking. People were standing in little groups, and there was a queer rising, hissing sound of whispering all over the place, now that the news was spreading.

When they reached the car, Barber got into the back, allowing Richardson to sit next to Smith, on the front seat. He wanted to be at least that much alone for the time being.

Smith drove slowly and in silence. Even Richardson spoke only once. “What a way to get it,” he said as they drove between the bare, high trees. “In a lousy, three-hundred-thousand-franc claiming race.”

Barber sat in the corner, his eyes half closed, not looking out. He kept remembering the second time the two men had picked up the jockey. Smith’s selection for the afternoon, Barber thought. He closed his eyes altogether and saw the maps spread out on the bed in his room. The Mediterranean. The wide reaches of open water. He remembered the smell of burning. The worst smell. The smell of your dreams during the war. The smell of hot metal, smoldering rubber. Smith’s tip.

“Here we are,” Smith was saying.

Barber opened his eyes. They were stopped at the corner of the dead-end street down which was the entrance to his hotel. He got out.

“Wait a minute, Bertie boy,” Barber said. “I have something I want to give you.”

Smith looked at him inquiringly. “Can’t it wait, Lloyd?” he asked.

“No. I’ll just be a minute.” Barber went into his hotel and up to his room. The maps were folded in a pile on the bureau, except for one, which was lying open beside the others. The approaches to Malta. He folded it quickly and put all the maps into the manila envelope and went back to the car. Smith was standing beside the car, smoking, nervously holding on to his hat, because a wind had come up and dead leaves were skittering along the pavement.

“Here you are, Bertie boy,” Barber said, holding out the envelope.

Smith didn’t take it. “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?” he said.

“I’m sure.”

Smith still didn’t take the maps. “I’m in no hurry,” he said softly. “Why don’t you hold on to them another day?”

“Thanks, no.”

Smith looked at him silently for a moment. The fluorescent street lamps had just gone on, hard white-blue light, and Smith’s smooth face looked powdery in the shadows under his expensive hat, and his pretty eyes were dark and flat under the curled lashes.

“Just because a jockey falls at a jump—” Smith began.

“Take them,” Barber said, “or I’ll throw them in the gutter.”

Smith shrugged. He put out his hand and took the envelope. “You’ll never have a chance like this again,” he said, running his finger caressingly over the envelope edge.

“Good night, Jimmy.” Barber leaned over the car and spoke to Richardson, who was sitting there watching them, puzzled. “Give my love to Maureen.”

“Say, Lloyd,” Richardson said, starting to get out. “I thought maybe we could have a couple of drinks. Maureen doesn’t expect me home for another hour yet and I thought maybe we could cut up some old touches and—”

“Sorry,” Barber said, because he wanted, more than anything else, to be alone. “I have a date. Some other time.”

Smith turned and looked thoughtfully at Richardson. “He always has a date, your friend,” Smith said. “He’s a very popular boy. I feel like a drink myself, Mr. Richardson. I would be honored if you’d join me.”

“Well,” Richardson said uncertainly, “I live way down near the Hôtel de Ville and—”

“It’s on my way,” Smith said, smiling warmly.

Richardson settled back in his seat, and Smith started to get into the car. He stopped and looked up at Barber. “I made a mistake about you, didn’t I, Lloyd?” he said contemptuously.

“Yes,” Barber said. “I’m getting too old. I don’t want to keep at it too long.”

Smith chuckled and got into the car. They didn’t shake hands. He slammed the door, and Barber watched him pull sharply away from the curb, making a taxi-driver behind him jam on his brakes to avoid hitting him.

Barber watched the big black car weave swiftly down the street, under the hard white-blue lights. Then he went back to the hotel and up to his room and lay down, because an afternoon at the races always exhausted him.

An hour later, he got up. He splashed cold water on his face to wake himself, but even so he felt listless and empty. He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t thirsty and he kept thinking about the dead jockey in his soiled silks. There was no one he wanted to see. He put on his coat and went out, hating the room as he closed the door behind him.

He walked slowly toward the Etoile. It was a raw night and a fog was moving in’ from the river, and the streets were almost empty, because everybody was inside eating dinner. He didn’t look at any of the lighted windows, because he wasn’t going to buy anything for a long time. He passed several movie houses, neon in the drifting fog. In the movies, he thought, the hero would have been on his way to Africa by now. He would nearly be caught several times in Egypt, and he would fight his way out of a trap on the desert, killing several dark men just in time on the airstrip. And he would develop engine trouble over the Mediterranean and just pull out, with the water lapping at the wing tips, and he would undoubtedly crash, without doing too much damage to himself, probably just a photogenic cut on the forehead, and would drag the box out just in time. And he would turn out to be a Treasury agent or a member of British Intelligence and he would never doubt his luck and his nerve would never fail him and he would not end the picture with only a few thousand francs in his pocket. Or, if it was an artistic picture, there would be a heavy ground mist over the hills and the plane would drone on and on, desperate and lost, and then, finally, with the fuel tanks empty, the hero would crash in flames. Battered and staggering as he was, he would try to get the box out, but he wouldn’t be able to move it, and finally the flames would drive him back and he would stand against a tree, laughing crazily, his face blackened with smoke, watching the plane and the money burn, to show the vanity of human aspiration and greed.

Barber grinned bleakly, rehearsing the scenarios in front of the giant posters outside the theatres. The movies do it better, he thought. They have their adventures happen to adventurers. He turned off the Champs-Elysées, walking slowly and aimlessly, trying to decide whether to eat now or have a drink first. Almost automatically, he walked toward the Plaza-Athénée. In the two weeks that he had been wooed by Smith, they had met in the English bar of the Plaza-Athénée almost every evening.

He went into the hotel and downstairs to the English bar. As he came into the room, he saw, in the corner, Smith and Jimmy Richardson.

Barber smiled. Bertie boy, he thought, are you ever wasting your time. He stood at the bar and ordered a whiskey.

“… fifty missions,” he heard Richardson say. Richardson had a loud, empty voice that carried anywhere. “Africa, Sicily, Italy, Yugo—”

Then Smith saw him. He nodded coolly, with no hint of invitation. Richardson swivelled in his chair then, too. He smiled uncomfortably at Barber, getting red in the face, like a man who has been caught by a friend with his friend’s girl.

Barber waved to them. For a moment, he wondered if he ought to go over and sit down and try to get Richardson out of there. He watched the two men, trying to figure out what they thought of each other. Or, more accurately, what Smith thought of Richardson. You didn’t have to speculate about Jimmy. If you bought Jimmy a drink, he was your friend for life. For all that he had been through—war and marriage and being a father and living in a foreign country—it had still never occurred to Jimmy that people might not like him or might try to do him harm. When you were enjoying Jimmy, you called it trustfulness. When he was boring you, you called it stupidity.

Barber watched Smith’s face carefully. By now, he knew Smith well enough to be able to tell a great deal of what was going on behind the pretty eyes and the pale, powdered face. Right now, Barber could tell that Smith was bored and that he wanted to get away from Jimmy Richardson.

Barber turned back to his drink, smiling to himself. It took Bertie boy just about an hour, he thought, an hour of looking at that good-natured empty face, an hour of listening to that booming, vacant voice, to decide that this was no man to fly a small box of five-pound notes from Cairo to Cannes.

Barber finished his drink quickly and went out of the bar before Smith and Richardson got up from the table. He had nothing to do for the evening, but he didn’t want to get stuck with Jimmy and Maureen Richardson for dinner.

And now it was almost two months later and nobody had heard from Jimmy Richardson for thirty-two days.

In the whole afternoon of searching, Barber had not come upon any trace of Bert Smith. He had not been at the restaurants or the track or the art galleries, the barbershop, the steam bath, the bars. And no one had seen him for weeks.

It was nearly eight o’clock when Barber arrived at the English bar of the Plaza-Athenee. He was wet from walking in the day’s rain, and tired, and his shoes were soggy and he felt a cold coming on. He looked around the room, but it was almost empty. Indulging himself, thinking unhappily of all the taxi fares he had paid that day, he ordered a whiskey.

Barber sipped his whiskey in the quiet room, thinking circularly, I should have said something. But what could I have said? And Jimmy wouldn’t have listened. But I should have said something.
The omens are bad, Jimmy, go on home
.…
I saw a plane crashing at the fourth jump, I saw a corpse being carried across dead grass by Egyptians, Jimmy, I saw silks and maps stained by blood
.

I had to be so damned superior, Barber thought bitterly. I had to be so damned sure that Jimmy Richardson was too stupid to be offered that much money. I had to be so damned sure that Bert Smith was too clever to hire him.

He hadn’t said any of the things he should have said, and it had all wound up with a frantic, husbandless, penniless girl pleading for help that could only be too late now. Penniless. Jimmy Richardson had been too stupid even to get any of the money in advance.

He remembered what Jimmy and Maureen had looked like, smiling and embarrassed and youthfully important, standing next to Colonel Sumners, the Group Commander, at their wedding in Shreveport. He remembered Jimmy’s plane just off his wing over Sicily; he remembered Jimmy’s face when he landed at Foggia with an engine on fire; he remembered Jimmy’s voice singing drunkenly in a bar in Naples; he remembered Jimmy the day after he arrived in Paris, saying, “Kid, this is the town for me, I got Europe in my blood.”

He finished his drink and paid and went upstairs slowly. He went into a phone booth and called his hotel to see if there were any messages for him.

“Mme. Richardson has been calling you all day,” the old man at the switchboard said. “Ever since four o’clock. She wanted you to call her back.”

“All right,” Barber said. “Thank you.” He started to hang up.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” the old man said irritably. “She called an hour ago to say she was going out. She said that if you came in before nine o’clock, she would like you to join her at the bar of the Hotel Bellman.”

“Thanks, Henri,” Barber said. “If she happens to call again, tell her I’m on my way.” He went out of the hotel. The Bellman was nearby, and he walked toward it slowly, even though it was still raining. He was in no hurry to see Maureen Richardson.

When he reached the Bellman, he hesitated before going in, feeling too tired for this, wishing Maureen could be put off at least until the next day. He sighed, and pushed the door open.

The bar was a small one, but it was crowded with large, well-dressed men who were taking their time over drinks before going out to dinner. Then he saw Maureen. She was sitting in a corner, half turned away from the room, her shabby, thin coat thrown back over her chair. She was sitting alone and there was a bottle of champagne in a bucket in a stand beside her.

Barber went over to her, irritated by the sight of the champagne. Is that what she’s doing with my five thousand francs, he thought, annoyed. Women are going crazy, too, these days.

He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. She jumped nervously, then smiled when she saw who it was. “Oh, Lloyd,” she said, in a funny kind of whisper. She jumped up and kissed him, holding him hard against her. There was a big smell of champagne on her breath and he wondered if she was drunk. “Lloyd, Lloyd …” she said. She pushed him away a little, holding on to both his hands. Her eyes were smeary with tears and her mouth kept trembling.

“I came as soon as I got your message,” Lloyd said, trying to sound practical, afraid Maureen was going to break down in front of all the people in the bar. She kept standing there, her mouth working, her hands gripping his avidly. He looked down, embarrassed, at her hands. They were still reddened and the nails were still uneven, but there was an enormous ring glittering, white and blue, on her finger. It hadn’t been there when she came to his hotel, and he knew he had never seen her with a ring like that before. He looked up, almost frightened, thinking, What the hell has she started? What has she got herself into?