Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Текущая страница: 50 (всего у книги 53 страниц)

Rich man’s weather, Dwyer remembered.

Turn the page to start reading the follow-up to Rich Man, Poor Man

CHAPTER 1

FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—

I AM WORTHLESS, MONIKA SAYS. SHE SAYS IT ONLY HALF-SERIOUSLY. MONIKA, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS NOT DEMONSTRABLY WORTHLESS. BEING IN LOVE WITH HER UNDOUBTEDLY CLOUDS MY VISION OF HER. MORE ABOUT THAT LATER.

SHE ASKED ME ONCE WHAT I WRITE IN THIS NOTEBOOK. I TOLD HER THAT THE COLONEL KEEPS SAYING WE HERE IN NATO ARE ON THE FIRING LINE OF CIVILIZATION. IT IS IMPORTANT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS, I TOLD HER, TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE ON THE FIRING LINE OF CIVILIZATION IN BRUSSELS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. MAYBE SOME DUSTY, IRRADIATED SCHOLAR WILL DIG AROUND IN THE RUINS OF THE CITY AND COME UPON THIS NOTEBOOK, CHARRED A LITTLE AROUND THE EDGES AND PERHAPS STIFF WITH THE RUSTY STAINS OF MY BLOOD, AND BE GRATEFUL TO WM. ABBOTT, JUNIOR, FOR HIS FORETHOUGHT IN JOTTING DOWN HIS OBSERVATIONS OF HOW THE SIMPLE AMERICAN SOLDIER LIVED WHILE DEFENDING CIVILIZATION ON THE EDGE OF EUROPE. WHAT THE PRICE OF OYSTERS WAS, THE SHAPE AND DIMENSIONS OF HIS BELOVED’S BREASTS, HIS SIMPLE PLEASURES, LIKE FUCKING AND STEALING GASOLINE FROM THE ARMY, THINGS LIKE THAT.

MONIKA SAID, DID I ALWAYS HAVE TO BE FRIVOLOUS? AND I SAID, WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO BE?

DON’T YOU BELIEVE IN ANYTHING? SHE ASKED ME.

I BELIEVE IN NOT BUCKING THE TIDE, I TOLD HER. IF THERE’S A PARADE GOING DOWN THE STREET I FALL IN LINE AND KEEP STEP, WAVING TO THE POPULACE, FRIEND AND FOE ALIKE.

GO BACK TO YOUR SCRIBBLING, SHE SAID. WRITE DOWN THAT YOU’RE NOT A TRUE REPRESENTATIVE OF YOUR GENERATION.

SCRIBBLING PERHAPS IS THE WORD FOR WHAT I’M DOING. I COME FROM A LITERARY FAMILY. BOTH MY MOTHER AND FATHER ARE—OR WERE—WRITERS. OF A SORT. MY FATHER WAS A PUBLIC RELATIONS MAN, A MEMBER OF A PROFESSION NOT HELD IN PARTICULARLY HIGH ESTEEM IN THE HALLS OF ACADEME OR IN PUBLISHERS’ OFFICES. STILL, WHATEVER THE MERITS OR FAILURES THAT CAN BE PUT TO HIS ACCOUNT, HE ACHIEVED THEM AT A TYPEWRITER. HE LIVES IN CHICAGO NOW AND WRITES ME OFTEN, ESPECIALLY WHEN HE IS DRUNK. I REPLY DUTIFULLY. WE ARE GREAT FRIENDS WHEN WE ARE FOUR THOUSAND MILES APART.

MY MOTHER USED TO WRITE CRITICISM FOR NASTY LITTLE MAGAZINES. OUR COMMUNICATIONS ARE MINIMAL. SHE DOES SOMETHING FOR THE MOVIES NOW. I GREW UP TO THE MUSIC OF TYPEWRITERS AND IT SEEMS NORMAL FOR ME TO PUT MY THOUGHTS, SUCH AS THEY ARE, ON PAPER. THE AMUSEMENTS ARE LIMITED HERE, ALTHOUGH IT’S BETTER THAN NAM, AS THE COLONEL KEEPS SAYING.

I PLAY TENNIS WITH THE COLONEL AND PRAISE HIS FEEBLE BACKHAND, WHICH IS ONE WAY OF GETTING AHEAD IN THE ARMY.

IF THE PREEMPTIVE RUSSIAN STRIKE DOESN’T HIT NATO, AS THE COLONEL WARNS IT WILL, I’LL KEEP SCRIBBLING. IT GIVES ME SOMETHING TO DO WHEN THINGS GET SLOW AT THE MOTOR POOL, WHERE I AM CALLED THE TRUCKMASTER.

I WONDER WHAT THE GUY IN CHARGE OF THE MOTOR POOL AT THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE WARSAW PACT FORCES IS DOING TONIGHT AS I WRITE THIS.

«  »

Alexander Hubbell was a newspaperman. Or at least he worked for Time Magazine in Paris. He was not supposed to be a newspaperman this week because he was on holiday with his wife. His wife was taking a siesta in the hotel at the base of the cape and Alexander Hubbell was approaching the préfecture of police in Antibes. He had been puzzling over a name that he had read in Nice-Matin three days ago, Jordache. An American named Jordache had been murdered in the port of Antibes just five days after his wedding. The murderer or murderers were being sought. For the time being no motive for the crime had been found. The victim who had been the owner of a yacht called the Clothilde, berthed in the harbor of Antibes, had been clubbed to death on the deck of his own ship.

Hubbell prided himself on his newspaperman’s memory and it had annoyed him that a name he felt he should have recognized and classified played only at the edges of his consciousness. He was relieved when he remembered. When he was still working in New York, there had been an issue of Life Magazine with the photographs of ten promising young politicians throughout the United States and one of the pictures had been of somebody called Jordache, he couldn’t recall the Christian name, who was the mayor of a small town about a hundred miles from New York City called Whitby. Then he remembered more. After the piece in Life there had been a scandal at the college in Whitby when rioting students had demonstrated in front of the mayor’s home and the mayor’s wife had appeared at the doorway drunk and naked. Somebody had taken a photograph and the print had gone around the office.

Still, a man whose wife had exposed herself bare-assed in front of a howling mob of students might well have gotten rid of her and married somebody with less flamboyant habits.

Of course, it might be somebody entirely different with the same name, Hubbell thought, as he waited for a light to change. A yacht in Antibes was a long way from Whitby, New York. Anyway, it was worth looking into. If it turned out to be the same promising young politician it would make a useful little story, vacation or no vacation. He had been on holiday five days already and was beginning to get bored.

The single policeman in the paint-flaked empty anteroom was dozing behind his desk, but brightened, glad for company, when Hubbell told him, in his good French, that he was a newspaperman and that he had come to make inquiries about the murder. The policeman went into another room and came out a moment later to tell him that the chef could see him now. Crime, it seemed, was not rife in Antibes that afternoon.

The chef was a sleepy-eyed, small, dark man in a blue T-shirt and rumpled cotton pants. A gold front tooth gleamed when he spoke: “What can I do for you, monsieur?”

Hubbell explained that the details of the murder of an American in France, especially if this was the Jordache he thought it was, a man of considerable importance back home, would be of interest to the American public. He and his editors would be most grateful to the chef for any light he could shed on the affair.

The chef was used to French newspapermen, who had treated the murder as a routine settling of waterfront accounts. This shrewd-looking American, representative of a prestigious magazine, investigating the death of a fellow countryman in a holiday resort that attracted many Americans, was a different matter. The chef would have been happier if the arrest had already been made and the culprit behind bars, but there was no help for that at the moment.

“Are there any clues,” the man was saying, “as to who might have done it or what the motives were?”

“We are working on the case with diligence,” the chef said. “Twenty-four hours a day.”

“Do you have any leads?”

The chef hesitated for a moment. In the movies reporters were always finding clues the police overlooked. The American seemed like an intelligent man and there was the possibility that he might come up with something useful. “On the night of his wedding,” the chef said, “Monsieur Jordache was involved in an argument—a brutal argument, I have been told by his sister-in-law—in a bar in Cannes called La Porte Rose—with a man who is known to the police. A foreigner. Yugoslav. By name Danovic. We have interrogated him. He has a perfect alibi, but we would like to question him again. Unfortunately, he seems to have disappeared. We are at the moment looking for him.”

“A brutal argument,” Hubbell said. “You mean a fight.”

The chef nodded. “Of extreme brutality, I have been told by the sister-in-law.”

“Do you know what it was about?”

“The sister-in-law claims that the foreigner was about to commit rape on her when Monsieur Jordache intervened.”

“I see,” Hubbell said. “Was Jordache in the habit of getting into fights in bars?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the chef said. “I knew Monsieur Jordache. In fact, we occasionally had a glass together. It was with great sorrow that I learned of his death. I knew him as a peaceful man. He was very well liked. He had no known enemies. However—I cannot believe that he was a man of some importance in America, as you have said.”

“Nice-Matin says he owned a yacht,” Hubbell said. He laughed lightly. “That’s pretty important.”

“He worked the yacht,” the chef said. “He was a charter captain. It was his means of livelihood.”

“I see,” Hubbell said. He couldn’t imagine one of the ten most promising young politicians in America making his living out of ferrying boating parties around the Mediterranean, no matter how many times his wife had displayed herself naked back home. The story was becoming less interesting. “Perhaps the murder was political?” he asked hopefully.

“I don’t believe so. He was not a political man at all. We tend to accumulate information on political people.”

“Smuggling?”

“I hardly think so. In that field, too, we have our information. Or at least suspicions.”

“How would you describe him, then?” Hubbell persisted, out of force of habit.

The chef shrugged. “A decent workingman. A good type.” Brave type in French. Measured praise, slightly patronizing from a French cop. “Honest, as far as anyone knew,” the chef went on. “We were not really intimate. He spoke very little French. Not like you, monsieur.” Hubbell nodded recognition of the compliment. “And my English, I regret to say, is most rudimentary.” The chef smiled at his disability. “We did not discuss our private philosophies.”

“What did he do before he came here? Do you know?”

“He was a merchant seaman.” The chef hesitated. Jordache had told him over a glass of wine, after the chef had commented on the broken nose, the scar tissue, that he had been a boxer. But he had asked the chef to keep quiet about it. In waterfront cafés boxers were likely targets for large men made belligerent by drink. “I didn’t come to France to fight,” Jordache had said. “It isn’t my lucky country for fighting. I had one bout in Paris and got my brains knocked out.” He’d laughed as he said it. From the look of the body the fight he’d been in before he died hadn’t been a lucky one, either.

Well, the chef thought, why not tell the newspaperman? It couldn’t do any harm anymore to Jordache, who wasn’t going to be doing much drinking in waterfront cafes from now on. “It appears,” said the chef, “that he was a professional pugilist. He even fought in Paris. Once. In the main event. He was knocked out.”

“A fighter?” Hubbell’s interest was aroused once more. The sports section might run a couple of hundred words. If the man had fought a main event in Paris he must have had some sort of reputation. People would be curious about an American fighter being killed in France. He would telex into the office as much of the story as he could dig up here and tell it to get the background dope out of the morgue. They rewrote all of his stories in New York anyway. “Jordache?” Hubbell said. “I don’t remember any fighter by that name.”

“He fought under an assumed name,” the chef said, making a mental note for himself to look into that part of Jordache’s history. Professional boxing was a business that gangsters were always mixed up in. There might be a lead there—a promise broken, a deal gone sour. He should have thought of it sooner. “He fought under the name of Tommy Jordan.”

“Ah,” the newspaperman said. “That helps. Certainly. I remember some stories in the papers about him. That he was promising.”

“I know nothing about that,” the chef said. “Just the fight in Paris. I looked it up in I’Equipe. He was a great disappointment, l’Equipe said.” Now he wanted to call a promoter in Marseilles who had connections with the milieu. He stood up. “I’m afraid I have to go back to work now,” he said. “If you want more information perhaps you could speak to the members of his family. His wife, his brother, his son.”

“His brother? He’s here?”

“The entire family,” the chef said. “They had been on a cruise together.”

“Would you happen to know the brother’s first name?”

“Rudolph. The family was originally German.”

Rudolph, Hubbell thought, remembering, Rudolph Jordache, that was the name in Life. “So,” he said, “he wasn’t the one who was married here?”

“No,” the chef said impatiently.

“And his wife is here, too?”

“Yes, and under the circumstances she, the sister-in-law, might be able to help you more than I can …”

“The sister-in-law?” Hubbell said, standing too. “The one in the bar?”

“Yes. I suggest you ask her,” the chef said. “If you find out anything that might assist me I would be grateful if you visited me again. Now, I’m afraid I …”

“Where can I find her?”

“She is at the Hôtel du Cap at present.” He had ordered Jean Jordache to remain in Antibes for the time being, and had taken her passport. He would need Jean Jordache for help in the case when he found Danovic. If he ever found him again. He had interviewed the woman, but she had been hysterical and drunk and he had gotten only a confused and disjointed story from her. And now the idiot of a doctor had put her under sedation. The doctor had said she was unstable, a confirmed alcoholic, and that he wouldn’t be responsible for her sanity if the chef kept after her with questions. “The others,” the chef said, “I believe can be found on the Clothilde in the harbor. Thank you for your interest, monsieur. I trust I haven’t wasted your time.” He put out his hand.

Hubbell said, “Merci bien, monsieur.” He had gotten all the information he was going to get, and left.

The chef sat down at his desk and picked up the phone to dial Marseilles.

The small white ship moved slowly in the afternoon sunlight across the Mediterranean swell. On the far-off coast, the buildings along the shore and back in the hills made a pink and white pattern against the green background of pine and olive and palm. Dwyer stood in the bow, the name of the ship, Clothilde, printed on his clean white jersey. He was a short, tight-muscled man and he had been crying. Because of his protruding long front teeth he had always been called Bunny, as far back as he could remember. Despite his muscles and his workingman’s clothes, there was something ineradicably girlish about him. “I’m not a fag,” he had said the first time he had had any kind of conversation with the dead man, whose ashes had just been strewn over the sea. He stared at the pretty coast through tear-blurred, soft black eyes. Rich man’s weather, the murdered man had said.

You could say that again, Dwyer thought. Not his weather, nor mine either. We fooled ourselves. We came to the wrong place.

Alone in the pilothouse, dressed like Dwyer in chinos and white jersey, his hand on a spoke of the polished oak and brass wheel, stood Wesley Jordache, his eyes fixed on the point of land on which stood the citadel of Antibes. He was tall for his age, a lanky, powerful, rawboned boy, tanned, his blond hair bleached in streaks by sun and salt. Like Dwyer, he was thinking of the man whose ashes he had consigned to the sea, the man who had been his father. “Poor, stupid, crazy son of a bitch,” the boy said aloud, bitterly. He remembered the day his father, whom he hadn’t seen for years, had come to take him out of the military school on the Hudson, where he had fought half the students, all ages, all classes, all sizes, in blind, incomprehensible, meaningless fury.

“You’ve had your last fight,” his father had said.

Then the silence. And the rough man saying, “Did you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir,” the man had said. “I’m your father.”

His father had laid down the rules for the wrong member of the family, the boy thought, his eyes on the citadel where, he had been told, Napoleon had been imprisoned one night on his return from Elba.

At the rail aft, dressed in incongruous black, stood the boy’s uncle, Rudolph Jordache, and his aunt, Gretchen Burke, brother and sister of the murdered man. City people, unaccustomed to the sea, accustomed to tragedy; stiff figures of death against the sunny horizon. They did not touch or speak or look at each other. What was left unsaid on this azure summer afternoon would not have to be explained or mourned or apologized for later.

The woman was in her early forties, tall, slender and straight, her black hair blowing a little in the offshore breeze, framing a luminously pale face, the signs of age just omens now, hints of things to come. She had been beautiful as a girl and was beautiful in a different way now, her face stern, marked by sorrow and a troubled sensuality that was not temporary or fleeting but a permanent habit. Her eyes, squinting against the glare, were a deep blue that in some lights shaded down to violet. There was no damage of tears.

It had to happen, she thought. Of course. We should have known. He probably knew. Maybe not consciously, but known just the same. All that violence could not have a nonviolent end. True son of his father, the blond stranger in the family, alien to the dark brother and the dark girl, although all from the same bed.

«  »

The man was slim, too, a well-cared-for, aristocratic Yankee slim-ness, inherited from no parent, acquired by an act of will, now accentuated by the neatly cut, almost ambassadorial dark American suit. He was younger by two years than his sister and looked younger than that, a false, gentle echo of youth in the face and bearing of a man whose speech and movements were always deliberate and considered, a man who had known great authority, had struggled all his life, had won and lost, had taken on responsibility in all situations, had come up from penury and want to amass a considerable fortune, who had been ruthless when necessary, cunning when it was useful to be cunning, harsh with himself and others, generous, by his lights, when it was possible to be generous. The resignation that had been forced upon him was there in the thin, controlled mouth, the watchful eyes, was there to be discovered or guessed at. It was a face that could have been that of a youthful air force general whose command had been taken away from him for a failure in the ranks below him that might or might not have been his fault.

He went alone, Rudolph Jordache was thinking; he came into the cabin where I was sleeping and closed the door softly and left alone. Left for what was to become his death, disdaining my help, disdaining me, disdaining my manhood or what he would think of, if he ever thought, as my lack of manhood, in a situation that required a man.

Down below, Kate Jordache was packing her bag. It didn’t take long. On top of her other things she first put the white jersey with the ship’s name on it that had made Thomas laugh when he saw what her full bosom had done to the lettering, then the bright dress he had bought her for their wedding just eight days ago.

She had nagged Thomas into marrying her. That was the word—nagged. They had been perfectly happy before, but then when she knew she was pregnant– Proper, bloody little well-brought-up, lower-class, obedient, English working girl … Here comes the bride. If there had been no wedding, that awful, twittery, smart-talking woman, that fancy wife of Rudolph’s, would never have had the excuse to get drunk, would not have gone off with a Yugoslav pimp, would have kept her expensive pink pants on her, would not have needed rescuing or a man fighting for her, and a man a lot better than her husband would be alive today.

Enough of that, Kate thought. Enough. Enough.

She closed the bag with a snap and sat down on the edge of the bunk, her solid brown body just beginning to show the swell of the child within her, her capable, quick hands folded quietly in her lap as she looked around her, for the last time, she had decided, at the cramped cabin with the familiar noise of the sea swishing past the open porthole.

Thomas, she thought, Thomas, Thomas.

“Who was Clothilde?” she had asked once.

“She was a queen of France. She was somebody I knew as a boy. She smelled like you.”

Absent from the small company of mourners on the vessel heading for the coast of France was Jean, Rudolph Jordache’s wife. She sat on a bench in the park of the hotel watching her daughter playing with the young girl Rudolph had hired to take care of the child until, as Rudolph had put it, she was in condition to handle Enid again herself. How long would that be? Jean had asked herself. Two days, ten years, never?

She was dressed in slacks and a sweater. She had not brought along clothes suitable for a funeral. Rudolph had been relieved when she said she wouldn’t go. She could not bear the thought of stepping aboard the Clothilde again, of facing the silent, accusing stares of the wife, the son, the beloved friend.

When she had looked at herself in the mirror in the morning she was shocked at what the last days had done to the small, pretty, girlish face.

The skin of her face, her entire body, seemed to be stretched unbearably on some invisible rack. She felt as though at any moment her body would explode and her nerves erupt through the skin, snapping and crackling like wild lines of wire, crackling under fatal electrical charges.

The doctor had given her some Valium, but she was past Valium. If it weren’t for the child, she thought, she would go down to the sea and throw herself off the rocks into it.

As she sat there in the shadow of a tree, in the spicy fragrance of pine and sun-warmed lavender, she said to herself, Everything I touch I destroy.

«  »

Hubbell sat over a coffee on the terrasse of a café in the main square, thinking over what the policeman had told him. The policeman obviously knew more than he was telling, but you had to expect that from the police, especially with an embarrassing unsolved murder on their hands. The sister-in-law might be able to help you more than I can, the cop had said. The sister-in-law. The naked lady, the wife of the promising young mayor. Definitely worth a couple of hundred words. The harbor could wait.

He paid for his coffee and walked over to a parked taxi and got in and said, “The Hôtel du Cap.”

Madame Jordache was not in her room, the concierge said, but he had seen her go out into the park with her child and the child’s nurse. Hubbell asked the concierge if there was a telex in the hotel and was told that there was one. He asked if he might use it that evening and after a moment’s hesitation the concierge said he thought that could be arranged. The hesitation Hubbell rightly interpreted to mean that a tip would be involved. No matter. Time Magazine could afford it. He thanked the concierge and went out to the terrace and the steps leading to the long avenue through the noble park down to the bathing pavilion and restaurant and the sea. He suffered a moment of envy as he thought of the small room in the noisy little hotel on the highway in which his wife was taking her siesta. Time Magazine paid well, but not well enough for the Hôtel du Cap.

He went down the steps and into the fragrant park. A minute later he saw a little girl in a white bathing suit throwing a beach ball back and forth with a young girl. Seated on a bench nearby was a woman in slacks and a sweater. It was not the sort of scene that you would ordinarily associate with a murder.

He approached the group slowly, stopping for a moment as if to admire a bed of flowers, then smiling at the child as he neared the group. “Bonjour,” he said. “Good afternoon.”

The girl said, “Bonjour,” but the woman on the bench said nothing. Hubbell noticed that she was very pretty, with a trim, athletic figure, that her face was drained and pale, with dark circles under the eyes. “Mrs. Jordache?” he said.

“Yes?” Her voice was flat and toneless. She looked up at him dully.

“I’m from Time Magazine.” He was an honorable man and would not pretend to be a friend of her husband’s or of the murdered man or an American tourist who had heard about her trouble and wished, in his frank American way, to offer his sympathy. Leave the tricks for the young fellows fighting for by-lines. “I’ve been sent down to do a story on your brother-in-law.” A white lie, but permissible within his code. If people thought you were assigned to do a job, they often felt some small obligation to help.

Still the woman said nothing, just stared at him with those lifeless eyes.

“The chief of police said you might be able to give me some information about the affair. Background information.” The “background” had an innocuous ring to it, with its assumption that what would be said would not actually be published, but merely used as a guide for a responsible journalist who wanted to avoid errors in writing his story.

“Have you talked to my husband?” Jean asked.

“I haven’t met him yet.”

“Haven’t met him yet,” Jean repeated. “I wish I hadn’t. And I bet he wishes I hadn’t.”

Hubbell was taken aback, as much by the intensity with which the woman had spoken as by what she had said.

“Did the policeman tell you why I could give you information?” the woman demanded, her voice harsh and rasping now.

“No,” Hubbell lied.

Jean stood up abruptly. “Ask my husband,” she said, “ask the whole goddamn family. Just leave me alone.”

“Just one question, Mrs. Jordache, if I may,” Hubbell said, his throat constricted. “Would you be prepared to lay criminal charges against the man who attacked you?”

“What difference would it make?” she said dully. She sat heavily on the bench, stared at her child, running after the beach ball in the sunshine. “Go away. Go away. Please.”

Hubbell got out of the taxi and walked along the port. Not a fitting place to die, he thought as he went toward the port captain’s shack to find out where the Clothilde was berthed. The port captain was a weathered old man, sitting outside his shack, smoking a pipe, his chair tilted against the wall as he took the afternoon sun.

The port captain gestured with his pipe toward the mouth of the port, where a white boat was slowly coming in. “There she is. They’ll be here for a while,” the old man said. “They chewed up their starboard propeller and shaft. You American?”

“I am.”

“It’s a shame what happened, isn’t it?”

“Terrible,” Hubbell said.

“They just buried his ashes in the sea,” the old man volunteered. “As good a place to be buried as anywhere else for a sailor. I wouldn’t mind it myself.” Even in midseason, the port captain had plenty of time for conversation.

Hubbell thanked the man and walked around the port and sat down on an upturned dory near the place on the quay into which the Clothilde was being maneuvered. He saw the two figures in back at the stern, with the American flag rippling in the breeze behind them. He saw a short, tight-muscled man working on the chain forward and a tall blond boy spinning the wheel in the pilothouse as the ship slowly came in, stern first, with the engine now off and the blond boy running aft to throw a line to a sailor on the quay, as the man ran to the stern and jumped nimbly to the quay to catch a second line that the boy threw to him. When the two lines were secure, the man leaped back onto the deck and he and the boy manhandled the gangplank into place, practiced and skillful, no word between them. The two people in black had moved from the stern, out of the way, superfluous.

Hubbell got up from where he was sitting on the dory, feeling clumsy and heavy after the display of sea-going agility, and started up the gangplank. The boy looked at him sullenly.

“I’m looking for Mr. Jordache,” Hubbell said.

“My name is Jordache,” the boy said. He had a deep, nonadolescent voice.

“I believe I mean that gentleman over there,” Hubbell said, gesturing toward Rudolph.

“Yes?” Rudolph came over to the head of the gangplank.

“Mr. Rudolph Jordache?”

“Yes.” The tone was short.

“I’m from Time Magazine …” Hubbell saw the man’s face set. “I’m very sorry about what happened.…”

“Yes?” Impatiently, questioning.

“I don’t like to intrude on you at a moment like this …” Hubbell felt foolish, talking at a distance, blocked off by the invisible wall of the boy’s hostility, and now the man’s. “But I wonder if I could ask you a few questions about …”

“Talk to the chief of police. It’s his business now.”

“I have talked to him.”

“Then you know as much as I do, sir,” Rudolph said and turned away. There was a cold, small smile on the boy’s face.

Hubbell stood there another moment, feeling that perhaps he had been wrong in his choice of a profession, then said, “I’m sorry,” to nobody in particular because he couldn’t think of anything else to say or do and turned around and walked toward the entrance to the port.

When he got back to his hotel, his wife was sitting on the small balcony outside their room in a bikini, working on her tan. He loved her deeply, but he couldn’t help noticing that she looked absurd in a bikini. “Where’ve you been all afternoon?” she asked.

“Working on a story,” he said.

“I thought this was going to be a vacation,” she said.

“So did I,” he said.

He got out his portable typewriter, took off his jacket and began to work.

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