Short Stories: Five Decades (93 page)

The letter had depressed Barber and he hadn’t answered it. You got enough of that sort of thing from the French. He wished the ex-waist-gunner would stop writing him, or at least write on different subjects. Barber hadn’t answered his ex-wife, either, because he had come to Europe to try to forget her. He hadn’t answered his mother, because he was afraid she was right. And he hadn’t gone down to Eze, because no matter how broke he was, he wasn’t selling that particular commodity yet.

Stuck into the mirror above the bureau was a photograph of himself and Jimmy Richardson, taken on the beach at Deauville the summer before. The Richard-sons had taken a cottage there, and Barber had spent a couple of weekends with them. Jimmy Richardson was another one who had attached himself to Barber during the war. Somehow, Barber was always being presented with the devotion of people whose devotion he didn’t want. “People hang on to you,” a girl who was angry at him once told him, “because you’re an automatic hypocrite. As soon as somebody comes into the room, you become gay and confident.”

Jimmy and he had been in bathing trunks when the picture was snapped, and Barber was tall and blessed with a blond, California kind of good looks next to Jimmy, who seemed like a fat, incompetent infant, standing there with the sunny sea behind him.

Barber peered at the photograph. Jimmy didn’t look like the sort of man who would ever be missing from anywhere for thirty-two days. As for himself, Barber thought wryly, he looked automatically gay and confident.

He leaned over and took the picture down and threw it into a drawer. Then, holding the phone loosely, he stared around him with distaste. In the glare of the unshaded lamp, the dark woodwork looked gloomy and termite-ridden, and the bed, with its mottled velours spread, the color of spoiled pears, looked as though it had been wallowed on by countless hundreds of obscenely shaped men and women who had rented the room for an hour at a time. For a second, he was piercingly homesick for all the rooms of all the Hotel Statlers he had slept in and all the roomettes on trains between New York and Chicago, and St. Louis and Los Angeles.

There was a whistling, staticlike sound in the phone, and he shook himself and gave the number of the George V. When he got the George V, he asked for M. Smith, Mr. Bert Smith. After a while, the girl said M. Smith was no longer at the hotel. Barber asked hurriedly, before the girl could cut him off, whether M. Smith was expected to return shortly or if he had left a forwarding address. No, the girl said after a long wait, he was not expected to return and there was no forwarding address.

Barber hung up. He was not surprised about Bert Smith. He was a man who wandered mysteriously from hotel to hotel, and he might have used a half-dozen names besides Smith since Barber had spoken to him last.

With a conscious effort, Barber tried not to think about Jimmy Richardson or his wife, who was called, as a friendly squadron joke, Beauty, or about Jimmy Richardson’s two small sons.

Scowling, Barber went over to the window. The winter rain of Paris was seeping down into the narrow street, blurring it with the unproductive malice of city rain, chipping colorlessly at the buildings opposite, making it impossible to imagine what they had looked like when they were new. A workman was unloading cases of wine from a truck, looking persecuted by the weather, the Paris sound of clinking bottles muted and made hollow and mournful by the flow of gray water from the skies and from window ledges and signs and rolled awnings. It was not a day for a husband to be missing, for a friend to be missing. It was not a day to be alone or to have only fifteen thousand francs in your pocket or to be in a narrow hotel room where the heat was off from ten in the morning till six at night. It was not a day to be without a job or cigarettes or lunch. It was not a day on which to examine yourself and realize that no matter how many excuses you gave yourself, you were going to wind up knowing that, finally, you were responsible.

Barber shook himself again. There was no sense in just staying in the room all day. If he was going to do any good, he would have to find Bert Smith. He looked at his watch. It was nearly two-thirty. He tried to remember all the places he had ever seen Bert Smith at two-thirty in the afternoon. The fancy restaurant near the Rond-Point, where the movie people and the French newspaper owners and the rich tourists ate; the bistro on the Boulevard Latour-Maubourg, on the Left Bank; the restaurants at Auteuil and Longchamp and St. Cloud. Barber looked at the newspaper. They were running at Auteuil today.

If he was not at the races and if he was still in Paris, Bert Smith was likely to be in one art gallery or another in the middle of the afternoon. Bert Smith was an art lover, or at least he bought pictures, shrewdly and knowingly. Since Smith lived in hotel rooms, which were unlikely places for a collection, it was probable that he bought paintings on speculation or as an agent or, when they were important ones that the government did not wish to have leave the country, to be smuggled out of France.

Barber had also seen Smith late in the afternoons in the steam room at Claridge’s, a small, round man with surprisingly well-shaped legs, sitting in the vapor, wrapped in a sheet, growing pinker and pinker, smiling luxuriously in the steam, sweating off the fat that he had accumulated in many years of eating in the best restaurants in Europe.

He had also seen Smith several times around six o’clock in the evening in the barbershop at the George V getting shaved, and after that in the bar upstairs, and in the bar at the Relais Plaza and the English bar downstairs at the Plaza-Athénée. And late at night he had seen him at various night clubs—L’Eléphant Blanc, Carroll’s, La Rose Rouge …

Barber thought unhappily of the last fifteen thousand francs in his wallet. It was going to be a long, wet, hard, expensive day. He put on his hat and coat and went out. It was still raining, and he hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address of the restaurant near the Rond-Point.

It had started about two months before, in the stand at Auteuil just before the sixth race. The day was misty and there weren’t many spectators, and Barber had not been doing very well, but he had got a tip on the sixth race, on an eight-to-one shot. He put five thousand down on the nose and climbed high up in the stand to get a good view of the race.

There was only one other spectator near him in the stand, a small, round man wearing an expensive-looking velours hat, and carrying a pair of binoculars and a rolled umbrella, like an Englishman. He smiled at Barber and nodded. As Barber smiled back politely, he realized that he had seen the man many times before, or his brother, or a half-dozen other men who looked like him, in restaurants and in bars and on the street, usually with tall girls who might have been lower-class mannequins or upper-class tarts.

The man with the umbrella moved over to him along the damp concrete row of seats. He had little, dapper feet and a bright necktie, and he had a well-cared-for, international kind of face, with large, pretty dark eyes, fringed by thick black lashes. He had what Barber had come to call an import-export face. It was a face that was at the same time bland, cynical, self-assured, sensual, hopeless, and daring, and its owner might be Turkish or Hungarian or Greek or he might have been born in Basra. It was a face you might see in Paris or Rome or Brussels or Tangier, always in the best places, always doing business. It was a face, you felt somehow, that was occasionally of interest to the police.

“Good afternoon,” the man said, in English, tipping his hat. “Are you having a lucky day?” He had an accent, but it was difficult to place it. It was as though as a child he had gone to school everywhere and had had ten nurses of ten different nationalities.

“Not bad,” Barber said carefully.

“Which do you like in this one?” The man pointed with his umbrella at the track, where the horses were gingerly going up to the distant starting line on the muddied grass.

“Number Three,” Barber said.

“Number Three.” The man shrugged, as though he pitied Barber but was restrained by his good breeding from saying so. “How is the movie business these days?” the man asked.

“The movie business went home a month ago,” Barber said, slightly surprised that the man knew anything about it. An American company had been making a picture about the war, and Barber had had four lucky, well-paid months as a technical expert, buckling leading men into parachutes and explaining the difference between a P-47 and a B-25 to the director.

“And the blond star?” the man asked, taking his glasses away from his eyes. “With the exquisite behind?”

“Also home.”

The man moved his eyebrows and shook his head gently, indicating his regret that his new acquaintance and the city of Paris were now deprived of the exquisite behind. “Well,” he said, “at least it leaves you free in the afternoon to come to the races.” He peered out across the track through the glasses. “There they go.”

No. 3 led all the way until the stretch. In the stretch, he was passed rapidly by four other horses.

“Every race in this country,” Barber said as the horses crossed the finish line, “is a hundred metres too long.” He took out his tickets and tore them once and dropped them on the wet concrete.

He watched with surprise as the man with the umbrella took out some tickets and tore them up, too. They were on No. 3, and Barber could see that they were big ones. The man with the umbrella dropped the tickets with a resigned, half-amused expression on his face, as though all his life he had been used to tearing up things that had suddenly become of no value.

“Are you staying for the last race?” the man with the umbrella asked as they started to descend through the empty stands.

“I don’t think so,” Barber said. “This day has been glorious enough already.”

“Why don’t you stay?” the man said. “I may have something.”

Barber thought for a moment, listening to their footsteps on the concrete.

“I have a car,” the man said. “I could give you a lift into town, Mr. Barber.”

“Oh,” Barber said, surprised, “you know my name.”

“Of course,” the man said, smiling. “Why don’t you wait for me at the bar? I have to go and cash some tickets.”

“I thought you lost,” Barber said suspiciously.

“On Number Three,” the man said. From another pocket he took out some more tickets and waved them gently. “But there is always the insurance. One must always think of the insurance,” he said. “Will I see you at the bar?”

“O.K.,” Barber said, not because he hoped for anything in the way of information on the next race from the man with the umbrella but because of the ride home. “I’ll be there. Oh—by the way, what’s your name?”

“Smith,” the man said. “Bert Smith.”

Barber went to the bar and ordered a coffee, then changed it to a brandy, because coffee wasn’t enough after a race like that. He stood there, hunched over the bar, reflecting sourly that he was one of the category of people who never think of the insurance. Smith, he thought, Bert Smith. More insurance. On how many other names, Barber wondered, had the man lost before he picked that one?

Smith came to the bar softly, on his dapper feet, smiling, and laid a hand lightly on Barber’s arm. “Mr. Barber,” he said, “there is a rumor for the seventh race. Number Six.”

“I never win on Number Six,” Barber said.

“It is a lovely little rumor,” Smith said. “At present, a twenty-two-to-one rumor.”

Barber looked at the man doubtfully. He wondered briefly what there was in it for Smith. “What the hell,” he said, moving toward the seller’s window. “What have I got to lose?”

He put five thousand francs on No. 6 and superstitiously remained at the bar during the race, drinking brandy. No. 6 won, all out, by half a length, and, although the odds had dropped somewhat, paid eighteen to one.

Barber walked through the damp twilight, across the discarded newspapers and the scarred grass, with its farmlike smell, patting his inside pocket with the ninety thousand francs in a comforting bulge there, pleased with the little man trotting beside him.

Bert Smith had a Citroën, and he drove swiftly and well and objectionably, cutting in on other cars and swinging wide into the outside lane to gain advantage at lights.

“Do you bet often on the races, Mr. Barber?” he was saying as they passed a traffic policeman, forlorn in his white cape on the gleaming street.

“Too often,” Barber said, enjoying the warmth of the car and the effects of the last brandy and the bulge in his pocket.

“You like to gamble?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“There are many who do not like to gamble,” Smith said, nearly scraping a truck. “I pity them.”

“Pity them?” Barber looked over at Smith, a little surprised at the word. “Why?”

“Because,” Smith said softly, smiling, “in this age there comes a time when everyone finds that he is forced to gamble—and not only for money, and not only at the seller’s window. And when that time comes, and you are not in the habit, and it does not amuse you, you are most likely to lose.”

They rode in silence for a while. From time to time, Barber peered across at the soft, self-assured face above the wheel, lit by the dashboard glow. I would like to get a look at his passport, Barber thought—at all the passports he’s carried for the last twenty years.

“For example,” Smith said, “during the war …”

“Yes?”

“When you were in your plane,” Smith said, “on a mission. Weren’t there times when you had to decide suddenly to try something, to depend on your luck for one split second, and if you hesitated, if you balked at the act of gambling—sssszt!” Smith took one hand from the wheel and made a gliding, falling motion, with his thumb down. He smiled across at Barber. “I suppose you are one of the young men who were nearly killed a dozen times,” he said.

“I suppose so,” Barber said.

“I prefer that in Americans,” Smith said. “It makes them more like Europeans.”

“How did you know I was in the war?” Barber said. For the first time, he began to wonder if it was only a coincidence that Smith had been near him in the stand before the sixth race.