Acceptable Losses (37 page)

At last, Damon thought, crazily relieved, I am going to find out.

A shot rang out. Damon stopped. Somebody screamed. Then the man crumpled to the pavement two feet from where Oliver was standing with the door to the car open.

Schulter appeared from somewhere with a gun in his hand and two other large men, also holding guns.

Damon walked calmly toward where Schulter and the other two men were converging on the body lying on the pavement. Schulter kneeled down, put his ear to the man’s chest, then stood up. “He’s dead,” Schulter said. “For once the goddamn newspapers printed something useful. I had a hunch he’d show.” He beamed with pleasure, like a hunter who had just brought down a giant stag whose impressive horns would make a marvelous trophy to put over a fireplace. “Do you know him?”

Damon looked down at the dead man, the jacket gleaming with blood. The face was peaceful. Damon had never seen it before. He shook his head. “It might be anybody,” he said wonderingly to Sheila, who had her arms around him. “He never delivered his message.”

He sat in the garden in Old Lyme, looking out at the Sound. It was twilight and lights were beginning to glimmer along the shore and the water had turned to dark steel. Inside the house he could hear Sheila humming to herself as she prepared dinner. He looked forward to it hungrily. Aside from breakfast, lunch and dinner Sheila made eggnogs for him at eleven in the morning and at five in the afternoon and before they went to sleep at night in the rustling old house that creaked like a boat in the wind off the water. He had gained ten pounds in two weeks and he walked around the garden without a cane.

Schulter had been to visit there. “It’s the damnedest thing,” Schulter had said. “There wasn’t a scrap of identification on him. Not a license or a credit card or anything. Nobody claimed the body. The gun was an old German P38 that some GI probably brought back from the war. It could have passed through twenty hands by now. That’s all we know. Nothing else.” Schulter shook his head wonderingly. “He just came from nowhere. Off the pavement. Out of the sewer. Nowhere,” he said.

“Nowhere,” Damon said to himself in the twilight. He remembered that he had wanted to be allowed to die in the hospital and had not been fearful when he saw the man with the gun when he had moved out from behind the parked car.

Sheila came out from the kitchen in an apron, carrying two glasses of whiskey and soda, one for him and one for her. He took his glass as Sheila sat down on the chair beside his and they both looked out at the darkening Sound. He reached out for her hand. “Healer,” he said. “Giver of life.”

“Don’t get sentimental in your old age,” Sheila said. “I’m just the lady who brings you your whiskey before dinner.”

“What a nice place to be,” Damon said, as they drank together.

A Biography of Irwin Shaw

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an award-winning American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. His novel
The Young Lions
(1948) is considered a classic of World War II fiction. From the early pages of the
New Yorker
to the bestseller lists, Shaw earned a reputation as a leading literary voice of his generation.

Shaw was born Irwin Shamforoff in the Bronx, New York, on February 27, 1913. His parents, Will and Rose, were Russian Jewish immigrants and his father struggled as a haberdasher. The family moved to Brooklyn and barely survived the Depression. After graduating from high school at the age of sixteen, Shaw worked his way through Brooklyn College, where he started as quarterback on the school’s scrappy football team.

“Discovered” by a college teacher (who later got him his first assignment, writing for the
Dick Tracy
radio serials), Shaw became a household name at the age of twenty-two thanks to his first produced play,
Bury the Dead
. This 1935 Broadway hit—still regularly produced around the world—is a bugle call against profit-driven barbarity. Offered a job as a Hollywood staff scriptwriter, Shaw then contributed to numerous Golden Era films such as
The Big Game
(1936) and
The Talk of the Town
(1942). While continuing to write memorable stories for the
New Yorker
, he also penned
The Gentle People
(1939), a play that was adapted for film four different times.

World War II altered the course of Shaw’s career. Refusing a commission, he enlisted in the army, and was shipped off to North Africa as a private in a photography unit in 1943. After the North African campaign, he served in London during the preparations for the invasion of Normandy. After D-Day, Shaw and his unit followed the front lines and documented many of the most important moments of the war, including the liberations of Paris and the Dachau concentration camp.

The Young Lions
(1948), his epic novel, follows three soldiers—two Americans and one German—across North Africa, Europe, and into Germany. Along with James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
, Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
, and
The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk,
The Young Lions
stands as one of the great American novels of World War II. In 1958, it was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.

In 1951, wrongly suspected of Communist sympathies, Shaw moved to Europe with his wife and six-month-old son. In Paris, he was neighbors with journalist Art Buchwald and friends with the great French writers, photographers, actors, and moviemakers of his generation, including Joseph Kessel, Robert Capa, Simone Signoret, and Louis Malle. In Rome, Shaw gave author William Styron his wedding lunch, doctored screenplays, walked with director Federico Fellini on the Via Veneto, and got the idea for his novel
Two Weeks in Another Town
(1960).

Finally, he settled in the small Swiss village of Klosters and continued writing screenplays, stage plays, and novels.
Rich Man, Poor Man
(1970) and
Beggerman, Thief
(1977) were made into the first famous television miniseries.
Nightwork
(1975) will soon be a major motion picture. Shaw died in the shadow of the Swiss peaks that had inspired Thomas Mann’s great novel
The Magic Mountain
.

Shaw as a young soldier crossing North Africa from Algiers to Cairo in 1943.

Shaw’s US Army record.

Shaw just after D-Day in Normandy, France, in 1944.

A few weeks after D-Day, Shaw and his Signal Corps film crew liberate Mont Saint-Michel.

A 1944 letter from Shaw to his wife, Marian, describing the “taking” of Mont Saint Michel, as well as a nerve-wracking night under a cathedral when he almost shot a group of monks, believing them to be Germans.

Shaw as a warrant-officer in Austria in 1945, with Signal Corps Captain Josh Logan (left) and Colonel Anatole Litvak (center), who became his lifelong friends.

Shaw, Marian, and their son, Adam, on the terrace of the newly built Chalet Mia in Klosters, Switzerland, in 1957.