Nightwork (16 page)

There was one clue, if it could be called that. Along with the two suits and the flannel slacks and the houndstooth sport jacket, there was a tuxedo. It might mean that my man had intended to spend at least part of his time at a plush resort where people dressed for dinner. The only place I had ever heard of like that was the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, but there probably were a dozen others. And the presence of the tuxedo could also mean that its owner intended to go to London or Paris or some other city where dress might occasionally be formal while he was in Europe. Europe was just too goddamn enormous.

I thought of calling the ski club office in New York, explaining that there had been an innocent mix-up at the Zurich airport and asking for a copy of the manifest with the names of the people on board my plane and their home addresses. For a little while I entertained the notion of sending letters to each and every one of the more than three hundred passengers with my story of the mistake about the luggage and asking the recipients of the letter to let me know whether or not they had lost theirs, so that I could return the bag in my possession to its rightful owner. But thinking about this plan for just a minute or two, I realized how hopeless it would be. After the two fruitless days, I was sure that whoever had my bag would not be inclined to advertise.

Trying to get some idea of what the thief (which was how I now described the man to myself) might look like, I tried on some of his clothes. I put on one of his shirts. It fit me around the neck. I have a sixteen-and-a-half-inch neck. The sleeves were about an inch too short for me. Could I carry a tape measure and invent some plausible reason for measuring the necks and arms of all the Americans in Europe for the winter? There were two pairs of good shoes, one brown, one black, size ten. Whitehouse & Hardy. Stores in almost every big city in the United States. No footprint there. I tried them on. They fit me perfectly. My feet would be dry this winter.

The houndstooth jacket fit me well enough, too—a little loose around the middle but not much. No middle-aged paunch there, but then, again, the man was a skier and probably in good condition, no matter how old he was. The slacks were a little short, too. So the man was slightly shorter than I, say five foot ten or eleven. At least I wouldn’t have to waste my time on giants or fat men or midgets.

I hoped that the thief would turn out to be as thrifty as I intended to be and wear the clothes he had no doubt by now found in my bag, even though they would only fit him approximately, as his fit me. I was sure that if I saw a suit of mine go past I would recognize it. I realized I was grasping at straws—with seventy-thousand dollars in his pocket he was probably being measured at that moment by some of the best tailors in Europe. I had the same sense of pain that I imagined a husband might have knowing that at that moment his beautiful wife was in bed with another man. With anguish I realized I was
married
to a certain number of hundred-dollar bills. It wasn’t rational. After all, I was richer than I had been only two weeks before. But there it was. I was beyond rationality.

Meanwhile I had about five thousand dollars in cash on me. I had five thousand dollars worth of time to find a man with a sixteen-and-a-half-inch neck, thirty-four-inch arms, a size ten shoe, and no intention of returning seventy thousand dollars that had fallen, almost literally, from the heavens into his hands.

As I repacked the bag carefully, putting the gaudy jacket on top, the way I had found it, I thought, Well, at least there’s one consolation—I won’t have to spend any money on a new wardrobe to replace the one I had lost. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. I don’t know what I would have done if the bag had been full of women’s things.

I paid my bill and took a taxi to the Bahnhof and bought a first-class ticket for St. Moritz. The only people I had spoken to on the plane coming over were the couple who were going to ski the Corvatch at St. Moritz. They hadn’t told me their names or where they were going to stay. I knew the chances of their being able to give me any useful information if I did find them were almost infinitesimal. But I had to start somewhere. Zurich had no further charms for me. It had rained the two days I had been there.

At Chur, an hour-and-a-half ride from Zurich, I had to change for the narrow-gauge railroad that mounted into the Engadine. I went down the first-class car until I saw an empty compartment and went in and put my coat and two bags on the rack over the seats.

The atmosphere on the new train was considerably different from the one on the express from Zurich, which had been businesslike and quiet, with solid, heavy types reading the financial pages of the
Zurcher Zeitung.
Getting into the toylike cars en route to the Alpine resorts, there were a lot of young people, many of them already in ski clothes, and expensively dressed pretty women in furs, with appropriate escorts. There was a feeling of holiday that I was in no mood to share. I was hurting and I wanted to think and I hoped that no one would come into my compartment to disturb me. Undemocratically, I closed the sliding door of the compartment, as a deterrent to company. But just before the train started, a man pulled the door open and asked, in English, politely enough, “Pardon me, sir, are these seats taken?”

“I don’t think so,” I said as ungraciously as possible.

“Honey,” the man called down the corridor. “In here.” A fluffy blonde, considerably younger than the man, wearing a leopard coat and a hat to match, came into the compartment. I grieved briefly for all prowling animals threatened with extinction. The lady was carrying a handsome leather jewel case and smelled strongly of a musky perfume. A huge diamond ring graced the finger over her wedding band. If the world were better organized, there would have been a riot of porters and any other workers within a radius of ten blocks of the station platform. Unthinkable in Switzerland.

The man had no luggage, just some magazines and a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
under his arm. He dropped the magazines and paper on the seat opposite me and helped the lady off with her coat. Swinging it up to put it on the rack, the hem of the coat brushed against my face, tickling me and swamping me in a wave of scent.

“Oh,” the woman said, “excuse, excuse.”

I smiled glumly, restraining myself from scratching at my face. “It’s a pleasure,” I said.

She rewarded me with a smile. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight years old, and up to now she had obviously had every reason to feel that a smile of hers was indeed a reward. I was sure that she was not the man’s first wife, maybe not even the second. I took an instant dislike to her.

The man took off the sheepskin coat that he was wearing, and the green, furry Tyrolean hat, with a little feather in the band, and tossed them up on the rack. He had a silk foulard scarf tied around his throat, which he didn’t remove. As he sat down he pulled out a cigar case.

“Bill,” the woman said, complaining.

“I’m on a holiday, honey. Let me enjoy it.” Bill opened the cigar case.

“I hope you don’t mind if my husband smokes,” the woman said.

“Not at all.” At least it would kill some of the overpowering aroma of the perfume.

The man pushed the cigar case toward me. “May I offer you one?”

“Thank you, no. I don’t smoke,” I lied.

He took out a small gleaming clipper and cut off the end. He had thick, brutal, manicured hands that went with his high-flushed, fleshy face and hard blue eyes and jaw. I would not have liked to work for him or be his son. I figured he was over forty years old. “Pure Havana,” he said. “Almost impossible to find back home. The Swiss are neutral about Castro, thank God.” He used a thin gold lighter to start the cigar and leaned back, puffing comfortably. I looked out the window morosely at the snowy countryside. I had thought I was going to be on holiday, too. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to turn around at the next station and start for home. Except where was home? I thought of Drusack, who was not going to St. Moritz.

The train went into a tunnel and it was absolutely dark in the compartment. I wished the tunnel would go on forever. Self-pityingly, I remembered the nights at the St. Augustine and thought, Darkness is my element.

Sometime after we emerged from the tunnel, we were in sunlight. We had climbed out of the gray cloud that hung over the Swiss plain. The sunlight was somehow an affront to my sensibility. The man was dozing now, his head thrown back, the cigar dead in an ashtray. His wife had the
Herald Tribune
and was reading the comic strips, a rapt expression on her face. She looked foolish, her mouth pursed, her eyes childish and bright under the leopard hat. Was that what I had thought money was going to buy for me?

She became conscious that I was staring at her, looked up at me, giggled coquettishly. “I’m a pushover for comic strips,” she said. “I’m always afraid Rip Kirby is going to get killed in the next installment.”

I smiled inanely, looked at the diamond on her finger, earned, I was sure, in honest matrimony. She peered obliquely at me. I guessed that she never looked at anyone straight on. “I’ve seen you someplace before,” she said. “Haven’t I?”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Weren’t you on the plane Wednesday night? The club plane?”

“I was on it,” I said.

“I was sure I knew you from someplace before that. Sun Valley maybe?”

“I’ve never been in Sun Valley,” I said.

“That’s the wonderful thing about skiing,” she said, “you get to meet the same people all over the world.”

The man groaned a little, awakened by the sound of our voices. Coming out of sleep, his eyes stared at me with blank hostility. I had the feeling that hostility was his natural and fundamental condition and that I had surprised him before he had time to arrange himself for the ordinary traffic of society.

“Bill,” the woman said, “this gentleman was on the plane with us.” From the way she said it, it sounded as though it had been an extraordinary pleasure for us all.

“Is that so?” Bill said.

“I always feel it’s lucky to find Americans to travel with,” the woman said. “The language and everything. Europeans make you feel like such a dummy. I think this calls for a drink-drink.” She opened the jewel case, which she had kept on the seat beside her, and brought out an elegant silver flask. There were three small chromium cups, one inside the other, over the cap, and she gave one to me and one to her husband and kept one for herself. “I hope you like cognac,” she said, as she poured the liquor carefully into our cups. My hand was shaking, and some of the cognac spilled over on it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. The reason my hand was shaking was that the man had taken off the foulard scarf around his neck and for the first time I saw the tie he was wearing. It was a dark red woolen tie. It was either the tie that I had packed in my bag or one exactly like it. He crossed his legs and I looked down at his shoes. They were brown, plain-toed, with gum soles. They were not new. I had had just such a pair of shoes in my bag.

“Here’s to the first one to break a leg this year,” the man said, raising his chromium cup. He laughed harshly. I was sure he had never broken anything. He was just the sort of man who had never been sick a day in his life and didn’t carry anything stronger than aspirin with him when he traveled.

I drank my cognac in one gulp. I needed it. And I was glad when the lady refilled my cup immediately. I raised the cup gallantly to her and smiled widely and falsely, hoping the train would be wrecked and both she and her husband crushed, so that I could search them and their baggage thoroughly. “You people certainly know how to travel,” I said, with an exaggerated, admiring shake of the head.

“Be prepared in foreign lands,” the man said. “That’s our motto. Say …” He extended his hand. “My name’s Bill. Bill Sloane. And the little lady is Flora.”

I shook his hand and told them my name. His hand was hard and cold. The little lady (weight one twenty-five, I figured) smiled winsomely and poured some more cognac.

By the time we reached St. Moritz we were a cosy threesome. I had learned that they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, that Mr. Sloane was a three-handicap golfer, that he was a building contractor and a self-made man, that, as I had guessed, Flora was not his first wife, that he had a son at Deerfield, who, thank God, did not wear his hair long, that he had voted for Nixon and had been to the White House twice, that the Watergate fuss would die down in a month with the Democrats sorry they had ever started it, that this was their third visit to St. Moritz, that they had stopped over in Zurich for two days so that Flora could do some shopping, and that they were going to stay at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz.

“Where’re you staying, Doug?” Sloane asked me.

“The Palace,” I said without hesitation. I certainly couldn’t afford it, but I was not going to let my new friends out of my sight at any cost. “I understand it’s fun.”

When we got to St. Moritz, I insisted on waiting with them until their luggage came out of the baggage car. Neither of them changed expression when I swung the big blue bag off the rack. “Do you know your bag’s unlocked?” Sloane asked.

“The lock’s broken,” I said.

“You ought to get it fixed,” he said, as we left the compartment. “St. Moritz is full of Italians.” His interest could mean something. Or nothing. The two of them might be the best actors in the world.

They had eight bags between them, all brand new, none of them the twin of mine. That again could mean nothing. We had to hire an extra taxi for the baggage, and it followed us up the hill through the busy, snowy streets of the town to the hotel.

The hotel had a tantalizing, faint, indefinable aroma. Its source was money. Quiet money. The lobby was like an extension of the bank vault in New York. The guests were treated by the help in a kind of reverential hush, as though they were ikons of great age and value, frail and worthy of worship. I had the feeling that even the small, exquisitely dressed children with their English nannies, who walked decorously along the deep carpets, knew I didn’t belong there.