Nightwork (17 page)

Everybody at the reception desk and at the concierge’s desk shook Mr. Sloane’s hand and bowed to Mrs. Sloane. The tips had obviously been princely in the preceding years. Would a man like that, who could afford a wife like Flora and a hotel like the Palace, walk off with somebody else’s seventy thousand dollars? And wear his shoes in the bargain? The answer, I decided, was probably yes. After all, Sloane had confessed he was a self-made man.

When I told the clerk at the reception desk that I had no reservation, his face took on that distant no-room-at-the-inn look of hoteliers in a good season. He had pierced my disguise instantly. “I’m afraid, sir,” he began, “that …”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Mr. Sloane said, coming up behind me. “Fit him in, please.”

The clerk made an important small business of checking the room chart and said, “Well, there’s a double room. I might …”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“How long will you be staying, Mr. Grimes?” the clerk asked.

I hesitated. Who knew how long five thousand dollars would last in a place like that? “A week,” I said. I would skip orange juice in the mornings.

We all went up in the elevator together. The clerk had put me in the room next to the Sloanes. It would have been convenient if the walls had been thinner or I had been trained in electronic bugging equipment.

My room was a large one, with a great double bed with a pink satin spread and a magnificent view of the lake and the mountains beyond, pure and clear in the late afternoon sunlight. Under other conditions it would have been exhilarating. Now it merely seemed as if nature was being callous and expensive. I closed the blinds and in the gloom lay down fully dressed on the soft bed, the satin rustling voluptuously under my weight. I still seemed to smell Flora Sloane’s perfume. I tried to think of some way in which I could find out quickly and surely if Sloane was my man. My mind was flat and tired. The two days in Zurich had exhausted me. I felt a cold coming on. I could think of nothing except to hang on and watch. But then if I
did
find out that it was my tie he was wearing, my shoes he was walking around in, what would I do? My head began to ache. I got up off the bed and dug in the leather shaving kit for the tin of aspirin and swallowed two.

I dozed fitfully after that, dreaming disconnectedly. There was a man who appeared and disappeared at the edge of my dreams who might have been Sloane or Drusack, jangling keys.

I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. It was Flora Sloane, inviting me to dinner. I made myself sound enthusiastic as I accepted. I didn’t have to dress for dinner, she said; we were dining in town. Somehow, Bill had forgotten to pack his tuxedo, and it was being flown from America but hadn’t arrived yet. I said I preferred not dressing myself and went in and took a cold shower.

We met for drinks at the bar of the hotel. Sloane was wearing a dark gray suit. It was not mine. He had changed his shoes. There was another couple at the table who had been on our plane coming over and who were also from Greenwich. They had been out skiing that day and the wife was already limping. “Isn’t it marvelous?” she said. “I can just go up to the Corveglia Club every day for the next two weeks and just lie in the sun.”

“Before we were married,” her husband said, “she used to tell me how much she loved to ski.”

“That was before we were married, dear,” the woman said complacently.

Sloane ordered a bottle of champagne. It was finished quickly and the other man ordered a second one. I would have to get out of St. Moritz before it was my turn to reciprocate. It was easy to love the poor in that atmosphere.

We went to dinner in a restaurant in a rustic chalet nearby and drank a great deal more champagne. The prices on the menu were not rustic. During the course of the meal I learned more than I ever wanted to know about Greenwich—who was nearly thrown out of the golf club, what lady was doing it with what gynecologist, how much the new addition to the Powell’s house cost, who was leading the brave fight to keep black children from being bussed into the town schools. Even if I had been guaranteed that I would get my seventy thousand dollars back before the end of the week, I wondered if I could endure the necessary dinners.

It was worse after dinner. When we got back to the hotel, the two men went to play bridge and Flora asked me to take her dancing in the Kings Club downstairs. The lady with the limp came along with us to watch. When we were seated at a table, Flora asked for champagne, and this time it was fairly and truly on my bill.

I never liked to dance, and Flora was one of those women who clutch their partners as if to cut off any possible movement to escape. It was hot in the room and infernally noisy and my flannel blazer was heavy and too tight under the arms and I was swamped in Flora’s perfume. She also hummed amorously into my ear as we danced.

“Oh, I’m so glad we found you,” she whispered. “You can’t
drag
Bill onto a dance floor. And I’ll bet you’re a great skier, too. You move like one.” Sex and all other human activities were clearly inextricably entwined in Mrs. Sloane’s mind. “Will you ski with me tomorrow?”

“I’d love to,” I said. If I could have chosen a list of people whom I could suspect of having stolen my suitcase, the Sloanes would have been far down at the bottom.

It was after midnight, with two bottles of champagne gone, when I finally managed to call a halt. I signed the check and escorted the two ladies upstairs to where their husbands were playing bridge. Sloane was losing. I didn’t know whether I was glad or sorry. If it was my money, I would have wept. If it was his, I’d have cheered. Aside from his friend from Greenwich, there was a handsome, graying man of about fifty at the table, and an old lady encrusted with jewelry, with a harsh Spanish accent, like the cawing of a crow. The Beautiful People of the International Set.

While I was watching, the handsome, gray-haired man made a small slam. “Fabian,” Sloane said, “every year I find myself writing out a check to you.”

The man Sloane had called Fabian smiled gently. He had a charming smile, almost womanish in sweetness, with laugh wrinkles permanently around his liquid dark eyes. “I must admit,” he said, “I’m having a modest little run of luck.” He had a soft, husky voice and an accent that was a little strange. I couldn’t tell from the way he spoke where he came from.

“Modest!” Sloane said. He wasn’t a pleasant loser.

“I’m going to bed,” Flora said. “I’m skiing in the morning.”

“I’ll be right up,” Sloane said. He was shuffling the cards as though he was preparing to use them as weapons. …

I escorted Flora to her door. “Isn’t it comfy,” she said, “we’re just side by side?” She kissed my cheek good night, giggled, and said, “Night-night,” and went in.

I wasn’t sleepy and I sat up and read. I heard footsteps about a half hour later and the door to the Sloane’s room open and shut. There were some murmurs through the wall that I couldn’t make out and after a while silence.

I gave the couple another fifteen minutes to fall asleep then opened the door of my room silently. All along the corridor, pairs of shoes were placed in front of bedroom doors, womens’ and mens’ moccasins, wing tips, patent leathers, ski boots, in eternal sexual order. Two by two, entries to the Ark. But in front of the Sloanes’ door, there were only the dainty leather boots Flora Sloane had worn on the train. For whatever reason, her husband had not put out the brown shoes with the gum soles, possibly size ten, to be shined. I closed my door without a sound, to ponder the meaning of this.

“I
’M WORRIED ABOUT MY
husband,” Flora Sloane said to me. We were having a drink before lunch, seated in the sunshine on the terrace of the Corveglia Club, among the maritime Greeks, the Milanese industrialists, the people who were photographed beside pools at Acapulco, and the ladies of various nationalities who preyed on them all. Flora Sloane, who obviously had not been what has in other times been called “gently reared” and who lapsed, when excited, into a language and an accent you might expect to hear from a waitress in a diner in New Jersey patronized almost exclusively by truck drivers, was completely at home here and accepted all attention or deference with regal aplomb. I, on the other hand, felt like a man who had just been dropped behind enemy lines.

The temporary membership had cost me a hundred and twenty francs for two weeks, but where the Sloanes went I had to follow. Not that Sloane himself was very much in evidence. In the mornings, according to Flora, he was on the phone back to his office in New York for hours on end and in the afternoon and evening he played bridge.

“He won’t even have a
tan
when we get back to Greenwich,” she complained. “People won’t believe he’s ever
seen
an Alp.”

Meanwhile, I had the honor of leading Flora Sloane down the hill and buying her lunch. She was a fair skier, but one of those women who squealed when she came to a steep bit and constantly complained of her boots. I spent quite a bit of time kneeling in the snow, loosening the hooks, then tightening them again after three turns. I had refused to be seen in the red pants and the lemon yellow parka I had found in the suitcase and had bought myself a sensible navy blue outfit. At great expense.

At night, there was the inevitable sweaty dancing and the champagne. Madame Sloane was becoming progressively more amorous, too, and had a nasty habit of sticking her tongue in my ear while we danced. I wanted to get into the Sloanes’ room and search it, but not that way. There was a choice of reasons for my coolness, not the least of which was the total lack of all response to any sexual stimulation, dating from the moment I had realized that my seventy thousand dollars had disappeared. Money was power. That I knew. It had not occurred to me that its absence involved impotence. Any attempt at performance on my part, I was sure, would be grotesquely inadequate. Flora Sloane’s flirtatiousness was trying enough. Her derision would be catastrophic. I foresaw years of psychiatry ahead of me.

My efforts at detective work had been pathetically useless. I had knocked at the Sloanes’ door several times on one pretext or another in the hope of being invited in so that I at least could take a quick, surreptitious look around their room, but whether it was the wife or the husband who responded, all conversations took place on the threshold, the door just barely ajar.

I had opened my door every night when the hotel slept, but the brown shoes had never been in the corridor. I had begun to feel that I had been the victim of a hallucination in the train compartment—that Sloane had never worn brown shoes with gum soles and never had a red wool tie around his neck. I had brought up the subject of the confusion of luggage at airports these days, but the Sloanes had shown no interest. I would stay the week, I had decided, on the off chance that something would happen, and then I would leave. I had no idea of where I would go next. Behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps. Or Katmandu. Drusack haunted me.

“Those miserable bridge games.” Flora Sloane sighed over her Bloody Mary. “He’s losing a fortune. They play for five cents a point. Everybody knows Fabian’s practically a professional. He comes here for two months each winter and he walks away rich. I try to tell Bill that he’s just not as good a bridge player as Fabian, but he’s such a stubborn man he refuses to believe that anybody is better than him at
anything
. Then when he loses he gets furious at me. He’s the worst loser in the world. You wouldn’t believe some of the things he says to me. When he comes up to the room after one of those awful games, it’s nightmare time. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since I came up here. I have to
drive
myself to put on my ski boots in the morning. By the time I leave here, I’ll be a worn-out old hag.”

“Oh, come now, Flora.” I made the awaited objection. “You couldn’t look like a hag if you tried. You look blooming.” This was true. At all hours of the day and night, in no matter what clothes, she looked like an overblown peony.

“Appearances are deceiving,” she said darkly. “I’m not as strong as I look. I was
very
delicate as a child. Frankly, honey, if I didn’t know you were waiting for me downstairs every morning, I think I’d just stay in bed all day.”

“Poor girl,” I said sympathetically. The thought of Flora staying in bed was delicious, but not for the reason that Flora herself might have believed. With her off the hill I could give back my rented skis and boots and never have to go up the mountain again that winter. Even with the welcome discovery that my eyes served me adequately when skiing, after Vermont the sport had no joys for me.

“There’s a gleam of hope,” Flora said. She looked at me obliquely in that sidelong, automatically provocative way I had learned to hate. “Something has come up and Bill may have to go back to New York next week. Then we could spend
all
the time together.” The
all
had a thunderous emphasis that made me look around uneasily to see if anyone on the terrace happened to be listening to us. “Wouldn’t that be just beautiful?”

“B … bu … beautiful,” I said. It was the first time I had stuttered since I left the St. Augustine. “Let’s … let’s go in for lun … lunch.”

That afternoon she presented me with a watch. It was a great, thick model, guaranteed for accuracy under three hundred feet of water or when dropped from the roofs of tall buildings. It had a stopwatch attachment and all sorts of dials. It did everything but play the Swiss national anthem. “You shouldn’t have,” I said faintly.

“I want you to think of this marvelous week whenever you look at the time,” she said. “Don’t I get just a little kiss for it?”

We were in a
stubli
in the middle of town where we had stopped on the way to the hotel after the afternoon’s skiing. I liked it because there wasn’t a bottle of champagne in the house. The place smelled of melted cheese and wet wool from the other skiers who crowded the room, drinking beer. I pecked at her cheek.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked. “The watch, I mean.”

“I love it,” I said. “Hon … honestly. It’s just so extravagant.”