Nightwork (3 page)

I had no destination. I had told Freddy Cunningham that I was going to try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and one place was as good as another for that.

F
IGURE OUT MY LIFE. I HAD
plenty of time to do it. As I drove south, down the entire East Coast of America, I was alone, unfettered, free of claims, with no distractions, plunged in that solitude that is supposed to be the essential condition of philosophic speculation. There was Pat Minot’s cause and effect to be considered; also not to be overlooked was the maxim I had been taught in English lit courses that your character was your fate, that your rewards and failures were the result of your faults and virtues. In
Lord Jim
, a book I must have read at least five times since I was a boy, the hero is killed eventually because of a flaw in himself that permitted him to leave a shipload of poor beggars to die. He pays for his cowardice in the end by being killed himself. I had always thought it just, fair, inevitable. At the wheel of the little Volkswagen, speeding down the great highways past Washington and Richmond and Savannah, I remembered
Lord Jim
. But it no longer convinced me. I certainly was not flawless, but, at least in my opinion, I had been a decent son, an honorable friend, conscientious in my profession, law-abiding, careful to avoid cruelty or spite, inciting no man to be my enemy, indifferent to power, abhorring violence. I had never seduced a woman nor cheated a shopkeeper, had not struck a fellow human being since a fight in the schoolyard at the age of ten. I had definitely never left anyone to die. Yet …Yet there had been that morning in Dr. Ryan’s office.

If character was fate, was it the character of thirty million Europeans to die in World War II, was it the character of the inhabitants of Calcutta to drop in the streets of starvation, was it the character of thousands of citizens of Pompeii to be mummified in a flood of lava?

The ruling law was simple—accident. The throw of dice, the turning of a card. From now on I would gamble and trust to luck. Maybe, I thought, it was in my character to be a gambler and fate had neatly arranged it so that I could play out my destined role. Maybe my short career as a man who traveled the Northern skies was an aberration, a detour and only now, back to earth, was I on the right path.

When I got to Florida, I spent my days at the tracks. In the beginning, all went well; I won often enough to live comfortably and not have to worry about taking a job. There was no job that anyone could offer me that I could imagine accepting. I kept by myself, making no friends, approaching no women. I found, mildly surprised, that all desire had left me. Whether this was temporary or would turn out to be permanent did not bother me. I wanted no attachments.

I turned, with bitter pleasure, into myself, content with the long sunny afternoons at the track and the solitary meals and the evenings spent studying the performances of thoroughbreds and the habits of trainers and jockeys. I also had time now for reading, and indiscriminately devoured libraries of paperbacks. As Dr. Ryan had assured me, the condition of my eyes did not interfere with my ability to read. Still, I found nothing in any of the books I read that either helped or harmed me.

I lived in small hotels, moving on from one to another when other guests, to whom I had become a familiar presence, attempted to approach me.

I was ahead of the game by several thousand dollars when the season ended and I drifted up to New York. I no longer went to the track. The actual running of a race now bored me. I continued betting, but with bookies. For a while I went often to the theater, to the movies, losing myself for a few hours at a time in their fantasies. New York is a good city for a man who prefers to be alone. It is the easiest city in the world to enjoy solitude.

My luck began to change in New York and with the onset of winter I knew that I would have to look for some kind of job if I wanted to continue eating. Then the night man at the St. Augustine was held up for the second time.

I put the last of the January 15 bills in the file. It was now three hours into January 16. Happy Anniversary. I got up and stretched. I was hungry and I got out my sandwich and the bottle of beer.

I was unwrapping my sandwich when I heard the sound of the door from the fire emergency stairs opening into the lobby and quick woman’s footsteps. I reached for the switch and the lobby was brightly lit. A young woman was hurrying, almost running, toward the desk. She was unnaturally tall, with those thick soles and exaggerated high heels which made women look like so many displaced Watusis. She had on a white fake fur coat and a blonde wig that wouldn’t fool anybody. I recognized her. She was a whore who had come in just after midnight with the man in 610. I glanced at my watch. It was just after three o’clock. It had been a long session in 610 and the woman looked it. She ran to the front door, pushed futilely at the broken buzzer, then clattered over to the desk.

She knocked sharply on the glass over the desk. “Open the door, mister,” she said loudly. “I want to get out of here.”

I took the key from the drawer under the desk in which the pistol was kept and went through the little room next to the office where there was a huge old safe against the wall, lined with safety-deposit boxes. The safety-deposit boxes were relics of a richer day. None was in use now. I unlocked the door and stepped out into the lobby. The woman followed me across the lobby toward the front door. She was gasping for breath. Her profession didn’t keep her in shape for running down six flights of steps in the middle of the night. She was somewhere around thirty years old, and by the look of her they hadn’t been easy years. The women who came in and out of the hotel at night made a strong argument for celibacy.

“Why didn’t you take the elevator down?” I asked.

“I was waiting for the elevator,” the woman said. “But then this crazy, naked old man popped out of the door, making all kinds of funny noises, grunting, like an animal, and waving something at me. …”

“Waving wh … wh …
what?
”

“Something. It looked like a club. A baseball bat. It’s dark in that hall. You bastards certainly don’t waste much money on lights in this hotel.” Her voice was whiskey-hoarse, set in city cement, praising nothing. “I didn’t wait around to see. I just took off. You want to find out, you go up to the sixth floor and see for yourself. Open the goddamn door, will you? I have to go home.”

I unlocked the big, plate-glass front door, reinforced by a heavy, cast-iron grill. For a shabby old hotel like the St. Augustine, the management was nervously security conscious. The woman pushed the door open impatiently and ran out into the dark street. I took a deep breath of the cold night air as the clatter of heels diminished in the direction of Lexington Avenue. I stood at the door another moment, looking down the street, on the chance that a prowl car might be cruising past. I would have felt better about going up to see what was happening on the sixth floor if I had a cop with me. I was not paid for solitary heroics. But the street was empty. I heard a siren in the distance, probably on Park Avenue, but that was no help. I closed the door and locked it and walked slowly back across the lobby toward the office, thinking, Am I going to spend the rest of my life ushering whores to and from anonymous beds?

Praise him with stringed instruments and organs
.

In the office I took the passkey out of the drawer, looked for a moment at the pistol. I shook my head and shut the drawer.

Having the pistol there wasn’t my idea. It hadn’t helped the other night man when the two junkies came in and walked off with all the cash in the place, leaving the night man lying in his blood on the floor with a bump the size of a cantaloupe on his head.

I put my jacket on, somehow feeling that being properly dressed would give me more authority in whatever situation I would find on the sixth floor, and went out into the lobby again, locking the office door behind me. I pushed the elevator button and heard the whine of the cables as the elevator started down the shaft.

When the door creaked open, I hesitated before going in. Maybe, I thought, I just ought to go back into the office, get my overcoat and my sandwich and my beer, and walk away from here. Who needs this lousy job? But just as the door began to slide shut, I went in.

When I reached the sixth floor, I pushed the button that kept the elevator door open, and stepped out into the corridor. Light was streaming from the doorway of the room diagonally across from the elevator, number 602. On the worn carpet of the corridor, half in and half out of the light, was a naked man, lying on his face, his head and torso in shadow, old man’s wrinkled buttocks and skinny legs sharply, obscenely illuminated. The left arm was stretched out, the fingers of the hand curled, as though the man had been trying to grab at something as he fell. His right arm was under him. He lay absolutely still, Even as I bent to turn the man over, I was sure that nothing I could do and nobody I could call would do any good.

The man was heavy, with a big loose paunch that belied the thin legs and buttocks, and I grunted as I pulled the body over onto its back. Then I saw what the whore had said the man had been waving at her, that might have been a club. It wasn’t a club, but a long cardboard tube tightly wrapped in brown paper, the kind artists and architects use to carry rolled-up prints and building plans. The man’s hand was still clutching it. I didn’t blame the whore for being frightened. In the dim light of the corridor I’d have been frightened, too, if a naked man had suddenly sprung out waving the thing menacingly at me.

I stood up, feeling a chill on my skin, nerving myself to touch the body once more. I stared down at the dead face. The eyes were open, staring up at me, the mouth in a last tortured grimace. Grunting animal sounds, the whore had said. There was no blood, no sign of a wound. I had never seen the man before, but that was not unusual with my working hours, coming in after guests had checked in for the night and leaving before they came down in the morning. It was a round, fat, old man’s face, with a big fleshy nose and wispy gray hair on the balding skull. Even in the disarray of death, the face gave the impression of power and importance.

Fighting down a rising feeling of nausea, I knelt on one knee and put my ear to the man’s chest. His breasts might have been those of an old woman, with just a few straggles of damp white hair and nipples that were almost green in the bare light. There was the sour, living odor of sweat, but no movement, no sound. Old man, I thought, as I stood up, why couldn’t you have done this on somebody else’s time?

I bent down again and hooked my hands under the dead man’s armpits and dragged him through the open doorway into room 602. You couldn’t just leave a naked body lying in the corridor like that. I had been working in the hotel business long enough to know that death was something you kept out of the sight of paying guests.

As I pulled the body along the floor of the little hallway that led into the room proper, the cardboard tube rolled to one side. I got the body into the room, next to the bed, which was a tangle of sheets and blankets. There was lipstick smeared all over the sheets and pillows. The lady I had let out around one o’clock, probably. I looked down with something like pity at the old body naked on the threadbare carpet, the flaccid dead flesh outlined against a faded floral pattern. One last erection. Joy and then mortality.

There was a medium-sized but expensive-looking leather suitcase open on the little desk. A worn wallet lay next to it and a gold money clip, with some bills in it. In the bag three clean shirts were to be seen, neatly folded.

Strewn on the desk were some quarters and dimes. I counted the money in the clip. Four tens and three ones. I dropped the clip back on the desk and picked up the wallet. There were ten crisp new hundred-dollar bills in it. I whistled softly. Whatever else had happened that night to the old man, he had not been robbed. I put the ten bills back into the wallet and carefully placed it back on the desk. It never occurred to me to take any of the money. That was the sort of man I used to be.
Thou shalt not steal
. Thou shalt not do a lot of things.

I glanced at the open suitcase. Along with the shirts there were two pairs of old-fashioned button shorts, a striped necktie, two pairs of socks, some blue pajamas. Whoever he was, number 602 was going to stay in New York longer than he had planned.

The corpse on the floor oppressed me, made uncertain claims on me. I took one of the blankets from the bed and threw it over the body, covering the face, the staring eyes, the mutely shouting lips. I felt warmer, death now only a geometric shape on the floor.

I went back to the corridor to get the cardboard tube. There were no labels or addresses or identification of any kind on it. As I carried it into the room, I saw that the heavy brown paper had been torn raggedly away from the top. I was about to put it on the desk, next to the dead man’s other belongings, when I caught a glimpse of green paper, partially pulled out of the opening. I drew it out. It was a hundred-dollar bill. It was not new like the bills in the wallet, but old and crumpled. I held the tube so that I could look down into it. As far as I could tell, it was crammed with bills. I remained immobile for a moment, then stuffed the bill I had taken out back in and folded the torn brown paper as neatly as I could over the top of the tube.

Holding the tube under my arm, I went to the door, switched off the light, stepped out into the corridor and turned the passkey in the lock of room number 602. My actions were crisp, almost automatic, as though all my life I had rehearsed for this moment, as though there were no alternatives.

I took the elevator down to the lobby, went into the little windowless room next to the office, using the key. There was a shelf running along above the safe, piled with stationery, old bills, ragged magazines from other years that had been recuperated from the rooms. Pictures of extinct politicians, naked girls who by now were no longer worth photographing—the momentarily illustrious dead, the extremely desirable women, monocled assassins, movie stars, carefully posed authors—a jumble of recent and not-so-recent American miscellany. Without hesitation I reached up and rolled the tube back toward the wall. I heard it plop down onto the shelf, out of sight, behind the dog-eared testimony of scandals and delights.