Two Weeks in Another Town (3 page)

He put the letter in his pocket, to be mailed later, and sat back with the feeling of an unpleasant duty respectably but not brilliantly performed. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, tried to forget all the irritations and nerve-grinding of the last few months, which had culminated in Hélène’s attack on him, in Joe Morrison’s chilly attitude toward him when he had insisted upon holding Morrison to his promise to give him time off for Rome. The hell with it, he thought, all his problems mingling in distasteful confusion in his head. I don’t care if he sends me to Washington or Outer Mongolia or the South Pole, I don’t mind if my son marries a bearded lady from the circus and defects to Russia with the latest secrets of chemical warfare, I don’t care if I don’t make love to my wife from now till the end of the century. I don’t care, I don’t care…

Then he slept, the fitful, twitching sleep of overburdened, swiftly traveling modern man, the restless, unrefreshing, upright sleep of air liners.

The little old lady peered over her bourbon at the sleeping man. Ever since he had boarded the plane at Orly, she had stolen glances at him when she thought he was not looking in her direction. “Ssst,” she said to the hostess, who was walking down the aisle with a pillow.

“Who is the gentleman, my dear?” the little old lady whispered, holding onto the hostess’s arm. “I’ve seen him somewhere before.”

“His name is Andrus, Mrs. Willoughby,” said the hostess. “He’s getting off at Rome.”

The little old lady regarded the sleeping face. “No.” She shook her head. “I know I’ve seen him before, but I can’t place him. You’re sure his name is Andrus?”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Willoughby.” The hostess smiled politely.

“He has brutal hands,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “But he has a copious face. It’ll come back to me. From the depths of the past.”

“I’m sure it will,” said the hostess, thinking, Thank God I get off at Istanbul.

“I’m sure you’re too young to remember,” Mrs. Willoughby said obscurely, dismissing her.

The hostess passed forward with her pillow and Mrs. Willoughby took a small sip at her bourbon, staring accusingly at the brutal hands and the almost remembered copious face across the aisle.

Jack slept uneasily, moving fitfully against the cushion, a large man with a long, heavy head, the jaw on the side toward Mrs. Willoughby thickened and irregular and marked by a scar that curved down from his wiry, gray-flecked dark hair. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, Mrs. Willoughby decided, making the usual mistake of the old, judging people to be younger than they actually were. She approved of his size. She liked Americans to be big when they traveled in other countries. She approved of his clothes, too, a neutral gray suit, cut in the loose and comfortable manner which makes Europeans say that Americans don’t know how to dress, and a soft dark tie. But his identity eluded her. The name she was searching for was on the tip of her tongue, tantalizingly, and she knew it wasn’t Andrus. The gap in her memory made her feel insecure and old.

When Jack awoke, he pulled back the curtains and saw that they were losing altitude on the approach to Rome. Turning away from the window, he was conscious that the old lady across the aisle from him was staring at him intently, frowning. As he straightened in his seat and buckled the safety belt, he had the feeling that he must have spoken in his sleep and uttered a word of which the old lady hadn’t approved.

In the dusk, the runways were gleaming from a shower that had come in from the Alban Hills, and scraps of cloud, lit by the last dull red of the setting sun, raced across the streaked sky. Looking out of the window as the plane tilted and the flaps came down, Jack remembered the soft thick pewter color of the winter sky over Paris and was pleased with the contrast. Arriving almost anyplace in Italy, he thought, by any means of transportation, was calculated to lift the spirit and renew one’s appreciation of such simple things as color, rain, and the shapes the wind created in the sky.

M
RS. WILLOUGHBY MADE A
last, furrowed examination of him as she turned off toward the restaurant, where the passengers in transit were to wait while the plane was refueled. Jack tipped his hat politely at her, and as he moved toward the passport-control desk he heard her say, with severe satisfaction, “James Royal.” She said it to a Syrian gentleman who was walking beside her. The Syrian gentleman, who understood Arabic and French, spoke the only two words he knew in English. “Very good,” he said, sweating with the effort of international amity.

“I thought he was dead,” Mrs. Willoughby said, walking energetically toward the restaurant. “I’m sure somebody told me he was dead.”

Jack was almost through customs, across the counter from the official in a baggy striped suit who was marking his bags with a piece of chalk, when he saw Delaney. Delaney was standing beyond the glass doors that separated the customs enclosure from the waiting room. He was wearing a little tweed cap, like an Irish race-track tout, and a bright tweed coat, and his face shone, sunburned, near-sighted, welcoming on the other side of the glass. To Jack’s eyes, he didn’t look like a man who was in trouble. By the strength of his relief at seeing Delaney standing there looking so much as he had remembered him, Jack realized how fearful he had been of the first sight of his friend, fearful of the marks that the years might have made on him.

When Jack came through the door, Delaney shook his hand roughly, beaming, saying in his thick, hoarse voice, “I told them the hell with it, they could all go home, I wasn’t going to let you arrive with only a driver to meet you.” He grabbed the small brief case that Jack was carrying. “Here, let me,” he said. “Unless it’s all Top Secret and you’ll be broken to a pulp if you let it out of your hands.”

Jack smiled, walking beside the robust, fierce-looking little man toward the parking lot. “Actually, it’s the line of battle for Northern Europe,” he said. “But I have six other copies at home, if I lose this one.”

While the porter and the driver were putting Jack’s bags in the trunk of the car, Delaney stepped back and frowned thoughtfully at Jack. “You don’t look like a boy any more, Jack,” he said.

“I didn’t look like a boy the last time you saw me,” Jack said, remembering the day he had gone to Delaney’s house to say goodbye.

“Yes you did,” Delaney said, shaking his head. “It was against nature, but you did. A damaged boy. But a boy. I didn’t think I’d ever live to see the gray hairs and the lines. Christ,” he said, “I won’t ask you for any comments on how I look. I weep when I happen to see myself when I’m shaving.
Ecco!”
he said to the porter, stuffing hundred-lire coins into his hand. “Let’s go.”

They sped toward Rome in the rattly green Fiat. The driver was an olive-skinned young man with beautifully combed, gleaming hair and sad, black-fringed dark eyes. He swung the car in and out among the trucks and the motorcycles and Vespas like a racing driver, blinking his headlights impatiently when he was blocked momentarily on the narrow, bumpy road past the racecourse and the walls of the movie studio that Mussolini had built, in his big years, to challenge Hollywood.

“You can have the car and the driver,” Delaney said. “Whenever you want. For the whole two weeks. I insisted.”

“Thanks,” Jack said. “But if it’s any trouble, I can walk. I like walking around Rome.”

“Nonsense.” Delaney waved his hand in an imperial gesture. He had small, soft, surprising hands, like a child pianist’s, incongruous on his rough, short-coupled, broad body. “You have to make these people feel you’re important. Otherwise they have no use for you and they piss on your work. Be snotty enough and they’ll wreathe themselves in smiles when they give you the five thousand bucks.”

“Seriously,” Jack said, “I want to thank you for…”

“Forget it, forget it.” Delaney waved his hand again. “You’re doing me a favor.”

“That’s a lot of money for me, you know,” Jack said.

“I believe in throwing a little backsheesh in the way of our loyal public servants.” Delaney’s ice-blue, clear little monkey eyes glittered with amusement. “Keep them contented with their sorry lot. Tell me, what’s the inside dope? Are we going to have a war in the next ten minutes?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said.

“Good. I’ll be able to finish the picture.”

“How’s it going?” Jack asked.

“The usual,” Delaney said. “Some mornings I want to kiss everyone on the set. Some mornings I want to put a bullet through my brain. I’ve gone through it fifty times. The only difference is that this time we have the addition of a little Italian chaos, to make it more amusing. I have the script here.” He patted a bulky pile of paper on the seat beside him, stapled together in flimsy pink cardboard. “You can look it over tomorrow morning.”

“Don’t expect much,” Jack said. “You know, I haven’t read a line of dialogue for more than ten years.”

“Three days after they bury you,” Delaney said, “you’ll be a better actor than the boy I have in there now.”

“What’s the matter with him?” Jack asked. “I always thought he was pretty good.”

“The bottle,” Delaney said. “Six fathoms deep in Scotch. He
looks
all right, although that’ll go in another year or two, but you can’t understand a word he says. All I want you to do is put in the sound track—simple, clear, sexy, and comprehensible to the twelve-year-old mind.” He grinned. Then he spoke more seriously. “You’ve got to be good, kid,” he said. “You’ve got to be like the old days, Jack…”

“I’ll try,” Jack said uneasily. For a moment he was disturbed by the intensity of the expression in the cold blue eyes. There was a desperate, veiled signal there, a fierce appeal, that was out of all proportion with the actual job that Delaney wanted him to perform. For the first time in his life, Jack had the feeling that Maurice Delaney might one day break down.

“You’ve got to do more than try, Jack boy,” Delaney said quietly. “What you do will make or break the whole thing. It’s the keystone of the picture. That’s why I hunted all over the place to find you, because you’re the only one who can do it. You’ll see when you read it and when you run the stuff we’ve shot so far tomorrow.”

“Maurice,” Jack said, trying to lighten the sudden tension that had sprung up in the car, “you’re still taking movies too seriously.”

“Don’t say that,” Delaney said harshly.

“But after all these years,” Jack protested, “you could let up a little…”

“The day I let up a little,” Delaney said, “they can come for me and pack me away. With my permission.”

“They’ll never pack you away,” Jack said.

“That’s what you say.” Delaney granted savagely. “Have you read some of the reviews of my last few pictures? Have you seen the financial reports?”

“No,” Jack said. He had read some reviews, but he had decided on tact. And he had not seen the financial reports. That, at least, was true.

“There’s a good friend.” Delaney smiled widely, with monkey-cynicism and mischief. “One more thing.” He looked around him as though afraid that he was being overheard. “I’d be grateful if you kept this to yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Delaney said, “we’ve still got more than a week’s shooting to do and if Stiles catches on we’re not using his own famous golden voice he may turn sullen.”

“Can
you keep something like that quiet in Rome?”

“For one week,” Delaney said. “With luck. Yes. After that, let him scream. We don’t get onto the set until eleven thirty in the morning, and you and I’ll do our dirty work before then. Do you mind getting up at dawn?”

“You forget, I work for the government,” Jack said.

“Does the government get up early these days?” Delaney said. “It never occurred to me. God, what a life you must lead.”

“It’s not too bad,” Jack said, vaguely defending the last ten years.

“Anyway, it’s good of them to let you off for me. Tell them I’ll pay an extra hundred thousand bucks in taxes next year to show my appreciation.”

“Don’t bother.” Jack smiled. Delaney’s troubles with the Internal Revenue Department had been widely recounted in the newspapers, and someone had figured out that if he lived until the age of ninety, giving all his salary to the department, he would still be in debt for over two hundred thousand dollars at the end. “They owe me months of back leave,” Jack said. “And I was getting so nasty everybody in Paris cheered when I took off.” He had no intention of burdening Delaney with the story of the dangers he was running with Morrison by his insistence on coming to Rome.

“Working hard protecting civilization as we know it, kid?” Delaney asked.

“Only day and night,” Jack said.

“Do you think the Russians’re working day and night, too?”

“That’s what the man tells me,” Jack said.

“God,” Delaney said, “maybe we ought to blow the whole thing up and get it over with. Do you think when it blows they’ll get the income-tax records?”

“No,” Jack said, “it’s all on microfilm in underground vaults.”

“Ah,” Delaney said, “not even that hope. There’s no escape. Say,” he said, “just what do you do with all those soldiers in Paris?”

“A little bit of everything,” Jack said. “I brief visiting congressmen when my boss is busy, I draw up reports, I lie to newspapermen, I escort newsreel photographers and keep them away from secret installations, I write speeches for generals…”

“Since when have you learned how to write?”

“I haven’t,” Jack said. “But anybody who knows enough to spell deterrent with two r’s can write a speech for a general.”

Delaney laughed hoarsely. “How the hell did you ever get mixed up in anything like that?”

“By accident,” Jack said. Just the way I’ve gotten mixed up with everything else in my life, he thought. With Delaney, too. “I was playing tennis at St.-Germain one Sunday,” Jack said, “and my partner turned out to be an Air Force colonel. We won. He wanted to keep me as a partner, so he offered me a job.”

“Come on now,” Delaney said. “Even the Air Force can’t be as sloppy as that. He must have known something about you.”

“Of course,” Jack said. “He knew that I’d been mixed up with the movies at one time or another and there was a project on foot to make a documentary about the NATO forces, and one thing led to another…”