Beggarman, Thief (10 page)

Or if he hadn’t been sleeping like a baby, he’d have heard the footsteps on the deck, the way his father always did, no matter how tired he was or how deep in sleep, and come up to see his father on the way to rescue Jean Jordache, alone. He could have gone with him, maybe had the sense to make him call the police, at least be with him so that the Yugoslav would have realized there was no sense in fighting.

Who’m I kidding? Wesley thought. One night it would have happened in Portofino or Elba or Sicily. There was no stopping Jean Jordache from getting into trouble and dragging everybody along with her. He hadn’t liked her from the beginning and he’d told his father so. His father had said, “I admit she has her problems.
I
wouldn’t’ve married her, but Rudy is a different kind of man. She’s rich, she was pretty and smart …” Tom had shrugged. “Maybe you got to pay for rich, pretty and smart.” Only it was his father who’d paid. Too brave for his own good, too sure of himself. “I’ve had plenty of woman troubles myself.” He’d smiled a little sadly in the dark as he’d said that, and told his son about the twins they said he’d knocked up in Elysium, Ohio, when they jailed him on the charge of statutory rape. “Looking back,” Tom had said philosophically, “maybe it was worth it, though I didn’t think so at the time. I suppose I could tell you to be careful, but I don’t suppose it’d do any good, would it, Wesley?”

“I’m half careful,” Wesley had said. He’d screwed two married ladies on two different voyages, taking chances, with their husbands on board, and he knew his father knew about it.

“I noticed you like the stuff,” Tom said dryly.

“About like average, I guess,” Wesley said. “I wouldn’t know.”

“I did, too,” Tom said. “There was a wild English girl by the name of … let me see if I can remember her name … Betty, Betty Something—Betty Johns—that nearly got me killed in Paris because I spent two weeks with her down in Cannes, squandering my money and blowing up on wine and fancy meals before a fight. By the time the fight was over in Paris, with that Frenchman hitting me with everything but the water bucket, I was ready to take orders and become a monk.” He chuckled.

There were other names that came up in his reminiscences of his past for his son’s benefit, names he did not chuckle over: the boy with whom he had set fire to the cross on Boylan’s lawn and who had turned him in; Schultzy, his manager; the man he had blackmailed at the Revere Club for five thousand dollars; Falconetti, whom he had shamed before twenty-seven other members of a ship’s crew and caused to commit suicide. It was as though he felt the boy, starved for a father, now that he had finally found one, might get a false, noble impression of him that Tom could not live up to and had to correct to save the boy from inevitable and bitter disillusionment.

What advice he gave was practical. “You like the sea. Follow it. It’s a good life, at least if you get lucky, like me. It’s a nice mixture of laziness and work and variety and you’re out in the open air. In the end, you’ll have the
Clothilde
or maybe a better boat. Know what it’s all about. Give it loving care, like Dwyer and me. And I’d advise not screwing the lady guests.” He grinned. Father or no father, he couldn’t be holy about a young man’s overpowering interest in sex. “Be your own boss, because working for anybody else is the big trap. Learn everything. Above deck and below deck. You got a good chance with me and Bunny and Kate here to watch. Don’t skimp on equipment. If you don’t like anybody you hire on, for whatever reason, put him off at the next port. If you catch a guest with drugs, throw the drugs overboard without any conversation about it. If possible, don’t booze with them. You’ll be able to afford your own booze. Don’t be greedy. The word gets around. Fast. If you don’t like the looks of the sea, make for port, regardless of what some fat cat on board tells you about having to get to Rome or Cannes or Athens for an important business conference or to pick up a girlfriend. Don’t volunteer for any wars. Don’t back down, but don’t pick fights.…”

He should’ve put that on tape, Wesley thought, remembering, and played it before he went to sleep every night.

“Keep a gun on board. Just in case. Locked up. It can come in handy.” His father’s legacy—Don’t skimp on the equipment and keep a gun handy.

Wesley didn’t know where the gun on the
Clothilde
was locked away. Probably Bunny knew, but he was sure Bunny wouldn’t tell. It hadn’t been handy when it was needed.

His father talked on in the barred darkness, the voice calm, slightly amused, but the words incomprehensible.

The ache in the back of his head throbbed, the memory of his father’s voice dwindled away, like the sound of a buoy left to stern in a fog, and he slept.

CHAPTER 5

F
ROM
B
ILLY
A
BBOTT’S
N
OTEBOOK—

I HAVE A WEAKNESS FOR MY FATHER, WHO IS A WEAK MAN. I FORGAVE HIM. I HAVE NO WEAKNESS FOR MY MOTHER, WHO IS A STRONG WOMAN, AND WHOM I DO NOT FORGIVE. LET THE SCHOLAR WHO SIFTS THROUGH THE RUINS OF BRUSSELS IN THE NEXT CENTURY FIGURE THIS OUT. WE ARE ALL HAUNTED BY OUR PARENTS, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. I AM HAUNTED BY TWO FATHERS. WILLIAM ABBOTT, WHO SIRED ME, WAS, AND I SUPPOSE STILL IS, SMALL AND DELIGHTFUL, CHARMING AND USELESS.

COLIN BURKE, SECOND HUSBAND OF MY MOTHER, WAS A GLITTERING, SELFISH, TALENTED MAN, WHO COULD MAKE ACTORS PERFORM LIKE ANGELS AND THE SCREEN LIGHT UP LIKE A BONFIRE. I LOVED HIM AND ADMIRED HIM AND WISHED I COULD GROW UP TO BE LIKE HIM. I DID NOT. I GREW UP, I’M AFRAID, LIKE WILLIE ABBOTT, ALTHOUGH WITHOUT SOME OF HIS ESSENTIAL ATTRACTIVE QUALITIES. I LOVED HIM, TOO.

I HAVE PUT HIM TO BED, DRUNK, FIFTY TIMES.

I PLAYED FIVE SETS OF TENNIS TODAY FOR SIDE BETS, AND WON THEM ALL.

«  »

He had been to the consulate in Nice again, to the jail in Grasse, to which Wesley had been moved, twice during the week and three times to the lawyer’s office. The consul had been vague and apologetic about being vague, the lawyer had been helpful, up to a point, Wesley not helpful, just silent, unrepentant, physically no worse for wear and less interested in his own fate than that of the men imprisoned along with him, among them a jewel thief, a passer of stolen checks and an art forger. He hadn’t shaved since his arrest and the blondish thick stubble gave him an unkempt and wolfish look, at home among criminals. When he came into the small room in which Rudolph was permitted to speak to him, there was a rank, feral smell, a hunting beast caged in an unsanitary zoo. The smell transported Rudolph uncomfortably back to the room above the family bakery, the bed he shared with his brother Tom when they were in their teens, when Tom would come back late at night after a night of brawling in the town. He took out his handkerchief and pretended to be blowing his nose as Wesley sat down, grinning a little, opposite him across the small, unpainted, scarred table, guaranteed Provençal antique, provided by courtesy of the police of the floral city of Grasse.

Rudolph put on a solemn face, to indicate that this was no laughing matter. The police, through the lawyer, had let Rudolph know that the case was grave—a beer bottle might be construed to be a dangerous weapon—and that Wesley was not going to be let out of jail for some weeks, if then.

Rudolph had also spoken several times to his lawyer, Johnny Heath, in New York, who had told him that if he could extricate himself from the French, in all probability the estate would have to be settled in New York, as the last known residence in the United States of the murdered man, and that it would take time.

We will all be drowned in paper, Rudolph thought. He could see the
Clothilde
going down with all aboard in a sea of writs, court orders and legal foolscap, as he listened to Johnny Heath saying he guessed that the judge would almost certainly appoint Kate Jordache, the wife, even though she was a British subject, as executrix of the estate, which would probably be divided one-third to her and two-thirds to the son, although the child she was bearing was a complicating factor. The son, being a minor, would have to have a guardian until he reached the age of eighteen, and he didn’t see any reason why Rudolph, as the oldest and nearest male relative, couldn’t have the job. The estate would most probably have to be liquidated and taxes paid, which would mean selling the
Clothilde
within the year. But, Heath warned, he could not say definitely as yet—he would have to get other opinions.

He said nothing to Wesley of the problems that Heath had discussed. He merely asked if he were being treated well, if there was anything he wanted. Carelessly, the boy said that he was being treated like everybody else, wanted nothing. Baffling, unrewarding young man, Rudolph thought resentfully, immutably hostile. He cut the visits as short as possible.

When he returned wearily to the hotel, it was no better. Worse, in fact. The scenes with Jean were becoming more violent. She wanted to go home, get out of her prison, as she called it, probably the only time in its history that the Hotel du Cap had been so described. Somehow, she had gotten it into her head that it was Rudolph’s fault that she couldn’t leave and his telling her that it was the policeman who was holding her passport and not himself could not stem the flood of her hysteria. “God damn it,” she had said, during their latest argument, “your idiotic brother should have minded his own business. So I’d’ve been fucked. Big deal. It wouldn’t’ve been the first time an American lady got fucked in France and I’d’ve been on my way home by now.”

As the shrill voice battered at his ears, he had a quick vision of Jean as she had been when they had first married, a quick, lovely girl, passionate in the warm, afternoon lovemaking in the room overlooking the sea (was it the same room in which she slept now?—he couldn’t remember), offering to buy him a yacht on that surprising afternoon when she confessed that she, who he had believed before their marriage was a poor working girl, was wealthier by far than he was. Better not think of those days.…

The fact that Wesley had nearly killed a man Jean took as proof that it was the Jordaches’ inherent lust for violence, not her drunkenness or emotional instability, that had been at the root of the tragedy. “One way or another,” she had screamed at her husband, “with or without me, with their characters, those two men, that man and that boy, were doomed from the beginning. It’s in the blood.” Gretchen, he remembered, had said much the same thing and he damned her for it. He had seen Wesley in jail. It was not only Jordache blood in Wesley’s veins. He remembered the pouting, hard-eyed, curvaceous mother—Teresa. Who knew what Sicilian bandits had contributed to that rank smell, that wolfish grin? Guilt, if it
was
guilt, had to be fairly apportioned.

“I know about your crazy father,” Jean ranted on, accusing him, his crime-stained German ancestors. “I don’t know how you and your holy sister escaped it this long. And look at your sister—how did her husband die? Killed, killed, killed.…”

“In an automobile accident.” Rudolph tried to break through her high-pitched, intoning chant. “Fifty thousand people a year …”

“Killed,” Jean repeated stubbornly. “I’m frightened to think of what kind of life our child is going to have with you as the father.…”

Rudolph felt helpless before her attacks. He felt confident of himself, able to solve rational problems, but irrationality frightened him, confused him, left him unarmed. When he left the room Jean had thrown herself facedown on a couch, beating her hands against the pillows like a child, sobbing, “I want to go home, I want to go home.…”

Gretchen, too, although she didn’t say anything, was growing restive. She had work to go back to, a man kept telephoning her from New York, the attractions of the Côte d’Azur had long since lost their charm for her, and Rudolph realized that she was only staying on out of loyalty to him. Another debt.

Once, during the week, when they were alone together, she asked quietly, “Rudy, has it ever occurred to you to just pull out?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean quit. It isn’t your mess after all. Just pick up and leave. One way or another, they’ll all survive.”