Two Weeks in Another Town (16 page)

Holt cleared his throat uncomfortably. “We were talking back there”—he gestured toward the building behind them which housed the night club—“about your being in the government.”

Jack didn’t bother to correct him.

“What I mean is, chances are, you know quite a few people in the Embassy here.”

“A few,” Jack said.

“I’ve been in and out of there a dozen times the last month or so,” Holt said. “They’re very nice to me. Don’t get me wrong, they couldn’t be more polite and obliging, but—” He shrugged. “It never hurts to know someone who’s really in the business, does it?”

“No,” Jack said, noncommittally, wondering what trouble Holt could be in with the State Department that he could conceivably help him with.

“You see, what we’ve been trying to do is adopt a baby, Mother and me.” Holt sounded diffident, almost a little guilty, as though he had just confessed that he and his wife were planning a crime. “And you’d be surprised how many difficulties there are in the way.”

“Adopt a baby?” Jack said.
“Here?”

“As I said before, in the night club,” Holt said stiffly, embarrassed, “I think I can honestly say I’ve got over any prejudices about race that I might ever have had. Being born and bred in Oklahoma…” He stopped. “I mean”—now his voice was defiant—“what’s wrong with Italian babies?”

“Nothing,” Jack said hurriedly. “But wouldn’t it be easier to adopt a baby back home?”

Holt coughed self-consciously and put both hands to the rim of his sombrero and settled it a quarter of an inch more squarely on the center of his head.

“We have…uh…a few problems, a few little problems, back home,” he said. “Jack, I feel I can talk to you. I got that feeling back there at the table. You’re a man with understanding. Mr. Delaney tells me you’re the father of two children yourself…”

“Three,” Jack said automatically.

“Three,” Holt said. “I beg your pardon. You know how it is. Women need children. There’s something empty about a woman’s life if she doesn’t…Ah, hell, I don’t have to tell you. She’s liable to look for other things to fill the space…” His voice trailed off, and Jack once more had the vision of the bottle beside the piano. “And, for some reason, we haven’t been blessed,” Holt said. “The doctors say we are perfectly healthy, normal people, but we haven’t been blessed. It’s not as unusual as you think. You look around and you see the world crawling with kids, poor, starving, neglected”—his voice was hard and bitter as he contemplated the callous, undeserving fecundity of the poor—“and you never have any idea of how many homes’re empty and’re doomed to stay empty. And with all the scientists, all the vaccines, all the penicillin, all the hydrogen bombs and rockets to the moon, nothing to be done about it. Ah, the things we tried…” Holt looked out across the sliding dark river, with its country smell, its odor of winter loam and wet, frozen grass between its concrete banks. “What the hell, you’re a grown man,” he said harshly, “you’ve created sons, it’s not as though I’m going to shock you. Gas in the tubes, the fertility rhythm, the taking the temperature at six o’clock in the morning and then trying to…” He stopped. He seemed to be choking up. Then he continued in his calm, flat, conversational Oklahoma drawl. “We even went so far as to try artificial in—insemination, in a doctor’s office. Nothing. Poor Bertha,” he said, with twenty years’ love and pity, carried from one continent to another, in his voice. “You’ve only seen her for an hour or two so I don’t suppose you’ve noticed—but—” He hesitated, then plunged on. “She—well, if it was a man, you’d say she was a drinking man. A hard drinking man.”

“No,” Jack said, “I didn’t notice.”

“Well, she’s a lady, of course,” Holt said, “she could drink from morning to night and she’d never say a word that wasn’t right and proper, a cruel word, or an off-color word, or a word that couldn’t be spoken in the best home in the land, but—there’s no getting around it, Jack—it’s getting worse, year by year. If she had a family—one child—”

“I still don’t see,” Jack said, puzzled, “why it should be so hard to find a baby to adopt back home.”

Holt took in a deep, loud breath. He walked ten paces in silence. “Bertha’s a Catholic,” he said at last, “as I think I told you back there.”

“Yes.”

“And I was born and raised a Baptist and if I’m anything now, I’m still a Baptist,” Holt said. “And in America—well, the people who run orphanages put a lot of store in things like that. What I mean is, the system is Catholics give to Catholic families, Protestants give to Protestant families, even Jews—” He stopped, afraid that he had said something that he didn’t mean. “Of course, I have nothing against the Jews. I don’t have anything against any of them,” he said wearily. “In principle, I’m sure they’re right. In the majority of cases. Maybe if I turned Catholic…Bertha’s never asked me, of course,” he said quickly. “Don’t think she’d ever ask anything like that, and we haven’t even ever discussed it, not as much as a hint. But, privately, I must confess, there’ve been times when I’ve been tempted to go to Bertha and say to her, ‘Mother, take me for instruction to the nearest priest.’”

They were walking past a church, its medieval bronze doors shut against the night, the church dark and closed, not prepared to answer questions or gather in supplicants or absolve sin until daylight. Holt looked thoughtfully at the huge implacable doors and the sculptured saint, in an attitude of benediction in his niche to one side of the portal. “They’re powerful,” he whispered, “powerful.” He shook his head, shaking Romanism out from under the sombrero once and for all. “I’m not much of a Baptist,” he said. “I sometimes don’t go near a church for years, unless it’s to a funeral or a wedding. But I’m not a Catholic. I can’t say to anyone I am or I will be. A man can’t do that, can he, Jack? No matter what the bribe.”

It’s a funny question to ask in Rome, Jack thought, contemplating all the gods that had been overturned here, repudiated, installed, altered, swallowed, and for what bribes. “No, I guess not,” he said, because he knew that that was what Holt wanted to hear. “Still,” he said, “it seems to me that every once in a while I hear of people with different religions adopting children…”

“It happens,” Holt said. “Occasionally. But not to me.”

“Why not?” Jack asked.

“Delaney didn’t tell you about me?” Holt asked, suspiciously.

“No.”

“I guess it’s not so damn interesting.” Holt laughed harshly. “Only to me. It’s damn interesting to me.” He buttoned up his coat, as though he were cold. “I’m a felon, Jack,” he said flatly. “I served time. I served six years in Joliet, Illinois, for armed robbery.”

“Oh, Christ,” Jack said involuntarily.

“That’s it. Oh, Christ,” Holt said.

“I’m sorry,” said Jack.

“You got nothing to be sorry about. I held up a hardware store when I was twenty years old and I got a hundred and eighty bucks out of the till and I walked into an off-duty cop who was coming into the store to buy a hammer and a pound of nails and instead he got me. And it wasn’t the first time I pulled something like that,” Holt said harshly. “I had two misdemeanors on my sheet before that, and they didn’t know the half of it. Well,” he said briskly, “now I’m trying to adopt a little boy in Leghorn. Everybody back home told me it would be easy.” He chuckled ruefully. “You’d think it would, wouldn’t you? Overpopulation, homes broken up by the war, they’re always yelling they have five million people too many, that they have to emigrate.” He shook his head at his former naïveté. “Why, sir, you would be horrified—and I use the word advisedly—horrified—if I told you what degradation you have to go through just to give a poor little starving wop bastard a home with a swimming pool and seven servants and a Harvard education.” He stopped and looked around him, squinting, lost in the sleeping city. “I guess I’d better be getting back,” he said. “Bertha’ll begin to worry.”

“If there’s anything I can do,” Jack said.

“I don’t like to take up your time,” Holt said. “I know you’re down here to do an important job, and you’re a busy man—but if you just happen to drop into the Embassy and there’s a friend of yours who happens to be in good with the Italians…” He looked at his watch. “It’s late, now. Maybe some day this week, we’ll have dinner, you and me and Bertha, and I’ll tell you what I’ve done already, what people I’ve seen…”

“Of course,” Jack said.

“You’re a good boy, Jack,” Holt said. “I’m glad I had this talk. I tell you frankly, in the beginning, for the first hour or so, I was afraid I wasn’t going to like you. But I like you fine, now,” he said heartily. “Fine.”

He turned and went down the street toward the night club, the felon-millionaire with his six years in Joliet, Illinois, with his carefully nurtured tolerance of Italians, orphans, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, junkmen, with his sombrero, his oil wells, his deductible living in a Roman palazzo. Upright and helpless, he walked past the shut, implacable church, back to the wife who would be called a drinking man, if she were a man, and who could be wrenched away from the bottle (one thought) only by infant fingers.

Jack watched the tall, square-shouldered figure under the wide hat, the plainsman now committed to tax avoidance and artificial insemination, as he diminished under the foreign lampposts, beside the river he was sure he could swim, despite the testimony of literature, even clad in armor.

Back in Paris, Jack thought wryly, all I worry about are small things, like whether or not the Russians are going to drop the bomb before the end of the year.

Watching Holt until he was a small, anonymous blur in the perspective of stone and concrete of lampposts and dead trees, Jack understood why Delaney had been so insistent upon his meeting the oilman and his wife. Delaney wanted something from Holt—the three-picture deal might restore his prestige and his finances for the next ten years—and in return, he was ready to offer any favors within his powers. If Jack, through Delaney’s arrangement, could help steer the Holts through the tangle of Italo-American bureaucracy and get them their Leghorn orphan, Holt’s gratitude could be counted upon. Jack chuckled, thinking, it’s Despière and the article all over again. Delaney never stops. He maneuvers day and night. Maybe I ought to ask for a raise in pay. Andrus, the all-purpose actor, call in case of emergency, civil, artistic, alcoholic.

Then the chuckle died on his lips. Delaney had always maneuvered, it was true, but on a grand scale and for large stakes. When Jack had known him as a young man, he would never have condescended to this petty trading of favors. Today, with all his bluster, Delaney was fighting for his life, and he knew it, and was clawing around him wildly for anything that would save him. Well, if this is what he needs, or thinks he needs, Jack thought, I shall do my best to deliver. And if he needs more later on, I shall do my best to deliver then.

Even as he understood all this, Jack understood, too, that it was not only for Delaney that he was in this city, at Delaney’s bidding. He was there for himself, too. Delaney was a part of the image of the best time of Jack’s own life, the bright years before the war, when he had loved Delaney as a son might love a father, a brother a brother, a soldier the soldier who fought at his side, their fates dependent on each other’s courage and skill and fortitude. In rescuing Delaney, he was rescuing the purest image of his youth. If Delaney were to be shabby and defeated, Jack, too, would be shabby and defeated. I’m going to save him, Jack thought grimly, if it kills him. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to save him.

It’s going to be a crowded two weeks, he thought, as he started back toward his hotel, passing shuttered windows, locked churches, fountains playing in dark deserted squares, past broken temples and crumbling bits of walls that had guarded the citizens of the city two thousand years before.

Enjoy yourself, chéri,
he remembered his wife’s voice at the airport.

When he reached his hotel, he hesitated outside. Two policemen walked soberly up the street, past the entrance, and Jack looked at them speculatively, thinking, How do you say in Italian, “My dear friends, a little earlier this evening, a young man threatened to kill me. Would you be so kind as to come up with me and look under my bed?”

The policemen passed on. For a moment, Jack played with the idea of going to another hotel for the night, where he could get a few hours sleep untroubled by the possibility that Bresach might find him. Then, in the morning, he could decide what should be done about him.

The idea was tempting. But he shook his head irritably, annoyed at the arguments of cowardice. He went into the hotel and got his key. There were no messages.

When he reached his apartment he went in without hesitation. The lights were on, as he had left them. There was no one in the living room. He went through the rest of the suite. No one. He went back into the living room, bolted the door, turned out the light, and started undressing as he crossed the threshold of the bedroom. The bed was cold when he got into it, and he shivered a little. If Delaney hadn’t called at just that moment, he wondered, where would I be now?

He lay there, feeling the warmth come back under the covers, on the ripped sheet.
“Hymen O Hymenaeus,”
he said softly in the darkness. He shut his eyes and waited for sleep.

I
T WAS A BAD MORNING.
He awoke late, feeling headachy and hungover from the liquor of the night before and he had to bathe and dress in a hurry so as not to be late for the dubbing session at the studio. There was no message at the desk from Veronica and when he left the hotel to get into the car that Guido had waiting for him out front, Jack thought he caught a glimpse of Bresach, standing leaning against a store front on the other side of the street, staring at the hotel entrance. At any rate, it was a man in a duffel coat, briefly seen through the traffic, ominous, attendant.

Delaney was waiting for him with his secretary in the projection room, impatient, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. “Christ, Jack,” Delaney said as he came into the room, “we haven’t got ten years to do this job.”

Jack looked at his watch. “I’m only five minutes late, Maurice,” he said mildly.