Beggarman, Thief by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

and well-fed. The room was quiet, the atmosphere fittingly serious, the headwaiter a smiling Italian gentleman with brilliant teeth who spoke English. Perhaps, Rudolph thought, he is a spy for the Italian Army, goes home every night to draw up plans of the harbor to be microfilmed by an accomplice. Bella Nizza.
    Seated at a table with a gleaming white tablecloth, breaking a crisp roll and spreading butter over it, Rudolph felt that perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that the town was not worth the bones of a single Calabrian peasant. He knew no one in Calabria.
    To put an even keener edge to his appetite he ordered a martini. The martini came to the table, pale and icy cold. He fished out the olive and nibbled at it. It tasted of juniper and Mediterranean sunlight. He waved away the menu that the headwaiter offered him. “I know what I want,” he said.
    The meal, when it came, did justice to the concierge’s estimate of the restaurant’s cuisine. Rudolph ate and drank slowly, feeling newly restored with every bite of the food, every drop of the wines. Sometimes, he thought, the best of holidays can be fitted into only two hours of your life.
    When he had finished with the strawberries he asked for the check. He wanted to take a stroll, replete, nameless, unencumbered, sit at a café table and watch the evening traffic on the promenade while having his coffee and a brandy. He tipped the maitre d’hôtel and the waiters grandly and sauntered out into the balmy night air. He walked the few minutes to the beach. Oldest sea. Ulysses had survived it. Strapped to the mast, his sailors’ ears stopped by wax against the songs. Many brave men asleep in the deep. Tom now among them. Rudolph stood on the stony strand a few yards from where the gentle waves slid into France in a small lace of foam. It was a moonless night, but the stars were brilliant, and along the curve of the dark coast thousands of pinpoints of light made jeweled strings against the hills.
    He breathed deeply of the salt air. Even though there was the mumble of traffic behind his back he felt beautifully alone, the beach deserted except for him, with nothing before him but the dark expanse of water. Tomorrow, he knew, would be a day of guilt and turmoil, but that was tomorrow. He leaned down and picked up a smooth round stone and threw it, skipping, along the surface of the sea. It skipped three times. He chuckled. If he had been a younger man, a boy, he would have sprinted like a halfback down the beach, along the water’s edge, dodging the irregular ebb and flow of the waves. But at his age, in his black suit, it did not seem advisable, even in his mellow after-dinner state, to draw attention to himself from the strollers on the walk above the beach.
    He went back to the promenade and entered a brightly lit café, seating himself so that he could watch the crowded pavement, the sauntering men and women, their day’s work done or their tourists’ duties performed, now just enjoying the climate, the momentary exchange of glances, the opportunity to walk, unhurried in the soft night, arm in arm with a loved one.
    The café was not crowded. At a table, just one removed from his, a woman was reading a magazine, her head bent so that he could not see her face. She had looked up when he came in, then quickly gone back to her magazine. She had a half-full glass of white wine on the table in front of her. She had dark hair, nice legs, he noticed, was wearing a light blue dress.
    He was conscious of another, unspecific hunger.
    Don’t spoil the evening, he warned himself.
    He ordered a brandy and coffee from the waiter, in English. The woman, he noted, looked up again when he spoke. He detected, or thought he detected, a momentary glimmer of a smile on her face. She was not young, in her late thirties, he would have said, somewhere around his age, carefully made up, eye shadow. A little old for a prostitute, but attractive just the same.
    The waiter put down his