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

coffee and brandy and the little stamped check and went back toward the bar inside. Rudolph took a sip of the coffee, strong and black. Then he lifted the small glass of brandy and sniffed it. Just as he was about to drink, the woman raised her glass of wine to him. This time there was no doubt about it. She was smiling. She had a full red mouth, dark gray eyes, black hair. Politely, Rudolph raised his glass a little higher in salute, drank a little.
    “You’re American, aren’t you?” She had only a slight accent.
    “Yes.”
    “I knew as soon as you came in,” she said. “The clothes. Are you here on a pleasure trip?”
    “In a way,” he said. He didn’t know whether he wanted to continue the conversation or not. He was not easy with strangers, especially strange women. She didn’t look like the prostitutes he had seen prowling the streets of New York, but he was in a foreign country and he wasn’t sure how French prostitutes dressed and spoke. He was not used to being accosted by women. There was something forbidding about him, his friend and lawyer, Johnny Heath, had said, austere. Johnny Heath was accosted wherever he went, on the street, in bars, at parties. There was nothing austere about Johnny Heath.
    From adolescence Rudolph had developed an aloof, cool manner, believing that it gave him the air of belonging to another class than that of the boys and men he had grown up among, with their easy comradeship, their loud, plebeian conviviality. Perhaps, he thought, looking at the woman at the other table, I have overdone the act.
    “Are you enjoying yourself?” the woman asked. Her voice was husky, with a certain harshness in it that was not displeasing.
    “Moderately,” he said.
    “Are you in a hotel here in Nice?”
    “No,” he said. He supposed that there was a certain set routine ladies such as this one went through. He guessed that she was one of the higher paid members of her profession, who did not get to the point immediately but flattered a man by pretending that she was interested in him, putting the eventual transaction on a level that was not merely physical and commercial. “I’m just passing through,” he said. He was beginning to think, Why not? Once in my life, he thought, why not see what it’s like? Besides, he had been continent for a long time. Too long. He had not slept in the same room with Jean since she had had her miscarriage. More than a year. Sometimes, he thought, you must remember you are a man. Bare, forked animal. Even he. He smiled at the woman. It felt good to smile. “May I offer you a drink?”
    He had never offered a drink to a stranger before, man or woman. About time to begin. What have I been saving myself for, what have I been proving? In the one city of Nice itself, at this moment, there were probably thousands of men tumbling with women in joyous beds, regretting nothing, grasping the pleasure their bodies were conceived for, forgetting the day’s labors, the day’s fears. What put him above common humanity? “I’m alone,” he said daringly. “I don’t really speak French. I would enjoy some company. Somebody who speaks English.” Always the saving, modifying hypocritical clause, he thought.
    The woman looked at her watch, pretended at decision. “Well,” she said, “that would be very nice.” She smiled at him. She was pretty when she smiled, he thought, even white teeth and nice little wrinkles around the dark gray eyes. She folded her magazine and picked up her handbag and stood up and took the three steps to his table. He stood up and held the chair for her and she said, “Thank you,” as she sat down. “I like to talk to Americans whenever I get a chance. I was in Washington for three years and I learned to like Americans.”
    Gambit, Rudolph thought, but keeping his face agreeable. If I were Swedish or Greek, she’d say she liked Swedes and Greeks. He speculated on how she had spent her three years in Washington. Entertaining