Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online

little bitch is goading me into talking to her, trading with her, bribing her to leave the antipersonnel mines unexploded.
    “It would be interesting,” the article continued, “to get Jesse Craig to make a list of the people he has worked with, categorizing them by the above standards. Worth a novel. Worth a short story. Worth a sentence. Worth a phrase. Worth a comma. If ever I get to speak to him again, I shall attempt to induce him to supply me with such a list.”
    She is out for blood, he thought. My blood.
    The rest of the page was covered in handwriting. “Dear Mr. C., It’s late now, and I’m getting groggy. I have tomes more to go but not tonight. If you wish to comment on anything you’ve read, I’m madly available. To be continued in the next installment. Yours, G. McK.”
    His instinct was to crumple the pages and toss them over the edge of the balcony. But he held onto them, reasonably. After all, as the girl had said, she had a carbon. And would have a carbon of the next installment. And the next.
    A liner was swinging at anchor out in the bay, and for a moment he thought of packing his bag and getting on it, no matter where it was going. But it wouldn’t do any good. She’d probably turn up at the next port, typewriter in hand.
    He went into the living room and tossed the yellow sheets onto the desk.
    He looked at his watch. It was still too early for the Murphy’s lunch. He remembered that yesterday he had promised Constance he’d phone her. She had said she wanted a blow-by-blow report. It had been partly due to her that he had come to Cannes. “Go on down there,” she had said. “See if you can hack the action. You might as well find out now as later.” She was not a woman who temporized.
    He went into the bedroom and put in a call for Paris. Then he lay on the unmade bed and tried to doze while waiting. He had drunk too much the night before and had slept badly.
    He closed his eyes but couldn’t sleep. The thousand-fold amplified electric guitars of the movie he had just seen echoed in his ears, the orgiastic bodies writhed behind his hooded eyelids. If she’s in, he thought, I’m going to tell her I’m taking the plane back to Paris this afternoon.
    He had met her at a fund-raising party for Bobby Kennedy when he was on a visit to Paris in ’68. He, himself, was registered to vote in New York, but a friend in Paris had taken him along. The people at the party had been attractive and had asked intelligent questions of the two eloquent and distinguished gentlemen who had flown from the United States to ask for money and emotional support for their man from Americans abroad, most of whom were not permitted to vote. Craig was not as enthusiastic as the others in the room, but he had signed a check for five hundred dollars, feeling that there was something mildly comic in his offering money to anybody in the Kennedy family. While the intense political discussion was still going on in the large handsome salon whose walls were splattered with dark, nonobjective paintings that he suspected would soon be sold at prices considerably lower than his hosts had paid for them, he went into the empty dining room where a bar had been set up.
    He was pouring himself a drink when Constance followed him in. He had been conscious of her staring at him from time to time during the speeches. She was a striking-looking woman, dead pale, with wide greenish eyes and jet hair cut unfashionably short. At least it would have been unfashionable on anyone else. She was wearing a short lime-green dress and had dazzling legs.
    “Are you going to give me a drink? I’m Constance Dob-son. I know who you are,” she said. “Gin and tonic. Plenty of ice.” Her voice was husky, and she spoke quickly, in bursts.
    He made the drink for her.
    “What’re you doing here?” she asked, sipping at her drink. “You look like a Republican.”
    “I always try to look like a Republican when I’m abroad,” he said. “It