Nightwork by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

sometimes drank in, a waitress in a nearby Italian restaurant, others, who could point me out to someone who might come around making inquiries about me. Eventually, I knew, I would put a great deal more distance behind me, but for the time being crossing Central Park would have to do. But I didn’t want to flee blindly. I knew that I needed at least one day to think and plan.
    The hotel was a busy one, but middle class and commercial, and not the sort of place a man who had entered into sudden wealth would choose to celebrate in.
    I asked for a single room with bath, registered under the name of Theodore Brown, gave as my home address Camden, New Jersey, a city I had never visited, and followed the bellboy with the bags into the elevator. On the way up, I studied the man’s sullen, narrow face. He was young, but there was no trace of innocence in the guarded eyes, the tightly closed lips. It was a face designed specifically by nature for corruption. What wonders a man with a face like that could perform with a hundred thousand dollars.
    In the room, which overlooked the park, the bellboy put the big bag in a chair, turned on the light in the bathroom, ostentatiously earning his tip.
    “I wonder if you could do me a favor,” I said, taking out a five-dollar bill.
    The bellboy eyed the bill. “Depends on what the favor is,” the bellboy said. “The management don’t like whores coming in and out.”
    “Nothing like that,” I said. “I’d just like to make a bet on a horse and I’m new in town and …” I had entered a new life, but I was taking some baggage along with me. Ask Gloria cantered out of the stables of my past.
    The bellboy showed his teeth in what he imagined was an accommodating smile. “We have a house bookie,” he said. “I can have him up here in fifteen minutes.”
    “Thanks.” I gave him the five-dollar bill.
    “Very good of you, sir,” the bellboy said. The bill disappeared. “Do you mind telling me what you’re going to play?”
    “Ask Gloria in the second,” I said. “At Hialeah.”
    “It’s a fifteen-to-one shot,” he said. He was a student of the sport.
    “So it is,” I said.
    “Interesting,” he said. There was no doubt about what he was going to do with my five dollars. Dishonest as he was, he would live and die a poor man.
    When he left the room, I loosened my tie and lay down on the bed, although I still wasn’t tired. Try money, I thought, grinning, for that run-down feeling, that midmorning sag. More and more, thinking these days is in the form of a television commercial.
    The house bookie appeared promptly. He was a huge fat man in a rumpled suit, with three ball-point pens clipped into the breast pocket of his jacket. He panted when he moved and spoke in a high, almost soprano voice, surprising coming out of all that bulk. “Hi, pal,” he said as he came into the room. He looked around the room swiftly, taking everything in. He was a man prepared for ambush. Although he performed in daylight, he lived in the same world as the cop in the prowl car. “Morris said you were looking for a little action.”
    “A little,” I said. “I like Ask Gloria for …” I hesitated for a moment. “For three hundred to win in the second at Hialeah. The morning line has her at fifteen to one.” I had a peculiar feeling of lightheartedness, as though I were in an open plane, without oxygen, and had suddenly climbed from the deck to twenty thousand feet.
    The fat man took a creased sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, ran a finger down it. “I can give you twelve to one,” he said.
    “Okay,” I said. I gave him three bills.
    The bookie took the bills, examined them closely, glanced briefly at me. I detected respect, a certain delicate wariness.
    “My name is …” I started to say.
    “I know your name, Mr. Brown. Morris told me,” the bookie said. He made a note with one of the pens on the sheet of paper. “I pay off at six o’clock in the bar