Beggarman, Thief by Irwin Shaw Page B

a boy who had hit someone in a tavern with a beer bottle? What civic spirit or lust for fame or profit had driven the lawmakers among the statutes and the measured rhetoric to leave their academies and festivals to seek election, take on the burden of ruling that intelligent and warlike race? He himself had made speeches on the hustings, had cajoled, promised, heard the cheers of crowds, won and accepted office. Why? He couldn’t remember now.
    There was a bustle of traffic around him, even on the narrow stone road along the top of the ramparts. Antibes had once been a sleepy, forgotten town, but it was crowded now by the beneficiaries or the victims of the twentieth century, leaving winter behind them in the rush to the climate of the south, to work and live there, not only to play. Flowers and light industry. He himself was a northern man but he could use a few years of the south himself. If what had happened here had not happened, he might have settled cosily here, anonymous, unknown, retired gratefully, as some men did, in his thirties. He had the rudiments of French—think of Jeanne—he could have worked at it, learned to read Victor Hugo, Gide, Cocteau, whatever new men were worth reading, visited Paris for the theater. Dreams. Impossible now.
    He breathed deeply of the salt balmy air off the sea. Almost every place was open for him, but not this particular, haunted, beautiful place.
    He started walking again, down from the ramparts toward the port. He would get Dwyer to find Kate and they could have their discussion in a café, because Kate had said she never wanted to see the Clothilde again. She might have changed her mind by now, with the first shock over, she was not a sentimental woman, but he was not the one who was going to force her.
    Just at the entrance to the port there was a small seamen’s café. At a tiny table in front of it Dwyer was sitting with a woman, her back to Rudolph. When he called out to Dwyer the woman turned and he saw that it was Kate. She was thinner now, or was it the black dress she wore that made her look so? The nut brown of her complexion had faded and her hair was careless around her face. He felt a twinge of anger or something akin to anger. Knowing everything that he was trying to do for her, she had not even bothered to call to tell him where she was staying, and here she was sitting with Dwyer, the two of them looking like an old married couple, sharing secrets in the sunshine. She stood up to say hello to him and he was embarrassed.
    “May I join you for a moment?” he asked. There were moments and moments.
    Without a word, Dwyer drew up a chair from the next table. He was dressed as usual, tanned, muscular, his bantamweight arms ridged below the short sleeves of the white jersey with the printing on it. What mourning he carried was not on public display. “What will you have to drink?” Dwyer asked.
    “What are you two drinking?”
    “Pastis.”
    “Not for me, thanks,” Rudolph said. He didn’t like its sweet, licorice taste. It reminded him of the long, black, pliant sticks of candy, like miniature snakes, that his father had bought for him when he was a boy. He was in no mood to be reminded of his father. “If I could have a brandy?”
    Dwyer went into the café to fetch the brandy. Rudolph looked across the table at Kate. She was sitting there stolidly, no emotion showing on her face. She could be a Mexican peasant woman, Rudolph thought, all work done for the moment, sitting in front of an adobe wall in the sunlight, waiting for her husband to come home from the fields. She lowered her eyes, refusing to look at him, a baked mud wall around her primitive thoughts. He sensed hostility. Had the parting kiss when she left the Clothilde been a sardonic salute? Or had it been real, meant then and later regretted?
    “How is Wesley?” she asked, her eyes still averted. “Bunny told me all about it.”
    “He’s all right. They’re letting him leave France a week