CHAPTER 4

Billy watched with interest as George, which Billy knew was not the man’s real name, carefully worked at the table on the timing device. Monika, whom George addressed as Heidi, stood on the other side of the table, her face in shadow, above the sharp vee of light the work lamp cut over the table. “Are you following this closely, John?” George said in his Spanish-accented English, looking up at Billy. John was the name assigned to Billy in the group. Monika called him John, too, when members of the group were around. It reminded him of the hocus-pocus of secret societies he had started in the yard of the progressive school in Greenwich Village when he was a small boy. Only George wasn’t a small boy and neither was Monika. One laugh, he thought, and they’d kill me.

There were only two other associates of George and Monika-Heidi whom Billy had met, but they were not present this afternoon in the small room in the slum section of Brussels where George was working on the bomb. Billy had never seen George in the same room twice. He knew from various references in George’s conversation that there were cells like the one he had joined in other cities of Europe, but so far he had no notion of where they were or what exactly they did. Although for his own safety he was not particularly anxious to know any more than he was told, he could not help resenting the fact that he was still treated as an untested and scarcely trusted outsider by the others, even though he had twice supplied them with a half-ton from the motor pool and had driven the car in Amsterdam the night George had bombed the Spanish tourist office there. He didn’t know what other bombings George and Monika had been in on, but he had read about explosions in a branch of an American bank in Brussels and outside the office of Olympic Airways. If Monika and the man he knew as George had been responsible for one or all of them, Monika was keeping her promise—no one had been hurt either in Amsterdam or Brussels.

“Do you think you could put this together yourself, if necessary?” George was saying.

“I think so.”

“Good,” George said. He always spoke quietly and moved deliberately. He was dark and small, with gentle sad eyes and looked totally undangerous. Regarding himself in the mirror, Billy couldn’t believe that anyone could imagine that he was dangerous, either.

Monika was a different story, with her tangled hair and her eyes that blazed when she was angry. But he lived with Monika, was frightened of her, and loved her more than ever. It was Monika who had said he must reenlist. When he said that he couldn’t face any more time in the army, she had turned furiously on him and had told him it was an order, not a suggestion, and that she would move out if he didn’t do as she said.

“Next time we meet,” George said, “I’ll let you put together a dummy, just for practice.”

George turned back to his work, his fine, small hands moving delicately over the wires. Neither he nor Monika had told Billy where the bomb was going to be used or when or for what purpose, and by now he knew that it would be useless to ask any questions.

“There we are,” George said, straightening up. “All done.” The small plastic charge with the clockwork attachment and detonator lay innocently on the table under the harsh light. “Lesson over for the day. You leave now, John. Heidi will remain with me for a while. Walk to the bus. Take it in the direction away from your apartment for eight blocks. Then get off, walk for three more blocks and get a taxi. Give the driver the address of the Hotel Amigo. Go into the hotel. Have a drink at the bar. Then leave the hotel and walk home.”

“Yes, George,” Billy said. That was about all he ever said to the man. “Will I be seeing you for dinner tonight?” he asked Monika.

“That depends on George,” she said.

“George?” Billy said.

“Don’t forget,” George said. “At least ten minutes in the Hotel Amigo.”

“Yes, George,” Billy said.

Sitting in the bus going in the opposite direction from the house where he lived, surrounded by women going home after a day’s shopping to prepare the family dinner, by children on the way home from school, by old men reading the evening newspaper, he chuckled inwardly. If only they could guess what the small, mild-looking young American in the neat business suit had just been doing on one of the back streets of their city.… Although he hadn’t shown it in front of George and Monika, while he was watching the bomb being assembled he had felt his pulse race with excitement. Coldly, now, in the everyday light of the rumbling bus, he could call it by another name—pleasure. He had felt the same weird emotion racing away from the tourist office in Amsterdam, hearing the faint explosion six blocks behind him in the dark city.

He didn’t believe, as Monika did, that the system was tottering and that a random bomb here and there was going to topple it, but at least he himself was no longer just an insignificant, replaceable cog in the whole lousy inhuman machine. His acts were being studied, important men were trying to figure out who he was and what he meant and where he might strike next. The disdain of his comrades in arms for him as Colonel’s pet was now an ironic joke, made juicier by the fact that they had no notion of what he was really like. And Monika had had to admit that she had been wrong when she had said he was worthless. Finally, he thought, they would put a weapon in his hand and order him to kill. And he would do it. He would read the papers the next day and would report meekly to work, filled with secret joy. He didn’t believe that Monika and George and their shadowy accomplices would ever achieve their shadowy purposes. No matter. He himself was no longer adrift, at the mercy of the small daily accidents of the enlisted man who had to say, “Yes, sir,” “Of course, sir,” to earn his daily bread. Now he was the accident, waiting to happen, the burning fuse that could not finally be ignored.

He counted the blocks as the bus trundled on. At the eighth block he got off. He walked briskly through a light drizzle the three blocks that George had told him to cover, smiling gently at the passersby. There was a taxi at the corner of the third block, standing there as though it had been ordered expressly for him. He settled back in it comfortably and enjoyed the ride to the Hotel Amigo.

He was just finishing his beer at the dark bar at the Amigo, the small room empty except for two blond men at a corner table who were talking to each other in what he took to be Hebrew when Monika walked in.

She swung up on a stool next to him. “I’ll have a vodka on ice,” she said to the barman.

“Did George order you to come?” he asked.

“I am having a social period,” she said.

“Is it Monika or Heidi?” he whispered.

“Shut up.”

“You said social,” he said. “But it isn’t. You were sent here to see if I followed instructions.”

“Everybody understands English,” she whispered. “Talk about the weather.”

“The weather,” he said. “It was rather warm this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

“Rather,” she said. She smiled at the barman as he put her drink in front of her.

He nursed the last bit of his beer at the bottom of the glass. “What would you do,” he asked, “if I were sent back to America?”

Monika looked at him sharply. “Are you being shifted? Have you been keeping something from me?”

“No,” he said. “But the Colonel’s been getting restless. He’s been here a long time. Anyway, in the army, you never can tell …”

“Pull wires,” she said. “Arrange for someplace in Germany.”

“It’s not as easy as all that,” he said.

“It can be done,” she said crisply. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Still,” he said, “you haven’t answered my question. What would you do?”

She shrugged. “That would depend,” she said.

“On what?”

“On a lot of things. Where you were sent. What kind of job you got. Where I was needed.”

“On love, perhaps?”

“Never.”

He laughed. “Ask a silly question,” he said, “and you get a silly answer.”

“Priorities, John,” she said, accenting “John” ironically. “We must never forget priorities, must we?”

“Never,” he said. He ordered another beer. “There’s a chance I’ll be going to Paris next week.”

Again she looked at him sharply. “A chance?” she asked. “Or definitely?”

“Almost definitely. The Colonel thinks he has to go and he’ll put me on orders to accompany him if he does go.”

“You must learn not to spring things like this suddenly on me,” she said.

“I just heard about it this morning,” he said defensively.

“As soon as you know for sure, you let me know. Is that clear?”

“Oh, Christ,” he said, “stop sounding like a company commander.”

She ignored this. “I’m not talking idly,” she said. “There’s a package that has to be delivered to Paris next week. How would you go? Civilian plane?”

“No. Army transport. There’s an honor guard going for some sort of ceremony at Versailles.”

“Oh, good,” she said.

“What will be in the package?”

“You’ll know when you have to know,” she said.

He sighed and drank half the fresh beer. “I’ve always been partial to nice, uncomplicated, innocent girls.”

“I’ll see if I can find one for you,” she said, “in five or six years.”

He nodded dourly. In the corner the two blond men were talking more loudly, as though they were arguing.

“Are those two men speaking Hebrew?” he asked.

She listened for a moment. “Finnish,” she said.

“Are they close? Hebrew and Finnish, I mean?”

“No.” She laughed and kissed his cheek. She had decided to be Monika now, he saw, not Heidi.

“So,” he said, “business hours are over.”

“For the day.”

“For the day,” he said and finished his beer. “You know what I would like to do?”

“What?”

“I’d like to go home with you and fuck.”

“Oh, dear,” she said with mock gentility, “soldier talk.”

“The afternoon’s activities have made me horny,” he said.

She laughed. “Me, too,” she whispered. “Pay the nice man and let’s get out of here.”

It was dark by the time they got to the street where they lived. They stopped on the corner to see if they were being followed. As far as they could tell they were not. They walked slowly on the opposite side of the. street from his house. There was a man standing, smoking a cigarette, in front of the building. It was still drizzling and the man had his hat jammed down low over his forehead. There wasn’t enough light for them to see whether they had ever seen the man before.

“Keep walking,” Monika said in a low voice.

They went past the house and turned a corner and went into a café. He would have liked another beer but Monika ordered two coffees.

When they came back fifteen minutes later, they saw, from the opposite side of the street, that the man was still there, still smoking.

“You keep walking,” Monika said. “I’ll go past him and upstairs. Come back in five minutes. If it looks all right, I’ll turn on the light in the front room and you can come up.”

Billy nodded, kissed her check as though they were saying good-bye and went on toward the corner. At the corner he looked back. Hazard of the trade, he thought. Eternal suspicion. The man was still there but Monika had disappeared. Billy turned the corner, went into the café and had the beer that Monika had vetoed. When he left the café he walked quickly around the corner. He saw that the front room light was on. He kept on walking, his head down, over to the side of the street where the man was waiting in front of the house and started up the steps, taking his keys out.

“Hello, Billy,” the man said.

“Holy God! Dad!” Billy said. In his surprise he dropped his keys and he and William Abbott almost bumped heads as they both bent over to pick them up. They laughed. His father handed Billy the keys and they embraced. Billy noticed that the smell of gin, which he had associated with his father since early childhood, was absent.

“Come on in,” Billy said. “How long have you been waiting?”

“A couple of hours.”

“You must be soaked.”

“No matter,” Abbott said. “Time for reflection.”

“Come on upstairs,” Billy said, opening the door. “Uh—Dad—we won’t be alone. There’ll be a lady there,” he said as he led the way upstairs.

“I’ll watch my language,” Abbott said.

Billy unlocked the door and they both went into the little foyer and Billy helped his father off with his wet raincoat. When Abbott took off his hat, Billy saw that his father’s hair was iron gray and his face puffy and yellowish. He remembered a photograph of his father in his captain’s uniform. He had been a handsome young man, dark, smiling at a private joke, with black hair and humorous eyes. He was no longer a handsome man. The body, which had been erect and slender, was now saggy under the worn suit, a little round paunch at the belt line. I will refuse to look like that when I am his age, Billy thought as he led his father into the living room.

Monika was in the small, cluttered living room. Monika did not waste her time on housework. She was sitting in the one easy chair, reading, and stood up when they came into the room.

“Monika,” Billy said, “this is my father.”

Monika smiled, her eyes giving a welcoming glow to her face. She has sixty moods to the hour, Billy thought as Monika shook hands with Abbott and said, “Welcome, sir.”

“I saw you come in,” Abbott said. “You gave me a most peculiar look.”

“Monika always looks at men peculiarly,” Billy said. “Sit down, sit down. Can I give you a drink?”

Abbott rubbed his hands together and shivered. “That would repair a great deal of damage,” he said.

“I’ll get the glasses and ice,” Monika said. She went into the kitchen.

Abbott looked around him approvingly. “Cosy. You’ve found a home in the army, haven’t you, Billy?”

“You might say that.”

“Transient or permanent?” Abbott gestured with his head toward the kitchen.

“Transiently permanent,” Billy said.

Abbott laughed. His laugh was younger than his iron-gray hair and puffy face. “The history of the Abbotts,” he said.

“What brings you to Brussels, Dad?”

Abbott looked at Billy reflectively. “An exploratory operation,” he said. “We can talk about it later, I suppose.”

“Of course.”

“What does the young lady do?”

“She’s a translator at NATO,” Billy said. He did not feel called upon to tell his father that Monika also was plotting the destruction of the capitalist system and had almost certainly contributed to the recent assassination of a judge in Hamburg.

Monika came back with three glasses, ice and a bottle of Scotch. Billy saw his father eyeing the bottle hungrily. “Just a small one for me, please,” Abbott said. “What with the plane trip and all and walking around Brussels the whole, livelong day, I feel as though I’ve been awake for weeks.”

Billy saw that his father’s hand shook minutely as he took the glass from Monika. He felt a twinge of pity for the small man, reduced in size and assurance from the father he remembered.

Abbott raised his glass. “To fathers and sons,” he said. He grinned crookedly. He made the ice twirl in his glass, but didn’t put it to his lips. “How many years is it since we’ve seen each other?”

“Six, seven …” Billy said.

“So long, eh?” Abbott said. “I’ll spare you both the cliché.” He sipped at his drink, took a deep, grateful breath. “You’ve weathered well, Billy. You look in good shape.”

“I play a lot of tennis.”

“Excellent. Sad to relate, I have neglected my tennis recently.” He drank again. “A mistake. One makes mistakes in six or seven years. Of varying degrees of horror.” He peered at Billy, squinting like a man who has lost his glasses. “You’ve changed. Naturally. Matured, I suppose is the word. Lines of strength in the face and all that. Most attractive, wouldn’t you say, Monika?”

“Moderately attractive,” Monika said, laughing.

“He was a nice-looking child,” Abbott said. “But unnaturally solemn. I should have brought along baby pictures. When we get to know each other better, I’ll take you to one side and ask you what he says about his father. Out of curiosity. A man always worries that his son misjudges him. The sting of siredom, you might call it.”

“Billy always speaks of you lovingly,” Monika said.

“Loyal girl,” said Abbott. “As I said, the opportunities for misjudgment are infinite.” He sipped at his drink again. “I take it, Monika, that you are fond of my son.”

“I would say so,” Monika said, her voice cautious. Billy could see that she was unfavorably impressed by his father.

“He’s told you, no doubt, that he intends to reenlist.” Abbott twirled his glass again.

“He has.”

Ah, Billy thought, that’s what brought him to Brussels.

“The American Army is a noble and necessary institution,” Abbott said. “I served in it once, myself, if my memory is correct. Do you approve of his joining up again in that necessary and noble institution?”

“That’s his business,” Monika said smoothly. “I’m sure he has his reasons.”

“If I may be inquisitive, Monika,” Abbott said, “I mean—using the prerogative of a father who is interested in his son’s choice of companions—I hope you aren’t offended …”

“Of course not, Mr. Abbott,” Monika said. “Billy knows all about me, don’t you, Billy?”

“Too much,” Billy said, laughing, uneasy at the tenor of the conversation.

“As I was saying,” Abbott said, “if I may be inquisitive—I seem to detect the faintest of accents in your speech—could you tell me where you come from? I mean originally.”

“Germany,” she said. “Originally, Munich.”

“Ah—Munich.” Abbott nodded. “I was in a plane once that bombed Munich. I am happy to see that you are too young to have been in that fair city for the occasion. It was early in nineteen forty-five.”

“I was born in nineteen forty-four,” Monika said.

“My apologies,” Abbott said.

“I remember nothing,” Monika said shortly.

“What a marvelous thing to be able to say,” Abbott said. “I remember nothing.”

“Dad,” Billy said, “the war’s over.”

“That’s what everybody says.” Abbott took another sip, slowly. “It must be true.”

“Billy,” Monika said, putting down her half-finished glass, “I hope you and your charming father will excuse me. I have to go out. There are some people I have to see.…”

Abbott rose gallantly, just a little stiffly, like a rheumatic old man getting out of bed in the morning. “I hope we will have the pleasure of your company at dinner, my dear.”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Abbott. I have a date for dinner.”

“Another evening …”

“Of course,” Monika said.

Billy went into the foyer with her and helped her into her raincoat.

He watched as she wrapped a scarf around her tangled hair. “Will I see you later?” he whispered.

“Probably not,” she said. “And don’t let your father talk you out of anything. You know why he’s here, I’m sure.”

“I suppose so. Don’t worry,” he whispered. “And come back tonight. No matter what time. I promise still to be horny.”

She chuckled, kissed his cheek and went out the door. He sighed, inaudibly, fixed a smile on his face and went back into the living room. His father was pouring himself another drink, not a small one this time.

“Interesting girl,” Abbott said. His hand was no longer shaking as he poured the soda into his glass. “Does she ever comb her hair?”

“She’s not concerned with things like that,” Billy said.

“So I gathered,” Abbott said as he sat down again in the easy chair. “I don’t trust her.”

“Oh, come on now, Dad,” Billy said. “After ten minutes. Why? Because she’s German?”

“Not at all. I know many good Germans,” Abbott said. “I say that, although it isn’t true, because it is the expected thing to say. The truth is I don’t know any Germans and have no special feeling about them one way or another. Although I do have special feelings about ladies, a race I know better than I know Germans. As I said, she gave me a most peculiar look when she passed me coming into the house. It disturbed me.”

“Well,” Billy says, “she doesn’t give me any peculiar looks.”

“I suppose not.” Abbott looked judgingly at Billy. “You’re small—too bad you took after me and not your mother in that respect—but with your pretty eyes and manner, I imagine you arouse a considerable amount of female affection.”

“Most of the ladies manage to contain themselves in my presence,” Billy said.

“I admire your modesty.” Abbott laughed. “I was less modest when I was your age. Have you heard from your mother?”

“Yes,” Billy said. “She wrote me after you told her I was going to re-enlist. I didn’t know you kept in such close touch with her.”

“You’re her son,” Abbott said, his face grave, “and you’re my son. Neither of us forgets that, although we manage to forget many other things.” He took a long gulp of his whiskey.

“Don’t get drunk tonight, please, Dad.”

Abbott looked thoughtfully at the glass in his hand, then, with a sudden movement, threw it against the small brick fireplace. The glass shattered and the whiskey made a dark stain on the hearth. The two men sat in silence for a moment. Billy heard his father’s loud, uneven breathing.

“I’m sorry, Billy,” Abbott said. “I’m not angry at what you said. On the contrary. Quite the contrary. You have spoken like a dutiful and proper son. I’m touched by your interest in my health. What I’m angry about is myself.” His voice was bitter. “My son is on the verge of making what I consider a huge and perhaps irrecoverable mistake. I borrowed the money for the voyage from Chicago to Brussels from the last man in the world who can occasionally be prevailed upon to lend me a dollar. I came here to try to persuade you to … well … to reconsider. I walked around this town all day in the rain marshaling arguments to get you to change your mind. I managed not to order even one drink on the plane across the ocean, because I wanted to be at my best—” he smiled wryly “—which is not a very handsome best at best—for my meeting with you. I have antagonized you about your girl, whom I don’t know, as you pointed out, because of a peculiar look on a doorstep, and I have begun the proceedings by pouring a double Scotch, which is bound to remind you of painful weekends with your father when your mother lent you to me for paternal Sabbath guidance. Willie Abbott rides again.” He stood up abruptly. “Let us go to dinner. I promise not to touch another drop tonight until you deposit me at my hotel. After that I promise to drink myself into oblivion. I will not be in glorious shape tomorrow, but I promise to be sober. Where’s the John? I’ve been standing in the rain for hours and my bladder is bursting. For the sake of you and the United States Army I didn’t want to be caught pissing on the good burghers of Brussels.”

“Through the bedroom,” Billy said. “I’m afraid there’s a lot of stuff lying around. Monika and I have to get to work early in the morning and most of the time we don’t get back until dinner.” He didn’t want his father to think that Monika was a slob, although he occasionally complained to her about the mess they lived in. “There’s nothing in Marx or Mao or Ché Guevara,” he had said recently to her, “about good revolutionaries having to leave their underwear on the floor.” “We clean up on the weekends,” he said to his father.

“I will make no remarks, Billy,” Abbott said, “about the life-style of you and your lady. I am not the neatest man in the world, but paradoxically consider neatness in a woman a useful virtue. No matter. We make do with what comes along.” He looked searchingly at Billy. “You’re not in uniform, soldier. How is it if you’re in the noble and necessary army of the United States Army you’re not in uniform?”

“Off duty,” Billy said, “we can wear civilian clothes.”

“It was different in my day,” Abbott said. “I didn’t wear civilian clothes for four years. Ah, well, wars change.” He walked steadily out into the hall on his way to the bathroom. As he went out, Billy thought, That suit must be at least ten years old. I wonder if he’d let me buy him a new one.

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His father said a lot of things over dinner, on a variety of subjects. He insisted upon Billy ordering wine for himself but turned his own glass over when the waiter poured. He said the food was first-rate, but just picked at it. By turns, he was expansive, apologetic, regretful, cynical, optimistic, aggressive, self-denigrating and boastful.

“I’m not through yet,” was one of the things he said, “no matter what it looks like. I have a million ideas: I could eat up the field of public relations like a dish of whipped cream if I stayed off the booze. Ten of the top men in the field in Chicago have told me as much—I’ve been offered jobs in six figures if I joined Alcoholics Anonymous—but I can’t see myself making public confessions to a group of professional breast-beaters. If you’d forget this crazy idea of sticking with the army—I can’t get over that, I really can’t, a smart young man like you, with your education, not even an officer—what the hell do you do all day, just check out cars like a girl in a radio taxi office? Why, if you came out to Chicago with me, we could set up an agency—William Abbott and Son. I’ve read your letters—I keep them with me at all times—the first thing I pack when I move from one place to another is the box I keep them in—I’ve read them and I tell you you can write, you really can turn a phrase with the best of them. If I had had your talent, I tell you I just wouldn’t have a pile of unfinished plays in my desk drawer, no sir, not by a long shot. We could dazzle the folks, just dazzle them—I know the business from A to Z, you could leave that end of it to me, we’d have the advertisers knocking the door down to beg us to take their accounts. And don’t think that Chicago is small time. Advertising started there, for God’s sake.

“All right, I have a pretty good idea of what you think of the advertising business—the whore of the consumer society, all that crap. But like it or not, it’s the only society we have and the rule of the jungle is consume or be consumed. Trade a couple of years of your life and you can do whatever you damn well please after it. Write a book—write a play. When I get back to Chicago I’ll have your letters Xeroxed and send them to you, you’ll be amazed at yourself reading them all at once like that. Listen, your mother made a living, a damn good living, writing for the magazines, and just the things you dash off to me in a few minutes have more—what’s the word I’m looking for?—more tone, more spirit, more sense of what writing is about than she had in her best days. And she was highly thought of, let me tell you, by a lot of intelligent people—the editors were always after her for more—I don’t know why she quit. Her writing was good enough for the editors, for the public, but not for her. She has some insane idea of perfectionism—be careful of that—it can finally lead to molecular immobility—there’s a phrase, my boy—and she quit. Christ, somebody in the family ought to finally make it. She complains to me you almost never write her. I’m pleased, of course, you write me as often as you do, but after all, she’s your mother, it wouldn’t kill you to drop her a line from time to time. I know I was shitty to her, I disappointed her, I was a lousy husband. The truth is, she was too much for me—in every department—physically, intellectually, morally. She swamped me, but that doesn’t prevent me so many years later from appreciating her quality. There’s no telling how far she could have gone, with another man, with better luck.… Colin Burke being killed.

“That family—the Jordaches—the old man a suicide, the brother murdered, and sainted Rudolph just about beaten to death in his own apartment. That would have been something for your mother, if he’d have knocked it off. Three for three. Two brothers and a husband. What a percentage! And the kid—Wesley—did I write you he came to Chicago and looked me up? He wanted me to tell him what I knew about his father—he’s haunted by his father—the ramparts of Elsinore, for Christ’s sake—I guess you can’t blame him for that—but he looks like a zombie, his eyes are scary—God knows how he’s going to end up. I never even met his father, but I tried to pretend that I’d heard he was a fine fellow and I laid it on thick and the kid just stood up in the middle of a sentence and said, ‘Thank you, sir. I’m afraid we’re wasting each other’s time.’

“You’re half Jordache—maybe more than half—if ever a lady had dominant genes it was Gretchen Jordache—so you be careful, don’t you ever trust to inherited luck, because you don’t have it, on either side of the family tree.…

“I’ll tell you what—you get through with the goddamn army and you come out to Chicago to work with me and I’ll swear never to touch a drop of liquor again in my whole life. I know you love me—we’re grown men, we can use the proper words—and you’re being offered a chance that very few sons get—you can save your father’s life. You don’t have to say anything now, but when I get back to Chicago I want to see a letter from you waiting for me telling me when you’re arriving in town. I’ll be there in a week or so. I have to leave for Strasbourg tomorrow. There’s a man there I have to see. Delicate negotiations for an old account of mine. A chemical company. I have to sound out this Frenchman to see if he’ll take a fee, an honorarium—not to mince words, a bribe, for swinging my client’s business to his company. I won’t tell you how much money is involved. But you’d gasp if I did tell you. And I get my cut if I deliver. It’s not the jolliest way to earn a living, but it was the only way I could borrow enough money to come over here to see you. Remember what I said about the consumer society.

“And now it’s late and your girl is undoubtedly waiting for you and I’m deadbeat tired. If you give one little goddamn for the rest of your father’s life, that letter will be waiting for me in Chicago when I get there. And that’s blackmail and don’t think I don’t know it. One last thing. The dinner’s on me.”

When he got back home after putting his father in a taxi and walking slowly through the wet streets of Brussels, with little aureoles of foggy light around the lampposts, he sat down at his desk and stared at his typewriter.

Hopeless, hopeless, he thought. Poor, hopeless, seedy, fantasizing, beloved man. And I never did get the chance to tell him I’d like to buy him a new suit.

When he finally went to bed, it was alone.

Monika didn’t come in that night.

She came home before he went to work in the morning, with the package he was to deliver to an address on the me du Gros-Caillou in the 7th arrondissement in Paris when he went to the capital of France with his colonel. The package was comparatively harmless—just ten thousand French francs in old bills and an American Army, .45-caliber automatic pistol, equipped with a silencer.

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The .45 and the extra clips of ammunition were in his tennis bag as he got out of the taxi at the corner of the Avenue Bosquet and the rue St. Dominique at twenty minutes past three in the afternoon. He had looked at the map of Paris and seen that the rue du Gros-Caillou was a short street that ran between rue St. Dominique and rue de Grenelle, not far from the Ecole Militaire. The ten thousand francs were folded in an envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket.

He was early. Monika had told him he would be expected at three-thirty. Under his breath he repeated the address she had made him memorize. He strolled, peering in at the shop windows, looking, he hoped, like an idle American tourist with a few minutes to spare before meeting his partners for their tennis game. He was still about thirty yards from the arched gate that led into the street, when a police car, its siren wailing, passed him, going in the wrong direction, up the rue St. Dominique and stopped, blocking the rue du Gros-Caillou. Five policemen jumped out, pistols in their hands, and ran into the rue du Gros-Caillou. Billy quickened his pace, passed the opening of the street. He looked through the arch and saw the policemen running toward a building in front of which there were three other policemen who had come from the other end of the street. He heard shouting and saw the first three policemen plunge through the doorway. A moment later there was the sound of shots.

He turned and went back, making himself walk slowly, toward the Avenue Bosquet. It was not a cold day, but he was shivering and sweating at the same time.

There was a bank on the corner and he went into it. Anything to get off the street. There was a girl sitting at a desk at the entrance and he went up to her and said he wanted to rent a safety-deposit box. He had difficulty getting out the French words, “Coffre-fort.” The girl stood up and led him to a counter, where a clerk asked him for his identification. He showed his passport and the clerk filled out some forms. When the clerk asked him for his address he thought for a moment, then gave the name of the hotel he and Monika had stayed at when they were in Paris together. He was staying at another hotel this time. He signed two cards. His signature looked strange to him. He paid a year’s fee in advance. Then the clerk led him down into the vault, where he gave the key to the box to the guardian at the desk. The guardian led him to a row of boxes in the rear of the vault, opened one of the locks with Billy’s key and the second lock with his own master key, then went back to his desk, leaving Billy alone. Billy opened the tennis bag and put the automatic, the extra clips and the envelope with the ten thousand francs in it into the box. He closed the door of the box and called for the guardian. The guardian came back and turned the two keys and gave Billy his.

Billy went out of the vault and upstairs. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him and he went out onto the avenue. He heard no more shots, saw no more police. His father, it had turned out, had been needlessly pessimistic when he had warned him not to trust in inherited luck. He had just had ten minutes of the greatest luck of his or anybody’s life.

He hailed a cruising taxi and gave the driver the address of his hotel off the Champs Elysées.

When he got to the hotel, he asked if there were any messages for him. There were none. He went up to his room and picked up the phone and gave the girl at the switchboard the number of his apartment in Brussels. After a few minutes his telephone rang and the girl at the switchboard said there was no answer.

The Colonel had given him the afternoon and evening off and he stayed in his room, calling the number in Brussels every half hour until midnight, when the switchboard closed down. But the number never answered.

He tried to sleep, but every time he dozed off, he woke with a start, sweating.

At six in the morning, he tried the number in Brussels again, but there still was no answer.

He went out and got the morning papers, Le Figaro and the Herald Tribune. Over coffee and a croissant at a café on the Champs Elysées, he read the stories. They were not prominently featured in either of the papers. A suspected trafficker in drugs had been shot and killed while resisting arrest in the 7th arrondissement. The police were still trying to establish his identity.

They are playing it cosy, Billy thought, as he read the stories—they’re not giving away what they know.

When he went back to the hotel, he tried the apartment in Brussels again. There was no answer.

He got back to Brussels two days later. The apartment was empty and everything that had belonged to Monika was gone. There was no note anywhere.

When the Colonel asked him some weeks later if he was going to re-enlist, he said, “No, sir, I’ve decided against it.”