Beggarman, Thief

Part One

From billy abbott's notebook

I am worthless, Monika says. She says it only half-seriously. But I agree with her seriously. She once asked me what I write in this notebook. I told her that the colonel keeps saying we are on the firing line of civilization. It is important for future generations, I told her, to know what it was like to be on the firing line of civilization in Brussels in the second half of the 20th Century. Maybe some dusty, irradiated scholar will dig around in the ruins of the city and come upon this notebook, charred a little around the edges and perhaps stiff with the rusty stains of my blood, and be grateful to William Abbott, Jr., for his forethought in jotting down his observations of how the simple American soldier lived while defending civilization on theedge of Europe. What the price of oysters was, the shape and dimensions of his beloved's breasts, his simple pleasures, like fucking and stealing gasoline from the Army. Things like that.

Go back to your scribbling, Monika said. Scribbling perhaps is the word for what I'm doing. I come from a literary family. Both my mother and my father are--or were--writers. Of a sort. My father was a public-relations man, a member of a profession not held in particularly high esteem. Still, whatever his merits or failures, he achieved them at the typewriter. He lives in Chicago now and writes to me often, especially when he is drunk. I reply dutifully. We are great friends when we are 4000 miles apart.

My mother used to write criticism for nasty little magazines. She does something for the movies now. I grew up to the music of typewriters and it seems normal for me to put my thoughts, such as they are, on paper. The amusements are limited here, though it's better than 'Nam, as the colonel keeps saying.

I play tennis with the colonel and praise his backhand, which is awful, but that's one way of getting ahead in the Army. If the pre-emptive Russian strike doesn't hit NATO, as the colonel warns it will, I'll keep scribbling. It gives me something to do when things get slow at the motor pool where I work.

•

A telegram from my mother has come. "Your uncle Tom has been murdered," the telegram reads. "Suggest you try to come to Antibes for the Funeral. Your uncle Rudolph and I are at the hotel Du Cap D'Antibes. love, mother."

I have seen my uncle Tom just once, the time I flew from California to Whitby for my grandmother's funeral, when I was a boy. I liked him the night we stayed together in my uncle Rudolph's guest room. I was impressed by the fact that he carried a gun. He thought I was sleeping when he took the gun out of his pocket and put it away in a drawer before he undressed and got into the other bed. It gave me something to think about during the funeral the next day.

If an uncle had to be murdered, I would have preferred it to be Rudolph. We were never very friendly and, as I grew older, he showed me, very politely, that he disapproved of me and my views on society. But he is rich and there might be a mention of me in his will someday; if not out of any fondness for me, then out of brotherly love for my mother. From what I've heard, Thomas Jordache was not the type of man to leave a fortune.

I showed the telegram to the colonel and he gave me ten days of compassionate leave to go to Antibes. I sent a telegram of condolence to my mother and my uncle and said that the Army wouldn't let me off for the funeral.

Monika got time off from her job and we went to Paris. We had a marvelous time. Monika is exactly the sort of girl you want to have with you in Paris.

•

Monika, who is German, speaks German, English, French, Flemish and Spanish and she says she can read Gaelic. As far as I can tell, she is as pacific as myself, but, because of her job as NATO translator, she gets to hurl the most awesome threats, composed by belligerent old men, at other belligerent old men in the opposite wing of the great lunatic asylum we all inhabit.

I spent the day in bed with her.

We do that occasionally.

•

Happened to pick up a copy of the international edition of this week's Time magazine. Lo and behold, under "Crime," there was the saga of the Jordaches, with a nude photograph of Jean--that is, Mrs. Rudolph--and the whole unpleasant history of the family. Failure, disgrace and murder in several dozen well-chosen words, as follows:

About the last place you'd expect to find the three children of a Hudson River town German immigrant suicide baker would be a yacht on the Riviera. But after the recent Antibes waterfront killing of Thomas Jordache, better known years ago as middleweight boxer Tommy Jordan, a number of names from the past bubbled to the surface of a French police dossier. Among them: Rudolph Jordache, 40, Tom's brother, millionaire, ex-mayor of Whitby; Jordan's teenage son; and Mrs. Colin Burke, an erstwhile radio critic.

Sources in Antibes say that Jordan was bludgeoned to death only days after his wedding and after extricating his tipsy sister-in-law from the clutches of a harbor ruffian in a seedy Cannes night spot.

Staying at the plush Hôtel du Cap while police continued their investigation, Mrs. Rudolph Jordache says she was accosted while having a solitary quayside nightcap. Jordan, appearing on the scene, savagely beat the man. Later, Jordan was found murdered on his yacht.

French police will confirm only that they have a list of suspects.

Luckily, the piece doesn't mention me. It would have to be an outside chance for anyone to connect me with Mrs. Burke, once married to an eminent director, now dead, and before that to an obscure flack named Abbott. Monika would, of course, because I've talked to her about my mother, but, fortunately, Monika doesn't read Time.

Monika's not home--a note on the table. Will be gone a few days. She believes in the double standard, all right--but in reverse.

I miss her already.

•

Families. There's a subject. The Time story reminded me of my cousin.

Have never met Wesley Jordache. Poor little bastard. Lost in the shuffle. Will the murder of his father turn out to be an enlarging experience f'or his soul? It would be interesting to meet Cousin Wesley, compare notes. The same blood running in our veins.

•

Lately, Monika has become edgy. I find her watching me with a speculative look in her eye and it bodes no good. It would be the height of blind egotism if I believed that the speculation included sorrow at the thought of losing me, which could easily happen if the colonel got transferred and took his useful tennis partner with him.

I am that essential, forlorn modern figure, the seasonal laborer at the mercy of flood and drought, supply and demand.

I make do as well as I can, the sly valet expert at pilfering his master's time and treasure.

If Monika leaves me, I will screw the colonel's wife.

•

This will be the last entry in this notebook for some time.

I had better not write anything about Monika anymore.

There are snoops and authorized burglars everywhere. Brussels abounds in them.

Monika edgier than ever.

I love her. She refuses to believe me.

Billy Abbott, in civilian clothes, feeling at peace with the world after an excellent meal at the restaurant that overlooked La Grande Place of the city of Brussels, came out into the cool night air, holding on to Monika's arm. The meal had been expensive, as the restaurant was over-praised in all the guidebooks, but it had been worth it. Besides, he had won $60 that afternoon playing tennis with the colonel as his partner. Tennis and the colonel had changed Billy's life in the Army. The colonel was a tennis nut and tried to play at least an hour a day and, as befitted a true graduate of West Point, liked to win. The colonel had seen Billy play when Billy was only a corporal and had liked Billy's style, which was cool and tricky, so that he could beat players who hit the ball twice as hard as he did. Billy was also very quick and could cover three quarters of the court in doubles. Since the colonel was 47 years old, he needed a partner who could cover three quarters of the court. So now Billy was no longer a corporal but a master sergeant in command of the motor pool, a job that meant considerable extra money beyond his sergeant's pay, what with an occasional grateful tip from officers who had motorized business to conduct that was not officially Army business and the not-so-occasional opportunity to sell Army (continued on page 179)beggarman, thief(continued from page 154) gasoline clandestinely at prices cannily just below the prices in the city. The colonel also invited Billy to dinner. He liked to know what the enlisted men were thinking, as he often said, and the colonel's wifethought Billy was a charming young man and behaved like an officer, especially in civilian clothes. The colonel's wife liked to play tennis, too, and lived in hope of the day when the colonel would be sent off on an assignment for a month or two, leaving Billy behind.

It was not the Old Army, the colonel sometimes thought, but you had to keep up with the times. While the colonel was his commanding officer, there was no danger that Billy would be sent to Vietnam.

Billy knew that it was through his uncle Rudolph's good offices in Washington that he had been spared the unpleasant sound of hostile fire and one day he would show his gratitude. Right now, he had in his pocket a letter from his uncle that contained a check for $1000. Billy's mother had run dry as a source of funds and Monika, to whom Billy had spoken about his rich uncle, had pushed him into writing for money. She had been mysterious about why she needed it, but Billy had long ago resigned himself to the fact that she was a mysterious girl. She never told him anything about her family in Munich or why she had taken it into her head at the age of 18 to take a degree at Trinity College in Dublin. She was always going off on secret appointments but, except for that, most of the time was extremely agreeable to live with. That had been the condition on which she had moved into his cozy little fiat off the Place. He was to ask no questions when she said she hadto be away for an evening or sometimes a week. There were some delicate meetings among the delegates to NATO that could not be talked about. He was not a curious young man when it came to matters that did not concern him.

Monika was not really pretty, with her black, tangled hair and low-heeled shoes and sensible stockings, but she had large blue eyes that lit up her face when she smiled and a lovely small figure. The small was important. Billy was only 5'6" tall and slightly built and he didn't like the feeling of inferiority taller women gave him.

If he had been asked on this evening what profession he intended to follow, he would most probably have said that he was going to re-enlist. Every once in a while, Monika would get angry at him and denounce him for his lack of ambition. With his engaging youthful athlete's smile, he would agree with her that he had no ambition. The melancholy darkness of his eyes, fringed by heavy black lashes, gave his smile an extra value, as though he had made a special sad effort at gaiety for its recipient. Billy knew enough about himself not to turn the smile on too often.

Tonight was one of the times Monika had a mysterious appointment. "Don't wait up for me," she said as they gazed at the spotlit gilt magnificence of the Place's walls and windows. "I may be late, maybe all night."

"You're ruining my sex life," he said.

"I bet," she said. Trinity College, plus the troops of NATO, had given her an easy command of both the English and the American languages. She had written a paper on Swift and another one on Raymond Chandler. The Irish, she had told Billy, had liked the one on Chandler better. She was full of surprises, Monika, and it was one of the things he liked best about her. She was not the sort of girl to tear a passion to tatters, either, and she brought home interesting books for him to read. Although he had balked at Marx and Jung. There were limits to what a girl could expect of a man.

He kissed her lightly and watched her get into a cab. She sprang into it as if she were doing the running broad jump at a track meet. He admired her energy. He couldn't hear the address that she gave the driver. It occurred to him that he never heard where she was going when he put her in a cab.

He shrugged and strolled toward a café. It was too early to go home and there was nobody else he especially wanted to see that night.

In the café, he ordered a beer and took out the envelope with the check and his uncle's letter in it. 'There had been an exchange of letters, quite cordial, since Billy had seen the item in Time about Tom Jordache's death and the awful photograph of Rudolph's wife naked that they'd dug up somewhere. He hadn't mentioned the photograph in the letter to Rudolph and had been sincere, or as sincere as he could be, with his condolences. Uncle Rudolph had been chatty in his letter, with all the family news. He sounded like a lonely man who didn't know quite what to do with himself and he had written sadly, if reticently, of his divorce and the claiming of Cousin Wesley by the lady from Indianapolis. He had not mentioned the police record of Wesley's mother as a common prostitute, but Billy's own mother had not been sparing in details. His mother's letters tended to be stern and admonitory. She had never forgiven him for his refusal to keep away from the Army--she would have enjoyed playing the honored martyr, he felt resentfully, if he had gone to jail for five years as a conscientious objector. Everyone to his or her principles. For himself, he preferred playing tennis with a 47-year-old colonel and living in comparative luxury with a bright, shapely, multilingual and--admit it--beloved Fräulein in the civilized city of Brussels.

His letter to his uncle asking for a loan had been graceful and rueful rather than importunate. There had been some unlucky poker games, he had hinted, an expensive automobile breakdown, the necessity to buy a new car.... Rudolph's letter, which had arrived that morning, had been understanding, though he had made it clear that he expected to be repaid. Monika wanted the cash the next morning and he would have to go to the bank. He wondered what she might need it for. What the hell, he thought, dismissing the subject, it's only money and it's not even mine. He ordered a second beer.

•

In the morning, he discovered what she wanted the money for. She woke him up when she came in at dawn, made him a cup of coffee, sat him down and told him the $1000 was to be used to bribe a sergeant at the Army arms depot, so that the people she was working with, whom she wouldn't name or describe, could go in with a U. S. Army truck, which he, Billy, was expected to supply from the motor pool, and lift an unspecified number of guns, grenades and rounds of ammunition. He himself was not to be involved in the deal. Only to the extent of driving the truck out of the pool one night, with authentic orders, and delivering it half a mile down the road to a man who would be dressed as a U. S. Army MP lieutenant. The truck would he back before dawn. She said all this calmly, while he sat in silence, sipping his coffee, wondering if she had been on drugs all night. In the course of her explanation, given in the same even tones she might have used back at Trinity at a seminar on an obscure Irish poet, she also explained that he had been picked as her lover because of his job at the motor pool, though she admitted that she had become fond of him, very fond, since then.

He tried to control his voice when he finally spoke. "What the hell is all this stuff going to be used for?"

"I can't tell you, darling," she said, stroking his hand across the kitchen table. "And you'll be better off never knowing."

"You're a terrorist," he said.

"That's a word like any other," she said, shrugging. "I might prefer the word idealist, or a phrase like seeker after justice or an enemy of torture or just plain lover of the ordinary, traumatized, brainwashed common man. Take your pick."

"What if I just went to NATO and told them about you? About this crazy scheme?" He felt silly sitting there naked, shivering in a small, cold, bourgeois kitchen, dressed only in art old bathrobe that was half open, with his balls hanging out, talking about blowing people up.

"I wouldn't try that, darling,'- she said. "First of all, they would never believe you. I'd say that I had told you I'd leave you and this was your weird hippie way of getting revenge. And some of the boys I know can be very nasty customers, indeed...."

"You're threatening me," he said. "I guess you could call it that."

By the look in her eye he knew that she was not joking, that she was deadly serious. Serious was exactly the word. And deadly. He felt cold and frightened. He had never posed as a hero. He had never even had a fistfight in his life. "If I do this, this once," he said, trying to keep his voice from quavering, "I never want to see you again."

"That's for you to decide," she said evenly.

"I'll tell you at noon," he said, his mind racing, searching for a way he could get out of the whole thing, fly to America, hide out in Paris, London, escape the whole insane, surrealist plot in six hours.

"That will be time enough," Monika said. "The banks are open in the afternoon. But I must tell you, for your own sake--you will he watched."

"What the hell kind of woman are you?" he shouted, his voice out of control. "If you weren't so superficial and frivolous and self-satisfied," she said, without raising her voice, "you'd know by now, after living with me as long as you've clone."

"I don't know what's so frivolous and self-satisfied about not wanting to kill people," he said, stung by her description of him. "Don't be so goddamned smug."

"Every day," she said, "you put on a uniform. In the same uniform, thousands of young men your age go out every day to kill hundreds of thousands of people who never did them any harm. I consider that frivolous." As she talked, her eyes finally were darkening with anger.

"And you're going to stop that?" he said loudly. "You and five or six other murderous thugs?"

"We can try. Among other things that we will try. At least we'll have the satisfaction of knowing that we tried. And what satisfaction will you have?" She sneered at him, her mouth an ugly grimace. "That you played tennis while it all was happening? That there isn't a single human being alive who has any respect for you? That you sat idly by while the men whose boots you licked morning, noon and night were plotting to blow up the world? When everything goes up in the final explosion, are you going to be proud of yourself as you die because you ate well and drank well and lucked well while it all was being prepared? Wake up! Wake up! There's no law that says you have to be a worm."

"Rhetoric," he said. "So what'll you do--hijack an Israeli plane, break some windows in an embassy, shoot a policeman while he's directing traffic? Is that your idea of saving the world?"

"First of all, this has nothing to do with the Israelis. We--my group and I--have varying opinions on that subject, so don't worry about your Jewish friends, or my Jewish friends, for that matter."

"Thank you," he said sardonically, "for your German forbearance of the Jews."

"You bastard." She tried to slap him across the table, but he was too fast for her and caught her hand.

"None of that," he said. "You may be wonderful with a machine gun, but you're not a boxer, lady. Nobody's going to get away with hitting me. You've yelled at me anti yelled at me and threatened me and asked me to do something that might get me killed or land me in prison for life and you haven't explained anything yet." Recklessly, he went on, raving now. "If I'm going to help you, it's not going to be because you're scaring me into it or bribing me or anything like that. I'll make a deal with you. You're right--there's no law that says I have to be a worm. You convince me anti I'm with you. You sit down and keep your goddamn hands and your goddamn threats to yourself and calmly explain. Otherwise, no soap. You understand that?"

"Let go of my hand," she said sullenly.

He dropped her hand. She stared at him furiously. Then she began to chuckle. "Hey, Billy boy, there's something there, after all. Who would have guessed that? I think we need some fresh coffee. And you're cold. Go in and get dressed and put on a sweater and we'll have a nice little talk over the breakfast table about the wonder of being alive in the 20th Century."

In the bedroom, while he was getting dressed, he started shivering again. But even while he was shivering, he felt crazily exhilarated. For once, he hadn't backed down or slid away or evaded. And it could be a matter of life and death, he was sure of that. There was no sense in underestimating Monika's toughness or passion. The papers were full of stories of hijackings, bombings, political murders, theatrical massacres, and they were plotted and carried out by people who sat at the next desk from yours, who stood by your side in a bus, who went to bed with you, ate dinner with you. It was his tough luck that Monika was one of them. As she had said, he should have guessed something. Her insults had wounded him; it was one thing to know that you were worthless, it was another to be told by a woman whom you admired, more than that--much more--loved, who acted as though she loved you, that you had no value.

The chuckle in the cold, dawnlit kitchen had been a gift of respect and he accepted it gratefully. In Monika's eyes now, he was a worthy opponent and had to be treated accordingly. Until now, he had let the world go its own way and had been satisfied to find a snug Government-issue corner for himself. Well, the world had caught up with him and he had to deal with it. Frightened and wounded as he was, somehow he had found the strength to do so. He was involved, whether he liked it or not, and ready to deal. From one moment to another, almost instinctively, he had put a new price on his existence.

The hell with her, he thought, as he put on a sweater. Loss is the risk of breathing. The hell with all of them.

•

Monika was heating a fresh pot of coffee when he went back into the kitchen. She had taken off her shoes and was padding around in her stockinged feet, her hair a dark mess, like any housewife newly risen from the marital bed to make breakfast for her husband on the way to the office. Terror in thekitchen, bloodshed over a hot stove, victims designated among the clatter of pots and pans. He sat down at the scarred wooden table, rescued from some Belgian farmhouse, and Monika poured the coffee into his cup. Efficient German Hausfrau. She made good coffee. He tasted it with relish. She poured some coffee for herself, smiled at him gently. The woman who had told him that he had been selected as her lover because he happened to run a motor pool from which trucks could be obtained for deadly errands had disappeared. For the time being. For ten minutes on a cold morning, he thought, as he drank the scalding coffee.

"Well," he said, "where do we begin?" He looked at his watch. "It can't take too long. I have to be at work soon."

"We begin at the beginning," she said. "The state of the world. The world's in a mess. The fascists are everywhere...."

"In America...?"he said. "Come on, Monika."

"In America, it's still disguised," she said impatiently. "They can still afford to disguise it. But who gives them the arms, the money, the smoke screens, finally, the real support? The fat cats in Washington, New York, Texas. If you're going to insist on being naive, I won't bother talking to you."

"You sound as though it all comes out of a book."

"'Why not?" she said. "What's wrong with learning from a book? It wouldn't do you any harm to read a few books, either. If you're so worried about your beloved native land, you'll be relieved to hear that we're not operating in America now, not the people I'm with, anyway, though I'm not saying there aren't some who do. There're bombs going off in America, too, and there'll be more, I promise you. America's at the base of the pyramid and in the end it will be the prime target. And you're going to be surprised how easily it will crumble.Because the pyramid is shaky; it's based on lies, immoral privileges, stolen wealth, subjugated populations; it's based on sand beneath the surface."

"You sound more like a book than ever," he said. "Why don't you just get it out of the library and I'll read it myself?"

Monika ignored his gibe. "What we have to do," she went on, "is show that it's vulnerable as well as evil."

"How do you plan to do that with a few crazy gangsters?"

"Don't use that word," she said warningly.

"Whatever you want to call them. Gunmen. Assassins. Whatever."

"Castro did it in Cuba with twelve men."

"America's not Cuba," he said. "And neither is Europe."

"They're near enough. Both of them. The attacks will multiply. The men in power will get uneasy, uncertain, finally frightened. They'll act out of fear, make one mistake after another, each one worse than the last. They'll apply pressure. They'll make disastrous concessions that will only make people realize that they were close to defeat and will inspire more incidents, more cracks in the walls."

"Oh," he said, "turn off the record, will you?"

"A bank president will be assassinated," she chanted, rapt in her vision, "an ambassador kidnaped, a strike paralyze a country, money lose its value. They won't know where the next blow is coming from, just that there will be a next blow. The pressure will build up, until the whole thing explodes. It won't take armies...just a few dedicated people...."

"Like you?" he said.

"Like me," she said defiantly.

"And if you succeed, then what?" he said. "Russia takes the whole pot. Is that what you want?"

"Russia's time will come," she said.

"Don't think I'm fool enough to want that."

"What do you want, then?"

"I want the world to stop being poisoned, stop being headed toward extinction, one way or another. I want to stop the warriors we have now, the spies, the nuclear bombers, the bribed politicians, the killing for profit.... People are suffering and I want them to know who's making them suffer and what they're getting out of it."

"All right," he said, "that's all very admirable. But let's speak practically. Supposing I get you the truck; supposing you put your hands on a few grenades, plastique, guns. Just what, specifically, are you going to do with them?"

"Specifically," she said, "we are planning to blow in the windows of a bank here in Brussels, get some explosive inside the Spanish embassy, wipe out a judge in Germany who's the biggest pig on the Continent. I can't tell you more than that. For your own sake."

"You're ready to do a lot of things for my sake, aren't you?" he said. He bowed sardonically. "I thank you, my mother thanks you, my colonel thanks you."

"Don't be flip," she said coldly. "Don't ever be flip with me again."

"You sound as though you're ready to shoot me right now, dear little gunlady," he said, mocking her, pushing himself to courage, though he was shivering again, sweater and all.

"I've never shot anybody," she said. "And don't propose to. That is not my job. And if your scruples are so delicate, perhaps you'd like to hear that we plan to operate in such a way here in Belgium that nobody will get killed. What we do is merely unsettle, warn, symbolize."

"That's Belgium," he said. "What about other places?"

"That doesn't concern you," she said. "You don't have to know anything about it. Later on, if you are convinced and you want to take a more active part, you will be trained, you will be in on the discussions. Right now, all you are to do is go to the bank and cash your uncle's check and make a truck available for a few hours one night. Christ," she said fiercely, "it's nothing new to you, with your bribes--don't think I don't know how you live so high on a sergeant's pay--with your black-market gasoline...."

"My God, Monika," he said, "do you mean to say you can't tell the difference between a little petty larceny and what you're asking me to do?"

"Yes," she said. "One is cheap and distasteful and the other is noble."

"First you tell me there's nobody in the whole world who respects me," he said, "then you ask me to he noble. Don't you think you're asking too much?"

"No," she said. "You're intelligent...."

"Thanks again, lady."

"You're intelligent," she repeated, "butyou're uninformed. You've been leading your life in a trance. You don't like what you are, you despise everybody around you, I've heard you talk about your family, your mother, your father, your uncle, the animals you work with.... Don't deny it." She put up her hand to stop him as he tried to speak. "You've kept everything narrow, inside yourself. Nobody's challenged you to face yourself, open up, to see what it all means. Well, I'm challenging you now."

"And hinting that something very nasty will happen to me if I don't do as you want," he said.

"That's the way it goes, laddie," she said. "Think over what I've just said as you work this morning."

"I'll do just that." He stood up. "I've got to get to the office."

"I'll be waiting for you at lunchtime," she said.

"I bet you will," he said, as he went out the door.

•

The morning in the office passed for him in a blur. As he checked out orders, requests, manifests, operation reports, he made dozens of decisions, each one over and over again, each one discarded, the next one reached and discarded in turn. Three times he picked up the phone to call the colonel, spill everything, ask him for advice, help, then put the phone down. He looked up the schedule of the planes flying out of Brussels to New York, checked the notation with a pencil for the earliest flight to New York, decided to go to the hank, cash his uncle's check and get on the plane that morning. Hecould go to the CIA in Washington, explain his predicament, get Monika put behind bars, be something of a secret hero in those secret corridors. Or would he? 'Would those men, deft in murder and complicated underground maneuvers and the overthrow of governments, congratulate him and secretly, in their own style, scorn him for his cowardice? Or, even worse, turn him into a double agent, order him back to join whatever band Monika belonged to, tell him to report weekly on their doings? Did he want Monika behind bars? Even that morning, he could not honestly tell himself that he didn't love her. Love? There was a word. Most women bored him. Usually he made an excuse, after copulation, to jump out of bed and go home. With Monika, the night's entwining could never be called copulation. It was absolute delight. Had she learned what she knew about how to use her body to enchant a man at Trinity College, Dublin? The thought, even now, of losing her was desolation. To put it coarsely, he told himself, I can come five times a night with her and look forward eagerly to seeing her naked and rosy in bed at lunchtime.

He didn't want to be killed. He knew that, just as he knew he didn't want to give up Mon ika. But there was something titillating, deeply exciting, about the thought that he was daring enough to make love to a woman, make her gasp in pleasure and pain, at six in the morning and know that she was ready to order his execution at noon.

His life until now, he realized, had been drab, usual, without real emotion or feeling. She had disturbed him to whatever depths he was capable of. Was he going to be content, all his life, to be just a member of the herd, docile, imposed upon, shuttling between monotonous work and monotonous entertainment? Seasonal laborer, he had written.

He had thought that Monika was a romantic girl. At first it had amused him. She had read too many books, had studied too many old plays, he had told himself. But now, in the routine comings and goings of the military office, she seemed to him to be living her life at a pace that made him and all around him seem like slugs.

What would it be like to say to her, "I'm with you"? To slide in and out of shadows? To hear an explosion somewhere nearby while he was playing tennis at the immaculate club with the colonel and know that he had scheduled it? To pass a bank on whose board his uncle Rudolph sat and stealthily depose a bomb that would explode before the bank opened its doors in the morning? What brilliant fanatics would he meet, who flitted from one country to another, who would be heroes in the history books, perhaps, a century from now, who killed with poison, with their bare hands, who could teach you those mysteries, who could make you forget you were only 5'6" tall?

In the end, he did not call the colonel, he did not cash the check, he made no arrangements at the motor pool, he did not go out to the airport.

What he did was drift, dazed, through the morning and when the colonel called and said there was a game on at 5:30 that afternoon, he said, "Yes, sir, I'll be there," though he felt that there was a good chance he'd be dead by then.

•

She was waiting for him when he came out of the office. He was relieved that she had combed her hair, because the other men streaming past to go to lunch all looked at them speculatively, leers suppressed, mostly because of his rank, and he didn't like the idea of their thinking he consorted with a slob.

"Well?" she said.

"Let's have lunch," he said.

He took her to a good restaurant, where he knew the other men who wanted a change from the food in the Army mess were not likely to go. He also wanted the reassurance of crisp tablecloths, flowers on the tables, attentive waiters, a place where there was no suggestion of the world tottering, desperate plotters, crumbling pyramids. He ordered, for them both, oysters and sole.

They ate quietly, talking politely about the weather, about a conference that was to start tomorrow at which she was to act as translator, about his date for tennis with the colonel at 5:30, about a play that was coming to Brussels that she wanted to see. There was no reference to what had passed between them that morning until the coffee came. Then she said, "Well, what have you decided?"

"Nothing," he said. Even in the overheated cozy restaurant, he felt cold again. "I sent the check back to my uncle this morning."

She smiled coldly. "That's a decision, isn't it?"

"Partially." he said. He was lying. The check was still in his wallet. He hadn't known he was going to say it. It had come out mechanically, as though something had pushed a lever in his brain. But even as he said it, he knew he was going to mail the check hack, with thanks, explaining to his uncle that his finances had taken a turn for the better and there was no need at the moment for help. It would prove useful later on, when he really needed something from Uncle Rudolph.

"All right," she said calmly, "if you were afraid that the money could he traced, I understand." She shrugged. "It's not too important. We'll find the money someplace else. But how about the truck?"

"I haven't done anything about it."

"You have all afternoon."

"No, I haven't made up my mind yet."

"We can handle that, too, I suppose," she said. "All you have to do is look the other way."

"I'm not going to do that, either," he said. "I have a lot of thinking to do before I decide one way or another. If your friends want to kill me," he said harshly, but keeping his voice low, because he saw their waiter approaching with more coffee, "tell them that I'll be armed." He had had one morning's practice with a .45, could take it apart and reassemble it, but had had a very low score when he had fired at a target for the record. Gun fight at the Brussels OK Corral, he thought. Who was it--John Wayne? What would John Wayne have done today? He giggled.

"What're you laughing about?" she asked sharply.

"I happened to think of a movie I once saw," he said.

She smiled at him strangely. "You don't have to pack a gun. Nobody's going to shoot you. You're not worth a bullet."

"That's nice to hear," he said.

"Does anything ever make an impression on you, touch you?"

"I'll make out a list," he said, "and give it to you the next time we meet. If we meet."

"We'll meet," she said.

"When are you moving out of the apartment?" he asked.

She looked at him in surprise. He couldn't tell whether the surprise was real or feigned. "I hadn't intended to move out. Do you want me to move out?"

"I don't know," lie said. "But after today...."

"For the time being," she said, "let's forget today. I like living with you. I've found that politics has nothing to do with sex. Maybe with other people, but not with me. I adore going to bed with you. I haven't had much luck in bed with other men. The orgasms are few and far between in the New Left--at least for me--and in this day and age, ladies have been taught that orgasms are a lady's God-given right. You're the answer to a maiden's prayer for that, darling, if you don't mind my being a little vulgar. At least for this particular maiden. And I like good dinners, which you are obliging enough to supply. So"--she lit a cigarette. She smoked incessantly and the ashtrays in the apartment were always piled with butts. It irritated him, as he did not smoke and took seriously the warnings of the magazine articles about mortality rates for smokers. But, he supposed, you couldn't expect a terrorist who was constantly on the lookout for the police or execution squads to worry about dying from cancer of the lungs at the age of 60--"So," she said, exhaling smoke through her nostrils, "I'll divide my life while it lasts into compartments. You for sex and lobster and pâté de foie gras and others for less serious occupations, like shooting German judges. Aren't you glad I'm such a sensible girl?"

She's cutting me to pieces, he thought, little jagged pieces. "I'm not glad about anything." he said.

"Don't look so mournful, laddie," she said. "Everybody to his or her own talents. And now, I have most of the afternoon off. Can you sneak away for an hour or two?"

"Yes." He had long ago perfected a system of checking into and out of the office without being noticed.

"Good." She patted his hand. "Let's go home and get into bed and have a perfectly delicious afternoon fuck."

Furious with himself for not being able to stand up, throw a bill onto the table for the check and stalk out of the restaurant, he said, "I have to go back to the office for ten minutes. I'll meet you home."

"I can't wait." She smiled at him, her large blue eyes lighting up her Bavarian-Trinity face.

•

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 V of light the work 188 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. He always had to repress a tendency to laugh when she called him John, because 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 was some kind of network of cells like the one Billy had joined in other cities of Europe, but so far he had no notion of where they were or exactly what 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 aside from the tourist office, there had been explosions that he had read about in the papers in a branch of an American bank in Brussels and outside the office of Olympic Airways. Various revolutionary groups had written letters to the papers, each of them taking credit for the bombings: Basques, Palestinians, Cypriots, Turks, whatever. As Monika said, there were always plenty of organizations ready to get the publicity; the more the merrier--it added to the general uneasy confusion. 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 in either 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, sacl 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 three more years 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."

•

Sitting in the bus going in the opposite direction from the house where he lived, surrounded by women going home after a clay's shopping to prepare the family dinner, by children on the way home from school, by old men reading the evening newspaper, Billy 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 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. Colonel's pet, he was disdained by die men around him, had been dismissed as worthless by Monika. The disdain of his comrades-in-arms 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 clay 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 lowly hireling 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 passers-by. 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 into 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 onto a stool next to him. "I'll have a vodka on ice," she said to the barman.

"Did George order you to come?" Billy 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 some place 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 that. "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."

"So," he said, "business hours are over."

"For the day." She laughed and kissed his cheek. She had decided to be Monika now, he saw, not Heidi.

"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 f tick."

"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 being followed. 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 know 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. Billy would have liked another beer, but Monika ordered two coffees.

When they came back 15 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 cheek as though they were saying goodbye 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 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 taken in his captain's uniform that his mother had kept. 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, too, 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 60 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. "Cozy. 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 capitalistic 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 eying 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, squinting like a man who has lost his glasses, at Billy. "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, put on the defensive, which was an unusual position for her in any company, by his rambling, subtly hostile air.

"He's told you, no doubt, that he intends to re-enlist." 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 1945."

"I was born in 1944," 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, though 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 said, "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, though we manage to forget many other things." He took a long gulp of his whisky.

"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 whisky 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 have 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 adollar. I came here to try to persuade you to...well...to reconsider. I've 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've antagonized you about your girl, whom I don't know, as you pointed out, because of a peculiar look on a doorstep, and who may be perfect for you, 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."

•

His father said a lot of things over dinner, on a variety of subjects. He insisted upon Billy's 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 clay, 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 clown 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 few minutes have more--what's the wor 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.

"That family--the Jordaches--the old man a suicide, her brother murdered and sainted Rudolph just about beaten to death in his own apartment. 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 murdered 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.

"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 Billy 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 clown at his desk and stared at his typewriter.

Hopeless, hopeless, he thought. Poor, hopeless, seedy, fantasying, beloved man.

•

Monika came home before he went to work in the morning. With the package he was to deliver to an address on the Rue du Gros-Caillou he had to memorize in the seventh arrondissement in Paris when he went to the capital of Francewith his colonel. The package was comparatively harmless--just 10,000 French francs in old bills and an American Army .45-caliber automatic pistol, equipped with a silencer and two spare clips.

•

The .45 and the clips 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 20 minutes past three in the afternoon. He had looked at the map of Paris and seen that the Rue du GrosCaillou was a short street that ran between the Rue Augereau and the Rue de Grenelle, not far from L'Ecole Militaire. The 10,000 francs were folded in an envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket.

He was early. Monika had told him lie would be expected at 3:30. Under his breath he repeated the address she had made him memorize. He strolled, peering in at the shopwindows, looking, he hoped, like an idle American tourist. He was still about 30 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 and his skin was tingling, as though small pins were being jabbed into him in a thousand places. He could feel his hand trembling.

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 safe-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 lie 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 there. The guardianled 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. The guardian went back to his desk, leaving Billy alone. Billy waited until the guardian was out of sight, then put the automatic, the spare clips and the envelope with the 10.000 francs in it into the box. He closed the door of the box, leaving his key in the lock, and called for the guardian. The guardian came back and turned the two keys and gave Billy his.

Billy took a deep breath, said, "Merci," and 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, the concierge said. 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 Ilse switchboard closed down. But the umber never answered.

He tried to sleep, but every time he dozed off. he awoke 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 seventh arrondissement. The police were still trying to establish his identity.

They are playing it cozy, 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 were going to re-enlist, he said, "No, sir, I've decided against it."

•

As Billy was packing his bags to leave Brussels, he looked at the piece of paper.

"Honorable Discharge," he read. He smiled wryly as he slipped the document into a stiff envelope. Don't believe everything you see in print.

The next piece of paper he put into the envelope was a letter from his father. His father was happy that he had decided wisely about the Army and unhappy that he had decided not to come to Chicago, though he understood the attractions of Europe for a young man. Chicago could wait for a year or two. There was news about his mother, too. She was directing a picture. His father believed he should write and congratulate her. Of all things, his father added, one of the leading actors in the movie was Billy's cousin Wesley. A sullen boy, Wesley, at least in William Abbott's opinion. The Jordaches took care of the Jordaches, his father wrote. A pity he, Billy, was not on better terms with his mother.

The next thing Billy put into his bag was a Spanish-English dictionary. A Belgian businessman with whom he had played tennis and who was involved in building a complex of bungalows and condominiums at a place called El Faro, near Marbella, in Spain, with six tennis courts, had offered him a contract for a year as a tennis pro. The idea of Spain was attractive after Brussels and it was no contest against Chicago, and, after all, the only thing he did well was play tennis and it was a clean and well-paid job, in the open air, so he had said yes. He could stand some sunshine. Beware the senoñritas, his father had warned him.

The last piece of paper was undated and signed Heidi. It had been in an unstamped envelope that he had found in his mailbox the night before. "Had to depart suddenly because of the death of a friend. Understand you are not re-enlisting. Leave forwarding address, though I am sure I can find you. We have unfinished business to attend to."

He did not smile as he read the letter and tore it into small pieces and flushed it down the toilet. He did not leave a forwarding address.

He took the train to Paris. He had sold his car. Monika knew it too well--make, year, license number. Who knew how many people had its description and might be looking for it on the roads of Europe?

He could buy a new car in France. He could afford it. There was a modest but sufficient legacy waiting for him in the vault in the bank on the corner of the Avenue Bosquet in the seventh arrondissement in Paris.

"Billy had resigned himself to the fact that she was a mysterious girl."

The concluding installment of this excerpt from Irwin Shaw's forthcoming novel, "Beggarman, Thief," will appear in our October issue.