Irwin Shaw - Evening in Byzantium

Evening in Byzantium

Irwin Shaw

Contents

Many thanks to my editor, Kathy Anderson, for her invaluable assistance and advice.

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To Salka Viertel

Overture

Dinosauric, obsolete, functions and powers atrophied, dressed in sport shirts from Sulka and Cardin, they sat across from each other at small tables in airy rooms overlooking the changing sea and dealt and received cards just as they had done in the lush years in the rainfall forest of the West Coast when in all seasons they had announced the law in the banks, the board rooms, the Moorish mansions, the chateaux, the English castles, the Georgian town houses of Southern California.

From time to time phones rang, and hearty, deferential voices spoke from Oslo, New Delhi, Paris, Berlin, New York, and the card players barked into the instruments and gave orders that at another time would have had meaning and no doubt been obeyed.

Exiled kings on annual pilgrimage, unwitting Lears permitted small bands of faithful retainers, living in pomp without circumstance, they said, Gin, and, Youre on the schneider, and passed checks for thousands of dollars back and forth. Sometimes they talked of the preglacial era. I gave her her first job. Seventy-five a week. She was laying a dialogue coach in the Valley at the time.

And, He brought it two and a half million over the budget, and we had to yank it in Chicago after three days, and now look at him, the pricks in New York say hes a genius. Shit.

And they said, The future is in cassettes and the youngest of them in the room, who was fifty-eight, said, What future?

And they said, Spades. Double.

Below, on the terrace seven feet above sea level, open to the sun and wind, leaner and hungrier men spoke their minds. Signaling the hurrying waiters for black coffee and aspirin, they said, It isnt like the old days.

They also said, The Russians arent coming this year. Or the Japanese, and, Venice is finished.

Under shifting clouds, in sporadic sunlight, the shifty young men carrying lion cubs and Polaroid cameras wound among them, with hustlers international smiles, soliciting trade. But after the first day the cubs were ignored except by the tourists, and the conversation flowed on, and they said, Fox is in trouble. Big trouble, and, So is everybody else.

A prize here is worth a million, they said.

In Europe, they said.

And, Whats wrong with Europe? they said.

Its a Festival-type picture, they said, but it wont draw flies in release.

And they said, What are you drinking? and, Are you coming to the party tonight?

They spoke in English, French, Spanish, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Rumanian, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, on the subject of sex, money, success, failure, promises kept and promises broken. They were honest men and thieves, pimps and panderers, and men of virtue. Some were talented, or more than that, some shrewd, or less than that. There were beautiful women and delicious girls, handsome men and men with the faces of swine. Cameras were busy, and everybody pretended he didnt know that photographs were being taken.

There were people who had been famous and were no longer, people who would be famous next week or next year, and people who would die unknown. There were people going up and people going down, people who had won their victories easily and people unjustly flung aside.

They were all gamblers in a game with no rules, placing their bets debonairly or in the sweat of fear.

At other places, in other meetings, men of science were predicting that within fifty years the sea that lapped on the beach in front of the terrace would be a dead body of water and there was a strong probability that this was the last generation to dine on lobster or be able to sow an uncontaminated seed.

In still other places bombs were being dropped, targets chosen, hills lost and taken; there were floods and volcanic eruptions, wars and the preparation for wars, governments shaken, funerals and marches. But on the terrace for two weeks in springtime France, all the world was printed on sprocketed strips of acetate that passed through a projector at the rate of 90 feet per minute, and hope and despair and beauty and death were carried around the city in flat, round, shining tin cans.

T HE plane bucked as it climbed through black pillars of cloud. To the west there were streaks of lightning. The seat-belt sign, in English and French, remained lit. The stewardesses served no drinks. The pitch of the engines changed. The passengers did not speak.

The tall man, cramped in next to the window, opened a magazine, closed it. Drops of rain made pale, transparent traces, like ghostly fingers, along the Plexiglas portholes.

There was a muffled explosion, a ripping noise. A ball of lightning rolled down the aisle, incredibly slow, then flashed out over the wing. The plane shuddered. The pitch of the engines changed again.

How comfortable it would be, the man thought, if we crashed, how definitive.

But the plane steadied, broke out of the clouds into sunlight. The lady across the aisle said, Thats the second time thats happened to me. Im beginning to feel Im being followed. The seat-light signs went off. The stewardesses started to push the drink cart down the aisle. The man asked for a Scotch and Perrier. He drank appreciatively as the plane whispered south, high across the clouded heart of France.

Craig took a cold shower to wake himself up. While he didnt exactly have a hangover, he had the impression that his eyes were fractionally slow in keeping up with the movements of his head. As usual on such mornings he decided to go on the wagon that day.

He dried himself without bothering to towel his hair. The cool wetness against his scalp was soothing. He wrapped himself in one of the big rough white terrycloth bathrobes the hotel supplied and went into the living room of the suite and rang for breakfast. He had flung his clothes around the room while having a last whisky before going to bed, and his dinner jacket and dress shirt and tie lay crumpled on a chair. The whisky glass, still half-full, was beaded with drops of moisture. He had left the bottle of Scotch next to it open.

He looked for mail in the box on the inside of the door. There was a copy of Nice-Matin and a packet of letters forwarded from New York by his secretary. There was a letter from his accountant and another from his lawyer in the packet. He recognized the monthly statement from his brokers among the other envelopes. He dropped the letters unopened on a table. With the way the market was going, his brokers statement could only be a cry from the abyss. The accountant would be sending him unpleasant bulletins about his running battle with the Internal Revenue Service. And his lawyers letter would remind him of his wife. They could all wait. It was too early in the morning for his broker, his accountant, his lawyer, and his wife.

He glanced at the front page of Nice-Matin. An agency dispatch told of more troops moving into Cambodia. Cambodge, in French. Next to the Cambodian story there was a picture of an Italian actress smiling on the Carlton terrace. She had won a prize at Cannes some years before, but her smile revealed that she had no illusions about this year. There was also a photograph of the president of France, M. Pompidou, in Auvergne. M. Pompidou was quoted as addressing the silent majority of the French people and assuring them that France was not on the brink of revolution.