Nightwork

Irwin Shaw. Nightwork

To Gerda Nielsen

1

It was night and I was alone, behind the locked door, the bulletproof glass. Outside, the city of New York was in the black grip of January. For the last two years, six times a week, I'd come in an hour before midnight and left at eight in the morning. I was neither content nor discontent. The room I worked in was warm, the work untaxing, the necessity to speak infrequent.

My duties left me time for my own amusements, with no one to give me orders or change the routine of the night. I spent an hour on the Racing Form, preparing my bets for the next day. It was a lively paper, written with brio, confident of the future, renewing hope with each edition.

Finished with my calculations of times, weights, distances, sunshine, and rain, I read, making sure always to have a supply of books on hand to suit my tastes. For other nourishment there was a sandwich and a bottle of beer that I picked up on the way to work. Twice during the night I did isometric exercises, for the arms, the gut, the legs. Despite my sedentary occupation, at the age of thirty-three I was stronger and in better condition than I had been at twenty.-I'm just short of six feet tall and weigh one hundred and eighty-five pounds. People are surprised when they hear I weigh that much. I'm vain enough to be pleased by this. But I wish I were taller. Some women have told me I look boyish, which I don't take as a compliment. I have never longed for a mother. Like most men I would prefer to resemble the sort of man who is cast on television as a captain in the Marines or the leading figure in a desperate enterprise.

* * *

I was working on an adding machine, preparing the previous day's accounts for the day staff. The machine made a noise like a large, irritated insect as I hit the keys. The sound, which had at first annoyed me, was now familiar and rhythmic, soothing. Beyond the glass, the lobby of the hotel was dark. The management saved on electricity, as on everything else.

The bulletproof pane had been put in over the front desk after the last night man had been held up for the second time. Forty-three stitches. The night man had taken up another profession.

I owed my position to the fact that, at the urging of my mother, I had taken a year's course in business procedures in college. She had insisted that I learn at least one useful thing, as she put it, in those four years. I had finished college eleven years ago and my mother was now dead.

The name of the hotel was the St Augustine. What yearning for the South the name represented for the original owner or what obscure religious whim would have been hard to say. There were no crucifixes on any of the walls, and only the four potted rubber plants in the worn lobby had any conceivable connection with the Tropics. Although it looked respectable enough on the outside, the hotel had seen better days. As had its clientele. They paid modestly for their accommodations and expected little in return. Except for two or three guests who wandered in late, I hardly had to talk to anybody. I hadn't taken the job for its opportunities for conversation. Often whole nights went by without a single light showing on the switchboard.

I was paid one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. Home was one room with kitchenette and bath on East Eighty-first Street.

* * *

Tonight I had been interrupted only once, by a prostitute who had come down from upstairs a little after one o'clock and had to be let out the front door. I hadn't been on duty when she came in so I had no idea which room she had been visiting. There was a buzzer by the side of the door that was designed to open it automatically, but it had been broken for a week. I sniffed the cold night air briefly and was happy to close the door and get back to the office.

The Racing Form was open on my desk to the next day's program at Hialeah. The warm holidays of the South. I had made my choice earlier. Ask Gloria m the second. The filly had finished out of the money in its last three outings, but had had a good race up North in the autumn and was dropping down in class. The probable odds were fifteen to one.

I had always been a gambler. I had paid a good part of my way through college in fraternity poker games. When I still was working in Vermont, I played in a weekly poker game and figured I was ahead by several thousand dollars by the time I left. Since then I had not been particularly lucky.