Nightwork

The man pushed the cigar case toward me. 'May I offer you one?'

'Thank you, no. I don't smoke,' I lied.

He took out a small gleaming clipper and cut off the end. He had thick, brutal, manicured hands that went with his high-flushed, fleshy face and hard blue eyes and jaw. I would not have liked to work for him or be his son. I figured he was over forty years old. 'Pure Havana,' he said, 'almost impossible to find back home. The Swiss are neutral about Castro, thank God.' He used a thin gold lighter to start the cigar and leaned back, puffing comfortably. I looked out the window morosely at the snowy countryside. I had thought I was going to be on holiday, too. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to turn around at the next station and start for home. Except where was home? I thought of Drusack, who was not going to St Moritz.

The train went into a tunnel and it was absolutely dark in the compartment. I wished the tunnel would go on forever. Self-pityingly, I remembered the nights at the St Augustine and thought, darkness is my element.

Sometime after we emerged from the tunnel, we were in sunlight. We had climbed out of the gray cloud that hung over the Swiss plain. The sunlight was somehow an affront to my sensibility. The man was dozing now, his head thrown back, the cigar dead in an ashtray. His wife had the Herald Tribune and was reading the comic strips, a rapt expression on her face. She looked foolish, her mouth pursed, her eyes childish and bright under the leopard hat. Was that what I had thought money was going to buy for me?

She became conscious that I was staring at her, looked up at me, giggled coquettishly. 'I'm a pushover for comic strips,' she said. 'I'm always afraid Rip Kirby is going to get killed in the next installment.'

I smiled inanely, looked at the diamond on her finger, earned, I was sure, in honest matrimony. She peered obliquely at me. I guessed that she never looked at anyone straight-on. 'I've seen you someplace before,' she said. 'Haven't I?'

'Perhaps,' I said.

'Weren't you on the plane Wednesday night? The club plane?'

'I was on it,' I said.

'I was sure I knew you from someplace before that. Sun Valley maybe?'

'I've never been in Sun Valley,' I said. ; That's the wonderful thing about skiing,' she said, 'you get to meet the same people all over the world.'

The man groaned a little, awakened by the sound of our voices. Coming out of sleep, his eyes stared at me with blank hostility. I had the feeling that hostility was his natural and fundamental condition and that I had surprised him before he had time to arrange himself for the ordinary traffic of society.

'Bill,' the woman said, 'this gentleman was on the plane with us.' From the way she said it, it sounded as though it had been an extraordinary pleasure for us all.

'Is that so?' Bill said.

'I always feel it's lucky to find Americans to travel with,' the woman said. 'The language and everything. Europeans make you feel like such a dummy. I think this calls for a drink-drink.' She opened the jewel case, which she had kept on the seat beside her, and brought out an elegant silver flask. There were three small chromium cups, one inside the other, over the cap, and she gave one to me and one to her husband and kept one for herself. 'I hope you like cognac,' she said, as she poured the liquor carefully into our cups. My hand was shaking, and some of the cognac spilled over on it. 'Oh, I'm so sorry,' she said.

'Nothing," I said. The reason my hand was shaking was that the man had taken off the foulard scarf around his neck and for the first time I saw the tie he was wearing. It was a dark red woolen tie. It was either the tie that I had packed in my bag or one exactly like it. He crossed his legs and I looked down at his shoes. They were not new. I had had just such a pair of shoes in my bag.

'Here's to the first one to break a leg this year,' the man said, raising his chromium cup. He laughed harshly. I was sure he had never broken anything. He was just the sort of man who had never been sick a day in his life and didn't carry anything stronger than aspirin with him when he traveled.

I drank my cognac in one gulp. I needed it. And I was glad when the lady refilled my cup immediately. I raised the cup gallantly to her and smiled widely and falsely, hoping the train would be wrecked and both she and her husband crushed, so that I could search them and their baggage thoroughly. 'You people certainly know how to travel,' I said, with an exaggerated, admiring shake of the head.

'Be prepared in foreign lands,' the man said. 'That's our motto. Say...' He extended his hand. 'My name's Bill. Bill Sloane. And the little lady is Flora.'

I shook his hand and told them my name. His hand was hard and cold. The little lady (weight one twenty-five, I figured) smiled winsomely and poured some more cognac.