Nightwork

'How about the fifteen thousand for the picture? Were you leading me along on that, too?'

'On my honor, old man.' He raised his glass. To Rêve de Minuit.' We all clinked glasses happily. I had grown attached to the animal in the time that it took him to come from dead last at the turn, and then go on to lead the pack in the final three strides, and I told Fabian I hated to see him go.

'I'm afraid you have the instincts of a bankrupt, my friend,' Fabian had said. 'You are not yet sufficiently rich to love horses enough to hold onto them. The same, I may say, goes for ladies.' He looked meaningfully at Lily. There had been a noticeable tension between them in Paris. He had had three or four business conferences too many at odd hours with Nadine Bonheur. For myself, I had carefully avoided going to the studio where the movie was being shot and had not seen any of the people involved in it again. The busy signal on the telephone still tolled its message to me.

'What we'll do,' Fabian was saying, 'is buy a car. Do you have any objection to Jaguars?'

Neither Lily nor I had any objection to Jaguars.

'A Mercedes might be too flashy,' he said. 'We do not wish to appear nouveau riche. Anyway, I like to do what I can for the poor old Brits.'

'Hear, hear,' Lily said.

The waiter came with the caviar. 'Just lemon, please,' Fabian said, waving away the platter with chopped hard-boiled eggs and onion on it. 'Let us not dilute the pleasure.'

The waiter spooned mounds of grayish pearls on our plates. This was only the fourth time in my life that I had tasted caviar. I remembered the other three times clearly.

'We will fly to Zurich,' Fabian said. 'I have a little business to do in that fair city. Well pick up the car there. I think the only honest automobile dealers in the world can be found in Switzerland. Besides, there's a first-class hotel there I'd like Douglas to see.'

Baby, I thought, if they could see good old Miles Fabian back in Lowell, Massachusetts, now. Or if Drusack could see me. Then I was sorry I had thought of Drusack. Fabian had not yet asked me how I had come to be carrying seventy thousand dollars in my suitcase and I hadn't told him. Actually, there were many things we had to talk about. In Paris Fabian had spent most of his time around the movie set. Watching the shop, as he put it, while I wandered around sightseeing, sinking blissfully into the city. When we were together. Lily was almost always present and neither of us, I was sure, wanted her to hear about the details of our partnership, as I now thought of it. As for her, if she considered it odd that her lover of one night in Florence had turned up promptly in another country as the close friend and associate of her lover of some years, she gave no sign. As I was to find out, as long as she was fed and admired and taken to interesting places, she asked no questions. She had an aristocratic disregard for the machinery behind events. She was the sort of woman you could never imagine in a kitchen or an office.

'I would like to bring up a delicate subject,' Fabian said, expertly loading a portion of caviar on his toast, not losing a single egg. 'It is a question of numbers. Three to be exact.' He looked first at Lily, then at me. 'Do you get my drift?'

No,' I said.

Lily said nothing.

'It is the wrong number for traveling,' Fabian went on. 'It can lead to division, subterfuge, jealousy, tragedy.'

'I see what you mean,' I said, feeling a hot flush begin at my collar.

'I suppose you agree, Douglas, that Lily here is a beautiful woman.'

I nodded.

'And Douglas is a most attractive young man,' Fabian said, his tone paternal and kindly. 'And will become more so as he becomes accustomed to wealth and after we supply him with a fresh wardrobe, which I intend to do as soon as we reach Rome.'

'Yes,' Lily said. She looked demurely down at her plate.

'We must face the truth. I am an older man. I hope nobody is going to contradict me.'

Nobody contradicted him.

'The chances of mischief are plain,' Fabian helped himself to more caviar. 'If there is a lady you have in mind as a fit traveling companion, Douglas, why don't you get in touch with her?'