Nightwork by Irwin Shaw

say good-bye.”
    “What do you mean, good-bye?” Drusack was really shouting now. “Good-bye, good-bye, who says good-bye like that?”
    “I do, Mr. Drusack. I decided last night I don’t like the way you run your hotel. I’m quitting. …I have quit.”
    “Quit! Nobody quits like that. For Christ’s sake, it’s only Tuesday. You got things here. You got a half bottle of bourbon, you got your goddamn Bible, you …”
    “I’m donating it to the hotel library,” I said.
    “Grimes,” Drusack roared. “You can’t do this to me. I’ll have the police bring you in. I’ll …”
    I put the telephone gently down on its cradle. Then I went out to lunch. I went to a good seafood restaurant near Lincoln Center and had a large grilled lobster that cost eight dollars, with two bottles of Heineken.
    As I sat there in the warm restaurant, eating the good food and drinking the imported beer, I realized that it was the first moment since the whore had come running down from the sixth floor of the hotel that I had time to think about what I was doing. Everything up to now had been almost mechanical, act following act unhesitatingly, my movements ordered and precise, as though I had been following a program learned, assimilated, long ago. Now I had to make decisions, consider possibilities, scan the horizon for danger. Even as I was thinking this, I saw that something in my subconscious had made me choose a table where I could sit with my back against the wall, with a clear view of the entrance to the restaurant and of everybody who came in. I was amused by the realization. Given half a chance, every man becomes the hero of his own detective story.
    Amusement or not, the hour had come to take stock, think about my position. I could no longer depend on simple reflexes or on anything in my past to guide me for the future. I had always been completely law-abiding. I had never done anything to make enemies. Certainly not enemies like the two men who had frightened Drusack that morning. Naturally, I thought, men who came to a hotel where they expected to receive a hundred thousand dollars in cash from someone who was registered most probably under a false name and certainly with a false address might very likely be carrying guns or at least look like men who were in the habit of carrying guns. Drusack might have been a little hysterical that morning, but he was no fool and he had been in the hotel business a long time and had a feeling about who meant trouble when he arrived at the front desk and who didn’t. Drusack couldn’t possibly know just what trouble the two men represented and in all probability would never know.
    One thing was sure, or almost sure—the police wouldn’t be brought in, although an individual crooked policeman here or there might be in on it. So I wouldn’t have that to worry about. There was no possibility that the man who had registered under the name of John Ferris and the two men who had come to meet him at the hotel were engaged in a legal business transaction. It had to be bribery of some sort, a payoff, blackmail. This was when the scandals of the second Nixon Administration were just beginning to surface, when we all discovered that perfectly respectable people, pillars of the community, had developed the habit of secretly carrying huge sums of money around in attaché cases and stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars in office desks, so it didn’t occur to me, as it could have later, that I might have stumbled on an amateurish and comparatively undangerous political technique. What I had to deal with, I was sure, was grim professionalism, men who killed for money. Like spies in the movies, Drusack had said. I discounted that. I had seen the body.
    Gangsters, I thought. The Mob. Despite the occasional movies and magazine pieces about the underworld I had seen and read, like most people, I had only the vaguest notion of what was meant by the Mob and a perhaps exaggerated respect for its