Beggarman, Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gretchen said.
    It was no afternoon, she thought, to be forced to speak to Jean Jordache, either.
    “I think it might be nicer on deck,” Gretchen said to Dwyer after Rudolph had gone. The saloon, which had until now seemed like a welcoming, cosy room, had been darkened for her into a sinister countinghouse, where lives were entered in ledgers, became symbols, credits and debits, not flesh and blood.
    She had gone through it before. When her husband had been killed in the automobile accident there hadn’t been a will, either. Perhaps Colin Burke, who had never hit a man in his life, who had lived surrounded by books, play scripts, screenplays, who had dealt gently and diplomatically with the writers and actors whom he had directed, and often enough hated, had more in common than was apparent on the surface with her barely literate, ruffian brother.
    Without a will, there had been confusion about the disposal of Colin’s property. There was an ex-wife who lived on alimony, a mortgaged house, royalties. The lawyers had moved in, the estate tied up for more than a year. Rudy had handled everything then, as he was doing now, as he always did.
    “I’ll bring the drinks,” Dwyer was saying. “It’s nice of you to visit with me. The hardest part is being alone. After everything we been through, Tom and me. And now Kate’s gone. Most women would have made trouble aboard. Between two men been friends and partners for so long. Not Kate.” Dwyer’s mouth was quivering, almost imperceptibly. “She’s all right, old Kate, isn’t she?”
    “A lot better than all right,” Gretchen said. “Make it a stiff one, Bunny.”
    “Whiskey, isn’t it?”
    “Plenty of ice, please.” She went forward where the saloon cabin and wheelhouse would hide them from passersby on the quay. She had had enough of friends of Tom and Dwyer and Kate from the other boats in the harbor coming on board with doleful faces to mumble their condolences. Their grief was plain. She was not as sure of her own.
    In the bow, with the neat coiled spirals of lines and the polished brass and the bleached, immaculate teak deck, she looked out at the now familiar scene of the crowded harbor which had enchanted her when she saw it the first day: the bobbing masts, the men working slowly and carefully at the million small tasks that seemed to make up the daily routine of those who took their living from the sea. Even now, after all that had happened, she could not help but be affected by its quiet beauty.
    Dwyer came up behind her, barefooted, the ice tinkling in the glasses in his hands. He gave her her glass. She raised it to him, smiling ruefully. She hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day and the first mouthful tingled on her tongue. “I don’t usually drink hard stuff,” Dwyer said, “but maybe I ought to learn.” He drank in small sips, thoughtfully savoring the taste and effect. “I tell you,” he said, “your brother Rudy is one hell of a man. A take-hold guy.”
    “Yes,” Gretchen said. That was one way of describing him.
    “We’d’ve been in a stink of a mess without him.…”
    Or no mess at all, Gretchen thought, if he’d kept his wife at home and stayed on the other continent.
    “We’d’ve been stolen blind without him,” Dwyer said.
    “By whom?”
    “Lawyers,” Dwyer said vaguely. “Ships’ brokers, the law. Everybody.”
    Here was a man, Gretchen thought, who had been caught at sea in hurricanes, had done his job at the extremity of physical endurance, when a failure would have sent him and those who depended upon him to the bottom, who had survived the company of violent and brutal men, but who felt reduced to helplessness by a slip of paper, a mention of land-based authority. Another race, thought Gretchen, who all her adult life had been surrounded by men who moved among paper, in and out of offices, as surefooted and confident as an Indian in the forest. Her dead brother had belonged to another race, perhaps from