Read Online Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw - Free Book Online

same color as the woman’s, and they were obviously mother and daughter. The mother was calling out instructions in a language that Craig could not identify. Her tone was soft and encouraging, with a hint of laughter in it. Her skin was just beginning to turn rosy from the sun.
    “They’re Danes,” Murphy said. “I heard at breakfast. I must visit Denmark some day.”
    On inflated mattresses set back from the ladder leading to the sea two girls were lying face down, enjoying the sun. Their halters were discarded so that there would be no telltale strips of city-white skin across the tanned, beautiful young backs. Their brown rumps and long legs were smoothly shaped, appetizingly tinted. The bikini bottoms were merely a symbolic gesture toward public decorum. They were like two loaves of newly baked bread, warm, edible, and nourishing. Between them sat a young man, an actor Craig recognized from two or three Italian films. The actor was equally tanned, in swimming trunks that were hardly more than a jockstrap. He had a lean, muscular, hairless body, and a religious medal hung on a gold chain down his chest. He was darkly handsome, a superb animal with black hair and very white teeth, which he showed in a pantherish smile.
    Craig was conscious of Murphy beside him staring down at the trio next to the sea.
    “If I looked like that,” Craig said, “I’d smile, too.”
    Murphy sighed loudly as they continued walking.
    At the bar Murphy ordered a martini. He made no concessions to what his wife called the tropics. Craig ordered a beer.
    “Well,” Murphy said, raising his glass, “here’s to my boy.” He gulped down a third of his drink. “It’s wonderful finally catching up with you. In person. You don’t hand out much information in your letters, do you?”
    “There’s not much to say these days. Do you want me to bore you with the details of my divorce?”
    “After all these years.” Murphy shook his head. “I never would have thought it. Well, people have to do what they have to do, I suppose. I hear you’ve got a new girl in Paris.”
    “Not so new.”
    “Happy?”
    “You’re too old to ask a question like that, Murphy.”
    “The funny thing is I don’t feel a day older than the day I got out of the army. Stupider but not older. Hell, let’s get off that subject. It depresses me. How about you? What’re you doing down here?”
    “Nothing much. Lazying around.”
    “That kid, that Gail McKinnon, must have asked me in a dozen different ways what I thought you were after in Cannes. You want to work again?” Murphy glanced speculatively at him.
    “Might be,” Craig said. “If something good showed up. And if anybody was crazy enough to finance me.”
    “It’s not only you,” Murphy said. “Anybody’d have to be crazy to finance almost any movie these days.”
    “People haven’t been knocking your door down asking you to get me to work for them, have they?”
    “Well,” Murphy said defensively, “you’ve got to admit you’ve sort of dropped out of things. If you really want to work, there’s a picture I’m putting together … I might be able to swing it. I thought of you, but I didn’t bother writing you until it was more definite. And there wouldn’t be much money in it. And it’s a lousy script. And it’s got to be shot in Greece, and I know about you and your politics …”
    Craig laughed at the torrent of Murphy’s excuses. “It sounds just dandy,” he said. “All round.”
    “Well,” Murphy said, “I remember the first time you came to Europe, you wouldn’t go to Spain because you didn’t approve of the political situation there, and I …”
    “I was younger then,” Craig said. He poured some more beer into his glass from the bottle on the bar in front of him. “Nowadays, if you wouldn’t shoot a picture in a country whose politics you didn’t approve of, you wouldn’t expose much film. You certainly wouldn’t shoot a picture in America, would