Read Online Nightwork by Irwin Shaw - Free Book Online Page A

hadn’t spoken to Hale or written him in years. Hale certainly wasn’t expecting me. We had been in the same class at Ohio State and had been good friends. After I took the job in Vermont we had skied together several winters, when Hale wasn’t on a post overseas.
    “Your name, please?” the girl was saying.
    I gave her my name and she dialed a number on the desk telephone.
    The girl spoke briefly on the phone, put it down, scribbled out a pass. “Mr. Hale can see you now.” She handed me the pass and I saw she had written on it the number of the room I was to go to.
    “Thank you, miss,” I said. Too late, I saw the wedding ring on her finger. I have made another enemy in Washington, I thought.
    I went up in the elevator. The elevator was nearly full, but it rose in decorous silence. The secrets of state were being well-guarded.
    Hale’s name was on a door that was exactly the same as a long row of identical doors that disappeared in diminishing perspective down a seemingly endless corridor. What can all these people possibly be doing for the United States of America eight hours a day, two hundred days a year? I wondered, as I knocked.
    “Come in,” a woman’s voice called.
    I pushed the door open and entered a small room where a beautiful young woman was typing. Good old Jeremy Hale.
    The beautiful young woman smiled radiantly at me. I wondered how she behaved in taxicabs. “Are you Mr. Grimes?” she said, rising. She was even more beautiful standing up than sitting down, tall and dark, lissome in a tight blue sweater.
    “I am indeed,” I said.
    “Mr. Hale is delighted you could come. Go right in, please.” She held the door to the inner office open for me.
    Hale was seated at a cluttered desk, peering down at a sheaf of papers in front of him. He had put on weight since I had last seen him, and had added statesmanlike solidity to the mild polite face. On the desk in a silver frame was a family group, a woman and two children, a boy and a girl. Everything in moderation. Zero population growth. An example to the heathen. Hale looked up when I came in and stood, smiling widely. “Doug,” he said, “you don’t know how glad I am to see you.”
    As we shook hands, I was surprised at how moved I was by my friend’s greeting. For three years now, no one had been genuinely glad to see me.
    “Where’ve you been, where’ve you been, man?” Hale said. He waved to a leather sofa along one side of the spacious office and as I sat down pulled a wooden armchair close to the sofa and sat down himself. “I thought you’d disappeared from the face of the earth. I wrote three times and each time the letters came back. Haven’t you learned anything about forwarding addresses yet? And I wrote your girl friend, Pat, asking about you and she wrote back and said she didn’t know where you’d gone.” He scowled at me. He was agreeable-looking, tall, comfortably built, soft-faced, and the scowl was incongruous on him. “And you don’t look so almighty great, either. You look as though you haven’t been out in the open air for years.”
    “Okay, okay,” I said, “one thing at a time, Jerry. I just decided I didn’t like flying anymore and I moved on. Here and there.”
    “I wanted to ski with you last winter. I had two weeks off and I heard the snow was great. …”
    “I haven’t been doing much skiing, to tell the truth,” I said.
    Impulsively, Hale touched my shoulder. “All right,” he said. “I won’t ask any questions.” Even as a boy in college he had always been quick and sensitive. “Well, anyway, just one question. Where’re you coming from and what’re you doing in Washington?” He laughed. “I guess that’s two questions.”
    “I’m coming from New York,” I said, “and I’m in Washington to ask you to do a little favor for me.”
    “The government is at your disposal, lad. Ask and ye shall receive.”
    “I need a passport.”
    “You mean you never had a