This Time We Love Page 2

  He stepped back quickly, his feet moving automatically in the trained shuffle of the professional. His eyes darted to Gino, who was still groaning in the gutter to which he had fallen, but was now making preliminary efforts to get to his feet. Max stepped closer and kicked him, not too hard, in the side of the head. Gino collapsed into complete insensibility and the fight was over. It had taken, in all, perhaps fifteen seconds.

  The drunk was staring down at the two, one groaning, the other unconscious. His face was blank and he scratched his little beard. “Wha’ happen?” he demanded. “I din’ see it. Wha’ happen to the bassers?”

  Max was feeling his fingers, hoping he hadn’t sprained any of them. “I’m afraid we can’t have a repeat,” he growled, “just so you can see it. Come on, let’s get out of here. Never get in trouble in somebody else’s country. The police are seldom on your side.” He grabbed the other by the arm and hustled him down Via Alibert toward the lights of the Via del Babuino.

  Once there, he shot a glance up and down the street. There were no cabs in sight. He turned left, dragging his rescued compatriot along with him toward the Piazza di Spagna and the Spanish Steps.

  “Hey, ol’ pal, whataja do there, eh? Whataja do to them two bassers?”

  Max growled at him disgustedly, “I should have let them work you over. Don’t you know any better than to sound off like that in a bar? You’re lucky they didn’t beat you up and leave you for the street cleaners to find in the morning.”

  The other’s face twisted, as though he was on the verge of tears. “I’ma mean drunk,” he explained woefully. “When I get stoned, I get mean.”

  “You sure do,” Max said, some of the tenseness of the past ten minutes going out of him and his easygoing nature reasserting itself. “And, brother, you just don’t have the build for it.”

  The other pulled to a halt beneath a street lamp. “Pal,” he said, “owe you apology and deep-feel thanks, pal. Here. Here’s my card.” He wiggled his fingers into various pockets. “Have one here somewheres. Yea, here’s m’ card.”

  Max was beginning to find amusement in the situation, finally. He looked at the card, read it aloud. “Bert Fix,” and tie second line, “Horatius at the Bridge.” He looked up, blankly. “Horatius at the Bridge?”

  Bert Fix slurred something impatiently.

  Max looked back at the card. He’d had his thumb over part of the printing. It read, Publicity.

  “Oh,” he said. Then, “What’s Horatius at the Bridge?” realizing even as he spoke that it must be a movie.

  It was. Bert Fix’s tone implied that everybody knew that. “Opus,” he explained. “Biggest ever. Manfred King directing. Marcia McEvoy ‘n’ Clark Talmadge an’ lots of other stars. Multimillion production. A whopper. Haven’t you ever hearda Horatius? Big hero. Fights whole army so they won’t capture the bridge. How about a drink, pal?”

  “You’ve had a drink, Bert,” Max said, not unkindly.

  “Yeah, but I owe you one. Whaz your name, pal?”

  They had reached the impressively looming Spanish Steps which lead up from the Piazza Spagna to the square above, which is dominated by the church of Trinità dei Monti. In the middle of the piazza the Fontana della Barcaccia cooled the air with its spray. Max came to a halt. There’d be plenty of cabs passing here, it was a popular spot of a hot Roman night. He felt obligated, now that he’d rescued the aggressive little movie flack, to see that Bert Fix got back to his hotel before accumulating another case of trouble.

  “Max Fielding,” Max said, in answer to the other’s last question.

  “Man, you sure fixed them two bassers,” Bert said admiringly, looking up at him and closing one eye, the better to focus.

  “I used to teach judo during my hitch in the Marines,” Max said absently, waving for a cab and missing it.

  “Look, pal,” Fix said. “I owe you a drink.”

  “Okay,” Max said agreeably, “but not tonight. Neither of us needs anything more tonight.”

  The publicity man scowled up at him. “When?”

  Max had finally got the attention of a cabbie. The taxi circled the square, coming toward them. He’d lost the drift of what the other was saying. “When what?” he said.

  “Damnit, when can I buy you a drink?”

  “Tomorrow,” Max said, opening the cab door, and helping the smaller man in. “You can buy me a drink tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Bert Fix said. “Pal, you really got those two bassers.”

  The cab driver said something back over his shoulder and Bert Fix said, “Piazzo Amerigo Capponi,” and then to Max, “I gotta apartment there. You wanta come home with me an’ have a nightcap, pal?”

  “No thanks,” Max said. “You get to bed.”

  “I kinda wish you’d come, pal,” Bert Fix told him seriously. “Jeanette’ll gimme hell.”

  He could have asked who Jeanette was, but that would have only dragged things on. Max stepped back from the cab and made a gesture in the way of good-bye. The cab took off.

  When it was some fifty feet away, and Max had begun to turn away, preparatory to walking back to where he’d parked the Porsche, a ludicrous-appearing bearded face stuck itself out of one of the cab windows and yelled back at him something that sounded like, “Shake her at eight.”

  That didn’t seem to make much sense so Max grunted amusement, stuck his hands in his pockets and began to stroll along. It’d been a long day and he looked forward to a night alone in bed after that siege with the marchesa and her blond servant girl the night before.

  Chapter Two

  MAX FIELDING AWOKE almost invariably with a bitterness in both his mouth and in his view of the world. Why, he didn’t know, but there were few exceptions. His last memories of the night before might be downright hilarious, but morning’s light brought a vague, unexplained discomfort.

  He looked over at the other side of the bed to check if he had a companion. Nope. No feminine head of hair on the other pillow. For the first time in quite a time, he’d evidently slept alone. Well, that was good for a change. Women were fine, they were absolutely little darlings, but there came a saturation point, a satiation point, where it was a relief not to have to go through telling one so, all over again, in the cold newness of morning.

  Max ran his tongue all over the inside of his mouth in distaste and then yawned mightily. Now, just where was he? That was the question. He looked around the room, even while pushing the cover back. He scowled, while stretching. It looked like a motel. There weren’t many motels in Europe. It was an American institution, still in its infancy over here.

  Now it came back. It was a motel. He’d driven down from Venice the day before and pulled into the Motel AGIP on the Via Aurelia about eight miles west of town. Somebody he’d met up in Interlaken, in Switzerland, had told him about the place. Quite a deal, what with a couple of hundred rooms, each with bath. Part of the AGIP Italian national petroleum monopoly project, in cooperation with the Italian Automobile Club. One of the attractions was the price, about two dollars for a single, which was hard to beat in the Rome area, particularly if you had a car to park.

  On his way to the bath, stripping off his pajamas as he went, Max went into a routine which had become second nature. A routine that took him in a matter of moments from morning glumness to his more characteristic exuberance of spirit and easygoing outlook on life. He’d found early in the game that it is practically impossible for your chariot to swing low if you’re laughing, or even just grinning widely. You don’t have to have something to laugh about, simply exercising the laugh muscles around the mouth and eyes will definitely change your outlook for the better. Add to that the singing of a light, happy-go-lucky song, something that starts with such a line as Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day, and you’re well on the way. Add to that a brisk moment or two of cold shower, after the customary warm one, to stir up a sleep-sluggish body, and you’ve got it made.

  His bringing to mind the economy of his prese
nt quarters brought on further consideration of his financial position in general. He was running short already. Let’s see, what had he started with this time? Something like six thousand dollars, not counting the car fund. The car fund didn’t count. Every time he came to Europe he’d buy a German car, use it for the duration of his stay, ship it back home on a freighter, and resell it in the States. On an average, he came out a couple of hundred dollars ahead on the deal and, of course, had the use of the car for a period of months.

  He soaped himself, feeling resignation. All things, good or bad, come to an end, including batting around Europe leading the high life, on an indefinite vacation. Now he’d have to go on back home and get onto the old treadmill again, get into the old rut, put the old nose to the grindstone for a few months.

  Given care, he could save enough of a nest egg in four or five months to keep him for aproximately the same length of time, in idleness, in the world’s cheaper countries.

  Uncle Fred came to mind, and Max grinned as he changed the shower’s spray from warm to cool, then cold. He’d go back to his job as salesman for Fredric Fielding, founder, owner, manager and slave driver of Fielding Toys. He, Max Fielding, was the great cross that Uncle Fred bore on life’s path up Calvary. Sometimes he suspected that the old boy, in spite of family relationship, would love to fire Max permanently. Get him out of his hair, once and for all.

  Every time Max announced that he was tired of working and needed a lengthy vacation, Uncle Fred would go into a frenzy that made Samson’s pulling down the Philistine temple look like a three-year-old making with blocks.

  Max laughed his enjoyment of the memory. Fredric Fielding’s main bent in life was achieving financial success. Hell, that was too gentle a way of stating it. Uncle Fred wanted to accumulate all the money the government had ever printed, and then start up the Treasury presses again. It was beyond him to understand why Max didn’t have the same dream. It drove him frantic to see Max stroll his way through life working just hard enough to accumulate a comfortable little bank account, and then throwing over everything and taking off for South America or Europe, the South Pacific or North Africa, and squandering it all away.

  What infuriated Uncle Fred was that fact that Max was far and away the best salesman he’d ever had. Max could get orders for toys out of a mortician’s supply house, or a retirement home. And seemingly without effort, so far as Uncle Fred could see. The toy manufacturer was considerably like his brother Samuel, Max’s father, had been. His idea of life was to go in flailing, confront the enemy in his entrenchments and get into the clutch. Max deliberately changed the trend of his thoughts. He didn’t like to think about his father.

  Max used other tactics. He chuckled now, remembering his last big sale, one that had infuriated Uncle Fred in spite of its magnitude. It had been a buyer from a middle-west chain of department stores, a vice president in the corporation. It was a potential new account and Fredric Fielding had jittered about handing it over to his easygoing nephew. Max just didn’t take these things seriously enough.

  So Max had met the man, and they’d gone on to dinner, and somewhere along about the second martini it had developed that Mr. Edward Bigelow was a connoisseur of the limerick and the off-color joke. To brief an epic story, they’d never got around to talking about Fielding Toys. They’d gone from dinner to a night club, to a key club to which Max belonged, to Eddie Bigelow’s house. The two of them were that seldom round combination, good raconteurs and even better listeners. The session had crawled on for a period of some ten or twelve hours, well lubricated by half a dozen varieties of liquid. Eddie laughed to tears over the Lovelorn Gorilla, Max laughed till his rib cage ached over the Trotskyite in the Kremlin and the man born with the silver screw in his navel. They roared in uncontrolled mirth over the half-dozen versions of the limerick that began, There was a young man from Racine. Max had a version he’d picked up in England, that tied up the last line with a British twist, And guaranteed used by the Queen. But Eddie insisted that the best end of all was, But it was a helluva thing to clean.

  And the next day, when Uncle Fred had inquired ominously after Max had reported to work at roughly noon, Max had made the mistake of dissolving into laughter again and trying to tell his older relative the story of the Lovelorn Gorilla. Thwarted there, he’d had to admit that he had no order, nor even a further appointment. He didn’t mention the fact that he hadn’t got around to mentioning toys to the department store buyer. His expense account? Well, it ran somewhere up around two hundred dollars — it had been quite a night.

  Uncle Fred was going through a countdown by this time and from the color seeping up from his collar he was about to blast off. It was then that the phone rang.

  Mr. Edward Bigelow — ”Just tell Max it’s Eddie calling” — was on the phone, all but incoherent with suppressed laughter. Within ten minutes the substantial sales contract was made over the phone, and without the customer having actually seen any of the products.

  Uncle Fred was flabbergasted.

  He was more flabbergasted still when Max, with five per cent commission on the deal coming to him, quit on the spot, announcing that he’d decided to take a European vacation, until his money ran out.

  After a brisk toweling, Max dressed in slacks and sport shirt, contemplated a jacket and decided against it, in view of the heat. Max was no clothes horse. He wore clothes primarily for comfort, and if style quarreled with ease it was ignored. Rome, he knew from past visits, was on the conservative side so far as men’s wear was concerned, but Max Fielding couldn’t have cared less.

  He had turned the contents of his pockets onto the dresser the night before. Now he took them and returned them to his pockets, unit by unit. He thumbed through his thinning sheaf of traveler’s checks and whistled sadly. He’d have to shorten his Italian stay and find a ship back home. Genoa was probably his best bet. You could get a freighter from that Mediterranean port for as little as a hundred and fifty dollars, if you knew your way around. Max Fielding knew his way around.

  There was a card among the other odds and ends and for a moment he didn’t know where he had acquired it. Bert Fix, Horatius at the Bridge, Publicity. Oh, yes, the feisty, goateed drunk of the night before, the one who admitted to belligerence in his cups. Max grinned. His interfering with the two Italains had but postponed eventual disaster. Mr. Bert Fix was going to get himself an awful whaling one of these nights.

  He had wanted to buy Max a drink, but had forgotten to make a date. Max twisted his mouth as he tossed the card into the waste basket. He’d be needing somebody to buy his drinks unless he got on home and repaired his employment fences with Uncle Fred.

  He emerged into the Roman sun and squinted up at the sky for a moment, forgetting about money and letting the ardor of life flood over him.

  Man, why did some people allow themselves to get into a married rut where they pegged away at a job eight hours a day, five or six days a week, up to their ears in payments for house, furniture and car and scared to death of being fired? A rut where once a year you got two or three weeks of your own, in which to take off and live life in freedom — a vacation, they called it.

  He, Max, had it made. No ties. No more worries than those which make life interesting. No problems more important than whether to zero in on a blonde, this particular night, rather than one of the superlative redheads of Rome.

  He picked up a copy of the Rome Daily American at the stand in the restaurant entry and carried it with him to a table. Over his coffee and rolls, he winced at the headlines, read the comics, grimaced at the premonitions of world disaster to be found in the columnists’ opinions. He folded the paper back to the entertainment ads, wondering if there was anything on the economical side worth taking in.

  An ad hit his eye a glancing blow, and he returned to it, not knowing why. Shaker. A strange name for a night club in Rome. Evidently a fairly new, swank place; Max couldn’t remember it from his last visit to the Eternal City.

  He scowle
d at the advertisement. Why should it have particularly caught his attention? Then it came to him. Bert Fix, sticking his head out of the taxi the night before and yelling, “Shake her at eight.”

  What the thoroughly swacked movie flack had been calling was a date for that drink he insisted on buying Max. What he’d actually said was, “Shaker, at eight,” meaning eight o’clock.

  It turned out that the Shaker was fairish distance from the center of town, north of the large park which is the Villa Borghese and in a comparatively quiet area. It was just off the Via Archimede and was laid out in a modernistic, three interlocking cocktail lounges sort of arrangement. Very swank indeed, Max told himself, and no place for him to be blowing his money in case Bert Fix had forgotten his invitation of the night before.

  Actually, he couldn’t quite figure out why he had bothered to come. Possibly because the outrageous belligerence of the small man was so incongruous. Max wanted to see him sober. Or possibly it was because he, Max Fielding, was without contacts in Rome and was intrigued with the possibilities of meeting some of the town’s movie crowd.

  Bert Fix hadn’t forgotten. He was in the third of the lounges, started waving energetically as soon as Max entered the room, and was seated with two of the most gorgeous Italian women Max had visually drooled over either on the screen or in person.

  “Max, pal!” the flack yelled. “Over here, Max!” He already, evidently, had an edge on and the evening was young.

  Max came up and grinned down at the other. “You still alive?” he said easily. He made an effort to keep his eyes away from the plunging necklines of the two girls, both of whom were smiling up at him, perfectly aware of their offerings.

  Bert Fix jumped to his feet, pumped Max’s hand, even while explaining to the girls, “Here’s the guy I was telling you about. There were four of them, see? Following me down this dark street. Toughest part of town, see?”