“Do you know how many times a day I hear this?” Verderamé asked, his irritation deliberately exaggerated to shift the ground. “All these guys, these people, who come to me and complain about the price of my services. Nobody I protect has ever been forced out of business because I protect them, but they all whine about how they’re going to go bankrupt. What has that got to do with me except that they wanna Jew me outa what they owe me? Even if they do go bankrupt, what do I care? Someone else is going to take over the space.”
“This will break the back of my business and put fifty good men out on the street.” Harry’s neutrality was ebbing. He stared at the table.
“Well,” said Verderamé, “you’re young. Did you just get back from the service?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you do?”
“I was a clerk, in Washington. Supply,” Harry said. “It wasn’t exactly. . . .”
“But you served, right?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m gonna cut you some slack.”
Harry stiffened against expecting too much.
“I’m gonna drop it to two thousand.”
“It already is two thousand.”
“Twenty-five hundred.”
This hurt. “They said two thousand.”
“They made a mistake. Whata they know?”
“Two thousand is what I was talking about. Two thousand is what will kill us.”
“I did you a favor. I cut what you owe by twenty percent. Where else can you just walk in and get twenty percent off? You wanna be greedy?”
“I still don’t understand. Gottlieb charged so much less.”
“Okay,” Verderamé said. “Someone did us a favor, and now we’re doing them a favor. That’s all.”
“You mean you’re making me do the favor for you.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean.”
It was too dangerous for Harry to follow this line, so he became silent, not knowing what to say next. In the pause, Verderamé’s right hand, which in perhaps a conscious effort had been kept either beneath the table, under his lapel, or clenched in a cloth napkin, emerged for a second or two. Verderamé saw Harry’s eyes settle upon it and follow for the brief time it was in the open. His right thumbnail, and just his thumbnail, was dark yellow, and extended at least an inch beyond his thumb. That Harry had seen it was mysteriously embarrassing to Verderamé, and Harry knew immediately that nothing further would be accomplished.
“Two thousand?”
“Two thousand.”
“My father paid four hundred.”
“I collected for Gottlieb then. Your father and the nigger paid six hundred. Maybe it went down in the war. Your father begged like a fuckin’ dog.”
“My father did what?” Harry didn’t seem so weak when he said this.
“Your father, kid, begged like a dog. But he still paid the maximum.”
“I don’t think he did that,” Harry said.
“I think he did. Where’d you bury him, in a pet cemetery?”
Then came the sound of the creaking and scraping of chair legs as the heavy men at the bar dismounted. Expressionless, Harry whitened, which seemed to them to be the most dangerous of all signs.
“You just got back from the war,” Verderamé said, “where you fought at a desk. Lemme tell you something. I’m still in a war that I’ve been fighting since I was ten years old. It’s all I know. I can’t do anything else. I don’t want to do anything else. And I won’t pretend to you that I don’t love it in the same way that, no matter what he says, a cop loves what he does. I don’t know you. I don’t care about you. You don’t mean anything to me. But you just entered a game that I’ve been playing since before you were born. How you play is up to you, but you have no fuckin’ idea—I guarantee it—of what it took for me to get to this table. You just keep in mind that I’ve got the wall at my back and you’ve got the door.”
His anger rose again, inexhaustibly. “So I wanna know, who the hell are you? Some fuckin’ guy, some fuckin’ guy walks in off the street, you walk in here looking for a break from me, based on what? I’ll tell you, because I know. Because you think I might feel bad about what I do. You think so? You wanna ride a white horse? Look around you. You think the mayor doesn’t get a piece of both of us? The commissioner? Everybody is fucking everybody else. It’s what they call a circle jerk. If you stop, you die, but it keeps on going. The war’s not over, kid. It was never over, even before it started. And it’s right here, every day. You see?”
“There’s a difference,” Harry said, crossing the line, “between starting something . . . and finishing it.”
“I don’t like what I hear,” Verderamé told him tensely.
With no more than a second to react, Harry said, “We made the first payment. We’ll make the rest.”
“You were five hundred short.”
Harry was stunned. “I’ll have five hundred on Friday.”
“Then you can go back to two thousand,” Verderamé said. “Merry Christmas.”
16. The Abacus
AFTER THE INTERVIEW on Prince Street, Harry and Cornell went to the accountant. The one joke that the accountant had told even before the turn of the century, and would tell until he no longer breathed, came always upon the saying of his name, Ludwig Bernstein. “I’m not a law firm,” he would croak, “I’m an accountant!” The more he repeated this, the more droll he thought it was and the less other people did, a small part of the comprehensive unhappiness that had been killing him longer than most people had been alive.
On the seventeenth floor of a building on Third Avenue in the Forties, his offices had the June sound, contented and comforting, of half a dozen fans of different sizes that pushed the air until the hum as it was concerted from room to room was like that of a steady wind far out at sea. Harry and Cornell sat in a waiting area from which they could look up from reading the only magazines supplied—Boys’ Life and Good Housekeeping—to see buildings across the way baking in the sunlight until they were almost silver. The ceaseless sounds of traffic came from outside, and in a corner of the waiting area a fan the size of Achilles’ shield stood on one black-and-chrome leg and swept back and forth as if it were saying not merely no but tsk-tsk.
“It says here, Cornell, that you should never wear a poncho when riding a horse, because the horse may get spooked if the wind flaps the poncho. That makes sense.”
“It’s good to know,” said Cornell, “for Manhattanites.”
“What are you reading?” Harry asked.
“Tips for baking pies.”
“You think he puts these magazines out here to irritate his clients or to make himself seem more interesting by comparison?”
“I think these are the magazines he subscribes to.”
A tall woman whose hair was done up in a kind of lacquered mantilla suitable only for a giant flamenco dancer came in to announce that Mr. Bernstein was now available. They stood up quickly, and as they walked from the waiting area they heard the fan beginning to shuffle through the abandoned pages of Boys’ Life as if it were trying to find an article.
Ludwig Bernstein was a full five feet tall, with only enough bramble-like hairs on his head to make it look like a switchboard. He wore tweed as if there were no such thing as heat, and though on his lapel he sported a little card that said he had epilepsy, he had never had a fit. Although as immobile as if he had been filled with vertical rebar, he was both friendly and smart.
“Ludwig, this is Harry,” Cornell said, “Meyer’s son.”
“I’m Ludwig Bernstein—not a law firm, but an accountant!” A laugh gurgled up in him and then he got down to business. “The numbers you gave me, assuming they’re approximately correct, are hardly encouraging. But before we discuss them I should tell you that due to circumstances we can’t control, our fee is going up from twelve to fifteen thousand dollars.”
“That’s just . . . it’s . . . ,” Cornell said.
“You know it’s not
us, Cornell. We don’t see a penny of the increase. It’s them.”
Cornell nodded in resignation.
“Who’s them?” Harry asked, feeling more and more beleaguered by the minute.
Bernstein turned to Cornell as if to ask, He doesn’t know?
“He doesn’t know,” Cornell answered.
“So tell him.”
“The IRS.”
“Why would our taxes go up if our earnings are reduced?” Harry asked. “And how would you know in advance by how much? And you said your fee.”
“It’s not taxes,” Bernstein stated.
“Then what is it?”
Bernstein depressed his voice so that no one beyond his door would hear. “Copeland Leather enjoys an advantageous tax situation because of its utilization of various depletion allowances.”
“You mean for materials?” Harry asked.
“Minerals and timber.”
“Minerals and timber? What minerals and timber?”
“Subsidiaries that invest in the Southwest, Wyoming, and Montana.”
“We don’t have any subsidiaries.”
“You do. On paper.”
“Since when?”
“For a long time. It was the only way you got through the Crash. It started with real investments your father made. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“But now it’s not real.”
“Nothing is real,” Bernstein said, immensely pleased that he could reveal this to Harry. “God made the world, and we have to operate as if it is real. Maybe it’s not, but we have no choice. The Congress tried to ape God when it made the tax code, and if you don’t like it, the IRS will put you in prison. If you fight not to go to prison, eventually someone will shoot you. But, unlike God, because they’re almost human, they have weak spots.”
“You pay off the IRS?” Harry asked, astounded.
Bernstein was totally immobile, but Cornell leaned forward and said in a low whisper, “Revenue agents in Manhattan.”
“Christ,” Harry said, “what if someone finds out?” He felt both naive and unclean.
“First of all,” Bernstein said, “you don’t know. You’re relying upon my advice. Second, to whose advantage would it be to tell? Anyone who tells goes to jail. Anyone who doesn’t tell makes money. And, by the way, it didn’t come from us. They started it. They shook us down. If we don’t cooperate we spend the rest of our lives being audited. It would bankrupt you, but you wouldn’t know, because by the time you were bankrupt you’d have totally lost your mind. It’s kind of like your problem with whoever it is, but the government is a lot more reasonable. Whoever is taking a bite out of you, no matter how well he’s doing, is struggling to survive. He’s got a lot of enemies and he knows he can’t last long. The government, on the other hand, has no predators and will last forever—maybe not until the hour the sun goes out (I read in a magazine that the sun is doomed), but until a quarter of.”
“I have to pay off Verderamé, I have to pay off the IRS, I have to pay off the cops, the garbage men. . . . They’re all corrupt. But what’s worse is that I’m corrupt.”
“You forgot the building department,” Cornell reminded him, “and the Teamsters, the fire inspectors.”
“We’re not in compliance with the fire regulations?”
“Of course we are.”
Harry turned to the accountant. “You’re not a law firm, you’re an accountant, right? If we didn’t have to make all these payoffs, we’d be solvent, isn’t that so?”
“For the moment, nicely.”
“And as it is?”
“In reality? The only way you can last more than three months is to increase your revenues by fifty percent and keep your costs stable. Can you do that?”
“The buyer from Macy’s came by the other day,” Cornell announced. “He told me that they’re making more things, even wallets, from artificial fibers. The big chemical companies are going to build on their work during the war. He said in twenty years cotton and leather will be like whale oil.”
“That’s not so,” Harry insisted.
“Maybe not, but Macy’s cut back on their order. We’re going down a little bit at a time, no blow unbearable, just down, down, down, nothing fatal until the end.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry said to both older men, hoping for assurance that he knew would not come. “We make a wonderful product. It’s finely crafted of the best materials. We work hard. We don’t let imperfections pass. We should be prosperous.”
“People don’t want it as much as they used to, and then there’s Europe,” Cornell said.
“All right, that’s one thing, but why do all these people impinge upon us? They don’t make anything themselves. Their whole energies are devoted to tricking and forcing money from other people.”
“That’s human nature,” said Bernstein. “It was never different. Look, I have a house in the Catskills. My wife and I killed ourselves and spent a lot of money to make it nice—great view of the mountains, quiet. Last spring a neighboring farmer put sewage all over his fields. He didn’t ask, he didn’t care. The smell is impossible, you can’t drink the water, you can’t eat. Forget guests. I asked him about it, and he said he’d switched to this kind of fertilizer, and would use it every year. We’re going to have to sell the house, almost give it away. Guess who’s gonna buy it. And guess who’ll mysteriously stop using the new kind of fertilizer.”
“So what do we do when these people despoil us, just sit here and die?”
“That’s what you do,” said Ludwig Bernstein, whose work had overlooked the busy streets of Manhattan since the nineteenth century. “You play their game or you die, or sometimes you play their game and you die anyway.”
“What about,” Harry asked, “not playing their game, and not dying?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Bernstein. “I’d love to see that. I’d give anything to see it. But it doesn’t happen. What you said are the words that young men speak before they go down. Some die literally. Most just die a little inside.” And then he added, with a quivering smile, “Like me.”
17. The Glare of July
IN THE HEAT of July, the ocean was cool, and after a day in the moist glare of Amagansett beaches it was possible to believe that this was all of life and ever would be. For the talent of the sea in monopolizing perception is not limited to its empty reaches, but spills over and inundates the shore. The waters of lakes, streams, or the ocean bring contentment enough to tranquilize even someone who has always moved at the speed of New York—that is, walking as if chased, talking like a tobacco auctioneer, eyes darting, heart racing, skeptical and alert even as he sleeps. But take him out to East Hampton in July and he becomes a peasant with neither clock nor calendar, whose temperament is calibrated at the speed New Yorkers know only when they’re dead. There, on the beaches, away from what he thinks he treasures, he is truly happy for a week or a month, until he makes the mistake of going back, although it is true that the city itself can make someone happy if, like the ocean, it is seen with awe.
At three o’clock, Catherine and Harry came in from the beach. For seven hours they had walked, they had swum in the bracing, boxing surf, and now they were burnished with sun and throbbing with health. Whatever reservations the Hales may have had because they still did not know Harry, his background, or his prospects—this was only the second time they had met him—these were held in abeyance as the young couple stood before them, a gift of nature in its prime, their youth, strength, and love enlivening the house like the summer colors that drifted through the rooms in yellows and blues.
“Will you stay for dinner?” Evelyn asked. Billy was content to remain mute. “We haven’t really had a chance to see you. Unfortunately, the Holmeses are coming, but because you went out last night and are leaving tomorrow we have no other time. They’ve been on the calendar since April, and since Rufus may die at any moment we really can’t cancel.”
“That’s fine,” said Catherine. “They’re horr
ible, but maybe he’ll fall asleep like last time, and we’ll all eat in absolute silence, hoping that he hasn’t slipped away. I suppose some people think that’s fun.”
“Rufus has some sort of mucous condition,” Evelyn said to Harry. “His heart goes to sleep and so does he. He can’t drive.”
“He’s a real live wire,” Catherine said, “like Pancho Villa.”
“And he has emphysema,” Evelyn added, “which makes him hard to hear, and when he talks he does so very slowly, especially when he’s smoking.”
“He’s a veritable amusement park,” said Catherine, “and when he’s awake his chief enjoyment is to stimulate a bitter argument among everyone around him.”
“Your father has known him since they were boys. You don’t turn your back on someone because they’re in ill health. There are many things about him—one thing in particular—that we find difficult, but we just let them pass. Souls are complicated things. No one is perfect, Catherine. Your father sees him as he knew him when they were children.”
“What thing in particular?” Catherine inquired.
Evelyn glanced at Billy, who said, “It has to do with your mother, but it’s ancient history.”
“Were you involved with him?” Catherine asked, alarmed.
Evelyn found this amusing. “No. Not Rufus. Really, Catherine, what do you think I am, a wildebeest?” Then, changing the subject, she said, “The lobsters were just delivered, but will you and Harry pick up the clams and the corn? Our corn isn’t ready yet, but the corn from further inland is. Because it’s hotter away from the ocean, the corn is sweeter.”
“Doesn’t Frank usually pick up the dinner things?”
“Yes, but his license was suspended last week—going too fast on the Montauk road again because he didn’t want the lobsters to die. We tell him that they’re hardier than that, but he grew up in an era before refrigeration.”
“Strange to see a Mercedes without bullet holes,” Harry said as he guided Billy’s open car through the lanes that led into town in paths of beige macadam, “and stranger yet to be driving one. I’ve actually shot at these a few times. This one’s in really good shape.”