When I pointed out to him that we had long been in a position second to none, he raised his old leathery turtle head from a starched white collar, rotated it a quarter turn both left and right, lowered it, and said, "Just multiply that by eight."
I was not a senior partner then, in fact not even a partner. I was peripheral to a cabal of sycophants that had won Eugene B. Edgar's favor and needed a person much lower than themselves to be kicked. When mules are slapped on the nose, they kick, and my job was to stand in back of them.
I was, even at the age of thirty, a glorified errand boy. This made sense, as I had started as a runner, whereas most of the important people at the firm had crossed over laterally from Harvard, Yale, or other firms, and had never done anything lowly in their lives.
But I, too, had gone to Harvard. I was a half-caste—harmless and embraceable, repulsive and eschewed. Further complicating my status was that I was not a veteran of the Great War, having been, unlike Eugene B. Edgar in the Civil War, just too young. And I had spent the most glorious part of my youth not at Groton but in a mental institution. This, however, I handled with such nervous brilliance that I shake to this day in remembering it.
I would be in the midst of a croquet match, or hiking out during a yacht race, when someone might say, "I know you went to Harvard, but where did you prep?"
Harvard was necessary, but still plebeian. The real qualification was St. Paul's, Groton, or five or six others, which established your caste. I prepped in a nut hatch, but I sailed over the trap every time. All I had to say was, "At Château Parfilage."
"Really!" they would say. "In Switzerland?"
"The Bernese Oberland. Great skiing, and Paris was only a hop away."
One day in the middle of May of 1934, I found myself with a group of sycophants and Mr. Edgar at a lunch in the executive dining room of Stillman and Chase. I could hardly hear him, especially as he spoke faintly and was used to people striving to pick up his every word.
The sun was streaming in through the windows, but coolly, as if the azure sky were ice. I felt as strong as a man of thirty will feel. I was not following the conversation, for my attention was lost upon the beams of light and the passing of the clouds. And then I heard my name.
"Yes sir?" I said. I had been called by the great man himself.
"You like to walk about, don't you."
"I do, sir. How did you know?"
"I see you walking now and then, and, each time, it is clear from the color of your face that you've been out in the air for many hours. I saw you in East Hampton, on the beach, at Thanksgiving. You didn't see me. I was inside the Maidstone Club, with a telescope. I saw you holding one of the ropes in the Macy's Parade (this was ridiculous: I never did any such thing), and I saw you striding down Madison Avenue at the little hill where we used to keep our milk cows."
He appeared to be amused, and we waited as an ancient recollection swelled up and died down. "I wish I had the body and the bones," he said, "to walk twenty miles, or run down a hillside, leaping fallen trees and sliding on the dirt. You turn from side to side, you know, like a skier."
We all smiled. Even the sycophants were genuinely pleased.
"Here's a question for you. What's the name of the bank in Brooklyn on the northeast corner of Montague and Clinton?"
"The Brooklyn Trust, sir," I answered. That was easy.
"Go there," I was told by Eugene B. Edgar. "In that building is a young man who works as a loan officer. I'm told that he knows every inch of commercial and industrial real estate in Brooklyn, and the ins and outs of every company or trust that owns anything. Hire that man. With him, we'll know exactly what to buy and exactly how much to bid for it."
"What's his name?" I asked.
"I once knew, but I forgot."
"Are you sure he can be trusted to stand by us?" someone asked.
"Of course I'm sure. He's my nephew," was the reply.
"And what shall I offer him?" was my next question.
"Go as far as to triple your salary, whatever that is."
I could see that Mr. Edgar wanted to cast bread upon the waters, so I took a chance and asked, "In the meantime, may I double my salary?"
"Yes, if you bring him in," pronounced the richest man in America. "If you don't, your salary will be cut in half."
The next day, I left for Brooklyn at ten in the morning. Most people are optimistic when they awake, and I have observed a noticeable spike in optimism after the executives and staff of an enterprise imbibe their coffee. Fifteen to twenty minutes after they lower themselves to this, they are euphoric. Even as they touch the cesspool cup to their lips, an angelic expression sweeps across their faces. 10:30 to 11:00 A.M. is the best time to float a proposition among addicts. I would strike then.
I took the wrong subway—I always take the wrong subway when I go to Brooklyn; everyone does, even people who live there—and found myself on the other side of downtown. Still, I thought, I can make it. In fact, it was possible that were I a little late the euphoria at the Brooklyn Trust would rise to an even higher pitch. I hurried along, bounding up the curbs and leaping from them.
Ahead I saw an uncharacteristic knot of people, a line blocking the street, and sidewalks that looked like what you see from the side streets of Manhattan when a parade is moving up an avenue. I'll have to go around, I thought, and made a detour. But at the next corner the crowd was just as thick, and people were straining against police lines. Beyond the barricade, the area around Borough Hall was closed off and full of police cars. Now and then I heard fusillades of shots as in a battle, and from a distance the wailing of sirens criss-crossed the city and sent confusing echoes from the walls of stone and glass.
Not twenty feet beyond the lines was a figure lying motionless on the ground, with a young girl crouched over it, sobbing. The man, who was dead, wore the blue smock of someone who worked in a shoeshine parlor or as a custodian in a hive of bureaucrats, and the child who would not let him go was a girl of seventeen or eighteen. A schoolbag was still hanging from her shoulder, although half the books had scattered out and were lying on the ground nearby, some open, their pages riffling in the breeze.
The man had woolly white hair, and even as she rocked slowly back and forth, he was still, having come to his final rest. A woman next to me cried, but no one went into the plaza, as the girl was a colored girl and her father a colored man. It was not so unforgivable that no one had moved to bring the girl from the plaza. Who would pull her away from her father? Not I.
My heart went out to that girl, for I knew that in these moments her life would be cast into a hopeless story of stubborn devotion, an exhausting argument with God, an existence apart from all others, a long and sad meditation on fate, and purpose, and love.
The sound of the guns brought up my strength, as it always has. Their cracks and booms banish from me every fear and care, and each time I hear them I feel an ancestral soldier stir from within, ready to march as required.
An ambulance broke the ranks in which I was standing, the barricades fanned out, and I walked through with the mien of a police inspector: that is, with quick and bothered steps and a troubled, angry expression. Only one uniformed officer sought to question me, and I turned to him with immeasurable impatience and said, "Houlihan, Manhattan South." Maybe there was a Houlihan from Manhattan South.
The police were crouched like idiots behind cars that, except with the engine or the wheels, would never stop a rifle bullet. I remained standing as I surveyed the open plaza ahead, in which lay three bodies—two women and a man—untended.
"Houlihan," I said, "Manhattan South. Someone tell me about this, quick."
And someone did. A sniper had barricaded himself on the top floor of a building across the plaza. He had killed at least seven people, and, as anyone could hear, he was firing like mad into the interior of Brooklyn, where sound trucks had begun cruising the streets but where—New Yorkers being New Yorkers—everyone was still very much in evidence and expos
ed.
"If he's shooting out at the Brooklyn roads," I asked, "why are all of you hiding behind tin down here?"
"He shoots at us, too," a cop said. It was clear that as long as I was the most exposed participant, they would doubt that I was an official. Officials are supposed to stand in the line of fire, but it isn't actually a requirement. It's more of an option.
Although they didn't know it, I was no more exposed than were they, and it wasn't really that dangerous anyway. The sniper was now agitated and aimless. Were he to fire at me he would undoubtedly miss, and at that moment he was shooting only in the direction of the Spanish Monument, hundreds of feet over my head. Also, I was driven to meet his bullets, and had one smashed into me it would have been the fulfillment of my destiny. Destiny breaks the surface near crime. Those who spend their lives in slippers ridicule the idea of destiny, but in a rain of bullets, or even just a shower, destiny is everything: it becomes palpable, you feel it the way you feel the hot sun or a hurricane wind. Had I died that day I would have been content. Had I sunk onto a pavement covered with my own blood, I would have felt as comforted as a child finally taken into its mother's arms.
"Who's in there?" I asked, speeding up because the sergeant in charge was looking at me the way a bulldog looks at a man who is doing a bulldog imitation.
"And who are you?" he said, breaking my thin ice.
"Houlihan, Manhattan South."
"I don't know you," he said. "And why is that?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Where's your badge?" he challenged, still propped up against the wheel of a car like a drunk trying to kiss a wall. I knew that with the bullets whistling by, even so far overhead, he would dare not move.
"I don't wear jewelry," I said.
"Christ Almighty," he declared, "we've got one more lunatic."
"I'm not a lunatic," I told him. "I'm an investment banker."
"You're under arrest!" he screamed, floridly.
I stepped into the open, where I was born to be. The sniper saw me and began to direct a methodical stream of bullets in my direction. They ricocheted off the pavement, smashing the glass in the police cars. The cars were square then, with big windows.
I kept moving, so that the sniper could not correct his fire. He was off by several feet with each shot, laterally, and by almost that in range.
"Get in here you stupid son of a bitch!" the sergeant shouted. He tried to sound very authoritative, but in the bullet shower he was a gerbil.
"Make me," I said.
He closed his eyes and moaned.
"Give me a gun," I commanded.
"You'd need explosives," the sergeant said, trying to reason with me. "He's got the fire doors bolted and barred."
"I'll go up the fire escape," I said.
"You're crazy."
"Look, he's killed seven people already," I told the sergeant, rather full of rage for someone who was so calm. "What do you want to do, wait for a tank that climbs up the side of buildings?"
"You leave that to us!" he bellowed.
"No. I can't."
I ran across the plaza, jumping over benches, dodging left or right depending only upon the way my heart told me to turn, and as I ran the shots got closer and I could see the rifle barrel, the flashes. The police opened up. It sounded like a city trying to throw back planes—although, at the time, I had never heard that sound. Just before I reached the safety of an overhanging ledge, I realized that I might not get to the Brooklyn Trust before the end of banking hours.
Well, so what, I thought. I felt alive and angry in that wonderful taxing way in which you feel alive and angry when someone is firing a gun at you. I suppose that, early on, the wires in my brain were crossed, because when someone shoots at me I tend not to run away from the gun but toward it. I feel then, and only then, peace and joy. Even when I flew, when the world seemed full of light and all its edges were so well defined that they glowed like silver, I myself did not come afire until the sound of the cannon, and then it was as if a switch had been thrown and the lights of a great city had all come on at once.
After a moment of brief reflection and prayer, I ran to the side of the building and leapt up to the fire escape ladder. I thought my tremendous jump was, somehow, funny, and I weakened with laughter as I hung from the last rung of the ladder until I almost lost my grip. Then I scolded myself and began to climb. I think that if the sniper had been aware of my chortlings and ya-hoos he might have surrendered, but he was too far above me and probably too crazed to hear.
The fire escape dripped with chunks of masonry, iron, and lead, like a shot tower, or a waterfall breaking through a tangle of fallen trees. Each spent bullet, chip of stone, or piece of iron rail jingled not once or twice but a hundred times as it fell, striking different surfaces at different angles and velocities in a great concert of chimes and clinks. I myself was the only upward-moving pachinko ball pushing against this fragmented tide, rising story by story. It was perfectly safe. Because of the kindly suppressive fire of the police, the sniper was unable to shoot downward.
He was on the tenth floor, and when I got to the ninth, I stopped. Even I will not go straight at a gun at close range in a narrow field. There's no joy in that. I followed the fire escape as it wrapped around the building. Only then did I go up to the tenth floor. But you couldn't just round the corner, for the tenth-floor catwalk stopped abruptly at a turret window. I might have tiptoed across the ledge, but the sniper would have seen me in the window, shot through the glass, and I would have died like a bird in flight.
I climbed the roof until I sat at the very top, at the peak of a wedge of slate shingles, with my feet hanging out over the slope. To get to the ledge above the fire escape where the sniper had positioned his rifle, I would have to slide about twelve feet down the slate. I couldn't see beyond the end of the slide except to the plaza a hundred feet below.
My problem was how to get there without being launched into space in the last and most spectacular toboggan ride of my life. I had come to a dead end. I was on a narrow windblown projection 110 feet above the street, and a hundred guns were firing with astonishing imprecision at a target just a few feet below me. Every now and then a slug would smash a shingle, and pieces of slate jingle over the ledge and through the fire escape.
I didn't know what to do, so I waited, and as I waited my former happiness and ferocity boiled down into fear. I began to experience what Marlise calls Impetigo, by which she means an overpowering fear of heights, so I clung to a lightning rod, staring at my distorted reflection in the glass ball, hoping that something would happen and that the weather would not change. The firing intensified as reinforcements from other boroughs began to use tommy guns. These are short-range weapons of dubious accuracy. Lines of slugs whistled through the air and to the sides, shattering the slate. I thought that the ribs of the roof might be exposed by this excavating fire, which would allow me to climb down to the ledge. But for that to happen, I, too, would have to be excavated.
Then I heard a voice say, "Don't do it."
I looked around, still grasping the lightning rod. Hanging on to the wedge of the roof on the lee side of the firing was a stocky, bespectacled, sandy-haired man of approximately my age. I was, of course, preoccupied, and the last thing on my mind was the size of his ears. He had larger than normal ears, although I did not notice them until, many years afterward, he pointed to them and told me that they had been the coffee of his life, and that he was convinced that everyone on the street, especially beautiful women, saw them as clearly as if they were the Rock of Gibraltar. Apart from the ears, he looked like a young version of Father Flanagan. Of course, at the time, Father Flanagan was a young version (and, one hopes, a young virgin), and no one knew what he looked like, except those around him and possibly Spencer Tracy by instinct alone.
Though I thought he meant for me not to go after the sniper, he was under the impression that I was about to kill myself. "I have my reasons," I said.
"
They're never good enough."
"How do you know?"
"I work for the Transit Authority."
"I understand," I said. "That makes you as infallible as the Pope."
"No. I'm in Maintenance of Way. My job includes talking down the suicides. I've never heard a good enough reason (from someone healthy enough to climb a hundred feet up a suspension cable) for ending one's life."
"I'm not a jumper."
"I suppose you work up here," he said, looking at my Savile Row suit and Peale shoes.
"Of course I don't."
"So why are you here?"
"To get the son of a bitch below."
"The devil?"
"I don't know who he is. Why do you think the police are firing a hundred guns in our direction?"
"A hundred what?"
Because of the wind, he could hear nothing from my side of the roof. I will never forget his expression as he looked over and saw the army below.
"What did you do," he asked, "double-park?"
I can think of no other explanation but that this man had been sent by an angel. He had seen me from a Transit Authority building and, assuming that I was about to take my life, had come to dissuade me. Having talked down many jumpers from bridges and elevated platforms, and persuaded others to remove their necks from the rails forward of onrushing trains, he was unafraid of heights and accustomed to great danger. Half the subway in New York runs on trestles and over bridges, and he spent his days deep in tunnels and high in the air.
"How do we get down to that ledge without flying off into space?" I asked.
He peered intently over the ridge of the roof. "It's simple," he said. "I'll hang on to the lightning rod, and you climb down me like a ladder. Then, when you're safe, I'll slide, you catch my feet, and lower me as if you were taking in a pole."
"You're Polish?" I asked.