Read Memoir From Antproof Case Page 25


  "Swedish," he said, moving decisively to anchor himself on the lightning rod.

  I climbed down him and, after holding his ankles for several minutes while he kicked my face and implied that I was a chicken, straightened out and let go. I slid for a few long seconds until the soles of my feet connected with the ledge.

  Then he let go as if he were only a few feet above the ground, and I brought him in like a pole.

  "Now what?" he asked, not quite sure of our mission.

  "We turn around." We turned around. Though the fire escape was just six feet below, it was only two and a half feet wide, and unless we leaned out dangerously, we couldn't see it. I felt as if an unseen force were pushing me off the ledge and into the void. Though of course I had to resist it, I also tried not to offend it.

  "What's next?" I was asked.

  I improvised. "We drop to the fire escape and rush him."

  "He has a gun. You go first."

  "If he hits you, you won't necessarily die," I stated.

  "Still, you go first."

  "No no," I said. "It's safer for the one who goes first. It will shock him, and he'll aim for the second guy."

  "Even so, you go first."

  "All right, if you insist," I said.

  "Good. I'll follow soon after. When I drop, he'll turn from you. Then you rush him."

  I agreed to this. At that point I suppose I would have agreed to anything.

  I waved my arms for the police to stop firing, and when they did, I dropped. Because I thought I would miss the fire escape and fall to my death, going off the edge was much harder even than my first parachute jump, when at least I had a parachute. But I was lucky. I landed not only on the fire escape but on the rifle, pivoting it like a lever resting upon the fulcrum of the windowsill. It struck the sniper in the jaw with a blow that knocked him back into the room.

  The next thing I knew, the Swede landed next to me, full force, on his behind. He seemed unhurt, though slightly stunned.

  I took the rifle and tossed it gallantly over my head. Seconds later I heard it clatter on the pavement.

  "Why did you do that, you idiot!" the Swede screamed.

  "He's unconscious," I said confidently. A second passed.

  "No he's not," the Swede announced, dodging to the side as the sniper tried to impale him with a bayonet.

  "Cut it out!" I shouted. Then the sniper lunged at me. I backed up and felt the rail slam against my shoulders. "Cut it out!"

  This had an effect, and he froze. I saw him for the first time. I must say that I was surprised, and that he didn't fit my preconception of a sniper. He was about 5'3" tall, with thinning red hair and red beard, and his eyes, which were the most unusual pop eyes I've ever seen, made him look like a man who was being strangled.

  "Pressure on your neck!" I yelled as I dived through the window, to my regret. I found myself in his apartment, or office—whatever it was—and this was not where I wanted to be. The floor was two feet deep with the decomposed remnants of food and coffee grounds. A pot of coffee bubbled on the stove, and paper plates of roast fowl were scattered around, some perhaps a day old, some perhaps as old as a year. It was like being in a three-dimensional time lapse film of a decomposing chicken.

  Rising from the floor in disgust, I tried not to vomit. No good vomiting when someone is about to rush you with a bayonet. I could see that the bathtub was half-full of some kind of green slime, and that above the toilet was a picture of Al Jolson, with a throwing knife stuck in the throat.

  Near the stove was domelike birdcage in which lay the bones of a dead parrot, and on the front door was a calendar from January, 1922, that said, "To do...."

  My friend jumped in the window, and his first words were, "This is disgusting. This guy is disgusting."

  The sniper started to move his feet underneath him, which propelled him toward me. I dodged out of the way as if I were evading a punch, and he ran into the wall, but he turned in a flash. He was extremely agitated.

  "Don't you ever clean up?" I asked.

  "Don't tell me to clean up!" he shouted, in the only words I would ever hear him say.

  "I'm not telling you to clean up, I'm asking if you ever do."

  This drove him crazy. "Don't tell me to clean up!" he screamed, flailing at me, samurai-style, with the bayonet. He was quick, he was fast, and he was going to kill me.

  As it churned the air, the blade made a wonderful sound, and no wonder. It was the only clean thing in the apartment. I backed up, mesmerized. Then the Swede charged from the side, but the horrible messy guy made a move as quick as a trout taking a fly, and cut the Swede's face, from which blood shot as if it were being pumped. He collapsed into the filth.

  Then the sniper turned to me again, and I watched the windmill advance. I could not go around it, I could not fly above it, and I could not dive below it. I was very frightened at first. I thought I was going to die just like one of the chickens rotting on the floor.

  As he moved close enough so that I was breathing the air pushed by the blade, I understood that the only thing I could do was to absorb the thrust of the bayonet, remain on my feet, and grab that son of a bitch's throat. His pop eyes were his destiny, and I would fulfill it for him even as I bled.

  The bayonet struck me in the side. The cut was deep, but I did not feel it at first. Then he thrust it into my shoulder. I prayed in a flash that no arteries were severed, and I grasped his neck. He tried to withdraw the bayonet, but, for him, the distance between us would be fixed forever.

  Never had I been so determined. But what choice did I have? All my strength flowed into my hands. Then I heard the pitter patter of little feet on the fire escape. It didn't matter. It was the police. That didn't matter either. By the time they arrived inside, grimacing at what they beheld, the filthy little pop-eyed sniper was hanging from my hands, his eyes bulging, his flesh as white as a cloud.

  I failed to get to the Brooklyn Trust that day, and Eugene B. Edgar, the richest man in America, cut my salary in half. But it didn't matter, for in the Depression even half my salary was a princely sum.

  The Spark of Transgression

  (If you have not done so already, please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

  WHEN I RETURNED to my rooms on the top floor of the Hassler I held yet another bottle of ice-cold mineral water by the neck: first in my right hand, and then in the left as I opened the door. A woman had stayed in the suite before I took it, and the scent of a high quality perfume clung to unexpected places—I found it on my hands after I cranked up the awning, and I spent a highly charged minute sniffing the base of the telephone.

  It was not a perfume that Constance used, but of a rank elevated enough to bring home to me that she was gone. I went onto the terrace, put my feet up, and began to drink the water. Called Aqua Impala, it was sharp and sweet. Late at night Rome was silent but for the sound of wind moving through the trees in the Villa Borghese. Fountains splashing coldly in the summer air echoed off buildings that still held the day's heat in their ocher-colored walls.

  On my small terrace were planters filled with black earth and blooming flowers, and the stars that blazed over the Tyrrhenian lent to the night a soft mysterious light full of excitement and promise. Many a time I have contented myself for more hours than I dare admit, sinking into the slow but perfect rhythms of sunlight or stars, watching birds, or the plume of a fountain, or stalks of corn swaying in the golden air of a silent August afternoon.

  It reminded me that, in the late Twenties and throughout the Thirties, I had to stay in New York during most of the summer, and on weekends I would walk the abandoned streets of lower Manhattan, where you could hear a pigeon from five blocks away as it rose into the stifling air. It was on benches in parks that had no name, alone on vacant Sundays, that I found my resolution.

  And why not? I grew up on a farm, where I stayed until I was ten years of age, and there I took directly from nature and without difficulty what whole populations, lacking
such privilege, decry as having vanished, what philosophers struggle to find in a lifetime of labor, and what I could see, knowing nothing, with one glance into a sunlit stream.

  I have done well at times (and very badly at others) in society and at games of worth and dominance. But in the world of tilled landscapes run like lace with tracts of forest and rebellious creeks, in the world of broad fields and bright uninhabited bays, I invariably find solace and strength. It is where I have always wanted to be, even if I am seldom there, and it is where I will only chance to die on some windy perfect day like those I loved as a child.

  For a brief hour on my terrace at the Hassler I was my own man again, or, rather, a boy, able to plot my course with the kind of dead certainty common to those who know exactly who they are, what they love, where they have been, and where they are going.

  I knew what I had to do, though I was still puzzled as to why, and in the sad and tranquil Roman night I was left alone with the bottle of mineral water to translate my natural understanding into terms I could comprehend when strength and serenity were gone.

  Unless you count as felonies innocuous actions such as overturning coffee urns, putting mice in the bins of coffee beans at the A&P, and the reflexive punching of waiters and waitresses who put coffee next to me while I'm eating, I had never committed a crime.

  The murder for which I had been convicted was strictly self-defense, and in that I was. given no choice. Had my attacker been anything but a Belgian, and were the Huns not to have chosen Belgium to trample first, I would have been acquitted. Should not a perpetually inebriated judge be grounds for a determination of mistrial? It was the system of justice that was at fault, not I. I was merely a child attacked without reason by a large coffee-drinking adult.

  And the pop-eyed guy? That was violent, but hardly a crime. The police arrested me and the Swede, held us for a time, and then released us in the middle of the night with neither charge nor comment. A number of officers were awarded commendations for heroically suppressing a threat to public safety, and they did not have to explain why the sniper had died by asphyxiation, because when they arrived upon the scene they shot at the body for a full minute, driving bullets into the carcass in the same way that an explorer plants a flag at the top of a peak or on a palm-fringed beach.

  The character of the police department of the City of New York was an important factor in my calculations, for the looting of Stillman and Chase would take place, of course, in New York. Which was encouraging, for most of the department had no connection with crime except on a random basis. They were a costumed career bureaucracy that, with the exception of some saints and heroes, did the minimum required to make it look as if they were doing what they were supposed to have been doing.

  Whether they learned this from the other city bureaucracies, whether they exported it, or whether at some dim time in history—perhaps in the age of the dinosaurs—everyone learned it simultaneously, was immaterial: they were corrupt, they were ineffective, they did not come when called, they were incompetent, they were unconscious, they were asleep, and they were New York's finest.

  These defamations were valid for street crime, crimes of passion, parking offenses, and armed assault, but they were especially valid for the kind of high-level financial crime I contemplated, for of the vast armies of blue-coated soldiers, only a few (and perhaps none) were not astonishingly deferential to the Wasp mores and institutions that made up the Wall Street overworld that was clearly beyond their ken.

  How would a New York detective in the early 1950's react to a crime of arbitrage and straddling other than to think it was a violent sex perversion? Even were the violation more straightforward, the received wisdom was that the elite would take care of it among themselves. So, as far as police interference was concerned, I concluded that even if not completely in the clear, I had a gargantuan head start.

  As for the moral justification, really, one need not strain to find justification for robbing an investment bank, at least as they were when I knew them. They were caste-restricted highly ef ficient cartels that escaped competition and maintained their position by relying upon reams of regulations and unfathomable established customs. The regulations were written by appointed and elected politicians either in the pay of these firms or soon to join them. The customs were protected by networks of cronies and middle-level clerks on the take.

  In the Treasury markets the Fed gave Stillman and Chase a license to steal. It was a closed system that took money from the many and returned it to only a few, without affording to the many either choice or benefit. As a boy runner, I marveled at the way securities were traded. A broker would take an order from a school teacher or a milkman—a hundred shares of International Pickle at $5 apiece. The broker would say, 'I'll let you know by the close of the market if I can get that price.' He might then wait for the stock to drop to four dollars, buy it, and sell it to the milkman for five. Or he might buy the stock at five, watch it go up, sell it at six, and tell the milkman he had been unable to obtain it for five. In both cases the client was providing a guarantee for the broker's trading. I saw it happen a million times. Stillman and Chase did exactly this, and not only with money from the milkman but with pension funds, endowments, and municipal treasuries.

  Within the organization itself, reward had less to do with performance than position. Clerks and runners lived on a pittance and sometimes risked their lives, while the top echelon prided themselves on how a word here or a word there could churn a billion dollars and create a fortune in commissions. Though it was not the same thing, it reminded me of the way thieves pride themselves in appropriating at one fell swoop what it may have taken a man all his life to earn. For those who would condemn the partners of Stillman and Chase more than common thieves, I say, judge them not by their take but by their dishonesty. Whereas the value of material things fluctuates, disappears, the constancy of honesty is well known, and cannot be made to vary.

  Stillman and Chase had a particularly filthy habit, though not as refined as that of its Swiss counterparts, of husbanding the blood money of tyrants and sheiks. It was the vault of slave kingdoms on the Arabian Sea and Latin American dictatorships enamored of boots, belts, and bandoliers.

  I neither needed money nor wanted it. I had had an ocean of it and it had hardly mattered to me. All I ever wanted, really, was to build a barrier between myself and coffee. And I was not obsessed with striking at Stillman and Chase. They were indefensible, but if I robbed them I would not be making the world either a better or a worse place. I decided then, on the terrace of my room at the Hassler, as Roman owls hooted at the shooting stars, that I was going to rob Stillman and Chase because it was there, because this was the right thing to do, because it would bring a ray of sunshine into my life, because virtue was its own reward, because of ars gratia artis, and because excelsior timidus protectat.

  During the war the Swiss foreign minister protested to the American ambassador that an American warplane had violated Swiss neutrality by entering the country from the northeast, following the valley of the Rhine, and circling the Matterhorn at close proximity not once, twice, or three times, but six times—in figure eights, loops, and barrel rolls. The entire population of Zermatt had been transfixed, and several herds of goats stopped giving milk for days.

  Who do you think it was that upset the goats? I did. I did it because I thought I was going to die. Having done it, however, I knew somehow that I was going to live. In breaking the rules, I broke other things too, including the veils of falsehood that cover the truth like thunderclouds.

  Were the world perfect it would always be wrong to trespass, but as the world is not perfect, sometimes one must. And when you do, you live, you break free, you fly. But you must do it responsibly, you must not injure the innocent. Then, at least before they catch you, it works.

  I know that this is true, and the reason it is true, I believe, is that the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God.

  The next
morning, though I had stayed up most of the night and I was half a century old, I was full of energy. I strode to the front desk with the assurance and bravado I had had ten years earlier as an airman in the very same city. Although my plans had not solidified, my intentions were set. All that remained was to find a way, to hatch a plot, and I imagined that this would be quite enjoyable. Perhaps I would chance upon a brilliant scheme as I walked about the city that day. After all, I had been directed to the idea itself by my accidental encounter with the singers.

  My luggage was sent through directly to the Georges V in Paris, and I was free until the train left. I had routed myself through Frankfurt rather than San Remo, for I knew that I would sleep well in the cool air of the Alps. It always was the same: leave Rome at 5:00 P.M., dinner in Milan, snowfields before darkness, a sound and perfect sleep under the virgin wool blankets of Wagons hits as glacial air poured through the open window.

  I would arrive in Paris by afternoon, shower, and walk the city until dark, sitting on a bench in Passy as I read Le Monde, observing with paternal joy the ranks of school children in blue uniforms, and then buying a tie at Hermès to go with the suits I would pick up at my tailor in London. Perhaps in Paris I would meet a woman with whom I might fall in love, although I considered myself too old in many respects for that kind of thing, and would feel this way until I was reborn with the shock of plummeting into Brazil.

  All this while I drew my salary and qualified for the bonus. The work itself, when I did it, consisted of meeting with political egomaniacs who spoke not one un-self-serving word, and had less an idea of the state of their country's polity and economy than might a blind chicken on a provincial farm. Resident Stillman and Chase money people were there with the figures and proposals: I was the exposure guru. They used me to figure out the risk and, therefore, the charges, in floating a loan. I had a sterling record, and had never been wrong. My technique was simple. I looked at the fundamentals, I read everything I could, I paid great heed to history, and I talked to the people that investment bankers seldom talk to—small farmers, masons, students, policemen, factory workers, engineers, fishermen, dentists, and women hanging out the wash. From them I gauged the hope and corruption that determine a country's momentum, or lack of it.