"I don't look forward to supervising Wolf," I said. "You know I can't stand him."
"You won't be supervising him."
"Who's going to take his place?"
"No one."
"He's left?"
"No. You'll be working for him, though not directly. You'll report to Sherman Oscovitz."
"Oh no, oh no, oh my God," I said, and that was when they carried me down, because I wasn't able to walk.
Sherman Oscovitz was the supervisor of the gold handlers. He was a very nice man, but he was a moron. He had been with the firm even longer than I had, and his job was to keep track of the gold and shift it from cage to cage with the flows between accounts. He always wore a blue lab jacket, and his yellowish red hair was confined to a ring around a domelike bald head as perfectly symmetrical as the Pantheon.
He and every one of his vault workers had once been in trouble with the law. When he worked for a big commercial bank, Oscovitz had been caught renting out the little rooms where safe-deposit customers went to clip coupons. The others had been apprehended while peeking in a customer's box, or giving a friend the master key to the boxes while talking on the phone, or placing bets from banking premises—small-time stuff that Mr. Edgar had had the brilliance to spot as an immunization.
Oscovitz and his entire crew had been burned trying to pick a few shrimp off the grill, and were now as reliable as eunuchs. And just as exotic. Oscovitz himself, whether as a result of disease, diet, or heredity, was flatulent in the manner of kings. In normal circumstances, this would have been hard to bear, but in a bank vault ten stories underground.... Yes, we had ventilation, but not nearly enough.
Sherman Oscovitz's "protégé" was a hulking acromegalic giant who looked like Marlene Dietrich enlarged sixteen times and baked in a kiln. It was he who intoned my lessons in handling gold bars, telling me never to drop them, never to scrape them with a fingernail, and always to wear my white cotton gloves.
"Why?"
"Human body grease rots the gold."
That's ridiculous," I said. "Gold is inert. It won't rot—unless you sweat quicksilver."
"No, you're wrong. I've seen it get all rotten, and then we have to throw it away."
"You throw it away?"
"Yes."
"You throw it away."
"Uh huh, lots of it."
"Where do you throw it?"
"In the garbage can."
"Outside the vault?"
"Yes."
"What happens to it?"
"To what?"
"To the garbage."
"The garbage men take it."
"Do they know what's in it?"
"Yes, but they don't care about rotten gold. We explain to them that, because it's rotten, it's not worth anything. They complain because it's so heavy."
"How long have you been doing this?"
"Doing what?"
"Throwing away rotten gold."
"About three or four years. It never used to rot before then, but after the war a lot of bad-quality gold came in."
"How many bars a week do you throw away?"
"It depends. Sometimes six, sometimes two, sometimes ten."
"The next time you get some rotten gold," I told him, "give it to me. That way, the garbage men won't have to take it away."
"I can't do that."
"Why not?"
"Sherman says that rotten gold has to go into the garbage. If people get hold of it they might think it's valuable. You know how people are about gold. But not us!"
"No, not you!"
"You too!" he said, poking my chest and smiling. "Now you work here, too!"
The first time I was locked in a gold-cage—it was Argentina's—I felt very bad. Sherman had ordered me to rotate the Argentine gold and count it. I had to count and restack tens of thousands of gold bars.
We used scrap paper and a system of what Sherman called "variable check marks" to keep track. If, for example, you came up with thirty-five fewer bars than were supposed to be there, Sherman would pick up his pencil, add thirty-five check marks, and that was that. He never bothered to shuffle bars from one cage to another, because no one ever came to look. If anyone had, Sherman would have moved a few bars from here to there, and no one would have known the difference. The only danger lay in all the countries deciding to check their stocks simultaneously, and they had never even done so individually.
I was stunned not by the fact that close to a thousand twenty-seven-pound gold bars were missing, but that no one had stolen them: the simpletons had innocently thrown them away. At recent gold prices, they had disposed of almost $350 million.
I think, honestly, objectively, and without bias, that in that period I was actually insane. But I was supposed to have been insane, so I guess I was doing my job. After a few weeks of restacking bullion I was in extremely good condition, and the labor no longer tired me. I went to see Sherman Oscovitz mainly out of chagrin.
"Sherman," I said. "I've come to talk to you about the rotten gold."
"Oh?" he asked. "Did you find a piece?"
"No, I came to tell you that gold doesn't rot. It doesn't."
"Of course it does," he said.
"No. It doesn't. It does not rot."
"That's not true, Dave," he said. (My name is not Dave.) "We find bad pieces all the time."
"No, Sherman. It can't rot. It can tarnish when exposed to certain reagents, but only on the surface. It wouldn't be rotten inside."
"No?"
"No. It doesn't rot."
"We think it does. That's why we throw it away."
"I know you think it does. I understand. Tell me, what do you define as rotten?"
"We don't make it rot," he said, shaking his dome. "If you get one bad apple in a pile, then the others tend to follow."
"I know you don't make it rot, Sherman. What I'm asking is, how do you know it's rotten?"
"We see it."
"What do you see, exactly?"
"Rotten gold."
"What is rotten gold?"
"Gold that's rotten."
"Uh," (I thought for a moment), "tell me what it looks like."
"It's not shiny."
I waited for more, but he said nothing. "That's it?"
"What's it?" he asked, looking around.
"It's not shiny?"
"What's not shiny?"
"Rotten gold."
"That's right, Dave. That's how you know it's rotten." His eyes turned to the ceiling, as if to say, What an idiot!
"So, you mean that gold is rotten when it's not shiny."
"Now you're catching on," he said, "but that's not what makes it rotten. We don't know what makes it rotten."
"Sherman?"
"Yes?"
"You have an awful lot of rotten gold around here, don't you?"
"Yes, we do."
"Why don't you stack the rotten gold in compartment forty-eight, which is empty, and maybe it'll get better."
"I would never do that," he said. "As soon as I see a rotten piece, I throw it out. I don't want it to spread."
"Put it in a bag."
"A garbage bag?"
"Yes, a garbage bag."
"Are you kidding? Do you know how expensive those are?"
I gave up. For a while I ran after garbage trucks, but then I stopped. Although I tried, it was physically impossible to go through a fully loaded garbage truck in the few minutes allotted before it reached its home base. They dumped their loads onto a barge in the Hudson, and the gold returned to the sea, whence it had come, and how could I object?
If I hate anything, I hate being inside when the weather is nice. Even in storms and when it's cold I always prefer to walk the hills and weave through a forest of sunny clearings where no one has ever been, or where, at least, no one has ever stayed for more than a few minutes. I have never been happier than by a clear lake or stream, or upon a New England summit, watching the sun glint off well kept fields and silent towns. For this reason alone, never mind
the tribulations of working for an idiot, I began to go mad. Whereas I had seldom been in my office, and when I was I could open the window, I was now surrounded entirely by rock. Thunderstorms, blizzards, hurricanes, and clear days came and went, and we did not know it. In winter, I never saw daylight: I went down in the dark, and came up in the dark. Above his desk Oscovitz had a calendar with a picture of a cow standing on a Swiss mountainside. The depth, distance, and color were so beautiful that every time I looked at it I asked myself, "Why am I alive? What am I doing here?"
As a child I liked playing with blocks, and this was now my job, underground, in light that neither flickered nor changed. We restacked the gold to keep it fresh. If a gold bar remained too long in an airless place at the bottom of the pile, it would decay.
In anticipation of dropping one of the twenty-seven-pound ingots, our shoes were housed in magnesium shells, and of course we wore white gloves to protect the gold from our corrosive body grease. The bars were seven inches long, about three and a half inches wide, and one and three quarters inches high. Those cast in America were rectangular, and, in Europe, trapezoidal. Some were 100% pure, the color of Goldilocks' hair, others reddish and tinged with copper, and others white, having been contaminated with platinum and silver. I did not mind stacking gold, and never ceased to be amazed by its density and integrity. Though the fact that it was worth immense amounts of money may have clouded my view, I was most affected by its purity, its rarity, its smoothness and incorruptibility. It was an element, a noble of the periodic chart, and I was surrounded by thousands of tons of it, in walls that looked like the brickwork of heaven.
I soon discovered that the most striking difference between me and the morons was that they did not ask questions. They were uninterested in how things work, how facts had come to be, and the relationship of one thing to another. Indeed, they treated my questioning with hostility, because they could not supply me with answers and because they took my curiosity for sedition. Each and every one of my questions, it is true, was canted toward obtaining the information necessary for a robbery, but who would not have had such thoughts in similar circumstances? What kind of dead-on-its-feet, pusillanimous drone would it take to be trapped within the world's greatest concentration of wealth—buried with it, breathing it—and not give some thought to stealing it? The look the morons reserved for me was one of offended innocence, as if my line of inquiry were immoral.
We were surrounded by ten thousand tons of gold, not a single ounce of which had been coaxed from the earth in conditions of morality. It had been neither mined nor bought nor sold nor accumulated nor accepted in conditions of morality. Sherman Oscovitz lived in a one-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights, with neither a toilet nor a refrigerator. He ate at Nedick's on his way to and from work, and though he spent no money on anything but hot dogs, sauerkraut, and buttermilk, and though he wore a suit that was so cheap I wanted to pull it off his body, shred it, burn it, and put the ashes in sulfuric acid, his accumulated savings were only enough to buy, for example, one water ski, or three nights in a cheap hotel in Antwerp.
His discipline and poverty were devoted to the service of gold that belonged to sheiks who had slaves, and Latin dictators with a fondness for leather. Of what use was his honesty? What did it accomplish?
I only wanted to know about the electrical system, the security procedures, the depth of the rock, the architecture of the vault, the methods of accounting, and other intellectual questions relating to my environment, but had I continued that line of questioning I would have been expelled, so I became a mute observer.
There was no chance of taking the gold up and out. You couldn't sneak it out, for each person who entered the vault was weighed on a scale that was accurate to 1/1000th of an ounce. The exact humidity of the vault was recorded on a Gretzel Pisogram. That and the weight, metabolic characteristics, and tissue data about each vault worker were fed into an algorithm in a little office just outside the vault door. They knew exactly how much you would lose in transpiration, you were forbidden to pick your nose or spit, and if you weighed more on your way out than on your way in, they peered at you through a fluoroscope and checked your bodily crevices.
You could, of course, leave parts of yourself behind, but had you done that these would have been discovered, and, after all, how many people would be willing to trade slices of their flesh for dinner at Mamma Leone's or a cashmere coat?
The Cerberus who weighed us had a separate entrance, a secret address, and when the vault was closed he was spirited home in a car with blacked-out windows. No one ever spoke to him, he was incorruptible, and you could see by his bleached expression of vicious and arrested development that he lived for the chance of catching a violator and was as loyal and devoted as a Dominican abbot. Who can blame him, though, for letting the morons take the rotten gold, walk it right past him, and toss it in the garbage. He, too, thought it was rotten. Wouldn't you? I thought of this as an option, but Sherman said that all the gold I chose as rotten was perfectly sound.
Storming the vault was possible, but out the question for me. It would require a disciplined army of 150 men, and I have never been able to get along with even one. The steel door weighed ninety tons and was set in a 140-ton frame. It was tapered and airtight, and once it was closed even an army would not have been able to open it.
Tunneling was out, too. Cutting ten storeys down through Manhattan schist would have taken years of a construction project so large that Stillman and Chase would have had to float a bond issue to pay for it.
They had thought of everything. I even suspected that Sherman and his helpers had been lobotomized. They were so nice! They were always so pleasant! But in New York no one was like that unless he had had frontal brain surgery or was on the verge of stealing everything you possessed.
In my days of stacking bullion I waited for a sign, but no sign was forthcoming. I was entombed in a limpid sparkling pool of riches, which was also a physical metaphor for impossibility. No planning seemed an adequate match for the infinite precautions of the vault planners. Not unless it were founded on the spark of transgression itself.
As I waited, it occurred to me that this spark might never be generated, and that I might eventually become a sub-Oscovitz. Several decades hence (i.e., now), I would get the thrill of my life on the boardwalk in Coney Island when a fat widow would sit next to me and talk about French fries. Flushed and hyperventilating, I would ride home on the subway, overcome with lust and awe, and the memory and feeling would have to last for the rest of my life.
Deep in the gold vaults I would reflect upon that partly cloudy day in July when we talked about French fries and I observed her cleavage. I would remember as part of the legend the godlike state I had achieved on my way home, when I glowed like the filament in a lightbulb. And every time I heard the faint rumble of the subway below the vault, I would ... I would....
That was it! I jumped into the air like an electrocuted cat. I was sitting at the back of compartment 71, resting from a heavy lift, when it came to me. Everything fell into place at once. The Swede who was in maintenance of way with the Transit Authority, and the familiar-looking coffee-hater at the Blue Mill, both Smedjebakken. And I, sitting deep under the ground surrounded by the gold of atrocious sheiks. My need to save myself from becoming an Oscovitz. The vision of life ending in a small lonely room in the infinity of Brooklyn. The courage of Smedjebakken on the roof. His hatred of coffee. And the rumble of the subway beneath the vault.
Robbing an establishment such as Stillman and Chase was not without its risks, but as I equated failure to rob Stillman and Chase with death itself I did not have to fight for resolve. With luck and divine guidance, which sometimes come by the bucketful when you really need them, Smedjebakken and I would bankrupt those arrogant coffee-drinking bastards, and they would not even know it until we were halfway around the world, in a clean quiet country where coffee was all but unknown.
Poisoned by Champagne
(If you
have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
I FOUND SMEDJEBAKKEN in Astoria, living under his pseudonym, Massina. His wife was a career woman who would brook no nonsense. When she met me at the door of their modest row house she was turned out like a Wall Street lawyer—with suit, scarf, and brooch, all of the highest quality. I assumed that she had just come from Manhattan, with a Florentine-leather briefcase full of legal documents. I was wrong, but I did not discover this until later.
"What can I do for you?" she asked. She was severe in a way that her husband never would be. He had been born to fight a mythical battle that was denied to him, and he was saving his strength and his power for a time that might never come, while she seemed to have been suited to make efforts in a lesser world that failed to interest him.
"I'm looking for Smedjebakken," I said.
Her expression changed immediately. When she heard her husband's real name she assumed that I was someone from his past, who might, perhaps, excite his Viking sensibilities.
"He's in the back," she said, cooling to me. "Horowitz is buying a piano."
"I beg your pardon?"
"This evening, Vladimir Horowitz is buying a piano. He's picked two, and will play one, and then the other, until he decides. This happens several times a week, but it's not often that we get a Horowitz."
"Buying a piano from you?" I asked.
She looked at me as if I were an idiot. "From Steinway," she said. "The test studio faces our backyard. We look slightly down into it, and in all except the late fall and winter months they open the French doors."
"Ah," I said. "What a pity to miss it in the winter."
"We don't," she replied. I could see that she was beginning to form an extremely low opinion of me. "In winter, Paolo sits in the studio. They keep his lawn chair and table there. He drinks tea and eats rusks while he listens, just as he does in the summer."