If at the stone balcony rail you were not overcome by upwelling scent, you could see the surf, the white sand, and hundreds of half-nude recumbent women lying in the sun. On clear nights the stars came up in quiet brilliance, and when the moon was full it made a mother-of-pearl highway across the bay, lighting the waters to either side with a glow that revealed swells driven shoreward by warm wind.
My kitchen was well stocked and deliberately primitive: it was open to the courtyard in the back, like a balcony, and the drain was in the floor. I had a desk, a lamp, a filing cabinet, and a shelf with stationery, but no telephone.
"What are you going to do here?" Smedjebakken asked as we sat in the light of a fading afternoon.
"Why do you ask?"
"It's too good. You'll die. You know, the way they do in Florida."
"I'll figure out a challenge."
"Like what?"
"Like eradicating all the coffee plants in Brazil."
"You can't do that, and you know it."
"You're right."
"Then what will you do?"
"Just live."
"No such thing," Smedjebakken said. "You have to have something from which you can plan to escape."
"Memories."
"You can't escape them."
"Maybe I'll get married and have children, and I can start over. Meanwhile I'll read, go to the beach, and try to keep thin."
"You're as thin as a thread."
"After two weeks of tapir kabobs, anyone would be as thin as a thread. But that can't last forever, and we are of an age where we tend to get chubby."
"I don't care," Smedjebakken said. "I'm a family man. I don't have to worry about twenty-year-old girls who want me to look like a galley slave."
"What are you going to do?"
"You know what I'm going to do. You were with me."
"Only as far as Scotland."
"We go in a boat from Glen Larne. Then we disappear."
On the morning of the day it was done, I awoke in the house in Astoria knowing I would never see New York again. In some ways this was a blessing, and in some ways not. I have heard—and seen in photographs and films—that the city has lost its civility. It was always a difficult place, but its inhabitants knew to compensate for that with a rough sincerity and warmth that I left in full bloom, never imagining for a second that it would or could vanish.
On my last ride on the RR train I looked almost as lovingly at the faces and expressions of my fellow passengers as if I were staring at a photograph of times long past. They did not know that they made a photograph. They did not understand the vanishing background of their lives: the breeze that rustles the leaves in Union Square and Central Park, and the sunshine reflecting hotly from a meadow of golden windows; the valleys of rooftop water tanks; the spiderwork fire escapes; the vanishing wakes of ferries and tugs that churn across the harbor and leave drift lines of the whitest snow even in the hottest summer. They seemed so completely unaware of these monuments, markers, and memorials.
I loved the city. My blood was there, my family. I had left it and come back so many times that what I felt for it must have been love. I had seen it in wartime, I had seen it rich and kinetic and enraptured, I had seen it in gun-metal gray after a blizzard, and I had seen it in the Depression, when the streets were filled with wood fires like the roads leading from medieval cities—all quiet, expectant, waiting for a ray of light, as humble and perfect as a young child.
I had seen all this and loved it, and now I was on my way. I was saddened as I took in thousands of scenes that I would leave behind, but I knew the value of a final moment that comes like a sword-cut across the fibers of time. Though alarmingly quick, it gives eternal life to all that seems abruptly lost. And it makes for devotion, something that simply does not exist in busy undamaged lives that are allowed to play out according to plan.
When I went into the bank the electricity I felt crackling around in me was like a thunderstorm viewed from 40,000 feet, in which the lightning never ceases and its flashes dance like raindrops on a sun-saturated pond. I was afraid I would set off the alarms.
It was not enough merely to have engaged Oscovitz on the subjects of kissing and existentialism. I left the cage and went back out to him. When he saw me coming, he cringed.
"Sherman," I said, "Gorilla Boy sends his regards."
"Who?" Oscovitz asked.
"Gorilla Boy."
"Gorilla Boy who?"
"Gorilla Boy, O.B.E."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said Oscovitz, beginning to go into the mode of retreat to which he resorted when I was seized by moods he could not fathom.
"Gorilla Boy says: L, put suntan lotion on your head; B, open your heart to the love of a woman who loves you; F, learn to gallop a horse and cut pumpkins in half with a samurai sword; and, E, when you're happy, throw a kiss to the suckling pig in the meat case at Aiello's."
"Who is Gorilla Boy?" he demanded with unusual firmness.
With my thumb, I pointed to my chest. "I am, Sherman. I am. I'm Gorilla Boy. I work for you. Gorilla Boy ... works for you. And today, Gorilla Boy is going to finish stacking Cage Forty Seven."
"Good, good," he said. "Tomorrow you can start stacking Cage Forty Eight."
This, for him, was a fairly big moment, and I believe he believed I believed it was a fairly big moment. I smiled like a Cheshire cat and danced back into Cage 47, and when the gate clicked shut behind me I heard the great sound of the shotgun starters on my four holy engines and I saw the sky stretching away in a lovely round carpet of baby blue and cotton balls.
I had planned the exact procedure for shifting the walls, emptying the center, dropping the bars, and rebuilding the outer perimeter. When the process was completed, the almost invisible shaft cap that I had cut into the marble floor would be covered by tons of gold, and Cage 47 probably would not be revisited for years.
Never have I enjoyed physical labor more than when I spent eight seamless hours feeding gold bars into the modest but voracious mouth of the shaft Smedjebakken had built. After a few hundred bars I was sure that Smedjebakken was down on the siding, receiving them. If he hadn't been, they would have backed up.
Four hundred more and I began to feel the strain, but the more strain I felt the more I caught fire. I felt waves of delight generated by the great exercise. My muscles tightened and burned like those of a moving man on overtime, and I wondered if the next day I would be able to fly the C-54 to Newfoundland as we had planned.
"Cage Forty Seven is finished," I told Oscovitz.
"Oh, good, uh ... Gorilla Boy," Oscovitz said. "Tomorrow, you start on Forty Eight."
"No, Sherman," I said, soberly, seriously, quietly. My words felt to me like machetes cutting through a choking jungle beyond which lay the open sea.
"No?"
"No, Sherman."
"Why not?"
I hesitated. And then I said, gently, "Sherman, you'll never see me again." I smiled, turned, and walked to the elevator.
It was hurricane season. Baseball games were rained out, beach houses boarded up, and bobbing boats tethered in vain to docks that would flip in the wind. I had tried to convince Smedjebakken to delay the flights out, but he had to meet a schedule.
Whereas I had gone into the details of resettlement myself, he, being more adept at dealing with people, more trusting, and better reconciled to working within an organization, had delegated the tasks upon which I broke my teeth trying to fill out forms in Portuguese and waiting for an hour and a half in the post office line with office boys who read dime novels, talked about baseball, and ate shrimp candy. I have always hated Brazilian sugared shrimp: they smell almost as bad as coffee. But the worst candy is Chinese pigeon cakes. I took a bite of one once in Singapore and was hospitalized for a week.
Smedjebakken traveled to a European city and found a leading citizen to whom he offered this proposition. He wanted citizenship and new identities for himself, his wife, and his daughter. He wante
d a château near the capital city, privately situated in its own huge park. He wanted extensive modifications made to the house, including an indoor swimming pool. He wanted a capable and trustworthy staff, a summer house by the seacoast, several automobiles registered in his new name, and a modest but elegant pied-à-terre in a pleasant neighborhood of the capital. And he wanted the protection of the government, were he to require it, indefinitely.
"Are you a dictator? I don't know you," was the response.
This question was easily answered, but the next, which made Smedjebakken hesitate, was, "Are you a criminal?"
"This country, the name of which I cannot divulge," Smedjebakken told me, "is a land of moralphilosophes. Schoolchildren there learn categories of morality the way schoolchildren in America learn about Indians. So I said to him, 'Morally, I am not a criminal, for I have appropriated a vast amount of wealth from an immoraliste. I am as innocent as Saint Francis of Assisi.'
"'Saint Francis of Assisi?' was the reply. It was, after all, a strange comparison.
"'And anyone who aids me is a moraliste of the highest order. Those who aid me will receive not only just compensation, but a certain measure of glory, too.'"
Smedjebakken said that the man to whom he spoke inhaled until his chest swelled like a squab. He was quick to agree, and he was ruthless in setting a fee.
At today's gold price Smedjebakken's new start cost him $35 million, of which $10 million went to the squab, but it was well worth it. Assuming he held onto the gold, he now has at least $250 million for groceries, so he needn't have sought a bargain for refuge.
I'm somewhat different. I have to do everything myself, and I'm a big saver, which is why I have about $324 million left, even if it is hidden in a difficult place. I wanted to do what Smedjebakken did, but I was too well known in European, circles and was forced to flee to the Antipodes, where no one knew me and everything was confusingly upside down.
As payments had to be made, officials bribed, a château made ready, and a swimming pool built, Smedjebakken needed to get the gold across the Atlantic during hurricane season. But September is the best time to cross the North Atlantic, where hurricanes appear only in such a deracinated form that they seem to be nothing more than an apparatus for keeping dwindling icebergs moist with dew.
For me, the season was somewhat more perilous. Immediately after I returned from Glen Lame I would have to load the plane and get to Fort Myers, across the Caribbean, to the Amazon, and beyond. The plane would be carrying its maximum load and no reserves of fuel, which meant no going around storms, no vaulting above them, and a hell of a time punching through them.
In the evening I met Smedjebakken for a strengthening dinner before loading the bullion from a Transit Authority maintenance train onto a flatbed truck at the end of an unused subway spur in Washington Heights. We had always eaten well at the air museum—venison, fresh corn, tomatoes, spinach, basil, clam broth—but on this occasion decided to have egg creams and boiled beef sandwiches.
We sat at the counter of a delicatessen on 100th Street and Broadway, a neighborhood I knew well from my days as a runner. The owner, a lifelike copy of Otto Preminger, never ventured more than four feet from us, so we had to speak in code.
"Did you get the brassieres?" I asked Smedjebakken.
"Yeah," he said. "Every single one of them."
"Did anyone see?"
"Not a soul. I thought I would die taking them out of the tube. My muscles are cramped. What about you?"
"I'm okay, but, don't forget, I was just dropping them down the hole."
I could see that Otto Preminger was drawn to what we were saying by an increasingly powerful force. He was trying to conceal his interest by polishing a glass and staring off into space, ears cocked. Hardly a worry, as there was no way he could have known what we were talking about.
"Where are the brassieres now?" I asked Smedjebakken.
"Safe in the tunnel."
"We'll move them after dark."
"Why not just go whenever we get there?" Smedjebakken asked.
"New Jersey state troopers are notoriously suspicious, and they saturate the roads. In the daytime, especially in the light of sunset, the brassieres will shine with a diffuse glow. Better to move them at night."
"I sure as hell hope we don't have a flat tire," Smedjebakken said. "I don't think there's a jack alive that could lift the truck. We'd have to unload every single brassiere and pile it by the side of the highway."
"Don't worry," I told him. "By this time tomorrow evening, you'll be deep in the forests of Newfoundland."
I was not very good at flying multiengine planes. In fact, before the C-54, I had never flown one. I read a few manuals and thought about it a lot before we flew back to New Jersey, but you really have to learn this kind of thing incrementally, practicing the maneuvers at the behest of an experienced instructor. Unfortunately, I had to do everything at once and for the first time.
We were certain that we were going to die on takeoff when the plane stupidly battered the runway with its left wing tip. By that time, I was so out of practice flying even single-engine planes that I thought wing tips were shoes.
Landing wasn't so great, either. Never have I bounced as I did on the dandelion-strewn airstrip of the Ramapo Museum of Flight, and I dreaded putting the plane down when it was fully loaded. Nonetheless, at risk of our lives, Smedjebakken and I refused to leave behind even one brick. We had set ourselves a task, and the money was not the issue but rather a sense of completeness. Most thieves would probably have found our attitude incomprehensible.
All our numbers had to be remarkable or round, all our times exact. Perhaps people who have never stolen anything think that you steal because you want something. That isn't so. You steal for the same reason that you would otherwise work or dare—and, trust me, stealing is work. You steal for the same reason that an ice-skater practices for the Olympics, a composer composes, or a truck driver strives to cut his time.
It is exactly the same spark that keeps factories running around the clock, that moved John Henry to take on a steam hammer, that makes a sled dog run happily for ten hours in cold that freezes smoke. It's what makes machines sing and your blood flow.
I refer not to taking someone's wallet or breaking into a house and pulling out all the drawers to find S&H Green Stamps. Nor to selling Bensonhurst retirees Florida land covered by water in which alligators swarm like maggots. Nor to endangering perfectly innocent people by walking into a bank with a necklace of dynamite. My definition of stealing is knocking over the Louvre, Fort Knox, the Tower of London, or the Antwerp Central Diamond Vaults.
All the rest is for termites. And, I ask you, what did you expect? Was I supposed to forget what I had seen and what I had done? I attacked Berlin when Hitler was still in it. I fled from a Swiss mental institution to run away with a woman I still love even though she is dead, and we went to the Arctic Circle and stood at the foot of the aurora. I was once one of the richest men in the world, and once a kid who worked hard and saved his money for a sugared donut and some sheet music. I fought alongside the angels high above the earth where the air is as thin as helium and defeat is an exploding sun. I have tightened my grip and narrowed my eyes, rushing toward gunfire like gravity. I have been in a great army that took years to conquer half the world. I have sailed across the ocean, rocketed into the clouds, skimmed the Hudson and cut apart its lily pads with my propeller, and I have seen the demise of nations, and new nations arise.
Why not the Louvre, then? All it is is a big building full of the most brilliant reflections of what we know day by day, the great and the small. Had this been a quiet century and had my country been a backwater, perhaps I would have been more easily contented, but the world was swept by great and terrible things, and I was at the heart of them.
They were like the force that lights the aurora, stiffening and firing a host of insignificant particles into a fiery curtain. In times of greatness, every man becomes a king, which i
s the price paid by kings when they cannot stay the energies that keep them on their thrones.
So, we carried all of the bullion, even at risk to our lives, because it was important not to leave anything scattered behind. What we did cannot be justified except to say that it was much like music, where no theory can explain pleasure or depth, where mathematics cannot elucidate intractable beauty, but where, when things come together, they make a perfection understood by all.
And so it was that when I took off one humid unsettled morning when tall fat clouds drifted on winds that polished great patches of moist blue, I was happy. For me, and for Smedjebakken, what we had done meant not riches and not revenge, but daring and faith. And as we rose into the turbulent air, we were inexplicably moved.
I set a northeast course, and we flew on alone toward the blue-green forests of Newfoundland. Soon the Hudson narrowed to a small silver cord, and the broad lands through which it flowed, where I had grown up, were covered with cloud.
1914
(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)
THE NAVAL ACADEMY has released me from its employment. While I was in the hospital, Watoon took over my classes. With more than double the teaching load he was used to, and no one to whom he could turn for help in the language, he suffered a kind of nervous breakdown. Unable to carry on, he turned to his holy book, the Watoon English phraseology, and forced his students to drill from it directly.