Memoir From Antproof Case (38 page)

I dared not ask him to be specific, for, inexplicably, he was moved by his declaration to the point where his eyes had begun to sparkle in the light coming from the upper floors of the piano factory, and I thought it should rest, so I changed the subject.

"I play, you know," I said. "Not well, but well enough to appreciate someone who really knows what he is doing, and enough to understand that Mozart was a divine emissary. And I think he knew it from the time he was a baby. You know, you always hear about Freud, Marx, and Einstein. Of these I think only Einstein was truly great, but even he was far eclipsed by Mozart, who, in my opinion, was the greatest man ever to have lived."

"Yes," said Smedjebakken. "He wasn't like a baseball player or anything like that, was he, he was great beyond description."

After a few awkward moments when neither of us could say anything, because so much had to be said, Smedjebakken looked at me. "You're from the restaurant."

"And the roof," I added.

"Yes, the roof! And coffee."

"I hate it," I said, looking at the tea.

"Come inside," he told me. "It's getting cold out here. Let's go to the kitchen table."

"You drink tea?"

"If you come inside," he said, "I'll explain."

 

"I don't understand how a man sensible enough to figure out coffee could let himself get on the other side of tea," I said.

Smedjebakken was leaning over the kitchen table, his right hand on the throat of a lamp. After he pushed the switch, the room came up warm and his face glowed like a pumpkin. He looked at me, craftily. "I'm not perfect," he answered.

"But, to be a drug addict, in your own home, in front of your own family...."

"They have forgiven me."

"Why do you continue?"

"As I grow older," he said, "I find that I can't spring back as easily as I could when I was young. Then, I could go for days without sleep, I could work until I dropped, and, after a hap, start right in again. There seemed no end to my power or energy. But I no longer have the stamina to contemplate sixteen orgasms a day, much less to achieve them. My present self, though wiser, is bodily of almost a different species. At one time, my excessive vitality distorted all my opinions.

"How could it not have? I thought everything was possible, and that time moved with compassionate slowness. Hard to believe, but I wanted it to pass more quickly. I used to listen to music all night and lay ties all the next day.

"Then, youth left, fleeing like a coward from the onslaught of responsibility. And now that I'm well along into middle age, I need more strength than I have.

"I was at a loss. I had no way, no clue. But I needed the energy of two lives."

"So you turned to artifice."

"Yes!" He leapt up and ran out of the room. I thought he was propelled by shame, but he was back in a minute, carrying a book that he slammed down so hard I started.

"
'Narcotic Plants,
by William Emboden!'" he read, quite excitedly. Then he flipped rapidly through the pages until he found the passage he was seeking.

"'In Tibet,'" he began, "'weary horses and mules are given large vessels of tea to increase their capacity to work. Mules are said to be gamboling like colts as a result of their tea rations.... The distance between villages is accounted for in terms of the number of cups of tea necessary to sustain the person traveling that route. It has been ascertained that three cups of tea is equal to eight kilometers.'" He banged the book shut. All that slamming and banging was undoubtedly the work of the tea.

"If this devilish substance," he said, "will work so charmingly upon completely innocent animals at terribly high altitudes, why should I abjure it? Tea, being translucent and light, does not, like coffee, offend due to lack of purity. The base issue of coffee is filth, is it not?"

"That and other horrors," I offered. "Conformity, sameness, compulsion, addiction, mental illness, et cetera."

"I agree, but there's something pure, angelic, and light about tea, isn't there? Admit it."

"I don't know. I had a cup of tea once in Buffalo, and it would have been the cause of my suicide had I been able to get hold of a barrel."

"I belong to the Church of Rome," Smedjebakken declared. "I don't commit suicide. What other drawbacks are there?"

"Weakness of character?"

"My character is weak," he said. "I've known this since I failed to become president of the United States. I'm sunk in my own depravity."

I looked at him and said, "I'm not sure if you're right for my project."

By the glint in his eye I could tell that he didn't want to be left out, so, to barb the hook, I rose from my chair.

"Still," he said, "I've never had a cup of coffee, and I've attacked a hundred urns, overthrowing them for the sake of everything that is just and good."

"That's admirable," I said, sitting down.

"How many people have you met who attack coffee urns?"

"Only me."

"Perhaps then, even if we differ, even if you are an upper-class asshole investment banker, we should work together."

"You misunderstand me," I said. "I started as a courier, a long time ago, and now I do manual labor in the vaults."

"Really."

"Yes. In some ways, I like it. It's simple. It keeps me strong, and I don't have to devote my attention to meaningless and ephemeral details. I can think all day, like a prisoner in solitary confinement."

"That's why I like maintenance of way," Smedjebakken said. "I get to make solitary patrols, like Lewis and Clark, in a world half underground and half flying above it."

"Lewis and Clark weren't solitary," I said. "There were at least two of them."

"Ah, but they were so lonely. Tell me what you have in mind."

 

At that very moment, Angelica Massina, the actual Mrs. Smedjebakken, came downstairs with a dinner tray.

"How's everything?" Smedjebakken asked.

"Fine," she said. "Sleeping."

After she washed the dishes, she left the room without looking our way.

"Is she a lawyer?" I asked.

"No. She was a typist for the Navy, but she quit when our daughter was born."

"Oh," I said. "I thought she had just come home from Manhattan: the suit and everything. She has the air of a career woman."

"She was in Manhattan," Smedjebakken said. "She was at the hospital. Look, I don't mean to pry, but what is it that you want to talk about?"

"Money."

"You go first." He insolently crunched a rusk, as if to suggest that he was not impressed by the fact that I was an investment banker.

"Do you need it?"

"Of course I need it. Everyone needs it."

"Yes," I replied, "but some people think they don't, or pretend they don't."

"Monks and stuff."

"Some monks and stuff," I agreed, "but even monks and stuff need money. They have to eat. They need a roof, clothes. They have to advertise their wine."

"Fine. Monks need money. Is that what you came to tell me?"

"No. How much money?"

"How much money do monks need?"

"No, you," I said.

"How much money do I need?"

"Yes."

"I never looked at it that way. That's like saying, how tall would you like to be? You're as tall as you are. You can't get taller."

"But?" I asked.

"But what?"

"But? Come on. Tell me, the difference."

He crunched another rusk. "All right. You
can
get more money."

"That's right," I confirmed. "That's what all those upper-class assholes do, or what their forebears did. They say,
I think I'll get some more money.
"

"What do you want me to do, rob a bank?"

When I made no answer, and merely stared at him intently, he said, "You do. You want me to rob a bank."

I turned from him and walked to the window, where, to heighten the dramatic effect, I stood for the time it took to count to twenty-five.

"What are you counting, birds?" Smedjebakken yelled across the room, having heard me.

Then I came back to where I had been, and calmly said: "The biggest bank in the world. The greatest single concentration of wealth in the universe. We can do it slowly and methodically, and they may never know. If they do find out it could be many years from now, and no matter when they find out it's very likely that someone else will take the rap. We won't have to use weapons or resort to violence. We can split the proceeds equally. The only drawback is that you'll have to assume a new identity and live in a different place. You could be, for example, a Swedish count who has retired to a house in Geneva overlooking the lake. When you walk down the street in Switzerland you hear Mozart and Beethoven from within the houses, not boogie-woogie."

"I like boogie-woogie."

"So do I. But after five minutes...."

"Look," said Smedjebakken, leaning slightly forward. "Honesty is more important than money."

"Of course it is."

"So, I can't rob a bank."

"What's dishonest about robbing a bank?" I asked, offended that he had questioned my integrity. "We'd be taking out gold bullion. Did you ever really think about gold? It's mined by slave labor. In Rome and medieval Europe the gold was mined by slaves and serfs. Today in South Africa and the Soviet Union the miners are slaves except in name. That means that whoever possesses the gold after it comes from the earth is tainted."

"What about gold mined in the United States or Canada?"

"Gold is fungible, and the greater part of it was extracted by slave labor. Every bar is corrupt. But eventually," I continued, "it passes into legitimacy. You can't expect a moral trail to last through many owners, because you can't expect people to know things they can't know. Still, much of the gold goes into the treasuries of criminals, dictators, drug traders ... and to own it they have to put their mark on it, so to speak, so that you can know it's theirs and you can know you're taking it from someone who, on almost any scale of morality, has no right to it."

"Who do you want to take it from?"

"The gold I have in mind is kept in cages, and the most promising cage belongs to a sheik on the Arabian peninsula who has two hundred wives, several thousand slaves, and fifty Cadillacs. If he is criticized by his subjects and he can get to them, he will torture them until they die. I would say that, morally, he's compromised. Nothing you can do to a man like that is dishonest."

"What you propose is dishonest, whatever the circumstances," Smedjebakken said.

"No," I contradicted. "Actions are conditioned by contexts. As I see it, the longer this gold remains in its cage, the more evil will seep into the world. And if we lift the gold, we'll lighten the world."

Mrs. Smedjebakken reappeared. She looked drained and tired. I could tell that she hadn't yet had her dinner, and that my presence was blocking the way. I feared that even were her husband to decide upon my scheme, she would stop him. But it hardly mattered, as I had not yet succeeded in convincing Smedjebakken himself. This was due to either some fault of my own or some fault in him—excessive timidity, perhaps, or a badly formed sense of what was right and what was wrong. Or perhaps simple lack of imagination.

Picture my surprise, then, when he turned to me and said, "Yeah. The Yankees are playing Kansas City, and I've got two tickets. Here, you can take one of them, and I'll see you there tomorrow." He left the room, and as his footsteps pounded on the stairs, his wife, who seemed as if she were facing an unmitigated pain that never ceased, bravely smiled at me, and said, "Baseball fan?"

 

The image and the puzzle of Angelica Smedjebakken stayed with me. When she had asked me the awkward question, "Baseball fan?" across her kitchen table, she, though completely Italian, had seemed perfectly Japanese.

I had to clutch my stomach and moan to get excused from the vault early the next day. Oscovitz was not the paragon of subtlety, and telling him that you were ill meant nothing if it was not accompanied by something close to the last scene of
Madam Butterfly.
But it worked, and at noonday I rose through the rock and exited into the sunshine.

Though I had to go back underground, into the subway, in the subway were currents of air and huge spaces, and in the Bronx strong sunlight flooded through the open windows as we clicked along the elevated track. I believe that now the trains have plastic seats—I've seen them in movies—but in that era they were upholstered, wood, or wicker. To prevent the wicker from being snagged, it was covered with shellac. And overhead fans turned slowly in each car, as if tall people could be trusted not to decapitate themselves deliberately so they could sue the city, which is what they do now—and good luck to them.

In those days the Bronx had an awful lot of green in it and was mysteriously quiet. I believe that I'm being neither sentimental nor inexact when I say that things were slow because people had peace in their hearts, and people had peace in their hearts because things were slow. And, as I remember it, the dappled shade under the elevated tracks was as serene as the Amazon, neon signs in store windows glowed like jaguar eyes, and the traffic, which was quiet and even, flowed like black water under a bridge.

As I walked to Yankee Stadium I reflected upon the means that Smedjebakken had devised for our meeting. With seven pieces of information printed on a little piece of cardboard (Yankee Stadium, the gate, the section, the row, the seat, the date, and the time) you could, with machinelike certainty, bring two
people from entirely disparate parts of the earth to positions side by side at a particular instant.

This, I thought, might be a way to salvage the potential of normally wasted encounters, such as sharing a train car on a late summer's afternoon with a woman as beautiful as summer itself. I sometimes think back to the earlier years of the century and women I saw then, to whom even now I would devote myself entirely if only I could see them again. I remember the glow of their faces and the color and sparkle of their eyes. They were in white dresses on the bluff at Long Beach, or in a Winabout at Three Mile Harbor, or on a train going up to Ossining at four in the afternoon.