Memoir From Antproof Case (45 page)

"
Avanti!
" I commanded, as if I were in an Italian hotel room and a messenger had arrived with my newly shined shoes. Luckily for us, in their language this did not mean, "Let's do it," and we soon found our way back to the sunny drudgery of rhythmic paddling in a green infinity.

Smedjebakken didn't like the food in the hardscrabble settlements because it was so difficult and dangerous, but I loved it. We would sit in the glow of a brazier just after sunset, sipping warm beer from brown bottles with no labels, as a man who had not shaved since the Battle of Hastings grilled what he claimed were tapir kabobs. These we had sizzling hot, drowned in a red pepper sauce that the devil had used to paint his Bentley.

With our eyes opened wide as if by laboratory grapples, sweat pouring from our bodies, and our stomachs screaming in despair, we would eat this personification of fire, guzzle warm beer, and try to deal with a bean dish for which the recipe began, "Take one bean and a thousand pounds of garlic...."

Swaying and moaning, we would almost inevitably fall off our rickety wood chairs and collapse the tables upon which lay the food with which we did battle. But I loved this, I loved it even when we spent the night screaming in agony as tiny German scientists in our stomachs repeatedly built and blew up the Hindenburg. I loved it because it was so difficult, and because things that are difficult are good.

Smedjebakken looked at it differently. After all, he was used to eating golden rusks, cloud-white milk, and perfectly sugary lingonberries. He said, "I think, I think you like this, and I think you're crazy. I think
I'm
crazy for letting you pick the restaurants. Every time we eat, it's the Second Battle of the Marne."

"There's only one restaurant in this town," I told him, happily hallucinating with stomach pain. "There's only one building/'

Every night, I "chose" the restaurant, and every night it was the same. Our stomachs were like soldiers in a winter battle, and to this day I remember the struggle so clearly that it is as if time had stopped still. Even the lizards would line up just beyond the light of the fire, watching to see how we would fare. Olé!

 

In Rio we took stomach drugs. I opened a bank account, found an apartment, and set things up so carefully that I began to get nervous. The apartment was small and elegant, its living room giving out onto a terrace that was expertly planted with miniature citrus trees, coastal pines, and geraniums. Their scent was enough to make anyone crazy with happiness, and I was equally pleased to be able to hear the waves rolling gently against the beach. After I had had bookshelves built in the living room, I went on a spree at the English bookstore. I still have today everything I bought then—the pocket version (you'd have to have clown-sized pockets) of the
Britannica's
Eleventh Edition, the complete
O.E.D.,
sacred texts, Greek tragedy, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, dictionaries, foreign encyclopedias, the great works of history, Clausewitz,
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats,
the 'Old Testament' in Hebrew, the
Commedía
of Dante in Italian, the works of Pagnol, which I value over those of Colette or Proust, and 495 other books.

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 wanted 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 moral
philosophes.
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.