No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (26 page)

"From penniless refugee to multi-millionaire. Of
course you should kiss the ground," is what I said. "Kiss
ass, kiss anything for a deal like that. Shake hands with the devil,
do a deal with a heroin peddler and kill Edgar Wood, for a deal like
that. "

"
I presume that you are being deliberately rude
to provoke me."

"Isn't that what we're here for? To discuss why
you killed Edgar Wood?"

"Do you expect me to break down and confess?
Here and now? To you?"

"
Why don't you, Charles? Confession helps. The
sins eat at our souls. The burden grows heavy. There is no one here
but the seagulls and the surf, and they don't care. Me, I don't cane
about punishing, just knowing. "

He bent down and picked up a broken piece of shell.
He studied it, then tossed it in an arc toward the water. A wheeling
gull saw it, turned and dived for the splash it made.

"OK, Tony, you want a confession, I'll give you
a confession. I am a killer. I have killed, more than once. Not hired
anyone. No Doc Wellby for me. With my own hands I have killed. What
else should I confess to? Stealing? I have stolen. Money, food, even
shoes. Bribery, forgery . . . all those things I have done."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Well," he paused and thought a moment,
"Charles Goreman is not my real name."

"Who did you kill?"

"My real talent, I think, my special ability,
Tony, is to be able to assess value. The whole thing, Over &
East, is built on that single ability. I see a company. It is not
making money. Perhaps it is badly nm, it doesn't matter what the
reason. What matters is that it is only trading for twenty million,
and the assets can be sold for twenty-two million. So I goto the
bank, borrow the twenty and know that I will come out ahead. That's
the whole thing, and it's that simple."

"Where are we going?"

"How is your history? Do you now anything about
Hungary?"

"Mostly about the revolution. When was it? '56?"

"We have such a narrow view here, it is peculiar
.... I have asked many Americans about Hungary. College students,
professors, politicians, educated, aware people. How many of them
know that Hungary was the first fascist country? In 1932, when Adolf
Hitler was just applying for German citizenship, Horthy and Gombos
brought fascism to Hungary. They killed the Reds, persecuted the Jews
and shot anyone who argued. They needed no urging to join the Axis.
In 1941 they declared war on the Soviet Union and on the United
States. I know. I was there .... The Hungarians deserve the
Russians."

"Is there a point to this?"

"Maybe, maybe not. You told me confession is
good. So I am telling you, and the seagulls, and the surf, what I am
made of. Then maybe you can figure out if I killed my old friend
Edgar Wood .... "

Our feet splashed through the water that rushed up on
the beach.

"But the Hungarians had two redeeming qualities.
Yes. They did not believe in the final solution. And they could be
bought. With money. With money there were false papers; for money the
police would ignore false papers; money would even keep you out of
the army. Money meant survival. Life and death were measured in cash.
Do you understand that?"

I grunted. I probably didn't, not the way he had
lived it. "Where was I to get money, Tony? I will explain. The
Horthy government was confiscating Jewish property, moving area by
area. So I would go to a Jew, I would say, 'You are going to lose
your home. You can let "them" take it, or sell it to one of
these goyim, vultures, who will pay you only one-tenth what it is
worth. ' They would moan and cry then. 'There is a third way,' I
would tell them. 'Here, I have Hungarian papers,' and I would show
them the papers. 'Sell it to me.' The first time I did this, I was
fifteen ....

"Then he might say, 'How much?' I had no money.
Instead I would tell him that I would sell the house for him, maybe
to the second wave of vultures. Instead of one-tenth, I would get
half. Then we would split that and we would both be better off. You
see how I learned this thing of value?"

"Yes," I said. "And then the next time
you could pay cash up front and buy for less, make more."

"No. It was not that easy. I would have to pay
for the papers. Pay for the bribes. The clerks at the registrar, they
knew. Even they would have to be paid, to record the transaction.
Usually the, the . . . there is no word for it in English . . . the
people who did the confiscating, they had to be paid, government
people. Also, I had a family then. Parents, two sisters. Also,
education. I wanted education and Jews could not go to school, so I
paid for tutors for myself and my sisters."

"And the killing?"

"That came later. In 1944 the Soviet Army was at
the Carpathians, and Horthy tried to negotiate terms before they came
through the passes. The Germans would not permit that, and German
troops occupied the country. Immediately, the first priority was a
special rail line from Budapest to Auschwitz. Two, three hundred
thousand people were murdered in six months. For them, the
extermination of the Jews was more important than winning the war.
They were mad."

"You mean they couldn't even be bribed?"

"
0h, they would take Jewish money. They loved to
extort the money first and then put you on the special train after. I
paid one, to save my sisters. He took the money and then he tried to
arrest them, on the spot, right before me. He was the first man I
killed. He was Geheime Staatspolizei, Gestapo.

"
I used his papers to escape. Also his clothes.
I went west to Austria, because once, as a boy, we had gone to the
mountains. Then I was almost caught because the murder became known
and the papers were no good anymore. It was almost December and the
mountains were getting cold. I was growing ill from hunger and
exposure.

"That is how I came to kill my second man. He
caught me in his home, stealing his food and an overcoat and socks.
He was an old man. Over fifty anyway."

"Why did you kill him then?"

"He came for me with an ax. Can you imagine
that, here in America, killing a man for a loaf of pumpernickel and
an old overcoat?"

"Yeah, actually, I can."

"Maybe you are right," he said, and the
idea disturbed him. "That is a very sad thing."

We walked some more, until he spied a large hunk of
driftwood and we went and sat on it. He took out a cigarette, a
Gitane, and offered me one. It was formal and ceremonial, so I took
it.

"Is that all of them?" I asked.

"All of what? "

"Of your dead. Of your sins."

"There is one more. A German. He tried to stop
me when I was trying to get to the American lines."

"And Edgar Wood?"

"I better tell you how I met Edgar," he
said. Then he explained how he had been classified as a DP, displaced
person, and how, normally, he would have been sent to one of the DP
camps, or to Hungary, but for a young American. A lieutenant who took
pity on him and showed him how to get papers.

"Did you bribe him?" I asked.

"No," he said, still with wonder more than
a quarter of a century later.

"But you made it up to him later."

"Yes, but who could know that?" We sat on
the smooth, bleached wood, smoking. It was making me dizzy and a
little high. "My name. I made it up when I got to the American
lines. Gore man, it is a pun."

We smiled at each other, there in the moonlight,
enjoying a good pun.

"What was your real name?" I asked.

"What does it matter? I had many. Once I was
even Horthy. For two or three weeks, I think."

"And Edgar Wood knew all this. That's why he had
to die?"

Goreman laughed aloud. "No, no, Tony. You don't
understand what I'm trying to tell you."

"Edgar knew none of this. He knew nothing of who
I was before I became Charles Goreman. There were many things he did
not know."

"There are two things I don't know and wanted to
ask you about."

"Who killed Edgar Wood and why," he
replied.

"That wasn't it, but if you want to tell me,
I'll listen."

"I don't know either, so if you want to ask your
other questions I'll try those. "

"I know that Wood was your attorney when you
started. At that time he was a partner in a firm called Springstein,
Saperstein, Cohen, and Wood. After you took over LTI, the attorneys
for LTI, Choate, Winkler, etal, became the attorneys of record for
Over & East. Why?"

"I felt that they were a key factor in creating
a smooth transition. It was my way of saying 'thank you'. "

"Gimme a break," I said.

"You doubt me?"

"I think it could be radically rephrased. You
did a deal before the takeover attempt even started. LTI was bigger
than you. They could have fought you off. So I figure you had a
pipeline into LTI, that you knew every move they were going to make
before they made it. Then your pipeline turned around and told LTI,
'Well, it looks like Charlie Goreman has us outmaneuvered. Maybe the
best thing to do is let Over & East take you over.' "

We looked at each other for a moment. He lit a second
Gitane.

"You could phrase it that way," he said at
last.

"Who was the pipeline?"

"Is that your second question?"

"No," I said, "it's part of the
first."

"I don't mind answering questions about myself,
but I hesitate to speak about other people," he said.

"Was it Lawrence Choate Haven?"

"Yes," Goreman said, and realized where I
would go with the idea. "However, Edgar did not know that. He
was led to believe my source was at LTI."

"He could have found out."

"I doubt it. Lawrence and I were the only ones
who knew. "

"OK. My second question."

"Go ahead, Tony."

"How did you get started?"

"I thought you had investigated me. At least
gone to the library. The story of Samson Construction is there .... "

He sounded disappointed in me, while eager to sing
the Saga of Charles Goreman and Over & East.

"I know about it. But what I don't know is where
the first two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars came from.
You were in commodities, you had a couple of jobs, but that's
a big chunk of change."

"It was my patrimony. In '38 my father started
sending money out of Hungary, to here, the United States. We were
supposed to follow. We paid the Hungarians, they were willing, but
the United States would not take us, not then. Suddenly we were
there, and our money was here. If we had tried to bring it back, the
government would have stolen it. So here it stayed."

"You got here in '47," I pointed out; "you
didn't make your move until '54. How come?"

"I had a great deal of trouble getting the
money. The man who sent the money to the United States bore the name
Itzhak Oberetstock. I claimed to be his sole surviving heir, but my
name was Charles Goreman. There were no papers, nothing to show who I
was."

He sighed heavily. "It goes to show how much
trouble you can make for yourself, making puns. I don't do it any
longer."

"It took seven years for you to get the money?"

"No, no, only five. I got the money in '52.
Actually it was only eighty thousand dollars. A lot in those days.
Inside of a year I doubled it on the commodities market. By '54 I
increased that amount by filly percent. Then I spent six months
looking for something like Samson Construction .... It is getting
chilly. I am going back to the house."

He stood up and I followed him through the sand.

"How did you finally prove who you were?"

"I found some witnesses. People who knew me in
the old country. It was not difficult. But it was time—consuming
and expensive, in relation to the resources I had at that time."

"I would have been pissed."

"
It was better than being in Hungary with the
Arrow Cross Fascists or the Reds."

"So you're not angry about it."

"I cannot say that," he admitted. "I
was angry. But anger, resentment, these are not functional emotions.
Those are things that get in the way. I am a businessman. I deal only
in the value of things. "

"Who held your inheritance for you?"

"One of those big Wall Street law firms."

"Which one?"

"What matter, they are all alike. Big offices in
a big building, with a lot of very American names."

"Like Choate, Winkler, Higgiston, Hahn &
Moore. And the trustee was someone like Lawrence Choate Haven."

"Very much like that," he said.

"Did you feel like he was trying to defraud
you?"

"Feel? I felt many things. But did I have
grounds for suspicion? There were complications in establishing the
facts. That is all that I know."