The Dinner Party (28 page)

Groping for a connection, he asked, “Is it what the Japanese call
satori?
”

“That means enlightenment.”

“Oh. I didn't know that. How do you define enlightenment?”

“I don't know,” Leonard said. “I've never been there.”

“I don't understand,” Richard said hopelessly.

“I mean it's a state of being. I suppose you could call it a state of consciousness. But what it is, I don't know. I've never experienced it.”

As if driven by his own desperate need, the senator pressed the point. “But if you've never experienced it—”

“Dad, I've talked to people who have.”

“And what do they say?”

“They don't say very much. It's not anything you can describe.”

Then, again for a while, silence, until Richard asked, “Some day, next week or so, will you show me?”

“Sure.”

“I won't give up the Senate? I mean—if I go on with it?” he said half humorously, offering a joke that was not a joke.

Leonard shook his head, grinning for the first time in hours—or so it seemed to the senator.

THIRTY-SIX

Y
ou've driven my son-in-law out of here,” Augustus said. “Not very diplomatic, Web. You remember what old Dave Dubinsky used to say—punish your enemies, reward your friends. Richard isn't your enemy—or wasn't.”

“Just hold on, Gus. He was asking me to interfere with immigration and to interfere with the courts.”

“And with a trial in progress,” Justin put in. “You don't do that.”

“You're talking to old Augustus Levi. I been around a long time.”

“You know I couldn't say ‘yes,'” Heller said.

“Couldn't—no. Wouldn't—yes. I told him that, Webster. It's not just that you're a cold-hearted bastard, which you are, but you want that trial to go on. You want Sanctuary broken.”

“Of course I do.”

“I told him that. Trouble is, Webster, that Richard doesn't understand people like you and me, and he's never going to. I leave you out, Bill, because you're something else. You will blow with the wind. Webster and I are brick shithouses, top to bottom. The wind doesn't even touch the smell of us.”

“I heard you use my first name,” Justin said, smiling thinly.

“You damn well did, Sonny. My prerogative, not yours. You need a few laps more on your track record. And don't get your ass up. I'm old enough to be your daddy.”

“It's not easy,” Justin said. “I'll try—for the common good.”

“You're learning.”

Webster Heller lit his cigar again, and admitted that Flaminco was just about as sweet as some Cubans. “What do you pay for a cigar like this, Gus?”

“You'd have to ask Richard. I'd guess three dollars.”

“Lot of money. Things cost too much.”

“Always did.”

Justin looked at his watch and said, “Let's talk.”

Heller nodded at Augustus.

“Let's talk,” Augustus agreed. “We're on our way to Switzerland. My daughter, Dolly, said to stop by for the night and break bread with two elegant gentlemen. Well, here I am at your command, one poor old Jew facing the powers that be.”

“I was waiting for that poor old Jew routine. Let's come right to the point. We don't like that road, we don't want that road, and we don't need that road.”

“We?”

“That's right, Gus, we.”

“You're short-sighted,” Augustus said, watching the smoke curl up out of his cigar. “You might need that road more than you imagine. Suppose a bomb took out the canal—you wouldn't even need an atomic weapon to blow one of the locks. Then a road linking the two oceans through Central America might be worth its weight in gold. And we intersect the Pan-Am highway. Think about it.”

“We thought about it, Gus. It wouldn't be our road. It would be their road, and if we wanted it we'd have to put together a little war to get it. And believe me, putting together a small war in Central America is not as easy as it used to be.”

“My heart bleeds for you.”

“I'm sure. If we want a road, we'll build a road. We still have more money than you do, although sometimes I question it.”

“So you want me to drop it? That's the long and short of it.”

“Right.”

“I like you, Web. You don't crap around. You know, I have a lot in that project.”

“How much?”

“Over two hundred million.”

“Come on. You haven't really started.”

“I know your lads are watching me like buzzards, but consider. Four years of surveys and selling the project. Clearing. Ordering special earth movers. Six different machines designed just for the job. Building a terminal where we can unload ships. Cement and sheds to house it. Sand—it's just the beginning, Webster, and right now I imagine it's closer to a quarter of a billion. That kind of money is real, even to me.”

“You have guarantees.”

“From those countries? Come on. Yes, once we start construction, we'll put out the bond issues, and that will bring in the money. It's a business proposition, a high-toll road, and eventually it will pay off, but right now I'm bankrolling it. It's my dream and I'm not asking anyone to dream with me until a little reality sets in, and don't sit there and tell me you want me to swallow a quarter of a billion dollars because you live with some kind of a nightmare of Russians grabbing it.”

“We're not stupid, Mr. Levi,” Justin said. “We would be stupid if we asked you to swallow it.”

“So you come bearing gifts. Tell me about them.”

MacKenzie came into the dining room. “Can I bring you anything?” he asked Augustus. “Coffee?”

Augustus glanced at Heller and Justin, both of whom shook their heads.

“Nothing, Mac. Tell the ladies that we'll not be too long.”

He placed the humidor of cigars on the table and then left the room.

“You know,” Heller said, “you could swallow that quarter of a billion very nicely if you had to. Your earnings this year will be four times that. You have the tax loss, and we could sweeten it through Internal Revenue.”

“Thank you,” Augustus said sourly.

“Not finished, Gus. The Russians are feeling us out about putting together two off-shore platforms for their Siberian coast. We'll give you the contract. It's bad water and at least half a billion for each platform. It's a damn good tradeoff, and you'd come out with a neat profit—over and above what you write off on the road.”

“Beautiful.”

“God damn it,” Heller said, “don't look at me like that. You know what's going on. We rub their back, they rub ours. We sell them wheat and we sell them a lot of other things. Time comes when we might need that Siberian oil.”

“Oh, I do admire you gentlemen.”

“Now don't go holy on me, Gus.”

“Heaven forbid.”

“You know damn well that if we don't keep this country hopping with the threat of war breaking out in the next twenty-four hours, we won't get twenty cents out of the Congress. Don't play innocent, Gus. We have a war economy without a war, and it works and everybody eats. If we ever went to war with the Soviet Union, it would last about twenty minutes, and after it's over, even the cockroaches wouldn't find anything to eat.”

“That's as neatly put as ever I heard it, Web. So you want me to dump a road that might bring some prosperity down in that sink hole we call Central America, and go to work for the Commies. You want me to build them two off-shore platforms.” Now Gus's cigar had gone out. He studied it to discover whether it was worth retrieving, decided in the affirmative, and lit it thoughtfully. “Can I say my piece?”

“That's what we're here for, Gus.”

“I ramble a bit. That's the price that time exacts. Well, I got to go back a bit. I once hired a scholar, at the behest of my dear wife, Jenny, to look into my family past. The first Levi, the fellow who started our line, came to New York in 1669, and his son settled in Philadelphia in 1710. Went into the retail business, something I never cared for. He opened a little shop and sold ribbons, cottons, linens, thread. Did fairly well, and a hundred years later, the family owned three houses in the city and were the biggest linen and cotton merchants in Philadelphia. I paid that young man from Swarthmore eleven thousand dollars, a lot of money before inflation, to find out everything there was to find out about the Levis. Aside from money and a secretary of state after the Civil War, a vice president in the 1830s, there was not a hell of a lot to boast about. Two brothers who were captains in Washington's army, a college president, nothing very big.”

“I hope,” Justin interrupted, “that all this gets to the point eventually.”

“It does, yes indeed. Be patient, young fellow. Tell you something else this researcher dug up. He found over a thousand Jewish families in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, and only three of them could be traced to today. The rest had gradually turned Christian or whatever to a point where most of them had no memory of ever being Jewish—or so they claimed. Our family had done the same thing, except that they preserved the memory because the Revolution had put them into the history books. However, in the eighteen-seventies, they changed the family name to Livia. Can you imagine—Livia? And then, twenty years later, they were inspired to change Livia to Livingston, and that's the name I was born with. This young scholar I hired had a long, busy nose, and he worked out the fact that I was one sixteenth Jewish, which is pretty good after two hundred years of indifferent rutting. During World War Two, I was an infantry captain and there was a Rabbi Hirschman attached to our regiment, and one day I mentioned to him that I was one sixteenth Jewish. He blew his top at me and said-that no one was one quarter or one eighth Jewish, or anything else Jewish. You were either a Jew or you weren't. ‘All right, Rabbi,' I told him. ‘What do I have to do to be Jewish?' He says to me, ‘Are you circumcised, Gus?' ‘I am indeed.' ‘Then you're Jewish, and anyone who doubts you, send them to me.' Well, it's no tea party being Jewish. First thing that happened, I got busted to lieutenant.”

“For being Jewish?” Justin demanded.

“You are damn right, for being Jewish. There was a captain in the regiment who was as mean a foul-mouthed son of a bitch anti-Semite as you'll find, and he let go at one of the enlisted men, and since I was now Jewish, it became a personal affront, and I beat the hell out of this captain, and he went to the hospital and I was court-martialed and busted down to second lieutenant.”

Heller burst into laughter, choking over his cigar, taking a minute or so to clear his throat. “Why didn't they bust you down to private and chuck you into the stockade. That would have been proper.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But things were delicate. The concentration camps were being liberated.”

“I still don't see where this gets us. We listened to your family history. It's not what we came here for, but we listened.”

Nodding at Justin, Augustus said, “Webster, this is someone you have to work with?”

“I do, and for God's sake, Gus, he's right. You're diddling us.”

“No, sir. I am finishing my story. When I got out of the service, I got together with the family lawyers and had the name changed back to Levi—and by golly, I like being Jewish. Civilized. You know what's the blood of civilization—trade. Commerce. Roads. That road down south is my dream. It's what a piece of sculpture is to an artist. I'm making a passageway for the goods of the world.”

“I'd think a bit before I said anything more,” Heller told him. “I'd just think this over.”

“You know why I like being Jewish—because I'm apart from you. I can see what you're blind to. I'm not talking about religion, ethics, ideals, loyalty—neither of us have any of that. I'm talking about the sheer, nasty pleasure I get out of sitting here and telling you and that little man to go fuck yourselves. I'm building a road, and I intend to go on building it. I know what you'll do. You'll get your C.I.A. down there and you'll kill my workers and blow up my supplies and maybe in the end you'll stop me. But I'm going to use everything I have against you. I'm going to fight you in Congress, I'm going to fight you in the press, and I'll fight you in the media. Not because I give a damn either way about your stupid dance with your fellow lunatics in the Kremlin, but my road is cement and steel and not politics. It will be built because it has been waiting to be built these three hundred years, and I'm going to build it.”

There was a long, uncompromising silence after Augustus finished speaking. The three men sat and held onto the silence until it felt like a material thing that would break with a thunderous crash. In the end, it was broken quietly, even mildly, by Heller, who asked, “Is that your last word, Gus?”