House of All Nations (62 page)

‘The beauty is,' said Alphendéry, ‘that everything goes through normal banking and trading channels, so that business gets a real fillip, not like usual government business which goes through without intermediaries, excludes the trade and does no good to the trade. Our scheme takes care of the intermediaries. Everyone plucks from the trees—more than that,
it has to be
.'

‘How's that, how's that? It has to be.'

‘Why, the reason the American government couldn't be party to a three-dimension is because they couldn't admit they are dumping: there has to be a legitimate demand.'

‘Excellent.' Léon rubbed his hands. ‘It gets better every minute. Listen, you and I must go over this, work out all the points. Then you write them down, Michel, and give them to—Bertillon to read. He must learn it by heart. He'll get it anyhow, won't he? I'll go over and over and over—he must get it.'

‘Oh, of course, good heavens!' expostulated Michel, now at the end of his patience. ‘Jules will understand it perfectly. How do you think he made his money ? He can't be a complete goof.'

‘I don't know, I don't know—'

‘You sprang it on him like a thunderbolt this morning; you've been working it out for days—he only just heard of it.'

‘Listen,' urged Léon, himself not listening, ‘the reason we're not frightened to go with this plum to a government is because they can't steal the scheme because, say they sold a certain big amount to a consumer country on credit, it would do more harm than good: they wouldn't be so stupid. It would ruin them electorally.'

Alphendéry was cheerful. ‘They wouldn't be so stupid as to only see the smartaleck trick of going past us and making the direct sale on credit, because that would undermine the structure, while our spectacular project would revolutionize values—'

‘Of course, them government fellers are pretty stupid. You've got to point out to them the danger of selling direct. They don't care about the state of the European market. A danger—'

He came back to Alphendéry's office still talking it over, still recurring to the points of his scheme, which stood in his head without words and to which words fitted badly. Léon saw these moves, as perhaps an engineer sees a bridge in his mind, or a musician an overture. He did not see it in words and, therefore, people not forewarned thought him stupid or confused, but his mind was never confused on the wheat market or on the mechanism of his own schemes; although, true enough, many of his schemes were cut straight out of the broadcloth of fantasy, because he was too impatient to study.

On the way to the bank Léon suddenly cooled off, however, and Michel, who knew the man by now, divined that he had a rendezvous somewhere about four o'clock. As he pressed his hand in good-by, Léon roused himself from his urgent amorous preoccupations enough to murmur, ‘Impress it on him. Russia must get through the Five-Year Plan. There's a limited outlet for bills at forty-eight per cent discount; her gold production's still small. She's compelled to ship wheat, she needs—got to get valuta to pay for the Five-Year Plan goods. Wheat in America the same as coffee in Brazil.'

He left. He was half across the pavement when he turned dubiously and came back to Alphendéry still standing hatless between the two staves of Mercury in the door. He said urgently, as if it had just occurred to him, ‘At present European buyers are sitting down, doing nothing, pursuing a hand-to-mouth policy. Make a revolutionary stroke—change the whole psychology—' He nodded and went off again.

Alphendéry, aflame with the scheme, turned into the bank and hastened upstairs to find Jules. Jules was figuring on a piece of paper and looked up when Alphendéry entered.

‘I say, Michel, I've just been figuring out this scheme of Léon's. We can make plenty of dough out of it, can't we? What did he tell you at lunch? Do you think we can trust him or will he try to steal the swag? Perhaps I can make private arrangements with the Washington bunch.'

‘I went over that with Henri,' said Alphendéry with circumspection, avoiding the question of pure booty. ‘The commission to the Bertillon-Léon consortium from the U.S.A. would be one-half per cent plus carrying, freight, perquisites, say up to two per cent, not more, and the U.S.A. could afford to do this, on account of the increased value given their supplies. You see they know what's coming, or at least part of it. They would ship wheat as the contract with Russia called for it, and store it in silos in parts of Europe (this is not an essential part of the scheme, this is just mechanical). But the big money is made through us holding the wheat at our disposal and putting it on the market when and how we like when the news gets about and the demand comes in.'

Jules seemed grieved. ‘Isn't all this merchandising a lot of bunk? Why can't we make a straight steal? I don't know all this wheat game; Léon will do me in. I'd rather get the money myself and never pay the government bunch. How do I know Léon won't try to get away with it all?'

Alphendéry laughed. ‘If you don't, you mean. Now you two boys will have to have a letter of agreement, a public one and a private one, too; something special so that you two bright babies will be held to the straight line. But do me a favor, Jules, and give Léon's scheme a tryout. Don't start pulling off any bright ideas of the second degree.'

Jules laughed vainly. ‘Oh, I've got some ideas of my own. I'll put it into the hands of Bomba and get him to organize a little publicity. It'll help the thing along, give us a big start-off; the Washington crowd will be waiting to eat out of our hands, public opinion will make them—everyone will be pleased. The market will go up. The lambs will come in, it can only be a temporary boom, and we'll sell them till the cows come home.'

Alphendéry saw Jules travestying himself, with mortification. ‘For God's sake, don't do that, Jules. You don't want rumors about before we've so much as got hold of the wheat. This is secret business. You only have to tell the U.S.A. about consortium one, too, don't forget: consortia two and three you keep in your vest pocket and buttoned up. If I see Bomba getting wind of this, I assure you I'll have him shanghaied. William is only too anxious to do it now. He's all that's needed to ruin the finest scheme that Léon ever thought up, with all his genius.'

‘Genius, ptt!' Jules was willful.

Alphendéry had borne the brunt of the whole conversation, and in the scheme he thought he saw a real chance of making money for himself; enough to ‘get out'—his favorite dream. He said in a high despotic voice to Jules, ‘Jules, if you put Bomba, that tinhorn brass band, into this, I'll resign. Tell me you're going to do it, and I'll hand in my resignation right now.'

Jules raised his face with the disingenuous soft surprise of a spoiled child; he stopped his everlasting tracing on the writing block and smiled affectionately. ‘Michel, you surprise me! If it is so important to you, I won't tell Bomba.'

‘You mustn't, Jules—it would ruin the whole scheme.'

Jules began to trace again and laughed offhandedly. ‘Well, you write it all down from your angle and we'll go over it.' They began writing it down. William entered.

‘My original idea is the best,' flung out Jules, irritated by ten minutes' application and by some compliment of Alphendéry to Léon. ‘A consortium with myself—giant capital, form a society on the books, transfer funds from the bank on the books—any amount, offer the wheat to the French government at any price. Get it from the U.S.A. government, telling them we're the agents for the French government, get the money from the French government, sell the wheat secretly, and then skip. It's the simplest and you get double the money without all this finicking with scale-ups and short selling.'

Alphendéry looked pained. William said, ‘Well, let's try to understand Léon's scheme, at any rate.'

Alphendéry pleaded, ‘If you want to make money. Of course, if you want to cool your heels in the Santé for a few years, that's another story.' He felt a shiver of despair.

‘Why doesn't Léon go along and do the dirty work?' asked Jules next, angrily. Fifteen minutes' work and he was willing to throw the whole thing into the wastepaper basket.

Alphendéry laughed. ‘No one knows why he won't go to America. It's one of the mysteries of life. His Old Man of the Sea, Achitophelous, has something to do with it, so has a lady and a gun, and a gangster and a gun, and a stock exchange head-on collision and a gun, and a corner in chicken feed and a gun; but whose was the decisive gun I've never been able to find out. At any rate, there's a gun somewhere and look what a target Léon is. But he'll never tell. Why doesn't anyone in the world ever come clean?' He sighed. ‘This is a stroke of genius, Jules. There's no question of thieving. Get that right out of your head. You've got to work in with politics and you've got to work soon, for war and crisis are coming, and you've got to be prepared to make money. Ninety per cent of prewar money doesn't exist any more. You've got to be there when the cat jumps. Léon is right: Russia is the cue. You don't see the beauty of it yet. Germany now has no more credit. Dr. Luther is going from door to door with his hat in his hand. The Credit-Anstalt has just failed. There's no credit to be had. Valuta is cracking. The French are withdrawing funds from London. Why? What a mess! And Léon's taking all this into account! The man's superb! I've never understood why he's not the head of a great concern. He can wipe the floor with any of them.'

‘He doesn't know enough … he remains a peasant,' said Jules carelessly. They speculated for some time on Léon's characteristics. Jules said, ‘He could have been the head of Strindl's but he doesn't know how to blackmail them; he believes in making money through grabbing and cooking the books; now you can only get in with the big fellows by blackmail. He's a mug and he'll remain in the middle millions.'

He let them gabble about Léon under his nose, but his mind was made up and he found a good excuse for despising Léon by saying that he was a mug. He was really jealous of his talents; Jules went on to say that his own smash-and-grab scheme for the wheat was the only one that interested him.

Alphendéry affirmed impatiently, ‘We don't want to be like the rest of the two-penny
Luftmenschen
* who snatch brilliant schemes out of people's brains and tear them to pieces in their madness for an unearned profit.'

* Fantastics.

Jules said, ‘Ptt!'

‘Jules, it's not the idea that counts, although Léon's idea is superb, it's the use it's put to. All the little suckers and blackmailers round our bank are lousy with ideas, but they don't want to work, they don't want to put others to work; they want to suck unearned livings out of the air. In other words, stealing is the easiest thing and every sneak thief is our equal, if that's all we can do. You don't need a façade for that.'

Jules was nettled. ‘There's more to my scheme than that.'

‘Perhaps … but Léon drops a master scheme right into our lap.'

‘I wonder why.'

Alphendéry said bitterly, ‘Here we sit bandying about the people's bread. The eccentric thing is that to restore confidence we have to put up the price of bread, which is the chief food of the French people.'

‘How are you going to make money?' asked Jules, in astonishment. ‘You've got to sell the people what they want,' said William soberly. ‘No good selling them what they don't want.'

‘Oh, no one makes a fortune out of commodities … no great fortunes have been made that way,' charged Jules.

Léon came back to it, in the morning, before he left for Rotterdam. He was charming, persuasive, his thunder mitigated. ‘It's not easy to make money out of a rock field; but that's where you get nuggets. A cactus patch looks bad, but them big globes' leaves are full of milk. We have to learn to lick honey from thorns … We'll get it from A to Z. I'll be back on Saturday morning. We'll make a fortune between us, you'll see, Jules.' He clapped on Jules's table.

Ironically Jules measured him. ‘We'll make some money, I suppose, but not a fortune. No great swag was ever made out of commodities. To make a fortune, you've got to steal it, with nothing honest at the back of it. All great fortunes are financial … came out of the air. Anything that has hard work in it doesn't spell dough to me. They don't go together. The poor work hard and see what they get! Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are trying to pay their rent out of ‘honest' commodity business. Not for me! There's got to be a superstructure of graft, otherwise there's no sense in going into it.'

He shrugged his shoulders and looked at them both coldly. Alphendéry sprang up. ‘You're all wet, Jules, in saying that great fortunes have been financial. None has been. How many people have made money out of air? Perhaps Morgan—and then not air but steel, high explosives—but ninety-five per cent of the wealth of great financial oligarchs comes from industry and nothing else. The market ramps, the consolidations, the thefts, the flotations, came later. The money was made out of goods—it has to be.'

‘But Morgan was different, and he's my ideal man,' said Jules, clinging to his theme.

‘Money comes from exploited resources and manufactured goods,' said Alphendéry, incisively. ‘Pardon me for instructing two great men. Where do you think surplus value comes from? You can't extract surplus value out of a desk and swivel chair, whether you get them secondhand, or get a new Louis XVI set.'

Léon shouted, storming, but not angry. ‘No surplus value! Nothing about surplus value! It's the productive urge; you have it or you don't, that's all. I get the idea: the excess wheat. Are they going to drop it in the Gulf of Mexico? We can pass the buck.'

Alphendéry laughed. ‘They want to drop it in the Gulf of Mexico—don't you see?—because—it is surplus—Something that's over, and that they can't consume. Would they give it to the people free?'