Humboldt's Gift (40 page)

  “If I had no cash, I’d ask my mother to put me in steerage. How much do you tip when you get off the
France
in Le Havre?” I asked him.

  “I give the chief steward five bucks.”

  “You’re lucky to leave the boat alive.”

  “Perfectly adequate,” said Thaxter. “They bully the American rich and despise them for their cowardice and ignorance.”

  He told me now, “My business abroad is with an international consortium of publishers for whom I’m developing a certain idea. Originally, I got it from you, Charlie, but you won’t remember. You said how interesting it would be to go around the world interviewing a lot of second-, third-, and fourth-rank dictators—the General Amins, the Qaddafis, and all that breed.”

  “They’d have you drowned in their fishpond if they thought you were going to call them third-rate.”

  “Don’t be silly, I’d never do such a thing. They’re leaders of the developing world. But it’s actually a fascinating subject. These shabby foreign-student-bohemians a few years ago, future petty blackmailers, now they’re threatening the great nations, or formerly great nations, with ruin. Dignified world leaders are sucking up to them.”

  “What makes you think they’ll talk to you?” I said.

  “They’re dying to see somebody like me. They’re longing for a touch of the big time, and I have impeccable credentials. They all want to hear about Oxford and Cambridge and New York and the London season, and discuss Karl Marx and Sartre. If they want to play golf or tennis or ping-pong, I can do all of that. To prepare myself for writing these articles I’ve been reading some good things to get the right tone—Marx on Louis Napoleon is wonderful. I’ve also looked into Suetonius and Saint-Simon and Proust. Incidentally, there’s going to be an international poets’ congress in Taiwan. I may cover that. You have to keep your ear to the ground.”

  “Whenever I try that I get nothing but a dirty ear,” I said.

  “Who knows, I may get to interview Chiang Kai-shek before he kicks off.”

  “I can’t imagine that he has anything to tell you.”

  “Oh, I can take care of that,” said Thaxter.

  “How about getting out of this office?” I said.

  “Why don’t you, for once, go along with me and do the thing my style. Not to overprotect. Let the interesting thing happen. How bad can it be? We can talk just as well here as anywhere. Tell me what’s going on personally, what’s with you?”

  Whenever Thaxter and I met we had at least one intimate conversation. I spoke freely to him and let myself go. In spite of his eccentric nonsense, and my own, there was a bond between us. I was able to talk to Thaxter. At times I told myself that talking to him was as good for me as psychoanalysis. Over the years, the cost had been about the same. Thaxter could elicit what I was really thinking. A more serious learned friend like Richard Durnwald would not listen when I tried to discuss the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. “Nonsense!” he said. “Simply nonsense! I’ve looked into that.” In the learned world anthroposophy was not respectable. Durnwald dismissed the subject sharply because he wished to protect his esteem for me. But Thaxter said, “What is this Consciousness Soul, and how do you explain the theory that our bones are crystallized out of the cosmos itself?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that,” I said. But before I could begin I saw Cantabile approaching. No, he didn’t approach, he descended on us in a peculiar way, as if he weren’t using the floor with its carpeting but had found some other material basis.

  “Let me borrow this,” he said, and took up the black dude hat with the swerving brim. “All right,” he said, promotional and tense. “Get up, Charlie. Let’s go and visit the man.” He gave my body a rough lift. Thaxter also rose from the orange loveseat but Cantabile pushed him down again and said, “Not you. One at a time.” He took me with him to the presidential door. There, he paused. “Look,” he said, “you let me do the talking. It’s a special situation.”

  “This is one more of your original productions, I see. But no money is going to change hands.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t really have done that to you. Who else but a guy in bad trouble would give you three for two? You saw the item in the paper, hey?”

  “I certainly did,” I said. “And what if I hadn’t?”

  “I wouldn’t let you get hurt. You passed my test. We’re friends. Come meet the guy anyway. I figure it’s like your duty to examine American society from White House to Skid Row. Now all I want you to do is stand still while I say a few words. You were a terrific straight man yesterday. There was no harm in that, was there?” He belted my coat tightly as he spoke and put Thaxter’s hat on my head. The door to Stronson’s office opened before I could get away.

  The financier was standing beside his desk, one of those deep executive desks of the Mussolini type. The picture in the paper was misleading in one respect only—I had expected a bigger man. Stronson was a fat boy, his hair light brown and his face sallow. In build he resembled Billy Srole. Brown curls covered his short neck. The impression he made was not agreeable. There was something buttocky about his cheeks. He wore a tur-tleneck shirt, and swinging ornaments, chains, charms hung on his chest. The pageboy bob gave him a pig-in-a-wig appearance. Platform shoes increased his height.

  Cantabile had brought me here to threaten this man. “Take a good look at my associate, Stronson,” he said. “He’s the one I told you about. Study him. You’ll see him again. He’ll catch up with you. In a restaurant, in a garage, in a movie, in an elevator.” To me he said, “That’s all. Go wait outside.” He faced me toward the door.

  I had turned to ice. Then I was horrified. Even to be a dummy impersonating a murderer was dreadful. But before I could indignantly deny, remove the hat, stop Cantabile’s bluff, the voice of Stronson’s receptionist came, enormously amplified and room-filling, from the slotted box on the desk. “Now?” she said.

  And he answered, “Now!”

  Immediately the porter in the gray jacket entered the office, pushing Thaxter before him. His I.D. card was open in his hand. He said, “Police, Homicide!” and he pushed all three of us against the wall.

  “Wait a minute. Let’s see that card. What do you mean, homicide?” said Cantabile.

  “What do you think, I was just going to let you make threats and hold still? After you said how you’d have me killed I went to the State’s Attorney and swore a warrant,” said Stronson. “Two warrants. One John Doe for the hit man, your friend.”

  “Are you supposed to be Murder Incorporated?” said Thaxter to me. Thaxter seldom laughed aloud. His deepest delight was always more than half-silent, and his delight at this moment was wonderfully deep.

  “Who’s the hit man, me?” I said, trying to smile.

  No one replied.

  “Who has to threaten you, Stronson?” said Cantabile. His brown eyes, challenging, were filled with moisture, while his face turned achingly dry and pale. “You lost more than a million bucks for the guys in the Troika, and you’re finished, kid. You’re dead! Why should anybody else get in the act? You’ve got no more chance than a shit-house rat. Officer, this man is unreal. You want to see the story in tomorrow’s paper. Western Hemisphere Investment Corporation is wiped out. Stronson wants to pull a few people down with him. Charlie, go and get the paper. Show it to the man.”

  “Charlie ain’t going anywhere. Everybody just lean on the wall. I hear you carry a gun, and your name is Cantabile. Bend over, sweetheart—that’s the way.” We all obeyed. His own weapon was under his arm. His harness creaked. He took the pistol from Cantabile’s ornate belt. “No ordinary .38, a Saturday-Night Special. It’s a Magnum. You could kill an elephant with this.”

  “There it is, just as I told you. That’s the gun he shoved under my nose,” said Stronson.

  “It must run in the Cantabile family to be silly with guns. That was your Uncle Moochy, wasn’t it, who wasted those two kids? No effing class at all. Goofy people. Now we’ll see if you’ve got any grass on you. It would also be nice if there was a little parole violation to go with this too. We’ll fix you fine, buddy boy. Goddamn bunch of kid-killers.”

  Thaxter was now being frisked under the cloak. His mouth was wide and his nose strongly distorted and flaming across the bridge with all the mirth, the joy of this marvelous Chicago experience. I was angry with Cantabile. I was furious. The detective ran his hands over my sides, under the arms, up between my legs and said, “You two gentlemen can turn around. You’re quite a pair of dressers. Where did you get those shoes with the canvas sides?” he asked Thaxter. “Italy?”

  “The King’s Road,” said Thaxter pleasantly.

  The detective took off the gray porter’s jacket—under it he wore a red turtlenecked shirt—and emptied Cantabile’s long black ostrich-skin wallet on the desk. “And which one is supposed to be the hit man? Errol Flynn in the cape, or the check coat?”

  “The coat,” said Stronson.

  “I should let you make a fool of yourself and arrest him,” said Cantabile, still facing the wall. “Go ahead. On top of the rest.”

  “Why, is he somebody?” said the policeman. “A big shot?”

  “Fucking-A-right,” said Cantabile. “He’s a well-known distinguished man. Look in tomorrow’s paper and you’ll see his name in Schneiderman’s column—Charles Citrine. He’s an important Chicago personality.”

  “So what, we’re sending important personalities to jail by the dozen. Governor Kerner didn’t even have the brains to get a smart bagman.” The detective was enjoying himself. He had a plain seamed face, now jolly, a thoroughly experienced police face. Under the red shirt his breasts were fat. The dead hair of his wig did not agree with his healthy human color and was lacking in organic symmetry. It took off from his head in the wrong places. You saw such wigs on the playful, gaily-colored seats of the changing booths at the Downtown Club—hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters.

  “Cantabile came to see me this morning with wild propositions,” said Stronson. “I said, no way. Then he threatened he’d murder me, and he showed me the gun. He’s really crazy. Then he said he’d be back with his hit man. He described how the hit would be done. The guy would track me for weeks. Then he’d shoot half my face off like a rotten pineapple. And the smashed bone and the brains and blood running out of my nose. He even told me how the murder weapon, the evidence, would be destroyed, how the killer would saw it up with a power hacksaw and hammer the pieces out and drop them down different manholes in all the suburbs. Every little detail!”

  “You’re dead anyway, fat-ass,” said Cantabile. “They’ll find you in a sewer in a few months and they’ll have to scrape an inch of shit off your face to see who it was.”

  “There’s no permit for a gun. Beautiful!”

  “Now take these guys out of here,” said Stronson.

  “Are you going to charge everybody? You only got two warrants.”

  “I’m going to charge everybody.”

  I said, “Mr. Cantabile himself has just told you that I had nothing to do with this. My friend Thaxter and I were coming out of the Art Institute and Cantabile made us come here to discuss an investment, supposedly. I can sympathize with Mr. Stronson. He’s terrified. Cantabile is out of his mind with some kind of vanity, eaten up with conceit, violent egomania—bluff. This is just one of his original hoaxes. Maybe the officer can tell you, Mr. Stronson, that I’m not the Lepke type of hired killer. I’m sure he’s seen a few.”

  “This man never killed anybody,” said the cop.

  “And I have to leave for Europe and I have lots of things to attend to.”

  This last point was the main one. The worst of this situation was that it interfered with my anxious preoccupations, my complicated subjectivity. It was my inner civil war versus the open life which is elementary, easy for everyone to read, and characteristic of this place, Chicago, Illinois.

  As a fanatical reader, walled in by his many books, accustomed to look down from his high windows on police cars, fire engines, ambulances, an involuted man who worked from thousands of private references and texts, I now found relevance in the explanation T. E. Lawrence had given for enlisting in the RAF—”To plunge crudely among crude men and find for myself . . .” How did it go, now? “. . . for these remaining years of my prime life.” Horseplay, roughhouse, barracks obscenity, garbage detail. Yes, many men, Lawrence said, would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand. I saw what he meant. So it was time that someone—and why not someone like me?—did more with this baffling and desperate question than had been done by other admirable men who attempted it. The worst thing about this absurd moment was that my stride was broken. I was expected at seven o’clock for dinner. Renata would be upset. It vexed her to be stood up. She had a temper, her temper always worked in a certain way; and also, if my suspicions were correct, Flonzaley was never far off. Substitutes are forever haunting people’s minds. Even the most stable and balanced individuals have a secretly chosen replacement in reserve somewhere, and Renata was not one of the stablest. As she often fell spontaneously into rhymes, she had surprised me once by coming out with this:

              When the dear

              Disappear

              There are others

              Waiting near.

  I doubt that anyone appreciated Renata’s wit more deeply than I did. It always opened breath-taking perspectives of candor. But Humboldt and I had agreed long ago that I could take anything that was well said. That was true. Renata made me laugh. I was willing to deal later with the terror implicit in her words, the naked perspectives suddenly disclosed. She had for instance also said to me, “Not only are the best things in life free, but you can’t be too free with the best things in life.”

  A lover in the lockup gave Renata a classic floozy opportunity for free behavior. Because of my habit of elevating such mean considerations to the theoretical level it will surprise no one that I started to think about the lawlessness of the unconscious and its independence from the rules of conduct. But it was only antinomian, not free. According to Steiner, true freedom lived in pure consciousness. Each microcosm had been separated from the macrocosm. In the arbitrary division between Subject and Object the world had been lost. The zero self sought diversion. It became an actor. This was the situation of the Consciousness Soul as I interpreted it. But there now passed through me a qualm of dissatisfaction with Rudolf Steiner himself. This went back to an uncomfortable passage in Kafka’s
Diaries
pointed out to me by my friend Durnwald, who felt that I was still capable of doing serious intellectual work and wanted to save me from anthroposophy. Kafka too had been attracted by Steiner’s visions and found the clairvoyant states he described similar to his own, feeling himself on the outer boundaries of the human. He made an appointment with Steiner at the Victoria Hotel on Jungmannstrasse. It is recorded in the
Diaries
that Steiner was wearing a dusty and spotted Prince Albert and that he had a terrible head cold. His nose ran and he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nostrils with his fingers while Kafka, observing this with disgust, told Steiner that he was an artist stuck in the insurance business. Health and character, he said, prevented him from following a literary career. If he added theosophy to literature and the insurance business, what would become of him? Steiner’s answer is not recorded.