Humboldt's Gift (41 page)

  Kafka himself of course was crammed to the top with this same despairing fastidious mocking Consciousness Soul. Poor fellow, the way he stated his case didn’t do him much credit. The man of genius trapped in the insurance business? A very banal complaint, not really much better than a head cold. Humboldt would have agreed. We used to talk about Kafka and I knew his views. But now Kafka and Steiner and Humboldt were together in death where, presently, all the folk in Stronson’s office would join them. Reappearing, perhaps, centuries hence in a more sparkling world. It wouldn’t have to sparkle much to sparkle more than this one. Nevertheless, Kafka’s description of Steiner upset me.

  While I was engaged in these reflections, Thaxter had gotten into the act. He came on with malice toward none. He was going to straighten matters out most amiably, not patronizing people too much. “I really don’t think you want to take Mr. Citrine away on this warrant,” he said, gravely smiling.

  “Why not?” said the cop, with Cantabile’s pistol, the fat nickel-plated Magnum, stuck in his belt.

  “You agreed that Mr. Citrine doesn’t resemble a killer.”

  “He’s tired-out and white. He should go to Acapulco for a week.”

  “It’s preposterous, a hoax like this,” said Thaxter. He was showing me the beauty of his common touch, how well he understood and got around his fellow Americans. But it was obvious to me how exotic the cop found Thaxter, his elegance, his Peter Wimsey airs. “Mr. Citrine is internationally known as an historian. He really
was
decorated by the French government.”

  “Can you prove that?” said the cop. “You wouldn’t have your medal on you by any chance, would you?”

  “People don’t carry medals around,” I said.

  “Well, what kind of proof have you got?”

  “All I have is this bit of ribbon. I have the right to wear it in my buttonhole.”

  “Let’s have a look at that,” he said.

  I drew out the tangled faded insignificant bit of lime green silk.

  “That?” said the cop. “I wouldn’t tie it on a chicken leg.”

  I agreed with the cop completely, and as a Chicagoan I scoffed inwardly with him at these phony foreign honors. I was the Shoveleer, burning with self-ridicule. It served the French right, too. This was not one of their best centuries. They were doing everything badly. What did they mean by handing out these meager bits of kinky green string? Because Renata insisted in Paris that I must wear it in my buttonhole, we had been exposed to the insults of the real
chevalier
whom Renata and I met at dinner, the man with the red rosette, the “hard scientist,” to use his own term. He gave me the snubbing of my life. “American slang is deficient, nonexistent,” he said. “French has twenty words for ‘boot.’ “ Then he was snooty about the Behavioral Sciences—he took me for a behavioral scientist—and he was very rough on my green ribbon. He said, “I am sure you have written some estimable books but this is the kind of decoration given to people who improve the
poubelles
.” Nothing but grief had ever come of my being honored by the French. Well, that would have to pass. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.

  Cantabile was still facing the wall. The cop, I was glad to note, had it in for him. “You just hold it, there,” he said. It seemed to me that we in this office were under something like a huge transparent wave. This enormous transparent thing stood still above us, flashing like crystal. We were all within it. When it broke and detonated we would be scattered for miles and miles along some far white beach. I almost hoped that Cantabile would have his neck broken. But, no, when it happened I saw each of us cast up safe and separate on a bare white pearly shore.

  As all parties continued—Stronson, stung by Cantabile’s evocation of his corpse fished from the sewer, crying in a kind of pig’s soprano voice, “I’ll see that
you
get it, anyway!” while Thaxter was coming in underneath, trying to be persuasive—I tuned out and gave my mind to one of my theories. Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves. Take the case of Stron-son, a man who entered into desperate schemes to swindle gangsters. Or take myself, a lover of beauty who insisted on living in Chicago. Or Von Humboldt Fleisher, a man of powerful social instincts burying himself in the dreary countryside.

  Stronson didn’t have the strength to carry through. Seeing how self-deformed he was, fat but elegant; short of leg and ham, on platform shoes; given to squealing, but sending his voice deep, I was sorry, oh! deeply sorry for him. It seemed to me that his true nature was quickly reclaiming him. Had he forgotten to shave that morning or did terror make his beard suddenly rush out? And long awful bristles were coming up from his collar. A woodchuck look was coming over him. The pageboy wave went lank with sweat. “I want all these guys handcuffed,” he said to the plainclotliesman.

  “What, with one pair of cuffs?”

  “Well, put ‘em on Cantabile. Go, put ‘em on.”

  I completely agreed with him, in silence. Yes, manacle the son of a bitch, twist his arms behind him, and cut into the flesh. But having said these savage things to myself, I didn’t necessarily wish to see them happen.

  Thaxter drew the cop aside and said a few words in an undertone. I wondered later whether he hadn’t passed him a secret CIA code word. You couldn’t be sure with Thaxter. To this day I have never been able to decide whether or not he had ever been a secret agent. Years ago he invited me to be his guest in Yucatan. Three times I changed planes to get there, and then I was met at a dirt landing strip by a peon in sandals who drove me in a new Cadillac to Thaxter’s villa, fully staffed with Indian servants. There were cars and jeeps, and a wife and little children, and Thaxter had already mastered the local dialect and ordered people around. A linguistic genius, he quickly learned new languages. But he was having trouble with a bank in Mérida, and there was, of all things, a country club in his neighborhood where he had run up a tab. I arrived just as he was completing the invariable pattern. He said on the second day that we were leaving this damn place. We packed his steamer trunks with fur coats and tennis equipment, with temple treasures and electrical appliances. As we drove away I was holding one of his babies on my lap.

  The cop took us out of Stronson’s office. Stronson called after us, “You bastards are going to get it. I promise you. No matter what happens to me. Especially you, Cantabile.”

  Tomorrow he himself would get it.

  As we waited for the elevator, Thaxter and I had time to confer. “No, I’m not being booked,” said Thaxter. “I’m almost sorry about that. I’d love to go along, really.”

  “I expect you to get busy,” I said. “I felt that Cantabile was going to pull something like this. And Renata’s going to be very upset, that’s the worst of it. Don’t go off and forget me now, Thaxter.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Charles. I’ll get the lawyers right on this. Give me some names and numbers.”

  “First thing is to call up Renata. Take Szathmar’s number. Also Tomchek and Srole.”

  Thaxter wrote the information on an American Express receipt form. Could it be that he was still a cardholder?

  “You’ll lose that flimsy bit of paper,” I said.

  Thaxter spoke to me rather seriously about this. “Watch it, Charlie,” he said. “You’re being a nervous Nellie. This is a trying moment, sure. Exactly why you have to watch it all the more.
A plus forte raison
.”

  You knew that Thaxter was in earnest when he spoke French. And whereas George Swiebel always shouted at me not to abuse my body, Thaxter forever warned me about my anxiety level. Now there was a man whose nerves were strong enough for his chosen way of life. And notwithstanding his weakness for French expressions, Thaxter was a real American in that, like Walt Whitman, he offered himself as an archetype—”What I assume you will assume.” At the moment, that didn’t particularly help. I was under arrest. My feelings toward Thaxter were those of a man with many bundles trying to find the doorkey and hampered by the house cat. But the truth was that the people from whom I looked for help were by no means my favorites. Nothing was to be expected from Thaxter. I even suspected that his efforts to help might be downright dangerous. If I cried out that I was drowning, he would come running and throw me a life preserver of solid cement. If odd feet call for odd shoes, odd souls have odd requirements and affection comes to them in odd modes. A man who longed for help was fond of someone incapable of giving any.

  I suppose that it was the receptionist who had sent for the blue-and-white squad car now waiting for us. She was a very pretty young woman. I had looked at her as we were leaving the office and thought, Here’s a sentimental girl. Well brought up. Lovely. Distressed to see people arrested. Tears in her eyes.

  “In the back seat, you,” said the plainclothesman to Canta-bile, who, in his pinch hat, white in the face, hair sticking out at the sides, got in. At this moment, disheveled, he seemed for the first time genuinely Italian.

  “The main thing is Renata. Get in touch with Renata,” I told Thaxter as I got into the front seat. “I’ll be in trouble if you don’t—trouble!”

  “Don’t worry. People won’t let you disappear from sight forever,” said Thaxter.

  His words of comfort gave me my first moment of deeper anxiety.

  He did indeed try to get in touch with Renata and with Szathmar. But Renata was still at the Merchandise Mart with her client, picking fabrics, and Szathmar had already closed his office. Somehow Thaxter forgot what I had told him about Tomchek and Srole. To kill time, therefore, he went to a Black Kung Fu movie on Randolph Street. When the show let out he reached Renata at home. He said that since she knew Szathmar so well he thought he could leave things to her, entirely. After all, he was a stranger in town. The Boston Celtics were playing the Chicago Bulls and Thaxter bought a ticket to the basketball game from a scalper. En route to the Stadium the cab stopped at Zimmerman’s and he bought a bottle of Piesporter. He couldn’t get it chilled properly, but it went well with the sturgeon sand-wiches.

  Cantabile’s dark form was riding before me in the front seat of the squad car. I addressed my thoughts to it. A man like Can-tabile took advantage of my inadequate theory of evil, wasn’t that it? He filled all the gaps in it to the best of his histrionic ability with his plunging and bluffing. Or did I, as an American,
have
a theory of evil? Perhaps not. So he entered the field from that featureless and undemarcated side where I was weak, with his ideas and conceits. This pest delighted the ladies, it seemed— he pleased Polly and, apparently, his wife the graduate student as well. It was my guess that he was an erotic lightweight. But after all it’s the imagination that counts for most with women. So he made his progress through life with his fine riding gloves and his calfskin boots, and the keenly gleaming fuzz of his tweeds, and the Magnum he carried in his waistband, threatening everybody with death. Threats were what he loved. He had called me in the night to threaten me. Threats had affected his bowels yesterday on Division Street. This morning he had gone to threaten Stronson. In the afternoon he offered, or threatened, to have Denise knocked off. Yes, he was a queer creature, with his white face, his long ecclesiastical-wax nose with its dark flues. He was very restless in the front seat. He seemed to be trying to get a look at me. He was almost limber enough to twist his head about and preen his own back feathers. What might it mean that he had tried to pass me off as a murderer? Did he find the original suggestion for that in me? Or was he trying in his own way to bring me out, to carry me into the world, a world from which I had the illusion that I was withdrawing? On the Chicago level of judgment I dismissed him as ready for the bughouse. Well, he was ready for the bughouse, certainly. I was sophisticated enough to recognize that in what he proposed that we two should do with Polly there was a touch of homosexuality, but that wasn’t very serious. I hoped that they would send him back to prison. On the other hand I sensed that he was doing something for me. In his gleaming tweed fuzz, the harshness of which suggested nettles, he had materialized in my path. Pale and crazy, with his mink mustache, he seemed to have a spiritual office to perform. He had appeared in order to move me from dead center. Because I came from Chicago no normal and sensible person could do anything of this sort for me. I couldn’t be myself with normal sensible people. Look at my relations with a man like Richard Durnwald. Much as I admired him, I couldn’t be mentally comfortable with Durnwald. I was slightly more successful with Dr. Scheldt the anthroposophist, but I had my troubles with him too, troubles of a Chicago nature. When he spoke to me of esoteric mysteries I wanted to say to him, “Don’t give me that spiritual hokum, friend!” And after all, my relations with Dr. Scheldt were tremendously important. The questions I raised with him couldn’t have been more serious.

  All this went to my head, or flowed to my head, and I recalled Humboldt in Princeton quoting to me, “
Es schwindelt
!” The words of V. I. Lenin at the Sniolny Institute. And things were
schwindling
now. Now was it because, like Lenin, I was about to found a police state? It was from a flux or inundation of sensations, insights, and ideas.

  Of course the cop was right. Strictly speaking, I was no killer. But I did incorporate other people into myself and consume them. When they died I passionately ‘mourned. I said I would continue their work and their lives. But wasn’t it a fact that I added their strength to mine? Didn’t I have an eye on them in the days of their vigor and glory? And on their women? I could already see the outline of my soul’s purgatorial tasks, when it entered the next place.