Memoir From Antproof Case (32 page)

I didn't know what to do, so I waited, and as I waited my former happiness and ferocity boiled down into fear. I began to experience what Marlise calls
Impetigo
, by which she means an overpowering fear of heights, so I clung to a lightning rod, staring at my distorted reflection in the glass ball, hoping that something would happen and that the weather would not change. The firing intensified as reinforcements from other boroughs began to use tommy guns. These are short-range weapons of dubious accuracy. Lines of slugs whistled through the air and to the sides, shattering the slate. I thought that the ribs of the roof might be exposed by this excavating fire, which would allow me to climb down to the ledge. But for that to happen, I, too, would have to be excavated.

Then I heard a voice say, "Don't do it."

I looked around, still grasping the lightning rod. Hanging on to the wedge of the roof on the lee side of the firing was a stocky, bespectacled, sandy-haired man of approximately my age. I was, of course, preoccupied, and the last thing on my mind was the size of his ears. He had larger than normal ears, although I did not notice them until, many years afterward, he pointed to them and told me that they had been the coffee of his life, and that he was convinced that everyone on the street, especially beautiful women, saw them as clearly as if they were the Rock of Gibraltar. Apart from the ears, he looked like a young version of Father Flanagan. Of course, at the time, Father Flanagan was a young version (and, one hopes, a young virgin), and no one knew what he looked like, except those around him and possibly Spencer Tracy by instinct alone.

Though I thought he meant for me not to go after the sniper, he was under the impression that I was about to kill myself. "I have my reasons," I said.

"They're never good enough."

"How do you know?"

"I work for the Transit Authority."

"I understand," I said. "That makes you as infallible as the Pope."

"No. I'm in Maintenance of Way. My job includes talking down the suicides. I've never heard a good enough reason (from someone healthy enough to climb a hundred feet up a suspension cable) for ending one's life."

"I'm not a jumper."

"I suppose you work up here," he said, looking at my Savile Row suit and Peale shoes.

"Of course I don't."

"So why are you here?"

"To get the son of a bitch below."

"The devil?"

"I don't know who he is. Why do you think the police are firing a hundred guns in our direction?"

"A hundred what?"

Because of the wind, he could hear nothing from my side of the roof. I will never forget his expression as he looked over and saw the army below.

"What did you do," he asked, "double-park?"

I can think of no other explanation but that this man had been sent by an angel. He had seen me from a Transit Authority building and, assuming that I was about to take my life, had come to dissuade me. Having talked down many jumpers from bridges and elevated platforms, and persuaded others to remove their necks from the rails forward of onrushing trains, he was unafraid of heights and accustomed to great danger. Half the subway in New York runs on trestles and over bridges, and he spent his days deep in tunnels and high in the air.

"How do we get down to that ledge without flying off into space?" I asked.

He peered intently over the ridge of the roof. "It's simple," he said. "I'll hang on to the lightning rod, and you climb down me like a ladder. Then, when you're safe, I'll slide, you catch my feet, and lower me as if you were taking in a pole."

"You're Polish?" I asked.

"Swedish," he said, moving decisively to anchor himself on the lightning rod.

I climbed down him and, after holding his ankles for several minutes while he kicked my face and implied that I was a chicken, straightened out and let go. I slid for a few long seconds until the soles of my feet connected with the ledge.

Then he let go as if he were only a few feet above the ground, and I brought him in like a pole.

"Now what?" he asked, not quite sure of our mission.

"We turn around." We turned around. Though the fire escape was just six feet below, it was only two and a half feet wide, and unless we leaned out dangerously, we couldn't see it. I felt as if an unseen force were pushing me off the ledge and into the void. Though of course I had to resist it, I also tried not to offend it.

"What's next?" I was asked.

I improvised. "We drop to the fire escape and rush him."

"He has a gun. You go first."

"If he hits you, you won't necessarily die," I stated.

"Still, you go first."

"No no," I said. "It's safer for the one who goes first. It will shock him, and he'll aim for the second guy."

"Even so, you go first."

"All right, if you insist," I said.

"Good. I'll follow soon after. When I drop, he'll turn from you. Then you rush him."

I agreed to this. At that point I suppose I would have agreed to anything.

I waved my arms for the police to stop firing, and when they did, I dropped. Because I thought I would miss the fire escape and fall to my death, going off the edge was much harder even than my first parachute jump, when at least I had a parachute. But I was lucky. I landed not only on the fire escape but on the rifle, pivoting it like a lever resting upon the fulcrum of the windowsill. It struck the sniper in the jaw with a blow that knocked him back into the room.

The next thing I knew, the Swede landed next to me, full force, on his behind. He seemed unhurt, though slightly stunned.

I took the rifle and tossed it gallantly over my head. Seconds later I heard it clatter on the pavement.

"Why did you do that, you idiot!" the Swede screamed.

"He's unconscious," I said confidently. A second passed.

"No he's not," the Swede announced, dodging to the side as the sniper tried to impale him with a bayonet.

"Cut it out!" I shouted. Then the sniper lunged at me. I backed up and felt the rail slam against my shoulders. "Cut it out!"

This had an effect, and he froze. I saw him for the first time. I must say that I was surprised, and that he didn't fit my preconception of a sniper. He was about 5'3" tall, with thinning red hair and red beard, and his eyes, which were the most unusual pop eyes I've ever seen, made him look like a man who was being strangled.

"Pressure on your neck!" I yelled as I dived through the window, to my regret. I found myself in his apartment, or office—whatever it was—and this was not where I wanted to be. The floor was two feet deep with the decomposed remnants of food and coffee grounds. A pot of coffee bubbled on the stove, and paper plates of roast fowl were scattered around, some perhaps a day old, some perhaps as old as a year. It was like being in a three-dimensional time lapse film of a decomposing chicken.

Rising from the floor in disgust, I tried not to vomit. No good vomiting when someone is about to rush you with a bayonet. I could see that the bathtub was half-full of some kind of green slime, and that above the toilet was a picture of Al Jolson, with a throwing knife stuck in the throat.

Near the stove was domelike birdcage in which lay the bones of a dead parrot, and on the front door was a calendar from January, 1922, that said, "To do...."

My friend jumped in the window, and his first words were, "This is disgusting. This guy is disgusting."

The sniper started to move his feet underneath him, which propelled him toward me. I dodged out of the way as if I were evading a punch, and he ran into the wall, but he turned in a flash. He was extremely agitated.

"Don't you ever clean up?" I asked.

"Don't tell
me
to clean up!" he shouted, in the only words I would ever hear him say.

"I'm not telling you to clean up, I'm asking if you ever do."

This drove him crazy. "Don't tell
me
to clean up!" he screamed, flailing at me, samurai-style, with the bayonet. He was quick, he was fast, and he was going to kill me.

As it churned the air, the blade made a wonderful sound, and no wonder. It was the only clean thing in the apartment. I backed up, mesmerized. Then the Swede charged from the side, but the horrible messy guy made a move as quick as a trout taking a fly, and cut the Swede's face, from which blood shot as if it were being pumped. He collapsed into the filth.

Then the sniper turned to me again, and I watched the windmill advance. I could not go around it, I could not fly above it, and I could not dive below it. I was very frightened at first. I thought I was going to die just like one of the chickens rotting on the floor.

As he moved close enough so that I was breathing the air pushed by the blade, I understood that the only thing I could do was to absorb the thrust of the bayonet, remain on my feet, and grab that son of a bitch's throat. His pop eyes were his destiny, and I would fulfill it for him even as I bled.

The bayonet struck me in the side. The cut was deep, but I did not feel it at first. Then he thrust it into my shoulder. I prayed in a flash that no arteries were severed, and I grasped his neck. He tried to withdraw the bayonet, but, for him, the distance between us would be fixed forever.

Never had I been so determined. But what choice did I have? All my strength flowed into my hands. Then I heard the pitter patter of little feet on the fire escape. It didn't matter. It was the police. That didn't matter either. By the time they arrived inside, grimacing at what they beheld, the filthy little pop-eyed sniper was hanging from my hands, his eyes bulging, his flesh as white as a cloud.

I failed to get to the Brooklyn Trust that day, and Eugene B. Edgar, the richest man in America, cut my salary in half. But it didn't matter, for in the Depression even half my salary was a princely sum.

(If you have not done so already, please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

 

W
HEN
I
RETURNED
to my rooms on the top floor of the Hassler I held yet another bottle of ice-cold mineral water by the neck: first in my right hand, and then in the left as I opened the door. A woman had stayed in the suite before I took it, and the scent of a high quality perfume clung to unexpected places—I found it on my hands after I cranked up the awning, and I spent a highly charged minute sniffing the base of the telephone.

It was not a perfume that Constance used, but of a rank elevated enough to bring home to me that she was gone. I went onto the terrace, put my feet up, and began to drink the water. Called
Aqua Impala,
it was sharp and sweet. Late at night Rome was silent but for the sound of wind moving through the trees in the Villa Borghese. Fountains splashing coldly in the summer air echoed off buildings that still held the day's heat in their ocher-colored walls.

On my small terrace were planters filled with black earth and
blooming flowers, and the stars that blazed over the Tyrrhenian lent to the night a soft mysterious light full of excitement and promise. Many a time I have contented myself for more hours than I dare admit, sinking into the slow but perfect rhythms of sunlight or stars, watching birds, or the plume of a fountain, or stalks of corn swaying in the golden air of a silent August afternoon.

It reminded me that, in the late Twenties and throughout the Thirties, I had to stay in New York during most of the summer, and on weekends I would walk the abandoned streets of lower Manhattan, where you could hear a pigeon from five blocks away as it rose into the stifling air. It was on benches in parks that had no name, alone on vacant Sundays, that I found my resolution.

And why not? I grew up on a farm, where I stayed until I was ten years of age, and there I took directly from nature and without difficulty what whole populations, lacking such privilege, decry as having vanished, what philosophers struggle to find in a lifetime of labor, and what I could see, knowing nothing, with one glance into a sunlit stream.

I have done well at times (and very badly at others) in society and at games of worth and dominance. But in the world of tilled landscapes run like lace with tracts of forest and rebellious creeks, in the world of broad fields and bright uninhabited bays, I invariably find solace and strength. It is where I have always wanted to be, even if I am seldom there, and it is where I will only chance to die on some windy perfect day like those I loved as a child.

For a brief hour on my terrace at the Hassler I was my own man again, or, rather, a boy, able to plot my course with the kind of dead certainty common to those who know exactly who they are, what they love, where they have been, and where they are going.

I knew what I had to do, though I was still puzzled as to why, and in the sad and tranquil Roman night I was left alone with the bottle of mineral water to translate my natural understanding into terms I could comprehend when strength and serenity were gone.

 

Unless you count as felonies innocuous actions such as overturning coffee urns, putting mice in the bins of coffee beans at the A&P, and the reflexive punching of waiters and waitresses who put coffee next to me
while I'm eating,
I had never committed a crime.

The murder for which I had been convicted was strictly self-defense, and in that I was. given no choice. Had my attacker been anything but a Belgian, and were the Huns not to have chosen Belgium to trample first, I would have been acquitted. Should not a perpetually inebriated judge be grounds for a determination of mistrial? It was the system of justice that was at fault, not I. I was merely a child attacked without reason by a large coffee-drinking adult.

And the pop-eyed guy? That was violent, but hardly a crime. The police arrested me and the Swede, held us for a time, and then released us in the middle of the night with neither charge nor comment. A number of officers were awarded commendations for heroically suppressing a threat to public safety, and they did not have to explain why the sniper had died by asphyxiation, because when they arrived upon the scene they shot at the body for a full minute, driving bullets into the carcass in the same way that an explorer plants a flag at the top of a peak or on a palm-fringed beach.