Memoir From Antproof Case (33 page)

The character of the police department of the City of New York was an important factor in my calculations, for the looting of Stillman and Chase would take place, of course, in New York. Which was encouraging, for most of the department had no connection with crime except on a random basis. They were a costumed career bureaucracy that, with the exception of some saints and heroes, did the minimum required to make it look as if they were doing what they were supposed to have been doing.

Whether they learned this from the other city bureaucracies, whether they exported it, or whether at some dim time in history—perhaps in the age of the dinosaurs—everyone learned it simultaneously, was immaterial: they were corrupt, they were ineffective, they did not come when called, they were incompetent, they were unconscious, they were asleep, and they were New York's finest.

These defamations were valid for street crime, crimes of passion, parking offenses, and armed assault, but they were especially valid for the kind of high-level financial crime I contemplated, for of the vast armies of blue-coated soldiers, only a few (and perhaps none) were not astonishingly deferential to the Wasp mores and institutions that made up the Wall Street overworld that was clearly beyond their ken.

How would a New York detective in the early 1950's react to a crime of arbitrage and straddling other than to think it was a violent sex perversion? Even were the violation more straightforward, the received wisdom was that the elite would take care of it among themselves. So, as far as police interference was concerned, I concluded that even if not completely in the clear, I had a gargantuan head start.

As for the moral justification, really, one need not strain to find justification for robbing an investment bank, at least as they were when I knew them. They were caste-restricted highly ef ficient cartels that escaped competition and maintained their position by relying upon reams of regulations and unfathomable established customs. The regulations were written by appointed and elected politicians either in the pay of these firms or soon to join them. The customs were protected by networks of cronies and middle-level clerks on the take.

In the Treasury markets the Fed gave Stillman and Chase a license to steal. It was a closed system that took money from the many and returned it to only a few, without affording to the many either choice or benefit. As a boy runner, I marveled at the way securities were traded. A broker would take an order from a school teacher or a milkman—a hundred shares of International Pickle at $5 apiece. The broker would say, 'I'll let you know by the close of the market if I can get that price.' He might then wait for the stock to drop to four dollars, buy it, and sell it to the milkman for five. Or he might buy the stock at five, watch it go up, sell it at six, and tell the milkman he had been unable to obtain it for five. In both cases the client was providing a guarantee for the broker's trading. I saw it happen a million times. Stillman and Chase did exactly this, and not only with money from the milkman but with pension funds, endowments, and municipal treasuries.

Within the organization itself, reward had less to do with performance than position. Clerks and runners lived on a pittance and sometimes risked their lives, while the top echelon prided themselves on how a word here or a word there could churn a billion dollars and create a fortune in commissions. Though it was not the same thing, it reminded me of the way thieves pride themselves in appropriating at one fell swoop what it may have taken a man all his life to earn. For those who would condemn the partners of Stillman and Chase more than common thieves, I say, judge them not by their take but by their
dishonesty. Whereas the value of material things fluctuates, disappears, the constancy of honesty is well known, and cannot be made to vary.

Stillman and Chase had a particularly filthy habit, though not as refined as that of its Swiss counterparts, of husbanding the blood money of tyrants and sheiks. It was the vault of slave kingdoms on the Arabian Sea and Latin American dictatorships enamored of boots, belts, and bandoliers.

I neither needed money nor wanted it. I had had an ocean of it and it had hardly mattered to me. All I ever wanted, really, was to build a barrier between myself and coffee. And I was not obsessed with striking at Stillman and Chase. They were indefensible, but if I robbed them I would not be making the world either a better or a worse place. I decided then, on the terrace of my room at the Hassler, as Roman owls hooted at the shooting stars, that I was going to rob Stillman and Chase because it was there, because this was the right thing to do, because it would bring a ray of sunshine into my life, because virtue was its own reward, because of
ars gratia artis
, and because
excelsior timidus protectat.

During the war the Swiss foreign minister protested to the American ambassador that an American warplane had violated Swiss neutrality by entering the country from the northeast, following the valley of the Rhine, and circling the Matterhorn at close proximity not once, twice, or three times, but
six
times—in figure eights, loops, and barrel rolls. The entire population of Zermatt had been transfixed, and several herds of goats stopped giving milk for days.

Who do you think it was that upset the goats? I did. I did it because I thought I was going to die. Having done it, however, I knew somehow that I was going to live. In breaking the rules, I broke other things too, including the veils of falsehood that cover the truth like thunderclouds.

Were the world perfect it would always be wrong to trespass, but as the world is not perfect, sometimes one must. And when you do, you live, you break free, you fly. But you must do it responsibly, you must not injure the innocent. Then, at least before they catch you, it works.

I know that this is true, and the reason it is true, I believe, is that the spark of transgression comes directly from the heart of God.

 

The next morning, though I had stayed up most of the night and I was half a century old, I was full of energy. I strode to the front desk with the assurance and bravado I had had ten years earlier as an airman in the very same city. Although my plans had not solidified, my intentions were set. All that remained was to find a way, to hatch a plot, and I imagined that this would be quite enjoyable. Perhaps I would chance upon a brilliant scheme as I walked about the city that day. After all, I had been directed to the idea itself by my accidental encounter with the singers.

My luggage was sent through directly to the Georges V in Paris, and I was free until the train left. I had routed myself through Frankfurt rather than San Remo, for I knew that I would sleep well in the cool air of the Alps. It always was the same: leave Rome at 5:00
P.M.,
dinner in Milan, snowfields before darkness, a sound and perfect sleep under the virgin wool blankets of
Wagons hits
as glacial air poured through the open window.

I would arrive in Paris by afternoon, shower, and walk the city until dark, sitting on a bench in Passy as I read
Le Monde,
observing with paternal joy the ranks of school children in blue uniforms, and then buying a tie at Hermès to go with the suits I would pick up at my tailor in London. Perhaps in Paris I would meet a woman with whom I might fall in love, although I considered myself too old in many respects for that kind of thing, and would feel this way until I was reborn with the shock of plummeting into Brazil.

All this while I drew my salary and qualified for the bonus. The work itself, when I did it, consisted of meeting with political egomaniacs who spoke not one un-self-serving word, and had less an idea of the state of their country's polity and economy than might a blind chicken on a provincial farm. Resident Stillman and Chase money people were there with the figures and proposals: I was the exposure guru. They used me to figure out the risk and, therefore, the charges, in floating a loan. I had a sterling record, and had never been wrong. My technique was simple. I looked at the fundamentals, I read everything I could, I paid great heed to history, and I talked to the people that investment bankers seldom talk to—small farmers, masons, students, policemen, factory workers, engineers, fishermen, dentists, and women hanging out the wash. From them I gauged the hope and corruption that determine a country's momentum, or lack of it.

I liked my work, and I had intended to take my time in coming up with a way to ruin Stillman and Chase. Being human, I probably would have taken fifteen or twenty years, by which time I would have retired to East Hampton and Palm Beach, with a large belly, horn-rimmed glasses, a lemon-yellow blazer, and fifty cases of Laphroaig sitting in the cool of each basement. I can see myself waddling into the Maidstone Club on astonishingly skinny legs, a monogrammed sterling silver cigar tool hanging from my waist, a mashie niblick in one hand and a copy of
The Singapore Business Digest
in the other.

The clerk at the Hassler saved me from this, or, rather, he was the instrument of my salvation. He handed me a bill. Of course, I gave it right back to him without even looking at it.

"That will be taken care of by Stillman and Chase, in New York," I said, with a sparkle in my voice that came from knowing what I was going to do to them. "We have an account here." I resisted the temptation to add, "and the economic health of your nation depends upon us."

I knew something was wrong when a look of tremendous pain crossed his face. It was generated by the conflict between his obligation to be obsequious and his duty to collect the money.

"Absolutely, sir," he said. "The room charges will be paid directly from New York, but the additionals are now on your account."

"My account?"

"Yes sir."

"My personal account?"

"Yes sir."

"I don't have a personal account."

"We opened one for you, sir, when the letter of instruction came from Signor Piehand."

"Signor Piehand? In New York?"

"Yes sir."

He was referring to Dickey Piehand, the managing partner, a malicious, alcoholic, glorified concierge who had married a suppository heiress from a rotted branch of the Edgar family.

"What did it say?"

"It said, sir, that you would take care of the additionals."

"That prick," I said. "He's just a Scarsdale maggot who married a suppository heiress."

"Yes sir."

The clerk was Italian, and did not understand idiomatic English. I decided to get on with it.

"What are the additional ?" I asked.

"I can read them for you, sir." He read in a magnificent Northern Italian accent, pronouncing each and every syllable gloriously and incorrectly. "Din-ner in the café. Min-er-al wa-ter. Min-er-al wa-ter. Breakfast. Telephone Call. Telephone Call. Telephone Call. Min-er-al wa-ter. Min-er-al wa-ter. Pistachios. Telephone Call. Laundry. Min-er-al wa-ter. Telephone Call. Telephone Call. Breakfast. Telephone Call. Pistachios. Min-er-al wa-ter. Min-er-al wa-ter. Pistachios...."

Never had I had so objective a view of my habits, and I meekly paid the additionals, which, for a five-day stay, came to more than $800. At first it seemed like one of Dickey Piehand's moronic inefficiencies, or perhaps one of the Edgar practical jokes.

How could Stillman and Chase, I thought, be so formidable as to have known my decision of last night and closed me down today by means of a letter written a week ago? It was impossible, so it was either a mistake or a coincidence. A coincidence of what? On the one hand, I had my new resolution. On the other? Was it possible that, purely by accident, they had opened the battle just as it had occurred to me in my most private thoughts to do the same?

 

I finished my work in Europe, flew from London to New York, and went straight from Idlewild to the firm, where nothing seemed amiss until I reached my office. My secretary was gone and so was her desk. My reception room had no furniture whatsoever, not even a telephone. The only thing left was the rug.

"Where's Mrs. Ludwig?" I asked the fiendishly attractive Bryn Mawr girl who helped Byron Chatsworth track pork jowls, and who hated me because I had once told her point-blank that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but that she would never find love as long as she continued to drink coffee. She was offended because she thought that I was saying that only women should not drink coffee. No one should drink coffee. It makes both sexes equally disgusting.

"She moved to muni's," I was told.

I trod to muni's with indignant steps, and there was Mrs. Ludwig, lording it over the younger secretaries, her glasses hanging from a navy-blue cord that failed to match her sweater.

"Why are you in muni's?" I asked, like a husband who confronts his wife in the arms of another man.

"I was transferred," she replied. "I thought you knew." That ... was a lie.

"Who transferred you?"

"Mr. Piehand."

"We'll see about Mr. Piehand." But I knew already that the cause was lost. No way exists for a rational human being (or even an irrational human being) to fight a bureaucracy. Even when the country of the bureaucrats is conquered, they flourish, effortlessly traversing from the arteries of war to the veins of peace. Huge bureaucracies are simply invincible. Nonetheless, I throttled Dickey Piehand and pushed him up against the paneling in his office. Red with rage, glottals pouring from my throat like a professional gargler, I shook his porcine body.

"You transferred Mrs. Ludwig without asking me!" I screamed. "I've been here since 1918, and you've been here since 1951, you filthy little suppository!"

"It was decided in the administrative committee," he said in a death squeak. "Talk to Mr. Edgar if you have a complaint!"

He knew that was impossible. Eugene B. Edgar was so ancient that he would no longer speak to anyone but his stunning 'nurses.' In fact, very few people could tell if he were alive or if he were dead. What a tragedy that this man, who once had known almost everything, had come so far that he had forgotten it. But he still owned. He owned so much that though he could not walk, refused to speak, and could hardly hear, he was still treated like a prince even by those who hated him. The hundred or two hundred other human beings in the world who were born in the same year and still had not died were wrapped in shawls and looked upon as hamsters. People walked past them as if they were pieces of decaying wood. But Mr. Edgar, who was as physically alluring as a June roadkill in the middle of October, commanded more attention than would have the Bryn Mawr girl had she come to work in a strapless dress and with a tiara in her hair.