Memoir From Antproof Case (34 page)

Mrs. Ludwig's replacement, I was told, was not yet hired. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, she would be. Translated, this meant that as long as I remained at Stillman and Chase I would not have a secretary.

The administrative committee had also disallowed my expenses while traveling. They explained that though this reflected a general change in policy, it was confined to me. I felt, somehow, that my star was declining.

I went home. I was powerless and alone, and I slept for three days.

 

When I awoke I was no less powerless or alone, but I was well rested and hope had returned. It was a Friday evening in June, one of those evenings in New York when the air is sweet and the light is soft. In the sunset, all the glass turned gold. The breeze was as gentle as in a dream, and when the wind rose it was warm and reassuring. I knew I would be up all night and that I would watch the birds take to the air with the winds of sunrise, that I would see the change in the sky, the five o'clock powder blue.

I was finished at Stillman and Chase not because I could not do my job—I was really very good at my job—but rather because Constance had left me, and Constance had left me because of coffee.

My way had been clear as I had worked steadily and meritoriously, but then, after I met her, I rose like a rocket. As soon as I was associated with her immense wealth, success gravitated to me like cat hair. Investment bankers dream in billions, and everyone wanted to sit with me at lunch or in the boardroom. I was rapidly headed toward the inner circle that, more and more, did the thinking for Mr. Edgar and would emerge after the storm of his death with its hairy hands full of blood and money.

I took this for granted. I didn't need success at Stillman and Chase, as I was fully able to buy or begin my own investment bank. In those days I thought that no matter what I did my heels would click across polished marble for the rest of my life. But when Constance and I separated, I was culled from the herd.

After three days' sleep, I was hungry. I decided to take a long walk and have a good dinner. Having faced the reality of my situation, I was actually happy—in the way that you are happy when you pay a debt, even if it leaves you impoverished.

Dressed in khaki and white, I headed out into the perfect evening and walked diagonally through the park. I hoped I would not see Constance doing some sort of coffee dance in the
sheep meadow, and I didn't. The air carried the scent of blossoms and billowed warmly over lakes and fields. By Columbus Circle I was walking fast, and by the time I arrived at the restaurant almost an hour later I was ready to confront my destiny.

And I did, although not right off. In those days no one except swamis and biochemists knew about the perils of fat, and I ate accordingly. At the Blue Mill you ordered from a chalkboard menu that the waiter placed near your table, and that evening the only thing on it was rack of lamb. I didn't protest. It was served with tiny, crisp, roasted potatoes, a salad with a (perhaps literally) heart-stopping Roquefort dressing, and a glass of Santa Maddalena. To be safe, I ordered two dinners, even though I knew that after the meal I would undoubtedly debauch myself on a tour of the bakeries.

Hudson Street was filled with courting couples—girls in their summer dresses and their beaus in whipcord suits and navy-blue ties. It was Friday evening, when Saturday and Sunday lay ahead for correcting the mistakes and addressing the sorrows of the week.

I saw a very beautiful woman at a near table. She must have come in from the Hamptons, for a new sunburn gave to her youthful face the color of life and strength. She wore a sundress that exposed her gorgeous shoulders and arms and the roseate plain between her throat and chest in a way that paralyzed every man around her. And I had the wonderfully disconcerting experience of discovering that, though she was with someone else, she was looking at me.

I was never much to look at, but for one reason or another I was always involved in love affairs, perhaps because I loved so strongly. Marlise has a different opinion. According to her, "Womens love you because womens loves crazy peoples." Any way, I had become infatuated with the beauty from the Hamptons, and I found myself oblivious of everything around me except what I was eating.

This blimp ride came slowly to an end as I realized that the object of my infatuation had become distinctly uncomfortable. She had ceased staring at me, stopped talking to the jerky college boy who tried to be her dinner companion, and was shooting apprehensive glances over her shoulder as she nervously touched her exquisite auburn hair.

I became more alert watching her react to a disturbance unfolding at the far end of the dining room. I hadn't noticed it at first, but soon the sound of tense, adrenaline-boosted, breathless argumentation filled the restaurant. Everyone grew silent and stopped moving.

Three waiters had gathered around the table of a lone man who was making a lot of trouble. Just a drunk, I thought. But he didn't sound drunk. A young vagrant, I thought. But he was dressed much as I was, and he was about the same age. And, though he was heavier and a bit shorter, our coloring was the same and our voices similar, except that I could hear very distinctly that he had been educated by Jesuits. They have a characteristic pacing, rhythm, intonation, and tone that are as easy to spot as a style of dancing peculiar to a famous samba school.

This Jesuit was involved in hot dispute. A waitress charged out of the kitchen, followed by a man whose pencil mustache signified that he owned the restaurant. She was dressed like the waiters but wore a skirt rather than pants underneath her apron. A white napkin hung from her left arm, just as in Paris.

"He threw it at me!" she whined—hurt, amazed, and frightened—in a voice that was like a missile homing in on Bensonhurst. "He took it from my hand, and he threw it at me. Call the police."

Her apron had a huge wet stain on it. What had he thrown? Wine? Coca-Cola?

"He could have scalded me to death!" she yelled, her anger building. "He could have scarred me!"

Even though my mouth was full, I stopped eating. My eyes went from side to side, although what I was looking at I do not know.

The Jesuit didn't just sit there. Jesuits never do. His left hand pointed at her, index finger extended, arm cocked close to the body in the manner of a warrior or a street fighter, a gesture that I have never seen in anyone of good upbringing and normal proclivities. "She," he said, accusingly, and his words carried Jesuitically throughout the room, "put a cup of live coffee right on this table, right in front of me, as I was eating."

I stood. My napkin fell to the floor.

"So what?" one of the waiters asked.

The Jesuit rose from his seat explosively. "So what?" he asked. "How would you like to have a river of sewage blown into
your
face?"

As they stepped back, I stepped forward.

"This satanic substance," the Jesuit boomed, "was the ruin of Adam, the ruin of Eve, and has always been neither more nor less than the devil's lubricant. If I don't ask for this filth," he bellowed, "then
by God,
don't set it down before me!"

"Let me pay for his dinner!" I said, approaching the Jesuit, but my mouth was full, and no one understood me. I swallowed, nearly choking, and repeated myself.

"Why?" the owner asked.

"Because," I said slowly, "he's my brother."

***

Of course, he was not really my brother. I never had a brother. I was an only child, but you can have a brother in more ways than one, the most important being perhaps the feeling of having been thrown down by the same omnipotent force after having failed at achieving the same noble aim. We walked out into the night, thinking about the fight against a common enemy.

Although I did not know why, he was strikingly familiar and I had the sense that I had met him before.

"She put a cup of live coffee right in front of me," he said, still amazed. "I didn't ask for it. She said, 'Here's your coffee.'"

"They do that," I told him.

"I didn't actually throw it at her, I just shooed it off the table, like a snake, and she was standing in the way. I might have thrown it at her. The smell makes me violent.

"The whole world has been overtaken by that disgusting stuff," he continued. "It's like a virus from outer space, sent to enslave humanity not in chains but by beans. Did you know that at the zoo when they want hippos to vomit they stuff a handful of coffee grounds into their garage-mouths, and the hippos retch so hard they practically turn inside-out?"

"Yes, I know that," I answered. "Everyone knows that, but people forget."

"Coffee makes them think alike. They find it hard to imagine that someone actually might have the courage to say that it's immoral.

"You know," he offered, as we sat down on a concrete slab next to a loading platform, "there's nothing you can do about it, so you might as well just kill yourself. The power of coffee is far too strong." He squinted at me. "Haven't we met?"

"I was thinking the same thing. Were you in the army?" I asked.

"Yeah."

"Air Corps?"

"Railroad troops."

"Italy?"

"Northern France and Germany."

"Where did you do your officer's training?"

"In sergeant's school."

"Did you go to Harvard?" (He looked so very familiar.)

An expression of uncontrollable disgust seized his features. "Did you?"

"Yes. Class of Twenty-Six."

"Twenty-six what? Assholes?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I haven't met very many people from Harvard," he said, "but every single one that I have met is distinguished by one very brilliant thing."

"Brilliance is a prerequisite for admission," I mouthed.

"I didn't mean it that way."

"What, then, is the one brilliant thing that you think distinguishes them?"

"They think they're better than everyone else. And do you know what? They're barely distinguishable. And if they are, it's because they're actually worse. Early on they get coated with a kind of intellectual gel, and, as they go through life, it turns to glass.

"Then their buck-toothed children go to Harvard, and they really think they're something special, but the cycles of breeding and posturing have emptied them into nothing. I hate people who went to Harvard even more than I hate other arrogant sons of bitches like fighter pilots and investment bankers."

"How do you do," I said, and introduced myself.

"How do you do, I'm Paolo Massina," he said. "It was nice to know you. I hope you keep up the good work with the coffee, but we were never meant to march side by side." He began to walk away from where we had been sitting.

I followed, speaking to him in Italian, but it was clear that he understood not a word of what I was saying. "You don't speak Italian," I said, suspiciously.

"So what?"

"Paolo Massina?"

"I changed my name because of my wife's parents. It was bad enough that I wasn't from Brooklyn. They would have died had their daughter become Angelica Smedjebakken."

He disappeared around a corner. I knew him. I knew that I knew him, but I just couldn't place him.

 

Slow defeat in seemingly inconsequential affairs is more painful than may at first be apparent, because nature does not compensate for a bank clerk's sneer as it does for, let us say, being hurled over Niagara Falls. No adrenaline comes to the fore when you place last in the office popularity polls (as I had begun to do, consistently), and mysticism cannot comfort you when your stocks go down steadily in a booming market or when you are bitten by a dog whose owner then reviles you and carries it off to get a tetanus shot. Day after day,' like someone with a vicious skin disease, I sank lower and lower in the esteem of my fellow men—every single one of whom, I might add, was a coffee drinker.

I had expected to be lionized at the Stillman and Chase summer banquet, because I had really outdone myself just days before with a call that would be worth billions to Stillman and Chase in the years ahead.

Although the world did not learn of the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal until much later, my analysis of radio traffic and diplomatic
comings and goings indicated to me that the alliance had been formed sometime in May. The CIA hadn't a clue, or, if they did, it was lost in the bureaucratic Parcheesi, and from those quarters emerged nothing, not even a peep.

Meanwhile, in early June, just after I had returned to work and even though I was being pressured and nitpicked, I was attentive to the right signs and I came to the right conclusions. For this, I might add, I owe a great deal to my tutors in Arabic at the institution about which I had recently begun to entertain serious misgivings, and to Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb of Oxford.

That may sound impressive, but all it means is that for years I studied like a donkey, a ninny, and an ass, and when I emerged from my academic costume of black robe with white trees, scarlet-lined hood, and red fox-fur pompons, I was able to listen to the radio in Arabic. Then, instead of spending six more years in an institution of higher learning, I had hired a Russian émigré to monitor the Soviet broadcasts.

We had had signs of something in the wind, and were concerned about the emergence of Nasir, so while I was away my staff—except for Mrs. Ludwig—collected broadcast tapes, transcripts, notes, and data from the Egyptian airports.

To wit: many official Soviet visits, civilian traffic but mostly via military airfields, with that information supplied to us by M.I.5.1 spent three psychotic days listening to the May Egyptian broadcasts. There, and in the Soviet programs, we found a pronounced shift. Most of all, the Egyptians were suddenly relaxed and triumphant, as if they had swallowed a canary and were secretly enjoying the aftertaste.

I went directly to the barely living body of Mr. Edgar with my judgment that Egypt had made a démarche directly into the Soviet camp. Perhaps because I had not previously been wrong about such things, or because he was a gambler by nature (but an
informed
gambler), he took me at my word and ordered a massive divestiture.