Condominium (25 page)

Henry Churchbridge closed the paper and tossed it aside. He could imagine poor old Fred Dawdy reading that item avidly. It linked Jack Kennedy and Alger Hiss, boiling and bubbling with the ferment of conspiracy and corruption. And old Governor Lehman could not bring libel suits from the grave. Hell, they could have stated that Herbert Lehman had been proven to be the real father of Marilyn Monroe, alias Rebecca Finestein, and all the old Fred Dawdys would nod wisely and buttonhole their neighbors and say that they, by God, had seen it in print, and They wouldn’t let them print it if it wasn’t so, would They?

Buy gold. Store food. Arm yourselves. All the trite and time-worn warnings. C. Noble Winney was really afraid of the green ripper. That was the fear behind the fear. Everybody’s fear. And so now everybody could be too easily sold on conspiracy theories. The junk merchants rushed into print with their junk books. Supply and demand. If the People demand conspiracies, give them some. Give them some marksman prone behind the green knoll. Give them the mysterious group that hustled King’s killer into Canada. Give the Northeastern Media Establishment credit for enough sly trickery to bring down noble Richard. Make all the goofs nod and mutter and feel that they are really and truly on the track of the inside story. They could not believe the stark and terrible simplicity of events: that a weak, sexually warped little misfit in Dallas could combine a lot of luck with Marine Corps skills to kill the beloved president; that a dreary brooding little Arabian
kitchen scut, semiretarded, should have brought a pistol to work, in some half-ass dream of glory and revenge and father-killing; that a smiling and demented young man with sewers in his head could, all alone, stalk and cripple a governor; that a chronic criminal, a brute from a demanding background, could be so confused about reality he should attempt to win the cheers of society by killing a black preacher. If these simple things can be true, then anyone is at the mercy of any whim of the beasts in the street. And that is, of course, unthinkable. And with just a little diddling of the facts, each case can be made to appear like an intricate conspiracy, so well conceived and well hidden that one sees only a rare change in the consistency of the shadows, as if there is some creature in the bottom of the well.

Conspiracy theories sell well. Common sense is very difficult to merchandise. And someone is always ready and eager to manufacture something that will sell, no matter how meretricious.

He decided he was just about finished with the C. Noble Winney phenomenon. It had been weeks since he had been given a guided tour of Winney’s incredible workroom, with its giant scrapbooks, color codes, reference files and intricate cross-indexing. The amount of drudgery involved in accumulation and organization was a clue to the strength of the compulsion.

He had even been given a look at the special correspondence. It was kept in the safe file, in clear plastic envelopes in a leather three-ring notebook, zippered and locked. Letters to and from the legendary Mr. Hunt and Robert Welsh, Senator Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan.

Stilted letters of praise from Winney, noncommital acknowledgments from the recipients. Winney showed them to him, standing beside him, damp with pride and excitement, sour of
breath, turning the pages slowly so Henry could read them. He did not know what to say. He remembered the old joke about what to say about a new baby, and so he said, “Now
those
are
letters
!”

“I knew you’d see their importance, Henry. Can you make the discussion group tomorrow night?”

“I don’t really think so.”

“The subject is ‘The Plot Against Nixon.’ ”

“Sorry, Noble.”

“I’m sorry too. The time you did come, you contributed a great deal.”

“Maybe another time.”

One meeting had been enough. Six men: Brooks Ames and two of his volunteer guards, Fred Dawdy, Winney and himself. Winney guided the discussion and supplied “facts” when needed, out of a most impressive memory. Brooks Ames’s discussion technique was to outshout anyone. Dawdy kept bobbing his head, agreeing with everyone. Mrs. Winney supplied coffee and cookies. Winney handed out little file packets of material relating to the discussion as they left.

There was nothing more to be learned from Winney. His grotesque theories of vast conspiracies came in conflict with history. And when they did, Winney bent history to conform to the theories. At times it was an almost hypnotic performance, with Winney radiating such a concern and sincerity one wondered, after all, if perhaps he might be right in part of it. But some of it contradicted bits of recent history of which Henry Churchbridge had very specific knowledge, knowledge never published. So if part of the structure is that far from the truth, then all of it must be intricate fabrication.

He could go further with his new insight without any help from Winney. The specter was fear. Fear was the product of age.
The green ripper stalked the golden beaches, filling all too much space in the
Athens Times Record
, filling all too many fresh-dug holes in the marl and sand of what Hernando DeSoto had called a barren sandspit unfit for human habitation. With bifocaled stare and arthritic finger they ran down the newspaper columns checking the ages: 81, 74, 57, 68, 68, 60, 95, 84, 63, 71.… The golden years had the mortality rate of a Cuban infantry battalion. Jamming the elderly together emphasized that epidemic of the incurable disease, age. And as more caught the disease, they came hurrying down to join the already afflicted, the years bending them closer to the ever-receptive earth.

Yet the culture has labeled death unthinkable and unspeakable. One is forbidden even to think about it. It could come out of nowhere with its first horrid warning: a lump here or there, black stool in pink toilet water, a raspiness of voice, sudden weakness of a leg, lights flashing behind the eyes. Don’t think about it. Don’t do anything about it. It will go away.

And that is, of course, the perfect promise of the green ripper, because it will, indeed, go away, taking you with it as it goes.

Unable to turn inward, all fear turns outward, hence all the weird sects, massive door locks, electronic alarm systems, rejection of bond issues, religious fever, pinched, bitter, ugly, suspicious faces in Florida, California, Arizona—wherever the old ones gather for dying.

Fear is resonant, he realized. It bounces around the condominium walls, growing stronger rather than fading. We reinforce each other’s terrors. By guarding against assault, Brooks Ames creates the fear of assault. By speaking always of conspiracies, C. Noble Winney creates more fear of conspiracies.

We are not leavened by the generations we’ve sired. All the children would dilute fear by not believing in it. For the first time in
the history of the world, millions of the elderly are isolated from the rest of life, and somehow it brings out the worst in us.

I will write it all down, he thought, and felt a little tingle of excitement. Maybe it is an insight familiar to lots of sociologists, but by God it is brand new to me, and I am in the middle of it, and I have had a grand total of five articles published, all on aspects of foreign service, and working hard at this one may help delay the rotting process that seems to have started in my head. I find it increasingly difficult to remember, each morning, whether or not I have taken my pills.

BENJIE SAID
to Lew Traff, “Maybe you are remembering I’ve got ten kids to think about?”

“I know, I know. Ages one to thirteen.”

“Two to fourteen.”

They were riding down the sixth fairway of the Gator Hole Golf Club in a white cart with a yellow canopy. Benjie Wannover was at the tiller. It was eleven fifteen on a thick hot Saturday in July. Cole Kimber and a dermatologist named Francis Frake were in another cart on the far side of the fairway. Lew Traff got out and decided he would try to reach the green with his five wood. Frake was away. He swung. Neither Benjie nor Lew saw the flight of the ball.

“Don’t sway,” Benjie said.

“Sure, sure,” Lew said, and hit the five well, almost too well. It rose and sailed and came down on the far side of the green and just trickled over, out of sight. He got back into the cart and said,
“Because I don’t have ten kids, I would enjoy being convicted of a felony?”

Cole hit next, dropping a towering iron into the trap at the right of the green. Frail-looking Benjie had outdriven them all. His eight iron hit beyond the pin, bit and rolled back to within a foot of the hole.

“You sorry little bastard!” Kimber yelled.

They all took their try, to rule out a miracle, and then Benjie dropped his short putt. As they whirred toward the seventh tee, they all heard the grumbling in the east and glanced at the huge thunderheads reaching halfway up from the horizon, and agreed that they might finish the first nine, but that would probably be it for the day.

They decided to have lunch and see if it would clear, but by the time they had finished the lightning and thunder had stopped and rain was coming down so hard and so steadily Cole called it an old-time frog strangler. They changed in the locker room and Lew had one of the boys from the pro shop go bring his car around near the side door of the clubhouse. He drove Francis to his car and Cole to his, and then parked beside Benjie’s Olds station wagon.

“I don’t want to scare you,” Benjie said. “Shit, I don’t want to scare myself either. These two guys are FBI out of Tampa.”

“How does that work anyway? Who blows the whistle?”

“What happened was that Mister Sherman Grome, of Equity Mortgage Management Shares, Incorporated, has been borrowing his money to loan out from two banks, maybe more than two, in the Atlanta area. So during the normal course of events along came the bank examiners from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and they went through the loan files. Usually they would not bother checking out a loan where the payments are up to date. But these are different times. A lot of development loans have gone
sour, and a lot of real estate investment trusts have taken a dive. So, because EMMS was into this bank for a bundle, the examiners decided to check the books of the borrower. They have that right. They fine-honed it down to two months ago and related the last big bite to the money loaned to the Letra Corporation. Then they got a quick reading on the land cost, the Silverthorn tract, and made a report to the FDIC office in Atlanta, the regional office. After the boss man up there read the report, he bucked it to the U.S. Attorney in Tampa, saying there might be a little panky and a bit of hanky adding up to some kind of indictment somewhere down the road, and so the U.S. Attorney turned the file over to the Special Agent in Charge of the Tampa office of the FBI with a request to look into the Letra Corporation with particular regard to the expenditures made so far out of the big loan from Sherman Grome’s outfit, because, you see, if the loan to Letra is sour, then the loan from the Atlanta bank to Grome is just as bad.”

“Oh, dear Jesus Christ on a raft!”

“The FBI likes to hire lawyers and they like to hire accountants. These two guys are old hands: Barber and Grosscup. Like I explained in the office, it is no use making them go get subpoenas.”

“I know that.”

“I heard about how those aborigines in the Australian deserts, those jokers can be walking across a sandy waste and they can all of a sudden stop and kneel down and stick a straw down into the dry sand about eight or ten inches and suck up fresh sweet water. They know exactly where to start sucking. So do Barber and Grosscup.”

“But how bad off are we? Level with me.”

“What we did, when Letra took over the project, when the Marliss Corporation transferred everything to Letra, the plans and drawings and permissions and what all, then I had Letra reimburse Marliss for all the predevelopment expenses.” Suddenly the rain
was heavier and a gusty wind rocked the car. “Tucked in there, labeled ‘Fees and miscellaneous,’ was fifteen thousand for which I don’t have a scrap of backup. Five thousand went out one time and ten thousand another time.”

“You mean that out of the millions for the construction loan they pick a lousy—”

“They didn’t
pick
it. They came across it, is all.”

“You heard Marty tell me: ‘Don’t worry, Lew. Don’t worry.’ ”

“The same thing Sherman Grome is probably telling his people in Atlanta: ‘Don’t worry your little heads.’ Let me tell you something, my friend. Guys like Martin Liss, like Sherman Grome, they are programmed for boom times. They cut a lot of corners, and it works. They get fat. But when things pinch down, they turn out to be spread too thin. You can’t reach out on the table and pull all your bets back because you’ve covered too many numbers. Lew?”

“What, Benj? What?”

“When they go down, people go down with them.”

They looked at each other. The rain was bouncing high off the hood of Lew’s car, seen dimly through the mist on the windshield caused by their body heat and exhalations. Lew sighed and thumped his fist against his thigh.

“Where are we, then?”

Benjie shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s time to cut and run, even if we knew which direction or how far. Here’s where it is. They got these two dates and they came up with the two canceled checks. Both checks on the separate account we set up for Harbour Pointe. I was careful with that account. Even the prorated charge for overhead, I would write a check back from that account to Marliss, so when the time came we could substantiate capitalizing everything they would let us capitalize, so we’d look better tax-wise. Anything on that special account for one thousand and over
takes two out of any three signatures, you, me and Marty being the three. So the five was last February, signed by Marty and me, and the ten was in May, signed by you and me. The checks were cashed. My books show miscellaneous fees and cash expenses. That is fine for nineteen dollars and fifty-seven cents. It is not too great for fifteen thousand. They want better identification.”

“Like I should go get a receipt from Justin Denniver and his wife? What are you going to do?”