Memoir From Antproof Case (36 page)

 

Malagayang bati
Sa inyong pagsilang
Maligaya, Maligayang
Maligayang bati!

 

This little ditty would not leave me. I sang it for hours inside my closet until I imagined that I was one of J. Arthur Rank's great brass gongs, through which darkness and vibration pulsed as if at the heart of a very unkind and disappointing universe. I even sang it at home and on the subway, where I never had trouble getting a seat.

But, still, I did not leave the firm. I had resolved to hang on until they carried me out, and I held fast like a bulldog, breathing slowly through my crushed and humiliated nose.

***

They did carry me—not out, but down, deep down into the bowels of the earth, ten stories below the ground floor of our massive block-square building, where water ran in ancient underground rivers around a dry sarcophagus of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

When my appearance began to reflect my inner turmoil I was banished to the nearly silent and always stable underground, the place of death, the locus of safety and the absence of life. Still breathing slowly, I was moved to the stillest most passionless place on earth: the gold vaults.

"We're reassigning you to the custody section," I was told.

Of course, I was crestfallen. I did not dare ask if this meant that I had lost my partnership, though indeed I had, as the custody vice-presidency was, more or less, a junior position. The only reason the manager was called a vice-president was to reassure the potentates who left their gold in his care.

I suppose they thought it would be safe with a nasty, violent megalomaniac whose name was Wolf Brutus. I had hated it when he emerged from his caverns into the executive dining room, and was particularly happy when I was promoted to the inner circle and was able to take my meals in the smaller, far more splendid, Grotrian Room.

"I don't look forward to supervising Wolf," I said. "You know I can't stand him."

"You won't be supervising him."

"Who's going to take his place?"

"No one."

"He's left?"

"No. You'll be working for him, though not directly. You'll report to Sherman Oscovitz."

"Oh no, oh no, oh my God," I said, and that was when they carried me down, because I wasn't able to walk.

Sherman Oscovitz was the supervisor of the gold handlers. He was a very nice man, but he was a moron. He had been with the firm even longer than I had, and his job was to keep track of the gold and shift it from cage to cage with the flows between accounts. He always wore a blue lab jacket, and his yellowish red hair was confined to a ring around a domelike bald head as perfectly symmetrical as the Pantheon.

He and every one of his vault workers had once been in trouble with the law. When he worked for a big commercial bank, Oscovitz had been caught renting out the little rooms where safe-deposit customers went to clip coupons. The others had been apprehended while peeking in a customer's box, or giving a friend the master key to the boxes while talking on the phone, or placing bets from banking premises—small-time stuff that Mr. Edgar had had the brilliance to spot as an immunization.

Oscovitz and his entire crew had been burned trying to pick a few shrimp off the grill, and were now as reliable as eunuchs. And just as exotic. Oscovitz himself, whether as a result of disease, diet, or heredity, was flatulent in the manner of kings. In normal circumstances, this would have been hard to bear, but in a bank vault ten stories underground.... Yes, we had ventilation, but not nearly enough.

Sherman Oscovitz's "protégé" was a hulking acromegalic giant who looked like Marlene Dietrich enlarged sixteen times and baked in a kiln. It was he who intoned my lessons in handling gold bars, telling me never to drop them, never to scrape them with a fingernail, and always to wear my white cotton gloves.

"Why?"

"Human body grease rots the gold."

That's ridiculous," I said. "Gold is inert. It won't rot—unless you sweat quicksilver."

"No, you're wrong. I've seen it get all rotten, and then we have to throw it away."

"You throw it away?"

"Yes."

"You throw it away."

"Uh huh, lots of it."

"Where do you throw it?"

"In the garbage can."

"Outside the vault?"

"Yes."

"What happens to it?"

"To what?"

"To the garbage."

"The garbage men take it."

"Do they know what's in it?"

"Yes, but they don't care about rotten gold. We explain to them that, because it's rotten, it's not worth anything. They complain because it's so heavy."

"How long have you been doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"Throwing away rotten gold."

"About three or four years. It never used to rot before then, but after the war a lot of bad-quality gold came in."

"How many bars a week do you throw away?"

"It depends. Sometimes six, sometimes two, sometimes ten."

"The next time you get some rotten gold," I told him, "give it to me. That way, the garbage men won't have to take it away."

"I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Sherman says that rotten gold has to go into the garbage. If people get hold of it they might think it's valuable. You know how people are about gold. But not us!"

"No, not you!"

"You too!" he said, poking my chest and smiling. "Now you work here, too!"

The first time I was locked in a gold-cage—it was Argentina's—I felt very bad. Sherman had ordered me to rotate the Argentine gold and count it. I had to count and restack tens of thousands of gold bars.

We used scrap paper and a system of what Sherman called "variable check marks" to keep track. If, for example, you came up with thirty-five fewer bars than were supposed to be there, Sherman would pick up his pencil, add thirty-five check marks, and that was that. He never bothered to shuffle bars from one cage to another, because no one ever came to look. If anyone had, Sherman would have moved a few bars from here to there, and no one would have known the difference. The only danger lay in all the countries deciding to check their stocks simultaneously, and they had never even done so individually.

I was stunned not by the fact that close to a thousand twenty-seven-pound gold bars were missing, but that no one had stolen them: the simpletons had innocently thrown them away. At recent gold prices, they had disposed of almost $350 million.

I think, honestly, objectively, and without bias, that in that period I was actually insane. But I was supposed to have been insane, so I guess I was doing my job. After a few weeks of restacking bullion I was in extremely good condition, and the labor no longer tired me. I went to see Sherman Oscovitz mainly out of chagrin.

"Sherman," I said. "I've come to talk to you about the rotten gold."

"Oh?" he asked. "Did you find a piece?"

"No, I came to tell you that gold doesn't rot. It doesn't."

"Of course it does," he said.

"No. It doesn't. It does not rot."

"That's not true, Dave," he said. (My name is not Dave.) "We find bad pieces all the time."

"No, Sherman. It can't rot. It can tarnish when exposed to certain reagents, but only on the surface. It wouldn't be rotten inside."

"No?"

"No. It doesn't rot."

"We think it does. That's why we throw it away."

"I know you think it does. I understand. Tell me, what do you define as rotten?"

"
We
don't make it rot," he said, shaking his dome. "If you get one bad apple in a pile, then the others tend to follow."

"I know you don't make it rot, Sherman. What I'm asking is, how do you know it's rotten?"

"We see it."

"What do you see, exactly?"

"Rotten gold."

"What is rotten gold?"

"Gold that's rotten."

"Uh," (I thought for a moment), "tell me what it looks like."

"It's not shiny."

I waited for more, but he said nothing. "That's it?"

"What's it?" he asked, looking around.

"It's not shiny?"

"What's not shiny?"

"Rotten gold."

"That's right, Dave. That's how you know it's rotten." His eyes turned to the ceiling, as if to say,
What an idiot!

"So, you mean that gold is rotten when it's not shiny."

"Now you're catching on," he said, "but that's not what
makes
it rotten. We don't know what makes it rotten."

"Sherman?"

"Yes?"

"You have an awful lot of rotten gold around here, don't you?"

"Yes, we do."

"Why don't you stack the rotten gold in compartment forty-eight, which is empty, and maybe it'll get better."

"I would never do that," he said. "As soon as I see a rotten piece, I throw it out. I don't want it to spread."

"Put it in a bag."

"A garbage bag?"

"Yes, a garbage bag."

"Are you kidding? Do you know how expensive those are?"

I gave up. For a while I ran after garbage trucks, but then I stopped. Although I tried, it was physically impossible to go through a fully loaded garbage truck in the few minutes allotted before it reached its home base. They dumped their loads onto a barge in the Hudson, and the gold returned to the sea, whence it had come, and how could I object?

 

If I hate anything, I hate being inside when the weather is nice. Even in storms and when it's cold I always prefer to walk the hills and weave through a forest of sunny clearings where no one has ever been, or where, at least, no one has ever stayed for more than a few minutes. I have never been happier than by a clear lake or stream, or upon a New England summit, watching the sun glint off well kept fields and silent towns.
For this reason alone, never mind the tribulations of working for an idiot, I began to go mad. Whereas I had seldom been in my office, and when I was I could open the window, I was now surrounded entirely by rock. Thunderstorms, blizzards, hurricanes, and clear days came and went, and we did not know it. In winter, I never saw daylight: I went down in the dark, and came up in the dark. Above his desk Oscovitz had a calendar with a picture of a cow standing on a Swiss mountainside. The depth, distance, and color were so beautiful that every time I looked at it I asked myself, "Why am I alive? What am I doing here?"

As a child I liked playing with blocks, and this was now my job, underground, in light that neither flickered nor changed. We restacked the gold to keep it fresh. If a gold bar remained too long in an airless place at the bottom of the pile, it would decay.

In anticipation of dropping one of the twenty-seven-pound ingots, our shoes were housed in magnesium shells, and of course we wore white gloves to protect the gold from our corrosive body grease. The bars were seven inches long, about three and a half inches wide, and one and three quarters inches high. Those cast in America were rectangular, and, in Europe, trapezoidal. Some were 100% pure, the color of Goldilocks' hair, others reddish and tinged with copper, and others white, having been contaminated with platinum and silver. I did not mind stacking gold, and never ceased to be amazed by its density and integrity. Though the fact that it was worth immense amounts of money may have clouded my view, I was most affected by its purity, its rarity, its smoothness and incorruptibility. It was an element, a noble of the periodic chart, and I was surrounded by thousands of tons of it, in walls that looked like the brickwork of heaven.

I soon discovered that the most striking difference between me and the morons was that they did not ask questions. They were uninterested in how things work, how facts had come to be, and the relationship of one thing to another. Indeed, they treated my questioning with hostility, because they could not supply me with answers and because they took my curiosity for sedition. Each and every one of my questions, it is true, was canted toward obtaining the information necessary for a robbery, but who would not have had such thoughts in similar circumstances? What kind of dead-on-its-feet, pusillanimous drone would it take to be trapped within the world's greatest concentration of wealth—buried with it, breathing it—and not give some thought to stealing it? The look the morons reserved for me was one of offended innocence, as if my line of inquiry were immoral.

We were surrounded by ten thousand tons of gold, not a single ounce of which had been coaxed from the earth in conditions of morality. It had been neither mined nor bought nor sold nor accumulated nor accepted in conditions of morality. Sherman Oscovitz lived in a one-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights, with neither a toilet nor a refrigerator. He ate at Nedick's on his way to and from work, and though he spent no money on anything but hot dogs, sauerkraut, and buttermilk, and though he wore a suit that was so cheap I wanted to pull it off his body, shred it, burn it, and put the ashes in sulfuric acid, his accumulated savings were only enough to buy, for example, one water ski, or three nights in a cheap hotel in Antwerp.

His discipline and poverty were devoted to the service of gold that belonged to sheiks who had slaves, and Latin dictators with a fondness for leather. Of what use was his honesty? What did it accomplish?

I only wanted to know about the electrical system, the security procedures, the depth of the rock, the architecture of the vault, the methods of accounting, and other intellectual questions relating to my environment, but had I continued that line of questioning I would have been expelled, so I became a mute observer.

There was no chance of taking the gold up and out. You couldn't sneak it out, for each person who entered the vault was weighed on a scale that was accurate to 1/1000th of an ounce. The exact humidity of the vault was recorded on a Gretzel Pisogram. That and the weight, metabolic characteristics, and tissue data about each vault worker were fed into an algorithm in a little office just outside the vault door. They knew exactly how much you would lose in transpiration, you were forbidden to pick your nose or spit, and if you weighed more on your way out than on your way in, they peered at you through a fluoroscope and checked your bodily crevices.