Memoir From Antproof Case (37 page)

You could, of course, leave parts of yourself behind, but had you done that these would have been discovered, and, after all, how many people would be willing to trade slices of their flesh for dinner at Mamma Leone's or a cashmere coat?

The Cerberus who weighed us had a separate entrance, a secret address, and when the vault was closed he was spirited home in a car with blacked-out windows. No one ever spoke to him, he was incorruptible, and you could see by his bleached expression of vicious and arrested development that he lived for the chance of catching a violator and was as loyal and devoted as a Dominican abbot. Who can blame him, though, for letting the morons take the rotten gold, walk it right past him, and toss it in the garbage. He, too, thought it was rotten. Wouldn't you? I thought of this as an option, but Sherman said that all the gold I chose as rotten was perfectly sound.

Storming the vault was possible, but out the question for me. It would require a disciplined army of 150 men, and I have never been able to get along with even one. The steel door weighed ninety tons and was set in a 140-ton frame. It was tapered and airtight, and once it was closed even an army would not have been able to open it.

Tunneling was out, too. Cutting ten storeys down through Manhattan schist would have taken years of a construction project so large that Stillman and Chase would have had to float a bond issue to pay for it.

They had thought of everything. I even suspected that Sherman and his helpers had been lobotomized. They were so nice! They were always so pleasant! But in New York no one was like that unless he had had frontal brain surgery or was on the verge of stealing everything you possessed.

 

In my days of stacking bullion I waited for a sign, but no sign was forthcoming. I was entombed in a limpid sparkling pool of riches, which was also a physical metaphor for impossibility. No planning seemed an adequate match for the infinite precautions of the vault planners. Not unless it were founded on the spark of transgression itself.

As I waited, it occurred to me that this spark might never be generated, and that I might eventually become a sub-Oscovitz. Several decades hence (i.e., now), I would get the thrill of my life on the boardwalk in Coney Island when a fat widow would sit next to me and talk about French fries. Flushed and hyperventilating, I would ride home on the subway, overcome with lust and awe, and the memory and feeling would have to last for the rest of my life.

Deep in the gold vaults I would reflect upon that partly cloudy day in July when we talked about French fries and I observed
her cleavage. I would remember as part of the legend the godlike state I had achieved on my way home, when I glowed like the filament in a lightbulb. And every time I heard the faint rumble of the subway below the vault, I would ... I would....

That was it! I jumped into the air like an electrocuted cat. I was sitting at the back of compartment 71, resting from a heavy lift, when it came to me. Everything fell into place at once. The Swede who was in maintenance of way with the Transit Authority, and the familiar-looking coffee-hater at the Blue Mill, both Smedjebakken. And I, sitting deep under the ground surrounded by the gold of atrocious sheiks. My need to save myself from becoming an Oscovitz. The vision of life ending in a small lonely room in the infinity of Brooklyn. The courage of Smedjebakken on the roof. His hatred of coffee. And the rumble of the subway beneath the vault.

Robbing an establishment such as Stillman and Chase was not without its risks, but as I equated failure to rob Stillman and Chase with death itself I did not have to fight for resolve. With luck and divine guidance, which sometimes come by the bucketful when you really need them, Smedjebakken and I would bankrupt those arrogant coffee-drinking bastards, and they would not even know it until we were halfway around the world, in a clean quiet country where coffee was all but unknown.

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

 

I
FOUND
S
MEDJEBAKKEN
in Astoria, living under his pseudonym, Massina. His wife was a career woman who would brook no nonsense. When she met me at the door of their modest row house she was turned out like a Wall Street lawyer—with suit, scarf, and brooch, all of the highest quality. I assumed that she had just come from Manhattan, with a Florentine-leather briefcase full of legal documents. I was wrong, but I did not discover this until later.

"What can I do for you?" she asked. She was severe in a way that her husband never would be. He had been born to fight a mythical battle that was denied to him, and he was saving his strength and his power for a time that might never come, while she seemed to have been suited to make efforts in a lesser world that failed to interest him.

"I'm looking for Smedjebakken," I said.

Her expression changed immediately. When she heard her
husband's real name she assumed that I was someone from his past, who might, perhaps, excite his Viking sensibilities.

"He's in the back," she said, cooling to me. "Horowitz is buying a piano."

"I beg your pardon?"

"This evening, Vladimir Horowitz is buying a piano. He's picked two, and will play one, and then the other, until he decides. This happens several times a week, but it's not often that we get a Horowitz."

"Buying a piano from you?" I asked.

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. "From Steinway," she said. "The test studio faces our backyard. We look slightly down into it, and in all except the late fall and winter months they open the French doors."

"Ah," I said. "What a pity to miss it in the winter."

"We don't," she replied. I could see that she was beginning to form an extremely low opinion of me. "In winter, Paolo sits in the studio. They keep his lawn chair and table there. He drinks tea and eats rusks while he listens, just as he does in the summer."

"What a privilege to be allowed ... what luck to live ... how amazing..."I babbled on. It was my third strike with her.

"I suppose it is a privilege," she said coldly, "but they do pay him."

"Who pay him?" I asked. Strike four.

"
Who
pay him?"

"Pays, pays."

"Steinway."

"Why?"

"Over the years, the artists have come to rely upon his critique. They're superstitious about it, and won't buy a piano unless Paolo helps them choose. He has a fine ear. It all started with Toscanini, who, when he saw my husband sitting as if on a raised platform, assumed that he was some sort of judge."

"Toscanini?" I asked.

"Arturo Toscanini," she repeated, adding for my sake, "he's a music guy."

"Yes, of course, Toscanini, how extraordinary!"

"He thinks Paolo is an Italian who forgot how to talk. 'Every power of your mind,' he said, 'has fled to your ear, and it is the most beautiful ear.
Bellissimo!'
"

I heard strains of music coming from within the house. I pointed in their direction, and asked, "Mozart?"

Unfortunately, I was also pointing to a marble bust of Beethoven that stood in the hallway. Angelica was beginning to lose patience. "No," she said, "Beethoven," and led me toward the back.

"Don't talk until Mr. Horowitz is finished and has left," she commanded. "Unless, of course, you are asked a question."

I agreed. I was taken to a darkened terrace entirely overwhelmed by the enormous mass of the Steinway factory. The factory walls were of richly colored ancient brick, strewn with ivy and the old brown iron of fire escapes and shutter latches, old iron that, like old wood, was comforting not for what it looked like but for what it had seen. It had held its place serenely as all the things that now vexed me had long ago passed it by, not once, but a hundred times. It had been the patient platform for the thick ice of blizzards, the heat sump of the August sun, the gymnasium of ten thousand contemplative squirrels in gray flannel suits, the trellis of ivy and wisteria and blooms that had bloomed when my father was courting my mother.

The massive brick and solid iron was the frame of many score floating windows through which came sound and light. The
factory was at work that night, for the war had destroyed many pianos, the piano factories of Europe were in ruins, and the children born to returning soldiers were now old enough to begin their lessons at the keyboard.

Never in my life had I heard so many tappings, so many tuning forks, and so many basso profundo woods knocked into place with mallets that even in themselves were works of art. And as for the pianos, well, it was not so much craftsmanship and its vagaries that made one different from another, but accidents of wood that may have occurred with great slowness as summers varied in distant forests, or differences in ores that were first apparent as rivers of molten metal cooled long before the appearance of the clouds or the birth of the seas.

And at the base of all this was a middle-aged Vladimir Horowitz playing like sixty and lost in music to the detriment of time, of which all of us became mercifully forgetful. What beautiful cadenzas. They exploded into the night like huge white waves jumping shoreward in a
storm;
they took all the darkness from the air on that late September evening, and filled very beautifully all the empty spaces that exist to test the soul with doubt.

 

Smedjebakken looked dead. Not only was he immobile, his mouth open, his eyes wide, and his body stiff, but it was clear that his soul had risen from him (tethered, of course) to occupy some ethereal space nearby, like a weather balloon. It seemed as if all his mental power had been put by the magic of the music into a purifying centrifuge. Despite its connection to dance, music is nonetheless the emblem of immobility, for when it is really great it seizes time and holds it still in an invisible grip. I had experienced this many times myself, and now I was watching a portly engineer behind the Steinway factory in Astoria get exactly the same religion.

I was shocked, however, to see that he was a drug addict. The paraphernalia were arrayed damningly on a table beside him—a plate of rusks (as a chaser); a cup with leaves settled disgustingly at the bottom; and, out in the open, unconcealed, absolutely brazen, a pot of tea.

In my younger days, when I didn't know any better and when the recklessness of youth made me sometimes dissolute, I myself had experimented with tea. One January night, in a Harvey's Restaurant on the Niagara Frontier, I was so chilled and exhausted that I dipped a tea bag in a cup of hot water at least six times, and drank.

What visions I had, what ecstasy, what equanimity! I was able to see the continual action of colors, which move like a fire, but more evenly. The bee sees this, it is said, and what the bee saw, so did I. I watched falling snow blind the lights of Buffalo, and all my memories came as if upon the flood of a deep unagitated river cutting through the countryside of the present to find the place whence it had come.

Powerful stuff, tea, but, like all drugs, false and dangerous. For two weeks I lay moaning in the cheapest hotel in Buffalo, wanting with all my soul to kill myself, but having neither the courage to do so nor even the ability to leave the room. This was payment for mechanical ecstasy, or, if not that, the price one pays for two weeks in Buffalo.

When the lights came up I realized that the music had stopped. Horowitz leaned his head against his left hand, and, with the gravest of expressions, he said, "For the life of me, Paolo, I cannot decide which has the better sound. The actions are equal."

Smedjebakken didn't move.

"Which one, Paolo? Help me."

"Uh," Smedjebakken said. "Uh, Vladimir ... I think ... I think ... I think the one on the right. The one on the right has the contained magnificence of tone that you want."

"This one?"

"No, that's the one on the left. The one on my left is the one on your right. Artists," Smedjebakken said to me, acknowledging my presence for the first time, though he still did not know who I was. "The sonority of the one on the right," he continued, addressing himself entirely to Horowitz, "I would liken to claret as opposed to Beaujolais. Especially for Mozart, you want a bell-like sound muted by almost imperceptible mists of interference beginning at the strike of each note and following like a subtle echo thereafter."

"But what about for Beethoven?"

"Beethoven. Beethoven is ... less pure, more rounded, not as metallic. This piano is perfect for the area where Mozart and Beethoven meet, and when you play either, that is the magic circle where you want to be. You must tug each slightly in the direction of the other. For they are like a bipolar star, and eliciting absolute perfection from either depends upon leaning away from their proclivities and toward the center."

"Bravo," said Horowitz, throwing a kiss, making a bow, and signaling to the Steinway people that he had chosen the one on
his
left.

Before he went into the glowing interior of the factory and then, presumably, to his limousine, he said, "Thank you, Paolo. See you next time."

A Steinway worker pulled the doors to him like a fat woman doing the breast stroke, and they clicked shut. He brought up a trolley and attached it to the triangular base upon which rested the piano that Horowitz had chosen, and pulled it out of the studio, switching off the lights as he left.

"That's the way it is with Horowitz every time," Smedjebakken said to me. "Cash and carry."

"How often do you do this?" I asked.

"A couple of times a week, on average. They pay me."

"I know. Your wife told me. Do they pay you well?"

"It matches my TA salary, and I'd do it for free."

"That's extraordinary."

"It's the only gift I can give to my child," he said.

"How do you mean?"

"Music."

"Yes, music," I repeated, having nothing but a vague and unsatisfactory idea of what he meant.

"Someday," he went on, "they'll have high fidelity that will be indistinguishable from the real thing—a technology we can hardly dream of now—and she'll be able to listen to anything she wants, at any time. I'm saving for that."