Memoir From Antproof Case (44 page)

At first we did five feet a day, but toward the end we slowed down to just a few inches. This was because we continually had to check and recheck the length and attitude of the shaft, and to do so we had to take down the drill and its many sections. In the very last days, we moved only an inch each session. When we were not working, late at night, on the actual drilling, we attended to many other tasks.

Smedjebakken constructed a number of specialized tools for the last section of the shaft. When he was sure that the hole was within one foot of the surface of the vault floor, he switched to a thin bit that ran on its own motor at the top of the extension rods. For ten days he lifted this into its tiny hole and pushed it ahead only a quarter of an inch from a spot he calculated to have been four inches below the surface. He was off only a little. On the ninth day, when I went into the cage in the morning, I saw a tiny black speck surrounded by a perfectly circular pile of marble dust no bigger than a polka dot.

It had come up almost precisely midway between the two alarm wires. I was so proud that I spent most of the morning singing and dancing behind my sheltering wall of gold, happy that we had taken the trouble to be exact. In all that suffering way, we were off by only
³
/
₁₆
ths of an inch.

Smedjebakken had invented a circular milling apparatus that shaved the concrete and marble until it was the thickness of a pot cover. He had used the tiny drill hole as the center point for the milling, and I used it as my center point for a beveled compass cut in the marble. After five days of meticulous and quiet grinding, I freed the lid to discover that it lay on the shaft as tightly and evenly as a round in the chamber of a competition pistol.

I used a little bent prong to open this lid. When I peered inside, I couldn't see anything, but I could smell the air of the subway and hear distant trains rumbling across the underground prairies. The shaft led down at a slight angle all the way to the roof above the siding.

Next came the vinyl liner. Mounting took a week, with a full day just to glue the top to the sides of the shaft below the lid. At that point, we were ready to go, but we held back. We attended to our logistical arrangements and worried about the timing, for we wanted to get it just right.

From the time the shaft was in place, perfectly concealed, and ready to receive the gold bars, I was as dizzy as an upside-down baby. Although we hadn't planned to take all of it, at current prices the gold in Cage 47 was worth almost three billion dollars.

 

Immediately after the shaft was completed, something took hold of me that bridged the gulf between happiness and unhappiness. I thought at first that my sudden feelings of ebullience, optimism, and joy may have been due to my transit of the mid-century mark. But no one had ever said to me, 'When I passed fifty, I woke up and found that I was wonderfully happy.' Surely chronology was not the cause. Whatever happiness seized me far overshadowed revenge and easily eclipsed any thought of money. I don't care about money now.

The prospect of absconding with several billion dollars did, I confess, provide at least a little rapture, but no more than, say, getting back from escorting a bombing run. Perhaps that was it. I was young again, as if on the sea or in the air, made lively by having everything to lose and everything to gain, made content only by risk, for in the light of risk every earthly color catches heavenly fire. My woundedness after the divorce simply vanished, and instead of seeing women as part of a system of ropes and pulleys connected to Constance, they were reborn in my eyes with all the complex beauty and dignity I had understood before. After years in which I had forgotten love, I fell in love once again. It was, as usual, unrequited.

Two days after we completed the shaft, a group of Mexican bankers and treasury officials came to tour the vault. Previously, I would have received them upstairs and hosted a lunch in the small dining room. I would have taken them around to the various departments, and brought them down to the vault. Now Piehand, a fat preppy shitbird, did this.

As they passed my cage I hardly looked up, but then I smelled perfume and my head jerked like a whip. The instant I raised my eyes I saw a woman in profile. She was no older than twenty-six or twenty-seven, about half a foot taller than me, with a ramrod-straight back, wide soft shoulders, and the most regal bearing I had ever seen. Her long dark hair was tied behind her head, and, as she moved, it danced in a counterpoint that made me draw in my breath. I cannot describe the proportions of her face, the depth and joy in her eyes, the grace of her hands, the beauty of her walk. I guessed that though she might be easily hurt she was determined to see everything that she could see, and I felt that she wanted someone to be with her. She could hardly stand still: though she walked with natural dignity, it was clear that she wanted to dance.

I rose and pressed against the wire mesh. When she heard me, she turned. A woman like that would ordinarily have no truck with a man in a blue smock—a counter, a stacker, a returner to a one-room furnished flat—but I was so full of sudden love for her, so sure of myself, so risen from what I bad been, that when I faced her through the wire she could not turn away.

For a moment I thought that I might be the man she wanted. I had magically blown away the barricades of class with my view
into the future and my memory of the past, and with, dare I say it, love.

Her colleagues turned, and froze in puzzlement. I saw anger on the face of one, who, I imagine, was in the process of concluding that the only way I had kept her eyes and mine facing and flashing was by insulting her, and, being Latin, he may have been getting ready to spring to her defense.

I smiled and said, "
Buenos dias,
" in an accent I had learned from Zorro. I was so cocksure that even my blue jacket felt like a swordsman's cape.

You should have seen her. She smiled, and her eyes came alight. I was separated from her by steel mesh, but I felt her in my arms. She stood too long and smiled too beautifully not to cause a stir. And then she turned away.

I could have sought her out that evening. Indeed I could have sought her out that afternoon, but, as I was fifty years of age, I thought about her father and her mother, and I saw it from their point of view: how terrible that their magnificent, world-conquering, heart-stopping daughter had run off with a North American bank robber. I neither found her nor grew less happy. Happiness was a flame that had come up within me, and though I could not explain it, I hoped that it would remain.

 

As gold is very heavy and rather conspicuous, and we had no assistance, we had given much thought to logistics. It was imperative that once the bullion was in our hands we could immediately lift it away to a safe place.

We bought an airplane, but, naturally, before we did that we bought a dairy farm in New Jersey. This may sound extravagant, but it wasn't. The land was a long rectangle of eighty acres, and had been worked only for a short time by a returning GI who had taken no account of the soil. Unfortunately for him, his cows produced milk with an onionlike taint, forcing him to sell it at a cut rate to a chemical factory that used it in making artists' colors.

As he slowly went under, the former soldier killed and butchered his herd. When he was left with only three or four animals, he tried to burn down his barn during a lightning storm, but the rain was so heavy that it put out the fire in such a way that the fire marshal was able to rule that lightning was not the cause. The insurance company paid him nothing, and he was left with a charred barn, three suspicious cows who gave onion milk, and eighty acres of land that had become a Van Gogh-like riot of dandelions.

He was asking $7,200, and we bought at $6,000, because his useless rectangle of dandelions was a serviceable airfield. After we had cleaned up the barn, repainted it, and put up a fence, we hung a sign that said
RAMAPO MUSEUM OF FLIGHT.

I had stationery printed and opened a bank account in the name of Colonel Werner Guerney, USAAF Ret., and Smedjebakken became attaché Paul Coligny St. Maurice de Longpoint of the French Equatorial Africa Air Corps. It did not matter that he spoke not a word of French and could not pronounce his own name; we bought the airplane in Arizona, where they found his periodic exclamations in Swedish to be both very Gallic and very gallant. Whenever we encountered Air Force types in the course of tending the plane or the museum (which we neglected to open to the public) I was received very well as Colonel Guerney, for after my years as a fighter pilot I had an air of perfect authenticity. I never met anyone who knew me, perhaps because most of them were dead.

Drawing down my remaining, financial reserves close to the point of freeing my spirit from my body, we bought a surplus C-54 that had been through the Second World War and Korea,
but which, toward the end of the war in Korea, had been overhauled in expectation of more years of fighting. It had four Pratt & Whitney R2000-11 engines, and could carry 30,000 pounds of cargo in 1,000-mile hops. This translated very neatly into 1,111 gold bars, which today would be worth about $325 million.

We bought landing strips in two directions from the Ramapo Museum of Flight, because we were going to take two loads to two different locations: one for Smedjebakken and one for me. We might have taken more than that, but we didn't want to be greedy. And I could remove 2,222 bars from the center of the pile, leaving what appeared to be a perfectly intact structure. The only way you could determine that it was hollow would be to look over the top, but because the cube went almost up to the ceiling of the vault, it was not possible for a human being to place his eyes high enough to see. The only way to realize that the core was empty was to unstack it. This was done every five or ten years, and I would have just finished that task prior to my departure.

I was surprised by how easy it was to buy landing strips. I think people in rural and desolate areas must regard the notion of someone buying their almost worthless land for a landing strip in the same way that the city people who sit on Coca-Cola cases in candy stores think of the Irish Sweepstakes. You say, "I'd like to buy your farm," and they immediately ask, "For a landing strip?" It may have had something to do with the way I dressed. As the proprietor of the Ramapo Museum of Flight I had to look authentic, so I sometimes wore a bomber jacket, flight cap and goggles, white scarf, and wrist chronometer (which, until I went into the Air Force, I used to call a
watch).

I may still own some of the land I bought. The farm in the Ramapos was held under the name of Colonel Werner Guerney, as was the strip in Florida, on a snake-encrusted salt flat near Fort Myers that scared us to death because whenever the sea surged the runway was submerged.

The land I bought in Colombia, on the Peninsula de la Guajira, is probably used by drug runners now. The owners, two bandits in a little town called Inusu, didn't even want to know my name. Besides, Smedjebakken was exceedingly uncomfortable in the outback of South America and we left before we had anything in writing, so it seems that what we paid was only key money.

The next stop, in a microscopic settlement called Boa Esperança, on the savannah near the Rio Branco, was actually in Brazil. There we bought a hundred acres for $45. A thousand miles further on, in the town of Alto Parnaíba, we bought another hundred acres for another $45, more or less, and so it went. The only person who knows the last stop is Funio, who doesn't know that he knows. Marlise might know, but I doubt it. At one very crucial point in our family history, she was probably thinking about some French or Rumanian acrobat, while Funio and I were fixed on something quite different. I promised Marlise not to tell Funio about the gold, but I didn't promise not to refer to fond memories that Funio and I share, did I?

Never have I seen a bird more completely out of water than Smedjebakken pretending to be a French Equatorial air attaché traveling in the forgotten interior of Brazil. His Swedish face was always so florid that I had to check periodically to make sure he was not being squeezed to death by a boa constrictor. Once, as we were being paddled up a cool tributary of the Amazon by two male Indians who looked exactly like my Aunt Louise and smelled like fried chicken, Smedjebakken's straw hat was lifted by a gust of unexpected wind and propelled through
brilliant blue air until it fell onto the mirrorlike surface of the river. "Goddamit!" Smedjebakken screamed. The sun in his hair made him look like a medieval painting of an apostle with an electrified halo. "I'll die without my hat." He turned to the Indians: "Hatto! Hatto! Get hatto!"

They were perplexed, but by resorting to a combination of pantomime and bastardized Portuguese I conveyed the message. The problem was that the hatto was headed for a fork in the river that the Indians called "The Clouds of No Return." I pointed this out to Smedjebakken, and his response, which I remember vividly, was, "I don't give a fuck!"

The Indians observed his gesticulations and angry commands, and were perplexed. In their culture anger and urgency did not exist. Even conflict did not exist. They were in complete and hypnotic harmony with nature, and there is much we can learn from their gentle ways. For example, if they felt the need, they would calmly and gently shoot you with a poison arrow, butcher you, eat you, and shrink your head. They knew neither anxiety nor angst, and you simply could not get them riled up. Even as Smedjebakken was venting his hysteria they stood back in a kindly, curious fashion, like matrons looking into a meat case.

Nor did they seem to fear death, taking the canoe perilously close to a point in the river where we could feel invisible rubber bands pulling us downstream with the same attractive force that greets you beyond the rail of a bridge over black water. Perhaps they were unafraid because they lived with the knowledge that at any moment they might meet the basting brush, but whatever the source of their fatalism they kept paddling with such precision and verve that their muscles swelled and the air was just like the air in front of Nathan's at Coney Island. Even without speaking, they seemed to say that the choice was ours, but as Smedjebakken watched his hat bump and twist over increasingly Homeric waters, he lost his enthusiasm for the chase. "Let's just go on," he said quietly. "I don't need it."