Memoir From Antproof Case (53 page)

"I'm here in case Mr. Edgar wants to use the archives. What I do all day is my business."

"But what
do
you do?" I asked, purely out of curiosity.

"You could come down sometime and find out," she said, with a piercing look that took my breath away. "This place is
very
quiet."

I staggered away. Yes, she was pneumatic, and were she to have taken off her spectacles—black plastic frames that weighed almost as much as she did, and lenses that reduced her eyes to the size of sequins—she would have been devastatingly attractive. But you can't have affairs at the office no matter how much you might want to, and not only that, but given that I so badly needed her key, whatever I would have done would have been certain to have made me a gigolo.

This was long before my reunion with Smedjebakken, and this vault was high above the street. That was when I began to think about vaults, but none of the means I considered would have kept me dissociated from the murder of Mr. Edgar, or allowed me to continue at Stillman and Chase.

I was at a standstill.

 

I imagined everything from having the affair with Miss Dickstein, the archivist, which I would not do on principle, to having an affair with Dickey Piehand's secretary, which I would not do on principle, to having an affair with one of Mr. Edgar's 'nurses,' which I would not have done on principle but which I might have done anyway, not being able to resist. His nurses were the most beautiful women in the world. I don't think a single one of them was less than six feet tall, and they all were, literally, stunning. I couldn't take my eyes from them. No one could. Though Mr. Edgar had the world's greatest physicians, it was the presence of these women that kept him
alive so far beyond his time—an old trick known mainly to kings.

Their relations were, of course, purely platonic; his body was long gone. What kept him going was a series of wonderful ideas reverberating in his half-dead heart. But even had I been able to subvert a nurse or two the chances of being able to subvert Miss Dickstein were almost nil, and as for Piehand's secretary, I didn't even know if she had access to his keys. Despite its allure, the sexual approach was out for many reasons, including one that I've neglected to mention, which is that though I have always been in love and almost always have had someone to love, it has been one blind encounter after another, the play of perpetual accident. Whenever I've set my mind to winning over a particular woman, only disaster has followed. And then, finally, I was actually afraid that Miss Dickstein would be so intense in her amours that after our first encounter I would be reduced to the mysterious residue that announces where a bird has done battle with a cat. And so much for that.

Then came the next set of possibilities—the violent penetrations and commando operations that depended upon quick insertion, ruthless execution, a stick of plastic explosive to blow away the door of the lockbox, and fast escape. Unfortunately, these required the murder of Miss Dickstein or the erasure of her memory. As I would not have murdered an innocent person to discover who had murdered my parents, and as erasing Miss Dickstein's memory would undoubtedly have proved more difficult than having an affair with her, I realized that I could not reinvent the S.A.S. I would have to employ stealth alone. No one could know that I had been in and out. I needed the keys, for without them I would have to damage the locks, after which Miss Dickstein, who was on to me in more ways than one, would need only tell the police my address.

Hence the next avenue—chloroform. I would simply put all three people in a trance for long enough to press their keys onto a duplication tablet. I could have done it with Miss Dickstein, but the others were too risky. I'd either never get them alone or it would take a million years, and Mr. Edgar didn't have a million years. In fact, my major problem was that I had to race against time so I could kill him before he died.

I had killed only people who were in the midst of trying to kill me or someone else, and I had left a way out for all of them. Had they merely broken off their attacks, I would not have harmed them. This was different. It was vengeance and it was premeditated and the man was totally helpless.

Would the proof be sufficient, and was I able to judge? I thought about this for some time, and concluded that my reluctance to do the deed would ensure that the proof be really unambiguous. And if it were, I would not shrink from what I had to do. Nor would I worry about abandoning traditional forms of jurisprudence, or taking the law in my own hands. I knew that, even were he charged before he died, Mr. Edgar would spend five hundred million on lawyers and that no matter how guilty he was they would delay the disposition of his case until he was comfortably within his fully staffed mausoleum. (His favorite cooks, maids, and gardeners, but mainly maids, were to attend to him for the rest of his death. Those who were alive would dust the mausoleum and take telephone calls, those who were dead were buried standing up next to the parthenon in which he would lie.) I also knew that, even were he convicted he would get some sort of community-service rehabilitation sentence—which is another way of saying that for having my parents shot through the head and left to die on the floor, he would be forced to spend three months playing Ping-Pong with disadvantaged children, or explain to a group of failing dry cleaners how to maximize cash flow and cut expenses. But the son of a bitch couldn't even play Ping-Pong and he refused to talk, so his sentence would be just to continue staring at his Scandinavian nurses.

I wondered if I would be able to do it, and I didn't know. Meanwhile, I had no idea how to get into the 1913 and 1914 lockboxes.

That is, until Smedjebakken and I were well on our way to robbing the gold vault. Then it came to me, and it was easy, though he was entirely against prejudicing or risking our main operation with yet another subsidiary action such as stealing a painting. He refused to do it, until I told him of how, on a day early in June, I had lain between my mother and father, wanting to sleep with them forever, and then how I had awakened in the cold night when nothing had changed except the constitution of their flesh.

"All right," he said, "I'll help you do it. What do you have in mind?"

"I have to get the keys."

"How?"

"That's where you come in."

"Don't forget," he pointed out, "I can't enter the building. I've already been there as a surveyor. And even if I could, how would I get the keys? I'm not a pickpocket."

"Don't you think I have a plan?" I asked.

 

First, we bought a van. These days, vans are common, sleek, and carlike. Then, they were huge, they had rounded backs, and they looked like hearses. We cut a window into the side and put some machinery on a rolling table in the cargo space. A sign painter lettered the panels of the truck, and we were in business.
Considering that we already had the machinery and that the truck was used, the start-up cost was minimal.

The signs on the panels informed passersby that this was the place to have their keys "buffed, polished, deburred, and permanently glycerine-waxed." Were they to do so, they were told, they would "Never have trouble opening a lock again! Save precious time! End the fear of breaking a key in a lock! Preserve your precious keys! Give your keys a pleasant new odor and jingle!" Best of all, it was, "Only 5 Cents!" and it was, "Fast Fast Fast!"

It caught on like wildfire. Poor Smedjebakken spent days and nights in the van, polishing, deburring, and waxing the keys of Wall Street office workers. At lunch hour the line was ten deep. Every other customer asked him how he could make a living at only five cents a shot, and he told them that he was thinking of doubling the price.

Over a period of weeks we had him stationed at all points of the compass around Stillman and Chase. His starting place four blocks out became three, then two, then one, until, finally, he stayed right in front of the Stillman and Chase main entrance.

We were hoping, of course, that Miss Dickstein, Piehand's secretary, and, somehow, even Mr. Edgar, would have their keys polished on the street. In fact, Piehand's secretary did, but she wasn't carrying the key to the lockboxes. Piehand himself must have carried it, and he always walked by in a hurry.

We were going to have to go in. It wasn't very difficult. Everyone at Stillman and Chase was used to the presence of the key-polishing service, and I put up leaflets announcing that Stillman and Chase had arranged for everyone's keys to be polished at their desks, free of charge.

On the appointed day, Smedjebakken rolled the cart with the deburrers, polishers, and wax right into Stillman and Chase, and started off on the many keys of the security staff at the front desk. They didn't recognize the surveyor they had not too long before accompanied over a period of many hours, because ... well, this was the part Smedjebakken didn't like.

The service was called Mr. Tubby's Key to Perfection, and Smedjebakken was Mr. Tubby. We bought him a pair of fat-men's pants, the kind that look like the funnel on a rock crusher or an air vent on the
Queen Mary
, and strapped two down pillows to his waist. With a fake mustache and a fedora, he became Mr. Tubby.

Mr. Tubby worked the Stillman and Chase building for almost a week, polishing everyone's keys, even Mr. Edgar's. Because he was providing this very valuable service to them for free, saving them an entire nickel per key, everyone at Stillman and Chase from the janitors (who, granted, had a lot of keys) to Mr. Edgar himself, was overcome with joy. For weeks thereafter you could hear comments—no, whole conversations—about a key's new jingle; or how easy it had suddenly become to open locks; or about the wonders and delights of glycerine-waxing; how good the keys felt; how pleasant they smelled; how they glittered.

Amid the clutter of machinery and wax pots on his roller cart Smedjebakken kept waxen blocks that looked not at all incongruous and against which he skillfully pressed the lockbox keys and the big key to the bars that blocked the entrance to the vault in the daytime. He knew which they were because he made a point of doing Miss Dickstein before he got to the executive floor, where he knocked off Piehand's and Edgar's in a single half hour. After one more day at Stillman and Chase, Mr. Tubby vanished from the face of the earth. No one gave it a thought. No one in New York ever does.

 

I clocked Miss Dickstein's lunches. Because she had nothing to do all day, lunch must have loomed very large. As she was not only sensual but precise, she left always at 11:50
A.M
. I used to follow her through the very bright sunshine of the financial district, where, when people come out of their offices, they shield their eyes from the light of morning and the sparkling flashes of sidewalks embedded with crushed glass.

Every day without fail this crazy woman walked twelve blocks to a cafe near City Hall, and every day she had the same lunch: a bowl of smoked oysters and watercress, a gin and tonic, and a banana split. After her meal she lingered over a cup of tea while finishing a chapter in
The Economic History of Liberia.
With her glasses removed as she read, I saw that she was rather beautiful, and that despite her daily banana splits she was rather trim. She always took an hour and a half for lunch, and even if she finished early she would walk around the block until she had to come in.

At 11:51 one day I got off the elevator on the archives floor and walked through Miss Dickstein's magnificent office. I could still smell her perfume. At the bars I used a waxed, polished, deburred, fragrant copy of the key to let myself into the vault. The 1913 lockbox was to my left. As soon as I stepped in front of it I could be seen neither from the office nor the hall.

Though I shuddered when I looked one box over to the right and saw the numbers
1914,
I used my glittering keys on 1913, swung open the door, and pulled out the box. It weighed about fifty pounds. I carried it to a leather-topped table in the corner, where when I turned on a reading lamp that hadn't been lit in many years the filament oscillated in shock.

The records themselves smelled like New York in the Teens. Perhaps it was the way they made paper then, or the effect of age on leather, but if I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was a boy again, and that on any block you could see horses, hear their exhalations, and smell their bridles. I listened to the crackle of fires and watched many lines of wood and coal smoke ascend into what were clear blue skies nonetheless. I felt entirely at home and in my element. This was
my
time, I had known it, I had been born in the previous decade, and I would be familiar with any truth that I might find.

My fear that the papers would be unorganized was groundless. They were foldered and tabbed, and I merely shuffled through them. It had been a rough year for Mr. Edgar. The tabs read:
16th Amendment
(the income tax),
Pujo Report
(the House Banking Committee findings of monopoly concentration),
Federal Reserve, Owen-Glass, Panama Bankruptcy, Mexican Revolution.
Those were the obvious. Then there were others:
Knox vs. Nichols, Failed Debentures, Pacific Palisades, Sharpton Steel.
And others, too, but by 12:40 nothing had even hinted at what I was looking for. With half an hour remaining, I grew very nervous. I was more than nervous. Suddenly, I was terrified.

Breathing fast, I put back 1913 and opened 1914. Moving the drawer to the desk seemed to take hours; raising the lid, minutes.

The tabs told of the
Clayton Antitrust Act,
the
Federal Trade Commission,
and, now, of not just the advent but the consequences of the
Income Tax.
I read on:
Vera, S&O, Dutch Steel Contract, Exchange Profits,
and, then ... and then, I was blinded. I could hardly breathe. I had found a folder that was labeled
Hudson River Bridge.

With only ten minutes left I dared not try to read it. Besides, I was not in full possession of myself. I put back the 1914 box, locked it up, turned off the light above the desk (sentencing it to sleep for perhaps another several decades), and left with the folder held casually in my hands.