Memoir From Antproof Case (55 page)

Shielded by darkness and nearly overcome by the scent of the sea, I approached the house, and the closer I got the better I heard the sound of a hi-fi. It was a recording of a woman singing a ballad from a Broadway musical. Perfect.

The garage was located at a civilized remove from the house. As I knew from having been at several Piehand soirées and picnics and having had to eat there because of the coffee, it was far enough away for the sound of starting an engine not to carry. With a record going inside the house, I could have laid down an artillery barrage and no one would have been the wiser. Perhaps because it was such a benevolent evening that even Dickey Piehand was not afraid the night air might hurt his automobiles, the doors were open.

The top was down on the little MG, and a cat was sitting on the canvas cover that snapped across the gap in back of the seat. "Go away!" I said. It didn't move, so I picked it up, but, before I could throw it, it jumped from my hands and settled on the passenger seat. "All right," I said. "If you want to come with me, you can." The cat blinked, as they do, like a king.

I jumped into the MG, inserted the key provided by Mr. Tubby, and drove slowly down the driveway, with the lights off. When I got to Fishcake Lane I turned on the headlamps and picked up speed. Though driving on winding roads in a sports car on a moonlit summer night, I was subdued. I was thinking about things that were sad and true, and before I knew it the cat and I were flying high over the Sound on the steel deck of the Throgs Neck Bridge.

I had been to the Edgar place on Biscuit Neck a dozen times, for parties, small dinners with ministers of finance, and, most recently, to brief Mr. Edgar as he lay on his sickbed. I knew the inside of the house, the outside, the grounds, the paths through the woods, the exercise pavilions, tennis courts, and pools.

He owned all of Biscuit Neck, even the village. The Biscuit Neck police force was a public institution, he was the one taxpayer, and their primary function was to guard his two-thousand-acre estate. Needless to say, the town was rich, even if it was not heavily populated. As Mr. Edgar had begat no one to beget anyone else, there were no schools. Because his estate had its own sewage, water, and electrical systems, there was no maintenance to speak of: if a pothole had to be fixed on the main street, the gardeners would do it, and they knew how, because they were always repaying the forty-five miles of roads up at the house. The shops in the village were the tiny offspring of Tiffany, Dunhill, Mark Cross, S. S. Pierce, etc., and they were not really shops but offices from which to service the estate.

I parked in the shadows between the village and the heavy spear-point fence that went for many miles around the Edgar compound. That the police would carefully inspect the car and record the license number was a mathematical certainty.

Whereas the cat fit right through the bars and waited passively on the other side, I had to climb over. I listened carefully for the sound of approaching police cruisers, and when I heard nothing but existential silence I went up and over the fence, balancing precariously on the rail beneath the spear points, and then dropping to the ground. Had the spears been sharpened, I would not have been able to do it. I frankly do not understand why Mr. Edgar spent six million dollars to build the fence and left the spears dull. For another half-million he could have affixed razor-sharp blades instead, and though he would not be alive today at least he might have lived to have seen color television.

With the cat purring in my arms, I walked for half an hour over small hills and through forested groves, across vast fields of hay that had just been harvested, and under the ponderous black moon-shade of English oaks on the hundred-acre lawn.

Mr. Edgar had dinner at four. That he was not exactly Italian in his eating habits was well known. I doubted, however, that he was asleep, because the lights in his bedroom were blazing. He was home, and not in any of his châteaux or town houses, or on any of the yachts, the three largest of which were called the
Interest,
the
Dividend,
and the
Capital Gain.

Suddenly, blinding lights slewed in my direction and dogs began to howl. Had the dogs been loose, they would have done
me in. You don't have much chance with bull mastiffs, as their passion for hunting people down is what ties them together and sets them apart.

Luckily for me, Mr. Edgar did not want his dogs to foul his footpaths, so their handlers trucked them about in golf carts, and golf carts move very slowly. The cat and I ran behind the hedges that screened the pool. The dogs' noses kept leading them to us, and they got so close you could hear the springs of the golf carts knocking as the dogs strained to jump out. They were fifteen feet away, and the headlights were blinding even through the hedge. Dog saliva flew in the air. The droplets sparkled in the intense light and then were vacuumed up by the night. It was like the Trevi fountain in a high wind.

The moment I heard the leashes undipped and the rocking of the golf carts as the dogs left them, I pointed the cat through the hedge and pinched his flank. Off he shot, as straight as a rocket and as loud as an ambulance, and he led the dogs so deep into the darkness that in less than a minute I could barely hear the whine of golf carts chasing after them. Then, they, too, disappeared, and I was alone in the restored din of the crickets.

I sat on one of the chaises near the pool. The water was black, pure, and gurgling. One of the options of a man with as much money as Mr. Edgar is to have the filtering house a quarter of a mile away, so that one can sit by the pool without thinking of the West Side Highway. I lay back and looked up at the stars. Toward New York, the sky was bordered by a scalloped orange glow as the city's vast system of illumination backlit the tops of the oaks. Straight up, stars trembled and meteors flared in breathless white lines. The moon was somewhere, somehow whitening the black sky. I slept for at least an hour.

When I awakened I was calm and a little tired. I sat up and swung my feet to the ground, reflecting on the means by which Mr. Edgar had accumulated his wealth. Undoubtedly he had done many fine things. They could not, however, serve as a balance for his depravities. What a mistake it is of juries and judges to consider a man's good deeds when weighing his sins. Such-and-such a fellow raped and murdered someone's daughter, but he gave to charity and he was always cheerful. In the final ledger, one entry can easily disqualify every other, for more important than doing good is to refrain from doing harm.

As I sat near the pool trying to come fully awake—something I can usually do rather quickly by wiggling my toes—I remembered a meeting that I attended with Mr. Edgar and half a dozen others at the River Club. I was there to give a country estimate, but I never got around to that: Mr. Edgar was in a fury, and he held to one subject like a bulldog.

"We have many billions on account from institutions, governments, and individual investors," he said.

"
Zillions,
" asserted a young Edgar grandnephew. That was the end of him.

Mr. Edgar pulled out a cigar knife and placed it on the table. "Put your pinkie in here, Selwyn," he commanded the nephew, who did. "Good. Now, you shut up. If you so much as open your mouth, we'll feed your finger to the fish."

With the nephew out of the way, he turned to the comptroller. "What is our current return?"

"Four and a half percent, net."

"Which comes mainly from loans and investment."

"Yes sir."

"How much, exactly?"

"Three points, more or less."

"And what is our net, currently, from participation?"

"About one and a quarter."

"So tell me where that other quarter point comes in," Mr. Edgar ordered.

"Asset rental and leasing, prepaid charges not accountable as reimbursements, and fees."

"Fees!" thundered Mr. Edgar. "Fees!"

"Yes sir."

"How many points?" he demanded.

"An eighth of a point, sir."

"Asses!" he said. "Fees! No one questions them. They take advantage of people's lifetimes of passivity, their years of education and molding. There are two kinds of creature in the jungle—the tiger and the iguana. The tiger sets the fees, and the iguana pays them. I want
more fees.
"

"Arbitrarily, sir?"

"What the hell do you think a fee is, Nichols?" he screamed at Nichols. "Do we have transaction fees?"

"On what?"

"On everything."

"No."

"Levy transaction fees. And maintenance fees. And fees for opening an account, closing an account, having less than three accounts, and having more than two accounts. I want to see late charges, early charges, and surcharges on other charges. I want a fee fo. foreign accounts, a fee for domestic accounts, and a fee for accounts subject to audits. You get the picture? Gradually double or triple these fees over a period of two or three years, and index them to inflation. Institute a contact fee, a telephone charge, a bookkeeping adjustment charge, a flotation fee, a sinking fee, and, you, Nichols, go to the New York Public Library and—I don't care how long it takes—find five fees that no one has ever heard of. Look especially hard into Babylonia, the Sumerians, Byzantium, and the Holy Roman Empire. Those guys knew what they were doing, and they had balls."

"But Mr. Edgar, we'll drive away our customers."

"No we won't. Just be prepared to drop the fees of any customer who appears to be making good on a threat to leave, and increase those on the ones who stay put. It never fails."

"Yes sir."

When Mr. Edgar left the River Club that evening, he was—although not immediately—several hundred million dollars richer. He returned ten percent of that to charity, and for this he was universally acclaimed. As he said, there are two kinds of creature in the jungle: the tiger and the iguana. The tiger sets the fees, and the iguana pays them.

I rose to my feet, feeling quite unlike an iguana, and walked across the lawn. Outside Mr. Edgar's room was a huge rooftop terrace over the indoor swimming pool. Like a small park floating fourteen feet above the ground, it was two hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, with perfect stone railings, a fountain in the center, crushed marble paths, dense and tiny lawns, and, of course, flowers. If your eye could bear to look beyond the shocks of red, white, and yellow, you would see the vast lawn with its watercourses and stands of spruce and pine, and then, beyond that, Biscuit Neck harbor, where half a dozen sailing yachts were moored in a pattern that had been designed by a maritime painter.

The stonework of the mansion was, of course, magnificent, but unfortunately for Mr. Edgar the precisely cut granite blocks at the corners, coming together like cabinet joints, made perfect ladders to every terrace and bedroom. I climbed up to the floating gardens quite easily.

I walked on the lawns rather than the paths, and jumped flower beds from one rectangle of grass to another, making no
more sound than a salamander. The French doors leading from the bedroom to the terrace were open wide, with no screens. Depending upon location, temperature, wind, time, and humidity, insect liberation day on Long Island can come in September.

Mr. Edgar was watching a ticker tape that was connected perhaps to the Tokyo market or the New Delhi Menthol Exchange—I never found out—and he played it through his hands like a spinner making thread. On the desk next to him was a cable switch with a number of buttons undoubtedly for calling security, a nurse, a butler, or a secretary. I walked behind him, found where it plugged into the wall, and unplugged it. Then I came around the front of the desk and sat down. Leaning forward, I switched off the ticker tape.

"It's still half an hour to close, you idiot," he said to me. Senile or not, he was still Eugene B. Edgar, Conqueror of Worlds.

Though he knew me, I was so far out of context that he had not recognized me. Still, he was not alarmed. I suppose he had so many servants and aides that my sudden appearance in his bedroom at night did not disturb him.

"No," I said. "It's just a few minutes to close, but no bell will ring."

"What! Turn it back on!"

"Shut up," I said, "and listen."

At this point he began to press buttons in a way that I had never seen and would not see until, many years later, video games came to Brazil. He was going as fast as a court stenographer, but, hearing no bells or whistles, he looked at the wall and saw that the cord had been pulled. As if to confirm this, he reeled it in and held the plug in front of his face.

"That's right," I said. "It's not connected."

"Help! Help! Help!" he shouted in a voice so weak that I had trouble making out the words.

"Look," I told him, "if I can't hear you, no one else will. Do you realize that, through some freak of nature, you speak louder than you shout?"

"What do you want?"

"The Hudson River Bridge, nineteen-fourteen."

"What bridge?"

"You know what bridge."

"No no no no no!" he said. "No bridge."

"Try yes."

I could see the rapid movement of the great machinery behind his eyes that had, over the years, maneuvered his enfeebled body to commanding heights that now meant absolutely nothing. "What about it?" he asked.

"You decided to be severe with the first people to resist your offer for their land, so that others would cooperate."

"What if I did?" Then he recognized me. "I know you," he said.

"Of course you do. I've been at the firm, on and off, since that time."

"If this concerns something that happened then," he said with a fair amount of useless oil, "we can make adjustments. Bring it up in the next meeting. You haven't been to the meetings for quite some time. Where have you been?"

"I was demoted to the gold vault."

"If that's what it is.... Yes, I remember, the coffee ads. Why did you do that? It was uncalled for. But your lesson is learned. We can bring you back. With a bonus."

"I've already taken my bonus—an unusually big bonus, I might add."