Memoir From Antproof Case (56 page)

"Urrgh, urragh!" he said, clearing his throat. "How big?"

"Probably the biggest in the history of the firm. You see, what I did was, I cleared out one of the larger cages in the vault. I dropped the bricks down a shaft into a subway tunnel below. The pile that's left is hollow. Half of what we took is already gone, in Europe. The other half is loaded into a waiting C-54, which I will pilot tomorrow morning to Brazil."

Mr. Edgar was a brilliant man, who understood immediately upon hearing this that I was going to kill him. And I regret to say that he was a courageous man, for from that moment on he was neither coy nor afraid.

"Who were those two people to you?" he asked. So, you see, he knew. He was the one.

"They were my parents," I said, moved at last, but only to sorrow.

"
I
killed your mother and father?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

"I am, too."

"It took this long to find out?"

"It took this long."

"And now you've come to kill me."

"Yes."

He thought for a while, and I let him, perhaps because, somehow, I could see that he was not thinking of evasion. "Young man," he said, "it was the worst thing I have ever done. Unforgivable. In later years, but only in later years, it has caused me much grief. You don't have to believe that. Whatever I am, I know what's right, I know what's wrong, and I know what I've done." He laughed. "Go ahead," he said. "It will bring me peace. I hope it will comfort you, although, after what I did to you, so long ago, I doubt it."

After that, I didn't want to kill him. And killing a helpless person is the most horrible thing you can do. All my life I have believed that you defend the helpless, protect the innocent, love the child in the man.

And here before me sat an old man in a wheelchair, with a voice that could not call, and a body that could not move. I knew that if I killed him at least half of me would die, and that he might finally accomplish, as he had not in 1914, the murder of my entire family. And I thought to myself that my mother and father would not have wanted it that way. It was clear that all they would have wanted was to see me safe and happy, and that this would be their final embrace, their fondest desire, their last wish—as it would be mine with my child.

But then I thought of my mother and father lying in the pool of blood, with me between them trying to will them back to life. And I thought, to hell with me, I don't really much matter in this.

I then did the most difficult thing I have ever done. I killed him, and in so doing I killed the part of me that was best. But I was willing to sacrifice myself if only for love so strong that it may have turned out in the end to have been self-defeating. But it was love nonetheless, and I followed where it led.

"You'll hardly feel it," I said. I moved quickly and hit him at the base of the skull with a heavy pewter paperweight. He wasn't dead, he was merely unconscious. Then I pressed my left hand against his shoulder blades, cupped my right hand under his chin, and snapped his neck. My childhood was over, the circle was complete.

 

As I drove west toward the bridges I began to feel regret that my plan would incriminate Dickey Piehand, so instead of taking his car back over the Throgs Neck and quietly returning it to
its garage, I kept on all the way to the city. I had thought at first that it would be good fun to watch Dickey trying to snob and grease his way out of a murder rap, but then I realized that, if he didn't, he would go to the chair. You don't electrocute someone just because he's an ass, just because he torments you, just because he tries to bury you alive with flatulent morons. You want to, but you don't. Because he was home that night without an alibi, I had to make sure that the authorities knew his MG had been stolen, and that the person who had stolen it was not just Dickey Piehand pretending to be someone else. What I did with his automobile was fairly dramatic and somewhat risky, but still a lot easier than finding a parking place on the Upper East Side.

I didn't want to hurt the policemen, and yet I knew I had to immobilize their car, so I followed until I could approach at the proper angle, though with an agile little sports car it wás easy to maneuver quickly to strike position. The geometry of such an enterprise is much like that of a dogfight—but simpler because it's only two-dimensional.

After half an hour, they grew suspicious and pulled up next to a Department of Sanitation truck, motioning to me to come alongside. I could see that the right-hand doors of their cruiser were almost touching the garbage truck. All I had to do was make a loop and hit them directly from the left. I knew I had to do it quickly, so I gunned the engines, went up on the opposite sidewalk a little, smashed a few store windows, and came head-on at their left doors.

I didn't want to hurt them: I just wanted to stun them and trap them inside their vehicle. So, to decrease the tremendous speed that might otherwise have stove in their car and killed them, I slammed on the brakes and threw the MG into reverse.

What a noise! But the velocity at which I floated toward them as my rear wheels screeched and smoked was perfect, and I crunched their doors and windows tightly shut.

They were indeed stunned. I ran over to their car and pressed my face against the windshield, shouting, "Are you all right? Are you all right? What have you done to my car? Look what you did to my car!" What could they do? You can't shoot someone for being a bad driver, at least not right on the spot.

Their struggle to get out was just to save face, for they knew that they would have to wait for the fire department. Meanwhile, I knew that they would never forget what I looked like, which meant that they would know the difference between me and Dickey Piehand, who looked like, well, a suppository. I told them to stay put and that I would go for help. I said, "Wait here, I'll get the police!" I then calmly hailed a taxi and asked the driver to head uptown. After a few blocks I made him turn right and go over to Park, which he then drove down at lightning speed, dropping me at Grand Central, where I got on the shuttle, transferred at Times Square, and, eventually, took a bus to New Jersey.

The bus stopped in almost every town in New Jersey, I had to walk the last five miles, and I reached the airplane museum just before dawn. I knew I'd have to rest before my flight out, and checked my natural impulse to think of this as a delay. I had no schedule to meet, and was not running from anyone. In fact, time itself was suddenly as pleasant as June, when the scraggly bushes of winter surprise you not only with leaves but with flowers.

No one knew where I was or what I had done, and no one might ever know. Even had Stillman and Chase or the police
tied it all together that very morning, it hardly would have mattered. I could probably have lived undisturbed at the airplane museum for a year.

The rising sun lit the plane, which had remained immobile and at the ready inside the barn during the mad motion of the preceding hours, the gasoline absolutely still in its tank and without a ripple, the engine oiled, the struts and ailerons as stiff as when I had last seen them.

I took a shower and shaved, icing my face with a foot and a half of mentholated foam: I brushed my teeth—like Lady Macbeth—for at least ten minutes, with five loads of extremely minty tooth powder. Rather than have breakfast, I drank a quart of ice water. Lean, cleansed, exhausted, and having neglected to put on my clothes, I took a new canvas tarpaulin and walked into the center of the airfield.

The gate was closed, no one ever came within half a mile of it anyway, and I was in the center of seventy acres of dense wildflowers illuminated by a full sun streaming through an ether-clear sky. I rolled out the tarpaulin and lay upon it. Never in my life had I lain in the sun without any clothing whatsoever, but now it was almost as if I were directed to do so, as if I had no choice.

The morning air was cool, and I pulled the canvas over me like a coverlet. Then, at midday, it grew so hot that I sweated for hours, the droplets on my skin shining in the sun as they transpired. By then I had slept enough. I put on my khaki shorts and went out the gate, down the road, and to the river. This was a weekday in September, in the most rural part of New Jersey. I didn't see a single soul, which gave me a marvelous feeling of peace.

I swam in the river, which was warm and fresh, and went back to the airplane museum, where I cooked a dinner of steamed vegetables, broth, and grilled salmon. After going through that crazy tooth brushing thing again, I went to bed and had the most tranquil, restful sleep I had had in forty years.

 

When morning came, I cooked myself some pancakes. I do not now and did not then eat pancakes—they're too fattening, and they're not very common in Brazil—but when I was a boy my father used to make them for me, so I pretended that I was he, and I served them to me, and for a fleeting second it was as if he were there.

Then I brushed my teeth again for twenty minutes or so, thinking to myself that if I kept this up I wouldn't have any enamel left. I determined to brush less, and it has been a struggle ever since. Even now I have to use an egg timer to stop myself at three minutes.

I wondered if I should visit my parents' graves one more time. I had spent a day there the week before, knowing that I would never go back, and I poured out my heart to them. When I was young, right after they died, I used to lie on the ground and rest my cheek against the gravestones. I had stopped doing that, but the last time I was there I did it once more, pretending, in case anyone had been watching, to be asleep.

When I came back from overseas I went there with tremendous excitement, as if my mother and father were still alive, to tell them that I had survived. And then, when I reached the headstones, I felt awkward, and I said, "But don't worry, it's only a matter of time. Soon."

It was better not to go back. Instead, I taxied the plane onto the field and sat near it, this time fully dressed, until about eight
A.M.,
feeling the terror and regret of one who is about to leave forever all he has known. I did what I used to do when I was
nervous about going on a mission. I stood up, brushed the dust from my hands, and said, "Fuck it."

The engines of the C-54 started slowly, but I brought them up to the point where the plane strained against its brakes and the propellers were making their magic silver circles. I don't know what it is about propellers whirling at such great speed—perhaps it's because you can't hear yourself, or because of the pounding in your chest, like an excited heart, or perhaps it's because of a disturbance of magnetic fields—but when propellers gather speed, they wake up the world.

Looking from left to right to check the engines by eye, I released the brakes and brought up full power. Ever so slowly, but then faster and faster, the plane rolled down the long strip of bright wildflowers. I couldn't smell the scent that must have arisen as they were crushed, because I was hurtling so rapidly forward.

And then I pulled back on the stick, and was airborne. It was a slow, heavy climb, and I worried as I approached the barrier of trees, but the airplane just cleared them, bending back the supple tips of half a dozen evergreens.

To my left I saw the Hudson and the wondrous gray mass of New York. Steam and smoke streamed from glittering backlit skyscrapers and long ramparts of stone. The river blazed with reflected morning sun, and ferries moved across it as if on a brass tray, churning the spangled water behind them. The bridges were loaded with slowly moving cars, the parks deserted, the offices still empty.

I thought of all the children awaking or on their way to school. I thought of their mothers and fathers, forever busy and forever taking them for granted. If they had known how distant and sad they looked in this last high view, they might have stopped what they were doing, summoned the children, and held them as if never to let go.

 

Rising to 20,000 feet, I slipped over the great sugarloaf of air that pours from west to east along the Appalachians. I had no crew, my plane was in suspect condition, I was heavily loaded, proceeding without a flight plan, and headed for landing strips that I had not checked for months. My cargo was more than a thousand gold bars and I was going to spend either the first night or part of the second day and then the second night on the Peninsula de la Guajira, where there were three professions—farmer, priest, and bandit. I sensed an enlivening tension.

I didn't want to stay over at Fort Myers, because the tide would rise that night. I would have to wait until the water subsided, but if the wheels broke through the salt crust I would never get off. And spending the night at Fort Myers would mean a far longer wait at Inusu than otherwise, because I couldn't count on landing at (or even finding) Boa Esperança, the next stop, except in broad daylight.

Then there was the normal anxiety of flight. Passengers have their own anxieties, but those common to pilots are different. A pilot's profession is to hold impossibility at bay. His plane of many tons and tens of thousands of parts rises into the air to power its way through turbulence and thunderheads. If a nut comes loose, a hose falls off, a cable snaps, or a piston fouls, impossibility reasserts itself.

Things tend not to stay together or to be strong forever. Things have no courage but only endurance, which cannot be extended by a miracle of the heart as it can in a man. When their time comes, they snap without regret or apology. So your eyes are never still. They must hop from gauge to gauge as you recall
the place of each measurement in the whole, and dart across rows of warning lights looking for frightful illuminations. You peer out in all directions, scanning the sky and guessing the weather ahead. For fighter pilots, this is a habit that takes a particularly heavy toll. No matter how long it has been since you knew combat, you do not ever take for granted that the sky is a place of peace. Your eyes do not accept the course of history but sweep the air instead, looking for an enraged black spot enlarging in your direction. You cannot keep yourself from this compulsive scanning, you cannot keep from listening to your engines for broken patterns of sound, and you cannot keep your hands from flying like little birds to touch for reassurance the important switches, the stick, and the levers you need to pop the canopy.