The Embezzler (17 page)

All during those hot months a part of me sat and watched Guy Prime struggle for his financial life. For instead of closing down my firm, I was using every last resource to place it once more among the first in Wall Street. Such was my real crime, if crime it was. As I saw it then and as I continue to see it today, my moral guilt turns on one question: what would have been Rex's damages had I succeeded? Should he not have been glad to have his son's future father-in-law a power again in Wall Street? And if I failed, where were these same damages? I would still be unable to repay his loan, that was all. It boiled down to this: Rex had stipulated that I cut my throat and leave his debt unpaid. I proposed to have my throat and pay him back. Was I bound to lose all for his pride?

I wanted to see no one from my old life. I was even glad that Evadne was away. I felt that the disgrace of being a small boy reprimanded by a stern headmaster had to be wiped clean before I figured again in the social world. However invisible the stain of this imagined shame, I would keep to myself until I could appear, both inwardly and outwardly, as the old Guy Prime. I would not so much as step across the threshold of the Glenville Club so long as I was the creature of Rex Geer.

During the week I was busy enough, and on the weekends I went to my sister Bertha in Westhampton, where she had a shingle cottage on the beach to which she invited her chattering old maids and her crusty old bachelors. Poor Bertha, who had lived with Father until he died, had developed with long delayed freedom into the petty tyrant that she had hated him for being to her. She had long straight sandy hair, tied in a knot in back, a heavy countenance with chin thrust forward and watery pale eyes. She lived, despite tweeds and walking sticks, and a considerable consumption of whiskey, on a gross mental diet of romantic art: of Verdi and Puccini and Saint-Gaudens and Rodin and Greta Garbo.

She pretended to sneer at me and held me up to her friends as Goliath himself, but she was really delighted to show me off. I was the wind of the greenback prairies of the real world into their closed interior, and I had come batting in—that was the great thing!—not at their own timid solicitation but of my own accord. I was the proof (or a little wishful thinking could make me seem so) that the captains and the kings of earth, if they ever listened for a moment to their hearts, would come down to the beach and to Bertha Prime and sit on the veranda to talk of death and beauty. Bertha had resented that Father and life had loved me and scanted her, but she was all ready to forgive. Oh so ready! A little scolding, and I was her big darling brother again.

"I'm not surprised, Guy, after all that horsy set of Angelica's and all those sports-coated golfers, that your soul should cry out for a bit of companionship with those to whom the planet is more than a field for organized sport. You're late in starting, but you're not too late. After all, I can remember the dear dead days when you and Rex read Browning aloud."

I was oddly content, in the suspended existence of those weekends, with Bertha and the gentle little group that obeyed her and liked obeying. We walked on the dunes; we read plays aloud; we listened to symphonies on the Gramophone, and we put away a lot of cocktails. Angelica, calling me from the Cape, thought I had taken leave of my senses, and of course I had. Waiting for things to happen, one did not want to feel the interlude.

From the beginning of September to the middle of October a series of disasters occurred, one after another, that proved, if proof were needed, that the gods were against me. No protagonist of ancient Greek drama was more buffeted and with less cause than I. Had I once spurned Aphrodite when she reached out her snowy arms to me? Had I enjoyed a nymph for whom jealous Zeus had lusted? Or was it a matter of inheritance, and did I, like my father, have to pay for the
hubris
of some Prime ancestor? An early fall hurricane wrecked my Caribbean resort so that its opening had to be postponed a year. An injunction in that almost settled title suit closed down the operation of Georgia Phosphates. And finally the government insisted on additional studies before authorizing the issuance of my little drug company's new pill to reduce apprehension. I could have swallowed our entire production.

All I needed was a little time to overcome my obstacles. As I have pointed out before, my ventures ultimately brought in millions—for others. Knowing that it was my last gamble, I now flung into my businesses everything I could lay my clutching hands on and borrowed from everyone I knew. Angelica was back at Meadowview, but I did not welcome her questions, or Evadne's, and I stayed in town. My days and nights were devoted to meeting friends in search of loans, to delaying creditors, to pumping heart into associates. But still I needed time.

When the idea occurred to me of using the securities in Angelica's trust, my first reaction was simply a mild surprise that it had not occurred to me before. I had set up this trust for Angelica and the children on Father's death, using all of my inheritance. I had wanted them to be independent, at least for necessities, of my own risky businesses. Standard Trust and I were the trustees, but because I was the donor of the fund and because the trust instrument had given me the widest powers of investment and discretion, the bank had tended to regard itself more as a depositary than a fiduciary, and had allowed me to buy and sell as I chose and to keep the securities in my office vault for months at a time. This may seem very relaxed to present-day readers, but we were in 1936, and my name on Wall Street was still a synonym for reliability. Ironically enough, I had done better with this trust than with my own things, and there were seven hundred thousand dollars of stocks and bonds in my possession on that autumn Monday morning when I decided to pledge the lot.

The curious thing about my mental state was that I
knew
it was too late. I was convinced, in superstitious fashion, that nothing now could save me. There simply seemed to be a bleak and necessary logic in hurling this last log upon a dying fire. I do not, however, mean to imply that I acted from suicidal motives. I acted to save myself and my firm. I had to put down the last trump; it was the only way to play the hand. But in playing it, as coolly as I knew how, there was no longer hope in my heart.

By the middle of October word of my multiple borrowings had penetrated even to the sleepy corner where Standard Trust Company, like the dragon Fafner, dozed over its hoards. It had been a great bank in its day, but, swollen with fat old trusts whose beneficiaries were now too numerous to be effective critics and under the presidency of my late Uncle Chauncey, who had always been off yachting with his rich wife, its claws had dulled and only a faint puff of smoke was from time to time emitted from its clenched jaws. Now there were stirrings. Twice my obliging friend Pete Bissell lunched with me and asked timidly if it wouldn't "look better" if the trust assets were kept in the custody of the corporate trustee.

"It certainly would," I agreed each time. "How would you look if your co-trustee made off with the corpus of the trust? I guess somebody at Standard would have
your
corpus!"

Pete laughed, chokingly, half reassured, half scandalized. In the soft compliant eye of the eternally reassuring trust officer there was a little yellow spark of panic. But no. Not the senior partner of Prime King? Not the nephew of Chauncey Prime!

"When will you send it over?"

"Next week."

And next week I would forget.

I might even have got away with it, miraculous as it now seems, had an article not appeared in the Sunday
Times
on the damage of hurricanes, with pictures of my battered resort and, alas, a picture of me. Fafner awoke at last, and on Monday evening, as I was about to leave my office, I heard his belated roar on the telephone.

"Mr. Prime? It's Howard Landers. I'm a trust officer at Standard Trust."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Landers?"

"It has come to my attention that some of the securities of Mrs. Prime's trust are actually in your custody."

"That has been our usual practice."

"It is most irregular, Mr. Prime.
Most
irregular."

"Look here Landers, this is not an ordinary trust, and I happen to be your co-trustee. Pete Bissell is the man over there I deal with. Have you cleared this call with him?"

"He's cleared it with
me,
Mr. Prime. I am taking over supervision of your wife's trust. The first thing that I shall do is to correct at once this unprecedented irregularity. I must insist that all assets of the trust be delivered to the bank no later than tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow morning!"

"Is there any difficulty, Mr. Prime? Are the securities not physically in your office?"

"Of course they are. But I don't understand your tone. To call up a co-fiduciary, after years of allowing him to keep constantly traded securities in his office—a great convenience, incidentally to
both
trustees—and expect to reverse the procedure over night—well, it sounds as if you were suspicious of something!"

"I regret how it sounds, Mr. Prime. But our messenger will be over for the securities in the morning."

"Do you realize, Mr. Landers, that your attitude means that I shall never do business with Standard Trust again?"

"We have calculated the risks, Mr. Prime."

No, Mr. Geer was not in, his secretary told me when I called. Mr. Geer had left the office and was dining out—she did not know where—but was going to the opera later. I called Bertha who had Aunt Amy's box on Monday nights and asked her if she could spare a seat for me.

"Since when did you become an opera fan?"

"Be nice, Bertha," I sighed. "I've had a hard day."

"Well, if you sleep, don't snore. My friends are not the kind who go to the opera just to be seen."

I was late for
Traviata
and thought I would have to wait for the intermission to seek out Rex, but then I spotted him in a box only two away. I tiptoed out to the corridor and into the back of his box and stood for just a moment behind his chair before placing my hand on his shoulder. He looked up and, without even a word or a whisper, followed me from the box. He must have been prepared for the worst. No doubt to Rex my face had become the symbol of his personal doom. He would take it, as he took all things, like a man.

In a comer of the empty bar we sat at a small round table, and I looked about for a waiter.

"No, no," he muttered, "give it to me straight."

So I did, watching him as I spoke, seeing the too familiar process of his slow congealment. When I had finished there was a moment of silence, a moment of something almost like peace between us. What would have been the point of violence now?

"I realize that you may be the victim of an obsession," he said at last. "The rational part of me tells me that men like you may really not be responsible for their acts. But I wonder how much the concept of personal fault means to me. What seems important now—in fact, the only thing in the world that seems important now—is for me to recognize and learn to face the thing in you that is wicked. Maybe you can't help being wicked, any more than you can help the shape of your nose. But there it is, your nose and the wickedness. Before me. I see them." And he looked straight through me, as if at something strange and distant, but somehow no longer threatening. I had the distinct feeling that I was dead at last not only to Rex but to my whole world. There were many things in that feeling, but I wonder if relief may not have been one of them.

"Go ahead, Rex. Get it off your chest. I have it coming to me."

"We're beyond recriminations, you and I."

"Then let's not be beyond reason. Put up the money once more and I will sign over everything I own to you. You will hold it for Angelica and Evadne and Percy under any terms you wish. When my ship comes in—and it will come in—they will be rich. I will take myself away—to a Pacific island, anywhere—I'll never bother you again. All you will have to do is hold the securities and wait."

"How much will it take this time, Guy?" he asked wearily.

"Three quarters of a million. You see, I don't beat about the bush."

Rex continued to be inscrutable. "I'll have to go to my firm. I can't raise that much on such short notice. Your last loan cut me too low."

I stared. "But surely, Rex, you must be several times a millionaire!"

"It's all in trust for Lucy and George. I did what you did. Only I'm not an Indian giver. However, I can go to Marcellus de Grasse. Of course, I'll have to tell him."

"Of course," I murmured, without conviction. "But you
will
go to him?"

"Where will you be tonight?"

"In my room at the Schuyler Club."

"What will you do if the answer is no?"

"What can I do?"

Rex's gray-green eyes fixed me with a defiant glitter. The defiance was at my thinking that he would not say it. "Men have been known to kill themselves under these conditions."

"Well, I won't do that," I retorted with a grunt. "You can trust me to see the show out. I never could leave even a movie early. I like to know how things end."

"Very well." Rex rose. "Let this be good-by, then. Whatever happens, I don't think I want to see you again. I shall deal through George. George, too, will have to know all."

"Yes," I said, in the final flare-up of my bitterness, "he will have to know all,
your
all. Nobody will ever know mine!"

"Not even the creditor who shares your disgrace? Who is involved in your crime?"

"Oh, shucks, Rex,
you
won't have to go to jail."

"There are worse things than jail."

"That's the ultimate Rex!" I cried, in sudden, passionate anger. "That's the Rexest thing I ever heard! You've robbed me all my life, and now you want to steal the final iniquity of my punishment. And you call
me
the thief! When were you not picking my pockets? Father was on to you from the beginning. You envied me my popularity, my family, my whole bright little place in the sun. You hated those things because they weren't yours. You had to have them, not to enjoy them, but to destroy them. You grabbed the fortune that I should have made, and what have you ever done with it but build a big house that's as dreary as yourself and prate about morals while you practiced adultery? You made a world that's more sordid than the old Prime world that you sneered at, only yours isn't even gay. It's drab as a crow!"