The Palace Thief (3 page)

It was as though the more I tried to economize, the more she tried to waste. I began servicing extra accounts during my lunch hour, while at auction one day Scheherazade purchased a small etching by Goya, in front of which I found her standing when I returned home from the office. It was only a few inches tall, depicting a farmhouse and several chickens, yet she had placed it in the center of our living room wall. Over the course of months I saw that she was capable of standing before it for a half hour at a stretch, and I must concede that at times like this I felt no closer to understanding my wife than I would have
been to a pygmy. The following year she purchased a terra-cotta figurine from the Han Dynasty, smaller than my thumb, which she set on our mantle and which now and then I found her holding in her hands, late at night, when I ventured downstairs for seltzer water.

Nonetheless, I soon grew accustomed to our charge-account balances, and in the decade before our children were born we reached an equilibrium in our marriage. Indeed, these were the first times in which I can say that I was blissfully content. Thursday evenings at the symphony we stood outdoors on the octagonal balcony at intermission, and while Scheherazade gazed dreamily over the square I pursued in my mind some of the tax shelters and bankruptcy manipulations that had become a standard part of my practice. Such evenings were the embodiment of happiness for me. I felt I was about to be made a partner and had again heard news to that effect from Mr. Emond. My salary was as high as I had ever hoped to earn, and with stock options I could look forward to being a reasonably wealthy man in a decade.

Mr. Peters, however, had in the meantime expanded his auto-parts business into four factories in three states and had opened a chain of retail outlets. Furthermore, he had for some reason seized on the idea of baseball as a theme for his advertisements, which began to appear in the newspaper. I do not see what the connection is between automobile parts and our national pastime, but a smiling portrait of Eugene Peters wearing his baseball cap began to appear in the corner of these announcements, accompanied by slogans like “Doubleheader Sale” or “All-Star Prices.” One evening, watching the seven-o’clock news, I was startled to see that he had begun purchasing television commercials as well, and that he himself narrated them. Again, he wore the baseball cap. Needless to add, I soon
found his ads on my car radio as well when I drove to work in the morning, although I cannot say with certainty whether he was the narrator of these. It does not take a professional psychologist to observe that he was probably attempting to compensate for his two seasons of high school play, which were stellar neither at bat nor in the field. Within a short space of time a number of retired professional players began making cameo appearances at the end of these ads. These were minor players such as the back-up catcher for the World Championship 1954 Giants and a utility infielder from the team of 1962, and I will not bother with their names. However, I suppose it meant he was hobnobbing with these retired athletes, and although I do not know why, this thought irritated me. I had no desire to know of his successes, yet I found myself reading certain items in the business pages. The thousand dollars he had once asked me for might well have been a small fortune by now, and I myself might have been hobnobbing with these players, but by a simple act of will I was able to put this from my mind.

At home Scheherazade became pregnant with Naomi. I will remember the day I learned I was to become a father because my wife called me at work, which she rarely did, and because when I came home that day I found that she had purchased for herself an ermine stole. I do not mind saying that the sight of the ermine hanging in our closet when I went to hang up my own raincoat was more than I ordinarily would have tolerated, but given Scheherazade’s announcement, I felt in no position to object. In June Naomi was born.

It was at about this time that Mr. Peters entered our lives again. We received a letter inviting us to dinner, and I accepted, although the letter had been written by his secretary. I had Naomi’s college education to plan for now and was ready to consider and yet remain prudent about any business offer he
might make. Naomi’s money was in government bonds. Sensing that he would be asking me for another investment, I carefully calculated what I could afford to risk on a venture such as his. I arrived at a sum that, I do not mind saying, would surely have pleased him.

Scheherazade and I met Mr. Peters at the Carnelian Room Restaurant in the Fairmont Hotel, where we ate an elaborate dinner including a bottle of burgundy dating from the Second World War and a bottle of port dating from the First. Although needless to say I would not have ordered these vintages myself, I nonetheless attempted to pay for them at the end of the meal. Mr. Peters, however, had evidently made a prior arrangement with the waiter. I have gone over in my mind several times what occurred that evening. I had a reasonably pleasant time and I think he did, too. However, at the end of our meal, Scheherazade without hesitation ordered two different desserts, eating only part of one of them and leaving the other untouched. Mr. Peters did not seem to mind, and he even joked about it. However, he made no business offers.

In short succession Rachel and Abba were born. I had not yet been made partner at the firm because the position of Mr. Emond had been temporarily weakened, yet my own standing was still strong and I was earning in two months what my father used to earn in a year. I had developed a technique that was quite successful in recruiting new clients. I would take them to a meal at a nearby restaurant that had arrangements with the firm, where I would talk about professional sports or, if I could discern a leaning, the current political situation. I would not mention any business proposal until the table had been cleared. At this point, the maitre d’ would approach, recognize me by name, and offer us an aperitif “as his guest.” This, as I said, was by arrangement, and though I always asked for Grand Marnier,
I was brought scotch whiskey in an apertif glass instead, which I would then drain in a single draft. The whiskey could be counted on in the course of seconds to bring about a temporary, garrulous ease that I exploited by leaning toward the potential client and saying, in an offhand way that came easily after the cocktail, “Say, I bet they sock you at tax time.”

Every partner at the firm had such a method, in one form or another, that produced results, and over the experience of numerous years I found that my particular entreaty worked quite well with the genre of client with whom I had most contact, specifically attorneys, physicians, and the not-infrequent movie or television actor—members of the professions, in other words, that required a certain ease with the public. Of course, I could vary my approach. Meeting, as we sometimes did, with the financial staff of corporations, I certainly would not try the “socked at tax time” approach. In those situations, of course, Mr. Priebe or Mr. Emond was present alongside, and the entreaty was a formal one, made in advance of the meeting, carefully considered against competing bids and factually represented in documents.

In summary, I was able to do well at the firm, where I earned a good salary and good bonuses and was well on my way to a partnership, although I suppose I should mention another incident that occurred several years ago. At the time the firm still went by the name Priebe & Emond, as Paul Farmer had not yet been made a principal. One morning, before most of the other accountants and any of the secretaries were at their desks, Mr. Priebe appeared in my doorway and asked in a low voice whether I was free to see him in his office. There, we sat in the two padded chairs next to his window, which looked out over the Bay Bridge to the north and the shipyards to the east. Noticing that I was interested in the view, he chatted for several
minutes about the enormous tonnage of concrete contained within the bridge’s bulwarks; then he abruptly turned to the wall and asked me if I knew anything of what had been recently occurring in the savings and loan industry. Being familiar with the trade journals, I replied that I knew something of what was occurring then. It is important to note that this meeting between Mr. Priebe and myself occurred at least two years before the savings and loan affair became known to the public. Mr. Priebe then looked me in the eye and asked me what I would think of an accountant who knowingly doctored books to protect the partners in a government-backed savings institution. I understood that I was under consideration for a partnership at the firm and knew immediately that this was a test of my moral principles. “I would not approve,” I responded.

“I didn’t think you would,” said Mr. Priebe, nodding, and then he rose to shake my hand, signaling that our meeting was over. Two days later, Mr. Emond entered my office during the lunch hour and told me that he had heard what had happened and was proud of my response. I myself was as well, of course, and I continued my regular duties with increasing expectation of a promotion. However, within a month it was Mr. Farmer who received the partnership.

It is fruitless for me to speculate about what occurred, although I did notice that prior to his promotion Mr. Farmer had become more secretive about his work and was now often already in the office when I arrived in the morning. That is all I will say about this matter.

Without omitting anything of importance, I have skipped to the year when Naomi was fifteen, Rachel thirteen, and Abba nine. To my astonishment the children had grown up each with a distinct personality. Naomi was dark in all her features, in her hair and skin and the cast of her eyes, and dark in her character
as well. In our garden she sat in the plum tree’s deep shade, and at the table she ate without speaking. She had found a natural kinship with my wife that at times pleased me, for Naomi was my favorite, but I must say that at other times I felt the two of them were in collusion against me. They often went shopping together and sometimes returned with several twine-handled bags that they refused to open for me, laughing darkly to each other while they brought them upstairs to the bedrooms. At home Naomi often sat by herself. The brooding postures she assumed and the reticence with which she expressed her affections made her occasional demonstrations of love exquisite morsels that I pined for. Sometimes while I worked at my desk upstairs she would enter my study, walk up behind me and without saying anything place a hand on each of my shoulders. If I spoke, she withdrew them, so that often I did my work silently, scrutinizing the account books of physicians and attorneys while in the corner of my vision the dark fingers of my daughter lay unmoving. We hardly ever spoke. I believe she knew she was my favorite, and for a reason I do not understand, this excited in her a sense of injustice. Her tastes, like my wife’s, were extravagant.

Rachel, on the other hand, was everything Naomi was not. She had blond hair and pale, warm skin that rushed to color when she was excited, which was often. Where Naomi at the age of thirteen had worn small pearl earrings, Rachel wore boys’ sneakers and dressed in the same dungarees for a week. Rachel sat in the open, sunlit portion of our yard and practiced her field hockey in our living room. When I returned from work, she hugged me around the legs and begged for a ride on my feet, which I more often than not gave her, holding her by her pale arms and lifting her small sneakers across the Afghani carpet atop my oxfords, which I did not mind shining again later. On
Sundays Rachel dusted the windowsills without asking and emptied the small inlaid wastebasket in my study. I often found my pencils sharpened and the clips and erasers arranged in rows in my desk, and I made sure to thank Rachel whenever this occurred. Rachel, I believe, knew that Naomi was my favorite, though it is odd that in Naomi this situation produced forlornness and brooding, while in Rachel it created only exuberance.

As for Abba, he was a son and his childhood passed without the trouble and wondering I had found with my daughters. I bought him baseball gloves and football cleats and felt certain this was enough to pass him forward through his boyhood. He had an even disposition. He spoke softly and in general took easily to the world. He had no problems with his friends nor with his teachers, and he seemed to have missed his sister’s propensity to spend my money. Indeed, if it were not for Scheherazade’s intervention, I believe he might never have bought a thing for himself.

As I said, this was not true for my elder daughter. When Naomi was sixteen, for example, she decided she wanted a horse. Her high school had offered an equestrian course, and against my wishes she had learned to ride. One night soon after, she brought up the idea of owning a horse, and in response I could not help snorting, much like a horse myself. My own father was a wristwatch salesman, and I told Naomi that the descendants of such people did not own horses. Some of them
shoed
horses, I said, but none owned them. Naomi furrowed her dark brow. I thought the matter was ended, but several days later Scheherazade turned over in bed and mentioned that Naomi was at a brooding age and perhaps I ought to consider her request.

We bought the horse from a young man who lived in a mansion in Woodside. He wore riding britches that looked as
if they had been ordered from a men’s catalogue, and when I gave him my check he asked to see my driver’s license. Naomi mounted the beast, and as she sat there it stamped its hooves and flared its agate-colored nostrils. “Thank you, Daddy,” she said as she turned and started around the show ring.

The animal had cost as much as an automobile, and as she paraded it around the ring, her back arched, her high boots pressed into its flanks, I quickly calculated the feed and stable costs on a per-year basis. We had it boarded in a private stable. Like Naomi, the animal turned out to have a dark temperament, and like Naomi’s, this temperament was most prominent in regard to its benefactor. Naomi named him Dreamboat, which I did not like. I did not believe that a horse could differentiate among human beings; whenever I approached, however, Dreamboat flared his nostrils and snorted, and whenever I spoke he stamped his hooves. The thought occurred to me that he knew who had written the check for his purchase. On the other hand, whenever Naomi or Rachel or Scheherazade spoke to him, he flicked his tail and bowed his protuberant head, and whenever they approached with oats, he blinked his eyes like a lover. Abba, for his part, took after me and did not seem to notice the beast. For several months Naomi rode every day, and then she began riding a few times per week, and soon after that she stopped riding altogether. Dreamboat developed an infection in his leg. Antibiotics were needed, and when these failed, a veterinary surgeon. Up until that time I had thought there were no professionals more expensive than a physician. Dreamboat never recovered, and a year later he was taken from his agony.