The Utopianist's Complaint will be published in November, 2020.

                                                                                               The Hanging Man

 August 6, 1965:

THE BUSH-PLANE high above the Alaskan wilderness was nondescript in its livery, its wings pitching between airflows. Its engine sputtered and hacked.

The whistling of sliced air met a pair of muffled ears within. Long sunset light filled the portal through which Royal Alexander van der Bloode gazed. The de Havilland Otter’s fuselage glared as the wings shuddered, the engine awoke again grinding. He tightened his helmet and watched the landscape pass below, counting the snow-clad peaks to the west and spied the final landmark: the Gakona and Copper rivers’ confluence.

Just a few moments more. He held a peculiar teardrop-shaped crystal tight in his palm and said his usual prayer, then opened his jumpsuit’s collar and let the relic dangle from its cord around his neck.

The engine’s coughing became almost theatrical in regularity, as if to underline the Otter’s doom to any spectator below. The pilot Henry Delaney turned and lifted a fist and thumbed the signal. Royal placed his hand upon the door handle and released it. Cold stratosphere roared into the cabin.

He leapt outward and tumbled in space. The plane shrank in his wake.

As he plunged toward the earth in freefall, he found himself recalling his last bitter words to his ex-wife Trudy Cooke five years earlier. She might finally have her chance to rejoin those words next week—at his funeral.

He pulled the ripcord. Deceleration pulsed through his body as the parachute settled into a burnished ruby. Anxiously he inspected the lines—solid, vibrating, without tangle.

And to think people did this for fun…Madmen!

The plane had become a midge against the ember horizon, but Delaney was not behind him. The window of opportunity to steer into the meadow below was only twenty seconds, and the pilot was supposed to have shadowed him out the hatch, leaving the Otter to its destruction.

Was that? Couldn’t be. Yes, finally, there it was—the expanding lozenge drenched equally red and barely out of the plane’s wake in the enormous Halloween-colored sunset. A tremendous distance stretched between the two of them.

He tried to relax as he guided the parachute’s airflow. He craned his head around one last time and glimpsed a virgin smoke plume on the mountainous horizon.  

The Otter had crashed. He smiled tight against the rushing air. It was done: Royal van der Bloode is now a dead man, at last.

A draft at his back, a smooth, angular decent. The knoll to which he steered expanded rapidly, the treetops rising to meet him. Relax, old boy, he comforted himself: A slack body could mean the difference between landing whole and enduring a broken limb.

But he was coming in fast—much, much too fast. And too high. The target meadow flashed beneath him. In seconds the broccoli sea sharpened into monstrous Alaska fir and pine and sequoia, and he was treading a river of leaves and branches like whips, then submerged, slapped, falling, tumbling.

 HENRY DELANEY ROLLED into the field just in time to see his employer’s canopy disappear with brutal velocity into the trees far north. He noted the tree-line’s contours where he’d vanished and consulted his watch. Francis Meltzer’s helicopter should already have been waiting here to retrieve the both of them.

He gathered his parachute and tried van der Bloode with his walkie-talkie. It answered with only hiss and scratch.

A damn shame.

A few minutes later came the distant heartbeat of Meltzer’s Sikorsky. It approached and bucked and settled at the flat part of the clearing’s edge. When its blading slowed Meltzer leapt from the cockpit, followed by Dr. Robert Smith, bearing a suitcase of medical gear.

“Where is he?” Meltzer cried.

“He dropped right there,” the pilot pointed. “Could be a mile or more.”

Meltzer hung his head, silent.

“Those trees must be 700 years old,” Smith said. “They’re pine and sequoia, Hank.”

Delaney replied, “I’d say he’s dead.”

“No,” Meltzer said, “he isn’t.”

“Sequoia. Just look at those sons of bitches.”

“We have to make sure.” Francis Meltzer grabbed his backpack, which was overstuffed with climbing equipment and rescue gear—even a pistol—for every possible contingency. They ran for the tree line, fanning out with binoculars and walkie-talkies, the shouts of their employer’s name dwindling in each other’s ears.

 

ROYAL VAN DER Bloode was thinking:

There is promised for us everlasting life.

But what is the eternal to a woman gazing at the night sky—or this sunset?

She trembles beneath the immensity of it—and the thought of an interminable existence.

Yet in her terror, she yields nothing to what it only pretends to portend for her—that she herself is nothing.

No, her part in it all is assured. She is not alone.

For if she is alone in that immensity, she therefore owns it all, correct? She has it all to herself, and thus experiences a part of the unique estrangement of the Creator, her talking-companion.

But that’s only one horn of the dilemma…On the other hand, the world’s mystics have promised her a reprieve outside time entirely, in ecstasis, with the past and future being equal and opposite illusions...

He considered the problem.  

Anyone who lives within the present, with their mind catching itself awake enough to consider either of these promises, has brought themselves to the gates of eternity, and has found their—and everyone’s—true birthright.

He’d heard the chopper land and shouted himself hoarse.

Funny, how ideas swim when the blood floods the head…

The walkie-talkie crackled far below, three men calling his name between bursts of static and squelch. It had slipped from his jumpsuit on the tumble through the branches, when the parachute swallowed the pine’s uppermost limbs and his somersaulting ceased with a yank to his right leg, a headfirst plunge through the boughs. Now he was hanging upside down from a limb far above the forest floor, with nothing between gratitude and maiming or death but two cords strangling his thigh and ankle.

He placed his hand over the odd crystal that now rested in the hollow of his throat. Feeling judicious, he said another prayer. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way; this was no part of the Tulku’s prophecy. But he was grateful he hadn’t been knocked unconscious, speared or garroted on his jaunt through needle and leaf.

Hanging here gave him time to think about the twenty-second window of opportunity Delaney insisted upon yet neglected. He refused to entertain the implications of it. Instead, he imagined Zena Gebreselassie’s flawless skin and her heart-shaped face, that hourglass of her delicious body, the communion they’d shared two nights ago.

Calls filled the dusk: A dove, off to the right—and that piping, the bark of the barred owl? He pulled some pine needles from a branch and vigorously chewed them. None of it could stave off the disobedient truth: He may actually die today. Perhaps he’d never get to hear his ex-wife’s epitaph, or laugh over the photos of her at his memorial as he’d imagined.

He could feel the crystal just inside his jumpsuit’s collar, still pulsating with the remnants of his terror while crashing. He distilled his mental energies upon it and in a moment calm spread through him.

The Bastards want to own you, he’d once harangued Jan, his father. Face the truth: In this world, you’re property, to be disposed of as they see fit…And there’s no longer a whiff of sulfur to tip you off to their presence either. Old Nick’s minions are wearing Savile Row suits and their voices are as sweet as honey…And Moloch’s no longer visible, old man, seeing as his skin’s made of accountants and his flesh is fashioned of scholars and his blood’s running with bureaucrats and his bones made of generals…Identifying with the world-view of one’s slavemaster is a nasty affliction, the sickness of the age, Jan…Nasty business, to be doing those archons’ bidding and not even have a inkling you’re just a lackey, fed on the long newspaper spoon of their lies…

I’d paid taxes to keep their goddamned Beast going—and people died all the world over because of it.

Well, not any more.

If there was one person whom he could count on to find him, if it took days but ruined this phase of his plan, it was Francis Meltzer. He closed his eyes and breathed. The scent of the surrounding pines and sequoia was overwhelming at this elevation. Atomize it, bottle it, sell it, his mind whispered to him. Then mixed with the sappy aroma came a tangy smell, faint yet familiar. He sensed a wetness to his chest hair and noted the dark, damp patches running the front of his jumpsuit and recognized what had occurred: The product of the day’s three cups of coffee and terror of his crashing.

He kicked his free left leg, bending it stiffly at the knee to flush it of the prickling. He knew Meltzer and Smith and Delaney were out there searching. Again he yelled. He screamed. He listened.

Nothing.

The pinesap scent flooded his nostrils. The place smelled of old Saint Nicolas’s days, far past. His breaths deepened, his hunger eased. But the cable bit into his left leg. He sensed the delicate tension between his body and the branch from which he hung and felt the living energy of the tree. He crossed his free leg and again carefully flexed his knee to flush it of the prickling. He dared not remove the helmet, though the strap dug viciously into his chin, his face tumescent from inverted blood flow.

His eyelids fluttered. He gulped for air and locked his fingers together and cradled the back of his head. Gradually he felt like no intruder up here, elevated in the arms of this pine so large as to be a microcosm of the wilderness, like an ecological system unto itself sunk deep with mites, fungi, and ants, purposeful golden motes buzzing about its sap-stains below, the weeks-old rainwater creeping through its veins—and not least the spotted owl perched on a branch a few yards away, whose head ratcheted around to cast a dark carnelian eye upon him.

“Hullo there,” he groaned at the strix. “Victim of circumstance here, chum…Halfway ’tween heaven and earth…My job’s been tying me down lately, ha-ha…Life’s got me in a tangle…First step’s a—”

Could I interest you in some flying lessons? The bird’s clear tenor vibrated between his ears.

I know what you’re thinking. How can an Owl speak? It’s an interesting story, really. It’s not easy living at these heights. But before I tell you you must tell me about yourself. What has brought you here crashing out of the sky to my tree?

The body of feathers rustled indignantly and resettled its wings. It turned to face him once again, its saucer eyes intense with brows like accents.

You are a man on a mission. That much I know. No-one would willingly cast themselves from a hunk of flying reforged rock and come spilling through my branches if he weren’t determined in some unusual way to change the world. Is that it?

Royal choked, managed to reply: “Spot on.”

Well, you have certainly changed mine. But I’ll tell you, my world up here needs no fixing—not of your kind’s ‘fixing.’ But I must know what brings you here.

He was pleased to have a set of ears to hear him out. “The world beyond here has found itself in quite a situation. One of magnetic proportions, you might say, one of perceived inevitabilities that shall lead it to destruction—a fiery cataclysm which would be so thorough enough as to touch even this pristine place, your home. I aim to prevent it from happening.”

The Owl’s eyes narrowed to a single resentful glance. How very humble and charitable of you, to do that for us, the creatures of the wild. But what makes you think your kind needs this salvation—from its fate? Perhaps the will of one even greater that yourselves deems it so…You are so certain this is your common human fate, to die in worldwide fire?

“The chances are staggeringly high, Owl. Our world is run by madmen.”

And only you can prevent it?

“Well, not only me. Miracles can happen. But I fear that in my absence—and thus those of my progeny, the whole world is doomed, to a certainty.”

There are many futures, and you are choosing with this great project and will of yours to actuate but one of them. The vast fields of futurity can accommodate more than one willful man, for one thing—in any patch of that field. And second, the fields themselves are quite—slippery, shall I say, for any of your kind. You’ll find that the future is less your property than the sporting ground for forces far beyond your imaginings.

“That’s where skillful means comes into the picture.”

In a world as dark and complex as that which you hint, entering our time-space backwards you might say, ‘skillful means’ might not be enough to get the job done. How does one fool the entire race into—

“Omnium, Owl—Omnium.”

The bird’s head jerked and its eyes grew large at this reply. Then I shall discount the chances of your failure by half. Are you saying you have ambassadors to the Hive?

“An Embassy, yes, Owl—and more. I possess contracts with the Watchers, for their assistance. Our peculiar human psyches already have access to a special kind of energy, Owl, that beings such as yourself are unable to sense, let alone compass and control, which is very similar and resonant to the Omnium.”

It squinted. Oh, really?

“Yes. The Omnium may form a circuit between human minds’ energy that opens up a force greater than the sun. The techniques for accomplishing this feat have been forgotten for thousands of years. Thus all our minds and bodies, vessels and energies alike, must survive and must be saved.”

And you’re the man to do this.

“Yes.”

Tell me how you propose to bend this allotted fate for humanity. 

“I own the third largest shipping company in the world—and mines of coltan and silica…But these I am in the process of transforming. My many children shall complete my work. A-and then—”

Well, the Owl huffed, I’m impressed. Digging in the ground for shiny rocks and floating them across the water. Remarkable.

Royal grew impatient, his eyelids batting weakly. “It’s not evil that one should own a minor empire like mine…but the fair play with which that empire conducts its business with the rest of the people, is what matters.”

Splendid. Brilliant. So tell me you plan, then.

Without speaking, van der Bloode told him.

That is a good plan. It might even work, given the Omnium. But you must tell me where your plan came from—its origination, and your motives. Your motives must be pure, shouldn’t they? Oh, excuse me a moment— and with a flash of feathers the bird leapt in descent, and returned within seconds with a mouse in its mouth. Srrght klffy ddldds, it said. Quickly it gulped down the rodent. Continue. Your motives.

Suddenly Royal came awake. The nearby branch, thankfully, was bare.

His confusion lingered.

 

FRANCIS MELTZER hurried through the grass into the brush, alternating calls on the walkie-talkie with shouts. The treetops grew taller the further he made the ascending slope—Douglas fir and pines and sequoia forming an intermittent canopy against the orange sky. Birdsong everywhere. Silence and gentle winds high above. He heaved beneath the massive backpack of climbing gear, striding firmly on flat ground in distribution of its weight down his spine. 

He needed to take it easy. Groin-pulls. His ulcer. He’d exercised strenuously in preparation for this operation. His wife had caught on that something big was looming for Francis and his boss, despite her haven’t stepping foot in the Van der Bloode corporation offices for several years after the birth of their two children.

Here I am—goddamn Alaskan wilderness, after learning how to fly a goddamn helicopter.

 Only van der Bloode could have led him to such a special emergency. After what Francis had witnessed over the past seven years working for VDB Enterprises, a fate such as this for his boss seemed inevitable—some incredible scheme that would rival a CIA operation or an adventure from the Arabian Nights, the man’s beloved guidebook—and then go terribly wrong.

He found himself identifying the trees and plants as he passed. His pace slowed. He called out. He turned down the walkie-talkie; Delaney and Smith’s constant calls for van der Bloode grated his nerves further.

Although Francis had always been a magnet for people with dubious intentions, it was still a mystery to him. After eight years he still wondered how he’d ended up in the man’s employ. Freshly graduated from Harvard Business School in 1957, he had been certain of the success of the consolidation firm for new and bold American patents he’d planned with his fellow alumni. But it wasn’t to be; he had fallen for the man’s strange charm—that, and witnessing the miracle van der Bloode had performed in that New York District courtroom six years ago. No-one would ever know what had happened that day but the billionaire, Francis, and the Federal and state officials who had attempted to investigate his boss for communist activities.

But now they were engaged in fraud, and a situation of varying degrees of vigilance and panic for the rest of their lives. This queasiness would remain for a good while, until his employer’s death was made official before the world and it was clear that he, Francis Alan Meltzer, would be the sole inheritor of the man’s $2.7 billion shipping empire.

An immense hoax from this time onward, if events went as they anticipated.

He remembered distinctly that moment when his lives had diverged—the two Latin words that had slipped his lips at that B-School alumni dinner and his future boss latched onto him with the tenacity reserved for only the loneliest of souls. Throughout his Harvard years he’d heard of the alumnus who had made close to a hundred million dollars, the owner of a mining and shipping company that contracted with International Business Machines and Texas Instruments and the US government, one Royal Alexander van der Bloode (and how could that strange name slip one’s memory?) Although VDB Enterprises was touted weekly in the Wall Street Journal, no interview with its owner had ever been published. VDB had built a series of transistor-manufacturing plants during Francis’s senior year, but that was just frosting on the capital van der Bloode had inherited in taking over his father’s mines and shipping fleet. Francis heard other, ominous things: that the man’s astronomical trust had come from his family’s secret dealings with Krupp and I.G. Farben in the middle years of the Nazi regime; further, that the roots of the van der Bloode fortune stretched back into the opium trade—and worse. A few maintained his family was bent on playing all sides of world conflicts to their own profit. Could anything else explain such a staggering rise?

Then there was the occult angle: the rumors of Phi Beta Kappa party which involved strange, unknown drugs van der Bloode had access to—and the verified fact that two of those students who’d attended the party had left Harvard shortly afterward and gone off to India seeking some fantastic mineral lode he’d told them about. There was talk of hypnotism. He was also rumored to have studied the lost writings of Egyptian and Elizabethan magi (or Eastern yogis and rituals in another version of the stories), or was a follower of the mystical Christians Boehme and Eckhart, or that he was some sort of medicine man schooled in Himalayan worlds….

Weighing the elements of the picture, Francis suspended all judgment. The only thing that could produce such hearsay was the student’s silence about the source of his family fortune, and refused to condescend by correcting the rumors—a sign of his confidence, and contempt for his classmates. He wanted to keep them guessing, offering a slate clean for the writing.

Francis graduated the Business School magna cum laude, class of 1956, moved to Brooklyn Heights with three of his classmates, and for a year struggled to find backers for their patent firm, shunning the pencil-pushing mediocrity of the big accounting houses. One by one his fellow dreamers extricated themselves from his plan, taking the certainties of salary over Meltzer’s gamble. It can wait, they said; we’ll make our own capital first and do the thing right. They moved out and on. Francis was dejected.

Then two days before the annual business school alumni dinner it was announced that R. A. van der Bloode would be attending—on the condition that no members of the press would be present, and no photographers. Francis, who normally shunned those puffed-up affairs, was filled with curiosity and decided to go. He made sure to be unusually pressed and starched. He tamed his thick wavy hair into a pompadour and hid his brown eyes behind hornrims, having suffered the other MBAs, who always seemed to rise from their beds neatly groomed and smooth-cheeked. He’d let his appearance go somewhat since graduating, true, his body thickening as a result of cathode nights spent with a box of Yodels and Coca-Cola. He’d put on fifteen pounds since his first year of graduate school, and even then he’d been chunky.

With this extra effort, he looked like a vague Somebody.

He took the train up to Cambridge. The dinner was at the Baker Library conference hall, under unusually subdued lighting, and free of the pipe and cigar smoke that was normally so thick as to argue itself into part of the décor. In the smoke’s place was the chatter of newly-minted Organization Men. Francis seriously doubted he’d done the right thing in getting a business degree; he should have become the botanist or biologist he knew were both within him. Tad Mondale was there, martini-primed to shake a hundred hands and scoop his inside track. Mondale had been his freshman year roommate and proved the most arrogant and mean-spirited prick in the class. For years the jerk had spoken with admiration for van der Bloode, seeing in him an merciless exemplar of efficiency—for how else could one make such a fortune in four years’ time? Francis was sure Mondale would be first in line to meet the millionaire.

He milled about the room suffering words of encouragement and more van der Bloodish anecdotes. Even his old professors seemed filled with anticipation.

Then he overheard that the millionaire’s in-laws had been killed in an airplane crash a month earlier. “Silas Cooke was his father-in-law? Silas Cooke, of Mercury Industries?”

“That’s right,” professor Goldberg said. “Mr. Bloode’s married to their daughter Gertrude.”

“Why, that’s terrible.” Francis felt sorrow for the man. He made for the buffet, brushing off his friends. He wanted to be alone. He filled his plate with shrimp and saltines and cheese and petit fours, gathered from the tray of a cute waitress who milled through the room. It wasn’t long before Francis witnessed an exchange between she and Mondale, then a second sally as he pulled her aside and leaned in close, smiling with gin and insouciance. She laughed. Francis mashed the shrimps into his mouth with resentment.

Van der Bloode arrived with an entourage the likes of which he’d never seen: three bodyguards and a gauntlet of security officers from limousine to dining hall. Francis was shocked at the man’s appearance, whose elements together seemed designed to frame every action in eccentricity: he sported enormous muttonchop sideburns circa about 1820, wore severe tinted German glasses, and finished with a black collarless Nehru suit. There was nothing patrician-looking about his features at all, as Francis had expected: His complexion was Mediterranean, with an abundant brow and lips and sharp jaw. Francis, like everyone else, watched him closely during the dinner. The millionaire refused the d’oeuvres and the buffet and wine and sat sideways in his seat, impatiently tapping the table with his knuckles. He sat very still and moved stiffly. The sartorial oddity seemed meant to offset the lack of there there. Francis imagined the man’s face without the ridiculous whiskers and concluded that he could have had a career in Hollywood with that lantern jaw and cheekbones and sculpted eyebrows, cleft chin and full lips which seemed to alternate between a pout and the half-curl of a sneer as each alumni speaker outdid the last with a list of post-collegiate achievement.

When it came his turn at the podium van der Bloode gave a short and rambling speech spiced with homilies to a future age beyond the present one of mutually-assured destruction, when wealth would spread to the four corners of the earth. Then he directly addressed the current seniors: “In your classes you learn that there are three different characterizations of Man—you learn to take a single man and label him an economic man in one frame, a political man in another, and a cultural man in a third…You may well ask yourself, which motive ultimately dominates us? Are we primarily political animals, or economic agents, or cultural producers? Are there separate spheres of the public household? Are these separations even viable?

“Such habitual thinking will throw you far off the mark. There is only one man, the primal man, a spiritual being who wears a million masks. We are held captive by an illusion. All day long you study history, in one form or another. You learn to employ cause and effect in your analyses. Your heads become filled with economic facts which are meant come together into neat packets of explanation, as if the social sciences from which you operate were cut and dried as physics…That which we call ‘history’ is simply the work of trained monkeys we call historians, who interpret a set of clues to fashion stories in a certain way.”

Embarrassed coughs spread through the room. The man continued: “Discipline of history, we say. Academic discipline! Certainly true, for it takes discipline to prune the world tree’s chaotic superposition of events, its branches, into that golden thread of narrative. Events that play a crucial part are nonetheless suppressed. We excise all the details that seem to have no bearing upon that final story which we want to see. It is habit that fashions events into neat and readable lines of succession. It is habit which trims the branches of causality which can then be disseminated as history, as the true story, as the real…”

Francis heard murmured to his left: “Nietzschean bullshit.”

“But first,” the millionaire continued, “let’s make a going-over of the prevailing myth of our time, shall we? Our higher institutions sing it well. Every newspaper broadcasts it. It is the tale of the Game in which there are only two opposing players, two opposing forces, and the ultimate prize they claim is the same: Emancipation of humanity from ‘the slaughter-bench of history.’ That’s all well and good, but does not address our fundamental problem. Man’s inner world is the problem. The chaos inside. The random thoughts and the clashing desires. This inner clamor and the fisticuffs of democracy complement each other very well. If it is true that society is a machine for producing a certain kind of individual, we are in dire straits indeed.”

Van der Bloode went on for twenty-five minutes, speaking of false political binaries between West and East, capitalism and communism, between the invisible hand of the market and command economies, between transparency and secrecy, between speed and efficiency. The world of the future would require far more, he said: eventually there would exist miniaturized computing devices which could displace space-time and thus speed efficiencies but which when networked together would also hazard the creation of multiple worlds based upon far more divisive dichotomies than your urban/rural, wealthy/wanting, native/immigrant—these machines would give rise to subjective bubbles and fragmented historical narratives that would compete with one another in a near-Darwinian fashion…

The audience was flabbergasted. Francis heard mutterings of “Red” and “commie” nearby but nevertheless on returning to his table the millionaire found himself besieged by a group of eager MBAs. Francis sat at the adjoining table. There were condolences on the deaths of his in-laws. Mondale sprang upon van der Bloode, practically shouting in his ear, which drew a bodyguard’s hand upon his shoulder. Van der Bloode retorted the set of Taddish proposition with frowns each surlier than the last and ended in a fixed scowl. The crowd thickened. Each MBA was in his turn throwing a Great New Idea at the man. Mondale was rapidly losing ground, taking to his martini with quickening gulps and then yet louder schemes to which van der Bloode adamantly shook his head, making a final, dismissive shrug and turning back with which he detached himself from the orbit of Tadness. Francis was overjoyed.

But Mondale was just one amongst many; the crowd’s dozen self-congratulatory tones were producing a dissonant chord in the man. Francis edged closer and could see the physical effects: Van der Bloode was dropping his replies mid-sentence with a glowering expression, an ever-rapid pulling of those massive sideburns which suddenly looked to Francis like a cat’s bristling fur. Then the millionaire backed out of the crowd and leaned into the wall, obliviously tapping his foot, flushed with joy, ignoring everyone. Some took offense. But in a moment Francis grasped what had happened: Someone had put on an old Annette Hanshaw record on the hi-fi. Van der Bloode closed his eyes, mouthing the words…Then when the song ended van der Bloode’s voice, which suddenly boomed and drew attention to itself, startled everyone; the transformation was uncanny, as if the song had charged him. Van der Bloode, now relaxed, made a comeback as he explained his senior thesis on the dynamics of research and development, the feedback loops between Needs and Knowledge, the hidden mathematical factors which could make the timings of investment precise and secure. When he finished, someone asked him how he’d doubled his fortune in such a short time. He sneered and dismissed the question and spoke instead of the future ubiquity of computing machines, and the need to retain one’s humanity in the face of Control. “The world is full of faulty design,” he scowled. “Half the modern world is designed to fall apart, and the other half to clean it up. It’s inefficient. No aspect of society is untouched by this universal law.”

A chorus of objections. “Well, Bucky Fuller certainly is trying to—“

Van der Bloode raised his baritone to full volume. “Yes, Fuller is trying to engage the problem, but on a technical level only. That’s not what I’m speaking of. My point is that everyone could do with the simplification of their lives. We do not bloody need five brands of the same toothpaste and ten brands of the same dishwashing detergent. These Madison Avenue chaps are creating out of whole cloth new and unnecessary needs in people. By creating unnecessary needs we are creating a new type of man. This man may smell good and clean, he may be neat and manicured—in short, civilized, but…I personally would not want to be in the same room with the man of say ten generations from now if this trend continues, for he will have lost all sight of nature. He will be an entirely engineered creature, with engineered needs—an automaton. If, that is, the human race even survives beyond the next generation.”

There was a clearing of throats, a grasping for replies. Exasperated, Francis Meltzer piped in, “But you are a part of that world, right?”

The millionaire replied without looking at him, as if his answer was meant to sweep aside all objections. “Indeed, I am part of it, but by loose association only. What we at VDB are doing is laying the foundation for the office of the future, gentlemen. The paperless office…We must save the forests of the world. The course is inexorable. I’d rather not have my name associated with the sinking ship. We are a generation of fools.”

Francis suggested, “Vivo anonyme, then.”

Van der Bloode shot him a glance that immediately softened. Smiling, he said, “Lucretius?”

Francis said, “Yeah, we studied that stuff, all those old Romans, back in military academy.”

Van der Bloode explained how his father owned fifteen editions of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, including a papyrus copy circa the third century and supposedly salvaged from the Alexandrian Library. It was one of his prize possessions. “It’s a relic from back when philosophy meant something. Philosophy today is a travesty. It’s as if men sit around discussing the water in a ladle, its true purpose as invisible to them as the water in the well from which they drew it. And they don’t take that drink, as a result.”

Francis chuckled skeptically at the man’s sentiment. But he agreed. Wracking his memory, he quoted Aurelius. The millionaire came back with Seneca and Cicero. For the next ten minutes van der Bloode ignored everyone, questioning Francis on his academic work in management and sales and accounting. When van der Bloode asked about his plans for the immediate future Francis stammered through his reply with vague reference to the patent firm. Then, when he asked about his marital situation, Francis replied, “I’m waiting for my first million before I get hitched.” He added, touching his collar, “It’ll make it easier to have my choice, with a face like this.”

As far as Francis could tell, not once had the millionaire’s gaze behind those smoky lenses even so much as glance in curiosity at the burn scars mottling Francis’s face and neck—the topography of ridges which began at the roughened left ear and extended down his neck and along the jaw line to his chin, plunging down his throat in a pink swath. No, the rich man had not registered their existence. He replied, “Well, find yourself a girlfriend, mister Meltzer. How would you feel about coming to work for me? I’m prepared to offer you a negotiable salary, for your help.”

The undergrads gaped. Ten sets of eyes looked expectantly upon Francis. He chuckled, weighing the tactlessness of the offer against the possibility of that it was some hideous joke courtesy Tad Mondale.  Van der Bloode explained that his empire was skirting a management breakdown. He could sense it approaching like a squall. Business had been smooth, but it was a statistical certainty that a collapse of communications and logistics was coming. He spoke of the rude left hand and ignorant right hand, of the Big Picture: “It has grown too fast, and too much for me to manage.”

Francis said: Okay.

As they approached the limousine outside, the bodyguards closed the gauntlet, transforming the curb into a spontaneous VIP area. Van der Bloode motioned him into the idling Lincoln, where he explained that several of his junior execs had eyes on the position he was offering. There would be resentment over the hiring an unknown. But he knew: Francis would be perfect. Never did his character judgment fail him, he said, and he saw right through the machinations of sniveling office Caesars. In the six years he’d been in business he’d fired four junior execs—three of them for unnecessarily cutthroat attitudes towards their underlings. “An exec is only as good as how he treats the least of his employees,” he explained. He was a pragmatist, and occasionally his executives needed reminding of the fact. The interview would be a formality. Francis was astounded.

“Where are you headed just now?”

Francis stammered. “Boston main station.”

Van der Bloode told him there was vodka in the bar before them. “We shall drop you off there.”

The man extracted a pen from his pocket and copied Francis’s address onto the cuff of his shirt. Francis noticed the Easter lilies. “It is my first wedding anniversary today,” he said, tugging at the ring on his finger as if it were a foreign object lodged there.

“Oh,” Francis began. “Let me say I am very sorry to hear of the passing of your father and mother in law.”

Van der Bloode grew grim. “Thank you, Mr. Meltzer. It is very much appreciated.”

“Please pass along my condolences to your wife, for me, please.”

Van der Bloode closed his eyes. “Thank you, very much. I will.”

 

ON THE TRAIN back to Brooklyn Francis thought of how he’d spent the past days calling contact men from his apartment. He’d had macaroni and cheese for dinner, like every night. John Killobrough had been hired by Goldman Sachs, Martin Jansson by Morgan Stanley. The likelihood of the patent firm was diminishing by the day—but in its stead had come the opportunity of a lifetime.

Francis called his parents in Washington. D.C. and told them the news. The news must have traveled fast, for he received calls from his classmates and even a few professors congratulating him—and of course, Tad Mondale, with a voice full of importance as he casually probed Francis for any information about the strange turn of events at the dinner. There were rote gestures at reconciliation, that may or may not have existed in Mondale’s mind, but which Francis confirmed with monosyllabic answers and silence.

 

THREE DAYS LATER, he received a letter by courier asking for his CV, along with a package of documents outlining the array of VDB Enterprises, Inc. There in the corner was the oddest corporate symbol Francis had ever seen: set within an octagonal field, a bee taking flight from a mushroom, done in a style resembling an elaborate woodcut by John Tenniel, like a lost panel from his Alice in Wonderland illustrations. He read the corporate material, staring in disbelief at the photo of the millionaire wedged into the upper corner. A strange fellow, wearing those severe sunglasses in his own corporate brochure! His interview appointment was set for that Friday.

VDB SHIPPING & MINING’S offices occupied the top three floors of a building on Vesey Street in Lower Manhattan. At the elevator operator’s call, the doors strummed open and Francis squinted, thinking there was a mistake: the lobby resembled an empty nightclub whose décor included, of all things, a waterfall set into the entire length of the glassed wall and lit from below like a perpetual rainbow. A young woman was sitting at an amoeboid desk that looked more like a piece of abstract sculpture, or something from that Forbidden Planet movie he’d recently seen Uptown, like the future itself, like something from which Francis thought himself emphatically excluded. The doors began to creak shut before him when he noticed the letters floating there through some lighting trick in the spectral wash: VDB.

He slammed both shoulders in stepping off. The operator’s chuckling faded downward.

“Hello,” he said, massaging his arm, “I am—”

“Freeyancis Meltzer,” she chirped. “Yes, Mister veen d’Bloode and the tee-yim are waiting for you. I’m Esther Horowitz, mister veen d’Bloode’s secretary. Would you like some refreshments?”

Quite an accent. Queens, or deepest Brooklyn. With each step forward the girl came into view—her blond bob and widow’s peak, her straight slim nose and small, full mouth, each detail outdoing the last and coming together to form something he would never have expected: one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Sleepy blue eyes blinked behind feline frames. The backlit waterfall’s wash of artificial rain and light poured down her face like tears. “No, I’m fine, thank you…Jeepers, this is…Quite a setup…Here.”

She moved in a way Francis could feel, smiled and swayed across the fantastic lobby. The light in the hallways was low and lit with glowing orange sconces of Greek women and heavy Art Deco floor lamps, the occasional splash of sunlight from an open office door. She explained: Mister van der Bloode despised fluorescence as a cultivator of headache and burned synapses. Analysts and accountants and copyists scurried about but it all seemed uncommonly quiet, the voices subdued, the clattering of typewriters and ringing telephones confined behind closed doors. They passed what looked like a wagon’s wheel behind glass on one wall, two yards across and a dark marine color, misshapen and melted looking.

“What’s this?”

“That’s a pilots’ wheel Mr. veen der Bloode bought. It’s veery old! From the Greeks! Something, huh?”

They had spiraled deep into the center of the 17^th floor. “Here we are,” she chirped, quietly opening a double set of doors and revealing a boardroom lit by a skylight that ran the length of the ceiling, then Esther Horowitz retreated back down the hall. The brilliant morning cascaded onto a long table bearing three astrolabes and two globes. At the room’s far end a group of men were laughing at something—possibly his entrance, he wasn’t sure. A resonant Harlem voice said, “So, yeah, we were at the bridge game, and she says she caught her husband in the broom closet all disheveled-like and inhaling the floor wax…” Uproarious laughter. “Well, she’s on the Miltown train herself. Babbling on, all half-asleep and whatnot. She keeps going on about weeds growing in the corner cracks in their living room. It’s one of those Levitt jobs and whatnot, so no surprise there.”

Van der Bloode’s unmistakable Oxbridge voice boomed. “Forests are going to blade for that travesty. Long Island will be covered like an anthill.”

“Man sakes,” the Harlemer drawled in incredulity, “your teeth are blinding me today, Anton…Pepsodent?”

“You got it…And I gotta say, John, you smell swell for once…You musta cleaned both pits this morning.”

“Thanks—I did.”

Another colored man replied, “You want to feel a nice cheek, buster, check these. Used a squeegee on these babies. Baby smooth. Burma-Shaved the hell outta ‘em.”

“Rich and creamy-like?” another voice put in, chuckling.

“Feel this cheek.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Your wife told me it’s the softest thing she ever kissed, Norm, ”the burly executive growled. “And shit, you call that a haircut, beatnik?”

Francis stood in perplexity and van der Bloode suddenly noticed him standing there.

“Hello—here’s Mister Meltzer?”

 His new boss rose from a seat and called Francis over, excusing their sarcastic banter. The man was wearing a broadcloth band-collar shirt. Gold cufflinks flashed as he thrust himself across the room with long strides. He introduced his executives, Francis noting handshakes of varying confidence and vigor.  The man who’d been talking was the VDB counsel, a heavyset black man named John Swanson; two of the other junior executives were colored men as well, Anton Dexter and Harry Jackson.

 

THE INTERVIEW LASTED four hours and was done, it seemed, more for his own benefit than the millionaire’s team, who regarded Francis with open suspicion and whom van der Bloode seemed to treat in turn with a measure of aloofness. CFO Bill Williams, flat-topped, gruff, with the manner of a moribund jock, smirked at Francis several times as he poked the VDB Enterprises charts with a pointer and explained a corporate structure as complex as the very transistors the company had recently begun making. Then Grant Peters (roughly a decade older, he surmised) rose and re-explained the splay of connected rectangles. After this presentation, van der Bloode stood up. “We don’t believe in luck here,” he intoned. “Fortune favors the prepared observer, that is to say the researcher: someone who can recognize the patterns common to both scientific discoveries and hypothetical market needs. We engage here in what we call ‘possible world’ marketing, which is calculated daily as statistical probabilities based upon an index of production factors and political equilibrium points. It’s a form of thought experiments. In short, the money exists in potentia in the areas of overlap that we will clarify to the tune of millions of dollars. There are opportunities out there which are embryonic now, mister Meltzer, waiting to be ushered into reality.” Van der Bloode explained the three projects on the horizon: He was building two new transistor factories for IBM, having abandoned Germanium diodes; he was merging two promising pharmaceutical research firms; and was in the process of buying a failed bank in northern California. The shipping wing had forty-three vessels on the lanes, fifteen of them petroleum tankers transporting crude from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia all around the globe. Meltzer’s primary duty was to oversee the reports from van der Bloode’s network of academics, through the study of scientific journals, and military research, and thus use that information to manage the enormous stock portfolio. This purely analytic position was the crucial missing piece. He would report directly to the millionaire. Van der Bloode said, “We need fresh ideas on investment, and mister Meltzer here will provide them.”

After the interview he led Francis to his new office, which had a spectacular view of Lower Manhattan and the Hudson River. He threw a huge volume on the desk containing an index of holdings, his executives’ resumes, condensed bank statements for the past eight years, a section with every published news article about VDB, and a statement of purpose. Van der Bloode told him to study in particular the reports on the recent breakthroughs at Texas Instruments on the silicon chip.

 

ON MONDAY, van der Bloode called him to his office. Francis counted twenty-three paces from door to seat, entering a barrel-vaulted space that seemed to occupy a quarter of the 17^th floor. He ignored his fluttering stomach. Except for the contrast between the robin’s egg walls and crimson carpeting, which offset the Spartan furnishings with a single gesture of personality, the cavernous office seemed to defer to the financial district outside through five wide arch-shaped windows, whose white reflection set afire the Eames chairs and precisely placed objects on van der Bloode’s enormous desk—a marble inkwell, two librarian’s lamps, and a battlement wall of antique picture frames which faced his seat. In the corner an old, highly polished Philco radio roosted on a pedestal. His new boss explained how he’d owned the device for twenty years, had heard the world’s events through it, and would continue to, despising television…To the left of the desk was a curio cabinet filled with kaleidoscopes and telescopes; to the right, a bookcase held small red and green volumes which Francis recognized instantly: the Loeb classical library. There was an entire shelf of antiquarian volumes: “La Mille et une Nuit”, along with several further versions in German and even Arabic. When Francis asked about his interest, Van der Bloode raised an eyebrow and seemed to smirk and told him he’d read the story cycle some twenty-two times. “Scheherazade could imagine a way of negotiating this world we live in,” the millionaire said, “and tricking it to exploit people’s better natures. This book has no corollary in the modern world, which is a pity. We could do with—what should I call it—a master text, something to draw upon when conundrum and paradox rear their heads. An objective work of art.”

“That’s quite a recommendation.”

“A man once told me that only one-seventh of the original has ever been translated…And that only a tenth of Scheherazade’s stories were actually transcribed from spoken tradition into Arabic. A final version would contain every story that has ever—or ever will be—told. It would take as long as the cosmos has existed to tell it.”

Against the opposite wall was a fin-de-siecle couch, beneath what Francis took to be an antique dartboard, its wings closed. The half-drawn Venetian slats were as red as the carpet, and gave the impression of an ancient Roman apartment. From his angle Francis could see the framed photos of ostensibly what were the man’s parents, smiling behind the wheel of a model T, dancing in ballrooms and posing on boat decks, in gardens. For someone who professed to hate photographers, he certainly enjoyed their fruits, the imprisoning of time, in his parents’ case.

Francis looked around for the stock ticker. Then it occurred to him:

I am the stock ticker. And more…

Williams came to the door and called van der Bloode from the room. Francis leaned over and picked up a few of the frames and tried to prize out his employer’s features from those of his parents and concluded he’d received his looks from his mother, who was dark-complected and looked of African descent; the startling likeness left no doubt. Among the photos was a contemporary picture of an extraordinarily beautiful blond woman lounging in a garden. Her self-satisfied expression and the drape of her translucent body across the lawn chair made it look as if the flowers surrounding her were no more than a three-dimensional form of wallpapering. She must have been his wife, Trudy…Then, amongst the miniature Manhattan of frames, Francis noticed a scarred pocketwatch set in the center of a rectangular piece of Lucite on a wooden stand, next to a small piece of abstract sculpture, pointy and grey. He had just enough time to register the time on its face, 8:14, when van der Bloode reentered bearing a salad in a bowl. Noticing the picture Francis had replaced, Royal said that it was sporting of those flowers to put on such a good face—his wife didn’t photograph well. Curious, Meltzer rejoined that she was beautiful and asked his meaning. The man explained how Trudy rarely left their Dakota penthouse, the very place they’d met some fifteen years earlier, and how his father Jan had been wrong: some women don’t change at all over the years. “I wish the old man had been correct in her case. We must be careful what we wish for.”

Francis cleared his throat in embarrassment. “That pocketwatch—is it an heirloom?”

“No. That timepiece was found at Hiroshima. And that—next to it—are a group of pens fused together by the heat of the explosion. It is something to remind me of the Bastards we’re all up against.”

Francis reached towards the watch and said, “May I?” He stared at its faded face and tarnished metal. “I was there at Hiroshima, about a year after the attack.”

Van der Bloode froze in the act of sitting at his desk and gaped, open-mouthed in amazement. “You never mentioned it. Please tell me about it.”

“My father was a surgeon-captain in the Navy. Now he’s at the Mayo Clinic. He studied radiation sickness. We lived in Japan for about four months.” Francis told him how in the first eleven years of his life the Meltzer family had moved sixteen times; by the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor he felt he’d seen every desert and mountain and swamp in America. Then Flight Surgeon John Meltzer disappeared for four long years on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific theatre as Francis and his sisters settled, finally, in the Presidio. He told van der Bloode how in the spring of 1946, his father had received orders to Japan for his final commission as a member of a special team studying the effects of the atomic bomb on the surviving population of Hiroshima. Having been away too long from his family, John Meltzer brought them to live on a new Navy base, a converted Shinto monastery, for the summer. His father’s stints lasted five days at a time. After two months Francis tired of their drab rooms and the same Action Comics and National Geographics he’d read a hundred times. Having seen the photographs of the devastated city, a morbid curiosity had taken him over, and he pressed his father to let him come along for a day. “Man, was he anguished. He lost weight, and fast, like fifteen pounds. My mother thought the place was still radioactive and he was getting sick from it. Well it wasn’t radiation, but what he was seeing in those people…At first my mother was dead-set against it. Then the last week of his commission, he said I could come along with him for the last day. Guess he wanted me to see it, like witness it…I wish I hadn’t.” John Meltzer brought his son on the train to Hiroshima and stayed in an inn whose walls were cracked from blast. It looked like a swath of New Mexican desert had been set down amidst the estuaries, a grey landscape painted in ash and cinders. Francis counted on one hand the buildings which still stood; although mountains of scrap metal and wood had been collected over the year since the destruction, no-one had yet begun rebuilding, but for a few huts. As they wound their way into the center of the city John Meltzer told him: ground zero had roasted at approximately 2000 degrees, hence the color. The upper layer of ground had been instantaneously baked to dust, and the estuaries boiled within seconds. Everything within two miles had either been obliterated by the explosion or immediately set aflame by the heat. The shock wave and vacuum into which the surrounding air had sucked in knocked down buildings four miles away.

And the people at ground zero, well…One couldn’t even say they had been burned to death: they had been vaporized, or better still, there was no word yet in anyone’s language for what had happened to them. As they drove towards the makeshift hospital, John Meltzer slowed his Packard, stopped and pointed out the shadows flash-burned onto walls and sidewalks.

Francis asked what had happened to the souls of those Japanese in the center of the city. His father replied, “I doubt they had a chance. But we had no choice.”

Francis shivered and asked him why they hadn’t just detonated it over the Sea of Japan and threatened the emperor.

John Meltzer threw the car in gear and repeated: “We’d no choice.”

Naomi Meltzer had raised him to believe in a human soul which was not his property but the Lord’s, and which at death would return to Him. Now there was something in the universe that could obliterate the possibility of that Homecoming, a unique and terrible and evil thing: an atomic blast.

The Navy hospital was a two-story structure that had been a small public library. There were four American and ten Japanese doctors, photographic equipment, files and cabinets everywhere. With the help of interpreters his father examined a dozen men and women that day, some of them bearing only half a head of hair, their skin thick like the texture of his father’s attaché case. Their blood was drawn and burns measured as his father asked them polite questions, in the Japanese he’d picked, about up their distance and position from ground zero when the bomb had gone critical. A woman came in bearing an infant; one of its arms was a stump. There were three girls Francis’s age whose skin was an unimaginable variant of purple and mottled with keloid scars.

Francis tried to take some inspiration from his father, solid and stoic in his uniform. But it was of no use. After two hours he stumbled outside for air and vomited on an old pile of clothes as he imagined the flash beating back that cool August morning sunrise. The place was utterly silent around him; those nearby did not speak. His father told him about the Japanese sense of honor and the collective sense of unworthiness in those people, healthy and sick, who’d survived.

“So, yeah when we got back to Frisco, I couldn’t sleep. I started having goddamn nightmares. They lasted for years. My mother was so angry with my father. She was right. I shouldn’t have gone. It was the scars I’d seen on those poor hibakusha. My father insists to this day that the US had no other options. Of course there had been a choice.”

“Damn right,” van der Bloode murmured.

“I knew where my father kept copies of his files on them. He kept personal copies of everything. Wasn’t supposed to, but he did. One afternoon I went through all that stuff, found some lists of names and addresses, you know, addresses on streets that no longer existed, or were being rebuilt? Who knows. I wrote a letter. I apologized in that letter. I typed until my goddamn hands hurt. Wrote to as many hibakusha as I could. I knew someone would translate them for me on the other end. I hoped every day those people remained alive long enough to read that damn letter.”

Van der Bloode was moved. “I knew there was a reason that I met you, Francis. Any civilization which could create such a monstrosity must be entirely corrupt or misguided, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“We must do our best to counter it.”

Francis thought that van der Bloode was about to ask him the origin of his own burn scars, but it didn’t happen. Instead they discussed Francis’s weekend readings on Texas Instruments. Then van der Bloode seemed to grow bored, went silent for a moment, then said, “Francis, do you ever get the suspicion that things are not quite right with the world?”

He furrowed his brow. “Uh, yes, but what is there to compare ‘not right’ against?”

Van der Bloode’s insincere smile sent his whiskers out. “What I mean is that we, the human race collectively, will soon have the ability to relieve poverty across the globe. But it won’t happen. This country, America, has led the way in technology and with its principles on the equality of men…Yet Americans persist in their in inertia regarding poverty and disenfranchisement—of colored people, for instance. Americans on the whole seem to accept all manner of inequalities and take a big-stick approach when people disagree with them.” He then compared the Roman army structure to contemporary corporations and spoke of the public’s tacit consent in policy matters wherein only half the facts were made public, then told Francis about his contributions to the NAACP and his charitable organizations. Even so, he claimed, good will often dissipated itself through bureaucratic structures; the supporting institutions of capitalism and communism both were designed to absorb dissenting blows.

Francis sat there wondering to what extent he would be expected to buy into all this, and if the man lectured every new executive this way. Was it all just wacky opinions, generated from a life spent on some kind of moral autopilot? Had he harbored these idealisms throughout his Harvard years? Van der Bloode lit a cigar and told Francis how every week he consulted his father, Jan, who now since passing the business to his son divided his time between estates in Belgium and Languedoc. His father had begun the shipping arm of the company 34 years ago from a few rusty junkers bought with the inheritance his grandfather had given him—Gerrits van der Bloode, who owned mines across the Congo and Brazil and Alsace-Lorraine. He had convinced his father last year to sell off for $122 million the series of mines and the surrounding mineral-rich land in Brazil his family had owned for 2 generations. The sole remaining mines in the Congo yielded silicon and coltan and copper.

“And soon they will be off my ledgers as well. I saw the good work of my grandfather’s industry first hand only once. I was on summer break from Harvard back in, oh, 1950. My father for whatever obscure reason had always tried to keep me from hearing about it.” He’d told his father Jan he was going to Barcelona with his classmate Juan. Instead they took a week-long trip to the Brazilian rainforest. What they found appalled them both. “Men working with broken bones. Dysentery was rampant…The workers’ families lived in shanties. A corrugated tin shack and canvas tent passed for their hospital—this for two thousand workers, Francis. Their physician was a dissolute with a taste for the local camp women and sugar brandy.” They saw a man collapse and die, his body dragged off and tossed into a truck. The workers drank from communal buckets of water brought out every two hours and were given ten minutes to eat and a pasty gruel at noon. Thugs with truncheons prowled the long rows and men with binoculars stood ready with rifles at the pit’s rim and guarding the trucks which chained off towards the rail yards….

This was the good work? This was what was being touted as the beneficial gift to the Yaquis—their slave labor being an opportunity to leapfrog a hand-to-mouth jungle existence straight into the 19^th Century? “What Juan and I saw could have been in a Bosch panel or Goya etching. And this was what my father had shielded me from. You saw Hiroshima, Francis, and I saw what my family was truly about. The two visions are related. I finally knew what Blake had meant by his ‘dark Satanic mills’—and what it always had meant, and always would mean. There will be no end to human suffering as long as this system exists—or the world has been stripped bare of its buried loot.”

Ah, Francis, thought—here was the source of his earlier tirades: guilt. A well of unconscious remorse over being handed everything one could want in life—that, and perhaps van der Bloode’s mild narcissism of being an only child. Meltzer said, “If I may say so, you’re giving no credence to a fundamental decency in individuals…In their ability to choose.”

“Choose? I wish it were that easy.” He shook his head and blew a perfect smoke ring. “Choice is severely circumscribed in this situation we’ve set up for ourselves. Eventually, I will set up a foundation for peace. Or perhaps it shall be a stockbrokerage whose profits will be funneled directly to peace organizations—like a ready source of money for those who have none.”

Within a month Francis settled into his job, but it hadn’t been easy. Beneath him was a team of researchers. Every morning at seven he drove from his Brooklyn Heights apartment to the office to read the wires from Europe and Asia, then called the brokers until noon, assembling flow charts whose jagged contours steadily ascended. He grew accustomed to the relentlessly low lighting of the 17^th floor. The company used the most advanced Lamson tube system he’d ever seen. Often he paused to study the ancient pilots’ wheel that hung in the dim hallway. Tiny marine creatures were embedded in it, like insects in amber. The object was translucent, and strange patterns deformed its rough surface, as if it had been grown in some exotic green coral bed rather than made by any human hand. Van der Bloode claimed that it had been found on the wreck of a trireme on the Aegean Sea floor—which was impossible, because triremes were steered by tills, but he didn’t challenge his boss.

All the employees were painfully polite to one another, despite the obsolete Adlai Stevenson paraphernalia and Eisenhower portraits that were about equally distributed between the offices he’d come across. The furniture in each room had supposedly been custom-built to the employee’s personal specification but it all looked as if it belonged on Altair IV. Each quadrant of the 17^th floor had a color scheme from one specific band of the light spectrum, like an unfolding echo of the lobby’s rainbow—where Esther Horowitz worked behind that elaborate desk.

Francis had been playing it too cool to ask anyone directly about her, but had suffered through a few lewd comments by the other executives. All he knew was that Esther was 21, had grown up in Queens, and had been with the company for two years. His mind often drifted to her, enthroned at the end of his days when the staff queued at the elevator before the watery rainbow. Francis managed a few hungry glances at her swan’s neck and well-filled blouse and he maneuvered his attaché case before his trousers.

Admit it, virgin: virgin.

But not by choice. He’d had a slight girlfriend his freshman year, but had been thrown over for one of Tad Mondale’s friends. He’d had a dozen dates, but those had been born of pity, he was certain, over the scarring across his jaw and neck.

 

For five consecutive Monday mornings a slip of paper appeared on his desk in his boss’ blocky script alerting him which stocks to pick up and which to dump. He observed the portfolio simultaneously expand and increase in worth, a speculative balloon that impossibly rose. It amounted more to prediction than educated guesses. He examined the call and put indices for the past three years and found that van der Bloode’s actions were 65% correct, profitably, something simply impossible.

“Do you know something we don’t?” he said one day in his boss’ enormous office, holding up the latest list.

Van der Bloode squinted behind his dark glasses. “Come again?”

“Are you privy to some inside track on these stocks? How did you know to drop British Petroleum before that Suez nonsense? Or to pick up this Amalgamated Bessemer last month?”

“What of AB? Did it pay?”

“Pay, it went ballistic. US Steel snapped them up. They held a patent on a pressing material. It jumped seven points in one day. How do you know? Do you have an inside source of information?”

“Just dumb luck.”

“Luck, nothing. You’re batting .390 on all of these. What’s the trick?”

He shrugged. “Clean living?”

Francis chuckled, then said, “Can I ask you something else, sir?” he asked. He pointed at the fanciful company logo on the wall. “What’s with your seal? I must admit, I’m confused over it.”

Van der Bloode cleared his throat. “My father long ago adopted a boring old acronym for the company…That is the new tag.”

“What does it mean?”

“It illustrates the turning of the age, out of decay to flight? Wait a tick.” He rummaged through a drawer and brought out a recent issue of LIFE. “The Vice President of JP Morgan recently had some interesting adventures among the Mazatecs in Mexico. He’s written an article about it in this issue…He speculates that humanity made the leap to language by eating certain fungi that altered their consciousness…Ever since our inception as homo sapiens, we’ve been living in the age of effects from these ‘magic mushrooms’ as he calls them. Now, the human brain is a remarkably plastic organ, but I’d submit that language-based thought has literally changed our perceptive capabilities over the past fifty millennia…Unused faculties linger in us which lie unused, I mean…But the age will turn, and evolution must once again occur.”

Francis tried to conceal his frown at this torrent of strange verbiage. “And so that’s what your ‘new tag’ means?”

“Yes.”

“But the bee?”

He smiled enigmatically. “Just a favorite of mine.”

Francis could not understand what the corporate emblem had to do with marine commerce or mining or computing machines, and dismissed it as one of the man’s whimsies. Over the coming days he learned that others—Grant Peters in particular—agreed with him on its inappropriateness. The logo was only a year old, and even their merchant mariners had complained about it.

“We’re not in fucking Wonderland,” Peters grumbled.

But, as Francis would soon discover—yes, they all were.

 

            (Could be end of Meltzer in forest section)

 

 

SEEING THE ACCOLADES their boss was favoring him with, Williams and Peters began a campaign to undermine Francis. He’d distinctly heard himself referred to as “Golden Boy” several times—and even heard someone call him “the Alligator”.  Now, he was used to this, but not from grown men. Grant Peters commented incessantly on the bowties Francis wore, and corrected the least of the typos and grammatical mistakes in his memoranda. Twice his work had been entirely rewritten, changes that altered the conclusions of his analyses. Every week Bill Williams slapped a freshly-bought copy of Robert’s Rules on his desk without a word.  Soon the other juniors began to act in concert as well, qualifying Francis’s commands with promises to “run it by the big man” before doing it, giving him the impression that his commands were only suggestions. He’d become a glorified intercom, a human note pad and nothing else. Francis felt a milquetoast.

But it was supposed to be this way, right? All those debates on taxation and accounting control and model markets and sweat those last semesters…Show some backbone, champ. How will you last here, or anywhere, if you can’t take some real-world assholery? What did Dad say? The key to getting by is to let a dozen people a day be jerks—they will be jerks regardless of any opinion you hold or action you take, you know—so let em, and give it back as good as you get.

Except for one thing, dad: I am, in fact, better than those bastards. Might currently be a secret, and a closely-held one at that, but true: You are better.

Accept it. These things even themselves out in the end.

He remembered Professor Whisburn’s advice: take the long view, the God’s eye, view. Think in scale.

 

ONE AFTERNOON PETERS showed up at his door.

“Hey Meltzer is it true you saw Hiroshima after the war?”

“Yeah who told you that?”

“The big guy,” he said almost with pride. “So what was that like?”

Francis stared into space, gauging answers. “It was awful, what in hell do you think it was?”

He smirked. “Not many Japs left there, so it couldn’t have been so bad.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Believe me, you don’t.”

“Why in the world did you visit Hiroshima?”

“My father’s a doctor, Peters. In the Navy. He was researching radiation sickness for the Navy. Understand? What’s it to you?”

“That’s where you got this?” he said, pointing at his jaw.

Francis grit his teeth and felt like his bowtie was about to snap. “Where are those Meridian papers?”

“Lighten up, Golden Boy.”

After examining Peters’s new plan for the purchase of the eleven branches of the Meridian Savings and Loan, Francis fired off a memo to van der Bloode asking him to go through with his original scheme. Peters immediately called a closed meeting with his boss. Across the room, Van der Bloode fiddled abstractly with the knobs of his Philco as Peters went on. “Frank’s plan’s unsound,” he complained. “And my ass’ll be out in the wind over it.”

“Mister Meltzer’s ass, as you say, will be the sole posterior at risk, I assure you.”

“Exactly. If it succeeds, he’ll get the credit. If it fails, it’s my ass because it was my idea in the first place. If it’s my initiative, I should be the one carrying it out.”

Van der Bloode squinted, blinked, turning up the strains of Beethoven he’d triangulated upon. He could not see the difference. “I assure you, mister Peters, that you shall receive equal credit in the stabilizing. He fine-tuned your idea and made commendable additions.”

Van der Bloode went through with Francis’s version. The next morning, when Francis used his personal washroom he discovered a harsh species of toilet paper on the roller.

It was sandpaper, carefully rolled and cut. Francis was livid.

The millionaire called an emergency meeting to set his staff straight and quash all water-cooler talk. Although no one admitted to the prank, a barely-concealed smirk broke across Peters’s face, a Francis could see him stifle a giggle each time van der Bloode uttered the words “tissue paper” in his upper class twang. Peters was forty years old. Forty! When van der Bloode threatened to call a private detective agency and have the stall and roll dusted for fingerprints, a letter appeared on his desk later that afternoon from a copyist working under Williams, claiming he’d done it but had been put up to it by an agency he refused to name.

The next day he called Williams and Peters into his office.

“I’m afraid this is it. I have warned you repeatedly these past months. The both of you have been hazing mister Meltzer. I cannot have such resentment.”

“Hazing, nothing,” Williams blurted. “We’ve been sharpening him up.”

“You can submit your resignations by noon. Beyond that, you will be sacked.”

Francis came into van der Bloode’s office later that day and his boss sat him down. After Francis attempted a perfunctory defense of the two bastards, the businessman held up a palm to silence him. “It is okay. I discovered a certain fact about Mr. Williams which would have led to his speedy termination anyway.” He pulled on a sideburn with even, anxious tugs, the curls snapping back with each gesture. He remained silent.

“Well, sir, would you care to—”

“Mr. Williams was being paid quite handsomely to copy and report on our quarterly activities and my personal expenditures to another agency.”

“Who was it? Niarchos?”

“Far from our rivals, actually. No, the architect of his compromise was my brother-in-law.”

Francis was surprised. “Why would your brother-in-law…”

“There is some history here. Bad Bloode?” He smiled weakly. (This could be moved up into their first conversation, part of Meltzer in forest scene) “Robert Cooke and I had a row back in ’49 at Harvard. It was over Trudy and another matter. You see,” he said in obvious pain, “Trudy and Robert are twins, Francis. Identical twins.”

“Identical? I thought twins had to be—”

“In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, they are. Were you to have seen the two of them during their adolescence, you would understand…Of course I prefer to think Robert the copy of a template which nature intended to be feminine.” He seemed to shudder. “Feels better to think so, at least…And along with this rare prenatal event comes, well, I’ll call them certain liabilities of character…Instabilities.” His voice was rising, the gesticulations coming faster, then they stopped and he went calm, adjusting his dark glasses. “My marriage to Trudy did not sit well with Robert. It had a dire psychological effect—and he was unbalanced to begin with…He was arrested several times for petty crimes when an adolescent here on Manhattan. The Cookes did everything to erase any trace of in the society pages, or even in the police blotters. They hospitalized him twice for periods of a few months, until his ‘spells’ dissipated.

“Robert has difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy. He read a story in some penny dreadful when he was young and has been cracked about it ever since. He believes an ancient race of monsters built a city on the Antarctic. He became obsessed with this idea, from that time onward. He believes it to this day, for all I know. Now that he’s inherited Mercury Industries and is worth many millions he can do whatever he wishes. A personality like his with unlimited funds is a danger, now that he is the majority shareholder in Mercury, well, it beggars the imagination.”

“So?”

“I believe…I believe the plane crash which killed their parents was no accident.”

Meltzer’s stomach went hollow. “Is there evidence for that?”

“He knew he was beholden to that fortune. He would be nothing without it. A vagrant. Their parents gave them everything. He is smart, brilliant even, when he wants to be. He is obsessive.  He fought his parents for years over his inheritance and the meager trust they allowed him…They always favored Trudes, and were quite harsh with him…He must have felt as if split, and one half of him was externalized, Trudy, that is, ever out of his control and reach, was getting everything…I always believed he harbored unnatural feelings for her. He had no girl-friends the entire time I knew him. The criminality of his early years might be a case of his being unable to confront this darkness within himself and lashing out as a result…Which wouldn’t be so very spectacular if it weren’t for the fact that many of us in our circle believed he poisoned a few tutors of his when he was fourteen, at the Pointsman in Westchester. Two men died, Francis. Another teacher was sickened as well. Permanent debility.”

“Doesn’t mean he killed his parents, does it? How could he cause a plane crash?”

Van der Bloode gestured in conciliation. “Indeed. But you don’t know Robert. He knows many unsavory types. He has a criminal mentality, one of those minds in which loathing for people and irresistible compulsions are wedded together…Perhaps, to bring it back to my original point, the effects of the womb upon character.” He went abstract, staring at the portrait of his wife in the garden. “Well, it’s neither here nor there, is it, this armchair psychology…”

“He hates you for marrying his sister.”

“I am at a loss in the face of that.” He knit his brows and tugged at his whiskers.

Francis knew there was more to it. Yet he was fascinated. These were the dramas of other people you walked into the middle of, throughout your entire life. “You said that there was another matter between the two of you back at Harvard? Did he attend with you?”

“Oh, Lord no. He would appear on campus unannounced to harass me. For a semester he would not leave me alone, he and some old German git who was a sort of a mentor to him.” He arched his eyebrows in emphasis. “Incidentally, Robert told me this old German died, too, the following year on one of their trips to South American ruins, of food poisoning…We had this awful argument. The German git was about the campus following me about and—“

“But what did you fight about?”

“Oh,” he resettled in his seat. “It was silliness. We argued over an interpretation of events in the prehistoric world…I told the Cambridge police of their harassment and had the both of them ejected from campus.”

Again, Francis saw ample evidence that his boss had no poker face at all; there was more to it. “I take it you haven’t spoken with him.”

“Not face-to-face, in seven years. He refused to attend our wedding. But he sends Trudy letters. They speak on the phone, probably. He still adores her…And hates me, in equal proportion. He used to speak of revenge in many ways.”

Ah, the anonymity.

“But he is not so brazen as to try a frontal assault on us. No, the point of all this is that I learned that Williams had been approached to head the procurement accounts division at Mercury just a few months ago—and Williams accepted it. But his tenure was to start next year, Francis. Robert personally offered him the position for a salary of $50,000 a year.”

“Jeez!”

“An installment of the money had been paid to him immediately, in cash. Which brings me to my second point: We know, let’s get it right out on the table, that Bill was less than enthused at my hiring you. But how did Robert know Williams was so disgruntled as to be approachable? There must be another of Robert’s people here in the upper ranks, maybe several of them. I am no Hughes when it comes to internal security. I have told no-one else of this affair, Francis. I am grateful to have had a pretext to let Mr. Williams go, and I as steward must apologize to you for the bloody hazing you suffered. And thus by way of rectification I shall offer you Mr. Williams spot as Chief Financial. We’ll just let the chips fall where they may.”

 

FRANCIS WAS ASTOUNDED. He didn’t expect firings—even less Van der Bloode’s offer of Williams’s position as chief financial officer. He moved Lionel Pillsbury into the analyst job. To improve morale, van der Bloode surprised the upper management with ten sets of season tickets to the Yankees’ games, bought through some mysterious acquisition process known only to him.

REGARDLESS OF HIS promotion, there was no inoculation against the increasing tedium of his four teal walls and the growing piles of fiduciary history as his filing cabinets lost their orderly repose. Shipping reports mated with articles and produced journals. Briefs crossed with abstracts and yielded notes. He skimmed, he notated, he indexed his notes. He stared at the telephone, then rose and went to the window.

To call the broker Steck right now, or to not call Steck, to instead wait five minutes for that ferry out there on the Hudson to clear Lady Liberty and begin the slow drag to South Street—then call Steck. He pressed his nose up to the tinted window and tried to make out two of the VDB fleet, the Ludibria Pelagis and Ludibria Mundi docked over on the Brooklyn shores. He watched the clouds trawling above Manhattan. He’d bought a radio this morning, one with the tiny Civil Defense mark at AM 640, the only frequency which would remain should the Russians decide to have a party over New York—not that he would have much of a chance to reach for its dial when that happened.

He paced. He fantasized about Esther Horowitz. He imagined her beseeched by some Western oil tycoon in the lobby, some smooth old boy phantom waiting on the Eames couch for an appointment and striking up effortless witty banter with her, his voice filled with money and prestige and Esther guardedly enjoying the attention…Oh, that oilman was a smooth one, from the Tad Mondale school…But then Esther’s thoughts would turn back to the recent young hire from Harvard with the funny skin with whom she’d been nursing a crush.

That’s juvenile Francis. What are you, back at the Academy?

He wanted to go out there to the lobby and talk to her.

He came to his south window for the twelfth time. Light shifted on the skyscrapers about Vesey Street. He wondered if new office buildings could be haunted. VDB’s intermediate staff filled the two building floors beneath his wingtips, marine lawyers and some geologists and Lloyds brokers and a stable of accountants, but somehow he had leapfrogged them all to join the big leagues up here on the 17^th floor, and he owed it to two Latin words from a long-dead philosopher. Absurd.

Yet it was a great place to work. Good to his word in the limousine, van der Bloode treated his employees with respect and was very concerned with the dynamics between the executives’ disparate personalities. They seemed to possess a uniform philosophical bent, with similar outlooks on the world (although it had recently dawned on him that Grant Peters was the only war veteran on the executive staff, and the oldest of them, followed by Williams, then Swanson perhaps—but the rest were barely over 30 and he, Francis, was the youngest). Whether this was a conscious decision of his boss’s or just an accident, he didn’t know yet—and had been reluctant to ask, for Royal Alexander van der Bloode was the most aloof creature he’d ever met. He possessed all the mannerisms Francis had observed in rich bluebloods, regarding people outside his set with a mixture of fascination and amusement and using words like “unpleasantness” to describe their coarse manners. Bursts of singing came from his boss’ office, always a tune from the Jazz Age, sung in a fair approximation of a Tin Pan Alley vocalist with cupped hands for that megaphone effect. The songs passed around the office like a virus, a verse here, a chorus there, everyone finding themselves humming the same tune…Every clear day over Manhattan van der Bloode would maneuver one of his antique telescopes to study the chrome appointments of the Chrysler Building, calling it a gem and wishing they’d taken a lease there instead. Francis began to perceive an obsessive routine in the man’s life which van der Bloode himself didn’t seem to perceive. Never did he mention his wife, or the weekends he spent at their Southampton mansion. They lived a retiring life, he said; they never went out to parties or 500 club socials, never attending the cinema, nor even watched television.

And his boss was no Organization Man. With regularity, the discussion of business degenerated into soliloquies on the wastefulness and stupidity of society, on the confluence of politics with Madison Avenue, or the fiscal black hole of the Pentagon. All the junior executives were forced to sit in silence around the big oak table sighing inwardly as they endured their boss’ tirades—will it be just five minutes’ worth, or the twenty-five of last week?—which inevitably ended with apologies for his indulgence. Their boss’ constitutional aloofness seemed at odds with the very compassion which gave rise to his diatribes, but on the whole, Francis could not argue with van der Bloode’s opinions, couched as they were in some sneaky variant of the Socratic method which compelled affirmation of views you didn’t consciously know you held, but inevitably followed from what he had you carefully establish.

Act as if you already live in utopia, and without rancor for the laggards, the millionaire had said one day, and others will follow. Moving towards that utopia is what the brave people down South are doing when they sit down at those luncheon counters and endure all that horrific abuse. They’re acting as if those evil laws do not exist, because in the real world, they do not.

The real world? Francis puzzled, having stared for seeming days into that astrolabe in the conference table center.

Every day Anton Dexter and John Swanson would vent over the latest outrage in the South and van der Bloode joined in, but in this way, the mention of certain people or concepts were learned to be avoided at the table for fear of triggering their boss’ longer outbursts:

1. uranium mining magnate Charlie Steen;
2. the great war criminal Harry S. Truman;
3. the commercial Christmas holiday season and its trappings;
4. the Dulles brothers (“Frick and Frack”);
5. Vice-President Richard “The Whittier Gnome” Nixon;
6. “bloody Charlie Steen”;
7. their marine rivals Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos;
8. Macy’s Santa Claus;
9. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss;

10. any television shows;

11. any Madison Avenue firm, and finally—

12. that “Goddamn Satanic Bastard Charlie Steen.”

They also learned never to use the phrase “self-made man”—nor mention the name of any such man—for van der Bloode wasn’t a self-made man at all, and was painfully aware that the best he could hope to do would be to multiply his inheritance to staggering proportions, which is what he was doing….

The Hudson ferry out there had long cleared the Statute of Liberty. Time to call Steck at the stock exchange. Francis’s breath fogged the window. He remembered the words of the old rabbi back in Boston:

You exist to help other people. It is our covenant. Never forget that.

How I will end up helping the world isn’t up to me, is it? I will do my part and maybe people will remember and the fame of my deeds, whatever the hell they are, will be recalled for three generations at the most before noise sets in and begins to overtake the signal and everyone who might have remembered won’t and eventually the earth will be swallowed up by the sun and the curtain will set on the universe for good.

Qoheleth—everything has its day, right? Until the sun is no more.

An invisible slow fire’s eating it up, like one of those old Greeks thought—who was it, Chrysippus? No. Heraclitus. He said that slow-consuming fire is all that really exists.

Oh, so it’s that people can remember your deeds? van der Bloode’s voice seemed to rejoinder back in his mind.

You’re missing the point, old boy.

Francis turned from the huge window. He had the urge to once again examine that odd pilot’s wheel in the main hallway. To know it existed calmed him down for some reason—like evidence of something beyond the mundane, like it should belong in a museum for the world to gawk at and gain faith in mystery.

But look at all this work. He faced his desk and stared down the filing cabinets. Remarkable devices, that new Xerox photocopy machine and their Lamson pneumatic tube system…Even more so the UNIVAC and the ENIAC computers.

Hell, the pencil!

He sat down at his desk and doodled a while. He put the pencil aside and placed his head down. He dozed, once or twice thinking he heard van der Bloode call him on the intercom, then fell into a dream in which he stalked down candlelight passageways and entered his boss’ office without knocking and there saw van der Bloode sitting cross-legged before his desk beside a censer with a sandalwood thunderhead piled in the long afternoon light. A bell sounded. Its decay contained rapid melodies within the overtones. His boss intoned a note buried in the bell’s harmonics, which he held steady and bent upward a full third and sang a few syllables that contained no consonants.

And what he saw next—something small striking the floor in front of the man, a brilliant crystal that moved several inches right, then left, then expand into a puddle, and return to its initial form, all within a single second, a living yet inanimate thing—left Francis unaccountably terrified. He blinked and gaped and managed to ask what the dancing object was.

An heirloom. You’ll have to pardon my theatrics. The man snapped up the glittering object and placed it into his breast pocket. That was the way our ancestors prayed—all of our ancestors—for their prayer was a variation on the single tone at which our universe vibrates. Our forbears believed that speech is degenerated prayer, and all prayer is in turn degenerated music. Partitioned and separated from the fundamental sound…

In his office, Francis’s eyes fluttered at a dark ellipse of moisture upon the IBM digest that lay his desk. He wiped the saliva from his lips. He shook his head.

My God. Must have been the shrimp he’d had for lunch. It was easily the most vivid dream he’d ever had.

 

THE SOUND OF Esther Horowitz’s heels strode past his closed door—undoubtedly her, for she had a distinctive fast clip, those legs working in her tight skirt. He could almost see her walk past through the wall. He yawned.

Power had come into him.

Later that afternoon, he wound through the 17^th floor to the lobby and took a breath as his eyes fell upon her.

Out of my league.

“Big shakeup in your department, huh, Mr. Meltzuh?”

He loved her Queens accent. He stood straight, tightening his abdomen. “Look, you can call me Francis. Frank. Whatever you like. Just not mister.” He studied the topography of the piece of furniture before her. “Quite a desk here.”

“It’s Scandinavian. He let me pick it out.”

“Did he? That was nice of him. You chose well. Looks complicated. Lots of nooks and crannies.”

“I lose things ooll the time.”

She answered the phone, deftly jotting notes. He lingered, keeping his stomach tight, pretending to admire the Formica surface and glancing at her personal touches. An S & H catalogue and stamps. He saw a book there, On the Road. On a shelf, that Peyton Place. And there, a booklet written by van der Bloode himself called The Labyrinth of Light, more than a pamphlet yet shorter than a pulp paperback, consisting of aphorisms and interconnected short paragraphs exhorting something, as Francis read, he called “self-overcoming.”

They talked for a quarter hour until her ringing phones and intercom compelled Francis’s retreat back to his office. He smiled to himself. He’d learned Esther’s father was a rabbi of a Reformed Congregation in Kew Gardens Hills. She liked to raid antique stores for dresses and jewelry from the Jazz Decade and spoke of her morose older brother Joshua who was off at Cornell getting a Ph.d in philosophy and complained of how quickly the landscape of New York and especially her hometown of Kew Gardens Hills, Queens changed. She had bought a Kodak Signet and been photographing the city, by now a collection of 4,000 photographs, in 50 vinyl volumes. *

           

THE NEXT DAY van der Bloode called a meeting with his public relations staff. He groused about two congressmen who were attempting to court VDB to build his new processing facilities in their districts, assuring him that zoning laws could be amended. Then he brandished a copy of the Wall Street Journal, snapped it violently and read, “ ‘Some six times this past year VDB Enterprises has made overtures to the Meridian Savings and Loan headquartered in Modesto, California’…And lest we forget,” he dropped the paper and picked up a clipping, “there’s this tidbit: ‘R.A. van der Bloode has recently purchased controlling shares in Meridian in advance of news that TerraFirma Drilling, owned by Meridian, has filed for Chapter 11, in effect sinking its investment wing.’ And don’t forget this one—now I can’t expect fairness from these Bastards, nor the best intentions of editorialists, but here we have ad hominem attacks upon my character as the uber-capitalist robber baron….

“In the past week we’ve run off three sets of photographers from our place in Southampton. So I suppose the nub of my gist, gentlemen, is that we need a security detail. There will be a private sundering from the public. No more photographers anywhere near me, and all press releases will cross mister Dexter’s desk. Those he finds even mildly suspect will be cleared by me. My desk shall be the propaganda desk.”

 

FOR THE NEXT days he made the circuit through the 17^th floor to Esther’s desk and found words. On Friday, his work for the day complete, he timed his appearance at 4:30. Now the gambit. “Hey, did you know Royal hates movies?”

“Oh, yeah. All except that Harvey, right?”

“Yes. He calls them ‘hypnosis at twenty-four frames a second.’” He lowered his voice. “He should get out more often...So…So what kind of movies do you like, Esther?”

“I dunno, ooll kinds? Movies that show me the wuh-rold. Gramercy Park Theater’s oollways showing foreign movies. I saw this Japanese film last month, ‘Seven Samurai’? Wow.”

“What’s playing there now?”

“Film by a Swedish film die-rector. It’s set in the Middle Ages.”

“Sounds interesting…Look, would you like to—”

“I’d love to, Francis. Hey, I’ll take a picture of you.”

No, that’s okay. “Alright.”

 “Hey, can I offer you a ride home?”

The burning interval.

“Oh, sure,” she chirped. “That would be swell, Frank. You know how to get out there?”

“Oh, sure.”

            She slipped on her gloves, tied her scarf and swung her purse over her shoulder.

            Long Island Expressway to van Wyck…

 

ESTHER HOROWITZ WAS chewing gum and methodically turning her charm bracelet. The traffic slowed on East River Drive. She started talking about their boss. Francis said, “Well, he is charismatic, I’ll give him that. Should’ve been a professor, way he likes to talk on. Or a politician.”

“Good people can’t be politicians. That’s what my father says.”

“He’s right.”

“Mister V. helped some people out in my father’s temple. He’s a good egg.”

“Drives us nuts sometimes. Have you ever met his wife?”

“Oh, yeah, she came in once. Just walked right on past me. She didn’t even say hi! She was wearing this mink coat. She came in without saying anything and Mr. Swanson told me she yelled at Royal some, then left.”

“He never talks about her.” She seemed to relax and this in turn relaxed him. “Hey, does he ever take off those sunglasses?”

“No, I’ve nevvuh seen him without them…His eye-brain condition, you know.”

Francis leaned on the horn, brought the car up to speed. “Royal graduated four years ahead of me, and people at Harvard still talked about him when I graduated.”

“Like what? Tell!”

Francis chuckled. “Let’s see, oh…That he was involved in psychological experiments?”

Esther laughed.

“He got into a fight with Skinner, this big psychology professor. And his logic professor, Quine. He argued with all his profs, but those were the two big blow-ups. Then I heard—get this—that he was studying voodoo, or witchcraft.”

Esther propped her feet up on the lower edge of the dashboard and pulled the edge of her skirt straight. “Well, there is something strange about him. Like I swaya he can read people’s thoughts! There was this one time when I was thinking about Charles veen Doren and I don’t think I was talking out loud to myself but I might’ve been and he says, ‘you know ooll those games’re fixed’ or something like that—and then he goes on for like five minutes about how much he hates the TV. Well, I was kinda speechless, ya know? And he’s done that sorta thing with other people, too!”

So tell her.

“I had a weird dream about him last week. He was telling me something about owning a deed to a mine over in the Himalayas. Very queer dream. He was meditating, like a monk.”

“I’ve caught him doing that.”

Francis drew a quick breath. “So you saw him p-praying, or what?”

“No, he was just sitting on the floor burning incense…”

Francis—maintain. He concentrated on the smooth blacktop lanes, the chrome-laden bumper of the cars in front of him as Midtown loomed to his left.

“India, huh?” Esther said. “Did you know our offices were designed using Chinese geomancy?”

“Kind of strange.”

“Ehh,” Esther whined, waving dismissively.

Francis exhaled the queasy exhilaration that other people had sensed it. “No, you don’t want it getting out there to the Wall Street Journal. Chinese geomancy? Meditation? No.”

She waved again. “Ehh.”

Their rapport was flowing naturally now and Francis relaxed as they pulled onto the van Wyck Expressway. “You know how much he has made in stocks—just his portfolio—in the past two years? Take a guess.”

“I dunno…Couple million?”

“Ha. Try twenty-five million.”

“Get outta here!” she snapped with a wave.

“I’ve seen the numbers. He must get tips from all over the place. It’s not just a fluke, Esther, I’m telling you, it’s statistically impossible that he could make that much money from stocks in two years. The market’s like a big risk, unless you have access to secret information. Maybe he knows people who can make things happen.”

“Well it has to happen to somebody, ya know? And I’m glad it happens to him.” She went silent for a moment. “Hey, Frank…Can I ask you something?”

He could tell by the changed tone of her voice. Instinctively he touched his neck. “About this?”

“Yeah. I know I’m not supposed to ask, but…Oops.”

“Not supposed to?”

“Mr. V, well…You have to promise.”

Francis resettled himself against the vinyl. “He told everyone not to ask me what happened?”

She nodded. “Please, now.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You know…It’s not nice.”

“Nice or not nice doesn’t enter into it,” he snapped, piqued. “I can take it. Sure. It happened when I was fifteen. I was going to Jameson. That’s a military academy upstate? During the winter holiday, my dad had to travel to Paris for a doctors’ conference for a few weeks, so he brought us along. We had a hotel in the – arrondissement. So this one day my parents and sister went out for a walk and I stayed in the hotel room. I’m there dozing and I wake up hearing screaming, lots of screaming. I look across the street and I see flames in a window and smoke coming out. I ran downstairs and told the desk and I go out into the street. It was a school. I see kids up there. So I ran in, up the steps and there’s smoke everywhere. The goddamn hallway was on fire. They say. Well, that wasn’t a problem, I just ran through it, I guess, and it didn’t hurt, you know? There were three kids lying there. Asphyxiation, you know, drapes going up, furniture’s caught fire. Smoke had gotten to them in seconds. I grabbed those kids and took ‘em down. Don’t know how I did it…Gendarme were just showing up. It must have happened fast. I went back up there to look for more, didn’t find any. Then this kerosene heater blew up, right in front of me…At least that’s what they tell me happened, you know, I don’t remember it. Woke up three days later in the hospital. My shirt had caught fire. Burning kerosene all over my chest. They say I got the shirt off but there was still kerosene on my neck, here, see, a-and my chest.”

Her warm hand touched his arm and lingered there. He hadn’t looked over at her, concentrating on the road. “Doctors did the best they could. They couldn’t move me, so I had to stay in a hospital for two months. They tapered me off the morphine. I still have to take these drugs sometimes. The nerve damage, it lasts for years.”

He fell silent.

“You’re very strong,” she said, her voice small. “I can tell. We all can.”

“You know, the boss has never mentioned it, or asked me once. It’s like he doesn’t even see it. Like he pays no attention to anyone’s appearance.”

Her warm hand might have stroked his arm twice before pulling away. He was so flustered he couldn’t tell.

*

ESTHER MELTZER. HMM.

In the coming days he ate better. Twice a week on cool mornings and walked the Brooklyn Bridge down into the Financial District. There was something vaguely ridiculous in finding inspiration to live healthily because of a beautiful woman’s attention, but he was lightheaded now, the optimism doing half the work, and was certain if he’d accessed this faith before, which seemed a universal inheritance to everyone else, then he would have succeeded years ago, Harvard Business School or not. Now it was as if he could sense the presence of an alter-Francis, one who had never attended the alumni meeting. He chuckled at him, felt sorry for the lout. He would have to check up from time to time on old Francis the widget manager, a ghost in a parallel existence, chomping éclairs in his underwear before a TV belching out “Gunsmoke.”

Esther Horowitz’s hand in his. Redemption and reprieve. *

 

IN THAT FALL of 1957 their boss went on two months’ vacation with his wife Trudy to Spain, and returned frightfully thinner and hollow-eyed. He’d gone on two short trips with her previously, but the aftermath of this one had Francis wondering if the woman were a form of human radium.

One afternoon he saw Esther enter the Lamson-tube room. He followed, came up behind her and kissed her. “C’mon, silly, someone’ll see us.”

She pushed him away and straightened her blouse.

“I don’t care anymore.”

She sighed heavily and pouted. “But this isn’t the way for them to find out, silly.”

The pneumatic tubes whistled and whispered as the plastic cannisters came flying into the catch chambers and Esther checked their labels. Francis nuzzled her neck. She was right. This was not the way, with all the furtive look of a couple of teenagers in a school janitor’s closet. He pulled away. “Oh-oh, now I’ve got your cologne on me.” She carefully folded some notes into the capsule and opened the flap and the envelope vanished. She seemed upset by something. He asked what was wrong. Later that day she approached him with two Times Winchell articles from the previous week’s society page. “I’d wondered whether I should tell anyone, Frankie, but…”

She pointed at a paragraph. His wife Trudy van der Bloode was mentioned as having attended a function at Astor House—and another at a Pencey sorority alumni party—during the period of their supposed vacation together.

“Maybe it’s another woman, on the side,” Francis conjectured. “Or maybe they’re having trouble and he’s just Mr. Stiff Upper Lip.” Esther balled up the articles and tossed them in the trash, distraught. It made no sense—but the man was secretive, so an affair could not be ruled out. Francis bottled his curiosity. “Maybe he just needed to get away. I know he looks…Terrible. He won’t talk about what’s happened. So let’s just take it easy.”

 

BUT FRANCIS HIMSELF could not resist finding an answer. Every night for a week he excused himself shortly before his boss’s punctual 5:30 departure from the Vesey Street Building and waited in a cab or his Studebaker to follow his boss’ limousine as it wended north up Broadway to his Dakota apartment…Or another destination, for that second night they had worked their way east into Chinatown and the Lincoln came to rest before a Buddhist temple, where the man alighted into it for the remainder of the night.

For two weeks Francis followed him in taxis, shelling out some extra cash for weavings and lane-changes. On both Mondays van der Bloode went to a Brooklyn mosque. Tuesdays, he visited the Buddhist temple. Wednesdays he entered an apartment building on the Upper East Side, and Thursdays he visited one on the West Side.

The Friday night pilgrimage was the most mysterious of all for its brevity and location: van der Bloode entered a decrepit building with a crumbling Deco dancehall façade on 56^th and Seventh Avenue.

Francis was determined to know the truth about the Parkside apartment buildings—was it women? Business? He lingered in a trenchcoat and hat across the street and watched his boss enter, then asked the doorman which apartment that odd-looking man had been visiting. In both cases, to his surprise, he gained straightforward answers: “Some monk from Tibet, s’all. Guy’s been living here a few years with the United Nations delegate…Naw, from Bhutan, that’s right—not Tibet, Bhutan.”

And, on the East Side building: “Tenant’s a weird one. They all are in that apartment. Some South American medicine men. Yeah. They get together, have these meetings here on Wednesday nights or somepin.”

 

THE NEXT FRIDAY he took Esther bowling in Kews Gardens Hills and he lasted two frames before telling her of his spying upon their boss. *

 

BY THE END OF Francis’s tailings, van der Bloode’s color returned, he’d regained the weight and never spoke of the “illness.” Two months later, Meltzer informed him that his net worth was about to exceed ten figures. The man murmured impassively; his long fingers fiddled with his wedding ring, twisting it like a safe’s tumbler for that releasing combination. When the financial statements were analyzed and it was made official by the accounting department, Francis prodded his boss to hold a celebration of some kind. He replied: “You may celebrate. It’s the staff’s victory. I simply inherited a machine, fine-tuned it perhaps, and steered it a bit. It is you and they who have done the work.” His expression went blank.

“On the contrary,” Francis began.

“Mister Meltzer, stop,” van der Bloode said. “It is not enough.” He explained how he had recently traveled undercover to his African facilities. He discovered that his official policies of lowered quotas had regressed, and many of the on-site managers still possessed attitudes of sport towards the workers. “Four more men perished at --, three at ---. Five widows, Francis, and a total of thirteen fatherless children. Three of them had no mothers to begin with. It is those that most trouble me. You don’t see these kinds of figures turn up on the balance sheets, do you.”

“Your insurance will cover the payouts—”

“Money is no surrogate for human lives. That’s the Beast, and the Beast’s ways Francis. And I’m playing his earthly representative each passing day I hold onto these ventures…Imagine if I had a site, a special camp or facility in which to take care of these woman and their children…A place with good medicine and access to better kinds of education.”

“There, or here?”

“Oh, here in the States, I suppose.”

“You’d get them passports and transport them here?”

“Certainly. Especially the orphans. I can just imagine the red tape the State Department would throw up.”

 Meltzer shrugged. “Might be easier than you think.”

“Would you look into it for me, or assign it to someone? I am serious about this…” Van der Bloode had done preliminary research of the mining firm. He showed the figures of the past ten years alone: 111 dead at Brazil, 237 at Alsace-Lorraine, 49 at Haut-Katanga. “Figures, correct? Numbers on pages. No sweat and no sunburn and no black phlegm, nor broken bones here, just—numbers. Do you see anything more than numbers?”

Francis closed his eyes and shrugged in confusion.

“I’d wager prior to antibiotic treatments for wounds, the total dead on my family’s hands give or take, is near 25,000—on the mining side, since Gerrit struck his deal with King Leopold and some dynamite.”

“Wait, your grandfather worked for Leopold of Belgium?”

“Yes.”

So there it was: no need to postulate double-dealing practices to explain the van der Bloode fortune. That his grandfather was involved with that fat Belgian Bastard was enough—held up as exemplar, though, Leopold II had been at Ad-Prac session 2, by one of Francis’s professors.

 

FOR THREE DAYS his boss argued with his father in Languedoc over the phone, his normal reserve faltering and his raised voice vibrating the teak door from across the room. It was obvious he wasn’t seeking advice form his father but arguing over image and legacy and something believed long to have been a settled question—or not a question at all—in the equations of mercy and humanity, never apparently having been asked of the family business until his assumption of power.

He called Francis into his office and said, “I have an idea.”

His new tack: A business that would launder money for the most moral of purposes. It would deal exclusively in defense industries’ stocks and, instead of further capitalizing another venture from their gains, dump the monies into a trust that would periodically donate the funds to a charity that dealt with poverty.

The name he’d chosen: Metanoia Brokerage.

Then he thought: Why not start the charity as well? He sketched out a corporate chart on his desk. When finished, Francis was struck by its resemblance to an esoteric diagram his mother Naomi had once drawn for him, based on his rabbi grandfather’s study: the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life. Van der Bloode’s Tree would be laden with conduits of good will. The charity was to be called the Garden of Light Foundation, and dedicated to founding schools for war orphans and orphans of the big cities. It would provide a first-rate education and preparation for the Ivy League. Start small, he said, with a handful of schools where the children would be trained as the “civil servants and spies” of some as-yet-nonexistent future utopia…

Meltzer shook his head in grief. But he did not refuse.

 

TWO MEN APPEARED in the lobby one morning who seemed to have more of a military bearing than the lawyers they purported to be. Van der Bloode pulled Francis aside. “Yes, I met with these chaps yesterday and asked them back for your input. Now, play along, Francis.”

Meltzer stammered. “You mean, should I—”

“Just play along,” van der Bloode shrugged casually, smiling. “It might do us good to see how these Bastards work in practice. I would like to determine how deep their quid pro quo goes if we, hypothetically would agree to their demands.”

Francis entered his boss’ office to see the men sitting on the Eames couch, whispering. Two firm handshakes later he took a seat beside van der Bloode’s desk. One of the men had that burgeoning patrician face he was by now so familiar with from Harvard, like a brand—the strong cleft chin and sharp brows and blue eyes and corn-fed teeth. They were both in their early forties. The other man, darker in complexion, portly, lisped behind his glasses as van der Bloode opened his liquor cabinet to them and lit some Cubanos. Then Francis noticed something new hanging upon van der Bloode’s wall, two large ornate frames with calligraphic masterpieces within them. He squinted through the smoke, reading:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

                        for want of the shoe the horse was lost;

                        for want of a horse the man was lost;

                        for want of a man the battle was lost,

                        all for the want of the horseshoe nail.

            The second, just beside it, read:

                        Light in the soul, beauty in the person

Beauty in the person, harmony in the house

Harmony in the house, order in the nation

Order in the nation, peace in the world.

The two lawyers bantered back-and-forth like a grim but polished Lewis and Martin with their reminiscences on fighting together in the Burma theater and the Flying Tigers and their dashed hopes over Chiang Kai-Shek and their Company’s worldwide operations. Van der Bloode nodded in sympathy and put on his best face; Francis watched them study his boss’ enormous muttonchops and inscrutable eyes behind the tinted frames. Suddenly the blond one, whose name was Frick, pointed at the long antique bookcase and said, “You like the ancients, Mr. Bloode? And what’s that—the ‘Arabian Nights’?”

Frack, the other, said, “We know this little old man in Basra over in Iraq? Guy owns a dozen copies of it from the 15^th Century. Even has the version from the Abbasid caliphate, which Ibn Al-Nadim talked about? He won’t part with it unless he knows the interested party is more than some casual, uh, tourist, to the stories. Made two hundred thousand pounds the last time he let one go, to an antiquities house in London. Only sells to scholars—and people like you.” He cleared his throat as if in expectant punctuation.

Van der Bloode looked back and forth between the two lawyers and let the silence extend. “Well, you fellows certainly have done your homework on me. Impressive.”

Frick shrugged, hands out. “Running a shipping company, I’m sure you become privy to all sorts of rarities, like that pilot wheel you showed us yesterday? Men of your reach and stature in the business world always do.”

“Not really,” van der Bloode snapped. “Bit of an armchair dilettante. The world-view from my desk is fine. I also possess a copy of A Million Random Digits by RAND, which I read assiduously. Best book they ever published. Thrilling plot, great characters.”

The niceties seemed to end. Frack brought out maps and manifests. In startling detail the two lawyers outlined the VDB fleet’s seventeen major shipping routes and even the vessel numbers of the freighters cruising the seas at that very moment. “This is quite a net you’ve developed. Your ships put in at Latakia and Damascus and Tripoli. Your remaining mining operation in Haut Katanga has come under pretty heavy pressure by –‘s men and the ---.

Van der Bloode huffed impatiently. “I’m in the process of jettisoning that last odious possession. But mister Meltzer here is engaged in translations of political policies into, ahem, their consequent real world effects.”

The quadrivium of eyes fell upon him. “Yes, that’s right—p is in the process of petitioning with the .”

Frack sipped his martini and said, “The Latakia situation is ticklish. Nasser is playing all sides. To be frank, we’ve no clear idea presently where his true sympathies lie or who he’ll petition in the—”

Van der Bloode interrupted, “Perhaps his sympathies lie with his people.”

Frick smiled disingenuously, raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then, which people are you talking about? These Moslem populations are slippery. Cash can take us only so far. The Reds’ll back Nasser against Israel again, at any time. King Hussein’s doing his part but the Syrians are the problem—this United Arab Republic they have going with Nasser.”

Frack said, “We know for a fact that the Soviets are funneling all sorts of arms through Latakia.”

Van der Bloode pulled at his whiskers and said, “And you Agency people have the Arab Union—or you did, until the Iraqis threw in their lot with Nasser. And now your bought man Chamoun is in trouble. The Sixth Fleet’s getting quite a workout—in again, out again. Hard to tell who’s a real Communist with all the talk of neutrality and the National Pact.”

“Mr. Bloode, you have to understand this clearly. Syria and Egypt are sending Kalashnikov rifles into by the ton into Egypt through the Latakia ports.”

“Oh yes?” van der Bloode nodded eagerly. “On what evidence? Show me the evidence and I am strictly open to your counsel.”

Frick shot a glance at his partner. “This is why we need your unique services. Eyes there at Latakia. Your shipping company is only one of three based out of US-UK who put in that port. We need four men, say, on your ships to take extensive pictures of those Soviet vessels, and meet with our contacts on those same Soviet vessels. We have established some contacts on at least two of them.”

“You can help to establish these facts with certainty,” Frack emphasized. “We need to know.”

Van der Bloode clasped his hands behind his head, puffing heartily on his Cubano. “And suppose you find no evidence of this Red pipeline—none at all. Will we see articles touting this fact in Mr. Dulles’s press conferences? Will we read about it in the Times?”

“That’s not up to us. We get the facts. State and the Security Council make policy.”

The cigar danced in van der Bloode’s fingers. “Seems to me that in this case, your Agency director and the secretary of State are basically the same people, no? Brother Allen and brother Foster…In any case I am pretty sure what I will hear if you find nothing. What I’ll hear is, ‘no conclusive evidence, we are still searching.’ Or ‘we must have missed something.’ Or even ‘those crafty Reds must have planted a man in our ranks and sent the word to close up the shop.’ Something along those lines. And the public will still be led to believe Nasser’s a Red, despite all the lack of evidence for that proposition.”

Francis Meltzer shared in the wince that appeared on Frack’s face.

“That’s a pretty cynical assessment of the situation,” the lawyer replied. “No, these things all play a part in the flow to our consumers in the Committee and the White House, Mr. Bloode.”

“Many members of which,” Van der Bloode shot back, “have personal stakes, or should I say, stocks, in a scrupulously neutral—that is, un-nationalized—oil cartel in Egypt, or mining firm, or whatever. ‘Neutrality’ in their minds being a word which changes its meaning depending on whose mouth is uttering it. If the State Department deems a certain government neutral, it gives US and European firms a license to operate with free reign in that land with little more than slave labor. But if Nasser identifies himself as neutral, it means he’s a ‘Commie on the march,’ and he has to go.”

Frick chuckled. “Do you want to see Egypt go Red? Your transport revenue would disappear overnight. Then Syria, then Iraq. Boom, boom, boom. That’s a big gamble to take, to do nothing, to let that happen?”

Frack downed his whiskey in a single pull and grew angry. “Anyway, what the Committee makes of our work becomes policy. Our Company doesn’t make those policies.”

Van der Bloode pointed at Frack with the cigar. “But surely your senior analysts have a hand in deciding what constitutes this evidence…Someone in your Agency decides what ends up on Ike’s plate, and the National Security Council. And these senior analysts aren’t averse to following advice from quarters who have more to lose than just face on what floats up to the bureaucracy to Mr. Eisenhower’s ear.” Van der Bloode gave one of his tight smiles and wagged a finger. “These things work both ways. I’ve more eyes and ears than you think. I know about your successes, so-called. Mssrs Arbenz and Mossadegh can attest to your prestidigitations. Or at least the former can, still being alive.”

Both of them chuckled. Frack said, “People all across the world want to be free…Our firm had nothing to do with these popular movements.”

Frick exhaled wearily and said, “Your father, sir, understands the gravity of these matters, Mr. Bloode. We would hope we could continue a stable relationship with your family business. Or any relationship at all.”

This piqued the billionaire. “My father was a friend to Mr. Mossadegh’s family, too. You might not have known that. I may have been fresh out of college and resisted your recruiters back then, but I still believe in statecraft, not stagecraft. Your little Firm seems to see no difference between the two. Beyond that, I believe in something called fair play. I refused your petitions on Indonesia and the Philippines and still you come to me every goddamned year. You’re worse than ghosts of the passed on. And that is pretty much what your operations are creating—ghosts that will march silently into your midst at some later time and speak with a violence you won’t understand at some later point in our history.”

At once the lawyers stood grumbling and rolled up their maps. Their business here was over. They insisted that van der Bloode’s business would suffer greatly if Nasser had his way. Van der Bloode replied that he would take his chances.

 When they departed, Meltzer sat in awe of his boss. “Man sakes, you gave them a drubbing. You said they come by here every year?”

“Almost. The past three. Last year it was the South China Sea. They send different mannequins every time. And they tried to get me fresh out of the Crimson. I suspect that they’ve hired eyes in my fleet, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Their suitcases of cash talk, and they could get any of our mariners on their side for the right price.”

“You really hate them?” Meltzer asked.

“Fair play, Francis. Someone has to take a stand. Why not me?”

“Aren’t you afraid of, uh, retaliation of some kind?”

Van der Bloode laughed. “What, a Congressional investigation? Blackmail?”

Meltzer shrugged.

“No, they need me. Although the future may hold a sucker punch or two.”

At this Francis frowned. “What do you mean?”

 The billionaire shook his head dismissively and said, “My father had no qualms about engaging the SIS to protect the ‘circulatory system of commerce’ as he called it…Sadly, I’m not so principled. We will not let these Bastards grind us down, though, Francis, will we?”

 

 

ONE MORNING A FEW weeks later, Van der Bloode and Meltzer set off for the United Nations, where the new billionaire was to discuss the place of his enterprises in the relief efforts of the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development. The limousine was heading north to Kips Bay under a wintry blue slivering of skies. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees over the past twenty-four hours to hover in the single digits. Van der Bloode instructed the driver to take Bowery to Third Avenue. He’d never gone that way. His jaw dropped in shock at the sight of the cardboard shantytowns erected on the sidewalks, the garbage and sleeping bags of unfortunates without even the money for a flophouse. With the concrete canyons’ windchill, death was a possibility.

There on the sidewalk was a man whose clothes shone unnaturally silver. With a shock, van der Bloode realized he was wearing clothes entirely made of cellophane, a patchwork of tinfoil sheets, newspapers, old rags. The materials wrapping his legs were thick as an elephant’s, tattered, with each slow footstep revealing bare feet, black and swollen. Van der Bloode called out for the driver to stop.

“Look at that man.”

With a barrage of horns rising up behind them, the driver pulled the limousine to the curb further up the block. Francis Meltzer stifled comment. Van der Bloode pressed his head against the rear window. When the tramp shuffled stiffly within hailing distance, he rolled down the window. “Excuse me, sir…Hello? You there!” The gauzy hood blasted a cloud of breath, a black face turned to them, looked them over, and continued on, the layers of cellophane like a cape whipped in the wind behind him. Van der Bloode got out, his arms tightly folded across his chest, stopped him and gestured towards the limo. Then he tried to take his arm. The man resisted, then turned like a wheezy automaton, jerkily, to stare at the black vehicle with its open back door. Francis Meltzer drummed his fingers nervously.

“Get in,” he heard van der Bloode yelling against the biting wind. “You won’t be kidnapped. Just for a moment. Out of this infernal cold.”

The man eased into the spacious backseat with a rustle and popping. The car filled with the stench of the summer subway, of neglected teeth and marathons of filth. Van der Bloode seemed unfazed as he snuggled in next to the silvered man and slammed the door. Then Francis remembered: van der Bloode was suffering from a bad cold, his nasal passages blocked…But still this powerful human effluvium could not but make him start with revulsion if he’d realized its extent, and do whatever business he had with him standing a full ten feet away.

The man whispered, “Where we going?”

“You, sir, are going to a place you cannot imagine,” van der Bloode replied. “Take us to the condo.”

“Youse kin’apping me,” he muttered with resignation.

“No, it’s a resurrection, old boy.” Van der Bloode asked him questions about his upbringing. He muttered in reply. It was impossible to know how old he was, or even to what ethnicity he belonged, so thick was the grime and soot and grease caked across his round face. His eyes were jaundiced. His hands shook. He rasped, “You got inny booze?”

Van der Bloode nodded at Francis, who opened the liquor cabinet. The man asked for whiskey. “A good straight shot or two should warm you up, sir…” van der Bloode obliged.

“Or ten,” Francis murmured through his handkerchief.

They quit Bowery and the limo came stuck in the traffic of mid-town Broadway. After a few drinks, the man became expansive. His name was Herbert. His wife had divorced him after his return from the Korean conflict. He couldn’t hold a job, what with his memories and the subsequent week in a MASH unit. He’d lost his apartment, took to drink. What had he to lose?

Van der Bloode shook his head in sympathy. “Francis, I want Pillsbury to find an apartment for this man. I shall pay his rent for six months. With monies for food. You will stay in a hotel until then, mister Herbert. A warm bed tonight, and a good meal. The Ritz-Carlton, Francis? That’s a superb hotel. You can retire this supermarket attire forever.”

Meltzer was flabbergasted. He’d never slept in the Ritz-Carlton.

“Driver, to the Ritz-Carlton. Francis, please call Pillsbury and have him meet us there.”

Later, as Pillsbury in a greatcoat walked away from the limo with the unfortunate man, van der Bloode sneered and said, “What kind of society allows that sort of thing to happen?”

Meltzer sighed. The smell lingered like a haze. The limo would have to be cleaned. Twice over. “The same society that allows charity. Most of these men have chosen that kind of life, in one way or another. They made bad choices. And now they’re paying for it.”

Van der Bloode glared at Francis Meltzer. “Choices? Puts me in mind of quicksand.”

From then on, van der Bloode asked Pillsbury to accompany them in the limo every Sunday afternoon as they cruised north up Bowery and the billionaire would choose a particularly haggard tramp and Pillsbury would get out and lead him to a second waiting limo—with a ticket out of hell. No names were to be mentioned. Within a month the story had gotten around, the bums were wise and on the lookout for the black caravan. The anonymous philanthropist garnered a Metro article in the New York Times. Van der Bloode switched to Pillsbury’s new El Dorado, then simply took cabs for his “Midas jaunts,” as Meltzer called them, swearing the cabbies to a hundred dollars’ silence. Pillsbury contracted the flu, then lice, then had his nose broken by a belligerent manic-depressive who refused.

“Why dot just stump the city gubbermint to cleed up the Bowery, sir?” Pillsbury suggested through his bandages. “This is’t workeeg. I won’t do it eddymore.”

“Direct action, Lionel, is the best course.” Two of the rescued men disappeared from the Ritz without even touching their bank accounts, one vanished after emptying his of a thousand dollars. Herbert slept drunk on the Bowery half the time anyway, stretched out in his new Harris tweeds and Ritz blankets slumped across a cardboard mattress. But four of them were taking advantage of their changed fortune. Van der Bloode put them to work sorting mail.

“People are inherently good, Francis, it’s just that the Bastards’ machine happens upon them and spits them out on these sidewalks. This is true power, what I’m doing. It changes things for these men.”

“Power?” Meltzer scoffed. “Power? The only power you have is the power to withhold a new life from the rest of them. It’s not your giving, but the withholding. You’re throwing out pocket change, except that your quarters are C-notes.”

Van der Bloode seemed to take offense and replied testily, “What on earth are you prattling about?”

“Helping these vagrants as you’re doing is an affront to decency. It’s just the same as a lottery. I say, try to help all of them, or help none of them. Randomly picking a handful, with no method or whatever the hell you’d call it, is another insult to the others. You’re doling out another batch of cruelty on top of their lives. I mean, think of what it must be like for all those other men, who now know about this. They get passed over.”

“So…” van der Bloode started. He remained absorbed for a moment. “It’s no longer anonymous. But how can I help that these chaps have talked about it?”

“They’ll fight each other over it now. If you should keep on doing this, at least send them away to another goddamn city. They go back here to the damn Bowery and buy booze for these other tramps.”

“I do believe,” he said, “you are right.”

Later that day Francis entered the billionaire’s office and noticed

the antique dartboard’s wings were open. He came closer. A mashed wad of torn photos lingered in its center. Francis pulled out the dart and looked at the targets: pictures of Oppenheimer and Truman and Strauss, Ernest Lawrence and Klaus Fuchs, Ike and Nixon, Teller, all of them pinholed and abused. A paperclip had torn clean through Teller’s right eye. Rifling through the photos, Francis found a photo of John von Neumann barely punctured but for the very center of the genius’ nose, as if van der Bloode had taken pity on the photo of his firmer idol after his premiere good stroke.

 “Those scientists are like a cult, Francis, a religious cult,” he complained. “They have their own iconology…Trinity, they called it. That Bastard Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita as if he had written it for the occasion…Tell me, what did they call the bombs over Japan?”

“The fat man,” Francis sighed, “and the little boy.”

“That’s right. Their little boy…The product of the diseased, issueless sex.” Van der Bloode tugged on his band collar, loosened it. He shook his head sadly at von Neumann’s picture. “Poor departed Johnny was one of the Bastards through and through. A chap like him can turn young minds merely by his interests and association with certain things. Charisma and genius. You know, Francis, I formed a club for studying Johnny’s ideas with my flatmate at the Crimson.” He made a motion as if to remove his glasses but stopped himself.

“The Hungarians from Mars, yeah, I remember. I had a friend who joined it.”

 “The seduction of abstraction had us. By the time I’d graduated, fortunately, I’d seen the light.”

Francis cleared his throat in the irony of van der Bloode’s last comment. “But you wouldn’t write off Einstein, would you? He was responsible in some way as well. He wrote the letter to Roosevelt about the Bomb...Blame Rene Descartes, even. Or Pythagoras.”

“I had a change of heart about dear departed Johnny,” van der Bloode continued in agitation. “When I learned about the Manhattan Project, I wrote him off.” Again van der Bloode made as if to remove his spectacles but arrested the gesture, squinting at Francis. “The Pentagon is a monster, which he had no second thoughts about serving happily. A genius of his magnitude, and no second thoughts about the murder of millions of people. It’s a monstrous machine.”

“Or a windmill,” Francis countered.

“People like Johnny are the priests of a new religious cult. What would normally pass for their conscience cannot function together with their rationality. One part of them must fall and be collapsed and melded with the other. So the numbers numb them, you might say. The result is that they invest their life force into a death cult.”

Francis could see that van der Bloode was unmovable. The billionaire stroked the side of his nose, chew inside his cheeks in worry. “It can only end one way, this world. A big fire.”

 

IN THE WINTER MONTHS of early 1959, van der Bloode’s mood seemed to fluctuate with the Iraqi oil futures Francis had been studying. He looked again like a man poised on the edge of terminal illness. The fact that his wife had recently bore them twins made no difference whatsoever in his demeanor; in fact it worsened. The new-father babblings everyone expected—the detailed accounts of his children’s most banal activities—failed to occur. Within a month of the birth, Trudy van der Bloode had gone to Europe with an entourage of nannies. (Only thrice in the past two years had Meltzer glimpsed her in the backseat of the limousine into which Royal slumped—a blond bob-cut and sunglasses—off to their mansion in the Hamptons for a week).

Upon her return, van der Bloode began to sleep on his office couch several nights a week. He had Pillsbury search the housing market on Central Park East, and within three weeks owned an entire floor of a building at 73^rd Street. The research division was sending around reports about a stupendous breakthrough in computing: an integrated circuit built on a single tiny wafer of Germanium. Next stop would be silicon, and a reduction by a sixth of the space needed for circuitry, and another $20 million at least in sales to the federal government. Van der Bloode shrugged off the news, left the decision to Francis. The turning point came one day when at a board meeting his boss hardly said a word then blew a raspberry at some proposals without explanation and made a couple of dismissive gestures at others and generally just stared blankly into the mesh of the metal astrolabe in the center of the table. Francis could see that some of the executives smelled opportunities here. Meltzer was determined to prevent any taking advantage of his precarious emotional state, and after the meeting voiced his concern. Van der Bloode muttered, “It’s my wife…It’s simply…She is going to Europe again, without the boys.”

He made the same dismissive gesture, wiping the mention of her from the air. Francis thought it best not to press further. When she returned, Trudy van der Bloode began calling the office forty, fifty times a day. Van der Bloode would ease his door shut and his muffled voice would rise then fall silent. Then one afternoon prolonged shouting rose behind the door, followed by the sound of a phone repeatedly bashed down. There was a single strangled cry, then a yelping which wrenched eyes from their paperwork throughout the hall. A few moments later van der Bloode emerged from his office looking pale and bearing a peaceful smile. He was humming loudly—possibly “Crazy Rhythm,” but Esther, silent and stunned, couldn’t gather the melody which nervously buzzed from a place deep in his chest. A gross tremor rippled the edges of the document in his hand. He sighed and told her with a wink: I’m now in meetings all day long for the foreseeable future. He’d take no calls from Trudy at work—ever again. Not if the house were on fire, not if she had broken the Soviet nuclear codes, not if she’d claimed a measure of self-control. He would accept calls from their housekeepers and nanny only.

In the following days Francis noticed Trudy van der Bloode’s photo face down on his desktop, surrounded by a scattering of paper clips, a single rubber band. It looked like the man had been target practicing.

Then that summer, as the Cuban situation worsened, van der Bloode’s mood abruptly went lighter than Francis could ever remember.

“It’s my wife,” he chirped to Francis. “She has offered divorce. She’s put in with another man.” He offered Meltzer a Diplomatico and fell silent into one of those unbreachably deep van der Bloode quietudes Francis had come to know when he would seem to derive amusement from the effects of a personal narcotic coursing through his veins. “And what a blow for him, whoever he is, the dear chap,” he continued. “I shall have custody of the boys, however. Trudy is returning next week.”

A closed chapter, just like that. Francis hadn’t even the spare time to go on a single date the past year, much less enter into the depths of courtship, and yet to his boss the abrupt termination of his four-year marriage seemed no less significant than a cup of tea grown cold.

That’s the Brits for you…

The next day a tall old man was ushered into van der Bloode’s office. Two beefy men milled about the lobby waterfall.

“His father,” Esther whispered. Every few minutes Francis peeked down the hall. Several times he edged near van der Bloode’s door and heard his boss’ voice rise and fall across that huge chamber. It went on for three hours. He instructed Esther to beep his intercom twice as soon as they emerged.

He’d no sooner sat back down when she was at his door waving to him. Francis came out just in time to see father and son whispering to each other. The bearded old man waved a finger in his son’s face, then buried his hands in his trouser pockets as the billionaire, his face contorted with anger, railed in angry whispers at the old man. Jan van der Bloode rattled the loose change in his pockets like a tambourine, wetting his lips and chewing on the inside of his cheeks in worried abstraction as his son continued to berate him. Jan scowled and refused his handshake. Without a word he marched down the dim red corridor to his waiting bodyguards.

“You should consider properly lighting this place,” the old man shouted, “it’s like a tomb. It’s bad on the eyes.” And down they went. Van der Bloode shook his head in exasperation, retreated behind a slammed door. Francis didn’t ask.

The next morning Gerald Sillmmann, van der Bloode’s most trusted lawyer packed into three hundred pounds of sweating malice, delivered the divorce papers and van der Bloode signed them. Van der Bloode pulled at the ring on his finger. He doused it with water, basted it with melted butter packs from the commissary, then had Francis go out to Broadway to buy lard, into which he dipped his finger, but still the skin, grown comfortable and accommodating to the ring’s presence, refused to yield.

“Blast it.” His finger was swollen and raw. “Francis, get me a smith or someone who would know how to remove this bloody thing.”

Meltzer called Durbin, the maintenance man, who gawked at the spacious office. Meltzer had to grab him by the arm and direct his attention to the flustered billionaire, who had his hand submerged in an ice-filled bowl. Van der Bloode withdrew his hand and placed his elbow on the desk as if proffering an arm-wrestling bout. “Have you ever done this before?”

Durbin studied the Englishman with the strange whiskers and stricken look. He said, “Yes, I have. A man at Fidelity Trust on the fourth floor. That was just last month. So, yes. S’good you got your figgers in ice. Lemme see that.” He reached into his overalls and brought out pliers and cable cutters. Gently he worked the edge of the blade under the ring, producing winces.

“Now, hold on here, I’m a-gonna apply some pressure.” With a simple contraction of his fist the ring snapped off, revealing a pale furrow.

“Oh, thank God,” van der Bloode said, picking up the ring. “Francis, would you pay this man. A smirking Benjamin should do it.”

He sat down afterward at his desk with a bottle of Grand Marnier, massaging the ghost band on his finger. Francis was all business—what with the Fidelists’ appropriation of the Havana ports—until he watched van der Bloode pound his fourth drink while perusing an old leather volume which he’d pulled from his desk. “This is my old photo album. Look at me. I was fifteen.” Yellowed photos held in place by their corners. One showed van der Bloode looking not much different but for the whiskerless face, on the deck of a yacht. Camels tethered to posts rested on the river bank behind him. There were snapshots of him before the Pyramids, the Parthenon, from the Eiffel Tower. He stared wistfully at the pictures, the Leonardesque smile holding steady. “I rediscovered this album recently. Exhumed it. I’m not one to be sentimental but it does one good from time to time to try to recapture the origins of things.”

Francis again tried to bring up Castro’s marauding army, but it was of no use. By noon the man was drunk, spinning the kaleidoscopes arrayed across his desk and talking to the Chrysler Building in the distance like an old friend. He forewent his usual Greek salad and threw on his coat to continue his spree on the roof. Francis too had a swig up there, just to take the edge off, as Royal paced around and spewed venom at the modern world and leaned on the parapet to watch the window washers across Vesey Street work their way down the face of the opposite building. Noticing Royal’s fascination with the high-altitude work and his employer’s increasingly unsteady gait, he said, “First step’s a doozy, sir. You should just go home for the day.”

Van der Bloode, buffeted by an inner gale, leaned into the concrete and snarled at Francis to leave him alone. Meltzer retreated behind the service door to watch him. Later, after some shouting from the rooftop, a bit of New Year’s eve roared through the 17^th floor. With loosened tie and half-unbuttoned shirt, a six foot two pinball bounced from wall to wall down the ever-dusky corridors. Van der Bloode opened the bottom drawer of his desk and brought out a bottle of Chateau Lafitte and took a long swig.

“Vine and corn, beware the morn,” Francis counseled.

As evening descended they poured him into his limo. Van der Bloode blubbered in the back seat and yelled at the pedestrians.

“Now it kin hap’n,” he kept saying.

“What are you talking about, sir?”

With effort he pulled himself up to the glass and the neon swirl of Broadway and sputtered, “Jes lookit all those ladies out there…Booful ladies. I did what they said, right, France? Married Trudes. The good old Linea Aurum!”

“Yes, you did it, sir,” Meltzer agreed, watching the diamond chains of the Manhattan Bridge pass by. Did he say ‘Golden Thread’—in Latin?

“There are people out there in the worl’, France. There truly are real and sollit people out there. Lookit ‘em all. Ever’where. Don’t know what the hell they’re dealin with. Don’t know they gov’ment playing with fire of hell—”

Francis Meltzer once again stayed van der Bloode’s hand on the window crank, stopping him from spewing abuse at the crowded sidewalks.

“Trudes, how you like those mushrooms?” he said, laughing, humming tunelessly. It might have been “Crazy Rhythm,” but Francis wasn’t sure…

Meltzer put him to bed in his own penthouse and nursed him through the next day, doing business over the phone and giving hangover reports to Esther and Pillsbury as a sonata of groans issued from the agitating lump beneath the blanket on his couch. Once there was a gurgling sound and Francis grabbed one of his own wingtips and let his boss fill the shoe with half-processed liqueur. The weakness in his bones, he groaned, was like a shroud.

He didn’t venture from Francis’s penthouse the following day, a nightmare of dry heaves, nor the next. Then he took a limousine to his new condominium, still nauseous, and slept.

 

MELTZER RETURNED TO Vesey Street for the morning then checked up on his boss at his new condominium. As van der Bloode slept, he poked around the expanse of the apartment—eleven rooms full of nothing, afternoon light making double crosses upon the varnished floors. He came to what appeared to be a closet door at the end of a short hall, opened it and was astounded to see another set of rooms entirely whose floors and walls were covered with Asian and Persian carpets and tapestries. The place smelled of sandalwood and Easter lilies. Here was a lone elaborate hookah surrounded by cushions. Three more rooms lie beyond, identically furnished. Haphazardly stacked in a corner were a couple dozen antique-looking wooden boxes and crates of various sizes and shapes. Some were on the verge of collapse and disintegration, as if bashed half-apart during the journey by which they had come here. Francis opened a nail-laden lid and revealed an assortment of jars filled with a pearly, viscous substance. He unscrewed one and raised it to his nostrils, then instinctively reared back from the overwhelming cloud. Dizziness overtook him in a second.

It was the sweetest odor he had ever experienced, like an olfactoric flipbook of scents, lily and amber, orange blossom and lilac.

If heaven had a scent, what issued from that jar must have been close to it. Here were Tupperware containers full of what looked like dried mushroom caps and others with a dark viscous paste-like tar, and one filled to the brim with hard misshapen crumbling discs, and one with alfalfa.

He replaced the honey jar and retraced his path and continued throughout the empty chambers, which he vastly preferred to the Oriental madness. He came to a room that held two desks and reading lamps. One desk was covered with scrawled musings, diagrams and columns of words in English and Arabic and Greek. All these papers were weighed down by a stack of folio editions: here was a Monas Hieroglyphica by Dr. Ioannis Dee, a De Rerum Signatura by Jakob Boehme. Van der Bloode had copied out diagrams from them and seemed to have been attempting a taxonomy between the symbols of the two books…On the second desk were sets of old dictionaries and treatises on ancient Sanskrit and Tibetan. Van der Bloode had filled hundreds of pages with what appeared to be phonetic transpositions of the symbols on the other tables. Beside the desk was a leaning stack of volumes in English translation: Fihi Ma Fihi and Mathnawi by Jelaluddin Rumi, a beaten copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Seventy Couplets by Nagarjuna. Francis leant down to smell the folios’ thick pages, centuries old, and noticed there the long slips of paper as bookmarks—plane tickets, stapled together, along with his passport. Here was a Trans America flight from Idlewild to Paris, connecting there with a Lufthansa flight to New Delhi, then a handwritten receipt for a private flight to a place identified by a circular stamp depicting three mountains. The stamps on the passport conformed to the dates on the tickets; the last showed the blue figure of a dragon and unmistakable Sanskrit…He flipped the pages. Another trip itinerary appeared, this one from around the time in which Esther had discovered the Winchell articles when his boss had supposedly been in the Seychelles with his wife. This next said Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And in the months previous to that, he’d gone to Chile—the supposed trip he’d taken with Trudy to England. Further back, last winter, he’d gone to Brazil and the Caroline Islands in the South Pacific…

None of the sites conformed to ports on the VDB Shipping itineraries. Maybe the man was drumming up new business in his free time. But probably not, what with those nocturnal trips he’d seen him take last year. Francis puzzled over it all when there was the sound of a clearing throat behind him. Van der Bloode stood there in the red bathrobe, his hair spiky and disheveled. He was without his sunglasses. Violet eyes squinted at him in the gold light and Francis felt an almost physical blow from them. Instinctively, involuntarily, he look averted his gaze. Van der Bloode said, “I caught dysentery while I was in Dharamsala.”

“Dharamsala?” Francis replied, his voice catching. “What were you doing there?”

“Exploring.”

He again met his boss’ gaze. Those purplish eyes seemed more appropriate looking out from the face a jungle cat. Francis had never seen any like them. Those eyes must have given him trouble early in his life, spooked superstitious people. Now he understood why he wore the sunglasses. Francis frowned. “Dharamsala was once a summer vacation spot for the nabobs, right? A hill-town.”

“Yes, well, now it hosts altogether different folk.” He snorted and massaged the bridge of his nose and stared at the floor.

“This stamp?” Francis indicated the coiled serpent.

“From Dharamsala I went east, to Bhutan.”

“And Addis Ababa, and the Carolines?”

Van der Bloode ignored his question. “My father lived in Bhutan for five months when I was two. He became a friend to Jigme Wangchuck, the King of the Land. It was still a protectorate back then, in ’31. We returned together in ’47, after their independence. We hiked for four days through the most beautiful mountains in the world. It required a verbal and visual itinerary to get to our destination, which was a valley in which an order of monks lived. The initiates of this monastery have been there for at least two millennia. They have no engagement with the outer world and have kept it a strict secret because they have no need for us. The trip to their valley is something near unrepeatable. I know—I have tried.”

“Was that the same trip as those photos you showed me? When you were young? The Pyramids and such?”

“Yes. The air in Bhutan, and the heights, are enough to render a man insensible to anything mundane.” He seemed to drift into a sudden reverie. “You see, a Bhutanese medicine man, a Tulku, healed my father back in ’31, and Jan wanted to return to the valley. My father’s psyche had been changed by an extraordinary kind of honey they have there…I should explain. My mother died when I was just a few months old, Francis. My father simply wouldn’t accept it. He was severely depressed in spirit and neurotic…He tried everything to salve his pain. But what saved him from this grief—from himself, you might say—was this species of honey they eat in that valley of the Kingdom. This honey opens up a man, opens his mind, if you will, opens his soul. Like a spiritual bloodletting. It removed his melancholy by the root and quite literally saved his life. I only understood this when I went there myself with him.”

Francis thought of the sweet-smelling substance he’d found earlier. “Did you eat some yourself?”

“Yes. But not there. Only when I returned to Glastonbury.” He smiled and shook his head in disbelief. “Words, Francis, words cannot come close.”

“Try me.”

“No, you would have to have some on your morning toast.” His enormous violet eyes blinked at the lengthening crosses of light on the floor. “There is a cave entrance in that valley in Bhutan which is entirely covered in honeycomb. The monks have harvested the product of this comb for a thousand years.”

“Have you tried…other kinds of drugs? Like the mushrooms Wasson was writing about?”

“Many. I’ve taken psilocybin mushrooms about a dozen times. I spent two years trying to obtain igobaine, an African plant, and had one of my mariners pick up a shipment of this root indigenous to South America called yage. You make a brew out of it and drink it…the former blew my lid right off and is not fit for human consumption, as far as I’m concerned. Nor is datura, which laid me out for two days cataloguing demons and picking glowing insects out of my hair. The food of the sewer-gods, datura is…the latter, the yage, though, was wonderful…I also managed to get several artificial compounds that produce expanded consciousness. One is called lysergic acid and is by far the most long lasting, six to ten hours of pure strangeness. I have also taken mescaline from the Mexican peyote cactus. Aldous Huxley wrote a book about his experience with mescaline a few years ago. It’s a clean experience, once the vomiting stops.”

“Huh,” Francis replied, sharing the sentiment. “Don’t you worry that all this could make you, well, you know…insane?”

“Quite the opposite, after having taken the honey, Francis. I first took it at seventeen. The honey’s effects are for life and set one’s energetic or spiritual metabolism at a certain vibratory level that remains, and outstrips all other electrochemical reactions of which the brain is capable. Now, were I to have taken these compounds without first having eaten the honey, the shiny stuff, I would probably be in a padded room right now….

His boss fell silent. Francis watched the sunlight blade across the floor’s paneling.

Van der Bloode cleared his throat. “Have you ever heard of the element ( )?

“No…”

“There is only one deposit of it in the entire world, in a Himalayan valley, a mine to which I provisionally own the deed.” His boss yawned.

Suddenly Francis felt faint. “Wait—s-say that again? A mine?”

“The ( ).”

It was a fragment of breath, sounded without consonants, like a melodic snippet that lilted up and down like some miniature landscape of vowels. The strangeness of the word brought him to attention: I-auh-EE-o-ah. “Did we, did we talk about this mine before once?”

“Not that I know of. No. In fact, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it to anyone.”

Francis sat down on the long chevron of light on the floor.

“You look pale, old boy.”

“Just a little, uh, you know.”

“The ( ) is a singular element. I like to think of it as a sort of anti-uranium. Its sphere of influence extends around that valley and has affected all the forms of life within its radius. My father and I visited it. The valley was blue, Francis—everything in it had a bluish tinge to it, the dirt, the flora. The bees make this honey from several species of lily that grow there exclusively…I’ve been searching for this valley ever since. I have managed to find artifacts, some blue flowers and blades of blue grass, a vial of water from its springs, and of course the honey grown there. The Tulku gave my father many jars of the stuff, which he kept in Dharamsala and which I recently brought back. I now have agents based in Bhutan who follow the Bumthang traders’ movements and buy up anything remotely tinged with the blue cast…Twice my watchers attempted to follow the traders on their procurement runs but foundered in Bumthang where the landscape gets impassable. Apparently there are hidden tunnels and such. We walked through one to get to the valley. I am loathe to mount an actual expedition because it would take a year and we might conceivably have to cover every square mile of the country. Flying and attempting to take aerial reconnaissance is likewise out of the question, far too dangerous to navigate the landscape in an airplane…and I’m far ahead of him, anyway…” he murmured.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Far ahead of who?”

He sighed. “My father made the mistake of telling Silas Cooke of his trip to Bhutan back in 1931. Silas thought my father was joking about the ( ) and the honey, but he told Robert and Trudy about it. Trudy didn’t care a whit, but the story excited Robert’s imagination. After my father and I returned from our journey there in ’47 Robert somehow found out we’d gone to Bhutan…To be truthful, this matter is what led to our row at Harvard three years later. That, and the fact that I was to marry Trudy led to our final sundering…

“I’ve learned that Robert has spent the past two years in the Himalayas in India and Nepal. As far as I know he has told no-one what the real object of his search is, the ( ). He has hired geologists and expert mountaineers by the dozen and has been trying to ingratiate himself with the Wangchucks of Bhutan, the royal family—with staggering failure at it, thank God. The order of monks who protect the valley’s location and the mine have never told the Wangchuck rulers of its presence within their borders, for reasons, what with Robert’s incessant bothering, are obvious….But were he to succeed…” He threw up his hands.

“Why? What’s so important about it?” Francis was now filled with nausea, kneading his hands against one another. “W-when I was at the Crim I heard things a-about you. About a party you held there, some hushed-up thing…”

“I heard those too,” he replied.

“What about it, Royal? I heard you’d been experimenting with drugs and using hypnosis. Parker and Hepworth—those two Beta Kappas who dropped out? Did you do something to them with this honey?”

“Hepworth and Parky,” he sniffed. “Haven’t thought about them in a while.”

“Royal—did you use it on them? Or these other drugs?”

“They volunteered. Yes, they both ate the holy toast, Francis. But hypnotism’s a crude parlor trick compared to what the honey does…Combined with use of the ( ), amazing things are possible. Most clear crystals like your calcites and quartzes refract light. The ( ) gathers light, and interacts with it. It has a double existence—one in our extensional, physical universe, and another in every other cosmos which has fallen by the wayside in the actualization of the One in which we inhabit…It exists in all possible universes for it is made of the primal stuff, a physical echo of the beginning, because it is in constant reversal of the entropic process of matter itself.” Van der Bloode then outlined a theory of infinite cosmoses the likes of which Francis hadn’t heard in his basic physics coursework. Meltzer’s eyes glazed over and fell upon the antiquarian books scattered across his boss’ desk. Van der Bloode smiled, his bathrobe rustling.

With effort Francis rose from the floor and managed to say, “People were talking about this stuff back in Cambridge—that you had a-access to some mineral. I heard a rumor that some friends of yours quit their classes and went looking for it?”

“Poppycock. You mean Parky and Hepworth, right?”

“But…”

He took a step forward and the purple eyes blazed. “You don’t believe me, Francis, but you shall someday—perhaps someday soon. I shall be compelled to show you the ( )’s efficacy. Believe me, we will be tested within the next year. And I will have an opportunity to show you what it—and I—can do. Now, Francis, you must swear to me never to tell anyone what I’m about to tell you. Swear to me upon your parents or to God or whatever would make you the most uncomfortable to breach it.”

He shrugged. “Okay. I swear.”

“You do. Okay. The ( ) lode is fashioned of an element of non-terrestrial origin.”

“Okay.”

“It is the only remnant of a city that existed upon the island of Tethysandria, the continent that merged with the Eurasian landmass four million years ago.”

“Alright.”

“The beings who had created this city chose to enter embodiment here shortly after our planet’s atmosphere and seas had formed…They are spiritual beings who are the guardians of this planet.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The beings created the city from secretions of their physical minds, which in turn occupied more than a four-dimensional existence. It is pure spirit and light congealed. Thus the arrow of time, of entropy, does not exist for this element. Should the earth be destroyed, the ( ) would remain floating in its elliptical orbit about the sun. It is indestructible.”

“Uh-huh—yes, I see.”

“The astral spirit, you might say, of these beings retreated into the element when their physical mission was over. Their essences passed back into their sporting grounds of the Over-universe from whence they came…But temory of their advanced knowledge lingers within the ( ). And with that knowledge, the conquering of all our earthly ills—disease, war, et cetera.”

“Mm.”

“They came here to help shepherd a certain kind of life here. To call into existence what lies beyond us, for we humans are caught halfway between, you might say.”

Francis had been edging towards the door. “And you’ve been searching for this element, this lode in Bhutan.”

“I am on its trail, yes. I want to return to the valley and make good on the deed I was given to it.”

Meltzer stopped in the doorway. He recalled the tales about Royal having psychonautical adventures with a few classmates, but was this just a story he’d been refining for years, for his personal amusement, from Harvard? He needed an anchor, some reality.

Change the subject.

“Royal, l-let me ask you something. Do you—d-did you ever—love your wife?”   

The Leonardesque smile appeared and he took a long breath through the nostrils. “When I said it was an arranged affair, I was serious. Silas Cooke and my father thought a marriage between Trudy and I would do their ventures well. A super-combine of VDB and Mercury was the object, I suppose. My father goaded me from the age of fifteen onward until I graduated from Harvard. Trudy was always a rotten egg, and my father knew it, but no matter. He’s not been happy about our divorce. The whole thing was a throwback to the age of the troubadours. Unfortunately, I had no Arnaut Daniel to come to my aid…Now Robert has maneuvered into the reins of Mercury. It is going to be a race, a tough future.”

 

WHEN HE AGAIN FELT human enough to move from his apartment van der Bloode took the limo to his second condo on 73^rd Street. He returned to the office a week later and behaved as if nothing had happened, but for a curt apology to all for the “unpleasantness.” He told Francis he’d received an emetic for his soul and would begin anew. The spree had not originated in grief but a well of joy. He ordered all conceivable varieties of flower for every office on the floor. Every morning Francis swept a new pot of Easter lilies from his desk and deposited it outside his door.

Then two weeks later came the slalom. Trudy Cooke refused to award joint custody of the twins; moreover, she was suing him for half of everything, for “psychological distress” suffered during their marriage. Francis Meltzer thought: Now was the time for his boss to get drunk…But the billionaire sat at his desk perusing an antique volume of Linnaeus and discoursing on the world’s flora, and how entire plant panaceas in the slow pharmacy would never be discovered as a result, if humans continued in their spendthrift ways. Van der Bloode was expansive. Francis learned why: Just before her departure on the second Europe trip, Sillmmann had collected Trudy’s booze bills, had all but deposed their personal chef Chen Chang and his wife and their cleaning staff, their drivers and caterers—and all of them had given statements before she could turn them to her side. In their affidavits they denied Trudy Cooke’s allegations about her husband’s abusiveness. Van der Bloode produced a letter Trudy had sent him from Vienna admitting to an affair while still married. He brought up her long history of psychiatrists. Royal had sensed the impending end, her intentions, and had covered his bases.

The twins? Trudy could keep them. He’d be glad to pay child support, alimony. But his empire would not be split down the middle. Francis was appalled. “You seem more relaxed lately, Francis.” He smiled mischievously. “How are you and Esther getting along?”

Francis started. “So, so you know…Did she tell you?”

“No,” he sniffed.

He came closer to his boss. “Have people been talking about it?”

“Wrong again. She is a sweet young woman. I knew something good would come of that desk of hers she chose…Not my style exactly.”

Francis felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. For a moment he felt disoriented. Then sanity returned. “Royal, do you have a microphone in her desk? Is this place wired for sound?”

Van der Bloode looked offended. “Of course not, old boy.”

Francis cleared his throat and choked, “Yes, I love her very much.”

His boss smiled. “That’s very good. I know I’ve some loose and fast rules here—but very good show, Francis. Shall we yet keep it mum?”

“That would be best. Until we announce we’re going to get married.”

“Good news!” He proffered a hand and Francis shook it.

“Sort of engaged to be engaged. I was going to tell you tomorrow, as a matter of fact. You beat me to the punch here,” he chuckled nervously.

“I imagine I’ll be needing a new receptionist before long, then.”

“Oh,” Meltzer waved dismissively, “she loves it here. Don’t want to get ahead of myself but when we have kids, yeah, then you’ll need a new receptionist.” He suddenly felt an overwhelming gratitude; tears welled and he turned away to face the grey monolithic Financial District.

“Must be nice to feel this way about someone,” van der Bloode murmured.

“What are you going to do, Royal? Will you ever get remarried?

“I wish it were that easy. No woman could stand to hear my blathering for more than a few days, I think. I’ll have to spread the conversation around with several ladies. I would like to have children again, some day. Perhaps maybe even a lot of them.”

 

THEN CAME THAT terrible summer and autumn of 1959. Van der Bloode was renegotiating the employee pension plans; men and women who had been with the corporation since 1925 were now retiring. The workers in his sole remaining Brazilian mine and the shipyards were unionizing and he dealt with collective bargaining headaches. Francis noticed blocks of van der Bloode’s days reserved for men who seemed out of place, with frayed suits and weatherbeaten faces. Their identity finally came clear when one entered wearing a sailing cap and bars of the merchant marine.

“They keep sending things in by courier,” Esther told him. “From all over the place. I signed for a packet of photographs from Jakarta the other day. It’s like he’s got his sailors spying or something.”

 

“AND IT WOULDN’T be the first time,” Swanson said later that day. “He’s watching the movement of two freighters on the Indian lanes that are smuggling something to Yokohama.”

But van der Bloode laughed at Francis’s questions. Only later would he understand what these men were doing—that the mystery was even deeper than he imagined.

 Things took a definitive turn south at the stockholders’ meeting, held at a minor ballroom the Waldorf-Astoria. It was only the second time van der Bloode had attended the conference. Francis was nervous. The security alone to keep the financial press—especially photographers—encompassed dozens of hired bodyguards. The day of the meeting Francis learned that the billionaire had accumulated dossiers on his major holders over the past eight years, and had been studying them. He intended to tell them of his new philanthropic visions. His boss had paid for a massive buffet but it went barely touched by the grey eminences and Wall Street upstarts filling the conference room. Francis sweat for two hours beneath figures on the overhead projector explaining the company’s course before his voice gave out. Then van der Bloode rose and spoke. After thanking them and a few sunny words on rising profits, his shook his head and stopped cold.

“We’re free to do what we want,” he said. “Each of you are free, rational men. Economic man trumps political man in these rooms. And both these trump plain ‘man,’ I suppose. In short, VDB will be moving in a different direction.” He commandeered the overhead and drew his new Tree of Life and proposed his new philanthropic enterprise.  During a pause, Harold Myerson, One Million Preferred, stood and said, “And how is this relevant?”

Van der Bloode sat down and pulled the microphone close and between squeals of feedback replied, “I for one wish it were not possible for fifty million dollars in tax of this corporation’s profits to go into that big black hole next to Washington D.C…I’m  speaking of the Pentagon. Fifty million. Gentlemen, that’s enough money to manufacture twelve hydrogen bombs, or four B-47 bombers or twenty-five of the latest fighter jets. I take these figures from the United States Government Accounting and the Internal Revenue and the 87^th Congress appropriations fiscal year 1959. But it doesn’t matter how you slice it. Would that it were possible to allocate which government fraud our taxes go.” Nervous laughter rippled through the room. “And the monies we withhold from our employees in taxes, is also a sham…I once put my barristers on a fact-finding mission to unearth the supposed law requiring American laborers to pay a tax on their work. They came up nil. There are no such laws as enacted by Congress and found Constitutional, from the establishment of the Federal Reserve to the present day—in fact, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled not once but twice that such a tax scheme is un-Constitutional. Which eats up about a million dollars of my company’s payroll every year, in preparation and paper work and administrative costs…Heh…They are inevitable as death, correct? We obtain valuable things from this money. The services supposedly gotten from this slavery of the wage-earners—the roads and bridges, schools and hospitals? Unlikely. Improbable. State and local taxes, gentlemen, and excise and corporate taxes cover those services. Where does all this excess Federal income go? The Pentagon, gentlemen.”

Francis Meltzer groaned and hung his head. Here it came. Van der Bloode rose again, the feedback shrieking between words. Meltzer scrambled for the PA box in the podium. Hands desperately cupped ears, fingertips found tympanums. Van der Bloode seemed oblivious to both the microphone noise and the effects his words were having. “I happen to know that a portion of you own stocks in Martin Marietta and Boeing and Hughes. Perhaps I am overstepping my boundaries here. Perhaps it is none of my lot to criticize others and bite the hand that feeds me…I happen to know that several of you took a tremendous loss on your investments on the island of Cuba. But you made up for your losses with investments in the Titan program and the Phantom fighter. Maybe now you hope those Fidelists who took away your dice palaces will get blown back to the Stone Age. No, perhaps you more than hope: Perhaps you and your friends in Congress may do your best to see that the Fidelists go down swinging. Well, this double-dealing does not sit well with me. You are playing not just two sides of the fence but are getting paid here by a gardener who is watching the grass wither on both sides.”

The stockholders were aghast in silence. There were murmurings and met glances, a consensus of disgust. Francis Meltzer, too, was appalled. He could imagine the hearsay about a breach of faith—in the system, in integrity, in all their persons—rippling outward within minutes into the New York financial community. Finally Myerson barked, “What has this to do with anything? This is, uh, very irregular to say the least, sir.”

“Did we all at VDB work so hard last year simply to buy twelve atomic weapons for those Pentagon Bastards? I don’t think so.”

Myerson rolled his quarterly reports into a ball and smacked the tabletop. “What the United States government chooses to do with its revenue is of no matter to us. You should read the newspapers, sir. The Reds could wipe us all from the face of the earth. I for one won’t stand for this peacenik tripe. I am sorry. Not today.”

He stood up and gathered his attaché, followed by several others. Quickly it became a torrent. Meltzer made a move for the door, his eyes pleading. Van der Bloode’s voice became serene and soothing as he studied each of the departing, his manner that of a preacher wishing well his flock as he turned them out to the Sunday noon. “You are all very rich men. That must be infinitely pleasing to you, to know that a few words from your mouths can determine so many destinies. We all seem to fancy ourselves masters of the universe. Minor universes, anyway…When in fact each of our fortunes far exceeds the maintenance of our own well-being and our children’s. Beyond that, it’s conceivable that our fortunes are actually theft. Tell me, what motivates each of you now to continue.”

They ignored him. Francis heard:

Is this what a Harvard degree brought him?

Man’s in a bubble.

Needs a head-shrinker.

“No? Then I want to go out to the world and spread the news. Yes. Spread the news that R.A. has lost his mind. Yes, he actually believes in something more than the bottom line. He believes that buying a bottle of Coca-Cola can actually help kill a child in the Haut-Katanga…For what R.A. sees in the supermarket aisle is not the same as what you see. Your wives simply grab your television dinners and toss them in the cart with your frozen peas and corn. On the other hand, I look about the same supermarket and notice rubber moldings and tungsten light fixtures made from French imports that came at the cost of Viet refugees and peasants’ blood. I see foiled tin and Formica and Freon. We in America don’t send goodwill ambassadors anymore, no, we send Whirlpool miracle kitchens and Bendix washers to prosthyletize for us. Westinghouse and General Motors are now our missionaries…But R.A. is more concerned with our future together as a human race. So go now. Tell them all, my friends. Tell them all that I have two new mottos. The first: ‘my anonymity precedes me.’ The second: ‘act as if you are utopia’s spy in a Fallen world’…We are in the middle of a swindle, gentlemen, a great substitution…We are bi-locating our future, and splitting America into multiple realities…My enemy is not our competitors, but of an entirely different order—a brotherhood spread across a series of nations whose mint and forge are petroleum dollars, and whose currency is corpses.”

Van der Bloode wasn’t satisfied until the major holders skulked from the room under his onslaught. Meltzer and Pillsbury and the other team members packed the files and transparencies in silence as van der Bloode made half-apologies to the remaining four holdouts and answered their skeptical questions about the Garden of Light Foundation.

 

AT FIRST, MELTZER thought he could repackage the outburst as an elaborate joke, or a test of faith, or hint that his boss was a periodic drunkard—any problem more open to public amendment than his resting-state eccentricity. But no, whether by booze or some unresolved psychological complex, van der Bloode’s inner sentiments had been revealed. The stockholders’ faith would be hard to regain. Meltzer quickly wrote a letter of apology, citing vague personal stresses his boss had recently undergone, then had Esther stealthily copy and address them to each man, enveloped, stamped, and ready to go. Next he composed his own resignation statement. It devolved into a percussive tango which jammed the arms of his Selectric as he ranted on for three vitriolic pages about the Potemkin villages which privilege erected around one’s own character, preaching utopist complaints to a heavenly choir.

By the end, his hands aching, his frustrations had spent themselves and he’d granted the man a second, and surely last, chance.

 

“’RUMORS OF ERRATIC BEHAVIOR at a recent annual stockholders meeting prompted speculation about Mr. R. Alexander van der Bloode’s health. It is reported by eyewitnesses that a verbal tirade by Mr. Van der Bloode caused a walk-out at the meeting on the 27^th, when he proposed a new direction for his company’…Any word about the content of my tirade? Of course not. Nothing but generalities to fuel the innuendo. There was nothing ‘erratic’ about it, was there?”

“It was an utterly irresponsible thing to do,” Pillsbury huffed. “That was not the right forum to air your opinions, not by a million miles.”

“Francis?”

“I concur with Lionel, sir. Seven of them dumped all their shares.”

“Which we bought back.”

“It was no place in which to air your political viewpoint.”

Van der Bloode slapped his desk. “’Viewpoint’? They are not just my views—they are the objective truth of the matter. The truth is the last thing which you will find in the pages of these rags,” he shook the paper and tossed it at them. Meltzer gnawed upon a pencil, then his lips, but he could not begin the speech he’d prepared, nor anything approaching it, with his mind a tangle of competing interests.

 

LOOKING BACK ON those awful months that followed, Francis Meltzer concluded that what happened could only have been a kind of payback for his boss’ reckless behavior. At first it manifested with sightings of a black LTD parked across Vesey Street, the vehicle somehow going unpunished by NO PARKING restrictions, the two men in the vehicle staring him down as he pulled from the underground garage…Then one night Francis noticed the big Ford had fallen in behind him in the Park Row traffic and followed him over the bridge into Brooklyn Heights to his street and parked down the block.

Spooked, the next night he was ready nonetheless. He turned left onto Broadway, then right onto Chambers and north onto Lafayette. The Ford stayed right behind him, with two men attempting to lock eyes with him in the rear-view mirror.

He kept silent about it in the office; he knew Van der Bloode would go nuts and the executives never hear the end of this darker brand of paparazzi stalking him. For two days there was no car. Then, the next night, as he came out of Bickford’s Cafeteria:

“Francis Alan Meltzer?”

He squinted at the two men and the badge the taller one was holding up like some talisman meant to induce obedience, the flawless shine on their wingtips, the dark crisp suits which branded them a breed apart from your Manhattan detective.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like to ask you some questions.” The man jerked a head back towards the Ford idling at the Broadway curb. Francis was so startled he barked, “If I do will you stop following me around and wasting taxpayers’ dime?” and couldn’t believe he’d said it.

The agents looked at each other with amusement. The tall one, built like a linebacker with a pug nose and bushy eyebrows, pointed at the front of the LTD and snapped, “You can grab some gorp right there and answer our questions, sir. Or perhaps, if you like, you can get in the car. If not, well, then we can always take you downtown.”

Francis looked around and returned, “We are downtown.”

The second one, sporting a round babyface and a wide stance, snapped, “Make it easy on yourself, and get in the car and we’ll talk. It’s up to you.”

He took the third option. The smell of pipesmoke and oily leather inside wrenched a sneeze from him. Another G-man was in the passenger seat rustling through a valise. The linebacker got in the opposite side and slid in, picking up a manila folder. Gum was distributed and Francis demurred the offer. The big agent opened the folder to show a stack of 8x10 photos—of van der Bloode sitting in what appeared to be a white gazebo with African men in military uniforms and a few in dashikis. “You’re CFO of VDB Enterprises. Your boss ever talk about his dealings with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia?”

Francis exhaled noisily and was sure they could feel his heart pounding through the frame of the car. “Maybe in passing, once, but that was in a more general context of African politics…What is this? Are you investigating him?”

“Certain allegations have come to our attention,” the babyface replied. His voice was East Texan, a farm boy risen to the Big Boys. He nodded at the picture. “That is Selassie’s right-hand man, and the Ethiopian ambassador. This photo was taken last month in Southampton, at mister Bloode’s residence.”

“So what?” he swallowed his surprise.

The beefy one leaned in close. “We have reason to believe he is transporting arms through a Red element in Selassie’s regime and on to the Congo. But then there’s this,” he flipped the photo to reveal another shot of van der Bloode, this time with another group of men in suits in the same outdoor setting. “That’s the Interior Minister of Brazil, of Kubitschek’s government. And next week, here—Wangchuck’s regent from the Kingdom of Bhutan.”

Francis shrugged. “And he’s in international business. He meets with people. So what? I don’t know anything about this.”

“Narcotics trafficking is a serious business,” the schoolboy drawled. “Serious Federal time.” Francis removed his handkerchief and mopped his brow. He was shown photos of the billionaire entering the Brooklyn mosque, the Chinatown temple, various apartment buildings, his Dakota residence. “He has some strange night habits. Like a nocturnal animal. All over the place, all the action’s going on at night.” He held up a picture. “This man here is Shah Massoud, an Afghani holy man. One of those guys who puts on a skirt and twirls around until he babbles. He’s also a Communist and his people back home raise opium poppies for a living. Thousands of acres of the stuff. Know what happens to those poppies? They end up in the veins of some sick sonofabitch a few blocks from here.”

The linebacker said, “But there’s a path between those poppies and that junky’s veins and it goes straight through your boss. He’s a part of it.”

Francis laughed hollowly. “On what evidence?”

“Oh, we’ve got the goods,” said the Texan.

“But that’s classified information at the present time,” the linebacker clarified dreamily.

Francis balked. “We have no dealings in Afghanistan at the present, so that’s horseshit. Say, does Hoover know you guys are out here chewing gum?”

The linebacker chuckled. “Maybe you just don’t know about it, chief. Boss is setting up his own network right under that nose of yours.”

“That’s right,” the southern agent said, flapping another picture. “Quite a night owl. We have three of these, just like this one, taken over four nights. This one is of him entering a building on Fifty-Sixth at Seventh. It’s an office building. Used to be a dancehall, and a famous one, but it’s seen better days. Owned by Merkel Holdings, but just got bought by some company called Alethea. What’s in it, and why is Bloode going there? He ever mention it, Frank?”

“Alethea?” Francis said, puzzled and shocked. “That’s, that’s one of his h-holding companies.”

All three agents exchanged tight glances. “So he owns that building.”

“I suppose so,” Francis said, “he owns it. That’s not my division, real estate. ”

“Hm. Okay. How about this. Bloode ever talk about something called the ‘Counterprism’?”

Francis scowled. “Never heard of it.”

“Seen this?”

The linebacker held up a drawing—the very one van der Bloode had made of his Tree of Life and doodled many times on notes. Francis fought the bilious volcano percolating in his sternum. “No—never seen it.”

“It’s his map of the network.” The linebacker beside him pulled out a pipe and tobacco. “Wish we had a legend for it.”

“Maybe you could get it for us.”

The silent agent in the front passenger seat lit an Old Gold and blew the smoke at Francis and asked, “Why did your boss gather personal information on his stockholders?”

Francis was shocked; how the hell could they know about that? “It, it was part of a, a study of his to show the distribution of, of money invested in defense companies, versus other more normal types of, of businesses…Is that what got you guys started, the thing that happened at the Waldorf-Astoria a few months ago? I’ll tell you he’s under unbelievable pressure. Problems with his wife. He just had a breakdown, of sorts.”

The linebacker nodded to himself. “What do you know about his wife, Gertrude?”

“I’ve never met her.”

“Van der Bloode talk about her?”

“Ye-e-es,” Francis said defensively.

“And? Bad-mouth her?”

“Like I just said, I have never met her. He hardly talks about her. He’s a very private man and doesn’t discuss his personal life with the staff. Ever. All I know is that they’re getting divorced.”

“He ever talk about her mental health?”

“No.”

The Old Gold smoker evened his cuffs and said, “We need shipping manifests, Frank. If we can’t get them, that will be unfortunate for you. You could spare your company a lot of grief if you just got us mimeographs of the manifests.”

The Texan held up a hand, index finger and thumb spread wide. “We have a file like this on this beatnik Bloode and his company. If you don’t help us out here, Frank, there will be subpoenas. A public airing, too. We guarantee it.”

Francis took a breath and tried to remain calm as pedestrians bustled about the sidewalks outside, a world out of reach, this oiled leather cabin sealed away, as the man went on talking. “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he replied suddenly, “in the wrong neighborhood. Van der Bloode’s no communist. I would know. What do you need to see, his charitable contributions? H-his civic donations? His bowling scores? Those I could provide—hell, you could walk into Vesey Street and get those yourself.”

All three of them smiled disingenuously. “That wouldn’t help us.”

“No that would be too easy and liable to clear the whole thing up. You’re wasting your time. You should be out there chasing Costello’s thing, the Mafia.”

“This is serious business,” the Southern schoolboy said. “You’re fellow-traveling with a man who’s a major conduit in the communist world. Look at him.” He nodded at the photo. “That beard makes him look like fucking J. Fred Muggs. Surely you don’t want to continue associating yourself with this? It’s another strike against your people.”

Francis snapped, “Excuse me?”

The linebacker clucked his teeth and gazed out on the stream of pedestrians, puffing his pipe. “Bureau keeps turning over rocks and finding your kind beneath ‘em. Not that we’re prejudiced or anything. Far from it. It’s just that we tend to notice religious affiliations after a while. It becomes a bare fact. The Rosenbergs and Greenglass—what was that about? If it weren’t for them, America would be the sole power with the Bomb.”

Francis was aghast.

The pipe man said, “So be a good Jew and help out your fellow Americans. Otherwise you’re helping Mother Russia. And you know where that leads. Let’s make a show of allegiances here.”

He’d had enough. The pipe-smoker had his arm over the black vinyl of the seat, showing a ring, possibly of Masonic origin, on his pinky. Francis pointed at it, his fingertip within an inch of the gold band. “What’s that, one of those Ovaltine decoder rings? You assholes at the Bureau got your own secret squadron?”

The schoolboy didn’t like that at all. “Don’t get smart with us, Frankie, you know where this could go.”

Meltzer jammed on his fedora and pulled the door handle and sprang out to the sidewalk.

“We’ll be in touch,” came the chorus of voices.

 

THE NEXT MORNING he exited the elevator, trying to ignore the stomach that had recently been reminding him of its existence. He shook his umbrella, ducked into the restroom and took a long gulp of Pepto-Bismol. The firm averaged three bottles a day. All of them feared ulcers. And now this. 

He shambled into the boardroom, where Pillsbury was sitting in the corner, his head down next to the RCA-Victor, listening to the heated voices shouting the Jamaica Fields results and slapping the tabletop in frustration. Francis pawed at his stomach and popped three sticks of Juicyfruit, waving away Pillsbury’s offers of a cigar and celebration down the block: VDB Enterprises had officially breached one billion dollars in adjusted revenues. Meltzer vigorously shook another bottle of their communal milkshake and drew from it before handing the young accountant the last teaspoon. The three standing fans perched in the corners oscillated around the gathering executives like sentinels shaking their heads in negation.

Francis knew he had to tell them. He’d barely slept. He’d imagined himself twitching under the hot lights of a US Senate inquiry, the television camera intimate on his folded, clammy hands, perhaps, toying with a handkerchief—if he was lucky, they would offer him that facelessness such as Costello had got. He doubted it.

 

“JOIN THE CLUB,” Pillsbury later sneered. “Those same three guys knocked on my door last week.”

The billionaire jerked in his seat. “Why didn’t you tell us, for God’s sake?”

“Well, I’m saying it now, right?” he tried.

Van der Bloode was shaking his head. Rain lashed and beaded the arch-windows behind him.

Meltzer wiped a damp forehead with his handkerchief. “Did they show you photos and want to make some sort of deal?”

“Yep.” Pillsbury paused, searching for the least alarming words. But there weren’t any. He gazed at his boss and said, “They’re fishing on the assumption you’re Red and working with the KGB or something. A narco plot based out of Central Asia.”

Van der Bloode chuckled. Swanson said, “Think it’s the Waldorf that got ‘em started?”

“No,” van der Bloode replied. “No, Mr. Swanson…I—uh, we—rebuffed the Central Intelligence Agency last year. They wanted to place their agents on our tankers to spy on the Syrians. I believe that is what this is all about. I’m frankly surprised it has taken this long for therevenge to come wending though the night.”

“What did they want you to do?” Pillsbury asked.

Van der Bloode waved dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. We’re not lackeys of the US government, and that is the bottom line.”

Pillsbury folded his arms and gazed restlessly about the room. “They told me the KGB’s planted agents on our merchant marine and another one in our executive acting as a go-between with the Russian embassy here or at the UN.”

“Jesus!” Swanson cried.

Francis gulped. “The rumor alone could wipe us out…”

Van der Bloode stroked the side of his nose and pointed an index finger skyward. “Ridiculous! This is a basic divide-and-conquer tactic—or divide and divest, rather. But they’re probably going to enlist the help of the newspaper at some point to ratchet up the pressure. Then maybe they think I’ll play ball with the Agency. Or perhaps they’re doing this simply to punish me as an example to other businessmen.”

“Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, paranoid?” Swanson said.

Francis held back. There was, of course, that possibility that all the nocturnal meetings he himself had witnessed had in fact been subversive in nature. Their boss said, “It is the new modus operandi for Hoover and Dulles, I’m afraid.”

“How do you know that?” Dexter shot back, incredulous.

“I only name them because they’re the public faces of the machine. We’ve reached an enviable level of revenues, and we’re about to cease playing ball with the world. So this is a collective form of punishment. But we won’t stand for it, will we?”

Meltzer exclaimed, “Sir, we could all get called up before Un-American Activities. We have to be—realistic about this.”

The billionaire rubbed bleary eyes behind his dark glasses. “That’s their endgame, I suppose, a public airing…Let me ask you this—are you boys convinced that I am not a card-carrying member of the party, or even harbor a shred of Red belief?”

Dexter shrugged. “Of course.”

“Absolutely,” Pillsbury seconded.

“Nor am I a fellow traveler? Or a narcotics bag man?”

Again they concurred. “Mr. Meltzer?”

“No, no—I’m convinced,” he replied uneasily.

“Then there it is. That’s good enough for me.” His face went grave as Esther called from the desk intercom. “But I’m meeting with one of the mailroom chaps, and he has something interesting to say about something he witnessed yesterday.”

There was a knock on the door. A slight, bald man in blue jeans and plaid shirt entered, limping timidly into the office. His face was acne-ravaged and scarred beyond the careworn but with eyes that shone bright and clear as he approached the desk and greeted them each. Pillsbury introduced him as Clarence Stuck. He cleared his throat and told them about the black car he’d seen in the alley twice over the past two weeks and how a few nights ago he’d witnessed three men in suits fill its trunk with the unshredded paper waste of the 17^th floor.

“You see their license plates, Clarence?”

“No, it was kinda dark anyway, couldn’t see a damn thing in that alley, on the fronta that car…”

“Big black Ford LTD?”

He nodded.

 

EACH FLOOR HAD its own numbered Dumpster in the rear alley. The next night van der Bloode lingered with Clarence Stuck at the boiler room’s door, listening to him tell his life story and thank him every few minutes for his job. Van der Bloode asked only a continued silence as repayment on the matter of his rescue from the Bowery.

The LTS didn’t appearbut three nights later, sure enough, a black Ford growled into the alley at around midnight and disgorged three men in dark suits who rapidly and with a practiced set of almost balletic motion emptied more than half the Dumpster’s bales of neatly tied documents in less than a minute.

“Bloody Bastards,” van der Bloode cursed. He stepped from the door’s shadows, his soles clapping in the alley’s dim sour brickwork, and called out, “Perhaps it would work better if you just paid the rubbish men to just bring it to you…I should call the metropolitan police, since you are on my property and stealing—”

But the man on the Dumpster was already leaping to the pavement as his cohorts faded into the car. In seconds the Ford screeched in reverse from the alley, lights off. It had no front license plate.

“Hoover’s boys,” van der Bloode sighed to Clarence Stuck. “Well, they’ll certainly get a surprise in those particular bundles of joy.”

 

AS THE SUMMER HEAT DESCENDED the reports of tailing cars diminished. There were no subpoenas, nor summons. A collective relief swept through the 17^th floor. What had they all been fearing? Francis had the resources of a hundred-million dollar company at his disposal, the ear of its owner and president and CEO. And van der Bloode’s confidence in the face of potential disaster had been infectious. He’d corresponded with his stockholders and had sit-downs with the other seven major holders before the quarterly meeting, stopping short of apology but explaining a recent course reading Gandhi and the Dhammapada as the source of his ballroom tirade.

 

ONE NIGHT FRANCIS’S parents called him at home. Lt. Colonel John Meltzer had been working with cancer patients at the Mayo Clinic for the past years. Francis was unsure at first how much he should tell his father how far he had ventured into this strange labyrinthine byway of corporate life.

“We look for your name in the paper,” his mother Naomi said from the second telephone line.

“Caught you in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago talking about—what was it? Independence?”

“Interdependence. Yeah, that’s the 25-cent word of the moment. We’re just bluffing half the time, dad, it’s all hot air.”

“So I paid $15,000 for a business degree so you could blow a lot of hot air. Fine. Harvard’s doing well for you, son.”

His mother Naomi broke in. “How is the search for Mrs. Francis Meltzer going?”

“I’m dating.” As the innocuous conversation surrounding his love life went on, he sensed a lack of spontaneity in his parents’ voices, a coordination between them.

“Is your company in trouble?” his father said, his tone serious. “I read something in the papers about your boss there, had some sort of blow-up at a stockholders—”

“It’s nothing, dad. We’re under a ton of pressure here.”

“I can imagine. You know, son, I have something to tell you. It’s kind of difficult.”

Francis drew a breath. Illness? “Uh…”

“Some government men came to see me last night, and were asking questions about you.”

And not a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in sight. “FBI men, was it?”

“You know about this, then?”

“They are under mistaken impressions about Mr. van der Bloode…He’s not a Red. There are no Reds in the company.”

“They didn’t ask about him, they asked about you. I—I was amazed at what they knew. Did you really—did you buy a third car, Francis? An El Dorado?”

Meltzer stuttered into the phone. “I received a generous bonus last year, dad. I waited a year for that car, too.”

“I don’t care that you bought it, or how, just that you didn’t tell us.”

“Mom, you still there?”

“Yes, Frank,” meek, distant, “I’m here.”

“Your mother nearly fainted when I told her. These men had a run-down of your purchases and your banking activities. They had pictures of you. Wanted to know about your friends at Harvard and the clubs you joined, and what happened in Cairo…And how we paid for all your treatments and the surgery.”

Francis breathed rapidly, felt his pulse racing. “And?”

“And nothing,” John Meltzer said, anger entering his voice. “I told him the truth. I told him everything. I know you’re no communist and I told them so. You think that would be enough. No.”

 Francis could tell he was holding back something, saved, possibly to be kept from him. “What did they say about me?”

“They were talking about some letters you had written to Japan back when you were thirteen?”

Oh, God. “Letters?”

“They showed me two letters you’d written to the hibakusha, son. Said there were a few dozen more you’d sent. They wanted to know how you’d known those addresses. What could I tell them? You were there, with me, we were all there, and you copied down their addresses. That’s what I told them.”

Francis swallowed. “I wrote those letters, yes, and there’s no law against that.”

“Yes, I know that, and that’s what I told them, too. Wasn’t good enough. Son of a bitch insinuated I told you to write them. As if they were propaganda. Like I must have taught you how to propagandize that way.” His father’s voice was rising, each word burning into Francis’s stomach. He hadn’t heard his father use this tone and volume in a decade. “Why the hell would you do such a thing? How did you do it? My files?”

“Do they think I’m a Meiji sympathizer—back when I was a kid?”

“How did you get their addresses?” he shouted. “From my files?”

“That’s right, dad.”

“John,” his mother cut in, “don’t yell at him, we—”

“Names, stay out of it. Just hang up, please. Put the goddamn phone down right now.”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Francis pleaded.

The phone clicked as his mother, without a goodbye, hung up.

“Ten years in the Navy and I’m put on the spot like this?”

“I was young.”

“You’ll be sure to mention that next time, I hope, when you see them. Not if, but when. Which would be when?”

“Damned if I know. Three men talked to me in Midtown last month. They were real jerks. They’re trying to make some case against my boss and I wish I could tell you why but I can’t.”

“Try me.”

He paused. “This was last year. He was approached by Central Intelligence, dad, to put spies on our freighters. And he refused to do it. I can tell you why. He said that something like that would start small, with one, two, three men, but they would keep coming back and asking for more, ten, fifteen of their agents on the ships, all over the world, and in a few years they’re telling him what to do and running the company and delivering munitions and guns and God knows what else and soon the company name’s got CIA on it in big neon letters. And soon we’re in their pockets.”

“And this is what you think too?”

“Doesn’t matter what I think, it’s the truth. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. That’s what this is about. He refused to let them do it and ipso facto he’s labeled a pinko and you know, word gets over to the FBI and here we are. They are putting on the pressure and—Dad? Hello?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear that? Mom, are you back?”

“Naomi?” John Meltzer said. The clicking sounded in triple bursts of three, and the line reverted to a clarity of transmission neither father nor son had noticed in the preceding quarter hour. Quickly they hung up.