Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (46 page)

“God, I’d love to see him in his robes banging on his tambourine in the street,” said Bitsy eagerly. “We should all make a pact to always be on the lookout for Hare Krishnas and promise to call everyone if one of us finds him.”

“In my opinion,” said Fred Cartmell, “we would all be well advised to stay clear of him.”

“Do you think it’s all really true?” asked Bitsy.

“What?” asked Roger. “The
CIA
thing or the Hare Krishnas?”

“Either,” answered Bitsy. “Both.”

“Come on, Charley,” said Roger. “What did Nick say exactly, when you talked to him?”

Charley again adopted his mysterious air, deepening his voice and weighing his words pompously. “I really don’t have any more information than anyone else. However, Nick did indicate that he was involved in some sort of government service that it would be inappropriate to discuss. I’m surprised he hasn’t shown up, though. I believe he’s traveling quite a lot — he may be out of town.”

“Well, I know for sure the
FBI
or somebody spent a good two hours with me getting absolutely every piece of information I could come up with about him,” said Roger.

“You too?” asked Bitsy.

“They’ve talked to everyone who’s ever been in the same room with him,” said Charley.

“And they were pretty damn thorough too,” said Roger. “Amazingly thorough. Seemed kind of ridiculous, actually, beyond a certain point. But there’s probably not a single interesting fact about Nick they don’t know.”

“Nor a single interesting fact about Nick that they
do
know,” contributed Cartmell. “I defy anyone to name an interesting fact about Nick. That’s pretty much the whole point of Nick.”

“Well, I’ve never laid eyes on the man,” said the other woman, “but from what you say, he seems to have done at least one interesting thing.”

“Oh, Nick’s all right,” volunteered Bitsy without much apparent feeling. “Anyway, it must be something like the
CIA
. As opposed to the Hare Krishnas, I mean. He was never much on belief of any sort, as far as I could see. I can’t imagine him doing anything like that. I went out with him once or twice when we were in college,” she added, either to add weight to her opinion or because she thought the fact might in some way make her seem more interesting.

“It’s not clear to me,” said Cartmell, “in what way infiltrating the Hare Krishnas for the
CIA
is less weird than simply joining the Hare Krishnas straight out, without any confusion of motives. In fact, both on moral grounds and as a taxpayer, I think I prefer the latter. Not that I like the idea of my taxes being used to fund Halloway’s spiritual development.”

“Why shouldn’t Nick have your money?” said Roger. “They’re not going to put it to any better use.”

“I’d rather have it put into missiles or welfare fraud. Halloway has never evidenced much capacity for spiritual development. And anyway, why can’t I have my money? Now that they revise the tax laws every year, it’s a tricky business hanging on to anything at all.”

“I wish I’d been a tax lawyer,” said Roger. “It’s incredible what you have to go through just to figure out what you owe. I don’t know how people do it. I have this dispute with the
IRS
now — actually, there’s not even that much money involved — but I have these oil royalties — not much, but naturally one fraction is ‘tier one non-Sadlerochit oil,’ whatever that is, and another is something called ‘incremental tertiary oil’ — I wish I could show you the reporting requirements on this…”

I noticed after a while that I was not following Roger’s anecdote, although a few months ago I would probably have found it perfectly entertaining. I was, I realized, a bit shaken by this discussion which I had so eagerly anticipated. It was the tone that had been somehow disheartening, the lack of warmth. Or of affection. I tried to remember how I had talked of absent friends in such situations. It probably meant nothing, really. Still, these things can engender a feeling of emptiness. Remoteness.

I wandered in a bit of a trance out into the hall and down to the empty bedroom that had been left open so that guests could dump coats and briefcases on the bed. The weather was vaguely threatening so that, despite the time of year, there were a number of raincoats and shawls scattered about. I sat down on a chair by the window. Someone had left half a gin and tonic on the sill. I sipped at it, watching the liquid run down my esophagus and form a faint outline of the bottom of my stomach. I think I half hoped that someone would come in and notice before it faded. It would be a relief in a way. Have the whole thing over with. Free of all the decisions and anxiety. People would look after me. The tonic was flat and unpleasantly sweet, the gin like a chemical. Soon the glass was empty. I thought that I should probably leave, but I continued to sit there.

I heard someone approaching down the hall. Helen Carlson walked in followed by Tommy Peterson. I have always liked Helen: quiet, but sensible and solid.

As they entered, Tommy was saying, “I’ve arranged it with Bob” — Bob Carlson is Helen’s husband and a friend of mine — “so that the four of us are going out together for something to eat.” The Petersons and the Carlsons have always done everything together. Best friends.

“This is Jane’s, isn’t it?” said Helen, picking up a long raincoat from the bed and handing it to Tommy. Tommy took it and folded it over his left arm. Helen placed her open hand on Tommy’s shirt front and slid it down into his trousers. Tommy’s eyes closed momentarily and he expelled the air from his lungs with a faint sound that was almost a grunt or a sigh. He tried to embrace her, but with her arm twisted beneath his belt, they remained awkwardly turned apart from each other. Tommy ran his right hand down her back, still holding his wife’s coat over the other arm like an attendant. He bent his head and kissed her.

I must have made some noise. I don’t know. But something made them both pull abruptly apart and look around. No one to be seen. They had impassive expressions on their faces again. Helen picked up a bag and, moving toward the door, said, “Why don’t we try Parma?”

I listened to their steps and voices fade down the hall. Difficult to know what is in the hearts and minds of other people. Difficult, now that I think of it, to know always what is in one’s own heart and mind. Anyway, I found myself a bit demoralized. Partly it was finding out about Helen and Tommy, although you are always finding out these things about other people. But it was also the way I was finding out. Without their knowing. Spying. Sneaking. You find that this sort of illicit, intimate information about people only separates you from them.

I walked back through the hall. In the front rooms there were only half as many people as before. They were all loud, grinning crookedly, drunk. I slipped out the service entrance and down the stairs. The air outside was close and dirty. I should force myself to hurry, before it started to rain. I should really never have gone out in this weather.

A
fter that I found myself avoiding people I had known in my former life, but in my search for a broker I continued to go to parties of every conceivable kind almost daily for the next several weeks. It was the perfect time of year for it. The people who are still in the city in July, especially if they are single or their families have left for the summer, will often go out every night of the week, eating in restaurants and wandering from one gathering to another. I would spot little bands of them in the street or climbing out of taxis, and I would follow them to their celebrations, or sometimes I would simply walk into one of the big postwar apartment buildings with hundreds of apartments and go through the corridors until I heard the roar of a party behind a door. It never took long. I would drop in sometimes on three or four parties in an evening, until I found one that looked promising, and then I might hang about for hours, drifting from conversation to conversation, sometimes sipping cautiously from an abandoned drink in a corner, using as a straw the plastic shaft of an otherwise useless, invisible ball-point pen from which I had removed the ink cartridge. At these moments I think I sometimes lost sight of the fact that I was not really a guest at the party.

By the middle of July I had taken a careful look at several likely-looking brokers, finally settling on one Willis T. Winslow,
III
. I had first encountered Willy, as he is known to his friends, at a party on Seventy-second Street, where I spotted him aggressively telling another young man a story about an exciting disk-drive manufacturer selling at forty or fifty times earnings. I could see at once that he held promise. For one thing, although it was early in the evening, he had already drunk a great deal and showed no signs of easing off. Willis, I was soon able to observe, drinks almost continuously when in company. But unlike a lot of people, he does not lose his bearings when he is by himself: he keeps on drinking. I stayed with him the rest of the evening, and long before it was over he was having trouble moving about. Over the next few days I found out where Willy lived, where he had gone to school, who his friends were. I attended more parties with him. I even went in one day and stood next to his desk for several hours, listening to him talk to his customers over the telephone and watching his sporadic attempts to read research reports. At around eleven in the morning he came back from the water fountain with a paper cup and, slipping it into a desk drawer, managed to pour a shot of gin into it from a pint he had secreted there.

In the third week of July I saw my opportunity. One of the offices in which I had spent many tedious hours over the past month was that of Myron Stone, who was one of the most successful and feared of the corporate raiders — and this is a business in which a history of past success is by far the most useful weapon in securing future success. Over the course of seven months he had quietly accumulated, for various anonymous accounts that he or his associates controlled, just under 5 percent of the stock of Allied Resources Corp., at prices ranging from $9.50 to $11.00 a share, and then, having reached that point, he had paused for several weeks to marshal his forces for the final onslaught. During the time I had been watching him, he had been assembling a war chest of something around $100 million in commitments (which he would later describe to the press as $300 million) and working with his lawyers to prepare for every legal attack or defense that might conceivably be undertaken. In the second week of July I could see that this activity had reached a new level of intensity and that he would soon have to move in for the kill. I could always find Stone in his office, night or day, and, growing increasingly fascinated with his campaign, I spent far more time there than I really needed to for my purposes. What particularly astonished me was how much he had learned about Allied Resources and the people who ran it and how thorough his plans for its dismemberment and reconstitution already were. He was, however, not a sentimental man, and there would clearly be some anguishing moments for the current stewards of the assets of Allied Resources. It was perhaps only humane and best for everyone that the current management had so little warning of just how much more Myron Stone was going to do for the shareholders than they had thought necessary.

When the markets opened on Monday of the third week in July, Stone began buying Allied Resources shares again, quickly running over the 5 percent limit. He would now have ten more days to buy shares in secret, before he would have to file his 13D with the
SEC
and announce his intentions to an innocent and unsuspecting world. In those ten days, using brokers and accounts under various names which people would not connect to him, he would amass as much more of the stock as he could, before the public announcement drove the price up and before Allied Resources management realized what was going on and tried to stop him. But his massive buying would itself force the price up, and inevitably more and more people would figure out what was happening — or at least that
something
was happening — which would also tend to send the price soaring upward during the days before the announcement.

The day after Stone crossed the 5 percent mark, I was at the Crosby apartment, waiting for Mrs. Dixon to leave. As the door shut behind her, I was dialing Willis T. Winslow’s number.

“Hello, Willy? This is Jonathan Crosby… We met last night.”

“Oh, of course,” he replied. “How are you?” Willy’s memory of the night before, as of all nights before, would be sketchy at best.

“Fine, thanks,” I said with as much boyishly ingenuous enthusiasm as I could generate. “I really enjoyed our discussion, and I wanted to follow through on opening the account with you. Is this a good time for you? I don’t want to bother you if you’re busy now.”

“Oh, no. Not at all… I mean, any time will be busy, but this is as good a time as any. I just… Uh, let me get some information here, Jonathan… Get the paperwork out of the way… Just a second… Let me find the forms here…”

“It was good,” I said, while he searched for the account application, “to hear about Jim Washburn again. Although I was really more a friend of his brother Bob’s. Awful about Bob.”

“Terrible,” said Willis absently. “Let’s see. No, that’s not it… People drive much too much… Sorry I’m taking so long here. You went to Hotchkiss with Bob?”

“Actually, I knew them before that. Before we moved to Switzerland. Great people, the Washburns. You must know Peter Andrews from school as well.”

“Sure. Absolutely. Great guy. I gather he’s living out in California now.”

“That’s what somebody told me. Were you the same year as Peter?”

“Year after. Great guy… . Here it is. Let me just get a few pieces of information from you. Now, how exactly do you want your name to appear on the account?”

I spelled it out for him. Jonathan B. Crosby. He asked for my home address. I gave him the Fifth Avenue address, and I could tell he liked it. He asked for the business address. I told him I wasn’t really doing anything right now; I was just here in New York staying with my uncle while I figured out what I wanted to do. Social Security number? I gave him my new number. Bank references?