Nightwork (27 page)

“Very,” I said.

“I dislike flying,” Fabian said. “I am either bored in the air or frightened. Everyone to his own satisfactions. Mine, I’m afraid, are banal and selfish. I hate to work; I like the company of elegant women; I enjoy traveling, with a certain emphasis on fine, old-fashioned hotels; I have a collector’s instinct, which up to now I have had to suppress. None of this is particularly admirable, but I’m not running as an admirable entry. Actually, since we’re partners, I’d prefer it if we could share the same tastes. It would reduce the probability of friction between us.” He looked at me speculatively. “Do you consider yourself admirable?”

I thought for a moment, trying to be honest with myself. “I guess I never thought about it one way or another. I guess you could say it never occurred to me to ask myself if I was either admirable or unadmirable.”

“I find you dangerously modest, Douglas,” Fabian said. “At a crucial moment you may turn out to be a dreadful drag. Modesty and money don’t go well together. I like money, as you can guess, but I am rather bored by the process of accumulating it and am deeply bored by most of the people who spend the best part of their lives doing so. My feeling about the world of money is that it is like a loosely guarded city which should be raided sporadically by outsiders, noncitizens, like me, who aren’t bound by any of its laws or moral pretensions. Thanks to you, Douglas, and the happy accident that led you and myself to buy identical bags, I may now be able to live up to my dearest image of myself. Now—about you—Although you’re over thirty, there’s something—I hope you won’t take this unkindly—something youthful, almost adolescent—unformed, perhaps—that I sense in your character. If I may say so, as a man who has always had a direction, I sense a lack of direction in you. Am I unfair in saying that?”

“A little,” I said. “Maybe it’s not a lack of direction, but a confusion of directions.”

“Perhaps that’s it,” Fabian said. “Perhaps you’re not yet ready to accept the consequences of the gesture that you have made.”

“What gesture?” I asked, puzzled.

“The night in the Hotel St. Augustine. Let me ask you a question. Supposing you had come across that dead man, with all that money in the room, before your eyes went bad, while you still were flying, still were playing with the idea of marriage—would you have done what you did?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“There’s one thing you can always depend on,” Fabian said. “The wrong man will always be in the wrong place at the right moment.” He poured some more wine for himself. “As for me—there never was a time in my whole life that I would have hesitated for a second. Well, all that’s in the past. We want to move as far away as possible from the original source, to cover it up, so to speak, with so much fresh capital, that people will never speculate about just how we started in the first place. Don’t you agree?”

“In principle, yes,” I said. “But just how do you propose to do it? We can’t depend upon buying winning horses every day. …”

“No,” Fabian said, “I must admit, we have to regard that as unusual.”

“And you’ve told me you’re never going to play bridge or backgammon again.”

“No. The people I had to associate with depressed me. And the deception I had to practice made me a little ashamed of myself. Duplicity is unpleasant for a man who, by his own lights, would like to have a high opinion of himself. I sat down every night with the cold intention of taking their money away from them and nothing more—but I had to pretend to be friendly with them, be interested in them and their families, enjoy dining with them. …I really was getting too old for all that. Money …” He pronounced the word as though it were a symbol for a problem in mathematics that had to be solved. “To get the most pleasure out of money, it is best not to have to think about it most of the time. Not to have to keep on making it, with your own efforts or your own luck. In our case, that would mean investing our capital in such a way as to ensure us a comfortable income over the years. By the way, Douglas, what is your notion of a comfortable yearly income?”

“Fifteen, twenty thousand dollars,” I said. “Thirty, maybe.”

Fabian laughed. “Come, come, man, raise your sights a little.”

“What would
you
say?”

“One hundred, at least,” Fabian said.

“That’ll take some doing,” I said.

“Yes, it will. And entail some risks. From time to time it will also take nerve. And no matter what happens, no recriminations. And certainly no more stilettos.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident of the future than I actually was. “I’ll go along.”

“We share all decisions,” Fabian said. “I’m saying this as a warning to both of us.”

“I understand. Miles,” I said, “I’d like something in writing.”

He looked at me as though I had slapped him. “Douglas, my boy …” he said sorrowfully.

“It’s either that,” I said, “or I’m getting out right now.”

“Don’t you trust me?” he asked. “Haven’t I been absolutely honest with you?”

“After I hit you over the head with a lamp,” I said. Tactfully, I didn’t bring up the subject of the six-thousand-dollar horse that had actually cost fifteen thousand. “Well, what’s it to be?”

“Putting something in writing always leads to ugly differences of interpretation. I have an instinctive distaste for documents. I prefer a simple, candid, manly handshake.” He extended his hand toward me across the table. I kept my hands at my sides.

“If you insist.” He withdrew his hand. “In Zurich, we’ll put it all into cold legal language. I hope neither of us lives to regret it.” He looked at his watch. “Lily will be waiting for us for lunch.” He stood up. I took out my, wallet to pay for the wine, but he stopped me and dropped some coins on the table. “My pleasure,” he said.

“W
ELL, DONE AND DONE,” FABIAN
said as he and I left the lawyer’s office and stepped out into the slush of the Zurich street. “We are now bound together by the chains of law.” The agreement between us had just been notarized and the lawyer had promised to have us incorporated in Liechtenstein within the month. Liechtenstein, I had discovered, which imposes no taxes and where corporate income and outlay are closely guarded state secrets, had an irresistible attraction for lawyers.

There were to be two shares outstanding in the corporation—one owned by Fabian, the other by myself. There was a simple justification for this that I did not understand. For some reason which had to do with the intricacies of Swiss law, the lawyer had appointed himself president of the corporation. We had to choose a name for it and I had offered Augustine Investments, Inc. There had been no dissenting votes. Various fees had been paid.

Fabian had gallantly volunteered to include in the agreement the clause guaranteeing me the right to withdraw my original seventy thousand dollars at the end of a year. We had been to the private bank where Fabian already had a numbered account, and we made it a joint one, so that neither of us could take out any money without the consent of the other.

We each deposited five thousand dollars in our own names in an ordinary checking account in the Union Bank of Switzerland. “Walking-around money,” Fabian called it.

If either of us were to die, the full assets of the company and the balance in the bank went to the survivor. “It’s a little macabre, I know,” Fabian had said to me as I read the clause, “but one can’t afford to be finicky in matters like this. If you have any misgivings, Douglas, I could point out that I’m considerably older than you and can be expected to be the first to leave the scene.”

“I realize that,” I said. I didn’t tell him that it had occurred to me as I read the document that it also offered him the temptation to push me off a cliff or poison my soup. “Yes, it’s very fair.”

“Are you satisfied now?” Fabian asked, as we picked our way around a puddle. “Do you feel protected?”

“From everything,” I said, “except your optimism.” We had been in Zurich six days under a gray and sullen sky and in those six days Fabian had bought twenty thousand dollars more worth of gold, had been in and out of the sugar market, on margin, in Paris, twice, and had acquired three abstract lithographs by an artist I had never heard of, but who was going to skyrocket, as Fabian put it, in the next two years. As he had told me, he did not like to allow money to lie idle.

Fabian had discussed all our deals with me and had patiently explained the working of the commodity markets, where fluctuations were so erratic that fortunes could be made or lost in the space of an afternoon and where we had done incredibly well in sugar between Thursday and Friday. I understood, or pretended to understand, our convoluted operations, but when asked for an opinion could only leave decisions up to him. My own naïveté shamed me and I felt the way I had as a small boy in an arithmetic class when I was called on by the teacher for a question which every pupil but myself was prepared to answer. It all seemed so complicated and dangerous that I was beginning to wonder how I had been able to survive in the same world as Miles Fabian for thirty-three years.

By the end of the six days I wasn’t sure anymore that I could stand the daily wear and tear on my nerves. There was cold sweat on the palms of my hands every morning.

As for Fabian, nothing seemed to disturb him. The bigger the risk he was taking, the more serene he became. If there was one lesson I would have liked to learn from him, it was that. For the first time since I was a child, I began to suffer from my stomach. As I swallowed Alka-Seltzer after Alka-Seltzer, I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t nerves, but the rich food that we were eating twice a day in the fine restaurants of the city, and all the wines that Fabian kept ordering. But neither he nor Lily, nor Lily’s sister Eunice, complained of any distress, even after a most elaborate dinner at the Kronenhalle, a Helvetian monument to hearty food and Swiss digestion, where we had smoked trout, saddle of venison with Spätzle and preiselberry sauce, washed down first with a bottle of Aigle and later a heavy Burgundy, followed by slabs of Vacherin cheese and a chocolate soufflé.

I was beginning to worry about my weight, too, and my trousers were getting uncomfortably tight around my waist. Lily didn’t change by as much as an ounce, remaining gloriously slender, although she actually ate more than either Fabian or myself. Eunice, who was chubby and cuddly, remained chubby and cuddly. Fabian, by some miracle, was losing weight, and looked much the better for it, as though the sudden injection of money into his life had drastically improved his metabolism. No matter how much he ate and drank his eyes remained clear, his skin an even healthy pink, his gait springy, his moustache bristling with virility. Generals who had endured long years of peacetime obscurity must react similarly, I thought, when suddenly put in command of armies for enormous, bloody battles. Looking at him, I had the gloomy presentiment that, like a private in the ranks, I was going to do the suffering for the two of us.

Eunice had turned out to be a pretty, pleasant girl with an upturned nose, vulnerable blue eyes, the flowery coloring of a springtime mountain meadow, a sprinkling of freckles, a figure that would have been more fashionable in the age of Victoria than it was in the 1970s, and a soft, almost hesitant manner of speaking that was the result, it was easy to imagine, of the crisp and authoritative speech of her older sister. It was hard to conceive of her going through the Coldstream Guards, as Lily had suggested, or any other regiment.

Whenever the four of us went anyplace together, the two women invariably drew intense looks of admiration from the other men in the room, with Eunice getting just about the same time and an equal coefficient of lust as her more spectacular sister. Under other circumstances I would undoubtedly have been attracted to the girl, but confronted with Fabian’s semi-innocent voyeurism and raked by Lily’s cold, Florentine eye, I could not bring myself to voice any proposals, or even indicate that they might be welcome if they came from Lily’s sister. I had been brought up to believe that sex was a private aberration, not a public enterprise, and it was too late to change now. Chastely, ever since her arrival, Eunice and I had said good night in the elevator, without as much as a kiss on the cheek. Our rooms were on different floors.

It was with something like relief that I listened to the complaints of the two ladies about staying on in Zurich. They had exhausted the shopping, they said, the climate oppressed them, and they didn’t know what to do with themselves in the long hours Fabian and I sat talking in offices or in the lobby of the hotel with the various businessmen, bankers, and brokers Fabian collected from the financial center of the city, all of whom spoke, or rather whispered, English in a variety of accents, but whom I didn’t understand any better than either Eunice or Lily would have done if they had been in my place. Unfortunately, I had to stay, both at Fabian’s request and because of my grim resolve to be present at all transactions. But the two sisters had entrained for Gstaad, where the sun, according to the weather reports, was shining, the snow good, and the company welcoming. We would follow, Fabian promised, as soon as our business was finished in Zurich, which would not be long, he said, and then on to Italy. Fabian gave them the equivalent in Swiss francs of two thousand dollars from our joint account. Walking-around money, he called it, in a phrase I had come to dread. For a man who had led a precarious existence for most of his life, he had lordly habits.

Once the sisters were out of the way, Fabian managed to find time for some of the other attractions of the city. We spent long hours in the art museum, with especial attention to a Cranach nude that Fabian visited, he said, every time he passed through Zurich. He never tried to explain his particular tastes to me, but seemed content enough if I merely accompanied him on his rounds of the art galleries of the city. We went to a concert where we heard a program of Brahms, but all he said about it was, “In Mittel-europa, you must listen to Brahms.”

He even took me to the cemetery where James Joyce, who died in Zurich, was buried, the grave marked by a statue of the writer, and there wrung from me the admission that I had never read
Ulysses
. When we got back to town, he took me directly to a bookstore and bought me a copy. For the first time I had an inkling of the fact that the prisons of the world might be filled with men who had read Plato and appreciated music, literature, modern painting, fine wines, and thoroughbred horses.