“You bet.”
Then he heard the police siren in the distance.
“Where’s Bill?” he asked.
“He’s coming. Don’t worry.”
“Ellen, my sweet,” Joshua said, slipping behind the bar to pour himself a cognac, “if you have me arrested, I’m going to tell Bill that you were in Sidney’s hotel room.”
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
Joshua reached into his pocket, pulled out an antique man’s pocket watch on a long gold chain and dangled it before her. “He can handle women,” he said, “but he happens to be very fastidious.”
“You give me that!”
“I don’t want to be arrested,” Joshua said. “I also want Sidney’s contract paid out. Every fucking cent.”
The police car rocked to a stop outside.
“Bill,” she hollered, running toward the front door, “Bill!”
Leopold was camped in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire. Bouncing to his feet the instant Joshua came through the door. “When do we start work?” he burbled.
“Benny, only one thing worries me. You said I was the only writer who could save this project –”
“Am I frank? I’m frank,” he said.
“– that wouldn’t be because you need a Canadian or you lose your tax shelter money?”
“Certainly not.”
“Good. We’ll start work tomorrow. Book a table for lunch at Ma Maison. I’ll meet you there at one.”
“Done,” he said.
And the next morning, at 10 a.m., Joshua was on a plane to Montreal.
6
“OH MY GOD, DADDY. SOME FUCKING INHERITANCE. how could you do this to me?”
“Well, yeah. Right. What do you think, Pauline?”
“I think you’re both crazy.”
“The money’s still good,” Reuben insisted, “just a little old, that’s all.”
Joshua sent a wad of fifties flying toward the ceiling. “I need another drink, darling.”
“Let him fetch his own, he’s got no respect.”
“You heard your father.”
“O.K., O.K., but count it out again, will you, please.”
Flying home from L.A., Joshua was returning as broke as when he had left. Thirty-five thousand feet over Utah he began to finger that long thin key, saying to himself, what the hell, it’s mine, salvation time has come. And so, early in the morning the day after his return, he drove out to the Royal Bank of Canada, which was on the main street of Cornwall just across the border in Ontario, where they had kind of boxes. Smiling too much, his throat dry, he presented a letter to the manager, showing him his passport, and, with trembling hands, shoveled the contents of the box into a suitcase that he had brought with him. Easy as that. The quantity of the banknotes, some of them $100-bill bundles, overwhelmed him. My God, I’m rich. Loaded. He sang all the way home, careful not to exceed the speed limit, and only after he had led Pauline into the bedroom and emptied the suitcase on the carpet did he grasp the nature of his problem. There was a lot of money there, more than he had ever seen before, but it was vintage money. The banknotes were dated 1925, 1935, or ’37, and there was even a bundle of brand-new 1923 $2 bills, with a portrait of H.R.H. Edward, Prince of Wales, in the uniform of the Welsh Guards. For the rest, there were some $500 bills, issued in 1925, with a portrait of King George V; a pack of Silver Jubilee $25 bills, showing Their Majesties King George V and Queen Mary in their coronation robes; a stack of hundreds, issued the same year, with a portrait of Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester; and a goodly number of 1937 King George VI bills in fives, tens, twenties, and fifties.
Reuben was summoned, but couldn’t get to the house until late the following evening. “Well,” he said, “you’ve finally been to Cornwall.”
“Right.”
“I thought you’d cleaned out that box years ago.”
“How could I? What if you needed it?”
Pauline counted out the money again. “There’s thirty-two thousand eight hundred and twenty-two dollars here, if you want to include the shinplasters.”
Shinplasters, twenty-five-cent Dominion of Canada banknotes, first appeared in 1870, but were still being issued as late as 1929.
“Those are real collectors’ items,” Reuben said.
“Everything here is a collector’s item. What am I going to do with it?”
“Well, yeah, right. You dress up good, see. A three-piece suit, no flash in the tie or pointy shoes, and you step into a bank and ask to see the manager. Gee, you say, golly, I’m Senator Hornby’s son-in-law (you don’t have to say you’re Jewish, and these days they don’t ask outright any more, it’s not the style), there I was digging away in my garden out there on Lake Memphremagog one Saturday aft and clunk, clunk, I hit this old chest. Talk about pulling a lunch pail out of the toilet bowl. Gee whiz, look what I found.”
“I already thought of that.”
“Good.”
“Bad. A bank manager has to inform the mint when this sort of stuff comes in, especially in large quantities, the money goes back there, and then some smart-ass discovers my father has a prison record and back you go.”
“You’re not to redeem this money anywhere,” Pauline said, alarmed.
“I know, I know.”
“What a couple of banana-heads you are. You don’t take it into one bank, you move it around.”
“Sure, I get into my car and drive across Canada, cashing a hundred in every bank I pass, and five years later I’m home again, and they still send the bills back to the mint.”
“What I don’t understand,” Pauline said, “is why you didn’t invest the money, even in government bonds. It could have been worth four times as much now.”
“Well, yeah,” Reuben said, scratching his head, “right. But like Josh here once told me, I’ve led an unexamined life.”
“Tell her where the money comes from, Daddy.”
“Places.”
“Look,” Joshua said, brandishing a bundle of King George VI fifties, “these are all in sequence. They’ve never even been in circulation.”
“Oh, those,” he said, grinning in fond remembrance, “they come from the Bank of Nova Scotia in Ste. Agathe.”
“Did you also rob banks?” Pauline asked.
“How could you even think such a thing?”
“But it comes from a bank robbery,” Joshua put in.
“Well, yeah, possibly.”
“And it can be traced back to you?”
“Listen, they bust three banks a day here, maybe four if it isn’t too cold, and what we’re talking about is the thirties. How long do you think they hold a grudge?”
“This is impossible.”
“Most of the money’s clean, Josh.”
“How did you earn it?” Pauline asked.
“He was in insurance, sort of.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Then why did you have to hide it in a box?”
“Well,” Reuben said, groping, “it was the income tax. I never cared for it.”
“Don’t you pay tax?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“And look at this,” Joshua said, waving a stack of Silver Jubilee twenty-fives at him, “also unused and in sequence.”
“Shit, you think the money in your pocket hasn’t got a past? I mean, do you demand the family background of every banknote you’re handed? Let Pauline deposit some of it. Or the senator.”
“It’s not them I’m worried about, it’s you.”
Reuben retrieved a Prince Henry one-hundred from the pile. “We could run the money down to New York to a coin dealer. These must be very rare now.”
Joshua looked interested.
“A lot of these notes, you know, have to be worth much more than the face value now. And those dealers don’t ask questions.”
The two men began to study the different banknotes.
“What we need is a catalogue,” Joshua said, “with a price list.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, right.”
“No,” Pauline said, “absolutely no.”
They looked at her, startled to find she was still there.
“And why do we need the money, anyway?” she demanded.
Joshua poured himself another drink.
“You short, Josh?” Reuben asked.
“Some.”
“Well, how much money do we need?” Pauline asked.
Joshua frowned, embarrassed for her. Reuben looked disgusted.
“What’s wrong?”
“Shapiros don’t take money from women,” Reuben said, appalled.
“I’m not a woman, I’m his wife. How much do we need?”
“You heard my father.”
“You mean it’s O.K. to rob banks and collect insurance, as you both put it, and break hands and not pay taxes,” she said, her voice rising, “but it’s immoral to take money from your wife?”
“I brought him up good.”
“O.K.,” Pauline said, “take the money down to New York, you can both go to jail as far as I’m concerned,” and she left the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“I hate to criticize,” Reuben said, “but you’d think, what with all the privileges they had, the fancy schools, Westmount and all that shit, that they would at least have been brought up to know right from wrong.”
7
MONIQUE AND HER MOTHER ARRIVED IN IBIZA ON A balmy Monday evening on the ship from Barcelona.
Monique’s mother was fierce, stout, her round face flushed and her hair dyed red. Clutching a glossy black purse, she wobbled on spike-like high heels. But slender, olive-skinned Monique, bracelets jangling, black hair flying in her face, was something else again; flouncing down the gangplank, the first three buttons of her black blouse undone to reveal a swelling bosom, a maddening hint of white filigree. My, my. She also wore narrow black slacks and leather sandals. Her pouting lips were painted red, just like her toenails. Her eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. Only eight years after he had given up Terry and the Pirates, the Dragon Lady’s kid sister floats ashore.
Juanito, who was seated with Joshua on the terrace of the waterfront café, bit into his cheroot, spat, and summoned a blue-smocked dockhand to his side. Then he informed Joshua that mother and daughter had come down from Paris. The father, deceased, had been Spanish. A doctor, a Socialist. On the crossing, if a man approached Monique on deck, the mother had been right there, snarling.
Joshua shrugged, feigning indifference, as he watched the determined Carlos, his day at the bank done, weaving among passengers on the dock, peddling bottles of gaseosa. Carlos also dealt in contraband American cigarettes now, buying them from the sailors, selling them in the cafés. With the proceeds, he had already bought a Hebrew dictionary. A grammar. He subscribed to an Israeli newspaper, Maariv. “When the time comes to emigrate,” he said, “I’ll be ready. Nobody will take me for a fool.”
Passengers milled about impatiently, their luggage already assembled at their sides, clapping hands or hollering for porters, all unavailingly, as four men in blue smocks came sniffing around Monique and her mother, circling. The pair were obviously waiting for a missing piece of luggage. It arrived, a splendid wicker case gently deposited on top of four suitcases by a sailor. Monique’s mother dug into her purse, surfacing with some coins, but the sailor nodded no, smiling shyly at Monique as he retreated. The porters, ramming their carts ahead of them, closed in, almost colliding. Monique’s mother settled on the ugliest of the four and indicated the oldest and most grizzled of Ibiza’s three taxi drivers: Rafael. And in a moment mother and daughter were gone.
Strolling down to the barraca, Joshua hung back while Juanito, pad in hand, inspected dripping overflowing boxes of inkfish, lobster, and sea bass, all of which would be loaded onto the ship in the evening. His spunky ten-year-old son, also called Juanito, came skipping along after them, sipping a gaseosa he had bought from Carlos.
“What shall we do tonight?” Juanito asked.
“I don’t know,” a dispirited Joshua replied, “but I’m not going to Rosita’s again.”
Juanito, concerned, said, “We could go to Santa Eulalia.”
But Joshua wasn’t listening. Would he even know how to talk to a proper girl any more? After all that crazed whoring.
“A friend is killing a pig. He’s going to roast it. There will be a party. What do you say?”
More seamed, unknowable faces. Two weeks earlier, he had turned twenty-one. “Come home,” his father wrote. “I miss you.”
“Maybe I’ll just take the bus back to San Antonio. I don’t want to end up drunk again tonight.”
Juanito cuffed him playfully on the shoulder. “I am your friend. Tonight you should be with friends.”
Rafael pulled up in his quaking old Ford and Juanito sauntered over to chat with him. Leaning against the car window, he nodded again and again. Finally, he called Joshua over to join them. “The girl’s name is Monique and they are staying at the Casa del Sol. Her mother brought her here to get her away from a boyfriend. There was some trouble.”
“How does Rafael know all this?” Joshua asked.
“She never stopped talking, the mother. Rafael is dumb as they come,” Juanito said, yanking the taxi driver’s ear, “and ugly, but he was in Marseilles for three years and understands French. They quarreled all the way to San Antonio. The mother did up the top buttons of her blouse before she let her out of the taxi. Aii-aii. She can swear, the young one. She made Rafael’s ears burn.”
They didn’t go to the party in Santa Eulalia after all. Joshua wasn’t up to it and Juanito refused to go without him. Instead Juanito took him to a small restaurant run by a crony of his, a former ship’s cook. Juanito told him how much he had enjoyed the stories of Jack London and that he would like to see snow before he died. Maybe Joshua would invite him to Canada one day, he suggested, and they would fish through the ice with the Eskimos. He also insisted that he had only been joking the night he had said Blasco Ibañez was a real writer and Joshua was merely a kid. He was willing to bet Joshua was a very talented young man.
Monique, whom Joshua had found so bedazzling on first glance, wasn’t the first foreign young lady to have come to Ibiza while he was rooted there. One evening a British girl and her aunt, touring the Mediterranean islands, disembarked from the Jaime II. The aunt, a pulpy lady, seemingly rigid, carried a flowery parasol. The girl, engagingly freckled, was holding an easel and a painting box as she came tripping down the gangplank. She was a big girl, buxom and broad-hipped, a schoolteacher from Kingston-on-Thames. The first night she wandered late and alone, her manner tentative, into the noisy waterfront bar, immediately rendering it quiet. Juanito took it that having ventured into such a squalid bar alone, the girl, however demurely dressed, was a whore. Red hot. Crazy for it. Joshua cautioned him that she seemed a most well-bred young lady and this was certainly not the case. But Juanito, hastily cleaning his fingernails with a matchstick as he cursed Joshua for a fool, demanded that he introduce him. So Joshua invited the girl to their table. Her name was Peggy. She graciously allowed that her Spanish was bloody awful, actually, and that she would be happy for some English-speaking company. Peggy, who mucked about with paints, inquired about the most super vistas the island had to offer.
Juanito, his manner abrupt, said, “Tell her in English that I think she is beautiful.”
“Juanito recommends the area around Santa Eulalia.”
“How would one get there?”
Joshua told her where the bus stopped.
“Does she like me?” Juanito asked.
“She says you could do with a bath and a shave.”
Juanito spat on the floor.
“I take it your friend is one of the local peasants. They don’t speak proper Spanish, don’t you know. It’s a dialect.”
“Juanito’s a fine fellow.”
“Ask her, nicely, if she has ever been on board a fishing boat.”
“Man, it stinks below decks on yo
ur boats. You want her to be ill?”
Juanito, fixing her with his most enchanting smile, looked as if he might leap out of his trousers and mount her right there.
“Is he tiddly?” Peggy asked.
“Ask her, you bastard, if she would like to see the secret passage through the wall of the old town.”
“Juanito suggests that there are some fine views to be seen from the old town.”
“I would love to paint him.”
“She paints. She would like to know if you would pose for her.”
“I’m not a homosexual. Tell her I am in love with her.”
“Go to hell, Juanito.”
Peggy, lapsing into Spanish, smiled sweetly and said, “Mi alegro de esta aquí.”
“Oh,” Juanito responded, hugely encouraged, and he promptly ordered another round of drinks and shifted his chair tighter to Peggy.
“Oh, dear,” she said, appealing to Joshua with her big blue eyes.
“You go now,” Juanito said. “Good night.”
“You’re frightening her.”
“You know nothing. Go now.”
“Are we in for a sticky time?” Peggy asked.
Joshua eased his chair back a little from the table.
“You’re not thinking of leaving me alone with him, are you?”
“No,” he said, changing his mind, and appealing to Juanito once more to contain himself.
“You are not my friend. You are a son of a whore.”
“What was that he said?”
“He finds you pleasing to look at.”
“Cheek.”
“Tell her I know a beach where we can swim now.”
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