Highbinders

by Ross Thomas

  “My, you’re pretty,” I said.

  “Like it?” he said in a half-serious, half-hopeful tone.

  “What happened to the key chain?” I said. “You know, those three- or four-foot-long jobs that they used to wear?”

  Myron Greene glanced down. “I thought it might be just a bit much.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Well, congratulations anyhow.”

  “On what?”

  “On the Centennial Group. I heard that it hit one twenty-one at two o’clock yesterday afternoon so that makes you a millionaire, if you exercised your options which, knowing you, you sure as hell did.”

  Myron Greene shrugged at my news about the stock of the conglomerate that he had helped put together nearly six months ago. “It’s all on paper,” he said.

  “Well, it must be fun to tot up the figures anyway.”

  He shrugged again, his eyes still wandering around the apartment. “That’s new,” he said, indicating the butcher block that stood before the Pullman kitchen.

  “Actually, it’s a hundred and nineteen years old.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty bucks—and another fifty to get it hauled up here.”

  “It’s still a good investment.”

  “Jesus, Myron, I didn’t buy it as an investment.”

  “Maybe you should’ve.”

  “Let’s have a drink first.”

  “First before what?”

  “Before the bad news that dragged you out of your office at four o’clock on the afternoon that you became a millionaire.”

  Myron Greene looked at his watch. “I’m thirty-eight.”

  “Is that what your watch says?”

  Myron Greene sighed and sat down in one of the chairs around the hexagonal poker table. “If it had happened when I was twenty-eight, it might have meant something. I don’t know what though.”

  “Here,” I said, setting a Scotch and water down in front of him. “It’s got the meaning of life in it.”

  Myron Greene took a swallow of the drink and then looked slowly around the room. “At least you’ve lived,” he said.

  It was really the reason that I was Myron Greene’s client. He was convinced that I led a spicy existence peopled with long-legged blondes, likeable adventurers, and fairly honest crooks and thieves, all of whom had hearts of gold. I was, in Myron Greene’s eyes, a tear-around with an enviable life-style designed almost exclusively for fun and frolic, but highlighted here and there with the occasional thrill of mild danger.

  In reality, I was turning into a recluse who spent too much time alone in museums, galleries, motion pictures, and at any parade that happened to come along. I also drank too much in bars in the company of minor thieves, con men, prospering cops, failed gamblers, fast-buck hustlers, and others of their ilk such as out-of-work actors and free-lance writers.

  In my spare time, of which there was virtually no end, I stayed home, stared at the walls, looked at too much television, and read too much Dickens and Camus. On most Saturdays I got to see my eight-year-old son whose mother had married a man who, unlike Myron Greene, had made his first million at twenty-three. He was thirty-five now and apparently well on the way to his first billion.

  My son was never really quite sure what it was that I did for a living. “You mean you get things back for people, Dad?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You mean if somebody lost something, like a whole lot of money, you’d help them find it?”

  “No, I help people get things back that they’ve had stolen from them. It’s never money.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, jewelry, for instance. Or personal papers. Or valuable art such as paintings and pictures and things. Sometimes, even people.”

  “You mean people get stolen?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you go find them and then arrest the crooks?”

  “No, I go and buy the people or the things back.”

  He had to think about that for a moment. “And the people who have things stolen, they pay you to go buy them back from the crooks, huh?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes the crooks pay me.”

  “How much?” he said. I could see that his stepfather was teaching him a thing or two.

  “Ten percent,” I said. “Suppose you had something stolen.”

  “My bicycle.”

  “All right, your bicycle. And suppose whoever stole it was willing to sell it back to you for ten dollars.”

  “It’s worth more than that. A lot more.”

  “I know. So the crooks would say that if you’d use me to bring the money to them, they’d let you have the bike back for ten dollars.”

  He had to think about that, too. “I guess so,” he said finally. “But how do I know that they wouldn’t just take the ten dollars and keep my bike?” He was also growing up a true New Yorker.

  “Because I wouldn’t let them. No bike, no money.”

  “And how much would you charge me?”

  “I wouldn’t charge you anything. But if it were somebody else, some boy I didn’t know, I’d charge him a dollar.”

  “And he’d have to pay that?”

  “Either he or the crook who stole the bike.”

  “Huh,” my son said. “That’s a funny business.”

  “You’re right.”

  “What do you call it? I mean, what do you call what you do?”

  “I’m a go-between,” I said, feeling a little foolish.

  He shook his head slowly.“I never heard of that before.”

  “There’re not too many of us around.”

  “Mama always says you’re a writer.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “She says you used to work on a newspaper.”

  “That was a long time ago. The paper went out of business.”

  “When?”

  “About the time you were born.”

  “Did you write about football?”

  “No, I wrote a column.”

  “About what?”

  “People.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “All kinds. I wrote about crooks a lot.”

  “And who else?”

  “Oh, funny people. People who do funny things for a living.”

  “Like you do now?”

  “Uh-huh. Like I do now.”

  “Do you do this every day?” he said. “I mean do you go buy things back every day for people who’ve had them stolen from them?”

  “Not every day.”

  “When do you do it?”

  “Oh, about once or twice a year. Sometimes three times.”

  “Do you make a lot of money?”

  “No. Not a lot.”

  “Do you make as much as Jack?” Jack was his new father.

  “Nobody makes as much as Jack.”

  “Do you make as much as Uncle Myron?”

  “Not quite.”

  “I bet you make as much as Eddie.”

  This time I had to think. Eddie was the bell captain at the Adelphi, and a special pal of my son’s. Eddie was not only a bell captain, he was also a slum landlord, the owner of a taxicab fleet consisting of two cabs, a minor bookmaker, and—when pressed—a reliable procurer. “Well, Eddie might make just a little more than I do.”

  “Are you poor, Dad?”

  “You’ll have to ask your uncle Myron about that,” I said.

  “You’re broke, you know,” Myron Greene said after taking another swallow of his drink.

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “It’s about time.”

  “Well, you’re not really broke. You’ve got a few thousand left.”

  When he wasn’t putting conglomerates together, or finding fairly legal ways for his enormously rich clients to become even richer, Myron Greene gave some attention to my affairs, such as they were. He saw to it that my bills were paid; touted me on stocks that I nev
er bought (invariably to my regret); kept me even, or just a little ahead, with the Internal Revenue Service, and insisted that I squirrel some away each year in a Keogh plan for my golden retirement years which, as far as I could tell, had already arrived.

  And it was to Myron Greene that the rich and their insurance companies came when they wanted to ransom something that had been stolen from them, usually something which they were rather fond of, or at least accustomed to having around—a diamond necklace, a Klee, or perhaps a nine-year-old daughter.

  Or sometimes it was the thieves themselves who made the initial contact with Myron Greene. He liked to talk to them. In fact, he liked to talk to them so much that they sometimes couldn’t get him off the phone and I later had to explain that among other things, Myron Greene would like to have been a flashy criminal lawyer, if there had been any real money in it.

  So it was through Myron Greene that the go-between assignments came to me, usually two, sometimes three a year, and for his services he got ten percent of my ten percent and whatever pleasure it was that he found in skirting the world of the thief.

  Now as he sat at my poker table brooding about having become a millionaire ten years too late for it to mean anything, I said, “Well, there must be some alternative to welfare.”

  Myron Greene sighed, “You’re getting up there, too, you know.”

  “I’m six months older than you are.”

  “Middle-aged,” he said.

  “I don’t feel middle-aged, but then I get a lot of rest.”

  “You have real talent,” he said. “Have you ever thought of putting it to work again?”

  “You mean a steady job?”

  Myron Greene nodded.

  “I dreamt about it last Friday, I think it was, but before it got really bad, I woke up.”

  Myron Greene sighed again. “Well, I got a call earlier this afternoon. Long distance.”

  “From where?”

  “London,” he said. “London, England.”

  “I thought that that’s where London was.”

  “It involves a goodly sum.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred thousand.”

  “That’s not bad.”

  “Pounds.”

  “That’s even better. Who called?”

  “He said he was a friend of yours. Or at least a close acquaintance.”

  “Who?”

  “A Mr. Apex.”

  “English Eddie,” I said.

  “Yes,” Myron Greene said, “he did say his name was Edward. He also sounded awfully British.”

  “He’s not,” I said.

  “What is he?”

  “He’s American. He was reared in Detroit and his real name’s Eddie Apanasewicz and when I knew him he was probably the best international con man around.”

  Chapter Four

  BEFORE THE SECOND WORLD war, English Eddie Apex’s widowed mother had taught various sons and daughters of the Polish aristocracy in Warsaw how to speak the King’s English. It was more the Queen’s English really, the upper class English of Victoria’s time, with virtually no contractions, beautifully savored vowels, and consonants that were bitten off at the quick. And if it sounded slightly stilted, it had a wonderfully redeeming lilt to it, the legacy of the wandering Welsh scholar-linguist who had settled in Warsaw after the first world war and from whom Eddie Apex’s mother had learned her perfect English, along with her equally perfect French and German. I was once told that, even years later, exiled Poles could always tell which of their number had studied with Madame Apanasewicz.

  In the late summer of 1939, she accepted the aid of some of her former students and left Poland for London. She took with her only her last remaining student, who was her nine-year-old son Edward, and who had been named, for girlishly romantic notions, after the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and even later, the Duke of Windsor.

  She stayed in London only a week or two and then sailed for Canada where she arrived just as war broke out in Europe. With the help of distant relatives, she and her son emigrated from Canada to Detroit, where they both became naturalized American citizens in 1945.

  Meanwhile, her nine-year-old son, dressed in his old European clothes and speaking English like Freddie Bartholomew, only better, had the opportunity of going to grade school in Detroit with the sons and daughters of the workers who assembled automobiles, and later, during the war, tanks and airplanes.

  If he had been a delicate child, Eddie Apex’s story probably would be different. But he was a big-boned boy, large for his age, with oversized hands that he quickly learned to form into oversized fists. “The ones that I really had trouble with were the crackers, the southern lads,” he later said. “They told me that I talked ‘funny.’ I couldn’t even understand what they were saying for the first six months. All I knew was that I had to beat hell out of them before they beat hell out of me.”

  Eddie Apex’s mother, after working in a department store for eight years, died in 1947, the year that her son managed to graduate from high school. At seventeen and a half, he looked nearer to twenty-one or twenty-two. He was six-foot-two of big-boned brawn, green-eyed and fair-haired, narrow-hipped and wide-shouldered, and looked, indeed, like nothing so much as an all-American college wingback who spoke in the tones of Mayfair rather than Michigan.

  With nothing to keep him in Detroit, Eddie Apex headed for New York where he found his accent to be an asset rather than a liability, at least in the crowd that he fell in with, which in an earlier day might be said to have consisted solely of evil companions. They were for the most part veterans of World War Two who had discovered the rewards of the black markets in Europe and Asia and were then looking for enterprises that would prevent them from doing something distasteful, such as going to work.

  “We came up with the Lost English Cousin Con,” Eddie Apex told me years later. “One of my chaps had a couple of years of law school and he had a girl friend who worked for this fey genealogist who made a pretty good living by coming up with phony family trees for people who wanted to claim kin with British aristocracy. Well, that was our sucker list. My job was to pose as the mark’s long-lost cousin, fresh off the boat from London, who was in the states looking for a relative who could save the family castle. Well, to make a long story short, we made it appear to the mark that he could beat me out of a million-dollar estate for a mere twenty-five or fifty thousand dollars. Greed won. It always does, of course, and the mark wound up owning some awfully fancy parchment documents—all carefully aged, of course.” From that time on until 1963, English Eddie Apex, the surname he legally adopted on his twenty-first birthday, worked his various scams in most of the world’s playgrounds from Acapulco to the Aegean, earning himself a reputation among the cognoscenti as probably “the best long con man in the business.”

  I became privy to all these trade tricks in 1963 when English Eddie came to New York to announce his retirement at the age of thirty-three. He had never been arrested and he had never spent a minute in jail, but he was finding it more and more difficult to travel without spending hours on end in the company of immigration officials, none of whom was particularly anxious to have him set up shop within their particular borders.

  “Christ,” he said, “I can scarcely get into Switzerland anymore. When you can’t get in there with a bagful of money, you know things are bad.”

  So English Eddie Apex decided to retire and to announce his retirement through my column, if I were willing, which I was. I spent nearly a week with him and got two good columns out of it and one visit from a fraud squad detective who wanted to know if I really thought that English Eddie was hanging up his gloves.

  “I think so,” I said. “He’s made enough.”

  The detective nodded. “Like he says, he’s rich now.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I mean. It’s like he also says in your column, the rich always want to get more.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “
but maybe he’ll go legit.”

  The detective nodded again, gloomily. “Yeah, and my cat’ll whistle ‘Stardust,’ too.”

  The day after my last column on Eddie Apex appeared, he dropped by my office and handed me a carefully wrapped box. I opened it while he watched. It was an alligator wallet, obviously expensive. “I would have offered you money, but I didn’t think you’d take it,” he said, sounding to me for all the world like Richard Burton imitating a terribly bored captain of the guards.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “It’s rather a good wallet,” he said. “It should last you for years.”

  “Well, thanks very much.”

  “It’s nothing really. Oh, by the way, I think I told you that I was retiring to Mexico?”

  “That’s what you told me.”

  “Well, just let it stand that way. But actually I’m not.”

  “Not retiring?”

  “Oh, I’m retiring right enough, but not to Mexico.”

  “Where then?”

  “London.”

  “Why London?”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  He grinned his charming, con man’s grin. “I can pass there.”

  When he was gone, I examined the wallet. It had one of these semi-secret compartments and when I looked into it I found five one-hundred-dollar bills. I took them down to a bank to see whether they were any good and when I found that they were, I went out and bought something for my wife that was ridiculously expensive, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was.

  “What did he want?” I asked, after telling a fascinated Myron Greene a lot of what I knew about English Eddie Apex.

  “He was rather vague until we got down to the question of money.”

  “He usually perks up there.”

  “He said that he was calling me instead of you because he’d heard that I represented you, which he thought was sound because when it comes to negotiating in your own behalf, he didn’t think you’d be too effective.”

  “I don’t have your drive, Myron.”