He threw it open.
It was empty except for a coffee can. One large-sized Melittá coffee can, that was all. In fury, Szell ripped the lid from the goddamn thing.
And the diamonds tumbled out.
Szell decided he’d better sit down. The can had been full to the top. How much was that? He spread the contents of the can all across the bottom of the box.
The sound was louder than he’d intended, so he closed the box fast, in case the guard came running in. When he was secure again, he opened the box and began separating the diamonds. The smallest were the size of pencil erasers, and he wondered what those were in carats. Three? More than three, probably. There were literally dozens of them, and dozens more the size of a thumbnail.
Then there were the big ones.
Many bigger than pecans, and some the size of walnuts. Look at that one—Szell could not keep his hands off the stone—it was as big as a baby’s fist—and he suddenly saw a long-dead face, a pretty woman, frail and young and a cousin, she said, of the Rothschilds, and was this enough, it was all she had, would it suffice?
Yes, my dear, of course. More than enough.
Szell’s heart was pounding again, because he realized that what he was looking at was more than he had ever dreamed of. I can buy Paraguay if I choose. I won’t but I could, and—and—
Szell began gathering up the diamonds, banishing thoughts of country-purchasing. He was the possessor of one of the great fortunes, but what good was that if you had to hide in some tropical swamp. There were supposedly, in Turkey, doctors, great surgeons who did things to you, changed your face, could even, if you could stand the pain, shorten you, and perhaps that was the thing—give yourself to these men and let them rape you for their services—if they gave you a different exterior, you could sip champagne on the Continent until gout claimed you at the age of seventy-five. His hands were actually trembling as he managed to sweep the diamonds back into the can, put the can in his case. Then he called for the guard and had the empty box locked up again.
Szell waited through the locking procedure, then followed the guard to the main gate and beyond it to safety, where the blackie said, “My regards to your father—be sure and tell Mister Hessuh that Miz Barstow sends regards,” and Szell smiled and nodded and up the stairs he went, out of the building into the sunlight, where he realized that bad things came in fours, threes were nothing, because moving across the sidewalk now was a certifiable madman, a lunatic in running shoes and raincoat.
“It isn’t safe,” Babe said.
29
SZELL WAITED. NO SUDDEN moves. Because if this one was alive, that meant that, more than likely, his people were no longer, and that meant that the crazy was armed, probably a gun, Szell noted the bulge in the right raincoat pocket.
Of course, he was armed too. He had his Cutter, so losing was not something he intended. Winning was but a matter of getting close, of being right beside the enemy. Once you were right beside them, it was checkmate. Szell glanced around, looking for a suitable place to get close.
“So what happens?” Szell asked.
“Just tell me where you want to die,” Babe said.
“Oh come now,” Szell began, but then he saw the pistol butt coming out of the raincoat pocket and he realized this skinny creature, this one he had weeping in the chair no more than a few hours before, had to be taken seriously. All madmen had to be taken seriously. “Put it back—I wasn’t mocking you, but there are things you don’t know, I have items in my possession, terms can be made.”
“Where do you want to die?” Babe repeated. Very soft. His voice was from some other world, human no more.
Szell couldn’t believe it. He wants to kill me; I hold the wealth of the Indies in my suitcase and suddenly I am confronted with an idiot child who would glory in my death.
“The park,” Szell managed, pointing to the entrance a block away. “The park is quiet, we can talk to each other,” get close to each other, he did not add; right beside each other.
Babe nodded toward the green.
Szell began to walk. “You must hear me, you must let me tell you,” he said. “You are very young, but let me assure you of something: Life can take a very long time, and better live it through with comfort than without.”
Babe said nothing.
“You’re very young,” Szell said again. There was a pleading tone in his voice now. “You are very smart but not yet wise.”
“You killed my brother,” Babe said.
“No, that is a lie, I was not present, I swear.”
“Janeway told me. Elsa did too.”
“It had to be done,” Szell said. “I didn’t want to, I swear.”
“Janeway didn’t tell me anything,” Babe said. “Elsa didn’t either. So don’t worry about me. I’m fucking wise.”
They were getting close to the park now.
“Killing me accomplishes nothing,” Szell said.
“Not for you.”
“Nothing.”
Babe walked behind him. “Faster,” he said.
They crossed Fifth Avenue, entered the park.
“Head for the reservoir,” Babe said, and they walked up the steps and started around it. It was quiet, and too hot for many joggers. The entire right-hand part of the running path was lined with thick bushes.
“Here,” Babe said.
“I must show you! You must see!”
“Get into the bushes,” Babe said.
Szell backed down into the underbrush. “The coffee can, look at it, I beg you, just look at it, that’s all.”
Babe took out H.V.’s gun.
“Christ,” Szell cried, “one request, everyone grants that.”
“Did you?”
“Auschwitz was an extermination camp, not a concentration camp, they were not meant to regain strength.”
Babe cocked the pistol.
Szell fell to his knees, flinging his case open, grabbing the coffee can, all the time begging, “—Look—you must look—I ask no more—please—”
“I don’t want your diamonds,” Babe said softly. “I don’t even want you crawling, I just want you dead,” and then he said “Jesus,” because by that time Szell had the lid off the coffee can.
“You see? Millions—so many millions for us both—deals can be made—”
Babe hesitated, shook his head.
“At least look at what I’m offering you!—come down and look, consider it, I beg you, come down here next to me, come right beside me and decide, that is my last request, you must grant that!”
Babe hesitated one more time, then moved down into the dark covering of the bushes beside Szell, who waited, waited, and then when Babe was right beside him, the Cutter began to move.
Szell was candy.
Babe squeezed the shot off, and it exploded at close range into Szell’s chest. Szell spun backward as if yanked, then lay on his face in the dirt, trying to gather strength to move.
Babe sat comfortably on the ground, holding the gun, talking quietly. “I don’t know that you’ll understand this, but once upon a time, long ago, I was a scholar and a marathon man, but that fella’s gone now, dead I suppose, but I remember something he thought, which was that if you don’t learn the mistakes of the past, you’ll be doomed to repeat them. Well, we’ve been making a mistake with people like you, because public trials are bullshit and executions are games for winners—all this time we should have been giving back pain. That’s the real lesson. That’s the loser’s share, just pain, pure and simple, pain and torture, no hotshot lawyers running around trying to see that justice is done. I think we’d have a nice peaceful place here if all you warmakers knew you better not start something because if you lost, agony was just around the bend. That’s what I’d like to give you. Agony. Not what you’re suffering now. I mean a lifetime of it, ’cause that’s the only degree of justice I think we’re ready for down here yet, and I know any humanist might disagree with me too, but I don’t think you will, because you
had a lot to do with educating me, I’m like you now, except I’m better at it, because you’re going to die and I’ve still got a long way to go.”
Szell charged. He pushed himself forward like a tackle when the ball is snapped, trying to reach Babe, who didn’t bother moving, just fired again, and Szell’s stomach split and he spun back down.
“You know it gets easier? You’re the fifth I’ve killed today, and Karl went first, whap through the eye, and if I’d had time, I would probably have tossed my cookies over what I’d done, but each death it gets easier. I’m kind of enjoying this. Does it keep on getting better? Tell me, I’d really like to know.”
Szell was a bull of a man, and like a bull he made his final charge.
Babe waited until he was very close this time, then fired three or four times.
Szell screamed and collapsed, and there was blood coming from all over now.
“ ’Groin’ is a funny word,” Babe said quietly. “I don’t know the German for it, but I’m sure you do.” He began to talk more quickly then, because he could tell Szell was starting to die. “Oh, maybe you didn’t see it in the papers, but they’ve made this fabulous theological discovery, do you know what they’ve found? People don’t go to heaven or hell, they all go to one spot first, sort of a way station, and that’s where things happen, because, you probably won’t believe this, but some people on this earth have been known to do bad things to other people, innocent people, and at this way station, the innocent people wait, and then when their savager comes, they get to exact a little portion of revenge. God says revenge is good for the soul. Do you know who’s waiting for you, Mr. Szell? All the Jews. They’re all there, and you know what else? They’ve all got drills, like you used on me—remember how you said how wonderful it was, anyone could learn that, how to use them? Well, they have and they’re waiting, and I don’t know about you, but I think it’s gonna be terrific.”
Szell was almost dead now, but Babe just had time to get it in.
“Have a swell eternity,” Babe said ...
AFTER THE END
30
THE COP CAME TEARING along the reservoir, and he was big, and he had his gun out, and he looked efficient as hell.
Inside he was panicked.
He was not yet twenty-four, had been on the force less than a year, and he’d just been minding his own business on the corner of 90th and Fifth when the backfires started—that’s what he’d hoped the explosions were, anyway. Just backfires. Nothing to cause you trouble when it was this hot and you were stuck wearing the heavy uniform. The second explosion more or less convinced him that he wasn’t going to get his wish, and when the third shot came, he knew that’s what he’d been listening to: gunfire.
So he took off into the park, and it sounded like it had been a hassle near the reservoir, so he started there. “Hey,” he called to a kid. “You hear any shooting?”
The kid nodded, pointed to some bushes. “From there.”
The young cop took a peek. “Hey,” he said to the kid. “There’s a guy lying in these bushes. He don’t look so hot.”
“He’s dead I think is why.”
“Oh, right,” the young cop said, and suddenly he realized a number of things: a) the kid wasn’t any kid, he was older, in his twenties maybe, wearing sneakers and a raincoat; b) there was a pistol on the ground beside him; c) he was on the wrong side of the reservoir fence, the inside, so he must have climbed it, and that was illegal, there were signs posted all over. “Hey, you shouldn’t be in there.”
“I won’t be much longer.”
The young cop approached the fence warily now. “Nice gun,” he said, keeping his voice as casual as he could. “Yours?”
“It was my father’s,” Babe said.
The young cop was starting to get excited now—he’d never been involved with a murder before; hookers and junkies, sure, but he’d never been able to really crack the big time. “You didn’t, by any chance, just use it?”
“You mean, did I kill him?”
“Kind of like that, yeah.”
Babe nodded.
The cop quick cocked his pistol. “No funny moves,” he said.
“Can’t I just finish what I’m doing?”
“What are you doing?” He was just standing there, holding what looked like a coffee can, and was skimming marbles or pebbles across the reservoir.
“I’ve only got a few more to go,” Babe said. “Once I got four bounces.” He whipped another couple out across the water, wondering if the cop would let him sprint around the reservoir before they went in, it might be just the thing to clear his head. Babe glanced at the cop. Probably he’d say no, and anyway, it wouldn’t make you think straight, you’re tired, sleep’s the only thing that’ll do that, but no one’s gonna let you sleep for a while, not once this explodes. God alone knew which way the blast would hurl him, but there was about to be one hell of a detonation, that much was sure; he was either going to end up serving five hundred years in prison or as the biggest thing since Sonny Tufts. Babe skimmed a few more, watching the circles widen.
“Hey, it’s hot, let’s go,” the cop said.
Babe nodded, tossed away the empty can, got rid of a final handful.
... skip ... skip ...
... skip ... skip ...
... skip ...
The Temple of Gold
for Marion
Foreword
THE FIRST TIME I ever had a catatonic fit was also the first time I ever sold a piece of writing. The two events are more than a little related and I think to try and understand my onetime catatonia, you have to know what corner of the room I was coming from.
I was born in Chicago, 1931, and brought up in a then small commuter’s town, Highland Park. The 8:08 was the morning train of choice; the 5:40 p.m. brought the fathers home.
Mine was a businessman’s family. There were two children, my four-years-older brother, James, and myself. He went on to win an Oscar for writing The Lion in Winter, but in his teens he wanted to be a music critic.
I had always wanted to be a writer, I don’t know why. Probably because from my earliest memories, I have loved stories. I hid in books my first twenty years. I remember once picking up a play by O’Neill we had on our bookshelves, Ah, Wilderness—I hated it so much I could not believe he was this genius playwright, so I went to the library and over that weekend read everything he had ever written. Not such a big deal as I think back on it now. Except I was probably thirteen when I did it. So clearly, I read.
But my great love was comic books. I had many hundreds of them, all from what is now the golden age. My father was somehow on the mailing list for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. He brought that home. And I would go to Larson’s on Central with my allowance money for such wonders. The first Superman. Not just the first Batman but also the first Batman and Robin. Captain Marvel—and yes, I still know what SHAZAM stands for—the Sub-Mariner, on and on.
If you are wondering what my collection is worth I will tell you: zip. Because my mother, in an act of mother’s evil bordering on Medea’s, my mother, without asking or telling me, without so much as a word, gave my entire collection away. To the soldiers at Fort Sheridan.
I don’t remember writing during these early years. Maybe I tried a one-page something or other when I was twelve or in my midteens. Doubt it, though. I just had this vague notion that being a writer would be neat, whatever that meant.
Then Irwin Shaw came along to save me.
I was eighteen and an aunt gave me a copy of Mixed Company, a book of his collected stories. I’d never read a word by him, never probably heard his name. But I remember the lead story in the book was “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” About a guy who looked at women. It was followed by “The Eighty-Yard Run.”
Now you probably read this about me when all the millennium madness was going on—so and so was the greatest this, such and such was the greatest that—so you must have seen the headlines proclaiming me “Sports Nut of
the Century.” In truth, the balloting wasn’t even close.
Point being? The New Yorker, by this time, had begun its endless publishing of bloodless stories about, say, an American couple, unhappily married, and they go to Europe maybe to change things and they end up at the Piazza San Marco where in the last paragraph a fly would walk across the table, and the story would always end like this: “And she understood.” Well, “The Eighty-Yard Run” is about a football player. Shit, I remember thinking, can you do that? Can you write about stuff I care about?
I finished Mixed Company and probably didn’t know the effect it would have on me. You see, Shaw wrote so easily. Never the wrong word. You just go happily along mostly unaware of the miracles happening around you.
Shaw is out of fashion today, which is too bad for you, because he is one of the great story writers in our history, and more than likely, you don’t know that. He and F. Scott Fitzgerald are my two guys, and I have zero doubts on that score.
So I decided I would write like Irwin Shaw. (Easy money at the brick factory.) At eighteen, I began writing stories. Not a whole lot of instant acclaim. I took a creative writing course at Oberlin. Everyone else took it because it was a gut course. I wanted a career. Everyone else got As and Bs, I got the only C. It goes downhill from there.
I took a creative writing course at Northwestern one summer. Worst grade in the class. Oberlin had a literary magazine and I was the fiction editor. Two brilliant girls were involved with me. One was the poetry editor, one the overall chief. Everything was submitted anonymously. Every issue I would stick a story of mine in the pile. And wait for their comments.
“Well, we can’t publish this shit,” they would say when my story came up for discussion. Do you understand? I couldn’t get a story of mine in a magazine when I was the fiction editor.
I go into the Army after graduation, am sent to the Pentagon by mistake. Every evening I would go back to Fort Myers for dinner, then return to the Pentagon to write my stories.
The Novels of William Goldman Page 117