I Come as a Theif

by Louis Auchincloss

  Belle released herself from Lee’s embrace and surveyed her with a critical little smile. “My God, you did read the brochure.”

  “Of course, I did.”

  “Lee, you’re remarkable.”

  “I read it, and I was swept away. It should swamp us with new memberships.”

  She felt worthy of Tony again as she turned to the mailing list. It was going to be difficult to breathe in this new altitude, but it was obviously only by learning that she would survive.

  7

  The Max Leonards’ house in Vernon Manor, unlike its neighbors, was old—fifty years old—and had been, when they had bought it, of dark, weatherbeaten shingle, designed in a vaguely Queen Anne style, attractive enough when densely surrounded by lilacs and marigolds and a small, shimmering lawn. Now, however, that it had been converted by Elaine to the standards of opulent suburbia—painted light gray with picture windows, filled with bird prints and imitation French provincial furniture—now that it was bare and clean and bordered by a rock garden, it was as dull as Elaine herself.

  Max was perfectly able to assess his own responsibility for the changes in her. He was even able to derive a dry satisfaction in his own perspicacity. After all, he and she had been caught in the same net. Elaine had never guessed, when she had married the prettiest senior at Williams, the boy with the sunniest disposition, that she had mated with a driven creature, a compulsively industrious aspirant to riches and power. It might have been better, but only a little better, had he achieved them. As it was, Elaine, neglected, had tinned for a time to adultery, but not finding it a much favored vice in Vernon Manor, where husbands were jealously guarded, she had graduated to the bridge lunch at the country club, to long hours of gin and gossip with the girls. Now a failing fight with her figure had given her another occupation. The two Leonard daughters were away at boarding school. It was supposed to be a liberal one, but there were still letters from the headmistress.

  Elaine never joined Max for breakfast unless she had something to dispute with him. He hated the contrast that her billowing nightgown and undone hair offered to his own matutinal neatness. Never did she less seem the American blonde beauty of their early years, an image that she could still suggest when she was dressed and made up for a party.

  “Why do you suppose Tony told Governor Horton to withdraw his name from the Treasury job?”

  Max glanced up from his paper. “Where did you hear that? From the girls at the club?”

  “No, dear. They’ve never heard of Tony Lowder. He’s not nearly as famous as you like to think.”

  “Where did you hear it, then?”

  “From you. Last night. You never remember anything you tell me after the second nightcap.”

  Max reflected uncomfortably that this was true. It was curious that she, who drank so much more than he did, should have such total recall. It must have been because she was checking up on him. Now that her looks were going, and he had kept his, she was afraid of losing him.

  “I don’t know why Tony did it,” he admitted. “But I’ll sure as hell find out. I’m meeting him in town today.”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  “Isn’t that what you came down for?”

  “Then I suggest your sacred Tony is self-destructive.”

  Max prepared himself for the latest bit of country club Freud. “Aren’t we all?”

  “To a lesser extent. You can tell about Tony by the way he plays bridge. He’s a beautiful player, granted. But watch him through an evening when he has a winning streak. He gets progressively reckless. In the end, he’s apt to be badly set on a grand slam, doubled and vulnerable.”

  “He likes to give the opponents a break. He’s always that way in games.”

  “He might think of his partner.”

  “But that’s usually Lee. She understands.”

  “And it’s just a game. I know.” Elaine seemed very sure of herself. “But I suggest that all life is a game to Tony. A game he insists on losing. And you’re in for a sad disillusionment if you think Lee’s his only partner. The real partner is you, sonny boy!”

  Max looked at her suspiciously. Elaine could be a very insinuating woman. “What has given you this idea?”

  “Watching you and Tony. Over the years. Whenever there’s a noticeable disproportion between the affections of two supposedly best friends, watch out! There’s trouble in store.”

  “You don’t think Tony likes me?”

  “Oh, he likes you well enough. That’s not the point. The point is that what he feels about you bears no visible relation to what you feel about him. Tony’s emotional life is bound up entirely with women. He has a bare tolerance for his own sex. I think I should know something about that.”

  “Do you imply that you’ve had an affair with him?”

  “I imply that I could have. If I hadn’t been such a faithful wife.”

  Max snorted. “Perhaps you misunderstood him.”

  “A woman doesn’t misunderstand that kind of thing.”

  “You might.”

  Elaine flushed. “Maybe we’d understand each other better if we could talk frankly about your attitude toward Tony. Do you think we might do it impersonally? After all, we’re not children.”

  Max shrugged without answering.

  “I know he’s the light of your life,” Elaine continued tartly. “I’ve always known that. Oh, I don’t say it’s entirely a homosexual thing, though that’s obviously part of it. People make too much of that these days. The real point is that Tony has to have all the success you haven’t had. Tony has to lead your life. If you could ever exorcise Tony from your heart, you might discover a lot of things about yourself. You might…”

  “I might even discover,” Max interrupted angrily, “that I’m married to a woman who likes to turn a sharp knife in my guts under the cloak of a clinical discussion. Goodbye, Elaine. I’m going to my train.”

  ***

  In the Central Park Zoo, before the empty polar bear cage, Max smoked a cigarette impatiently, as if it were a task to be got through with. Tony had finished talking, for the moment anyway. He was gazing down at the seven faded wreaths piled under the sign. The bear had been shot a month before because it had seized and mauled the arm of a crazy man who had thrust a stick through the bars to annoy it. There had been no other way to make the poor beast let go of its tormentor.

  “You picked a good place to meet,” Max said bitterly. “You’re even crazier than the guy who stuck his hand in there.”

  “And you feel sorry for the bear.”

  “Hell, I am the bear. I’ll get shot, anyway, for your lunacy. And do you know something? I contradicted Elaine this morning when she said you liked to lose games. Well, she was right—for once in her life. You’d play Russian roulette with a cartridge in every slot.”

  “Except you won’t be shot. You can get out of town.”

  “And lose my law practice? And be disbarred? Thanks, pal!”

  “Don’t cry before you’re hurt, Max. I told you there was a good chance I could work a deal.”

  “A good chance! Do you realize the chance you’re taking with my life? Even if you did make a deal for me, how will that square me with Lassatta? Do you think he’ll ever believe I’m not a party to this crazy confession?”

  “You worry too much about Lassatta. Those boys are going to have it so in for me, they won’t even remember your name.”

  “You hope!” Max stamped his foot on the pavement in frustration. “And even if everything works out the way you say, where does that leave me? You were the biggest part of my plans.”

  “It’s tough, Max. I know.”

  “You think it’s all right to do this to me because you take the rap. But it’s not, because you’re getting some kind of a looney jag out of the whole thing. What’s there in it for me but despair? How can you treat a friend like that?”

  Tony became very grave at this. Suddenly he gripped Max’s shoulder. “Why don’t you come with me,
Max, and confess the whole thing?”

  “You are crazy.”

  “I have a kind of hunch that deep down you want to. A hunch that tells me you’re sick of the whole rat race. Is it so, Max?” But Max angrily shook off his hand. “You talk about friendship,” Tony continued. “Why don’t you see my side? We got into this thing as friends. It was your idea to go in, and I followed you. Now it’s my idea to get out. Why don’t you follow me?”

  “Because you’re changing the terms of the friendship.”

  “For the better.”

  Max turned away abruptly and walked to the center of the zoo, stopping before the seal tank. The seals were all asleep. Tony did not follow him, probably wishing to give him the opportunity to think it out. But Max did not need to think it out. He had no intention of doing the mad thing that Tony suggested. Something had come over him that threatened to be even stronger than his fear of Lassatta. It was a hot stifled feeling in his chest and deep in his throat that made him actually cough. He was not sure what it was, but he wondered if it might not be hate.

  Hate? For Tony? Was it conceivable? Of course it was conceivable! Love and hate had too much in common not to be interchangeable. But what was left of his life, then? Might he not just as well go for a ride with one of Lassatta’s thugs and get it over with?

  The surface of the dark water broke, and a seal’s head appeared. One of them had been under, after all. Max found himself thinking of Dr. Redding, his old headmaster at St. John’s, and how earnestly he had prayed in chapel. And then he thought of his mother, his darling pretty mother, Susie, who used to visit him once a term, coming up by bus and going back to New York the same day because she couldn’t afford the Parents’ House. How she had toiled to support him. How she had clung to the few “advantages” left after his father’s death, working for a party bureau for debutantes and their ghastly mothers, until her fluttery little bird’s heart had given out and he had been left alone. Could there be a more pathetic picture than that pretty boy and his pretty mother, alone against a sneering world? Laugh, will you? Screw you, brother! Max spat on the railing.

  But he had been thinking of Susie at St. John’s. And of Dr. Redding. For that was what he and Susie had noticed together: the way Dr. Redding prayed. He used to close his eyes tight, really tight, squeezing and crumpling his lids, and then he would shake his head heavily back and forth so that the loud rich quavery voice became more quavery, like water from a shaken garden hose. He seemed to be entering into some ecstatic private communion with God that made him forget the very service he was conducting.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Susie would whisper to Max. “You can see how real it all is to him.”

  Ah, yes, that was it. Susie had tried to give all the real things in life to her beloved boy by selling perfume, by modeling dresses, by arranging flowers at debuts. And seeing Dr. Redding wrestle with the God inside him had been a real thing. The idea would never have entered Susie’s pretty head that there could be any relationship between Dr. Redding’s God and Susie Leonard, or even between that presumably awful deity and little Max. But that was beside the point. The point was that if one wanted the real things—a good education, attractive friends and manners, a certain dash and style, and a vision of the idealism and religiosity of good teachers, or at least of headmasters—one had to pay for them. Of course, Dr. Redding was totally sincere in his convictions. He had to be. That was why his school was first class, why it cost so much.

  But Tony. Was that what Tony was doing? Shaking his head, making his voice quaver, taking on the role of Dr. Redding? What damn cheek! Max strode back to him.

  “How long will you give me before you go to the U.S. Attorney?”

  “How long do you want?”

  “Ill let you know. I’ll call you.”

  “Max!” Tony called, for Max was already hurrying away.

  “Screw you, brother.” He did not turn, for he did not want to see Tony’s smile.

  ***

  Max stood in the small, bare, paneled reception room of Shea, Collins & Bogardus, specialists in tax law, and glared at the stubborn girl behind the desk.

  “Mr. Bogardus never sees anyone before lunch,” she insisted. “All his appointments are between two and four.”

  “Hell see me. Just tell him I’ve come on a matter concerning his son-in-law.”

  She looked doubtful. “Can’t you come later?”

  “Call him, will you?”

  When she did this, and Mr. Bogardus’s secretary came right out to take him in, he made a little face at the receptionist, and she smiled. For all his troubles he had not lost his way with women.

  He did not have to ask Mr. Bogardus to close his door. The secretary did that, anyway. Tony’s father-in-law, tall, strongly built, almost comically distinguished with his side ring of gray hair and gleaming high forehead, stood splendidly before him with a broad, ingratiating smile.

  “And now, my dear Max, what can I do for you?” Grandly, Mr. Bogardus pointed to a chair, and both sat. “It’s a long time since I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you.”

  “Tony tells me you know everything,” Max blurted out. “Including his plan to confess.”

  The fine red lips of his host slowly retracted into an almost straight line. The large kindly eyes, blue-gray, became inscrutable. But when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “We are agreed, I hope, that it is the plan of a lunatic?”

  “Entirely.”

  “Who must be stopped.”

  “Ah, but how?”

  “Surely, Max, you have great influence with him?”

  “No more. He was adamant. I’ve begged. I’ve argued. It’s hopeless.”

  Mr. Bogardus looked down at his long, pink, clean fingernails as he took this in. “But Tony is very fond of you, surely. Even if he is willing to destroy himself and his family—for some unfathomable reason of his own—must it follow that you and your family share his fate? How does he square that with his bizarre conscience?”

  “He thinks he can make a deal with the U.S. Attorney that will leave me out.”

  “And do you think he can do that?”

  “I don’t know. He might.”

  “And he might not,” Mr. Bogardus retorted in a harder tone that seemed to smack of something like satisfaction. “But even if he does, have you thought of where that leaves you? The U.S. Attorney, of course, is a Republican. An ambitious Republican. He will want the greatest possible publicity. Think of it from his point of view. A rising Democratic politician, whom a Republican president has been induced to consider for an assistant-secretaryship of the Treasury at the urgent persuasion of Democratic bigwigs, walks into his office, confesses to a scandalous crime and offers to collaborate in prosecuting the Mafia. What a bonanza! You can count on the U.S. Attorney to make it the case of the year and to bag as many major crooks as he can while at the same time discrediting his political opponents.”

  Max listened, fascinated. He saw the conclusion which Mr. Bogardus was approaching, but he could not even bring a mutter from his dry mouth.

  “And where, my dear Max, I repeat, does that leave you? Even if your name is kept out of the trial, you can hardly expect that it will be unknown to a vengeful Mafia, stung to frenzy by Tony’s disclosures.”

  “I know, I know!” Max cried with a little yelp of panic.

  “So you see, my friend, you’ve got to stop Tony.”

  “How? How?”

  “Can you really think of nothing?”

  “Nothing. He’s crazy, I tell you. There’s no talking to him.” Max stared at the grave blank face before him. He felt that this strange man must know a solution, but that he would not articulate it until he had drained Max dry. “I suppose I could go to Lassatta—that’s the guy who started it all—and tell him what Tony’s going to do,” he continued desperately. “But I don’t suppose we want to go that far, do we?”

  “Hardly. We don’t want to add murder to the list of your peccadillos.” Bogardus now removed th
e mask and allowed his visitor to view his contempt. “No, as I see it, there’s only one thing you can do to save your neck. Go to the U.S. Attorney and confess ahead of Tony. Demand full police protection. You’ll get it. They’ll do anything for you when they hear your tale. They’ll even protect you permanently. They’ll give you a new name, a new country, if you want. And they won’t be the least interested in putting you in jail, either, because you weren’t a public official. Mark my words, Max, you can make any deal you propose.”

  Max swallowed and sucked his lips for moisture. “But couldn’t I do that with Tony?”

  “You’ll make a better deal if you do it on your own. Then they’ll think they owe you something. Otherwise, Tony will be the one they concentrate on. And the one they’ll primarily protect.”

  As Max took this in, he felt a gradual easing of his apprehension. Bogardus now seemed like a nurse, a very stiff and starched but wholly dependable and quite comfortable nurse, who was turning down the corner of a spotless bed and telling him to take off his clothes, his worries, his fears, to get in and sleep the sleep of reassurance and peace. A dull reassurance, a dull peace, perhaps, but no less desirable for being that. And Max, closing his eyes, knowing that the nurse would understand his silence, allowed himself to assess just how weary he was. He thought of Elaine and her spitefulness, of his daughters and their jeeriness; he thought of Tony and his hideous betrayal; he thought of Lassatta and death. Bogardus was right. There had to be an end to running. Yet when he spoke, it was not immediately to accept the plan.

  “What’s there in it for you?” he demanded bluntly. “Tony still goes to jail. As a matter of fact, it’s worse for him. He loses his chance to make a deal for himself.”

  “Exactly.” For the first time there was the hint of a glitter in those kindly eyes. “And that is what there’s in it for me. You can imagine what a father-in-law must think of a son-in-law like Tony. All I want to do is rescue my daughter and her children. If he makes a public confession and traps some big criminals, he may become a kind of hero. I know Lee. It will appeal to the romantic in her. But if he’s trapped himself by your confession, he’s just another rat. It’s harder for her to glamorize it.”