Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  “Difficult?”

  “I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I managed it. Things have changed now but at this time I was the only Jewish bodyguard in the whole Midwest. I broke ground out there. The other Jewish boys were all in law school. That was what the families wanted. Didn’t your old man want you to go to law school instead of to Chicago to become an English teacher?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Clive Cummis, your brother’s friend. Big New Jersey attorney now. Before you went out to graduate school to study literature, your father asked Clive to take you aside to plead with you to go to law school instead.”

  “I don’t myself remember that happening.”

  “Sure. Clive took you into the bedroom on Leslie Street. He said you’d never make a living teaching English. But you told him you weren’t having any of that stuff and to forget it.”

  “Well, that’s an incident that slips my mind.”

  “Clive remembers it.”

  “You see Clive Cummis, too?”

  “I get business from lawyers all over the country. I have a lot of law firms we work very closely with. We are exclusive agents for them. They’ll turn over all the cases to us where they need an investigator in Chicago. We’ll turn cases over to them, they’ll turn cases over to us. I’ve got a great working relationship with about two hundred police departments, basically in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. We have a great relationship with the county police, tremendous arrest record with the counties. I brought in a lot of people for them.”

  I have to tell you that I was beginning to believe him.

  “Look, I never ever wanted to do the Jewish thing,” he said. “That always seemed to me to be our big mistake. Law school to me was just another ghetto. So was what you did, the writing, the books, the schools, all that scorn for the material world. Books to me were too Jewish, just another way to hide from fear of the goyim. You see, I was having Diasporist thoughts even then. It was crude, it wasn’t formulated, but the instinct was there from the start. These people here call it ‘assimilation’ in order to disparage it—I called it living like a man. I joined the army to go to Korea. I wanted to fight the Communists. I never got sent. They made me an MP at Fort Benning. I built my body in the gym there. I learned to direct traffic. I became a pistol expert. I fell in love with weapons. I studied the martial arts. You quit ROTC because you were against the military establishment at Bucknell, and I became the best fucking MP they ever saw in Georgia. I showed the fucking rednecks. Don’t be afraid, I told myself, don’t run away—beat them at their fucking game. And through this technique I developed a tremendous sense of self-worth.”

  “What happened to it?” I asked.

  “Please, don’t insult me too much. I don’t carry a gun, the cancer has knocked the shit out of my body, the drugs, you’re right, they’re no good for the brain, they fuck up your nature, and, on top of everything, I am in awe of you—that’s true and always will be. It’s as it should be. I know my place vis-à-vis you. I’m willing to take shit from you that I never took before in my life. I’m a little powerless where you’re concerned. But I happen also to understand your predicament better than you give me credit for. You’re blitzed too, Phil, this isn’t the easiest situation for a classic Jewish paranoid to handle. That’s what I’m trying to address right now—your paranoid response. That’s why I’m explaining to you who I am and where I’m coming from. I’m not an alien from outer space. I’m not a schizoid delusion. And however much fun it is for you to think so, I’m not Meema Gitcha’s Moishe Pipik, either. Far from it. I’m Philip Roth. I’m a Jewish private detective from Chicago who has got cancer and is doomed to die of it, but not before he makes his contribution. I am not ashamed of what I have done for people up until now. I am not ashamed of being a bodyguard for people who needed a bodyguard. A bodyguard is a piece of meat, but I never gave anybody less than the best. I did matrimonial surveillance for years. I know it’s the comic-relief end of the business, catching people with their pants down, I know it’s not being a novelist who wins prizes for excellence—but that’s not the Philip Roth who I was. I was the Philip Roth who went up to the desk manager at the Palmer House and showed him my badge or gave him some other pretense so I could get to the registration book to see that they had actually signed in and what room they were in. I am the Philip Roth who in order to get up there would say I was a floral-delivery person and I gotta be sure this is personally done because the guy gave me a hundred dollars to get it up there. I am the Philip Roth who would get the maid and make up a story for her: ‘I forgot my key, this is my room, you can check downstairs that this is my room.’ I am the Philip Roth who could always get a key, who could always get in the room—always.”

  “Just like here,” I said, but that didn’t stop him.

  “I am the Philip Roth who rushes into the room with his Minolta and gets his pictures before they know what’s happened. Nobody gives you awards for this, but I was never ashamed, I put in my years, and when I finally had the money, I opened my own agency. And the rest is history. People are missing and Philip Roth finds them. I’m the Philip Roth who is dealing with desperate people all the time, and not just in some book. Crime is desperate. The person who reported them is desperate and the person who is on the lam is desperate, and so desperation is my life, day and night. Kids run away from home and I find them. They run away and they get pulled into the world of people who are scum. They need a place to stay, and so the people take advantage of that. My last case, before I got cancer, was a fifteen-year-old girl from Highland Park. Her mother came to me, she was a mess, a lot of tears and screaming. Donna registered for her high school class in September, went for the first two days, and then disappeared. She winds up with a known felon, warrants for his arrest, a bad guy. A Dominican. I found this apartment building in Calumet City where his grandmother lived, and I staked it out. It was all I had to go on. I staked it out for days. I sat upwards of twenty-six hours once without relief. With nothing happening. You have to have patience, tremendous patience. Even reading the newspapers is chancy because something could happen in a split second and you might miss it. There for hours and you have to be inventive. You hide in the vehicle, you sit low in the vehicle, you pretend you’re just hanging out like anybody else in the vehicle. Sometimes you go to the bathroom in the vehicle—you can’t help it. And meanwhile I am always putting myself in the criminal’s mind, how he’s going to react and what he’s going to do. Every criminal is different and every scenario I come up with is different. When you’re a criminal and you’re stupid, you don’t think, but if you’re a detective you have to be intelligent enough to not-think in the way this guy doesn’t think. Well, he turns up at the grandmother’s finally. I follow him on foot when he comes out. He goes to make a drug purchase. Then he comes back to the car. I make a pass by the car and there she is—I make a positive identification that it is Donna. It turned out later that he was doing drugs in the car himself. To shorten a long story, the car chase lasted twenty-five minutes. We’re driving about eighty miles an hour down side roads through four Indiana towns. The guy is charged with sixteen different counts. Eluding police, resisting arrest, kidnapping—he’s in deep shit. I interrogated the girl. I said, ‘How you doin’, Donna?’ She says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, my name is Pepper. I’m from California. I’ve been in town a week.’ This nice Highland Park high school girl of fifteen has the intelligence of a hardened con and her story is perfect. She’s been gone eleven months, and she had a fake birth certificate, a driver’s license, a whole bunch of fake IDs. Her behavior indicated to me that this guy was using her for prostitution. We found condoms in her pocketbook, sexual devices in the car and things.”

  I thought, He’s got it all down pat from TV. If only I’d watched more “L.A. Law” and read less Dostoyevsky I’d know what’s going on here, I’d know in two minutes what show it is exactly. Maybe motifs from fifteen shows, with a dozen detective movies t
hrown in. The joke is that more than likely there’s a terrifically popular network program that everyone stays home for on Friday nights, and not only is it about a private investigator who specializes in missing kids but it’s a Jewish private investigator, and the episode about the high school girl (sweet cheerleader, square parents, mind of her own) and the addict-pimp abductor (dirty dancer, folkloric grandmother, pitted skin) was probably the last one seen by Pipik before he’d hopped on the plane for Tel Aviv to play me. Maybe it was the in-flight movie on El Al. Probably everybody in America over three years of age knows about how detectives shit in their cars and call the cars vehicles, probably everybody over three in America knows exactly what is meant by a sexual device and only the aging author of Portnoy’s Complaint has to ask. What fun it must be for him putting me on like this. But is the masquerading relentless for the sake of the shakedown, or is the shakedown a pretext for the performance and all the real fun in the act? What if this isn’t simply a con but his parody of my vocation, what’s now known to mankind as a “roast.” Yes, suppose this Pipik of mine is none other than the Satiric Spirit in the flesh, and the whole thing a send-up, a satire of authorship! How could I have missed it? Yes, yes, the Spirit of Satire is of course who he is, here to poke fun at me and other outmoded devotees of what is important and what is real, here to divert us all from the Jewish savagery that doesn’t bear thinking about, come with his road show to Jerusalem to make everyone miserable laugh.

  “What are the sexual devices?” I asked him.

  “She had a vibrator. There was a blackjack in the car. I forget what else we had.”

  “What’s the blackjack, a kind of dildo? 1 suppose dildos are a dime a dozen on prime time by now. What the Hula-Hoop used to be.”

  “They use blackjacks for S & M. For beating and punishing and things like that.”

  “What happened to Donna? Is she white? I didn’t catch this show. Who plays you? Ron Liebman or George Segal? Or is it you playing them for me?”

  “I don’t know many writers,” he replied. “Is this the way they all think? That out there everybody is playing? Man! You listened too religiously to that kiddie program when you were a little boy—you and Sandy may have loved it too much. Saturday mornings. Remember? Nineteen forty also. Eleven a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Da-dum-da-dadada, dum-da-dadada, dum-dada-da-dum.”

  He was humming the tune that used to introduce “Let’s Pretend,” a fairy-tale half hour that little unmediaized American children adored back in the thirties and forties, my brother and I but two of the millions.

  “Maybe,” he said, “your perception of reality got arrested at the ‘Let’s Pretend’ level.”

  To this I did not even bother to reply.

  “Oh, that’s a cliché, is it? Am I boring you? Well,” he said, “now that you’re pushing sixty and ‘Let’s Pretend’ isn’t on the air anymore, someone should bore you long enough to explain that, one, the world is real, two, the stakes are high, and, three, nobody is pretending anymore except you. I have been inside your head for so long now and yet not until this moment have I understood what a writer is all about: you guys think it’s all make-believe.”

  “I don’t think any of it is make-believe, Pipik. I think—I know— that you are a real liar and a real fake. It’s the stories that purport to be about ‘it,’ it’s the struggle to describe ‘it,’ where the make-believe comes in. Five-year-old children may take the stories for real, but by the time you’re pushing sixty, deciphering the pathology of story making comes to be just another middle-age specialty. By the time you’re pushing sixty, the representations of ‘it’ are ‘it.’ They’re everything. Follow me?”

  “Nothing hard to follow except your relevance. Cynicism increases with age because the bullshit piles up on your head. What’s that got to do with us?”

  I heard myself ask aloud, “Am I conversing with this person, am I truly trying to make sense with him? Why?”

  “Why not! Why should you converse with Aharon Appelfeld,” he said, holding up and shaking Aharon’s book, “and not with me!”

  “A thousand reasons.”

  He was all at once in a jealous rage because I talked seriously to Aharon but not to him. “Name one!” he cried.

  Because, I thought, of Aharon’s and my distinctly radical twoness, a condition with which you appear to have no affinity at all; because we are anything but the duplicates that everyone is supposed to believe you and me to be; because Aharon and I each embody the reverse of the other’s experience; because each recognizes in the other the Jewish man he is not; because of the all but incompatible orientations that shape our very different lives and very different books and that result from antithetical twentieth-century Jewish biographies; because we are the heirs jointly of a drastically bifurcated legacy—because of the sum of all these Jewish antinomies, yes, we have much to talk about and are intimate friends.

  “Name one!” he challenged for a second time but on this subject I simply remained silent and, sensibly for a change, kept my thinking to myself. “You recognize Appelfeld for the person he claims to be; why do you refuse that with me? All you do is resist me. Resist me, ignore me, insult me, defame me, rant and rave at me—and steal from me. Why must there be this bad blood? Why you should see me as a rival—I cannot understand it. Why is this relationship so belligerent from your end? Why must it be destructive when together we could achieve so much? We could have a creative relationship, we could be partners—copersonalities working in tandem rather than stupidly divided in two!”

  “Look, I’ve got more personalities than I can use already. All you are is one too many. This is the end of the line. I don’t want to go into business with you. I just want you to go away.”

  “We could at least be friends.”

  He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “Never. Profound, unbridgeable, unmistakable differences that far outweigh the superficial similarity—no, we can’t be friends, either. This is it.”

  He looked, to my astonishment, about to burst into tears because of what I’d said. Or maybe it was just the ebb tide of those drugs. “Look, you never told me what happened to Donna,” I said. “Entertain us a little more, and then, what do you say, let’s bring this little error to an end. What became of Highland Park High’s fifteen-year- old dominatrix? How’d that show wind up?”

  But this, of course, riled him again.

  “Shows! You really think I watch PI shows? There isn’t one that depicts what’s real, not one. If I had a choice between watching “Magnum, P.I.” and “Sixty Minutes,” I’d watch “Sixty Minutes” any time. Shall I tell you something? Donna turned out to be Jewish. Her mother, I found out later, was the reason why she left. I won’t go into that, you don’t care. But I did, I got involved in those cases—they were my life before I got sick. I would try to find out what the reasons were they left and try to get them to stay. I would try to help them. That was very rewarding. Unfortunately this Dominican with Donna—his name was Hector—Donna had a problem with him—”

  “He had this power over her,” I said, “and to this day she’s trying to contact him.”

  “That happens to be the case. That’s true. She was charged with receiving stolen property, resisting arrest, eluding police too—she’s in a detention center.”

  “And the day she’s released from the detention center, she’ll run away again,” I said. “Great story. Everybody can identify, as they say. Beginning with you. She doesn’t want to be Dr. and Mrs. Jew’s Donna anymore, she wants to be Hector’s Dominican Pepper. All this autobiographical fantasy, is it nationwide? Is it worldwide? Maybe this stuff everybody is watching has inspired half the human population with the yearning for a massive transfer of souls, maybe that’s what you embody—the longings for metempsychosis inspired in mankind by all those TV shows.”

  “Idiot!” he shouted. “It’s staring you right in the face what I embody!”

  It is, I thought: exactly nothing. There is no meaning here at all. Tha
t’s the meaning. I can stop there. I could have started there. Nothing could look more like it meant something than this, and nothing could mean less.

  “So, what happened finally to Hector?” I asked him, hoping now that if I could lead him to the end of something, of anything, it might present an opportunity to get him up from my bed and out of the room without my having to call down to the desk for assistance. I never felt less inclined than at that moment to see this poor possessed scoundrel wind up in trouble. Not only was he meaningless but, having observed him for nearly an hour, I was hard-pressed to believe any longer that he was violent. In this way we weren’t dissimilar: the violence was all verbal. I had, in fact, actively to prevent myself from despising him less than was warranted, given the maddening mix-up he’d made of my life and the repercussions of this encounter, which I was sure were going to dog me in unpleasant ways in the future.

  “Hector?” he said. “Hector made bail, he’s out on bail.” Unexpectedly he began to laugh, but a laugh that was as hopeless and weary as any sound emitted by him yet. “You and Hector. I never saw the parallel till now. As if I don’t have enough grief from you, with all the ways you want to fuck me over, I’ve got Hector waiting in the wings. He called me, he spoke to me, he threatened my life—Hector told me he was going to kill me. This is just before I went into the hospital. I’ve arrested a lot of people, you realize, put a lot of people in prison. They phone me, they track me down, and I don’t hide. If somebody wants to get even with me, there’s nothing I can do. But I don’t look over my shoulder. I told Hector what I tell them all. ‘I’m listed in the book, man. Philip Roth. Come and get me.’”