‘Are we going to bankrupt or not?’
‘I’ll see … Hello? Get me our printers. No, tell him to come round at once: I’ve got a new letterhead for him.’
‘What letterhead’s that?’ asked Michel, anxiously.
‘The Amstel Discount Corporation, of course. When you go round to Lemaître’s, ask him to look up Belgian law and find out what incorporation fee, and what rules for directors and all that … Hello? Get me Maître Olympe … Say, that bomb idea is the best. Well pay an old anarchist to throw a bomb, then well hustle him out after he’s dropped a few clues, and we don’t even have to move from Paris. Or he can sit for six months and well make it up to him Say, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get “Old” Berthellot to falsify the books—Hello, is that you, Pierre? Say, have you been to see about that lease in the Rue Tronchet? Well, hurry up: I want it signed. I want to get the furniture in. Did you tell the brass-plate makers to make the name plate yet? Well, why the deuce didn’t you? I told you the name, Geneva International … Well, get it done. Good-by.’ He slammed down the telephone.
‘What about “Old” Berthellot?’ asked Michel.
‘Get Berthellot to falsify the books, you see and make believe to run off with about ten million francs. He has always wanted to live in the Channel Islands. You find out, Michel, where there are no extradition laws, and we’ll pay his passage. While he’s falsifying the books for his ten million he can cover up about—well, the lot: we’ll send him round to “inspect” the branches. Then I’ll pay the Parquet to forget it. Don’t want to crush dear old servant, loyal for many years, et cetera.’
‘Berthellot mightn’t like to end his days under a cloud.’
‘Don’t make me laugh. “Old” Berthellot. Old thief. He’s the only one of our paper directors who turns up for his monthly director’s fee. But he’s sane. He hasn’t got the neurosis of blackmail, like all the accountants and petty clerks who suddenly think they’ve found out a great scandal and run to the police: your-money-or-the-police breed. Berthellot will see in it a chance to insure his old age. That’s better than blowing up the bank. Or could we combine the two?’
‘Will I get Lemaître on the phone or are you just blowing off steam, Jules?’
‘Of course, I’m serious. I say, if I’d thought of it on May first we could have got a bunch of toughs to break into the bank, scare the customers and say they were communists, and loot a few filing cases: the government would adore a chance to search all the communist quarters for stolen cash.’
‘We didn’t have the money on May first. Besides, communists are known better than other citizens: they have party cards. This is just scatterbrained, Jules. You’re writing a comic-opera scenario.’
‘Couldn’t we forge party cards? Give it to some toughs? You’ve seen what they’re like, the cards, I mean, haven’t you? Could you remember? Or you could get one for a sample. I say, Adam Constant has one: let’s get him up.’
‘Listen, Jules: you know this is moonshine. This is a bad year. If you want to put on a first-class show, let’s conserve the money we have and wait till some really bad crash occurs, another Credit-Anstalt, a currency going off (the pound perhaps), a war, and then we can go futt with the honors of war. We can show that we lost our investments, were long of the pound, or had strong commitments in wheat or something of that sort. I have several friends—Léon, for instance—who would help us out in that way. Ephraim Dreyer would: we’ve done much the same for him. We’ve helped a hundred of the extra-rich evade their income taxes for years.’
‘I don’t trust the bastards: no rich man is a patriot, no rich man a friend. They have all only got one fatherland—the Ritz-Carlton; and one friend—the mistress they’re promising to divorce their wife for. Dreyer? The police have examined his books twice already; his books are too well known. Léon? Maybe.’
‘Antedated contracts in wheat. That’s the formula. Lemaître will tell us how exactly.’
‘Léon? His quid pro quo would be usury. I don’t trust that boy.’
‘Well, we’ll think something out.’
‘We can’t stand still! To stand still is to go backwards in this business. Tomorrow the clients guess wrong and if we’re out of the market ourselves, we lose a couple of millions in equities. Are you going to lunch? Have lunch with William and then you two come over to my house tonight. The whole family will be there. We’ll all talk it over …’ He laughed and sauntered out.
Alphendéry looked in at William’s door. ‘Going to lunch? O.K. I’ll wait.’
William nodded. His hands in his pockets he was looking out the window at some rats running on a neighboring roof, and occasionally he dictated a letter to Mlle. Dalbi. He was a blond personable figure, in the pink of condition, with a baby-skinned rosy face and never a wrinkle. He looked as if he had never been troubled by a thought in his life.
* * *
Scene Twenty-seven: Snapshots
A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow,’ William stated at lunch. ‘Everything is a time technique. I know Jules. If he wants to make a getaway, he had better make it. No good making two bites at a detonator. No good waiting till the barricades come, either. I know it’s coming because comtesses are going red, the Raccamonds are turning tables, and whores are getting conservative. Well, if you know that—it’s all a time equation—why wait? It doesn’t matter what country we’re in: all we do is to lease out the open spaces in people’s heads. What have you and I got to worry about, eh? We got enough to live on. Now, every day we work is a double saving: we pay for our food and we save another day in our reserves. But if it comes to going, we can go. Why wait? We’ve got the money. Profits in a stock market are like raising a boy: it takes twenty-five years to rear him and put him through college and one second for a taxi to mash him up when he’s rolling home drunk. Profits are like love: you spend a year waiting at the gate for Katie and it takes you three minutes to get over it.’
He dipped his face deeply into his beer. He came up like the gamboling porpoise, ‘So what do you care? Why worry? I never worry! Go to the pictures. Forget it. Don’t dream. I never dream. What is a dream? It’s a lunatic idea. I never had one.’
‘That’s interesting,’ murmured Alphendéry. ‘Janet said he came across authentic cases in psychopathology of people who never dreamed.’
‘Pathology!’ cried William wrathfully, suddenly emerging from his beer, ‘They have nightmares and I’m crazy. Look at Jules: everyone knows he’s as crazy as a bedbug, he comes in yellow every morning from dreaming. Look at me. I’m fat. He eats nothing.’
‘Yes, Jules dreams a lot,’ murmured Alphendéry.
‘Awake!’ He shrugged his shoulders and plunged again into his Pilsener. ‘All right, for a playwright: he can use them in his plays. Not in a balance sheet.’
In the afternoon, Jules was in hoplà temper. One of his old friends, Xesús Maria de Huesca, a poor Spanish nobleman of a junior line, came in with one of those perfect selling ideas which occur twice a day to the rouseabout geniuses of Paris boulevardiers. He was a man-mountain of about fifty, partly bald, with black eyes, suiting, hat, and shoes, and a gallant tie of various colors. Xesús Maria required a loan from Jules of twenty thousand francs with which to finance a sure-fire invention, a pill made of ingredients named in the Spanish Catholic Encyclopedia, under the heading ‘aphrodisiacs,’ to heat the blood in female hearts. Most of the money was needed for the printing of pamphlets, leaflets, and diagrams. Señor de Huesca had a middle-aged friend in the Place des Ternes who would compound the pills for him; and he intended to place them himself with the assistance of one or two indigent but intelligent compatriots. Jules refused this attractive proposition.
Cornells Brouwer, manager of Jules’s Brussels branch, came in and spent one hour and twenty minutes talking about the Aryan Path and ended by withdrawing ten thousand francs in cash to go to
Deauville for the week end.
Claire-Josèphe rang up to say she had just seen the famous medium, Ras Berri, who said that before Claire-Josèphe and Jules were pavilions and pillars of gold; and that Jules, Jr., had colic and they had better call Dr. Dupont in the Boulevard Malesherbes. Jules advised her to call Dr. Dupont in the Avenue Victor-Hugo, who was frequented by the Etat Major.
Pierre Olympe rang up to say that Tony and Aline had finally decided to divorce each other and were now living together in perfect harmony.
Richard Plowman came in with Frank Durban, and Durban said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to last long, Jules: I’ve advised Dick to take out all his money.’ Plowman laughed and hit him on the back, ‘You should have advised me not to go into the Burlington Arcade where I lost twelve pounds in notes, last time I was there. That rankles. It’s so silly.’ Jules’s face lighted up, ‘What makes you think I won’t last, Frank?’
‘It’s the drawing-room atmosphere,’ said Durban.
‘He just yearns for the veldt,’ said Plowman foolishly.
‘I don’t think your feet are on the ground,’ Durban ended, but amiably.
‘Of course not, he’s Mercury, he, he,’ giggled Jules’s old friend. ‘He flies through the air with the greatest of ease.’ His thin voice essayed a song.
‘Sit down, Richard,’ said Jules, taking the old man by the arm and showing him a deep, soft chair.
Richard Plowman took a cutting from his pocket, ‘You remember the octopus we shipped in the Mediterranean last summer, Jules? Here’s something extraordinary.’ He said to Durban, ‘In 1875 an extraordinary number of giant octopodes and squids were found either dead or dying on the surface of the sea. On the average they must have weighed half a ton each. Their long arms reached a length of forty feet. Remains of them have also been found in the stomach of the cachalot. They are found on the coasts of Alaska, Japan, New Zealand and on the Pacific Island of St. Paul. Think of the sudden disease that overwhelms a whole tribe of these fearless behemoths in a night! “The desolator, desolate.” Probably invisible microscopic misery! So we are attacked where we least expect it, eh?’ He went on in a calmer tone, ‘In warm waters at this season, the Loligo vulgaris—’
Jules leaned back and dreamed: let them go on talking. The two rich peaceable old men were like household gods—one on the right, one on the left—that assured him all was right on his hearth. When they went out, Durban stopped at the door and said, ‘Do you hear, Dick: you must take your money out. Or at least leave a few thousand francs only, for old sake’s sake.’
‘You’re frank in name and nature,’ said Jules, smiling.
‘I never stab in the back,’ said Durban.
Plowman smiled, pulled his mustaches, trembled with a sort of shining pride, ‘Frank, I’ve staked Jules since the very first day he started a little exchange shop: I believe in his star as I believe in—the Thirty-nine Articles!’
‘So do I,’ said Durban.
Plowman laughed and, putting his hand in his arm, dragged the old atheist out.
* * *
Scene Twenty-eight: Posters on the Bank
While the others prattled of segregations and holding companies, Claire-Josèphe, with her hair beautifully fixed in the manner of the Atlantide, and looking more like a debutante than a wife of ten years’ standing, battled for her own rights and those of her four children. She insisted on Jules providing for each member of the family, from mother to youngest son, separately, and on the bankruptcy taking place some considerable time after so doing, so that it would resemble neither collusion nor any other kind of fraud. She was in her rights. With the same delicate, virgin air, she produced documents that she had been working at all day with Maître Pierre Olympe, their crony. Jules accepted these with a twinkle but without a murmur. Alphendéry had spent hours of the late afternoon with Maître Lemaître, a leading jurisconsult.
‘Maître Lemaître thinks you are right. If you move now you will save money. He foresees greater severity on taxes and a tightening up perhaps of the banking laws, and severer penalties. If you move now, say, within a year, when the judiciary is still susceptible to certain kinds of persuasion, you will get out with your skin whole. Lemaître calculates that the bankruptcy will take fifteen months to arrange, and you begin now. You must keep on making investments which lose money and buying contracts in commodities on which you lose money. This Guildenstern and Rosenkrantz combination might even help us!’ He laughed at his cleverness. ‘Naturally, you must make a little, too: but on the whole, the picture will show a man who has lost his touch and his nerve. But it must be stage-managed, this decline from multimillionaire to pauper! Otherwise, irate clients will chase you for mishandling their affairs. You must work up a background of misfortune and pathos so that those you steal from will pipe their eye every time they think of you.’
‘Impossible!’ Jules’s large handsome white hand cut the air. ‘A year? He’s mad. I want to take the next boat, if I’m going at all, as it were. What will happen in a year? Perhaps long before that, there will be a panic and everyone will want their money.’
‘You can’t suddenly have a one-hundred per cent bankruptcy in any case—it wouldn’t look convincing,’ said Michel. ‘And then there’s Plowman.’
‘I don’t know,’ Jules looked worried. ‘This morning I had my ideas straight and I was all for going clean out. Now you fellows have got me so confused with your Lemaîtres and Plowmans—why can’t you fellows ever think straight? If I have to, I’ll pay out Plowman. But it’s a waste of money. What does Maître Lemaître know about business? His family has always been rich and always been in the law: naturally he thinks in long legal mazy exits. No punch to them. I don’t want to have a book written for me on the art of going bankrupt with fifty subsections. Any little peddler on a side street with all his brains in his cockeye can go bankrupt overnight and I’ve got to be a prince and take a year at it! I won’t do it that way.’
Alphendéry leaned back and eyed Jules with patient scorn. ‘Every little cockeye spends six months at least cooking the books, and working up antedated claims: that’s why they’re so thin and mangy: they stay up at night working seriously at it, the way they do their business, too.’
‘All right,’ cried Jules, exasperated, ‘all right. Let’s forget it. We’ll keep on in the same old way and one of these days we’ll go up the chimney in good and earnest: that will be honest and kosher—the books will please your Lemaître, but he won’t get his fee. Dick Plowman can pipe his eye but he won’t get a sou back. William and the twins can go and drive milk carts and Claire-Josèphe can teach school. I’m with you all—you ninnies! Is that banking! The Comtesse won’t have her money, I won’t have her confidence, the State won’t get its taxes, and our landlords won’t get their rent … Ugh! Ptt! You haven’t got an ounce of money brains in your heads. People love thieves.’
‘That’s so,’ said Alphendéry. ‘Léon has loved Méline ever since Méline stole about three hundred thousand guilders from him. Only death will part them.’
‘And so,’ said Jules, now master of himself and of the scene, ‘I don’t have to go through all that mishmash.’
Claire-Josèphe’s sweet, frail voice broke in: ‘Jules, darling, you must first fix up the children’s futures: then you will know how much you have left.’
‘Now,’ said Jules, ‘you boys have nothing to worry about, you know that. We’re all together. We’ll scatter and then we’ll meet again at a fixed place on a fixed date. We can fly. William still has a pilot’s license. Alphendéry gets air-sick but he’s necessary because he can hand out the flapdoodle to passport officials and he looks like a Bulgarian or a Spaniard or something. By the way, Michel. Your friends down in the Communist Party must know a lot about faking passports. Why don’t you go down and get us a wad of false passports, for Claire and the boys and the twins and William, you, and me. I don’t mind paying a
lot for them. They can use the money to stick posters on the bank denouncing the golden octopus after we’ve gone. And good luck to them.’ He laughed consumedly! ‘Oh, I’d love to see it. Like a man who wants to see his own funeral.’ He forgot the notion.
Their talk lasted till two in the morning. Michel was driven home by Jules. They were so exhausted, one and all, that the bankruptcy was beginning to take on the face of a deliverer. Michel particularly kept saying to himself, as he paced the floor of his apartment, ‘The waste of life, the waste of life!’
The telephone rang: an airy voice said, ‘Lo! I’m in bed. I say, Michel, let’s form our own Bertillon Bank Creditors’ Protection Committee. You can head it.’
‘That will impress everyone …’
‘No: you know the rumors about, that you represent God knows who, Alsatian high finance, Gros, Hartmann, Herrenschmidt, Mieg, and so forth?’
‘Yes. I’ve heard I represent everyone from Deterding to Oustric. You mean pretend three-quarters of the bank belongs to my correspondents. You can’t arrange that in a night. And I’d be on the stand: I don’t think I could stand the strain after all these years, frankly, Jules.’
‘Couldn’t we sell the bank on its goodwill to someone in the Netherlands, or some American; on the ground that all that money was placed in by your interests?’
‘I think that kind of sucker has withered away some years since. But you might be able to sell the bank. That’s an idea.’
House of All Nations Page 25
