Establishment (4 page)

“Will you?”

Tears welling into her eyes, Barbara shook her head. “No. That would do no good. That would only destroy both of us.”

“Will he come back?”

“If he lives—yes. He'll come back. He thinks he's indestructible. In all those years of war, he was never wounded, never scratched. But that—”

Sammy saw the tears and reacted to the tone of voice, and he began to cry. Jean took him in her arms, and Barbara went to the bathroom and washed her face. When she returned, Jean said, “There's still the money. That must be one of the reasons they came to him. Where could he find a hundred and ten thousand dollars?”

“I think,” Barbara said, “I think he'll go to daddy. Would daddy give it to him?”

Jean thought about it for a while. “He might. He just might. I've long ago given up trying to anticipate what Dan Lavette might do.”

***

Newspapermen who interviewed Dan Lavette frequently described him as leonine. The term amused him. A man is inside himself, and unless he is an actor or a politician, he rarely knows the image he presents to the outside world. It might be said that he generally knows even less concerning his inner self. Long ago, before Dan Lavette's Chinese wife, May Ling, died, he had moments when he felt himself and knew himself at least to some degree, and in those moments he had never seen himself as or considered himself a lionlike character. If anything, he had been as bewildered and confused as the next man. Yet it was quite true that now, in his sixtieth year, he might be described as leonine. He was a large man, six feet two inches in height, and over the past few years he had put on weight. His thick, curly hair had turned white, his face and neck had become heavier, and when he tightened his belt it creased the beginnings of a paunch.

He had become a legend in the Bay Area. When columnists were at a loss for a subject, there was always gold to be mined out of Dan Lavette. They could go back to his boyhood, when he ran his crabbing boats out of Fisherman's Wharf and fought the fish pirates with a double-barreled shotgun, or to the financial empire he had built with his partner, Mark Levy, before the Great Depression, or to his marriage to Jean Seldon, or to his divorce and his subsequent marriage to May Ling, or to his years of poverty when he fished mackerel out of San Pedro, or to the incredible shipyard he had built during the war years on Terminal Island. It was all grist for their mills, and the enticing thing about Lavette was that he never ceased to make good copy. He and his former wife, Jean, scorned to disguise that they were living together, a condition still regarded with censure in 1948. He operated a fleet of tankers that already held a commanding position in the trade, and, true to form, he made the headquarters of his shipping company in Jack London Square in Oakland. The fact that his son, Thomas—to whom he had not spoken for years—was in partnership with Jean's ex-husband, John Whittier, operating the largest cargo fleet on the West Coast, only made the copy more intriguing.

That Bernie Cohen came to him was not solely dependent on their relationship. If there had been no relationship at all and if Cohen had asked for the one man in the Bay Area who might respond to the strange scheme in which he was involved, he surely would have been recommended to Lavette. Now he sat in Dan's office, listening uneasily as Dan said, “I have to get my bearings, Bernie. You're married to my daughter for two years, and you've never asked for a nickel, breaking your ass with that damn garage of yours, and now it's a hundred and ten thousand dollars. I almost like it. Is there any chance of seeing any of that money again?”

“Not much, no. I could give you a note, and Brodsky could sign it as a representative of the Haganah, but I'd be a liar if I said there was any chance of them repaying it.”

“So it's charity.”

“Not deductible.”

“Just to sweeten it. You're a strange man, Bernie, but you're not crazy. At least, not much crazier than most of us. What in hell ever gave you the notion that I'd go for this?”

“Desperation. There's nowhere else to go.”

“You don't think I owe you something because you married my daughter?”

“I'm the one who owes you. No.”

“And you're walking out on her for a month, two months, six months. Does she know that?”

“She knows.”

“Does she like it?”

“What do you think, Dan? No, she doesn't like it. But she won't tell me not to do it.”

“What about the garage?”

“Gomez, my foreman, he's a good man. I can trust him. He'll run the garage. If we get the planes and if everything goes according to schedule, I could be back in three weeks.”

“You don't really believe that?”

Bernie shrugged. “No, not really. It could take a few months.”

Dan reached into a drawer and took out a box of cigars. “Smoke? These are clear Havana.” Bernie shook his head. Dan clipped the end and lit the cigar. “Ten C-54s for one hundred and ten thousand. This is a demented world we live in, Bernie. Ford's Willow Run plant cost the government five million and better. They sold it off as war surplus, and someone walked in and bought it for seventy thousand dollars. A part of the plant was filled with cases of sterling silver screws; they were worth ten times what he paid for the plant. No one knew it. I started the first airline out here on the Coast. That was back in twenty-eight. We flew Ford trimotors—tin geese, they called them. One of them cost more than these ten C-54s. By the way, what makes you think they're in any condition to fly?”

“They checked them out.”

“I think the whole scheme is totally insane. I don't know whether Barbara ever told you how I feel about war. I made two fortunes out of two wars. It's the filthiest, bloodiest, stupidest rotten game man ever invented. There are no good guys and no bad guys. It's a lousy, rotten scam.”

“Sure,” Bernie said softly. “I won't argue. I lived in it ten years of my life. What should we do, Dan? Let ourselves be slaughtered? Being a Jew is a unique thing. Other victims are picked at random. We're chosen specifically. Without these planes, the Arabs will slaughter us. Hitler killed six million of us. Doesn't it have to end somewhere? There's just no other way in the world to get fighter planes into Palestine.” He shook his head. “I don't know why I'm dumping all this on you. You're not Jewish.”

“I'm not. That's true. And let me tell you something, Bernie. If I should take leave of my senses and give you this money, it's not for you or your cause. I don't believe in causes. I'm a hard, cynical businessman, without a bone of idealism in my body, but I had a partner once who was the closest thing to a brother I ever had. Closer. His name was Mark Levy, and I guess maybe Barbara told you about him. He was Jewish, and I have a very large tab that he never collected. I owe him. Maybe this is a way to close a debt to a dead man; maybe it isn't. Let me think about it.”

“Our time's running out, Dan.”

“I'll let you know tomorrow.”

After Cohen had left, Dan sat and brooded and stared at the smoke of his cigar. Then he pressed his intercom and asked his secretary to send in Stephan Cassala. Cassala was the son of Anthony Cassala, who founded the Bank of Sonoma soon after the 1906 earthquake and watched it go under in 1929. Anthony died soon after the collapse of his bank. Stephan, at fifty-three, was now vice president and general manager of Lavette Shipping.

“Steve,” Dan said, “sit down and think about this.” Stephan dropped into a leather armchair facing Dan. He was a tall, slender, dark man, with deepset eyes and a long, brooding face. “Suppose I were to ask you,” Dan went on, “to get me a hundred and ten thousand in cash and not have any record of it. Lose it. Could you do it?”

“You don't want to tell me what you need it for?”

“No.”

“It wouldn't be easy. Our cash position is not great.”

“What do you draw cash for?”

“Expenses, some bonuses, dock guards on short notice, and bribes. Mostly bribes. You know that, Dan.”

“How do you cover the bribes?”

“We lose it. Juggle it—a little here, a little there. But a hundred and ten thousand will take a lot of juggling.”

“Can you do it?”

“If you need the money, I can do it.” He stared at Dan worriedly. “Are you being blackmailed?”

“No.”

“You're not paying off? I heard rumors of the Mob beginning to operate here in Oakland. Dan, if you pay off, there's no end to it.”

“I'm not paying off.”

“I'm curious as hell.”

“Then stay curious, Steve. If you don't know what it's for, then someday you can swear under oath that you never knew.”

“That way? Jesus, I don't like it, Dan.”

“Don't worry. It's all in a good cause. Or so they tell me.”

At eleven o'clock the following morning, Dan Lavette, carrying a bulging briefcase, rang the doorbell of his daughter's house. Barbara opened the door, looked at him in amazement, and then embraced him. “Daddy, what a delicious surprise!”

“I never walked in on you before like this,” he apologized.

“Then you should have. Once a week, at least.”

He went into the little parlor and put down the briefcase. She helped him off with his coat and asked whether anything was wrong.

“No. Or maybe yes. Depending on how you look at it.”

“What?”

“It can wait. Where's my grandson?”

“Upstairs in his playpen, being happy and fat and content, the way no citizen of this world has any right to be. But Sammy's too young and foolish to know that.”

“Bernie home?”

“He's at the garage. Come on, what brings you here? Has my mother been talking to you?”

“First I'll see my grandson.”

Barbara looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “All right. You want coffee?”

“Sure.”

“I'll be in the kitchen.” She watched Dan as he mounted the stairs. There was a time when he would have taken them two at a time. Now he walked slowly. Strangely, it was the first time Barbara had ever seen him as an aging man. She did some quick calculations and arrived at fifty-nine. Almost sixty was not old, or was it? There were times when her own thirty-four years felt like the weight of ages. For a moment or two, she listened to his jovial, booming exchange with his grandson, wondering whether he didn't frighten the little boy to death. Then she went into the kitchen and prepared fresh coffee.

“He's crying,” Dan said as he entered.

“Well, either you scared him to death or he wants you back there. Either way, he'll stop.”

“I don't scare my grandson. He understands me.”

“You scare a lot of people, daddy, believe it or not.”

“The hell I do. I'm a lamb.”

“Yes, I know.”

She poured the coffee and they sat down at the kitchen table. “Well,” she said, “what brings you here—aside from Sammy?”

“And you.”

“Yes. What else? Bernie?”

He nodded.

“He went to see you yesterday?”

Dan nodded again.

“And?”

“He told me the story, and he asked me to give him a hundred and ten thousand dollars.”

“Just like that?” Barbara said in amazement.

“No, not just like that. We talked. Tell me, Bobby, what's with you two? Another woman?”

“With Bernie?” She shook her head.

“It's not impossible. That's something no man's immune to.”

“Would it sound crazy if I told you he's very much in love with me, and I'm very much in love with him, and our marriage stinks?”

“No. It would sound reasonable. It's happened before. I never asked you how much you make, Bobby. I know the garage is no great shakes. Does Bernie take anything out of it?”

“Not yet, no.”

“What do you live on?”

“I'm supposed to head up the foundation when I have the time, which isn't often. I do get to at least one meeting a week. They pay me four hundred and fifty a month.”

“Princely.”

“It was my decision, daddy. I don't need the money. My last book earned over thirty thousand dollars, and I hope the next one will do as well.”

“In other words, you pay for everything.”

“Bernie works twelve, fourteen hours a day.”

“That doesn't solve anything.”

“But it would if he earned the money and I took it,” Barbara said angrily. “Oh, I am so sick to death of this idiotic male notion of what is right and what is proper.”

“I didn't make it and neither did Bernie,” Dan said gently. “We're just the result.”

“If that isn't the most self-serving, self-satisfying thing I have ever heard!” She drew a deep breath. “Now I'm getting very angry, and I shouldn't. Not with you, daddy.”

“You were right. He did stop crying,” Dan said.

Barbara stared at him. Then she began to laugh. “Oh, I do love you. But you're the strangest man.”

“I don't know. I've met some really strange ones.”

“But what about Bernie?”

“If he can't get the money from me, will that change it? Will he give it up?”

“Bernie? Daddy, if he wants that money, he'll get it. He'll rob a bank. He'll blow up an armored car—or something equally insane. That's the way he is, the way he thinks. But I understand why you couldn't give it to him.”

“Did you want me to?”

“I don't know. I just don't know.”

“Then you'd better make up your mind, Bobby, because that briefcase out in the living room contains one hundred and ten thousand dollars in cash, and it's up to you whether I leave it here or not.”

Moments went by while she stared at him, speechless. Finally she said, “My coffee's cold. Do you want another cup?”

He nodded. She went to the stove, put the gas on under the pot for a few minutes, and poured the coffee. Then she said, “Why?”