In Sunlight and in Shadow (26 page)

The exquisite tension in Verderamé’s manner and presence that turned solicitous comments into orders and threats told Harry that he was one of those people whose reservoirs of anger, though covered with humor, good nature, or curiosity, are so deep that when they erupt nothing can contain them. When people like this work in an office or a factory everyone is afraid of crossing them. If they yoke their anger to ambition, well, then they are Verderamé, someone who when he was younger had had to relieve the pressure on his soul by every now and then beating some other one to death. For him, innocence was insolent provocation, and lack of aggression an indictment that had to be violently suppressed. Verderamé’s eyes sparked. Like so many of the short-fused and explosive, he was often charming, graceful, and captivating. The pit viper betrays how it will strike not in its movements, which are feints, but in its eyes.

Harry saw that Verderamé was looking in his eyes with the same care with which he himself had earlier looked in Verderamé’s. Nor did Harry’s irises move a millimeter, as he had retreated into complete neutrality and suspended his emotions to the point where he felt he could have been in someone else’s body.

In a heavy Sicilian dialect, Verderamé called out to the men at the bar. “Who did we send to this boy?” In the same dialect, they answered that they weren’t sure, that it could have been Marco or Sammy, or John, the new guy.

Harry understood, and kept them from knowing that he did. He had thought that perhaps by speaking in Italian he could make some headway, but now he would not give up the advantage of being privy to conversations they thought secret. And, beyond that, to them his academic Roman dialect would no doubt sound pretentious. “Copeland Leather,” he said.

Verderamé drew his head back and opened his eyes a little wider, quickly restoring his expression, to show that he was familiar with the subject.

“I asked the guys you sent if I could see you. Until last week, we were paying Mickey Gottlieb a fifth of what they told us. It’s not as if business is suddenly good. We’re competing with cheap European labor. What we make is on a par with the best leather goods in the world, but though we’re as good as England or Italy, we can’t do better, and as their product begins to come in cheaply, they’re killing us.”

“What does that have to do with me? What are you telling me this for?” He was already angry, not with reason, but because he could be.

“If . . . we pay that amount every month. . . .”

“Every week, it’s always by the week.”

“Every week. God, every week. We’ll be out of business in six months, and then we won’t be able to pay anything.”

“Do you know how many times a day I hear this?” Verderamé asked, his irritation deliberately exaggerated to shift the ground. “All these guys, these people, who come to me and complain about the price of my services. Nobody I protect has ever been forced out of business because I protect them, but they all whine about how they’re going to go bankrupt. What has that got to do with me except that they wanna Jew me outa what they owe me? Even if they do go bankrupt, what do I care? Someone else is going to take over the space.”

“This will break the back of my business and put fifty good men out on the street.” Harry’s neutrality was ebbing. He stared at the table.

“Well,” said Verderamé, “you’re young. Did you just get back from the service?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you do?”

“I was a clerk, in Washington. Supply,” Harry said. “It wasn’t exactly. . . .”

“But you served, right?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m gonna cut you some slack.”

Harry stiffened against expecting too much.

“I’m gonna drop it to two thousand.”

“It already is two thousand.”

“Twenty-five hundred.”

This hurt. “They said two thousand.”

“They made a mistake. Whata they know?”

“Two thousand is what I was talking about. Two thousand is what will kill us.”

“I did you a favor. I cut what you owe by twenty percent. Where else can you just walk in and get twenty percent off? You wanna be greedy?”

“I still don’t understand. Gottlieb charged so much less.”

“Okay,” Verderamé said. “Someone did us a favor, and now we’re doing them a favor. That’s all.”

“You mean you’re making me do the favor for you.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean.”

It was too dangerous for Harry to follow this line, so he became silent, not knowing what to say next. In the pause, Verderamé’s right hand, which in perhaps a conscious effort had been kept either beneath the table, under his lapel, or clenched in a cloth napkin, emerged for a second or two. Verderamé saw Harry’s eyes settle upon it and follow for the brief time it was in the open. His right thumbnail, and just his thumbnail, was dark yellow, and extended at least an inch beyond his thumb. That Harry had seen it was mysteriously embarrassing to Verderamé, and Harry knew immediately that nothing further would be accomplished.

“Two thousand?”

“Two thousand.”

“My father paid four hundred.”

“I collected for Gottlieb then. Your father and the nigger paid six hundred. Maybe it went down in the war. Your father begged like a fuckin’ dog.”

“My father did what?” Harry didn’t seem so weak when he said this.

“Your father, kid, begged like a dog. But he still paid the maximum.”

“I don’t think he did that,” Harry said.

“I think he did. Where’d you bury him, in a pet cemetery?”

Then came the sound of the creaking and scraping of chair legs as the heavy men at the bar dismounted. Expressionless, Harry whitened, which seemed to them to be the most dangerous of all signs.

“You just got back from the war,” Verderamé said, “where you fought at a desk. Lemme tell you something. I’m still in a war that I’ve been fighting since I was ten years old. It’s all I know. I can’t do anything else. I don’t want to do anything else. And I won’t pretend to you that I don’t love it in the same way that, no matter what he says, a cop loves what he does. I don’t know you. I don’t care about you. You don’t mean anything to me. But you just entered a game that I’ve been playing since before you were born. How you play is up to you, but you have no fuckin’ idea—I guarantee it—of what it took for me to get to this table. You just keep in mind that I’ve got the wall at my back and you’ve got the door.”

His anger rose again, inexhaustibly. “So I wanna know, who the hell are you? Some fuckin’ guy, some fuckin’ guy walks in off the street, you walk in here looking for a break from me, based on what? I’ll tell you, because I know. Because you think I might feel bad about what I do. You think so? You wanna ride a white horse? Look around you. You think the mayor doesn’t get a piece of both of us? The commissioner? Everybody is fucking everybody else. It’s what they call a circle jerk. If you stop,
you
die, but
it
keeps on going. The war’s not over, kid. It was never over, even before it started. And it’s right here, every day. You see?”

“There’s a difference,” Harry said, crossing the line, “between starting something . . . and finishing it.”

“I don’t like what I hear,” Verderamé told him tensely.

With no more than a second to react, Harry said, “We made the first payment. We’ll make the rest.”

“You were five hundred short.”

Harry was stunned. “I’ll have five hundred on Friday.”

“Then you can go back to two thousand,” Verderamé said. “Merry Christmas.”

A
FTER THE INTERVIEW
on Prince Street, Harry and Cornell went to the accountant. The one joke that the accountant had told even before the turn of the century, and would tell until he no longer breathed, came always upon the saying of his name, Ludwig Bernstein. “I’m not a law firm,” he would croak, “I’m an accountant!” The more he repeated this, the more droll he thought it was and the less other people did, a small part of the comprehensive unhappiness that had been killing him longer than most people had been alive.

On the seventeenth floor of a building on Third Avenue in the Forties, his offices had the June sound, contented and comforting, of half a dozen fans of different sizes that pushed the air until the hum as it was concerted from room to room was like that of a steady wind far out at sea. Harry and Cornell sat in a waiting area from which they could look up from reading the only magazines supplied—
Boys’ Life
and
Good Housekeeping
—to see buildings across the way baking in the sunlight until they were almost silver. The ceaseless sounds of traffic came from outside, and in a corner of the waiting area a fan the size of Achilles’ shield stood on one black-and-chrome leg and swept back and forth as if it were saying not merely
no
but
tsk-tsk.

“It says here, Cornell, that you should never wear a poncho when riding a horse, because the horse may get spooked if the wind flaps the poncho. That makes sense.”

“It’s good to know,” said Cornell, “for Manhattanites.”

“What are you reading?” Harry asked.

“Tips for baking pies.”

“You think he puts these magazines out here to irritate his clients or to make himself seem more interesting by comparison?”

“I think these are the magazines he subscribes to.”

A tall woman whose hair was done up in a kind of lacquered mantilla suitable only for a giant flamenco dancer came in to announce that Mr. Bernstein was now available. They stood up quickly, and as they walked from the waiting area they heard the fan beginning to shuffle through the abandoned pages of
Boys’ Life
as if it were trying to find an article.

Ludwig Bernstein was a full five feet tall, with only enough bramble-like hairs on his head to make it look like a switchboard. He wore tweed as if there were no such thing as heat, and though on his lapel he sported a little card that said he had epilepsy, he had never had a fit. Although as immobile as if he had been filled with vertical rebar, he was both friendly and smart.

“Ludwig, this is Harry,” Cornell said, “Meyer’s son.”

“I’m Ludwig Bernstein—not a law firm, but an accountant!” A laugh gurgled up in him and then he got down to business. “The numbers you gave me, assuming they’re approximately correct, are hardly encouraging. But before we discuss them I should tell you that due to circumstances we can’t control, our fee is going up from twelve to fifteen thousand dollars.”

“That’s just . . . it’s . . . ,” Cornell said.

“You know it’s not us, Cornell. We don’t see a penny of the increase. It’s them.”

Cornell nodded in resignation.

“Who’s
them?
” Harry asked, feeling more and more beleaguered by the minute.

Bernstein turned to Cornell as if to ask, He doesn’t know?

“He doesn’t know,” Cornell answered.

“So tell him.”

“The IRS.”

“Why would our taxes go up if our earnings are reduced?” Harry asked. “And how would you know in advance by how much? And you said your fee.”

“It’s not taxes,” Bernstein stated.

“Then what is it?”

Bernstein depressed his voice so that no one beyond his door would hear. “Copeland Leather enjoys an advantageous tax situation because of its utilization of various depletion allowances.”

“You mean for materials?” Harry asked.

“Minerals and timber.”

“Minerals and timber? What minerals and timber?”

“Subsidiaries that invest in the Southwest, Wyoming, and Montana.”

“We don’t have any subsidiaries.”

“You do. On paper.”

“Since when?”

“For a long time. It was the only way you got through the Crash. It started with real investments your father made. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“But now it’s not real.”

“Nothing is real,” Bernstein said, immensely pleased that he could reveal this to Harry. “God made the world, and we have to operate as if it is real. Maybe it’s not, but we have no choice. The Congress tried to ape God when it made the tax code, and if you don’t like it, the IRS will put you in prison. If you fight not to go to prison, eventually someone will shoot you. But, unlike God, because they’re almost human, they have weak spots.”

“You pay off the IRS?” Harry asked, astounded.

Bernstein was totally immobile, but Cornell leaned forward and said in a low whisper, “Revenue agents in Manhattan.”

“Christ,” Harry said, “what if someone finds out?” He felt both naive and unclean.

“First of all,” Bernstein said, “you don’t know. You’re relying upon my advice. Second, to whose advantage would it be to tell? Anyone who tells goes to jail. Anyone who doesn’t tell makes money. And, by the way, it didn’t come from us. They started it. They shook us down. If we don’t cooperate we spend the rest of our lives being audited. It would bankrupt you, but you wouldn’t know, because by the time you were bankrupt you’d have totally lost your mind. It’s kind of like your problem with whoever it is, but the government is a lot more reasonable. Whoever is taking a bite out of you, no matter how well he’s doing, is struggling to survive. He’s got a lot of enemies and he knows he can’t last long. The government, on the other hand, has no predators and will last forever—maybe not until the hour the sun goes out (I read in a magazine that the sun is doomed), but until a quarter of.”

“I have to pay off Verderamé, I have to pay off the IRS, I have to pay off the cops, the garbage men. . . . They’re all corrupt. But what’s worse is that I’m corrupt.”

“You forgot the building department,” Cornell reminded him, “and the Teamsters, the fire inspectors.”

“We’re not in compliance with the fire regulations?”

“Of course we are.”

Harry turned to the accountant. “You’re not a law firm, you’re an accountant, right? If we didn’t have to make all these payoffs, we’d be solvent, isn’t that so?”

“For the moment, nicely.”

“And as it is?”

“In reality? The only way you can last more than three months is to increase your revenues by fifty percent and keep your costs stable. Can you do that?”

“The buyer from Macy’s came by the other day,” Cornell announced. “He told me that they’re making more things, even wallets, from artificial fibers. The big chemical companies are going to build on their work during the war. He said in twenty years cotton and leather will be like whale oil.”