The Magic Christian (2 page)

“Stout fellow!”
cried Grand warmly, breaking off the count down to step forward and give the chap a hearty clap on the shoulder and hand him the six thousand.

“You needn’t actually eat the ticket,” he explained. “I was just curious to see if you had your price.” He gave a wink and a tolerant chuckle. “Most of us have, I suppose. Eh? Ho-ho.”

And with a grand wave of his hand, he stepped inside his car and sped away, leaving the man in the dark summer suit standing on the sidewalk staring after him, fairly agog.

G
RAND DROVE LEISURELY
up the East River Drive—to a large and fine old house in the Sixties, where he lived with his two elderly aunts, Agnes and Esther Edwards.

He found them in the drawing room when he arrived.

“There you are, Guy!” said Agnes Edwards with tart affection, who at eighty-six was a year senior to Esther and held the initiative in most things between them.

“Guy, Guy, Guy,” exclaimed Esther happily in her turn, with a really beautiful pink smile for him—but she insisted then upon raising her teacup, so that all to be seen now was her brow, softly clouded, as ever, in maternal concern for the boy. Both women were terribly, chronically, troubled that Guy, at fifty-three, was unmarried—though perhaps each, in her way, would have fought against it.

Guy beamed at them from the doorway, then crossed to kiss both before going to his big sofa-chair by the window where he always sat.

“We’re just having tea, darling—do!” insisted his Aunt Agnes with brittle passion, flourishing her little silver service bell in a smart tinkle and presenting her half-upturned face for his kiss—as though to receive it perfunctorily, but with eyelids closed and tremoring, one noticed, and a second very thin hand which, as in reflex, started to rise towards their faces, wavering up, clenched white as the lace at her wrists.

“Guy, Guy, Guy,” cried Esther again, sharpening her own gaiety as she set her cup down—quickly enough, but with a care that gave her away.

“You will take tea, won’t you, my Guy!” said Agnes, and she conveyed it in a glance to the maid who’d appeared.

“Love some,” said Guy Grand, giving his aunts such a smile of fanatic brightness that they both squirmed a bit. He was in good spirits now after his trip—but soon enough, as the women could well attest, he would fall away from them, lapse into mystery behind his great gray
Financial Times
and
Wall Street Journal
for hours on end: distrait, they thought; never speaking, certainly; answering, yes—but most often in an odd and distant tone that told them nothing, nothing.

“Guy . . .” Agnes Edwards began, turning her cup in her hand and forcing one of the warm playful frowns used by the extremely rich to show the degree of seriousness felt.

“Yes, Aunt Agnes,” said Guy unnecessarily, even brightly, actually coming forward a bit on his chair, not turning his own cup, but fingering it, politely nervous.

“Guy . . . you
know
Clemence’s young man. Well, I
think
they want to get
married!
And . . . oh I don’t know, I was just wondering if we couldn’t
help.
Naturally, I haven’t said a thing to her about it—I wouldn’t dare, of course . . . but then what’s
your
feeling on it, Guy? Surely there’s something we can do, don’t you agree?”

Guy Grand could have no notion what she was talking about, except that it was undoubtedly a question of money; but he spoke darkly enough to suggest that he was weighing his words with care.

“Why I should think so, yes.”

Agnes Edwards beamed and raised her cup in a gesture both coy and smug, then the two women glanced at each other, smiling prettily, almost lifting their brows—whatever it was, it was a certain gain all around.

Grand’s own idea of what he was doing—“making it hot for people”—had formed crudely, literally, and almost as an afterthought, when, early one summer morning in 1938, just about the time the Spanish Civil War was ending, he flew out to Chicago and, within an hour of arrival, purchased a property on one of the busiest corners of the Loop. He had the modern two-story structure torn down and the debris cleared off that day—that very morning, in fact—by a demolition crew of fifty men and machines; and then he directed the six carpenters, who had been on stand-by since early morning, when they had thrown up a plank barrier at the sidewalk, to construct the wooden forms for a concrete vat of the following proportions: fifteen feet square, five feet deep. This construction was done in an hour and a half, and it seemed that the work, except for pouring the concrete, was ended; in fact the carpenters had put on their street clothes and were ready to leave when, after a moment of reflection, Grand assembled them with a smart order to take down this present structure, and to rebuild it, but on a two-foot elevation—giving clearance beneath, as he explained to the foreman, to allow for the installation of a heating apparatus there.

“That’ll make it hot for them,”
he said—but he wasn’t speaking to the foreman then, nor apparently to anyone else.

It was mid-afternoon, and collecting from the flux of the swollen summer street were the spectators, who hung in bunches at the sturdy barrier, gatherings in constant change, impressed in turn by the way the great man from the East snapped his commands, expensively dressed as he was, shirt turned back at the cuff.

And when the work was going ahead correctly, Grand might give the crowd a moment of surveillance from where he stood in the center of the lot, finally addressing them, hands cupped to his mouth as if he had to shout—though, actually, they were only a few yards away.

“Tomorrow
. . .” he would say,
“. . . back . . . tomorrow! Now
. . .
getting
. . .
it
. . .
ready!”

When an occasional wiseacre could get his attention and attempt some joke as to what was going on there beyond the barrier, Grand Guy Grand would smile wearily and shake a scolding finger at him.

“Now . . . getting . . . it . . . ready,”
he would shout slowly, or something else equally irrelevant to the wiseacre’s jibe; but no one took offense, either because of not understanding or else because of the dignity and bearing of the man, and the big diamond he wore at his throat.

Another contractor, three workers, a truck of sand and gravel, and six sacks of quick-drying cement arrived at the working site at two o’clock, but were forced to wait until the new forms were complete. Then a sheet of metal was lowered into place and the concrete was poured into the forms. Under Grand’s spirited command, it was all so speedily done that well before dusk the work was ended, including the installation of a great gas burner there, star-shaped with a thousand dark jets, like a giant upturned squid stretched beneath the structure. It was apparent now that when the board forms were removed, the whole would resemble a kind of white stone bath, set on four short columns, with a heating apparatus beneath, and small ramps leading up the vat on each of its sides.

Before dinner Guy Grand completed arrangements begun earlier in the day with the Chicago stockyards: these provided for the delivery of three hundred cubic feet of manure, a hundred gallons of urine, and fifty gallons of blood, to an address in the suburbs. Grand met them there and had the whole stinking mess transferred to a covered dump truck he had purchased that morning. These arrangements cost Grand a pretty penny, because the stockyards do not ordinarily conserve or sell urine, so that it had to be specially collected.

After securing the truck’s cover, Grand climbed into the cab, drove back towards the stockyards and parked the truck there, where the stench of it would be less noticeable.

Then he took a taxi into town, to the near North Side and had a quiet dinner at the Drake.

At nine o’clock, while it was still light, he returned to the working site, where he was met by some of the crew, and saw to the removal of the board forms and the barrier. He inspected the vat, and the burner below—which he tested and found in good working order. Then he dismissed the crew and went back to his hotel.

He sat at his desk writing business letters until his thin gold wrist-clock sounded three
A.M.
Exactly then he put away his writing things, freshened himself up, and, just before leaving the room, paused near the door and collected a big leather brief case, a gas mask, a wooden paddle, a bucket of black paint, and an old, stiff paintbrush. He went downstairs and took a cab out to the place where he had parked the dump truck. Leaving the cab, he got into the truck and drove back to the working site. There he backed the truck carefully up one of the ramps and then emptied all that muck into the vat. The stench was nearly overpowering, and Grand, as soon as he had parked the truck and gotten out of it, was quick to don the gas mask he had brought.

Stepping up one of the ramps, he squatted on the parapet of the vat and opened the brief case, out of which he began taking, a handful at a time, and dropping into the vat, ten thousand one-hundred-dollar bills, slowly stirring them in with his wooden paddle.

And he was in this attitude, squatting at the edge of the vat, gas mask covering his face, stirring with his paddle and dumping bills into the muck, the work only half begun, when a passing police patrol car pulled up to investigate the activity and, above all, the stench. But before the officers could properly take account, Grand had closed the brief case, doffed his mask, given them five thousand dollars each, and demanded to be taken at once to their precinct captain. After a few hushed words between them, and a shrugging of shoulders, they agreed.

At the station, Grand spoke privately with the captain, showing him several business cards and explaining that it was all a harmless promotion stunt for a new product.

“Naturally my firm is eager to cooperate with the authorities,” he said, and handed the captain twenty-five thousand.

And so it was finally agreed that Grand might return to the site and proceed, as long as whatever he was doing did not involve criminal violence within the precinct. Moreover, while the captain could make no definite promise about it, he was attentive enough to Grand’s proposal of an additional fifty thousand on the following noon if the police would be kept away from the site for a few hours that morning.

“Think it over,” said Grand pleasantly. “Better sleep on it, eh?”

Back at the site, Grand Guy donned his mask again, and dumped the remaining contents of the brief case into the vat. Then he stepped down, opened the can of paint, gave it good stirring, and finally, using his left hand so that what resulted looked childish or illiterate, he scrawled across the vat FREE $ HERE in big black letters on the sides facing the street.

He climbed up for a final check on the work. Of the bills in the muck, the corners, edges, and denomination figures of about five hundred were visible. After a moment he stepped down and, half crouching beneath the vat, took off his mask and saw to his burners. He did a short terse count down and turned the valve full open; then he removed the handle so that it could not easily be interfered with. As he touched off the match, the thousand flames sprang up, all blue light, and broke back doubling on the metal plate, and on the wet concrete—a color of sand in summer moonlight: one of those chosen instants, lost to childhood, damp places in reflection, surface of cement under the earth, the beautifully cool buried places . . . the stench became unbearable; he stood and quickly donned his mask, turned away from the site and walked across the street where he paused at the corner and surveyed the whole. Already in the pale eastern light, the moronic scrawl, FREE $ HERE, loomed with convincing force, while below the thousand flames beat up, blue-white and strangely urgent for this hour of morning on a downtown corner of Chicago.

“Say . . .” mused Grand, half-aloud,
“that’ll
make it hot for them all right!” And he leaped into the big dump truck and drove like the wind back to his hotel. At dawn he caught the plane for New York.

The commotion that occurred a few hours later on that busy corner of the Loop in downtown Chicago was the first and, in a sense perhaps, the most deliberately literal of such projects eventually to be linked with the name of “Grand Guy” Guy Grand, provoking the wrath of the public press against him, and finally earning him the label, “Eccentric” and again towards the end, “Crackpot.”

“I
S
C
LEMENCE A
person?” asked Guy, taking a bit of sweet biscuit now, popping it into his mouth.

Aunt Esther raised her hand to conceal a shaming twitter, and Aunt Agnes feigned impatience.

“Guy, great silly!” said Agnes. “Really!” Though after a moment she softened, to continue:

“Clemence is the new
maid!
She’s a Catholic girl, Guy—
and
a very nice one, if I may say so. She’s marrying this Jewish boy, Sol—how they’ll manage I’m sure I don’t know—I talked to them both, I told them that we were Protestants, had always been Protestants, and always
would
be Protestants—but that I didn’t mind! Not in the least! ‘Freedom of worship and creed!’ I said. It’s always been a principle of
my
religion. Not so insistent and pushy as
some
I could name! I didn’t tell them
that,
of course, but there you are. Well,
she
wants a honeymoon in
Italy,
and a visit to the Pope, which I think is terribly sweet—and
he
wants to go to
his
place in the East, wherever it is; Israel, isn’t it? Oh, I don’t say it badly. They’re
very
nice, Guy—both of them as gentle and polite as you please, and . . . well, they’ve enough money for
one
of the trips, you see, but
not
for both. I wish we could help them, Guy. I think it would be nice if they could go to
both
of their places, don’t you agree? You remember how much I enjoyed Calvin’s chair in Geneva! Of course it isn’t the same, but it
would
be sweet. What’s your feeling on it, Guy?”