Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [108]
“I do feel better,” Jack said. He liked the rich man. He liked the way he dressed, and he liked his somewhat long, curly gray hair, and his mustache, and his fine gray eyes, and his amused smile. The rich man looked like a good rich man, not a bad rich man, although Jack was not sure what the distinction was, and just being with him made Jack forget his new problems, as if all he had to do was ask Bronson and Bronson would give him a whole wad of money and everything would be fine. It was a pleasant feeling. He wondered if Bronson felt this way all the time; never having to worry about money.
“What’s it like to be rich?” he asked. “No shit. We’re not friends, we’ll probably never see each other again. So you can tell me.”
“I suppose you’re right. When I was a boy,” Bronson said, “I was a Mormon. I was sent to Germany by the church to be a missionary. I got there in the middle of the German inflationary period. Nineteen twenty-three. For ten thousand marks you could buy a newspaper. Upper middle-class families were dining on cabbage soup. Nobody had any toothpaste. Some people just laughed at me. That was all right. Others thought I had an answer to their problems, and that was bad. That kept me awake nights, that look of hope in people’s eyes, as if all their troubles came from believing in the wrong God. But that didn’t happen often. Anyway, the whole thing struck me as a gigantic fraud; the church, the religion, the belief in the myth, everything. But I didn’t stop yet, because, you see, the money was coming from the church. And my family. So for weeks after I was absolutely certain there was no God, I kept on with my missionary activities. I felt like a fool. Eventually I gave it up and went to Paris to be a poet.” He laughed. “My father and mother absolutely refused to send me any more money. I absolutely refused to come home. All of this absoluteness by mail. Finally my father changed his mind and sent me money. I became an expatriate. I spent most of the money on girls, and the rest of the time, when I wasn’t trying to make friends with the older Americans, I would stay in my room, reading Black Mask or trying to write poems about what I had seen in Germany. I suppose they were just awful, but some of them got published. The problem was in getting the French prostitutes to see the importance of this. Besides, my artistic conscience was bothering me. You see, I really wanted money, a lot of it. I didn’t want to believe that that was what I wanted, because it seemed such a shabby ambition. At any rate, I went to New York eventually, after my parents’ money ran out, and `immersed myself in the roots of my native soil,’ which is to say, starved. This went on for six months. It was awful. I suppose I went insane. I started making money; I had a flair for the kind of intricate blackmailing necessary to life insurance sales, and after a while I began investing. Since I thought of myself as a cynic and a thief anyway, I had no trouble doubling, then tripling, my investments.” He smiled at Jack. “You have no idea how intense I was in those days. I was a priest. I made a lot of money and I managed to keep it. That’s all. I’m still in the life insurance business. I own three companies.”
Later, when Bronson let Jack out of the car in front of his building, he said, “Look, don’t feel too angry with Saul Markowitz. He spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp. He’s a very withdrawn man.”
“I haven’t got a worry in the world,” Jack said. He was drunk from the fine whisky, and he waved good-bye to Myron Bronson and loped up the stairs. When he woke up in the afternoon he was angry at himself for not having conned Bronson out of something, but then he realized it would have been very difficult to do, if Bronson’s story of his life was true. Somehow, it did not sound true. It was all too easy. Yet, such things did happen, he supposed.
It would have remained an episode, one of those odd meetings that happen to people who drink a lot, if it hadn’t been for Sally’s card, which Jack found a few days later on his bureau.