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By Root 6155 0

lost interest in them utterly. I could sell my Oriental rugs. I had told Renata that I was tired of them, and she knew an Armenian dealer who was willing to take them on commission. Now that foreign currencies were booming and the oil-rich Persians no longer wished to work at the loom. German and Japanese buyers and even Arabs were raiding the Midwest and carrying off the carpets. As for the Mercedes, perhaps it would be better to get rid of it. I was always greatly shaken when forced to fret about money. I felt like a falling rigger or dangling window washer, caught under the arms by his safety harness. I was strained across the chest and seemed to be deprived of oxygen. I considered sometimes storing a cylinder of oxygen in the clothes closet for just such spells of worry. I should of course have opened a numbered Swiss bank account. How was it, that having lived most of my life in Chicago, I hadn’t thought to provide myself with a bagman? And now what had I to sell? Thaxter was sitting on two articles of mine, a reminiscence of Kennedy Washington (now as far behind us as the founding of the Capuchin Order) and an article from the unfinished series “Great Bores of the Modern World.” There was no money there. It was excellent, but who would publish a serious study of bores?

I was even willing now to consider George Swiebel’s scheme for mining beryllium in Africa. I had scoffed at this when George proposed it but wilder ideas were commercially sound and no man ever knew what form his Dick Whittington’s cat might take. A man named Ezekiel Kamuttu, George’s guide to the Olduvai Gorge two years ago, claimed to own a mountain of beryllium and semiprecious stones. A sack of exotic burlap was at this moment lying under George’s bed, filled with peculiar minerals. George had given me a sweat sock filled with these and asked me to get them assayed at the Field Museum by Ben Isvolsky, one of our schoolmates, now a geologist. Sober Ben said they were the real thing. At once he lost his scholar’s air and began to put business questions to me. Could we get these stones in marketable quantities on a regular basis? And with what machinery, and how get into the bush and out? And who was this Kamuttu? Kamuttu, George said, would lay down his life for him. He had invited George to marry into his family. He wanted to sell him his sister. “But,” I said to Ben, “you know George’s boon-companion complex. He has a few drinks with natives, they see how real he is and that his heart is bigger than the Mississippi. It really is, too. But how can we be sure that this Kamuttu hasn’t got some con? Maybe he’s stolen these beryllium samples. Or maybe he’s bonkers. There’s no world shortage of that.”

Knowing Isvolsky’s domestic troubles, I understood why he dreamed of making a killing in minerals. “Anything,” he told me, “to get away from Winnetka for a while.” Then he said, “Okay, Charlie, I know what’s on your mind. When you come back here to see me you want to be shown those birds.” He referred to the museum’s great collection of birds, hoarded up over decades and stored in classified drawers. The huge workshops and laboratories behind the scenes, the sheds, storerooms, and caverns were infinitely more fascinating than the museum’s public exhibits. The preserved birds were collapsed, their legs tagged. And mainly I liked to see the hummingbirds, thousands upon thousands of little bodies, some no bigger than my fingertip, endless varieties of them, all spattered minutely with a whole Louvre of iridescent colors. So Ben took me to inspect them again. He had full cheeks and woolly hair, a bad skin but an agreeable face. The museum treasures now bored him and he said, “If this Kamuttu really has a mountain of beryllium we should go there and grab it.”

“I’m leaving soon for Europe,” I said.

“Ideal. George and I can pick you up. We can all fly to Nairobi together.”

Thoughts of beryllium and Oriental rugs showed how nervous I was, and impractical. When I was in this state only one man in all the world could help me, my practical brother Julius, a real-estate