Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [20]
“Did you see us?”
“The host saw. George Swiebel swears you were flashing cards to each other.”
“Why didn’t he speak up, that dumb prick. He should have thrown us out.”
“He may have been afraid to tackle you.”
“Who, that health fiend, with all the color in his face? For Christ sake he looks like an apple, with all that jogging five miles a day, and the vitamins I saw in his medicine chest. There were seven, eight people at the game. They could have bounced us. Your friend has no guts.”
I said, “Well, it wasn’t a good evening. I was high, though you don’t believe it. Nobody was rational. Everyone was out of character. Let’s be sensible.”
“What, I have to hear from my bank about your stop order, which is like a kick in the ass, and then be sensible? You think I’m a punk? It was a mistake to get into all that talk about education and colleges. I saw the look you gave when I told the name of the cow-college I went to.”
“What’s colleges got to do with it?”
“Don’t you understand what you’re doing to me? You’ve written all that stuff. You’re in Who’s Who. But you dumb asshole you don’t understand anything.”
“At two in the morning it’s hard for me to understand. Can’t we meet in the daytime when my head is clear?”
“No more talk. Talk is finished.”
He said this many times, however. I must have received ten such calls from Rinaldo Cantabile. The late Von Humboldt Fleisher had also used the dramatic properties of night to bully and harass people.
George Swiebel had ordered me to stop the check. My friendship with George goes back to the fifth grade, and to me such pals are a sacred category. I have been warned often against this terrible weakness or dependency on early relationships. Once an actor, George had given up the stage decades ago and become a contractor. He was a wide-built fellow with a ruddy color. There was nothing subdued about his manner, his clothing, his personal style. For years he had been my self-designated expert on the underworld. He kept me informed about criminals, whores, racing, the rackets, narcotics, politics, and Syndicate operations. Having been in radio and television and journalism, his connections were unusually extensive, “from putrid, to pure,” he would say. And I was well up among the pure. I make no such claims for myself. This is to explain how George saw me.
“You lost that money at my kitchen table, and you’d better listen,” he said. “Those punks were cheating.”
“Then you should have called them on it. Cantabile has a point.”
“He’s got nothing, and he’s nobody. If he owed you three bucks, you’d have to chase him for it. Also he was spaced out on drugs.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t notice anything. I gave you the high sign a dozen times.”
“I didn’t see. I can’t remember. , . .”
“Cantabile was working on you every minute. He snowed you. He was smoking pot. He was talking art and culture and psychology and the Book-of-the-Month Club and bragging about his educated wife. You bet every hand you were dealt. And every single subject I ever asked you not to mention you were discussing freely.”
“George, these night calls of his are wearing me down. I’ll pay him. Why not? I pay everybody. I have to get rid of this creep.”
“No pay!” Trained as an actor, George had learned to swell his voice theatrically, to glare, to seem startled and to have a startling effect. He shouted at me, “Charlie, you listen!”
“But I’m dealing with a gangster.”
“There are no Cantabiles in the rackets any more. They all got thrown out years ago. I told you. . . .”
“He puts on a damned good imitation then. At two a.m. I’m convinced that he’s a real hoodlum.”
“He’s seen The Godfather or something, and he’s grown a dago mustache. He’s only a confused big-mouth kid and a dropout. I shouldn’t have let him and his cousin into the house. Now you forget this. They were playing gangster and they cheated. I tried to stop you giving him the check. Then I made you stop payment. I won’t let you give in. Anyhow, the whole thing— take it from me—is over.”
So I submitted. I