Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [31]
And then suddenly, there were formerly poor people in officers’ clubs, beautifully costumed and ordering filets mignon and champagne. There were formerly poor people in enlisted men’s clubs, serviceably costumed and clad and ordering hamburgers and beer. A man who two years before had patched the holes in his shoes with cardboard suddenly had a Jeep or a truck or an airplane or a boat, and unlimited supplies of fuel and ammunition. He was given glasses and bridgework, if he needed them, and he was immunized against every imaginable disease. No matter where he was on the planet, a way was found to get hot turkey and cranberry sauce to him on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
What had happened?
What could have happened but a Ponzi scheme?
When Dr. Carlo di Sanza stepped aside and let Clyde and me go on, Clyde began to curse himself for his own lack of large-scale vision. “Bartender, air-conditioner repairman, locksmith—prison guard,” he said. “What’s the matter with me that I think so small?”
He spoke of his long association with white-collar criminals, and he told me one conclusion he had drawn: “Successful folks in this country never think about little things.”
“Successful?” I said incredulously. “You’re talking about convicted felons, for heaven’s sake!”
“Oh, sure,” he said, “but most of them have plenty of money still stashed away somewheres. Even if they don’t, they know how to get plenty more. Everybody does just fine when they get out of here.”
“Remember me as a striking exception,” I said. “My wife had to support me for most of my married life.”
“You had a million dollars one time,” he said. “I’ll never see a million dollars, if I live a million years.” He was speaking of the corpus delecti of my Watergate crime, which was an old-fashioned steamer trunk containing one million dollars in unmarked and circulated twenty-dollar bills. It was an illegal campaign contribution. It became necessary to hide it when the contents of all White House safes were to be examined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and men from the Office of the Special Prosecutor. My obscure office in the subbasement was selected as the most promising hiding place. I acquiesced.
Somewhere in there my wife died.
And then the trunk was found. The police came for me. I knew the people who brought the trunk to my office, and under whose orders they were operating. They were all high-ranking people, some of them laboring like common stevedores. I would not tell the court or my own lawyers or anyone who they were. Thus did I go to prison for a while.
I had learned this much from my mutual disaster with Leland Clewes: It was sickening to send another poor fool to prison. There was nothing quite like sworn testimony to make life look trivial and mean ever after.
Also: My wife had just died. I could not care what happened next. I was a zombie.
Even now I will not name the malefactors with the trunk. It does not matter.
I cannot, however, withhold from American history what one of the malefactors said after the trunk was set down in my office. This was it: “Whose dumb fucking idea was it to bring this shit to the White House?”
“People like you,” said Clyde Carter, “find yourselves around millions of dollars all the time. If I’d of went to Harvard, maybe I would, too.”
We were hearing music now. We were nearing the supply room, and it was coming from a phonograph in there. Edith Piaf was singing “Non, je ne regrette rien.” This means, of course, “No, I am not sorry about anything.”
The song ended just as Clyde and I entered the supply room, so that Dr. Robert Fender, the supply clerk and lifer, could tell us passionately how much he agreed with the song. “Non!” he said, his teeth gnashing, his eyes blazing. “Je ne regrette rien! Rien!”
This was, as I have already said, a veterinarian and the only American to