The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [60]
“They believed in right and wrong. The right and wrong of the markets, the portfolios, the insider information.”
“Then it was your turn to join the business. Did you know what you were doing?”
“I was defining myself. That’s what my father said. He said people who have to define themselves belong in the dictionary.”
“Because you strike me as somebody who doesn’t always know what he’s doing.”
“I pretty much knew. I definitely knew.”
I could hear Norman unraveling the improvised cellophane wrap on his little jar of fig spread and then using his finger to rub the stuff across a saltine cracker. On visitors’ days his lawyer smuggled a jar of Dalmatian fig spread into the camp, minus the metal cap. Norman said he liked the name, Dalmatia, Dalmatian, the Balkan history, the Adriatic, the large spotted dog. He liked the idea of having food of that particular name and place, all natural ingredients, and eating it on a standard cafeteria cracker, undercover, a couple of times a week.
He said that his lawyer was a woman and that she concealed the fig spread somewhere on her body. This was a throwaway line, delivered in a monotone and not intended to be believed.
“What’s your philosophy of money?”
“I don’t have one,” I said.
“There was the year I made a shitpile of money. One year in particular. We could be talking, total, easy nine figures. I could feel it adding years to my life. Money makes you live longer. It seeps into the bloodstream, into the veins and capillaries. I talked to my primary-care physician about this. He said he had an inkling I could be right.”
“What about the art on your walls? Make you live longer?”
“I don’t know about the art. Good question, the art.”
“People say great art is immortal. I say there’s something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.”
“All those gorgeous paintings, the shapes and colors. All those dead painters. I don’t know,” he said.
He lifted his hand toward my bunk, up and around, with a splotch of fig preserves on half a cracker. I declined, but thanks. I heard him chewing the cracker and sinking into the sheets. Then I lay waiting for the final remarks of the day.
“She’s talking directly to you. You realize this, using the girls.”
“I don’t think so, not even remotely.”
“In other words this never occurred to you.”
“Everything occurs to me. Some things I reject.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sara Massey.”
“Good and direct. I see her as a strong woman with roots going back a long way. Principles, convictions. Getting revenge for your illegal activities, for the fact you got caught, maybe for joining your father’s business in the first place.”
“How smart I am not to know this. What grief it spares me.”
“This sneaky-pretty woman in your words. She’s reminding you what you did. She’s talking to you. Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi. Hang Seng, Hong Kong.”
All around us, entombed in cubicles, suspended in time, reliably muted now, men with dental issues, medical issues, marital issues, dietary demands, psychic frailties, sleep-breathing men, the nightly drone of oil-tax schemes, tax-shelter schemes, corporate espionage, corporate bribery, false testimony, medicare fraud, inheritance fraud, real estate fraud, wire fraud, fraud and conspiracy.
They started arriving early, men crowding the common room, some carrying extra folding chairs, snapping them open. There were others standing in the side aisles, a spillover of inmates, guards, kitchen staff, camp officials. I’d managed to squeeze into the fourth row, slightly off-center. The sense of event, news in high clamor, all the convergences of emotional global forces bringing us here in a wave of complex expectation.
A cluster of rain-swept blossoms was fixed to one of the high windows. Spring, more or less, late this year.
There were four common rooms, one for each dorm, and I was certain that all were packed, inmates and others collected in some odd harmonic, listening to children talk about economic collapse.
Here, as time approached, Feliks Zuber rose