Highbinders (3 page)

“How much?”

“One hundred thousand.”

“That’s not bad.”

“Pounds.”

“That’s even better. Who called?”

“He said he was a friend of yours. Or at least a close acquaintance.”

“Who?”

“A Mr. Apex.”

“English Eddie,” I said.

“Yes,” Myron Greene said, “he did say his name was Edward. He also sounded awfully British.”

“He’s not,” I said.

“What is he?”

“He’s American. He was reared in Detroit and his real name’s Eddie Apanasewicz and when I knew him he was probably the best international con man around.”

B
EFORE THE SECOND WORLD
war, English Eddie Apex’s widowed mother had taught various sons and daughters of the Polish aristocracy in Warsaw how to speak the King’s English. It was more the Queen’s English really, the upper class English of Victoria’s time, with virtually no contractions, beautifully savored vowels, and consonants that were bitten off at the quick. And if it sounded slightly stilted, it had a wonderfully redeeming lilt to it, the legacy of the wandering Welsh scholar-linguist who had settled in Warsaw after the first world war and from whom Eddie Apex’s mother had learned her perfect English, along with her equally perfect French and German. I was once told that, even years later, exiled Poles could always tell which of their number had studied with Madame Apanasewicz.

In the late summer of 1939, she accepted the aid of some of her former students and left Poland for London. She took with her only her last remaining student, who was her nine-year-old son Edward, and who had been named, for girlishly romantic notions, after the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and even later, the Duke of Windsor.

She stayed in London only a week or two and then sailed for Canada where she arrived just as war broke out in Europe. With the help of distant relatives, she and her son emigrated from Canada to Detroit, where they both became naturalized American citizens in 1945.

Meanwhile, her nine-year-old son, dressed in his old European clothes and speaking English like Freddie Bartholomew, only better, had the opportunity of going to grade school in Detroit with the sons and daughters of the workers who assembled automobiles, and later, during the war, tanks and airplanes.

If he had been a delicate child, Eddie Apex’s story probably would be different. But he was a big-boned boy, large for his age, with oversized hands that he quickly learned to form into oversized fists. “The ones that I really had trouble with were the crackers, the southern lads,” he later said. “They told me that I talked ‘funny.’ I couldn’t even understand what they were saying for the first six months. All I knew was that I had to beat hell out of them before they beat hell out of me.”

Eddie Apex’s mother, after working in a department store for eight years, died in 1947, the year that her son managed to graduate from high school. At seventeen and a half, he looked nearer to twenty-one or twenty-two. He was six-foot-two of big-boned brawn, green-eyed and fair-haired, narrow-hipped and wide-shouldered, and looked, indeed, like nothing so much as an all-American college wingback who spoke in the tones of Mayfair rather than Michigan.

With nothing to keep him in Detroit, Eddie Apex headed for New York where he found his accent to be an asset rather than a liability, at least in the crowd that he fell in with, which in an earlier day might be said to have consisted solely of evil companions. They were for the most part veterans of World War Two who had discovered the rewards of the black markets in Europe and Asia and were then looking for enterprises that would prevent them from doing something distasteful, such as going to work.

“We came up with the Lost English Cousin Con,” Eddie Apex told me years later. “One of my chaps had a couple of years of law school and he had a girl friend who worked for this fey genealogist who made a pretty good living by coming up with phony family trees for people who wanted to claim kin with British aristocracy. Well, that was our sucker list. My job was to pose as the mark’s long-lost cousin, fresh off the boat from London, who was in the states looking for a relative who could save the family castle. Well, to make a long story short, we made it appear to the mark that he could beat me out of a million-dollar estate for a mere twenty-five or fifty thousand dollars. Greed won. It always does, of course, and the mark wound up owning some awfully fancy parchment documents—all carefully aged, of course.” From that time on until 1963, English Eddie Apex, the surname he legally adopted on his twenty-first birthday, worked his various scams in most of the world’s playgrounds from Acapulco to the Aegean, earning himself a reputation among the cognoscenti as probably “the best long con man in the business.”

I became privy to all these trade tricks in 1963 when English Eddie came to New York to announce his retirement at the age of thirty-three. He had never been arrested and he had never spent a minute in jail, but he was finding it more and more difficult to travel without spending hours on end in the company of immigration officials, none of whom was particularly anxious to have him set up shop within their particular borders.

“Christ,” he said, “I can scarcely get into Switzerland anymore. When you can’t get in there with a bagful of money, you know things are bad.”

So English Eddie Apex decided to retire and to announce his retirement through my column, if I were willing, which I was. I spent nearly a week with him and got two good columns out of it and one visit from a fraud squad detective who wanted to know if I really thought that English Eddie was hanging up his gloves.

“I think so,” I said. “He’s made enough.”

The detective nodded. “Like he says, he’s rich now.”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I mean. It’s like he also says in your column, the rich always want to get more.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but maybe he’ll go legit.”

The detective nodded again, gloomily. “Yeah, and my cat’ll whistle ‘Stardust,’ too.”

The day after my last column on Eddie Apex appeared, he dropped by my office and handed me a carefully wrapped box. I opened it while he watched. It was an alligator wallet, obviously expensive. “I would have offered you money, but I didn’t think you’d take it,” he said, sounding to me for all the world like Richard Burton imitating a terribly bored captain of the guards.

“You’re right,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

“It’s rather a good wallet,” he said. “It should last you for years.”

“Well, thanks very much.”

“It’s nothing really. Oh, by the way, I think I told you that I was retiring to Mexico?”

“That’s what you told me.”

“Well, just let it stand that way. But actually I’m not.”

“Not retiring?”

“Oh, I’m retiring right enough, but not to Mexico.”

“Where then?”

“London.”

“Why London?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“What?”

He grinned his charming, con man’s grin. “I can pass there.”

When he was gone, I examined the wallet. It had one of these semi-secret compartments and when I looked into it I found five one-hundred-dollar bills. I took them down to a bank to see whether they were any good and when I found that they were, I went out and bought something for my wife that was ridiculously expensive, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was.

“What did he want?” I asked, after telling a fascinated Myron Greene a lot of what I knew about English Eddie Apex.

“He was rather vague until we got down to the question of money.”

“He usually perks up there.”

“He said that he was calling me instead of you because he’d heard that I represented you, which he thought was sound because when it comes to negotiating in your own behalf, he didn’t think you’d be too effective.”

“I don’t have your drive, Myron.”

Myron Greene nodded his agreement at that. “Well, it seems that a work of art has been stolen from a party or parties that Mr. Apex is representing. The thieves are willing to sell it back for one hundred thousand pounds. The owner—or owners, I’m not sure which because Apex would sometimes say ‘they’ and sometimes ‘he’ when referring to whomever it was stolen from—anyway, they or he are willing to engage your services as go-between for the usual ten percent. At this point, of course, we started negotiating. I asked for your expenses. Mr. Apex declined, but countered with an offer of earnest money—ten percent of your fee to be deposited in your bank here. I told him that I thought fifteen percent of your fee in advance would be far more in line in view of the fact that you would be paying your own expenses. We settled for twelve and a half percent in advance. I must say that Apex seems quite good at doing large sums in his head.”

“He didn’t say what had been stolen?” I said.

“No.”

“Or from whom?”

“No.”

“It’s probably hot then.”

“Really? What makes you think so?” It was obvious that Myron Greene would be delighted if it were. Shady dealings always fascinated him.

“Let’s look at it this way,” I said. “Firstly, Eddie Apex is involved. I don’t think I need a secondly.”

“You said he retired.”

“He retired from the con, not from crime.”

“He certainly sounds straightforward,” Myron Greene said.

“He hasn’t lost his touch then. You notice he didn’t say what was stolen or from whom. You know as well as I do, Myron, that when any valuable art is stolen, the first to be notified is the insurance company and the second is the police. And usually it’s the insurance company or another lawyer who calls you. Or maybe the thieves themselves. But here we’ve got an ex-con artist calling on behalf of clients unnamed about an unmentionable work of art that somebody has stolen and is willing to sell back for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. That means that its true market value must be close to a million or more. But no insurance company seems to be involved. No lawyer. And certainly no police. That makes it sound hot to me.”

“Possibly,” Myron Greene said. “You present a good case. However, it may be that whatever was stolen was uninsurable—or even that whoever stole it threatened to destroy it, if the police were brought in. We’ve known cases like that before.”

“Kidnappings mostly.”

We sat there at the poker table in silence for a while until I got up and mixed us both another drink. “I perhaps neglected to mention that the earnest money that Apex agreed to advance is nonreturnable,” he said.

My admiration for Myron Greene’s ability as a skilled negotiator rose several more degrees. “You talked
Eddie Apex
out of that?”

Myron Greene smiled for perhaps the first time that day, the day that he became a millionaire. “He did take a bit of convincing,” he said as modestly as he could. “Of course, it means that you’ll have to go to London to find out what the deal is. If you don’t like it, you can turn it down and, except for your expenses, you’ll have made twelve hundred and fifty pounds or approximately three thousand dollars.”

“Apex won’t talk about it over the phone?”

“No.”

“Why doesn’t he just write us a letter?”

Myron Greene smoothed his hair. “There’s a time factor.”

“What time factor?”

“You have to be there tomorrow night.”

We shared another silence and after a few moments I said, “Well, London should be pleasant this time of year.”

“You lived there once, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh. A long time ago for about a year. It was when the paper thought that I might do the same thing for London that Buchwald was doing for Paris. It didn’t work out though.”

“What happened?”

“I got homesick.”

A
T TEN MINUTES TO
nine on the morning after the night that I had lodged in jail, I was sitting on a bench in along brown and green hall just off the Marlborough Street Magistrates courtroom, sharing out my cigarettes with about thirty or so other bums, layabouts, wifebeaters, and meth drinkers. Metropolitan police flowed up and down the hall, stopping now and again to exchange a friendly word or two with what seemed to be some fairly regular customers.

I was shaved, showered, breakfasted, and suited up in a glen plaid number with a black knit tie that I hoped would make me look respectable and even, with luck, a bit stuffy. I sat there on the bench, half-listening to a tall, thin Australian, bony as a sackful of antlers, counsel me that if I really wanted to do some serious drinking, I should drop down around Earls Court where the pommy bastards would leave you alone, at least most of the time.

I was nodding away at this when a police constable stopped in front of me. He had blond hair, sideburns, and pale blue eyes that were still no friendlier than they had been the evening before in front of the Black Thistle.

“Well, Mr. St. Ives, you’re looking a bit better this morning.”

I nodded. “Constable Wilson, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir. I must say you were coming on a bit strong yesterday, what with your karate chops and all.”

“I don’t know any karate chops,” I said. “I thought I was being mugged.”

“In broad daylight?” Constable Wilson seemed almost shocked at the idea.

“Sorry,” I said, “I keep forgetting that it can’t happen here.”

“Well, certainly not can’t, but when it does, it’s usually the coloreds involved.”

“Why a night in the pokey and a day in court?” I said. “Why didn’t you just pour me in a taxi and ship me home?”

“Huh,” he said. “Put you in the hands of that lot in your condition and you would’ve been mugged. Or worse.”

“I thought all London taxi drivers were polite. Friendly.”

He grinned, but I couldn’t detect much humor in it. “Like all London bobbies, right?”

“Sure.”

“Well, we might have done, if you hadn’t come on with that karate.”

“I don’t know any karate,” I said.

Finally, my name was called and I was in the courtroom, standing in the dock, feeling something like a latterday Jack the Ripper, and there was Constable Wilson presenting his case, telling everybody how drunk I had been, but that I didn’t have any previous record, and the magistrate, not really caring, asked me how I chose to plead, and after I said that I chose to plead guilty, I was told to step down and pay the man.