The Auerbach Will (40 page)

“Hans—what's
wrong
with him?”

Hans bends over her son. “Nothing,” he says. “He's just drunk.” Saying, “Come on, Prince, old boy,” he lifts him by the arms and swings him over his shoulder in a football-player's half-carry. “You go back to bed, Ma'am,” Hans says. “I'll clean him up and get him to bed. Don't worry—he'll be fine. I'll clean up the mess.” With his free hand, he quickly unlocks the door to Prince's bedroom and carries him inside.

Twenty

The Florida night is warm and moist and, from the terrace of his penthouse condominium where Arthur Litton stands, the only sounds are the susurrous rustle of the Atlantic surf on the beach below, the gnatlike buzz of small planes in the distant sky, and the occasional, jarring sound of an ambulance siren making its way southward toward Miami General on Route One. Florida, after all, is where old people come to die, and the sounds of the vehicles that minister to their needs are never far away. The night is clear, but moonless, and on nights like these there is more than the usual small-aircraft traffic heading toward the Everglades. These planes invariably fly low, out of radar range, and without lights, for they are almost always involved in drug traffic. Their activities amuse Arthur Litton in a grim way, because this is a business in which he has chosen not to involve himself, though he has been offered numerous opportunities. That is a business, he thinks, only for human beings who are little better than animals, the dregs of the world, traffickers in misery and death. No, that is not at all his cup of tea, and he is proud to have kept it firmly at arm's length. Except for once. But that had been as a favor to Essie.

Inside the apartment, he has kissed his sleeping Angelique good night, where she has dozed off with her reading light still on, with her copies of
Vogue, Harper's Bazaar
, and
Town & Country
spread out about her, her pale arms and yellow hair loose across the white satin sheets and many tiny lace-edged pillows. Angelique, he thinks, has been well-named. She is an angelic woman, and it is a wondrous thing to him that a new love such as this one should have been offered to him in old age, a kind of miracle. How could he have faced old age without her?

Arthur Litton has been in retirement for some years, and his principal activities are playing golf with his old friend and sometime partner, Frankie Corelli, fishing in the waterway from the pier, and sunning himself here on the terrace or downstairs by the building's pool. In the evenings, he and Angelique often read to one another, and occasionally they go into Lauderdale or Miami Beach for dinner, or have a few friends over—Frankie Corelli and his wife, a few others—for a get-together. It is a quiet life. And it also amuses Arthur Litton that this quiet life is so much in contrast with the kind of life the newspapers try to depict for him from time to time—the mastermind of the Underworld, genius of the Mob. The Mob, if it can be called a Mob, hasn't solicited his opinion, advice, or help in years, and their concerns are no longer his. It is true that he will sometimes notice an FBI agent tailing him when he walks his dog—Arthur Litton will usually recognize the fellow and throw him a jaunty salute—or he will see someone from the State Prosecutor's office making notes of license plates of certain friends who come to visit him, but he is used to this. These are minor nuisances. And it is true that he assumes that his telephone line is still tapped, and so he simply makes his important calls from pay booths. His trouser pockets always jingle with dimes and quarters, telephone change. Aside from these little inconveniences, it is an easy life.

Mastermind of the Underworld. To Arthur Litton, this is funny, too. Of all the state and federal charges that have been leveled against him over the years, not a single one has been made to stick and, each year, he has smiled as the statute of limitations on one or another unproven allegation has run out. In the meantime, he has educated two fine sons, one at Stanford and one at Amherst, seen them launched in fine careers—one in real estate, the other a dentist—seen them marry and have fine children of their own. It is a good life, and he and Angelique have everything they want. Arthur Litton has only one serious complaint. Washington, as though in a fit of pique or frustration, has denied him a passport. It is as though, unable to prove any actual wrongdoing on the part of the Mastermind of the Underworld, Washington has decided to keep America's public enemy securely on America's shores. America, love it—or stay, seems to be their motto, and Arthur Litton is bitter that he cannot go with Angelique to Rome and Paris when she goes to shop for clothes.

Oh, Arthur Litton will not deny that he made a lot of money during Prohibition; he did, and so did a lot of other people. When people talk of his “debt to society,” he thinks wryly that society's heaviest debt is to itself—for the millions of dollars that it lost to its Volstead Act, that monstrous example of mass self-delusion. American society, in his opinion, is still paying for that, and may go on doing so for generations. Prohibition made a great many people rich, including men who are now regarded as the pillars of American business. Well, Arthur Litton could tell you a thing or two about these men and they would not be described in lapidary terms, unless as extremely rough diamonds. These were men who had people killed to get what they wanted, and, despite claims to the contrary, Arthur Litton has never killed anyone, nor has he ordered the killing of anyone. He ran his business like any other business, and when his people turned in poor performances, or failed to follow orders or do their jobs, they were reprimanded or dismissed—punished, just as cheats, liars and malingerers are punished in any business. He is proud of his record on that score. His record is clean on that score, it has been a clean life.

If you asked him, Arthur Litton would tell you that he has always viewed his business as just one of several avenues out of the ghetto, out of the poverty of Norfolk, Rivington, Hester, Orchard and Delancey Streets. Many others chose the same route, he was by no means unique. It was a route that worked, that brought him to where he is today, to an oceanfront condominum that would probably fetch $750,000 if he were ever to put it on the market, which he does not plan to do. His route has made him several times a millionaire, though he is not as rich as some published reports would have him be. No matter. It is enough to give him and Angelique an easy life.

His sister Essie simply chose another route, marriage, and the fact that her marriage to that piss-pious Jake Auerbach made her a woman worth
hundreds
of millions and was thanks to Arthur Litton is something that he never forgets to remind himself. It was thanks to
him
, not Jake, that the Auerbachs got in on the ground floor at Eaton & Cromwell. It was he, not Jake, who heard about George Eaton and Cyrus Cromwell and their crummy little mail-order shop—a fact that the piss-pious Jake very quickly managed to forget. Piss-pious. That is a term he reserves for his late brother-in-law. Where would you be, Esther Auerbach, he often asks himself, if it hadn't been for me? Still scrubbing linoleum on Grand Boulevard, still trying to grow cabbage in the backyard. If Arthur Litton ever decided to write a book about his life—which, of course, he will never do—he would have quite a juicy little tale to tell. But he is no longer really bitter—or so he tells himself—about being forced out of what could have been his own company. He has led his life without it. Essie has paid her debt. Still, when he thinks of her millions in the hundreds, compared with his five or six, it rankles.

Just as Arthur Litton has always thought of his as a life without regrets, he has also thought of his life in retirement as one without cares—no cares more pressing than deciding which filly to put a nickel on next Saturday at Hialeah. Until about three weeks ago, that is. That was when his niece began telephoning Angelique from New York, asking to speak to him, and leaving messages. He has not laid eyes on Joan since she was a snot-nosed little kid. He hadn't liked Joan then, and he is sure he doesn't like her now—particularly with this latest development. Now Joan is in Miami, demanding to see him, leaving a message that what she has to tell him is important for his future. He has not spoken to her, but these are the messages Angelique has relayed, and now Joan is just a few miles down the beach, checked in at the Omni.

Why should he see her? Just because she is Essie's daughter? That, to him, is not reason enough. Arthur Litton knows how to deal with federal and state prosecutors and their bureaucratic toadies, for their moves are always predictable. A family's moves are not. In fact, they are often dangerously the opposite. Joan, furthermore, runs a newspaper—he knows all about that—and if there is any group for whom Arthur Litton has less respect than federal prosecutors it is newspaper people, who will make up any kind of story, tell any kind of lie, to make a headline. No, he is certain that Joan is here on some kind of fishing expedition, wanting to pump him for some kind of information. She has told Angelique that she has some sort of message for him from Essie, but that story makes no sense. If Essie needs to reach him, she knows exactly how to do it, and so does Charles. No, a fishing expedition is what it is.

But should he see her? That is what is worrying him now. That is what is keeping him up after his normal bedtime, unable to sleep, prowling about the terrace of his penthouse, smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening to the night noises. Of course he will tell her nothing. Essie has kept up her end of the deal, and so will he. Unlike her late husband, Essie is a straight-shooter, and so, in any deal, is Arthur Litton. There is no question on that score, in which case there is no reason not to see her. But still, but still. She is a newspaper person, and a woman, and if he has no use for newspaper people as a breed, he has even less use for newspaper
women
. Newshens,
Time
magazine used to call them. Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Dorothy Kilgallen, Adela Rogers St. Johns—always grubbing around in the dirt like chickens for pieces of old corn. Or old porn. It was all the same. Perhaps all she wants to write about is his “life-style,” or how Arthur Litton looks today. But he has had enough publicity to fill a lifetime, and isn't looking for any more today. He has also had his share of aggravation, and doesn't need any more from a long-lost niece.

Should he see her? What does she want? He has to admit to a certain amount of curiosity. How did she find his unpublished number? From Daisy? It is not fair, he thinks almost petulantly, to be handed these questions and worries at this time of his life, when life should be easy, quiet, good. He decides to postpone any decisions until tomorrow.

From behind the shadow of his building, a half-moon appears, and Arthur Litton's wide terrace is bathed in a gentle, restful light, and he thinks he will sit for just a moment longer to enjoy it, and moves to a garden bench near the clump of blue hydrangea bushes. His terrace is his great pride. It is lushly planted, and it has a secret. Every climbing vine, every shrub and tree, every bloom is artificial, made of plastic, but fashioned so cleverly that most people, seeing it for the first time, do not realize it. Even the water lilies blossoming in the basin of the central fountain are not real. His terrace garden was created, at no small expense, by an outfit called Fabulous Fakes in Bal Harbour, and few people who have visited Arthur Litton's apartment have stopped to wonder how he gets tulips and chrysanthemums to blossom in the same season, or why the blue hydrangea bushes, more indigenous to the New England coast, do so well in southern Florida. The reasons for the artificial garden are threefold. First, it requires no maintenance. Second, in the hurricane season, the garden can be quickly packed up and stored out of harm's way. And third, having planter boxes and tubs that require no watering keeps Arthur Litton free from complaints of neighbors on the floors below that his water is coming through their dining room ceilings. If their ceilings leak, it is only from rain, not from Arthur Litton. He knows that, when the identity of the anonymous purchaser of his condo—for whom his lawyer was acting as agent—became known, there was some displeasure expressed by other tenants in the building. For this reason, he has always tried scrupulously to be a good neighbor. And in the seventeen years he has lived in this apartment there has never been a single complaint involving the tenancy of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Litton. In fact, he has even heard himself and Angelique described as “model neighbors.”

So I do not deserve this latest aggravation, he thinks, sitting on his garden bench, admiring his luxuriant, man-made garden, where palms and cacti from the desert sprout up among sweet Williams, primroses, phlox and columbine, and where Alberta spruce grows in a ground-cover of California ice-plant. I do not deserve this worry at the end of a long and for the most part satisfying life. At this time of life, a man deserves peace. He is tired, but not yet sleepy. His head aches slightly, and there is a small pain in his right shoulder. In his shirt pocket, he fishes for a digitalis pill, and places it under his tongue. It is angina pain, for his ticker has been giving him a bit of trouble lately, which his doctor tells him is normal for his time of life, particularly for a man who refuses to quit smoking. He waits for the pill to do its work.

But suddenly, instead, the pain grows sharper. He starts to rise, then decides to sit still until the pain, as it must, passes. But there is something different now, and he thinks he should cry out to Angelique for help, but he suddenly cannot find the breath. He seizes the trunk of a hydrangea bush for support, to pull himself to his feet, but the slender metal rod that provides the armature for the shrub is no match for his weight and, instead, the bush is easily uprooted from its planter tub of Sim-U-Soil. At this point, the pain becomes massive, and Arthur Litton falls sideways into the hydrangeas.

The plastic boughs sag with his weight, and in the half-moon-light the vivid blooms seem to embower his fallen body with the pale blue clusters of their lifeless blooms.