Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

This last was pure malarkey. A good federal prison is like a sanatorium. I have been told by more than one ex-convict: “They made a new man out of me in jail. They fixed my hernia and operated my cataracts, they gave me false teeth and fitted me with a hearing aid. On my own, I could never afford it.”

A veteran like Eiler has received plenty of clemency letters. Thousands of them are sent by civic leaders, by members of the Congress, and, sure as shooting, by other federal judges, all of them using the low language of high morals—payola letters putting in a good word for well-connected constituents or political buddies, or old friends in the rackets. You can leave it to Judge Eiler to read between the lines.

I may even have been effective. Tanky got a short sentence. Eiler certainly understood that Tanky was acting on instructions from the higher-ups. If there were kickbacks, he didn’t keep much of the money. Presumably a few bucks did stick to his fingers, but he never would have owned four large homes, like some of his bosses. I take it, too, that the judge was aware of secret investigations then going on and of indictments being prepared by grand juries. The government was after bigger game. These are not matters which Eiler will ever discuss with me. When we meet, we talk music or tennis, sometimes foreign trade. We gossip about the university. But Eiler was aware that a stiff sentence might have endangered Tanky’s life. He would have been suspected of giving information to get out sooner. It is generally agreed that Tanky’s patron, Dorfman, was killed last year after his conviction in the Nevada bribery case because he would have been sent to prison for life and he might therefore well have chosen to make a deal with the authorities. Dorfman was shot in the head last winter by two men, executed with smooth skill in a parking lot. The TV cameras took many close-ups of the bloodstained slush. Nobody bothered to wash it away, and in my fantasy the rats came at night to lap it. Expecting to die, Dorfman made no arrangement to protect himself. He hired no bodyguards. A free-for-all shoot-out between bodyguards and hit men might have brought reprisals against his family. So he silently endured the emotions of a doomed man, as he waited for the inevitable hit.

A word about how people think of such things in Chicago, about this life to which all have consented. Buy cheap, sell dear is the very soul of business. The foundations of political stability, of democracy, according even to its eminent philosophers, are swindle and fraud. Now, smoothness in fraud arranges immunity for itself. The top executives, the lawyers at the nucleus of power, the spreaders of the most fatal nets— they are never shredded and incinerated, they never leave the blood of their brains in parking lots. Therefore Chicagoans accord a certain respect to those four-mansion crooks who risk their lives in crimes of high visibility. We are looking at the fear of death that defines your essential bourgeois. The Chicago public doesn’t examine its attitudes as closely as this, but there you are: the Mob big shot has prepared his soul for execution. He must. For such elementary reminders that justice in some form still exists the plain man is grateful. (I am having a moment of impotent indignation; let’s drop it.)

I have to relate that I was embarrassed by the delivery of a case of Lafite-Rothschild prior to the sentencing. I hadn’t yet mailed my letter to the judge. As a member (inactive) of the bar, I record this impropriety with discomfort. Nobody need know. Zimmerman’s liquor truck brought me a dozen delicious bottles too conscience-contaminated to be drunk. I gave them to hostesses, as dinner gifts. At least Tanky knew good wine.

At the Italian Village I had ordered Nozzole, a decent Chianti which Tanky barely tasted. Too bad he didn’t allow himself to become tipsy. I might have made him an amusing cousinly confidence (off the record for us both). I, too, am involved in the lending of big sums. Tanky dealt in millions. As one who prepares briefing documents, I am involved with the lending of billions to Mexico, Brazil, Poland, and other hopeless countries. That very day, the representative of a West African state had been sent into my office to discuss aspects of his country’s hard-currency problems; in particular, restrictions on the importing of European luxury products, especially German and Italian automobiles used by the executive class (in which they made Sunday excursions with their ladies and all the kids to watch the public executions—the big entertainment of the week: he told this to me in his charming Sorbonnish English).

But Tanky would never have responded with confidences about the outfit. So I never did get a chance to open this potentially intriguing exchange between two Jewish cousins who dealt in megabucks.

Where this private, confidential wit might have been, there occurred instead a deep silence. Gulfs of silence are what give a basso profundo like mine its oceanic resonance when talk resumes.

It should be said that it’s not my office work that most absorbs me. I am consumed by different interests, passions. I am coming to that.

With time off for good behavior, Tanky would have only about eight full months to serve in a decent jail in the Sunbelt, where as a trained accountant he could reckon on being assigned light work, mostly fooling with computers. You would have thought that this would satisfy him. No, he was restless and pressing. He apparently thought that Eiler might have a soft spot for low-rumbling, off-the-wall Cousin Ijah. He may even have concluded that Ijah “had something” on the judge, if I know anything about the way minds work in Chicago.

In any case, Cousin Eunice telephoned again, to say, “I must see you.” In her own behalf, she would have said, “I’d like to see you.” So I knew it was Tanky. What now?

I recognized that I couldn’t refuse. I was trapped. For when Coolidge was president the Brodskys had slept on Cousin Shana’s floor. We were hungry and she fed us. The words of Jesus and the prophets can never be extracted from the blood of certain people.

Mind, I absolutely agree with Hegel (lectures at Jena, 1806) that the whole mass of ideas that have been current until now, “the very bonds of the world,” are dissolving and collapsing like a vision in a dream. A new emergence of Spirit ls—or had better be—at hand. Or as another thinker and visionary has put it, mankind was long supported by an unheard music which buoyed it, gave it now, continuity, coherence. But this humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different, barbarous music welling up, and a different elemental force has begun to manifest itself, without form as yet.

That, too, is a good way to put the matter: a cosmic orchestra sending out music has suddenly canceled its performance. And where, with regard to the cousins, does that leave us? I confine myself to cousins. I do have brothers, but one of them is a foreign service officer whom I never see, while the other operates a fleet of taxicabs in Tegucigalpa and has written off Chicago altogether. I am blockaded in a small historical port, as it were. I can’t sail forth; I can’t even extricate myself from the ties of Jewish cousinhood. It may be that the dissolution of the bonds of the world affects Jews in different ways. The whole mass of ideas that have been current until now, the very bonds of the world…

What has Tanky to do with bonds or ties? Years in the underworld. Despises his sister. Thinks his cousin Ijah a creep. Here before us is a life to which all have consented. But not Cousin Ijah. Why is he a holdout? What sphere does he think he is from? If he doesn’t get into the action so gratifying for the most significant and potent people around, where does he satisfy his instincts?