Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“You like the dangerous assignments,” I said.

“I have to be challenged twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I like to live on the edge, always up — it keeps my adrenaline going. Anything other than that I consider boring.”

“Well, I’m stunned.”

“I see that.”

“I had you figured for an adrenaline freak but it wasn’t exactly a law enforcer that I would have thought to call you.”

“It’s impossible for a Jew to be a private detective?”

“No.”

“It’s impossible for a detective to look like me? Or like you?”

“No, it’s not even that.”

“You just think I’m a liar. It’s a cozy universe you’ve got going — you’re the truth-telling Philip and I’m the lying Philip, you’re the honest Philip and I’m the dishonest Philip, you’re the reasonable Philip and I’m the manic psychopath.”

“I like the missing-persons bit. I like that that’s your specialty. Very witty in the circumstances. And what got you into detective work? Tell me that, while we’re at it.”

“I was always the type of person who wanted to help other people. Since I was a kid I couldn’t stand injustice. It drove me crazy. It still does. It always will. Injustice is my obsession. I think it has to do with being a Jewish kid growing up in the war era. America wasn’t always fair to Jews in those days. Beaten up in high school. Just like Jonathan Pollard. I could even have gone in the same direction as Pollard. Acting out of my love of Jews, I could have done it. I had the Pollard fantasies, volunteering for Israel, working for the Mossad. At home, FBI, CIA, they both turned me down. Never found out why. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t because of you, because they thought it was just too much bother, a guy who was a veritable duplicate of somebody in the public eye. But I’ll never know. I used to draw a cartoon strip for myself when I was a kid. ‘A Jew in the FBI.’ Pollard is very important to me. What the Dreyfus case was to Herzl, the Pollard case is to me. Through my PI contacts I’ve heard that the FBI attached Pollard to a polygraph machine, gave him lists of prominent American Jews, and told him to identify the other spies. He wouldn’t do it. Everything about the guy repels me except that. I live in dread of a second Pollard. I live in dread of what that will mean.”

“So, is what I’m supposed to gather from all this that you became a detective to help Jews?”

“Look, you tell me you know nothing about me and you’re at a disadvantage because I know so much about you. I’m explaining to you that it’s my profession to know as much as I know, not just about you but about everyone . You ask me to level with you. That’s what I’m trying to do. Except all I meet with is a barrage of disbelief. You want me to take a polygraph? I could pass it with flying colors. Okay, I haven’t been calm and collected with you. It surprises me, too. I wrote and apologized for that. Some people blitz you, no matter who you are. I have to tell you that you are only the second person in my life to blitz me like this. In my line of work I’m hardened to everything and I see everything and I have to learn to handle everything. The only other time it happened before, that I was blitzed anything like this, was in 1963, when I met the president. He came to Chicago. I was doing some bodyguard work then. Usually I was employed by a private contractor, but at this time I was employed by the public sector, too. It was the mayor’s office. I couldn’t speak when he shook my hand. The words wouldn’t come out. That doesn’t usually happen. Words are a large part of my business and account for ninety percent of my success. Words and brains. It was probably because I was having masturbatory fantasies in those days about his wife on her water skis and I felt guilty. Do you know what the president said to me? He said, ‘I know your friend Styron. You’ve got to come down to Washington and have dinner with us and the Styrons some night.’ Then he said, ‘I’m a great admirer of Letting Go.’ That was in August 1963. Three months later he was shot.”

“Kennedy mixed you up with me. The president of the United States thought a bodyguard in the mayor’s office was a novelist on the side.”

“The guy shook a million hands a day. He took me for another dignitary. It wasn’t hard — there was my name, my looks, and besides, people are always taking a bodyguard for somebody else. That’s part of the job. Somebody desires protection. Somebody like you, say, who might be feeling threatened. You ride around with them. You pretend you’re a friend or something. Sure, some guys tell you they want to make it obvious that you’re a bodyguard, so you play that part. Nice dark suit, the sunglasses, you carry a gun. The goon outfit. That’s what they want, you do it. They want it obvious — they like the flash, the glitter of it. I had one client I worked with all the time in Chicago, a big contractor and developer, lots of money, and a lot of people who might be after him, and he loved the show. I’d go to Vegas with him. Him and his limousine and his friends — they wanted it always to be a big thing. I had to watch the women when they went to the bathroom. I had to go into the bathroom with them without their knowing it.”

“Difficult?”

“I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I managed it. Things have changed now but at this time I was the only Jewish bodyguard in the whole Midwest. I broke ground out there. The other Jewish boys were all in law school. That was what the families wanted. Didn’t your old man want you to go to law school instead of to Chicago to become an English teacher?”

“Who told you that?”

“Clive Cummis, your brother’s friend. Big New Jersey attorney now. Before you went out to graduate school to study literature, your father asked Clive to take you aside to plead with you to go to law school instead.”

“I don’t myself remember that happening.”

“Sure. Clive took you into the bedroom on Leslie Street. He said you’d never make a living teaching English. But you told him you weren’t having any of that stuff and to forget it.”

“Well, that’s an incident that slips my mind.”

“Clive remembers it.”

“You see Clive Cummis, too?”

“I get business from lawyers all over the country. I have a lot of law firms we work very closely with. We are exclusive agents for them. They’ll turn over all the cases to us where they need an investigator in Chicago. We’ll turn cases over to them, they’ll turn cases over to us. I’ve got a great working relationship with about two hundred police departments, basically in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. We have a great relationship with the county police, tremendous arrest record with the counties. I brought in a lot of people for them.”

I have to tell you that I was beginning to believe him.

“Look, I never ever wanted to do the Jewish thing,” he said. “That always seemed to me to be our big mistake. Law school to me was just another ghetto. So was what you did, the writing, the books, the schools, all that scorn for the material world. Books to me were too Jewish, just another way to hide from fear of the goyim. You see, I was having Diasporist thoughts even then. It was crude, it wasn’t formulated, but the instinct was there from the start. These people here call it ‘assimilation’ in order to disparage it — I called it living like a man. I joined the army to go to Korea. I wanted to fight the Communists. I never got sent. They made me an MP at Fort Benning. I built my body in the gym there. I learned to direct traffic. I became a pistol expert. I fell in love with weapons. I studied the martial arts. You quit ROTC because you were against the military establishment at Bucknell, and I became the best fucking MP they ever saw in Georgia. I showed the fucking rednecks. Don’t be afraid, I told myself, don’t run away — beat them at their fucking game. And through this technique I developed a tremendous sense of self-worth.”