The Wrong Kind of Money Page 16

  “I promise, Mama.”

  “And here’s something else you must keep,” she said. “It’s very important.” She reached into the drawer of her bedside table and withdrew a slim leather case. She handed it to Hannah. On the front of it was stamped, in gold letters, BATHSHEBA MARCELLA SACHS.

  “What’s in it, Mama?”

  “Open it.”

  Hannah opened it and pulled out a slender green booklet.

  “It’s her passport,” her mother said. “If she should ever need to travel outside the United States, she will need a passport. Notice that it lists her place of birth as New York City. Ordinarily to obtain a passport, you need to produce a birth certificate, but a birth certificate lists both parents’ names. A passport does not. Bathy’s birth certificate has been removed from the records at the American Embassy in Berlin. There is no longer an official record of her birth. But now that you and Bathy have this passport, you will always have proof that she is a United States citizen in good standing, and no one will ever ask any questions. So it’s important that you must keep her passport valid. It must be renewed every five years. You must not let her passport expire, Hannie. Do you understand? You must keep this in the safest possible place for her—I suggest in a safe deposit box. It’s the only document she will ever need. You see, Bathy must never know the truth. It would hurt her so.”

  “I understand, Mama. But how were you able to do this?”

  “Mr. Baruch. Mr. Baruch is very close to President Roosevelt. Mr. Baruch was able to do this for me, with the help of the White House. Mr. Baruch was always grateful for the fine education he received at your papa’s school.”

  “I see,” Hannah said, studying Bathy’s picture in the passport. It all seemed so long ago, those months in Europe, when her mother had taken charge of everything, inventing what would become their story as they went along. Hannah herself had been too frightened of the situation in which she found herself to do anything but exactly what her mother told her to. And there had seemed to be no one else, no one in the world to whom she could turn, besides her mother. “You’re young,” her mother had said. “When this is all over, you’ll simply forget that any of this happened. It will be easy, wait and see.” But it hadn’t been easy, and she couldn’t forget. How could she? It had stayed with her, every living day of her life since then, it seemed: that memory. And the terror and confusion of those days.

  Now her mother said, “Always remember that you are a Sachs. We Sachses take care of our own.” Then her mother said sharply, “Don’t do that, Hannah!”

  She had just pressed the passport picture to her lips.

  Anyway, that was how Bathy came to live with Jules and Hannah when she was not quite seven years old.

  And now Patsy Collingwood and Pookie Satterthwaite have just been seated at one of the skinny tables at Mortimer’s. The skinny tables are the ones at the front of the restaurant, by the windows, where fashionable diners are displayed for viewing by the passersby on Lexington Avenue, and they are called the skinny tables because no woman larger than a size eight is permitted to sit there. Larger women are relegated to the back of the room. This is said to be the arrangement preferred by Glenn Bernbaum, the ethnically laundered proprietor who, looking like an English country squire in his Tattersall tweed hacking jacket and doeskin slacks, moves about greeting, with studied indifference, his socially prominent clientele.

  “I’m sure you asked me here to discuss Topic A,” Pookie says, perching forward in her chair and resting her elbows on the table.

  “Exactly,” says Patsy. “I’d like to know what you think Georgette Van Degan is trying to pull.”

  “A coming-out party, of all the un-chic things. And for that fat daughter of hers, of all people. Perrier with lime,” she says to the waiter.

  “The same,” Patsy says. “Exactly. It’s all so fifties-sounding. The Times hasn’t covered coming-out parties for years.”

  “And Roxy wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. I’m surprised she even mentioned that this one was being planned.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The Times doesn’t even report weddings anymore.”

  “Well, not exactly. I’ve heard that you can pay the Times to do a wedding.”

  “But this isn’t even a wedding. It’s a debutante party, of all things. Can you pay the Times to write up a debutante party?”

  “Perhaps. But Georgette wouldn’t do that. That’s not her style at all.”

  “No. She’s definitely up to something.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I smell a rat.”

  “And with Carol Liebling, of all the B-list people.”

  “C-list.”

  “D-list.”

  “They live in our building,” Pookie says. “In fact, he’s president of the board. He only got the job because nobody else would take it. Nobody can stand him. He’s always trying to slap new assessments on us. Actually, he’s kind of cute.”

  “Speaking of cute,” Patsy says, “did you notice our waiter? I haven’t seen him here before.”

  “Hmm,” Pookie says, giving the distant waiter a long, appraising look. “Adorable.”

  “Probably gay.”

  “Shall we try to find out?” Pookie giggles.

  “Now, darling, we’ve got to learn to keep our hands off children,” Patsy says. “Let’s get back to Topic A. What’s Georgette up to?”

  “Georgette never does anything unless she’s got a plan. She’s definitely got a plan with this latest bit. The point is, what is it?”

  “Exactly. That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

  “And how did Carol Liebling get William Luckman to her dinner party? How’d she pull that one off?”

  “Exactly. I was supposed to have him at my house last Thursday night. Then Georgette pulled out. Then he pulled out. I had to call the whole thing off.”

  “Oh? And you didn’t ask Darius and me?”

  “Darling, I just told you. I had to call the whole thing off.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You know, Pookie,” Patsy says. “Sometimes I wonder about those Lieblings. Are they on everybody’s B-list because they’re too rich? I mean, I’m rich, and you’re rich, but they’re richer than everybody else combined. Are people jealous of them? Is that why they’re on the B-list—and don’t even seem to care?”

  “No, darling, that has nothing to do with it. It’s because his father was a bootlegger, and even had people killed, or so I’ve heard. And because his mother is a foul-mouthed old battle-ax. And because they’re”—she silently mouths the word—“Jewish.”

  “You think that’s it? I’m not so sure.”

  “Well, the only thing I’m sure of, darling, is that we’ve got to draw our wagons into a circle until we find out what Georgette is up to.”

  “Exactly. Of course, I have one theory.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I wonder if Georgette is trying to humiliate Carol Liebling in some way by dragging her into doing this un-chic thing. I mean, I adore Georgette, but you know how she likes to humiliate people, how she likes to drag people down so she gets the upper hand. There’s nothing Georgette loves more than dragging people down, humiliating them.”

  “But why would she want to humiliate Carol Liebling?”

  “Jealousy? Because they have too much money?”

  “But she’s doing this debutante thing with Carol. If she humiliates Carol, she’s going to humiliate herself, too, isn’t she?”

  “Darling, nobody has ever succeeded in humiliating Georgette, though all of us have tried.”

  “Nobody has succeeded except—”

  “Except.”

  “Truck Van Degan.”

  “Exactly.”

  At first the newlyweds, Jules and Hannah Liebling, lived at Hampshire House. In those days most of the best apartment buildings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were quite flagrant in their refusal to accept Jewish tenants, stopping just short of placing signs
in their lobbies to that effect. And so the answer, for affluent Jewish families, became the Upper West Side or, for some, apartment hotels like Hampshire House, which was neither really East Side nor West Side, but sort of in the middle, on Central Park South. Hampshire House was already known as “the Hollywood hotel.” It was where all the movie moguls stayed when they were in town. The figure 2600 sticks in Hannah Liebling’s mind, though she is not sure now whether that was their apartment number or the rent.

  Oh, and Hannah has to admit that though she might not have been in love with him, it was exciting being married to Jules Liebling. Those were exciting years, those last years of American Prohibition, with the money simply rolling in. They were exciting years, but they were also terrifying, dangerous years. People were killed—particularly people on the periphery of the liquor trade. But then there were people who had to be killed, traitors who deserved to be killed, or who did things they knew they might be killed for. There were people who tried to work both sides of the Prohibition laws, for example. There were U.S. Government Treasury agents who collected their government salaries and then tried to sell the liquor they had confiscated, proving the unwisdom of trying to serve two masters. In fact, Jules pointed out, by 1929 most of the men who were called bootleggers were on the payroll of the U.S. Government. In a chaotic situation like this, how could mayhem be avoided?

  Of course, Jules’s principal distilling operations were still located in the province of Quebec, where everything was perfectly legal and things remained relatively calm. One American exception was a distillery he owned in Kentucky, which was licensed to produce alcohol for medicinal purposes, and was supposed to be dispensed only with a doctor’s prescription. But if doctors chose to bend the law and prescribe liquor for people who didn’t need it, Jules Liebling had no control over this.

  The real trouble, Jules explained to her, was on what was called “the South Shore”—that is, the southern, or American, side of Lake Erie. The South Shore had become a war zone, a killing field. Some liquor shipments were confiscated by revenuers, but most were simply stolen at gunpoint. Boats and trucks were hijacked, their drivers murdered and their corpses tossed by the side of the road. Jules usually tried not to get involved with what was going on on the South Shore, but by February 1929 things had reached such a state—with so many of his shipments being stolen before they reached their rightful purchasers in the United States—that Jules decided to step in and do something about it. He summoned his Midwest distributor, Mr. Alphonse Capone, to New York for a meeting. In fact, Mr. Capone was one of Hannah’s very first dinner guests in her new home at Hampshire House.

  The newspapers, of course, had branded Mr. Capone a bootlegger. But the use of this term was forbidden in the Liebling household, and to Hannah he was simply one of her husband’s many American distributors, the one who had the exclusive contract to distribute Ingraham products in the Chicago area. Mr. Capone’s arrival in New York was well chronicled in the press, and there was no doubt that he enjoyed the publicity, and that his was becoming a household name throughout the world. He arrived at Grand Central in his own private railway car, known as a Palace Car, with his own retinue of servants and bodyguards. A special red carpet was rolled out along the station platform to greet him. At Hampshire House, four of his bodyguards stationed themselves about the hotel lobby. Two more were posted outside the front entrance to the apartment, and another two guarded the rear service door.

  Though she knew that Mr. Capone had other business interests in Chicago besides her husband’s products, it was hard for Hannah to think of Mr. Capone as a gangster. In fact, in those days nobody really thought of him that way. He was simply a fabulously rich man. In the year 1927 alone, when he was only twenty-seven, he had an income of $105,000,000, the highest gross income received by a private U.S. citizen in all of history—$35,000,000 more than Henry Ford would ever earn in his best year. Now, still under thirty and looking even younger, Mr. Capone seemed to Hannah simply a sweet, plump, baby-faced little man, with impeccable manners, who was one of her husband’s best customers. He bought his liquor on consignment, and paid Ingraham a royalty of thirty percent on every case he sold. And he always paid his bills on time, and always in cash. Hannah knew this because she often helped Jules with the books.

  Mr. Capone, she discovered, was also a deeply religious man. He bowed his head and crossed himself before picking up his fork, and did the same thing, she learned, whenever he passed a church or a cemetery. He told her that as a youth he had served as an altar boy at St. Francis of Assisi Church, and had been so trusted for his honesty that he had been given the job of counting the money in the collection baskets.

  Because she knew Mr. Capone was of Italian extraction, she had asked her cook to prepare an Italian dinner for him, and he had declared her lasagne the best he had ever eaten. For dessert, she remembers, he ate a full dozen of her cook’s famous brownies, and after dinner insisted on going into the kitchen to give the Negro cook a kiss. The poor woman nearly fainted dead away. She was that thrilled. The richest man in the world had kissed her!

  Hannah also remembers the after-dinner conversation.

  “Our overhead was particularly high last month, Alphonse,” Jules said.

  “Yes. Three of your shipments failed to reach their destination.”

  “Do you think they might still be in the Chicago area?”

  “Jules, I simply have no idea.”

  Jules puffed on his cigar. “There’s a garage in North Clark Street,” he said at last. “Number three-oh-five, I believe. Are you familiar with the building?”

  “I am. It belongs to Georgie Moran.”

  “After hours, I gather, he uses it as a distribution center.”

  “So I’m told,” Mr. Capone said.

  “I’m also told that cases of my labels have been turning up there,” Jules said.

  Mr. Capone looked pained. “Georgie’s a good Irish Catholic boy,” he said. “He’s a good friend of mine. We’re competitors, yes, but friendly competitors. Georgie wouldn’t do a thing like that to me.”

  “But what about some of the people working for him? Can they be trusted?”

  Mr. Capone ran his finger under the collar of his shirt. “I’ve never had any trouble with Georgie,” he said. “I wouldn’t want any trouble with Georgie.”

  Jules’s face grew thoughtful. “Perhaps,” he said, “it would be useful if I had a little talk with George Moran, Alphonse.”

  Mr. Capone looked enormously relieved. “Yes, that would be a big help, Jules,” he said.

  Then the conversation turned to other matters. “More coffee, Mr. Capone?” Hannah asked him.

  Mr. Capone returned to Chicago, where he was welcomed with much fanfare, the next morning.

  But then, a week later, the newspapers blazed with lurid headlines. Seven men had been machine-gunned down in a North Clark Street garage in Chicago. All of them, it seemed, worked for Mr. George Moran. Immediately the press and the police as well were claiming that the murders were the work of Al Capone, though there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support this thesis. The press gave Alphonse Capone the nickname “Scarface,” though Hannah hadn’t noticed any scars, and George Moran was nicknamed “Bugs”—all of which made the principals sound more sinister and romantic. And because the shootings occurred on February 14, the press christened the event the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

  “Do you really think Mr. Capone could have had anything to do with it?” Hannah asked Jules.

  “Nonsense. You heard Alphonse say he and George Moran were good friends.”

  “What about Mr. Moran? Could he have done it if his men were cheating him?”

  Jules sighed. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said. “I guess anything is possible in these troubled times.”

  And then, at the end of the month, working on the books, Hannah noticed some invoices made out to George Moran. Was this some mistake?

  “I pointed out some inefficiencies
in his operation,” Jules said. “He’s repaying the favor by giving me some of his business.”

  “But I thought Mr. Capone had exclusive distribution rights for Chicago,” she said.

  “I persuaded Alphonse to share distribution rights with Mr. Moran,” he said. “At least for the time being, until things settle down a bit.”

  The perpetrators of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre were never apprehended. In fact, the government was never able to get any of its charges against Mr. Capone to stick. Finally, in 1931, they got him for a white-collar crime, income-tax evasion, which could have happened to anybody, and which Mr. Capone regarded as an insult. He was given a light prison sentence and a fine of $50,000. Which he promptly paid, in cash. Hannah used to have a box of her cook’s brownies sent to him once a month in his prison cell, and he always wrote her a charming thank-you note. To Hannah, no matter what terrible things they said and wrote about him, Mr. Alphonse Capone was always a true gentleman of the old school.

  By 1933, of course, Prohibition was a thing of the past. That wonderful Age of Innocence was over.

  7

  “Uncovered Treasures”

  When Carol Liebling first began to fall in love with the work she was doing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was already a little bit sick of it. The year was 1988, one of the most uneventful years in the history of the American republic. After taking a scary 500-point tumble the year before, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had begun gliding comfortably upward again—past 3,000, then 3,500, and finally flirting with the seemingly impossible 4,000 mark, while Carol could remember a day when the magic goal to overtake had been a mere 1,000. The twinkly smile and ruddy complexion of Ronald Reagan seemed to reassure the country that all was well, or at least that nothing was really amiss, as the rich got richer and the poor went elsewhere, where they were probably better off. The president’s way of dismissing unwelcome news was comforting. He would simply cock his head, grin, shrug, and say, “W-e-e-ll …” And Carol was restless.