The Magic Christian Read online

  And when the work was going ahead correctly, Grand might give the crowd a moment of surveillance from where he stood in the center of the lot, finally addressing them, hands cupped to his mouth as if he had to shout—though, actually, they were only a few yards away.

  “Tomorrow. . .” he would say, “. . . back . . . tomorrow! Now . . . getting . . . it . . . ready!”

  When an occasional wiseacre could get his attention and attempt some joke as to what was going on there beyond the barrier, Grand Guy Grand would smile wearily and shake a scolding finger at him.

  “Now . . . getting . . . it . . . ready,” he would shout slowly, or something else equally irrelevant to the wiseacre’s jibe; but no one took offense, either because of not understanding or else because of the dignity and bearing of the man, and the big diamond he wore at his throat.

  Another contractor, three workers, a truck of sand and gravel, and six sacks of quick-drying cement arrived at the working site at two o’clock, but were forced to wait until the new forms were complete. Then a sheet of metal was lowered into place and the concrete was poured into the forms. Under Grand’s spirited command, it was all so speedily done that well before dusk the work was ended, including the installation of a great gas burner there, star-shaped with a thousand dark jets, like a giant upturned squid stretched beneath the structure. It was apparent now that when the board forms were removed, the whole would resemble a kind of white stone bath, set on four short columns, with a heating apparatus beneath, and small ramps leading up the vat on each of its sides.

  Before dinner Guy Grand completed arrangements begun earlier in the day with the Chicago stockyards: these provided for the delivery of three hundred cubic feet of manure, a hundred gallons of urine, and fifty gallons of blood, to an address in the suburbs. Grand met them there and had the whole stinking mess transferred to a covered dump truck he had purchased that morning. These arrangements cost Grand a pretty penny, because the stockyards do not ordinarily conserve or sell urine, so that it had to be specially collected.

  After securing the truck’s cover, Grand climbed into the cab, drove back towards the stockyards and parked the truck there, where the stench of it would be less noticeable.

  Then he took a taxi into town, to the near North Side and had a quiet dinner at the Drake.

  At nine o’clock, while it was still light, he returned to the working site, where he was met by some of the crew, and saw to the removal of the board forms and the barrier. He inspected the vat, and the burner below—which he tested and found in good working order. Then he dismissed the crew and went back to his hotel.

  He sat at his desk writing business letters until his thin gold wrist-clock sounded three A.M. Exactly then he put away his writing things, freshened himself up, and, just before leaving the room, paused near the door and collected a big leather brief case, a gas mask, a wooden paddle, a bucket of black paint, and an old, stiff paintbrush. He went downstairs and took a cab out to the place where he had parked the dump truck. Leaving the cab, he got into the truck and drove back to the working site. There he backed the truck carefully up one of the ramps and then emptied all that muck into the vat. The stench was nearly overpowering, and Grand, as soon as he had parked the truck and gotten out of it, was quick to don the gas mask he had brought.

  Stepping up one of the ramps, he squatted on the parapet of the vat and opened the brief case, out of which he began taking, a handful at a time, and dropping into the vat, ten thousand one-hundred-dollar bills, slowly stirring them in with his wooden paddle.

  And he was in this attitude, squatting at the edge of the vat, gas mask covering his face, stirring with his paddle and dumping bills into the muck, the work only half begun, when a passing police patrol car pulled up to investigate the activity and, above all, the stench. But before the officers could properly take account, Grand had closed the brief case, doffed his mask, given them five thousand dollars each, and demanded to be taken at once to their precinct captain. After a few hushed words between them, and a shrugging of shoulders, they agreed.

  At the station, Grand spoke privately with the captain, showing him several business cards and explaining that it was all a harmless promotion stunt for a new product.

  “Naturally my firm is eager to cooperate with the authorities,” he said, and handed the captain twenty-five thousand.

  And so it was finally agreed that Grand might return to the site and proceed, as long as whatever he was doing did not involve criminal violence within the precinct. Moreover, while the captain could make no definite promise about it, he was attentive enough to Grand’s proposal of an additional fifty thousand on the following noon if the police would be kept away from the site for a few hours that morning.

  “Think it over,” said Grand pleasantly. “Better sleep on it, eh?”

  Back at the site, Grand Guy donned his mask again, and dumped the remaining contents of the brief case into the vat. Then he stepped down, opened the can of paint, gave it good stirring, and finally, using his left hand so that what resulted looked childish or illiterate, he scrawled across the vat FREE $ HERE in big black letters on the sides facing the street.

  He climbed up for a final check on the work. Of the bills in the muck, the corners, edges, and denomination figures of about five hundred were visible. After a moment he stepped down and, half crouching beneath the vat, took off his mask and saw to his burners. He did a short terse count down and turned the valve full open; then he removed the handle so that it could not easily be interfered with. As he touched off the match, the thousand flames sprang up, all blue light, and broke back doubling on the metal plate, and on the wet concrete—a color of sand in summer moonlight: one of those chosen instants, lost to childhood, damp places in reflection, surface of cement under the earth, the beautifully cool buried places . . . the stench became unbearable; he stood and quickly donned his mask, turned away from the site and walked across the street where he paused at the corner and surveyed the whole. Already in the pale eastern light, the moronic scrawl, FREE $ HERE, loomed with convincing force, while below the thousand flames beat up, blue-white and strangely urgent for this hour of morning on a downtown corner of Chicago.

  “Say . . .” mused Grand, half-aloud, “that’ll make it hot for them all right!” And he leaped into the big dump truck and drove like the wind back to his hotel. At dawn he caught the plane for New York.

  The commotion that occurred a few hours later on that busy corner of the Loop in downtown Chicago was the first and, in a sense perhaps, the most deliberately literal of such projects eventually to be linked with the name of “Grand Guy” Guy Grand, provoking the wrath of the public press against him, and finally earning him the label, “Eccentric” and again towards the end, “Crackpot.”

  IV

  “IS CLEMENCE A person?” asked Guy, taking a bit of sweet biscuit now, popping it into his mouth.

  Aunt Esther raised her hand to conceal a shaming twitter, and Aunt Agnes feigned impatience.

  “Guy, great silly!” said Agnes. “Really!” Though after a moment she softened, to continue:

  “Clemence is the new maid! She’s a Catholic girl, Guy—and a very nice one, if I may say so. She’s marrying this Jewish boy, Sol—how they’ll manage I’m sure I don’t know—I talked to them both, I told them that we were Protestants, had always been Protestants, and always would be Protestants—but that I didn’t mind! Not in the least! ‘Freedom of worship and creed!’ I said. It’s always been a principle of my religion. Not so insistent and pushy as some I could name! I didn’t tell them that, of course, but there you are. Well, she wants a honeymoon in Italy, and a visit to the Pope, which I think is terribly sweet—and he wants to go to his place in the East, wherever it is; Israel, isn’t it? Oh, I don’t say it badly. They’re very nice, Guy—both of them as gentle and polite as you please, and . . . well, they’ve enough money for one of the trips, you see, but not for both. I wish we could help them, Guy. I think it would be nice if they could go to both of their places, don’t you agree? You remember how much I enjoyed Calvin’s chair in Geneva! Of course it isn’t the same, but it would be sweet. What’s your feeling on it, Guy?”

  “But Guy has always been eager to help in such matters,” Esther broke in warmly.

  “Thank you, Aunt Esther,” said Guy with soft humility, “I do like to think that the record speaks for itself.”

  Guy Grand had owned a newspaper for a while—one of Boston’s popular dailies, with a circulation of 900,000. When Grand assumed control, there was, at first, no change in the paper’s format, nor in its apparently high journalistic standards, as Grand stayed on in New York on the periphery of the paper’s operations, where he would remain, he said until he “could get the feel of things.”

  During the second month, however, French words began to crop up unaccountably in news of local interest:

  Boston, Mar. 27 (AP)—Howard Jones, vingt-huit ans, convicted on three counts of larceny here, was sentenced this morning to 20-26 months in Folsom State Prison, Judge Grath of 17th Circuit Court of Appeals announced aujourd’hui.

  Working then through a succession of editors, proofreaders, and linotype operators, Grand gradually put forward the policy of misspelling the names of cities, islands, and proper nouns in general—or else having them appear in a foreign language:

  YANKS HIT PARIGI

  MOP-UP AT TERWEEWEE

  During the war, when geographic names were given daily prominence in the headlines, these distortions served to antagonize the reader and to obscure the facts.

  The circulation of the paper fell off sharply, and after three months it was down to something less than one-twentieth of what it had been when Grand took over. At this point a major policy change was announced. Henceforth the newspaper would not carry comics, editorials, feature stories, reviews, or advertising, and would present only the factual news in a straightforward manner. It was called The Facts, and Grand spent the ransom of a dozen queens in getting at the facts of the news, or at least a great many of them, which he had printed then in simple sentences. The issues of the first two days or so enjoyed a fair sale, but the contents on the whole appeared to be so incredible or so irrelevant that by the end of the week demand was lower than at any previous phase of the paper’s existence. During the third week, the paper had no sale at all to speak of, and was simply given away; or, refused by the distributors, it was left in stacks on the street corners each morning, about two million copies a day. In the beginning people were amused by the sight of so many newspapers lying around unread; but when it continued, they became annoyed. Something funny was going on—Communist? Atheist? Homosexual? Catholic? Monopoly? Corruption? Protestant? Insane? Negro? Jewish? Puerto Rican? POETRY? The city was filthy. It was easy for people to talk about The Facts in terms of litter and debris. Speeches were made, letters written, yet the issue was vague. The editor of The Facts received insulting letters by the bagful. Grand sat tight for a week, then he gave the paper over exclusively to printing these letters; and its name was changed again—Opinions.

  These printed letters reflected such angry divergence of thought and belief that what resulted was sharp dissension throughout the city. Group antagonism ran high. The paper was widely read and there were incidents of violence. Movements began.

  At about two P.M. on June 7th, crowds started to gather in Lexington Square near the center of the city. The Jewish, Atheist, Negro, Labor, Homosexual, and Intellectual groups were on one side—the Protestant and American Legion on the other. The balance of power, or so it seemed, lay with the doughty Catholic group.

  It was fair and windless that day in Boston, and while the groups and the groups-within-groups bickered and jockeyed in the center of Lexington Square, Guy Grand brought off a tour de force. Hovering just overhead, in a radio-equipped helicopter, he directed the maneuver of a six-plane squadron of skywriters, much higher, in spelling out the mile-long smoke-letter words: F**K YOU . . . and this was immediately followed by a veritable host of outlandish epithets, formulated as insults on the level of group Gestalt: Protestants are assholes . . . Jews are full of crap . . . Catholics are shitty . . . and so on, ad nauseum actually.

  It set the crowd below hopping mad. Grand Guy Grand dropped to about a hundred feet, where he canted the plane towards them and opened the door to peer out and observe. The crowd, associating the low-flying helicopter with the outrageous skywriting going on above, started shouting obscenities and shaking their fists.

  “You rotten Mick!”

  “You dirty Yid!”

  “You black bastard!”

  That was how the fighting began.

  During the Lexington Square Riots, Grand set his plane down to twenty-five feet, where he cruised around, leaning out the door, expressionless, shouting in loud, slow intonation:

  “WHAT’S. . . UP? WHAT’S. . . UP?”

  By four o’clock the square was in shambles and all Boston on the brink of eruption. The National Guard had to be brought into the city and martial law obtained. It was thirty-six hours before order was fully restored.

  The press made capital of the affair. Investigations were demanded. Guy Grand had paid off some big men in order to carry forward the project, but this was more than they had bargained for. Back in New York it cost him two million to keep clear.

  V

  “YES, I SEE,” said Guy, clearing his throat, looking with concern at the piece of sweet biscuit in his hand, “. . .certainly. Why don’t you . . . well, you know, find out how much they need, make out a check, and . . .”

  Aunt Esther covertly twittered again, her eyes bright above the very white hand that hid her mouth, and Agnes turned her own face sharply away in mock exasperation with the boy.

  “Not give them the money, Guy!” Agnes exclaimed. “They wouldn’t hear of it, of course—the young man, Sol, especially. Surely you know how proud those people are . . . a defensive-mechanism, I suppose; but there you are, even so! No—what I had in mind was to tell them of a stock to buy, you see.”

  “Right,” said Guy crisply, “then they would take one of the trips later, that the idea? But, hold on—if they spend all their money on the one trip, how can they buy into the stock in question?”

  “Guy!” said his aunt in a voice of ice and pain.

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Grand with perfect candor.

  Aunt Esther took refuge behind her kerchief, into her ceaseless giggling.

  “I mean make it go up and down!” cried Agnes crossly. “Or rather down first, then up.”

  She regarded him narrowly for a moment, her thinness stretching upwards like an angry swan, suspecting perhaps that he was being deliberately obtuse.

  “A perfect babe in the woods!” she said. “How you manage to hold your own at conference table I’m sure I couldn’t imagine!”

  “Sorry,” said Grand, unsmiling, following through with the youthful gesture of slightly ducking his head for a sip of tea.

  Of course it was all largely an act between them.

  “Name one good stock in which you hold ten thousand shares,” said Agnes sharply.

  “One good stock . . .” repeated Guy Grand, his great brow clouding.

  “. . . that begins with an ‘A’,” said Aunt Esther.

  “That begins with an ‘A’?” said Grand, almost incredulous, yet as willing as a good-natured child at play. “Esther!” cried Agnes.

  “Well, do you mean exactly ten thousand, or at least ten thousand?” asked Guy.

  “At least ten thousand,” said Agnes. “And it needn’t,” she added, with a straight look to her sister, “begin with an ‘A’!”

  “Hmm. Well, how about ‘Abercrombie and Adams’?” said Grand tentatively, “there’s a fairly sound—”

  “Good,” said Aunt Agnes. “Now then, what if you sold all your shares of that? What would happen to the price of it?”

  “Take a nasty drop,” said Grand, with a scowl at the thought of it. “Might cause a run.”

  “There you are then!” cried Agnes. “And Clemence’s young man buys—when the price is down, he buys, you see—then the next day, you buy back what you sold! I should think it would go up again when you buy back what you sold, wouldn’t it?”

  “Might and might not,” said Grand, somewhat coldly.

  “Well,” said Agnes, with a terrible hauteur, “you can just keep buying until it does!” Then she continued, in softer tones, to show her ultimate reasonableness: “Surely you can, Guy. And then, you see, when it’s up again, Clemence and her young man will sell.”

  “Yes,” said Grand with a certain quiet dignity, “but you know, it might not look good, that sort of thing, with the Federal Securities Commission.”

  Agnes’s lips were so closely compressed now that they resembled a turtle’s mouth.

  “Might not look,” she repeated, making it hollow, her eyes widening as though she had lifted a desert rock and seen what was beneath it. “Well,” she said with unnerving softness, taking a sip of tea to brace herself and even, turning to draw on her sister with a look of dark significance, “. . . if all you’re concerned with is appearance—then perhaps you aren’t the person I thought you were, after all.” And she poured herself another cup.

  Grand was stricken with a mild fit of coughing. “Yes,” he was able to say at last, “. . . yes, I see your point, of course. Does bear some thinking through though, I must say.”

  His aunt, momentarily aghast, had just started to speak again, when the maid stepped inside the door to announce the arrival of Miss Ginger Horton—an extremely fat lady, who entered the room then, wearing an immense trapeze sunsuit and carrying her Pekinese.

  “Guy!” she cried, extending her hand, as he, rising, came forward. “How too good to see you!

  “Say hello to Guy, my Bitsy!” she shrieked gaily to the dog, pointing him at Guy and the others. “Say hello to everybody! There’s Agnes and Esther, see them, Bitsy?”