Bunny

Right before the Stooping Man to the open door of his car, a man in a grey coat and hat stepped forward towards him with a small thin envelope of white paper in his gloved hand. The Stooping Man, right by the car door, paused to accept the envelope.

Inside the car, he is seated. With the car door open, he unseals the envelope and withdraws the folded piece of paper. The message is in typed script:

Here and ready.

   Pres

The Stooping Man puts the envelope in his inside coat pocket.

Later his car pulls on to Wall Street and stops in front of the building of gargoyles. There the driver parks and opens the door for him. He steps out onto the curb, puts on his hat, and gives a momentary expressionless glance towards the top of building before going inside.

Inside an sunlit room, with several comfortable lounge chairs next to each other, the man who had come in from Greenwich by car, and the man who had entered the elevator with a case, are sitting in chairs. They are smoking cigarettes. There are standing ash trays next to the chairs. On the walls are framed black-and-white photographs of ancient collegiate and prep school male sports teams and players. Yale is written on one of the uniforms.

The man from Greenwich is speaking to other one,

The thing of it is---the kids. You hate to say to see a guy do that to his family. Pariahs. That's what they will be.

In the hallway outside the office, the elevator arrives and a bell is heard.

The man from Greenwich pauses, having heard it.

"Bill's here," he says to the other.

"You always have the knack."

"Pfft. I timed it, from when the messenger came back. But we'll see. He looks at his watch, as if timing something."

He signals to the other man and put out their cigarettes, and they stand up out of their chairs.

As they do so, and turn, they see the Stooping Man standing in the doorway, smiling and looking at them.


"Hey there!" Pres says to Bill, and shakes his hands, the way a close friend shakes the hand of a man he has not seen in a long time. Knight steps up behind Pres and does the same, shaking Bill's hand.

"Long time no see," says Pres to him, punctuating each syllable like reciting an Indian chant.

Bill throws his head back in a silent chuckle and brings his jaw back down level. He looks up at the photographs on the wall. He sighs deeply and looks back at the other two men.

"A fine college reunion this is," says Bill, who steps forward to the middle of the room, between the two other men.

"Is my brother here yet?...No wait, I know he isn't..." he pauses, "but here he comes."

He motions towards the door, with a grin, and almost on cue a boisterous bustle in heard from a nearby room---greetings, hello, hey there. 

The man who comes in the door is in his  Forties, balding to the point of just having a tuft of hair on time. He is grinning wide, and animated in his motion, playful and sanguine.

"Bill!" he says, and he grabs hold of the Stooping Man with a tight embrace. The Stooping Man, in his embrace, smiles back at him.

"How's merry old London?" the bald man says to him. "I here they are having a war over there."

He leans a little closer and whispers, "You didn't start it, did you?" and then breaks out in laughter, and the others laugh with him.

"Bunny, thankfully you have not changed one bit in my absence."

The Stooping Man

When the Stratoliner had landed and finally come to rest on the runway, and the forward door was opened, and the passengers started to disembark into the autumn air of Long Island, one of the first to emerge, but not the first, having let a few people go out ahead of him, was the tall man who had been seated at the window, and had looked down through it at the building of gargoyles on Wall Street.

He was long of frame and sturdy. He had been athletic in his youth, in boarding school. He had handsome features. He wore the most conventional of wool coots. His suit was immaculate to him, seemingly showing no extraneous crease. As he came through the door, he bent his head down slightly, in order to pass through it. And on the other side, and the top of the stairs, and while donning his hat, he did not stand fully straight, but kept the posture of stooping as a part of his posture, as if he were always passing through the door of a passenger aircraft.

As he looked out over the runway momentarily, his face went into its automatic response in these situations, the muscles followed the well-organized, tightly-scripted routine they knew so well, while drawing his facial muscles back into what would have been taken for the genuine and warm smiles.

He descended in the stairs as if he were an anonymous traveler. There were no photographers rushing up to greet him, as if he were a Hollywood star arriving for a premiere in the City. The photographers were miles away, and unconscious of his presence. It is the way he wanted it.

He walked across the tarmac carrying nothing in his hands. He split off by himself, and was trailed by a few other men several dozen feet behind him. Near one of the hangars he approached an automobile. The door was opened for him by a uniformed chauffeur was stood at attention like a soldier.

Wearing the same smile as on the stairs, he approached the open door of the automobile, making eye contact with nobody.

Out of Greenwich

[continued from here]

Shooting his mouth off.

That was the truly the one unforgivable sin. It was truly the only rule of the entire game, the only one that had to be obeyed by all players. All the other rules were simply guidelines foisted upon each man by nature. The strong are victorious. The weak perish.  All rules of behavior beyond that derive from this brutal self-correcting principle.

The man in the back of the car thought about these things as he driver took him south on the main highway from Connecticut into New York, and then the Bronx.

He should be glad that Kennedy has destroyed himself this way, so precipitously. Certainly he will glad about that, he thought to himself, in reference to another person. He will not take as any kind of setback. He never does.

Instead the anger he cultivated during his commute was more personal. It went close to the center of his own struggle, of the things he himself had been forced to learn along the way, through bitter experience, and what had been taught to him.

Keeping your mouth shut was not just part of the code.  It was the essence of the code. 

To violate it in such open way, most especially in the press, as Kennedy has done, was to make everyone stop in their tracks and pay attention to you. It was the height of awkwardness. The band stops playing.

No real damage is usually done. Nothing changes, except that  never again can you be taken into trust.

Worst of all---and this is what made the man in the car especially angry---you have destroyed your family. The ambitions of your wife---for she is the one who will hold your ambitions as a banker holds a promissory note---have been destroyed in an instance.

Your sons will also inherit this distrust, before they have even had a chance to become men. The man who kills his career by speaking out in the wrong way is thus the despicable of men, an egotist of the greatest scale, who accomplishes but destruction.

Now he could hear his own fathers words to him, when he was much younger. He thought about them, and how he would express them himself, to his own sons, if he could start from scratch.

It may be unfair, but that is how it works. Society is a family enterprise. Individual persons act within in societ, as they do in sport, but as in sport it is always as part a team, and in society the basis of each team is a family. Either it is your own family, if you are powerful, wealthy and long-established, or as part another family, with whom you wish to ally.

"Mr. Bush,"

He was interrupted by driver, as they had arrived at the front of 63 Wall Street.

Gargoyles

[continued from here]

When the Stratoliner was almost at the Brooklyn Bridge, and now well below ten thousand feet, and slightly to the east of the tip of Manhattan, alongside the aircraft one might have noticed that one of windows in the forward part of the plane, hitherto shaded by a closed curtain, as the others nearby it, was slightly parted, only a slight crack, as if to let in as little sunlight as possible.

One might have noticed the fingers of man of middle age pulling the fabric aside this way, long enough that he might look down onto the tops of the building along Wall Street, the rivals to the Bank of Manhattan Trust buildings, going down the hill. His eyes sought out a particular building, all the way down Wall at the bottom of the hill at Pearl Street. Compared to the Bank of Manhattan Trust, it was hardly worth attention to the casual observer. Only thirty-six stories---half of the number of its dominating rival, and rising even shorter since it was placed closer to the water front.

It blended in well with the other buildings, although a closer inspection of the rooftop, one might noticed the anomaly of the strange decor---the medieval pikes along the roof, and the great drain spouts projected from the side, gave the appearance of prickly fortress, armored for battle. It was the opposite of the soft inviting look of the Empire State.  One could not have noticed as well, unless one was very up close to the roof, that the drainspouts were guarded each and every one by gargoyles that scowled down at the street below.

Down inside that building, on one of the topmost floors, sunlight fills a large empty conference room with a large polished table flanked by cushioned chairs bespeaking great opulence expressed in subdued tones. On the wall are portraits of groups of men, sitting in a pose towards the camera. In some of the portraits, the style of their dress and grooming obviously goes back to the middle of the previous century. Other groups of men are from earlier in the Twentieth Century. The portrait in the center shows a group of men in the contemporary era. About a dozen men are in the portrait. Some of the men are sitting in chairs in front, and others are standing behind them, dignified.

Looking closely at the portrait one might have noticed one of the men sitting off to the side. He was lean of frame with gentle contours of face, and deep eyebrows. He looked in his late Forties. He was in fact the man who had been looking out the window of the embassy in Moscow.

Next to it is a large clock on a shelf. The hands of the clock reads a few minutes past nine o'clock.

In the passenger cabin of the Stratoliner, we see the same man sitting in comfortable seat by himself byside the window where the curtain is pulled closed, as it in the other nearby rows, which are empty. His gold wristwatch says ten minutes past nine.

Down on the street level of Wall Street, far too small to be seen from the aircraft, men in wool coats and hats walk briskly along the sidewalk towards their destinations, some stepping out of automobiles with drivers, and taxis, and others coming up from the subway, and walking extra fast, as if trying to catch up with the others.

One of the men, who is carrying a leather attache case, approaches the front entrance of the building at Wall Street and Pearl, the one with the gargoyles on the top. He turns into the entrance and goes into the lobby. A close inspection would have revealed him as one of the men standing in the back of the portrait next to the clock. As he enters the buiding, we see the address as 63 Wall Street.

Meanwhile out in the wooded suburbs of Greenwich, Connecticut, where a few late commuters are still waiting on the train station, up in the hills beyond the station,  a graceful mansion sits among the trees and hedges, the door opens and a man---also one of the ones standing in the portrait, in his mid forties, with light hair, a large forehead,  pinched-up eyebrows comes out of the front door also carrying a leather case and with several folded newspapers under his arm. He walks in relaxed fashion along the path towards the garage, where a uniformed driver is wiping the windshield wipers of a late model sedan. The driver greets him as the man approaches, without stopping his work. The man with case smiles and says something back to him. One would have noticed that they had a very relaxed relationship, and had been comfortable with each other for a while, and that the man with the case felt at ease talking to him, and vice versa.


With the driver at the wheel, they come down past the train station. The man with the case sits in the back reading one of the folded up newspaper. Looking at one,  he grimaces a bit, as in in distaste. The newspaper is the Boston Globe.

The headline is several weeks old now. The news is old. But he must bring in the paper anyway, in case a copy of it is needed. He looks at the headline.

Kennedy Says Democracy All Done

Pinch Coming in U.S. Trade Loss
Ambassador Asks Aid to England Be Viewed as “Insurance;” Begs America Wake Up, Give More Power to Mobilize Industry. By Louis M. Lyons

Joseph P. Kennedy was sitting in his shirtsleeves eating apple pie and American cheese in his room at the Ritz-Carlton. His suspenders hung around his hips...

Skipping down past the fold he reads

“Hitler has all the ports in Europe, you see. Never forget that. The only reason the English haven’t taken over the Irish ports is because of American public opinion.

If We Get In, Democracy Ends
 
“People call me a pessimist. I say, 'What is there to be gay about? Democracy is all done.’”
“You mean in England or this country, too?”
“Well, I don’t know. If we get into war it will be in this country, too. A bureaucracy would take over right off. Everything we hold dear would be gone. They tell me that after 1918 we got it all back again. But this is different. There’s a different patter in the world.

 


"Idiot," he mutters to himself, scowling at the words on the page. His driver asks him if he said something. His face immediately changes to a pleasant smile and he waves it off.

"Some people just can't help shooting their mouth off," he said.

His driver nods as if  he knows exactly what he means.

At that moment,  on the high floor of the building guarded by gargoyles, inside the conference room, the clock among the portraits reads ten minutes past nine o'clock. We see this is also the time on the watch of the man in the back of the car. In the passenger cabin of the plane it is also the time on the watch of the man sitting by himself, beside the window, who appears lost in thought, as if his mind is calculating some very long tabulation.


Just at that instant, through the nearby open door of the cockpit, one of the crew members, whose one watch has stopped, asks the captain for the time, and he tells him "exactly nine o'clock on the dot."

The War About to Come

In due course the plane descended below 10,000 feet as it came over the upper harbor along the Brookyln waterfront headed towards Governor's Island.

In that era (1940), anyone looking at New York, whether from ground level or 12,000 feet, could not have help but been struck by the thick seamless jagged carpet of wharves and piers that jutted nearly every available piece of real estate on the waterfront.

Along both sides of the East River, and on the other side of the island along the North River---the part of the mighty Hudson and it scrapes along the west side of Manhattan, carving its last great channel as it barrels to the sea.

There on the Manhattan side are the great terminals of the mighty passenger lines, whose numbers of elegant traffic has dropped precipitously over the last year with the coming of the war.

The last war finished off the great German lines. Now the British ones are falling to the same fate. Cunard's great new, the RMS Queen Elizabeth is a troop transport. Soon the American ones will join them, and instead of passengers in Manhattan they will pick up men in uniforms on the opposite bank, on the Hoboken pier, disgorging from the rail lines that fan out to the military training bases. These men will be gathered from around the country to come here, and they must be transported over the ocean. Then they will be transported back, or their cadavers, some of them, and dropped off at the pier once again, and then fanned out across the continent back to their homes.

It's a big beautiful system. Last time was so disorganized. It was a trial run. This time we will get it right. The system will work much better, and this time too it will be sustained.

The View from a Stratoliner

 [continued from here]

November 1940

Against a brilliant blue sky, with a spatttering of cumulus clouds in the background, a shiny fixed wing aircraft, a Boeing 307 Stratoliner, bearing no marks of any commercial airline, hovers gently in the air as it soars twelve thousand feet above the Lower New York Harbor, the contours of which below describe gentle arcs forming the northern coast of New Jersey and the islands of New York that frame the unbridged opening of Hudson. In the distance, towards the direction of motion of the aircraft, the little tops of the skyline of the City form jagged crests recognizable in their climax in Midtown at the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.

Even at that altitude, the Midtown towers---both in volume and height---clearly dominate the skyline at the near tip of the island, the ancient glacial hillock where the old Dutch settlement has become for many decades running the city's financial district, the skyline of which reaches it own singular crest at the recognizable four-sided pointed copper spire of the high pyramidal copper top of Bank of Manhattan Trust Building---70 stories and 942 feet---rising out straight up out of the bedrock of the island a little down Wall Street from the top of the hill at Broadway.

The view advantage from the Stratoliner is the apparently same that one would have achieved with any of the passenger aircraft of the day that could achieve twelve thousand feet, yet at the same time it is completely different and unique. For the Stratoliner is not just any fixed wing commercial aircraft, but is the first one produced by human beings with a pressurized passenger cabin. For those who have had the privilege of experienced this comfort, the experience of air travel has changed for ever. The jarring physiological side-effects that came with high-altitude passenger flight in unpressurized flight, and its concomitant psychological disruptions, is now a thing of the past. For those who can afford it, a new type of personal transportation is available.

Eventually too the noisy propeller engines will be replaced by sleek jet ones. The gas turbine engine has been the rage among flight enthusiasts since the 1920s. The Germans have already flown such an aircraft, and shown that it is practical. It is only a matter of time. The pace of advancement may be slow or fast, depending on the exigencies that drive the adoption of such innovations. Now there is a war. Things always happen faster in a war.

In the meantime, for a few select people in the know, this ability to place oneself swiftly anywhere on the globe in relative ease and comfort, has rewritten the rules of the game. All the ways that things were done in the past has now been eclipsed by this new power, of appearing in person at any place on the planet of one's choosing.

One day this ability may be commonplace, but for now, those who can experience this are a very select club. They are the same people who even when not in the air, can travel in the greatest luxury on sea or earth. They have always lived in a different world than the rest of us, but now the gap has suddenly gotten much, much bigger.

The great statesmen and generals of the past, and even the great conquerors of empires, could barely have dreamt of the ability to do such a thing.  

Compared to previous eras, a new type of human being has been created, one with almost godlike abilities compared to previous eras.   

Those who can take advantage of it first will be those who can master the world. This is always how it has worked, and how it will always work, until the end of time.