THE CARNATION MADE ME feel silly. It was supposed to be red, but the flower shop in the Hilton had only pink ones so I paid fifteen pence for one and let the girl in the shop pin it to my lapel.
“My, don’t we look nice,” she said. “Like to use our mirror?”
“I seem to remember how I look,” I said, smiled my good-bye, and crossed the lobby, heading for the hotel entrance and a taxi. Nobody noticed my carnation and I think I felt a trifle disappointed.
It was 5:35 P.M. and the London traffic rush was on, but for only twenty pence the Hilton doorman whistled me up a taxi, held the door for me, inquired of my destination, and after I told him, repeated it to the driver, “The Black Thistle on New Cavendish Street. Know it, mate?”
“I should hope to,” the driver said, gave the meter flag a twist, and nosed his cab out into the Park Lane traffic.
It wasn’t much of a ride, not more than three-quarters of a mile, if that, but the traffic was thick and stubborn and we didn’t pull up in front of the Black Thistle until nearly six o’clock.
I’ve never much cared for pubs. I suppose it’s because I detest cocktail parties and an English pub, right after five-thirty opening time, reminds me of nothing so much as an American cocktail party that’s about to run out of gin.
The Black Thistle was a Watney pub and it seemed fairly new, or at least its furbishings did, with lots of glittering vinyl and some embarrassingly bad murals on two walls. I made my way through the crowd at the bar, asked for and got a large whisky, poured a little water into it from a pitcher, pocketed the change from a pound, turned, and had the glass knocked from my hand by a gray tweed elbow that was covered with a black suede patch.
The elbow belonged to a man who was holding a pint of beer. His back had been to me and when he turned I saw that he was in his late twenties, a little over six feet tall, and already growing a paunch. He had a smooth plump pink face that was turning red. I think he was blushing.
“Terribly sorry,” he said. “Did I get any on you?”
“It’s all right,” I said.
He bent down to pick up my glass and I got a good view of the top of his head. It was as bald and as pink as his face, except for a thick white scar on his crown that was about two inches long. What hair he had left was light blond and confined to the sides of his head and the nape of his neck. He wore it long and brushed back so that it hung down over the collar of his figured blue shirt.
When he rose he smiled apologetically and said, “What were you drinking, whisky?”
“That’s right.”
“A large one, I’d think. I’ll get you another.”
“Don’t bother.”
He smiled again. His teeth were a bit gray, but it was still a nice enough smile. “If somebody slopped my drink, they could bloody well buy me another. Be back in a second.”
It was more like sixty seconds before he could shoulder his way back through the chattering crowd bearing my drink. It even had an ice cube in it. I noticed then that his eyes were a familiar shade of gray and I couldn’t remember where I had seen that particular shade recently until he smiled again and I saw his teeth. “American, aren’t you?” he said, handing me the drink.
“That’s right.”
“Thought you might like the ice. Most of you chaps do.”
“Thanks.”
“Are you all set now?”
“I’m fine.”
He smiled his gray smile again. “Well, enjoy yourself.”
I nodded and he turned away and moved into the crowd. I moved out of it, edging toward the door where nobody was standing and where anybody who wanted to could admire the carnation in my buttonhole. After I took a swallow of my drink I looked at my watch. It was five past six. I was still ten minutes early.
A large English whisky is about equivalent to a single shot in a fairly honest New York bar so I had quickly finished my drink and was trying to decide whether it was really worth the effort to go for a refill when the cramps hit. They hit just above my belt and it was as if somebody had slammed my stomach with an iron pipe. From the inside.
I doubled over and dropped the empty glass. It rolled a couple of feet. The pain hit again, even worse than before, and this time it was as though iron prongs were digging into my stomach, rusty iron prongs, and I thought wasn’t I lucky that Harley Street was only three blocks away. An appendicitis would be only routine to the men of Harley Street—just as it had been to old Dr. Marland who had cut my appendix out the summer that I was fifteen years old.
The pain gave way to nausea, a wave of it, and I knew I was going to throw up. Because I’m basically a tidy sort I decided that it would be better to throw up outside in the gutter rather than all over the Black Thistle’s pretty purple carpet.
I turned and lurched toward the door. The pain went away almost as quickly as it had come. In its place was the nausea plus a curious sense of well-being that somehow combined the peace of marijuana with the recklessness of three martinis. But it was better than both. The closest I had ever been to it before was for a fleeting moment once when I had counted backwards from ten while a dentist injected sodium pentothal into my left arm just before hacking out an impacted wisdom tooth. You won’t feel a thing, he had said, and I hadn’t, except a supreme sense of confident elation.
I felt the same way as I stumbled outside and made a mess in the New Cavendish street gutter, but not really minding at all because I could cope with that and, if given just a few moments’ rest, could probably even come up with a passkey to the universe.
But I was never to have the chance. My arms were grabbed from behind. In front of me two men and a girl came out of the Black Thistle. They looked at me. The girl made a face and giggled and the two men grinned and then laughed. I decided not to be mugged, not in broad daylight on New Cavendish Street, London W. 1. Not with a small crowd looking on and grinning and giggling about it.
I jerked my right arm free and drove my elbow back hard. It sank into something soft and I heard a most satisfactory whoosh. A voice said, “Here, now!” so I stamped down hard with my left heel on something that felt very much like an instep. “Get him, Bill!” another voice said. I was all set to spin and kick Bill in the balls when hard hands clamped on my left wrist and thrust it up and back until my own hand was between my shoulder blades. Another slight jerk and my left shoulder would go. I decided that it wasn’t worth it and that I should stop struggling and start complaining. “Goddamned bastards,” I said.
“Here, now,” the first voice said again. “That’s no way to talk.”
I turned my head and got a look at the one I had hit in the stomach. He had a hard young face with a mean thin mouth and pale blue eyes as friendly as snakes. He also had a set of long blond sideburns. I couldn’t see the rest of his hair because he had it covered up with the blue pot helmet that London police constables normally wear.
THE LIGHT BULB WAS the first thing I saw when I awoke. It was a weak, frosted one, not much more than a sickly twenty-five watts, and it was screwed into a socket in a ceiling that must have been twenty feet high. I assumed that the light never went off, not until it burned out.
I lay there and had the headache. Actually, it was a bit more than a headache. It was a malignant tumor that was going to burst through my skull right above the eyes where the sinuses were. It was, I decided, a rotten way to die.
But instead of dying, I got up. At least I swung my feet down to the floor and raised myself into a slumped sort of sitting position. I had been lying on a slab of yellow tile that was fitted into one corner of the room about two feet above the floor. It was a bed. To soften it up were two gray blankets that felt as though they had been woven out of wooden fiber. Fairly soft wood perhaps. One of the blankets had been folded up and I had used it as a pillow. I didn’t remember folding the blanket. I didn’t remember anything after meeting the muggers who had turned out to be two London cops.
They must have brought me to where I was, which, I saw, was a jail cell and a rather spacious one at that. I estimated it to be at least seven feet wide and twelve feet long and apparently designed for single occupancy. Furnishings and appointments other than the tile bunk included a seatless toilet, a one-tap sink, a big gray iron door with a peephole, no windows, and a former occupant’s scratched notation that “Lord God it is awful here.”
I got up, used the toilet, drank some water from the tap, and reached for a cigarette. I didn’t have any. I went through my pockets and there was nothing in them. I looked at my left wrist. My watch was still on it and the time was half past five. In the morning, I assumed. They had let me keep my watch, my clothes, my headache, and my pink carnation. The carnation looked old and tired and bedraggled and I felt that we had a lot in common except that it still smelled nice.
I had never been in jail before. Not to stay. Not in a jail where they slam a big iron door shut on you. I had once spent part of a night in a New York precinct station, but there they had kept me in a room with some desks and some chairs and a window and they had let me keep my cigarettes and my matches and even a little of my dignity.
For what seemed to be a long time I stood there in the middle of the cell and looked around. I decided that I could never do a five-year stretch. Or a five-month one. Or even five days. Five hours were about my limit and I had already done that and more, so I went over and started kicking hell out of the big iron door.
After a while they came to see what was the matter. After a week maybe, or ten days, somebody came and opened the peephole and said, “Stop that kicking now. We got people here who’re trying to sleep.”
“I just thought I’d let you know I’m ready to leave,” I said.
“Ready to leave, are we?”
“That’s right.”
“Sobered up a bit, have we?”
I wasn’t going to argue. “Stone sober.”
I felt him taking a good look at me through the peephole. Finally, the voice said, “Well, let’s see what Sergeant Matthews has got to say.” The peephole slammed shut.
It took Sergeant Matthews a fortnight to make up his mind about me. Or maybe it was only ten days. That was jail time. By real time, the time on my watch, it was fifteen minutes before the key clacked and turned in the lock. The big iron door swung open and a young policeman stood there, dangling a large key from a large ring and nodding his head as if I were about what he had expected; certainly no better.
“This way,” he said, and I followed him down a hall that was lined with big iron doors like the one I had been behind. We entered a room that held some desks and a wooden bench and some chairs. Behind one of the desks was a policeman with three stripes on his sleeve. Sergeant Matthews, I presumed.
“Here he is, Sergeant, Mr. Philip St. Ives,” the young policeman said and the sergeant looked at me with thirty- or thirty-one-year-old green eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly and if not incurious, certainly indifferent.
“Sit down, Mr. St. Ives,” Sergeant Matthews said.
I sat down and he reached into a drawer and drew out a manila envelope and started removing its contents. The contents were what had been in my pockets. He ticked the items off on a form, shoving them across the desk to me one by one. When he got to the cigarettes I said, “Mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all, sir,” he said without looking up.
I lit one of the Pall Malls and blew some smoke up into the air. The cigarette tasted all right, better than I had expected, but it did my headache no good.
“Your people must have been English, a name like that,” he said.
“Or French,” I said.
“Oh?”
“The French spell it with a Y.”
“Pretty little place. St. Ives, I mean. Ever been there?”
“No.”
“Pretty little place.”
That seemed to exhaust the topic and Sergeant Matthews shoved the last item across the desk to me and said, “Would you count your money, sir? Should be thirty-one pounds and nine pence there plus some American coins.”
I counted it and put the money into my wallet. “It’s all there.”
He nodded. “Sign here, please.”
While I signed the form he said, “I must say,I expected you to be a size bigger.”
I handed him back his pen. “Why?”
“From the way my men were talking when I came on duty, they claimed to have collared themselves an American karate expert. Constable Wilson especially—limping around he was with a bad foot to prove it.”
“I don’t know any karate,” I said. “I just thought I was being mugged.”
“At six o’clock in the evening and the sun not down?” Sergeant Matthews made his brown eyebrows form two skeptical arcs.
“I’d forgotten where I was when they grabbed me.”
“Your home’s New York, isn’t it, sir?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t suppose they wait until dark there. Muggers, I mean.”
“Daylight or dark, it’s all pretty much the same to them.”
“Must be an interesting place.”
“Terribly,” I said. “What’re you charging me with, drunk and disorderly?”
“Just drunk, sir.”
I tapped my wallet with a finger. “Have I got enough in here to cover it?”
“That’ll be up to the magistrate, sir.”
“Can’t I just post bond and forget about it? Forfeit it, I mean.”
Sergeant Matthews shook his head. He seemed a little sorry about the entire thing. “Afraid not, sir,” he said, handing me an official-looking form. “This is your summons to appear at the Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court at nine this morning.”
I sighed, took the summons, folded it, and put it away in a pocket. “What if I don’t show?”
All traces of sympathy vanished. “Then a warrant will be issued for your arrest.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Can I go now?”
“Certainly, sir.” Sergeant Matthews looked at the clock on the wall. “You should be able to get back to your hotel, take a nap, tidy up, get a good breakfast in you, and be in court with plenty of time.”
I stood up. “Well, thanks for everything, Sergeant.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Where’s the best place to catch a taxi?”
“Out to the street, then right to the next corner. Should be one along directly.”
I nodded a good-bye of sorts, went through the entrance of the stationhouse, and out into what seemed to be a kind of alley or mews. I walked to the street without looking back, turned right, and headed for the corner. About halfway there, I spotted a dustbin, unpinned my carnation, and dropped it in. It had served its purpose. Somebody had recognized me all right.
ONLY TWO DAYS PRIOR to spending that night in a London jail cell, Julia Child and I had been pounding hell out of a couple of boned chicken breasts when Myron Greene, my lawyer, the new millionaire, knocked on the door of my “deluxe” efficiency on the ninth floor of the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth. There was an ivory-colored doorbell that Myron Greene could have pressed, but he knew better because it didn’t work, and hadn’t worked in three years. The Adelphi Apartment-Hotel was that kind of a place.
I put my stainless-steel mallet down on the ancient butcher block that I had recently acquired from a seventy-two-year-old Brooklyn butcher who had said to hell with it and gone out of business the day that prime porterhouse hit $4.25 a pound. I nodded as Julia Child dipped the pounded chicken breasts, first into the nutmeg-seasoned flour, and then into the lightly beaten egg yolk. “I got it, Julia,” I said, switched off the television set, and went to the door.
Myron Greene stood there for a moment, eyeing me with the same faint disapproval that he probably eyed all grown men who answer their doors at four in the afternoon dressed only in terry-cloth bathrobe and denim apron.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Not bad; how are you?”
He came in and looked around the way that he always did, as though expecting to find a badly mismanaged seraglio. While he looked, I took the opportunity to examine what a bright New York attorney, who had just become a millionaire at thirty-eight, might wear on a nice warm May day.
If he had been born about a century and a half earlier, Myron Greene probably would have been a disciple of Beau Brummell, a slightly plump disciple perhaps, but nevertheless a devoted one. As it was, he contented himself with dressing about six months behind the latest cry which, on that particular May afternoon, happened to be a half-hearted revival of the zoot suits of the wartime forties.
Myron Greene was wearing a modified version of one, a powder blue number with a jacket that draped almost to his knees. High-waisted britches went halfway up his chest and were held there by two-inch-wide midnight blue suspenders. His brown, graying hair, still modishly long, glistened with what I suspected of being a pound or two of Vaseline.
“My, you’re pretty,” I said.
“Like it?” he said in a half-serious, half-hopeful tone.
“What happened to the key chain?” I said. “You know, those three- or four-foot-long jobs that they used to wear?”
Myron Greene glanced down. “I thought it might be just a bit much.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Well, congratulations anyhow.”
“On what?”
“On the Centennial Group. I heard that it hit one twenty-one at two o’clock yesterday afternoon so that makes you a millionaire, if you exercised your options which, knowing you, you sure as hell did.”
Myron Greene shrugged at my news about the stock of the conglomerate that he had helped put together nearly six months ago. “It’s all on paper,” he said.
“Well, it must be fun to tot up the figures anyway.”
He shrugged again, his eyes still wandering around the apartment. “That’s new,” he said, indicating the butcher block that stood before the Pullman kitchen.
“Actually, it’s a hundred and nineteen years old.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Brooklyn.”
“How much?”
“Fifty bucks—and another fifty to get it hauled up here.”
“It’s still a good investment.”
“Jesus, Myron, I didn’t buy it as an investment.”
“Maybe you should’ve.”
“Let’s have a drink first.”
“First before what?”
“Before the bad news that dragged you out of your office at four o’clock on the afternoon that you became a millionaire.”
Myron Greene looked at his watch. “I’m thirty-eight.”
“Is that what your watch says?”
Myron Greene sighed and sat down in one of the chairs around the hexagonal poker table. “If it had happened when I was twenty-eight, it might have meant something. I don’t know what though.”
“Here,” I said, setting a Scotch and water down in front of him. “It’s got the meaning of life in it.”
Myron Greene took a swallow of the drink and then looked slowly around the room. “At least you’ve lived,” he said.
It was really the reason that I was Myron Greene’s client. He was convinced that I led a spicy existence peopled with long-legged blondes, likeable adventurers, and fairly honest crooks and thieves, all of whom had hearts of gold. I was, in Myron Greene’s eyes, a tear-around with an enviable life-style designed almost exclusively for fun and frolic, but highlighted here and there with the occasional thrill of mild danger.
In reality, I was turning into a recluse who spent too much time alone in museums, galleries, motion pictures, and at any parade that happened to come along. I also drank too much in bars in the company of minor thieves, con men, prospering cops, failed gamblers, fast-buck hustlers, and others of their ilk such as out-of-work actors and free-lance writers.
In my spare time, of which there was virtually no end, I stayed home, stared at the walls, looked at too much television, and read too much Dickens and Camus. On most Saturdays I got to see my eight-year-old son whose mother had married a man who, unlike Myron Greene, had made his first million at twenty-three. He was thirty-five now and apparently well on the way to his first billion.
My son was never really quite sure what it was that I did for a living. “You mean you get things back for people, Dad?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean if somebody lost something, like a whole lot of money, you’d help them find it?”
“No, I help people get things back that they’ve had stolen from them. It’s never money.”
“What things?”
“Well, jewelry, for instance. Or personal papers. Or valuable art such as paintings and pictures and things. Sometimes, even people.”
“You mean people get stolen?”
“Sometimes.”
“And you go find them and then arrest the crooks?”
“No, I go and buy the people or the things back.”
He had to think about that for a moment. “And the people who have things stolen, they pay you to go buy them back from the crooks, huh?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes the crooks pay me.”
“How much?” he said. I could see that his stepfather was teaching him a thing or two.
“Ten percent,” I said. “Suppose you had something stolen.”
“My bicycle.”
“All right, your bicycle. And suppose whoever stole it was willing to sell it back to you for ten dollars.”
“It’s worth more than that. A lot more.”
“I know. So the crooks would say that if you’d use me to bring the money to them, they’d let you have the bike back for ten dollars.”
He had to think about that, too. “I guess so,” he said finally. “But how do I know that they wouldn’t just take the ten dollars and keep my bike?” He was also growing up a true New Yorker.
“Because I wouldn’t let them. No bike, no money.”
“And how much would you charge me?”
“I wouldn’t charge you anything. But if it were somebody else, some boy I didn’t know, I’d charge him a dollar.”
“And he’d have to pay that?”
“Either he or the crook who stole the bike.”
“Huh,” my son said. “That’s a funny business.”
“You’re right.”
“What do you call it? I mean, what do you call what you do?”
“I’m a go-between,” I said, feeling a little foolish.
He shook his head slowly.“I never heard of that before.”
“There’re not too many of us around.”
“Mama always says you’re a writer.”
“Not anymore.”
“She says you used to work on a newspaper.”
“That was a long time ago. The paper went out of business.”
“When?”
“About the time you were born.”
“Did you write about football?”
“No, I wrote a column.”
“About what?”
“People.”
“What kind of people?”
“All kinds. I wrote about crooks a lot.”
“And who else?”
“Oh, funny people. People who do funny things for a living.”
“Like you do now?”
“Uh-huh. Like I do now.”
“Do you do this every day?” he said. “I mean do you go buy things back every day for people who’ve had them stolen from them?”
“Not every day.”
“When do you do it?”
“Oh, about once or twice a year. Sometimes three times.”
“Do you make a lot of money?”
“No. Not a lot.”
“Do you make as much as Jack?” Jack was his new father.
“Nobody makes as much as Jack.”
“Do you make as much as Uncle Myron?”
“Not quite.”
“I bet you make as much as Eddie.”
This time I had to think. Eddie was the bell captain at the Adelphi, and a special pal of my son’s. Eddie was not only a bell captain, he was also a slum landlord, the owner of a taxicab fleet consisting of two cabs, a minor bookmaker, and—when pressed—a reliable procurer. “Well, Eddie might make just a little more than I do.”
“Are you poor, Dad?”
“You’ll have to ask your uncle Myron about that,” I said.
“You’re broke, you know,” Myron Greene said after taking another swallow of his drink.
“I’m not surprised,” I said. “It’s about time.”
“Well, you’re not really broke. You’ve got a few thousand left.”
When he wasn’t putting conglomerates together, or finding fairly legal ways for his enormously rich clients to become even richer, Myron Greene gave some attention to my affairs, such as they were. He saw to it that my bills were paid; touted me on stocks that I never bought (invariably to my regret); kept me even, or just a little ahead, with the Internal Revenue Service, and insisted that I squirrel some away each year in a Keogh plan for my golden retirement years which, as far as I could tell, had already arrived.
And it was to Myron Greene that the rich and their insurance companies came when they wanted to ransom something that had been stolen from them, usually something which they were rather fond of, or at least accustomed to having around—a diamond necklace, a Klee, or perhaps a nine-year-old daughter.
Or sometimes it was the thieves themselves who made the initial contact with Myron Greene. He liked to talk to them. In fact, he liked to talk to them so much that they sometimes couldn’t get him off the phone and I later had to explain that among other things, Myron Greene would like to have been a flashy criminal lawyer, if there had been any real money in it.
So it was through Myron Greene that the go-between assignments came to me, usually two, sometimes three a year, and for his services he got ten percent of my ten percent and whatever pleasure it was that he found in skirting the world of the thief.
Now as he sat at my poker table brooding about having become a millionaire ten years too late for it to mean anything, I said, “Well, there must be some alternative to welfare.”
Myron Greene sighed, “You’re getting up there, too, you know.”
“I’m six months older than you are.”
“Middle-aged,” he said.
“I don’t feel middle-aged, but then I get a lot of rest.”
“You have real talent,” he said. “Have you ever thought of putting it to work again?”
“You mean a steady job?”
Myron Greene nodded.
“I dreamt about it last Friday, I think it was, but before it got really bad, I woke up.”
Myron Greene sighed again. “Well, I got a call earlier this afternoon. Long distance.”
“From where?”
“London,” he said. “London, England.”
“I thought that that’s where London was.”
“It involves a goodly sum.”
“How much?”
“One hundred thousand.”
“That’s not bad.”
“Pounds.”
“That’s even better. Who called?”
“He said he was a friend of yours. Or at least a close acquaintance.”
“Who?”
“A Mr. Apex.”
“English Eddie,” I said.
“Yes,” Myron Greene said, “he did say his name was Edward. He also sounded awfully British.”
“He’s not,” I said.
“What is he?”
“He’s American. He was reared in Detroit and his real name’s Eddie Apanasewicz and when I knew him he was probably the best international con man around.”
BEFORE THE SECOND WORLD war, English Eddie Apex’s widowed mother had taught various sons and daughters of the Polish aristocracy in Warsaw how to speak the King’s English. It was more the Queen’s English really, the upper class English of Victoria’s time, with virtually no contractions, beautifully savored vowels, and consonants that were bitten off at the quick. And if it sounded slightly stilted, it had a wonderfully redeeming lilt to it, the legacy of the wandering Welsh scholar-linguist who had settled in Warsaw after the first world war and from whom Eddie Apex’s mother had learned her perfect English, along with her equally perfect French and German. I was once told that, even years later, exiled Poles could always tell which of their number had studied with Madame Apanasewicz.
In the late summer of 1939, she accepted the aid of some of her former students and left Poland for London. She took with her only her last remaining student, who was her nine-year-old son Edward, and who had been named, for girlishly romantic notions, after the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and even later, the Duke of Windsor.
She stayed in London only a week or two and then sailed for Canada where she arrived just as war broke out in Europe. With the help of distant relatives, she and her son emigrated from Canada to Detroit, where they both became naturalized American citizens in 1945.
Meanwhile, her nine-year-old son, dressed in his old European clothes and speaking English like Freddie Bartholomew, only better, had the opportunity of going to grade school in Detroit with the sons and daughters of the workers who assembled automobiles, and later, during the war, tanks and airplanes.
If he had been a delicate child, Eddie Apex’s story probably would be different. But he was a big-boned boy, large for his age, with oversized hands that he quickly learned to form into oversized fists. “The ones that I really had trouble with were the crackers, the southern lads,” he later said. “They told me that I talked ‘funny.’ I couldn’t even understand what they were saying for the first six months. All I knew was that I had to beat hell out of them before they beat hell out of me.”
Eddie Apex’s mother, after working in a department store for eight years, died in 1947, the year that her son managed to graduate from high school. At seventeen and a half, he looked nearer to twenty-one or twenty-two. He was six-foot-two of big-boned brawn, green-eyed and fair-haired, narrow-hipped and wide-shouldered, and looked, indeed, like nothing so much as an all-American college wingback who spoke in the tones of Mayfair rather than Michigan.
With nothing to keep him in Detroit, Eddie Apex headed for New York where he found his accent to be an asset rather than a liability, at least in the crowd that he fell in with, which in an earlier day might be said to have consisted solely of evil companions. They were for the most part veterans of World War Two who had discovered the rewards of the black markets in Europe and Asia and were then looking for enterprises that would prevent them from doing something distasteful, such as going to work.
“We came up with the Lost English Cousin Con,” Eddie Apex told me years later. “One of my chaps had a couple of years of law school and he had a girl friend who worked for this fey genealogist who made a pretty good living by coming up with phony family trees for people who wanted to claim kin with British aristocracy. Well, that was our sucker list. My job was to pose as the mark’s long-lost cousin, fresh off the boat from London, who was in the states looking for a relative who could save the family castle. Well, to make a long story short, we made it appear to the mark that he could beat me out of a million-dollar estate for a mere twenty-five or fifty thousand dollars. Greed won. It always does, of course, and the mark wound up owning some awfully fancy parchment documents—all carefully aged, of course.” From that time on until 1963, English Eddie Apex, the surname he legally adopted on his twenty-first birthday, worked his various scams in most of the world’s playgrounds from Acapulco to the Aegean, earning himself a reputation among the cognoscenti as probably “the best long con man in the business.”