The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss Page B

international manipulators, by birth an Armenian, by nationality a Panamanian, with a Vatican title, a French wife and a universal fortune. The papers had been filled that morning with revelations of his hoaxes: the nonexistent warehouses, the forged letters from crowned heads, the concealed youth of poverty and crime.
    "I'm sure, if his wife suspected anything, she didn't give a hoot," Angelica was saying. "Women love men of mystery. Of course, it never lasts. One of the fascinations is precisely that it doesn't. Only dull things last. And dull men."
    "Like stockbrokers?" I suggested with a smile, looking at Rex, who stared down into his plate.
    "I don't see anything particularly fascinating about Landi, Mummie," Evadne protested. "His whole life was a cheap trick."
    "Yes, but a trick that worked! For a while, anyway. Ordinary millionaires try to delude themselves into thinking they're happy with different kinds of private transport: planes or cars or yachts—vulgar things to carry them from distraction to distraction. Landi knew that the only point of money was to create a child's dream of fairy palaces with golden bathtubs full of asses' milk. He made the dream real—for a minute."
    "Hasn't Meadowview been your dream, my dear?" I asked.
    "Me? Dream? Why, Guy, I haven't even been to sleep!"
    "You should have told me you wanted a pirate. I might have complied."
    "What would your Sunday foursome at Glenville have said?" Angelica retorted.
    I shrugged and sipped more champagne. I was beginning to enjoy the conversation. My sense of Rex's outrage, conveyed by his stubbornly lowered head and immovable shoulders, made up a little for my sense of moral inferiority. "What do
you
think, Percy?" I asked my son. "Does Count Landi appeal to the romantic in you? Or hasn't that side survived the impact of your too rarely visited law school?"
    Percy looked up in indignation. "I'm hardly a romantic, Pa. If you'd ever bother to look at me, you'd see I am the coolest of realists. But families, naturally, are myopic."
    "They are, my boy. They are just that."
    Poor Percy had none of the Hyde charm. He had the looks of the Hyde men: the short, stiff, curly black hair, the pale long face, the thin cheeks that somehow never seemed to be properly shaven, the large, aquiline, porous nose. But he moved awkwardly, and his tone was shrill. He was intelligent, even sensitive, but he was not brilliant. He had the knobbly personality that is accepted in geniuses, but only in geniuses. At school and college he had gone in for every activity: sports, dramatics, glee club, journal, debate, but he had been remarkable more for the energy that he had scattered than for the quality of accomplishment. He had talked at different times of becoming a composer, a poet, an actor. But here Angelica had stepped in. The Hydes liked charades, not theatre; they could write jingles, not odes. When it came to a question of the artist's life there was not much to choose between them and the Primes, except that my family was franker. Angelica would never admit to what depths of subtle persuasion she had descended to bring about Percy's enrollment in Columbia Law.
    Percy now treated us to his opinion of Landi.
    "Gall on that scale is to me the highest kind of courage. I would call his the perfect life. To be dealt a hand without a single honor card, and to play it for a grand slam, knowing all the time that it can never be made, that the most one can hope, even by magic, is to take twelve tricks and lose the last! And then when it happens, when one sees the ace of trumps finally played, to retire without a word or a sigh, without even a joke, to one's magnificent Renaissance library and there, after a sip of Napoleon brandy and a nod to one's peerless Masaccio triptych, to take out the jeweled revolver that one has bought years before for just this purpose and put its single gold bullet in one's fertile brain. How fine!"
    "What about his wife, his children?" I