Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page B

its thousands of commercial
possibilities, the Chicago Fair also happened to provide a vast ebb and flow of
anonymity, where one could meet and transact business without necessarily being
observed. Earlier that day Vibe had stepped out of his private train, “The
Juggernaut,” onto a personally reserved platform at the Union Station, having
only the night before departed from the Grand Central depot in New York. As
usual, he was in disguise, accompanied by bodyguards and secretaries. He
carried an ebony stick whose handle was a gold and silver sphere chased so as
to represent an accurate and detailed globe of the world, and inside of whose
shaft was concealed a spring, piston, and cylinder arrangement for compressing
a charge of air to propel smallcaliber shot at any who might offend him. A
sealed motor conveyance awaited him, and he was translated as if by supernatural
agency to the majestic establishment defined by State, Monroe, and Wabash. On
the way into the lobby, an elderly woman, respectably though not sumptuously
dressed, approached him, crying, “If I were your mother I would have strangled
you in your cradle.” Calmly Scarsdale Vibe nodded, raised his ebony aircane,
cocked it, and pressed the trigger. The old woman tilted, swayed, and went down
like a tree.
    “Tell the house physician the bullet
is only in her leg,” said Scarsdale Vibe helpfully.
    No one had offered to take Professor
Vanderjuice’s hat, so he held it in his lap, as an insecure young actor might a
“prop.”
    “They treating you all right over at
the Stockmen’s Hotel?” the magnate inquired.
    “Well actually, it’s the Packer’s
Inn, Fortyseventh and Ashland. Right in the middle of the Stockyards and
all—”
    “Say,” it occurred to a large and
criminallooking individual who had been whittling an image of a locomotive from
a piece of firewood with one of those knives known throughout the prisons of
our land as an Arkansas toothpick , “you’re not of the vegetarian persuasion, I hope.”
    “This is Foley Walker,” said
Scarsdale Vibe, “in whom his mother claims to find virtues not immediately
apparent to others.”
    “Guess you can hear that whole
hootenanny from where you are,” Foley went on. “Bet you there’s even guests
known to catch insomnia from it, eh? but there’s equally as many find it
strangely soothing. No different here at the Palmer House, if you think about
it. Racket level runs about the same.”
    “Same kind of activities as well,”
muttered Ray Ipsow. They were gathered at a marble table in a sort of parlor,
over cigars and whiskey. The smalltalk had turned to surplus wealth. “I know
this fellow back in New Jersey,” said Scarsdale Vibe, “who collects railroads.
Not just rolling stock, mind, but stations, sheds, rails, yards, personnel, the
whole shebang.”
    “Expensive hobby,” marveled the
Professor. “Are there such people?”
    “You have to have some idea of the
idle money out here. It can’t all be endowments to the church of one’s choice,
mansions and yachts and dogruns paved with gold or what have you, can it. No,
at some point that’s all over with, has to be left behind . . . and still here’s this huge mountain
of wealth unspent, piling up higher every day, and dear oh dear, whatever’s a
businessman to do with it, you see.”
    “Hell, send it on to me,” Ray Ipsow
put in. “Or even to somebody who really needs it, for there’s sure enough of
those.”
    “That’s not the way it works,” said
Scarsdale Vibe.
    “So we always hear the plutocracy
complaining.”
    “Out of a belief, surely fathomable,
that merely to need a sum is not to deserve it.”
    “Except that in these times, ‘need’
arises directly from criminal acts of the rich, so it ‘deserves’ whatever
amount of money will atone for it. Fathomable enough for you?”
    “You are a socialist, sir.”
    “As anyone not insulated by wealth
from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.”
    Foley paused