"He went up about five minutes ago," said the young man. "Then he found you couldn't get to the Observation Platform in this car and he had me take him all the way down."
"Forget these passengers," said Heller. "It's life and death. Take me all the way down instantly!"
The operator did that. "He seemed awful confused, Mr. Jet," he said as they rocketed downwards with the other passengers protesting.
Heller was out and over to the express elevator on 34th Street at speed. He was up to the 80th floor in less than a minute. He switched to the elevator to the 86th floor. The sign said:
Visibility Poor Today
There wasn't any traffic to the 86th floor.
He stepped out into the area of the snack bar and souvenir stand. Only the clerks.
He rushed out onto the Observation Platform. He ran along the high fence which encloses it and prevents suicides. He was looking down. It made me dizzy.
Then he saw a hand. It was gripping the bottom leg of a firmly embedded chair over by the door, well away from the edge.
Heller looked over the top of the seat. There was Izzy. He was hugging the platform pavement, gripping the bottom leg. He was at least twenty feet from the edge!
"Izzy!" said Heller. "Get up!"
"No. Height makes me so dizzy I can't walk! I can't let go. I came up here to throw myself off but now I can't let go of this chair!"
"What's happened?" said Heller.
"All this bad publicity on you triggered it," wailed Izzy. "That student story this morning was the last straw! My back is broke. I can't be responsible for you anymore!"
"Oh, come now," said Heller, "that's been going on for some time. There must be something else."
Izzy began to weep. "I don't even deserve your scolding me. And you should. I have been so flustered and nervous with all this press that I have been making business mistakes."
Heller knelt down by him and put a hand on him as though holding him from slipping.
It made Izzy wail all the harder. "You shouldn't be nice to me! I've ruined us." He choked and gasped for a bit. Then he said, all in a rush, "We were about to owe a fortune in income tax. There was an old, old company that was so deep in debt nobody would touch it: even the government and unions had abandoned it, years ago. The
Chryster Motor Corporation. I couldn't resist it. It would have furnished us with debt for years and years!"
Heller put a second hand on him as though he might slide horizontally twenty feet. "Well, that doesn't sound so incompetent, Izzy."
"It wasn't," said Izzy. And then he wailed, "But right away I did the most stupid thing! I fired the board of directors and I put my mother in charge of it and it started making money! For the first time since 1968!"
"But that's good news," said Heller.
"Oh, no it isn't!" cried Izzy. "Right away, IRS made a retroactive ruling and invented taxes for it, overdue and compounded with fines and penalties clear back to 1967! They've impounded all our bank accounts even in corporations that aren't interlocked! We're ruined!"
"How ruined?" said Heller.
"We need over a million and a half to free our bank accounts. We can't pay our staff or rent. We don't even have money to start exchange arbitrage again. Throw me over the fence. You'll be better off without me. I'll close my eyes."
Heller pried his fingers loose from the leg of the seat with some difficulty. Izzy had his eyes tightly closed. Heller picked him up.
"Oh, thank you, thank you," said Izzy. He obviously thought Heller was going to throw him over the high fence.
But Heller carried him into the area with the souvenir stand and snack bar and pushed an elevator button. Izzy tentatively opened his eyes and saw he was no longer on the platform and began to sob anew.
Heller carried him down in the elevators and then up again to their floor. He went on through to his office, opened it and put Izzy in a chair.
Heller went to a safe and got out the black garbage bag. He began to empty wallets and pile wads of notes in Izzy's lap.
The heap grew. Mostly thousand-dollar bills. Izzy was holding them up to the light, checking them.
Suddenly Izzy began to count them with the expert motions of a bank teller.
"One hundred and one thousand, two hundred and five!" said Izzy.
"Tax free," said Heller. "Now, will that let you start arbitrage exchange again?"
"Oh, yes! How did you do this?"
"And you can begin to pay the rent and payroll?"
"Oh yes. The pound is out the bottom in Singapore and high in New York. But..."
"There's a string," said Heller. "Promise me not to go near that Observation Platform again."
"Oh, I won't. The wind hurts my sinuses!"
"And one more thing," said Heller. "I have now saved your life twice so you are doubly responsible for me."
"Oh no!" said Izzy with a wail. "Not with all that bad publicity!"
Heller reached for the money.
"I PROMISE TO BE DOUBLY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU!" shouted Izzy. And he ran with speed for the telex room, probably to get away before Heller thought of anything else.
Well, I ruminated, they were still in business. But they owed a million and a half and IRS had a way with it, being run as it was to keep Rockecenter rich and everybody else poor, especially potential competition. Hadn't I heard that in 1905, Rockecenter's great-grandfather had been the one who financed and pushed and hammered Congress to amend the Constitution and put income tax into law? And when it happened in 1911, that the family fortune was so organized that only it survived when those of all competitors were swept away? Cunning people, the Rockecenters, no matter that the current scion was insane. Here was IRS working for them still. Izzy didn't have a prayer of getting hold of a million and a half! A half he might make. But a million and a half, never. Not with just arbitrage, not with all his current expenses. Not even Izzy.
It was a relief. For Izzy's Chryster Motor Corporation would have been a potential competitor of Rockecenter interests. Izzy might pull the wool over Heller's eyes. But he couldn't fool me. He had obviously bought old, rickety, mostly defunct Chryster to build and install Heller's carburetors! One more crazy Izzy dream gone to pot.
But it was the media thing that really intrigued me. Rockecenter had that down, too.
And Heller? He really had no idea of what was happening to him or who was doing it. During the rescue of Izzy, his hands had gotten pretty dirty on the Observation Platform and there he stood looking closely at the soot. He just had no idea at all of the really important things that were going on!
About nine forty-five, Heller's day was given another jolt. He had been listening to speeded-up Italian-language tapes he had probably gotten from the language school down the hall and was just doing a replay of how to pronounce numerous Italian saints when Bang-Bang came bursting in.
"Right away, right now, Babe ordered you brought in. Come on!"
Heller said, "Santa Margherita."
"Do you no good to pray. She sounded quite put out. (Bleeped) mad, in fact. Come along."
Heller got into a white sheepskin coat, buckled its belt and put on a white leather cap with earmuffs. Pulling on white gauntlets he followed Bang-Bang.
They went down the elevator and over to the 34th Street Observatory entrance which Bang-Bang usually used due to the large taxi stand there, apparently. It was Heller's usual route out when he had to take a cab. He started to signal one.
"Hell, no," said Bang-Bang, pointing to the old orange cab. "I'm driving you!"
"Won't that take you out of your parole jurisdiction?" said Heller, but he got in.