“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.”
Chapter Four
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.”