“A single franked specimen sold at Sotheby’s last June for two thousand one hundred pounds. Times four, gives us eight thousand four hundred. Add fifty percent for the pristine set, and we’re in the neighborhood of thirteen grand. However. You have Central London overheads, you pay on the nail, and I have high hopes for a long-term relationship, Mr. Kriebel.”
“Oh, I think we are on ‘Bernard’ terms from now on.”
“Then call me Marcus, and my price is ten thousand.”
Kriebel’s already decided to accept, but pretends to agonize out of courtesy: “Commonwealth stamps are underperforming at present.” He lights his pipe and the aria ends. “The highest I can go is eight and a half, alas.”
“It’s an icy day for chasing me to Trafalgar Square, Bernard.”
He sighs through hairy nostrils. “My wife will pull me limb from limb for my softness, but young philatelists should be encouraged. We can agree to split the difference: nine thousand two hundred and fifty?”
“Ten is a simpler, rounder number.” I put on my scarf.
A final sigh. “Ten it is.” We shake. “You’ll take a check?”
“Yes, but, Bernard …” he turns in the doorway to his cubbyhole, “… would youlet your sweet Half-Annas out of sight prior to getting your hands on the payment?”
Bernard Kriebel tilts his head at my professionalism. He returns my stamps and goes to prepare my check. A terminally ill bus hauls itself up Charing Cross Road. Demons drag Don Giovanni down into the underworld: The fate of all amateurs who neglect their homework.
I WEAVE THROUGH Christmassy Soho, blaring, steamy, and hazardous with icy slush, cross the glacial stampede of traffic on Regent Street, and arrive at Suisse Integritй Banc’s discreet London office, tucked away behind Berkeley Square. Security Ape holds the bulletproof door open with a nod of recognition; I have an appointment. Once within its airy, mahogany and cream interior, I deposit my check with the petite female teller across the polished desk, who asks no questions beyond, “How are you today, Mr. Anyder?” There’s a little Swiss flag by her computer terminal, and as she fills out my deposit slip, I wonder if Madam Constantin, as a Swiss expatriate of understated means, ever graces this same plush chair. That odd encounter in King’s College Chapel keeps returning to me, even if I’ve experienced no more time-slips. “Until next time, Mr. Anyder,” the teller says, and I agree, Yes, until next time. The money is only the side product of my art, but I still leave feeling armed and flak-jacketed; when Kriebel’s check clears, my account will cross the fifty K mark. This is, of course, a tadpole-sized account for Integritй’s sheets, but it’s a tidy enough stash for an undergraduate paying his own way in the world. And it will multiply. Half of my fellow Humberites—unless their parents are good and willing milkers—are so up to their nostrils in debt and denial that for their first five working years they’ll have to take whatever shit gets flung their way and act like it’s caviar. Not I. I’ll throw it back. Harder.
IN A SHELTERED walkway off Piccadilly Circus, two men in suits and raincoats are blocking off a doorway and haranguing someone, hidden from view. The bright windows of Tower Records shine out through the feeble sleet, and early commuters are pouring into Piccadilly Circus Tube, but my curiosity is piqued. Between the men’s backs I glimpse a shrunken Yeti huddled in an entrance. “Nice business strategy you’ve got worked out,” says one. “You watch people buy flowers thereand collar them for money hereso they can’t walk off without feeling like callous bastards.” The tormentor sounds drunk. “We’re in marketing, too, see. So what’s your hit rate?”
“I”—the Yeti’s blinking and scared—“I don’t hit no one.”
The tormentors laugh in each other’s face: not a nice sound.
“All—all I’m askin’ for’s a bit of change. The hostel’s thirteen quid a night.”
“Then get yourself a shave and get a job stacking shelves!”
“Nobody’ll give me a job without I’ve got a perm’nent address.”
“Get a permanent address, then. Duh.”
“Nobody’ll rent me a room without I’ve got a job.”
“This one’s got excuses for everything, hasn’t he, Gaz?”
“Hey. Hey. Want a job? I’ll give you a job. Want it?”
The burliest one leans down: “My colleague’s asking you very nicelyif you want a job.”
The Yeti swallows and nods. “What’s the job?”
“Hear that, Gaz? Beggars can be choosers, after all.”
“Money collector,” says Gaz. “Ten quid a minute, guaranteed.”
The Yeti has a facial tic. “What do I have to do?”
“The clue’s in the job title.” The guy turns and lobs a pocketful of coins into a gap in the traffic roaring into Piccadilly Circus. “Collect the fucking money, Einstein!” Coins roll between tires and under cars, scattering in ruts of dirty ice. “Look at that, the streets of London arepaved with gold.” The two tormentors shuffle off, delighted with themselves, leaving the shrunken Yeti calculating the odds of picking up coins without getting whacked by a bus. “Don’t,” I tell the homeless guy.
He glares at me. “ Youtry sleepin’ in a skip.”
I take out my wallet and offer him two twenties.
He looks at the money and looks at me.
I say, “Three nights in the hostel, right?”
He takes the notes and slips them inside his dirty coat. “Obliged.”
My sacrifice to the gods duly performed, I let Piccadilly Circus Tube Station suck me down into its vortex of body odor and bad breath.
THE LINES ARE simple enough: “Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.” For this plainspoken pragmatism, Cardinal Pole denounced Niccolт Machiavelli as the devil’s apostle. After Earl’s Court my carriage lurches into the dying light. Gasworks and Edwardian roofs, chimneys and aerials, a supermarket car park, Premises for Rental. Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard;and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat. But what does “beating the system” mean? Becoming rich enough to buy one’s manumission from the daily humiliation of employment? Another train on a parallel track overtakes us slowly enough for me to glimpse the young City worker I’ll have turned into this time next year, squashed against the window, only a meter away. Good skin, good clothes, drained eyes. How to Get Seriously Rich by Thirtyreads the cover of his magazine. The guy looks up and sees me. He squints at my Penguin Classic to make out the title, but his train swings away down a different track.
If I have doubts that you beat the system by moving up, I damn well know you don’t beat it by dropping out. Remember Rivendell? The summer before I went up to Cambridge a few of us went clubbing at the Floating World in Camden Town. I took Ecstasy and got off with a waifish girl wearing dried-blood lipstick and clothes made of black cobwebs. Spidergirl and I got a taxi back to her place: a commune called Rivendell, which turned out to be a condemned end-of-terrace squat next to a paper recycling plant. Spidergirl and I frolicked to an early Joni Mitchell LP about seagulls and drowsed until noon, when I was shown downstairs to the Elrond Room, where I ate lentil curry and the squat’s “pioneers” told me how their commune was an outpost of the postcapitalist, postoil, postmoney future. For them everything was “inside the system”—bad—or “outside the system”—good. When one asked me how I wanted to spend my sojourn on Earth, I said something about the media and was bombarded with a collective diatribe about how the system’s media divides people, not connects them. Spidergirl told me that “here in Rivendell, we actually talk to each other, and share tales from wiser cultures, like the Inuit. Wisdom’s the ultimate currency.” As I left, she asked for a “loan” of twenty pounds to buy a few things from Sainsbury’s. I suggested she recite an Inuit folktale at the checkout, because wisdom is the ultimate currency. Some of her response was radical feminist, most was just Anglo-Saxon. What I took from Rivendell, apart from pubic lice and an allergy to Joni Mitchell that continues to the present day, was the insight that “outside the system” means poverty.