“Tuesday before Thanksgiving,” Cooper said, puffing up a little, as he always did when discussing Grady. “But he’s awfully busy with early graduation—I’ll have to ask Marsha.”
“Wednesday before Thanksgiving then,” the old man said, ignoring his son’s equivocation. “I’ll telephone the admiral tomorrow morning. You’ll come, too, Tabatha?” Her name sounded oddly formal on his lips.
“Yes, Grandpa,” she said, subdued in the aftermath of her outburst. “I’d like to come.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to stay at Alton,” Henry said. “But I’m sure Bitsy would like to come, if someone would fetch her at the station.”
“Of course,” Dexter said, to Henry’s obvious relief. Bitsy, Harriet’s younger sister, had been the ideal schoolmaster’s wife until eight months ago, when she’d become “overwrought,” as Henry put it, after the birth of their fourth child. She’d begun studying Russian with a tutor and chanting passages from Pushkin. She spoke of wanting to travel the world and live in a yurt. Poor Henry hadn’t any idea what to do.
George’s drab daughters, Edith and Olive, hovered in the doorway, skeins of mud-colored wool dripping from their knitting needles. Something for soldiers. “We’ve been waiting,” Olive said to Tabby reproachfully, and she rose and went with them, Dexter basking in the wonderful knowledge that she’d done well.
“And you, Arthur?” he asked his father-in-law when the girls had gone. “What do you hear?”
“Well. Unlike you gentlemen, I don’t actually do anything other than listen at doors,” the old man said. “But my listening tells me that something is imminent. With us at the fore.”
It took all of them a moment to absorb this. Even Cooper understood that the old man meant an aggression. “In Europe or Asia, Pop?” he asked.
“No self-respecting commander would ever let such a thing slip,” the old man said gruffly. “Of course, there are more possibilities than just those two.”
Dexter guessed then that he meant North Africa, where the Brits were finally mustering some grit against Rommel. “We need the battle experience,” he said, working it out in his mind.
The old man grazed his eyes. “Precisely.”
If true, it was a staggering thing to know in advance. So far, what Arthur Berringer told them had always proved true. Dexter used to puzzle over why the old man would share sensitive facts with the likes of Cooper, who lacked intelligence or judgment, or Dexter, whose business took place on both sides of the law. It had occurred to him that his father-in-law might be feeding them false facts—either to test them or to use them as mouthpieces for rumors he wanted spread. But Dexter had never repeated a word; such was the old man’s power. And that was the answer. Arthur Berringer confided freely in his son and sons-in-law for the same reason Dexter left his front door unlocked: he’d the power to make them trustworthy. But while Dexter’s power derived from physical force, the old man’s had been distilled into abstraction. The Berringers were wearing top hats to the opera when Dexter’s people were still copulating behind hay bales in the old land. He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.
“The Allies will win this war,” the old man said.
“Isn’t that . . . premature?” George asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it to just anyone,” the old man said. “But it is a fact.”
“I doubt the navy sees it that way, Dad,” said Cooper.
“It’s not the navy’s job to think that way, son. Or the army’s. Or the Coast Guard’s. Their job is to win. It is the bankers’ job to anticipate—second job, that is, after we’ve paid for the war itself.”
For Arthur Berringer, all of human achievement—be it the Roman conquests or American independence—was a mere sideshow of the machinations of bankers (taxation in the first instance; the Louisiana Purchase in the second). Like any hobbyhorse, this one occasioned its share of weary sighs from family members. Not Dexter. For him, the existence of an obscure truth recessed behind an obvious one, and emanating through it allegorically, was mesmerizing. It was what had first intrigued him, at age fifteen, about the two men who came every third Monday to see his father at his Coney Island restaurant. Another man came less often, always in brand-new spats, a red handkerchief gushing from his breast pocket. Dexter’s father always went behind the bar to pour this man’s brandy rather than have the barkeep do it.
The blank face his pop wore after these visitations betrayed humiliation and anger, and Dexter knew better than to ask what they meant. But he was drawn to the men—a smoldering of dim feeling behind their eyes, a heaviness to their hands when they gave him a pat or a swat. He curried their favor, refilling their glasses, lingering at their tables when his father wasn’t watching. They took notice of him gradually, with a mute animal awareness. Later, when men who’d fought the Great War returned, Dexter recognized, in their fractured gazes and somnolent movements, something of what he’d first admired in Mr. Q.’s men. By then he knew what it meant: intimacy with violence.
“Of course,” Arthur added with a laugh, “since the Depression, we bankers have had the leisure and . . . solitude, you might say, to think about the future. The Civil War left us with a federal government. The Great War made us a creditor nation. As bankers, we must anticipate what changes this war will thrust upon us.”
“What do you anticipate?” asked Henry, who distrusted Roosevelt.
The old man leaned forward and took a long breath. “I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever,” he said quietly. “Not the Romans. Not the Carolingians. Not Genghis Khan or the Tatars or Napoleon’s France. Hah! You’re all looking at me like I’ve one foot in the funny farm. How is that possible? you ask. Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”
Dexter listened, a dark umbrella of worry opening slowly inside him. He’d been a soldier for over two decades, observing a chain of command to ensure the prosperity and vigor of the organization he served: a shadow government, a shadow country. A tribe. A clan. Now, suddenly, everyone was an American. A common enemy had made for strange bedfellows; rumor had it that the great Lucky Luciano had struck a deal with the feds from his jail cell to root out Mussolini sympathizers from the waterfront. What would Dexter’s own place be when the war ended?
“I won’t have much part in all this,” Arthur Berringer said. “I’ll be too old to see it fructify.” He waved away their rustle of demurral. “It will belong to you, my boys, you and yours. Make certain you’re ready.”