But the cruelest cut of all from my perspective, strange as it might seem, was the club itself. Not only the Vagabond Club—which held no special carte blanche—but all such clubs.
These clubs did not exist in order to make the world a better place. They performed no service, delivered no product, provided no function—such as improving their members through learning or counsel to take productive and valued roles in society. Men like these joined clubs like these because they believed they already were the most valued members of society, and they wanted to shut everybody else out.
If the main purpose of the Vagabond Club had been only a little boyish camaraderie, who would care? But this so-called brotherhood was a license to unearned privilege outside club walls. The last three CEOs of the Bank of the World, for instance, had been chosen in the paneled rooms of private clubs like these. They were not selected for intelligence, competence, productivity, leadership, or value, nor were the handful of men who chose them necessarily qualified to judge such things. They were chosen because they belonged to the Club!
I felt it was time to end this ghost government of the American economy—but the task was daunting and time was running out. Inevitable as fate, the night came at last—the night before the arrival of the Vagabonds. I gave one last call to Tavish to see if he’d found a single trace of anything I might pin on Lawrence. I’d been so desperate in these last two weeks, I’d even asked him to phone his teckie pals around the bank to troll for gossip—but this, too, had proven fruitless.
Tonight he sounded as gloomy as I felt. We knew that by ten o’clock tomorrow, Aegean time—when the ship from the mainland arrived here on the isle—it would be the end. And there wasn’t a damned thing that we could do.
“Though it’s no help at all,” said Tavish on the watery-sounding line, “there’s one rather amusing thing I thought might cheer you. I spoke with your secretary; Pavel always has the juiciest gossip around the bank. Guess what the fates have brought your old boss, Kiwi? He’s been blackballed from joining the Vagabond Club!”
“Not really?” I gasped. “How could something like that happen?”
“It seems it was during the secret vote to decide on his admission,” Tavish explained. “But Pavel says that hearsay indicates it might have been Lawrence himself who cast the dissenting vote.”
“Impossible,” I assured him. “I have it from the horse’s mouth—Lawrence was his only sponsor. You’d hardly peg him as a chap who’d change his mind at the finish line.”
“Nevertheless, even Kiwi believes it,” Tavish told me. “You can’t imagine his behavior. Pavel says he’s been locked up for days, wearing mirrored glasses and frothing at the mouth! No one seems to know, either, if he’s still next in line to succeed Lawrence at the bank. The only thing that would cheer me more would be if Karp got deported to Germany!”
We hung up, laughing a lot and pretending we were more uplifted than we were. I told Tavish I’d phone the next day with a postmortem on our joint fate, once I knew what it was. But if Kiwi’s blackball was the only news Tavish could dredge from the bank, I was afraid I knew our fate already.
The sun rose brilliantly on the dreadful day—casting its sparkling diamonds indifferently upon the sea beneath, like that old tale about pearls before swine.
The swine boat had not yet arrived, but those in our group looked as if they were the ones being taken to slaughter as they headed over the hill to town—leaving Pearl and me behind at the castle to hide our recognizable faces. I lay on the sun-splashed parapet in an absolute daze, mindlessly watching a butterfly moving like a silvery bit of paper among Lelia’s many flowers.
I couldn’t bring myself to believe that—right or wrong, success or failure—this was really the end. It didn’t seem possible, after all our cleverness and hard work, that we could go down in a complete shutout, without scoring a single point.
Pearl went off to the hot pool to bathe alone, probably so that we didn’t have to look at each other like miserable, helpless lumps while waiting for the knell of fate that might not come for hours.
I sat there alone and watched the butterfly; it was zipping around with no apparent goal, sometimes bouncing off the wall, riding an air current in an aimless circle, disinterestedly exploring a flower. How strange that an insect could survive without any goal, I thought, when people never could.
Lawrence, for example. I knew from the first that his every act was triggered by a motive, though I hadn’t been able to prove any of them to be nefarious and illegal. His motive for keeping the auditors at bay was because he planned to buy this island and park money here. And his motive for sponsoring Kiwi to the Vagabond Club was—
I sat up in my deck chair and looked at the butterfly more closely. That flitting, aimless motion around one spot—could it be camouflage?—or an evasion tactic? What was Lawrence’s motive for sponsoring Kiwi to the Vagabond Club? And if a guy like Lawrence did sponsor someone like Kiwi, surely he’d first make certain beyond a doubt that no one would blackball his handpicked candidate. It must have been Lawrence himself who’d put the kibosh on Kiwi—but why?
Then in a sudden flash, I understood. I had been asking myself the wrong question, all along.
