Trust

Back in 1938, a young man accosts Partenza outside her apartment. He wears a pin-striped suit but neither tie nor hat. He knows the details of her work with Bevel and threatens to inform the FBI about her father’s communist press if she doesn’t give him a copy of everything she writes for Bevel. He orders her to meet him at a soda fountain in a few days with the copies. Shaken, Partenza returns to her apartment.

At her next meeting with Bevel, Partenza is preoccupied by how to deal with the extortionist. She considers informing Bevel but worries that either he’ll suspect she’s already divulged information or he sent the man to test her discretion. Worse, she fears Bevel will accuse her of concocting the extort scheme herself. Partenza decides the best course of action is to write new, entirely fictional pages for the extortionist. Bevel reprimands Partenza for being distracted.

As Partenza debates what to do, Bevel describes the ways in which his wild financial successes from 1921-1927 boosted the American economy and bemoans that the press doesn’t credit him for this boom. As he talks, he periodically tells her to strike things he’s said but doesn’t want in his story. Bevel argues against the accusation that he manipulated the economy and orchestrated the crash of 1929: “The sole idea that anyone could sway or penetrate every company trading on the New York Stock Exchange is laughable. I lifted the whole nation with me” (307). He argues that in shorting the stock market prior to the 1929 crash he was not only protecting himself but protecting the economy by acting as a corrective force against the power of speculators and government regulation.

For days, Partenza works frantically to construct a plausible fiction for the extortionist while continuing work on Bevel’s autobiography. These two stories complement each other: What is too technical for the autobiography lends the extortionist’s fiction plausible specificity, while the creative freedom of writing the extortionist’s fiction inspires ways to fill gaps in her depiction of Mildred for the autobiography.

For material for both stories, Partenza returns to the library, where she reads more autobiographies of famous American men, newspaper articles about finance, and novels and society pages about the ultrawealthy of New York. In concocting the story for the extortionist, Partenza finds it much easier to create a persona for Bevel than for Mildred. To Bevel she can easily assign the trappings of the titan of finance: yachts, oenophilia, private planes. It’s harder to fabricate a persona for Mildred because she doesn’t fit the mold of a society woman. Partenza turns to Vanner’s other novels for inspiration because in Helen he seemed to understand women like Mildred. Partenza is shocked to discover that Vanner doesn’t appear in the library’s archives: Bevel, one of the library’s main donors, has erased Vanner’s work.

Jack visits to reconcile. With Partenza working nonstop, the apartment has fallen into chaos. Jack offers to clean; Partenza gratefully accepts. She leaves to buy groceries for dinner. When she returns her father is still working and Jack is still cleaning, but someone has replaced the discarded pages from her story for the extortionist with blank ones. She suspects Jack.

Partenza is dismayed to find that she’s more concerned about the possible breach of her NDA than Jack betraying her. She attributes this to the enormous influence and threat of Bevel’s wealth: “[S]uffering the loss of a friend was nothing next to facing Bevel’s wrath. Such was the extent of his power. His fortune bent reality around it. This reality included people—and their perception of the world, like mine” (317). At the same time, Partenza senses that Bevel’s respect for her depends on her ability to resist his influence and challenge him in small ways. In these instances, Bevel relaxes from his stiff fear of ridicule and becomes slightly more effusive.

At their next meeting, Bevel commends Partenza for her imaginative portrayal of Mildred. He instructs her to invent a suitable hobby for Mildred—flower arrangement. Partenza hides her bewilderment and asks for a tour of the house, secretly hoping to find traces of the true Mildred; Bevel acquiesces. He gives her a tour of his art collection that makes it clear that he doesn’t care about art. The music room is more modest than the private concert hall described in Bonds. The library is made for someone who doesn’t read. Bevel shows her his home office, in which a dozen mathematicians perform the research for his investments, explaining that they “study stock records and industrial records, predict future trends from past tendencies, detect patterns in mob psychology, design models to operate more systematically” (320). Bevel emphasizes that he owes his success to his unique marriage of intuition with scientific analysis.

Bevel refuses to show Partenza Mildred’s rooms. Partenza asks him to tell her more about Mildred’s intelligence. He maintains that it manifested in her management of the house, her taste in music, and her ability to keep up with him. He commends Partenza for also being able to keep up with him. She probes whether he treats all rumors with the same force with which he treated Vanner; he doesn’t. Partenza leaves no longer worried about the stolen papers.

Partenza meets the extortionist at the soda fountain. Seeing him eating a sundae in the same pin-striped suit, she realizes that he’s just a kid in his only suit pretending to be tough. For $10 he tells her the truth: Jack, having tailed Partenza and learned Bevel’s identity, paid the kid to extort her for a story Jack could leverage for a newspaper job. Hatred overwhelms Partenza. She tells the kid to tell Jack that Bevel knows about his extortion and plans to destroy him, and that he should skip town.