The Magic Christian Read Free

crudely, literally, and almost as an afterthought, when, early one summer morning in 1938, just about the time the Spanish Civil War was ending, he flew out to Chicago and, within an hour of arrival, purchased a property on one of the busiest corners of the Loop. He had the modern two-story structure torn down and the debris cleared off that day—that very morning, in fact—by a demolition crew of fifty men and machines; and then he directed the six carpenters, who had been on stand-by since early morning, when they had thrown up a plank barrier at the sidewalk, to construct the wooden forms for a concrete vat of the following proportions: fifteen feet square, five feet deep. This construction was done in an hour and a half, and it seemed that the work, except for pouring the concrete, was ended; in fact the carpenters had put on their street clothes and were ready to leave when, after a moment of reflection, Grand assembled them with a smart order to take down this present structure, and to rebuild it, but on a two-foot elevation—giving clearance beneath, as he explained to the foreman, to allow for the installation of a heating apparatus there.
    “That’ll make it hot for them,” he said—but he wasn’t speaking to the foreman then, nor apparently to anyone else.
    It was mid-afternoon, and collecting from the flux of the swollen summer street were the spectators, who hung in bunches at the sturdy barrier, gatherings in constant change, impressed in turn by the way the great man from the East snapped his commands, expensively dressed as he was, shirt turned back at the cuff.
    And when the work was going ahead correctly, Grand might give the crowd a moment of surveillance from where he stood in the center of the lot, finally addressing them, hands cupped to his mouth as if he had to shout—though, actually, they were only a few yards away.
    “Tomorrow . . .” he would say, “. . . back . . . tomorrow! Now . . . getting . . . it . . . ready!”
    When an occasional wiseacre could get his attention and attempt some joke as to what was going on there beyond the barrier, Grand Guy Grand would smile wearily and shake a scolding finger at him.
    “Now . . . getting . . . it . . . ready,” he would shout slowly, or something else equally irrelevant to the wiseacre’s jibe; but no one took offense, either because of not understanding or else because of the dignity and bearing of the man, and the big diamond he wore at his throat.
    Another contractor, three workers, a truck of sand and gravel, and six sacks of quick-drying cement arrived at the working site at two o’clock, but were forced to wait until the new forms were complete. Then a sheet of metal was lowered into place and the concrete was poured into the forms. Under Grand’s spirited command, it was all so speedily done that well before dusk the work was ended, including the installation of a great gas burner there, star-shaped with a thousand dark jets, like a giant upturned squid stretched beneath the structure. It was apparent now that when the board forms were removed, the whole would resemble a kind of white stone bath, set on four short columns, with a heating apparatus beneath, and small ramps leading up the vat on each of its sides.
    Before dinner Guy Grand completed arrangements begun earlier in the day with the Chicago stockyards: these provided for the delivery of three hundred cubic feet of manure, a hundred gallons of urine, and fifty gallons of blood, to an address in the suburbs. Grand met them there and had the whole stinking mess transferred to a covered dump truck he had purchased that morning. These arrangements cost Grand a pretty penny, because the stockyards do not ordinarily conserve or sell urine, so that it had to be specially collected.
    After securing the truck’s cover, Grand climbed into the cab, drove back towards the stockyards and parked the truck there, where the stench of it would be less noticeable.
    Then he took a taxi into