SEIZE THE DAY
397
and his sister. I have to steady him down or he'll go from Brazil to
Australia the next day. The way I keep him in the here-and-now is by
teaching him Greek."
This was a complete surprise! "What, do you know Greek?"
"A friend of mine taught me when I was in Cairo. I studied Aris–
totle with him to keep from being idle."
Wilhelm tried to take in these new claims and examine them.
Howling from the window like a wolf when night comes-that was some–
thing really to think about. But the Greek! He realized that Tamkin was
watching to see how he took
it.
More clements were continually being
added. A
few
days ago Tamkin hinted that he had once been in the un–
derworld, one of the Detroit Purple Gang. He was once head of a mental
clinic in Toledo. He had worked with a Polish inventor on an unsink–
able ship. He was a technical consultant in the fieJd of television. In the
life of a man of genius, all of these things might happen. But had they
happened to Tamkin? Was he a genius?
He often said that he had attended some of the Egyptian royal
family as a psychiatrist. "But everybody is alike, common or aristocrat,"
he told Wilhelm. "The aristocrat knows less about life."
An Egyptian princess whom he had treated in California, for hor–
rible disorders he had described to Wilhelm, retained him to come back
to the old country with her, and there he had had many of her friends
and relatives under his care. They turned over a villa on the Nile to
him. "For t:thical reasons, I can't tell you many of the details about
them," he said-but Wilhelm had already heard all these details, and
strange and shocking they were, if true.
If
true-he could not be free
from doubt. For instance, the general who had to wear ladies' silk stock–
ings ... and all the rest. Listening to the doctor when he was so strangely
factual, he had to translate his words into his own language, and he
could not translate fast enough or find terms of his own to fit what he
heard.
"Those Egyptian big-shots invested in the market, too, for the heck
of it. What did they need extra money for? By association, I almost
became a millionaire myself, and if I had played it smart there's no
telling what might have happened. I could have been the ambassador."
The American-the Egyptian ambassador? "A friend of mine tipped
me off on the cotton. I made a heavy purchase of it. I didn't have that
kind of money, but everybody there knew me. It never entered their
minds that a person of their social circle didn't have dough. The sale
was made on the phone. Then, while the cotton shipment was at sea,
the price tripled . When the stuff suddenly became so valuable, all hell
broke loose on the world cotton market, they looked to see who was
the owner of this big shipment. Me! They investigated my credit and
found out I was a mere doctor, and they canceled. This was illegal.
I sued them. But as I didn't have the money to fight them I sold the
suit to a Wall Street lawyer for twenty thousand dollars. He fought it
and was winning. They settled with him out of court for more than a
million. But on the way back from Cairo, flying, there was a crash.
