Текст книги "Book of Numbers "
Автор книги: Joshua Cohen
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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 41 страниц)
Thor Ang Balk, Danish national and the founder of b-Leaks who after allegedly drugging and raping a 16 year old Spanish “alt” or “alternative” model—with whom he’d been in sexually explicit correspondence, and who b-Leaks would later insist, without documentation, was an asset of US intelligence—fled his base in Copenhagen, was detained at Reykjavík-Keflavík airport, and spent a week dodging press while awaiting the verdict of the Icelandic authorities as to whether to return him to Denmark, until Andrey Vasilyevich Tsyganov, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation, dispatched a detachment that managed to surrept him back to the embassy’s chancery at Garðastræti 33, his residence for the past six—the profile was dated—14 months.
Yet another—now that I’d switched to tetration.de, .com, to utilize its tetrans—I tetrated, proprietarily tetrated, myselves: Principal hadn’t been reported dead or even missing yet, and no newsfeed mention meant me instead. Just Autotet fluff, and fluffy charticles about Autotet, earnings reports and predictions, stock flux. All the tabloid sites were sedent, their comments sections too. cohencidence.us was, reload, was down.
Then I finally did what I’d been waiting to do, I tetrated what’d been stabbing at my insides since Dubai, cutting away at my synaptic fray since Dhabi, I tetrated “what is that dagger called traditionally used in the united arab emirates”—no questionmark, no question, sharp demand—and was returned weaponsoftheworld.com, khanjar: “The khanjar was the traditional dagger of the Oman and the United Arab Emirates (but in Yemen called ‘the jambiya’). It carried in a ivory or leather scabbard and decorated with jewel, gold, silver, etc., etc., worn on a belt similar decorated. Though today it worn as formal dress or as symbolical ‘fashion statement,’ in the history it was the regular weapon for revenge or assassining.”
I loaded bankofamerica.com but had been brainvacuumed of my portpass. It was different from my PIN, and wasn’t any other Rachy anniversary. I exceeded all my allotted attempts. BoA was sending an email that would let me change my portpass.
I put off checking Rach’s blog, and went loading all my six million emails.
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From: [email protected]
Mon, Oct 3, 2011, 11:13 AM
call yourmother, myung
Knock knock? Who’s there? Aaron. Aaron who? Why Aaron you replying to email? Though the other punchline is Aaron the side of caution. Dear, dear—this is your personal assistant again. Your Lisabeth. Telling you that your mother’s been ringing nonstop. She’s worried. You haven’t been answering her emails, and she’s been telling Lisabeth that the only reason she got involved with paying Verizon $54/month, and she can’t understand why her first month’s bill should be $88, incidentally, was to be in touch with her son! and then Lisabeth went through explaining her plan, the Quantum, 15/5 Mbps, 10 MB of hosting! I told her you were off on an investigative project, something about unfair wage labor practices in telecom manufacturing because that’s what was in the NY Review under my latte (rhetorical latte), which was how I found out you’d told her you were doing something about scandals between donors and museums relating to deaccession policies and I apologized and agreed, you were overcommitted and overdue on both without an alibi, and she wondered how I held my soap, which was faintly erotic, and already today the answer’s on my desk (your mother made me a soapdish).
Besides your mother traffic’s been standard: Ad Shulinsky’s now claiming you’re charging lingerie and Arab whores to your wife’s Amex (please use a rubber and also, DON’T CHARGE ARAB WHORES TO YOUR WIFE’S AMEX), and that you haven’t renewed the lease on your office (which was relayed to me only on Friday and I’m trying to intercede without involving Lisabeth or Seth but the voicemail Ad left says Rach’s holding your possessions with intent to recoup your rent she paid—there better be nothing in there, in terms of P—“possessions” better just mean “the scattered grains of your neighbor’s nukeable basmati”! and I haven’t even mentioned the Eisenizers yet, or Alana, telling me she’s been leaving msgs but your phone’s off the hook or whatever the new hooks are, I told her get in line!
But Rach—just think—if her blog’s a retaliation for what you’ve already done, think about how she’ll reply to a felony. You’re both behaving like fucking children. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, fuck you. Dibarnu dofi. Forgive me. Or just trust me.
Bullet points, brass tacks, takhles:
–Feyer has been retained, informally. I had him pick me up on East End Ave so we wouldn’t be followed and we weren’t (the Asian) despite that he’d decided it was smart to take his Austin Healey. We drove to Jersey, in homage, or because if anyone followed us to the Brisket King of Linden, they could have us. They could have us with a side of kishka. I explained, not all of it, of course, just the divorce and money angles. Feyer tendered his advice. If you’re indeed out of country, which I suspect you are, which you’d better be to be so incommunicado, and out of country for a protracted time (there are no definites on time), it’s only logical that you’d require a foreign bank. Anyway, it’s imperative we talk, either by phone or my preference is in person.
–My schedule: I leave for the Book Fair, in Frankfurt, Germany, 10/14–16, and I’m bringing along the final version of Cal’s novel, which he just delivered fresh from Iowa after two years of revisions, dicking around with commas like they haven’t already been paid for in the States, and spoken for by publishers in four foreign languages (German, French, Hebrew, and Dutch). I’ll do my Fair business to shore up the rest of the rights and then if you’re in Europe I’ll rebook my flight or extend and meet you in Zurich and we’ll go banking. Feyer advises that we found a company and not a personal account (under your own name). So pack for an incorporation vacation, all names pair well with the Swiss AG, we’ll drink silver tequila tête à tête de cuvee, eat popcorn like gold teeth and write it off. In Europe there’s Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Andorra, before we’re talking Cyprus, Channel Islands. What does P do? Query? Another option if the logistics go south is that I go ahead wherever and open an account myself and deposit the sum and then when you surface we’ll make you a cosigner or even if you’d prefer remove me totally and cash me out. Now Feyer who suggested this mentioned that I wouldn’t require your permission for this, or the bank wouldn’t—because the bank wouldn’t know that you exist, obviously—and if that suggestion doesn’t shake you out of Arabia, even if just for a phonecall, I don’t know what will. The IRS doesn’t have quite the incentive of an embittered wife with forensic accountants. THIS MUST BE ATTENDED TO IMMEDIATELY. 10/28 I have to be back in NY for a routine coronary catheterization indignity but if you can’t get together the week after Frankfurt or until later in the month I’m after any excuse to tramp around France with the NBA expats as they waste their lost season dunking on ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne. Beyond October, let’s not get into. Beyond October, forget it.
–now: the urgency. You remember Tad Geary? Cal’s friend once upon a time at the Times, and now with Wired? Anyway, he called Friday day and talked, because he always does, like an NPR segment, all about the death of print, and whistleblowing, and drones, before getting down to the salacious, genital warts at The New Yorker, herpes at The Journal, and from the venereal it’s always been a natural transition to the topic of literary agency—because just as I was sure he was going to propose an ebook he slipped me a rumor that I’d been working with P. I denied, but must not’ve been as convincing as this rumor from sources unspecified, because Geary was already reassuring me that if certain access was given or blanks were filled in my identity and the “granulars” of my “partnering” would stay privileged. I didn’t counter with what access he was after, but then the questions he asked explained everything (the blanks). Like, where’s P? When’s P back in Palo Alto? Is the health as awful as the gossip? What if anything are the plans for succession? I told him they’d just hire a computer. Then he took me to school on the health gossip. It was stomach cancer, he said. Or colon. That’s not me being unsure. That was him. Then I had to call Cal, to coordinate blurbs with the comma czar and, I’m predicting, permanent writer in residence of Iowa, and while I had him on the phone said that Geary would be calling asking questions of him and that he’d be doing me a favor. If he’d pump Geary for his sources especially. I told Cal I wasn’t involved in any tech projects, that not only didn’t I know Bing from Skype, I thought lit agencies were cheapened by having sites, that’s why we never got one. Geary called, because I’m a prophet, on Saturday, and told Cal everything he’d already told me and Cal feigned curiosity, but didn’t have to feign ignorance, and probed, and promised to investigate for Geary out of interests of his own, because he’d just turned in a new novel, which would require my, Aaron Szlay’s, full attention. The takeaway was that Geary had no indication of P’s medical status, no verification, and the only news he had of P’s potential book property was of my ostensible repping and Finn’s ostensible publishing of it, both of which tips had been passed to him, independently passed, by some Buddhist guru, Master Tetsugen Ken Classman, and a VC named Dustin Something, who’s tight, apparently, like they’re sharing the same bunk on a yacht tight, with Kori Dienerowitz and, Geary told Cal who told me, he was finding it strange that not only had the same tips reached him, Geary, through two different channels, but also that Dienerowitz—whose stakes were higher than everyone’s by degrees of magnitude, or higher than everyone’s but P’s—would have said anything about P to anyone, even intimately. Geary suspects a powerplay. A ploy or coup, but to what conclusion, Geary has no conclusion. I haven’t jawed any of this with Finn (he’ll be in Frankfurt).
–because, now, the Asian: I went out to Staten Island yesterday to explain myself to Svetlana (because she wasn’t taking my calls). I took the ferry. You can’t top for climax the Staten Island Ferry. Sveta wouldn’t let me in and the mother whom I’d met all of once outside Macy’s (Sveta once tricked me into going to Macy’s to get a swimsuit only to meet in the ladies’ swimsuit section a Soviet lady with Chernobyl growths on her chin and the cheeks of a circus cosmetologist who gave her daughter a crate of homemade beef cutlets and shook my hand and said, “You be glad forever”)—anyway, Svetlana’s mother, handling a difficult situation, came out to the stoop with a bottle of Evian for me, or not even that but the fucking bottle with trees on it, Poland Spring, and forced a smile and went back in and locked the door. Whatever. That isn’t the point. Returning to the ferry, the Asian was onboard (she’s Korean). She made sure I noticed her, the sweats, collegiate, crimson, Harvard. So loose on her, windblown at the railings. I decided, fuck it, enough cowardice and slapstick, and as the ferry launched I chased her casually up, down, and across the decks. But then I realized I wasn’t chasing her. She was just trying to get away from the crowds. Away, windy. Starboard’s the side that isn’t port. I violated my policy of never engaging Red Sox fans, especially not from Harvard. But she had this together professional don’t trifle with me thing that just cracked. That was her affect, cracked. A once organized type a ivy executive human now broken. She told me her name was Myung Unsui (she spelled it out), but I’ll admit that ever since a certain site has appeared in my life, I’ve been having trouble with my manure detector. I’m just going to relate what she said, and let you be the judge of whether it’s true or just, as the distinguished typo has it, “voracious,” because I’m too frazzled—I can’t sleep but if I do sleep all I dream about is apnea.
She said she worked for P. Confirm this. She said she was an assistant and very close personally, and either it’s all imagined in her head or they were fucking. By fucking I mean in love, confirm this. They were traveling together. She said they were traveling with a friend of mine, but she didn’t say your name, or your names fungible. She mentioned the UAE. But how it checks is that she also described you, physically, accurately, but in that ruthless quibbling analytic metricsexual way. Don’t shoot the messenger, just diet and shave. You and P were working all the time, she said. She was obviously jealous. She had that envy pout that so transcends all cultures and races and even our species that if the aliens ever contact me but I snub them because I’m writing an email to a client that’s the expression the aliens will have, all their suctorial prehensile mouths petulant. Her job was that every place you went to she went to that place before you and set everything up. But in the Emirates P told her to go back to the States and leave you two alone, just you and P. He told her to take the rest of his entourage back to the office “to await further instruction,” which she said with airquotes and henna on her hands, like Achsa once had. She did, she took. But no instruction followed. P was misaligned, she said. I didn’t understand. She hesitated and then said, cancer. The Battery grew. The statue and the bridges and everything and even with all of that she was crying.
She stood around the office doing absolutely nothing. She didn’t sit because she’d never had an office in the office. She’d just shared whatever office P was in and now he wasn’t in any and no one knew where he was or when he was returning and if she had a job anymore she decided it was to comport herself like she knew but would never divulge and above all wasn’t anxious about anything. But then she didn’t have a job anymore. She was fired. She was called in by Kori Dienerowitz himself and pretended to miss the voicemail but couldn’t pretend again, she couldn’t do anything but go in and get fired. She’d never been fired before. She said she still wasn’t sure that he had the authority to fire her, but regardless her email was denied, her logs were closed, whatever the lingo is, they confiscated her computer and parkingpass, which I gather in California is rather severe. She wouldn’t answer any of my questions about P’s relationship with Dienerowitz. She just kept talking about “termination,” about how being “terminated” was like being called “a witch,” which her grandmother who’d been a shaman or shamaness I guess had been “branded,” she said, in Korea. She was embarrassed, and talked fast, and then was embarrassed because her accent intensified. She had no friends in California, she had no friends except family in NY, and so she flew to NY and disguised the disgrace she felt by using her savings to pay off their apartment in the Bronx, Grand Concourse, so uptown in the city’s math that the numbers collapse, with a 208th Street jumping to a 210th Street intersecting with a 208th Ave and a 210th Blvd. Having been sapped unconfident, and sapped by TV, and she had to share the TV with her grandmother, she now found herself the last two or so weeks commuting alongside her parents to the tip of Hunts Point to help out with their deli. Balance the books. Make change to slide around atop the carousel behind the bulletproof partition. Acrylite. Like in a taxi. Like she’d done throughout Bronx Science, like she was a teenager again, humiliated. “The bills are filthy.” “No one ever takes the one moment to unwrinkle.” We docked. We went up toward Whitehall and approached my office and paused in front of it as if acknowledging that yes, this was a building, yes, this was a building acknowledged by both of us as my office, then resumed, went further, Bowling Green, the Bull getting its balls fondled by tourists. She talked about a job interview she had coming up. “Shit IT.” But she couldn’t even get her references together. If people knew her, she said, they knew her as P’s, and worried about her loyalties. She couldn’t stop chewing gum or cutting her hair, and she took off the Sox hat and showed me. Sometimes, putting the scissors down, she’d just suck on the hair, sometimes she’d swallow it. “There is nothing to do at a deli.” It was a bad business model. No systems, so inventory’s all by sense or by hand. Her father insisted on giving credit, microfinance for the parish, her mother on keeping a bunny despite the health department. The licensing, the taxes. Operating costs and insurance. Unreliable labor. Callingcards returns. The powerball machine always breaking. The hassle of cashing checks and regularly explaining to regular customers that prepared foods can’t be paid for with stamps. The franchises and chain pharmacies that undercut pricing by stocking in bulk or their own productlines. 24 hours, two shifts of 12, seven days a week, and she insisted on the nightshifts so as to better follow me and then, letting her parents take off for some church and peace and a touch of the flu, she was by herself and went out to rearrange the produce and some bath salts maniac jerks around the corner and grabs the scissors out of her apron and holds them to her face. “He does not want money.” “But he does not want to be alive either.” I’m just typing what she said. I wondered if she’d ever considered a career in publishing. But we were on Wall Street. Bankers were out in the mild. She was about to go down for a 4 train. To Woodlawn, I said. Yes. Get out at Yankee Stadium, take the Bx4. Yes, she said, but Bx6. I’ll be able to find her. A family clunked up from the station arguing already, carrying protest signs and a megaphone. I asked her and I was yelling as she descended why she’d been following me and she paused and turned sniffling and clung to herself as she met me on the landing, and she answered that Kori Dienerowitz was trying to sabotage my friend, you, and that he had government resources behind him, because P had gotten involved with Thor Balk of b-Leaks, or his involvement was forced at the threat of disclosing his disease. But that at core P wasn’t compelled by any of that and instead he was working on something beyond death, something spiritual. And that my friend, you, would never understand that, and that for all the chip and wisdom you cultivated you were just a nice guy out of your depth. Not nice but sad, she said. “Like Principal, he treats you like he’s inventing you and knows that it’s bad but still better than anything else,” “you don’t think he has a soul until you realize he just shares yours.”
aar
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10/14, FRANKFURT
Riding trains, in their impassive passing, in, their, speed, that, smoothes the tracks out, that straightens the rails and evens the ties—it feels like how you tour a museum. How you tour a busy museum on a weekend or holiday noon.
You streak by mindlessly, peeking over heads, pardon me, Entschuldigen Sie, until something stills you, something tries to keep you, but you can’t be stilled, you can’t be kept, you’re bound to a schedule and hurried by, and the only impression you retain is one of resentment—not of the murmurous crowd, but of the artifacts in their cases, their stasis.
A city revolving its exhibitions by the neighborhood, the block, with the only explanatory labels the graffiti: ZIZ tagged along a quarter kilometer of trackfence in the chemical blue of the toilet in the trainstation’s men’s room, ZiZiZiZiZ bubbled in the neon pink of the powdered soap, then Un train peut en cacher un auteur, fuck death, fuck debth, ¡mauerpower! Drab Altbau progressing along the timeline into the new, the housingblock towers disinterred in tiers, archaeological strata of the future spilling onto balconies, hanging gardens of prams and bicycles, antennae, satellitedishes, and saggy feldgrau panties—all of it being left behind like a diorama display, as if Berlin were a museum of itself behind “glass.”
Cranes guarded the route, imperious in their hover, monitoring progress, approving entry, denying entry, wreckingballs at the ready to prevent a touch, even a linger, enforcing a policy of No Eating, No Drinking, No Flash Photography.
The woman had emerged from behind a grate to ring in the next customer like an automaton skeleton in an astronomical clock of the Northern Renaissance, but with a Deutsche Bahn blazer, and without a scythe. Only after I’d managed to explain that I didn’t want to go directly to Frankfurt but wanted to switch along the local routes instead, changing from train to train, each one smaller than the last, at the smallest and least convenient stations, accidental depots that were just collisions or breakdowns, and only after the woman had quoted me how that’d cost more than double than and take more than four times the time of the ICE, the InterCityExpress, I settled, but requested a ticket only oneway, which might’ve confused or even disappointed the customers behind me, who’d been convinced I was a criminal or escaped convict, but now realized that even if I were one, I was inept and beyond that, cheap.
Only a corpse would lay out for a oneway ticket. Frankfurt and the grave are the only two destinations to which the directest route is also the cheapest.
Have all the pensioned docenty dyejobbed perfume in their pits ladies of this continent shut all the ports and gates, bar all the entrances, barricade—screen—all the emergency exits, and it all becomes a museum, in which all us museumgoers become the exhibits, relics studying one another, studying ourselves.
This has been me just following a track, unable to stop and get off.
I hadn’t slept. Just loitered, vagranced. Benched. No sleep now.
My suit still hadn’t dried from showering in the sink. I felt clung to. The many things in my many pockets weighed on me. My rightleg had my keys, my leftleg had my wallet. Passports pinched my asscheeks. My Tetote, a pocket unto itself, was strapped left to right across my heart. All my possessions were pressuring me, hungrily, pressuring through my pockets, insatiably, until I myself was pocketed as a single speeding point, without volition, beating.
A couple of businesstypes toward the rear of my car had unpacked their tablets. Ereaders, which is a term that can indicate either the person reading or the thing that’s read, but they were ereading. Any news that was newer would be prophecy, which the train enabled with wifi. To turn the page, to turn the screenpage of their tablet devices, they made a slight slash with the indexfinger, like how tyrants used to select their concubines and condemn their jesters to death. Stroke, off with her clothes. Stroke, off with his head.
And I was doing it too—dismissing my fellow passengers with their own gesture. I esat with my efinger in the iair and islashed it around. Then I went clicking on things, at least on the window between me and the thing, as if whatever I clicked would have to explain itself to me. As if I’d press on a village we passed and it’d surrender its name. Press on a town for population, demographic, economic realia. Press on a field we passed, press on the pane between me and field, and projected back through my whorled prints would be a history of its sowing, its reaping, the annals of who’d screwed between its sheaves.
We’d cross the Elbe (which the Soviets never did, though neither did the Americans), cross over its tributary the Saale, or I forget which one of the Saales, and how many Saales, and how many rivers we’d cross that weren’t a Saale, but I’ll never forget what redundancy feels like. Redundancy feels like doing this on my own.
Whatever lay in the path of the straightest standard gauge connection would be crossed and in that crossing, obliterated. We’d span every other river in the Reich and why not even the same river twice—we’d pass but not pass through the Harz, and we wouldn’t cross the Rhine (my father the soldier did once, in the opposite direction).
A man who didn’t strike me as a businesstype—rather he was closer to being into football, American, though his footballsized face was intelligent—settled across the aisle. What bothered me, initially as an affront to that intelligence, subsequently because it marked him as a danger, was that he wasn’t doing anything, he wasn’t reading or ereading anything that would’ve made his language public, he wasn’t even playing a game.
I sat with head averted at my window, deep in a comp lit seminar with my and Principal’s twin passports. As the strokers kept stroking screenpages, and the fields blocked by like crosswordpuzzle blanks, like spot the differences between the photos teasers.
It wasn’t obvious whether the man was weak fat or strong fat or even which seat he was sitting in besides the whole row, with the median armrest raised. He pivoted toward me, and his neckhair and wristhairs were so alert and bristling as though frequency tuning that I toted up, got away, over the metal tack, the bridles and saddles that coupled the cars, stopping midway between the caboose and the motive, the diningcar.
I needed a drink, to rid myself of my last coin.
The English/French/Spanish menu encouraged me to “Sample the Regional Wine,” which was what I ordered by pointing.
No speech, just cork—no need to retail my own blushing terroir.
The waiter returned having linked his cuffs and buttoned his collar and clipped around it a redherring bowtie. He set down bread, which I refused with a headwag. He would’ve charged me if I’d touched it. Then he brought the grail of plastic goblets, already poured. Even the napkin had its price. It was a check that unfolded like linen, €4, a €1 tip rounding up, and that was all of it.
Prost, prosit—I took a sip. Trust nothing you read. Nothing about this wine was local. Motion has no local.
Just as I was rimming the sip the door autoslid. And behind it was another door, a wall, my aislemate. He was tall and wide as if he were quarried from the surrounding terrain, as if he were being quarried from the car itself, a raw rupestral growth who had to nick himself down just to fit into my fantasies. He boothed two booths away facing me and ordered a mineral water and was served that sparkling clarity in a glass anchored by a big crystal of ice with a big halfsliced citron floating atop like a buoy.
The English language is like a tunnel with endless clearance—an eye or ear too forgiving. Americans especially can usually get where someone’s coming from. This has to do with being mediated, having seen and heard enough screenwise to know how Yugo gangsters inflect, when they plot amongst themselves without subtitles. How Russian assassins dress, when they’re planning to explode a motorcade. We have every variation, not least the counterintuitive. But I can’t say I can do the same offscreen and within another culture. I couldn’t dig deep enough into his umlauts to judge them native. But I could still suspect some curry in his wurst. His skin was either racially tan or tanned. How he poured. How he drank. How he did absolutely nothing else. How he wouldn’t leave my face. And so I slumped to show him his reflection in my baldspot—and then he finished—to repel him by his reflection—and then he left. Coins on the table, no tip. Just a cock of the head. Tongue out. Like he was aiming.
Probably just an overreaction. Probably he’d just never been around a Jew before.
In the next car another passenger sat reading another book. Not ereading an ebook. The passenger just closed the thing. And took a euro billsized card, an indexcard that spanned the indexfinger to the middle of the hand, and marked the page. No cornering, no folds. Cards. Reminders of the census. Cards were how censuses used to be conducted. Once, each city, each town, each village had an official going door to door, collecting information, marking each dwelling’s data with pen or pencil on card. Each municipality collected its cards and summarized their stats in a report, and each bound report was put on a train and relayed to the capital. I’m wondering whether any of their couriering officials ever read them if bored on the journey. I’m just guessing that another book, containing and summarizing the stats of all the municipal books, would have to be compiled in the capital.
But then at the turn of the century—1890? 1880? I forget, my exactitudes are later—the census was automated, at least partially automated, first in America and only later in Europe. In 1933 the Nazis counted only in Germany, but in 1939 they counted in all the annexations too, counting Austria, Sudetenland, Memelland, counting Poland, the Generalgouvernement, at least in part. The censustakers distributed to each household a strip of paper, a survey whose filling was mandatory and whose findings the takers themselves coded onto a card by a system of punched holes, a punchcard. This citizen had blond hair, punch, this noncitizen had black hair, punch, cranial and facial type, nose type (straight or curved, weakly or strongly bent in which cardinality), tabulating religion (column 22 hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, hole 3 annihilated). Did he or she have one Jewish parent or two? even one Jewish grandparent? Any disabilities? and/or disfigurements? Glasses and/or hearing aid would help to complete the form—condemn. An accounting tallying poetically, still—all identities are voids.
The punchcard and its calculating machine—the storage/memory and processor of the earliest computing—were invented in 1890 by a German American from Buffalo, NY, named Hollerith, whose company became the company that became IBM, which, in turn, licensed the technology to the Nazis (but don’t get all nitpicky angry if online contradicts me and says the year was 1889 and the city was Albany and the inventor’s name was Höllerith and the licensing was done by an IBM subsidiary).
