Catch and Release

Speaking of Greed

The doctor shuffled the pack of playing cards seven times, then offered them to the soldier, who sat to his right. The soldier cut them, and the doctor picked up the deck and dealt two cards down and one up to each of the players — the policeman, the priest, the soldier, and himself.

The game was poker, seven-card stud, and the priest, who was high on the board with a queen, opened the betting for a dollar, tossing in a chip to keep the doctor’s ante comfortable. The soldier called, as did the doctor and the policeman.

Over by the fireplace, the room’s other occupant, an elderly gentleman, dozed in an armchair.

The doctor gave each player a second up-card. The policeman caught a king, the priest a nine in the same suit with his queen, the soldier a jack to go with his ten. The doctor, who’d had a five to start with, caught another five for a pair. That made him high on the board, but he took a look at his hole cards, frowned, and checked his hand. The policeman checked as well, and the priest gave his Roman collar a tug and bet two dollars.

The soldier said, “Two dollars? It’s a dollar limit until a pair shows, isn’t it?”

“Doctor has a pair,” the priest pointed out.

“So he does,” the soldier agreed, and flicked a speck of dust off the sleeve of his uniform. “Of course he does, he was high with his fives. Still, it’s one of the anomalies of the game, isn’t it? Priest gets to bet more, not because his own hand just got stronger, but because his opponent’s did.

“What are you so proud of, Priest? Queens and nines? Four hearts?”

“I hope I’m not too proud,” the priest said. “Pride’s a sin, after all.”

“Well, I’m proud enough to call you,” the soldier said, as did the doctor and the policeman. The doctor dealt another round, and now the policeman was high with a pair of kings. He too was in uniform, and wordlessly he tossed a pair of chips into the center of the table.

The priest had caught a third heart, the seven. He thought for a long moment before tossing four chips into the pot. “Raise,” he said softly.

“Priest, Priest, Priest,” said the soldier, checking his own cards. “Have you got your damned flush already? If you had two pair, well, I just caught one of your nines. But if I’m chasing a straight that’s doomed to lose to the flush you’ve already got...” The words trailed off, and the soldier sighed and called. So did the doctor, and the policeman looked at his kings and picked up four chips, as if to raise back, then tossed in two of them and returned the others to his stack.

On the next round, three of the players showed visible improvement. The policeman, who’d had a three with his kings, caught a second three for two pair. The priest added the deuce of hearts and showed a four flush on board. The soldier’s straight got longer with the addition of the eight of diamonds. The doctor, who’d had a four with his pair of fives, acquired a ten.

The policeman bet, the priest raised, the soldier grumbled and called. The doctor called without grumbling. The policeman raised back, and everyone called.

“Nice little pot,” the doctor said, and gave everyone a down card.

The betting limits were a dollar until a pair showed, then two dollars until the last card, at which time you could bet five dollars. The policeman did just that, tossing a red chip into the pot. The priest picked up a red chip to call, thought about it, picked up a second red chip, and raised five dollars. The soldier said something about throwing good money after bad.

“There’s no such thing,” the doctor said.

“As good money?”

“As bad money.”

“It turns bad,” said the soldier, “as soon as I throw it in. I was straight in five and got to watch everybody outdraw me. Now I’ve got a choice of losing to Policeman’s full house or Priest’s heart flush, depending on which one’s telling the truth. Unless you’re both full of crap.”

“Always a possibility,” the doctor allowed.

“The hell with it,” the soldier said, and tossed in a red chip and five white chips. “I call,” he said, “with no expectation of profit.” The doctor was wearing green scrubs, with a stethoscope peeping out of his pocket. He looked at his cards, looked at everyone else’s cards, and called. The policeman raised. The priest looked troubled, but took the third and final raise all the same, and everybody called.

“Full,” the policeman said, and turned over a third three. “Threes full of kings,” he said, but the priest was shaking his head, even as he turned over his hole cards, two queens and a nine. “Queens full,” said the priest.

“Oh, hell,” said the soldier. “A full house masquerading as a flush. Not that I have a right to complain — the flush would have beaten me just as handily. Got it on the last card, didn’t you, Priest? All that raising, and you went in with two pair and a four flush.”

“I had great expectations,” the priest admitted.

“The Lord will provide and all that,” said the soldier, turning over his up cards. The priest, beaming, reached for the chips.

The doctor cleared his throat, turned over his hole cards. Two of them were fives, matching the pair of fives he’d had on board.

“Four fives,” the policeman said reverently. “Beats your boat, Priest.”

“So it does,” said the priest. “So it does.”

“Had them in the first four cards,” the doctor said.

“You never bet them.”

“I never had to,” said the doctor. “You fellows were doing such a nice job of it, I saw no reason to interfere.”

And he reached out both hands to gather in the chips.

“Greed,” said the priest.

The policeman was shuffling the cards, the doctor stacking his chips, the soldier looking off into the middle distance, as if remembering a battle in a long-forgotten war. The priest’s utterance stopped them all.

“I beg your pardon,” said the doctor. “Just what have I done that’s so greedy? Play the hand so as to maximize my gains? That, it seems to me, is how one is intended to play the game.”

“If you’re not trying to win,” said the soldier, “you shouldn’t be sitting at the table.”

“Maybe Priest feels you were gloating,” the policeman suggested. “Salivating over your well-gotten gains.”

“Was I doing that?” The doctor shrugged. “I wasn’t aware of it. Still, why play if you’re not going to relish your triumph?”

The priest, who’d been shaking his head, now held up his hands as if to ward off everyone’s remarks. “I uttered a single word,” he protested, “and intended no judgment, believe me. Perhaps it was the play of the hand that prompted my train of thought, perhaps it was a reflection on the entire ethos of poker that put it in motion. But, when I spoke the word, I was thinking neither of your own conduct, Doctor, nor of our game itself. No, I was contemplating the sin of greed, of avarice.”

“Greed is a sin, eh?”

“One of the seven deadly sins.”

“And yet,” said the soldier, “there was a character in a film who argued famously that greed is good. And isn’t the profit motive at the root of much of human progress?”

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the policeman said, “but it’s the desire for what one can in fact grasp that makes one reach out in the first place. And isn’t it natural to want to improve one’s circumstances?”

“All the sins are natural,” said the priest. “All originate as essential impulses and become sins when they overstretch their bounds. Without sexual desire the human race would die out. Without appetite we’d starve. Without ambition we’d graze like cattle. But when desire becomes lust, or appetite turns to gluttony, or ambition to greed—”

“We sin,” the doctor said.

The priest nodded. The policeman gave the cards another shuffle. “You know,” he said, “that reminds me of a story.”

“Tell it,” the others urged, and the policeman put down the deck of cards and sat back in his chair.

Many years ago (said the policeman) there were two brothers, whom I’ll call George and Alan Walker. They came from a family that had had some money and respectability at one time, and their paternal grandfather was a physician, but he was also a drunk, and eventually patients stopped going to him, and he wound up with an office on Railroad Avenue, where he wrote prescriptions for dope addicts. Somewhere along the way his wife ran off, and he started popping pills, and the time came when they didn’t combine too well with what he was drinking, and he died.

He had three sons and a daughter, and all but the youngest son drifted away. The one who stayed — call him Jack — married a girl whose family had also come down in the world, and they had two boys, George and Alan.

Jack drank, like his father, but he didn’t have a medical degree, and thus he couldn’t make a living handing out pills. He wasn’t trained for anything, and didn’t have any ambition, so he picked up day work when it came his way, and sometimes it was honest and sometimes it wasn’t. He got arrested a fair number of times, and he went away and did short time on three or four occasions. When he was home he slapped his wife around some, and was generally free with his hands around the house, but no more than you’d expect from a man like that living a life like that.

Now everybody can point to individuals who grew up in homes like the Walkers’ who turned out just fine. Won scholarships, put themselves through college, worked hard, applied themselves, and wound up pillars of the community. No reason it can’t happen, and often enough it does, but sometimes it doesn’t, and it certainly didn’t for George and Alan Walker. They were discipline problems in school and dropped out early, and at first they stole hubcaps off cars, and then they stole cars.

And so on.

Jack Walker had been a criminal himself, in a slipshod amateurish sort of way. The boys followed in his footsteps, but improved on his example. They were professionals from very early on, and you would have to say they were good at it. They weren’t Raffles, they weren’t Professor Moriarty, they weren’t Arnold Zeck, and God knows they weren’t Willie Sutton or Al Capone. But they made a living at it and they didn’t get caught, and isn’t that enough for us to call them successful?

They always worked together, and more often than not they used other people as well. Over the years, they tended to team up with the same three men. I don’t know that it would be precisely accurate to call the five of them a gang, but it wouldn’t be off by much.

One, Louis Creamer, was a couple of years older than the Walkers — George, I should mention, was himself a year and a half older than his brother Alan. Louis looked like a big dumb galoot, and that’s exactly what he was. He loved to eat and he loved to work out with weights in his garage, so he kept getting bigger. It’s hard to see how he could have gotten any dumber, but he didn’t get any smarter, either. He lived with his mother — nobody knew what happened to the father, if he was ever there in the first place — and when his mother died Louis married the girl he’d been keeping company with since he dropped out of school. He moved her into his mother’s house and she cooked him the same huge meals his mother used to cook, and he was happy.

Early on, Louis got work day to day as a bouncer, but the day came when he hit a fellow too hard, and the guy died. A good lawyer probably could have gotten him off, but Louis had a bad one, and he wound up serving a year and a day for involuntary manslaughter. When he got out nobody was in a rush to hire him, and he fell in with the Walkers, who didn’t have trouble finding a role for a guy who was big and strong and did what you told him to do.

Eddie O’Day was small and undernourished and as close as I’ve ever seen to a born thief. He got in trouble shoplifting as a child, and then he stopped getting into trouble, not because he stopped stealing but because he stopped getting caught. He grew up to be a man who would, as they say, steal a hot stove, and he’d have it sold before it cooled off. He was the same age as Alan Walker, and they’d dropped out of school together. Eddie lived alone, and was positively gifted when it came to picking up women. He was neither good-looking nor charming, but he was evidently seductive, and women kept taking him home. But they didn’t keep him — his relationships never lasted, which was fine as far as he was concerned.

Mike Dunn was older than the others, and had actually qualified as a schoolteacher. He got unqualified in a hurry when he was caught in bed with one of his students. It was a long ways from pedophilia — he was only twenty-six himself at the time, and the girl was almost sixteen and almost as experienced sexually as he was — but that was the end of his teaching career. He drifted some, and the Walkers used him as a lookout in a drugstore break-in, and found out they liked working with him. He had a good mind, and he wound up doing a lot of the planning. When he wasn’t working he was pretty much a loner, living in a rented house on the edge of town, and having affairs with unavailable women — generally the wives or daughters of other men.

The Walkers and their associates had a lot of different ways to make money, together or separately. George and Alan always had some money on the street, loans to people whose only collateral was fear. Louis Creamer did their collection work, and provided security at the card and dice games Eddie O’Day ran. George Walker owned a bar and grill, and sold more booze there than he bought from the wholesalers; he bought from bootleggers and hijacked the occasional truck to make up the difference. We knew a lot of what they were doing, but knowing and making a case aren’t necessarily the same thing. We arrested all of them at one time or another, for one thing or another, but we could never make anything stick. That’s not all that unusual, you know. They say crime doesn’t pay, but they’re wrong. Of course it pays. If it didn’t pay, the pros would do something else.

And the Walkers were pros. They weren’t getting rich, but they were making what you could call a decent living, but for the fact that there was nothing decent about it. They always had food on the table and money under the mattress (if not in the bank), and they didn’t have to work too hard or too often. That was what they’d had in mind when they chose a life of crime. So they stayed with it, and why not? It suited them fine. They weren’t respectable, but neither was their father, or his father before him. The hell with being respectable. They were doing okay.

The years went by and they kept on doing what they were doing, and doing well at it. Jack Walker drank himself to death, and after the funeral George put his arm around his brother and said, “Well, the old bastard’s in the ground. He wasn’t much good, but he wasn’t so bad, you know?”

“When I was a kid,” Alan said, “I wanted to kill him.”

“Oh, so did I,” George said. “Many’s the time I thought about it. But, you know, you grow older and you get over it.” And they were indeed growing older, settling into a reasonably comfortable middle age. George was thicker around the middle, while Alan’s hair was showing a little gray. They both liked a drink, but it didn’t have the hold on them it had had on their father and grandfather. It settled George down, fueled Alan, and didn’t seem to do either of them any harm.

And this wouldn’t be much of a story, except for the fact that one day they set out to steal some money, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

It was a robbery, and the details have largely faded from memory, but I don’t suppose they’re terribly important. The tip came from an employee of the targeted firm, whose wife was the sister of a woman Mike Dunn was sleeping with; for a cut of the proceeds, he’d provide details of when to hit the place, along with the security codes and keys that would get them in. Their expectations were considerable. Mike Dunn, who brought in the deal, thought they ought to walk off with a minimum of a hundred thousand dollars. Their tipster was in for a ten percent share, and they’d split the residue in five equal shares, as they always did on jobs of this nature. “Even splits,” George Walker had said early on. “You hear about different ways of doing it, something off the top for the guy who brings it in, so much extra for whoever bankrolls the operation. All that does is make it complicated, and give everybody a reason to come up with a resentment. The minute you’re getting a dollar more than me, I’m pissed off. And the funny thing is you’re pissed off, too, because whatever you’re getting isn’t enough. Make the splits even and nobody’s got cause to complain. You put out more than I do on the one job, well, it evens out later on, when I put out more’n you do. Meantime, every dollar comes in, each one of us gets twenty cents of it.” So they stood to bring in eighteen thousand dollars apiece for a few hours work, which, inflation notwithstanding, was a healthy cut above minimum wage, and better than anybody was paying in the fields and factories. Was it a fortune? No. Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice? Hardly that. But all five of the principals would agree that it was a good night’s work.

The job was planned and rehearsed, the schedule fine-tuned. When push came to shove, the pushing and shoving went like clockwork. Everything happened just as it was supposed to, and our five masked heroes wound up in a room with five of the firm’s employees, one of them the inside man, the brother-in-law of Mike Dunn’s paramour. And it strikes me that we need a name for him, although we won’t need it for long. But let’s call him Alfie. No need for a last name. Just Alfie will do fine.

Like the others, Alfie was tied up tight, a piece of duct tape across his mouth. Mike Dunn had given him a wink when he tied him, and made sure his bonds weren’t tight enough to hurt. He sat there and watched as the five men hauled sacks of money out of the vault.

It was Eddie O’Day who found the bearer bonds.

By then they already knew that it was going to be a much bigger payday than they’d anticipated. A hundred thousand? The cash looked as though it would come to at least three and maybe four or five times that. Half a million? A hundred thousand apiece?

The bearer bonds, all by themselves, totaled two million dollars. They were like cash, but better than cash because, relatively speaking, they didn’t weigh anything or take up any space. Pieces of paper, two hundred of them, each worth ten thousand dollars. And they weren’t registered to an owner, and were as anonymous as a crumpled dollar bill.

In every man’s mind, the numbers changed. The night was going to be worth two and a half million dollars, or half a million apiece. Why, Alfie’s share as an informant would come to a quarter of a million dollars all by itself, which was not bad compensation for letting yourself be tied up and gagged for a few hours.

Of course, there was another way of looking at it. Alfie was taking fifty thousand dollars from each of them. He was costing them, right off the top, almost three times as much money as they’d expected to net in the first place.

The little son of a bitch... Alan Walker went over to Alfie and hunkered down next to him. “You did good,” he said. “There’s lots more money than anybody thought, plus all of these bonds.” Alfie struggled with his bonds, and his eyes rolled wildly. Alan asked him if something was the matter, and Mike Dunn came over and took the tape from Alfie’s mouth.

“Them,” Alfie said.

“Them?”

He rolled his eyes toward his fellow employees. “They’ll think I’m involved,” he said.

“Well, hell, Alfie,” Eddie O’Day said, “you are involved, aren’tcha? You’re in for what, ten percent?” Alfie just stared.

“Listen,” George Walker told him, “don’t worry about those guys. What are they gonna say?”

“Their lips are sealed,” his brother pointed out.

“But—” George Walker nodded to Louis Creamer, who drew a pistol and shot one of the bound men in the back of the head. Mike Dunn and Eddie O’Day drew their guns, and more shots rang out. Within seconds the four presumably loyal employees were dead.

“Oh, Jesus,” Alfie said.

“Had to be,” George Walker told him. “They heard what my brother said to you, right? Besides, the money involved, there’s gonna be way too much heat coming down. They didn’t see anybody’s face, but who knows what they might notice that the masks don’t hide? And they heard voices. Better this way, Alfie.”

“Ten percent,” Eddie O’Day said. “You might walk away with a quarter of a million dollars, Alfie. What are you gonna do with all that dough?”

Alfie looked like a man who’d heard the good news and the bad news all at once. He was in line for a fortune, but would he get to spend a dime of it? “Listen,” he said, “you guys better beat me up.”

“Beat you up?”

“I think so, and—”

“But you’re our little buddy,” Louis Creamer said. “Why would we want to do that?”

“If I’m the only one left,” Alfie said, “they’ll suspect me, won’t they?”

“Suspect you?”

“Of being involved.”

“Ah,” George Walker said. “Never thought of that.”

“But if you beat me up...”

“You figure it might throw them off? A couple of bruises on your face and they won’t even think of questioning you?”

“Maybe you better wound me,” Alfie said.

“Wound you, Alfie?”

“Like a flesh wound, you know? A non-fatal wound.”

“Oh, hell,” Alan Walker said. “We can do better than that.” And he put his gun up against Alfie’s forehead and blew his brains out.

“Had to be,” George Walker announced, as they cleared the area of any possible traces of their presence. “No way on earth he would have stood up, the kind of heat they’d have put on him. The minute the total goes over a mill, far as I’m concerned, they’re all dead, all five of them. The other four because of what they might have picked up, and Alfie because of what we damn well know he knows.”

“He was in for a quarter of a mill,” Eddie O’Day said. “You look at it one way, old Alfie was a rich man for a minute there.”

“You think about it,” Louis Creamer said, “what’d he ever do was worth a quarter of a mill?”

“He was taking fifty grand apiece from each of us,” Alan Walker said. “If you want to look at it that way.”

“It’s as good a way as any to look at it,” George Walker said.

“Beady little eyes,” Eddie O’Day said. “Never liked the little bastard. And he’d have sung like a bird, minute they picked him up.” The Walkers had a storage locker that nobody knew about, and that was where they went to count the proceeds of the job. The cash, it turned out, ran to just over $650,000, and another count of the bearer bonds confirmed the figure of two million dollars. That made the total $2,650,000, or $530,000 a man after a five-way split.

“Alfie was richer than we thought,” George Walker said. “For a minute there, anyway. Two hundred sixty-five grand.”

“If we’d left him alive,” his brother said, “the cops would have had our names within twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours? He’da been singing the second they got the tape off his mouth.”

Eddie O’Day said, “You got to wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“How much singing he already done.” They exchanged glances.

To Mike Dunn, George Walker said, “This dame of yours. Alfie was married to her sister?”

“Right.”

“I was a cop, I’d take a look at the families of those five guys. Dead or alive, I’d figure there might have been somebody on the inside, you know?”

“I see what you mean.”

“They talk to Alfie’s wife, who knows what he let slip?”

“Probably nothing.”

“Probably nothing, but who knows? Maybe he thought he was keeping her in the dark, but she puts two and two together, you know?”

“Maybe he talked in his sleep,” Louis Creamer suggested.

Mike Dunn thought about it, nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

Later that evening, the Walkers were in George’s den, drinking scotch and smoking cigars. “You know what I’m thinking,” George said.

“The wife’s dead,” Alan said, “and it draws the cops a picture. Five employees dead, plus the wife of one of them? Right away they know which one was working for us.”

“So they know which direction to go.”

“This woman Mike’s been nailing. Sister of Alfie’s wife.”

“Right.”

“They talk to her and what do they get?”

“Probably nothing, far as the job’s concerned. Even if Alfie talked to his wife, it’s a stretch to think the wife talked to her sister.”

Alan nodded. “The sister doesn’t know shit about the job,” he said.

“But there’s one thing she knows.”

“What’s that?”

“She knows she’s been sleeping with Mike. Of course that’s something she most likely wants kept a secret, on account of she’s a married lady.”

“But when the cops turn her upside-down and shake her...”

“Leads straight to Mike. And now that I think about it, will they even have to shake her hard? Because if she figures out that it was probably Mike that got her sister and her brother-in-law killed...”

George finished his drink, poured another. “Her name’s Alice,” he said. “Alice Fuhrmann. Be easy enough, drop in on her, take her out. Where I sit, she looks like a big loose end.”

“How’s Mike gonna take it?”

“Maybe it’ll look like an accident.”

“He’s no dummy. She has an accident, he’ll have a pretty good idea who gave it to her.”

“Well, that’s another thing,” George Walker said. “Take out Alfie’s wife and her sister and there’s nobody with a story to tell. But I can see the cops finding the connection between Mike and this Alice no matter what, because who knows who she told?”

“He’s a good man, Mike.”

“Damn good man.”

“Kind of a loner, though.”

“Looks out for himself.” The brothers glanced significantly at each other, and drank their whiskey.

The sixth death recorded in connection with the robbery was that of Alfie’s wife. Mike Dunn went to her home, found her alone, and accepted her offer of a cup of coffee. She thought he was coming on to her, and had heard from her sister what a good lover he was, and the idea of having a quickie with her sister’s boyfriend was not unappealing. She invited him upstairs, and he didn’t know what to do. He knew he couldn’t afford to leave physical evidence in her bed or on her body. And could he have sex with a woman and then kill her? The thought sickened him, and, not surprisingly, turned him on a little too. He went upstairs with her. She was wearing a robe, and as they ascended the staircase he ran a hand up under the robe and found she was wearing nothing under it. He was wildly excited, and desperate to avoid acting on his excitement, and when they reached the top of the stairs he took her in his arms. She waited for him to kiss her, and instead he got his hands on her neck and throttled her, his hands tightening convulsively around her throat until the light went out of her eyes. Then he pitched her body down the stairs, walked down them himself, stepped over her corpse and got out of the house.

He was shaking. He wanted to tell somebody but he didn’t know whom to tell. He got in his car and drove home, and there was George Walker with a duffle bag.

“I did it,” Mike blurted out. “She thought I wanted to fuck her, and you want to hear something sick? I wanted to.”

“But you took care of it?”

“She fell down the stairs,” Mike said. “Broke her neck.”

“Accidents happen,” George said, and tapped the duffle bag. “Your share.”

“I thought we weren’t gonna divvy it for a while.”

“That was the plan, yeah.”

“Because they might come calling, and if anybody has a lot of money at hand...”

“Right.”

“Besides, any of us starts spending, it draws attention. Not that I would, but I’d worry about Eddie.”

“If he starts throwing money around...”

“Could draw attention.”

“Right.”

“Thing is,” George explained, “we were thinking maybe you ought to get out of town for a while, Mike. Alfie’s dead and his wife’s dead, but who knows how far back the cops can trace things? This girlfriend of yours—”

“Jesus, don’t remind me. I just killed her sister.”

“Well, somebody can take care of that.” Mike Dunn’s eyes widened, but he didn’t say anything.

“If you’re out of town for a while,” George said, “maybe it’s not a bad thing.” Not a bad thing at all, Mike thought. Not if somebody was going to take care of Alice Fuhrmann, because the next thing that might occur to them was taking care of Mike Dunn, and he didn’t want to be around when that happened. He packed a bag, and George walked him to his car, and took a gun from his pocket and shot him behind the ear just as he was getting behind the wheel.

Within hours Mike Dunn was buried at the bottom of an old well at an abandoned farmhouse six miles north of the city, and his car was part of a fleet of stolen cars on their way to the coast, where they’d be loaded aboard a freighter for shipment overseas. By then Alan Walker had decoyed Alice Fuhrmann to a supermarket parking lot, where he killed her with a homemade garrote and stuffed her into the trunk of her car.

“Mike did the right thing,” George told Eddie O’Day and Louis Creamer. “He took out Alfie’s widow and his own girlfriend, but he figured it might still come back to him, so I gave him his share and he took off. Half a mill, he can stay gone for a good long time.”

“More’n that,” Eddie O’Day said. “Five hundred thirty, wasn’t it?”

“Well, round numbers.”

“Speaking of numbers,” Eddie said, “when are we gonna cut up the pie? Because I could use some of mine.”

“Soon,” George told him.

Five-thirty each for Louis Creamer and Eddie O’Day, $795,000 apiece for the Walkers, George thought, because Louis and Eddie didn’t know that Mike Dunn had not gone willingly (though he’d been willing enough to do so) and had not taken his share with him. (George had brought the duffle bag home with him, and stashed it behind the furnace.) So why should Eddie and Louis get a split of Mike’s share?

For that matter, George thought, he hadn’t yet told his brother what had become of Mike Dunn. He’d never intended to give Mike his share, but he’d filled the duffle bag at the storage facility in case he’d had to change his plans on the spot, and he’d held the money out afterward in case the four of them wound up going to the storage bin together to make the split. As far as Alan knew, Mike and his share had vanished, and why burden the lad with the whole story? Why should Alan have a friend’s death on his conscience?

No, George’s conscience could carry the weight. And, along with the guilt, shouldn’t he have Mike’s share for himself? Because he couldn’t split it with Alan without telling him where it came from.

Which changed the numbers slightly. $530,000 apiece for Alan, Louis, and Eddie. $1,060,000 for George.

Of course we knew who’d pulled off the robbery. Alfie’s wife had indeed suffered a broken neck in the fall, but the medical examination quickly revealed she’d been strangled first. Her sister had disappeared, and soon turned up in the trunk of her car, a loop of wire tightened around her neck. Someone was able to connect the sister to Mike Dunn, and we established that he and his clothes and his car had gone missing. Present or not, Mike Dunn automatically led to Creamer and O’Day and the Walkers — but we’d have been looking at them anyway. Just a matter of rounding up the usual suspects, really.

“Eddie called me,” Alan said. “They were talking to him.”

“And you, and me,” George said. “And Louis. They can suspect all they want, long as they can’t prove anything.”

“He wants his cut.”

“Eddie?”

Alan nodded. “I asked him was he planning on running, and he said no. Just that he’ll feel better when he’s got his share. Mike got his cut, he said, and why’s he different?”

“Mike’s case was special.”

“Just what I told him. He says he owes money he’s got to pay, plus there’s some things he wants to buy.”

“The cops are talking to him, and what he wants to do is pay some debts and spend some money.”

“That’s about it.”

“And if the answer’s no? Then what?”

“He didn’t say, but next thing I knew he was mentioning how the cops had been talking to him.”

“Subtle bastard. You know, when the cops talk to him a few more times—”

“I don’t know how he’ll stand up. He’s always been a stand-up guy before, but the stakes are a lot higher.”

“And you can sort of sense him getting ready to spill it. He’s working up a resentment about not getting paid. Other hand, if he does get paid...”

“He throws money around.”

They fell silent. Finally George said, “We haven’t even talked about Louis.”

“No.”

“Be convenient if the two of them killed each other, wouldn’t it?”

“No more worries about who’ll stand up. Down side, we’d have nobody to work with, either.”

“Why work?” George grinned. “You and me’d be splitting two million, six fifty.”

“Less Mike’s share,” Alan pointed out.

“Right,” George said.

They were planning it, working it out together, because it was not going to be easy to get the drop on Eddie, who was pretty shrewd and probably a little suspicious at this stage. And, while they were figuring it all out, Louis Creamer got in touch to tell them he’d just killed Eddie O’Day.

“He came by my house,” Louis said, “and he was acting weird, you know? He said you guys were going to pull a fast one and rat us out to the cops, but how could you do that? And he had this scheme for taking you both out and getting the money, and him and me’d split it. And I could see where he was going. He wanted me for about as long as it would take to take you both down, and then it would be my turn to go. The son of a bitch.”

“So what did you do?”

“I just punched him out,” Louis said, “and then I took hold of him and broke his fucking neck. Now I got him lying in a heap in my living room, and I don’t know what to do with him.”

“We’ll help,” said George.

They went to Louis’s house, and there was Eddie in a heap on the floor. “Look at this,” George said, holding up a gun. “He was packing.”

“Yeah, well, he was out cold before he could get it out of his pocket.”

“You did good, Louis,” George said, pressing the gun into Eddie’s dead hand and carefully fitting his index finger around the trigger. “Real good,” he said, and pointed the gun at Louis, and put three shots in his chest.

“Amazing,” Alan said. “They really did kill each other. Well, you said it would be convenient.”

“One of them would have cut a deal. In fact Eddie did try to cut a deal, with Louis.”

“But Louis stood up.”

“For how long?”

“That was nice, taking him out with Eddie’s gun. They’ll find nitrate particles in his hand and know he fired the shot. But how’d he get killed?”

“We’re not the cops,” George said. “Let them worry about it.”

We didn’t worry much. We looked at who was still standing, and we brought in the Walkers and grilled them separately. They had their stories ready and we couldn’t shake them, and hadn’t really expected to. They’d been through this countless times before, and they knew to keep their mouths shut, and eventually we sent them home. A week later they were at George’s house, in George’s basement den, drinking George’s scotch. “We maybe got trouble,” Alan said. “The cops in San Diego picked up Mike Dunn.”

“That’s not good,” George said, “but what’s he gonna say? They’ll throw the dame at him, Alfie’s wife, and they got him figured for the sister, too. He’ll just stay dummied up about everything if he knows what’s good for him.”

“Unless they offer him a deal.”

“That could be a problem.” George admitted.

Alan was looking at him carefully. George could almost hear what was going through Alan’s mind, but before he could do anything about it Alan had a gun in his hand and it was pointed at George.

“Now put that away,” George said. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Just put that away and sit down and drink your drink.”

“You’re good, Georgie. But I know you too well. I just told you they arrested Mike, and you’re not the least bit worried.”

“I just said it could be a problem.”

“What you almost said,” Alan told him, “was it was impossible, but you didn’t, you were quick on the uptake. But you knew it was impossible because you knew all along Mike Dunn was where nobody could get at him. Where is he, Georgie?”

“Buried. Nobody’s gonna find him.”

“What I figured. And what happened to his share? You bury it along with him?”

“I tucked it away. I didn’t want the others to know what happened, so Mike’s share of the money had to disappear.”

“The others are gone, Georgie. It’s just you and me, and I don’t see you rushing to split the money with your brother.”

“Jesus,” George said, “is that what this is about? And will you please put the gun down and drink your drink?”

“I’ll keep the gun,” Alan said, “and I think I’ll wait on the drink. Now that Louis and Eddie are out of the picture, you were gonna split Mike’s share with me, weren’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why don’t I believe you, brother?”

“Because you’re tied up in knots. Because they grilled you downtown, same as they grilled me, and they offered you a deal, same as they offered me a deal, and we’re the Walkers, we’re not gonna sell each other out, and if you’d relax and drink your fucking drink you’d know that. You want your share of Mike’s money? Is that what you want?”

“That’s exactly what I want.”

“Fine,” George said, and led him to the furnace room, where he hoisted the duffle bag. They returned to the den, with Alan holding a gun on his brother all the way. George set down the bag and worked the zipper, and the bag was full of money, all right. Alan’s eyes widened at the sight of it.

“Half’s yours,” George said.

“I figure all of it’s mine,” Alan said. “You were gonna take it all, so I’m gonna take it all. Fair enough?”

“I don’t know about fair,” George said, “but you know what? I’m not going to argue. You take it, the whole thing, and we’ll split what’s in the storage locker. And drink your fucking drink before it evaporates.”

“I’ll take what’s in the locker, too,” Alan said, and squeezed the trigger, and kept squeezing until the gun was empty. “Jesus,” he said, “I just killed my own brother. I guess I’ll take that drink now, Georgie. You talked me into it.” And he picked up the glass, drained it, and pitched forward onto his face.

The room fell silent, but for the crackling of the fire and, after a long moment, a rumbling snore from the fireside.

“A fine story,” said the doctor, “though not perhaps equally engrossing to everyone. The club’s Oldest Member, it would seem, has managed to sleep through it.” They all glanced at the fireplace, and the chair beside it, where the little old man dozed in his oversized armchair.

“Poison, I presume,” the doctor went on. “In the whiskey, and of course that was why George was so eager to have his brother take a drink.”

“Strychnine, as I recall,” said the policeman. “Something fast-acting, in any event.”

“It’s a splendid story,” the priest agreed, “but one question arises. All the principals died, and I don’t suppose any of them was considerate enough to write out a narrative before departing. So how are you able to recount it?”

“We reconstructed a good deal,” the policeman said. “Mike Dunn’s body did turn up, eventually, in the well at the old farmhouse. And of course the death scene in George Walker’s den spoke for itself, complete with the duffle bag full of money. I put words in their mouths, and filled in the blanks through inference and imagination, but we’re not in a court of law, are we? I thought it would do for a story.”

“I meant no criticism, Policeman. I just wondered.”

“And I wonder,” said the soldier, “just what the story implies, and what it says about greed. They were greedy, of course, all of them. It was greed that led them to commit the initial crime, and greed that got them killing each other off, until there was no one left to spend all that money.”

“I suppose the point is whatever one thinks it to be,” the policeman said. “They were greedy as all criminals are greedy, wanting what other men have and appropriating it by illegal means. But, you know, they weren’t that greedy.”

“They shared equally,” the doctor remembered.

“And lived well, but well within their means. You could say they were businessmen whose business was illegal. They were profit-motivated, but is the desire for profit tantamount to greed?”

“But they became greedy,” the doctor observed. “And the greed altered their behavior. I assume these men had killed before.”

“Oh, yes.”

“But not wantonly, and they had never before turned on each other.”

“No.”

“The root of all evil,” the priest said, and the others looked at him. “Money,” he explained. “There was too much of it. That’s the point, isn’t it, Policeman? There was too much money.”

The policeman nodded. “That’s what I always thought,” he said. “They had been playing the game for years, but suddenly the stakes had been raised exponentially, and they were in over their heads. The moment the bearer bonds turned up, all the deaths that were to follow were carved in stone.” They nodded, and the policeman took up the pack of playing cards. “My deal, isn’t it?” He shuffled the pack, shuffled it again.

“I wonder,” the soldier said. “I wonder just what greed is.”

“I would say it’s like pornography,” the doctor said. “There was a senator who said he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it.”

“If he got an erection, it was pornography?”

“Something like that. But don’t we all know what greed is? And yet how easy is it to pin down?”

“It’s wanting more than you need,” the policeman suggested.

“Ah, but that hardly excludes anyone, does it? Anyone who aspires to more than life on a subsistence level wants more than he absolutely needs.”

“Perhaps,” the priest proposed, “it’s wanting more than you think you deserve.”

“Oh, I like that,” the doctor said. “It’s so wonderfully subjective. If I think I deserve — what was your phrase, Policeman? Something about dreaming of avarice?”

“‘Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.’ And it’s not my phrase, I’m afraid, but Samuel Johnson’s.”

“A pity he’s not here to enliven this conversation, but we’ll have to make do without him. But if I think I deserve to have pots and pots of money, Priest, does that protect me from greed?” The priest frowned, considering the matter.

“I think it’s where it leads,” the policeman said. “If my desire for more moves me to sinful action, then the desire is greedy. If not, I simply want to better myself, and that’s a normal and innocent human desire, and where would we be without it?”

“Somewhere in New Jersey,” the doctor said. “Does anyone ever think himself to be greedy? You’re greedy, but I just want to make a better life for my family. Isn’t that how everyone sees it?”

“They always want it for the family,” the policeman agreed. “A man embezzles a million dollars and he explains he was just doing it for his family. As if it’s not greed if it’s on someone else’s behalf.”

“I’m reminded of the farmer,” said the priest, “who insisted he wasn’t at all greedy. He just wanted the land that bordered his own.”

The soldier snapped his fingers. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the essence of greed, that it can never be satisfied. You always want more.” He shook his head. “Reminds me of a story,” he said.

“Then put down the cards,” the doctor said, “and let’s hear it.”

In my occupation (said the soldier) greed rarely plays a predominant role. Who becomes a soldier in order to make himself rich? Oh, there are areas of the world where a military career can indeed lead to wealth. One doesn’t think of an eastern warlord, for example, slogging it out with an eye on his pension and a cottage in the Cotswolds or a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale. In the western democracies, though, the activating sin is more apt to be pride. One yearns for promotions, for status, perhaps in some instances for political power. And financial reward often accompanies these prizes, but it’s not apt to be an end in itself.

Why do men choose a military career? For the security, I suppose. For self-respect, and the respect of one’s fellows. For the satisfaction of being a part of something larger than oneself, and not a money-grubbing soulless corporation but an organization bent on advancing and defending the interests of an entire nation. For many reasons, but rarely out of greed.

Even so, opportunities for profit sometimes arise. And greedy men sometimes find themselves in uniform — especially in time of war, when the draft sweeps up men who would not otherwise choose to clothe themselves in khaki. As often as not, such men make perfectly acceptable soldiers. There was a vogue some years ago for giving young criminals a choice — they could enlist in the armed forces or go to jail. This later went out of fashion, the argument against it being that it would turn the service into a sort of penitentiary without walls, filled with criminal types. But in my experience it often worked rather well. Removed from his home environment, and thrown into a world where greed had little opportunity to find satisfaction, the young man was apt to do just fine. The change might or might not last after his military obligation was over, of course.

But let’s get down to cases. At the end of the second world war, Allied soldiers in Europe suddenly found several opportunities for profit. They had access to essential goods that were in short supply among the civilian population, and a black market sprang up instantly in cigarettes, chocolate, and liquor, along with such non-essentials as food and clothing. Some soldiers traded Hershey bars and packs of Camels for a fraulein’s sexual favors; others parlayed goods from the PX into a small fortune, buying and selling and trading with dispatch.

There was nothing in Gary Carmody’s background to suggest that he would become an illicit entrepreneur at war’s end. He grew up on a farm in the Corn Belt and enlisted in the army shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to the infantry and participated in the invasion of Italy, where he picked up a Purple Heart and a shoulder wound at Salerno. Upon recovery from his injury, he was shipped to England, where in due course he took part in the Normandy invasion, landing at Utah Beach and helping to push the Wehrmacht across France. He earned a second Purple Heart during the German counterattack, along with a Bronze Star. He recuperated at a field hospital — the machine-gun bullet broke a rib, but did no major damage — and he was back in harness marching across the Rhine around the time the Germans surrendered.

Neither the bullets he’d taken nor the revelations of the concentration camps led Gary to a blanket condemnation of the entire German nation. While he thought the Nazis ought to be rounded up and shot, and that shooting was probably too good for the SS, he didn’t see anything wrong with the German women. They were at once forthright and feminine, and their accents were a lot more charming than the Nazis in the war movies. He had a couple of dates, and then he met a blue-eyed blonde named Helga, and they hit it off. He brought her presents, of course — it was only fitting, the Germans had nothing and what was the big deal in bringing some chocolate and cigarettes? Back home you’d take flowers or candy, and maybe go out to a restaurant, and nobody thought of it as prostitution. He brought a pair of nylons one day, and she tried them on at once, and one thing led to another. Afterward they lay together in her narrow bed and she reached to stroke the stockings, which they hadn’t bothered to remove. She said, “You can get more of these, liebchen?”

“Did they get a run in them already?”

“Gott, I hope not. No, I was thinking. We could make money together.”

“With nylons?”

“And cigarettes and chocolate. And other things, if you can get them.”

“What other things?”

“Anything. Soap, even.”

And so he began trading, with Helga as his partner in and out of bed. She was the daughter of shopkeepers and turned out to be a natural at her new career, knowing instinctively what to buy and what to sell and how to set prices. He was just a farm boy, but he had a farm boy’s shrewdness plus the quickness it had taken to survive combat as a foot soldier, and he learned the game in a hurry. As with any extralegal trade, there was always a danger that the person you were dealing with would pull a fast one — or a gun or a knife — and use force or guile to take everything. Gary knew how to make sure that didn’t happen.

It was another American soldier who got Gary into the art business. The man was an officer, a captain, but the black market was a great leveler, and the two men had done business together. The captain had a fraulein of his own, and the two couples were drinking together one evening when the captain mentioned that he’d taken something in trade and didn’t know what the hell he was going to do with it. “It’s a painting,” he said. “Ugly little thing. Hang on a minute, I’ll show you.” He went upstairs and returned with a framed canvas nine inches by twelve inches, showing Salome with the head of John the Baptist. “I know it’s from the Bible and all,” the captain said, “but it’s still fucking unpleasant, and if Salome was really that fat I can’t see losing your head over her. This look like five hundred dollars to you, Gary?”

“Is that what you gave for it?”

“Yes and no. I was going back and forth with this droopy-eyed Kraut and we reached a point where we’re five hundred dollars apart. And he whips out this thing of beauty. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I vill hate myself for doing zis, but you haff me over a bushel.’ And he goes on to tell me how it’s a genuine Von Schtupp or whatever the hell it is, and it’s worth a fortune.

“The way he did it, I couldn’t come back and say, look, Konrad, keep the picture and gimme a hundred dollars more. I do that and I’m slapping him in the face, and I don’t want to rub him the wrong way because Konrad and I do a lot of business. And the fact of the matter is yes, we’re five hundred bucks apart, but I could take the deal at his price and I’m still okay with it. So I said yes, it sure is a beautiful picture, which it’s not, as anyone can plainly see, and I said I’m sure it was valuable, but what am I gonna do with it? Sell it in Paris, he says. Sell it in London, in New York. So I let him talk me into it, because I wanted the deal to go through but what I didn’t want was for him to try palming off more of these beauties on me, because I saw the look in his eye, Gary, and I’ve got a feeling he’s got a shitload of them just waiting for a sucker with a suitcase full of dollars to take them off his hands.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Well, I don’t guess I’ll throw darts at it. I could take it home, but what’s a better souvenir, a genuine Luger or an ugly picture? And which would you rather spend your old age looking at?”

Gary looked at the painting, and he looked at Helga. He saw something in her eyes, and he also saw something in the canvas. “It’s not that ugly,” he said. “What do you want for it?”

“You serious?”

“Serious enough to ask, anyway.”

“Well, let’s see. I’ve got five hundred in it, and—”

“You’ve got zero in it. You’d have done the deal for what he offered, without the painting.”

“I said that, didn’t I? Strategic error, corporal. I’ll tell you what, give me a hundred dollars and it’s yours.”

“Let’s split the difference,” Gary said. “I’ll give you fifty.”

“What is it we’re splitting? Oh, hell, I don’t want to look at it anymore. Give me the fifty and you can hang it over your bed.”

They didn’t hang it over the bed. Instead Helga hid it under the mattress. “The Nazis looted everything,” she told him. “Museums, private collections. Your friend is stupid. It’s a beautiful painting, and we can make money on it. And if we can meet his friend Konrad—”

“There’s more where this one came from,” he finished. “But how do we sell them?”

“You can get to Switzerland, no?”

“Maybe,” he said.

The painting, which he sold without ever learning the artist’s name — he somehow knew it was not Von Schtupp — brought him Swiss francs worth twenty-eight hundred American dollars. The proceeds bought four paintings from the droopy-eyed Konrad. These were larger canvases, and Gary removed them from their frames and rolled them up and took them to Zurich, returning to Germany this time with almost $7000. And so it went. It wasn’t a foolproof business, as he learned when his Zurich customer dismissed a painting as worthless kitsch. But it was a forgiving trade, and most transactions were quite profitable. If he was in doubt he could take goods on consignment, selling in Zurich or Geneva — or, once, in Madrid — and sharing the proceeds with the consignor. But you made more money if you owned what you were selling, and he liked owning it, liked the way it felt. And if there was more risk that way, well, he liked the risk, too.

All his time and energy went into the business. Art was all he bothered with now — there were enough other soldiers making deals in stockings and cigarettes — and he was preoccupied with it, with the buying and selling and, almost as an afterthought, with the paintings themselves. Because it turned out he had a feel for it. He’d seen something in that first painting of Salome, even if he hadn’t realized it at the time. He’d responded to the artistry. Before he enlisted, he’d never been to a museum, never seen a painting hanging in a private home, never looked at any art beyond the reproductions in his mother’s J.C. Penney calendar. He learned to look at the paintings, as he’d never looked at anything before. The more he liked a painting, the harder it was to part with it. He fell in love with a Goya, and held onto it until something else came along that he liked better. Then he sold the Goya — that was the one he took to Madrid, where he’d heard about a crony of Franco’s who wouldn’t be put off by the work’s dodgy provenance.

It was easier to part with Helga. They’d been good for each other, as lovers and as business partners, but the affair ran its course, and he didn’t need or want a partner in his art dealings. He gave her a fair share of their capital and went on by himself.

Nothing lasts forever, not even military service. There came a time for Gary to board a troopship headed back to the States. He thought of staying in Europe — he had a career here, for as long as it could last — but in the end he realized it was time to go home. But what to do with his money? He had run his original stake of cigarettes and nylons up to something like eighty thousand dollars. That was a lot of cash to carry, and it was cash he couldn’t explain, so he had to carry it — he couldn’t put it in a bank and write himself a check.

But what he could do, and in fact did, was buy a painting and bring that home with him. He chose a Vermeer, a luminous domestic interior, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. It hadn’t come to him in the usual way; instead, he’d found it in an art gallery in Paris and had been hard pressed to get the snooty owner to cut the price by ten percent. On the troopship, squinting at the painting in his footlocker by what little illumination his flashlight afforded, he decided he must have been out of his mind. He’d had all that cash, and now he was down to what, fifteen thousand dollars? That was a lot of money in 1946, it would buy him a house and get him started in a business, but it was a fifth of what he’d had. Well, maybe he could run it up a little. It would be a week before the ship docked in New York, and there were plenty of men on board with money in their pockets and time on their hands. There were card games and crap games running twenty-four hours a day, and he’d always been pretty good at a poker table.

I suspect you can guess at the rest. Maybe he ran up against some card sharps, or maybe the cards just weren’t running his way. He never knew for sure, but what he did know was that he reached New York with nothing in his kick but the five hundred dollars of case money he’d tucked away before he started. Everything else was gone, invested in straights that ran into flushes, flushes that never came in, and bluffs some other guy called. You’d think he’d be desolate, wouldn’t you? He thought so himself, and was surprised to discover that he actually felt pretty good. If you looked at it one way, he left Germany with eighty thousand dollars and landed in New York with five hundred. But there was another way to see it, and that was that he had five hundred dollars more than he’d had when he left Iowa in the first place, and he’d been shot twice and lived to tell the tale, and he had a Bronze Star to keep his two Purple Hearts company, and he knew as much about women as anybody in Iowa, and more about art. The money he’d had, well, in a sense it had never been real in the first place, and, as for the paintings he’d trafficked in, well, they hadn’t been real either. They’d all of them been stolen, and they had no provenance, and sooner or later they could very well be confiscated and restored to their rightful owners. He figured he’d done just fine.

“Soldier? Have you finished?”

The soldier looked up, blinked. “More or less,” he said. “Why? Don’t you like the story?”

“It’s a fine story,” the doctor said, “but isn’t it unfinished? There’s a sense of closure, in that our hero is back where he started. That’s if he went back to his family’s farm, which I don’t believe you mentioned.”

“Didn’t I? Yes, he returned to the farm.”

“And to the girl he left behind him?”

“I don’t believe there was a girl he’d left behind,” said the soldier, “and if there was, well, she’d been left too far behind to catch up with him.”

“That must have been true of the farm as well,” the priest offered.

The soldier nodded. “That proved to be the case,” he said. “He had, as it were, seen Paree — and Madrid and Geneva and Zurich and Berlin, and no end of other places more stimulating than an Iowa cornfield. He’d spent two days in New York, waiting for his train, and he’d spent much of it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the galleries on upper Madison Avenue. He stayed in Iowa for as long as he could, and then he packed a bag and returned to New York.”

“And?”

“He found a cheap flat, a fifth-floor walkup in Greenwich Village for $22 a month. He made the rounds of the art galleries and auction houses until he found someone who was willing to hire him for $40 a week. And, gradually, he learned the business from the ground up. From the very beginning he saved his money — I don’t know how he could have saved much when he earned forty dollars a week, but he managed. Half of it went into a permanent savings account. The other half went into a fund to purchase art.

“Years passed. Although there was often a woman in his life, he never married, never formed a long-term alliance. Nor did he move from his original apartment in the Village. The neighborhood became increasingly desirable, the surrounding rents went up accordingly, but his own rent, frozen by the miracle of rent control, was still under a hundred dollars a month twenty-five years later.

“His capital grew, as did his collection of prints and paintings. The time came when he was able to open a gallery of his own, stocking it with the works he’d amassed. Rather than represent living artists, he dealt in older works, and on more than one occasion he was offered work he recognized from his time in Germany, stolen paintings he’d brokered years ago. Since then they’d acquired provenance and could be openly bought and sold.

“He’s in the business today. He could retire, he’ll tell you, but then what would he do with himself? He walks with a cane, and on damp days he feels the pain of his second wound, the rib broken by the machine-gun bullet. It’s funny, he says, that it never bothered him once it healed, and now it aches again, after all those years. You think you’re done with a thing, he’ll say philosophically, but perhaps no one is ever done with anything.

“He’s respected, successful, and if I told you his name, which is certainly not Gary Carmody, you might very well recognize it. There were rumors over the years that he occasionally dealt in, well, not stolen goods exactly, but works of art with something shady about them, and I don’t mean chiaroscuro. But nothing was ever substantiated, and there was never a scandal, and few people even remember what was once said of him.”

“And that’s the end of the story,” the policeman said.

“Well, the man’s still alive, and is any story ever entirely over while one lives? But yes, the story is over.”

“And what does it all mean?” the priest wondered. “He was a rather ordinary young man, not particularly greedy, until circumstances created a great opportunity for greed to flourish. Greed led him into a marginally criminal existence, at which he seems to have thrived, and then his circumstances changed, and he tried to change with them. But greed led him to try his hand at poker—”

“Even as you and I,” murmured the doctor.

“—and he lost everything. But what he retained, acquired through greed, was a love of art and a passion for dealing in it, and as soon as he could he returned to it, and worked and sacrificed to achieve legitimate success.”

“Unless those rumors were true,” the policeman said.

“It’s a fine story,” the doctor said, “and well told. But there’s something I don’t entirely understand.”

“Oh?”

“The Vermeer, Soldier. He was working for nothing and living on less. My God, he must have been scraping by on bread and water, and it would have been day-old bread and tap water, too. Why couldn’t he sell the Vermeer? That would have set him up in business and kept him living decently until the gallery started paying for itself.”

“He fell in love with it,” the policeman offered. “How could he sell it? I daresay he still owns it to this day.”

“He does,” the soldier said. “It hung briefly on the wall of his room in the farmhouse in Iowa, and for years it hung on a nail in that fifth-floor Village walkup. The day he opened his own gallery he hung it above his desk in the gallery office, and it’s still there.”

“A lucky penny,” the doctor said. “‘Keep me and you’ll never go broke.’ And I’d say he’s a long way from broke. I haven’t priced any Vermeers lately, but I would think his would have to be worth an eight-figure price by now.”

“You would think so,” the soldier allowed.

“And he wouldn’t part with it. Is that greed, clinging so tenaciously to that which, if he would but let it go, might allow him to reach his goals? Or is it some other sin?”

“Like what, Doctor?”

“Oh, pride, perhaps. He defines himself as a man who possesses a Vermeer. And so it hangs on his crumbling wall while he lives like a churchmouse. No, make that like a ruined aristocrat, putting on a black tie every night for dinner, setting the table with Rosenthal china and Waterford crystal, and dining on stone soup. Made, you’ll no doubt recall, by simmering a stone in water for half an hour, then adding salt.”

“An old family recipe,” the policeman said. “But would the painting be worth that much? An eight-figure price — that’s quite a range, from ten to a hundred million dollars.”

“Ninety-nine,” the doctor said.

“I stand corrected. But if it increased in value from fifty thousand dollars to — oh, take the low figure, ten million. If it performed that well, how can you possibly argue that he should have sold it? He may have struggled, but it doesn’t seem to have harmed him. Who can say he was wrong to keep it? He’s a success now, he’s been a success for some years — and he owns a Vermeer.”

They fell silent, thinking about it. Then the priest cleared his throat, and all eyes turned toward him.

“I should think,” he said, “that at least two of the figures are after the decimal point.” He drew a breath, smiled gently. “I suspect Soldier has neglected to tell us everything. It’s a forgery, isn’t it? That priceless Vermeer.” The soldier nodded.

“By Van Meegeren, I would suppose, if it fooled our Mr. Carmody the first time around. That fellow’s Vermeers, sold as the fakes that they are, have reached a point where they command decent prices in their own right. I don’t suppose this one is worth quite what that young soldier gave for it half a century ago, but it’s a long way from valueless.”

“A fake,” the policeman said. “How did you guess, Priest?”

“The clues were there, weren’t they? Why else would his heart sink when he peered at the painting as it reposed in his footlocker? He saw then by flashlight what he hadn’t seen in the gallery’s more favorable lighting — that he’d squandered all his profits on a canvas that was never in the same room as Vermeer. No wonder he gambled, hoping to recoup his losses. And, given the state of mind he must have been in, no wonder he lost everything.”

“An expert in New York confirmed what he already knew,” the soldier said. “Could he have sold it anyway? Perhaps, even as the Parisian dealer, knowingly or unknowingly, had sold it to him. But he’d have taken a considerable loss, and would risk blackening his reputation before he even had one. Better, he always felt, to keep the painting, and to hang it where he would see it every day, and never forget the lesson it was there to teach him.”

“And what was that lesson, Soldier?”

“That greed can lead to error, with devastating results. Because it was greed that led him to sink the better part of his capital into that worthless Vermeer. It was a bargain, and he should have been suspicious, but the opportunity to get it at that price led him astray. Greed made him want it to be a Vermeer, and so he believed it to be one, and paid the price for his greed.”

“And hung it on his wall,” the priest said.

“Yes.”

“And moved it to his office when he opened his own gallery. So that he could look at it every day while conducting his business. But others would see it as well, wouldn’t they? What did he tell them when they asked about it?”

“Only that it was not for sale.”

“I don’t suppose it harmed his reputation to have it known that this new kid on the block was sufficiently well-fixed to hang a Vermeer on his wall and not even entertain offers for it,” the doctor mused. “I’m not so sure he didn’t get his money’s worth out of it after all.”

They fell silent again, and the policeman dealt the cards. The game was seven-card stud, but this time the betting was restrained and the pot small, won at length by the priest with two pair, nines and threes. “If we were playing Baseball,” he said, raking in the chips, “with nines and threes wild, I’d have five aces.”

“If we were playing tennis,” said the doctor, who had held fours and deuces, “it would be your serve. So shut up and deal.” The priest gathered the cards, shuffled them. The soldier filled his pipe, scratched a match, held it to the bowl. “Oh, it’s your pipe,” the doctor said. “I thought the old man over there had treated us to a fart.”

“He did,” said the soldier. “That’s one reason I lit the pipe.”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the doctor declared, and the priest offered the cards and the policeman cut them, and, from the fireside, the four men heard a sound that had become familiar to them over time.

“You see?” said the doctor. “He’s done it again. Try to counteract his flatulence with your smoke, and he simply redoubles his efforts.”

“He’s an old man,” the policeman said.

“So? Who among us is not?”

“He’s a bit older than we are.”

“And isn’t he a pretty picture of what the future holds? One day we too can sleep twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four, and fill the happy hours with coughing and snuffling and snoring and, last but alas not least, great rumbling pungent farts. And what’s left after that but the grave? Or is there more to come, Priest?”

“I used to wonder,” the priest admitted.

“But you no longer doubt?”

“I no longer wonder, knowing that all will be made clear soon enough. But I’m still thinking of greed.”

“Deal the cards, and we can do something about it.”

“As I understand it,” the priest went on, “crimes of greed, crimes with mercenary motives, fluctuate with economic conditions. When and where unemployment is high and need is great, the crime rate goes up. When times are good, it drops.”

“That would stand to reason,” the soldier said.

“On the other hand,” said the priest, “the criminals in Policeman’s story fell tragically under the influence of greed not when they lacked money, but when they were awash in it. When there was not so much to be divided, they shared fairly and equally. When the money flooded in, they killed to increase their portion of it.”

“It seems paradoxical,” the policeman agreed, “but that’s just how it was.”

“And your corporal-turned-art dealer, Soldier. How does he fit into the need-greed continuum?”

“Opportunity awakened his greed,” the soldier said. “Perhaps it was there all along, just waiting until the chance came along to make money on the black market. We could say he was greediest when he bought the fake Vermeer, and again when he realized what he’d done and tried to recoup at the card table.”

“A forlorn hope,” said the doctor, “in a game like this one, where hours go by before someone deals the cards.”

“His money gone,” the soldier went on, “he applied himself like a character out of Horatio Alger, but was he any less avaricious for the fact that his actions were now ethical and lawful? He was as ambitious as ever, and there was a pot of gold looming at the end of his rainbow.”

“So greed’s a constant,” said the priest, and took up the deck of cards once again.

“It is and it isn’t,” the doctor said. “Hell, put down the damned cards. You just reminded me of a story.” The priest placed the cards, undealt, upon the table. By the fireside, the old man sighed deeply in his sleep. And the priest and the soldier and the policeman sat up in their chairs, waiting for the doctor to begin.

Some years ago (said the doctor) I had as a patient a young man who wanted to be a writer. Upon completion of his education he moved to New York, where he took an apartment rather like your art dealer, Soldier, but lacking a faux-Vermeer on the wall. He placed his typewriter on a rickety card table and began banging out poems and short stories and no end of first chapters that failed to thrive and grow into novels. And he looked for a job, hoping for something that would help him on his way to literary success.

The position he secured was at a literary agency, owned and operated by a fellow I’ll call Byron Fielding. That was not his name, but neither was the name he used, which he created precisely as I’ve created an alias for him, by putting together the surnames of two English writers. Fielding started out as a writer himself, sending stories to magazines while he was still in high school, and getting some of them published. Then World War Two came along, even as it did to Gary Carmody, and Byron Fielding was drafted and, upon completion of basic training, assigned to a non-combat clerical position. It was his literary skill that kept him out of the front lines — not his skill in stringing words together but his ability to type. Most men couldn’t do it.

When he got out of the service, young Fielding wrote a few more stories, but he found the business discouraging. There were, he had come to realize, too many people who wanted to be writers. Sometimes it seemed as though everybody wanted to be a writer, including people who could barely read. And when they tried their hand at it, they almost always thought it was good.

Was such monumental self-delusion as easy in other areas of human endeavor? I think not. Every boy wants to be a professional baseball player, but an inability to hit a curveball generally disabuses a person of the fantasy. Untalented artists, trying to draw something, can look at it and see that it didn’t come out as they intended. Singers squawk, hear themselves, and find something else to do. But writers write, and look at what they have written, and wonder what’s keeping the Nobel Commission fellows from ringing them up.

You shake your heads at this, and call it folly. Byron Fielding called it opportunity, and opened his arms wide.

He set up shop as a literary agent; he would represent authors, placing their work with publishers, overseeing the details of their contracts, and taking ten percent of their earnings for his troubles. This was nothing new; there were quite a few people earning their livings in this fashion — though not a fraction of the number there are today. But how, one wondered, could Byron Fielding hope to establish himself as an agent? He had no contacts. He didn’t know any writers — or publishers, or anyone else. What would persuade an established writer to do business with him?

In point of fact, Fielding had no particular interest in established writers, realizing that he had little to offer them. What he wanted was the wannabes, the hopeful hopeless scribblers looking for the one break that would transform a drawer full of form rejection slips into a life of wealth and fame. He rented office space, called himself Byron Fielding, called his company the Byron Fielding Literary Agency, and ran ads in magazines catering to the same hopeful hopeless ones he was counting on to make him rich. “I sell fiction and non-fiction to America’s top markets,” he announced. “I’d like to sell them your material.” And he explained his terms. If you were a professional writer, with several sales to national publishers to your credit, he would represent you at the standard terms of 10 % commission. If you were a beginner, he was forced to charge you a reading fee of $1 per thousand words, with a minimum of $5 and a maximum of $25 for book-length manuscripts. If your material was salable, he would rush it out to market on his usual terms. If it could be revised, he’d tell you how to fix it — and not charge you an extra dime for the advice. And if, sadly, it was unsalable, he’d tell you just what was wrong with it, and how to avoid such errors in the future.

The money rolled in.

And so did the stories, and they were terrible. Fielding stacked them, and when each had been in his office for two weeks, so that it would look as though he’d taken his time and given it a careful reading, he returned it with a letter explaining just what was wrong with it. Most of the time what was wrong was the writer’s utter lack of talent, but he never said that. Instead he praised the style and found fault with the plot, which somehow was always flawed in ways that revision could not cure. Put this one away, he advised each author, and write another, and send that along as soon as it’s finished. With, of course, another reading fee.

The business was profitable from the beginning, with writers incredibly sending in story after story, failing entirely to learn from experience. Fielding thought he’d milk it for as long as it lasted, but a strange thing happened. Skimming through the garbage, he found himself coming across a story now and then that wasn’t too bad. “Congratulations!” he wrote the author. “I’m taking this right out to market.” It was probably a mistake, he thought, but this way at least he got away with a shorter letter.

And some of the stories sold. And, out of the blue, a professional writer got in touch, wondering if Fielding would represent him on a straight commission basis. By the time my patient, young Gerald Metzner, went to work for him, Byron Fielding was an established agent with over ten years in the business and a string of professional clients whose work he sold to established book and magazine publishers throughout the world.

Fielding had half a dozen people working for him by then. One ran a writing school, with a post office box for an address and no visible connection with Byron Fielding or his agency. The lucky student worked his way through a ten-lesson correspondence course, and upon graduating received a certificate of completion and the suggestion that he might submit his work (with a reading fee) to guess who. Another employee dealt with the professional clients, working up market lists for the material they submitted. Two others — Gerald Metzner was one of them — read the scripts that came in over the transom, the ones accompanied by reading fees. “I can see you are no stranger to your typewriter,” he would write to some poor devil who couldn’t write an intelligible laundry list. “Although this story has flaws that render it unsalable, I’ll be eager to see your next effort. I feel confident that you’re on your way.” The letter, needless to say, went out over Byron Fielding’s signature. As far as the mopes were concerned, Fielding was reading every word himself, and writing every word of his replies. Another employee, also writing over Fielding’s mean little scrawl, engaged in personal collaboration with the more desperate clients. For a hundred bucks, the great man himself would purportedly work with them step-by-step, from outline through first draft to final polish. They would be writing their stories hand in hand with Byron Fielding, and when it was finished to his satisfaction he would take it out to market.

The client (or victim, as you prefer) would mail in his money and his outline. The hireling, who had very likely never sold anything himself, and might in fact not ever have written anything, would suggest some arbitrary change. The client would send in the revised outline, and when it was approved he would furnish a first draft. Again the employee would suggest improvements, and again the poor bastard would do as instructed, whereupon he’d be told that the story, a solid professional effort, was on its way to market.

But it remained a sow’s ear, however artfully embroidered, and Fielding wouldn’t have dreamed of sullying what little reputation he had by showing such tripe to an editor. So the manuscript went into a drawer in the office, and there it remained, while the hapless scribbler was encouraged to get cracking on another story.

The fee business was ethically and morally offensive, and one wondered why Fielding didn’t give it up once he could afford to. The personal collaboration racket was worse; it was actionably fraudulent, and a client who learned what was going on could clearly have pressed criminal charges against his conniving collaborator. It’s not terribly likely that Fielding could have gone to jail for it, but a determined prosecutor with the wind up could have given him some bad moments. And if there were a writer or two on the jury, he couldn’t expect much in the way of mercy.

Fielding hung on to it because he didn’t want to give up a dime. He didn’t treat his professional clients a great deal better, for in a sense he had only one client, and that client was Byron Fielding. He acted, not in his clients’ interests, but in his own. If they coincided, fine. If not, tough.

I could go on, but you get the idea. So did young Metzner, and he wasn’t there for long. He worked for Fielding for a year and a half, then resigned to do his own writing. A lot of the agency’s pro clients were writing soft-core paperback fiction, and Metzner tried one of his own. When it was done he sent it to Fielding, who sold it for him.

He did a few more, and was making more money than he’d made as an employee, and working his own hours. But it wasn’t what he really wanted to write, and he tried a few other things, and wound up out in California, writing for film and television. Fielding referred him to a Hollywood agent, who, out of gratitude and the hope of more business, split commissions on Metzner’s sales with Byron Fielding. Thus Fielding made far more money over the years from Gerald Metzner’s screenwriting than he had ever made from his prose, and all he had to do for it was cash the checks the Hollywood agent sent him. That was, to his way of thinking, the ideal author-agent relationship, and he had warm feelings for Metzner — or what passed for warm feelings in such a man.

When Metzner had occasion to come to New York, he more often than not dropped in on his agent. He and Fielding would chat for fifteen minutes, and then he could return to Hollywood and tell himself he hadn’t entirely lost touch with the world of books and publishing. He had an agent, didn’t he? His agent was always happy to see him, wasn’t he?

And who was to say he wouldn’t someday try his hand at another novel?

Years passed, as they so often do. Business again called Gerald Metzner to New York, and he arranged to drop by Fielding’s office on a free afternoon. As usual, he waited for a few minutes in the outer office, taking a look at the sea of minions banging away at typewriters. It seemed to him that there were more of them every time he visited, more men sitting at more desks, telling even more of the hopeful hopeless that they had talent in rare abundance, and surely the next story would make the grade, but, sad to say, this story, with its poorly constructed plot, was not the one to bring their dreams to fulfillment. What a story required, you see, was a strong and sympathetic lead character confronted by a problem, and... Di dah di dah di dah.

He broke off his reverie when he was summoned to Fielding’s private office. There the agent waited, looking younger than his years, health club-toned and sunlamp-tanned, a broad white-toothed smile on his face. The two men shook hands and took seats on opposite sides of the agent’s immaculate desk.

They chatted a bit, about nothing in particular, and then Fielding fixed his eyes on Gerald. “You probably notice that there’s something different about me,” he said.

“Now that you mention it,” Metzner said, “I did notice that.” Years of pitching doubtful premises to studio heads and network execs had taught him to think on his feet — or, more accurately, on his behind. What, he wondered, was different about the man? Same military haircut, same horn-rimmed glasses. No beard, no mustache. What the hell was Fielding talking about?

“But I’ll bet you can’t quite put your finger on it.”

Well, that was a help. Maybe this would be like soap opera dialogue — you could get through it without a script, just going with the flow.

“You know,” he said, “that’s it exactly. I sense it, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“That’s because it’s abstract, Gerry.”

“That would explain it.”

“But no less real.”

“No less real,” he echoed.

Fielding smiled like a shark, but then how else would he smile? “I won’t keep you in suspense,” he said. “I’ll tell you what it is. I’ve got peace of mind.”

“Peace of mind,” Metzner marveled.

“Yes, peace of mind.” The agent leaned forward. “Gerry,” he said, “ever since I opened up for business I’ve been the toughest, meanest, most miserable sonofabitch who ever lived. I’ve always wrung every nickel I could out of every deal I touched. I worked sixty, seventy hours a week, and I used the whip on the people who worked for me. And do you know why?”

Metzner shook his head.

“Because I thought I had to,” Fielding said. “I really believed I’d be screwed otherwise. I’d run out of money, I’d be out on the street, my family would go hungry. So I couldn’t let a penny get away from me. You know, until my lawyers absolutely insisted, I wouldn’t even shut down the Personal Collaboration dodge. ‘Byron, you’re out of your mind,’ they told me. ‘That’s consumer fraud, and you’re doing it through the mails. It’s a fucking federal offense and you could go to Leavenworth for it, and what the hell do you need it for? Shut it down!’ And they were right, and I knew they were right, but they had to tell me a dozen times before I did what they wanted. Because we made good money out of the PC clients, and I thought I needed every cent of it.”

“But now you have peace of mind,” Metzner prompted.

“I do, Gerry, and you could see it right away, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t know what it was you were seeing. Peace of mind, Gerry. It’s a wonderful thing, maybe the single most wonderful thing in the world.”

Time for the violins to come in, Metzner thought. “How did it happen, Byron?”

“A funny thing,” Fielding said. “I sat down with my accountant about eight months ago, the way I always do once a year. To go over things, look at the big picture. And he told me I had more than enough money left to keep me in great shape for as long as I live. ‘You could shut down tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and you could live like a king for another fifty years, and you won’t run out of money. You’ve got all the money you could possibly need, and it’s in solid risk-free inflation-resistant investments, and I just wish every client of mine was in such good shape.’”

“That’s great,” said Metzner, who wished he himself were in such good shape, or within a thousand miles thereof.

“And a feeling came over me,” Fielding said, “and I didn’t know what the feeling was, because I had never felt anything like it before. It was a relief, but it was a permanent kind of relief, the kind that means you can stay relieved. You’re not just out of the woods for the time being. You’re all of a sudden in a place where there are no woods. Free and clear — and I realized there was a name for the feeling I had, and it was peace of mind.”

“I see.”

“Do you, Gerry? I’ll tell you, it changed my life. All that pressure, all that anxiety — gone!” He grinned, then straightened up in his chair. “Of course,” he said, “on the surface, nothing’s all that different. I still hustle every bit as hard as I ever did. I still squeeze every dime I can out of every deal I touch. I still go for the throat, I still hang on like a bulldog, I’m still the most miserable sonofabitch in the business.”

“Oh?”

“But now it’s not because I have to be like that,” Fielding exulted. “It’s because I want to. That’s what I love, Gerry. It’s who I am. But now, thank God, I’ve got peace of mind!”

“What a curious story,” said the priest. “I’m as hard pressed to put my finger on the point of it as your young man was to recognize Fielding’s peace of mind. Fielding seems to be saying that his greed had its roots in his insecurity. I suppose his origins were humble?”

“Lower middle class,” the doctor said. “No money in the family, but they were a long way from impoverished. Still, insecurity, like the heart, has reasons that reason knows nothing of. If he’s to be believed, Byron Fielding grew up believing he had to grab every dollar he could or he risked ruin, poverty, and death.”

“Then he became wealthy,” the priest said, “and, more to the point, came to believe he was wealthy, and financially secure.”

“Fuck-you money,” the policeman said, and explained the phrase when the priest raised an eyebrow. “Enough money, Priest, so that the possessor can say ‘fuck you’ to anyone.”

“An enviable state,” the priest said. “Or is it? The man attained that state, and his greed, which no longer imprisoned him, still operated as before. It was his identity, part and parcel of his personality. He remained greedy and heartless, not out of compulsion but out of choice, out of a sense of self.” He frowned. “Unless we’re to take his final remarks cum grano salis?” To the puzzled policeman he said, “With a grain of salt, that is to say. You translated fuck-you money for me, so at least I can return the favor. A sort of quid pro quo, which in turn means...”

“That one I know, Priest.”

“And Fielding was not stretching the truth when he said he was the same vicious bastard he’d always been,” the doctor put in. “Peace of mind didn’t seem to have mellowed him at all. Did I mention his brother?”

The men shook their heads.

“Fielding had a brother,” the doctor said, “and, when it began to appear as though this scam of his might prove profitable, Fielding put his brother to work for him. He made his brother change his name, and picked Arnold Fielding for him, having in mind the poet Matthew Arnold. The brother, whom everyone called Arnie, functioned as a sort of office manager, and was also a sort of mythical beast invoked by Byron in time of need. If, for example, an author came in to cadge an advance, or ask for something else Byron Fielding didn’t want to grant, the agent wouldn’t simply turn him down. ‘Let me ask Arnie,’ he would say, and then he’d go into the other office and twiddle his thumbs for a moment, before returning to shake his head sadly at the client. ‘Arnie says no,’ he’d report. ‘If it were up to me it’d be a different story, but Arnie says no.’”

“But he hadn’t actually consulted his brother?”

“No, of course not. Well, here’s the point. Some years after Gerald Metzner learned about Byron Fielding’s peace of mind, Arnie Fielding had a health scare and retired to Florida. He recovered, and in due course found Florida and retirement both bored him to distraction, and he came back to New York. He went to see his brother Byron and told him he had decided to go into business. And what would he do? Well, he said, there was only one business he knew, and that’s the one he would pick. He intended to set up shop on his own as a literary agent.

“‘The best of luck to you,’ Byron Fielding told him. ‘What are you going to call yourself?’

“‘The Arnold Fielding Literary Agency,’ Arnie said.

“Byron shook his head. ‘Better not,’ he said. ‘You use the Fielding name and I’ll take you to court. I’ll sue you.’

“‘You’d sue me? Your own brother?’

“‘For every cent you’ve got,’ Byron told him.”

The soldier lit his pipe. “He’d sue his own brother,” he said, “to prevent him from doing business under the name he had foisted upon him. The man may have achieved peace of mind, Doctor, but I don’t think we have to worry that it mellowed him.”

“Arnie never did open his own agency,” the doctor said. “He died a year or so after that, though not of a broken heart, but from a recurrence of the illness that had sent him into retirement initially. And the old pirate himself, Byron Fielding, only survived him by a couple of years.”

“And your young writer?”

“Not so young anymore,” said the doctor. “He had a successful career as a screenwriter, until ageism lessened his market value, at which time he returned to novel-writing. But the well-paid Hollywood work had taken its toll, and the novels he wrote all failed.”

They were considering that in companionable silence when a log burned through and fell in the fireplace. They turned at the sound, observed the shower of sparks, and heard in answer a powerful discharge of methane from the old man’s bowels.

“God, the man can fart!” cried the doctor. “Light up your pipe, Soldier. What I wouldn’t give for a cigar!”

“A cigar,” said the priest, thoughtfully.

“Sometimes it’s only a cigar,” the doctor said, “as the good Dr. Freud once told us. But in this instance it would do double duty as an air freshener. Priest, are you going to deal those cards?”

“I was just about to,” said the priest, “until you mentioned the cigar.”

“What has a cigar, and a purely hypothetical cigar at that, to do with playing a long-delayed hand of poker?”

“Nothing,” said the priest, “but it has something to do with greed. In a manner of speaking.”

“I’m greedy because I’d rather inhale the aroma of good Havana leaf than the wind from that old codger’s intestines?”

“No, no, no,” said the priest. “It’s a story, that’s all. Your mention of a cigar put me in mind of a story.”

“Tell it,” the policeman urged.

“It’s a poor story compared to those you all have told,” the priest said. “But it has to do with greed.”

“And cigars?”

“And cigars, yes. It definitely has to do with cigars.”

“Put the cards down,” the doctor said, “and tell the story.”

There was a man I used to know (said the priest) whom I’ll call Archibald O’Bannion, Archie to his intimates. He started off as a hod carrier on building sites, applied himself diligently learning his trade, and wound up with his own construction business. He was a hard worker and a good businessman, as it turned out, and he did well. He was motivated by the desire for profit, and for the accoutrements of success, but I don’t know that I would call him a greedy man. He was a hard bargainer and an intense competitor, certainly, and he liked to win. But greedy? He never struck me that way.

And he was charitable, more than generous in his contributions to the church and to other good causes. It is possible, to be sure, for a man to be at once greedy and generous, to grab with one hand while dispensing with the other. But Archie O’Bannion never struck me as a greedy man. He was a cigar smoker, and he never lit a cigar without offering them around, nor was there anything perfunctory about the offer. When he smoked a cigar, he genuinely wanted you to join him.

He treated himself well, as he could well afford to do. His home was large and imposing, his wardrobe extensive and well chosen, his table rich and varied. In all these areas, his expenditures were consistent with his income and status.

His one indulgence — he thought it an indulgence — was his cigars.

He smoked half a dozen a day, and they weren’t William Penn or Hav-a-Tampa, either. They were the finest cigars he could buy. I liked a good cigar myself in those days, though I could rarely afford one, and when Archie would offer me one of his, well, I didn’t often turn him down. He was a frequent visitor to the rectory, and I can recall no end of evenings when we sat in pleasantly idle conversation, puffing on cigars he’d provided.

Then the day came when a collection of cigars went on the auction block, and he bought them all.

A cigar smoker’s humidor is not entirely unlike an oenophile’s wine cellar, and sometimes there is even an aftermarket for its contents. Cigars don’t command the prices of rare bottles of wine, and I don’t know that they’re collected in quite the same way, but when a cigar smoker dies, the contents of his humidor are worth something, especially since Castro came into power in Cuba. With the American embargo in force, Havana cigars were suddenly unobtainable. One could always have them smuggled in through some country that continued to trade with Cuba, but that was expensive and illegal, and, people said, the post-revolution cigars were just not the same. Many of the cigar makers had fled the island nation, and the leaf did not seem to be what it was, and, well, the result was that pre-Castro cigars became intensely desirable.

A cigar is a perishable thing, but properly stored and maintained there’s no reason why it cannot last almost forever. In this particular instance, the original owner was a cigar aficionado who began laying in a supply of premium Havanas shortly after Castro took power. Perhaps he anticipated the embargo. Perhaps he feared a new regime would mean diminished quality. Whatever it was, he bought heavily, stored his purchases properly, and then, his treasures barely sampled, he was diagnosed with oral cancer. The lip, the mouth, the palate — I don’t know the details, but his doctor told him in no uncertain terms that he had to give up his cigars.

Not everyone can. Sigmund Freud, whom Doctor quoted a few minutes ago, went on smoking while his mouth and jaw rotted around his cigar. But this chap’s addiction was not so powerful as his instinct for self-preservation, and so he stopped smoking then and there.

But he held on to his cigars. His several humidors were attractive furnishings as well as being marvels of temperature and humidity control, and he liked the looks of them in his den. He broke the habit entirely, to the point where his eyes would pass over the humidors regularly without his ever registering a conscious thought of their contents, let alone a longing for them. You might think he’d have pressed cigars upon his friends, but he didn’t, perhaps out of reluctance to have to stand idly by and breathe in the smoke of a cigar he could not enjoy directly. Or perhaps, as I somehow suspect, he was saving them for some future date when it would be safe for him to enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed.

Well, no matter. In the event he did recover from his cancer, and some years passed, and he died of something else. And, since neither his widow nor his daughters smoked cigars, they wound up consigned for sale at auction, and Archie O’Bannion bought them all.

There were two thousand of them, and Archie paid just under sixty thousand dollars for the lot. That included the several humidors, which were by no means valueless, but when all was said and done he’d shelled out upwards of twenty-five dollars a cigar. If he consumed them at his usual rate, a day’s smoking would cost him $150. He could afford that, but there was no denying it was an indulgence.

But what troubled him more than the cost was the fact that his stock was virtually irreplaceable. Every cigar he smoked was a cigar he could never smoke again. Two thousand cigars sounded like an extraordinary quantity, but if you smoked six a day starting the first of January, you’d light up the last one after Thanksgiving dinner. They wouldn’t last the year.

“It’s a damned puzzle,” he told me. “What do I do? Smoke one a day? That way they’ll last five years and change, but all the while five out of six of the cigars I smoke will be slightly disappointing. Maybe I should smoke ’em all up, one right after the other, and enjoy them while I can. Or maybe I should just let them sit there in their beautiful humidors, remaining moist and youthful while I dry up and age. Then when I drop dead it’ll be Mary Katherine’s turn to put them up for auction.”

I said something banal about the conundrum of having one’s cake and eating it, too.

“By God,” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? Have a cigar, Father.”

But, I demurred, surely not one of his Havanas? “You smoke it,” he said. “You earned it, Father, and you can damn well smoke it and enjoy it.”

And he picked up the phone and called his insurance agent.

Archie, I should mention, had come to regard the insurance industry as a necessary evil. He’d had trouble getting his insurers to pay claims he felt were entirely legitimate, and disliked the way they’d do anything they could to weasel out of their responsibility. So he had no compunctions about what he did now.

He insured his cigars, opting for the top-of-the-line policy, one which provided complete coverage, not even excluding losses resulting from flood, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. He declared their value at the price he had paid for them, paid the first year’s premium in advance, and went on with his life.

A little less than a year later, he smoked the last of his premium Havanas. Whereupon he filed a claim against his insurance company, explaining that all two thousand of the cigars were lost in a series of small fires.

You will probably not be surprised that the insurance company refused to pay the claim, dismissing it as frivolous. The cigars, they were quick to inform him, had been consumed in the normal fashion, and said consumption was therefore not a recoverable loss.

Archie took them to court, where the judge agreed that his claim was frivolous, but ordered the company to pay it all the same. The policy, he pointed out, did not exclude fire, and in fact specifically included it as a hazard against which Archie’s cigars were covered. Nor did it exclude as unacceptable risk the consumption of the cigars in the usual fashion. “I won,” he told me. “They warranted the cigars were insurable, they assumed the risk, and then of course they found something to whine about, the way they always do. But I stuck it to the bastards and I beat ’em in court. I thought they’d drag it out and appeal the judgment, and I was set to fight it all the way, but they caved in. Wrote me a check for the full amount of the policy, and now I can go looking for someone else with pre-Castro Havanas to sell, because I’ve developed a taste for them, let me tell you. And I’ve got you to thank, Father, for a remark you made about having your cake and eating it, too, because I smoked my cigars and I’ll have ’em, too, just as soon as I find someone who’s got ’em for sale. Of course this is a stunt you can only pull once, but once is enough, and I feel pretty good about it. The Havanas are all gone, but these Conquistadores from Honduras aren’t bad, so what the hell, Father. Have a cigar!”

“I don’t know why you were so apologetic about your story, Priest,” the soldier said. “I think it’s a fine one. I’m a pipe smoker myself, and any dismay one might conceivably feel at watching one’s tobacco go up in smoke is more than offset by the satisfaction of improving the pipe itself, as one does with each pipeful one smokes. But pipe tobacco, even very fine pipe tobacco, costs next to nothing compared to premium cigars. I can well understand the man’s initial frustration, and ultimate satisfaction.”

“An excellent story,” the doctor agreed, “but then it would be hard for me not to delight in a story in which an insurance company is hoist on its own petard. The swine have institutionalized greed, and it’s nice to see them get one in the eye.”

“I wonder,” said the policeman.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the doctor told him. “You’re thinking that this fellow Archie committed lawful fraud. You’re thinking it was his intention to make the insurance company subsidize his indulgence in costly Cuban tobacco. That’s entirely correct, but as far as I’m concerned it’s quite beside the point. Lawful fraud is an insurance company’s stock in trade, and anyway what’s sixty thousand dollars on their corporate balance sheet? I say more power to Archie, and long may he puff away.”

“All well and good,” the policeman said, “but that’s not what I was thinking.”

“It’s not?”

“Not at all,” he told the doctor, and turned to the priest. “There’s more to the story, isn’t there, Priest?”

The priest smiled. “I was wondering if anyone would think of it,” he said. “I rather thought you might, Policeman.”

“Think of what?” the soldier wanted to know.

“And what did they do?” the policeman asked. “Did they merely voice the threat? Or did they go all the way and have him arrested?”

“Arrested?” cried the doctor. “For what?”

“Arson,” the policeman said. “Didn’t he say the cigars were lost in a series of small fires? I suppose they could have charged him with two thousand counts of criminal arson.”

“Arson? They were his cigars, weren’t they?”

“As I understand it.”

“And doesn’t a man have the right to smoke his own cigars?”

“Not in a public place,” said the policeman. “But yes, in the ordinary course of events, he would have been well within his rights to smoke them. But he had so arranged matters that smoking one of those cigars amounted to intentional destruction of insured property.”

“But that’s an outrage,” the doctor said.

“Is it, Doctor?” The soldier puffed on his pipe. “You liked the story when the insurance company was hoist on its own petard. Now Archie’s hoisted even higher on a petard of his own making. Wouldn’t you say that makes it a better story?”

“A splendid story,” said the doctor, “but no less an outrage for it.”

“In point of fact,” the policeman said, “Archie could have been charged with arson even in the absence of a claim, the argument being that he forfeited the right to smoke the cigars the moment he insured them. Practically speaking, though, it was pressing the claim that triggered the criminal charge. Did he actually go to jail, Priest? Because that would seem a little excessive.”

The priest shook his head. “Charges were dropped,” he said, “when the parties reached agreement. Archie gave back the money, and both sides paid their own legal costs. And he got to tell the story on himself, and he was a good fellow, you know, and could see the humor in a situation. He said it was worth it, all things considered, and a real pre-Castro cigar was worth the money, even if you had to pay for it yourself.”

The other three nodded at the wisdom of that, and once again the room fell silent. The priest took the deck of cards in hand, looked at the others in turn, and put the cards down undealt. And then, from the fireside, the fifth man present broke the silence.

“Greed,” said the old man, in a voice like the wind in dry grass. “What a subject for conversation!”

“We’ve awakened you,” said the priest, “and for that let me apologize on everyone’s behalf.”

“It is I who should apologize,” said the old man, “for dozing intermittently during such an illuminating and entertaining conversation. But at my age the line between sleep and wakefulness is a tenuous proposition at best. One is increasingly uncertain whether one is dreaming or awake, and past and present become hopelessly entangled. I close my eyes and lose myself in thought, and all at once I am a boy. I open them and I am an old man.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, and the others nodded in assent.

“And while I am apologizing,” the old man said, “I should add a word of apology for my bowels. I seem to have an endless supply of wind, which in turn grows increasingly malodorous. Still, I’m not incontinent. One grows thankful in the course of time for so many things one took for granted, if indeed one ever considered them at all.”

“One keeps thanking God,” the priest said, “for increasingly smaller favors.”

“Greed,” said the old man. “What a greedy young man I was! And what a greedy man I stayed, throughout all the years of my life!”

“No more than anyone, I’m sure,” the policeman said.

“I always wanted more,” the old man remembered. “My parents were comfortably situated, and furnished me with a decent upbringing and a good education. They hoped I would go into a profession where I might be expected to do some good in the world. Medicine, for example.”

“‘First, do no harm,’” the doctor murmured.

“But I went into business,” said the old man, “because I wanted more money than I could expect to earn from medicine or law or any of the professions. And I stopped at nothing legal to succeed in all my enterprises. I was merciless to competitors, I drove my employees, I squeezed my suppliers, and every decision I made was calculated to maximize my profits.”

“That,” said the soldier, “seems to be how business is done. Struggling for the highest possible profits, men of business act ultimately for the greatest good of the population at large.”

“You probably believe in the tooth fairy, too,” the old man said, and cackled. “If I did any good for the rest of the world, it was inadvertent and immaterial. I was trying only to do good for myself, and to amass great wealth. And in that I succeeded. You might not guess it to look at me now, but I became very wealthy.”

“And what happened to your riches?”

“What happened to them? Why, nothing happened to them. I won them and I kept them.” The old man’s bowels rumbled, but he didn’t appear to notice. “I lived well,” he said, “and I invested wisely and with good fortune. And I bought things.”

“What did you buy?” the policeman wondered.

“Things,” said the old man. “I bought paintings, and I don’t think I was ever taken in by any false Vermeers, like the young man in your story. I bought fine furniture, and a palatial home to keep it in. I bought antique oriental carpets, I bought Roman glass, I bought pre-Columbian sculpture. I bought rare coins, ancient and modern, and I collected postage stamps.”

“And cigars?”

“I never cared for them,” the old man said, “but if I had I would have bought the best, and I can well appreciate that builder’s dilemma. Because I would have wanted to smoke them, but my desire to go on owning them would have been at least as strong.”

They waited for him to go on; when he remained silent, the priest spoke up. “I suppose,” he said, “that, as with so many desires, the passage of time lessened your desire for more.”

“You think so?”

“Well, it would stand to reason that—”

“The vultures thought so,” the old man said. “My nephews and nieces, thoughtfully telling me the advantages of making gifts during my lifetime rather than waiting for my estate to be subject to inheritance taxes. Museum curators, hoping I’d give them paintings now, or so arrange things that they’d be given over to them immediately upon my death. Auctioneers, assuring me of the considerable advantages of disposing of my stamps and coins and ancient artifacts while I still had breath in my body. That way, they said, I could have the satisfaction of seeing my collections properly sold, and the pleasure of getting the best possible terms for them.

“I told them I’d rather have the pleasure and satisfaction of continuing ownership. And do you know what they said? Why, they told me the same thing that everybody told me, everybody who was trying to get me to give up something that I treasured. You can guess what they said, can’t you?”

It was the doctor who guessed. “You can’t take it with you,” he said.

“Exactly! Each of the fools said it as if he were repeating the wisdom of the ages. ‘You can’t take it with you.’ And the worst of the lot, the mean little devils from organized charities, armored by the pretense that they were seeking not for themselves but for others, they would sometimes add yet another pearl of wisdom. There are no pockets in a shroud, they would assure me.”

“I think that’s a line in a song,” the soldier said.

“Well, please don’t sing it,” said the old man. “Can’t take it with you! No pockets in a shroud! And the worst of it is that they’re quite right, aren’t they? Wherever that last long journey leads, a man has to take it alone. He can’t bring his French impressionists, his proof Liberty Seated quarters, his Belgian semi-postals. He can’t even take along a checkbook. No matter what I have, no matter how greatly I cherish it, I can’t take it with me.”

“And you realized the truth in that,” the priest said.

“Of course I did. I may be a doddering old man, but I’m not a fool.”

“And the knowledge changed your life,” the priest suggested.

“It did,” the old man agreed. “Why do you think I’m here, baking by the fire, souring the air with the gas from within me? Why do you think I cling so resolutely, neither asleep nor awake, to this hollow husk of life?”

“Why?” the doctor asked, after waiting without success for the old man to answer his own question.

“Because,” the old man said, “if I can’t take it with me, the hell with it. I don’t intend to go.”

His eyes flashed in triumph, then closed abruptly as he slumped in his chair. The others glanced at one another, alarm showing in their eyes. “A wonderful exit line,” the doctor said, “and a leading candidate for the next edition of Famous Last Words, but do you suppose the old boy took the opportunity to catch the bus to Elysium?”

“We should call someone,” the soldier said. “But whom? A doctor? A policeman? A priest?”

There was a snore, shortly followed by a zestful fart. “Thank heavens,” said the doctor, and the others sighed and nodded, and the priest picked up the deck and began to deal out the cards for the next hand.