Fools die

Book III
Chapter 11

Valerie’s father fixed it so that I didn’t lose my job. My time away was credited as vacation and sick time, so I even got paid for my month’s goofing off in Vegas. But when I went back, the Regular Army major, my boss, was a little pissed off. I didn’t worry about that. If you’re in the federal Civil Service of the United States of America and you are not ambitious and you don’t mind a little humiliation, your boss has no power.

I worked as a GS-6 administrative assistant to Army Reserve units. Since the units met only once a week for training, I was responsible for all administrative work of the three units assigned to me. It was a cinch racket job. I had a total of six hundred men to take care of, make out their payrolls, mimeograph their instruction manuals, all that crap. I had to check the administrative work of the units done by Reserve personnel. They made up morning reports for their meetings, cut promotion orders, prepared assignments. All this really wasn’t as much work as it sounded except when the units went off to summer training camp for two weeks. Then I was busy.

Ours was a friendly office. There was another civilian named Frank Alcore who was older than I and belonged to a Reserve unit he worked for as an administrator. Frank, with impeccable logic, talked me into going crooked. I worked alongside him for two years and never knew he was taking graft. I found out only after I came back from Vegas.

The Army Reserve of the United States was a great pork barrel. By just coming to a meeting for two hours a week you got a full day’s pay. An officer could pick up over twenty bucks. A top-ranking enlisted man with his longevity ten dollars. Plus pension rights. And during the two hours you just went to meetings of instruction or fell asleep at a film.

Most civilian administrators joined the Army Reserve. Except me. My magician hat divined the thousand-to-one-shot kicker. That there might be another war and the Reserve units would be the first guys called into the Regular Army.

Everybody thought I was crazy. Frank Alcore begged me to join. I had been a private in WW II for three years, but he told me he could get me appointed sergeant major based on my civilian experience as an Army unit administrator. It was a ball, doing your patriotic duty, earning double pay. But I hated the idea of taking orders again even if it was for two hours a week and two weeks in the summer. As a working stiff I had to follow my superior’s instructions. But there’s a big difference between orders and instructions.

Every time I read newspaper reports about our country’s well-trained Reserve force I shook my head. Over a million men just fucking off. I wondered why they didn’t abolish the whole thing. But a lot of small towns depended on Army Reserve payrolls to make their economies go. A lot of politicians in the state legislatures and Congress were very high-ranking Reserve officers and made a nice bundle.

And then something happened that changed my whole life. Changed it only for a short time but changed it for the better both economically and psychologically. I became a crook. Courtesy of the military structure of the United States.

Shortly after I came back from Vegas the young men in America became aware that enlisting in the newly legislated six months’ active duty program would net them a profit of eighteen months’ freedom. A young man eligible for the draft simply enlisted in the Army Reserve program and did six months’ Regular Army time in the States. After that he did five and a half years in the Army Reserve. Which meant going to one two-hour meeting a week and one two-week summer camp active duty. If he waited and got drafted, he’d serve two full years, and maybe in Korea.

But there were only so many openings in the Army Reserve. A hundred kids applied for each vacancy, and Washington had a quota system put into effect. The units I handled received a quota of thirty a month, first come, first served.

Finally I had a list of almost a thousand names. I controlled the list administratively, and I played it square. My bosses, the Regular Army major adviser and a Reserve lieutenant colonel commanding the units, had the official authority. Sometimes they slipped some favorite to the top. When they told me to do that, I never protested. What did I give a shit? I was working on my book. The time I put into the job was just to get a paycheck.

Things started getting tighter. More and more young men were getting drafted. Cuba and Vietnam were far off in the horizon. About this time I noticed something fishy going on. And it had to be very fishy for me to notice because I had absolutely no interest in my job or its surroundings.

Frank Alcore was older and married with a couple of kids. We had the same Civil Service grade, we operated on our own, he had his units and I had mine. We both made the same amount of money, about a hundred bucks a week. But he belonged to his Army Reserve unit as a master sergeant and earned another extra grand a year. Yet he was driving to work in a new Buick and parking it in a nearby garage which cost three bucks a day. He was betting all the ball games, football, basketball and baseball, and I knew how much that cost. I wondered where the hell he was getting the dough. I kidded him and he winked and told me he could really pick them. He was killing his bookmaker. Well, that was my racket, he was on my ground-and I knew he was full of shit. Then one day he took me to lunch in a good Italian joint on Ninth Avenue and showed his hole card.

Over coffee, he asked, “Merlyn, how many guys do you enlist a month for your units? What quota do you get from Washington?”

“Last month thirty,” I said. “It goes from twenty-five to forty depending how many guys we lose.”

“Those enlistment spots are worth money,” Frank said. “You can make a nice bundle.”

I didn’t answer. He went on. “Just let me use five of your spaces a month,” he said. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks a spot”

I wasn’t tempted. Five hundred bucks a month was a hundred percent income jump for me. But I just shook my head and told him to forget it. I had that much ego. I had never done anything dishonest in my adult life. It was beneath me to become a common bribe taker. After all, I was an artist. A great novelist waiting to be famous. To be dishonest was to be a villain. I would have muddied my narcissistic image of myself. It didn’t matter that my wife and children lived on the edge of poverty. It didn’t matter that I had to take an extra job at night to make ends meet. I was a hero born. Though the idea of kids paying to get into the Army tickled me.

Frank didn’t give up. “You got no risk,” he said. “Those lists can be faked. There’s no master sheet. You don’t have to take money from the kids or make deals. I’ll do all that. You just enlist them when I say OK. Then the cash goes from my hand to yours.”

Well, if he was giving me a hundred, he had to be getting two hundred. And he had about fifteen slots of his own to enlist, and at the rate of two hundred each that was three grand a month. What I didn’t realize was that he couldn’t use the fifteen slots for himself. The commanding officers of his units had people to be taken care of. Political bosses, congressmen, United States senators sent kids in to beat the draft. They were taking the bread out of Frank’s mouth and he was properly pissed off. He could sell only five slots a month. But still, a grand a month tax-free? Still, I said no.

There are all kinds of excuses you can make for finally going crooked. I had a certain image of myself. That I was honorable and would never tell a lie or deceive my fellowman. That I would never do anything underhanded for the sake of money. I thought I was like my brother, Artie. But Artie was down-to-the-bone honest. There was no way for him ever to go crooked. He used to tell me stories about the pressures brought on him on his job. As a chemical engineer testing new drugs for the federal Food and Drug Administration he was in a position of power. He made fairly good money, but when he ran his tests, he disqualified a lot of the drugs that the other federal chemists passed. Then he was approached by the huge drug companies and made to understand that they had jobs which paid a lot more money than he could ever make. If he were a little more flexible, he could move up in the world. Attic brushed them off. Then finally one of the drugs he had vetoed was approved over his head. A year later the drug had to be recalled and banned because of the toxic effects on patients, some of whom died. The whole thing got into the papers, and Artie was a hero for a while. He was even promoted to the highest Civil Service grade. But he was made to understand that he could never go higher. That he would never become the head of the agency because of his lack of understanding of the political necessities of the job. He didn’t care and I was proud of him.

I wanted to live an honorable life, that was my big hang up. I prided myself on being a realist, so I didn’t expect myself to be perfect. But when I did something shitty, I didn’t approve of it or kid myself, and usually I did stop doing the same kind of shitty thing again. But I was often disappointed in myself since there was such a great variety of shifty things a person can do, and so I was always caught by surprise.

Now I had to sell myself the idea of turning crook. I wanted to be honorable became I felt more comfortable telling the truth than lying. I felt more at ease innocent than guilty. I had thought it out. It was a pragmatic desire, not a romantic one. If I had felt more comfortable being a liar and a thief, I would have done so. And therefore was tolerant of those who did so behave. It was, I thought, their metier, not necessarily a moral choice. I claimed that morals had nothing to do with it. But I did not really believe that. In essence I believed in good and evil as values.

And then if truth were told, I was always in competition with other men. And therefore, I wanted to be a better man, a better person. It gave me a satisfaction not to be greedy about money when other men abased themselves for it. To disdain glory, to be honest with women, to be an innocent by choice. It gave me pleasure not to be suspicious of the motives of others and to trust them in almost anything. The truth was I never trusted myself. It was one thing to be honorable, another to be foolhardy.

In short, I would rather be cheated than to cheat someone; I would rather be deceived than be a deceiver; I gladly accepted being hustled as long as I did not become a hustler. I would rather be faked out than be a fake-out artist. And I understood that this was an armor I sheathed myself in, that it was not really admirable. The world could not hurt me if it could not make me feel guilty. If I thought well of myself, what did it matter that others thought ill of me? Of course, it didn’t always work. The armor had chinks. And I made a few slips over the years.

And yet-and yet-I felt that even this, smugly upright as it sounded, was in a funny kind of way the lowest kind of cunning. That my morality rested on a foundation of cold stone. That quite simply there was nothing in life I desired so much that it could corrupt me. The only thing I wanted to do was create a great work of art. But not the fame or money or power, or so I thought. Quite simply to benefit humanity. Ah. Once as an adolescent, beset with guilt and feelings of unworthiness, hopelessly at odds with the world, I stumbled across the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov. That book changed my life. It gave me strength. It made me see the vulnerable beauty of all people no matter how despicable they might outwardly seem. And I always remembered the day I finally gave up the book, took it back to the asylum library and then walked out into the lemony sunlight of an autumn day. I had a feeling of grace.

And so all I wished for was to write a book that would make people feel as I felt that day. It was to me the ultimate exercise of power. And the purest. And so when my first novel was published, one that I worked on for five years, one that I suffered great hardship to publish without any artistic compromise, the first review that I read called it dirty, degenerate, a book that should never have been written and once written should never have been published.

The book made very little money. It received some superlative reviews. It was agreed that I had created a genuine work of art, and indeed, I had to some extent fulfilled my ambition. Some people wrote letters to me that I might have written to Dostoevsky. I found that the consolation of these letters did not make up for the sense of rejection that commercial failure gave me.

I had another idea for a truly great novel, my Crime and Punishment novel. My publisher would not give me an advance. No publisher would. I stopped writing. Debts piled up. My family lived in poverty. My children had nothing that other children had. My wife, my responsibility, was deprived of all material joys of society, etc., etc. I had gone to Vegas. And so I couldn’t write. Now it became clear. To become the artist and good man I yearned to be, I had to take bribes for a little while. You can sell yourself anything.

Still, it took Frank Alcore six months to break me down, and then he had to get lucky. I was intrigued by Frank because he was the complete gambler. When he bought his wife a present, it was always something he could hock in the pawnshop if he ran short of cash. And what I loved was the way he used his checking account.

On Saturdays Frank would go out to do the family shopping. All the neighborhood merchants knew him and they cashed his checks. In the butcher’s he’d buy the finest cuts of veal and beef and spend a good forty dollars. He’d give the butcher a check for a hundred and pocket the sixty bucks’ change. The same story at the grocery and the vegetable man. Even the liquor store. By noon Saturday he’d have about two hundred bucks’ change from his shopping, and he would use that to make his bets on the baseball games. He didn’t have a penny in his checking account to cover. If he lost his cash on Saturday, he’d get credit at his bookmaker’s to bet the Sunday games, doubling up. If he won, he’d rush to the bank on Monday morning to cover his checks. If he lost, he’d let the checks bounce. Then during the week he would hustle bribes for recruiting young draft dodgers into the six months’ program to cover the checks when they came around the second time.

Frank would take me to the night ball games and he’d pay for everything, including the hot dogs. He was a naturally generous guy, and when I tried to pay, he’d push my hand aside and say something like: “Honest men can’t afford to be sports.” I always had a good time with him, even at work. During lunch hour we’d play gin and I would usually beat him for a few dollars, not because I played better cards but because his mind was on his sports action.

Everybody has an excuse for his breakdown in virtue. The truth is you break down when you are prepared to break down.

I came in to work one morning when the ball outside my office was crowded with young men to be enlisted in the Army six months’ program. In fact, the whole armory was full. Au the units were busy enlisting on all eight floors. And the armory was one of those old buildings that had been built to house whole battalions to march around in. Only now half of each floor was for storerooms, classrooms and our administrative offices.

My first customer was a little old man who had brought in a young kid of about twenty-one to be enlisted. He was way down on my list.

“I’m sorry, we won’t be calling you for at least six months,” I said.

The old guy had startlingly blue eyes that radiated power and confidence. “You had better check with your superior,” he said.

At that moment I saw my boss, the Regular Army major signaling frantically to me through his glass partition. I got up and went into his office. The major had been in combat in the Korean War and WW II, with ribbons all over his chest. But he was sweating and nervous.

“Listen,” I said, “that old guy told me I should talk to you. He wants his kid ahead of everybody on the list. I told him I couldn’t do it.”

The major said angrily, “Give him anything he wants. That old guy is a congressman.”

“What about the list?” I said.

“Fuck the list,” the major said.

I went back to my desk where the congressman and his young protege were seated. I started making out the enlistment forms. I recognized the kid’s name now. He would be worth over a hundred million bucks someday. His family was one of the great success stories in American history. And here he was in my office enlisting in the six months’ program to avoid doing a full two years’ active duty.

The congressman behaved perfectly. He didn’t lord it over me, didn’t rub it in that his power made me subvert the rules. He talked quietly, friendly, hitting just the right note. You had to admire the way he handled me. He tried to make me feel I was doing him a favor and mentioned that if there was anything he could ever do for me, I should call his office. The kid kept his mouth shut except to answer my questions when I was typing out his enlistment form.

But I was a little pissed off. I don’t know why. I had no moral objection to the uses of power and its unfairness. It was just that they had sort of run me over and there was nothing I could do about it. Or just maybe the kid was so fucking rich, why couldn’t he do his two years in the Army for a country that had done so well by his family?

So I slipped in a little zinger that they couldn’t know about. I gave the kid a critical MOS recommendation. MOS stands for Military Occupational Specialty, the particular Army job he would be trained for. I recommended him for one of the few electronic specialties in our units. In effect I was making sure that this kid would be one of the first guys called up for active duty in case there was some sort of national emergency. It was a long shot, but what the hell.

The major came out and swore the kid in, making him repeat the oath which included the fact that he did not belong to the Communist party or one of its fronts. Then everybody shook hands all around. The kid controlled himself until he and his congressman started out of my office. Then the kid gave the congressman a little smile.

Now that smile was a child’s smile when he puts something over on his parents and other adults. It is disagreeable to see it on the faces of children. And was more so now. I understood that the smile didn’t really make him a bad kid, but that smile absolved me of any guilt for giving him the booby-trapped MOS.

Frank Alcore had been watching the whole thing from his desk on the other side of the room. He didn’t waste any time. “How long are you going to be a jerk?” Frank asked. “That congressman took a hundred bucks out of your pocket. And God knows what he got out of it. Thousands. If that kid had come in to us, I could have milked him for at least five hundred.” He was positively indignant. Which made me laugh.

“Ah, you don’t take things seriously enough,” Frank said. “You could get a big jump on money, you could take care of a lot of your problems if you’d just listen.”

“It’s not for me,” I said.

“OK, OK,” Frank said. “But you gotta do me a favor. I need an open spot bad. You notice that red-headed kid at my desk? He’ll go five hundred. He’s expecting his draft notice any day. Once he gets the notice he can’t be enlisted in the six months’ program. Against regulations. So I have to enlist him today. And I haven’t got a spot in my units. I want you to enlist him in yours and I’ll split the dough with you. Just this one time.”

He sounded desperate so I said, “OK, send the guy in to see me. But you keep the money. I don’t want it.”

Frank nodded. “Thanks. I’ll hold your share. Just in case you change your mind.”

That night, when T went home, Value gave me supper and I played with the kids before they went to bed. Later Vallie said she would need a hundred dollars for the kids’ Easter clothes and shoes. She didn’t say anything about clothes for herself, though like all Catholics, for her buying a new outfit for Easter was almost a religious obligation.

The following morning I went into the office and said to Frank, “Listen, I changed my mind. I’ll take my half.”

Frank patted me on the shoulder. “That a boy,” he said. He took me into the privacy of the men’s room and counted out five fifty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over. “I’ll have another customer before the end of the week.” I didn’t answer him.

It was the only time in my life I had done anything really dishonest. And I didn’t feel so terrible. To my surprise I actually felt great. I was cheerful as hell, and on the way home I bought Value and the kids presents. When I got there and gave Vallie the hundred dollars for the kids’ clothes, I could see she was relieved that she wouldn’t have to ask her father for the money. That night I slept better than I had for years.

I went into business for myself, without Frank. My whole personality began to change. It was fascinating being a crook. It brought out the best in me. I gave up gambling and even gave up writing; in fact, I lost all interest in the new novel I was working on. I concentrated on my government job for the first time in my life.

I started studying the thick volumes of Army regulations, looking for all the legal loopholes through which draft victims could escape the Army. One of the first things I learned was that medical standards were lowered and raised arbitrarily. A kid who couldn’t pass the physical one month and was rejected for the draft might easily pass six months later. It all depended on what draft quotas were established by Washington. It might even depend on budget allocations. There were clauses that anyone who had had shock treatments for mental disorders was physically ineligible to be drafted. Also homosexuals. Also if he was in some sort of technical job in private industry that made him too valuable to be used as a soldier.

Then I studied my customers. They ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-five, and the hot items were usually about twenty-two or twenty-three, just out of college and panicked at wasting two years in the United States Army. They were frantic to enlist in the Reserve and just do six months’ active duty.

These kids all had money or came from families with money. They all had trained to enter a profession. Someday they would be the upper middle class, the rich, the leaders in many different walks of American life. In wartime they would have fought to get into Officers Candidate School. Now they were willing to settle for being bakers and uniform repair specialists or truck maintenance crewmen. One of them at age twenty-five had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange; another was a securities specialist. At that time Wall Street was alive with new stocks that went up ten points as soon as they were issued, and these kids were getting rich. Money rolled in. They paid me, and I paid my brother, Artie, the few grand I owed him. He was surprised and a little curious. I told him that I had gotten lucky gambling. I was too ashamed to tell him the truth, and it was one of the few times I ever lied to him.

Frank became my adviser. “Watch out for these kids,” he said. “They are real hustlers. Stick it to them and they’ll respect you more.”

I shrugged. I didn’t understand his fine moral distinctions.

“They’re all a fuckin’ bunch of crybabies,” Frank said. “Why can’t they go and do their two years for their country instead of tucking off with this six months bullshit? You and me, we fought in the war, we fought for our country and we don’t own shit. We’re poor. These guys, the country did good by them. Their families are all well-off. They have good jobs, big futures. And the pricks won’t even do their service.”

I was surprised at his anger, he was usually such an easygoing guy, not a bad word for anybody. And I knew his patriotism was genuine. He was fiercely conscientious as a Reserve master sergeant, he was only crooked as a civil servant

In the following months I had no trouble building up a clientele. I made up two lists: One was the official waiting roster; the other was my private list of bribers. I was careful not to be greedy. I used ten slots for pay and ten slots from the official lists. And I made my thousand a month like clockwork. In fact, my clients began to bid, and soon my going price was three hundred dollars. I felt guilty when a poor kid came in and I knew he would never work his way up the official list before he got drafted. That bothered me so much that finally I disregarded the official list entirely. I made ten guys a month pay, and ten lucky guys got in free. In short, I exercised power, something I had always thought I would never do. It wasn’t bad.

I didn’t know it, but I was building up a corps of friends in my units that would help save my skin later on. Also, I made another rule. Anybody who was an artist, a writer, an actor or a fledgling theater director got in for nothing. That was my tithe because I was no longer writing, had no urge to write, and felt guilty about that too. In fact, I was piling up guilt as fast as I was piling up money. And trying to expiate my guilts in a classical American way, doing good deeds.

Frank bawled me out for my lack of business instinct. I was too nice a guy, I had to be tougher or everybody would take advantage of me. But he was wrong. I was not as nice a guy as he thought or the rest of them thought.

Because I was looking ahead. Just using any kind of minimum intelligence, I knew that this racket had to blow up someday. There were too many people involved. Hundreds of civilians with jobs like mine were taking bribes. Thousands of reservists were being enlisted in the six months’ program only after paying a substantial entrance fee. That was something that still tickled me, everybody paying to get into the Army.

One day a man of about fifty came in with his son. He was a wealthy businessman, and his son was a lawyer just starting his practice. The father had a bunch of letters from politicians. He talked to the Regular Army major, then he came in again on the night of the unit’s meeting and met the Reserve colonel. They were very polite to him but referred him to me with the usual quota crap. So the father came over with his son to my desk to put the kid’s name down on the official waiting list. His name was Huller and his son’s name was Jeremy.

Mr. Hiller was in the automobile business, he had a Cadillac dealership. I made his son fill out the usual questionnaire and we chatted.

The kid didn’t say anything, he looked embarrassed. Mr. Hiller said, “How long does he have to wait on this list?”

I leaned back in my chair and gave him the usual answer. “Six months,” I said.

“He’ll be drafted before then,” Mr. Hiller said. “I’d appreciate it if you could do something to help him.”

I gave him my usual answer. “I’m just a clerk,” I said. “The only people that can help you are the officers you talked to already. Or you could try your congressman.”

He gave me a long, shrewd look, and then he took out his business card. “If you ever buy a car, come to see me, I’ll get it for you at cost.”

I looked at his card and laughed. “The day I can buy a Cadillac,” I said, “I won’t have to work here anymore.”

Mr. Hiller gave me a nice friendly smile. “I guess that’s right,” he said. “But if you can help me, I’d really appreciate it”

The next day I had a call from Mr. Hiller. He had the ersatz friendliness of the salesman con artist. He asked after my health, how I was doing and remarked on what a fine day it was. And then he said how impressed he was with my courtesy, so unusual in a government employee dealing with the public. So impressed and overcome with gratitude that when he heard about a year-old Dodge being offered for sale, he had bought it and would be willing to sell it to me at cost Would I meet him for lunch to discuss it?

I told Mr. Huller I couldn’t meet him for lunch but I would drop over to his automobile lot on my way home from work. He was located out in Roslyn, Long Island, which wasn’t more than a half hour away from my housing project in the Bronx. And it was still light when I got there. I parked my car and wandered around the grounds looking at the Cadillacs, and I was smitten by middle-class greed. The Cadillacs were beautiful, long, sleek and heavy; some burnished gold, others creamy white, dark blue, fire engine red. I peeked into the interiors and saw the lush carpeting, the rich-looking seats. I had never cared much about cars, but at that moment I hungered for a Cadillac.

I walked toward the long brick building and passed a robin’s-egg blue Dodge. It was a very nice car that I would have loved before I walked through those miles of fucking Cadillacs. I looked inside. The upholstery was comfortable looking but not rich. Shit.

In short, I was reacting in the style of the classically nouveau riche thief. Something very funny had happened to me the past months. I was very unhappy taking my first bribe. I had thought I would think less of myself, I had always so prided myself on never being a liar. Then why was I so enjoying my role as a sleazy small-time bribe taker and hustler?

The truth was that I had become a happy man because I had become a traitor to society. I loved taking money for betraying my trust as a government employee. I loved hustling the kids who came in to see me. I deceived and dissembled with the lip smacking relish of a peasant penny ante lago. Some nights, lying awake, thinking up new schemes, I also wondered at this change in myself. And I figured out that I was getting my revenge for having been rejected as an artist, that I was compensating for my worthless heritage as an orphan. For my complete lack of worldly success. And my general uselessness in the whole scheme of things. Finally I had found something I could do well; finally I was a success as a provider for my wife and children. And oddly enough I became a better husband and father. I helped the kids with their homework. Now that I had stopped writing I had more time for Vallie. We went out to the movies, I could afford a baby-sitter and the price of admission. I bought her presents. I even got a couple of magazine assignments and dashed off the pieces with ease. I told Vallie that I got all this fresh money from doing the magazine work.

I was a happy, happy thief, but in the back of my mind I knew there would come a day of reckoning. So I gave up all thoughts of buying a Cadillac and settled for the robin’s-egg blue Dodge.

Mr. Hiller had a large office with pictures of his wife and children on his desk. There was no secretary and I hoped it was because he was smart enough to get rid of her so that she wouldn’t see me. I liked dealing with smart people. I was afraid of stupid people.

Mr. Hiller made me sit down and take a cigar. Again he inquired after my health. Then he got down to brass tacks. “Did you see that blue Dodge? Nice car. Perfect shape. I can give you a real buy on it. What do you drive now?”

“A 1950 Ford,” I said.

“I’ll Jet you use that as a trade-in,” Mr. Hiller said. “You can have the Dodge for five hundred dollars cash and your car.”

I kept a straight face. Taking the five hundred bucks out of my wallet, I said, “You got a deal.”

Mr. Huller looked just a little surprised. “You’ll be able to help my son, you understand.” He really was a little worried that I hadn’t caught on.

Again I was astonished at how much I enjoyed these little transactions. I knew I could stick him up. That I could get the Dodge just by giving him my Ford. I was really making about a thousand dollars on this deal even by paying him the five hundred. But I didn’t believe in a crook driving hard bargains. I still had a little bit of Robin Hood in me. I still thought of myself as a guy who took money from the rich only by giving them their money’s worth. But what delighted me most was the worry on his face that I hadn’t caught on that this was a bribe. So I said very calmly, without a smile, very matter-of-fact, “Your son will be enlisted in the six months’ program within a week.”

Relief and a new respect showed on Mr. Hiller’s face. He said, “We’ll do all the papers tonight, and I'll take care of the license plates. It’s all set to go.” He leaned over to shake my hand. “I’ve heard stories about you,” he said. “Everybody speaks highly about you.”

I was pleased. Of course, I knew what he meant. That I had a good reputation as an honest crook. After all, that was something. It was an achievement.

While the papers were being drawn up by the clerical staff, Mr. Hiller chatted to some purpose. He was trying to find out if I acted alone or whether the major and colonel were in on it. He was clever, his business training, I guess. First he complimented me on how smart I was, how I caught on quickly to everything. Then he started to ask me questions. He was worried that the two officers would remember his son. Didn’t they have to swear his son into the Reserve six months’ program? Yes, that was true, I said.

“Won’t they remember him?” Mr. Hiller said. ‘Won’t they ask about how he jumped so quickly on the list?”

He had a point but not much of one. “Did I ask you any questions about the Dodge?” I said.

Mr. Huller smiled at me warmly. “Of course,” he said. “You know your business. But it’s my son. I don’t want to see him get in trouble for something I did.”

My mind began to wander. I was thinking how pleased Vallie would be when she saw the blue Dodge: Blue was her favorite color and she hated the beat-up old Ford.

I forced myself to think about Mr. Hiller’s question. I remembered his Jeremy had long hair and wore a well-tailored suit with vest and shirt and tie.

“Tell Jeremy to get a short haircut and wear sports clothes when I call him into the office,” I said. “They won’t remember him.”

Mr. Hiller looked doubtful. “Jeremy will hate that,” he said.

“Then he doesn’t have to,” I said. “I don’t believe in telling people to do what they don’t feel like doing. I’ll take care of it.” I was just a little impatient.

“All right,” Mr. Hiller said. “I’ll leave it in your hands.”

When I drove home with the new car, Vallie was delighted and I took her and the kids for a drive. The Dodge rode like a dream and we played the radio. My old Ford didn’t have a radio. We stopped off and had pizza and soda, routine now but something we had rarely done before in our married life because we had had to watch every penny. Then we stopped off in a candy store and had ice-cream sodas and I bought a doll for my daughter and war games for the two boys. And I bought Vallie a box of Schrafft chocolates. I was a real sport, spending money like a prince. I sang songs in the car as we were driving home, and after the kids were in bed, Vallie made love to me as if I were the Aga Khan and I had just given her a diamond as big as the Ritz.

I remembered the days when I had hocked my typewriter to get us through the week. But that had been before I ran away to Vegas. Since then my luck had changed. No more two jobs; twenty grand stashed away in my old manuscript folders on the bottom of the clothes closet. A thriving business which could make my fortune unless the whole racket blew up or there was some worldwide accommodation that made the big powers stop spending so much money on their armies. For the first time I understood how the war industry bigwigs and industrialists and the army generals felt. The threat of a stabilized world could plunge me back into poverty. It was not that I wanted another war, but I couldn’t help laughing when I realized that all my so-called liberal attitudes were dissolving in the hope that Russia and the United States didn’t get too friendly, not for a while at least.

Vallie was snoring a little, which didn’t bother me. She worked hard with the kids and taking care of the house and me. But it was curious that I was always awake late at night no matter how exhausted I was. She always fell asleep before I did. Sometimes I would get up and work on my novel in the kitchen and cook myself something to eat and not go back to bed until three or four in the morning. But now I wasn’t working on a novel, so I had no work to do. I thought vaguely that I should start writing again. After all, I had the time and money. But the truth was I found my life too exciting, wheeling and dealing and taking bribes and for the first time spending money on little foolish things.

But the big problem was where to stash my cash permanently. I couldn’t keep it in the house. I thought of my brother, Artie. He could bank it for me. And he would if I asked him to do it. But I couldn’t. He was so painfully honest. And he would ask me where I got the dough and I’d have to tell him. He had never done a dishonest thing for himself or his wife and kids. He had a real integrity. He would do it for me, but he would never feel the same about me. And I couldn’t bear that. There are some things you can’t do or shouldn’t do. And asking Artie to hold my money was one of them. It wouldn’t be the act of a brother or a friend.

Of course, some brothers you wouldn’t ask because they’d steal it. And that brought Cully into my mind. I’d ask him about the best way to stash the money the next time he came to town. That was my answer. Cully would know, that was his metier. And I had to solve the problem. I had a hunch the money was going to roll in faster and faster.

– -

The next week I got Jeremy Huller into the Reserves without any trouble, and Mr. Hiller was so grateful that he invited me to come to his agency for a new set of tires for my blue Dodge. Naturally I thought this was out of gratitude, and I was delighted that he was such a nice guy. I forgot he was a businessman. As the mechanic put new tires on my car, Mr. Hiller in his office gave me a new proposition.

He started off dishing out some nice strokes. With an admiring smile he told me how smart I was, how honest, so absolutely reliable. It was a pleasure to have dealings with me, and if I ever left the government, he would get me a good job. I swallowed it all up, I had had very little praise in my life, mostly from my brother, Artie, and some obscure book reviewers. I didn’t even guess what was coming.

“There is a friend of mine who needs your help very badly,” Mr. Miller said. “He has a son who needs desperately to get in the six months’ Reserve program.”

“Sure,” I said. “Send the kid in to see me and have him mention your name.”

“There’s a big problem,” Mr. Hiller said. “This young man has already received his draft notice.”

I shrugged. “Then he’s shit out of luck. Tell his folks to kiss him good-bye for two years.”

Mr. Huller smiled. “Are you sure there’s nothing a smart young man like you can do? It could be worth a lot of money. His father is a very important man.”

“Nothing,” I said. “The Army regulations are specific. Once a guy receives his draft notice he can no longer be enlisted in the Army Reserve six months’ program. Those guys in Washington are not that dumb. Otherwise everybody would wait for his draft notice before enlisting.”

Mr. Hiller said, “This man would like to see you. He’s willing to do anything, you know what I mean?”

“There is no point,” I said. “I can’t help him.”

Then Mr. Hiller leaned on me a little. “Go see him just for me,” he said. And I understood. If I just went to see this guy, even if I turned him down, Mr. Hiller was a hero. Well, for four brand-new tires I could spend a half hour with a rich man.

“OK,” I said.

Mr. Hiller wrote on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I looked at it. The name was Eli Hemsi, and there was a phone number. I recognized the name. Eli Hemsi was the biggest man in the garment industry, in trouble with the unions, involved with the mobs. But he also was one of the social lights of the city. A buyer of politicians, a pillar of support to charitable causes, etc. If he was such a big wheel, why did he have to come to me? I asked Mr. Hiller that question.

“Because he’s smart,” Mr. Hiller said. “He’s a Sephardic Jew. They are the smartest of all the Jews. They have Italian, Spanish and Arab blood, and that mixture makes them real killers, besides being smart. He doesn’t want his son as a hostage to some politician who can ask him for a big favor. It’s a lot cheaper and a lot less dangerous for him to come to you. And besides, I told him how good you were. To be absolutely honest, right now you’re the only person who can help him. Those big shots don’t dare step in on something like the draft. It’s too touchy. Politicians are scared to death of it.”

I thought about the congressman who had come in to my office. He’d had balls then. Or maybe he was at the end of his political career and didn’t give a shit. Mr. Miller was watching me carefully.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m Jewish. But the Sephardic you have to be careful with or they’ll just outwit you. So when you go to see him, just use your head.” He paused and anxiously asked. “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought then how I felt about orphans. We were all freaks. Not knowing our parents, we never worried about the Jews or the blacks, whatever.

The next day I called Mr. Eli Hemsi at his office. Like married men having an affair, my clients’ fathers gave me only their office numbers. But they would have my home number, just in case they had to get in touch with me right away. I was already getting a lot of calls which made Vallie wonder. I told her it was gambling and magazine work calls.

Mr. Hemsi asked me to come down to his office during my lunch hour and I went. It was one of the garment center buildings on Seventh Avenue just ten minutes away from the armory. A nice little stroll in the spring air. I dodged guys pushing hand trucks loaded with racks of dresses and reflected a little smugly on how hard they were working for their paltry wages while I collected hundreds for a little dirty paperwork, at the crossroads. Most of them were black guys. Why the hell weren’t they out mugging people like they were supposed to? An, if they only had the proper education, they could be stealing like me, without hurting people.

In the building the receptionist led me through showrooms that exhibited the new styles for the coming seasons. And then I was ushered through a little grubby door into Mr. Hemsi’s office suite. I was really surprised at how plush it was, the rest of the building was so grubby. The receptionist turned me over to Mr. Hemsi’s secretary, a middle-aged no-nonsense woman, but impeccably dressed who took me into the inner sanctum.

Mr. Hemsi was a great big guy who would have looked like a Cossack if it had not been for his perfectly tailored suit, rich-looking white shirt and dark red tie. His face was powerfully craggy and had a look of melancholy. He looked almost noble and certainly honest. He rose from his desk and grasped my hands in both of his to greet me. He looked deep into my eyes. He was so close to me that I could see through the thick, ropy gray hair. He said gravely, “My friend is right, you have a good heart. I know you will help me.”

“I really can’t help. I’d like to, but I can’t,” I said. And I explained the whole draft board thing to him as I had to Mr. Hiller. I was colder than I meant to be. I don’t like people looking deep into my eyes.

He just sat there nodding his head gravely. Then, as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said, he just went on, his voice really melancholy now.

“My wife, the poor woman, she is in very bad health. It will kill her if she loses her son now. He is the only thing she lives for. It will kill her if he goes away for two years. Mr. Merlyn, you must help me. If you do this for me, I will make you happy for the rest of your life.”

It wasn’t that he convinced me. It wasn’t that I believed a word he’d said. But that last phrase got to me. Only kings and emperors can say to a man, “I will make you happy for the rest of your life.” What confidence in his powers he had. But then, of course, I realized he was talking about money.

“Let me think about it,” I said, “maybe I can come up with something.”

Mr. Hemsi was nodding his head up and down very gravely. “I know you will. I know you have a good head and a good heart,” he said. “Do you have children?”

“Yes,” I said. He asked me how many and how old they were and what sex. He asked about my wife and how old she was. He was like an uncle. Then he asked me for my home address and phone number so that he could get in touch with me if necessary.

When I left him, he walked me to the elevator himself. I figured I had done my job. I had no idea how I could get his son off the hook with the draft board. And Mr. Hemsi was right, I did have a good heart. I had a good enough heart not to try to hustle him and his wife’s anxieties and then not deliver. And I had a good enough head not to get mixed up with a draft board victim. The kid had had his notice and would be in the Regular Army in another month. His mother would have to live without him.

The very next day Vallie called me at work. Her voice was very excited. She told me that she just received special delivery service of about five cartons of clothing. Clothes for all the kids, winter and fall outfits, and they were beautiful. There was also a carton of clothes for her. All of it more expensive than we could ever buy.

“There’s a card,” she said. “From a Mr. Hemsi. Who is he? Merlyn, they are just beautiful. Why did he give them to you?”

“I wrote some brochures for his business,” I said. “There wasn’t much money in it, but he did promise to send the kids some stuff. But I thought he meant a few things.”

I could hear the pleasure in Vallie’s voice. “He must be a nice man. There must be over a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes in the boxes.”

“That’s great,” I said. “I’ll talk to you about it tonight.”

After I hung up, I told Frank what had happened and about Mr. Hiller, the Cadillac dealer.

Frank squinted at me. “You’re on the hook,” he said. “That guy will be expecting you to do something for him now. How are you going to come across?”

“Shit,” I said, “I can’t figure out why I even agreed to go see him.”

“It was those Cadillacs you saw on Huller’s lot,” Frank said. “You’re like those colored guys. They’d go back to those huts in Africa if they could drive around in a Cadillac.”

I noticed a little hitch in his speech. He had almost said “niggers” but switched to “colored.” I wondered if it was because he was ashamed of saying the ugly word or because he thought I might be offended. As for the Harlem guys liking Cadillacs I always wondered why people got pissed off about that. Because they couldn’t afford it? Because they should not go into debt for something not useful? But he was right about those Cadillacs getting me on the hook. That’s why I had agreed to see Hemsi and do Hiller the favor. Way back in my head I hoped for a shot at one of those luxurious sleek cars.

That night, when I got home, Vallie put on a fashion show for me with her and the kids. She had mentioned five cartons, but she hadn’t mentioned their size. They were enormous, and Vallie and the kids had about ten outfits each. Value was more excited than I had seen her in a long time. The kids were pleased, but they didn’t care too much about clothes at that age, not even my daughter. The thought flashed through my mind that maybe I’d get lucky and find a toy manufacturer whose kid had ducked the draft.

But then Vallie pointed out that she would have to buy new shoes to go with the outfits. I told her to hold off for a while and made a note to keep an eye out for a shoe manufacturer’s son.

Now the curious thing was that I would have felt that Mr. Hemsi was patronizing me if the clothes had been of ordinary quality. There would have been the touch of the poor receiving the hand-me-downs of the rich. But his stuff was top-rate, quality goods I could never afford no matter how much babe money I raked in. Five thousand bucks, not a thousand. I took a look at the enclosed card. It was a business card with Hemsi’s name and title of president and the name of the firm and its address and phone printed on it. There was nothing written. No message of any kind. Mr. Hemsi was smart all right. There was no direct evidence that he had sent the stuff, and I had nothing that I could incriminate him with.

At the office I had thought that maybe I could ship the stuff back to Mr. Hemsi. But after seeing how happy Value was, I knew that was not possible. I lay awake until three in the morning, figuring out ways for Mr. Hemsi’s son to beat the draft.

The next day, when I went into the office, I made one decision. I wouldn’t do anything on paper that could be traced back to me a year or two later. This could be very tricky. It was one thing to take money to put a guy ahead on a list for the six months’ program, it was another to get him out of the draft after he had received his induction notice.

So the first thing I did was to call up Hemsi’s draft board. I got one of the clerks there, a guy just like me. I identified myself and gave him the story I had thought out. I told him that Paul Hemsi had been on my list for the six months’ program and that I had meant to enlist him two weeks ago but that I had sent his letter to the wrong address. That it had been all my fault and I felt guilty about it and also that maybe I could get in trouble on my job if the kid’s family started to holler. I asked him if the draft board could cancel the induction notice so that I could enlist him. I would then send the usual official form to the draft board, showing that Paul Hemsi was in the six months’ program of the Army Reserve, and they could take him off their draft rolls. I used what I thought was exactly the right tone, not too anxious. Just a nice guy trying to right a wrong. While I was doing this, I slipped in that if the guy at the draft board could do me this favor, I would help him get a friend of his in the six months’ program.

This last gimmick I had thought about while lying awake the previous night. I figured that the clerks at the draft board probably were contacted by kids on their last legs, about to be drafted, and that the draft board clerks probably got propositioned a lot. And I figured if a draft board clerk could place a client of his in the six months’ program it could be worth a thousand bucks.

But the guy at the draft board was completely casual and accommodating. I don’t even think he caught on that I was propositioning him. He said sure, he’d withdraw the induction notice, that it was no problem, and I suddenly got the impression that smarter guys than I had already pulled this dodge. Anyway, the next day I got the necessary letter from the draft board and called Mr. Hemsi and told him to send his son into my office to be enlisted.

It all went off without a hitch. Paul Hemsi was a nice soft-spoken kid, very shy, very timid, or so it seemed to me. I had him sworn in, stashed his papers until he got his active-duty orders. I drew his supply stuff for him myself, and when he left for his six months’ active duty, nobody in his outfit had seen him. I’d turned him into a ghost.

By now I realized that all this action was getting pretty hot and implicating powerful people. But I wasn’t Merlyn the Magician for nothing. I put on my star-spangled cap and started to think it all out. Someday it would blow up. I had myself pretty well covered except for the money stashed in my house. I had to hide the money. That was the first thing. And then I had to show another income so I could spend money openly.

I could stash my money with Cully in Las Vegas. But what if Cully got cute or got killed? As for making money legit, I had had offers to do book reviews and magazine work, but I had always turned them down. I was a pure storyteller, a fiction writer. It seemed demeaning to me and my art to write anything else. But what the hell, I was a crook, nothing was beneath me now.

Frank asked me to go to lunch with him and I said OK. Frank was in great form. Happy-go-lucky, top-of-the-world. He’d had a winning week gambling and the money was rolling in. With no sense of what the future could bring, he believed he’d keep winning, the whole bribe scam would last forever. Without even thinking of himself as a magician, he believed in a magic world.