If the River Was Whiskey

THE DEVIL AND IRV CHERNISKE

JUST OUTSIDE the sleepy little commuter village of Irvington, New York, there stands a subdivision of half-million-dollar homes, each riding its own sculpted acre like a ship at sea and separated from its neighbors by patches of scrub and the forlorn-looking beeches that lend a certain pricy and vestigial air to the place. The stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors, and software salesmen who live here with their families know their community as Beechwood, in deference to the legend hammered into the slab of pink marble at the entrance of Beechwood Drive. This slab was erected by the developer, Sal Maggio, in the late nineteen-sixties, though there are few here now who can remember that far back. For better or worse, Beechwood is the sort of community in which the neighbors don’t know one another and don’t really care to, though they do survey each other’s gardeners and automobiles with all the perspicacity of appraisers, and while the proper names of the people next door may escape them, they are quick to invent such colorful sobriquets as the Geeks, the Hackers, the Volvos, and the Chinks by way of compensation.

For the most part, the handsome sweeping macadam streets go untrodden but for the occasional backward jogger, and the patches of wood are ignored to the point at which they’ve begun to revert to the condition of the distant past, to the time before Maggio’s bulldozer, when the trees stretched unbroken all the way to Ardsley. Fieldmice make their home in these woods, moths, spiders, sparrows, and squirrels. In the late afternoon, garter snakes silently thread the high rank thick-stemmed morass of bluegrass gone wild, and toads thump from one fetid puddle to another. An unpropitious place, these woods. A forgotten place. But it was here, in one of these primordial pockets, beneath a wind-ravaged maple and within earshot of the chit-chit-chit of the gray squirrel, that Irv Cherniske made the deal of his life.

Irv was one of the senior residents of Beechwood, having moved into his buff-and-chocolate Tudor with the imitation flagstone façade some three years earlier. He was a hard-nosed cynic in his early forties, a big-headed, heavy-paunched, irascible stock trader who’d seen it all — and then some. The characteristic tone of his voice was an unmodulated roar, but this was only the daintiest of counterpoint to the stentorian bellow of his wife, Tish. The two fought so often and at such a pitch that their young sons, Shane and Morgan, often took refuge in the basement game room while the battle raged over their heads and out across the placid rolling lawns of Beechwood Estates. To the neighbors, these battles were a source of rueful amusement: separately, yet unanimously, they had devised their own pet nickname for the Cherniskes. A torn, ragged cry would cut the air around dinnertime each evening, and someone would lift a watery gimlet to his lips and remark, with a sigh, that the Screechers were at it again.

One evening, after a particularly bracing confrontation with his wife over the question of who had last emptied the trash receptacle in the guest room, Irv was out in the twilit backyard, practicing his chip shot and swatting mosquitoes. It was the tail end of a long Fourth of July weekend, and an unearthly stillness had settled over Beechwood, punctuated now and again by the distant muffled pop of leftover fireworks. The air was muggy and hot, a fiery breath of the tropics more suitable to Rangoon than New York, Irv bent in the fading light to address a neon-orange Titleist. Behind him, in the house which seemed almost to sink under the weight of its mortgage, Tish and his sons were watching TV, the muted sounds of conflict and sorrow carrying fitfully to where he stood in the damp grass, awash in birdsong. He raised the nine-iron, dropped it in a fluid rush, and watched the ball rise mightily into the darkening belly of the sky. Unfortunately, he overshot the makeshift flag he’d set up at the foot of the lawn and carried on into the ragged clump of trees beyond it.

With a curse, Irv trundled down the hill and pushed his way through the mounds of cuttings the gardener had piled up like breastworks at the edge of the woods and a moment later found himself in the hushed and shadowy stand of beeches. An odor of slow rot assaulted his nostrils. Crickets chirruped. There was no sign of the ball. He was kicking aimlessly through the leaves, all but certain it was gone for good — two and a half bucks down the drain — when he was startled by a noise from the gloom up ahead.

Something — or someone — was coming toward him, a presence announced by the crush of brittle leaves and the hiss of uncut grass. “Who is it?” he demanded, and the crickets fell silent. “Is someone there?”

The shape of a man began to emerge gradually from the shadows — head and shoulders first, then a torso that kept getting bigger. And bigger. His skin was dark — so dark Irv at first took him to be a Negro — and a wild feral shock of hair stood up jaggedly from his crown like the mane of a hyena. The man said nothing.

Irv was not easily daunted. He believed in the Darwinian struggle, believed, against all signs to the contrary, that he’d risen to the top of the pack and that the choicest morsels of the feast of life were his for the taking. And though he wasn’t nearly the bruiser he’d been when he started at nose tackle for Fox Lane High, he was used to wielding his paunch like a weapon and blustering his way through practically anything, from a potential mugging right on down to putting a snooty maître d’ in his place. For all that, though, when he saw the size of the man, when he factored in his complexion and considered the oddness of the circumstances, he felt uncertain of himself. Felt as if the parameters of the world as he knew it had suddenly shifted. Felt, unaccountably, that he was in deep trouble. Characteristically, he fell back on bluster. “Who in hell are you?” he demanded.

The stranger, he now saw, wasn’t black at all. Or, rather, he wasn’t a Negro, as he’d first supposed, but something else altogether. Swarthy, that’s what he was. Like a Sicilian or a Greek. Or maybe an Arab. He saw too that the man was dressed almost identically to himself, in a Lacoste shirt, plaid slacks, and white Adidas. But this was no golf club dangling from the stranger’s fingertips — it was a chainsaw. “Hell?” the big man echoed, his voice starting down low and then rising in mockery. “I don’t believe it. Did you actually say ‘Who in hell are you?’?” He began to laugh in a shallow, breathy, and decidedly unsettling way.

It was getting darker by the minute, the trunks of the trees receding into the shadows, stars dimly visible now in the dome of the sky. There was a distant sound of fireworks and a sharp sudden smell of gunpowder on the air. “Are you…are you somebody’s gardener or something?” Irv asked, glancing uncomfortably at the chainsaw.

This got the stranger laughing so hard he had to pound his breastbone and wipe the tears from his eyes. “Gardener?” he hooted, stamping around in the undergrowth and clutching his sides with the sheer hilarity of it. “You’ve got to be kidding. Come on, tell me you’re kidding.”

Irv felt himself growing annoyed. “I mean, because if you’re not,” he said, struggling to control his voice, “then I want to know what you’re doing back here with that saw. This is private property, you know.”

Abruptly, the big man stopped laughing. When he spoke, all trace of amusement had faded from his voice. “Oh?” he growled. “And just who does it belong to, then — it wouldn’t be yours, by any chance, would it?”

It wasn’t. As Irv well knew. In fact, he’d done a little title-searching six months back, when Tish had wanted to mow down the beeches and put in an ornamental koi pond with little pink bridges and mechanical waterfalls. The property, useless as it was, belonged to the old bird next door—“the Geek” was the only name Irv knew him by. Irv thought of bluffing, but the look in the stranger’s eye made him think better of it. “It belongs to the old guy next door — Beltzer, I think his name is. Bitzer. Something like that.”

The stranger was smiling now, but the smile wasn’t a comforting one. “I see,” he said. “So I guess you’re trespassing too.”

Irv had had enough. “We’ll let the police decide that,” he snapped, turning to stalk back up the lawn.

“Hey, Irv,” the stranger said suddenly, “don’t get huffy — old man Belcher won’t be needing this plot anymore. You can hide all the golf balls you want down here.”

The gloom thickened. Somewhere a dog began to howl. Irv felt the tight hairs at the base of his neck begin to stiffen. “How do you know my name?” he said, whirling around. “And how do you know what Belcher needs or doesn’t need?” All of a sudden, Irv had the odd feeling that he’d seen this stranger somewhere before — real estate, wasn’t it?

“Because he’ll be dead five minutes from now, that’s how.” The big man let out a disgusted sigh. “Let’s quit pissing around here — you know damn well who I am, Irv.” He paused. “October twenty-two, 1955, Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart Church in Mount Kisco. Monsignor O’Kane. The topic is the transubstantiation of the flesh and you’re screwing around with Alfred LaFarga in the back pew, talking ‘Saturday Night Creature Features.’ ‘Did you see it when the mummy pulled that guy’s eyes out?’ you whispered. Alfred was this ratty little clown, looked like his shoulders were going to fall through his chest — now making a killing in grain futures in Des Moines, by the way — and he says, ‘That wasn’t his eye, shit-for-brains, it was his tongue.’”

Irv was stunned. Shocked silent for maybe the first time in his life. He’d seen it all, yes — but not this. It was incredible, it really was.. He’d given up on all that God and Devil business the minute he left parochial school — no percentage in it — and now here it was, staring him in the face. It took him about thirty seconds to reinvent the world, and then he was thinking there might just be something in it for him. “All right,” he said, “all right, yeah, I know who you are. Question is, what do you want with me?”

The stranger’s face was consumed in shadow now, but Irv could sense that he was grinning. “Smart, Irv,” the big man said, all the persuasion of a born closer creeping into his voice. “What’s in it for me, right? Let’s make a deal, right? The wife isn’t working, the kids need designer jeans, PCs, and dirt bikes, and the mortgage has you on the run, am I right?”

He was right — of course he was right. How many times, bullying some loser over the phone or wheedling a few extra bucks out of some grasping old hag’s retirement account, had Irv wondered if it was all worth it? How many times had he shoved his way through a knot of pink-haired punks on the subway only to get home all the sooner to his wife’s nagging and his sons’ pale, frightened faces? How many times had he told himself he deserved more, much more — ease and elegance, regular visits to the track and the Caribbean, his own firm, the two or maybe three million he needed to bail himself out for good? He folded his arms. The stranger, suddenly, was no more disturbing than sweet-faced Ben Franklin gazing up benevolently from a mountain of C-notes. “Talk to me,” Irv said.

The big man took him by the arm and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. He wanted the usual deal, nothing less, and he held out to Irv the twin temptations of preternatural business success and filthy lucre. The lucre was buried right there in that shabby patch of woods, a hoard of Krugerrands, bullion, and silver candlesticks socked away by old man Belcher as a hedge against runaway inflation. The business success would result from the collusion of his silent partner — who was leaning into him now and giving off an odor oddly like that of a Szechuan kitchen — and it would take that initial stake and double and redouble it till it grew beyond counting. “What do you say, Irv?” the stranger crooned.

Irv said nothing. He was no fool. Poker face, he told himself. Never look eager. “I got to think about it,” he said. He was wondering vaguely if he could rent a metal detector or something and kiss the creep off. “Give me twenty-four hours.”

The big man drew away from him. “Hmph,” he grunted contemptuously. “You think I come around every day? This is the deal of a lifetime I’m talking here, Irv.” He paused a moment to let this sink in. “You don’t want it, I can always go to Joe Luck across the street over there.”

Irv was horrified. “You mean the Chinks?”

At that moment the porch light winked on in the house behind them. The yellowish light caught the big man’s face, bronzing it like a statue. He nodded. “Import/export. Joe’s got connections with the big boys in Taiwan — and believe me, it isn’t just backscratchers he’s bringing in in those crates. But I happen to know he’s hard up for capital right now, and I think he’d jump at the chance—”

Irv cut him off. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But how do I know you’re the real thing? I mean, what proof do I have? Anybody could’ve talked to Alfred LaFarga.”

The big man snorted. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he fired up the chainsaw. Rrrrrrrrrrow, it sang as he turned to the nearest tree and sent it home. Chips and sawdust flew off into the darkness as he guided the saw up and down, back and across, carving something in the bark, some message. Irv edged forward. Though the light was bad, he could just make out the jagged uppercase B, and then the E that followed it. When the big man reached the L, Irv anticipated him, but waited, arms folded, for the sequel. The stranger spelled out BELCHER, then sliced into the base of the tree; in the next moment the tree was toppling into the gloom with a shriek of clawing branches.

Irv waited till the growl of the saw died to a sputter. “Yeah?” he said. “So what does that prove?”

The big man merely grinned, his face hideous in the yellow light. Then he reached out and pressed his thumb to Irv’s forehead and Irv could hear the sizzle and feel the sting of his own flesh burning. “There’s my mark,” the stranger said. “Tomorrow night, seven o’clock. Don’t be late.” And then he strode off into the shadows, the great hulk of him halved in an instant, and then halved again, as if he were sinking down into the earth itself.

The first thing Tish said to him as he stepped in the door was “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been shouting myself hoarse. There’s an ambulance out front of the neighbor’s place.”

Irv shoved past her and parted the living-room curtains. Sure enough, there it was, red lights revolving and casting an infernal glow over the scene. There were voices, shouts, a flurry of people clustered round a stretcher and a pair of quick-legged men in hospital whites. “It’s nothing,” he said, a savage joy rising in his chest — it was true, true after all, and he was going to be rich—“just the old fart next door kicking off.”

Tish gave him a hard look. She was a year younger than he — his college sweetheart, in fact — but she’d let herself go. She wasn’t so much obese as muscular, big, broad-beamed — every inch her husband’s match. “What’s that on your forehead?” she asked, her voice pinched with suspicion.

He lifted his hand absently to the spot. The flesh seemed rough and abraded, raised in an annealed disc the size of a quarter. “Oh, this?” he said, feigning nonchalance. “Hit my head on the barbecue.”

She was having none of it. With a move so sudden it would have surprised a cat, she shot forward and seized his arm. “And what’s that I smell — Chinese food?” Her eyes leapt at him; her jaw clenched. “I suppose the enchiladas weren’t good enough for you, huh?”

He jerked his arm away. “Oh, yeah, I know — you really slaved over those enchiladas, didn’t you? Christ, you might have chipped a nail or something tearing the package open and shoving them in the microwave.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” she snarled, snatching his arm back and digging her nails in for emphasis. “The mark on your head, the Chinese food, that stupid grin on your face when you saw the ambulance — I know you. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She clung to his arm like some inescapable force of nature, like the tar in the La Brea pits or the undertow at Rockaway Beach. “Isn’t it?”

Irv Cherniske was not a man to confide in his wife. He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang. But this once, because the circumstances were so arresting and the stranger’s proposal so unique (not to mention final), he relented and let her in on his secret.

At first, she wouldn’t believe it. It was another of his lies, he was covering something up—devils: did he think she was born yesterday? But when she saw how solemn he was, how shaken, how feverish with lust over the prospect of laying his hands on the loot, she began to come around. By midnight she was urging him to go back and seal the bargain. “You fool. You idiot. What do you need twenty-four hours for? Go. Go now.”

Though Irv had every intention of doing just that — in his own time, of course — he wasn’t about to let her push him into anything. “You think I’m going to damn myself forever just to please you?” he sneered.

Tish took it for half a beat, then she sprang up from the sofa as if it were electrified. “All right,” she snapped. “I’ll find the son of a bitch myself and we’ll both roast — but I tell you I want those Krugerrands and all the rest of it too. And I want it now.”

A moment later, she was gone — out the back door and into the soft suburban night. Let her go, Irv thought in disgust, but despite himself he sat back to wait for her. For better than an hour he sat there in his mortgaged living room, dreaming of crushing his enemies and ascending the high-flown corridors of power, envisioning the cut-glass decanter in the bar of the Rolls and breakfast on the yacht, but at last he found himself nodding and decided to call it a day. He rose, stretched, and then padded through the dining room and kitchen to the back porch. He swung open the door and halfheartedly called his wife’s name. There was no answer. He shrugged, retraced his steps, and wearily mounted the stairs to the bedroom: devil or no devil, he had a train to catch in the morning.

Tish was sullen at breakfast. She looked sorrowful and haggard and there were bits of twig and leaf caught in her hair. The boys bent silently over their caramel crunchies, waiflike in the khaki jerseys and oversized shorts they wore to camp. Irv studied his watch while gulping coffee. “Well,” he said, addressing his stone-faced wife, “any luck?”

At first she wouldn’t answer him. And when she did, it was in a voice so constricted with rage she sounded as if she were being throttled. Yes, she’d found the sorry son of a bitch, all right — after traipsing all over hell and back for half the night — and after all that he’d had the gall to turn his back on her. He wasn’t in the mood, he said. But if she were to come back at noon with a peace offering — something worth talking about, something to show she was serious — he’d see what he could do for her. That’s how he’d put it.

For a moment Irv was seized with jealousy and resentment-was she trying to cut him out, was that it? — but then he remembered how the stranger had singled him out, had come to him, and he relaxed. He had nothing to worry about. It was Tish. She just didn’t know how to bargain, that was all. Her idea of a give and take was to reiterate her demands, over and over, each time in a shriller tone than the last. She’d probably pushed and pushed till even the devil wouldn’t have her. “I’ll be home early,” he said, and then he was driving through a soft misting rain to the station.

It was past seven when finally he did get home. He pulled into the driveway and was surprised to see his sons sitting glumly on the front stoop, their legs drawn up under them, rain drooling steadily from the eaves. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, hurrying up the steps in alarm. The elder, Shane, a pudgy, startled-looking boy of eight, whose misfortune it was to favor Tish about the nose and eyes, began to whimper. “She, she never came back,” he blubbered, smearing snot across his lip.

Filled with apprehension — and a strange, airy exhilaration too: maybe she was gone, gone for good! — Irv dialed his mother. “Ma?” he shouted into the phone. “Can you come over and watch the kids? It’s Tish. She’s missing.” He’d no sooner set the phone down than he noticed the blank space on the wall above the sideboard. The painting was gone. He’d always hated the thing — a gloomy dark swirl of howling faces with the legend “Cancer Dreams” scrawled in red across the bottom, a small monstrosity Tish had insisted on buying when he could barely make the car payments — but it was worth a bundle, that much he knew. And the moment he saw that empty space on the wall he knew she’d taken it to the big man in the woods — but what else had she taken? While the boys sat listlessly before the TV with a bag of taco chips, he tore through the house. Her jewelry would have been the first thing to go, and he wasn’t surprised to see that it had disappeared, teak box and all. But in growing consternation he discovered that his coin collection was gone too, as were his fly rod and his hip waders and the bottle of V.S.O.P. he’d been saving for the World Series. The whole business had apparently been bundled up in the Irish-linen cloth that had shrouded the dining-room table for as long as he could remember.

Irv stood there a moment over the denuded table, overcome with grief and rage. She was cutting him out, the bitch. She and the big man were probably down there right now, dancing round a gaping black hole in the earth. Or worse, she was on the train to New York with every last Krugerrand of Belcher’s hoard, heading for the Caymans in a chartered yacht, hurtling out of Kennedy in a big 747, two huge, bursting, indescribably heavy trunks nestled safely in the baggage compartment beneath her. Irv rushed to the window. There were the woods: still, silent, slick with wet. He saw nothing but trees.

In the next instant, he was out the back door, down the grassy slope, and into the damp fastness of the woods. He’d forgotten all about the kids, his mother, the house at his back — all he knew was that he had to find Tish. He kicked through dead leaves and rotting branches, tore at the welter of grapevine and sumac that seemed to rise up like a barrier before him. “Tish!” he bawled.

The drizzle had turned to a steady, pelting rain. Irv’s face and hands were scratched and insect-bitten and the hair clung to his scalp like some strange species of mold. His suit — all four hundred bucks’ worth — was ruined. He was staggering through a stubborn tangle of briars, his mind veering sharply toward the homicidal end of the spectrum, when a movement up ahead made him catch his breath. Stumbling forward, he flushed a great black carrion bird from the bushes; as it rose silently into the darkening sky, he spotted the tablecloth. Still laden, it hung from the lower branches of a pocked and leprous oak. Irv looked round him cautiously. All was still, no sound but for the hiss of the rain in the leaves. He straightened up and lumbered toward the pale damp sack, thinking at least to recover his property.

No such luck. When he lifted the bundle down, he was disappointed by its weight; when he opened it, he was shocked to the roots of his hair. The tablecloth contained two things only: a bloody heart and a bloody liver. His own heart was beating so hard he thought his temples would burst; in horror he flung the thing to the ground. Only then did he notice that the undergrowth round the base of the tree was beaten down and trampled, as if a scuffle had taken place beneath it. There was a fandango of footprints in the mud and clumps of stiff black hair were scattered about like confetti — and wasn’t that blood on the bark of the tree?

“Irv,” murmured a voice at his back, and he whirled round in a panic. There he was, the big man, his swarthy features hooded in shadow. This time he was wearing a business suit in a muted gray check, a power yellow tie, and an immaculate trenchcoat. In place of the chainsaw, he carried a shovel, which he’d flung carelessly over one shoulder. “Whoa,” he said, holding up a massive palm, “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He took a step forward and Irv could see that he was grinning. “All’s I want to know is do we have a deal or not?”

“Where’s Tish?” Irv demanded, his voice quavering. But even as he spoke he saw the angry red welt running the length of the big man’s jaw and disappearing into the hair at his temple, and he knew.

The big man shrugged. “What do you care? She’s gone, that’s all that matters. Hey, no more of that nagging whiny voice, no more money down the drain on face cream and high heels-just think, you’ll never have to wake up again to that bitchy pout and those nasty red little eyes. You’re free, Irv. I did you a favor.”

Irv regarded the stranger with awe. Tish was no mean adversary, and judging from the look of the poor devil’s face, she’d gone down fighting.

The big man dropped his shovel to the ground and there was a clink of metal on metal. “Right here, Irv,” he whispered. “Half a million easy. Cash. Tax-free. And with my help you’ll watch it grow to fifty times that.”

Irv glanced down at the bloody tablecloth and then back up at the big man in the trenchcoat. A slow grin spread across his lips.

Coming to terms wasn’t so easy, however, and it was past dark before they’d concluded their bargain. At first the stranger had insisted on Irv’s going into one of the big Hollywood talent agencies, but when Irv balked, he said he figured the legal profession was just about as good — but you needed a degree for that, and begging Irv’s pardon, he was a bit old to be going back to school, wasn’t he? “Why can’t I stay where I am,” Irv countered, “—in stocks and bonds? With all this cash I could quit Tiller Ponzi and set up my own office.”

The big man scratched his chin and laid a thoughtful finger alongside his nose. “Yeah,” he murmured after a moment, “yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. But I like it. You could promise them thirty percent and then play the futures market and gouge them till they bleed.”

Irv came alive at the prospect. “Bleed ’em dry,” he hooted. “I’ll scalp and bucket and buy off the CFTC investigators, and then I’ll set up an offshore company to hide the profits.” He paused, overcome with the beauty of it. “I’ll screw them right and left.”

“Deal?” the devil said.

Irv took the big callused hand in his own. “Deal.”

Ten years later, Irv Cherniske was one of the wealthiest men in New York. He talked widows into giving him their retirement funds to invest in ironclad securities and sure bets, lost them four or five hundred thousand, and charged half that again in commissions. With preternatural luck his own investments paid off time and again and he eventually set up an inside-trading scheme that made guesswork superfluous. The police, of course, had been curious about Tish’s disappearance, but Irv showed them the grisly tablecloth and the crude hole in which the killer had no doubt tried to bury her, and they launched an intensive manhunt that dragged on for months but produced neither corpse nor perpetrator. The boys he shunted off to his mother’s, and when they were old enough, to a military school in Tangiers. Two months after his wife’s disappearance, the newspapers uncovered a series of ritual beheadings in Connecticut and dropped all mention of the “suburban ghoul,” as they’d dubbed Tish’s killer; a week after that, Tish was forgotten and Beechwood went back to sleep.

It was in the flush of his success, when he had everything he’d ever wanted — the yacht, the sweet and compliant young mistress, the pair of Rolls Corniches, and the houses in the Bahamas, and Aspen, not to mention the new wing he’d added to the old homestead in Beechwood — that Irv began to have second thoughts about the deal he’d made. Eternity was a long time, yes, but when he’d met the stranger in the woods that night it had seemed a long way off too. Now he was in his fifties, heavier than ever, with soaring blood pressure and flat feet, and the end of his career in this vale of profits was drawing uncomfortably near. It was only natural that he should begin to cast about for a loophole.

And so it was that he returned to the church — not the Roman church, to which he’d belonged as a boy, but the Church of the Open Palm, Reverend Jimmy, Pastor. He came to Reverend Jimmy one rainy winter night with a fire in his gut and an immortal longing in his heart. He sat through a three-hour service in which Reverend Jimmy spat fire, spoke in tongues, healed the lame, and lectured on the sanctity of the one and only God — profit — and then distributed copies of the Reverend Jimmy Church-Sponsored Investment Guide with the chili and barbecue recipes on the back page.

After the service, Irv found his way to Reverend Jimmy’s office at the back of the church. He waited his turn among the other supplicants with growing impatience, but he reminded himself that the way to salvation lay through humility and forbearance. At long last he was ushered into the presence of the Reverend himself. “What can I do for you, brother?” Reverend Jimmy asked. Though he was from Staten Island, Reverend Jimmy spoke in the Alabama hog-farmer’s dialect peculiar to his tribe.

“I need help, Reverend,” Irv confessed, flinging himself down on a leather sofa worn smooth by the buttocks of the faithful.

Reverend Jimmy made a small pyramid of his fingers and leaned back in his adjustable chair. He was a youngish man — no older than thirty-five or so, Irv guessed — and he was dressed in a flannel shirt, penny loafers, and a plaid fishing hat that masked his glassy blue eyes. “Speak to me, brother,” he said.

Irv looked down at the floor, then shot a quick glance round the office — an office uncannily like his own, right down to the computer terminal, mahogany desk, and potted palms — and then whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this.”

Reverend Jimmy lit himself a cigarette and shook out the match with a snap of his wrist. “Try me,” he drawled.

When Irv had finished pouring out his heart, Reverend Jimmy leaned forward with a beatific smile on his face. “Brother,” he said, “believe me, your story’s nothin’ new — I handle just as bad and sometimes worser ever day. Cheer up, brother: salvation is on the way!”

Then Reverend Jimmy made a number of pointed inquiries into Irv’s financial status and fixed the dollar amount of his tithe — to be paid weekly in small bills, no checks please. Next, with a practiced flourish, he produced a copy of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the text of which was interspersed with biblical quotes in support of its guiding theses, and pronounced Irv saved. “You got your holy book,” the Reverend Jimmy boomed as Irv ducked gratefully out the door, “—y’all keep it with you every day, through sleet and snow and dark of night, and old Satan he’ll be paarless against you.”

And so it was. Irv gained in years and gained in wealth. He tithed the Church of the Open Palm, and he kept the holy book with him at all times. One day, just after his sixtieth birthday, his son Shane came to the house to see him. It was a Sunday and the market was closed, but after an early-morning dalliance with Sushoo, his adept and oracular mistress, he’d placed a half dozen calls to Hong Kong, betting on an impending monsoon in Burma to drive the price of rice through the ceiling. He was in the Blue Room, as he liked to call the salon in the west wing, eating a bit of poached salmon and looking over a coded letter from Butram, his deep man in the SEC. The holy book lay on the desk beside him.

Shane was a bloated young lout in his late twenties, a sorrowful, shameless leech who’d flunked out of half a dozen schools and had never held a job in his life — unlike Morgan, who’d parlayed the small stake his father had given him into the biggest used-car dealership in the country. Unwashed, unshaven, the gut he’d inherited from his father peeping out from beneath a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it looked as if it had been used to stanch wounds at the emergency ward, Shane loomed over his father’s desk. “I need twenty big ones,” he grunted, giving his father a look of beery disdain. “Bad week at the track.”

Irv looked up from his salmon and saw Tish’s nose, Tish’s eyes, saw the greedy, worthless, contemptible slob his son had become. In a sudden rage he shot from the chair and hammered the desk so hard the plate jumped six inches. “I’ll be damned if I give you another cent,” he roared.

Just then there was a knock at the door. His face contorted with rage, Irv shoved past his son and stormed across the room, a curse on his lips for Magdalena, the maid, who should have known better than to bother him at a time like this. He tore open the door only to find that it wasn’t Magdalena at all, but his acquaintance of long ago, the big black man with the wild mane of hair and the vague odor of stir-fry on his clothes. “Time’s up, Irv,” the big man said gruffly. In vain did Irv look over his shoulder to where the Reverend Jimmy’s holy book sat forlorn on the desk beside the plate of salmon that was already growing cold. The big man took his arm in a grip of steel and whisked him through the hallway, down the stairs, and out across the lawn to where a black BMW with smoked windows sat running at the curb. Irv turned his pale fleshy face to the house and saw his son staring down at him from above, and then the big man laid an implacable hand on his shoulder and shoved him into the car.

The following day, of course, as is usual in these cases, all of Irv’s liquid assets — his stocks and bonds, his Swiss and Bahamian bankbooks, even the wads of new-minted hundred-dollar bills he kept stashed in safe-deposit boxes all over the country — turned to cinders. Almost simultaneously, the house was gutted by a fire of mysterious origin, and both Rolls-Royces were destroyed. Joe Luck, who shuffled out on his lawn in a silk dressing gown at the height of the blaze, claimed to have seen a great black bird emerge from the patch of woods behind the house and mount into the sky high above the roiling billows of steam and smoke, but for some reason, no one else seemed to have shared his vision.

The big refurbished house on Beechwood Drive has a new resident now, a corporate lawyer by the name of O’Faolain. If he’s bothered by the unfortunate history of the place — or even, for that matter, aware of it — no one can say. He knows his immediate neighbors as the Chinks, the Fat Family, and the Turf Builders. They know him as the Shyster.