“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.