“‘The best of luck to you,’ Byron Fielding told him. ‘What are you going to call yourself?’
“‘The Arnold Fielding Literary Agency,’ Arnie said.
“Byron shook his head. ‘Better not,’ he said. ‘You use the Fielding name and I’ll take you to court. I’ll sue you.’
“‘You’d sue me? Your own brother?’
“‘For every cent you’ve got,’ Byron told him.”
The soldier lit his pipe. “He’d sue his own brother,” he said, “to prevent him from doing business under the name he had foisted upon him. The man may have achieved peace of mind, Doctor, but I don’t think we have to worry that it mellowed him.”
“Arnie never did open his own agency,” the doctor said. “He died a year or so after that, though not of a broken heart, but from a recurrence of the illness that had sent him into retirement initially. And the old pirate himself, Byron Fielding, only survived him by a couple of years.”
“And your young writer?”
“Not so young anymore,” said the doctor. “He had a successful career as a screenwriter, until ageism lessened his market value, at which time he returned to novel-writing. But the well-paid Hollywood work had taken its toll, and the novels he wrote all failed.”
They were considering that in companionable silence when a log burned through and fell in the fireplace. They turned at the sound, observed the shower of sparks, and heard in answer a powerful discharge of methane from the old man’s bowels.
“God, the man can fart!” cried the doctor. “Light up your pipe, Soldier. What I wouldn’t give for a cigar!”
“A cigar,” said the priest, thoughtfully.
“Sometimes it’s only a cigar,” the doctor said, “as the good Dr. Freud once told us. But in this instance it would do double duty as an air freshener. Priest, are you going to deal those cards?”
“I was just about to,” said the priest, “until you mentioned the cigar.”
“What has a cigar, and a purely hypothetical cigar at that, to do with playing a long-delayed hand of poker?”
“Nothing,” said the priest, “but it has something to do with greed. In a manner of speaking.”
“I’m greedy because I’d rather inhale the aroma of good Havana leaf than the wind from that old codger’s intestines?”
“No, no, no,” said the priest. “It’s a story, that’s all. Your mention of a cigar put me in mind of a story.”
“Tell it,” the policeman urged.
“It’s a poor story compared to those you all have told,” the priest said. “But it has to do with greed.”
“And cigars?”
“And cigars, yes. It definitely has to do with cigars.”
“Put the cards down,” the doctor said, “and tell the story.”
There was a man I used to know (said the priest) whom I’ll call Archibald O’Bannion, Archie to his intimates. He started off as a hod carrier on building sites, applied himself diligently learning his trade, and wound up with his own construction business. He was a hard worker and a good businessman, as it turned out, and he did well. He was motivated by the desire for profit, and for the accoutrements of success, but I don’t know that I would call him a greedy man. He was a hard bargainer and an intense competitor, certainly, and he liked to win. But greedy? He never struck me that way.
And he was charitable, more than generous in his contributions to the church and to other good causes. It is possible, to be sure, for a man to be at once greedy and generous, to grab with one hand while dispensing with the other. But Archie O’Bannion never struck me as a greedy man. He was a cigar smoker, and he never lit a cigar without offering them around, nor was there anything perfunctory about the offer. When he smoked a cigar, he genuinely wanted you to join him.
He treated himself well, as he could well afford to do. His home was large and imposing, his wardrobe extensive and well chosen, his table rich and varied. In all these areas, his expenditures were consistent with his income and status.
His one indulgence — he thought it an indulgence — was his cigars.
He smoked half a dozen a day, and they weren’t William Penn or Hav-a-Tampa, either. They were the finest cigars he could buy. I liked a good cigar myself in those days, though I could rarely afford one, and when Archie would offer me one of his, well, I didn’t often turn him down. He was a frequent visitor to the rectory, and I can recall no end of evenings when we sat in pleasantly idle conversation, puffing on cigars he’d provided.
Then the day came when a collection of cigars went on the auction block, and he bought them all.
A cigar smoker’s humidor is not entirely unlike an oenophile’s wine cellar, and sometimes there is even an aftermarket for its contents. Cigars don’t command the prices of rare bottles of wine, and I don’t know that they’re collected in quite the same way, but when a cigar smoker dies, the contents of his humidor are worth something, especially since Castro came into power in Cuba. With the American embargo in force, Havana cigars were suddenly unobtainable. One could always have them smuggled in through some country that continued to trade with Cuba, but that was expensive and illegal, and, people said, the post-revolution cigars were just not the same. Many of the cigar makers had fled the island nation, and the leaf did not seem to be what it was, and, well, the result was that pre-Castro cigars became intensely desirable.
A cigar is a perishable thing, but properly stored and maintained there’s no reason why it cannot last almost forever. In this particular instance, the original owner was a cigar aficionado who began laying in a supply of premium Havanas shortly after Castro took power. Perhaps he anticipated the embargo. Perhaps he feared a new regime would mean diminished quality. Whatever it was, he bought heavily, stored his purchases properly, and then, his treasures barely sampled, he was diagnosed with oral cancer. The lip, the mouth, the palate — I don’t know the details, but his doctor told him in no uncertain terms that he had to give up his cigars.
Not everyone can. Sigmund Freud, whom Doctor quoted a few minutes ago, went on smoking while his mouth and jaw rotted around his cigar. But this chap’s addiction was not so powerful as his instinct for self-preservation, and so he stopped smoking then and there.
But he held on to his cigars. His several humidors were attractive furnishings as well as being marvels of temperature and humidity control, and he liked the looks of them in his den. He broke the habit entirely, to the point where his eyes would pass over the humidors regularly without his ever registering a conscious thought of their contents, let alone a longing for them. You might think he’d have pressed cigars upon his friends, but he didn’t, perhaps out of reluctance to have to stand idly by and breathe in the smoke of a cigar he could not enjoy directly. Or perhaps, as I somehow suspect, he was saving them for some future date when it would be safe for him to enjoy them as they were meant to be enjoyed.
Well, no matter. In the event he did recover from his cancer, and some years passed, and he died of something else. And, since neither his widow nor his daughters smoked cigars, they wound up consigned for sale at auction, and Archie O’Bannion bought them all.
There were two thousand of them, and Archie paid just under sixty thousand dollars for the lot. That included the several humidors, which were by no means valueless, but when all was said and done he’d shelled out upwards of twenty-five dollars a cigar. If he consumed them at his usual rate, a day’s smoking would cost him $150. He could afford that, but there was no denying it was an indulgence.
But what troubled him more than the cost was the fact that his stock was virtually irreplaceable. Every cigar he smoked was a cigar he could never smoke again. Two thousand cigars sounded like an extraordinary quantity, but if you smoked six a day starting the first of January, you’d light up the last one after Thanksgiving dinner. They wouldn’t last the year.