He made money also by consulting with clients profitably on a personal freelance basis for fees, percentages, and commissions and by participating on a modest scale in several advantageous real estate syndication ventures, which he never understood. When national affairs again took a turn toward the menacing, he found himself going as a father in anguished consternation to his old wartime acquaintance Milo Minderbirider. Milo was elated to see him.
"I was never even sure you always really liked me," he revealed almost gratefully.
"We've always been friends," said Yossarian evasively, "and what are friends for?"
Milo showed caution instantaneously with a native grasp that never seemed to fail him. "Yossarian, if you've come to me for help in keeping your sons out of the war in Vietnam- "
"It's the only reason. I have come."
"There is nothing I can do." By which Yossarian understood him to mean he had already used up his quota of illegal legal draft exemptions. "We all have our share to shoulder. I've seen my duties and I've done them."
"We all have our jobs to do," added Wintergreen. "It's the luck of the draw."
Yossarian remembered that Wintergreen's jobs in the last big war had consisted mainly of digging holes as a stockade prisoner and filling them back up for having gone AWOL one time after another to delay going overseas into danger; selling stolen Zippo cigarette lighters once there; and serving in a managerial capacity in military mailrooms, where he countermanded orders from high places that fell short of his standards, simply by throwing them away.
"I'm talking about one kid, damn it," pleaded Yossarian. "I don't want him to go."
"I know what you're suffering," said Milo. "I have a son of my own I worry about. But we've used up our contacts."
Yossarian perceived dismally that he was getting nowhere and that if Michael had bad luck in the draw, he would probably have to run off with him to Sweden. He sighed. "Then there's nothing you can do to help me? Absolutely nothing?"
"Yes, there is something you can do to help me," Milo responded, and for the moment, Yossarian feared he had been misunderstood. "You know people that we don't. We would like," Milo continued, and here his voice grew softer, in a manner sacramental, "to hire a very good law firm in Washington."
"Don't you have a good firm there?"
"We want to hire every good law firm, so that none of them can ever take part in an action against us."
"We want the influence," explained Wintergreen, "not the fucking law work. If we had the fucking influence we'd never need the fucking law work or the fucking lawyers. Yossarian, where could we begin if we wanted to get all the best legal connections in Washington?"
"Have you thought of Porter Lovejoy?"
"C. Porter Lovejoy?" At this, even Wintergreen succumbed to a state of momentary awe.
"Could you get to C. Porter Lovejoy?"
"I can get to Lovejoy," casually answered Yossarian, who'd never met Lovejoy but got to him simply with a phone call to his law office as the representative of a cash-rich corporate client seeking the services of someone experienced in Washington for an appropriate retainer.
Milo said he was a wizard. Wintergreen said he was fucking okay. "And Eugene and I agree," said Milo, "that we want to retain you too, as a consultant and a representative, on a part-time basis, of course. Only when we need you."
"For special occasions."
"We will give you an office. And a business card."
"You'll give more than that." Yossarian turned suave. "Are you sure you can afford me? It will cost a lot."
"We have a lot. And with an old friend like you, we're prepared to be generous. How much will you want, if we try it for a year?"
Yossarian pretended to ponder. The figure he would name had jumped instantly to mind. "Fifteen thousand a month," he finally said, very distinctly.
"Fifteen dollars a month?" Milo repeated, more distinctly, as though to make sure.
"Fifteen thousand a month."
"I thought you said hundred."
" Eugene, tell him."
"He said thousand, Milo," Wintergreen sadly obliged.
"I have trouble hearing." Milo pulled violently at an earlobe, a though remonstrating with a naughty child. "I thought fifteen dollars sounded low."
"It's thousand, Milo. And I'll want it on a twelve-month basis even though I might be available for only ten. I take two-month summer vacations."
He was delighted with that whopper. But it would be nice to have summers free, maybe to return to those two literary projects of yore, his play and comic novel.
His idea for the stage play, reflecting A Christmas Carol, would portray Charles Dickens and his fecund household at Christmas dinner when that family was at its most dysfunctional, shortly before that splenetic literary architect of sentimental good feeling erected the brick wall indoors to close his own quarters off from his wife's. His lighthearted comic novel was derived from the Doctor Faustus novel of Thomas Mann and centered on a legal dispute over the rights to the fictitious and horrifying Adrian Leverkühn choral masterpiece in those pages called Apocalypse, which, stated Mann, had been presented just once, in Germany in 1926, anticipating Hitler, and possibly never would be performed again. On one side of the lawsuit were the heirs of the musical genius Leverkühn, who had created that colossal composition; on the other would be the beneficiaries to the estate of Thomas Mann, who had invented Leverkühn and defined and orchestrated that prophetic, awesome, and unforgettable unique opus of progress and annihilation, with Nazi Germany as both the symbol and the substance. The attraction to Yossarian of both these ideas lay in their arresting unsuitability.
"Fifteen a month," Milo finally tabulated aloud, "for twelve months a year, will come to amp;"
"A hundred and eighty," Wintergreen told him curtly.
Milo nodded, with an expression that revealed nothing.
"Then we agree. You will work for us for one year for one hundred and eighty dollars."
"Thousand, Milo. A hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year, plus expenses. Tell him again, Eugene. And write out a check for three months in advance. That's the way I'm always paid, quarterly. I've already gotten you C. Porter Lovejoy."
Milo 's look of pain was habit. But from that date on, Yossarian knew, but did not care to admit, he had not been in serious want of teady cash, except in those uncommon times of divorce and the successive collapse of his tax shelters a dozen years after each had been erected by infallible specialists.
"And by the way"-Wintergreen took him aside at the end- "about your son. Establish a legal residence in a black neighborhood where the draft boards don't have trouble meeting their quotas. Then, lower back pain and a letter from a doctor should do the rest. I have one son technically living in Harlem now, and a couple of nephews who officially reside in Newark."
Yossarian had the feeling about Michael, and himself, that they would sooner flee to Sweden.
C. Porter Lovejoy and G. Noodles Cook took to each other symbiotically from the day Yossarian brought them together, with a reciprocating warmth Yossarian had never felt toward Noodles or for Porter Lovejoy either the few times they had met.
"That's one I owe you," Noodles had said afterward.
"There's more than one," Yossarian took the precaution of reminding him.
C. Porter Lovejoy, silver-haired, bipartisan, and clearheaded, as the friendly press chose consistently to describe him, was a man still very much at ease with life. He had been a Washington insider and a made member of the Cosa Loro there for almost half a century and by now had earned the right, he liked to ruminate to listeners, to start slowing down.