“Which are?”
“That he’s a top Mafia buttonman who knows where Judge Crater is buried.”
“They can’t prove anything, though.”
“Maybe not. But who wants to spend the rest of his life starring in FBI home movies?”
“Not a pleasing prospect for a lover of privacy,” Silversmith said, and revised certain of his plans.
“You’ve been a good customer,” Maginnis said, two weeks later. “Today you get a bonus, and it’s absolutely free. You get a forty-foot Chris-Craft, fully equipped. Where do you want it?”
“Just moor it at the dock of my Nassau place,” Silversmith said. “Oh, and thanks.”
“Another free gift,” Maginnis said, three days after that. “Ten additional wishes, no strings attached.”
“That makes eighteen unused wishes to date,” Silversmith said. “Maybe you should give some to another deserving customer.”
“Don’t be silly,” Maginnis said. “We’re very pleased with you.”
Silversmith fingered his brocade scarf and said, “There is a catch, isn’t there?”
It was one month and fourteen wishes later. Silversmith and Maginnis were seated in lawn chairs on the broad lawn of Silversmith’s estate at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. A string quartet was playing softly in the background. Silversmith was sipping a Negroni. Maginnis, looking more harried than usual, was gulping a whiskey and soda.
“Well, you could call it a catch,” Maginnis admitted. “But it’s not what you think.”
“What is it?”
“You know that I can’t tell you that.”
“Do I maybe end up losing my soul to you and going to hell?”
Maginnis burst into rude laughter. “That,” he said, “is just about the last thing you have to worry about. Excuse me now. I’ve got an appointment in Damascus to see about that Arabian stallion you wanted. You get five more bonus wishes this week, by the way.”
Two months later, after dismissing the dancing girls, Silversmith lay alone in his emperor-sized bed in his eighteen-room apartment on the Pincio in Rome and thought sour thoughts. He had twenty-seven wishes coming to him and he couldn’t think of a thing to wish for. And furthermore, he was not happy.
Silversmith sighed and reached for the glass that was always on his night table filled with seltzer flown in from Grossinger’s The glass was empty.
“Ten servants and they can’t keep a lousy glass filled,” he muttered. He got out of bed, walked across the room and pushed the servant’s button. Then he got back in bed. It took three minutes and thirty-eight seconds by his Rolex Oyster, whose case was carved out of a single block of amber, for the butler’s second assistant to hurry into the room.
Silversmith pointed at the glass. The assistant butler’s eyes bugged out and his jaw fell. “Empty!” he cried. “But I specifically told the maid’s assistant—”
“To hell with the excuses,” Silversmith said. “Some people are going to have to get on the ball around here or some heads are going to roll.”
“Yes, sir!” said the butler’s second assistant. He hurried to the built-in wall refrigerator beside Silversmith’s bed, opened it and took out a bottle of seltzer. He put the bottle on a tray, took out a snowy linen towel, folded it once lengthwise and hung it over his arm. He selected a chilled glass from the refrigerator, examined it for cleanliness, substituted another glass and wiped the rim with his towel.
“Get on with it, get on with it,” Silversmith said ominously.
The butler’s second assistant quickly wrapped the towel around the seltzer bottle, and squirted seltzer into the glass so exquisitely that he didn’t spill a drop. He replaced the bottle in the refrigerator and handed the glass to Silversmith. Total elapsed time, twelve minutes, forty-three seconds.
Silversmith lay in bed sipping seltzer and thinking deep brooding thoughts about the impossibility of happiness and the elusiveness of satisfaction. Despite having the world’s luxuries spread before him—or because of it—he was bored and had been for weeks. It seemed damned unfair to him, to be able to get anything you wanted, but to be unable to enjoy what you could get.
When you came right down to it, life was a disappointment, and the best it had to offer was never quite good enough. The roast duck was never as crisp as advertised, and the water in the swimming pool was always a shade too warm or too cold.
How elusive was the quest for quality! For ten dollars you could buy a pretty fair steak; for a hundred dollars you could get a really good Porterhouse; and for a thousand dollars you could buy a kilo of Kobe beef that had been massaged by the hands of consecrated virgins, together with a genius chef to prepare it. And it would be very good indeed. But not a thousand dollars good. The more you paid, the less progress you made toward that quintessence of beef that the angels eat when God throws his yearly banquet for the staff.
Or consider women. Silversmith had possessed some of the most intoxicating creatures that the planet could offer, both singly and in ensemble. But even this had turned out to be nothing worth writing a memoir about. His appetite had palled too quickly in the steady flood of piquantly costumed flesh that Maginnis had provided, and the electric touch of unknown female flesh had turned abrasive—the sandpaper of too many personalities (each one clutching her press clippings) against Silversmith’s increasingly reluctant hide.
He had run through the equivalent of several seraglios, and the individuals who comprised them were as dim in his memory now as the individual ice cream cones of his youth. He vaguely remembered a Miss Universe winner with the odor of the judge’s cigar still clinging to her crisp chestnut hair; and there had been the gum-chewing scuba instructress from Sea Isle, Georgia, in her exciting black rubber wet suit, blowing an inopportune pink sugary bubble at the moment of moments. But the rest of them had passed from his recollection in a comic strip of sweaty thighs and jiggling boobs, painted smiles, fake pouts, and stagey langours; and through it all the steady heaving rhythm of the world’s oldest gymnastic exercise.
The best of them had been his matched set of three Cambodian temple dancers—brown and bright-eyed creatures, all flashing eyes and floating black hair, sinuous frail limbs and small, hard breasts like persimmons. Not even they had diverted him for long. He had kept them around to play bridge with evenings, however.
He took another sip of seltzer and found that his glass was empty. Grumpily he got out of bed and crossed the room to the servant’s bell. His finger poised over it—
And just at that moment enlightenment came to him like a million-watt light bulb flashing in his head.
And he knew what he had to do.
It took Maginnis ten days to find Silversmith in a broken-down hotel on 10th Avenue and 41st Street in New York. Maginnis knocked once and walked in. It was a dingy room with tin-covered walls painted a poisonous green. The smell of hundreds of applications of insecticide mingled with the odor of thousands of generations of cockroaches. Silversmith was sitting on an iron cot covered with an olive blanket. He was doing a crossword puzzle. He gave Maginnis a cheerful nod.
“All right,” Maginnis said, “if you’re through slumming, I’ve got a load of stuff for you—wishes 43 and 44, plus as much of 45 as I could put together. Which of your houses do you want it delivered to?”
“I don’t want it,” Silversmith said.
“You don’t, huh?”
“No, I don’t.”
Maginnis lit a cigar. He puffed thoughtfully for a while, then said, “Is this Silversmith I see before me, the famous ascetic, the well-known stoic, the Taoist philosopher, the living Buddha? Non-attachment to worldly goods, that’s the new number, right, Silversmith? Believe me, baby, you’ll never bring it off. You’re going through a typical rich man’s freakout, which will last a few weeks or months, like they all do. But then comes the day when the brown rice tastes extra-nasty, and the burlap shirt scratches your eczema worse than usual. This is followed by some fast rationalizing, and the next thing you know you’re having Eggs Benedict at Sardi’s and telling your friends what a valuable experience it was.”