Myron Greene stood there for a moment, eyeing me with the same faint disapproval that he probably eyed all grown men who answer their doors at four in the afternoon dressed only in terry-cloth bathrobe and denim apron.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Not bad; how are you?”
He came in and looked around the way that he always did, as though expecting to find a badly mismanaged seraglio. While he looked, I took the opportunity to examine what a bright New York attorney, who had just become a millionaire at thirty-eight, might wear on a nice warm May day.
If he had been born about a century and a half earlier, Myron Greene probably would have been a disciple of Beau Brummell, a slightly plump disciple perhaps, but nevertheless a devoted one. As it was, he contented himself with dressing about six months behind the latest cry which, on that particular May afternoon, happened to be a half-hearted revival of the zoot suits of the wartime forties.
Myron Greene was wearing a modified version of one, a powder blue number with a jacket that draped almost to his knees. High-waisted britches went halfway up his chest and were held there by two-inch-wide midnight blue suspenders. His brown, graying hair, still modishly long, glistened with what I suspected of being a pound or two of Vaseline.
“My, you’re pretty,” I said.
“Like it?” he said in a half-serious, half-hopeful tone.
“What happened to the key chain?” I said. “You know, those three- or four-foot-long jobs that they used to wear?”
Myron Greene glanced down. “I thought it might be just a bit much.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Well, congratulations anyhow.”
“On what?”
“On the Centennial Group. I heard that it hit one twenty-one at two o’clock yesterday afternoon so that makes you a millionaire, if you exercised your options which, knowing you, you sure as hell did.”
Myron Greene shrugged at my news about the stock of the conglomerate that he had helped put together nearly six months ago. “It’s all on paper,” he said.
“Well, it must be fun to tot up the figures anyway.”
He shrugged again, his eyes still wandering around the apartment. “That’s new,” he said, indicating the butcher block that stood before the Pullman kitchen.
“Actually, it’s a hundred and nineteen years old.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Brooklyn.”
“How much?”
“Fifty bucks — and another fifty to get it hauled up here.”
“It’s still a good investment.”
“Jesus, Myron, I didn’t buy it as an investment.”
“Maybe you should’ve.”
“Let’s have a drink first.”
“First before what?”
“Before the bad news that dragged you out of your office at four o’clock on the afternoon that you became a millionaire.”
Myron Greene looked at his watch. “I’m thirty-eight.”
“Is that what your watch says?”
Myron Greene sighed and sat down in one of the chairs around the hexagonal poker table. “If it had happened when I was twenty-eight, it might have meant something. I don’t know what though.”
“Here,” I said, setting a Scotch and water down in front of him. “It’s got the meaning of life in it.”
Myron Greene took a swallow of the drink and then looked slowly around the room. “At least you’ve lived,” he said.
It was really the reason that I was Myron Greene’s client. He was convinced that I led a spicy existence peopled with long-legged blondes, likeable adventurers, and fairly honest crooks and thieves, all of whom had hearts of gold. I was, in Myron Greene’s eyes, a tear-around with an enviable life-style designed almost exclusively for fun and frolic, but highlighted here and there with the occasional thrill of mild danger.
In reality, I was turning into a recluse who spent too much time alone in museums, galleries, motion pictures, and at any parade that happened to come along. I also drank too much in bars in the company of minor thieves, con men, prospering cops, failed gamblers, fast-buck hustlers, and others of their ilk such as out-of-work actors and free-lance writers.
In my spare time, of which there was virtually no end, I stayed home, stared at the walls, looked at too much television, and read too much Dickens and Camus. On most Saturdays I got to see my eight-year-old son whose mother had married a man who, unlike Myron Greene, had made his first million at twenty-three. He was thirty-five now and apparently well on the way to his first billion.
My son was never really quite sure what it was that I did for a living. “You mean you get things back for people, Dad?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean if somebody lost something, like a whole lot of money, you’d help them find it?”
“No, I help people get things back that they’ve had stolen from them. It’s never money.”
“What things?”
“Well, jewelry, for instance. Or personal papers. Or valuable art such as paintings and pictures and things. Sometimes, even people.”
“You mean people get stolen?”
“Sometimes.”
“And you go find them and then arrest the crooks?”
“No, I go and buy the people or the things back.”
He had to think about that for a moment. “And the people who have things stolen, they pay you to go buy them back from the crooks, huh?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes the crooks pay me.”
“How much?” he said. I could see that his stepfather was teaching him a thing or two.
“Ten percent,” I said. “Suppose you had something stolen.”
“My bicycle.”
“All right, your bicycle. And suppose whoever stole it was willing to sell it back to you for ten dollars.”
“It’s worth more than that. A lot more.”
“I know. So the crooks would say that if you’d use me to bring the money to them, they’d let you have the bike back for ten dollars.”
He had to think about that, too. “I guess so,” he said finally. “But how do I know that they wouldn’t just take the ten dollars and keep my bike?” He was also growing up a true New Yorker.
“Because I wouldn’t let them. No bike, no money.”
“And how much would you charge me?”
“I wouldn’t charge you anything. But if it were somebody else, some boy I didn’t know, I’d charge him a dollar.”
“And he’d have to pay that?”
“Either he or the crook who stole the bike.”
“Huh,” my son said. “That’s a funny business.”
“You’re right.”
“What do you call it? I mean, what do you call what you do?”
“I’m a go-between,” I said, feeling a little foolish.
He shook his head slowly.“I never heard of that before.”
“There’re not too many of us around.”
“Mama always says you’re a writer.”
“Not anymore.”
“She says you used to work on a newspaper.”
“That was a long time ago. The paper went out of business.”
“When?”
“About the time you were born.”
“Did you write about football?”
“No, I wrote a column.”
“About what?”
“People.”
“What kind of people?”
“All kinds. I wrote about crooks a lot.”
“And who else?”
“Oh, funny people. People who do funny things for a living.”
“Like you do now?”
“Uh-huh. Like I do now.”