Catch and Release Paperback

by Lawrence Block

  “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.

  The money rolled in.

  And so did the stories, and they were terrible. Fielding stacked them, and when each had been in his office for two weeks, so that it would look as though he’d taken his time and given it a careful reading, he returned it with a letter explaining just what was wrong with it. Most of the time what was wrong was the writer’s utter lack of talent, but he never said that. Instead he praised the style and found fault with the plot, which somehow was always flawed in ways that revision could not cure. Put this one away, he advised each author, and write another, and send that along as soon as it’s finished. With, of course, another reading fee.

  The business was profitable from the beginning, with writers incredibly sending in story after story, failing entirely to learn from experience. Fielding thought he’d milk it for as long as it lasted, but a strange thing happened. Skimming through the garbage, he found himself coming across a story now and then that wasn’t too bad. “Congratulations!” he wrote the author. “I’m taking this right out to market.” It was probably a mistake, he thought, but this way at least he got away with a shorter letter.

  And some of the stories sold. And, out of the blue, a professional writer got in touch, wondering if Fielding would represent him on a straight commission basis. By the time my patient, young Gerald Metzner, went to work for him, Byron Fielding was an established agent with over ten years in the business and a string of professional clients whose work he sold to established book and magazine publishers throughout the world.

  Fielding had half a dozen people working for him by then. One ran a writing school, with a post office box fo
r an address and no visible connection with Byron Fielding or his agency. The lucky student worked his way through a ten-lesson correspondence course, and upon graduating received a certificate of completion and the suggestion that he might submit his work (with a reading fee) to guess who. Another employee dealt with the professional clients, working up market lists for the material they submitted. Two others—Gerald Metzner was one of them—read the scripts that came in over the transom, the ones accompanied by reading fees. “I can see you are no stranger to your typewriter,” he would write to some poor devil who couldn’t write an intelligible laundry list. “Although this story has flaws that render it unsalable, I’ll be eager to see your next effort. I feel confident that you’re on your way.” The letter, needless to say, went out over Byron Fielding’s signature. As far as the mopes were concerned, Fielding was reading every word himself, and writing every word of his replies. Another employee, also writing over Fielding’s mean little scrawl, engaged in personal collaboration with the more desperate clients. For a hundred bucks, the great man himself would purportedly work with them step-by-step, from outline through first draft to final polish. They would be writing their stories hand in hand with Byron Fielding, and when it was finished to his satisfaction he would take it out to market.

  The client (or victim, as you prefer) would mail in his money and his outline. The hireling, who had very likely never sold anything himself, and might in fact not ever have written anything, would suggest some arbitrary change. The client would send in the revised outline, and when it was approved he would furnish a first draft. Again the employee would suggest improvements, and again the poor bastard would do as instructed, whereupon he’d be told that the story, a solid professional effort, was on its way to market.

  But it remained a sow’s ear, however artfully embroidered, and Fielding wouldn’t have dreamed of sullying what little reputation he had by showing such tripe to an editor. So the manuscript went into a drawer in the office, and there it remained, while the hapless scribbler was encouraged to get cracking on another story.

  The fee business was ethically and morally offensive, and one wondered why Fielding didn’t give it up once he could afford to. The personal collaboration racket was worse; it was actionably fraudulent, and a client who learned what was going on could clearly have pressed criminal charges against his conniving collaborator. It’s not terribly likely that Fielding could have gone to jail for it, but a determined prosecutor with the wind up could have given him some bad moments. And if there were a writer or two on the jury, he couldn’t expect much in the way of mercy.

  Fielding hung on to it because he didn’t want to give up a dime. He didn’t treat his professional clients a great deal better, for in a sense he had only one client, and that client was Byron Fielding. He acted, not in his clients’ interests, but in his own. If they coincided, fine. If not, tough.

  I could go on, but you get the idea. So did young Metzner, and he wasn’t there for long. He worked for Fielding for a year and a half, then resigned to do his own writing. A lot of the agency’s pro clients were writing soft-core paperback fiction, and Metzner tried one of his own. When it was done he sent it to Fielding, who sold it for him.

  He did a few more, and was making more money than he’d made as an employee, and working his own hours. But it wasn’t what he really wanted to write, and he tried a few other things, and wound up out in California, writing for film and television. Fielding referred him to a Hollywood agent, who, out of gratitude and the hope of more business, split commissions on Metzner’s sales with Byron Fielding. Thus Fielding made far more money over the years from Gerald Metzner’s screenwriting than he had ever made from his prose, and all he had to do for it was cash the checks the Hollywood agent sent him. That was, to his way of thinking, the ideal author-agent relationship, and he had warm feelings for Metzner—or what passed for warm feelings in such a man.

  When Metzner had occasion to come to New York, he more often than not dropped in on his agent. He and Fielding would chat for fifteen minutes, and then he could return to Hollywood and tell himself he hadn’t entirely lost touch with the world of books and publishing. He had an agent, didn’t he? His agent was always happy to see him, wasn’t he?

  And who was to say he wouldn’t someday try his hand at another novel?

  Years passed, as they so often do. Business again called Gerald Metzner to New York, and he arranged to drop by Fielding’s office on a free afternoon. As usual, he waited for a few minutes in the outer office, taking a look at the sea of minions banging away at typewriters. It seemed to him that there were more of them every time he visited, more men sitting at more desks, telling even more of the hopeful hopeless that they had talent in rare abundance, and surely the next story would make the grade, but, sad to say, this story, with its poorly constructed plot, was not the one to bring their dreams to fulfillment. What a story required, you see, was a strong and sympathetic lead character confronted by a problem, and...Di dah di dah di dah.

  He broke off his reverie when he was summoned to Fielding’s private office. There the agent waited, looking younger than his years, health club-toned and sunlamp-tanned, a broad white-toothed smile on his face. The two men shook hands and took seats on opposite sides of the agent’s immaculate desk.

  They chatted a bit, about nothing in particular, and then Fielding fixed his eyes on Gerald. “You probably notice that there’s something different about me,” he said.

  “Now that you mention it,” Metzner said, “I did notice that.” Years of pitching doubtful premises to studio heads and network execs had taught him to think on his feet—or, more accurately, on his behind. What, he wondered, was different about the man? Same military haircut, same horn-rimmed glasses. No beard, no mustache. What the hell was Fielding talking about?

  “But I’ll bet you can’t quite put your finger on it.”

  Well, that was a help. Maybe this would be like soap opera dialogue—you could get through it without a script, just going with the flow.

  “You know,” he said, “that’s it exactly. I sense it, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “That’s because it’s abstract, Gerry.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “But no less real.”

  “No less real,” he echoed.

  Fielding smiled like a shark, but then how else would he smile? “I won’t keep you in suspense,” he said. “I’ll tell you what it is. I’ve got peace of mind.”

  “Peace of mind,” Metzner marveled.

  “Yes, peace of mind.” The agent leaned forward. “Gerry,” he said, “ever since I opened up for business I’ve been the toughest, meanest, most miserable sonofabitch who ever lived. I’ve always wrung every nickel I could out of every deal I touched. I worked sixty, seventy hours a week, and I used the whip on the people who worked for me. And do you know why?”

  Metzner shook his head.

  “Because I thought I had to,” Fielding said. “I really believed I’d be screwed otherwise. I’d run out of money, I’d be out on the street, my family would go hungry. So I couldn’t let a penny get away from me. You know, until my lawyers absolutely insisted, I wouldn’t even shut down the Personal Collaboration dodge. ‘Byron, you’re out of your mind,’ they told me. ‘That’s consumer fraud, and you’re doing it through the mails. It’s a fucking federal offense and you could go to Leavenworth for it, and what the hell do you need it for? Shut it down!’ And they were right, and I knew they were right, but they had to tell me a dozen times before I did what they wanted. Because we made good money out of the PC clients, and I thought I needed every cent of it.”

  “But now you have peace of mind,” Metzner prompted.

  “I do, Gerry, and you could see it right away, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t know what it was you were seeing. Peace of mind, Gerry. It’s a wonderful thing, maybe the single most wonderful thing in the world.”

  Time for the violins to come in, Metzner thou
ght. “How did it happen, Byron?”

  “A funny thing,” Fielding said. “I sat down with my accountant about eight months ago, the way I always do once a year. To go over things, look at the big picture. And he told me I had more than enough money left to keep me in great shape for as long as I live. ‘You could shut down tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and you could live like a king for another fifty years, and you won’t run out of money. You’ve got all the money you could possibly need, and it’s in solid risk-free inflation-resistant investments, and I just wish every client of mine was in such good shape.’”

  “That’s great,” said Metzner, who wished he himself were in such good shape, or within a thousand miles thereof.

  “And a feeling came over me,” Fielding said, “and I didn’t know what the feeling was, because I had never felt anything like it before. It was a relief, but it was a permanent kind of relief, the kind that means you can stay relieved. You’re not just out of the woods for the time being. You’re all of a sudden in a place where there are no woods. Free and clear—and I realized there was a name for the feeling I had, and it was peace of mind.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you, Gerry? I’ll tell you, it changed my life. All that pressure, all that anxiety—gone!” He grinned, then straightened up in his chair. “Of course,” he said, “on the surface, nothing’s all that different. I still hustle every bit as hard as I ever did. I still squeeze every dime I can out of every deal I touch. I still go for the throat, I still hang on like a bulldog, I’m still the most miserable sonofabitch in the business.”

  “Oh?”

  “But now it’s not because I have to be like that,” Fielding exulted. “It’s because I want to. That’s what I love, Gerry. It’s who I am. But now, thank God, I’ve got peace of mind!”

  * * *

  “What a curious story,” said the priest. “I’m as hard pressed to put my finger on the point of it as your young man was to recognize Fielding’s peace of mind. Fielding seems to be saying that his greed had its roots in his insecurity. I suppose his origins were humble?”