Catch and Release Paperback

by Lawrence Block

  “Lower middle class,” the doctor said. “No money in the family, but they were a long way from impoverished. Still, insecurity, like the heart, has reasons that reason knows nothing of. If he’s to be believed, Byron Fielding grew up believing he had to grab every dollar he could or he risked ruin, poverty, and death.”

  “Then he became wealthy,” the priest said, “and, more to the point, came to believe he was wealthy, and financially secure.”

  “Fuck-you money,” the policeman said, and explained the phrase when the priest raised an eyebrow. “Enough money, Priest, so that the possessor can say ‘fuck you’ to anyone.”

  “An enviable state,” the priest said. “Or is it? The man attained that state, and his greed, which no longer imprisoned him, still operated as before. It was his identity, part and parcel of his personality. He remained greedy and heartless, not out of compulsion but out of choice, out of a sense of self.” He frowned. “Unless we’re to take his final remarks cum grano salis?” To the puzzled policeman he said, “With a grain of salt, that is to say. You translated fuck-you money for me, so at least I can return the favor. A sort of quid pro quo, which in turn means...”

  “That one I know, Priest.”

  “And Fielding was not stretching the truth when he said he was the same vicious bastard he’d always been,” the doctor put in. “Peace of mind didn’t seem to have mellowed him at all. Did I mention his brother?”

  The men shook their heads.

  “Fielding had a brother,” the doctor said, “and, when it began to appear as though this scam of his might prove profitable, Fielding put his brother to work for him. He made his brother change his name, and picked Arnold Fielding for him, having in mind the poet Matthew Arnold. The brother, whom everyone called Arnie, functioned as a sort of office manager, and was also a sort of mythical beast invoked by Byron in time of need. If, for example, an author came in to cadge an advance, or ask for something else Byron Fielding didn’t want to grant, the agent wouldn’t simply turn him down. ‘Let me ask Arnie,’ he would say, and then he’d go into the other office and twiddle his thumbs for a moment, before returning to shake his head sadly at the client. ‘Arnie says no,’ he’d report. ‘If it were up to me it’d be a different story, but Arnie says no.’”

  “But he hadn’t actually consulted his brother?”

  “No, of course not. Well, here’s the point. Some years after Gerald Metzner learned about Byron Fielding’s peace of mind, Arnie Fielding had a health scare and retired to Florida. He recovered, and in due course found Florida and retirement both bored him to distraction, and he came back to New York. He went to see his brother Byron and told him he had decided to go into business. And what would he do? Well, he said, there was only one business he knew, and that’s the one he would pick. He intended to set up shop on his own as a literary agent.

  “‘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.

  “It’s a damned puzzle,” he told me. “What do I do? Smoke one a day? That way they’ll last five years and change, but all the while five out of six of the cigars I smoke will be slightly disappointing. Maybe I should smoke ’em all up, one right after the other, and enjoy them while I can. Or maybe I should just let them sit there in their beautiful humidors, remaining moist and youthful while I dry up and age. Then when I drop dead it’ll be Mary Katherine’s turn to put them up for auction.”

  I said something banal about the conundrum of having one’s cake and eating it, too.

  “By God,” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it? Have a cigar, Father.”

  But, I demurred, surely not one of his Havanas? “You smoke it,” he said. “You earned it, Father, and you can damn well smoke it and enjoy it.”

  And he picked up the phone and called his insurance agent.

  Archie, I should mention, had come to regard the insurance industry as a necessary evil. He’d had trouble getting his insurers to pay claims he felt were entirely legitimate, and disliked the way they’d do anything they could to weasel out of their responsibility. So he had no compunctions about what he did now.

  He insured his cigars, opting for the top-of-the-line policy, one which provided complete coverage, not even excluding losses resulting from flood, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. He declared their value at the price he had paid for them, paid the first year’s premium in advance, and went on with his life.

  A little less than a year later, he smoked the last of his premium Havanas. Whereupon he filed a claim against his insurance company, explaining that all two thousand of the cigars were lost in a series of small fires.

  You will probably not be surprised that the insurance company refused to pay the claim, dismissing it as frivolous. The cigars, they were quick to inform him, had been consumed in the normal fashion, and said consumption was therefore not a recoverable loss.

  Archie took them to court, where the judge agreed that his claim was frivolous, but ordered the company to pay it all the same. The policy, he pointed out, did not exclude fire, and in fact specifically included it as a hazard against which Archie’s cigars were covered. Nor did it exclude as unacceptable risk the consumption of the cigars in the usual fashion. “I won,” he told me. “They warranted the cigars were insurable, they assumed the risk, and then of course they found something to whine about, the way they always do. But I stuck it to the bastards and I beat ’em in court. I thought they’d drag it out and appeal the judgment, and I was set to fight it all the way, but they caved in. Wrote me a check for the full amount of the policy, and now I can go looking for someone else with pre-Castro Havanas to sell, because I’ve developed a taste for them, let me tell you. And I’ve got you to thank, Father, for a remark you made about having your cake and eating it, too, because I smoked my cigars and I’ll have ’em, too, just as soon as I find someone who’s got ’em for sale. Of course this is a stunt you can only pull once, but once is enough, and I feel pretty good about it. The Havanas are all gone, but these Conquistadores from Honduras aren’t bad, so what the hell, Father. Have a cigar!”

  * * *

  “I don’t know why you were so apologetic about your story, Priest,” the soldier said. “I think it’s a fine one. I’m a pipe smoker myself, and any dismay one might conceivably feel at watching one’s tobacco go up in smoke is more than offset by the satisfaction of improving the pipe itself, as one does with each pipeful one smokes. But pipe tobacco, even very fine pipe tobacco, costs next to nothing compared to premium cigars. I can well understand the man’s initial frustration, and ultimate satisfaction.”

  “An excellent story,” the doctor agreed, “but then it would be hard for me not to delight in a story in which an insurance company is hoist on its own petard. The swine have institutionalized greed, and it’s nice to see them get one in the eye.”

  “I wonder,” said the policeman.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the doctor told him. “You’re thinking that this fellow Archie committed lawful fraud. You’re thinking it was his intention to make the insurance company subsidize his indulgence in costly Cuban tobacco. That’s entirely correct, but as far as I’m concerned it’s quite beside the point. Lawful fraud is an insurance company’s stock in trade, and anyway what’s sixty thousand dollars on their corporate balance sheet? I say more power to Archie, and long may he puff away.”

  “All well and good,” the policeman said, “but that’s not what I was thinking.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Not at all,” he told the doctor, and turned to the priest. “There’s more to the story, isn’t there, Priest?”

  The priest smiled. “I was wondering if anyone would think of it,” he said. “I rather thought you might, Policeman.”

  “Think of what?” the soldier wanted to know.

  “And what did they do?” the policeman asked. “Did they merely voice the threat? Or did they go all the way and have him arrested?”

  “Arrested?” cried the doctor. “For what?”

  “Arson,” the policeman said. “Didn’t he say the cigars were lost in a series of small fires? I suppose they could have charged him with two thousand counts of criminal arson.”

  “Arson? They w
ere his cigars, weren’t they?”

  “As I understand it.”

  “And doesn’t a man have the right to smoke his own cigars?”

  “Not in a public place,” said the policeman. “But yes, in the ordinary course of events, he would have been well within his rights to smoke them. But he had so arranged matters that smoking one of those cigars amounted to intentional destruction of insured property.”

  “But that’s an outrage,” the doctor said.

  “Is it, Doctor?” The soldier puffed on his pipe. “You liked the story when the insurance company was hoist on its own petard. Now Archie’s hoisted even higher on a petard of his own making. Wouldn’t you say that makes it a better story?”

  “A splendid story,” said the doctor, “but no less an outrage for it.”

  “In point of fact,” the policeman said, “Archie could have been charged with arson even in the absence of a claim, the argument being that he forfeited the right to smoke the cigars the moment he insured them. Practically speaking, though, it was pressing the claim that triggered the criminal charge. Did he actually go to jail, Priest? Because that would seem a little excessive.”

  The priest shook his head. “Charges were dropped,” he said, “when the parties reached agreement. Archie gave back the money, and both sides paid their own legal costs. And he got to tell the story on himself, and he was a good fellow, you know, and could see the humor in a situation. He said it was worth it, all things considered, and a real pre-Castro cigar was worth the money, even if you had to pay for it yourself.”

  The other three nodded at the wisdom of that, and once again the room fell silent. The priest took the deck of cards in hand, looked at the others in turn, and put the cards down undealt. And then, from the fireside, the fifth man present broke the silence.

  * * *

  “Greed,” said the old man, in a voice like the wind in dry grass. “What a subject for conversation!”

  “We’ve awakened you,” said the priest, “and for that let me apologize on everyone’s behalf.”