Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

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, as 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 Leverkuhn 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 Leverkuhn, who had created that colossal composition; on the other would be the beneficiaries to the estate of Thomas Mann, who had invented Leverkuhn 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 ..."

"A hundred and eighty," Wintergreen told him curtly.