Brass Go-Between Read Online Free

thanks.”
    Myron Greene’s asthma got worse. I could hear him wheeze over the phone. “Uh—there may be a slight risk involved.”
    “That’s why I said no.”
    “My friend’s client is perfectly willing to compensate you, of course.”
    “How much is a slight risk worth to him?”
    “Say ten thousand dollars?”
    “Nobody pays that much for a slight risk.”
    “Well, there’s—”
    “Hold on,” I said. I thought a moment and then asked: “How much do you charge for divorces?”
    “I’ve never handled a divorce,” Myron Greene said, a little stiffly, I thought.
    “Well, if you did, how much would you charge?”
    “I don’t really know, there’s—”
    “Get me a divorce and the ten thousand and I’ll do it.”
    It was Myron Greene’s turn to think. “All right,” he said after a few moments. “Can you be at my office at five?”
    Despite the high-priced and perfectly sound advice of the attorney who was Myron Greene’s friend, the family of the kidnap victim refused to call in either the New York police or the FBI. Instead, they insisted on following the kidnapers’ instructions exactly. The instructions weren’t very innovative. They had me drop a satchel stuffed with $100,000 in used ten- and twenty-dollar bills along a lonely stretch of New Jersey farm road at 3:30 in the morning. I then drove for three minutes at exactly 20 miles an hour until my headlights picked up the family’s heir, a 20-year-old youth who was staggering down the center of the road, his hands tied behind him. He was also completely hysterical.
    The story never made the papers, but it got around, and the police and even the FBI started to drop in on me at odd hours. When they began to mention the penalty for neglecting to report a felony, I called Myron Greene who called his friend who called his wealthy client. The client presumably called the mayor or the governor or God, and the visits from the FBI and the police stopped.
    The third time that I heard from Myron Greene was four months later just as the ten thousand dollars was nearing its end, the victim of my profligate ways and a visit from a polite but firm representative of the Internal Revenue Service. This time Myron Greene suggested that we enter into an agreement whereby he would negotiate my fee in exchange for ten percent of whatever it was.
    “In other words you want ten percent of my ten percent,” I said.
    “It would be decidedly advantageous to you,” Myron Greene said.
    “I didn’t think you would walk across the street for a thousand-dollar fee.”
    He paused and I listened to his asthma for a while. “It’s not the fee really,” he said. “It’s not that at all. It’s simply that I find such proceedings fascinating.” He sighed a little, a wheezy sort of a sigh. “I really should have been a criminal lawyer.”
    “It would just make your asthma worse.”
    I decided that Myron Greene could throw in a few more services if he wanted to be a go-between’s agent, so we negotiated at length in his Madison Avenue offices. Finally, he agreed to accept my power of attorney and to perform such onerous chores as filing my quarterly income-tax statements on time, paying my bills, keeping my alimony payments current, and even maintaining my checkbook in some kind of order. His secretary, a forty-five-year-old dynamo whom Myron Greene called Spivack, would do the work and the lawyer would get ten percent of whatever fees came my way and the pleasure of being, vicariously at least, in the company of thieves.
    During the four years that followed I found that it was not a vocation or profession that needed advertising. The lawyers and the thieves and the insurance companies and even the cops spread the word that I could be trusted to follow instructions and that I was as honest as could be reasonably expected. Nearly all of the assignments came through Myron Greene, four or five or six a year, and they netted me a satisfactory if not gaudy living, even