Oalámaóa

In any circumstances my friend Karmesin is rather better than life-size, but when the weather turns chilly and he puts on his winter overcoat, passers-by sometimes run around the block simply for the wonder of seeing him a second time, advancing in all his outrageous majesty. For in this coat, which is of some moth-eaten blackish-gray fur, with his great red face and his mustache which, like the philosopher Nietzsche's, hangs down in corkscrew curls, he has something of the air of a hard-up Jove wrapped in his last leaky thundercloud.

"Oh, let people look," he said to me, "they will never see a coat like this again. It is the last."

"Too bad," I said.

"Yes. It is made of the fur of the Mongolian Syrax. This pelt was taken off an extinct beast found frozen along with the mammoths in the Siberian snows." He shot his cuffs. "You know, considering it is forty-seven-thousand years old, it is not very much the worse for wear."

Now Karmesin has been described as either the greatest crook or the greatest liar the world has ever known. But how is it possible to reconcile the evident pennilessness of this remarkable man with his accounts of his unfailing success as a master thief? And, if you know Karmesin, you ask yourself, "How is it possible that such a man could condescend to lie?" Mongolian Syrax, for example! There was no mention of any such beast, extinct or otherwise, in any available reference-work. No furrier had ever heard of such a creature. Yet I still feel in my heart that somehow or other the authorities must be wrong. "Look at the Piltdown Skull," I say to myself. "Oh, surely, there must have been one – just one – Mongolian Syrax!"

Such is the power of the man.

He rolled himself a cigarette fat as a cheroot, and put it between his lips. Under that portentous mustache it looked no bigger than a thermometer.

He said, "I once made a little money out of a kind of overcoats. I cannot bother to recall the exact amount. Tens of thousands – there are people nowadays to whom it would be a small fortune, I hear. Offer me a cup of coffee and I will tell you about it."

In the café Karmesin settled himself comfortably, pocketed four lumps of sugar and some toothpicks, and went on:

• • •

The overcoats to which I refer (said Karmesin) were, in fact, coats of paint, and the cloth was second-hand canvas. Yes, they were pictures, supposed to be the work of the French artist Paul Gauguin. Even the likes of you, my friend, will have heard of Gauguin, since I am told that both Mr. George Sanders and Sir Laurence Olivier have portrayed him in The Moon and Sixpence. As a character, Gauguin cannot miss with the general public: he deserted his family, swindled his friends, thrashed his mistresses, and (to paraphrase Mr. Longfellow) departing left behind him toothmarks in the hands that fed him.

But he painted some quite decorative pictures in the South Seas. They make suburban homes look artistic, especially in light oak frames. And although he was poor in his unsavory lifetime, some time after his death his pictures became immensely valuable. So, since his brushwork is not too difficult to imitate, the faking of Gauguins was, until recently, something like a little industry in itself. For example, I knew an innkeeper near Arles who made twenty million francs by selling a Gauguin portrait of his grandfather, purported to have been left by the painter in lieu of cash for an unsettled bill. The innkeeper sold two hundred and eighty of these "originals" before he retired – used to buy them by the dozen from a dealer in Marseilles; nail one over a hole in the chicken coop, and wait for a tourist to "discover" it.

You see, even if your sucker can be persuaded that he has been caught, he can generally be relied on to keep his mouth shut. He loathes being revealed as a fool. That is why so few clever fakers of works of art are exposed in their lifetimes.

But by about 1945 mere copies of famous paintings by Paul Gauguin became a drug on the market. By that date, it has been calculated, more than five million dollars had been spent on spurious originals of one canvas alone, the one named Te Po. It was necessary to discover a hitherto unheard-of Gauguin picture. I gave only a passing thought to the matter, being occupied with more lucrative affairs just then. But as luck would have it, I ran into an impecunious painter named Molosso – and here, if you like, was an extraordinary type! He was, in a way, a little like the Dutch hero, Van Meegeren, who painted pictures alleged to be by old Dutch masters with such consummate skill, and such scientific meticulousness, that he fooled all the German experts, and got undisclosed millions out of such collectors as the Reichsmarshal Goering. Van Meegeren reproduced the same pigments that the old masters had used, ground out of identical earths and jewels in the same kind of mortars with exactly similar pestles; and he applied his paint with hair-for-hair reconstructions of the old brushes, upon genuine but worthless contemporary canvases, copying the strokes of the great artists to the tiniest capillary, with an exquisite perfection of microscopic skill that has never been equaled.

Or perhaps it has? What Van Meegeren did, might not someone else have done? Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, in the Louvre, is alleged by some experts to be a fake. Believe me, my young friend, some strange stories might come out if some of our famous art galleries were carefully examined today!

Well, my little Molosso was a lesser Van Meegeren. I really marvel at this kind of man – I am lost in wonder, that one who can paint a new picture as superbly as, say, Vermeer would have painted it if he had chosen the subject, should not elect to be a great genius in his own right. Why didn't this titanic faker Van Meegeren cry, "But I am the master!" I can only assume that his genius was not strong enough; it had its rotten spot, and poverty found it, so that he argued, "Why should I go hungry as Van Meegeren, when I can drink champagne by pretending to be Vermeer?" So he faked, and Goering was fooled, and it was a great joke. But it was also a pitiful tragedy, an Allegory of Genius Strangled by Greed. The great soul takes the rough road.

Little Molosso started to paint with a high spirit and a light heart. But your true artist must be made of tough stuff, and Molosso wanted heart. A great man can whitewash a barn for a bit of bread without losing the glory and the dream; but when Molosso learned that the world preferred to spend its money on greeting cards rather than canvases, he drifted into the position of a disgruntled mediocrity who enjoyed being what they call "misunderstood." He would have gone to the dogs completely but for his wife, a cheerful little woman, who adored him and took his ill-treatment of her as a matter of course. And in abusing her Molosso could feel as a hungry genius is romantically supposed to feel – that if he had been a man like Gauguin, with spirit enough to leave her abruptly with a parting punch in the jaw, he might have been recognized as great. As it was, he was kind enough to stay married to her and let her work for him.

For her sake I decided to make Molosso rich.

The idea came to me suddenly one evening after I had walked home with him from the printer's office at which, I being there on business, he had scraped an acquaintance with me. I was amused by his preposterous virulence – it broke out when we were passing a printseller's shop. Rembrandt painted with mud, he shouted, Da Vinci was a plumber, Van Gogh painted in Braille for the blind, and as for Gauguin – bah! – he, Molosso, had painted better when he was eighteen!

"And if you don't believe me, come upstairs and I'll prove it," he said.

Having time to kill, I went to see what he had to show. And indeed, Molosso really did have a most peculiar talent. Alas, it was a talent without soul! He was so empty of original spirit that he almost frightened me. How shall I put it? If you asked him to depict, for instance, a landscape he had seen, he would stand helpless, paralyzed, while the paint dried on his palette. But if you said, "Molosso, paint me a landscape as Salvator Rosa, or Turner, or Van Gogh might have painted it," why, then he would go to work at once, with tremendous energy, and the results would have been astonishing – if he had not tired of the game in the middle.

Since we had been talking of Gauguin, he pulled out a half-finished canvas, saying, "There. Painted when I was eighteen. I'd thought of passing it off as genuine to some fat pig of a collector, just to show my disdain for collectors in general, and that leprous charlatan of a Gauguin in particular. But I thought, oh what the devil, they are beneath my (continued on page 134)Oalámaóa(continued from page 52) contempt! But look – there's your precious Gauguin in every stroke, every line, every vulgar splash of eye-catching color. It was to have been a variation on one of that ham-fisted stockbroker's Polynesian themes. I was going to call it Oalámaóa."

"Meaning?" I asked.

"Meaning simply Oalámaóa – men, pigs, women, hibiscus and bananas. What else is there in the Pacific?"

I looked closely and long. And it was then that my scheme sprouted, swelled, and blossomed to perfection in my head like one of those Japanese paper flowers in warm water. Now, as I was about to speak, Molosso's wife came in, carrying a package of groceries and three bottles of wine. He did not even say "hello" to her – simply jerked a thumb in her direction and said to me, "That's Lucille, the cross I have to bear."

I said, "Madame, I am most impressed by your husband's work, and propose to offer him a commission worthy of his brush."

"What does she know?" cried Molosso. "She sews buttons on rich women's drawers in a lingerie shop in the Rue de Miromesnil. But are you serious, sir? A commission?"

"If you are free," I said.

"Free! I wish I were!" said Molosso, with a bitter look at his nice little wife. "But sir, I'd do anything in the world rather than continue to paint sickening cherubs and nauseating roses for Minard's Hand-Painted Greeting Cards."

"Work for me for six months, then," I said, "and I will pay you one thousand dollars American every month. All your expenses will be paid. At the end of our association, I will pay you thirty thousand dollars in cash. Well?"

Well! So began what must be the neatest piece of polite skulduggery that even the rare picture business has ever known. And these, my friend, are very strong words indeed.

• • •

So. A few months later I called on no less a person than Mr. Egon Mollock, in his suite at the Crillon. He had come to Paris for his usual annual visit, seeking what he might devour, for he was a multimillionaire and a collector. Of what? Of anything that nobody else had, of anything any other collector would give his ears for. He was not a lover of beauty; only of rarity. If wart hogs had been scarce he would have collected wart hogs. As it was, he went after original works of art, which he kept locked up in his mansion in Connecticut.

To this loveless jailer of the beautiful, I said, "I have news for you, in confidence, Mr. Mollock. Imogene Gribble wants to sell a Gauguin."

"Very likely," said he. "But I happen to know that the Gobseck Collection is entailed."

"Exactly. That is why I am empowered to speak to you – in the strictest confidence."

I should explain, here, that Lucien Gobseck was one of those mystery men of money whose histories always have to be hushed up. He came up overnight like a toadstool, and helped to finance Louis Napoleon's coup d'état; had a long, murky career as company promoter, moneylender, and unofficial pawnbroker to the great, and died in 1899, leaving a colossal fortune and an art collection which hardly anyone has ever been allowed to look at. The collection is entailed – in other words, it is an heirloom; it may be inherited, but never sold. And such an inheritance, nowadays, is the legatee's nightmare. There is many a proud inheritor who, ruined by death taxes and insurance premiums, prays day and night for a good hot fire fanned by a hard dry wind.

Gobseck's only child, a girl, reversed the accepted order of things. Generally, it is an American heiress who marries a penniless Frenchman. She married a cowhand out of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, named Boscobel, said to be the most optimistic poker-player on earth. But even so, their daughter Imogene brought a large fortune to her husband, a Bostonian named Gribble, who abhorred gambling and invested only in sure things at twelve-and-a-half percent. Thus, when he passed on – Bostonians never die, they simply pass on – Imogene was left with only about twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and this incubus of a Gobseck Collection to keep up and pay insurance on.

I said, "The Tonkin Necklace has been broken up and replaced with a paste replica these five years. So has the Isabella Tiara. Morally, Imogene Gribble is justified; in law, she is culpable. I feel that I am no more a purveyor of stolen property in offering Oalámaóa, than you would be a receiver of it if you bought it. This kind of technically illicit deal is less reprehensible than, say, smuggling a bottle of cognac. Nobody is the loser, but everyone gains. A copy of Oalámaóa moulders in the dark instead of the beautiful original: Mrs. Gribble has some money, which she needs; I draw my commission; and you have the joy of possession – "

" – Oalámaóa? I never heard of it," he said.

"Neither had I until I first saw it," I told him. "It is possible that old Gobseck foresaw Gauguin's value, and bought some unheard-of canvases. Who knows?"

"I have met Imogene Gribble," said Mollock, looking at me with that unpleasant smile of his, which has been so aptly likened to a tired earthworm trying to bite its other end. "What is to prevent my dealing with her directly?"

"If the lady chose to deal directly, I imagine she would not have employed me as a go-between," I said, with some coldness. "Mrs. Gribble mentioned three of her acquaintances whom I might approach in this matter: Karyatidis the shipowner, Gregor Dreidl the theatrical man, and your good self."

"Why did you come to me first – if you did come to me first?"

"Because, I said, with a shrug, "Karyatidis is on his yacht, Dreidl is in New York, and you happen to be in Paris."

"Well," he said, grudgingly, "I'll look at the picture."

I had it with me. Mollock, who had done so much under-the-counter buying in his time, remarked on the fact that the canvas was still stretched in its framework. He had rather expected it to be rolled up in a cardboard tube. I reminded him, "This is not a stolen canvas, my dear sir, cut from its framework with a razor-blade. Why mar it even that little, therefore?"

"This is no Nineteenth Century canvas," he said.

"Of course not. It is very much older. The art-dealer, Père Tanguy, from whom most Parisian artists of Gauguin's time got their supplies, had a considerable stock of perfectly good canvases painted by unheard-of mediocrities of every century. The pictures were worthless; the canvases were excellent. So impecunious painters often bought them for a few francs, cleaned them, and painted over them. This you must know. Ah . . ." I said with a sigh, ". . . whoever sold Gauguin that bit of canvas is still whistling for his money, I'll wager, wherever he is!"

"But what a blaze of color!" he exclaimed.

So it was. There was something stunning in the impact of the color of Oalámaóa as it hit your eye. Little Molosso, in his vanity and his spite, had out-Gauguined Gauguin, so to speak. The central figure was a golden-skinned woman, nude, walking as if under a spell, followed by a group of young men wearing lava-lavas of different tints but all marked with the same meandering, tantalizing design. They were coming out of a jungle flaring with flowers. To the right, in the foreground, a black-and-white pig rooted among the shrubs.

I said, "He must have enjoyed himself, that man, painting this picture."

Mollock nodded. "I wonder what that pattern means, there on the cloth."

"Some Polynesian ideograph, no doubt," I said.

"And how much does Imogene Gribble want for this?" he asked.

"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars," I said.

"Like hell she does," said he. "Do you realize that if I don't buy, a word dropped by me will make the sale of this picture to anybody else absolutely impossible?"

"Sir," said I, "in naming you, Karyatidis and Dreidl, Mrs. Imogene Gribble referred only to the three most respectable of her list of potential buyers."

I will not bore you with an account of the negotiations that followed. They started before lunch, and ended at cocktail-time. Mollock wheedled me, Mollock tempted me, and at last I fell. With an air of shame I accepted $105,000 as the "official" price paid for Oalámaóa in this highly unofficial deal, and an extra fifteen thousand dollars strictly off the record as my price for underselling my employer. Mollock was very good at figures. He put it to me, "Say I pay a hundred and thirty-five thousand for Oalámaóa. Your dealer's commission, twenty percent, amounts to twenty-seven thousand dollars, and that is that. But say I pay only a hundred and five thousand, and give you a private honorarium of fifteen thousand, you make thirty-six thousand and I save fifteen."

You can't argue with arithmetic. An expert having, after a secret examination of the picture, pronounced it "The Gauguin to end all Gauguins," I took my money and Mollock sailed for America. My little game was well begun.

. . . Yes, you heard me correctly – begun. Do you think a man like me expends such creative planning and precise administrative work for a wretched $120,000? Do you take me for a common crook?

To proceed: as soon as he got home, Mollock had his new acquisition suitably framed and lighted, and gave a select little dinner for a few of the collectors he hated most, and Oalámaóa was unveiled. The effect was all he had hoped it might be; Mollock savored to the full the joy of seeing the unfeigned admiration of his guests for the picture, and their ill-disguised envy and loathing for himself. Dreidl, the theatrical man, offered him $180,000 for the picture, on the spot. This finagler had turned himself into something called a Fine Arts Development Corporation, among other slippery things, and could somehow elude the tax-collectors in his artistic sidelines by pretending to be a dealer. But our Mr. Mollock would not sell. He wanted to gloat. Oalámaóa was his alone, for the price of a few limousines!

I let him wallow in his base triumph for several days. Then I sent one of my friends to Mollock in the guise of a visiting French expert. This reliable man, whom I had most thoroughly drilled in his role, looked at the picture, did what the theatrical people call a double-take, and burst out laughing. "Why!" he cried. "Bless my soul, but what a clever little rascal Molosso turned out to be, after all! I never thought he had it in him to stick to one thing for so long, though."

"What are you talking about? And who is Molosso?"

"A painter of greeting cards for Minard, in Paris. You have probably seen his signature on the more expensive kinds of birthday felicitations, wedding congratulations, etcetera, etcetera. You may certainly see his highly noticeable signature (he is a vain little fellow) in all its glory on this excellent fake. Why, the rogue has had the consummate impudence to paint his name openly – but openly – all over it!"

And he pointed out that interesting meandering design on the men's draperies in the picture – the very design Mollock had been the first to point out, and which I had said might be some Polynesian ideograph.

"See, sir – you need no magnifying glass – this is simply Molosso's regular signature over and over again. See? Molossomolossomolosso, with the loops filled in. But oh, what a beautiful joke!"

I need scarcely tell you that Mollock failed to see the beauty of it. But he was a hard man, and a ruthless man, and a quick-thinking and a persuasive man. He talked to my friend the "expert"; he wheedled him, he tempted him, and, like me, my friend fell. He agreed, for a consideration – five thousand dollars down, and five thousand more on completion of the deal – to sell Oalámaóa to the Greek magnate Karyatidis.

First, Mollock let it be rumored that, on account of some unfortunate speculations in Africa, he might be compelled to sell part of his collection. It was not true, of course – the man was a born liar. And then Karyatidis was delicately approached in the matter of the Oalámaóa. Mollock knew his brother artgraspers: if he owned a picture and Dreidl desired it, then Karyatidis would stop at nothing to get it. Then he wrote us an ambiguously-worded authority to act for him in the sale of his recently-acquired canvas, Oalámaóa. "Gauguin never painted better," he said in the note. But he did not say that Gauguin had painted Oalámaóa.

And Karyatidis bought the picture for $210,000, to hang in the saloon of his yacht. Of this not untidily round sum, I sent Mollock not one penny. And when he began to act in a generally offensive, resentful manner, I took little Molosso to see Karyatidis, and I said, "M. Karyatidis, you have nothing to fear from Mollock. His hands are tied and his lips are sealed. You have only to threaten him with criminal proceedings for trying to sell you a fake Gauguin."

"What fake Gauguin?"

I pointed out the cunning device of Molosso's signature. I presented Molosso, saying, "Here is the man who painted the picture entitled Oalámaóa, which now adorns your saloon."

Karyatidis had not risen from fig-packer to multimillionaire by being easily surprised. He rubbed his chin, and looked me up and down, and said, "What's your angle? Make it good."

"Why," I said, "M. Molosso was employed to paint over the original Gauguin, so that the canvas might not fall into enemy hands during the war. The true Oalámaóa is underneath the one you see. Cry 'Fake!' and Mr. Mollock will cut his imagined losses, and keep quiet. M. Molosso will clean the canvas, and you will be the possessor of the original after all. Only Mollock will be out of pocket. I, sir, am the thief here, and nobody else."

"And what is the subject of the picture underneath?" asked Karyatidis.

"Oalámaóa," I said, "but without Molosso's signature on the draperies."

"All right," said Karyatidis. Then he went on to indicate, in a soothing voice, that if I double-crossed him I would soon wish I had never been born; the ocean beds, from Alexandretta to Caracas, were white with the bones of men who had tried to double-cross Karyatidis. It was not the money, he said, but the principle of the thing. I told him point-blank that I had double-crossed better men than he when he was unhygienically boxing figs for his living in Istanbul. "I know," he said. "You must have something up your sleeve, or why come to me at this point, when you could be far away with two hundred and ten thousand of my money? You must know you'll never get another penny out of me."

"Perhaps you will get a penny out of me," I said. "I mean, at the expense of someone you don't like."

"Ah, that! An enemy's penny brings good luck," he said. "I like you. I could use a man like you in my business."

"Compliment for compliment, I could use a man like you in mine," I told him.

Well, then Molosso went to work, off came Oalámaóa's top coat, and there was a similar picture underneath; only, as I had said, the pattern of the embroidery was different, on the men's garments. Molosso's signature was gone.

"The difference is obvious, now," said Karyatidis.

"Isn't it?" I said. "And here is your enemy's penny." I gave him an envelope. "This," I told him, "contains a sheet of white paper bearing a perfect impression of Molosso's right thumb in ivory black. Look carefully at the lower-right-hand corner of Oalámaóa, and you will see, deep in the original paint, an identical thumbprint."

"Are you telling me this is a fake, too?"

"Absolutely. But wait. You do not like Mr. Dreidl, I believe? Well, he will come to you and beg you to sell this Oalámaóa, and you will let him have it at a profit. And I will take dealer's commission."

With this, I left him, absolutely bewildered, perhaps for the first time in his life.

So I went to visit Gregor Dreidl in his indecently voluptuous office, and I told him, as one crook might tell another, of the whole affair, and he was tremendously amused. But he stopped laughing when I said, "The cream of the jest is, that underneath this second Oalámaóa – THERE IS A THIRD! And this one at the bottom is the genuine one!"

And after so much tedious palaver that to give you a mere précis of it would make me so hoarse that I should be compelled to ask you for more coffee, Dreidl went to Karyatidis and bought Oalámaóa for $225,000 and one cent. The Greek insisted on that penny; had to have it brand-new, too. Later, I heard, he had it mounted in diamonds and used it for a scarf-pin.

I took my twenty percent, and, having grown bored with the affair, concluded it in the following manner:

I went to Mollock, who, to put it mildly, upbraided me. That Oalámaóa he had paid good money for was a fake, he cried. I said yes, I knew, and I was much to blame; for the fake had been deliberately overpainted on the original. But this, I said, was not the worst of it. Paul Gauguin himself had perpetrated a kind of fake!"

"I mean," I said, "that Gauguin was paid to disguise an immensely valuable old master with a comparatively worthless original of his own – oh Mr. Mollock, Mr. Mollock – that Oalámaóa was painted over The Stoning of St. Stephen, by El Greco, and I would give my right arm to get it back!"

Dazed, he said, " . . . Somebody painted a fake Gauguin over a real Gauguin, who painted over a genuine El Greco?"

"Yes, yes! The existence of the Gauguin was known, and it was covered with a replica of itself, it seems. But nobody knew until now that Gauguin himself had been hired by Gobseck to cover the St. Stephen. Here is a letter to prove it. It was written in Paris after Gauguin's last exhibition there in 1893, at Durand-Ruel's. To old Camille Pissarro, who wanted money. Look!"

It was a rambling letter, written in that violet ink which, with the pinpoint pen-nib, used to be at the service of the patrons of most French cafés. It was a very good letter – the man I paid to write it could copy a twenty-dollar bill line-for-line in five hours with pen and brush. The cogent passage, freely translated, ran:

. . . The exhibition at Durand-Ruel was a bloody fiasco, a catastrophe. Bah! To the critics I say, "Shut your mausoleums, you penny-a-liners – the bones stink!" As for money, what does one use for it? How I hate Paris and the Parisians! I earned myself a species of dishonest penny the other day, and oh my friend, the irony of it! That bloated swine of a Lucien Gobseck got hold of a daub by that maudlin skeleton-man El Greco, of the Stoning of St. Stephen – stolen, of course, from the Kuwalsky-Brzesky mansion. And for 1500 france I was commissioned secretly to paint "something of my own, just anything" over it. I must admit that it gave me a certain pleasure to smother one of Theotocopouli's maudlin Saints. And so my dreamy Oalámaóa's pagan nudity smothers the Cretan priest's boy's sheet-tin-draped, angular, tubercular visions. There is a melancholy satisfaction in this . . .

"It breathes the very spirit of Gauguin," I said; and I should have known, for I composed it myself. "It was for a long time among Pissarro's papers. Nobody seemed to know what Gauguin was talking about. But now we know. And here is the point – no El Greco is listed in the Gobseck inventory, so Imogene Gribble will be free to sell in the open market. Three hundred thousand dollars would not be too much for a new El Greco!"

"You did right to come to me first with this letter," said Mollock. "I take it as an act of good faith. I hold you entirely innocent in that other unfortunate affair. Let's talk about this . . ." He plied me with wine, he charmed me, he put the matter in a kaleidoscope of different colors and a conjurer's cabinet of angles, and at last he got that letter out of me for five thousand dollars down and a verbal promise of "a percentage of assessed values to be mutually agreed.

"And after that, I suppose, he went to work on Dreidl: it must have been like an apache dance of mud-wrestlers. I simply disappeared. If anybody ever scraped the third Oalámaóa off that tormented canvas, I can tell you what they found: an execrably daubed Cupid and Psyche, painter unknown, dated 1610.

• • •

"What happened to Molosso and his wife?" I asked, as Karmesin casually pocketed my cigarettes.

"The inevitable. As soon as I paid him his ninety thousand dollars he ran away with a big blonde. I had saved ten thousand for his wife. She divorced him and married a man who has a restaurant at Nogent-sur-Marne. She is happy, and has two children. Molosso had to marry the big blonde, who beats him unmercifully whenever he misbehaves. My mission was accomplished."

"And Mollock was the main victim, really?"

"Yes, He was not a gentleman. He wounded my sensibilities. He tried to bribe and corrupt me," said Karmesin. "Still, all weighed and paid, I suppose I cleared about two hundred thousand dollars, give or take a thousand."

And, having emptied the sugar bowl, he rose and left the café.