Catch-22 (32 page)

   ‘But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini
was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was
fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the
Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the
Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young
friend’—the old man’s knowing, disdainful eyes shone even more effervescently
as Nately’s stuttering dismay increased—’that you and your country will have a
no more loyal partisan in Italy than me—but only as long as you remain in
Italy.’

   ‘But,’ Nately cried out in disbelief, ‘you’re a turncoat! A
time-server! A shameful, unscrupulous opportunist!’

   ‘I am a hundred and seven years old,’ the old man reminded
him suavely.

   ‘Don’t you have any principles?’

   ‘Of course not.’

   ‘No morality?’

   ‘Oh, I am a very moral man,’ the villainous old man assured
him with satiric seriousness, stroking the bare hip of a buxom black-haired
girl with pretty dimples who had stretched herself out seductively on the other
arm of his chair. He grinned at Nately sarcastically as he sat between both
naked girls in smug and threadbare splendor, with a sovereign hand on each.

   ‘I can’t believe it,’ Nately remarked grudgingly, trying
stubbornly not to watch him in relationship to the girls. ‘I simply can’t
believe it.’

   ‘But it’s perfectly true. When the Germans marched into the
city, I danced in the streets like a youthful ballerina and shouted, “Heil
Hitler!” until my lungs were hoarse. I even waved a small Nazi flag that I
snatched away from a beautiful little girl while her mother was looking the
other way. When the Germans left the city, I rushed out to welcome the
Americans with a bottle of excellent brandy and a basket of flowers. The brandy
was for myself, of course, and the flowers were to sprinkle upon our
liberators. There was a very stiff and stuffy old major riding in the first
car, and I hit him squarely in the eye with a red rose. A marvelous shot! You
should have seen him wince.’ Nately gasped and was on his feet with amazement,
the blood draining from his cheeks. ‘Major—de Coverley!’ he cried.

   ‘Do you know him?’ inquired the old man with delight. ‘What a
charming coincidence!’ Nately was too astounded even to hear him. ‘So you’re
the one who wounded Major – de Coverley!’ he exclaimed in horrified
indignation. ‘How could you do such a thing?’ The fiendish old man was
unperturbed. ‘How could I resist, you mean. You should have seen the arrogant
old bore, sitting there so sternly in that car like the Almighty Himself, with
his big, rigid head and his foolish, solemn face. What a tempting target he
made! I got him in the eye with an American Beauty rose. I thought that was
most appropriate. Don’t you?’

   ‘That was a terrible thing to do!’ Nately shouted at him
reproachfully. ‘A vicious and criminal thing! Major—de Coverley is our squadron
executive officer!’

   ‘Is he?’ teased the unregenerate old man, pinching his pointy
jaw gravely in a parody of repentance. ‘In that case, you must give me credit
for being impartial. When the Germans rode in, I almost stabbed a robust young
Oberleutnant to death with a sprig of edelweiss.’ Nately was appalled and
bewildered by the abominable old man’s inability to perceive the enormity of
his offence. ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’ he scolded vehemently.
‘Major—de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him.’

   ‘He’s a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a
silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead?’ Nately answered softly with somber
awe. ‘Nobody knows. He seems to have disappeared.’

   ‘You see? Imagine a man his age risking what little life he
has left for something so absurd as a country.’ Nately was instantly up in arms
again. ‘There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!’
he declared.

   ‘Isn’t there?’ asked the old man. ‘What is a country? A
country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually
unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America,
Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now
fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t
all be worth dying for.’

   ‘Anything worth living for,’ said Nately, ‘is worth dying
for.’

   ‘And anything worth dying for,’ answered the sacrilegious old
man, ‘is certainly worth living for. You know, you’re such a pure and naive
young man that I almost feel sorry for you. How old are you? Twenty-five?
Twenty-six?’

   ‘Nineteen,’ said Nately. ‘I’ll be twenty in January.’

   ‘If you live.’ The old man shook his head, wearing, for a
moment, the same touchy, meditating frown of the fretful and disapproving old
woman. ‘They are going to kill you if you don’t watch out, and I can see now
that you are not going to watch out. Why don’t you use some sense and try to be
more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.’

   ‘Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s
knees,’ Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. ‘I guess you’ve
heard that saying before.’

   ‘Yes, I certainly have,’ mused the treacherous old man,
smiling again. ‘But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on
one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.’

   ‘Are you sure?’ Nately asked with sober confusion. ‘It seems
to make more sense my way.’

   ‘No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.’ Nately
turned to ask his friends and discovered they had gone. Yossarian and Dunbar
had both disappeared. The old man roared with contemptuous merriment at
Nately’s look of embarrassed surprise. Nately’s face darkened with shame. He
vacillated helplessly for a few seconds and then spun himself around and fled
inside the nearest of the hallways in search of Yossarian and Dunbar, hoping to
catch them in time and bring them back to the rescue with news of the
remarkable clash between the old man and Major—de Coverley. All the doors in
the hallways were shut. There was light under none. It was already very late.
Nately gave up his search forlornly. There was nothing left for him to do, he
realized finally, but get the girl he was in love with and lie down with her
somewhere to make tender, courteous love to her and plan their future together;
but she had gone off to bed, too, by the time he returned to the sitting room
for her, and there was nothing left for him to do then but resume his abortive
discussion with the loathsome old man, who rose from his armchair with jesting
civility and excused himself for the night, abandoning Nately there with two
bleary-eyed girls who could not tell him into which room his own whore had gone
and who padded off to bed several seconds later after trying in vain to
interest him in themselves, leaving him to sleep alone in the sitting room on
the small, lumpy sofa.

   Nately was a sensitive, rich, good-looking boy with dark
hair, trusting eyes, and a pain in his neck when he awoke on the sofa early the
next morning and wondered dully where he was. His nature was invariably gentle
and polite. He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate,
or neurosis, which was proof to Yossarian of just how crazy he really was. His
childhood had been a pleasant, though disciplined, one. He got on well with his
brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though
they had both been very good to him.

   Nately had been brought up to detest people like Aarfy, whom
his mother characterized as climbers, and people like Milo, whom his father
characterized as pushers, but he had never learned how, since he had never been
permitted near them. As far as he could recall, his homes in Philadelphia, New
York, Maine, Palm Beach, Southampton, London, Deauville, Paris and the south of
France had always been crowded only with ladies and gentlemen who were not
climbers or pushers. Nately’s mother, a descendant of the New England
Thorntons, was a Daughter of the American Revolution. His father was a Son of a
Bitch.

   ‘Always remember,’ his mother had reminded him frequently,
‘that you are a Nately. You are not a Vanderbilt, whose fortune was made by a
vulgar tugboat captain, or a Rockefeller, whose wealth was amassed through
unscrupulous speculations in crude petroleum; or a Reynolds or Duke, whose
income was derived from the sale to the unsuspecting public of products
containing cancer-causing resins and tars; and you are certainly not an Astor,
whose family, I believe, still lets rooms. You are a Nately, and the Natelys
have never done anything for their money.’

   ‘What your mother means, son,’ interjected his father affably
one time with that flair for graceful and economical expression Nately admired
so much, ‘is that old money is better than new money and that the newly rich
are never to be esteemed as highly as the newly poor. Isn’t that correct, my
dear?

   Nately’s father brimmed continually with sage and
sophisticated counsel of that kind. He was as ebullient and ruddy as mulled
claret, and Nately liked him a great deal, although he did not like mulled
claret. When war broke out, Nately’s family decided that he would enlist in the
armed forces, since he was too young to be placed in the diplomatic service,
and since his father had it on excellent authority that Russia was going to
collapse in a matter of weeks or months and that Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt,
Mussolini, Gandhi, Franco, Peron and the Emperor of Japan would then all sign a
peace treaty and live together happily ever after. It was Nately’s father’s
idea that he join the Air Corps, where he could train safely as a pilot while
the Russians capitulated and the details of the armistice were worked out, and
where, as an officer, he would associate only with gentlemen.

   Instead, he found himself with Yossarian, Dunbar and Hungry
Joe in a whore house in Rome, poignantly in love with an indifferent girl there
with whom he finally did lie down the morning after the night he slept alone in
the sitting room, only to be interrupted almost immediately by her incorrigible
kid sister, who came bursting in without warning and hurled herself onto the
bed jealously so that Nately could embrace her, too. Nately’s whore sprang up
snarling to whack her angrily and jerked her to her feet by her hair. The
twelve-year-old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken or like a twig
with the bark peeled off her sapling body embarrassed everyone in her
precocious attempts to imitate her elders, and she was always being chased away
to put clothes on and ordered out into the street to play in the fresh air with
the other children. The two sisters swore and spat at each other now savagely,
raising a fluent, deafening commotion that brought a whole crowd of hilarious
spectators swarming into the room. Nately gave up in exasperation. He asked his
girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast. The kid sister
tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three of
them ate respectably in a nearby open-air café. But Nately’s whore
was already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go
streetwalking with two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately
and the kid sister followed meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to
pick up valuable pointers, Nately to eat his liver in mooning frustration, and
both were saddened when the girls were stopped by soldiers in a staff car and
driven away.

   Nately went back to the café and bought the kid
sister chocolate ice cream until her spirits improved and then returned with
her to the apartment, where Yossarian and Dunbar were flopped out in the
sitting room with an exhausted Hungry Joe, who was still wearing on his
battered face the blissful, numb, triumphant smile with which he had limped
into view from his massive harem that morning like a person with numerous
broken bones. The lecherous and depraved old man was delighted with Hungry
Joe’s split lips and black-and-blue eyes. He greeted Nately warmly, still
wearing the same rumpled clothes of the evening before. Nately was profoundly
upset by his seedy and disreputable appearance, and whenever he came to the
apartment he wished that the corrupt, immoral old man would put on a clean
Brooks Brothers shirt, shave, comb his hair, wear a tweed jacket, and grow a
dapper white mustache so that Nately would not have to suffer such confusing
shame each time he looked at him and was reminded of his father.

   April had been the best month of all for
Milo. Lilacs bloomed in April and fruit ripened on the vine. Heartbeats
quickened and old appetites were renewed. In April a livelier iris gleamed upon
the burnished dove. April was spring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder’s
fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.

   ‘Tangerines?’

   ‘Yes, sir.’

   ‘My men would love tangerines,’ admitted the colonel in
Sardinia who commanded four squadrons of B-26s.

   ‘There’ll be all the tangerines they can eat that you’re able
to pay for with money from your mess fund,’ Milo assured him.

   ‘Casaba melons?’

   ‘Are going for a song in Damascus.’

   ‘I have a weakness for casaba melons. I’ve always had a
weakness for casaba melons.’

   ‘Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane,
and you’ll have all the casabas you can eat that you’ve money to pay for.’

   ‘We buy from the syndicate?’

   ‘And everybody has a share.’

   ‘It’s amazing, positively amazing. How can you do it?’

   ‘Mass purchasing power makes the big difference. For example,
breaded veal cutlets.’

   ‘I’m not so crazy about breaded veal cutlets,’ grumbled the
skeptical B-25 commander in the north of Corsica.

   ‘Breaded veal cutlets are very nutritious,’ Milo admonished
him piously. ‘They contain egg yolk and bread crumbs. And so are lamb chops.’

   ‘Ah, lamb chops,’ echoed the B-25 commander. ‘Good lamb
chops?’

   ‘The best,’ said Milo, ‘that the black market has to offer.’

   ‘Baby lamb chops?’

   ‘In the cutest little pink paper panties you ever saw. Are
going for a song in Portugal.’

   ‘I can’t send a plane to Portugal. I haven’t the authority.’

   ‘I can, once you lend the plane to me. With a pilot to fly
it. And don’t forget—you’ll get General Dreedle.’

   ‘Will General Dreedle eat in my mess hall again?’

   ‘Like a pig, once you start feeding him my best white fresh
eggs fried in my pure creamery butter. There’ll be tangerines too, and casaba
melons, honeydews, filet of Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.’

   ‘And everybody has a share?’

   ‘That,’ said Milo, ‘is the most beautiful part of it.’

   ‘I don’t like it,’ growled the unco-operative fighter-plane
commander, who didn’t like Milo either.

   ‘There’s an unco-operative fighter-plane commander up north
who’s got it in for me,’ Milo complained to General Dreedle. ‘It takes just one
person to ruin the whole thing, and then you wouldn’t have your fresh eggs
fried in my pure creamery butter any more.’ General Dreedle had the
unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the Solomon Islands to
dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and a craving
for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with a
yearning for Polish sausage.

   ‘Polish sausage is going for peanuts in Cracow,’ Milo
informed him.

   ‘Polish sausage,’ sighed the general nostalgically. ‘You
know, I’d give just about anything for a good hunk of Polish sausage. Just
about anything.’

   ‘You don’t have to give anything. Just give me one plane for
each mess hall and a pilot who will do what he’s told. And a small down payment
on your initial order as a token of good faith.’

   ‘But Cracow is hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines. How
will you get to the sausage?’

   ‘There’s an international Polish sausage exchange in Geneva.
I’ll just fly the peanuts into Switzerland and exchange them for Polish sausage
at the open market rate. They’ll fly the peanuts back to Cracow and I’ll fly
the Polish sausage back to you. You buy only as much Polish sausage as you want
through the syndicate. There’ll be tangerines too, with only a little
artificial coloring added. And eggs from Malta and Scotch from Sicily. You’ll
be paying the money to yourself when you buy from the syndicate, since you’ll
own a share, so you’ll really be getting everything you buy for nothing.
Doesn’t that makes sense?’

   ‘Sheer genius. How in the world did you ever think of it?’

   ‘My name is Milo Minderbinder. I am twenty-seven years old.’
Milo Minderbinder’s planes flew in from everywhere, the pursuit planes,
bombers, and cargo ships streaming into Colonel Cathcart’s field with pilots at
the controls who would do what they were told. The planes were decorated with
flamboyant squadron emblems illustrating such laudable ideals as Courage,
Might, Justice, Truth, Liberty, Love, Honor and Patriotism that were painted
out at once by Milo’s mechanics with a double coat of flat white and replaced in
garish purple with the stenciled name M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS AND
PRODUCE. The ‘M & M’ In ‘M & M ENTERPRISES’ stood for Milo &
Minderbinder, and the & was inserted, Milo revealed candidly, to nullify
any impression that the syndicate was a one-man operation. Planes arrived for
Milo from airfields in Italy, North Africa and England, and from Air Transport
Command stations in Liberia, Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi. Pursuit
planes were traded for additional cargo ships or retained for emergency invoice
duty and small-parcel service; trucks and tanks were procured from the ground
forces and used for short-distance road hauling. Everybody had a share, and men
got fat and moved about tamely with toothpicks in their greasy lips. Milo
supervised the whole expanding operation by himself. Deep otter-brown lines of
preoccupation etched themselves permanently into his careworn face and gave him
a harried look of sobriety and mistrust. Everybody but Yossarian thought Milo
was a jerk, first for volunteering for the job of mess officer and next for
taking it so seriously. Yossarian also thought that Milo was a jerk; but he
also knew that Milo was a genius.

   One day Milo flew away to England to pick up a load of
Turkish halvah and came flying back from Madagascar leading four German bombers
filled with yams, collards, mustard greens and black-eyed Georgia peas. Milo
was dumbfounded when he stepped down to the ground and found a contingent of
armed M.P.s waiting to imprison the German pilots and confiscate their planes.
Confiscate! The mere word was anathema to him, and he stormed back and forth in
excoriating condemnation, shaking a piercing finger of rebuke in the
guilt-ridden faces of Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn and the poor
battle-scarred captain with the submachine gun who commanded the M.P.s.

   ‘Is this Russia?’ Milo assailed them incredulously at the top
of his voice. ‘Confiscate?’ he shrieked, as though he could not believe his own
ears. ‘Since when is it the policy of the American government to confiscate the
private property of its citizens? Shame on you! Shame on all of you for even
thinking such a horrible thought.’

   ‘But Milo,’ Major Danby interrupted timidly, ‘we’re at war
with Germany, and those are German planes.’

   ‘They are no such thing!’ Milo retorted furiously. ‘Those
planes belong to the syndicate, and everybody has a share. Confiscate? How can
you possibly confiscate your own private property? Confiscate, indeed! I’ve
never heard anything so depraved in my whole life.’ And sure enough, Milo was
right, for when they looked, his mechanics had painted out the German swastikas
on the wings, tails and fuselages with double coats of flat white and stenciled
in the words M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS AND PRODUCE. Right before their
eyes he had transformed his syndicate into an international cartel.

   Milo’s argosies of plenty now filled the air. Planes poured
in from Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Poland—from everywhere in Europe, in fact, but
Russia, with whom Milo refused to do business. When everybody who was going to
had signed up with M & M Enterprises, Fine Fruits and Produce, Milo created
a wholly owned subsidiary, M & M Fancy Pastry, and obtained more airplanes
and more money from the mess funds for scones and crumpets from the British
Isles, prune and cheese Danish from Copenhagen, éclairs, cream
puffs, Napoleons and petits fours from Paris, Reims and Grenoble, Kugelhopf,
pumpernickel and Pfefferkuchen from Berlin, Linzer and Dobos Torten from
Vienna, Strudel from Hungary and baklava from Ankara. Each morning Milo sent
planes aloft all over Europe and North Africa hauling long red tow signs
advertising the day’s specials in large square letters: ‘EYEROUND, 79¢…
WHITING, 21¢.’ He boosted cash income for the syndicate by leasing tow
signs to Pet Milk, Gaines Dog Food, and Noxzema. In a spirit of civic
enterprise, he regularly allotted a certain amount of free aerial advertising
space to General Peckem for the propagation of such messages in the public
interest as NEATNESS COUNTS, HASTE MAKES WASTE, and THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS
TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER. Milo purchased spot radio announcements on Axis
Sally’s and Lord Haw Haw’s daily propaganda broadcasts from Berlin to keep
things moving. Business boomed on every battlefront.

   Milo’s planes were a familiar sight. They had freedom of
passage everywhere, and one day Milo contracted with the American military
authorities to bomb the German-held highway bridge at Orvieto and with the
German military authorities to defend the highway bridge at Orvieto with
antiaircraft fire against his own attack. His fee for attacking the bridge for
America was the total cost of the operation plus six per cent and his fee from
Germany for defending the bridge was the same cost-plus-six agreement augmented
by a merit bonus of a thousand dollars for every American plane he shot down.
The consummation of these deals represented an important victory for private
enterprise, he pointed out, since the armies of both countries were socialized
institutions. Once the contracts were signed, there seemed to be no point in
using the resources of the syndicate to bomb and defend the bridge, inasmuch as
both governments had ample men and material right there to do so and were
perfectly happy to contribute them, and in the end Milo realized a fantastic
profit from both halves of his project for doing nothing more than signing his
name twice.

   The arrangements were fair to both sides. Since Milo did have
freedom of passage everywhere, his planes were able to steal over in a sneak
attack without alerting the German antiaircraft gunners; and since Milo knew
about the attack, he was able to alert the German antiaircraft gunners in
sufficient time for them to begin firing accurately the moment the planes came
into range. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone but the dead man in
Yossarian’s tent, who was killed over the target the day he arrived.

   ‘I didn’t kill him!’ Milo kept replying passionately to Yossarian’s
angry protest. ‘I wasn’t even there that day, I tell you. Do you think I was
down there on the ground firing an antiaircraft gun when the planes came over?’

   ‘But you organized the whole thing, didn’t you?’ Yossarian
shouted back at him in the velvet darkness cloaking the path leading past the
still vehicles of the motor pool to the open-air movie theater.

   ‘And I didn’t organize anything,’ Milo answered indignantly,
drawing great agitated sniffs of air in through his hissing, pale, twitching
nose. ‘The Germans have the bridge, and we were going to bomb it, whether I
stepped into the picture or not. I just saw a wonderful opportunity to make
some profit out of the mission, and I took it. What’s so terrible about that?’

   ‘What’s so terrible about it? Milo, a man in my tent was
killed on that mission before he could even unpack his bags.’

   ‘But I didn’t kill him.’

   ‘You got a thousand dollars extra for it.’

   ‘But I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t even there, I tell you. I
was in Barcelona buying olive oil and skinless and boneless sardines, and I’ve
got the purchase orders to prove it. And I didn’t get the thousand dollars.
That thousand dollars went to the syndicate, and everybody got a share, even
you.’ Milo was appealing to Yossarian from the bottom of his soul. ‘Look, I
didn’t start this war, Yossarian, no matter what that lousy Wintergreen is
saying. I’m just trying to put it on a businesslike basis. Is anything wrong
with that? You know, a thousand dollars ain’t such a bad price for a medium
bomber and a crew. If I can persuade the Germans to pay me a thousand dollars
for every plane they shoot down, why shouldn’t I take it?’

   ‘Because you’re dealing with the enemy, that’s why. Can’t you
understand that we’re fighting a war? People are dying. Look around you, for
Christ’s sake!’ Milo shook his head with weary forbearance. ‘And the Germans
are not our enemies,’ he declared. ‘Oh I know what you’re going to say. Sure,
we’re at war with them. But the Germans are also members in good standing of
the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders. Maybe
they did start the war, and maybe they are killing millions of people, but they
pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I could name.
Don’t you understand that I have to respect the sanctity of my contract with
Germany? Can’t you see it from my point of view?’

   ‘No,’ Yossarian rebuffed him harshly.

   Milo was stung and made no effort to disguise his wounded
feelings. It was a muggy, moonlit night filled with gnats, moths, and
mosquitoes. Milo lifted his arm suddenly and pointed toward the open-air
theater, where the milky, dust-filled beam bursting horizontally from the
projector slashed a conelike swath in the blackness and draped in a fluorescent
membrane of light the audience tilted on the seats there in hypnotic sags,
their faces focused upward toward the aluminized movie screen. Milo’s eyes were
liquid with integrity, and his artless and uncorrupted face was lustrous with a
shining mixture of sweat and insect repellent.

   ‘Look at them,’ he exclaimed in a voice choked with emotion.
‘They’re my friends, my countrymen, my comrades in arms. A fellow never had a
better bunch of buddies. Do you think I’d do a single thing to harm them if I
didn’t have to? Haven’t I got enough on my mind? Can’t you see how upset I am
already about all that cotton piling up on those piers in Egypt?’ Milo’s voice
splintered into fragments, and he clutched at Yossarian’s shirt front as though
drowning. His eyes were throbbing visibly like brown caterpillars. ‘Yossarian,
what am I going to do with so much cotton? It’s all your fault for letting me
buy it.’ The cotton was piling up on the piers in Egypt, and nobody wanted any.
Milo had never dreamed that the Nile Valley could be so fertile or that there
would be no market at all for the crop he had bought. The mess halls in his
syndicate would not help; they rose up in uncompromising rebellion against his
proposal to tax them on a per capita basis in order to enable each man to own his
own share of the Egyptian cotton crop. Even his reliable friends the Germans
failed him in this crisis: they preferred ersatz. Milo’s mess halls would not
even help him store the cotton, and his warehousing costs skyrocketed and
contributed to the devastating drain upon his cash reserves. The profits from
the Orvieto mission were sucked away. He began writing home for the money he
had sent back in better days; soon that was almost gone. And new bales of
cotton kept arriving on the wharves at Alexandria every day. Each time he
succeeded in dumping some on the world market for a loss it was snapped up by
canny Egyptian brokers in the Levant, who sold it back to him at the original
price, so that he was really worse off than before.