"Goodwin-SmallChange" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godwin Parker)

silence. Heavy days on a Superbowl weekend, light on April 15 after taxes when
no one had much to drop, but never a day missed. Always the same meticulous
accounting by his Collector, the rank smell of undeodorized sweat, and more
money. Lemming lost five pounds sacking and carrying the loot to the bank before
he gave in with bitter reluctance and bought a fourth-hand Econoline van to
transport his wealth.

His first bank and then a second grew concerned with currency storage. After a
fierce agony of scruples-- you didn't spend money, for God's sake--Lemming
purchased a condemned house and then another, fitting each with barred windows
and time-locked steel doors. At length, when he could no longer spread out or
up, Lemming delved down, adding cavernous vaults under his houses. He loved to
sit in his treasure rooms as in a church. When the subways rumbled beneath, his
horde responded in a silver choir. To this monetary hymn the IRS sang their own
gleeful counterpoint. Lemming groaned at their assessments, but that was how the
nickel flipped. In the tenth year, arrogance growing apace with affluence, he
allowed himself an indolent joke at Revenue's expense.

"Look," he condescended graciously, offering the harried tax rep the remains of
a Diet Cola. "Instead of auditing all this, just tell me how much the President
needs. And come on, join me for dinner. McDonalds has a special on small
burgers."

The decades paraded stately by in a jingling serenade of profit. Gonville
Lemming grew indifferent to the muted sounds above at midnight, grew old with
Collector Number Five who was ever punctual, ever precise in report. One
Christmas Eve, seized with uncharacteristic Yule spirit, Lemming left an
offering in the collection room of last week's meatloaf, yesterday's salad,
decal coffee and a thrift shop card from the cheerful donor commending the
loyalty of Number Five.

He should not have eavesdropped for gratitude. Beyond the door the sentiments
were more audible than usual and graphic, their general drift defining Lemming
as a mother-groping tightwad sonofabitch who would bum down an orphanage for fun
and profit if he wasn't too effing tight to buy matches.

Then poof!-- silence and the smell of sweat lingering in the blistered air, ripe
as the declined meatloaf.

In his last year of life, during a severe national depression and an odd
shortage of hard money, Lemming brought off the coup of an acquisitive lifetime,
loaning the government ten billions in ready cash at a mere eighteen point seven
percent. The President flinched but signed.

"What's so bad?" Lemming comforted him, retrieving the pen as a memento. "You
people pay that much on your plastic."

What the hell, he needed the vault space anyway. He considered allowing the
truculent but tireless Number Five to shorten his route, at least skip the less
solvent southern states, but thought better of it. Not the money but the