Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [131]
‘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.