The Darkest Evening of the Year

romantic penury in a garret and write great novels. He had soon discovered that looking at feet all day didn’t inspire memorable fiction, so he started dealing marijuana, added an ecstasy line, and expanded into a nice little cocaine franchise.
    From the start, he declined to take an illegal drug. He liked his brain the way he had originally found it. Besides, he would need every gray cell he had if he was to write enduring novels.
    Trading drugs had led to trading weapons, the way shoe sales can easily lead to a broader career in men’s haberdashery. Although he had a personal prohibition against the use of drugs, he had never tried a weapon he didn’t like.
    He had not yet used any of the human organs in which he traded, but if he ever needed a kidney or a liver, or a heart, he knew where to get it.
    Somehow he turned fifty years of age. He never saw it coming. They said time flew when you were having fun, and what Billy believed in more than anything else was fun.
    His love of fun explained why he had given up trying to write important fiction. Writing was no fun.
    Reading was fun. All of his life, he had been an avid reader, devouring no fewer than three novels a week, sometimes twice that many.
    He had no patience for those few books on the market that sought to find order or hope in life. He liked books steeped in irony. Wry comic novels about the folly of humanity and the meaninglessness of existence were his meat. Fortunately novelists turned them out by the thousands. He didn’t care for writers full of brooding nihilism, but rather for those who sweetened their nihilism with giggles, the kind of guys who would be happy operating a weenie stand in Hell.
    Books were formative. They had made him the man that he was at fifty: worldly, cheerful, wildly successful in business, confident, and content.
    Six years ago, he had gone to work for a man who had taken a family fortune earned in legitimate enterprise and had used it to build a criminal empire, an ingenious reversal of the usual order of things. His current operation was not on behalf of his boss’s illegal businesses but on behalf of the boss himself, a personal matter.
    As arranged, Georgie Jobbs was waiting for Billy under the bridge. The bridge was six lanes wide and offered a lot of cover for a private transaction.
    Georgie stood in the dark beside his Suburban, and as Billy coasted to a stop, Georgie switched on a flashlight, holding it under his chin, directed up over his face, to distort his features and make him look spooky. He knew Billy liked to have fun, and this was his idea of wit.
    Occasionally people asked Georgie if he was related to Steve Jobs, the famous software-dot.com-animation-iPhone multibillionaire, which annoyed Georgie because he didn’t want anyone to think he would be associated with people like that. Instead of simply denying any relationship, Georgie peevishly called attention to the spelling difference—“Hey, I got two Bs”—which only led to confusion.
    Georgie was making faces in the flashlight beam because he liked Billy Pilgrim. Likability was Billy’s greatest asset.
    People liked him in part because of his appearance. Pudgy, with a sweet dimpled face and with curly blond hair as thin now as it had been when he was a baby, he looked huggable.
    And people liked Billy because Billy genuinely liked people. He didn’t look down on them because of their ignorance or foolishness, or because of their idiot pride or their pomposity, but delighted in them for what they were: characters in the greatest irony-drenched, dark-comic novel of all, life .
    He got out of the Land Rover and said, “Look at you, you’re Hannibal Lecter.”
    Georgie mangled the line from the movie about eating someone’s liver with fava beans and a good Chianti.
    “Stop it, stop,” Billy said, “you’ll have me pissing my pants.”
    He hugged Georgie Jobbs, asked how his brother Steve was doing, and Georgie said “You crazy sonofabitch,” and they threw some playful punches at each other.
    The best private investigators had scruples and a regard for the law. Two steps down from them were guys like Vern Lesley and Bobby Onions.
    Georgie Jobbs was an entire flight down the stairs from Lesley and Onions. He had always wanted to be a PI, but he didn’t have the patience to meet the standards and pass the test. He also didn’t like the idea of being able to carry only a licensed gun, or of giving anyone a legitimate reason to call him a