Gris' flea-infested wardrobe has been purged by fire, so he has no clothes. This leads him to put on an old raincoat and go out to a department store run by "a very well-informed Jew" and his wife, who proceed to have Gris try on many different outfits. Gris is absolutely passive during this process and ends up spending every last cent he has on the resulting pile of clothing.
So rather than having to raise just over six thousand dollars to buy a hit on the Countess Krak, Gris now has to scrape together the full ten grand - or does he?
See, Gris isn't concerned about the ever-increasing amount of money he needs, because he's confident that "Something would turn up." And whaddya know, something does! When he walks into the Narcotici mob's office, planning "to hire a hit man on credit..."
Okay, I'll admit that the Mission Earth books are starting to blur together like a slurry of sewage, but I thought I remembered Gris spending a lot of Book Four in serious poodoo with some credit agencies, a harrowing experience that you'd think would lead someone to be reluctant to buy things on credit in the future. Guess I'm imagining things.
Anyway, when Gris walks into the mob office he finds that sure enough, he's listed as months overdue for an appointment with consigliere Razza Louseini, whose characterization is as follows: Italian mobster, knife scar from mouth to left ear, "reptilian eyes." Louseini complains that he has an outstanding bill for those snipers Gris hired waaaaaay back in Book Three, who were subsequently counter-sniped by Bang-Bang. None of the Rockecenter-affiliated organizations - Swindle & Crouch, Octopus Oil, the federal government - are willing to pay for it, and the missing payment is playing merry hell with the mob's computer records. Geez, with as much money as the mob makes, Gris is probably going to owe them thousands and thous-
The bill is two thousand bucks. That's all his snipers cost.
The mobster is so desperate to get that outstanding fee paid, in fact, that he gives in when Gris promises to pay the due amount if they give him another hit man. He doesn't add anything to the bill or anything. In a few days Gris will have his hired killer for one fifth of what he was expecting to pay.
I walked out, practically treading on air. I wasn't ten thousand in the red, I was only two thousand.
Two thousand to go and one dead Countess Krak!
Which brings me back to the beginning of the chapter and "why?"
Gris starts the book with four thousand dollars. He is immediately "forced" to spend it all on new clothes, because his old wardrobe was infested with parasites, because he stole it from a man in Turkey he subsequently murdered, because he was forced to flee the country due to potential adultery charges, because he wasted a fortune on what he thought were whores, because he let himself be talked into buying a limousine and female companionship, because his angry demand for his fair share of a kickback from back in Book One was finally repaid in a shipment of gold bars.
Had the author not arbitrarily put fleas in Gris' stolen clothes, or allowed Gris to fight back against the enthusiastic Jewish tailor, Gris would have been able to pay the mobster out of pocket and hire a hitman immediately - after all, if two snipers only cost two thousand dollars, one gunmen should surely cost half of that at most, right? So why did the author not want that to happen? Why take Gris' money away from him in an, again, arbitrary and random fashion?
The answer arrives in two chapters. See, Gris now has to "earn" two thousand dollars. And remember how Gris is making money these days...
Yes, all of this was an excuse for the author to write about the further sexual adventure of Soltan Gris.
Back to Chapter One
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