(If you’re just now jumping in, here are links to the other four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Read on.

JIRÍ:

I tell you what it’s like, just between you and me. It’s like Pastano sitting and thinking he has some devilishly clever scheme fitting together perfectly smoothly; thinking, pretty much, that he’s twelve steps ahead of the game. It’s Pasty glowing with that ingratiatingly self-satisfied mug at the thought he’s in his victory lap. The thunder’s there, but he doesn’t realize it isn’t applause. This is what I thought when I first caught wind of his so-called “plan.”

I get a call. This guy saying, I can give Sam Gammon to you on a silver platter. Who’s this, I ask. What do you mean, ’silver platter’? What’s the meaning of this? But, borderline case though it might’ve been, Boots’ name entered into dialogue first thing and was pretty much a hook for me. It didn’t matter how crazy I thought Pastano was, it wasn’t a tip I could just blindly disregard without so much as a blink or sniffle. Later I hear via a very rational and reliable source that Pastano’s got some kind of complex, what’s the word, messianic?—something like that. So obviously his advice is going to be suspect. It was suspect all along, not as if anything he said one way or the other could’ve completely assured me he was walking the straight line towards Memphis, so to speak. But I had to wonder, is my point. What kind of trick was he trying to pull?