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a creditor perhaps, but no run-of-the-mill creditor.
    “Tell him I’ll call him back in an hour,” Mr. Sheer invariably whispered, or if he were stepping out, as he called it, for a few minutes, he would not fail to remind me, “If Bierman calls, tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.” Since Mr. Sheer never did call Bierman back, and since, as the days passed, the frequency of Bierman’s calls increased until they were coming at fifteen-minute intervals, I protested against having to repeat this farcical sentence, and begged Mr. Sheer to change the message, to suppress it altogether, or to speak to Bierman, who was getting very angry. But Mr. Sheer refused. The sentence, in his eyes, was a mark of civility to Bierman. To leave no message would be the equivalent of cutting him on the street. The sentence, moreover, had, for him, a kind of magic that I did not understand until I had had a longer experience of Mr. Sheer and his promises. Mr. Sheer’s promises were a kind of fiat money issued at will and with no regard to fulfillment, or, indeed, to plausibility. He differed from the ordinary debtor who, under pressure, offers a promise as a substitute for cash, in that the ordinary debtor is not deceived by the substitute, but expects the creditor to be, while Mr. Sheer was himself deceived and concerned himself hardly at all with what the creditor might think. And it was not only to creditors that Mr. Sheer extended his gilded pledges. He showered them about him like an obstinate philanthropist. He knew where he could get me an ermine wrap for practically nothing (I had nowhere to wear it). He knew a man that would place Elmer, the colored boy, in the Cotton Club floor show (Elmer was a serious-minded youth who did not dance). Objectively, none of the promises had any validity. Their usefulness was of a different sort. They acted as a kind of transmission belt to the real world from the world of Mr. Sheer’s fancy, the powerhouse of dreams that kept his life’s wheels turning. So this sentence which I kept passing on reassured Mr. Sheer in the same measure that it infuriated Bierman.
    When the man commenced to shout at me on the phone and, what was worse from Mr. Sheer’s point of view, to mention a lawyer, Mr. Sheer reluctantly abandoned that particular magic. Instead, he drew me into the dark inner room, seated me on the velvet couch, and announced with an appealingly gloomy air that he was going to take me into his confidence. Bierman was a jeweler, he said, and it was a question of diamonds. The story branched out and became more elaborate, and on subsequent days he gave me different versions of it, but this was all I was ever certain of: Bierman was a jeweler and it was a question of diamonds.
    I know this because very early in the game I talked to Bierman himself in his office.
    Even here perhaps I am too cocksure, for I remember, uncomfortably, a scheme by which Mr. Sheer at a later date staved off a creditor. He had borrowed a hunting bronze featuring some falcons from a lady art dealer, and had got Abernethie and Rich to display it in a window full of hunting equipment. Through them, he had sold it to one of the Long Island sporting people. When Mrs. Martino, the dealer, wanted her money, it had already been parceled out to the landlord, the stationer, the photographer, and the telephone company. It was true, Mr. Sheer informed her, that he had sold the picture, but he had not yet been paid. This held Mrs. Martino at bay for some months, but at the end of that time, she began to make herself unpleasant, and Mr. Sheer saw that it was time to act. He went around to Abernethie’s and asked for the loan of one of their offices “to talk to a client in.” They gave him an office marked VICE-PRESIDENT . He arranged to have Mrs. Martino meet him there, and arrived himself a little ahead of time, accompanied by an old vaudeville actor he knew. The vaudevillian hid his hat and sat down behind the desk. When Mrs.