Hurray! Another book to race through: Nightwork by Irwin Shaw. Shaw's entry in Wikipedia only lists Nightwork under his array of works; it is not reviewed like his better known Rich Man, Poor Man and Evening in Byzantium. Not having read those two, I cannot say how Nightwork stacks up against them. (Comparing it to my last review, it pales against Tropic of Cancer, but it still is a better picaresque.)
The protagonist Douglas Grimes (hearken to crimes) is a night clerk in a seedy hotel in New York City in the early 1970s when a guest dies in front of room 602 and Grimes discovers a cardboard roll of $100 bills. He keeps the money and flies off to Europe with a ski club that is regularly waived through Swiss customs. After a mix-up of luggage, Grimes discovers his ill-gotten wealth is with another one of the people from the plane. He eventually traces the bag to Miles Fabian, an archetype resort gigolo/adventurer. He ends up "partnering" with Fabian and the quest to multiple the money begins: buying a lame thoroughbred in Paris, speculating in gold and land in the Alps; investing in Chianti in Italy; and eventually, opening up an art gallery on Long Island. All the while expecting the original owners of the found money to come after him seeking revenge and repayment.
Fabian's monologue midway through their escapades explains their motivations and the milieu in which they conspire to profit: "A long time ago I decided that the world was a place of infinite injustice. What have I seen and lived through? Wars in which millions of innocent perished, holocausts, droughts, failures of all kinds, corruption in high places, the enrichment of thieves, the geometric multiplication of victims. And nothing I could possibly do to alter or alleviate any of it. I am not a pain seeker or reformer, and even if I were, no conceivable good would come out of my suffering or preaching. So - my intention has always been to avoid joining the ranks of the victims. As far as I could ever see, the people who avoided being victims had at least one thing in common. Money." (A bit of Shaw leaking through here, after his run-in with the HUAC and his exile to Davos.)
There are plenty of adventures, unique but not parodied characters encountered across their travels, interesting female diversions -- but both men are charmed and the investments never fail and wealth accrues. At the story's end, the partnership is broken, Grimes is married and reconciled with one of his brothers, and financially set so that when the "bad guys" show up, it is anticlimactic to pay them off. Where is the enlightenment?
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