Life & Wisdom Quote by Donald E. Westlake

Control is the joke, and the joke is the control. Westlake drops us into a narrator who treats people like interchangeable tools: Stark is a missing wrench, calls go unanswered, and the speaker simply "alternates between the two" as if swapping out engines. The sentence is built to sound casual, even managerial, but it carries the chill of a professional criminal mind (or at least a mind trained to reduce relationships to function). The parenthetical "or whatever he's doing" is the key tell: the narrator doesn't actually know Stark's inner life and barely cares. What matters is availability.

Westlake's intent is to smuggle character through logistics. Instead of describing loyalty, rivalry, or affection, he shows it as a scheduling problem. The faux-offhand phrasing ("That usually works well") is classic Westlake: comedy used as a solvent to dissolve sentimentality. It also sets up the central anxiety of any scheme-heavy world: precision. Plans are fragile, dependent on the right person in the right slot at the right time.

Then comes the sly human slip: "occasionally an idea for the wrong guy drifts through my mind". The verb "drifts" makes the mistake feel almost innocent, like a daydream, but the subtext is darker. In a life where "ideas" likely mean jobs, cons, or violence, misassigning the "wrong guy" isn't awkward; it's dangerous. Westlake gets tension without melodrama by letting error enter as a mild inconvenience, which is exactly how competent, morally flexible people talk when they refuse to admit how much is at stake.