Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner bondsman, rents a cottage in West Egg next to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Drawn into the world of his cousin Daisy and her brutish husband Tom, Nick becomes the confidant for Gatsby's singular, five-year obsession: to win back Daisy and recreate a perfect past, a dream that ultimately collides with reality and ends in violence.
Gatsby pocketed his souvenirs with satisfaction. “I’m going to make a big request of you today,” he said, “so I thought you ought to know something about me.” He mentioned knowing about Nick’s tea with Jordan Baker, and that she would speak to him about “this matter.” He would say no more. As they neared the city, his manner grew rigid. They passed the Valley of Ashes, where Mrs. Wilson strained at the garage pump, and crossed the Queensboro Bridge. Sunlight flickered through the girders; Manhattan rose in white heaps and sugar lumps, built from “nonolfactory money.” A dead man passed in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by carriages of mourners with tragic eyes. A limousine carrying three fashionable Black passengers rolled by, and Nick laughed at the haughty roll of their eyeballs. Anything can happen now, he thought, even Jay Gatsby.
They lunched in a cool Forty-second Street cellar. In the anteroom, Gatsby introduced Nick to Meyer Wolfshiem, a small, flat-nosed Jew with luxuriant hair in his nostrils and tiny, perceptive eyes. Wolfshiem was mid-story, his hands shaping the air: “I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: ‘All right, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and there.” He led them into the restaurant, his gaze sweeping the room with the caution of a creature always assessing threat. He mourned the old Metropole, “filled with faces dead and gone,” and recounted the night Rosy Rosenthal was shot. “I pulled him down in his chair,” Wolfshiem said, his nose flashing. “Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you move outside this room.” Rosy went anyway, and died on the sidewalk with three bullets in his belly. “Four of them were electrocuted,” Nick offered. “Five, with Becker,” Wolfshiem corrected, then asked if Nick was looking for a business connection. Gatsby quickly interceded: “Oh, no, this isn’t the man.” Wolfshiem looked disappointed. “I had a wrong man.”
Over coffee, Wolfshiem’s cuff links caught Nick’s eye—pieces of ivory. “Finest specimens of human molars,” Wolfshiem said. “Gatsby’s very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.” After he left, Gatsby explained: “He becomes very sentimental sometimes.” Then, coolly, he added the staggering fact: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.” The idea staggered Nick. He had always thought of the fix as an event, not a single man’s doing—a burglar blowing a safe with single-mindedness.
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