What’s the going rate for a soul?

I received a phone message the other day from a woman who has always felt that I am the antichrist. This time she accused me of having sold my soul to the devil.

She calls every once in a while when she feels that I’ve committed a sin against the Maker, as she calls him, and screams her objections. She calls herself Hester, the name of the adulteress in “The Scarlet Letter,” which may or may not be a coincidence.

This time she was screaming at me for a recent column in which I said that God came to me in the form of Queen Latifah, who happens to be one of my favorite entertainers. God knew that, which is why he chose to make his appearance in that form, wearing a low-cut dress adorned with sequins.

Hester was incensed because I had said God was a woman, and not only a woman but an African American woman, and not only an African American woman but an African American woman in show biz, and not only an African American woman in show biz but an African American woman in show biz who drank martinis.

After shouting into my message machine for about 10 minutes, she ended her monologue with what she must have felt was the greatest damnation of all. “You,” she said, “have sold your soul to the devil!”

When I mentioned that to my wife, the witty Cinelli, she said, “How much is the devil paying for souls these days and what did you do with the money?”

“He gave me $5,000,” I said, “and I spent it all on gambling, booze, fine food and prostitutes.”

“You should have gotten more,” she said. “Then we could have paid off the credit cards.”

The incident started me wondering just exactly what the devil might be paying for souls in an age when a lot of people don’t even have one.

I asked a friend, Shortcut Bernstein, who, I am told, once read the Bible from cover to cover to win a bet.

He said, “That depends on whose soul it is. I suspect he would pay more for Charlie Sheen’s soul than for Donny Osmond’s, because there is probably more sin in Charlie’s than in Donny’s.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be more satisfying for the devil to try to buy a pure soul rather than a rotting, sin-stained soul? It seems to me there would be a kind of challenge in that, like seducing a nun.”

I thought of calling Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Not because I believe he might be working for the devil or know about the price of souls but because he knows about money. Cinelli suggested that interest rates and inflation should be considered in any attempt to determine the cost of a soul.

Inflation, according to an online definition, is “the continual increase in prices of goods and services produced in an economy.” It goes on to say that changes in supply and/or demand can cause either “cost-push inflation” or “demand-pull inflation.” Long-term inflation is caused by “the rate of growth of the money supply exceeding the rate of growth in gross national product.”

Let me simplify that for you. If there are only 99 bottles of beer on the wall, and everyone in the city wants one, the beer owner is going to increase the price per bottle until it will take a wheelbarrow full of greenbacks to buy one. Only Eli Broad will be able to afford it. Then there will be only 98 bottles of beer on the wall and so on down the line.

But that doesn’t solve our problem. One has to know what the devil was paying for souls in the beginning. Then, after calculating the rate of inflation and applying what we know about the theoretical soul-seller, we can determine what he might be offering for souls today.

I searched through the Bible but found no reference to original price. And although it has been some time since I read “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” I don’t believe it contained exactly what the devil paid a farmer, Jabez Stone, for his soul. I do recall that the old coot reneged on the deal and had to hire Daniel Webster to keep him out of hell. Today, he’d hire Johnnie Cochran.

After considerable thought, I hit upon my own formula to fix the price of a soul. A martini in 1955 at my favorite Oakland bar cost 50 cents. Today, at almost any bar, it costs about $8. That’s a 1,500% increase. So let’s say the going price of a soul in ’55 was about the price of a new Buick, which was maybe $3,000, loaded. Multiply that by 1,500 and you get $4.5 million.

That would pay off our house, our car and our credit cards and leave a little something left over for several months of evil excess.

Suits me, Hester. Make it

in cash and let the good times roll.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.