Dmitry Karamazov says that the lieutenant colonel implicitly trusted Trifonov. After his sad day of reckoning, the lieutenant colonel would presumably have said that Trifonov was not trustworthy. Unfortunately, Trifonov was trustworthy just so long as there was some longer-run incentive for him to be reliable in their mutually beneficial relationship. The moment there ceased to be any expectation of further gains from his relationship with the lieutenant colonel, Trifonov had no incentive to be trustworthy in this highly irregular commercial dealing between de facto crooks. Not surprisingly, he ceased to be trustworthy.

XREF: Connects to game theory's shadow of the future — trust in repeated interactions collapses when the relationship ends.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 63