All the King's Men (69 page)

“Boss,” somebody said, “Boss–those telegrams–that shows you now–that shows you how folks feel about you.”

He said nothing.

Just then the girl came in with another batch of telegrams. She set the tray on the desk in front of him. He fixed her with his glance. Then he laid his hand on the pile of yellow paper and gave it a slight shove and said, in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice, “Get this muck out of here.”

The girl got that muck out of there.

The bloom had gone from the occasion. The boys began to drift out of the office and off to the swivel chairs which had not been warmed that morning. As Tiny was leaving, the Boss said, “Tiny, wait a minute. I want to talk to you.”

Tiny came back. I was heading out, too, but the Boss called me. “I want you to be in on this,” he said. So I sank into one of the chairs over by the wall. Tiny disposed himself in a big green leather chair to one side of the desk, crossed his knees, to the great strain of his hams and of the fabric which covered them, inserted a cigarette in his long holder, lighted it, and waited.

The Boss was in no hurry. He brooded a full minute before he lifted his eyes to Tiny Duffy. But then he came in fast. “There won’t be any contract with Larson,” he said.

When breath came back, Tiny managed, “Boss–Boss–you can’t, Boss.”

“Yes, I can,” the Boss said, without raising his voice.

“You can’t, Boss. It’s all fixed up, Boss.”

“It isn’t too late to unfix it,” the Boss said. “It isn’t too late.”

“Boss–Boss–” the word was almost a wail, and the cigarette ash was falling down the starched white front of the Duffy shirt, “you can’t break your word to old Larson. He’s a good guy and you can’t. You’re a square-shooter, Boss.”

“I can break my word to Larson,” the Boss said.

“You can’t–you can’t change your mind, Boss. Not now. You can’t change it now.”

The Boss rose very abruptly from his chair at the desk. He fixed his eyes on Tiny and said, “I can change a hell of a lot of things.”

In the ensuing silence, the Boss came round the desk. “That’s all,” he said, in a voice not much more than a husky whisper. “And you can tell Larson to do his damnedest.”

Tiny got to his feet. He opened his mouth several times, wet his lips, and seemed about to speak, but each time the now gray face closed back up over the expensive bridgework.

The Boss went up to him. “You tell Larson.” he said. “Larson is your pal, and you tell him.” He punched Tiny’s front with a stiff forefinger. “Yeah,” he said, “he is your pal, and when you tell him you can put your hand on his shoulder.” Then the Boss grinned. I had not expected a grin. But it was a wintry and uncomforting grin. It put the seal on everything that had been said.

Tiny made the door, and was gone. He didn’t bother to close it, but kept on going through without a pause, dwindling away over the long green carpet. The he had disappeared.

But the Boss was not watching his departure. He was staring moodily down at the bare top of his desk. After a moment he said, “Shut the door.” I got up and shut it.

I did not sit back down, but stood in the open space between the desk and the door, waiting for him to say whatever it was he was going to say. Whatever it was, he didn’t say it. He merely looked up at me with a look that was innocent and questioning, and asked, “Well?”

I do not know what it was he wanted me to say or what he expected me to say. Since that time I have thought a good deal about that. That was the time for me to say whatever it was I was ever going to have to say to Willie Stark, who had been Cousin Willie from the country and who was now the Boss. But I did not say it. I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “Well, it doesn’t matter if you kick Tiny around some more. He is built for it. But Larson is a different kind of cooky.”

He continued to look at me and seemed about to say something, but the question faded off his face. Then he said, “You got to start somewhere.”

“Start what?”

He studied me a moment before he said, “Skip it.”

I went on back to my own office. That was how that day started. I got to work on a last review of the subsidiary figures for the tax bill. Swinton, who was handling the thing through the Senate, had wanted them Saturday, but I had been running behind on my homework. I had had that date to meet Swinton and the Boss Saturday evening, but things had not fallen out that way. Later in the morning I ran into a kink. I went out into the big room and started for the Boss’s door. The girl out there said that he had gone across to Sadie Burke’s office. The door there was closed. I hung around a few minutes in the big room, waiting for the Boss to come out, but the door stayed closed. Once I could hear a voice raised beyond the door, but then it dropped.

The ringing of my own telephone bell took me back into my office. It was Swinton saying what the hell, why didn’t I get the figures down to him. So I got my papers together and went down to see Swinton and give him the stuff. I was with him about forty minutes. When I came back up to the office, the Boss was gone. “He’s gone to the hospital,” the girl said. “He’ll be back this afternoon.”

I looked over toward Sadie’s door, thinking maybe she could help me and Swinton. The girl caught my glance. “Miss Burke,” she said, “she’s gone too.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” the girl replied, “but I can tell you this, Mr. Burden, wherever it is she sure must already be there the way she tore out of here.” Then she smiled with that knowing snotty little secret way the hired help always uses to make you think they know more than they are telling, and reached up a nice rounded little red-nailed white hand to tuck in a stray back lock of really beautiful corn-colored hair. Having tucked in the lock, with a motion which raised her breast for Mr. Burden’s inspection, she added “And wherever it is she’s gone they probably won’t like her getting there, to judge from the look on her face when she left.” The she smiled sweetly to show how happy any place would be to have her arrive there.

I went back into my office and gave some letters until lunch. I had a sandwich down in the basement cafeteria of the Capitol, where eating was like eating in a jolly, sanitary, well-run, marble-glistening morgue. I ran into Swinton, jawed some with him, and went, at his suggestion, up to the Senate when it reconvened after lunch. About four o’clock a page came up to me and handed me a slip of paper. It was a message from upstairs. It read: “Miss Stanton telephones to ask you to come right away to her apartment. It is urgent.”

I crumpled up the slip, threw it down, and headed up tom my office for my coat and hat. I told them in the office to notify Miss Stanton I was on my way. When I got outdoors I discovered that it had begun to rain. The clean, pale sunlight of the morning was gone now.

Anne answered my knock so quickly that I figured she must have been standing by the door. But when the door flung open, I might not have recognized, at the first glance, the face I saw there unless I had known it to be Anne Stanton’s. It was white and desperate and ravaged, and past the tears which you could know had been shed. And somehow you could know what kind of tears they had been: tardy, sparse and painful, quickly suppressed.

She clutched my arm with both hands, as though to support herself. “Jack,” she exclaimed, “Jack!”

“What the hell?” I asked, and shoved the door shut behind me.

“You’ve got to find him–you’ve got to find him–find him and tell him–” She was shaking as if with a chill.

“Find who?”

“–tell him how it was–oh, it wasn’t that way–not what they said–”

“For Christ’s sake, what who said?”

“–they said it was because of me–because of what I did–because–”

“Who said?”

“–oh, you’ve got to find him, Jack–you’ve got to find him and tell him and bring him to me and–”

I grabbed her, hard, with a hand on each shoulder, and shook her. “Look here!” I said. “You come out of this. Just stop jabbering a minute and come out of this.”

She stopped talking and stood between my hands, in my clutch, and looked up at me with her white face and shivered. Her breathing was shallow, quick, and dry.

After a minute, I said, “Now tell me who you want me to find.”

“Adam,” she said. “It’s Adam.”

“Now why do I find him? What’s happened?”

“He came here and said it was all because of me. Of what I had done.”

“What was because of what you had done?”

“He was made Director because of me. That’s what he said. Because of what I had done. That’s what he said. And he said–oh, Jack, he said it–”

“Said what?”

“He said he wouldn’t be paid pimp to his sister’s whore–he said that–he said that, Jack–to me, Jack–and I tried to tell him–tell him how it was–and he pushed me and I fell down on the floor and he ran out–he ran out and you’ve got to find him, Jack–you’ve got to and–”

And she was off again on the jabber. I gave her a good shaking. “Stop it,” I commanded. “Stop it or I’ll shake your teeth out.”

When she had quieted down again and was hanging there between my hands, I said, “Now start slowly from the start and tell me what happened.” I led her over to a chair and pushed her down into it. “Now tell me,” I said, “but take it easy.”

She looked up at me for a moment as though she were afraid to begin.

“Tell me,” I said.

“He came up here,” she began. “It was about three o’clock. As soon as he came in the door I knew something terrible had happened–something terrible had already happened to me today but I knew this was another terrible thing–and he grabbed me by the arm and stared in my face and didn’t say a word. I guess I kept asking him what was the matter, and he held my arm tighter and tighter.”

She pushed the sleeve up and showed the bruise marks halfway down the left forearm.

“I kept asking him what was the matter, and all at once he said, ‘Matter, matter, you know what’s the matter.’ Then he said how there had been a telephone call to him, how somebody–a man–that was all he said–had called and told him–told him about me–about me and–”

She didn’t seem to be able to go on.

“About you and Governor Stark,” I completed it for her.

She nodded.

“It was awful,” she whispered, not at me, but raptly, to herself. And repeated, “It was awful.”

“Stop that and go ahead,” I ordered, and shook her.

She came up out of it, looked at me, and said, “He told him about me and then how that was the only reason he was ever made Director and how now the Governor was going to dismiss him as Director–because he had paralyzed his son with a bad operation–and how he was going to get rid of me–throw me out–that was what the man said on the telephone, throw me out–because of what Adam did to his son–and Adam heard him and ran right over here because he believed it–he believed it about me–”

“Well,” I demanded savagely, “the part about you is true, isn’t it?”

“He ought to have asked me,” she said, and made a distracted motion with her hands, “he ought to have asked me before he believed it.”

“He’s not a half-wit,” I said, “and it was there ready to be believed. You’re damned lucky he didn’t guess something long back, for if–”

She seized me by the arm and her fingers dug in “Hush, hush!” she said, “you mustn’t say it–for nothing was that way–and not the way Adam said–oh, he said terrible things–oh, he called me terrible things–he said if everything else was filthy a man didn’t have to be–oh, I tried to tell him how things were–how they weren’t like he said–but he pushed me so hard I fell down and he said how he wouldn’t be pimp to his sister’s whore and nobody would ever say that about him–and then he ran out the door and you’ve got to find him. Find him and tell him, Jack. Tell him, Jack.”

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him it wasn’t like he said. You’ve got to tell him that. You know why I did everything I did, you know what happened. Oh, Jack–” and she grabbed my sleeve and hung on, “it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t horrible like that. I tried not to be horrible. Was I, Jack? Was I? Tell me, Jack!”

I look down at her. “No,” I said, “you weren’t horrible.”

“But it has happened to me. It has all happened to me. And he’s gone.”

“I’ll find him,” I said, and detached myself from her, ready to go.

“It won’t do any good.”

“He’ll listen to sense,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t mean Adam. I mean–”

“Stark?”

She nodded. Then said, “Yes. I went to the place–the place out of town we used to meet in. He called me early this afternoon. I went there and he told me. He is going back to his wife.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

Then I pulled myself together, and headed for the door. “I’ll get Adam,” I said.

“Get him,” she said, “get him. For he’s all I’ve got now.”

As I stepped out the door of the apartment house no the rain, I reflected that she had Jackie Burden, too. At least as an errand boy. But I made the reflection without bitterness and quite impersonally.

Finding somebody in a city in a city if you can’t call in the cops is quite an undertaking. I had tried it often enough back when I was a reporter, and it takes luck and time. But one rule is always to try the obvious first. So I went to Adam’s apartment. When I saw his car sitting out front I figured I had played into the blue ones. I parked my own car, noticed that the driver’s door of his car was open and might get swiped off by a passing truck and was certainly letting the seat get wet, slammed it shut as I passed, and went on into the apartment house.

I knocked vigorously on the door. There was no answer. But that didn’t mean anything. Even if Adam was there, he might not be willing, under the circumstances, to answer his door. So I tried the knob. The door was locked. I went down to the basement and dug out the Negro janitor and told him some cock-and-bull story about having left some stuff up there in Adam’s place. He had seen me around with Adam a lot, and so he let me in. I prowled through the place, but no Adam. Then I spied his telephone. I called his office, then the hospital, then the medical-school office, then the exchange where the doctors left numbers when they weren’t at their usual haunts. It was no go. Nobody knew anything about Adam. Or rather, each one had a pretty good idea where he was, but the idea was never any good. That left all the town wide open.