Chapter Eight 8 страница

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.

I went back down into the street. The fact that the car was there was funny. He had abandoned it. Where in the hell did a man go off in the rain, on foot, this time of day? Or night, rather?–for it was dusk now.

I thought of the bars. For it is a tradition that a man, when he has received a great shock, heads for a bar, puts his foot on the rail, orders five straight whiskies in a row, downs then one after another while he stares with uncomprehending eyes at the white, tortured face in the mirror opposite him, and then engages the bartender in a sardonic conversation about Life. But I couldn't see Adam Stanton playing that game. But I went to the bars, anyway.

That is, I went to a lot of them. A lifetime isn't long enough to go to all the bars in our city. I began with Slade's place, had no luck, asked Slade to try to hang on to Dr. Stanton if he came in, and then moved through the other establishments of chromium, glass bricks, morros, colored lights, comfy Old English worm‑eaten oak, sporting prints, comic frescoes, or three‑piece orchestras. Around seven‑thirty I called up Adam's office and then the hospital again. He wasn't at either place. When they told me that at the hospital, I said I was calling for Governor Stark, whose son was there as a patient of Dr. Stanton, and could they please try to dig up something. They came back with the report that Dr. Stanton had been expected well before seven, that he had had an appointment with another doctor to examine some plates, but that he had not come. They had been unable to locate him at his office or at home. Would I like to leave a message for Dr. Stanton when he came in? I said, yes, to have him get in touch with me at the earliest possible moment, it was important. I would leave word at my own hotel as to my whereabouts.

I went back to my hotel and had a meal in the coffee shop, having left word at the desk to page me if a call came. But none came. So I dawdled in the lobby with the evening papers. The _Chronicle__ had a long editorial lauding the courage and sound sense of the handful of men in the Senate who were making a fight against the administration's tax bill, which would throttle business and enterprise in the state. There was a cartoon opposite the editorial. It showed the Boss, or rather, a figure with the Boss's head but a great swollen belly, dressed in a Buster Brown suit with the little pants tight above great hairy thighs. On one knee the monster balanced a big pudding and from the gaping hole in the top had just plucked a squirming little creature. The pudding bore the label _The State__ and the squirming little creature the label _Hardworking Citizen__. From the mouth of the Boss's head came one of those balloons of words the comic‑strip artists use to indicate the speech of their characters. It said: "Oh, what a good boy am I!" Under the cartoon was the caption: _Little Jack Horner__.

I read on down through the editorial. It said that our state was a poor state, and could not bear the burden thus tyrannically imposed upon it. That was an old one. Every time the Boss had cracked down–income tax, mineral‑extraction tax, liquor tax, every time–it had been the same thing. The pocketbook is where it hurts. A man may forget the death of the father, but never the loss of the patrimony, the cold‑faced Florentine, who is the founding father of our modern world, said, and he said a mouthful.

This is a poor state, the opposition always screamed. But the Boss said: "There is a passel of pore folks living in it and no mistake, but the state isn't poor. It is just a question of who has got his front feet in the trough when slopping time comes. And I aim to do me some shoving and thump me some snouts." And he had leaned forward to the crowd, with the shagged‑down forelock and the bulging eyes, and had lifted his right arm to demand of them and of the hot sky, "Are you with me? Are you with me?" And the roar had come.

More money for graft, the opposition always screamed. "Sure," the Boss had said, lounging easy, "sure, there's some graft, but there's just enough to make the wheels turn without squeaking. And remember this. There never was a machine rigged up by man didn't represent some loss of energy. How much energy do you get out of a lump of coal when you run a steam dynamo or a locomotive compared to what there actually is in that lump of coal? Damned little. Well, we do a hell of a lot better than the best dynamo or locomotive ever invented. Sure, I got a bunch of crooks around here, but they're too lily‑livered to get very crooked. I got my eye on 'em. And do I deliver the state something? I damned well do."

The theory of historical costs, you might put it. All change costs something. You have to write off the costs against the gain. Maybe in our state change could only come in the terms in which it was taking place, and it was sure due for some change. The theory of the moral neutrality of history, you might call it. Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.

The theory of historical costs. The theory of the moral neutrality of history. All that was a high historical view from a chilly pinnacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it.

But sitting there in the lobby, waiting for the call which did not come, I was willing to let those speculations rest. I went back to the editorial. That editorial was shadow‑boxing, all right. It was shadow‑boxing, for at the very minute it was just as likely true as not that the vote was being called up in the Capitol, and it would take the winged hosts to make the vote different from what it was going to be after the MacMurfee boys had talked themselves out and the count was called.

It was around nine o'clock when I was paged. But it wasn't Adam. It was a message from the Capitol saying the Boss was there and wanted me to come up. I left word at the desk that if Dr. Stanton should call me, he was to be asked to call the Capitol, I would leave instructions with the operator on the switchboard there. Then I ran up Anne to give her the news, or rather, the no‑news, about my efforts to date. She sounded calm and tired. I went out to my car. It had been raining again, for the gutter by the curb was running with a black stream which gleamed like oil in the lights of the street. But it had let up now.

When I pulled into the Capitol grounds I saw that the place was pretty well lit up. But that wasn't surprising, even at that hour, when the Legislature was in session. And when I got inside, the place was certainly not uninhabited. The solons had broken up shop for the evening and were milling about in the corridors, especially at those strategic points where the big brass spittoons stood. And there were plenty of other people around, too. There were a lot of reporters, and herds of bystanders, those people who love to have the feeling that they are around when something big is happening.

I worked through the place and up to the Boss's office. They told me there that he had gone down with somebody to the Senate.

"There wasn't any hitch about the tax bill passing, was there? I asked the girl.

"Don't be silly," the girl said.

I started to tell her that I had been around there back when she was lying in the crib sucking her thumb, but didn't do it. Instead, I asked her to take care of the business of Adam's call for me, and went down to the Senate.

At first I didn't spot the Boss. Then I saw him off to one side, with a couple of the Senators and Calvin Sperling and discreetly in the background several other men, just hangers‑on who were warming their hands at the blaze of greatness. Over to one side of the Boss, I saw Sugar‑Boy lounging against the marble wall, with his cheeks drawn in to suck the sugar cube which, at that moment no doubt, was dissolving its bliss down his gullet. The Boss stood with his hands clasped behind him and his head hanging a little forward. He was listening to something one of the Senators was telling him.

I approach the group and stood back from it, waiting. In a minute I caught the Boss's eye and knew that he had seen me. So I went over to Sugar‑Boy and said, "Hello."

He managed to get the word out after several efforts. The he resumed work on the sugar. I leaned against the wall beside him, and waited.

Four or five minutes passed, and the Boss still stood there with his head hanging forward, listening. He could listen a long time and not say a word, just let the fellow our it out. The stuff would pour out and pour out, and the Boss would just be waiting to see what was in the bottom of the bucket. Finally, I knew that he had enough. He knew what was in the bottom of the fellow's bucket or that there wasn't anything there, after all. I knew that he had had enough, for I saw him suddenly lift his head up sharp and look straight at the man. That was the sign. I stopped leaning against the wall. I knew the Boss was ready to go.

He looked at the man and shook his head. "It won't wash," he said in a perfectly amiable fashion. It was loud enough for me to hear. The other fellow had been talking low and fast.

Then the Boss looked over at me and called, "Jack."

I went to him.

"Let's get upstairs," he said to me, "I want to tell you something."

"O. K.," I said, and started toward the door.

He left the men and followed me, catching up with me at the door. Sugar‑Boy fell in just on his other side and a little back.

I started to ask the Boss how the boy was, but thought better of it. It was just a question of the kind of badness, and there wasn't any use asking about that. So we moved on through the corridor to the big lobby, where we would take an elevator up to his office. Some of the men lounging along the corridor stepped back a little and said, "Howdy‑do, Governor," or "

"Hi, Boss," but the Boss only bowed his response to the greetings. The other men, those who said nothing, turned their heads to watch the Boss as he passed. There wasn't anything out of the ordinary about all that. He must have passed down that corridor a thousand times, or near that many, with men calling out to him, or saying nothing and following with their eyes his progress over the glittering marble.

We came out into the great lobby, under the dome, where there was a blaze of light over the statues which stood with statesmanlike dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place, and over the people who moved about in the area. We walked along the east wall, toward the inset where the elevators were. Just as we approached the statue of General Moffat (a great Indian fighter, a successful land speculator, the first governor of the state), I noticed a figure leaning against the pedestal.

It was Adam Stanton. I saw that his clothes were soaked and that mud and filth were slopped up his trousers half to the knees. I understood the abandoned car. He had walked away from it, in the rain.

Just as I saw him, he looked in our direction. But his eyes were on the Boss, not on me. "Adam," I said, "Adam!"

He took a step toward us, but still did not look at me.

Then the Boss veered toward Adam, and thrust out his hand in preparation for a handshake. "Howdy‑do, Doctor," he began, holding out his hand.

For an instant Adam stood there immobile, as though about to refuse to shake the hand of the man approaching him. Them he put out his hand, and as he did so I felt a surge of relief and thought: _He's shaking hands with him, he's all right now, he's all right__.

Then I saw what was in his hand, and even as I recognized the object, but before the significance of the recognition had time to form itself in my mind and nerves, I saw the two little spurts of pale‑orange flame from the muzzle of the weapon.

I did not hear the report, for it was lost and merged with the other more positive staccato series of reports, on my left. With his right arm still extended Adam reeled back a step, swung his reproachful and haggard gaze upon me and fixed it, even as a second burst of firing came and he spun to the floor.

In the astonishing silence, I rushed toward Adam as he fell. Then I heard somewhere in the lobby a woman begin screaming, then a great rush of feet and babble of voices. Adam was bleeding heavily. He was stitched across the chest. The chest was all knocked in. He was already dead.

I looked up to see Sugar‑Boy standing there with the smoking automatic in his hand, and off to the right, near the elevator, a highway patrolman with a pistol in his hand.

I didn't see the Boss. And thought: _He didn't hit him__.

But I was wrong. Even as I thought that and looked around, Sugar‑Boy dropped his automatic clattering to the marble, and uttering some strangled, animal‑like sound, rushed back beyond the statue of Governor Moffat.

I laid Adam's head back on the marble and went beyond the statue. I had to shove the people back now, they were crowding so. Somebody was yelling, "Stand back, stand back, give him air!" But they kept crowding up, running to the spot from all over the lobby and from the corridors.

When I broke through, I saw the Boss sitting on the floor, breathing heavily, staring straight ahead. He had both hands pressed to his body, low on the chest and toward the center. I could see no sign that he was hit. Then I saw a very little ooze of blood between two of the fingers, just a little.

Sugar‑Boy was leaning above him, weeping and sputtering, trying to speak. He finally managed to get out the words: "D‑d‑d‑d‑does it hur‑hur‑hur‑hurt much, Boss–does it hur‑hur‑hur‑hurt?"

The Boss did not die there in the lobby under the dome. In fact, he lived quite a while and died on a clean, white, antiseptic bed, with all the benefits of science. For a couple of days it was given out that he would not die at all. He was seriously wounded–there were two little.25‑caliber slugs in his body, slugs from a little toy target pistol Adam had had since he was a kid–but an operation was possible, and he was a very strong man.

So there was all over again the business of the waiting room with the potted plants and water colors and artificial logs on the cozy hearth. A sister of Lucy Stark came with Lucy the morning of the operation. Old Man Stark, the Boss's father, was too feeble to leave Mason City. You could see that Lucy's sister, a woman a good deal older than Lucy, dressed in country black with high‑laced black kid shoes, was a strong‑minded, sensible woman who had been through a lot and knew how to help somebody else through. You could look at her squarish, slightly reddened, coarse‑skinned hands, with their square‑cut nails, and know that she knew how to take hold. When she entered the waiting room there at the hospital and cast a practiced and critical, not quite scornful, glance over the potted plants and the artificial logs, it was like a pilot mounting to the pilothouse and taking over.

She sat very stiff and severe in a chair, not one of the chintz‑covered soft ones. She was going to permit no spilling over of emotion, not in a strange room and at that time of the day–the time of day when every day there was breakfast to get and the children to fix and the men to clear out of the house. There would be a proper place and time. After it was over, after she got Lucy home, she would put her to bed in a room with the curtains drawn, and would put a cloth dabbled with vinegar on her forehead, and would sit by the bed and hold her hand, and would say, "Now just you cry if you want to, baby, then you'll feel better, then you lie still and I'll sit here, I won't leave you, baby." But that would come later. Meanwhile Lucy now and then stole a look across at her sister's hewn and eroded face. It wasn't exactly a sympathetic face, but it seemed to have what Lucy was looking for.

I sat over on the couch and looked at the same old picture magazines. I felt definitely that I was out of place. But Lucy had asked me to come. "He would want you to be there," she had said.

"I'll wait down in the lobby," I said.

She shook her head. "Come upstairs," she said.

"I don't want to be underfoot. You sister will be there, you said."

"I want you to," she had said, and so there I was. And it was better, I decided, even if I was out of place, than being down in the lobby with all the newshawks and politicos and curiosity‑seekers.

It didn't take them awfully long. They said the operation was a success. When the nurse who had brought the news said that, Lucy slumped in her chair and uttered a dry, gasping sob. The sister, who herself had seemed to relax a little at the words, looked sharply at Lucy. "Lucy," she said, not loud but with some severity, "Lucy!"

Lucy raised her head, met the sister's reproving gaze, murmured humbly, "I'm sorry, Ellie, I'm sorry. It's just that I've–I've–"

"We must thank God," Ellie announced. The she rose briskly, as though she were about to step right out and do that before it slipped her mind. But she turned to the nurse. "When can she see her husband?" she asked.

"It will be some time," the nurse said. "I can't tell you exactly, but it will be some time. If you wait here I can let you know." She moved to the door. There she turned, and asked, "Can I get anything for you? Some lemonade? Some Coffee?"

"That's right kind and considerate," the sister said, "but we'll just say no thanks this time of morning."

The nurse went out, and I excused myself and followed. I went down to the office of Dr. Simmons, who had performed the operation. I had known him around the place. He was a sort of friend of Adam–about as good a one as Adam had, for he never had chummed up with anybody, that is, anybody except me, and I didn't count, for I was the Friend of His Youth. I had known Dr. Simmons around the place. Adam had introduced us.

Dr. Simmons, a dry, thin, grayish man, was at his desk, writing something on a big card. I told him to finish what he was doing. He said he was about through, the secretary picked up the card and put it into a filing cabinet, and he turned to me. I asked him how the Governor was doing. The operation had been a success, he said.

"You mean you got the bullets out?" I asked.

He smiled in a sort of chilly way, and said he meant a little more than that. "He's got a chance," he said. "He's a strong man."

"He's that," I agreed.

Dr. Simmons picked up a little envelope from his desk, and emptied the contents into his hand. "No matter how strong they are they can take much of this diet," he said, and held out his hand, open, to show me the two little pellets resting there. A.25‑caliber slug is small, all right, but these looked even smaller and more trivial than I had remembered.

I picked one of them out of his hand and examined it. It was a little misshapen slug of lead. Fingering it, I thought of how a long time back, when we were kids at the Landing, Adam and I used to shoot at a pine board, and how sometimes we had dug the lugs out of the soft wood with a pocketknife. Sometimes the slug dug out of the wood hadn't been a bit more misshapen than this one, the wood was so soft.

"The son‑of‑a‑bitch," Dr. Simmons said irrelevantly.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28