<p>"You seen the Boss?" he asked.</p>
<p>I shook my head.</p>
−
<p>
"Gee," he said, and the sympathy and gloom appeared magically on his face, "it is sure tough. It is what I always calls tragic. A kid like that. A good clean square-shooting kid like that. It is tragic, and no mistake."
</p>
<p>"You needn't practice on me," I said.</p>
−
<p>
"It will be tough on the Boss," he said, and shook his head.
</p>
<p>"Just save your fire till he gets here."</p>
<p>"Where is he?"</p>
<p>"I don't know."</p>
−
<p>
I tried to get hold of him yesterday," Tiny said, "but he wasn't at the Mansion. They said they didn't know where he was, he hadn't been home. He was out to the hospital a while, but I missed him there. He wasn't in a hotel, either."
</p>
<p>"You seem to have been thorough," I said.</p>
−
<p>
"Yeah," Tiny said, "I wanted to tell him how us boys all felt."
</p>
−
<p>
Just then Calvin Sperling, who was Commissioner of Agriculture, came in with a couple of other fellows. They were wearing crepe on their faces, too, till they saw the Boss was not in. Then they eased off and began to snap their bubble gum. "Maybe he won't be coming." Sperling suggested.
</p>
−
<p>
"He'll come," Tiny pronounced. "It won't faze him. The Boss is tough."
</p>
−
<p>
A couple more of the fellows came by, and then Morrisey, who had followed Hugh Miller a long time back as Attorney General, after Miller's resignation. The cigar smoke began to get thick.
</p>
−
<p>
Once Sadie stopped at the door, laid one hand on the jamb, and surveyed the scene.
</p>
<p>"Hi, Sadie," one of the boys said.</p>
−
<p>
She did not respond. She continued her survey for a moment longer, then said, "Jesus Christ," and moved on. I heard the door of her own office shut.
</p>
−
<p>
I drifted over to the window back of the Boss's desk and looked out over the grounds. It had rained during the night and now in the weak sunlight the grass and the leaves of the live oaks, even the trailing moss, had a faint sheen, and the damp concrete of the curving drives and walks gave off an almost imperceptible, glimmering reflection. The whole world, the bare boles of the other trees, which had lost their leaves now, the roofs of the houses, even the sky itself, had a pale, washed, relieved look, like the look on the face of a person who has been sick a long time and now feels better and thinks maybe he is going to get well.
</p>
−
<p>
That wasn't exactly the look on the Boss's face when he came in, but it gives some idea of what that look was. He wasn't really pale, but he was paler than usual, and the flesh seemed to hang a little loose at the jawbone. There were a couple of razor nicks along the bone. Under his eyes were grey circles, as though the flesh had been bruised but was just about well now. But the eyes were clear.
</p>
−
<p>
He had come across the reception room without making any noise on the thick carpet, and for an instant he stood in the doorway of the office before anybody noticed his arrival. The chatter didn't die; it was frozen in mid-syllable. Then there was a kind of noiseless scurry and fumble to adjust the funeral faces which had been laid aside. Then, with the faces in place and only a little askew, they crowded around the Boss and shook his hand. They told him they wanted to tell him how they felt. "You know how us boys all feel, Boss," they said. He said, yes, he knew, very quietly. He said, yes, yes, and thank you.
</p>
−
<p>
Then he moved toward the desk, the boys falling away from him like water from the prow of a ship when it is first warped out from the pier and the screw makes the first revolutions. He stood before the desk, handling the telegrams, looking at them, letting them drop.
</p>
−
<p>
"Boss," somebody said, "Boss–those telegrams–that shows you now–that shows you how folks feel about you."
</p>
<p>He said nothing.</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>The girl got that muck out of there.</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
When breath came back, Tiny managed, "Boss–Boss–you can't, Boss."
</p>
−
<p>
"Yes, I can," the Boss said, without raising his voice.
</p>
<p>"You can't, Boss. It's all fixed up, Boss."</p>
−
<p>
"It isn't too late to unfix it," the Boss said. "It isn't too late."
</p>
−
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>"I can break my word to Larson," the Boss said.</p>
−
<p>
"You can't–you can't change your mind, Boss. Not now. You can't change it now."
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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?"
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>"Start what?"</p>
<p>He studied me a moment before he said, "Skip it."</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>"Where did she go?"</p>
−
<p>
"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.
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
She clutched my arm with both hands, as though to support herself. "Jack," she exclaimed, "Jack!"
</p>
−
<p>
"What the hell?" I asked, and shoved the door shut behind me.
</p>
−
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>"Find who?"</p>
−
<p>
"–tell him how it was–oh, it wasn't that way–not what they said–"
</p>
<p>"For Christ's sake, what who said?"</p>
−
<p>
"–they said it was because of me–because of what I did–because–"
</p>
<p>"Who said?"</p>
−
<p>
"–oh, you've got to find him, Jack–you've got to find him and tell him and bring him to me and–"
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
After a minute, I said, "Now tell me who you want me to find."
</p>
<p>"Adam," she said. "It's Adam."</p>
<p>"Now why do I find him? What's happened?"</p>
−
<p>
"He came here and said it was all because of me. Of what I had done."
</p>
<p>"What was because of what you had done?"</p>
−
<p>
"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–"
</p>
<p>"Said what?"</p>
−
<p>
"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–"
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
She looked up at me for a moment as though she were afraid to begin.
</p>
<p>"Tell me," I said.</p>
−
<p>
"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."
</p>
−
<p>
She pushed the sleeve up and showed the bruise marks halfway down the left forearm.
</p>
−
<p>
"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–"
</p>
<p>She didn't seem to be able to go on.</p>
−
<p>
"About you and Governor Stark," I completed it for her.
</p>
<p>She nodded.</p>
−
<p>
"It was awful," she whispered, not at me, but raptly, to herself. And repeated, "It was awful."
</p>
−
<p>
"Stop that and go ahead," I ordered, and shook her.
</p>
−
<p>
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–"
</p>
−
<p>
"Well," I demanded savagely, "the part about you is true, isn't it?"
</p>
−
<p>
"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."
</p>
−
<p>
"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–"
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>"Tell him what?"</p>
−
<p>
"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!"
</p>
−
<p>
I look down at her. "No," I said, "you weren't horrible."
</p>
−
<p>
"But it has happened to me. It has all happened to me. And he's gone."
</p>
−
<p>
"I'll find him," I said, and detached myself from her, ready to go.
</p>
<p>"It won't do any good."</p>
<p>"He'll listen to sense," I said.</p>
<p>"Oh, I don't mean Adam. I mean–"</p>
<p>"Stark?"</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>"Well, I'll be damned," I said.</p>
−
<p>
Then I pulled myself together, and headed for the door. "I'll get Adam," I said.
</p>
−
<p>
"Get him," she said, "get him. For he's all I've got now."
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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__.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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.
</p>
−
<p>
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."
</p>
−
<p>
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.
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