All the King's Men (64 page)

“That’s what he said to me,” the Boss told me, “by God, that’s what he said, and I ought to slapped him down.” But he was shaken. You could see that, all right.

Meanwhile the Boss had handled the Sibyl Frey business. I had, as I said, no part in it. What happened was, however, simple and predictable. There had been two ways to get at MacMurfee: Judge Irwin and Gummy Larson. The Boss had tried to scare the Judge, and that have failed. So now he had to buy Gummy. He could buy Gummy because Gummy was a businessman. Strictly business. He would sell anything for the proper figure, immortal soul or mother’s sainted bones, and his old friend MacMurfee was neither. If Gummy told MacMurfee to lay off, that he wasn’t going to be Senator, MacMurfee would lay off, because without Gummy, MacMurfee was nothing.

The Boss had no choice. He had to buy. He might have dealt directly with MacMurfee, and have let MacMurfee to go the Senate, with the intention of following up himself when the next senatorial election rolled around. But there two arguments against that. First, the timing would have been bad. Now was the time for the Boss to step out. Later on he would be just another senator getting on toward fifty. Now he would be a boy wonder breathing brimstone. He would have a future. Second, if he let MacMurfee climb back on the gravy train, a lot of people on whose brows the cold sweat would break now if even in the privacy of the boudoir the mere thought of crossing the Boss should dawn on them would figure that you could buck the Boss and get away with it. They would begin to make friends and swap cigars with friends of MacMurfee. They would even begin to get ideas of their own. But there was a third argument, too, against doing business with MacMurfee. It was, rather, not an argument; it was simply a fact. The fact was that the Boss was the way he was. If MacMurfee had forced him into a compromise, at least MacMurfee shouldn’t be the one to profit by it. So he did business with Gummy Larson.

The figure was not cheap. It was not peanuts. It was the medical-center contract, the general contract. It would be arranged that Larson would get the contract.

But I had nothing to do with the arranging. Duffy did that, for he had been pulling all along for such an arrangement, and I suppose that he must have got some sort of private kickback or sweetening from Larson. Well, I don’t begrudge him that. He had worked for it. He had cringed and sweated and felt the baleful speculative stare of the Boss on him in the long silence after he had tried to sell the idea of Gummy Larson. It wasn’t his fault that an accident now made the deal possible and not his own conscientious efforts. So I don’t begrudge him his sweetening.

All of this went on behind my back, or perhaps even under my eyes, for in those days as fall came on I felt as though I were gradually withdrawing from the world around me. It could go its way and I would go mine. Or I would have gone my way if I had known what it was. I toyed with the thought of going away, of saying to the Boss, “Boss, I’m getting the hell away from here and never coming back.” I could afford to do it, I thought. I didn’t have to lift a finger for my morning sinker and Java. Maybe I wouldn’t be rich-rich, but I figured I was going to be rich in a nice, genteel, Southern way. Nobody down here ever wants to be rich-rich, for that, of course, would be crass and vulgar. So I was going to be just genteel rich. As soon as they wound up the Judge’s estate. (If they ever did, for his affairs were complicated and it was going to take some time.)

I was going to be genteel rich, for I had inherited the fruits of the Judge’s crime, just as some day I would inherit from my mother the fruit of the Scholarly Attorney’s weakness, the money he had left with her when he learned the truth and just walked away. On the proceeds of the Judge’s old crime I would be able to go away and lead a nice, clean, blameless life in some place where you sit under a striped awning beside a marble-topped table and drink vermouth, cassis and soda and look out over the wimpling, dimpling, famous sunlit blue of the sea. But I didn’t go. True, since I had lost my fathers, I felt as though I could float effortless away like a balloon when the last cord is cut. But I would have to go on the money from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough a bond that held me there. To change the image, it was a long cable to an anchor, and the anchor flukes clung and bit way down there in the seaweed and ooze of a long time past. Perhaps I was a fool to feel that way about my little inheritance. Perhaps it was no different from any other inheritance anybody had. Perhaps the Emperor Vespasian was right when, jingling in his jeans the money which had been derived from a tax on urinals, he wittily remarked:
“Pecunia non olet.”
_

I didn’t go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in my office or out at the University library and read books and monographs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work on: a tax bill. I knew so little of what was going on that it wasn’t until the arrangement was an accomplished fact that I knew anything about it.

I went up to the Mansion one night with my brief case full of notes and charts to have a session with the Boss. The Boss was not alone. Back there in the library with him were Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy, and, to my surprise, Gummy Larson. Sugar-Boy sat over in a corner, hunched in a chair and holding a glass between both hands, the way a child holds a glass. Out of the glass he would take little finicking sips, after each sip lifting his head up the way a chicken does when it drinks. Sugar-Boy wasn’t a drinker. He was afraid, he said, it might make him “n-n-n-n-ner-ner-vous.” It would have been awful if Sugar-Boy got so nervous he couldn’t bust jelly glasses every shot when you threw them up in the air for him or couldn’t wipe a mule’s nose with the rear fender of the black Cadillac. Duffy, of course, was a drinker, but he wasn’t drinking that night. He obviously was not in any mood for drinking, even if in fleeting glimpses one caught a glimmer of triumph mixed with the acute discomfort he was experiencing as he stood in the open space in front of the big leather couch. The discomfort was due, in part at least, to the fact that the Boss was, very definitely, drinking. For when the Boss really drank, what tender inhibitions ordinarily shackled up his tongue were absolutely removed. And now he was drinking all right. It looked like the first fine flush of a three-day blow and the barometer falling. He was cocked back on the leather couch with a pitcher of water, a bottle, and a bowl of ice on the floor beside his crumpled coat and empty shoes. When the Boss really got the works, he usually took off his shoes. He was sock-feet drunk now. The bottle was a long way down.

Mr. Larson stood back from the foot of the couch, a middle-sized, middle-aged, compact, gray-faced, gray-suited, unimaginative-looking man. He did not drink. He had once been a gambling-house operator and had found that it did not pay to drink. Gummy was strictly business and he didn’t do anything unless it paid.

As I entered and took in the layout, the Boss put his already red-rimmed gaze on me, but didn’t say a word until I approached the open space in front of the couch. Then he flung out an arm to indicate Tiny, who stood in the middle of that unprotected open space, with a wan smile on his tallow. “Look!” the Boss said to me, pointing. “He was the one going to fix it up with Larson, and what did I tell him? I told him, hell, no. Hell, no, I told him, I’d be damned first. And what happened?”

I took that as rhetorical question and said nothing. I could see that the tax bill was out for the evening, and started sidling back the way I had come.

“And what happened?” the Boss bellowed at me.

“How do I know?” I asked, but with that cast present I had begun to have a fair notion of the nature of the drama.

The Boss swung his head toward Tiny. “Tell him,” he commanded, “tell him, and tell him how puking smart you feel!”

Tiny didn’t manage it. All he managed was the wan smile like a winter dawn above the expanse of expensive black tailoring and the white-pipe waistcoat and diamond pin.

“Tell him!”

Tiny licked his lips and glanced shyly as a bride at the impassive, gray-faced Gummy, but he didn’t manage it.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” the Boss said, “Gummy Larson is going to build my hospital and Tiny fixed it up like he has been trying to do and everything is happy.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Yeah, everybody is happy,” the Boss said. “Except me. Except me,” he repeated, and struck himself heavily on the chest. “For I’m the one said to Tiny, Hell, no, I won’t deal with Larson. For I’m the one wouldn’t let Larson come in this room when Tiny got him here. For I’m the one ought to driven him out of this state long ago. And where is he now? Where is he now?”

I looked over at Gummy Larson, whose gray face didn’t show a thing. Way back in the old days, when I had first known Gummy and he had been a gambling-house operator, the police had beat him up one time. Probably because he got behind in his protection money. They had worked over his face until it looked like uncooked hamburger. But that had healed up now. He had known it would heal up and had taken the beating without opening his trap because it always paid to keep your trap shut. It had paid him in the end. Eventually he was a rich contractor and not a gambling-house operator. He was a rich contractor because he had finally made the right connections in the City Hall and because he knew how to keep his mouth shut. Now he stood there on the floor and took everything the Boss was throwing at him. Because it paid. Gummy had the instincts of a businessman, all right.

“I’ll tell you where he is,” the Boss said. “Look, there he is. Right in this room. Standing right there, and look at him. He is a beauty, ain’t he? Know what he has just done? He has just sold out his best pal. He has just sold out MacMurfee.”

Larson might have been standing in church, waiting for the benediction, for all his face showed.

“Oh, but that isn’t anything. Not a thing. Not for Gummy.”

Who didn’t twitch a muscle.

“Oh, not for Gummy. The only difference between him and Judas Iscariot is that Gummy would have got some boot with that thirty pieces of silver. Oh, Gummy would sell out anything. He sold out his best pal, and I–and I–” he struck himself savagely on the chest with a hollow sound like a thump on a barrel–”and I–I had to buy, the sons-of-bitches made me buy!”

He relapsed into silence, glowered across at Gummy, then reached down for the bottle. He poured a lot into the glass, and sloshed in some water. He wasn’t bothering with ice now. He was nearly down to essentials. Before long the water would go.

Gummy, from the vast distance of sobriety and victory and the moral certainty which comes from an accurate knowledge of exactly to the penny what everything in the whole world is worth, surveyed the figure on the couch, and when the pitcher had been set back down, said, “If we’ve got our business arranged, Governor, I think I’ll be on my way.”

“Yeah,” the Boss said, “yeah,” and swung his sock-feet to the floor, “yeah, it’s arranged, by God. But–” he stood up, clutching the glass in one hand, and shook himself like a big dog, so that some of the liquor sloshed from the glass–”listen here!” He started across to Larson, sock-feet heavy on the rug, head trust out.

Tiny Duffy wasn’t exactly in the way, but he didn’t give back fully enough or perhaps with enough alacrity. Anyway, the Boss nearly brushed him in passing, or perhaps did brush him. At that instant, without even looking at his target, the Boss flung the liquid in his glass full into Duffy’s face. And in one motion simply let the glass fall to the floor. It bounced on the rug, not breaking.

I could see Duffy’s face at the moment of contact, the big pie face of surprise which reminded me of the time years before when the Boss had scared Duffy off the platform at Upton at the barbecue, and Duffy had fallen over the edge. Now, after the surprise, there was the flash of fury, then the merely humble and aggrieved expression and the placating whine, “What made you go and do that now, Boss, what made you go and do that?”

And the Boss, who had passed him, turned at that, looked at Duffy, and said, “I ought to done it long ago. I ought to done it long ago.”

Then he moved to Larson, who, unperturbed by the goings-on, had picked up his coat and hat and stood waiting for the dust to settle. The Boss stood directly in front of him, the bodies almost touching. Then he seized Larson by the lapels and thrust his own flushed face down to the gray one. “Arranged,” he said, “yeah, it’s arranged, but you–you leave one window latch off, you leave one piece of iron out of the concrete, you put in one extra teaspoon of sand, you chip one piece of marble, and by God–by God–I’ll rip you open, I’ll–” And still clutching the lapels, he jerked his hands apart sideways. A button from Larson’s coat, which had been buttoned up, spun across the room and bounced on the hearth with a little click.

“For it’s mine,” the Boss said, “you hear–that’s my hospital–it’s mine!”

Then there wasn’t any other sound, but the Boss breathing.

Duffy, the damp handkerchief with which he had sponged himself still clutched in his hand, regarded the scene, with awe and horror on his face. Sugar-Boy wasn’t paying the slightest attention Meanwhile, Larson stood there, the Boss’s hands still gripping the lapels, and didn’t blink an eye. I had to hand it to Gummy. He didn’t quiver. He had ice water in his veins. Nothing fazed him, not insult or anger or violence or getting his face beat into a hamburger. He was a true businessman. He knew the value of everything.

He stood there under the heavy, flushed face, no doubt feeling the hot, alcoholic breath rasp on his own face, and waited. Then the Boss released his hold. He simply opened his hands in mid-air, fingers spread, and stepped back. He turned his back and walked away from the spot as though it were vacant. His sock-feet made no sound, and his head swayed ever so little as he moved.

He sat on the couch and leaned forward with his elbows on his spread knees, the forearms hanging forward, and stared into the embers on the hearth as though he were absolutely alone.