She shook her head. ‘You pick strange friends.’
‘You should know.’
‘All right, Standish,’ she said, bristling. ‘Let’s get something straight. I had a job to do, and that’s all there was to it. What if I’d come to you and said, “Listen, buddy, I’m a member of the loyal opposition, and I want to do a smear piece on you. Give me something quotable, will you?” What if I’d said something like that?’
‘Why do you have to do a smear piece at all?’
‘It’s my job.’
‘Nice job.’
‘You should talk. What about the people you work for?’
‘Don’t believe everything your father reads.’
She started to say something, then hesitated, then said, ‘Yon really do see yourself as pure, don’t you?’
‘That’s an exaggeration. I don’t see myself writing smear pieces, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You’d be perfectly willing to smear my father with his employees, wouldn’t you?’
‘Only with the truth.’
‘You wouldn’t say very much, then, would you?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s supposed to mean you haven’t got the corner on truth, Sir Galahad.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ I whispered. ‘We didn’t come up here to start a war. We got a letter. Some of the workers wanted to start a local of the Machinists, so we came up to set up an election, and if the majority wanted a local, fine. And if the majority wanted to stick with the company union, that was fine, too.’
‘And the majority is always right.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘You’re such a moron!’ She got to her feet, agitated. ‘Why do I bother about you? I told you what my father said, and that’s all. He didn’t order you beaten up, and he didn’t want yon beaten up. And if you have any sense you’ll go away from here But you don’t have any sense, do you?’
‘Not much, I guess.’
‘A moron,’ she repeated, angrily. She strode to the door and flung it open, then glared back at me. ‘Say what you want to Dr Reedman,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter to me. If I’m trying to help you, it’s not because I’m scared you’ll talk.’
‘Then why is it?’
‘Because you’re such a moron, that’s why. Because everybody feels sorry for a yearling.’ She stormed out, and slammed tin-door.
As soon as she left, I lay prone on the bed again, easing my stomach. Even talking in a whisper, I’d done too much, and now my throat ached more than ever. I breathed carefully through my nose, and stared at the ceiling, and tried to understand why she’d really come here. Her father had sent her, she’d said. Had he? Thinking about it, I had to suppose he had; she’d been so sullen and reluctant at first, I had to accept her statement that she hadn’t come of her own free will.
But later. Advice, and irritation, and the news that she felt sorry for me. Because I was a moron and a yearling. A pretty portrait, that; I hoped it wasn’t a good likeness.
Although I ached all over, and although it had been too long since I’d last slept—and that sleep, in fact, on a metal cell cot. I suddenly found myself restless. No, restless is too weak a word. The way a horse champs and stamps in its stall during a thunderstorm, that’s the way I felt. I wanted to raise my head and stamp my feet; I wanted to be out in the clean air, and running.
Finally, I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I pushed myself off the bed, grunting at the sharp twinges in my stomach, and moved shakily—like a drunk or a paralytic—to the door. For some reason, I switched the lights off first, and then pulled the door open. It had nothing to do with caution, not wanting to outline myself against the light or anything like that; I just didn’t want to spoil the outer night with an overflow of yellow.
Outside, everything was crisp and clear, and it somehow seemed easier to walk, though I still couldn’t straighten completely. But it was a cool night, with a far black sky full of minute stars, and with a silence accented by the calls of peepers in the woods behind the motel. There was moonlight, too, grotto-pale.
Either my senses were heightened, or there was an aural clarity about the air. When I walked out from the shade of the building onto the moonlit gravel, the soft crush of it beneath my feet was the clearest sound I’d ever heard. I walked straight out, to the modernistic sign by the highway, standing on gracefully arched metal posts, and then just stood there for a while, looking at the pule cement of the road.
A car came by, coming from the south and heading toward town. I stepped closer to the sign, and waited as it whished by, throwing headlight beams out to either side. Then I turned and walked the other way, along the dirt shoulder beside the road, southward, away from Wittburg.
I walked and walked, and only two more cars passed me, both heading north. For the rest of the time, the road was mine. My steps sounded clear on the ground, the roadway was faintly luminous, and trees formed a solid black bulk on my left. I felt like-running, but when I tried it my stomach knife-twinged badly, and I had to stop. So I kept walking instead, not thinking, paying attention only to my senses, to the sight of the road and the sound of my footsteps and the smell of the clean country night.
After a while I had to stop, because my legs were getting shaky And only then did I remember Walter, and realize what I had actually been doing. I’d been running away. But I hadn’t even admitted it to myself; I’d distracted myself with sensory impressions.
There were white concrete posts spaced along the side of the road at this point, and I sat on one of them and lit a cigarette, my first since leaving the motel. My first, in fact, since Ben had beaten me up. I took one puff on it, choked and coughed as it burned my throat, and then threw it away.
You’re a coward, Paul. Yes, you’re a yearling, and yes, you’re a moron, but those are only the secondary characteristics. The primary fact about you, Paul, is that you are a coward. You are trying to run away from Walter Killy. You are trying to run away from Everyman’s responsibility at least to try to avenge himself of personal injustices. You are trying to run away from a life more complicated than you’d expected. You’re a coward, Paul.
Knowing this, I also knew I was doomed to stay here till the end. Knowing I was a coward, I also knew I was too much of a coward to let myself run away. My cowardice in the face of the brutality of Ben and Jerry, the hypocrisy of Captain Willick, the power of Leonard Fleisch, and the bland amorality of Sondra Fleisch, was pale before my cowardice in the face of my own self-revulsion. I was more afraid of losing my own high opinion of myself than of anything else on earth. So I got to my feet again, and retraced my steps.
It seemed longer, going back. The motel loomed finally, squat and primitive in the darkness, like a long low Indian mudhut. I went into my cubicle, but didn’t turn on the light. I undressed, moving slowly because now I was stiffer and more fragile than ever, and crawled into bed. A car went by on the road, northward, angles of lightbeam sweeping backwards past the windows, and then there was silence.
In the silence, there were buzzings. A drone of low bed conversation from far away, the passing of another car, a frail distant murmur of night insects. In my throat there was a dim buzzing of hoarse ache, and the white taping held my stomach taut. I closed my eyes, and drifted into the deeper buzzings of sleep.
Fourteen
Pounding woke me. My eyes opened to pitch darkness, and I moved, hampered by the unexpected restriction around my middle. The pounding stopped, and then the doorknob rattled and then the pounding started again.
I was afraid. Before the beating, I would have been angry, bin now I was afraid. I cowered on the bed in the dark, thinking of the walls as fragile. The pounding stopped again, and a voice called, ‘Wake up in there!’
‘Who is it?’ But I whispered it, to myself.
The voice muttered, just barely loud enough for me to hear. ‘God damn it to hell.’ There was irritation in the voice, not men ace. The doorknob rattled angri
ly.
I got up slowly from the bed, as though afraid to make a sound, put on my glasses, and crept across the dark room to the door. The rattling had stopped, again, and now an aggravated silence awaited without. I leaned against the door, the side of my face pressed to the panel, and heard low murmurings in the wood. ‘Who is it?’ With a great effort, I could make the hoarse whisper loud. But it dried my throat again, and made me cough.
‘At last,’ said the voice. ‘It’s Fletcher. Open the door.’
‘Oh. Oh! Just a minute.’ I’d forgotten all about Fletcher. I pawed the wall beside the door, felt the light switch, clicked it on, and blinked in the sudden glare. Then I unlocked the door As I opened it, I realized I was still in shorts and T-shirt. But Fletcher was already coming into the room.
He was of medium height, around fifty years of age, stocky of body, well dressed and full-faced. He looked like a very busy and successful lawyer. He came in, looked around the room, and said, ‘Killy’s not released yet.’
‘No, sir.’
Then he glanced at me. ‘You didn’t say anything about all that,’ he said, and gestured at my face.
I touched my cheek, felt the bandages. ‘That happened since.’
‘Local toughs?’
‘Police.’
He grimaced. ‘Bad. That the reason for the voice?’
‘I—I guess so.’
‘Better close the door.’
‘Yes, sir.’ I closed it quickly, made sure the snap-lock was on. When I turned back to the room, Fletcher was seated in the armchair, opening his suit coat. ‘You’d better sit down,’ he told me. ‘You look pale.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What’s that? You’re taped up?’
‘Yes. Around my stomach.’
‘Anything broken?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Good.’
I lay down on the bed again, feeling weak. Then a sudden temporal panic struck me, and I sat up to say, ‘What time is it, do you know?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘Quarter past two. Would have been here earlier, but the car-rental people fouled up in Syracuse.’ The way he said it, it was plain he considered incompetence the greatest sin, total competence the only worthwhile goal. Such an attitude instilled confidence, and I lay back down pleased that my earlier confidence in him had been justified.
He brought out a flat silver cigarette case, and snapped it open. ‘I don’t suppose you feel like smoking right now.’
I shook my head. ‘No, thank you.’
‘Thought not.’ The cigarette case contained a lighter. He used it, slipped the case back in his pocket, and said, ‘I don’t want you to use your voice too much. But I need to know what’s been going on around here. Just give me the highlights.’
‘There was correspondence with a man named Hamilton, a worker at the shoe factory here. Walter and I came up to see him.
We talked to his wife, but he was still at work. Then we got arrested, here, and they kept me all night, and they’ve still got Walter. They didn’t tell me till morning what it was all about Hamilton had been killed. Shot.’
‘And they haven’t charged Walter?’
‘I don’t think so. They’ve been holding him for questioning They’ve beat him up some, too.’
‘What about you? What did you do to get all that?’
‘I—well, there’s a girl working for the paper here, she goes in the same college I do. She’s the daughter of the factory manager but I thought—well, I talked to her. And then, in the paper, she twisted everything around and called me a tough and sneering, defiant Standish, and I went up to tell her off.’
‘At the paper?’
I felt myself blushing. ‘No, at her father’s house. And I talked with her father there.’
‘Argue with him?’
‘No—not really. He tried to tell me the Machinists was a bad union.’
Fletcher made a brief sour smile. ‘Told you all about Hoffa, he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘They always do. Men like Hoffa do more good for management than NAM. Say the word union to a management man, and the first thing he says is Jimmy Hoffa. But they won’t tell you unclean unions wish Hoffa’d never been born.’ He shrugged, showing again his irritation for sloppiness. ‘So you won’t be won over, and when you left he turned the dogs on you.’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘You’re too new at this,’ he told me. ‘I’ll have you driven down to Syracuse in the morning. You can take a plane to Washing ton.’
Again it was offered, the nearly honourable out, but I said, ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to leave town.’ That wasn’t true, bin the truth would have sounded sentimental and simple-minded to this pragmatic, clear-headed man.
‘Mm. In that case, stay here. Don’t move from this room. I’ll have food brought in for you. Don’t go anywhere, and don’t talk to anybody.’
‘Well, there’s—’
He gazed bleakly at me. ‘There’s already somebody else?’
Embarrassed confusion came over me, and I nodded.
He sighed, and shook his head. Now I was the one who was sloppy and incompetent. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
‘When I came to, after they beat me up, there was an old man here. He got a doctor for me, and paid for it himself. He was a friend of the dead man, Hamilton, and he told me Hamilton’d learned something.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. He was trying to—Hamilton was trying to dig up any dirt he could that would help the union. And he found something out, but he wouldn’t say what it was. This old man—Jeffers, his name is—he wanted me to help him, to—well, to go over Hamilton’s trail.’ As I said it, it sounded ridiculous.
Fletcher gazed at me, his mouth thin, and said, ‘And you see yourself in the role of Philo Vance, is that it?’
‘Mr Fletcher, nobody cares! Hamilton is dead, and the police won’t do anything about it, and nobody else is doing anything about it, and this man Jeffers asked me to help him, and I want to help him.’
‘You won’t do any good,’ he told me. ‘You’ll do only harm. Harm to yourself, harm to this old man, harm to Killy and the union, harm all the way round. Keep out of it. You should know by now that you don’t know enough to participate in this kind of battle.’
‘I don’t care. I want to do it.’
He sat back, studying me. Finally, he said, ‘This isn’t your light. There’s no reason to get yourself embroiled.’
‘A man is dead, Mr Fletcher.’
‘You didn’t know him, you had no part in his death, you don’t owe him anything.’
‘But—’
He raised a hand. ‘One moment. I am not saying that his death doesn’t matter, or that there’s no point in striving for justice.’ He smiled thinly. ‘I wouldn’t be in the work I’m in if I thought that But there’s a best way to go about anything, and a worst way. and many mediocre ways in the middle. The way you’re choosing strikes me as being one of the very worst. All I’m asking is that you give us a chance to try the best way first.’
‘What way?’
‘This city is controlled by a tight small clique, with its power based in the shoe factory. But that power is very delicately balanced, ready to totter. The murder proves that, and so does the treatment given to you and to Killy. If they were secure in then power, they could ignore you. In other words, with the impetus of the last two days, and given the proper knowledgeable direction, that power can be made to collapse utterly. The key is in the union, in the workers. I will predict that a local of the Machinists will be the bargaining agent for the workers here within a month. Now, I’ve seen this happen before. Once the workers have a source of power of their own, a general clean-up of the city follows in very short order. A union local, particularly when it represents such a high percentage of a city’s population, is a potent political tool. Within two years, this will be a clean city. And the local, you can be sure of it, will not rest
until the Hamilton murder is reopened and solved. That is the best way He made sense. And he was right, I had been casting myself as a sort of Philo Vance in the rough. But Philo Vance didn’t seem like a very successful survival type—in the rough.
Still, I was part of this. Too much had happened to me, too much had been done to me, for me to be able to accept the good sense of my further non-involvement. I was involved, good sense or not. Fletcher could do a better job than me of freeing Walter A local of the Machinists could do a better job of forcing the police to find and punish the murderer of Charles Hamilton than I could ever hope to do. These were true, and good sense, bin they couldn’t get around the fact that I was involved, that I had been hurled into the middle of this thing and I had to get myself out of it, self-respect more or less intact. And it would take more than baiting a nasal guard with my superior vocabulary.
Nevertheless, a degree of caution had been pounded into me.
Innocence had failed rather abysmally, and anger had failed in an even more spectacular manner. The only other method I could think of was guile. I had no idea how good I’d be at guile, but it was the last tool in that weapons chest. And, of necessity, I used it first on Fletcher.
‘I guess you’re right,’ I said. ‘Will you talk to the old man tomorrow?’
‘I’ll be glad to. He may be able to help.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’ll have to see about releasing Killy first thing tomorrow. If your friend gets here before I come back, ask him to wait.’
‘I will.’ I wanted to talk to Gar before he met Fletcher, anyway.
He paused, glancing at the other bed. ‘Shall I have someone may here tonight? Do you think the police might be back?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘All right, then. You can meet the others in the morning. Sorry I had to wake you.’
‘It’s all right.’
Fifteen
In the morning, I met the others. They were an accountant, a public relations man, and a protector, and I met them in the room next door to mine, one of the two double units I had reserved for Fletcher.
The accountant, here to study the company union’s books if he ever got a chance at them, was a small dry man with wire rimmed spectacles and a narrow apologetic handshake. He was dry all over, as though he’d been left out in the sand and wind except for his eyes, which behind the spectacles were watery and very weak. His name was Mr Clement, and he murmured briefly when I was introduced to him by Fletcher, and then retired at once to the fringe of the group.
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