Now she sat in the booth and told me, over our glasses of Coca Cola, what had happened in Adam's apartment.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked, when she got through.
"You know," she said.
"You want me to make him stick to it?"
"Yes," she said.
"It'll be hard."
She nodded
"It'll be hard," I said, "because he is acting perfectly crazy. The only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard try to bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too. It even indicates that Tiny Duffy is an honest man. Or," I added, "hasn't been able to deliver the goods."
"You will try?" she asked.
"I'll try," I said, "but don't get your hopes up. I can only prove to Adam what he would already know if he hadn't gone crazy. He just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord Fauntleroy suit."
"That's no fair," she burst out.
I shrugged, then said, "Well, I'll try, anyway."
"What will you do?"
"There is only one thing to do. I'll go to Governor Stark, get him to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an official–Adam is an official, you know–and call on Adam to swear to the charges. If he'll swear to them. That ought to make him see how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect him. And–" to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situation–"it wouldn't do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee. Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn't mean much. He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you–" And I stopped dead.
"If I what?" she demanded.
"Nothing," I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.
"What," she demanded.
I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had it. So I said it. "If you will testify," I said.
"I'll do it," she said without hesitation.
I shook my head. "No," I said.
"I'll do it."
"No, it won't wash."
"Why?"
"It just won't. After all, you didn't see anything."
"I was there."
"It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely that. It would never stand up."
"I don't know," she said. "I don't know about those things. But I know this. I know that isn't the reason you changed your mind. What made you change your mind?"
"You never have been on a witness stand. You don't know what it is to have a mean, smart lawyer saw at you while you sweat."
"I'll do it," she said.
"No."
"I don't mind."
"Listen here," I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off the end of the open drawbridge, "if you think Coffee's lawyer wouldn't have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry."
"You mean–" she began, and I knew from her face that she had caught the point.
"Exactly," I said. "Nobody may know anything now, but when the fun started they would know everything."
"I don't care," she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by the absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn't break and is enough. I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that I had never noticed them before and would always notice then again. I suddenly felt awful–literally sick, as though I had been socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal. Then before I knew, the way I felt changed into anger, and I lashed out.
"Yeah," I said, "you don't care, but you forget one thing. You forget that Adam will be sitting right there looking at little sister."
Her face was white as a sheet.
The she lowered her head a little and was looking at her hands, which were clenched together now around the empty Coca Cola glass. Her head was low enough so that I could not see her eyes, only the lids coming down over them.
"My dear, my dear," I murmured. Then as I seized her hands pressed around the glass, the words wrenched out of me, "Oh, Anne, why did you do it?"
It was the one question I had never meant to ask.
For a moment she did not answer. Then, without raising her eyes, she said in a low voice, "He wasn't like anybody else. Not anybody else I'd ever known. And I love him. I love him, I guess. I guess that is the reason."
I sat there and reckoned I had asked for that one.
She said, "Then you told me–you told me about my father. There wasn't any reason why not then. After you told me."
I reckoned I had asked for that one, too.
She said, "He wants to marry me."
"Are you going to?"
"Not now. It would hurt him. A divorce would hurt him. Not now."
"Are you going to?"
"Perhaps. Later. After he goes to the Senate. Next year."
One part of my mind was busy ticketing that away: _The Senate next year. That means he won't let old Scoggan go back. Funny he hadn't told me__. But the other part of my mind which was not the nice, cool, steel filing cabinet with alphabetical cards was boiling like a kettle of pitch. A big bubble heaved up and exploded out of the pitch, and it was my voice saying, "Well, I suppose you know what you are up to."
"You don't know him," she said, her voice even lower than before. "You've known him all these years and you don't know him at all." Then she had lifted her head and was looking straight into my eyes. "I'm not sorry," she said, quite distinctly. "Not for anything that's happened."
I walked down the street in the hot darkness toward my hotel under a magnificent throbbing sky, breathing the old gasoline fumes the day had left and the sweet, marshy smell of the river at low water which the night brought up into the streets, and thinking, yes, I knew why she had done it.
The answer was in all the years before, and the things in them and not in them.
The answer was in me, for I had told her.
_I only told her the truth__, I said savagely to myself, _and she can't blame me for the truth!__
But was there some fatal appropriateness inherent in the very nature of the world and of me that I should be the one to tell her the truth? I had to ask myself that question, too. And I couldn't be sure of the answer. So I walked on down the street, turning that question over and over in my mind without any answer until the question lost meaning and dropped from my mind as something heavy drops from numb fingers. I would have faced the responsibility and the guilt, I was ready to do that, if I could know. But who is going to tell you?
So I walked on, and after a while I remembered how she had said I had never known him. And the _him__ was Willie Stark, whom I had known for the many years since Cousin Willie from the country, the Boy with the Christmas Tie, had walked into the back room of Slade's old place. Sure, I knew him. Like a book. I had known him a long time.
_Too long__, I thought then, _too long to know him__. For maybe the time had blinded me, or rather I had not been aware of the passing of time and always the round face of Cousin Willie had come between me and the other face so that I had never really seen the other face. Except perhaps in those moments when it had leaned forward to the crowds and the forelock had fallen and the eyes had bulged, and the crowd had roared and I had felt the surge in me and had felt that I was on the verge of the truth. But always the face of Cousin Willie above the Christmas tie had come again.