Or for weeks there wouldn't be any shenanigans. Sadie would treat the Boss with an icy decorum, meeting him only and strictly in the course of business, standing quietly before him while he talked. She would stand there before him and study him out of the black eyes, in which the blaze was banked now. Well, despite all the shenanigans, Sadie knew how to wait for everything she had ever got out of the world.
So the summer went on, and we all lived in it. It was a way to live, and when you have lived one way for a while you forget that there was ever any other way and that there may be another way again. Even when the change came, it didn't at first seem like a change but like more of the same, an extension and repetition.
It came through Tom Stark.
Given the elements, it was perfectly predictable. On one hand there was the Boss, and on the other hand there was MacMurfee. MacMurfee didn't have any choice. He had to keep fighting the Boss, for the Boss wouldn't deal with him, and if (and it looked more likely _when__ than _if__) the Boss ever broke MacMurfee in the Fourth District, Mac was a goner. So he had no choice, and he would use anything he could lay his hands on.
What he laid his hands on was a fellow named Marvin Frey, previously unknown to fame. Frey had a daughter named Sibyl, also unknown to fame, but not, Mr. Frey said, unknown to Tom Stark. It was simple, not a new turn to the plot, not a new line in the script. An old home remedy. Simple. Simple and sordid.
The outraged father, accompanied by a friend, for witness and protector no doubt, called on the Boss and stated his case. He got out, white in the face and obviously shaken, but he had the strength to walk. He walked across the long stretch of carpet from the Boss's door to the door to the corridor, getting inadequate support from the friend, whose own legs seemed to have lost some of their stiffening, and went out.
Then the buzzer on my desk went wild, the little red light which meant headquarters flashed, and when I switched on the voice box, the Boss's voice said, "Jack, get the hell in here." When I got the hell in there, he succinctly outlined the case to me, and gave me two assignments: first, get hold of Tom Stark, and second, find all there was about Marvin Frey.
It took all day and the efforts of half of the Highway Patrol to locate Tom Stark, who was, it developed, at a fishing lodge on Bigger's Bay with several cronies and some girls and a lot of wet glasses and dry fishing tackle. It was near six o'clock before they fetched him in. I was out in the reception room when he came in. "Hi, Jack," he said, "what's eating on him now?" And he cocked his head toward the Boss's door.
"He'll tell you," I said, and watched him head toward the door, a wonderfully set-up in dirty white duck trousers, sandals, and a pale-blue short-sleeved silky sport shirt that stuck to the damp pectoral muscles and almost popped over the brown biceps. His head, with a white gob cap stuck on it, was thrust forward just a little bit, and had the slightest roll when he walked, and his arms hung slightly crooked with the elbows a little out. Watching the arms hanging that way, you got the impression that they were like weapons just loosened and riding easy and ready in the scabbards. He didn't knock, but walked straight into the Boss's office. I retreated to my own office and waited for the dust to settle. Whatever it was, Tom was not going to stand and take it, not even from the Boss.
A half hour later Tom came out, slamming the door so that the heavy gold-framed paintings of the former governors hung around the paneled walls of the big reception room shivered like autumn leaves in a blast. He stalked across the room, not even giving a look in the direction of my open door, and went out. At first, he had, the Boss told me later, denied everything. Then he had admitted everything, looking the Boss in the eye, with a what-the-hell's-it-to-you expression. The Boss was fit to be tied when I saw him a few minutes after Tom's departure. He had only a small comfort–that from the legal point of view, Tom had been just one of a platoon of Sibyl's friends, according to Tom himself. But, aside from the legal point of view, that fact just made the Boss madder, Tom's being one of a platoon. It would be convenient in any discussion of the paternity of Sibyl's alleged child, but it seemed to hurt the Boss's pride.
I had found Tom and brought him in as one of my assignments. The second one took a little longer. Finding out about Marvin Frey. There wasn't much to find out, it appeared. He was a barber in the only hotel in a fair-sized town, Duboisville, over in the Fourth District. He was a sporting barber, with knifeedged creases in his striped pants, ointment on his thinning hair, hands like inflated white rubber gloves, a _Racing Form__ in his hip pocket, the shapeless soft nose with the broken veins like tiny purple vines, and breath sweetly flavored with Sen-Sen and red-eye. He was a widower, living with his two daughters. You don't have to find out much about a fellow like that. You know it all already. Sure, he has an immortal soul which is individual and precious in God's eye, and he is that unique agglomeration of atomic energy known as Marvin Frey, bur you know all about him. You know his jokes, you know the insinuative _hee-hee__ through his nose with which he prefaces them, you know how the gray tongue licks luxuriously over his lips at the conclusion, you know how he fawns and drools over the inert mass with the face covered with steaming towels which happens to be the local banker or the local gambling-house proprietor or the local congressman, you know how he kids the hotel chippies and tries to talk them out of something, you know how he gets in debt because of his bad hunches on the horses and bad luck with the dice, you know how he wakes up in the morning and sits on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the cold floor and a taste like brass on the back of his tongue and experiences his nameless despair. You know that, with the combination of poverty, fear, and vanity, he is perfectly designed to be robbed of his last pride and last shame and be used by MacMurfee. Or by somebody else.
But it happened to be MacMurfee. This angle had not appeared in Marvin's first interview. It appeared a few days later. One of the MacMurfee's boys called on the Boss, said MacMurfee had heard how a fellow named Frey had a daughter named Sibyl who had something on Tom Stark, but MacMurfee had always liked football and sure liked the way Tom carried the ball, and didn't want to see the boy get mixed up in anything unpleasant. Frey, the fellow said, was not in any frame of mind to be reasonable. He was going to make Tom marry the daughter. (The Boss's face must have been something to see at that point.) But Frey lived over in MacMurfee's district, and MacMurfee knew him a little, and maybe MacMurfee could put some reasonableness into Frey's head. It would cost something, of course, to do it that way, but there wouldn't be any publicity, and Tom would still be a bachelor.
What would it cost? Well, some money for Sibyl. Folding money.
But this meant that MacMurfee was simply acting out of deep heart and generous nature.
What would it cost? Well, MacMurfee was thinking he might run for Senator.
So that was it.
But the Boss, as Anne Stanton had told me, was figuring on going to the Senate himself. He had it in the sack. He had the state in a sack. Except for MacMurfee. MacMurfee and Marvin Frey. But still, he wasn't in any mood to dicker with MacMurfee. He didn't dicker, but he stalled.
There was one reason he could take the chance and stall. If Marvin and MacMurfee had had it sewed up absolutely tight, and could have ruined the Boss, they would have done it without further ado. They wouldn't have bothered to dicker. They had some cards, all right, but it wasn't necessarily a straight flush, and they had to take their gamble, too. They had to wait, while the Boss did his thinking, and hope that he wouldn't think up anything unpleasant in his turn.
While the Boss did his thinking, I saw Lucy Stark. She wrote me a note and asked me to come to see her. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to talk about Tom. Obviously, she wasn't finding out anything from Tom himself, or at least, what she considered to be the truth and the whole truth, and she wasn't talking it over with the Boss for on the matter of Tom she and the Boss had never agreed. So she was going to ask me questions, and I was going to sit and sweat on the red plush upholstery in the parlor of the farmhouse where she was living. But that had to be. Long back, I had made up my mind that when Lucy Stark asked me to do something I was going to do it. It was not exactly that I felt I owed Lucy Stark a debt, or had to make restitution, or do penance. At least, if there was a debt, it was not to Lucy Stark, and if there was restitution to be made it was not to be made to her. If there was a debt, it was, perhaps, due to me, from me. And if restitution was to be made, it was to be made to me, by me. And as for penance, there had been no crime for which I should do it. My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don't have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.