"Tell him what?"
"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!"
I look down at her. "No," I said, "you weren't horrible."
"But it has happened to me. It has all happened to me. And he's gone."
"I'll find him," I said, and detached myself from her, ready to go.
"It won't do any good."
"He'll listen to sense," I said.
"Oh, I don't mean Adam. I mean–"
"Stark?"
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."
"Well, I'll be damned," I said.
Then I pulled myself together, and headed for the door. "I'll get Adam," I said.
"Get him," she said, "get him. For he's all I've got now."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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__.
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.
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.
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."
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.
The theory of historical costs. The theory of the moral neutrality of history. All that was a high historical view from a chilly pinnacle. Maybe it took a genius to see it. To really see it. Maybe you had to get chained to the high pinnacle with the buzzards pecking at your liver and lights before you could see it. Maybe it took a genius to see it. Maybe it took a hero to act on it.