“Useless?” That one brought Danile to his feet, too. Blasphemy against the penal system was apparently even worse than blasphemy against the church.
“Yes, you’re goddam right, useless! Look, you take a kid—” I had to stop and shake my head and take a deep breath and start all over again, so the words would come out slow enough to be pronounced. “You take a kid,” I said. “He burgles a grocery store. The law gets him, and the court gives him six months in a reformatory, and he comes out a worse kid than when he went in. And ten years and four penitentiaries later, he winds up in one of these modern clinks with the pastel-pink bars and more psychiatrists than prisoners, and they spend five years trying to undo the damage that was done by that reformatory.”
“That’s an oversimplification!” he shouted.
“How else are we going to talk, if we don’t simplify, you fat-headed fact-filled do-gooder?”
“I didn’t come here—”
“To be insulted, I know. All right, now listen. You take that same kid, only instead of the law getting him, I get him. And nobody knows about his crime but me and the grocer and his parents. He gets the scare of his life, when he sees how easily he was caught, and he gets the word on what would have happened if the cops had found him instead of me, and the grocer gets his money back, and the kid never pulls that kind of stunt again.”
He shook his head rapidly, saying, “And you accuse me of idealism, when you expect—”
“Expect, hell! That’s what happened! That is exactly what happened with a kid who broke into Joey Casale’s grocery store. The hell with your theories. I’m telling you what works, and I’m trying to tell you what the goddam system is in this world, and how I fit into that system. And if I don’t fit into that system, I’m through.”
“If Satan himself—” he started, but I cut him off. “You’re goddam one hundred per cent right!” I snapped. “If Satan himself were Mayor of Winston, and all the lesser devils had all the offices in City Hall, they would be the ones running my world. And if I expected to live in that world, I would have to make my peace with them.”
“Make a deal with them, you mean.”
“Say it any way you want,” I said.
He took a deep breath, then suddenly turned away from me and walked over to the window. He stood looking down at Winston for a long minute, and then he glanced back at me and said, “You ought to leave Winston for a while, Mr. Smith. You ought to leave right away.”
And he was a different man. The voice, the manner of speaking, the words, the expression on his face, all were totally different. In that one split-second, he had gone from Archer Danile, reformer and idealist and prim Puritan, to Archer Danile, practical and realistic human being.
The switch was too fast for me. I was still mad at that other Danile, and so my voice was unnecessarily loud and harsh when I said, “Why should I?”
“There are things here you know nothing about,” he said. “You live too close to the surface. You shouldn’t judge men on the assumption that they, too, live close to the surface. I sympathize with you and, in a way, I agree with you. And I am giving you friendly advice when I suggest that you leave town for a while, and that you do not leave a forwarding address behind you.”
“Speak plainly,” I said.
He shook his head, smiling a bit. “I have. I can’t speak more plainly.”
The telephone rang then, interrupting my question before it got fairly started. Scowling, Danile picked up the receiver, listened a moment, and said, “Five minutes.” He listened again, and said, “All right. And what about Miss London? Isn’t she back in her room yet?... Yes, you do that.”
He hung up, looked back at me, and said, “Not tonight, Mr. Smith. Perhaps tomorrow, if you are foolish enough to still be in town, and dependent upon circumstances, of course — perhaps tomorrow we can make some arrangement. In the meantime, good night, Mr. Smith.”
I studied him, and I could make no sense out of him. “Good night,” I said, and left the apartment.
I rode down in the elevator, thinking glum thoughts, and in the lobby I noticed somebody I knew, a little old man in a black suit and a chauffeur’s cap. His name was Tommy O’Connell, and he was sitting over in a corner, apparently waiting for somebody, and his presence answered a number of questions.
But I’ll take direct evidence in preference to circumstantial evidence every time, as I’d mentioned to Harcum this afternoon. So I walked over and said, “Hi, Tommy.”
“Oh, hi there, Tim,” he said. He grinned up at me, so he hadn’t been told who he should or shouldn’t talk to.
“Danile will be down in a couple of minutes,” I said.
He nodded. “I know,” he said. “The guy on the desk just called him.”
So that was that. I said so long to Jordan Reed’s chauffeur and walked out of the hotel.
Twenty-Nine
The living room was crowded when I got back to Cathy’s place. Aside from Cathy and Bill Casale and Hal Ganz, there were three new arrivals, the presence of all of whom surprised the hell out of me. One of them was Ron, whom I hadn’t expected to see out on bail before tomorrow morning. The second was Art, my former bodyguard courtesy of Jack Wycza, whom I hadn’t expected to see ever again. And the third was Councilman Myron Stoneman, one of the seven people to whom I’d made my ultimatum the day before.
Everybody wanted to talk at once, including me, and so everybody jabbered and nobody listened, until finally Ron shouted us all down and said, “One at a time, God damn it, one at a time. Let’s get straightened out here. Myron, you first.”
Myron nodded at Ron. His heavy, not-very-bright-looking face was dark with controlled anger. “Thanks, Ron,” he said. “You’ve been training yourself for the legislature, I see.”
“Speak your piece, Myron,” I said.
Myron turned his scowl to me. “I’ve always thought it a good idea,” he said, “to know what my friends and partners are up to. So I’ve cultivated a few secretaries and clerks — a bush-league spy system — to let me know what’s doing in the world. It’s paid off. About an hour ago, I got a call from Jordan Reed’s secretary. Reed is selling us out. He’s wangled a deal with the CCG, him and Harcum and Watkins.”
“A deal?”
“The way I hear it,” he said sourly, “Jordan has high hopes of being governor.”
So that’s what Jordan wanted, as substitute for a son. The whole state. “What about the rest of you?” I asked.
“He’s throwing us to the wolves. Dan Wanamaker and Claude Brice and Les Manners and Ron over there and you, Tim. A nice all-star lineup for the scandal.”
“So they could be bought,” said Ron softly.
Myron glanced at him and grinned without humor. “They sure as hell could,” he said. “Dan Wanamaker and Claude Brice have already left town. Les Manners is reading his lawbooks. I want to know what you people are planning-on doing.”
Hal Ganz, his faith in human institutions practically indestructible, said, “Are you sure they’ve got a deal with the CCG? Maybe they’re just hoping for one, maybe the CCG doesn’t know anything about it.”
“The CCG knows plenty about it,” I told him. “That’s why Masetti was pulled out. He was a legitimately honest reformer. The new man they sent in, Danile, is a politician’s politician.”