(Come to think of it, dear, what else is worth thinking about? Money?)
Yes, money, at the moment, and I have plans for that. The country is about to elect a chief of goverilment-and I am the only man on Terra who knows who will be elected. Why did it stick in my memory? Take a look at my registered Families' name.
So my pressing problem is to lay hands on money to bet on that election. What I win I'll use to gamble in the bourse-except that it won't be gambling, as this country is already in a war economy and I know it will continue.
I wish I could accept bets on the election instead of placing them-but that is too risky to my skin; I don't have the right political connections.
You see- No, I had better explain how this city is organized.
Kansas City is a pleasant place. It has tree-shaded streets, lovely residential neighborhoods, a boulevard and park system known throughout the planet. Its excellent paving encourages the automobile carriages that are beginning to be popular. Most of this country is still deep in mud; Kansas City's well-paved streets have more of these autopropelled vehicles than horse-drawn ones.
The city is prosperous, being the second largest market and transportation center of the most productive agricultural area on Ierra-grain, beef, pork. The unsightly aspects of this trade are down in river bottoms while the citizens live in beautiful wooded hills. On a damp morning when the wind sets from that quarter one sometimes catches a whiff of stockyards; otherwise the air is clear and clean and beautiful.
It is a quiet city. Traffic is never dense, and the clopclop of horses' hooves or the warning gong of an electrically propelled street-railroad car is just enough to accent the silence-the sounds of children at play are louder.
Galahad is more interested in how a culture uses its leisure than in its economics-and so am I, as scratching a living is controlled by circumstances. But not play. By play I do not mean sex. Sex can't take up too much time of humans matured beyond adolescence (except a few oddies like the fabled Casanova-and Galahad of course-'Me 'at's off to the Dyuke!').
In 1916 (nothing I say necessarily applies ten years later and certainly not one hundred years later; this is the very end of an era)-at this time the typical Kansas Citian makes his own play; his social events are associated with churches, or with relatives by blood and marriage, or both-dining, picnicking, playing games (not gambling), or simply visiting and talking. Most of this costs little or nothing except the expense of supporting their churches-which are social clubs as much as they are temples of religious faith.
The major commercial entertainment is called "moving pictures"-dramatic shows presented as silent black-and-white shadow pictures flickering against a blank wall. These are quite new, very popular, and very cheap-they are called "nickel-shows" after the minor coin charged as a fee. Each neighborhood (defined as walking distance) has at least one such theater. This form of entertainment, and its technological derivatives, eventually had (will have) as much to do with the destruction of this social pattern as the automobile carriages (get Galahad's opinions on this), but-in 1916-neither has as yet disturbed what appears to be a stable and rather Utopian pattern.
Anomie has not yet set in, the norms are strong, customs 'are binding, and no one here-&-now would believe that the occasional rumble is Cheyne-Stokes breathing of a culture about to die. Literacy is at the highest level this culture will ever attain-my dears, the people of 1916 simply would not believe 2016. They won't even believe that they are about to be enmeshed in the first of the Final Wars; that is why the man for whom I am named is about to be reelected. "We Are Neutral." "Too Proud to Fight." "He Kept Us Out of War." Under these slogans they are marching over the precipice, not knowing it is there. (I'm depressing myself-hindsight is a vice...specially when it is foresight.)
Now let's look at the underside of this lovely city:
The city is a nominal democracy. In fact it is nothing of the sort. It is governed by one politician who holds no office. Elections are solemn rituals-and the outcomes are what he ordains. The streets are beautifully paved because his companies pave them-to his profit. The schools are excellent, and they actually teach-because this monarch wants it that way. He is pragmatically benign and does not overreach. "Crime" (which means anything illegal and includes both prostitution and gambling) is franchised through his lieutenants; he never touches it himself.
Much of this crime-by-definition is handled by an organization sometimes called "The Black Hand"-but in 1916 it usually has no name and is never seen. But it is why I don't dare accept election bets; I would be encroaching on a monopoly of one of this politician's lieutenants-which would be very dangerous to my health.
Instead, I'll bet by the local rules and keep my mouth shut.
The "respectable" citizen, with his pleasant home and garden and church and happy children, sees none of this and (I think) suspects little of it and thinks about it less.
The city is divided into zones with firm though unmarked bounds. The descendants of former slaves live in a zone that forms a buffer between the "nice" part of town and the area dominated by and lived in by the franchised monopolists of such things as gambling and prostitution. At night the zones mix only under unspoken conventions. In the daytime there is nothing to notice. The boss, maintains tight discipline but keeps it simple. I've heard that he has only three unbreakable rules: Keep the streets well paved. Don't touch the schools. Don't kill anyone south of a certain street.
In 1916 it works just fine-but not much longer. I must stop; I have an appointment at K.C. Photo Supply Company to use a lab-in private. Then I must get back to the grift: separating people from dollars painlessly and fairly legally.
Love forever and all the way back,
L
P.S. You should see me in a derby hat!
DA CAPO-III
Maureen
Mr. Theodore Bronson né Woodrow Wilson Smith aka Lazarus Long left his apartment on Armour Boulevard and drove his car, a Ford landaulet, to a corner on Thirty-first Street, where he parked it in a shed behind a pawnshop-as he took a dim view of leaving an automobile on the Street at night. Not that the car had cost Lazarus much; he had acquired it as a result of the belief of an optimist from Denver that aces back to back plus a pair showing could certainly beat a pair of jacks-Mr. "Jenkins" must be bluffing. But Mr. "Jenkins" had a jack in the hole.
It had been a profitable winter, and Lazarus expected a still more prosperous spring. His guess about a war market on certain stocks and commodities had usually been correct, and his spread of investments was wide enough that a wrong guess did not hurt him much as most of his guesses were right- they could hardly be wrong since he had anticipated stepped-up submarine warfare, knowing what would eventually bring this country into the war in Europe.
Watching the market left him time for other "investments" in other people's optimism, sometimes at pool, sometimes at cards. He enjoyed pool more, found cards more rewarding. All winter he had played both, and his plain and rather friendly face, when decorated with his best stupid look, marked him as a natural sucker-a look he enhanced by dressing as a hayseed come to town.