Росс Макдональд - Blue City

The store was dark, but a thin line of light shone under a door at the back. I knocked. The door at the back opened, and a bulky shadow appeared in the rectangle of light, walking not quite like a man. He switched on the store lights and hobbled towards me, through a junk heap of rusty stoves, baby carriages whose original occupants had long since graduated from high school, fly-specked dishes, and battered furniture – the detritus of broken homes and the leavings of people bettering themselves on the installment plan.

He was a heavy old man who swung one leg stiffly from the hip and rolled as he walked. He flattened his broad nose against the window in the front door and peered at me. Then he shouted through the pane: “What do you want? I’m all closed up.”

I shouted back: “Are you the man that writes the letters to the newspapers?”

“I’m the man. You been reading them?”

“Let me in. I want to talk to you.”

He unsnapped a key ring from his belt, unlocked and opened the door. “So what do you want to talk to me about? Ideas?”

The smile which swallowed his eyes was wide, bland, and simple, like the smile on a Buddha’s stone face. The naked crown of his head was level with my chin, but he was almost as wide as the door. He swung his stiff leg and moved back out of my way.

“What’s Engels doing in the window?” I asked.

“You know his face? Almost nobody in this godforsaken burg knows him. They ask me who’s that, is that your father? So I tell them who Engels was. I tell them what he stood for. I educate them without their knowing what I’m doing.” He sighed heavily. “The exploited masses.”

“A good many of the exploited masses must come in here. You’re in a good spot to spread your gospel.”

“You come in the back.” Without touching me, his right arm moved in the circular gesture of embrace. “I like to talk to a man who knows ideas.”

He led me down a narrow aisle to the back of the store, through a tiny office containing a high bookkeeper’s desk, into his living apartment. The room where he invited me to sit down was a combination of living-room and kitchen. There were a deal table, a few old leather chairs and some painted wooden ones, a bookcase in one corner, a gas plate on the shelf beside the sink. Above the bookcase there was an amateurish pencil sketch of Karl Marx.

“Why don’t you put Marx in the window?”

“Then not so many people would ask me who he was, because they know. I wouldn’t have a chance to educate them.”

“You’ve been in this town a long time, haven’t you, Mr. Kaufman?”

“Nearly all my life. I’ve been right here in this location for the last thirty-five years.”

“You should be able to tell me something about the municipal government. Where’s the real power in the town?”

“You a reporter? Or writing a book?”

“I’m gathering material,” I said.

He didn’t ask me what kind of material. He smiled more blandly than before, and said: “You want it the way they spell it out in the papers for the exploited masses? Or do you want it the way I see it? Sometimes I think, especially since they threw out the labor organizers in the rubber factories – I think I’m the only man in town who isn’t stone blind.”

“Spell it out your way.”

He leaned back in his wide chair and bent his good leg over his stiff one. “According to the city charter the city’s laws are made by a city council of twelve members elected annually by the people, voting according to wards. The mayor, elected annually by the people at large, is the head of the executive branch of the city government, and he administers the city laws as passed by the council.”

“Who runs the police?”

“A police board, of which the mayor is an ex-officio member. The other three members are appointed for overlapping periods of three years by the city council. All that is the way it’s written down in the charter.”

“And who actually runs the town?”

“Alonzo Sanford dominates the town. But you can’t say he actually runs it. For a good many years he had a working alliance with a man called J.D. Weather. Weather got hold of a slot-machine concession for this area, and over a period of years he developed into an old-fashioned city boss. He spent money in the right places and got his hands on the council and the police force. At the same time he was pushing down roots, staging political picnics, helping the little people out of jams, getting them medical care when they couldn’t pay for it, helping families to get on relief, contributing to campaigns run by the Poles and the Serbs and the Italians and the other minorities. It got so everybody in town knew him, and most of them liked him. They knew they could count on J.D. Weather in a pinch, and they voted the way he wanted them to. He never held any office himself, but the last fifteen years no mayor or councilman could get elected in this town unless he gave him the nod.”

“Where does Alonzo Sanford come into this?”

“For one thing, because a man like Weather couldn’t get away with corrupting the city government without help. The so-called better people would run him out of town. Sanford was his high-class protection.”

“I don’t see what Sanford got out of the deal.”

“Everything he wanted,” the old man said – “men in office who wouldn’t tax his real estate too hard, police who would help to keep union activity out of his plants. And, working through J.D. Weather, he could stay in the background and pose as a grand old citizen. As long as they didn’t touch him, the maggots could eat up the town.”

It was painful to hear my father talked about like that. I had never lost the conception of him that I had formed as a boy: leading citizen, square businessman, straight talker, everybody’s friend. “Was J.D. Weather that bad?”

“He was bad for the town. I don’t think he ever took direct graft himself, but he made it possible for others to take it. Once corruption starts, it always spreads, right down to the policeman on his beat, taking a cut from a floozie or protecting a petty thief. Personally, J.D. Weather wasn’t a bad man. He did a lot of good for individuals – that was one of his holds on the town. But he interfered with the democratic processes and corrupted this city from the top down – all so he could rake in a thousand a week from his slot machines, and feel generous and powerful in the bargain.”

“You didn’t like him much.”

“Why is this town twenty years behind the times?” he snorted. “Underpaid men and women in the rubber plants, working for fifteen-twenty dollars a week. They try to do something for themselves, and the cops take their leaders to the edge of town and give them a beating and send them up the road. Slot machines and poolrooms and whorehouses, instead of playgrounds and community houses to keep the juvenile delinquents from going delinquent. Some of the worst slums in the country, with Alonzo Sanford taking in high rents from them. Why do things stay that way? Because they conspired to keep ’em that way. I thought things might start to be different when Allister got in the year before last–”

“It’s funny,” I said. “I asked you about the town, and you give me past history. J.D. Weather’s been dead for two years.”

“But the melody lingers on, boy. That’s what I can’t understand about Allister.”

“He’s the mayor now, isn’t he?”

“He’s been mayor for nearly two years. He ran on a reform platform. He promised to clean up the town. He was a young lawyer out of the D.A.’s office, and he talked like a fighter, and I thought he meant it. So did a lot of other people; he got the support of the honest middle-class elements, and the workers that had any idea what was good for them. After J.D. Weather got killed, he practically swept the town. He knew the facts of municipal corruption, and he didn’t pull any punches. That was during his campaign for election. But when he got in, things went on as before. Last year he came up for re-election, and he toned down his talk a lot. He didn’t go in for facts any more, he went in for high-sounding generalities. But he got in by a whopping majority, because there wasn’t any opposition worth talking about.”