Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

When he got through, he turned his sweat-streaked white face toward her, she fetched the ice cream and they had a jolly little family party. Then she went out and got into her car and drove home.

She telephoned me. I met her at an all-night drugstore, and across the imitation-marble top of the table in the booth. I saw her for the first time since the morning in May when she stood at the door of her apartment and had read the question in my face and had slowly and wordlessly nodded the answer. When I heard her voice on the telephone that night, my heart took the little leap and _kerplunk__, like the frog into the lily pond, just as it had before, and for the moment what had happened might as well not have happened. But it had happened, and what I had now as my cab wheeled me down-town to the all-night-drugstore, was the wry and bilious satisfaction that I was being called on for some special reason the other fellow couldn't be expected to answer. But the satisfaction forgot even to be wry and bilious and was, for the moment, just simple satisfaction when I stepped out of the cab and saw her standing inside the glass doors of the drugstore, a trim erect figure in a light-green polka-dot dress with some kind of a white jacket hung across one of her bare arms. I tried to make out the expression on her face, but before I could discover what it was, she spied me and smiled.

It was a tentative, apologetic sort of smile, which said _please__ and _thank you__ and at the same time expressed an innocent and absolute confidence that your better nature would triumph. I walked across the hot pavement toward that smile and the green polka-dot figure which stood there behind the glass like something put in a showcase for you to admire but not touch. Then I laid my hand on the glass of the door, and pushed, and left the street, where the air was hot and sticky like a Turkish bath and where the smell of gasoline fumes mixed with the brackish, dead-sweet smell of the rivers which crept city on still nights in summer, and entered the bright, crisp, antiseptic, cool world behind the glass where the smile was, for there is nothing brighter, crisper, more antiseptic, and cooler than a really first-rate corner drugstore on a hot summer night. If Anne Stanton is inside the door and the air conditioning is working.

The smile was on me and the eyes looked straight at me and she put out her hand. I took it, thought how cool and small and firm it was, as though I were just discovering the fact, and heard her say, "It looks like I'm always calling you up, Jack."

"Oh, that's O. K.," I said, and released the hand.

It couldn't have been More than an instant we stood there then without saying anything, but it seemed a long and painfully embarrassed time, as if neither of us knew what to say, before she said, "Let's sit down."

I started to move back toward the booths. Out of the tail of my eye, I notice that she made a motion, quickly suppressed, to hang on to my arm. As I noticed that fact, the satisfaction which had been for the moment simple satisfaction, was again merely the wry and bilious satisfaction with which I had started out. And it stayed that kind, as I sat in the booth and looked at her face which was not smiling now and was showing the tensions and the tightness of the skin over the fine bone and showing, I suppose, the years that had gone since the summer when we sat in the roadster and she sang to Jackie-Bird, and promised never to let anybody hurt poor Jackie-Bird. Well, she had kept her promise, all right, for Jackie-Bird had flown away that summer, before the fall came, to some place with a better climate where nobody would ever hurt him, and he had never come back. At least, I had never seen him since.

Now she sat in the booth and told me, over our glasses of Coca Cola, what had happened in Adam's apartment.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked, when she got through.

"You know," she said.

"You want me to make him stick to it?"

"Yes," she said.

"It'll be hard."

She nodded

"It'll be hard," I said, "because he is acting perfectly crazy. The only thing I can prove to him is that if this Coffee bastard try to bribe him it only indicates that the job is on the level as long as Adam wants to keep it that way. It only indicates, furthermore, that somebody farther up the line had declined to take a bribe, too. It even indicates that Tiny Duffy is an honest man. Or," I added, "hasn't been able to deliver the goods."

"You will try?" she asked.

"I'll try," I said, "but don't get your hopes up. I can only prove to Adam what he would already know if he hadn't gone crazy. He just has the high cantankerous moral shrinks. He does not like to play with the rough boys. He is afraid they might dirty his Lord Fauntleroy suit."

"That's no fair," she burst out.

I shrugged, then said, "Well, I'll try, anyway."

"What will you do?"

"There is only one thing to do. I'll go to Governor Stark, get him to agree to arrest Coffee on the grounds of attempted bribery of an official–Adam is an official, you know–and call on Adam to swear to the charges. If he'll swear to them. That ought to make him see how things line up. That ought to show him the Boss will protect him. And–" to that point I had only been thinking of the Adam end but now my mind got to work on the possibilities of the situation–"it wouldn't do the Boss any harm to hang a rap on Coffee. Particularly if he will squeal on the behind-guy. He might bust up Larson. And with Larson out, MacMurfee wouldn't mean much. He might hang it on Coffee, too, if you–" And I stopped dead.

"If I what?" she demanded.

"Nothing," I said, and felt the way you do when you are driving merrily across the drawbridge, and all at once the span starts up.

"What," she demanded.

I looked into her level eyes and saw the way her jaw was set, and knew that I might as well say it. She would work on me till she had it. So I said it. "If you will testify," I said.

"I'll do it," she said without hesitation.

I shook my head. "No," I said.

"I'll do it."

"No, it won't wash."

"Why?"

"It just won't. After all, you didn't see anything."

"I was there."

"It would just be hearsay testimony. Absolutely that. It would never stand up."

"I don't know," she said. "I don't know about those things. But I know this. I know that isn't the reason you changed your mind. What made you change your mind?"

"You never have been on a witness stand. You don't know what it is to have a mean, smart lawyer saw at you while you sweat."

"I'll do it," she said.

"No."

"I don't mind."

"Listen here," I said, and shut my eyes and took the plunge off the end of the open drawbridge, "if you think Coffee's lawyer wouldn't have plenty on the ball you are crazy as Adam. He would be mean and he would be smart and he would not have one damned bit of fine old Southern chivalry."

"You mean–" she began, and I knew from her face that she had caught the point.

"Exactly," I said. "Nobody may know anything now, but when the fun started they would know everything."

"I don't care," she affirmed, and lifted her chin up a couple of notches. I saw the little creases in the flesh of her neck, just the tiniest little creases, the little mark left day after day by the absolutely infinitesimal gossamer cord of thuggee which time throws around the prettiest neck every day to garrote it. The cord is so gossamer that it breaks every day, but the marks get there finally, and finally one day the gossamer cord doesn't break and is enough. I looked at the marks when Anne lifted her chin, and realized that I had never noticed them before and would always notice then again. I suddenly felt awful–literally sick, as though I had been socked in the stomach, or as though I had met a hideous betrayal. Then before I knew, the way I felt changed into anger, and I lashed out.