Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

It was Sugar-Boy all right, and I didn't want to see him. If he should raise his head he would look right at me. Now while he was sunk in the picture magazine I tried for the door. I edged over to one side easy and was almost past his natural area of vision when he lifted his head and our eyes met. He rose from the chair and came toward me.

I gave an ambiguous nod which might have served merely for recognition, a rather chilly and discouraging recognition, or for a signal to follow me out to the hall where we could talk. He took the latter interpretation, and followed me. I didn't wait just outside the door, but move some distance across the hall to the steps (those newspaper rooms in public libraries are always in a half basement, next to the men's latrine) which led up to the main lobby. Maybe he would read something into that extra distance. But he didn't. He came padding over to me, with his blue serge trousers bagging down low of his can and the tops crumpling over his black, soft-leather box-toed shoes.

"How-how-how–" he began, and the face began its pained, apologetic contortions, and the spit flew.

"I'm making out," I said, "How're you making out?"

"Aw-aw-aw-right."

He stood there in the dingy, dimly lit basement hall of the public library with the cigarette butts on the cement floor around us and the door of the men's latrine behind us and the air smelling of dry paper and dust and disinfectant. It was eleven-thirty in the morning and outside the gray sky dripped steadily like a sogged old awning. We looked at each other. Each one knew the other was there out of the rain because he had no other place to go.

He shuffled his feet on the floor, looked down to the floor, then back up at me. "I-I-I could-a had a-a-a-a job," he declared earnestly.

"Sure," I said, without much interest.

"I-I-I-I just didn't wa-wa-wa-want one. Not yet," he said. "I didn't fee-fee-feel like no job yet."

"Sure," I repeated.

"I-I-I got me some mo-mo-money saved up," he said apologetically.

"Sure."

He looked searchingly at me. "Y-y-y-you got a job?" he asked.

I shook my head, but was about to say in my defense what he had just said, that I could have had one if I had wanted. I could have been sitting up in a nice office next door to Tint Duffy's office with my feet on a mahogany desk. If I had wanted. And as that crossed my mind, with the momentary flicker of weary self-irony, I suddenly saw like a blaze of lightening and a clap of thunder what the Lord had put before me. Duffy, I thought, Duffy.

And there was Sugar-Boy standing before me.

"Listen," I said, and leaned toward him in the empty hall, "listen, do you know who killed the Boss?"

The biggish head rolled a little to one side on the little stem of a neck as he looked up at me and the face began its painful twitching. "Yeah," he said, "yeah–the son-of-a-bi-bi-bitch and I-I-I shot him."

"Yeah," I said, "you shot Stanton–" and I thought with an instantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now dead, and I hated the malformed, sad little creature before me–"yeah, you shot him.

The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated, "I-I-I shot him."

But suppose you don't know," I said, leaning, "suppose there was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it."

I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound came.

"Suppose," I continued, "suppose I could tell you who–suppose I could prove it–what would you do?"

Suddenly his face wasn't twitching. It was smooth as a baby's and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.

"What would you do?" I demanded "I'd kill the son-of-a-bitch," he said. And he had not stuttered at all.

"They'd hang you," I said.

"I'd k-k-k-kill him. They couldn't h-h-h-hang me before I killed him."

"Remember," I whispered, leaning closer, "they'd hang you."

He stared up at me, prying into my face. "Who-who-who is it?"

"They'd hang you. Are you sure you'd kill him?"

"Who-who-who–" he began. Then he clutched my coat. "Y-y-you know–" he said, "y-y-you know something you ain't t-t-t-telling me."

I could tell him. I could say to him, meet me here at three o'clock, I want to show you something. I could bring the stuff from Sadie, the stuff that lay up in my room in a desk, and he would take one look. One look. It would be like touching a trigger.

His hands were clutching and clawing at my coat. "T-t-tell me," he was saying.

One look. It was perfect. I could meet him here in the afternoon. We could step into the latrine and he could take one look, and I would go home and burn the stuff. Hell, why burn it? What had I done? I even warned the little burger they'd hang him. They had nothing on me.

He was clawing at me, importunately and feebly, saying, "T-t-tell me, you better t-t-tell me now."

It would be too easy. It was perfect. And the perfect mathematical irony of it–the perfect duplication of what Duffy had done–struck me, and I felt like laughing out loud. "Listen here," I said to Sugar-Boy. "Stop clawing on me and listen here and I'll–"

He stopped clawing and stood meekly before me.

He would do it, I knew he would do it. And it was such a joke on Duffy I almost laughed out loud. And as the name of Duffy flashed across my mind I saw Duffy's face, large and lunar and sebaceous, nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a joke, and even s I opened my lips to speak the syllables of his name, he winked. He winked right at me like a brother.

I stood there stock-still.

Sugar-Boy' face began to twitch again. He was going to ask again. I stared down at him. "I was kidding," I said.

There was absolute blankness on his face, and then an absolute murderousness. There wasn't any flare of fury. It was a cold and innocent and murderous certainty. It was as though his face had suddenly frozen in a split second in that certainty, and it looked like the face of a man who had been trapped and had died in the snow long ago, centuries ago–back in the ice age, perhaps–and the glacier brings it down all those centuries, inch by inch, and suddenly, with its primitive purity and lethal innocent, it stares at you through the last preserving glaze of ice.

I stood there for what seemed forever. I couldn't move. I was sure I was a goner.

Then the ice face wasn't there. It was just Sugar-Boy's face on a head to big for the neck, and it was saying, "I-I-I durn near d-d-done it."

I ran my tongue over my dry lips. "I know it," I said.

"Y-y-you oughtn't d-d-d-done me that way," he said in humble complaint.

"I'm sorry."

"Y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn't d-d-done me like that."

"I know how you feel," I said. "And I'm sorry. I really am."

"F-f-ferget it," he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than before, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost some of his sawdust.

I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as him, I suppose, "You really would have done it."

"It w-w-was the B-B-Boss," he said.

"Even if they'd hang you."

"They w-w-wasn't n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss. And they k-k-killed him. They h-h-had to go and k-k-kill him."

He shuffled his feet on the cement floor and looked down at them. "He could t-t-talk so good," he half-mumbled with his stuttering. "The B-B-Boss could. Couldn't nobody t-t-talk like him. When he m-m-made a speech and ev-ev-everybody y-y-yelled, it looked l-l-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you." He touched his chest with his hand to indicate where something looked like it might bust inside you. Then he looked questioningly at me.

"Sure," I agreed, "he was a great talker."

We stood there for half minute more without anything to say to each other. He looked at me and then down at his feet. Then back at me, and said, "W-w-well, I reckon I'll b-b-be getting on."