Gary Amdahl - The Daredevils

There was no glass in the door that bore the number he’d been given, and no one appeared in answer to his knock. He paused for a moment, put his hand carefully on the knob, turned it, pulled the door open, and entered the room.

Three men were arranged at the far end of a leather-topped table with green lamps on it. One man was at its head, the other two pushed away from the table in their leather chairs, fanned out and not quite facing him in perfect symmetry, as if they were posing for a photograph. Which of course they were: a photographer banged his tripod exiting another door to Charles’s left, next to which he saw, as the door closed, a fifth man sitting on a plain wooden chair with a notebook on his lap, his lips pursed, looking back at Charles over the top of a pince-nez.

“Here’s our young daredevil,” said one of the men at the table, a balding man with burning eyes. He stood up: his body was a large soft triangle. “You know he is because he just walked right in when nobody came to the door! Have a seat, Slick.” He smiled ambiguously, a vigorous, good-looking, intelligent-seeming man, Charles thought, but there was something in the way he held his head, thrust it, or in the way he pulled his lips back, widened his eyes.

The man at the head of the table, balding too but with larger features and a more expansive, athletic, unruffled, and almost kindly demeanor, looked Charles frankly up and down. The third man, gray-haired and wearing luxuriant silver moustaches, did not look up from his neat stack of documents.

He thought of all the successful men he had known in his life, all the company men, the men of business and empire, of politics and religion — sound men, powerful men, strong men, overlords and overseers, aides, secretaries, footmen with enough influence to put a thousand men out of work with a wink, men who dressed the king and drank deep choking drafts of humiliation so that they might wear nice suits of clothes and eat real turtle soup. And he thought of the men who had no power and never would but who dressed and acted as if they did: there, certainly, was another kind of false acting, acting that revealed nothing but sordid pathetic fear, pitiful men lashing out with tiny scratching hands, making squeaky threats and running away, hunched over. surviving. And he thought of his brothers and their friends from Harvard, the neo-Benthamites, Utilitarians, the “new men” who saw politics as a science, business as a science, not as a means of managing the welfare of the country or distributing its wealth, as Father and his friends saw it or pretended to see it, but as a means of establishing and securing power, demonstrating over and over again their superiority with displays of dismissive affability, bored ignorance of everything but the spectacular wisdom that had landed them so much loot. And then there were the men in this room. Instantly he smelled their nauseating corrupt power and waited with dreamlike confidence that was not his own as one by one their hands rose from their laps to find a glass of water or a pen, and he could see and confirm his hallucinatory foreknowledge that, a la Strindberg, they were blackened with use, crusty with blood. These were operational men, men who liked, or perhaps even needed, craved, to go down to the pen to slaughter hogs. They were field generals, crazy men, he figured, and almost admirable for it, men who got up on horses if they were drunk or mad enough, and either dodged bullets and reaped the rewards of notoriety and a grateful country, or were shot down to die in the mud and shit like common slaves. This was a frontier state, he reminded himself. They were all barbarians. Subjugate, wander, forget. That was why Father had currency, why he had respect and even in some quarters admiration: he lived in the Old West and the New West with equal conviction and consequentiality. Oh, he had all the power Father and Alexander and Andrew had, and more besides, at least potentially, because he saw what might be a way around dogma and God and fear, but he was not sound, not sound. Never really had been. Not in the way a pseudo-democratic oligarchic capitalist had to be.

Charles returned the careful, neutral regard of these three men, these three of the eight commissioners of Minnesota Public Safety, lawyers all, hard, practical, profoundly but carefully unprincipled men.

“A good deal of authority has been invested in us,” said the vain and stately man, still not looking up from his papers. “Mr. Minot, your. uncle? Cousin?”

“My father’s cousin.”

“Whoever he is has no doubt alluded to our sanction.”

“Oh, surely you know who — they named a town after him in North Dakota!”

“You — what? Yes, oh yes, of course, just a — never mind that. You will need to know a little more about us. That is all I meant to say.”

“But not much more!” the triangular man shouted, laughing in apparent good humor.

“Mr. Minot is my father’s cousin,” Charles repeated, hoping to draw the vain but shy man’s gaze from his papers. “Not my uncle. He has a town named after him in western North Dakota.”

And that man did so. He was not shy, but so apparently full of undirected hate that it was distracting him entirely. “Is that so?” he said. “Yes, yes, of course, didn’t I just say.?”

The affable-seeming man said, “We have prepared a report for the edification of our agents, and herewith present it to you.”

Charles was quite sure this man was the governor of the state. He knew the governor sat on the MCPS board but was surprised to see him here, now.

“Do you know,” said the triangular man, “we never thought to ask if you can read and write, Slick!”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said, “I can do all that.”

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he chuckled. “The next president of the United States!”

“I can do all that and more besides,” he said, staring first at the triangular man, then at the hateful, vain man, then at the affable-seeming man, the governor.

“‘Do you know,’” mimicked that man, raising his eyebrows in reproach. “I don’t see where the profit is, John, in making fun of our agents. Particularly—”

“Well,” said the triangular man, “I do, and that’s enough, isn’t it? Isn’t that what we’ve been saying here, and agreeing to so tiresomely? My guess is Slick understands me. Slick? What say?”

He had been gesturing at Charles with his head and let one of those nods bring his face fully around to him. Charles took a moment, a stage moment, to smile, feeling it to be a great but necessary expense. “Sure I do,” he said brightly.

“See?” asked the triangular man mock-plaintively.

“His father,” said the affable man, “Theodore Roosevelt himself—”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the triangular man. “Begging your pardon, Governor, begging your pardon, Mr. Minot, sir.”

“Not at all,” Charles said. He and the triangular man shared what seemed to be a sincere smile.

The first man resumed his briefing, regaining his athletic kindness. “Three laws, as you know, were passed in reply to President Wilson’s call for preparedness. The first outlaws syndicalism in all its forms, and in all kinds and degrees of participation. For example, ‘interest in a subversive organization’ is now against the law. So we have a question or two about. about your associations in San Francisco.”

Charles was deep in his character and did not blush. “Which associations particularly? I really have no idea what you think you know about me. Apart, of course, from nearly having been blown to pieces.”

“The associations that result in the signs being waved about on the street in front of your theater—”

“Before it was blown up.”

“—insisting you weren’t an American,” said the triangular man. “Associations with people who threw the bomb at you in the theater. People who threw the bomb at the parade.”