John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Clumly dragged his hat off wearily. “Anybody see them?”

Figlow shook his head. “Clarence Pieman was closest, Car 26. I sent him over to see what he could do.” He was looking at the top of the door, not meeting Clumly’s eyes, and his mouth showed more than the usual measure of disgust.

“And?”

“They slashed his tires.”

Clumly closed his fists. Pure hell was what he put up with. Nobody knew. A god damn comedy. When he had himself in control he got out a cigar and banged the end of it on the top of the rail, then licked the tip.

“Anything else?”

“Man from the Dairyman’s League called, said to remind you of a speech there, week from the thirteenth of this month. I put a note on your desk. And let’s see. D.A.’s been on the phone. Wants to talk to you.”

“It’ll keep,” Clumly said.

“I do’ know. It was pretty near ten when he called. He wouldn’t call that late if it wasn’t important. Been after you all day.”

“Love of Christ, can’t he see we’re busy? Nobody tell him about the break?”

“Yessir, I told him, and the day man had told him already.” He lit a cigarette.

“Well what’d he say to it?”

Figlow looked down at his book, then answered without taking the cigarette from his mouth. “He sent his congratulations. Still wants to talk to you.”

Clumly lit the cigar.

Figlow said, “Salvador’s mother called. Wants to talk to you too. And then the Mayor called. Real het up. He says you should call him right away.”

Clumly pointed his cigar at him. “You tell the Mayor—”

“Yessir. But he says you should call him.”

“Ok, that’s enough. Put a note on the board for Kozlowski. Tell him come see me first thing in the morning.”

“Yessir.”

“And call my wife. Tell her I’ll be home in an hour.”

“Yessir.”

He turned toward the door of his office, but Figlow said, “Sir?” Clumly waited, bent over and scowling. “Any luck?” Figlow asked. “You know who did it?”

Clumly considered, his molish face squeezed shut. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. He considered further and changed his mind. He shook his head once, with a jerk, then went into his office and snapped on the light.

He had plenty to do, but he stood at the window and smoked, bent over like a beetle on its hind legs. “It’s a funny business,” he said aloud. What should he talk about to the Dairymen? Thank God he hadn’t missed it! Crime and Automation. The Minimum Wage and the Juvenile Delinquent. He’d done those already. Change a word here and there, talk of automated farming. … The light was on in the Mayor’s office. Time was running out on him. The Sunlight Man’s phrase. There was a new bundle of letters on the desk. He knew all right what the D.A.’s call would be about. Walter Boyle was due for trial in the morning, and as things stood now it was a blowout. Miller was right, they could convict him if they wanted, since the Sunlight Man had given them something to go on. And if by magic, well, according to a piece he’d seen in the Reader’s Digest once, there were police departments in big cities like New York that used people like the Sunlight Man all the time. Why not? No different from tricking a man into confessing things you had never found out he’d done.

But all that was beside the point.

It was not so much that it smelled of voodoo, for him, at least. It didn’t. The Sunlight Man knew Boyle because there was some kind of connection. It was the connection, not just the convictions, you had to get hold of. A man had to know, understand the whole thing. No short-cuts. He had to get to the truth, the whole truth. … Or was he fooling himself? Suppose it was impossible to get to the truth.

He felt uneasy, exactly the way he’d felt when he was standing with Kozlowski, talking with the whore they’d cajoled into letting them in. “Too old for this work,” he said aloud. “Old head’s giving out.” It was true, but it wasn’t the point. He was responsible for every man, woman, and child in the city of Batavia— that was it. But he shook his head. It was not. All had something to do with Mayor Mullen’s Time-Product-Factor. Boyle’s case didn’t warrant throwing out the larger possibilities. That was the thing. (Is that true? he wondered. He went on testing it.) You might throw away concern for the whole picture when you went after someone like the Sunlight Man, someone dangerous. But a man like Boyle … “The Truth-Product-Factor,” he said aloud. His brain felt wider for an instant, and his heart jumped. The Time and Truth Factors. Name of a speech. He covered his eyes with one hand. “Yes, fine,” he said. “Hell.”

Sure as day, his days were numbered. Let Boyle go, let the teen-age hoods keep on beating up women in their beds, let that damned pile of mail on his desk keep building, and he was finished — no big testimonial dinner, no parade, no pension, no gold watch. A jailbreak in a town like Batavia! The love of God! And a jailbreak he’d almost expected right from the beginning. Suddenly, reaching his decision, he crossed to his desk and picked up the phone. The number was on the card Scotch-taped to the desktop, beneath the papers. He pushed the papers away to see it, then dialed.

It was the D.A.’s wife who answered. He was asleep. But when she heard who it was that was calling she said she’d get him.

The D.A. said, “God damn it all, Clumly, I never heard such a thing. Why the fucking trial’s tomorrow.”

Clumly scraped the ash from his cigar into the green glass tray and waited.

“Well ok,” the D.A. said. “Ok, ok, ok. What have you got?”

“Suppose we had to get it by wire-tapping?” He bent lower over the phone, looking down his nose with sly, glinting eyes like a rat’s.

“Sweet Christ, Clumly, come off it, will you? It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“Correct. One o’clock in the morning.”

“Ok ok. Wait a minute. I gotta light a cigarette.” There was a pause. “Ok. I don’t care if you got it by sleeping with his mother. Now let me have it.”

Clumly was sweating. His decision had been clear. But he couldn’t remember now why he’d come to it. A pain began to feel its way out from his abdomen into his groin and stomach, and he racked his brains for a way to stall, think it through again. “I can’t,” he thought, and by accident said it aloud.

“What?”

“I can’t go along with that,” Clumly said soberly. He bit his lip and checked an absurd urge to giggle.

“You what?”

He repeated it. “It’s invasion of privacy,” he said. “You see that piece in the Saturday Evening Post?”

Silence at the other end. He felt as if he were falling, tumbling slowly head over heels, nauseous, and he wanted to howl. A cop hasn’t got opinions, he’d said to Kozlowski. But it was a lie. Kozlowski understood. He wished Kozlowski were here, something to fix on, get steady by, like the lines of a chair when you were drunk.

Then the howling came, but not from Clumly. The D.A. was swearing like a maniac, cursing him up one side and down the other. Clumly hung up.

He sat shaking, with his fingertips pressed to his eyes, the sickness spreading all through him now, like something green and rotten, a primeval sea seeping up in a burnt-out field. You’re digging your own grave, Clumly. For a principle you can’t even get clear. Right. And who’s to decide when holding out for the Whole Truth is warranted by the Truth-Product-Factor? Ha! You. Certainly. The State of New York versus Clumly. Called also God. “You want my job, take it,” he said aloud. They would. Nothing could save him except — He opened his eyes. The Sunlight Man. The old feeling came over him again, the absolute, irrational certainty that the bearded man was the sum total of all Clumly had been fighting all his life. Scrape together the Sunlight Man’s secrets, and you’d have in your hands a collection of horrors, it might be, that would knock a common mortal on his hiney. The pain was suddenly lighter. He’d beat them yet. What could they do to the Police Chief who’d brought down the Sunlight Man?