All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [152]
“I’m going to reach into my pocket,” I said, 2not for a gun, just for my wallet, so I can show you something. Did you ever hear of Willie Stark?”
“Sure,” he said. And jabbed.
“You ever hear of Jack Burden,” I asked, “the newspaper fellow who is a sort of secretary to Willie?”
He reflected a moment, still prodding me on. “Yeah,” he said then, grudgingly.
“Then maybe you’d like my card,” I said, and reached for the wallet.
“Naw, you don’t,” he said, and let the weight of the stick lie across my lifted forearm, “naw you don’t, I’m gitten it myself.”
He reached in for the wallet, took it, and started to open it. As a matter of principle.
“You open that,” I said, “and I’ll bust you anyway, call the wagon or not. Give ii here.”
He passed it over to me. I drew out a card, and handed it to him.
He studied it in the bad light. “Jeez,” he said, with a slight hissing sound like the air escaping from a child’s balloon, “how wuz I to know you wuz on the payroll?”
“You damned well better find out next time,” I said, before you get gay. Now call me a cab.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, hating me with the pig’s eyes out of the swollen face. “Yes, sir,” he said, and went to the box.
Suddenly Anne pulled herself loose from me, and I thought she was going to run. So I grabbed her again. “Oh, you’re so wonderful,” she said, in a harsh whisper, “so wonderful–you’re grand–you bully the bullies–you cop the cops–you’re wonderful–”
I stood there holding her, not listening, aware only of a weight in my middle like a cold stone.
“–you’re so wonderful–and clean–everything is so wonderful and clean–”
I didn’t say anything.
“–you’re so damned wonderful–and clean and strong–oh, you’re a hero–”
“I’m sorry I acted like a son-of-a-bitch,” I said.
“I can imagine to what particular thing you are referring,” she whispered in mock sweetness, underscoring the particular, setting it meticulously in my hide like a banderilla. Then she swung her face from me, and wouldn’t look at me, and the arm I clutched might as well have belonged to a dummy in a show window, and the cold stone in my stomach was a stone in a deep well covered with slime, and the pig’s eyes in the swollen, black-jowled face came back and hated me in the dull, mist-streaked night, and a horn moaned down the river, and in the cab Anne Stanton sat back in one corner, very straight and as far from me as possible, and the light from the street lamps we passed would flicker across her white face. She would not speak to me. Until we came to a street with a car track on it. Then she said, “Get out. You can catch some car here. I don’t want you to take me home.”
So I got out.
Five nights later I heard Anne Stanton’s voice on the telephone.
It said, “Those things–those papers you said you had–send them to me.”
I said, I’ll bring them.”
It said, “No. Send them.”
I said, “All right. I’ve got extra photostat of one thing. Tomorrow I’ll get photostat of the other paper and send them together.”
It said, “A photostat. So you don’t trust me.”
I said, “I’ll send them tomorrow.”
Then there was the click, in the little black tube. Then the tiny, windy, humming sound which is the sound of space falling away from you, and of infinity, and of absolute nothingness.
Every night when I came into my room, I would look at the telephone. I would say to myself: It is going to ring. Once, even, I was sure that it had rung, for the tingle and stab of its ringing was in all my nerves. But it hadn’t rung. I had merely fallen asleep. Once I picked up the thing and held it to my ear, listening to the tiny, humming sound which is the sound of the various things I have already mentioned.
Every night, at the desk in the lobby, I asked if there have been any numbers left for me. Yes, sometimes there were numbers. But never the right number.
Then I would go up to my room, where the telephone was and the brief case with the photostat and the affidavit from Memphis. I hadn’t given that to the Boss yet. I hadn’t even told him about it yet. Not that I was thinking about not giving it to him. I would give it to him. That was in the cards. But not yet. Not quiet yet. After the telephone had rung.