All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [219]
I took that as rhetorical question and said nothing. I could see that the tax bill was out for the evening, and started sidling back the way I had come.
“And what happened?” the Boss bellowed at me.
“How do I know?” I asked, but with that cast present I had begun to have a fair notion of the nature of the drama.
The Boss swung his head toward Tiny. “Tell him,” he commanded, “tell him, and tell him how puking smart you feel!”
Tiny didn’t manage it. All he managed was the wan smile like a winter dawn above the expanse of expensive black tailoring and the white-pipe waistcoat and diamond pin.
“Tell him!”
Tiny licked his lips and glanced shyly as a bride at the impassive, gray-faced Gummy, but he didn’t manage it.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” the Boss said, “Gummy Larson is going to build my hospital and Tiny fixed it up like he has been trying to do and everything is happy.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Yeah, everybody is happy,” the Boss said. “Except me. Except me,” he repeated, and struck himself heavily on the chest. “For I’m the one said to Tiny, Hell, no, I won’t deal with Larson. For I’m the one wouldn’t let Larson come in this room when Tiny got him here. For I’m the one ought to driven him out of this state long ago. And where is he now? Where is he now?”
I looked over at Gummy Larson, whose gray face didn’t show a thing. Way back in the old days, when I had first known Gummy and he had been a gambling-house operator, the police had beat him up one time. Probably because he got behind in his protection money. They had worked over his face until it looked like uncooked hamburger. But that had healed up now. He had known it would heal up and had taken the beating without opening his trap because it always paid to keep your trap shut. It had paid him in the end. Eventually he was a rich contractor and not a gambling-house operator. He was a rich contractor because he had finally made the right connections in the City Hall and because he knew how to keep his mouth shut. Now he stood there on the floor and took everything the Boss was throwing at him. Because it paid. Gummy had the instincts of a businessman, all right.
“I’ll tell you where he is,” the Boss said. “Look, there he is. Right in this room. Standing right there, and look at him. He is a beauty, ain’t he? Know what he has just done? He has just sold out his best pal. He has just sold out MacMurfee.”
Larson might have been standing in church, waiting for the benediction, for all his face showed.
“Oh, but that isn’t anything. Not a thing. Not for Gummy.”
Who didn’t twitch a muscle.
“Oh, not for Gummy. The only difference between him and Judas Iscariot is that Gummy would have got some boot with that thirty pieces of silver. Oh, Gummy would sell out anything. He sold out his best pal, and I–and I–” he struck himself savagely on the chest with a hollow sound like a thump on a barrel–“and I–I had to buy, the sons-of-bitches made me buy!”
He relapsed into silence, glowered across at Gummy, then reached down for the bottle. He poured a lot into the glass, and sloshed in some water. He wasn’t bothering with ice now. He was nearly down to essentials. Before long the water would go.
Gummy, from the vast distance of sobriety and victory and the moral certainty which comes from an accurate knowledge of exactly to the penny what everything in the whole world is worth, surveyed the figure on the couch, and when the pitcher had been set back down, said, “If we’ve got our business arranged, Governor, I think I’ll be on my way.”
“Yeah,” the Boss said, “yeah,” and swung his sock-feet to the floor, “yeah, it’s arranged, by God. But–” he stood up, clutching the glass in one hand, and shook himself like a big dog, so that some of the liquor sloshed from the glass–“listen here!” He started across to Larson, sock-feet heavy on the rug, head trust out.
Tiny Duffy wasn’t exactly in the way, but he didn