Clarkton (16 page)

“That's a laugh,” Ryan said. “That's a laugh if I ever heard one.”

“You got a big mouth, Ryan,” the other officer told him. “You got one hell of a big mouth.”

“Sure I have, and I'm going to shoot it off. What kind of crap are you trying to pull on us? These are the plant gates—they been the plant gates for twenty-five years. That's enough for common law, isn't it? There's nobody used those lots out there except the cows, and the public road comes in.”

“It's a company road,” Fanway said. “You don't want no trouble, Ryan—all right. We don't want none either. We got warrants for you and for Raye over there for trespass, and if you're going to force our hand, we got John Does for the whole goddam lot of you. Now are you going to get that line out of here peaceful and back it up to the street, or do we have to run the whole lot of you in?”

Ryan could hear Raye breathing, short and hot. “Let's see the warrants,” he said.

“Here they are, clean and legal and neat.”

Raye said, “I told you, Danny. I know that sonovabitch from way back.”

“I don't like that kind of talk,” Fanway said.

“How come you got warrants for Raye and me?” Ryan wanted to know.

“I don't write the warrants,” Fanway sighed. “What about it, Ryan?”

Ryan nodded and turned slowly to Renoir. “Take them back to the street, Murray. Pull the other lines back too. Then get the story over to Noska and Max Goldstein. Tell Max to fix bail. We don't want to sleep in that dirty, lousy can of theirs.”

9.
I
t was too late to meet Wilson at the office, so
Lowell went to the police station, and he arrived there only a few minutes after Ryan and Joey Raye were taken in. Lowell was not drunk; he did not get drunk easily; but two drinks on an empty stomach had taken the edge off his thoughts. A fairly mellow fuzz had tempered the mental agony that accompanied him from Abbott's office; and the jigsaw nature of the future had resolved itself into a piece. Things always had worked out, and this would too. In Lois' lap he threw the responsibility of leaving him or not, and it seemed to him that it did not make a great deal of difference which course she took; for, the way he felt now, he could trace an end to the real importance of things to the time of Clark's death. He liked that thought. Perhaps he would go off to Europe with Fern—he could find a business reason for a passport—once this miserable interruption of the strike was done; the thought of traveling with a pretty young girl like Fern—so young himself—and people seeing them together, watching them together, was a most pleasant thought, and he thought nostalgically of a young person's discovery of Paris, the adventures Europe offered anyone who had a little money and enthusiasm, the abstract culture of things long dead and broken, and the way he might communicate that to Fern—almost to a point where he could substitute her for Clark.

Along with this, there was a determination to see the strike through and see it through quickly, wash his hands of it. The more he despised Wilson as an insufferable ass, the less eager he was to remove himself to the tune of Wilson's admiring condescension.

He walked into the police station, and the officer at the desk said, “Yes, Mr. Lowell—they're inside in Captain Curzon's office. They're waiting for you.”

Nodding, he followed the officer. He was a sick man, but he didn't feel sick; he was a man bereft, and yet he didn't feel bereft. It gave him a sense of excitement to know that in the absolute, he controlled this business, and Hamilton Gelb, Tom Wilson, Young Frank Norman, and Jack Curzon all would do his wishes, if he only formulated his wishes definitely enough. Power was not something he had ever sought for, and when he read about people whose life pattern was determined by a quest for power, or met such people, he reacted as he always had to his father, with a mixture of awe, disgust, and contempt. The extreme of it, the Adolf Hitler, was an insane and vulgar little man, and that varied in degrees all the way down the scale. He had never had any desire for power, just as he had never been conscious of a desire for money—but he was conscious of power how, more and more conscious, and the taste was not unpleasant. It was microcosmic; it was not his doing, as he thought; it was a little world in a corner of Massachusetts: but the taste was not unpleasant. He became George Clark Lowell more precisely. He was George Clark Lowell walking into Curzon's dusty, shabby office, where four men who worked for him sat and waited, and after they shook hands with him, they explained to him what they had done.

He sat down. “You can't hold them on a trespass charge,” he said.

“A few hours,” Gelb said. “All we need is a few hours.”

Wilson, less certain than Gelb, thought about Goldstein. “That Jew,” he decided, “will begin to raise hell.”

Gelb ignored Wilson and said to Lowell, “I don't like to draw things out. If you want an endurance contest, you don't need me.”

“I don't want an endurance contest. If you think you could wind it up, how long would that be?”

“Most of it today—and the rest tomorrow.”

Curzon said anxiously, “I just want your assurances that you'll be behind me, Mr. Lowell.”

“Whatever Mr. Gelb does—”

“Could you stay?” Gelb asked Lowell. “Jack is becoming fat and old.” He had the faculty for saying insulting things without actually being insulting, and he could frame a request in the type of insinuation that is almost impossible to refuse. Lowell wanted to refuse, but he found himself agreeing. They all walked out of the office and went up the grooved wooden stairs to the second floor. Curzon opened the door to a room in the back of the building, standing aside for them to go in. As they entered, Lowell could not help reflecting on the cheapness of the whole thing, made out of the thin tissue of a Hollywood film—or perhaps this reality was the pattern that Hollywood used—Ryan sitting on a wooden chair under a strong electric light with one of Curzon's men on each side of him. To Lowell, it was real and foolish at the same time, and he found it difficult to associate Gelb, a man whom he had come to respect highly and even to like, with this sort of thing. He stood well back in the shadow, ashamed and uncomfortable, looking at Ryan, a small, ordinary, work-worn man of no particular age—and asking himself whether he wouldn't have to stop it now, be forced to stop it, since it was an affront to every sensibility and every parcel of good taste he owned.

He wondered whether it had been like this for Clark, coming into a battle, and whether a battle was as shabby. Like Elliott Abbott, the little man in the wooden kitchen chàir was his archetype enemy, the bearded, bomb-carrying subject matter of ten thousand cartoons stretching back to his earliest childhood, but for the life of him he could not associate the charade with the actuality.

Yet he didn't stop it.

It began with Gelb, who stood a little in front of Lowell. Wilson and Norman stepped over to one side, and the shadows swallowed them. Curzon placed himself at the edge of the circle of light, snapping Ryan's head up with the back of his hand as Gelb spoke. To Lowell, the change that came over Curzon was extraordinary; the flabbiness of the man disappeared; his whole nature seemed to undergo a transformation, just as a surgeon, ordinary and run-of-the-mill in everyday life, becomes an artist in an operating room.

“Hello, Ryan,” Gelb said casually. “I been looking forward to meeting you.”

“You don't want the dinge too?” Curzon smiled.

“I just want Ryan. Ryan's my boy.”

“Not the dinge?”

“Just Ryan—just Danny Ryan. He's my boy. I like Ryan. I respect him. All I hear in Clarkton is Danny Ryan; he's a big man in Clarkton.”

“You're Gelb,” Ryan said, smiling very thinly. “I like to see who I'm talking to.”

“He likes to see who he's talking to,” Curzon grinned. “He's my boy too. He likes to see who he's talking to.”

“I see you, Curzon,” Ryan said. “It ain't no sight for sore eyes.”

“I never seen a mick who didn't talk too much. Go on talking, Ryan.”

Gelb walked into the edge of the circle of light and stood there, staring seriously at Ryan. Then he asked him, “Are you an honest man, Ryan?”

“I pinched pennies from my old lady. That's how I got my start.” ‘

“I ask a straight question, Ryan, I like a straight answer. If you're too proud to make an odd buck, we'll do it another way.”

“I'm proud. The Ryans were kings in the old country.”

“He's got a sense of humor,” Curzon said.

“I have seen reds that couldn't be bought,” Gelb said slowly. “Are you one?”

“I'm in this racket for what I get out of it. Moscow pays a grand a week. Can you do better?”

“You're a snotnose,” Gelb said deliberately. “You're like all the rest of them. You don't have to sing for us, Ryan. Everything there is to know about you and that nigger we picked up, we know. Everything—understand me? Now you can play ball or we can let Curzon here work over you a little.”

“What kind of ball?”

“I've got a statement here, just a short statement describing how you and your buddies fomented the strike in order to advance the political ends of your party. It names some names. The statement will not be used unless it's necessary to use it, and I don't foresee any necessity. You have my word for that. In any case, the strike will be over tomorrow. Mr. Lowell has agreed to meet the union's demands tomorrow, and that's the end of it. But I want this statement signed by you. Mr. Lowell is willing to pay two thousand dollars for it.”

“It's cheap at the price,” Ryan said. “I have known two-bit' writers for the
Daily Worker
to go over the hill for Willie Hearst or one of his pals, and that put them on ice for the rest of their lives. But for a working stiff, two grand is plenty.”

“You don't have to make a speech,” Gelb told him quietly, the edge that Lowell had noted once before coming into his voice. “You just say yes or no, Ryan. That's all I want—yes or no.”

“The trouble is, Gelb, that you're out of date. Lowell don't know that. You're from 'thirty-seven, but this ain't 'thirty-seven. You don't move in and smash strikes today. You don't blow and expect labor to fall over. Everything changes except bastards like you, Gelb—”

Curzon hit him in the face, a sound like an apple dropping from a tree onto a hard board, and he went over backward, chair and all. To Lowell, it appeared to happen very, very slowly, and he couldn't understand why Ryan had not seen the blow coming, had not attempted to get out of its way. The hot, bitter acid in Lowell's stomach rose, and he moved back, quite apart from his own volition, until his shoulders pressed against the door. Being a sensitive man, he felt the blow; it stung him even after the two officers had picked up both the chair and Ryan, and set them in place. In terms of the essence of brutality, it was quite the most horrible thing Lowell had ever seen; and though he was forty-four years old, and though he had traveled through most of the nations of Europe and seen a good deal beside that, he could recall nothing that was like this.

Ryan shook his head and tried to spit out a broken tooth that dangled by shreds of flesh. His upper lip was broken and swelling already, and a thin black stream of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

“He's my boy,” Gelb said.

“He's my boy, too,” Curzon grinned. “He's got guts. All micks got guts. Nothing he likes better than a little scrap.”

“Maybe he wants peace and comfort,” Gelb said. “He's a family man. Five children. A family man gets tired of scrapping. He wants peace and comfort. He thinks I'm out of date—but it could be that he is out of date. You hurt his face too much,” he said to Curzon. “The little man is not pretty to begin with, so why do you want to hurt his face so much, Jack?”

“No more on the face,” Curzon smiled.

“No more.” His tone toward Ryan was conciliatory and wheedling. “How about it, Danny? I don't like this any better than you do.”

“To hell with you!” Ryan said.

Curzon hit him in the stomach this time, and again it seemed to Lowell that the police captain moved with agonizing slowness—even though all of Curzon's body arched, with the blow, lifting Ryan again, hurling him and the chair outside the cone of light into the darkness. And both sounds were delayed, the sound of the fist in Ryan's stomach, the smack and the burst of breath driven out, and then the crash of man and chair rolling over on the floor.

The two officers brought back Ryan and the chair. They put Ryan in the chair, but he hung over, his hands grasping his stomach. The tooth hung out of his open mouth, dangling on one slender strand of pink gum.

“He's a daisy,” Gelb said. “He's cute. He's a daisy.”

“He's my boy,” smiled Curzon. “The shine is bigger, but he's my boy.”

Over his shoulder, Gelb said, “You note this, Frank. He's a person of principle. I offer him two thousand dollars, but he's proud. Very proud people, Communists. They know all the answers, but when I ask him a calm, polite question, he only says, the hell with it. That's a lot of pride for cheap shanty Irish.”

“He loves to be beat,” Curzon chuckled. “He loves to take it.

“But he could stop taking it. He could get it into his head that when the mill opens, he and the comrades are going to be out of jobs. He could get it into his head that he has no future in Clarkton. He could get it into his head that there's no future in his whole filthy racket. He could get it into his head and he could make it pay, too.”

Ryan was breathing again. He shook the tooth loose, watching it as it fell to his knee and then slid down on the floor.

“You have been a hero,” Gelb sighed. “I want to do business, Ryan. I deal in dollars and cents. What about it?” His voice changed again, “You have a wife and kids. Where does it get you, Ryan? Take it easy for a while. You got one life to live, and you screw it all to the devil. Take it easy. Maybe we can work out something with Mr. Lowell where you can really take it easy. He wants to be fair. I want to be fair. There's no need for all this kind of thing, no need at all. Whatever you think of me, Ryan, whatever you heard, I can tell you truthfully that I hate brutality. I deplore the need for it. I admire efficiency. That's why I admire you people. I am not taken in by what fools say about you. I sincerely admire you. That's why I make it two thousand dollars; that's why I set a fair price:”