Thus would RAMJAC be brought tumbling down.

There was a bizarre sidelight to the case. O'Looney, before he finally found out who Mary Kathleen really was, fell in love with his dream of her when she was young. He had it all wrong, incidentally. He dreamed that she was tall and buxom and black-haired, whereas she had been short and scrawny and red-haired. He dreamed that she was an immigrant who had gone to work for an eccentric millionaire in a spooky mansion, and that she had been both attracted and repelled by this man, and that he had abused her to the point of death.

All this came out in divorce proceedings brought against O'Looney by his wife of thirty-two years. It was front-page stuff in the tabloids for a week or more. O'Looney was already famous by then. The papers called him "The man who blew the whistle on RAMJAC," or variations on that theme. Now his wife was claiming that his affections had been alienated by a ghost. He wouldn't sleep with her anymore. He stopped brushing his teeth. He was chronically late to work. He became a grandfather, and he didn't care. He wouldn't even look at the baby.

What was particularly sick about his behavior was that, even after he found out what Mary Kathleen had really been like, he stayed in love with the original dream.

"Nobody can ever take that away from me," he said. "It's the most precious thing I own."

He has been relieved of his duties, I hear. His wife is suing him again — this time for her share in the small fortune he got for the movie rights to his dream. The film is to be shot in a spooky old mansion in Morristown. If you can believe the gossip columns, there is to be a talent search for an actress to play the Irish immigrant girl. Al Pacino has already agreed to play Sheriff O'Looney, and Kevin McCarthy to play the eccentric millionaire.

So I dallied too long, and now I must go to prison again, they say. My high jinks with Mary Kathleen's remains were not crimes in and of themselves, since corpses have no more rights than do orts from last night's midnight snack. My actions were accessory, however, to the commission of a class E felony, which according to Section 190.30 of the Penal Law of New York State consists of unlawfully concealing a will, I had entombed the will itself in a safe-deposit box of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, a division of RAMJAC.

I have tried to explain to my little dog that her master must go away for a while — because he violated Section 190.30. I have told her that laws are written to be obeyed. She understands nothing. She loves my voice. All news from me is good news. She wags her tail.

I lived very high. I bought a duplex with a low-interest company loan. I cashed stock options for clothes and furniture. I became a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Ballet, coming and going by limousine.

I gave intimate parties at my home for RAMJAC authors and recording artists and movie actors and circus performers — Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mick Jagger, Jane Fonda, G?nther Gebel Williams, and the like. It was fun. After RAMJAC acquired the Marlborough Gallery and Associated American Artists, I had painters and sculptors to my parties, too.

How well did I do at RAMJAC? During my incumbency, my division, including subsidiaries under its control, both covert and overt, won eleven platinum records, forty-two gold records, twenty-two Oscars, eleven National Book Awards, two American League pennants, two National League pennants, two World Series, and fifty-three Grammies — and we never failed to show a return on capital of less than 23 percent. I even engaged in corporate in-fighting, preventing the transfer of the catfood company from my division to General Foods. It was exciting. I got really mad.

We just missed getting another Nobel prize in literature several times. But then we already had two: Saul Bellow and Mr. Singer.

I myself have made Who's Who for the first time in my life. This is a slightly tarnished triumph, admittedly, since my own division controls Gulf & Western, which controls Who's Who. I put it all in there, except for the prison term and the name of my son: where I was born, where I went to college, various jobs I've held, my wife's maiden name.

Did I invite my own son to my parties — to chat with so many heroes and heroines of his? No. Did he quit the Times when I became his superior there? No. Did he write or telephone greetings of any sort? No. Did I try to get in touch with him? Only once. I was in the basement apartment of Leland and Sarah Clewes. I had been drinking, something I don't enjoy and rarely do. And I was physically so close to my son. His apartment was only thirty feet above my head.

It was Sarah who had made me telephone him.

So I dialed my son's number. It was about eight o'clock at night. One of my little grandchildren answered, and I asked 'him his name.

"Juan," he said.

"And your last name?" I said.

"Stankiewicz," he said. In accordance with my wife's will, incidentally, Juan and his brother, Geraldo, were receiving reparations from West Germany for the confiscation of my wife's father's bookstore in Vienna by the Nazis after the Anschluss, Germany's annexation of Austria in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-eight. My wife's will was an old one, written when Walter was a little boy. The lawyer had advised her to leave the money to her grandchildren so as to avoid one generation of taxes. She was trying to be smart about money. I was out of work at the time.

"Is your daddy home?" I said.

"He's at the movies," he said.

I was so relieved. I did not leave my name. I said I would call back later.

As for what Arpad Leen suspected about me: Like anyone else, he was free to suspect as much or as little as he pleased. There were no more fingerprinted messages from Mrs. Graham. The last one confirmed in writing that Clewes and I and Ubriaco and Edel and Lawes and Carter and Fender were to be made vice-presidents.

There was a deathly silence after that — but there had been deathly silences before. One lasted two years. Leen meanwhile operated under the mandate of a letter Mary Kathleen had sent him in Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-one, which said only this: "acquire, acquire, acquire."

She had certainly picked the right man for the job. Arpad Leen was born to acquire and acquire and acquire.

What was the biggest lie I told him? That I saw Mrs. Graham once a week, and that she was happy and well and quite satisfied with the way things were going.

As I testified before a grand jury: He gave every evidence of believing me, no matter what I said about Mrs. Graham.

I was in an extraordinary position theologically with respect to that man. I knew the answers to so many of the ultimate questions he might want to ask about that life of his.

Why did he have to go on acquiring and acquiring and acquiring? Because his deity wanted to give the wealth of the United States to the people of the United States. Where was his deity? In Morristown, New Jersey. Was she pleased with how he was doing his job? She was neither pleased nor displeased, since she was as dead as a doornail. What should he do next? Find another deity to serve.

I was in an extraordinary position theologically with respect to his millions of employees, too, of course, since he was a deity to them, and supposedly knew exactly what he wanted and why.

Well — it is all being sold off now by the federal government, which has hired twenty thousand new bureaucrats, half of them lawyers, to oversee the job. Many people assumed that RAMJAC owned everything in the country. It was something of an anticlimax, then, to discover that it owned only 19 percent of it — not even one-fifth. Still — RAMJAC was enormous when compared with other conglomerates. The second largest conglomerate in the Free World was only half its size. The next five after that, if combined, would have been only about two-thirds the size of RAMJAC.