And with those remarks, Ton Stark went out and slammed the door, probably leaving the Boss paralyzed with the rush of blood to his head.

"That's what he said to me," the Boss told me, "by God, that's what he said, and I ought to slapped him down." But he was shaken. You could see that, all right.

Meanwhile the Boss had handled the Sibyl Frey business. I had, as I said, no part in it. What happened was, however, simple and predictable. There had been two ways to get at MacMurfee: Judge Irwin and Gummy Larson. The Boss had tried to scare the Judge, and that have failed. So now he had to buy Gummy. He could buy Gummy because Gummy was a businessman. Strictly business. He would sell anything for the proper figure, immortal soul or mother's sainted bones, and his old friend MacMurfee was neither. If Gummy told MacMurfee to lay off, that he wasn't going to be Senator, MacMurfee would lay off, because without Gummy, MacMurfee was nothing.

The Boss had no choice. He had to buy. He might have dealt directly with MacMurfee, and have let MacMurfee to go the Senate, with the intention of following up himself when the next senatorial election rolled around. But there two arguments against that. First, the timing would have been bad. Now was the time for the Boss to step out. Later on he would be just another senator getting on toward fifty. Now he would be a boy wonder breathing brimstone. He would have a future. Second, if he let MacMurfee climb back on the gravy train, a lot of people on whose brows the cold sweat would break now if even in the privacy of the boudoir the mere thought of crossing the Boss should dawn on them would figure that you could buck the Boss and get away with it. They would begin to make friends and swap cigars with friends of MacMurfee. They would even begin to get ideas of their own. But there was a third argument, too, against doing business with MacMurfee. It was, rather, not an argument; it was simply a fact. The fact was that the Boss was the way he was. If MacMurfee had forced him into a compromise, at least MacMurfee shouldn't be the one to profit by it. So he did business with Gummy Larson.

The figure was not cheap. It was not peanuts. It was the medical-center contract, the general contract. It would be arranged that Larson would get the contract.

But I had nothing to do with the arranging. Duffy did that, for he had been pulling all along for such an arrangement, and I suppose that he must have got some sort of private kickback or sweetening from Larson. Well, I don't begrudge him that. He had worked for it. He had cringed and sweated and felt the baleful speculative stare of the Boss on him in the long silence after he had tried to sell the idea of Gummy Larson. It wasn't his fault that an accident now made the deal possible and not his own conscientious efforts. So I don't begrudge him his sweetening.

All of this went on behind my back, or perhaps even under my eyes, for in those days as fall came on I felt as though I were gradually withdrawing from the world around me. It could go its way and I would go mine. Or I would have gone my way if I had known what it was. I toyed with the thought of going away, of saying to the Boss, "Boss, I'm getting the hell away from here and never coming back." I could afford to do it, I thought. I didn't have to lift a finger for my morning sinker and Java. Maybe I wouldn't be rich-rich, but I figured I was going to be rich in a nice, genteel, Southern way. Nobody down here ever wants to be rich-rich, for that, of course, would be crass and vulgar. So I was going to be just genteel rich. As soon as they wound up the Judge's estate. (If they ever did, for his affairs were complicated and it was going to take some time.)

I was going to be genteel rich, for I had inherited the fruits of the Judge's crime, just as some day I would inherit from my mother the fruit of the Scholarly Attorney's weakness, the money he had left with her when he learned the truth and just walked away. On the proceeds of the Judge's old crime I would be able to go away and lead a nice, clean, blameless life in some place where you sit under a striped awning beside a marble-topped table and drink vermouth, cassis and soda and look out over the wimpling, dimpling, famous sunlit blue of the sea. But I didn't go. True, since I had lost my fathers, I felt as though I could float effortless away like a balloon when the last cord is cut. But I would have to go on the money from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough a bond that held me there. To change the image, it was a long cable to an anchor, and the anchor flukes clung and bit way down there in the seaweed and ooze of a long time past. Perhaps I was a fool to feel that way about my little inheritance. Perhaps it was no different from any other inheritance anybody had. Perhaps the Emperor Vespasian was right when, jingling in his jeans the money which had been derived from a tax on urinals, he wittily remarked: _"Pecunia non olet."__

I didn't go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in my office or out at the University library and read books and monographs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work on: a tax bill. I knew so little of what was going on that it wasn't until the arrangement was an accomplished fact that I knew anything about it.

I went up to the Mansion one night with my brief case full of notes and charts to have a session with the Boss. The Boss was not alone. Back there in the library with him were Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy, and, to my surprise, Gummy Larson. Sugar-Boy sat over in a corner, hunched in a chair and holding a glass between both hands, the way a child holds a glass. Out of the glass he would take little finicking sips, after each sip lifting his head up the way a chicken does when it drinks. Sugar-Boy wasn't a drinker. He was afraid, he said, it might make him "n-n-n-n-ner-ner-vous." It would have been awful if Sugar-Boy got so nervous he couldn't bust jelly glasses every shot when you threw them up in the air for him or couldn't wipe a mule's nose with the rear fender of the black Cadillac. Duffy, of course, was a drinker, but he wasn't drinking that night. He obviously was not in any mood for drinking, even if in fleeting glimpses one caught a glimmer of triumph mixed with the acute discomfort he was experiencing as he stood in the open space in front of the big leather couch. The discomfort was due, in part at least, to the fact that the Boss was, very definitely, drinking. For when the Boss really drank, what tender inhibitions ordinarily shackled up his tongue were absolutely removed. And now he was drinking all right. It looked like the first fine flush of a three-day blow and the barometer falling. He was cocked back on the leather couch with a pitcher of water, a bottle, and a bowl of ice on the floor beside his crumpled coat and empty shoes. When the Boss really got the works, he usually took off his shoes. He was sock-feet drunk now. The bottle was a long way down.

Mr. Larson stood back from the foot of the couch, a middle-sized, middle-aged, compact, gray-faced, gray-suited, unimaginative-looking man. He did not drink. He had once been a gambling-house operator and had found that it did not pay to drink. Gummy was strictly business and he didn't do anything unless it paid.

As I entered and took in the layout, the Boss put his already red-rimmed gaze on me, but didn't say a word until I approached the open space in front of the couch. Then he flung out an arm to indicate Tiny, who stood in the middle of that unprotected open space, with a wan smile on his tallow. "Look!" the Boss said to me, pointing. "He was the one going to fix it up with Larson, and what did I tell him? I told him, hell, no. Hell, no, I told him, I'd be damned first. And what happened?"