“Thanks.” He busied himself at a fantastic little bar. Something nagged me, besides the stumbling music. Not the lavish evidence of money: I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers — who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem? It wasn’t that: it was something the corner of my eye had noticed as I entered the room and then lost. I rediscovered it while Keller fussed with the drinks. Simply a painting near the arched entrance from the foyer. I had to drift toward it, and stare.
There was a background of melancholy darkness deepening to black. A mirror, and perhaps some light was felt as coming impossibly out of the mirror itself. A young man looked into it. Of him you saw only a bare arm and shoulder, part of an averted cheek; these alone were enough to speak, and poignantly, of extreme youth, whereas the face in the mirror was bitterly knowing with many years. There was in it no grotesque, no exaggeration of age. Taken alone, that sorrowing outward-gazing face might have belonged to a man with thirty or forty difficult and disappointing years behind him. I suppose any imaginative artist might have hit on such a conception, and while the technical skill was great, so is that of a thousand painters. But…
“Like it?” said Keller idly, coming behind me with my drink. “Abe gets the damnedest ideas sometimes. Not everybody cares for it.”
I put my face in order. “Rather startling work.”
“I guess so. He doesn’t really work at it, just tosses ’em off.”
“Abe — oh, Abraham Brown? I saw the name on your doorbell.”
“Uh-huh.” He was without suspicion: Will Meisel is quite functional. “Friend of mine, shares this apartment with my uncle and me. He’s practicing now, don’t like to bust in or I’d introduce you.”
I thought: “Your uncle?”
“Some other time,” I said. “Is he — uh — interested in the Party too?”
“More or less.” Keller sat down with his drink, sighed, waved smoke away from his face in a human gesture. “Not really politically conscious. Just a kid, Mr. Meisel. Hasn’t found himself. Only twenty-one.”
I had to change the subject or betray myself. “Max live near here?”
Keller smiled tolerantly; his eyes said I was a little slow with the drink. “Right upstairs. Penthouse….”
Angelo is alive.I finished my drink, not obsequiously but fast.
A gorilla searched me politely in the penthouse foyer, and Keller apologized for not warning me about it. It’s fortunate the grenade fits flat to the skin. Joseph Max was already in a chattering crowd. Keller ran interference for me through a forest of arms, bosoms, cocktail glasses. My mind was downstairs with “Abraham Brown.” I believe my foggy abstraction was mistaken for the tongue-tied veneration I was supposed to feel in the presence of a Great Man.
At close range the resemblance to Calhoun ends with the jaw. The rest of the big sallow face is blurred and puttyish under a graying mane. Hyperthyroid eyes like Walker’s and with the same weak look, almost of blindness. He probably avoids glasses out of vanity, but of course Max is anything but blind: he had Will Meisel weighed, taped, card-indexed in one smiling glance. I saw in him, Drozma, something of the paranoid intensity of Hitler; not very much of the peevish intellectual fury of Lenin and his mirthless bearded schoolboys; plenty of naked power hunger, but very little of the genuine ruggedness we associate with Stalin or Attila or Huey Long. Max is in the tyrant tradition, but there’s a weak core. His first major defeat may be his last — he’ll shoot himself or get religion. But the machine he’s built won’t necessarily crack when he does.
“Mr. Meisel! Mr. Keller spoke of you today. Fine to meet you, sir. Hope you’ll want to work right along with us.” He has charm.
I said: “This is a great year for America.”
Thought that one up all by myself. The large eyes thanked me. I watched him testing the words for a campaign banner. A bright platinum girl blazed a smile at me. Glasses went up in a toast to something or other. At a directive glance from Max, Platinum took me in tow, provided me with a drink, and clung. Miriam Dane, and a smoldering bundle she is.
Vividly, self-consciously female. Her mouth is unhappily petulant when she forgets to smile. She has an air of listening for something that might call her any moment. She was practicing little-girl awe at anything that fell from my lips. I guess I’m into the Party, Drozma, if I choose to play it that way. But now that I know Angelo is alive, all bets are off. I have no plan beyond tomorrow morning, when I shall go to that apartment after Keller should have left for his office.
Miriam was watching for someone, and presently asked: “Abe Brown didn’t come up with you and Bill, did he?” Her hand wandered toward a solitaire diamond on her finger as she spoke.
“No, he was practicing. I didn’t even meet him…. Honey, I’m a horribly observant old man.” I beamed a Santa Claus look on the diamond. “Abe Brown?”
There was something wrong with her little act of cute annoyance. It was acting twice removed: meant to look like pretty irritation hiding pleasure, what it hid was not pleasure but some sort of confusion. “You don’t miss much, Mr. Meisel — can I call you Will? Yes, that’s how it is.” And then she was introducing me here and there. I shook something moist and unappetizing that belonged to Senator Galt of Alaska, and he brayed. Has a hirsute fringe like William Jennings Bryan.
And Carl Nicholas. Yes, Drozma. Max’s big room was so full of smoke and women’s perfumes that I did not distinguish the scent from Keller’s until Miriam took me over to meet him. Gross, ancient, pathetic. His Salvayan eyes are far down in morbid flesh. The nine years have brought him into our change of old age, Drozma. And whereas you, my second father, accepted the change graciously as you accept all inevitable things, and spoke of it once in my presence as your “assurance of mortality,” this Abdicator, this Namir — why, he’s a bottle imp, irreconcilable, locked up in fat and weakness and still aching to overturn an uninterested universe. He wheezed and touched my hand but hardly looked at me, intent on Max’s performance. Nevertheless I was worried and escaped quickly. Miriam said under her breath: “Poor guy, he can’t help it, gives me the creeps though. Know I shouldn’t feel that way. He’s done a lot for the Party, Max thinks everything of him.” She patted my arm. “You’re nice. Silly, aren’t I?”
“No,” I said. “You ain’t. Just young and slim.” She liked that. “You’re — full time in Party work, Miriam?”
“Oops!” She round-eyed her lovely face at me. “Didn’t you know? Little me, I’m secretary to — Him.” The eyes indicated Max’s gaunt grandeur and misted over. “It’s wonderful. I just never get used to it.” After a pause resembling silent prayer (no, I don’t dislike Miriam: she’s funny and pretty and I think she’s going to get hurt) she took me to see Max’s famous collection of toy soldiers.
They have a room apart: broad tables, glass-covered cases. Red Indians, Persians, Hindus on elephants, Redcoats, Dutchmen of the Armada. Some are old; one set resembled some I saw at the Museum in Old City — French medieval. They say Max plays with them when he can’t sleep. A quirk of greatness? That room was dim when we entered. Miriam turned on overhead lights, disturbing a muttered conversation of two men in shadow at the far end. Miriam ignored them, leading me from case to case. One of them was Daniel Walker, and his smooth round face was ravaged, desolate. The other — old, white-haired, taller than I, absurdly cadaverous — was far gone in drink, glassy-eyed, holding himself upright with silly dignity. As we left, Miriam whispered: “The old man, that’s Dr. Hodding….”