‘Really?’ Meade asked gratefully.
‘Really,’ Blackstone confirmed.
But he was thinking, even so, I’d rather cut my own arm off than go on a picnic with Todd.
‘Why am I so stupid?’ Meade wailed. ‘Why did it have to turn out that Plunkitt was the organ grinder and I was no more than the monkey? And what would Clarissa have thought of me if she’d been there? Would she ever have considered marrying me after that?’
‘Clarissa wasn’t there,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘And the way things turned out wasn’t your fault. You can only do serious damage to the enemy if you have the right ammunition — and we didn’t.’
‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’ Meade asked. ‘Do you think the only graft he’s involved in is what he calls “honest graft”?’
‘I don’t know,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘But even if it is true — even if every cent he’s ever made has been, strictly speaking, legal — that still doesn’t make him exactly a choirboy, does it?’
Meade forced a smile on to his face. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not even a defrocked one.’
‘Because he’d never have had the opportunity for this “honest graft” of his if he hadn’t been an important politician,’ Blackstone continued. ‘And he’d never have become an important politician in this city if he hadn’t used all possible means — legal and illegal — to fix elections.’
Meade’s smile had been growing in strength as Blackstone spoke, and now he looked positively amused.
‘Have I said something funny?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Not exactly,’ Meade replied. ‘Or rather, it’s not what you said that was funny, so much as it’s the fact that it was you who said it.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Blackstone admitted.
‘You remember me meeting you down at the docks, don’t you?’ Meade asked.
‘Of course I do.’
‘And you remember me saying that there were no real detectives in New York City?’ Meade paused, and suddenly looked a little troubled. ‘I was maybe being a little disloyal to Inspector O’Brien when I said that,’ he continued, ‘but I’ve always thought of him as a moral crusader rather than a true detective.’ He paused again. ‘Anyway, you remember me saying that about the Detective Bureau?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And you didn’t believe me, did you?’
‘Well, I. .’ Blackstone began, uncomfortably.
‘Now imagine that instead of talking about the Detective Bureau, I’d talked about Senator Plunkitt. Imagine if I’d delivered then that little speech on Plunkitt that you delivered just now. You’d have thought I was a prime candidate for the funny farm, wouldn’t you?’
Good God, Meade was right, Blackstone told himself. He would have thought the sergeant was a candidate for the funny farm. But now his whole view of the city — his whole way of thinking about it — had altered.
And how long had that taken?
Amazingly — incredibly — it had taken less than a day and a half!
Yet, in some ways, he was starting to feel as if he’d never existed anywhere else — as if New York City had been his entire universe for as long as he could remember.
So maybe the city did actually have the power to change people, without them even really noticing it happen.
And maybe that power was both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
‘What’s on your mind, Sam?’ he heard Meade say.
Blackstone grinned self-consciously. ‘I was worried about becoming a new man without ever having got the old one quite right.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Blackstone said. ‘Shall we get back to the matter of Senator George Plunkitt?’
‘Sure.’
‘The one thing I’m absolutely sure of is that when he said he had no real idea why Inspector O’Brien visited him, he wasn’t lying.’
‘But he had to know,’ Meade protested. ‘Otherwise, none of it makes any sense.’
‘None of what makes any sense?’
‘I knew Patrick O’Brien well. Very well indeed. Given the opportunity to speak to Plunkitt, he wouldn’t have wasted that time by talking about the weather, or baseball, or if Oklahoma should be a state.’
‘But that’s just what Plunkitt says he did talk about,’ Blackstone said. ‘And I believe him.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ Meade said stubbornly. ‘Patrick was one of the most direct men I’ve ever met.’
‘Perhaps, but. .’
‘No,’ Meade corrected himself, ‘he was the most direct man. If he had accusations to make, he’d make them, without even stopping to think about the consequences that might have on his own career. And if he wanted help or information, he’d come right out and ask for it, even if he knew there was a good chance of his request being turned down.’
‘But there might be circumstances when. .’
‘His opinion of himself wasn’t based on what others thought of him, or what they were prepared to do for him. He was his own man, you see. He was always his own man.’
‘Maybe not always,’ Blackstone cautioned. ‘Sergeant Saddler did say he’d been acting strangely for the last few days of his life.’
‘But why wouldn’t he tell Senator Plunkitt what it was he wanted?’ Meade asked, still fretting over the point like a wild dog worrying a dead sheep, and almost conceding that George Plunkitt had been speaking the truth. ‘And what was it that he wanted?’
‘I don’t know,’ Blackstone said crisply, ‘but we’re not going to find out by sitting here, are we?’
‘So what’s your plan?’ Meade asked.
Yes, what was his plan? Blackstone wondered. Where did they go after they’d come up against the brick wall which was Senator Plunkitt?
‘My plan is to follow your plan,’ he said. ‘My plan is go back to the Lower East Side, and see if we can pick up O’Brien’s trail.’
‘So you think it’s a good plan, do you?’ Meade asked, with suspicious innocence.
No, not really, Blackstone thought. In fact, not at all. But it’s the only plan we’ve got.
‘It could work,’ he said aloud. ‘Longer shots than that have been known to come off.’
‘The reason I’m asking, Sam, is that when you told me to go down to the Lower East Side last night, I got the distinct impression it wasn’t because you thought it was good plan — it was because you were looking for an excuse to get me out of your hair for a while.’
‘That’s what you thought, was it?’ Blackstone asked, non-committally.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. And after I’d left you at the luxurious Hotel Rat-trap on Canal Street, and I was walking through the Lower East Side, I began to see the hopelessness of the plan — as it stood — for myself.’
‘As it stood?’ Blackstone repeated.
‘That’s right,’ Meade agreed. ‘And I started to realize that we desperately needed to come up with something that would give us an extra edge. And that’s when I had my idea.’
He was deliberately teasing, Blackstone thought. But after the morning the boy had had, what was wrong with letting him have his bit of fun?
‘What idea?’ he asked.
‘This,’ Meade said, reaching into his pocket, taking out a small poster, and laying it flat on the table between them.
The banner along the top of the poster screamed:
Have you seen this man?
And beneath it was a photograph of the man it referred to.
It came as a shock to Blackstone to realize that though he’d been investigating O’Brien’s death for a day and half — and had built up an image of him through what others had told him — he had not, until that moment, had any real idea of what the man himself looked like.