Simmons’s voice had taken on a faint edge. “I’ll try not to make it irreverent,” he said, “because you don’t like that.”
“Say it however you goddam well please.” The old man was back in his big chair, holding tight to the arms.
“All right,” Paul said. “It goes like this. Most times if somebody says, ‘Change this,’ I want reasons. But when Jesus Christ Ben Caldwell or his anointed disciple Nat Wilson give me the Word, then I tug at my forelock and say, ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ and the change is made. Not for me to question why. Does that answer the question?”
McGraw said slowly, “Don’t be flip with me, young fellow.” Automatic response. He sat quiet, thoughtful, puzzled still. He said at last, “You’re sayin’, are you not, that it was Nat Wilson himself who signed those changes?” Paul’s face showed surprise. “I never thought different. Why would I?”
“And,” McGraw said, “because the changes, as far as I’ve seen, stand to save you a little money here, a little there, all of it adding up to quite a bit, then you had even more reason to take what was handed you without question, is that it?”
“I think I recall you suggesting,” Paul said, “that the teeth of gift horses are best not examined.” He tapped the papers in his lap. “If this was the way they wanted their building wired, and as you say, I saved money by doing it their way, why should I raise any kind of a fuss?” McGraw said slowly, “Nat Wilson says he didn’t issue those changes.”
Paul’s face altered, but he said merely, “I see.”
“And what, goddammit, do you see? Will Giddings doesn’t believe Wilson issued those changes either. Neither does Ben Caldwell.”
“And what do you think, Father-in-law?”
The office was silent again. McGraw looked at his hands spread flat on the desktop. “What I think,” he said slowly, “would call down penance in confession.” He was looking straight at Simmons now. “I’m thinking that the knave-or-fool judgment applies. You’re carrying on with the man’s wife—”
“Patty told you that?”
McGraw sat silent, watching still.
“Okay,” Paul said at last. “That’s how it is.” He spread his hands. “You can’t understand it—”
“That I cannot. Nor can I forgive.” The black fury was rising, irresistible. “I’m an old-fashioned working-class fool, and you’re young, bright, educated, decently bred, and all—and the stench of you is in my nostrils like the stench of something dead that’s been out in the sun too long.”
“Look,” Paul said, “I’ve taken enough—”
“You haven’t begun to take,” McGraw said. “Move from that chair before I’m done and I’ll break your back.” He paused His breathing was audible now. With effort he forced his voice down. “Why would Nat Wilson issue those changes* Tell me that. They gain him nothing. He is the architect He and Ben Caldwell, Ben mostly of course, but that changes nothing. Between them they approved Lewis’s electrical drawings, his design. Why should Wilson make any attempt at change?”
Simmons sat silent! He wanted to stand up and walk out, and was afraid. The old man behind the desk was, as he had told Zib, a fearsome old man, quite capable of the physical violence he had threatened.
“I asked you a question,” McGraw said.
“You asked several.”
“Then answer them all.”
Simmons took a deep breath. “Nat Wilson is a subtle man,” he said.
“And what, goddammit, is that supposed to mean?”
“He resents me.”
McGraw was frowning now. “Why?” And then, “Because you’re carrying on with his wife, is that what you mean?”
Simmons nodded. It was better, he thought, not to speak.
“I don’t believe it,” McGraw said. “I know the man. If he knew you were sneaking behind his back, he’d brace you with it and take a few teeth out of that Pepsodent smile. He—”
“And he is playing with Patty,” Paul said.
McGraw opened his mouth. He closed it again, but it reopened despite him. And then it closed once more. And opened. No sound emerged. His face had lost its color and his breath came now in great gasps that were not enough. His eyes protruded as he tried to make a gesture with one hand, and failed. He slumped deep in his chair, gasping still like a fish on the bank.
Paul got up quickly. He stood for a moment indecisive and then walked to the door and threw it open. To Laura outside he said, “You’d better call an ambulance. He’s—I think—he’s having a heart attack.”
Grover Frazee took a cab back to his Pine Street office after his lunch with the governor. He had known Armitage a long time, and in the usual meaning of the words they were, he supposed, good friends…
But in the governor’s world, and as far as that went in Frazee’s too, friendship was a fine-sounding word that had very little to do with business. Business was conducted on its merits, period.
If a man produced you backed him; if he failed, you did not.
Oh, he hadn’t failed. Not yet. But in the foreseeable future the building was going to be damned near empty. There was the rub.
You could lay the blame to general business conditions or that administration down in Washington with its three-steps-forward-and-two-and-a-half-steps-back policies.
But placing the blame accomplished nothing. Explanation rarely helped, and in this instance, today at lunch, explanation hadn’t even softened the governor’s attitude.
“You’re the man in charge, Grover,” the governor had said, “which means that you get the brickbats as well as the bouquets. I know the feeling and the position.” He grinned bitterly as he stirred sugar into his coffee and watched the liquid swirl. He looked up at last. “How bad is it? Give me some figures.” He watched Frazee steadily.
Frazee gave them to him—percentage of rented floor space, and of possible new rentals, certain and hoped-for income versus basic maintenance and carrying costs. Discouraging. “But it can’t last,” he said.
“The hell it can’t.” The governor’s voice did not rise, but it “had taken on a new note. “Unemployment hasn’t dropped and inflation hasn’t been whipped. I don’t think there’s a chance of our going into a thirties-type depression, but neither do I think that all of a sudden everything is going to be ginger-peachy, particularly in the big cities.”
“Bob Ramsay—”
“Bob Ramsay hears voices. It’s a wonder to me he hasn’t come down from the nearest hill with new tablets. He thinks we’re going to put the whole state to work for his city, and we aren’t. He thinks maybe he’ll make the city into the fifty-first state, and he isn’t going to. He thinks Congress is going to roll over and wave its paws in the air after giving him a blank check, and it isn’t going to work that way either.”
Privately, Frazee entertained similar views, but he said nothing.
“He loves this city,” the governor said. “I’ll give him that. And he’s held it together almost with his bare hands. But the fact of the matter is that too much business is moving out, into the suburbs, more than is coming in. The big time, the big apple, the place where it’s at—that concept has lost its appeal. What is left here is turning rapidly into a place for the very rich and the very poor, and neither group rents office space in big buildings.” Well, Frazee thought now in the quiet of his own office, Bent Armitage was probably right. He usually was.
The phone on his desk buzzed quietly. He opened the switch. “Yes?”
“Mr. Giddings to see you,” Letitia’s voice said. “He says it is urgent.”
First Armitage at lunch, now Will Giddings obviously with some kind of trouble; there are times when they seem to come at you from all sides. “All right,” Frazee said in resignation. “Send him in.”