The Fourth K

Golf was a perfect sport for hatching conspiracies. There were the jokes, the good exercise and the agreements struck. And what could be more i

The Socrates Club turned out to be better than Inch expected. He became friendly with the hundred or so men who controlled the country's economic apparatus and political machinery. It was in the Socrates Club that Louis Inch became a member of the Money Guild that could buy the entire congressional delegation of a state in one deal. Of course you couldn't buy them body and soul-you were not talking abstractions here, like the Devil and God, good and evil, virtue and sin. No, you were talking politics. You were talking of what was possible. There were times when a congressman had to oppose you to win reelection. It was true that 98 percent of the congressmen were always reelected, but there were always the 2 percent that had to listen to their constituents.

Louis Inch dreamed the impossible dream. No, not to be President of the United States, he knew his landlord imprint could never be erased. His smudging the very face of New York was an architectural murder. There were a million slum dwellers in New York, Chicago and especially Santa Monica who would fill the streets ready to put his head on a pike. No, his dream was to be the first trillionaire in the modern civilized world. A plebeian trillionaire, his fortune won with the callused hands of a workingman.

Inch lived for the day when he could say to Bert Audick, "I have a thousand units." It had always irritated him that Texan oil men talked in units-a "unit" in Texas was one hundred million dollars. Audick had said about the destruction of the city of Dak, "God, I lost five hundred units there." And Inch vowed someday to say to Audick, "Hell, I got about a thousand units tied up in real estate," and Audick would whistle and say, "A hundred billion dollars." And then Inch would say to him, "Oh, no, a trillion dollars. Up in New York a unit is a billion dollars." That would settle that Texas bullshit once and for all.

To make that dream come true, Louis Inch capitalized on the concept of airspace. That is, he would buy the airspace above existent buildings in major cities and build on top of them. Airspace could be bought for peanuts; it was a new concept, as marshlands had been when his grandfather bought them, knowing that technology would solve the problem of draining the swamps and turn them into profitable building acres. The problem was to prevent the people and their legislators from stopping him. That would take time and an enormous investment, but he was confident it could be done. True, cities like Chicago, New York, Dallas and Miami would be gigantic steel-and-concrete prisons, but people didn't have to live there, except for the elite who loved the museums, the cinemas, the theater, the music. There would of course be little boutique neighborhoods for the artists.

And of course the thing was that when Louis Inch finally succeeded, there would no longer be any slums in New York City. There would simply be no affordable rents for the petty criminal and working classes. They would come in from the suburbs, on special trains, on special buses, and they would be gone by nightfall. The renters and buyers of the Inch Corporation condos and apartments could go to the theater, the discos and the expensive restaurants and not worry about the dark streets outside. They could stroll along the avenues, even venture into the side streets, and could walk the parks, in comparative safety. And what would they pay for such a paradise?

Fortunes.

Summoned to the meeting of the Socrates Club in California, Louis Inch began a trip across the United States to confer with the great real estate corporations of the big cities. From them he exacted their promise to contribute money to defeat Ke

Santa Monica is one of the most beautiful towns in America, mainly because its citizens have successfully resisted the efforts of real estate interests to build skyscrapers, voted laws to keep rents stable and control construction. A fine apartment on Ocean Avenue, overlooking the Pacific, cost only one sixth of the average citizen's income. This was a situation that had driven Inch crazy for twenty years.

Inch thought Santa Monica an outrage, an insult to the American spirit of free enterprise; these units under today's conditions could be rented for ten times the going rate. He had bought up many of the apartment buildings. These were charming Spanish-style complexes wasteful in their use of valuable real estate, with their i

He did not of course try to directly bribe the three city councilors he invited to Michael's but he told them his plans, he showed how everybody could become multimillionaires if certain laws were changed. He was dismayed when they showed no interest. But that was not the worst part.

When Inch got into his limousine, there was a shattering explosion. Glass flew all around the interior of the limo, the back window disintegrated, the windshield suddenly sprouted a large hole and spiderwebs appeared in the rest of the glass.

When the police arrived, they told Inch that a rifle bullet had done the damage. When they asked him if he had any enemies, Louis Inch assured them with all sincerity that he did not.

The Socrates Club's special seminar on "Demagoguery in Democracy" commenced the next day.

Those present were Bert Audick, now under a RICO indictment; George

Greenwell, who looked like the old wheat stored in his gigantic Midwest silos; Louis Inch, his handsome pouting face pale from his near death the day before; Martin "Take It Private" Mutford, wearing an Armani suit that could not hide his going to fat; and Lawrence Salentine.

Bert Audick took the floor first. "Would somebody explain to me how Ke

Nobody laughed at his little joke, so he went on. "We can dick around all we want but we have to face one central fact. He is an immense danger to everything we in this room stand for. We have to take drastic action."

George Greenwell said quietly, "He can get you indicted but he can't get you convicted-we still have due process in this country. Now, I know you have endured great provocation. But if I hear any dangerous talk in this room I walk out. I will listen to nothing treasonous or seditious."

Audick took offense. "I love my country better than anyone in this room," he said. "That's what gripes me. The indictment says I was acting in a treasonable way. Me! My ancestors were in this country when the fucking Ke

Salentine said dryly, "We know Ke

Mutford said, "What Ke