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“That’s enough, Walter,” Rudolph said, wearily. He hung up the phone and lay back on the baby-blue, slippery silk bedspread. He got ten thousand dollars a year for being Mayor of Whitby. And he donated the entire amount to charity. Public service.
He got up from the bed, maliciously pleased to see that his shoes had left a stain on the silk, and went into the living room. Joh
“Later, please,” Rudolph said. “I’m busy being a devoted and self-sacrificing public servant at the moment.” He poured a Coke over some ice and went to the window and looked out at Dallas. Dallas glittered in the baking sun, rising from its desolate plain like a senseless eruption of metal and glass, the result of a cosmic accident, inorganic and arbitrary.
Rudolph went back into his bedroom, and gave the number of the office of the Chief of Police in Whitby to the telephone operator. While waiting for the call to come through he looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a man who needed a vacation. He wondered when he was going to have his first heart attack. Although in America only businessmen were supposed to have heart attacks, and theoretically he had abandoned all that. Professors lived forever, he had read somewhere, and most generals.
When he got Ottman on the phone, Ottman sounded mournful. But he always sounded mournful. His métier, which was crime, offended him. Bailey, the former Chief of Police, whom Rudolph had put in jail, had been a hearty and happy man. Rudolph often regretted him. The melancholy of integrity.
“We’ve opened up a can of worms, Mr. Mayor,” Ottman said. “Officer Slattery picked up a Whitby freshman at eight-thirty this morning in a diner, smoking a marijuana cigarette. At eight-thirty in the morning!” Ottman was a family man who kept regular hours, and the mornings were precious to him. “The boy had one and one-third ounces of the drug on him. Before we booked him he talked and talked. He says in his dormitory there are at least fifty kids who smoke hash and marijuana. He says if we go there we’ll find a pound of the stuff, at least. He’s got a lawyer and he’ll be out on bail by this evening, but by now the lawyer must have told a few people and what am I supposed to do? President Dorlacker called me a little while ago and told me to stay away from the campus, but it’s bound to be all over town and if I stay away from the campus what does that make me look like? Whitby University isn’t Havana or Buenos Aires, for Christ’s sake, it’s within the city limits and the law’s the law, for Christ’s sake.”
I picked a great day to come to Dallas, Rudolph thought. “Let me think for a minute, Chief,” he said.
“If I can’t go in there, Mr. Mayor,” Ottman said, “you can have my resignation as of this minute.”
Oh, God, Rudolph thought, honest men! Some day he was going to try marijuana himself and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe it would be just the thing for Jean.
“The lawyer for the kid is Leon Harrison’s lawyer, too,” Ottman said. “Harrison’s already been in here and asked what I intend to do. He’s talking about calling a special meeting of the board of trustees.”
“All right, Chief,” Rudolph said. “Call Dorlacker and tell him you’ve spoken to me and that I’ve ordered a search for eight o’clock tonight. Get a warrant from Judge Satterlee and tell your men to leave their clubs at home. I don’t want anybody hurt. The news’ll get around and maybe the kids’ll have the sense to get rid of the stuff before you hit the dormitory.”
“You don’t know kids these days, Mr. Mayor,” Ottman said sorrowfully. “They ain’t got the sense to wipe their ass.”
Rudolph gave him the number of the hotel in Dallas and told him to get back to him after the raid that evening. He hung up and finished his Coke. The lunch on the plane coming down had been dreadful and he had heartburn. He had foolishly drunk the two Manhattans the stewardess had plunked down on his tray. For some reason he drank Manhattans when he was in the air. Never on the ground. What significance there?
The phone rang. He waited for Joh
“Rudy?” It was Gretchen’s voice.
“Yes.” There had been a coolness between them since she had told him that Jean was an alcoholic. Gretchen had been right, but that only made the coolness more pronounced.
“I called Jean at your house,” Gretchen said, “and she told me where you are. I hope I’m not disturbing you.” She sounded disturbed herself.
“No, no,” Rudolph lied. “I’m just dawdling idly in that well-known holiday spot, Dallas Les Bains. Where are you anyway?”
“Los Angeles. I wouldn’t have called you, but I’m out of my mind.”
Depend upon families to pick the right time and place to be out of their minds.
“What is it?” Rudolph asked.
“It’s Billy. Did you know he dropped out of school a month ago?”
“No,” Rudolph said. “He hardly ever whispered his secrets to me, you know.”
“He’s down in New York, living with some girl …”
“Gretchen, darling,” Rudolph said, “there are probably half a million boys Billy’s age in New York right this minute living with some girl. Be thankful he isn’t living with some boy.”
“Of course it isn’t that,” Gretchen said. “He’s being drafted, now that he’s not a student anymore.”
“Well, it might do him some good,” Rudolph said. “A couple of years in the Army might make a man of him.”
“You have a baby daughter,” Gretchen said bitterly. “You can talk like that. I have one son. I don’t think a bullet through his head is going to make a man of my son.”
“Now, Gretchen,” Rudolph said, “don’t make it so automatic. Induct the boy and two months later send the corpse home to mother. There are an awful lot of boys who serve their time and come home without a scratch.”
“That’s why I’m calling you,” Gretchen said. “I want you to make sure that he comes home without a scratch.”
“What can I do?”
“You know a lot of people in Washington.”
“Nobody can keep a kid out of the draft if he’s goofed school and he’s in good health, Gretchen. Not even in Washington.”
“I’m not so sure about that, either,” Gretchen said, “from some of the things I’ve heard and read. But I’m not asking you to try to keep Billy out of the Army.”
“Then what are you trying to get me to do?”
“Use your co
Rudolph sighed. The truth was that he did know some people in Washington who could most probably do it and who would most probably do it if he asked them. But it was just the sort of petty, privileged, inside politicking that he despised the most. It offended his sense of rectitude and cast a shadow on his entire reason for going into public life. In the world of business it was perfectly normal for a man to come to you and ask you to place a nephew or a cousin in some favored position. Depending upon how much you owed the man or how much you expected to get from him in the future, or even how much you liked him, you helped the nephew or cousin, if you could, without thinking twice about it. But to use the power you had gained by the votes of people to whom you had promised impeccable representation and the sternest respect for the law to deliver your sister’s son from the threat of death while actively or tacitly approving of sending thousands of other boys the same age to their destruction was another thing.
“Gretchen,” he said over the slight buzz of wire between Dallas and Los Angeles, “I wish you could figure out some other way …”
“The only other person I know who might be able to do something,” Gretchen said, her voice rising, “is Colin Burke’s brother. He’s a general in the Air Force. He’s in Viet Nam right now. I bet he’d just fall all over himself with eagerness to keep Billy from hearing a shot fired.”