Mullen tipped his head. “How you been, Fred?” Still holding Clumly’s hand.
“Fine, Walt,” Clumly said.
The afternoon sunlight, breaking through the Venetian blinds to Clumly’s right, made bands across the Mayor’s face.
“Good,” Mullen said. “That’s all that matters, isn’t it.” He released Clumly’s hand, veered away toward the center of the room, head still cocked, and rubbed his hands together. Clumly rolled the cigar between his fingers. Wittaker closed the door softly behind them, shutting out the clutter of his own, much smaller office and the closed door to the council chamber.
“Sit down,” the Mayor said.
Two captain’s chairs, old and nicked, faced the Mayor’s desk, another stood to the right of it. It was an absurd arrangement, calculated to shatter a man’s calm, because the Mayor never sat at his desk when he talked. He roamed about like a restless creature in a narrow cage, fussing with things, adjusting the blinds, studying the photographs beside the window (photographs in which he himself almost invariably appeared, inconspicuous in a second row, while men of more importance opened the racetrack, cut the tape at the western end of the New York State Thruway, or shook hands with one another, holding some solemn trophy on display). He went now to the hotplate on the waist-high cabinet where he made his coffee—a scummy glass Silex into which he spooned out Instant Nescafé.
“I’m not supposed to have to do this,” he said. “Make my own coffee. That man—” He pecked with his nose toward the door Wittaker had closed as he left. “He remembers as much as he wants to remember. You know the problem. Well, good worker. Dependable. Trained sociologist, you know. Don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“Mmm,” Clumly said.
“Cup of coffee, Fred?”
He wanted one badly, and therefore took hold of himself. “Just had one. Thanks all the same.”
“Fine, fine.” He screwed the lid on and put the coffee jar back in the cabinet. Except for a pair of galoshes, there was nothing else in the cabinet, as far as Chief Clumly could see. “Be right back,” Mullen said. He carried the Silex out past Wittaker’s office and into the hall and to the men’s room to get water. He took several minutes to get back. When he had the coffee heating, he came to stand by the bookshelf under the photographs and lounged on his feet, looking at them, bent forward, hands in pockets, his back to Clumly. “Damned hot,” he said. “We’re supposed to get an air-conditioner in here, they passed it more than a year ago. Well, it’s the old story. Corruption.” He turned to wink.
“Mmm,” Clumly said.
The Mayor cleared his throat and stepped to the window to the right of the pictures. (There were two windows, a wide window in the narrow wall behind his desk, a narrow window in the wide wall.) From the window where he stood he could look down on the jail or, scrooching down in his collar, up at the trees, old elms that dwarfed the City Hall.
“Well, we have a mutual problem, Fred. Speaking very frankly, I thought the best thing was to talk with you about it. I know you appreciate my position.”
“Certainly,” Clumly said.
He was moving again, crossing over to the Barcalounger, the coffee table, with its dusty artificial flowers and old copies of Sports Afield and Life and the National Geographic.
“It’s about the budget.” His face grew redder.
Clumly nodded, pursing his lips.
“Now I want to speak very frankly with you, man to man. As I mentioned in my letter of, I think, June fourteenth, your budget don’t make sense, Fred. Now I don’t know what’s happening over there, and I know you have your own troubles, that’s only natural, but this thing has got me, well, to speak frankly, perplexed.”
“What’s the problem?” Clumly said. But he knew. And it was true that the room was insufferably hot. The man’s forever dancing around made it hotter.
“The problem, frankly, is communications. Between our two offices, I mean.” His mouth tightened a little and he tipped his blazing head far to the left and squinted. “The problem is we don’t have no communications. You don’t answer my letters.”
“Ah,” Clumly said.
“Now I think you’ll admit I’m not merely being petty when I say I can’t win no budget for you from that skinflint council if you don’t tell me nothing. Now I ask you, what am I to say to them? ‘How much for the cops?’ they want to know. Imagine how I’ll look if I say to them, ‘Frankly, the Chief hasn’t told me nothing yet.’”
“We did submit a budget,” Clumly said. He felt cross, but he kept it out of his voice.
“Well yes. Sure you did. A botch of a budget, if I may speak very frankly. You want six new motorcycles, you say to me, and what do you put under ‘Justification’? ‘Necessary.’ Now I ask you. And BMW’s you want, when Firster’s been selling us Harleys for years and his brother’s the County Superintendent. And what’s your Justification? ‘ Necessary.’ It won’t do, Fred. It’s a little thing. I don’t begrudge you your fancy foreign-made motorcycles that you got to buy up in Buffalo and the local merchants be damned. But I’ll tell you frankly, it’s them little things that lose elections. Now listen. What am I asking you? Clumly, I’m asking you take a few minutes and write a few words about why a cop needs some motorcycle made off in Germany that’s got no distributor here in Batavia. Just explain it, justify it, that’s all I ask. Just answer your mail.” His face was nearly purple, though his voice was controlled. His fist was closed tight. He relaxed himself, smiling. “You see my side, don’t you, Fred,” he said. I wrote to you on June fourteenth, and again on the second of July, and again last week, if memory serves me right. What the devil you people doing over there with your mail?”
The coffee was boiling, and he went to it and poured two cups and brought one to Clumly whether he wanted it or not. “Sugar?” he said.
“No thanks,” Clumly said.
“Funny joke I heard,” the Mayor said. “It’s a little off-color.” He glanced at the door. “Fellow goes into a cafe and gets coffee and says to the waitress, you know how to sweeten your coffee when you ain’t got no sugar? No, how? she says. Get your sweetheart to put her finger in, he says. She looks shocked and she says—” He began to laugh. “And then put it in the coffee? she says.”
“Mmm,” Clumly said.
“Well,” Mullen said. He straightened up. “Well all right. Yes.” He laughed again, then stopped himself. “Little joke now and then,” Mayor Mullen said. He cocked his head. “Grin and bear it. Walk on the bright side. All work no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
Clumly recalled the cigar in his hand and raised it to his lips, patting his pocket with his left hand for matches.
“Well all right, then,” Mayor Mullen said. “I don’t know what you people are doing over there, but I thought we’d both benefit from a little talk about it. A little talk don’t hurt, I say.” His bright little eyes bored into Clumly’s nose.
“No, that’s right.”
“Of course the motorcycles aren’t all of it. Whole budget’s a problem. It runs the whole gambit. And then there’s other problems. You wrote me last winter about them parking meters, the new ones we put in on the lot behind Felton’s. You said they’re a problem, lot of difficulty one way or another—I forget the details: take a whole different schedule than the other meters, on account of the different size coin-boxes, throws you people off your synchronization, something like that. I asked you, if you saw my letter, should we put in all new meters, all the same kind, would that be justified, or would it be cheaper in the long run to reevaluate the whole parking system, what with urban renewal making havoc of what we got? Well I waited and waited. That was way last winter. So let me speak frankly about this. Because you see I’m on the spot as much as you are. What’s your explanation for all this? You see my problem.”
Clumly sucked in on the cigar and bowed his head a moment. It was not exactly that he had no explanation. It was as though they talked different languages. Where should he begin?
Mayo
r Mullen turned away and put his cup on the bookshelf. He looked at the books, rubbing his jaw and frowning. A strange batch of things—God knew where he’d picked it all up. Success in Business. The Robe. Two volumes of an encyclopedia, a book of business law, a world almanac old as the hills, some leatherbound Reader’s Digest condensations.
“God damn it, Fred, I’m going to level with you,” Mayor Mullen said. He went purple again. “You’re up to your ears and you know it. You know it and I know it and the town knows it. ‘What’s happened to Clumly?’ people say to me. I was over at the Rotary last Wednesday afternoon, and Phil Uphill said, ‘Walt, I want to ask you something? Chief Clumly been sick or something?’ ‘Why no, Phil, not that I know of,’ I says to him. ‘Well, I wondered,’ he says. ‘He acts funny lately. He don’t get the work out,’ Phil says. ‘That fire on Washington, we needed that street blocked off and the police was noplace to be seen. Off chasing cats or something, I don’t know what.’ ‘Well I don’t know, Phil,’ I says. ‘I’ll have a word with him.’ ‘You better, Walt,’ he says, ‘and that’s the truth.’ I says, ‘One thing, sure, they mean to cooperate, you can bet your boots on that,’ I says. ‘But they got troubles all right. Clumly’s working with a lot of new men. Big turnover there,’ I says, ‘and I can’t believe it’s Fred Clumly’s fault. Maybe he sent out one of those new men and the fellow got lost. Ha ha.’ Well listen now, Fred. Phil looks at me and says, ‘Ain’t the way I heard it. I heard Miller sent men and Clumly called ’em back. I heard Clumly said, if the people want to watch the place burn, let ’em watch.’”
Clumly folded his hands and said nothing. His clothes were sticking to him and his belt bit in at his shoulderblade.
“You say that, Fred?” Mayor Mullen asked.
“I may have,” Clumly said. He cleared his throat. “Acting according to your instructions, you know. Time Product Factor. I don’t remember the fire—what day it was—and I don’t know what we were doing right then. But it’s possible something more important came up. I don’t know.”
“More important,” Mullen said. He stood staring.
“Maybe there was a wreck that afternoon, or a fight somewhere, or maybe it was the day we raided—” He checked himself. He couldn’t think of a place they’d raided in a month. He tried to think when it was they’d arrested the Sunlight Man.
Mayor Mullen walked over to the Barcalounger and leaned one hand on the back, pushing it down. After a long moment he said, “You retire next year, that right, Fred?”
“October.”
“Been a long career,” Mullen said. “A lot of people look up to you with a whole lot of respect.”
Clumly waited. The Mayor gazed at the wall where there were no pictures, absolutely blank, the wall to the left of the door as you came in. It was the wall you didn’t see as you entered the room: so that when you came in you saw photographs, a window, chairs, plants on the windowsill and cabinet (dead), but when you went out you saw nothing, a dirty yellow wall as empty as a grave.
The Mayor said, “Fred, you got to put your house in order. This is no time to snap. Talking frankly to you. I think of you as a personal friend, a man I’ve been proud to have on my team. I mean that. Every word.”
Clumly turned his head back to the desk. It gave him a crick in his neck to be constantly twisting around to follow the Mayor with his eyes wherever he roamed. The Mayor came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder, firm.
“I’m pulling for you, Fred. Now you know I am. And every man on the Police Force is pulling for you. Yessir. But if all this keeps up, complaints keep coming, if I have to go before that City Council—” He pointed toward the Chamber—“and I have to tell them Fred Clumly’s not getting the paperwork done, well … I hope it won’t come to that. I believe it won’t come to that.” Suddenly, ferociously, he exclaimed, “More coffee, Fred?”
Clumly started, thinking for an instant of the girl Rosemary with the henna-red hair, and Kozlowski running the toe of his boot back and forth along the crack in the floor. “No no,” he said. “No coffee. I’m fine. Fine.”
“Suit yourself,” Mullen said. Then, solemnly: “I’m glad we had this little talk.”
Clumly nodded, getting up.
“Heard a funny story,” Mayor Mullen said as he showed him to the door. “You’ll die at this one. Lady told her three lovers whichever one brought her the most ping-pong balls could have her hand in marriage.”
“I heard it,” Clumly said.
“Seems the first lover went to the grocery store, and the second lover went to the sporting goods store, and the third lover went to Africa.”
Clumly shaped the end of the half-smoked cigar between his thumb and first finger, his eyes tacked to it.
“Well the first lover that went to the grocery store comes back with a hundred ping-pong balls, and the second lover that went to the sporting goods store comes back with a thousand ping-pong balls, but all the one that comes back from Africa has got is two big brown bloody balls. Are these ping-pong balls? the lady says. Ping-pong balls, he says, I thought you said King Kong’s balls!” The Mayor roared. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Well, Fred, I be seeing you,” he said. “Walk on the bright side. Grin and bear it.”
“Good night,” Clumly said. His heels clicked loudly on the wooden floor of the long empty hallway. Behind him Mayor Mullen went on laughing, filling the corridor with quick, dusky echoes like bats.
When Clumly got back to the station, at quarter-after-six, a paper bag of hamburgers tucked under his arm, a guilty sensation like suffocation inside him, Miller was still at his desk, chin-deep in papers, and Mickey Salvador was working on the police radio speaker with a screwdriver, whistling to himself. Clumly drew off his hat. “Any excitement?” he said.
“Like a tomb,” Miller said. He looked at the paper sack and, after thinking about it, grinned. “You, Chief? Any news?”
“Nothing,” he said.
Miller said, “Got a minute?”
“Come on in.” He opened the door to his office and went in. He sat down, motioned Miller to the chair across from him. “What’s on your mind, son?” The word son rang oddly in his ears. They’d worked just fine together all these years, he and Miller. If he had had a son, Miller was the kind of man he’d want him to be. But he felt slightly worried in Miller’s presence. He would be his replacement, if they forced him to resign. It was even possible that behind his back … But he checked himself. It came to him that there were things missing from the clutter on his desk. Miller had picked them up, then. Miller was helping out again, covering for him. It made him feel sick. Clumly had done the same for Miller, picked up some of his work when he was crowded. There was nothing unusual in that, no reason for Miller to sit there grinning too gently, pitying him. We all work together. You can’t run a Force without mutual respect. Watchdogs. (“Cowdogs, you mean,” Kozlowski had said.) He winced and opened the sack.
Miller stretched out his legs. “It’s nothing much,” he said. “A couple of things. One is this kid Salvador. I tried to talk to him.”
“Mmm?”
He opened his hands. “I don’t know. That is, nothing specific. Makes me nervous. He wants to be loved. Know what I mean?”
Clumly scowled.
“It’s this. He’s easygoing, gets into these long conversations with the bears. Long talk with the Indians this afternoon—kidding around with them, big friend of the family. I let him finish with ’em, and then I laid down the law—to them, not him: No more talk. One word back there in the cells and I said I’d brain the whole crowd of ’em. It’s your buddy the Sunlight Man mainly. Keeps getting at the Injuns, working ’em up. So I tell them to stow it. New policy. Pretty soon I hear them back there chattering again and I go back and guess who’s right up to his nose in it. Salvador.”
Clumly nodded and bit into the first of the hamburgers. He was feeling guilty now about not having offered Miller one. It wasn’t too late even now, but he didn’t. “He’ll get slugged for
his trouble. After they’ve knocked him on his can once, he’ll see reason.”
“Yeah. Still—”
“You’re as jumpy as I am,” Clumly said. He smiled wryly.
Miller looked at the front of Clumly’s desk. “It’s true,” he said. “Tired. Maybe I should go home and knock up the old lady or beat the dog or something.” He smiled, and now he relaxed for a moment, but soon his eyes became thoughtful. “There’s something in the air, you know it? It’s like a smell.” He tipped his head back to look at the ceiling, thinking. “You want to know the truth? I keep hearing things. Somebody digging a tunnel right under us, or some kind of prehistoric monster waking up, down under the ground, scratching to get out.”
“You need a good stiff whiskey.”
“You telling me?”
Clumly hunted up his pencil and wrote himself a note about Salvador. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.
“Yeah, good.” He started to get up.
“There was something else too?”
“I guess so.” He mused, then stood up, pushed his fists down into his pockets, and leaned toward Clumly. “I know how to nail our thief—Walter Boyle.” He drew his right hand from his pocket and snapped his fingers.
“How?” He happened to break wind as he spoke, but not noticeably.
Miller pivoted away and went to the window. The sky was red now. “You ever hear of a paragnost, Chief?” When Clumly said nothing, he went on, “It’s a guy who knows things it’s impossible to know. The future, the past, what people around him are thinking.”
“A mind reader.”
He nodded. “Sort of. Anyhow, we got one right in our hands. Your Sunlight Man may be a lot of things, and some things he may not be, but one thing he is for sure is one of them. Listen.” He turned suddenly and crossed to the file to the right of Clumly’s desk and opened the drawer. He shuffled through the confusion of papers that lay flat in the drawer and pounced on one of the tapes. He cocked his eyebrow, reading the label on the tape, then drew the tape out and threaded it through the machine. “This is from day before yesterday,” he said. He played with the buttons, running the peeping, babbling tape through the spools until he found the place he wanted. “There,” he said. “Listen.” They bent over the machine.