CLUMLY: Nevertheless, we have two murders …
SUNLIGHT: By panic, yes.
CLUMLY: What has this to do—
SUNLIGHT: Very good! I judged you right.
CLUMLY: This is a democracy. Bunch of people get together and they decide how they want things, and they pass a law and they have ’em that way till they’re sick of it, and then they pass some other law—
SUNLIGHT: But that’s insane.
CLUMLY: Well—
SUNLIGHT: Have you really missed the point? Listen! How can you act for what you don’t believe in? And don’t tell me “That’s democracy.” Don’t take me for a fool. It I accepted democracy I’d put up with the majority opinion until I could muster the voting power to change it. But I don’t! Who in his right mind does? Take a look at the world! Are the demonstrators accepting majority opinion? Are they setting up an alternative? A demonstrator is a Hell’s Angel without brains. Or put it this way. You say accept majority opinion, work lawfully to change it. Suppose the majority favors anarchism, or suppose the majority goes Nazi. Will you quietly pass pamphlets soberly arguing for a change of opinion? It comes to this: I say the world you support is foul, and, personally, I opt out. I don’t say I can beat you. I’m not interested in beating you. I say only that the will of the gods is with me. Your side will win, eventually. You’ve got the votes. But meanwhile I will kill you. The gods will rumble on, indifferent to your theories, and your house will in due time fall around your ears.
CLUMLY: You’ve got no feeling. You don’t care about people.
SUNLIGHT: Ha! Madness! I care about every single case. You care about nothing but the average. I love justice, you love law. I’m Babylonian, and you, you’re one of the Jews. I can’t cover every single case, I have no concern about covering cases, so I cover by whim whatever cases fall into my lap—the Indian boy, the Negro thief, for instance—and I leave the rest to process. But you, you cover all the cases—by blanketing them, by blurring all human distinctions.
CLUMLY: That’s unfair. We’re closer than you think! (Reconsidering:) That is—
SUNLIGHT: Yes, true. I’ve said so all along. You are my friend. Yet my enemy. “The greatest good for the greatest number.” In Germany ten people out of a hundred were Jews. Suppose it were forty, or forty-nine! Still they’d be the smaller number. I say your rule’s insane. Can you really think number has anything whatever to do with truth?
CLUMLY: I can’t understand you. You seem such a moral person, and yet—
SUNLIGHT: I make murder possible. Yes! I watch a man I have talked with shot down, and afterward I don’t show a sign of remorse. Not a sign! Am I twitching? wringing my hands? I watch an old woman shot dead for merely entering a room, and I don’t even say to you “excuse me.” It baffles you.
CLUMLY (stubbornly): You’re insane.
SUNLIGHT: Say it with conviction.
CLUMLY: You’re insane!
SUNLIGHT: Exactly. Just the same, they’re puzzling, aren’t they, those man-sized gods of wood and stone. Who eat and drink and sleep and hunt, who show no visible sign that they are gods and who are, for all that, certainly gods.
CLUMLY: That may be. I don’t know about such things. It seems all muddled. But I’ll tell you this. Give yourself up, bring the Indian back—
SUNLIGHT: Impossible. The request is absurd!
CLUMLY: You’re a lunatic.
SUNLIGHT: You are a bore.
(Sound of an explosion.)
4
The pulpit seemed to blow up in the Sunlight Man’s hands. When the smoke cleared, he was gone. There seemed no question of his having ducked to right or left, or having sunk through the floor. The oldest trick in the world, and one of the simplest, you may say if you know. Nevertheless, Fred Clumly blinked, wide awake now, sick with futility. He got up at last, reaching into his coat absently to turn off the tape recorder, and stepped out into the aisle like a man publicly chastised. He stood squinting for a long time, rubbing his jaw, and then at last he went up the carpeted steps onto the dais. His skin still crawled. The smoke had left a scent that mingled now with the Sunlight Man’s stench, a faint pungency like that left where a cherry bomb has gone off. Aside from that, nothing. Not a trace. Beyond the stained-glass windows the sky was gathering the first gray of dawn. His ears were still ringing with the sound of the explosion. He touched the pulpit. Black dust came off on his fingers. The man was still here, it came to him—crouched somewhere close by—and he wanted to speak to him, to show he was not fooled. “Next time, then,” he thought. He would see that he was not sleepy next time. He would not be so easy to fool. On the pulpit, where the Bible should be, he found a box elaborately wrapped in a small iron chain. He listened. It did not seem a bomb.
He walked down the aisle toward the vestibule, then over to the door and out onto the street, the queer, chained box under his arm. It was cold out, but still summery. It would be hot again tomorrow. There was no one on the street, not a car in sight except one, parked halfway down the block, beyond the Lutheran church. He walked to his own car, got in, started it. It was almost five in the morning when he got home. He lay down on the couch, instead of going up to his bed, and fell asleep at once. He dreamed of being buried alive and woke up freezing cold and furious. It was seven now. Esther was fixing his breakfast in the kitchen. He gritted his teeth and went slowly, painfully upstairs and went to bed. Half-asleep he realized what it was that the box contained. It would be—he clenched his fists—his stolen pistol.
VIII
The Kleppmann
File
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
—II Timothy 3:1
1
Will Hodge Jr sat with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, fists squared on the steering wheel, shoulders and belly monumental, trousers drawn up a trifle to preserve the press, revealing lean bare shins as white as milk. He drove with authority and grace, head back, jaw thrown forward: an Assyrian king. He surveyed the city as though it belonged to him and he to it. The tall buildings threw angular shadows over the pavement, dignified and impersonal, as was fitting. He was home. During the absurd session at the police station, he’d been tormented by confused emotions, among them a momentary sense, unusual with him, that there was deep meaning in all of this. There was no specific cause behind this feeling he had, as far as he could tell—not his father’s storming past him without a word as he and Luke stood waiting for their turn with the Police Chief, not Clumly’s ridiculous accusations (not even Clumly took them seriously: a stall, an evasion, an explosion of senseless energy in what seemed for the moment a senseless universe), not the feeling of accomplishment Will Jr had had as he exploded Clumly’s ludicrous theories one by one, not Luke’s shame and indignation, not even the smell of the dead policeman’s blood. Perhaps simply this: sitting in Clumly’s office, soberly reasoning with a half-senile country cop on a case that would never have come up in a city like Buffalo, he had felt a burst of pleasure in his having escaped all that, having fled that cave of miscalculation and inevitable embarrassment that had once been his prison—the discomfiture summed up for him in his partnership with a small-town, old-fashioned attorney, Will Hodge Sr. It was almost frightening, when you thought about it. His father had been dealing with tax cases all his life and yet, compared to a first-rate tax man, knew nothing: his client was a helpless victim, and neither the client nor the lawyer was so much as aware of it. Will Jr knew it for a fact. He himself, as attorney for a small corporation—Flemming Construction, of North Tonawanda—had automatically been made an official of the company, a position in fact no more meaningful than, say, Head Custodian, but an “official,” nevertheless. So that when the Government had slapped a twenty-thousand-dollar fine on all responsible officials for the company’s failure to pay its taxes, Will Jr, though he had known nothing about the evasion of payment, had been held to be liable, like the others. Some of them, too, had known nothing about the thing. “There
’s nothing you can do,” his father had said; “buy them off. Pay them ten thousand.” And he would have done it except that at lunch with Lou Solomon he had gotten, between two puffs from Solomon’s leather-covered pipe, a specialist’s opinion. “Show cause why you shouldn’t be considered a ‘responsible official.’ Stop by after lunch and I’ll show you what to do.” Obvious, and yet even he himself had missed it. It was a grand old ideal, the Jack-of-all-trades attorney, but like all grand old ideals, it didn’t work. He’d been amazed when his father had told him, long ago, that he couldn’t afford to run his office in Batavia if he didn’t get seven dollars an hour for every case. Here in Buffalo, with Hawley, Hawley Poacher, it was forty-five an hour. But the difference was important. Here they didn’t make mistakes, or anyway not obvious mistakes. Tax specialists, litigation specialists, labor specialists, merger specialists, the works. A murderous overhead—ten dollars a foot for office space, someone had said—and murderous hours, if you were the type who cared about the client’s pocketbook, but it was worth it, you could hold up your head.
Sitting in that small-town police station with that small-town chief, smelling the pungency of his small-town green cigar and hearing the twang of small-town reporters in the hallway—and more than that, yes: sitting in that green-treed town he’d more or less grown up in and loved the way he loved his own arms and legs—he had felt released: he had grown up, had finally broken free of the myth, the old hunger for the ancient south (or whatever the line was)—broken out of Eden, anyhow, released his childish clutch on the impossible: it was a transition place, an evolutionary stage he and his kind had broken out of for the world coming in: the city.
He drove to the office instead of home, moved his station wagon in and out of the Sunday afternoon traffic with confidence as ample as his belly, jaw thrown forward with comfortable superiority, and he looked up with satisfaction at the towering buildings of darkening concrete and brick, their upper reaches bright where the falling sunlight struck, their lower windows full, like abstracted eyes, with the reflected glory of neon and blue-gray smoke and the shining roofs of passing cars. He slowed with majestic benevolence for a brown dog wandering out in the street; stopped for the light when it was only yellow; and passing the old Methodist church he felt a warmth rushing up through his heart as though he were himself responsible for the lighted windows, the small pleasant crowd of idlers on the concrete steps preparing for the evening service.
There was a parking space waiting. There always was on a Sunday evening. He pulled his station wagon into it, got out and locked the doors. He bought a Buffalo Evening News with the air of a patron of the arts, though Louise would have a copy at the house already, and he unfolded it with the detached curiosity of a stockbroker as he let himself into the M&T lobby. He signed in, gave his usual polite greeting to the attendant-and-elevator-boy, and rode to the fourteenth floor. The old man—the “boy”—stared at the buttons Will Jr might have pushed for himself if things were done that way in the M&T Building, and Will Jr bowed his head and pretended to read. The old man had gray hair, huge spots on his neck, long spotted ears. One of the wrinkled hands folded behind him was missing two fingers. “Poor old Sam,” Will Jr thought, though he was unsure of the name, and shook his head. The elevator hung in space a moment, then settled level with the fourteenth floor, and when the door opened Will Jr stepped out. He observed that his shoes still shone like mirrors. He let himself into Hawley, Hawley & Poacher, allowed the door to click shut behind him, and walked to the seventh door on the left, his office, and turned on the lights. He phoned his wife.
“You’ll be late then?” she said. Her tone was an accusation.
“Something’s come up,” he said. “I’ll hurry, love. I give you my solemn assurance.” He smiled into the phone.
“Ok,” she said. After a moment: “Can you say hello to Danny?”
Will Jr wiped the sweat from his upper lip and smiled again. “Sure thing,” he said, “put him on.”
Then his son’s voice. “Hi.”
“Hoddy do-dee?” Will Jr said. A silence. “You doing everything your mommy tells you, honey?”
After a long silence the boy said, “Hi.”
The sweat was there again. Nevertheless he said jovially, “You and Sister been having lots of fun?” Then: “Is Mommy still there, honey?”
Again the boy said, “Hi.”
He said, “Can I talk to your mommy again, Danny?”
He heard the child say, forming the words carefully, “He wants to talk to you,” and then Louise was on again, and then Maddie, his six-year-old daughter. She said, “Hi, Daddy.” He could see her, standing with her blond head tipped, both hands on the telephone receiver.
“Hi!” he said.
“Bowser got out without his muzzle, Daddy,” she said.
Will scowled. “Did Mommy get him back?”
“We had to chase him, and we were by the store and we got some Spook.”
“How nice!” he said.
“Danny spilled his,” she said. “He cried and cried.”
“I should think so,” he said warmly. “That must have been something!” He laughed. Then: “Well, bye-bye, honey. I’ll see you soon.”
“I miss you, Daddy,” she said.
“I miss you too, honey,” he said. “Give Mommy a big Kiss for me. Bye-bye.”
He heard her hang up.
He replaced the receiver and leaned back in his padded swivel chair and covered his eyes with one hand. He was back in Buffalo, back in the old grind. He reached in his coat-pocket for the roll of Tums. C’est la vie, he thought. He sat forward. As he was reaching for the new collection form he’d been working on, he thought again of the little white stones Clumly had shown him, and his hand paused in mid-air. For the twentieth time, it seemed to him, the memory had almost come, but again it sank back and he could not catch what it was. He concentrated on the image that seemed to have released it, the hairless Chief with the green cigar in one hand, the stones in the other, his small eyes glittering. “What are these stones, Will? You seen them before?” Will had almost told him. It had been right on the tip of his tongue and perhaps if he had not pushed himself, if he’d been able to speak without thinking, it would have come out. But then the memory or half-memory was gone, and he was baffled. “I don’t know,” he had said. “They remind me of something, but—” Clumly was watching him, and even Clumly, no doubt, could see he was telling the truth. “If you remember, call me,” Clumly said. There was a hellish intensity in Clumly’s look. “I’ll do that,” Will said. “I’ll call,” and went on trying to remember. He drew the collection form toward him and fished in his inside coat-pocket for his pen. On the desk just beside the form lay a thick manilla folder with the neatly typed heading, Kleppmann. Organs inside his belly closed around the name and, once again, he felt sweat on his lip.
The Tums never helped, really, and he knew he was deluding himself in pretending to imagine they gave temporary relief, but he had no choice, he was a man mercilessly driven, as it seemed to him, both from without and from within. Day after day, whether he was at home or off on one of his innumerable trips, he worked lunatic hours, often from eight in the morning until midnight, and when he asked himself why—there were many in the firm who felt no such compulsions—he could find no adequate reason, or, rather, found too many.
He had not meant to get into legal collection: all the force of his past, all the force of his personal kindness, stood against the paltry business of debtor chasing. He had dreamed of going into politics, at first, which was almost the whole reason he had gone in with his father when he passed his Bar exams. Genesee County was small enough that a man could get a toe-hold, and the family was known there, known both personally and politically. And so Will Jr had gone to Batavia full of joy, in the rich sunlight of his idealism and personal ambition.
That was done with, shot down not by any campaign of his own but by what he’d learned campaigning for his father.
 
; They’d bought a house in the country, fifteen miles from the office. It was a place two hundred and fifty years old, made of fieldstone, with beautiful chimneys at each end and a view of, you would have said, Paradise. It had a windmill and barns and a creek running through, and there were sugar maples on the wide, sloping lawn. The barns, made of native oak, were in good repair. They could live there all their lives, if they wanted. They could return to it between sessions at Albany or—who knew?—maybe Washington someday, just as Will Jr’s grandfather had returned year after year to Stony Hill. It was June when he took Louise there. He stood with Madeline on his shoulders—Danny was not yet born at the time—and he held Louise’s hand tightly in his own.
“It’s beautiful, Willie,” she said, eyes bright as the morning.
They had the place fixed up by fall; his father’s campaign for County Judge was winding up. But September and October are the saddening of the year in Western New York. In the morning the air snaps and there’s a smell of winter; at noon it warms to a kind of false hope—gray corn in the fields, gray expanses of frost-bitten grass. Wasps stir in the eaves, preparing for their sleep until spring. The shaggy, toothless old people who come out from the County Farm every spring to work as hired men or to beg put on their sweaters and overcoats and put their belongings in grocery bags with string handles and begin their trudge along the high-crowned gray dirt roads, going in. The evening slides in cold, and birds fly south. The Indians leave too, old men and boys who come out for the summer to do handywork or man the gypsum quarries, tanneries, trucking lines, construction jobs; they shrink back into the Reservation.
Will Jr, full of nervous energy and troubled thought, went calling for his father, wrote speeches for him, attended country banquets. No one in Genesee County had ever worked harder for public office, but the omens were bad. The blunt truth was that Will Sr was not good at it. Loving his father, loving his virtues and defects alike, he had not until now seen his father with the eyes of an outsider. Now he had to. The truth was that Will Hodge Sr did not have an open, engaging smile. When the Congressman smiled, in the old days, the room grew brighter, the very crops improved: his huge white teeth shone like enormous square pearls, and even a man who opposed him was softened. Uncle Ben had that smile, and Uncle Tag had had it—a smile as easy and natural and gentle as a child’s. They could smile at themselves as quickly as at anything else, and yet, however sunny their dispositions, their minds raced smoothly on, ingenious and just. They were invulnerable. They made you think of airline pilots or acrobats or millionaires. You felt safe. But Will Hodge Sir’s smile was rueful. It was as if he saw impossibilities at every turn. He would do his best to administer justice wisely, he promised, and there was no doubt whatever that he told the truth—yet you felt uneasy. And there were other troubles, more palpable. When Will Jr’s Uncle Taggert had fled, Will Sr had soberly covered the losses, had worked himself hard paying the debts a dollar on the dollar. Nonetheless, he was tainted by the event. There were even insinuations that Will Sr had cut corners in his own right. There was no question, if one saw the case with the eyes of God, that Will Hodge Sr was a better man than his opponent. But the case would not be judged by the eyes of God.