All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [256]
But the question kept coming back. Even when I wasn’t thinking of it, I would suddenly be aware of its gnawing like a mouse’s tooth stitching away inside the wainscoting of my mind.
For a while I didn’t see how I could ask Anne. I couldn’t ever say anything to her about what had happened. We would sit forever in our conspiracy of silence, forever bound together in that conspiracy by our awareness of our earlier, unwitting conspiracy to commit Adam Stanton and Willie Stark to each other and to their death. (If we should ever break the conspiracy of silence we might have to face the fact of that other conspiracy and have to look down and see the blood on our hands.) So I said nothing.
Until the day when I had to say it.
I said, “Anne, I’m going to ask you a question. About–about–it. Then I’ll never say another word about it to you unless you speak up first.”
She looked at me without answering. But I could see in her eyes the recoil of fear and pain, and then the stubborn mustering of what forces she had.
So I plunged on, “You told me–that day when I came to your apartment–that somebody had telephoned Adam–had told him–had told him about–”
“About me,” she said, finishing the sentence on which I had, for the moment, wvered. She hadn’t waited for the impact. With whatever force she had she was meeting it head-on.
I nodded.
“Well?” she queried.
“Did he say who had telephoned him?”
She thought a minute. You could see her, even as she sat there, lifting the sheet off that moment when Adam had burst in on her, like somebody lifting the sheet off the face of a corpse on a marble slab in a morgue and peering into the face.
Then she shook her head. “No,” she said, “he didn’t say–” she hesitated–“except that it was a man. I’m sure he said man.”
So we resumed our conspiracy of silence, while the seesaw wavered and swayed beneath us and the black clawed up at us and we clung on.
I left the Landing next day.
I got to town in the late afternoon, and put in a call to Sadie Burke’s apartment. There was no answer. So I tried the Capitol, on the off chance that she would be there, but there was no answer on her extension. Off and on during the evening I tried her apartment number, but with no luck. I didn’t go around the Capitol to see her in the morning. I didn’t want to see the gang who would be there. I didn’t ever want to see them again.
So I telephoned again. Her extension didn’t answer. So I asked the switchboard to find out if possible where she was. After two or three minutes the voice said, “She is not here. She is ill. Will that be all, please?” Then before I could put my thought in order, I heard the click of being cut off.
I rang again
I rang again.
“This is Jack Burden,” I said, “and I’d like to–”
“Oh–Mr. Burden–” the switchboard said noncommittally, or perhaps in question.
There had been a time and it hadn’t been very long back when the name Jack Burden got something done around that joint. But that voice, the tone of that voice, told me that the name Jack Burden didn’t mean a damned thing but a waste of breath around there any more.
For a second I was sore as hell. Then I remembered that things had changed.
Things had changed out there. When things change in a place like that, things change fast and all the way down, and the voice at the switchboard gets another tone when it speaks your name. I remembered how much things had changed. Then I wasn’t sore any more, for I didn’t give a damn.
But I said sweetly, “I wonder if you can tell me how to get in touch with Miss Burke. I’d sure appreciate it.”
Then I waited a couple of minutes for her to try to find out.
“Miss Burke is at the Millett Sanatorium,” the voice then said.