One-Shot | Page 3

Abner Longmans Braun,
most of which was fifteen years cold.
There'd been a time when I'd known Braun, briefly and to no profit to
either of us. As an undergraduate majoring in social sciences, I'd taken
on a term paper on the old International Longshoreman's Association, a
racket-ridden union now formally extinct--although anyone who knew

the signs could still pick up some traces on the docks. In those days,
Braun had been the business manager of an insurance firm, the sole
visible function of which had been to write policies for the ILA and its
individual dock-wallopers. For some reason, he had been amused by
the brash youngster who'd barged in on him and demanded the
lowdown, and had shown me considerable lengths of ropes not
normally in view of the public--nothing incriminating, but enough to
give me a better insight into how the union operated than I had had any
right to expect--or even suspect.
Hence I was surprised to hear somebody on the docks remark that
Braun was in the city over the week end. It would never have occurred
to me that he still interested himself in the waterfront, for he'd gone
respectable with a vengeance. He was still a professional gambler, and
according to what he had told the Congressional Investigating
Committee last year, took in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year at it,
but his gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or
shady insurance deals. Nowadays what he did was called
investment--mostly in real estate; realtors knew him well as the man
who had almost bought the Empire State Building. (The almost in the
equation stands for the moment when the shoestring broke.)
Joan had been following his career, too, not because she had ever met
him, but because for her he was a type study in the evolution of what
she called "the extra-legal ego." "With personalities like that,
respectability is a disease," she told me. "There's always an
almost-open conflict between the desire to be powerful and the desire
to be accepted; your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile, but people
like Braun are damned with a conscience, and sooner or later they crack
trying to appease it."
"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin bearing," I said. "Braun's ten-point
steel all the way through."
"Don't you believe it. The symptoms are showing all over him. Now
he's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring beginning actresses, joining
playwrights' groups--he's the only member of Buskin and Brush who's
never written a play, acted in one, or so much as pulled the rope to raise

the curtain."
"That's investment," I said. "That's his business."
"Peter, you're only looking at the surface. His real investments almost
never fail. But the plays he backs always do. They have to; he's sinking
money in them to appease his conscience, and if they were to succeed it
would double his guilt instead of salving it. It's the same way with the
young actresses. He's not sexually interested in them--his type never is,
because living a rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort
towards respectability. He's backing them to 'pay his debt to society'--in
other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail."
"It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute."
"Of course it isn't," Joan had said. "The next thing he'll do is go in for
direct public service--giving money to hospitals or something like that.
You watch."
She had been right; within the year, Braun had announced the founding
of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been
born--the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more
Abner Longmans Brauns born down here. It depressed me to see it
happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics
as a fighting liberal--a New Dealer twenty years too late. Since I'm
mildly liberal myself when I'm off duty, I hated to think what Braun's
career might tell me about my own motives, if I'd let it.
* * * * *
All of which had nothing to do with why I was prowling around the
Ludmilla--or did it? I kept remembering Anderton's challenge: "You
can't take such a gamble. There are eight and a half million lives riding
on it--" That put it up into Braun's normal operating area, all right. The
connection was still hazy, but on the grounds that any link might be
useful, I phoned him.
He remembered me instantly; like most uneducated, power-driven men,

he had a memory as good as any machine's.
"You never did send me that paper you was going to write," he said.
His voice seemed absolutely unchanged, although he was in his
seventies now. "You promised you would."
"Kids don't keep their promises as well as they should,"