One-Shot | Page 3

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," I said. "But I've still got copies and I'll see to it that you get one, this time. Right now I need another favor--something right up your alley."
"CIA business?"
"Yes. I didn't know you knew I was with CIA."
Braun chuckled. "I still know a thing or two," he said. "What's the angle?"
"That I can't tell you over the phone. But it's the biggest gamble there ever