“It was not until February 14th that the Government declared a state of unlimited emergency. The precipitating incident was the aerial bombardment and destruction of B Company, 27th Armored Regiment, on Fort George Hill in New York City. Local Syndic leaders had occupied and fortified George Washington High School, with the enthusiastic co-operation of students, faculty and neighborhood. Chief among them was Thomas ‘Numbers’ Cleveland, displaying the same coolness and organizational genius which had brought him to pre-eminence in the metropolitan policy-wheel organization by his thirty-fifth year.
“At 5:15 A.M. the first battalion of the 27th Armored took up positions in the area as follows: A Company at 190th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, with the mission of preventing reinforcement of the school from the I.R.T. subway station there; Companies B, C, and D hill down from the school on the slope of Fort George Hill poised for an attack. At 5:25 the sixteen Patton tanks of B Company revved up and moved on the school, C and D Companies remaining in reserve. The plan was for the tanks of B Company to surround the school on three sides—the fourth is a precipice—and open fire if a telephone parley with Cleveland did not result in an unconditional surrender. There was no surrender and the tanks attacked.
“Cleveland’s observation post was in the tower room of the school. Seeing the radio mast of the lead tank top the rise of the hill, he snapped out a telephone order to contact pilots waiting for the word at a Syndic field floating outside the seven mile limit. The pilots, trained to split-second precision in their years of public service, were airborn by 5:26, but this time their cargo was not liquor, cigarettes or luggage. In three minutes, they were whipping rocket bombs into the tanks of Company B; Cleveland’s runners charged the company command post; the trial by fire had begun.
“Before it ended North America was to see deeds as gallant and strategy as inspired as any in the history of war: Cleveland’s historic announcement—’It’s a great day for the race!’—his death at the head of his runners in a charge on the Fort Totten garrison, the firm hand of Amadeo Falcaro taking up the scattered reins of leadership, parley, peace, betrayal and execution of hostages, the Treaty of Las Vegas and a united Mob-Syndic front against Government, O’Toole’s betrayal of the Continental Press wire room and the bloody battle to recapture that crucial nerve center, the decisive march on Baltimore....”
B. Arrowsmith Hynde,
The Syndic—a Short History.
“No accurate history of the future has ever been written—a fact which I think disposes of history’s claim to rank as a science. Astronomers quail at the three-body problem and throw up their hands in surrender before the four-body problem. Any given moment in history is a problem of at least two billion bodies. Attempts at orderly abstraction of manipulable symbols from the realities of history seem to me doomed from the start. I can juggle mean rain-falls, car-loading curves, birth-rates and patent applications, but I cannot for the life of me fit the recurring facial carbuncles of Karl Marx into my manipulations—not even, though we know, well after the fact, that agonizing staphylococcus aureus infections behind that famous beard helped shape twentieth-century totalitarianism. In pathology alone the list could be prolonged indefinitely: Julius Caesar’s epilepsy, Napoleon’s gastritis, Wilson’s paralysis, Grant’s alcoholism, Wilhelm II’s withered arm, Catherine’s nymphomania, George III’s paresis, Edison’s deafness, Euler’s blindness, Burke’s stammer, and so on. Is there anybody silly enough to maintain that the world today would be what it is if Marx, Caesar, Napoleon, Wilson, Grant, Wilhelm, Catherine, George, Edison, Euler and Burke—to take only these eleven—were anything but what they were? Yet that is the assumption behind theories of history which exclude the carbuncles of Marx from their referents—that is to say, every theory of history with which I am familiar....
“Am I then saying that history, past and future, is unknowable; that we must blunder ahead in the dark without planning because no plan can possibly be accurate in prediction and useful in application? I am not. I am expressing my distaste for holders of extreme positions, for possessors of eternal truths, for keepers of the flame. Keepers of the flame have no trouble with the questions of ends and means which plague the rest of us. They are quite certain that their ends are good and that therefore choice of means is a trivial matter. The rest of us, far from certain that we have a general solution of the two-billion body problem that is history, are much more likely to ponder on our means....”
F. W. Taylor,
Organization, Symbolism and Morale
CHARLES ORSINO WAS LEARNING THE business from the ground up—even though “up” would never be very high. He had in his veins only a drop or two of Falcaro blood: enough so that room had to be made for him; not enough for it to be a great dearth of room. Counting heavily on the good will of F. W. Taylor, who had taken a fancy to him when he lost his parents in the Brookhaven Reactor explosion of ‘83, he might rise to a rather responsible position in Alky, Horsewire, Callgirl, recruitment and Retirement or whatever line he showed an aptitude for. But at 22 one spring day, he was merely serving a tour of duty as bagman attached to the 101st New York Police Precinct. A junior member of the Syndic customarily handled that job; you couldn’t trust the cops not to squeeze their customers and pocket the difference.
He walked absently through the not-unpleasant routine of the shakedown. His mind was on his early-morning practice session of polo, in which he had almost disgraced himself.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Orsino; a pleasure to see you again. Would you like a cold glass of beer while I get the loot?”
“No, but thanks very much, Mr. Lefko—I’m in training, you know. Wish I could take you up on it. Seven phones, isn’t it, at ten dollars a phone?”
“That’s right, Mr. Orsino, and I’ll be with you as soon as I lay off the seventh at Hialeah; all the ladies went for a plater named Hearthmouse because they thought the name was cute and left me with a dutch book. I won’t be a minute.”
Lefko scuttled to a phone and dickered with another bookie somewhere while Charles absently studied the crowd of chattering, laughing horseplayers. ("Mister Orsino, did you come out to make a monkey of yourself and waste my time? Confound it, sir, you have just fifty round to a chukker and you must make them count!” He grinned unhappily. Old Gilby, the pro, could be abrasive when a bone-head play disfigured the game he loved. Charles had been sure Benny Grashkin’s jeep would conk out in a minute—it had been sputtering badly enough—and that he would have had a dirt-cheap scoring shot while Benny changed mounts. But Gilby blew the whistle and wasn’t interested in your fine-spun logic. “Confound it, sir, when will you young rufflers learn that you must crawl before you walk? Now let me see a team rush for the goal—and I mean team, Mr. Orsino!")
“Here we are, Mr. Orsino, and just in time. There goes the seventh.”
Charles shook hands and left amid screams of “Hearthmouse! Hearthmouse!” from the lady bettors watching the screen.
High up in the Syndic Building, F. W. Taylor—Uncle Frank to Charles—was giving a terrific tongue-lashing to a big, stooped old man. Thornberry, president of the Chase National Bank, had pulled a butch and F. W. Taylor was blazing mad about it.
He snarled: “One more like this, Thornberry, and you are out on your padded can. When a respectable member of the Syndic chooses to come to you for a line of credit, you will in the future give it without any tom-fool quibbling about security. You bankers seem to think this is the middle ages and that your bits of paper still have their old black magic.
“Disabuse yourself of the notion. Nobody except you believes in it. The Inexorable Laws of Economics are as dead as Dagon and Ishtar, and for the same reason. No more worshippers. You bankers can’t shove anybody around any more. You’re just a convenience, like the non-playing banker in a card game.
“What’s real now is the Syndic. What’s real about the Syndic is its own morale and the public’s faith in it. Is that clear?”
Thornberry brokenly mumbled something about supply and demand.
Taylor sneered. “Supply and demand. Urim and Thummim. Show me a supply, Thornberry, show me a—oh, hell. I haven’t time to waste re-educating you. Remember what I told you and don’t argue. Unlimited credit to Syndic members. If they overdo it, we’ll rectify the situation. Now, get out.” And Thornberry did, with senile tears in his eyes.
At Mother Maginnis’ Ould Sod Pub, Mother Maginnis pulled a long face when Charles Orsino came in. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Orsino, but I’m afraid this week it’ll be no pleasure for you to see me.”
She was always roundabout. “Why, what do you mean, Mrs. M.? I’m always happy to say hello to a customer.”
“It’s the business, Mr. Orsino. It’s the business. You’ll pardon me if I say that I can’t see how to spare twenty-five dollars from the till, not if my life depended on it. I can go to fifteen, but so help me—”
Charles looked grave—graver than he felt. It happened every day. “You realize, Mrs. Maginnis, that you’re letting the Syndic down. What would the people in Syndic Territory do for protection if everybody took your attitude?”
She looked sly. “I was thinking, Mr. Orsino, that a young man like you must have a way with the girls—” By a mighty unsubtle maneuver, Mrs. Maginnis’ daughter emerged from the back room at that point and began demurely mopping the bar. “And,” she continued, “sure, any young lady would consider it an honor to spend the evening with a young gentleman from the Syndic—”
“Perhaps,” Charles said, rapidly thinking it over. He would infinitely rather spend the evening with a girl than at a Shakespeare revival as he had planned, but there were drawbacks. In the first place, it would be bribery. In the second place, he might fall for the girl and wake up with Mrs. Maginnis for his mother-in-law—a fate too nauseating to contemplate for more than a moment. In the third place, he had already bought the tickets for himself and bodyguard.
“About the shakedown,” he said decisively. “Call it fifteen this week. If you’re still doing badly next week, I’ll have to ask for a look at your books—to see whether a regular reduction is in order.”
She got the hint, and colored. Putting down fifteen dollars, she said: “Sure, that won’t be necessary. I’m expecting business to take a turn for the better. It’s sure to pick up.”
“Good, then.” To show there were no hard feelings, he stayed for a moment to ask: “How are your husbands?”
“So-so. Alfie’s on the road this week and Dinnie’s got the rheumatism again but he can tend bar late, when it’s slow.”
“Tell him to drop around to the Medical Center and mention my name, Mrs. Maginnis. Maybe they can do something for him.”
She glowed with thanks and he left.
It was pleasant to be able to do things for nice people; it was pleasant to stroll along the sunny street acknowledging tipped hats and friendly words. (That team rush for the goal had been a sorry mess, but not his fault—quite. Vladek had loosed a premature burst from his fifty caliber at the ball, and sent it hurling off to the right; they had braked and backed with much grinding of gears to form V again behind it, when Gilby blew the whistle again.)
A nervous youngster in the National Press Service New York drop was facing his first crisis on the job. Trouble lights had flashed simultaneously on the Kansas City-New York, Hialeah-New York and Boston-New York trunks. He stood, paralyzed.
His supervisor took it in in a flash and banged open the circuit to Service. To the genial face that appeared on the screen, he snapped: “Trace Hialeah, Boston and Kansas City—in that order, Micky.”
Micky said: “Okay, pal,” and vanished.
The supervisor turned to the youngster. “Didn’t know what to do?” he asked genially. “Don’t let it worry you. Next time you’ll know. You noticed the order of priority?”
“Yes,” the boy gulped.
“It wasn’t an accident that I gave it to him that way. First, Hialeah because it was the most important. We get the bulk of our revenue from serving the horse rooms—in fact, I understand we started as a horse wire exclusively. Naturally the horse-room customers pay for it in the long run, but they pay without pain. Nobody’s forcing them to improve the breed, right?
“Second, Boston-New York trunk. That’s common-carrier while the Fair Grounds isn’t running up there. We don’t make any profit on common-carrier service, the rates are too low, but we owe it to the public that supports us.
“Third, Kansas City-New York. That’s common carrier too, but with one terminal in Mob Territory. No reason why we should knock ourselves out for Regan and his boys, but after the other two are traced and closed, we’ll get around to them. Think you got it straight now?”
“Yes,” the youngster said.
“Good. Just take it easy.”
THE SUPERVISOR MOVED AWAY TO do a job of billing that didn’t need immediate doing; he wanted to avoid the very appearance of nagging the boy. He wondered too, if he’d really put it over, and decided he hadn’t. Who could, after all. It took years on the wires to get the feel. Slowly your motivation changed. You started by wanting to make a place for yourself and earn some dough. After years you realized, not with a blinding flash, but gradually, that you were working for quite another reason. Nice gang here that treats you right. Don’t let the Syndic down. The customers pay for their fun and by God, you see that they get it or bust a gut trying.
On his way to the 101st Precinct station house, the ears of Charles Orsino burned as he thought of the withering lecture that had followed the blast on Gilby’s whistle. “Mister Orsino, is it or is it not your responsibility as team captain to demand that a dangerous ball be taken out of play? And did or did not that last burst from Mister Vladek beat the ball out of round, thus giving rise to a distinct possibility of dangerous ricochets?” The old man was right of course, but it had been a pocked and battered practice ball to start with; in practice sessions, you couldn’t afford to be fussy—not with regulation 18 inch armor steel balls selling for thirty dollars each at the pro shop.
He walked between the two green lamps of the precinct station and dumped his bag on the sergeant’s desk. Immediately the sergeant started a tale of woe: “Mr. Orsino, I don’t like to bother you with the men’s personal troubles, but I wonder if you could come through with a hundred dollar present for a very deserving young fellow here. It’s Patrolman Gibney, seven years in the old 101st and not a black mark against him. One citation for shooting it out with a burglar and another for nabbing a past-post crook at Lefko’s horse room. Gibney’s been married for five years and has two of the cutest kids you ever saw, and you know that takes money. Now he wants to get married again, he’s crazy in love with the girl and his first wife don’t mind, she says she can use a helping hand around the house, and he wants to do it right with a big wedding.
“If he can do it on a hundred, he’s welcome to it,” Charles said, grinning. “Give him my best wishes.” He divided the pile of bills into two orderly stacks, transferred a hundred dollars to one and pocketed the other.
He dropped it off at the Syndic Building, had an uninteresting dinner in one of its cafeterias and went to his furnished room downtown. He read a chapter in F. W. Taylor’s—Uncle Frank’s—latest book, Organization, Symbolism and Morale, couldn’t understand a word he read, bathed and got out his evening clothes.
A thin and attractive girl entered a preposterously-furnished room in the Syndic Building, arguing bitterly with a white-bearded, hawk-nosed old man.
“My dear ancestor,” she began, with exaggerated patience.
“God-damn it, Lee, don’t call me an ancestor! Makes me feel as if I was dead already.”
“You might as well be for all the sense you’re talking.”
“All right, Lee.” He looked wounded and brave.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Edward—” She studied his face with suddenly-narrowed eyes and her tone changed. “Listen, you old devil, you’re not fooling me for a minute. I couldn’t hurt your feelings with the blunt edge of an axe. You’re not talking me into anything. It’d just be sending somebody to his death. Besides, they were both accidents.” She turned and began to fiddle with a semi-circular screen whose focus was a large and complicated chair. Three synchronized projectors bore on the screen.
The old man said very softly: “And what if they weren’t? Tom McGurn and Bob were good men. None better. If the damn Government’s knocking us off one by one, something ought to be done. And you seem to be the only person in a position to do it.”
“Start a war,” she said bitterly. “Sweep them from the seas. Wasn’t Dick Reiner chanting that when I was in diapers?”
“Yes,” the old man brooded. “And he’s still chanting it now that you’re in—whatever young ladies wear nowadays. Promise me something, Lee. If there’s another try, will you help us out?”
“I am so sure there won’t be,” she said, “that I’ll promise. And God help you, Edward, if you try to fake one. I’ve told you before and I tell you now that it’s almost certain death.”
Charles Orsino studied himself in a three-way mirror.
The evening suit was new; he wished the gunbelt was. The holster rode awkwardly on his hip; he hadn’t got a new outfit since his eighteenth birthday and his chest had filled out to the last hole of the cross-strap’s buckle since then. Well, it would have to wait; the evening would cost him enough as it was. Five bodyguards! He winced at the thought. But you had to be seen at these things and you had to do it right or it didn’t count.
He fell into a brief reverie of meeting a beautiful, beautiful girl at the theater, a girl who would think he was interesting and handsome and a wonderful polo player, a girl who would happily turn out to be in the direct Falcaro line with all sorts of powerful relations to speak up for him....
Someone said on his room annunciator: “The limousine is here, Mr. Orsino. I’m Halloran, your chief bodyguard.”
“Very well, Halloran,” he said casually, just as he’d practiced it in the bathroom that morning and rode down.
The limousine was a beauty and the guards were faultlessly turned out. One was democratic with one’s chief guard and a little less so with the others. As Halloran drove, Charles chatted with him about the play, which was Julius Caesar in modern dress. Halloran said he’d heard it was very good.
Their arrival in the lobby of the Costello created no sensation. Five bodyguards wasn’t a lot of bodyguards, even though there seemed to be no other Syndic people there. So much for the beautiful Falcaro girl. Charles chatted with a television director he knew slightly. The director explained to him that the theater was sick, very sick, that Harry Tremaine,—he played Brutus—made a magnificent stage picture but couldn’t read lines.
By then Halloran was whispering in his ear that it was time to take their seats. Halloran was sweating like a pig and Charles didn’t get around to asking him why. Charles took an aisle seat, Halloran was across the aisle and the others sat to his side, front and rear.
The curtain rose on “New York—A Street.”
The first scene, a timekiller designed to let fidgeters subside and coughers finish their coughing, was a 3-D projection of Times Square, with a stylized suggestion of a public relations consultant’s office “down in one” on the apron.
When Caesar entered Orsino started, and there was a gratified murmur around the auditorium. He was made up as French Letour, one of the Mobsters from the old days—technically a hero, but one who had sailed mighty close to the wind. This promised to be interesting.
“Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.”
And so to the apron where the soothsayer—public relations consultant—delivered the warning contemptuously ignored by Letour-Caesar, and the spotlight shifted to Cassius and Brutus for their long, foreboding dialogue. Brutus’ back was to the audience when it started; he gradually turned—
“What means this shouting? I do fear the people will choose Caesar for their king!”
And you saw that Brutus was Falcaro—old Amadeo Falcaro himself, with the beard and hawk nose and eyebrows.
Well, let’s see now. It must be some kind of tortured analogy with the Treaty of Las Vegas when Letour made a strong bid to unite Mob and Syndic and Falcaro had fought against anything but a short-term, strictly military alliance. Charles felt kind of sore about Falcaro not getting the title role, but he had to admit that Tremaine played Falcaro as the gutsy magnifico he had been. When Caesar re-entered, the contrast became clear; Caesar-Letour was a fidgety, fear-ridden man. The rest of the conspirators brought on through Act One turned out to be good fellows all, fresh and hearty; Charles guessed everything was all right and he wished he could grab a nap. But Cassius was saying:
“Him and his worth and our great need of him—”
All very loyal, Charles thought, smothering a yawn. A life for the Syndic and all that, but a high-brow version. Polite and dignified, like a pavanne at Roseland. Sometimes—after, say, a near miss on the polo field—he would wonder how polite and dignified the great old days actually had been. Amadeo Falcaro’s Third Year Purge must have been an affair of blood and guts. Two thousand shot in three days, the history books said, adding hastily that the purged were unreconstructed, unreconstructable thugs whose usefulness was past, who couldn’t realize that the job ahead was construction and organization.
And Halloran was touching Charles on the shoulder. “Intermission in a second, sir.”
They marched up the aisle as the curtain fell to applause and the rest of the audience began to rise. Then the impossible happened.
Halloran had gone first; Charles was behind him, with the four other guards hemming him in. As Halloran reached the door to the lobby at the top of the aisle, he turned to face Charles and performed an inexplicable pantomime. It was quite one second before Charles realized that Halloran was tugging at his gun, stuck in the holster.
The guard to the left of Charles softly said: “Jesus!” and threw himself at Halloran as the chief guard’s gun came loose. There was a .45 caliber roar, muffled. There was another that crashed, unmuffled, a yard from Charles’ right ear. The two figures at the head of the aisle collapsed limply and the audience began to shriek. Somebody with a very loud voice roared: “Keep calm! It’s all part of the play! Don’t get panicky! It’s part of the play!”
The man who was roaring moved up to the aisle door, fell silent, saw and smelled the blood and fainted.
A woman began to pound the guard on Charles’ right with her fists, yelling: “What did you do to my husband? You shot my husband!” She meant the man who had fainted; Charles peeled her off the bodyguard.
Somehow they got into the lobby, followed by most of the audience. The three bodyguards held them at bay. Charles found he was deaf in his right ear and supposed it was temporary. Least of his worries. Halloran had taken a shot at him. The guard named Weltfisch had intercepted it. The guard named Donnel had shot Halloran down.
He said to Donnel: “You know Halloran long?”
Donnel, not taking his eyes from the crowd, said: “Couple of years, sir. He was just a guy in the bodyguard pool.”
“Get me out of here,” Orsino said. “To the Syndic Building.”
In the big black car, he could almost forget the horror; he could hope that time would erase it completely. It wasn’t like polo. That shot had been aimed.
The limousine purred to a halt before the titanic bulk of the Syndic Building, was checked and rolled on into the Unrestricted Entrance. An elevator silently lifted the car and passengers past floors devoted to Alcohol Clerical, Alcohol Research, and Testing, Transport, Collections Audit and Control, Cleaning and Dying, Female Recruitment and Retirement, up, up, up, past sections and sub-sections Charles had never entered, Syndic member though he was, to an automatic stop at a floor whose indicator said: enforcement and public relations.
It was only 9:45 P.M.; F. W. Taylor would be in and working. Charles said: “Wait here, boys,” and muttered the code phrase to the door. It sprang open.
F. W. Taylor was dictating, machine-gun fashion, to a mike. He looked dog-tired. His face turned up with a frown as Charles entered and then the frown became a beam of pleasure.
“Charles, my boy! Sit down!” He snapped off the machine.
“Uncle—” Charles began.
“It was so kind of you to drop in. I thought you’d be at the theater.”
“I was, Uncle, but—”
“I’m working on a revision for the next edition of Organization, Symbolism and Morale. You’d never guess who inspired it.”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t, Uncle. Uncle—”
“Old Thornberry, President of the Chase National. He had the infernal gall to refuse a line of credit to young McGurn. Bankers! You won’t believe it, but people used to beg them to take over their property, tie up their incomes, virtually enslave them. People demanded it. The same way they demanded inexpensive liquor, tobacco and consumer goods, clean women and a chance to win a fortune and our ancestors obliged them. Our ancestors were sneered at in their day, you know. They were called criminals when they distributed goods and services at a price people could afford to pay.”
“Uncle!”
“Hush, boy, I know what you’re going to say. You can’t fool the people forever! When they’d had enough hounding and restriction, they rose in their might.
“The people demanded freedom of choice, Falcaro and the rest rose to lead them in the Syndic and the Mob and they drove the Government into the sea.”
“Uncle Frank—”
“From which it still occasionally ventures to annoy our coastal cities,” F. W. Taylor commented. He warmed to his subject. “You should have seen the old boy blubber. The last of the old-time bankers, and they deserved everything they got. They brought it on themselves. They had what they called laissez-faire, and it worked for awhile until they got to tinkering with it. They demanded things called protective tariffs, tax remissions, subsidies—regulation, regulation, regulation, always of the other fellow. But there were enough bankers on all sides for everybody to be somebody else’s other fellow. Coercion snowballed and the Government lost public acceptance. They had a thing called the public debt which I can’t begin to explain to you except to say that it was something written on paper and that it raised the cost of everything tremendously. Well, believe me or not, they didn’t just throw away the piece of paper or scratch out the writing on it. They let it ride until ordinary people couldn’t afford the pleasant things in life.”
“Uncle—”
A cautious periscope broke the choppy water off Sea Island, Georgia. At the other end of the periscope were Captain Van Dellen of the North American Navy, lean as a hound, and fat little Commander Grinnel.
“You might take her in a little closer, Van,” said Grinnel mildly.
“The exercise won’t do you any lasting damage,” Van Dellen said. Grinnel was very, very, near to a couple of admirals and normally Van Dellen gave him the kid-glove treatment in spite of ranking him. But this was his ship and no cloak and dagger artist from an O.N.I. desk was telling him how to con it.
Grinnel smiled genially at the little joke. “I could call it a disguise,” he said patting his paunch, “but you know me too well.”