“Enough,” Farrell said. “Enough.” He had already had breakfast with the Knights of Columbus and listened to a morning concert of the Methodist Youth Federation glee club. Tuesday couldn’t get here fast enough.
Eleanor gave him a thin smile—understanding and sympathy, but with some reserve. She had been opposed to his getting involved in all of this in the first place, though she would never be difficult about it. Eleanor was a smart and capable woman, too sure of herself to be difficult.
George Farrell was forty-three, president of the Avondale Furniture Company, tables and chairs, a family-owned business that had been started by Farrell’s great-grandfather in 1868; returning Civil War veterans were getting married, furnishing new homes. Farrell had been a part of the family business since he’d graduated from Northwestern University, but he had never taken a great interest in the running of the concern, nor had he ever put himself in a position of real authority or control. He was a figurehead president, the different divisions of the company all being run by competent professionals, and he was content to leave it that way; he had enough to do so he didn’t feel like a useless sponge, but not so much that he felt overburdened.
When, a few years ago, he’d been asked by some local pols to run for the City Council, Farrell had accepted at once, only later pausing to wonder why he’d wanted the job. Partly, of course, it had been his pleasure at being asked. But also there was a certain boredom that had been coming over him the last few years, a boredom caused by his general remoteness from his livelihood, by the casual irrelevance of his working day. Would the City Council be a cure for that?
It would. Farrell loved politics, every bit of it. He loved the maneuvering, he loved the deals and the sense of being an insider, the almost frightening feeling of being in a house of cards constructed of winks and nods and handshakes, and he also loved the occasional feeling of accomplishment, the knowledge of a job well done, the people’s trust justified, a valuable task competently completed.
He was also a realist. He knew that the workings of Tyler, of any city, required accommodations with men you would never invite into your own home. Men like Adolf Lozini, for instance; a crook, no better than a mobster, with his hand in every unsavory operation in town. But necessary, because crime and vice would go on existing no matter what, and it was important that some sort of control be laid over the cesspool. Lozini, half murderer and half businessman, was that control.
Or had been. But Lozini was getting old, he was losing his competence, and a better man would be taking his place. Better in many ways; not only better at controlling the criminal element, but also better in his attitudes toward the city and toward his fellow-men. Lozini’s replacement was a man Farrell could get along with, could understand and even sympathize with—could almost invite to the house.
The removal of Lozini would mean, naturally, the removal of Alfred Wain, who was Lozini’s puppet in the mayor’s chair. The job had been offered to Farrell, and he knew at once that he would be no puppet, that he could work within the system and still be a much more effective mayor than Wain had ever been. In one sense, his public posture as a reform candidate was a mockery, since he was supported by criminal funds just as much as Wain had ever been. Yet in another way, Farrell told himself that he truly was a reformer, in comparison with Wain; under himself, Tyler would be a much better, a much cleaner, a much less corrupt city.
The limo was coming to a stop, at the main entrance of the Carlton-Shepard, Tyler’s only first-class hotel. The maroon-uniformed doorman opened the car doors and they all got out, to no reception at all. The few people in the vicinity were all hotel guests, out-of-towners who wouldn’t recognize Farrell or care about who he was, well-off people who wouldn’t be distracted from their own concerns by the appearance of a chauffeured limousine.
The Carlton-Shepard lobby was cool and spacious. The giant cabbage roses in the carpet design were spaced so that Farrell’s stride matched them exactly; he amused himself by stepping from the center of one rose to the center of the next, all the way across the lobby to the elevator that was being held for him. His campaign headquarters was the entire seventh floor, a lavish expenditure in local terms, but necessary as a public display of his big-league aspirations. It had been important at first to demonstrate that he wasn’t merely another one of those well-meaning amateurs, those ministers and teachers and other bumblers that the opposition had routinely been mounting against Wain over the years.
Five of them entered the elevator now, with the maroon-uniformed operator: Farrell, Eleanor, Jack, and the two plainclothesmen. They started up, everybody remaining silent in the slightly uncomfortable proximity, and when the elevator stopped, the indicator light over the door read 5.
The operator himself seemed confused. He moved his control bar back and forth twice, then frowned up at that lit number 5. One of the plainclothesmen said, “What are you stopping for?”
“I didn’t,” the operator said, and at the same time somebody knocked on the door. The operator looked around at the plainclothesmen and said, “Should I open it?”
They didn’t seem to know. Farrell found himself suddenly frightened—an assassination? That happened to national figures, not local ones. Who would assassinate him?
Lozini. What if Lozini had found out somehow, if he’d decided to fight back by eliminating Wain’s competition before weeding his own garden?
One of the plainclothesmen said, “Yeah, open it.” Neither of them had a gun in sight, but they both had their hands back on their rumps, their jackets pushed back out of the way.
There was a gate to open, and then a gold-painted door, and the fifth-floor hall was revealed, with two men standing in it. One of them nodded to the plainclothesmen, saying, “That’s okay, Toomey, Calesian sent us.”
The plainclothesmen relaxed, and so did Farrell. So they were police. When he’d first seen them, with their general aura of toughness, he’d thought they were Lozini’s men for sure.
One of the plainclothesmen said, “What’s up?”
“Trouble on seven,” one of the new men said. “A threat against Mr. Farrell’s life. We’re supposed to take him up a different way. The rest of you people proceed. There’s no threat against anybody else. Mr. Farrell?”
The man wanted him to leave the elevator. Farrell hesitated, unsure what to do. The plainclothesman beside him said to the new men, “We’ll come with you.”
“Calesian wants the rest of you to stay in a body,” the new man said. “To cover us when we take Mr. Farrell up the other way.”
“We’re supposed to stay with him,” the plainclothesman said.
“You’ve got the candidate’s wife there.” The other new man said, “Let’s not hang around here and be targets.”
