A change of gravity

TWENTY-THREE

Robert Pooler in a dark blue suit, medium-blue broadly striped white-collared shirt and red-and-blue geometrically patterned tie had a rural-looking goat-shouldered younger man by the right elbow when Merrion spotted him. The younger man, bald except for an inch-wide fringe of brown hair from ear to ear, wore a narrow maroon knit tie, a homespun-grey shirt, voluminous pleated grey pants, brownish suede shoes and a worried expression. They emerged from a doorway partway down the long corridor leading away from the reception area into the southeasterly corner of the eleventh floor of the office tower in the Bay State West complex on Main Street in Springfield.

"I haven't been in there since they had the time for the governor back in Eighty-eight. Five hundred a head for cocktails and peanuts, not even cashews for Christ sake, and then the bastard's a no-show. No wonder he lost. But they've still got that hush, like a shrine."

Merrion and Hilliard had the bar at Grey Hills to themselves that evening, the honor system operating on weekday nights that attracted few members in the off-season. "Still very classy. Maybe even a bit deeper, more luxurious, like they had it reupholstered in a heavier fabric. They must have to have somebody come in every year or so to clean it, don't you think? "First of May again, Fleason. Time to call the hush-cleaning people; steam all the wickedness out, freshen up the deception area."

About half a minute earlier the receptionist, a light-skinned middle-aged black woman with a blunt haircut and a hangdog expression not quite masking undifferentiated hostility had patronizingly taken his name, nodding, 'to see Mister Pooler."

"Not actually saying, but obviously meaning," Merrion told Hilliard, '"Oh, well, then, you must be in one heavy peck ah shit there, chile, you here to see Mister Pooler."

She had responded by keying a button on her telephone desk set when the light glowed steady red, in a tone verging on insolence she said: "A Mister Merrion to see you, sir." Then she had said haughtily to Merrion: "Mister Pooler will see you shortly. If you'll just have a seat."

Merrion told Hilliard 'the attitude's about the same as ever, too, I'd have to say. Every time I've had any kind of contact with Butler, Corey no more'n two or three other times in my life; don't see much of their ilk in the lowly district court I've always kind of wondered what gives with that bunch. They've got more attitude'n the fuckin' IRS.

What is it with a law firm that looks down on people who've got problems like they're dirt? They should be glad to see us. Isn't that what they're for, for the luv va Mike? Help people with their problems if they've got 'em; help them not to get 'em if so far they've been lucky isn't that what lawyers do?" '"Do," yes," Hilliard said. "Talk about, no. The good ones're sort of like successful call girls. Truly elegant call girls never took many calls anyway, even before they moved up. They considered themselves "models" or "actresses," sometimes "flight attendants." In Europe a century ago they were "courtesans." Their looks brought them to the attention of refined gentlemen. Their skills prompted the gentlemen to display them to their friends, also gentlemen of taste and breeding. If fate was kind, one of them made a flattering offer of an exclusive arrangement. The working girls became fine ladies, far above their previous calling, so far above it they may never've done it. They live at stylish addresses, two or three of them: city; winter; summer. Their clothes are in excellent taste. They have cars and drivers, to carry them to shops and lunch. They arrange formal but intimate dinners for thirty or forty, all without batting an eye. They talk about the theater and the ballet, and what's going on in the art world. What they do for what all of this costs still goes for about the same price they charged while they were on a fee-for-service basis, now under exclusive long-term contract to the one refined gentleman, one of marriage. What they act as though they do and prefer to talk about are not that sort of thing at all. Your top law firms behave the same way."

The slope-shouldered younger man had a manila folder thick with yellow papers in his left hand. Pooler was talking as the two of them walked up the corridor toward where Merrion sat in a red leather wing chair next to a reading table with a brass lamp. He could not recall ever having seen Pooler when he had not either been talking or else waiting with poorly concealed impatience for someone else to finish saying whatever was taking so long. Then Pooler would expel "Yes," from his mouth in a whinnying sigh of relief implying: regardless of that and resume talking.

The younger man, three to five inches taller than Pooler at five-eight or so like nearly every normal adult male, Merrion thought, with what he recognized as mean pleasure was stooping slightly, inclining his shiny head so as to hear clearly what Pooler was saying. That made it look as though he was deferring to Pooler.

That was the way Pooler wished it. He deliberately inflicted that discomfort upon everyone he talked to, speaking so softly that anyone taller would have to bow slightly to hear him. He did not look up while talking with anyone, even when he was seated and his listener was standing. He believed that the person inducing another to adopt a posture of deference dominated every situation. He sought dominance at all times, regardless of the apparent absence of any subject in contention or under negotiation.

"That son of a bitch," Merrion said once to Hilliard, 'you know there has to be something wrong with a guy who makes people uncomfortable on purpose."

Merrion had first met Pooler on the evening of the first Wednesday in April of 1968 at a small gathering of western Massachusetts Democratic politicians in the private dining room upstairs in a good restaurant in Springfield. The meeting had been called hurriedly by men and women with decades of gritty experience in Democratic state and national politics left puzzled and unsure of what to do in the wake of the shock they had sustained the previous Sunday evening. President Johnson's request for TV time had not been simply to announce, as feared, a further escalation of the war in Vietnam (although he had included that, to widespread disapproval). He had thunderstruck the country by mournfully and reproachfully announcing his irrevocable decision not to seek (or to accept, either, as though there'd been more than an outside chance that someone truly out of touch might call for a convention draft) their party's nomination to be re-elected 'as your prezdun."

Incorrectly, the party elders imputed their own sad uncertainty to younger regulars like Hilliard and Merrion. They too had been startled when Lyndon Johnson publicly renounced all ambition for a second full term of his own, but Merrion had been relieved and Hilliard had been elated. He had no doubt what to do. He was so sure that he abrogated his policy of saying nothing publicly until he had first tested it aloud on himself by discussing its probable effect with Merrion — Merrion that night had been unavailable, aloft on his way home from a long weekend in New Orleans with Sunny Keller, on leave from her assignment at Lackland Air Force base in Texas. Unrestrained by Merrion's caution, Hilliard jubilantly told the first reporter seeking his reaction that evening that he was backing Bobby Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination, 'hammer and tongs."

Hilliard's commitment was not new. Only his disclosure of it was. Well before Sen. Eugene McCarthy's anti-Vietnam war campaign bucking Johnson in the February New Hampshire primary had yielded a close-second-place finish, Hilliard had said he hoped that Kennedy would challenge the president, but he had not said so for attribution in the media. Rashly doing so that night, he said that LBJ's withdrawal was 'the best news the party's had in years. If he'd wanted the nomination, he would've had it for the asking. Sitting presidents are not to be denied, McCarthy or not. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. But then he would've lost. Guarantee you, matched-up against Lyndon, Nixon wins."

"I think that maybe did not play too good," Merrion told him grimly in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. Hilliard demurred, but after two days of fielding strong reactions, he reluctantly accepted Merrion's assessment: "You've made a lot of people goddamned mad at you, all at once, without doing yourself any damned good at all. No other mistake we've ever made, and we have made some beauts, did so much damage so fast. You've pissed-off people we don't even know. They didn't know each other, until you lit them off; you're the first thing they've ever had in common.

"First you pissed off the people who've always run the fucking party.

Postmasters, Customs collectors, marshals, all the way up to judges and ambassadors: "First our party, then our country, dead right or dead wrong." They think Eugene McCarthy is a rotten, treacherous, party-wreckin' son of a bitch, and anyone who's with him or anybody else, like Bobby, who's against the President, is either a traitor or a Republican. Which in their books is much the same thing.

"At the very same time you enraged the McCarthy people. They've been scheming and conniving for the past five years to mug the old farts and take the party away from them. Then lo and behold, along comes Gene McCarthy, the answer to their prayers, with the balls to stand up and say "Aw right, if nobody else'll do it, goddamn it, I'll do it myself."

Roll the fuckin' dice, and get the movement underway, even if it does mean the end of his career they go berserk the guy, the Way, the Truth and the Light. "Peacemakers" they claim to be; Colt Peacemakers, maybe. Look like dangerous animals to me; crazy eyes, foam in their scraggliass-beards. So what do you do? Make them as screaming mad at you's they were at LBJ. You ain't got no Secret Service to protect you, and you're local; they can get in your face.

"You think you can reason with them? Calmly tell them they just have to understand that this's how it's going to be, might as well get used to it? Bobby Kennedy's bringing all his muscle in and he's going to take it away: you got any idea how they're gonna react? They probably wont tear you limb from limb. They'll want to do that, but they wont know how. They're from good homes, went to private schools; no seminars in dismemberment. They'll practice self-restraint. Engage you in dialogue. All that passive shit, you know? Non-violent resistance. Pacificism. They'll address you in dulcet tones, probing your raison d'etre. They'll say: '"Hey you fucker, what the fuck, the nomination's his7. Like it was a fucking tricycle he now decides he wants to play with, and all he's gotta do is just come along and take it? This's something that he owns, 'cause he's a fucking Kennedy7. His brother left it to him?

Whose fuckin' country is this ours or the Kennedys?"

Pooler that evening in the spring of '68 was an assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. He was four confident years out of Yale and the Georgetown Law School. Immediately after they'd been introduced by Frank Snodgrass, a State committeeman who owned a lumber yard in Ware, Pooler said: "Being Hilliard's co-pilot, you're also therefore RFK."

Merrion, nearing thirty and feeling seasoned, mature and sagacious, failed nonetheless to connect an arrogant young man named Pooler to a powerful political family named Corey at the helm of a powerhouse law firm. He was distracted; Sunny Keller by then was many thousands of miles away from home in Vietnam, and that night like most April nights in the Pioneer Valley was a little chilly. Merrion's mind at that point had been focused on his chances of getting into bed with Mary Pat Sweeney after the meeting they turned out to be good. Rather absently he said to Pooler: "I haven't really decided. But Danny's always been a strong Kennedy backer. So I suppose I will be, too." Levelly, he thought.

Pooler said: "I suppose that means you wont give the vice president anything more'n lip-service if he gets the nomination."

"At this point I don't think I'd been in that room more than five minutes," Merrion said many times after that evening, explaining time and time again, at Hilliard's insistence, to person after person, that he'd never had a beef with Pooler and that as far as he knew Pooler'd never had a reason, that night or any other, to have a beef with him.

Each time word of another such recital reached his ears, Dan Hilliard privately thanked Merrion. "Since we of course both realize that that soothing declaration isn't one hundred percent true, and I know how painful you find it to dissemble, I really appreciate your willingness to repeat it so many, many times."

The necessity for many repetitions made it clear to them that Pooler had marketed his version at every political gathering he attended, well into the mid-Seventies, long after RFK had been assassinated and Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey. He used it to imply that Hilliard and Merrion put personal loyalties before party loyalty, and therefore should not be entrusted with power. Merrion and Hilliard used their sanitized summary of the encounter in Springfield as evidence that Pooler was a saboteur, undermining them to promote his own veiled interests.

Hilliard was the only person who ever heard Merrion's complete and accurate report of his exchange with Pooler. "I told him I hadn't said that, either that I was gonna be with Kennedy or I'd be sitting out. I said neither one of us ever refused to close ranks and I didn't like him suggesting that we would. I said you hadn't made any threats; you just said you were backing RFK. No dramatics at all.

"Pooler told me he didn't believe me and anyway, I didn't have to say a word it was written all over my face. That sounded to me like he was calling me a liar. I asked him if he'd mind telling me what else he could read on my face, so I'd have some idea of all the stuff I didn't know I knew yet. He called me a typical country wise-ass. I guess that could've been his sophisticated Yale idea of humor.

"If it is, his idea's wrong. He may have a very good barber razor-cut that wavy hair, not to mention an excellent tailor — he probably paid more for his suit than my whole wardrobe cost but he doesn't have a nice way of telling anybody anything. He never will. He's a natural-born prick.

"He gets up too close when he talks to you, and he spits when he says words that have S in them. It's all he can do to keep from poking you in the chest. He's got a couple bad teeth, almost black; you can see them on the upper left side of his mouth when he curls that lip of his.

His breath's too sweet; must be really bad before he uses too much mouthwash. He's ugly, too; he's already got jowls, at what, twenty-eight or twenty-nine? That's fuckin' indecent, too young to have jowls. But it figures; he's starting to get heavy all over. His waist's already begun to disappear. Some day pretty soon he wont have one anymore. Wake up some fine morning and find he's dispensed with it. He'll say he got rid of it because he couldn't find any purpose for it. He'll taper: Narrow at the ends, his head and his feet, and thick in the middle, his ass and his belly for ballast, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Thirty years or so from now, he's pushing sixty, he'll have wattles, like a turkey. And those beady little eyes like a snake, a short, fat snake that spits. A garden adder, green and black. Except I don't think those're poisonous, and he is."

"Are adders smart?" Hilliard said. "I don't know that much about reptile IQs."

"I dunno, why?" Merrion said.

"Because if they're not," Hilliard said, "Pooler's no adder. I don't argue with you that the guy's a snake. You know him lots better'n I do, since I don't know him at all, but if he's a snake and adders aren't smart, Pooler's a different breed."

"Yeah, well," Merrion said, "I called him an asshole, which he is, smart or not. I said it politely, of course. Just making an observation: "You're the biggest asshole I've met in a long time."

"He seemed to take it personally, looked shocked and backed away, so that's where I guess we agreed to leave it. Little prick."

Hilliard said it would be best if no one heard that part. "Bob Pooler isn't just trying to look dangerous he is dangerous. His mother's maiden name was Corey, and his daddy is a partner, along with his granddaddy, Warren, in Butler, Corey. Which means his family's got a major piece of that mammoth law firm, which makes nothing but money.

Furthermore, it's been a big wealthy firm ever since the first Pynchon, Sam, pulled up a tuffet and sat down by the river to catch his breath, and before you knew it, he'd gone and founded a city.

"And if plain old big money doesn't impress you, you can throw in a herd of state and federal judges, ambassadors, law school deans, and a slew of directors of operas and museums and chairmen of corporate boards. Money buys power, and power brings in more money, which in turn ac cures more power, even for obnoxious little assholes such as Bobby Pooler who get everything wrong except their choice of ancestors.

When poor humble peasants like us go up against powerful rich assholes, the behoovin' begins. It behooves us to do our best to get along with them.

"It'll be a damned sight better for us if everyone else who meets that kid forms his own opinion of him which'll probably be the same as yours without any assistance from you. So that when the day finally comes when Junior doesn't get what he really wants, at least a federal judgeship, he wont come gunning for us. When he gets it in the teeth, his own people'll have to tell him. "When it's unanimous that you're a little shit; everybody who's dealt with you hates your guts; you're outnumbered. There's too many of 'em to single out one or two like Amby and Danny, and get even."

Bob Pooler still dressed beautifully but he wasn't aging well, Merrion decided happily, as the younger man with Pooler stopped at the office door nearest the reception desk, clearly eager to go in. Pooler's wavy black hair had thinned out on the top, the remainder growing grey, with a straggly end or two where the comb-over brushed the ears. His waist had all but disappeared. The obtrusive attitude had not. Pooler halted when his captive did, still holding onto him and talking, completing his train of thought.

His conversation was full of minor visible events. He made a chopping motion with his right hand each time he wanted to drive home a point, puffing and deflating his cheeks, furrowing his brows, to vary the intensity of what he said. Merrion could read his lips; he punctuated every third or fourth sentence with "You see? You see that? You see?"

The younger man, restless, seemed to feel obliged to nod at each gesture, as though believing that there must be some quota of obeisance which when satisfied would enable him to get away.

Then Pooler abruptly released the elbow, frowning, staring after the other man's back, as though considering whether to become annoyed at him for leaving with his folder. He apparently concluded that to do so would be pointless; there was no hope that he would ever understand what Pooler had explained. He shook his head once, irritably, then turned toward the reception area. He saw Merrion sitting in the wing chair; recognizing him in curiously Giving no sign of having recognition, he proceeded to the reception desk; accepted a thin sheaf of pink messages; riffled through them without evident interest; put them back on the reception desk and looked up again at Merrion.

"He looked at me the same way that you'd look at a school bus blocking an intersection where you want to make a turn. Nothing personal, you know? Just another obstacle in your way interfering with what you want to do. He really is a shabby piece of shit. I think the only reason the bastard finally did acknowledge me was the snooty black receptionist. She said something I couldn't hear, and it was like her knowing I was there to see him made it so he had to see me. That was the only reason he did it. He obviously knew me, but otherwise he would've ignored me. Gone back down to his office, no hello or anything. He must be the rudest fucker inna world. If he isn't, I hope I never meet the champ."

Merrion uncrossed his legs and stood up as Pooler approached him, taking inventory of Merrion's apparel, head to toe: Ralph Lauren Polo blue blazer; tan twill slacks; light blue Oxford cloth shirt, open at the collar; brown Florsheim loafers. "Ambrose," he said drily, extending his hand. "What can I do for you?"

"The same way I used to say Hello to guys I didn't like when I was at Valley Ford. Gave me some shit about a bill or they did too much complaining. After they did that just once, once was all they hadda do it whenever they brought their cars in for service, or they had something wrong with them, they hadda wait. That was Pooler's attitude toward me today," Merrion said to Hilliard.

"You tell me, Bob," Merrion said to Pooler, shaking his hand once. "I don't really know why I'm here. Wasn't my idea to come. Danny Hilliard sent me down. He said I should see you."

"Yes," Pooler said. "Looking at me," Merrion said to Hilliard, 'like now he knows why he thought he smelled cat shit in the building. He really hates my guts, but he's got this problem with me.

"His problem is that he can't heave my ass out in the street. He can't get at me. Me getting that assistant-clerk slot almost thirty years ago, couple years before he even met me, much less hated me on sight: that's the only reason that he didn't do his best to stop it from happening. If he'd known me then, he would've, and probably succeeded.

But by the time he discovered we despised each other, I was already in.

And then four years after that, his grandfather and his father were so busy scheming how they're gonna get their paws on that racetrack, they didn't notice us getting' into Grey Hills. Otherwise the Big Chief and Little Beaver would've used the blackballs on us."

"Yes," Pooler said again. "Well, I think I know what it's about." He extended his right hand to usher Merrion away from the chair toward the corridor beyond the reception desk. Merrion held back. Pooler raised his right eyebrow. "I think it would be better," he said, 'if we didn't talk about it here, but in my office."

"Lead on," Merrion said, smiling, but not very much. "I'll toddle right along behind."

Pooler had arranged the framed pictures and testaments on the credenza and the wall behind his desk so it appeared that once he had received his diplomas from Yale and Georgetown Law, his certificates of admission to the State and federal bars and his appointment as an Assistant US Attorney, he'd spent most of his time away from that desk standing behind lecterns, either delivering speeches, shaking hands with other people or assisting them to display laminated plaques, scrolls and certificates now interspersed among the pictures.

"There's one picture of him shooting off his mouth in a white turtleneck under one of those crew-neck sweaters with the big white reindeer marching across his chest," Merrion told Hilliard. "Except for that the guy never seems to've gotten within range of anyone holding a camera except when he's had a jacket and tie on. I bet he sleeps in a suit. On weekends he wears his tux to bed instead of pajamas, case a charity dinner breaks out inna middle of the night."

"He told you what's been bothering him," Hilliard said.

"He told me what he's been hearing," Merrion said. "He said what bothers him about what he's been hearing is that he's afraid it means the feds're going to come after you in order to go through you to get at somebody else. And the way they're gonna get at you's through me."

"That's essentially what he told me," Hilliard said. "But can you see how he thinks they can do this?"

"Hey," Merrion said, 'that's your job, to tell me. You and Pooler.

You're the fuckin' lawyers. All I am in this fuckin' lash-up's a poor fuckin' clerk of court. I know my part in this comedy, but that doesn't mean I've got any idea what the play is about. Doesn't mean dog-squat to me. I don't know what the feds can do. I assume it's maximum damage, of course, if they can and they want to do anything.

You're asking me how they plan to do the damage, there I can't help you. I just hope it's not jail they've got in mind. I go into jails in the course of my employment. I don't like 'em. I'm always glad to get out.

"Best I can figure, what Pooler said, it all goes back all the way to Chassy and Larry Lane, Fiddle Barrow and the Carneses; how those guys were doing business around here, thirty, forty years ago, you and me're just getting' started. I don't really see how they can do this, considering that every statute of limitations I ever heard of expires after five or six years. If they haven't bagged you by then, they can't. Except for murder and treason; and I don't think they got us on that.

"But according to what Pooler says, they got a way says they can get around it. I don't trust him but I guess I believe him. Still think the bastard'll bear watching, though. He's a shifty mother-fucker and I think he's twenty-to-forty-percent on the side of the enemy here. He told me he hates to lose. Said he goes into every case fully expecting to win. "When I can't expect that, I refuse it." But this time I think if his client loses, he'll be able to take it in his stride."

Pooler seemed dwarfed by his own lustrous brown leather desk chair. He sat far down in it so that hunched behind the desk he looked like a frog sitting on a rock, partially obscured behind a bigger rock in front that hid his body except for his shoulders and the part of his torso above the base of his sternum. Once he had Merrion seated in the barrel chair he studied him, working his mouth while he used his left index finger to rub his left nostril, hard. Then he picked up large black-framed eye-glasses with visible bifocal lines and used both hands to put them on, spreading the bows and fitting them over his ears as carefully as though he had been preparing to cut a diamond. When he looked up the upper and lower lenses enlarged Merrion's view of his brown irises differently, so that their upper and lower hemispheres did not quite seem to match. Pooler swallowed and said "Yes."

Merrion did not say anything. "I felt like some kind of specimen," he told Hilliard. "Something helpless in a lab that this guy was now going to cut up and see if he could learn something. Hard on me, maybe, but useful to him."

Pooler rested his chin on his left hand and extended his index finger up alongside the corner of his mouth. He licked his lips.

"The gist of it's the club memberships," he said. "From all we've been able to gather naturally not wanting to appear to be too interested but from what we can piece together that's essentially the direction they seem to be taking." His teeth were even and white.

"Grey Hills?" Merrion said. To Hilliard later he said: "I wasn't saying that to give the guy a hard time. Playing Mickey-the-dunce with him there. If we're really involved in something here, it isn't all just smoke and mirrors, how the hell could Grey Hills have anything to do with it? Almost twenny-five years after we joined it? It was a legitimate question.

"He thought I was jerkin' his chain. For Pooler that question was all it took. My asking that really creased it."

"Yeah," Pooler said, glowering at him, "Grey Hills. I know, it's a long time ago, but that's the way it is with over-reaching. You may get what you want at the time, but what you have to do to get it, well, those things have a way of coming back to haunt you.

"You probably never heard what I had to say at the time you and Hilliard applied for membership. I knew you by then from meeting you in Sixty-eight, and I didn't like you. And I said then to them, my father and grand ad I didn't like it and I thought it was a rotten idea for you and Dan to become members. Quite candidly said so. And not just to them, either; to the membership committee; totally open and aboveboard. I would've said it to you and Dan, if the opportunity'd occurred, said it right to your faces.

"I said it was a very bad idea. That no matter how nice and friendly it might look as though wed all become, dealing in party and legislative matters, the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills.

"My father and the Chief said their concerns were political. They were sorry circumstances had been such that the membership rolls had to be reopened, and very much regretted that had made it possible for people like you and Dan to aspire to membership and apply. They said when they voted to reopen, they assumed that the high price of initiation and membership would be enough to prevent your kind from even trying to get in. If they had ever dreamed that people like you might somehow find the money, they would've blocked the proposal at the outset.

It would've never made it out of the executive committee, much less been approved by the board of governors or voted on by the entire membership. In hindsight they fully agreed it would have been far better if they'd bitten the bullet and submitted to a hefty extraordinary one-time assessment on the membership to meet the club's financial needs.

"But now it was too late. They were afraid that if they kept you out, Dan might retaliate, prevail upon his pals on Beacon Hill to refuse to grant racing days for that damned racetrack the Chief was so obsessed about. They were obsessed by that damned track. They virtually ordered me not to use my blackball.

"I didn't, but I warned them. I told them no good would ever come out of letting the pair of you in. I said nothing but trouble would ever come out of it. I told my dad that, and I told the Chief, too, it was an awful idea.

"I couldn't know then exactly what form the trouble would take, what repercussions there'd be. I must confess it didn't cross my mind that somehow your joining some day might form the basis for a tax evasion case, which seems to be the way they're heading. But there was no doubt in my mind that some day, sooner or later, something bad was certain to happen. Now my ugly premonition seems to be coming true.

"I want to emphasize that none of this was personal. It was not that I had a thing against you. Even though wed had that confrontation over the Humphrey candidacy, that was irrelevant. Nor had I anything against Dan Hilliard, or anyone who'd gotten where he is today by means of his own good hard work. More power to him, I say. I just knew that trouble was bound to come out of it some day, if your applications went through. My father and the Chief knew it too. I suspect you both knew, regardless of whether you admitted it to yourselves, that the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills. You didn't have the stuff.

"By rights you didn't have the means, the resources, to be members. How you came by them, I don't know, and I don't want to. I do know some kind of shady business was involved. Had to be; you had no other way, no honest way, to have laid your hands on that amount of money that fast. Sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars? An assistant clerk of courts and a state rep on the lower rungs of power? I'll give you your due: you were cute. No one's ever found out what you did or how you did it. But cleverness purifies nothing: the dirty politician's still like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight: so brilliant, and yet so corrupt, he shines, and stinks."

Merrion glared at him. "You piece of yellow shit," he said, 'getting me in here to say that to me. The next time we meet where some of my friends're around, so I'll have witnesses, I'm gonna call you out, dare you to repeat that. If you don't I'm gonna call you a fuckin' coward, and spit on you. And if you do, you'd better have a friend with you to hold your fancy bridgework or you're gonna swallow it."

Pooler smiled. "Sorry, Amby, but there's no other way of putting it, wasn't then and isn't now, and your reaction to the statement of that fact just proves it: you're not Grey Hills material and you never were.

Neither of you ought to've been allowed to place yourselves in the position where you'd have to do whatever it is you've done to meet the obligations membership entailed. As the fix you're now in proves conclusively. But back then, no one would listen to me."

He nodded, pouching his cheeks with air like an industrious squirrel with a cargo of acorns. "And now the day of reckoning has come, just as I predicted. But now it's too late for my cautions to do any good."

Merrion said to Hilliard: "I considered getting up and winding up and letting him have it, popping him one in the chops. Pasting him six or eight good ones, glasses and all, right in his smug little, fat little, face. Hair on the walls and blood on the floor; teeth in the nap of the rug. Change his nose from convex to concave. But I restrained myself. For one thing I don't want his yard-man to wind up behind the wheel of my car, using my house as an equipment shed. Particularly since I'd most likely still be in jail when he won the civil suit turning all of my goods over to him. Besides, my impression is that at least until one of us belts him, he's at least got to pretend he's on our side."

"Hell, if you think about it," Hilliard said, 'he may actually manage to get us to agree with him about Grey Hills. He's a third generation member. He's never seemed to use his membership much; I've seldom seen him there. But up 'til now I've always assumed it was because he was working all the time. Or else he just didn't like golf. There are people like that, you know. But now you've got me wondering: Maybe it's fear of rubbing elbows with riffraff like us, using showers that we've used, that's made him scarce up there. Is he really that petty?

If he is, he's right saying we're not fit to be members. What kind of asshole'd pay money to hang out with him? The very idea's disgusting.

Fine mess you got us into, Ollie, you and your grandiose ideas."

"Hey," Merrion said, 'my intentions were good. I'd had an unexpected bit of good fortune. Shared it with a friend."

"Yeah," Hilliard said, 'well, so whaddaya think? Myself I think I'd have to say the two of us by working hard've paved the road to Hell damned well."