The Book of Tony

The thing you had to Remember about Tony Lintner was that he had a lot of foresight. He was a planner. I'd always noticed that about him. I remember driving with him on upper Madison Avenue in New York about two o'clock one morning and when we came to a red light he put the car into reverse and left it there until the light changed. I asked, how come?

"Every once in a while along here," he said, "some jerk will pop up with a gun in his hand. So what you do is, you have the car doors locked, and you have the thing in reverse. Naturally, he expects you to go the other way, so there he is, with his hand on the door and it not opening, and he's getting set to jump away, sort of watching the rear end of the car, and whapl you stand on the gas and just twitch the wheel a bit to the right and the front end comes around and knocks him flat as pizza and you're all set to shove it into low and run over him."

That was old Tony. He was a dreamer, all right. You had to admire him.

He was the same way about women. He made out like a maniac, and it was all according to the hook. His book.

"There are only two things you have to know about women," he'd say. "One is that they all want to go to bed in the worst way. If a man tries to persuade a girl to go to bed with him she's got to hate him, because he's showing her he's stupid: he's trying to tell her to do something she's already made up her mind to do. All she wants from him is an excuse to do it, and an argument is no excuse.

"The other thing is that a beautiful tomato whose old man owns an international widget works and will leave her thirty-four million when he dies can be just as sexy, just as passionate, just as much fun in every other way as the saddest pig who ever sat at home without a date on New Year's Eve."

When I first knew Tony he was about twenty-five, twenty-six or so and we were in the public relations business, a racket that suited his temperament better than mine, I must say. He was just under six feet tall, rugged-looking, and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you that he had the right tailor and all that, because it's so obvious that he would. Tony was with it, always. I remember telling him that I had a chance to pick up a pretty good two-seater Hornet.

"A Hornet?" he said. "You out to lunch or something?"

"What's the matter with a Hornet?" I said. "You had one."

"That's right," he said. "Had."

He was driving a four-seater Thunderbird at the time. I remember because he and I went up to Stowe in it and he had Doris with him.

Doris was the kind of dame who louses up a weekend for you by making you wonder why you didn't stay home, if you couldn't promote anything better than your own date. The girl I was with was a nice little beast, and I was fond of her. I thought she was good-looking and even reasonably bright and it certainly saddened me to see her turn into a dopey-looking idiot right under my eyes. She knew it, too, and I would have felt a little sorry for her if I hadn't been so depressed myself.

Doris had it. She wasn't so beautiful as to be breathtaking, she wouldn't absolutely shake you when you first saw her, although she built, she did build, and grow as you watched, but she could look at you and say, "How are you?" and you felt the room tilt just a little bit, say about five degrees, and hang there, and then drop back with a soft thud. The three words she said didn't mean anything much because the message came banging over and the message was, "How nice to meet you, after having heard so much about you; how interesting you must be, and how pleasant you are to look upon. I, for my part, am a warm, friendly, wholly aware person, all woman and very proud of it, and I do look forward to knowing you better. Understand me, I am Tony's girl, but I'd like to be your friend as well." About like that. The girl could really project, and it was all effortless. I mean, anybody could do it who was gorgeous, wholly secure in her personality, young, intelligent, dressed by Michael Garrity, a year out of Miss Finch's and already aware that by no possible effort within the boundaries of rational behavior could she spend even the interest on her money — and Daddy still down in The Street, baling up more of it every day. That was what Tony had in the front seat of the T-bird. And I in the back with my pig.

Coming down a slope, Doris made it like Penny Pitou, is all, swinging from side to side like a round-assed robin in the air, riding those long legs in fawn stretch-pants, laughing her head off. Sitting in front of the fire at the lodge later, she drank straight Scotch like a sailor and belted the conversation around, light, quick, funny, and still going to a lot of trouble to pull my girl in every once in a while, not letting her feel out of it just because she was out of it. I was impressed by that, I must say. With all this, I said to myself, she's nice, too? Later she took Tony to bed like a lady, no stupid hypocrisy about being tired and hurrying off to sleep alone, and no roguish leers, either. It was too much.

I had lunch with old Tony the Wednesday afterward. He came into Michael's a little late, brisk and bright, casing the room as he walked toward me. He looked great, the slob.

"So, buddy," he said, 'Vhat'd you think of Doris?"

"Don't talk to me," I said.

"You're right," he said. "That's pretty close to being it, wouldn't you say?"

"Somebody should warn her, is all," I said.

He stuck his beak into his martini. "Do no good, buddy," he said. "Doris believes in me."

Doris did, but her old man didn't. However, he was merely a cynical, cruel-minded, grasping old tycoon with a mind like a steel trap and five decades of experience in judging men behind him, so Tony figured that he would be no problem.

The third time they met, Tony told me, the old goat took him into the small library after dinner — there was a big one up on the third floor — poured him a shot of 1870 brandy and said, "What do you plan to do with my daughter's money, if she's chump enough to marry you?" Except for the dialog, it was a scene right out of Jane Austen.

Tony smiled at him. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all, because I'm not a money-man. I don't know much about finance. My interest hasn't run that way. So I wouldn't do anything about it my1 self. But I'm a great believer in the worth of the expert, Mr. Hollis, and so, to the extent that I had anything to say about it, I'd urge Doris to leave it in the hands of professionals, say the people at the Hanover Bank. I understand they have had a lot of experience in handling trusts and that sort of thing."

The old man stared at him. "You don't think for a minute that I believe a word of what you're saying, do you?" he said.

"I hope you do, sir," Tony said, "but it doesn't really matter. In the first place, I haven't asked Doris to marry me, and I'm not sure I'm going to. In the second place, I'm not sure she'd say yes if I did ask her. You asked me an academic question and I answered it. If you didn't like my answer, I'm sorry, but it's the only one I could have given you, because I haven't thought much about the matter."

The old man took another bite out of his brandy. "You're not sure you'd want to marry her, eh?" he said. "She's not quite what you had in mind, I suppose, not quite good enough for you?"

"I didn't say that, sir," Tony said.

"So why are you running around with her? For laughs?"

Tony wouldn't answer him. He just set down his glass and bit down hard, to make the muscles in his jaw jump. He held his breath and let his face go red, and he pumped up the veins in his forehead. He locked into the old man's eyes and stayed there. What an operator!

"I suppose you're sleeping with her?" Hollis said.

Tony let his breath out in a long whistling sigh. "Sir," he said, "if I said no you might think me less of a man than I believe I am, and you might well accuse me of being indifferent to a beautiful and utterly enchanting woman; if I said yes, you would call me a louse, and properly. So, with your permission, I'll just pass that question, with the remark that if anyone else asked it I'd hit him a shot in the head."

"You terrify me," the old goat said. "Have some more brandy, and don't tell me how good it is, because you wouldn't know."

They sat there for a while, listening to the well-mannered crackle of the fire (four-foot hickory logs, six inches through, seasoned under cover for three years, no more, no less). Now and then the trumpet-call of an automobile drifted up from 72nd Street, softly through the cold spring night.

"You're either honest or very crafty," Hollis said finally. "I consider the first alternative to be entirely out of the question. Shall we, as the saying goes, join the ladies?"

You or I might think we'd lost that round, and maybe the whole contest with it, but Tony didn't think so. He just carried on, endearing himself to Doris, and spending a regular two hours a day in studying the ramifications of Hollis Industries, Ltd.

Understand me, Doris wasn't getting hurt. Could she get hurt by a character who phoned her three times a day (never early in the morning, always five minutes after he'd left her at night, always whenever she had something dull to do, like two hours at the hairdressers'), who never forgot her least preference (no anchovies in- Caesar salad, Chateau Suduiraut '47, couldn't stand the sight of Marlon Brando) and who seemed to know, surely, before she did, what she was thinking? The idea that women like pink-cheeked, awkward, fumbling juveniles as lovers, happy in their eager adoration, is a piece of nonsense fostered by those who can't get anything else and by those who've had everything else. They want experts, and Doris had one. When Tony had to run down to Rio on business for ten days he came back and told her he'd had a girl down there. Did he ask her to forgive him? Don't be silly. He led her surely and quickly to pride in his virility, he made her proud that other women threw themselves at him, humbly happy that he had told her, when he didn't have to tell her. I'm glad you did it, she told him. I'm very glad. I adore you!

"What else would she say?" Tony told me. "Hell, they all go by the book. Everybody goes by the book."

One day in the middle of summer, Tony found what he'È been looking for: a crack in the granite-and-steel facade of Hollis Industries. He found it in the Economics Society Library. "I sat there looking at that page," he told me, "and I felt like Pasteur when he first boiled up a quart of milk, or whatever the hell it was he did. You know: I knew I had the answer."

It didn't look like much. Hollis Industries owned sixty-two percent of an outfit called Electronics Associates. They made subminiature bits and pieces for jet aircraft, rockets, missiles and so on, very expensive and secret stuff. The company had been formed by a German refugee, a fantastic character, a genius, I suppose, who had taken all kinds of devices and made them smaller and lighter. For example, he'd reduced a certain kind of radio direction-finder from a weight of twenty-six pounds to two ounces and a half! He'd been thrown out on his head long since, of course, and old man Hollis owned the men who owned the company. It was very profitable. Well, every dollar's worth of business they did was with the government. (continued on page 46) Book of Tony (continued from page 42) You can imagine.

The only trouble was, the thing was a monopoly. I can't tell you in detail because of course I don't know: everything they made was classified seventeen ways. But still it was a monopoly, everybody else who'd tried to get into that particular segment of the miniaturization racket had been muscled out, and the little nugget Tony had found in the library was two-headed: he'd found that a certain Senator, one Dodsworth, was warming up an antitrust proceeding against Electronics Associates, and he'd noticed that the components, the bits and pieces that went into the gimmicks they made, came from all over the country, wire here, ball-bearings there, shellac, copper, cotton, rubber, paint, nickel, platinum and whatnot. He had all he needed and he went around to see old man Hollis.

His proposition was straight and simple: Electronics needed, or shortly would need, a public relations job of the first order. The way to lick the antitrust attack was not to wait until it had started and then spend $100,000 on lawyers and probably lose anyway. The smart method was to take the wind out of the Senator's sails with a big campaign. What would the campaign be? It would be utterly simple: it would show that Electronics Associates was not monopolistic because it drew on little businesses all over the land: a paint factory in Pennsylvania, a cotton-grower in Mississippi, a wire mill in Colorado, and so on through a long list. A monopoly? Ridiculous. Electronics Associates was a pillar of strength, a vital support to Small Business and The American Way. Phoney? Like a nine-dollar bill. Practical? Like a paper clip. It couldn't miss, and Hollis, no idiot, needed no more selling than the simple outline.

Tony moved in for the kill. Did he want a king's ransom for the idea? Certainly he did not. He would set up his own public relations outfit to handle it and he would charge Hollis a modest fee. All he wanted, he told the old man, was the chance to establish himself in business.

"I've got an idiot vice-president in charge of public relations," Hollis said.

"What's to prevent me from having him do the job?"

"Not a thing, sir," Tony said, looking at him trustingly with his big, blue eyes, "except your own sense of ethics."

The old goat gave him a short grunt in B-flat.

"How much is it going to cost me to set your little outfit up?" he asked. "Both arms and one leg, say, for openers?"

"Not a dime, sir," Tony told him, showing him that old straight, level, All-American-Boy stare. "All I want from you is a contract. I'll raise my own money."

That did it.

"You see," Tony told me, "everybody's a sucker on his own ground. You try to sell old Hollis, say a piece of a Broadway show or a Venezuelan oil well, and he'll run in the experts and kill you dead in ten minutes. But money is his own racket, he's his own expert there, and he knows that a young fellow who turns down, say, $ 150,000 that he can have for the asking, and turns it down on principle, has got to be honest, sincere and eminently worth-while in every way. That's what the book says, and that's the way it's got to be."

What do you mean, did he have trouble raising the money? Are you serious? With a signed contract from Hollis Industries in his pocket? Didn't you ever hear the story about how old J. P. Morgan made a man rich by walking across the Exchange floor arm in arm with him? All Tony had to do was let the word get out and then tell the people where he wanted the stuff delivered and when.

Doris and Tony were married a month later.

The girl's mother felt that her social position indicated a three-month honeymoon in Europe, kicking off with a Mediterranean cruise on the yacht, and Doris had no burning objection, but Tony did. He just couldn't take the time, he told her, and do justice to the vital work at hand. They compromised on a fast trip to Hawaii, and they went by great iron bird just like any other peasants. Well, not exactly: they had a charter plane, a little old 707 jet all to themselves. The old man tossed this into the hopper along with the town house on 65th Street, the Ferrari roadster and the rest of the junk they got for wedding presents. He still hadn't bought Tony all the way, he was still dragging his feet, fighting his every instinct, obviously: he fixed things so that there was no way in which Tony could get his grubby fingers on Doris' main holdings, but that was OK with Tony, he wanted it that way for the time being, and in any case, what did he need money for at that stage of the game? Doris had never used money. She barely knew what the stuff looked like. When she wanted anything she picked up a phone and told somebody to send it. Once a month the bills went to the bank. She never saw them. Tony made a big point of covering the maids and the cook and the food bills and the guy who brought the newspapers and similar big items. He could afford that much out of the modest $20,000 a year he was paying himself as president of his new outfit. PRO Incorporated, he called it. Actually he was making more, and spending less, than he had been before he married Doris. So was I, for that matter: he was giving me $12,000 to oversee the galley slaves who did the work.

We did the business for Electronics Associates all right. We killed off Senator Dodsworth's little plan in under sixty days. It was easy. Everything went exactly as planned. It was to laugh.

The Dodsworth campaign was just the kickoff in Tony's book. It had lifted the curtain on the whole multilayered Hollis empire; he knew now which keys opened which doors. There were thirty-two separate- corporations in the Hollis monolith, and it was no problem to find five of them that needed public relations help. We didn't keep the Dodsworth job a secret, either. Tony had a scheduled sequence of leaks: word of mouth here, a column mention there, a hint in a news broadcast. Furthermore, we were the pipeline into the mountain of gold. What the hell, could it be bad to buy an in with old J. R.'s son-in-law, and charge it to Uncle Sugar? It wasn't long before we had a $25,000 minimum fee, and important outfits lining up to pay it. Tony raised himself via a complicated capital-gains arrangement and gave me his old $20,000; he bought out the people who'd put in the original money and he was off and running. He hadn't touched a cent of Doris' money, if you don't count letting her pick up an odd tab here and there, and he hadn't taken anything from the old man that he couldn't almost truthfully say he'd earned. When the first wedding anniversary came around Hollis seemed to be taking an almost human view. "The old ox climbed into my pocket and buttoned up the flap," Tony told me.

"I misjudged you, boy, maybe," he had said. "There's a lesson in it for you: no matter how old you get, no matter how smart you think you are, never tell yourself thÈt you're an infallible expert on other human beings. You can be wrong."

"That's right, sir," Tony said. "I'll always remember that." He should have, too.

For their first anniversary, he and Doris picked up the raincheck on the three months in Europe. I was minding the store and I sent the cable, two weeks before they were due back, to tell them that one of the bloodiest-handed pirates of American industry had sacked his last town: J. R. Hollis, the wire associations told a waiting world the next day, had died on the firing line, carried off by a coronary accident in the middle of a board meeting. (Purple-faced, he had been screaming his rage at a couple of squares who'd got sore when they discovered that their little (continued on page 122) Book of Tony (continued from page 46) old factory, in the family for three generations, had been milked bone-dry.)

"I was wrong about the old goat," Tony said to me. "Somehow I figured he'd live to be seventy at least and here he's whisked off in his prime, at sixty-nine." He laughed. "It's just like he told me — you can always be wrong about people."

That you can. And I was wrong about Tony. I'd made up my mind that he'd grown to like being a tycoon, junior grade; that he'd forgotten, or at least set aside, his old purpose of being able to live for pleasure and privilege alone. But he hadn't forgotten. It had all been in the book: marry the girl to get to the father; warm the old boy up not for what he could provide alive, good as that might be, but for what he could provide dead, if he would. And he had provided. The strings that had been tied around Doris' inheritance had been cut and the stuff was lying there all over the place.

"You know the sensation?" Tony said to me. "It's like a dream I used to have when I was a kid. I was standing in a cellar and there was a coal chute coming in one window; and coming down, the coal chute there was a river of vanilla ice cream, sliding, slowly, like white lava, and I had to eat it faster than it came in, so I wouldn't drown in it. Well, that's the sensation, buddy."

He ate, I'll say that for him. And he didn't have to improvise ways and means of doing it, either. He had it all down in the book. It was all planned.

Take the private car, for example. Who has a private railroad car today? Well, Lucius Beebe, OK. Who else? It used to be, in the days of the dedicated spenders, when they were really sending it in around the turn of the century, everybody who was anybody had a private car. It used to be one of the cachets that marked the difference between a really rich millionaire and somebody who just had a lot of money. You had the Pullman company run. you up a little old land-yacht, with a full kitchen, a liar, a few boudoirs complete with double beds, none of this berth nonsense, a fireplace, any other trifling convenience you felt like, a burrow at the front end for the help to scuttle into when you didn't want them around, the whole tiling done up in mahogany and rosewood and Spanish leather. Tony had had the plans for his drawn up a long time, since he was thirteen for all I know, and the stone-cutters were still chipping away at the old man's monument (a simple twenty-ton slab of rose marble, "J. R. Hollis, 1886-1955, He Builded Better Than He Knew") when he had American Car and Foundry working three shifts a day on it. It cost a hair under $600,000 and I won't attempt to describe it to you except to say that a friend of mine, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, told me that in his considered opinion, it was the most luxurious land-transportation machine in recorded history. It had all the ordinary things that anybody would think of, like carpeting hand-woven in France and solid-gold champagne faucets in the wall, and then it had special features, too: for example, ultrasmall television cameras hidden in the ceiling light fixtures in each bedroom.

Not many people knew about them, and in a way I'm surprised that I did because as time went on Tony cut me in a little less, but he did tell me about the cameras. It was during my first trip on the car. (You pay the railroad twenty fares and they hook it onto the end of whatever train you like.) We were going to Arizona, Tony and Doris, my girl and I and two other couples. We'd left Grand Central at five in the afternoon and it had been a fairly big night. At nine next morning Tony and I were the only ones up. I saw him at the end of the car, sitting on the back of his neck, nursing a glass of yellow tomato juice, watching the track unreel. I plopped down beside him and he buzzed the kitchen for juice for me.

"You sleep good?" he asked me.

"Like dead," I said. "This thing puts out a nice ride."

"Little old gyroscopes underneath," Tony said. "You may be interested to know, buddy," he went on, "that you and Adele made the record last night. I thought you'd never quit and let me go to sleep."

"Again?" I said. "Slower?"

"Like for duration," he said.

I squeezed my head-bones. "Forgive me," I said. "I thought I was sober, but I'm misjudging people again. Obviously. I'm still stoned, because I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

So he told me. I just looked at him.

"You sore, buddy?" he said.

"Why, no," I said. "Those of us who know and love you could never really get sore at you, Tony. I might want to kill you, is all." I thought about it for a while. "Doris, too?" I said finally.

"Doris doesn't really like (he idea," he said. "The girl's a doll, but a little on the square side sometimes. She went to sleep."

"Well, either you dig the late, late show or you don't," I said.

I found the gimmick that night and thumbed a wad of chewing gum over the lens.

Well, that was the private car. Then there were the two planes, one just an ordinary Aero Commander like Eisenhower's, for hacking around in, and the other a DC-8 redesigned to be nice for about twelve people instead of a himdred and ten. There were twenty automobiles beginning with Aston Martin and ending with Zil. (Sure, he got a Zil, don't ask. me how. "Just like Khrushchev's," he said.) There was the town house in New York and one in Berkley Square and one on the Avenue Foch; there was the place in Sussex and the chateau near Nimes and the cottage (cottage!) in Montego Bay. Tony kept on eating, fighting to keep that vanilla ice cream from rising above his knees. Van Cleef and Arpels knew him well. Harry Winston was like a brother to him. ("Harry, it's a nice little stone. I'm not knocking it, Harry. Sure, I know. But, Harry, you said you were sending me a big gem!")

It didn!t bother Doris to see Tony spend money. She loved him. He was her man. He was almost as nice to her after they were married as he had been before, really very nearly, and by his lights he was a rock of fidelity. I know for a fact that they'd been married a year before he had so much as one other girl. I suppose he'd planned it that way. I can see him, getting eager, but marking off the months and weeks on the calendar until a year had passed, or whatever.

• • •

I know it's hard to believe, but it's a fact that money is a limited source of kicks. It's demonstrable: look around at the really rich. The dopes among them keep living it up, running from Jamaica to Monaco to St. Moritz like rabbits scut-tering from burrow to burrow, spending it as if tomorrow had been torn off the calendar; the brighter ones sooner or later give all that up and start looking for power, and the brighter they are the sooner they do it. Tony was pretty bright, and he had to come to it.

He drifted in to see me one day, laughing.

"The girl at the desk asked me who I was," he said.

"New," I said. "Been here about six months, is all. What brings you to our gilded sweatshop?"

"I've been thinking about Dods-worth," he said. He stood at the window, looking down Park Avenue, shiny in the rain. "You remember Dodsworth?" he said without turning.

"SureÈ"

"Dodsworth was a dope. Also, he was a United States Senator."

"So?"

"I, on the other hand, am not a dope."

I didn't say anything. I just sat there and let the idea seep down through the brain cells. I suppose he'll want Lyndon Johnson's office, I said to myself.

Tony went on. "I'm not a born politician like, for example, Jack Kennedy, and I'm a lot younger, but, in balance, I have considerably more money than he has, and more than his old man has, if it comes to that, and I'm a better planner."

"Kennedy isn't really a bum at it," I said.

"Didn't say he was. I'm just better, right?"

"Am I supposed to leap to my feet and say, 'Right, chief?" I said. "Because if I am, you're plugged into the wrong circuit."

He turned around then. "No, buddy," he said, giving me the big smile, "that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to tell me what you think."

"I think you're out of your skull," 1 told him. "But if you want it, you can get it, I imagine."

"I want it."

"As a general rule," I said, "you're supposed to start a little short of the United States Senate. How about you do a warmup in some easy job, mayor of New York, for instance?"

"An old-fashioned concept," he said. "We have to think big. Like the jokers who run commercial aviation in Russia. They went from two-engined airplanes to jets: they skipped the big four-engine plane, leap-frogged it. I'll leap-frog the mayoralty and the state legislature and all that jazz."

"How does this notion look to Doris?" I asked him.

He shrugged impatiently. "Doris wants what I want, buddy," he said. "Like in the book. The Book of Ruth, for example: Whither thou goest, and so forth."

"That's nice," I said.

He picked up his topcoat.

"If you're going to dedicate your life to the service of the people," I told him, "you'd better run down to Barney's and turn that thing in on a simple Republican tweed."

"You think so, buddy?" he said.

"Didn't you tell me that stuff was shatusa, and doesn't the Indian government forbid the export of what little shatusa there is?"

"I see your point," he said.

"What did you tell me that coat cost?" I asked.

"I didn't," he said, "but it was like three thousand."

"I can see it now," I said. "One photograph of the candidate wearing his three-thousand-dollar topcoat, climbing into his Zil limousine, and it's good-bye Charlie. You got to be a U.S. Senator?"

"Get a big office Monday," he said. "New building somewhere. Put a fake name on the door. Hire some people. Buy some brains. Phone me."

"Yes, Mr. President," I said.

You think he was stabbing for the moon? You do? It's people like you that are what's wrong with this country. You don't take the trouble to find out the score, you don't look up the rules of the game. For example, we had a little package deal at PRO Inc.: S50.000 for the cover of Time. It wasn't unique with us. 1 imagine that if you dropped around to sec Len Jolberg or the right man at K. & H. they'd be willing to discuss a similar proposition. I'm not saying you can buy a Time cover. You can't, not for §50,000 and not for $500,000. Harry Luce is not up for purchase and as far as I know, neither is anybody who works tor him. But for 550,000 we could give any reasonably equipped client a fair shot at getting his mug on Time. No guarantee, of course, but we made it a lot oftener than we didn't. Over a period of twelve months the guy just became prominent, is all. He would turn up here and there making a lot of speeches, and they'd be great speeches. Articles under his by-line would show in important magazines, and they'd be solid, original, brilliantly written pieces. A book by him would appear, if briefly, on the best-seller lists. A small but respectable college would give him an honorary doctorate. The governor of his state would solicit his service on an investigatory commission. Odds and ends like that for a while, and then, suddenly, when the progress chart his account executive ran indicated that the time had come, we'd let off the H-bomb: a superficially brilliant, novel, controversial plan for saving the land from the ravaging Slobbovians or something of the sort. And then, just maybe, the editors of Time in solemn conclave assembled would decide that our boy was the best of a thin lot of candidates for the issue of February 31 or so.

Takes a little planning, a lot of work, is all.

So who should be surprised when Anthony Limner, boy pol, came crawling out of his gold-plated hole, blinking shyly in the sun? It wasn't long before fatheads from one end of the land to the other were hanging on his words, his, you should excuse the expression, just as if he knew what he was talking about. I want to tell you that inside six months he was in orbit, and old Senator Glastonbury, who had nothing going for him but seventeen years of reasonably honest service to the constituency, was noticing that he slept better if he took a little Seconal with his toddy.

I'll say one thing for Tony, he never believed his own publicity. When I showed him the first honest editorial suggesting that the country needed hands like his at the helm (when I say "honest" I mean that it wasn't a straight plant, the guy who wrote it believed it was his own idea). Tony laughed.

"If you didn't see it happen, who could believe it?" he said. "Right by the book. Right down the line. It's like having your own crystal ball, buddy. Like we know what's going to happen six months from now, and we're the only people in the country who do." A little later the warm, sentimental side of him showed. "You know," he said, "I wish old man Hollis had lived to see it. After all, he had it coming. He was the first customer, so to speak, he bought the first package, and it's a shame he can't see what kind of a store I'm running now. Too bad." He shook his head sadly. "You know, Doris tells me the old goat had a secret yen, all his life, to be governor?"

"He just didn't plan things right, did he, Chiefie?" I said.

"Don't be unkind, buddy," Tony said. "Old Hollis did the best he could with what he had to work with. Limited talent, that was his problem. He lacked foresight, like."

Sure he did.

The nominating convention was set for Tune 28 that year, and it was on a Monday, May 17, that I got the word. I got a phone call from a lawyer named Homer Barnet: Jones, Pitcairn, Barnet and Wolfe. He wanted to know when I could drop around to see him about a matter of some little importance. I made it that afternoon.

It was a Wall Street outfit. Barnet was sixty or so. He had white hair, white piping on his waistcoat, a Phi Bete key on the fat-linked watch chain and he spoke with grave, fatigued courtesy.

"If you would be so good, sir," he said, handing me a clipped sheaf of about fifteen photostat sheets. I read. The first page was a letter to Barnet from J. R. Hollis. It was a letter of instruction, ordinary except that the signature had been witnessed. It was short and to the point: ". . . wishing to safeguard my daughter Doris . . . candidly, for the furtherance of my own ego . . . suspicion of insincerity . . . you will engage competent surveillance on a twenty-four-hour basis, seven days a week for two full years beginning on the day after my interment . . . remarks indicating basic, rooted disrespect for me or my memory . . . mistreatment of my daughter or infidelity to her . . . rash or profligate use of her funds, or use obviously intended to further sensual purpose . . . fraudulent or cynical or deceptive attitudes calculated to further his career . . . you will, in the light of your best judgment, make private disclosure to my daughter, or, if the circumstances warrant, private disclosure to Mr. Lintner either directly or through any agency you choose, or, if need be, public disclosure through any media you consider suitable . . . monies left over from the Èund provided for this purpose to be placed at the disposal of my trustees for assignment to a charitable institution or institutions ..."

The rest of the pages constituted a precis of the results of the two years of twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance. I read them, my scalp tingling as my hair tried to stand straight up. I don't know who had done the job, but they hadn't learned their trade by home study of a mail-order course, I can tell you that. Apparently Tony hadn't lighted a cigarette that they hadn't noticed. Of remarks indicating disrespect to the sacred memory of J. R. Hollis, 218 on 170 known occasions; of infidelity, 49 known instances with eight women; of profligacy, 1091; of fraudulent or cynical attitudes designed to further his career well, obviously they owned at least six people in PRO Inc. body and soul, and clearly the office had been wired up like the switchboard at the FBI. Senator? If that stuff got out? In a square election, he couldn't have made secretary of the Little Neck P.T.A. I don't know what the job might have cost. Using three operatives a shift, nine a day, bare minimum, transportation, expenses, bribes, photographs, every electronic gimmick known to man oh, say $2500 a week.

Tony Lintner was dead. It remained only to bury him.

"You understand, sir," Barnet was saying in his whispery baritone, "you have read a synopsis. The full report amounts to many hundreds of pages. It is, of course, available to you, and to Mr. Lintner, for perusal in this office."

"What are you going to do with it?" I said.

Barnet held his hands fingertip to fingertip, as if he were praying for guidance.

"As to that," he said, "you will have noticed that the letter of instruction gives us wide discretionary powers. We are not bound to public disclosure, if we can achieve Mr. Hollis' plain purpose in another fashion. It has occurred to us to suggest to Mr. Lintner that he deny himself further access to Mrs. Limner's funds, that he agree to a dissolution of the marriage, and that he withdraw himself from the public eye."

"Isn't that blackmail?" I said.

"My dear sir," Barnet said. "We are acting here as executors under the clearest instructions. There is no remote question of illegality."

There wasn't, either.

I must say, Barnet and his boys were gentlemanly about it. Tony got the same Chesterfieldian treatment that I'd had. He could arrange the matter with Doris as he chose, telling her anything he liked, so long as he did it within a week. He chose to tell'her that he was fed up with her and had been for a long time: fed up with her old man's money and fed up with life in the gilded fleshpots. He was off to the blue horizon, he told her, to find himself, to ferret out the true Tony Lintner. It was a ghastly thing to do to her, but maybe the other way would have been worse. I don't know.

He sold PRO Inc. I had some vague notion that he might turn it over to me, sort of a going-away present, token of past services, that sort of thing, but he hadn't planned it that way. I guess he felt that he'd need every dime he could get to soften his descent to a slightly different standard of living. I went with him to Idlewild. Rio, one way.

"What are you going to do?" he said.

"1 don't know," I said. "I've got no plans."

"You never did have, did you?" he said.

"No," I said. "I never did."

It was true. I just let things roll along. I did think that somebody ought to help Doris over the hump, over the bad first few months, and I tried. After all, 1 knew the girl pretty well, and she knew me pretty well. She said she appreciated it, and we just went along. We didn't even plan getting married. It just happened. 1 think she may have liked the idea of being close to someone who'd been close to Tony. And I didn't see any reason why not: I'd read the letter and I knew that old Hollis hadn't made any unusual testamentary arrangements for Doris' second husband, should she have one. My tastes are simpler,Ètoo. I sold the private railroad car, complete with seeing eyes in the bedrooms, and the house in London, too. Who needs that climate anyway? I bought a mile of beach in Hawaii instead.

I haven't a clue where old Tony is now. He could be dead, and I rather think he is. I've never suggested that to Doris, of course. I know she's still fond of him, or of his memory. She keeps his picture in her bedroom still. I don't mind. After all, he was my friend, too, in a way. I even get a kick out of it once in a while. I look over at him and I say to myself, "You dig the late, late show, Chiefie?"