I Come as a Theif by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

says he's been to everybody he can go to."
    "Then he can go broke."
    "Jesus, Bob! You know how close we are to a breakthrough. Why can't you see us through yourself?"
    "Myself! Hell, man, I'm in the same boat!"
    "Sometimes I wonder if we couldn't get an injunction to make Nixon stop this crazy war that's scaring the market."
    "You do that. You do just that. In the meantime I'll be selling you out."
    "Give me at least till Monday, for God's sake."
    "Why? Will you have it Monday?"
    "I've always had it before, haven't I?"
    There was a long pause, followed by Everett's sigh of exasperation.
    "Okay. Till Monday. But you know I shouldn't."
    Max folded his hands in quiet misery as he stared into the big empty crystal inkwell above his blotter and cursed the war, the government and the bad luck of Max Leonard. He felt suddenly depleted, as if a lifetime of running just ahead of due dates had at last presented him with the bill. But hadn't he always known it would? That his luck couldn't hold forever? That the whole hysterical forty-year cycle of being something one was not—or at least never quite—the brightest and most popular boy in his class, the proud young husband of the prettiest girl in hers, the brilliant lawyer, and fixer, the handler of situations, the manager of the rising spokesman of liberals—had to end when the energy, or daring, or capacity of self-delusion, or, again, the possible just plain luck, ran out? He had been able to pay off the creditors of youth who had backed him through law school and marriage to Elaine by the unanticipated early death of his mother, who had left him
just
enough. He had been able to pay off the second group, those who had staked him to the handsome law office that had enabled him to lure Tony Lowder from Hale & Cartwright by going behind Tony's back to Tony's client, Joan Conway. But there was such a thing, obviously, as the end of the road. And yet. It was like a dream where you run and run and run, and there it is, the goal, the rostrum, the prizes, the hum already of the applause, but you can't
quite
reach it, you can't ever reach it. Tony in politics at last, and just as Max had seen and planned, a hit, and the money almost theirs—the very brink of glory—and now this. Max would have to look for a job as a wretched law clerk. At best.
    He looked resentfully at Elaine's heart-shaped face and lustrous hairdo on the other side of the empty inkwell. Elaine's marriage vows had been strictly for richer or richer. She would not even try to understand failure. Well, let her go. Let her take the children and go back to her snippy old mother. That was the least of his worries. The one insane error of his whole career had been to marry a poor girl, and yet it had seemed logical at the time, indeed imperative. For Elaine had been herself just as much the symbol of success as the money that he had wanted. What was the good of one without the other?
    But what was the good of either? Might there not be an actual relief in failure? That was the way Tony sometimes talked. Tony talked to him about Max Leonard as if Max Leonard did not understand the contradictions of his own nature. This was absurd because crazy people usually know they're crazy. Max was utterly aware of his own craziness, aware of it from minute to minute, aware of all his drives and compulsions, aware of the hopelessness of it all. He knew that the brief dizzy moments of joy when one of his plans worked out were hardly worth the fuss. But what else could a man do? He picked up the ringing telephone.
    "What is it, Miss Jordan?"
    "It's that man again, sir. The one you spoke to yesterday who wouldn't give his name."
    "I'll take him." He quickly pressed the white button. "Good morning, Jerry."
    "Okay, fella, where is it?"
    "I haven't got it."
    "I didn't ask you that. I asked, where is it?"
    "I need time, Jerry."
    "I don't give time. You know that."
    "What can I do then?"
    "You guess what
I
can do, fella. You