a kind of glamour. To Frings it had seemed that Tomasson had seen everything, his insight informed not merely by conjecture or personal bias but by previous experiences. Frings had often gone drinking with him at the old Palomino Tavern, before it was torn down, along with half that block, to put up the Havana Hotel. Frings could never match Tomasson and always left him at the bar, ranting to whoever would listen—and people did generally listen. Frings had kept careful track of the wisdom that Tomasson imparted on those nights and still remembered most of it clearly, though as Frings grew in experience, he found that he disagreed to a greater or lesser degree with much of what Tomasson had once said.
Like most reporters of the time, Tomasson was deeply cynical about the City’s government. There seemed no end to the stream of corrupt mayors who took the City’s helm. Darwin, Tomasson had claimed, explained it all. The most able of the “criminal class,” as he called it, rose to the top and were able to defeat any honest challenge through vote-rigging, bribery, intimidation, and downright theft. The strongest criminal, he said, always prospered.
Frings agreed that Darwin explained it, but he understood Darwin a little differently. To Frings, it was a matter of innovation: Innovation was required to gain and hold power; thus, old methods of corruption and graft became obsolete quickly, and success depended on being able to quickly and constantly formulate new methods and forms of acquiring wealth and maintaining power. Maybe, in the end, Tomasson’s argument was essentially the same. But to Frings, the nimble mind trumped all other attributes.
Frings’s desk sat in a corner of the newsroom, part of a maze of desks, topped by black Smith-Coronas and Bell telephones. At the best of times the room buzzed with noise. Inexperienced reporters struggled to concentrate amid the tumult. Today, just a day after the Block bombing, the newsroom had all the intensity of a squadron scrambling for battle. The assistants scuttled around purposefully, answering to the frequent shouts from reporters at their desks. Everyone seemed to be smoking a cigarette or a cigar, obscuring the ceiling in a haze of tobacco smoke.
Frings, though, was in a marijuana-induced zone, undistracted by the maelstrom around him as he typed a column that would run in the next day’s newspaper.
A Man of Action
By Francis Frings
Provocation will bring out the true nature of the provoked. A man who is by nature contemplative will consider his options and select one that seems to best respond to the provocateur. This is the modus operandi of the chess master, the debater, the general. In short, this is the method observed by men for whom an improper response is irrevocably disastrous. The contemplative man’s opposite number is the man of action. Like a drunken lawyer caught with an ace up his sleeve, the man of action’s response to provocation is to flail out with frenzied violence at the first unfortunate to cross his path. His violence is used as a salve to his own wounds, rather than to punish the offending party.
I bring forth these two types of men because I fear for the political Left in the City in the substantial wake of the recent bombing directed at the mayor’s cohort Ian Block. Why do I fear? The mayor is, I feel indisputably, a man of action. He is a retired professional pugilist who, by training and nature, responded to insult to his person with immediate, furious, and overwhelming violence. Does anyone doubt that his instincts in the mayor’s office have been the same as his instincts between the ropes? Ask the thugs of the White Gang, who were eradicated like so many culled rabbits in the wake of the Birthday Party Massacre. Draw your own conclusions as to the justice of that remarkable period, but understand that other, less obviously culpable targets may be the next to feel the mayor’s considerable wrath.
Why do I fear for the political Left? Because when the mayor begins his flailings, the easiest and most obvious target will be the anarchists and communists. Who else would you expect to bear the burden of blame? The Bristol Gang? They are now part and parcel of the mayor’s regime, as much a part of the king’s court as the industrialists who are the public faces of the mayor’s cabal. Who else? I cannot think of one to supplant the anarchists and communists from the top of the mayor’s