Two Trains Running - By Andrew H. Vachss Page 0,58

count up the years, but that’d just make us sound old,” Lymon said, smiling. “How come you ask, Roy?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just natural. In times of crisis, you always look to the people you know you can count on. And talking about how far back you go with them, it’s kind of a comfort, I suppose.”

“Crisis? Come on, Roy. I know Dioguardi’s been nibbling and all, but that’s happened before. We always come out on top.”

“It’s the top that’s the problem. The top over us.”

“Us? We’re not part of—”

“Everybody’s part of something, Lymon. Look, who’s the mayor of this town?”

“Bobby Wyeth. He’s been the—”

“Uh-huh. And who’s the boss of this town?”

“Well, you, Roy. Who else?”

“Yeah. But if you were an outsider, you wouldn’t know that, would you? If you wanted something, I don’t know, a permit to put up a building, or a license to open a club, you’d go on down to City Hall, right?”

“I guess. . . .”

“And Bobby—not that you could get to see Bobby yourself, right off—he could take care of that for you. Everyone knows how that works—you have to take care of the person who takes care of you. If the job is big enough, the pie gets cut up right in Bobby’s office, and he passes out the little slices. Passes them down, okay? But if it’s a small-potatoes job, the cut travels up, from the building inspector or whoever, until it finally gets to Bobby.”

“Sure.”

“Well, we don’t get a taste of that pie, Lymon. We’re not supposed to; that’s not the deal. But all of what we do get, it comes from the same place, like a lot of wires plugged into the same socket.”

“Well, sure, Roy. I mean, I guess so.”

“You know what they call the vote, Lymon?”

“The . . . what?”

“The vote. The right to vote, actually. What they call it is the ‘franchise.’ ”

“You mean, like a Howard Johnsons?”

“I don’t think that’s what they were thinking of when they named it, but that’s what it comes down to. See, it costs money to be elected. Money and muscle. The money and muscle, that’s what buys votes. And once you control enough of those, you get to make money. Like Bobby Wyeth does. Like we do.”

“So in every town . . . ?”

“In every town, every village, every city, every state—hell, in every country—”

“—Whoever runs the show, he gets a franchise to make money,” Lymon said, like a schoolboy reciting out loud, to reinforce the lesson.

“Right,” Beaumont said. “But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Without us, Bobby Wyeth isn’t the boss of anything. His whole operation, it’s like a damn army tank. Once it gets rolling, it doesn’t matter who the driver is, what’s going to stand in its way? But a tank’s still a machine. And machines, they don’t run on air. They need gas. They need oil. They need maintenance.”

Beaumont paused a beat, then went on: “And that’s us, Lymon. We’re the only place the machine can get what it needs.”

“Maybe that was so, once,” Lymon said, thoughtfully. “But now, any election day, Bobby Wyeth can put a hundred precinct captains out in the street.”

“He can,” Beaumont conceded. “And if they want to keep their city jobs, they’ll be out there, bringing in the voters. That’s the way Bobby pays: with jobs, mostly. And I don’t mean just cleaning the streets, or driving a bus, either. Being a judge, that’s a job, too.”

“So you’re saying Bobby doesn’t need us anymore?”

“No. No, I’m not saying that at all. We need each other. That’s the way it works. The way it works everywhere. Real power is never public. You can’t rub folks’ noses in it; they won’t stand for it. We’ve got enough on Bobby Wyeth to put him under the jail, we wanted to do that. The first nickel he ever took, you handed it to him yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. And that was before he ever got elected, too.”

“So we could put a lot of dirt on him, so what? There may be some rubes out there who actually think politicians aren’t all crooks, but there aren’t enough of them to elect the town dogcatcher. The newspapers make a big deal out of political corruption, but the average guy, he expects a man in office to make something for himself. Bobby’s got a house that had to cost him ten, fifteen years’ salary . . . and there’s no mortgage on it. He