The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

OUR FINAL LANDING WAS at the headquarters of Senator Thomas Collier Platt, who held court at the Fifth Avenue when he wasn’t in Washington. Known as the “Easy Boss,” he wasn’t like his Democratic shadow, Dick Croker, the grandest of Grand Sachems, who rose up from the whimsical mayhem of his own street gang. Croker didn’t care for music or poetry and art. He was a mixer who may have clubbed many a man to death at the polls. He ruled Manhattan’s precincts, but he didn’t have Senator Platt’s wide appeal. Platt seldom spoke above a whisper. Platt had the sweet, soft hands of a violinist. Platt had even attended Yale College once upon a time. He read poetry to his children. But he was murderous in his own way. He could wreck the career of a Governor with one of his whispers. Presidents would arrive for a Sunday chat at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, sit in one of the mandarin corridors off the main lobby until the Senator was prepared to greet you in his Amen Corner—Platt had been a theology student at Yale. He slumped behind his mahogany desk, an heirloom of some sort, and looked like a cadaver in a gray suit. Senator Platt was a sallow man. He had the complexion of a spent candle. But his lips were always moist, and he stared out at you from the deep hollows of his eyes. Nothing got past the Senator’s gaze. And at the moment his gaze fell upon Nan. He didn’t care for crime reporters, any reporters at all. But he hadn’t objected to my bringing her here. And then I realized he had known Nan before she was baptized by Pulitzer. Perhaps he’d used her as a “swallow,” to entrap Republican Assemblymen he couldn’t keep in line. We were both escorted by one of his lackeys to the Amen Corner. You weren’t allowed to sit in his exalted presence, not at first. But he found a chair for Nan, an heirloom like his own, with a velvet-covered cushion.

“You’re a clever lad, Roosevelt, to bring Pulitzer’s little girl with you. What’s her name?”

He said all this in a menacing whisper, without gazing at me once.

“You know my name, Senator,” she said. “I’ve sat on your lap many a time.”

And the cadaver livened considerably.

“But that was in the old days. . . . Can you guess why the Commissioner dragged you here in the middle of the night?”

I could feel myself sliding down into some abyss. But Nan was as much a pol as Senator Platt.

“I suppose it was to eat your heart out,” she said. “To overwhelm you with my wit.”

“And your loveliness,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

But Nan was immune to the Easy Boss’s accolades. “I’m practically a grandma, Senator. My thighs are full of ripples.”

“Ripples an old man might admire,” he said before that sallow ice of his returned. “But you know the rules. You will not repeat a word you hear at this table.

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