"Treaty," she said. "I tell you they're all in it. Now that I've seen
the Government in action I understand what I saw in Mob Territory.
They've gone rotten, that's all. They've gone rotten. The way he treated
you, because he thought you didn't have his rank! Sometimes my uncle's
high-handed, sometimes he tells a person off, sometimes he lets him know
he's top man in the Syndic and doesn't propose to let anybody teach him
how to suck eggs. But the spirit's different. In the Syndic it's parent
to child. In the Mob it's master to slave. Not based on age, not based
on achievement, but based on the accident of birth. You tell me 'You're
a Falcaro' and that packs weight. Why? Not because I was born a Falcaro
but because they let me stay a Falcaro. If I hadn't been brainy and
quick, they'd have adopted me out before I was ten. They don't do that
in Mob Territory. Whatever chance sends a Regan is a Regan then and
forever. Even if it's a paranoid constitutional inferior like Jimmy's
father. Even if it's a giggling pervert like Jimmy.
"God, Charles, I'm scared.
"At last I know these people and I'm scared. You'd have to see Chicago
to know why. The lakefront palaces, finer than anything in New York.
Regan Memorial Plaza, finer than Scratch Sheet Square--great gilded
marble figures, a hundred running yards of heroic frieze. But the hovels
you see only by chance! Gray brick towers dating from the Third Fire!
The children with faces like weasels, the men with faces like hogs, the
women with figures like beer barrels and all of them glaring at you when
you drive past as if they could cut your throat with joy. I never
understood the look in their eyes until now, and you'll never begin to
understand what I'm talking about until you see their eyes...."
Charles revolted against the idea. It was too gross to go down. It
didn't square with his acquired picture of life in North America and
therefore Lee Falcaro must be somehow mistaken or hysterical. "There,"
he murmured, stroking her hair. "We'll be all right. We'll be all
right." He tried to soothe her.
She twisted out of his arms and raged: "I _won't_ be humored. They're
mad, I tell you. Dick Reiner was right. We've got to wipe out the
Government. But Frank Taylor was right too. We've got to blast the Mob
before they blast us. They've died and decayed into something too
horrible to bear. If we let them stay on the continent, with us their
stink will infect us and poison us to death. We've got to do something.
We've got to do something."
"What?"
It stopped her cold. After a minute she uttered a shaky laugh. "The fat,
sloppy, happy Syndic," she said, "sitting around while the wolves
overseas and the maniacs across the Mississippi are waiting to jump.
Yes--do what?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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