Do you know what it is that's made him so fat. He's in the habit of, everyone that gets arrested by him, he eats their breakfast. Didn't he eat up your breakfast? Yeah, I thought as much. But a man with a belly like that can't be made into a whip-man and never will be, that is quite out of the question." "There are whip-men like that," Willem insisted, who had just released the belt of this trousers. "No," said the whip-man, striking him such a blow with the cane on his neck that it made him wince, "you shouldn't be listening to this, just get undressed." "I would make it well worth your while if you would let them go," said K., and without looking at the whip-man again--as such matters are best carried on with both pairs of eyes turned down--he pulled out his wallet. "And then you'd try and put in a complaint against me, too," said the whip-man, "and get me flogged. No, no!" "Now, do be reasonable," said K., "if I had wanted to get these two punished I would not now be trying to buy their freedom, would I? I could simply close the door here behind me, go home and see or hear nothing more of it. But that's not what I'm doing, it really is of much more importance to me to let them go free; if I had realised they would be punished, or even that they might be punished, I would never have named them in the first place as they are not the ones I hold responsible. It's the organisation that's to blame, the high officials are the ones to blame." "That's how it is!" shouted the policemen, who then immediately received another blow on their backs, which were by now exposed. "If you had a senior judge here beneath your stick," said K., pressing down the cane as he spoke to stop it being raised once more, "I really would do nothing to stop you, on the contrary, I would even pay you money to give you all the more strength." "Yeah, that's all very plausible, what you're saying there," said the whip-man, "only I'm not the sort of person you can bribe. It's my job to flog people, so I flog them." Franz, the policeman, had been fairly quiet so far, probably in expectation of a good result from K.'s intervention, but now he stepped forward to the door wearing just his trousers, knelt down hanging on to K.'s arm and whispered, "Even if you can't get mercy shown for both of us, at least try and get me set free. Willem is older than me, he's less sensitive than me in every way, he even got a light beating a couple of years ago, but my record's still clean, I only did things the way I did because Willem led me on to it, he's been my teacher both for good and bad. Down in front of the bank my poor bride is waiting for me at the entrance, I'm so ashamed of myself, it's pitiful." His face was flowing over with tears, and he wiped it dry on K.'s coat. "I'm not going to wait any longer," said the whip-man, taking hold of the cane in both hands and laying in to Franz while Willem cowered back in a corner and looked on secretly, not even daring to turn his head.