A and its
individual dock-wallopers. For some reason, he had been amused by the
brash youngster who'd barged in on him and demanded the lowdown, and had
shown me considerable lengths of ropes not normally in view of the
public--nothing incriminating, but enough to give me a better insight
into how the union operated than I had had any right to expect--or even
suspect.

Hence I was surprised to hear somebody on the docks remark that Braun
was in the city over the week end. It would never have occurred to me
that he still interested himself in the waterfront, for he'd gone
respectable with a vengeance. He was still a professional gambler, and
according to what he had told the Congressional Investigating Committee
last year, took in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year at it, but
his gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or shady
insurance deals. Nowadays what he did was called investment--mostly in
real estate; realtors knew him well as the man who had _almost_ bought
the Empire State Building. (The _almost_ in the equation stands for the
moment when the shoestring broke.)

Joan had been following his career, too, not because she had ever met
him, but because for her he was a type study in the evolution of what
she called "the extra-legal ego." "With personalities like that,
respectability is a disease," she told me. "There's always an
almost-open conflict between the desire to be powerful and the desire to
be accepted; your ordinary criminal is a moral imbecile, but people like
Braun are damned with a conscience, and sooner or later they crack
trying to appease it."

"I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin bearing," I said. "Braun's ten-point
steel all the way through."

"Don't you believe it. The symptoms are showing all over him. Now he's
backing Broadway plays, sponsoring beginning actresses, joining
playwrights' groups--he's the only member of Buskin and Brush who's
never written a play, acted in one, or so much as pulled the rope to
raise the curtain."

"That's investment," I said. "That's his business."

"Peter, you're only looking at the surface. His real investments almost
never fail. But the plays he backs _always_ do. They have to; he's
sinking money in them to appease his conscience, and if they were to
succeed it would double his guilt instead of salving it. It's the same
way with the young actresses. He's not sexually interested in them--his
type never is, because living a rigidly