Free Three Days Before the Shooting ... by Ralph Ellison Page B

kind of saint or even into a perfect politician. Anyway, not before he’s cold!”
    For a moment this produced silence, which was broken by a policeman who approached through the crowd calling for “Congressman Brock,” and the calm man excused himself and left. Then the fat man chuckled. “Saint?” he said. “Who the hell said he was a saint? Why, I could tell you things about Sunraider that …”
    And now it was as though he’d given a signal to release a veritable deluge of the lies and rumors that had collected about the figure of the Senator. Drawing together, they pressed me even closer to the wall as they let themselves go. First they rehashed the rumor that for a time during his youth the Senator had been the leader of an organization which wore black hoods and practiced obscene ceremonials with the ugliest and most worn-out prostitutes they could find. Like certain motorcycle gangs of today they also engaged in acts of violence and hooliganism and were accused of torturing people—derilicts and such. They were also said to have distributed Christmas baskets and comic books to the poor.
    I was familiar with this rumor and had found no substantiation for it, except for the hardly related fact that the Senator was famous for wearing a spectacular black cashmere overcoat of balmoral cut that was lined full length with sable.
    Next came the rumor that the Senator, a wealthy bachelor, had kept for a time a beautiful Jewish mistress whom he showered with expensive jewelry, furs, works of art (he was alleged to have given her one of the finest Picas-sos), but I dismissed this as untrue when the narrator, a columnist known as a notorious liar, claimed that this fair lady was kept locked in a luxurious establishment in Georgetown which was staffed with mute Oriental servants and guarded by three vicious dogs—a Doberman pinscher, a German shepherd, and a Weimaraner.
    “Sonsabitches would let you enter,” the columnist said, “but God help anyone who tried to leave without the Senator’s permission.”
    “What happened to the mistress?”
    “Damn if I know,” the columnist said. “But I understand that one night she got the dogs to turn on Sunraider, and he got rid of the whole shooting gallery. He was jealous as hell of that woman.”
    Then came the hair-raising and eye-stretching story that cast the Senator as villain in the destruction of a highly skilled diplomat’s career. For reasonsof his own—about which the gossipmonger relating it was unclear—Sunraider was said to have persuaded a pious Pullman porter to accuse the diplomat of having approached him, the porter, with some odd deviationary sexual proposition while returning in his Pullman car via San Francisco from Casablanca. The porter, said to be an extraordinarily homely black man, was described as a high deacon of his church, a Shriner, a Prince Hall Mason, an Elk of the I.B.P.O.E. species, an Alpha Phi Alpha, a lifetime member in good standing of the United Sons of Georgia—all highly respected Negro fraternal organizations. Thus, with these charges coming from such quarters, the diplomat’s goose was cooked. The executive branch simply could not withstand the anticipated outcry.
    Which makes us once again aware that anyone can do just about anything in this country—throw it off track, strip its gears—if only he knows where to throw a fistful of mud or where to stand to speak out of turn. In this democracy, of course, all things are possible. But why on earth should a Pullman porter, at that time privy by the very nature of his employment to all manner of peccadilloes of the great, be allowed to affect the destiny of a diplomat? Even so, I don’t believe that the Senator could be that malicious or irresponsible. And besides, the official records show that the diplomat in question left the service simply because he wished to retire. Objectively, the dwindling of his family fortune, one of the official reasons given, not to mention the