"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 orthodox family life is part of the effort towards respectability. He's backing them to 'pay his debt to society'—in other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail."
"It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute."
"Of course it isn't," Joan had said. "The next thing he'll do is go in for direct public service—giving money to hospitals or something like that. You watch."
She had been right; within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more Abner Longmans Brauns born down here. It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly liberal myself when I'm off duty, I hated to think what Braun's career might tell me about my own motives, if I'd let it.
All of which had nothing to do with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla—or did it? I kept remembering Anderton's challenge: "You can't take such a gamble. There are eight and a half million lives riding on it—" That put it up into Braun's normal operating area, all right. The connection was still hazy, but on the grounds that any link might be useful, I phoned him.
He remembered me instantly; like most uneducated, power-driven men, he had a memory as good as any machine's.
"You never did send me that paper you was going to write," he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged, although he was in his seventies now. "You promised you would."