The Trail of the Slug

By C. J. Alexander

Seattle, an emerald city on the Sound, clean and beautifulexcept for people who abuse others in the markets and on the streets.

A city of industry and commerce, of giant airliners and tiny microchips, it is the target of industrial espionage that affects the security of the nation.

The S.P.D., swift and efficient, but can it do its job when a majority of the city doesnt want it done?

An explosion? No, not a blast as from Semtex or nitroglycerine. Far worse, it is three old men, each nearing the end of his life, each no longer willing to compromise, banded together for the most bizarre vigilante activity the West has seen. They are the Society of the Slug, and they will disrupt an entire city.

On the other hand, one might say that this is a love story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 26, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462090150

C. J. Alexander

C. J. Alexander, Writing Westerns as Alex Stoffel, he writes Action/Adventures as C. J. Alexander. He is a retired Computer Science Professor who recently relocated with his wife, Lila, to Southern Arizona. Hobbies include studying lectures on European History and Theoretic Physics, and rebuilding and shooting WWII M1 Garand Rifles.

Book preview

PROLOGUE 

Listen, reader—whoever you might be or from whatever walk of life you might come—and I will set for you this tale of three men who stand a major American city on its ear, evoking in the end both rousing cheers and bitter cries for incarceration.

In the northwest part of the contiguous forty-eight states lies a city of sloping hills, the water of Puget Sound on the west and mountains to the east. It is the city of Seattle with its bustling roadways and confusing traffic, for here they designate some lanes of freeways as inbound in the morning, but outbound in the afternoon. The city is a bright jewel to some, a wet and soggy place to others, but known far and wide as the city with the most courteous drivers in the country, for here, the tale is told, local drivers have been known to wave with a smile to out-of-state vehicles and actually give way to them in traffic.

It is a city which lives by the sea and the air. The salmon once was king but now must share its throne with both the mighty denizens of the sky built by Boeing and the smallest points on microchips at which an electrical current (or non-current) can be detected. It is a clean city, as cities go, and it is peopled by healthy-looking specimens, many of whom, when the weather is friendly, are seen to spend lunch-hours from the office jogging swiftly up and down the streets in running clothes. Some run even when the weather is not so friendly, but I digress.

Four seemingly unrelated and quite trivial events take place which will change forever the lives of three men, as well as those of many who don’t even know them, and create a social and legal upheaval the likes of which you, in all probability, will never again behold. Come, let me show you these events.

The first takes place here, in this parking lot outside the shopping mall called Northgate. Notice how crowded it is, but there, look there. There are two vacant spaces side by side. A car coming around the end of the row moves toward the vacant spaces to claim one. Look quickly now, watch that Mercedes coming from the other way speed up. He’s trying to beat the other car to the spaces. But why? There are two.. .ah, now we see. The man in the Mercedes won the race the other driver never knew he was in, and now he triumphantly parks his shining silver convertible at an angle. He is taking up two spaces. It’s the ploy of those with vehicles they deem too new and/or too valuable to risk receiving scratches or a dents from neighboring cars’ doors. The other driver merely shakes his head in disgust and drives away to look for another space. That’s it. Aggravating, but no big deal, right? Wrong.

Well, follow me, now, and let’s get along to this large grocery on the right. To observe the next event, we need to enter the store and stand in line behind the second check-out counter from the left. Can you see that woman at the head of the line, the tall, stern one suspiciously eyeing the display of each item as it is checked through? Good Lord, she must have a hundred and fifty dollars worth in the cart. Note that in spite of the impatience of those behind her, she is oblivious to it all. Finally, it is accomplished. The check-out girl announces the total to the woman who is only now pulling out a wad of coupons from her purse, a stack nearly two inches thick. You can see the shoulders of those in front of you slump in disgust. A couple of the shoppers push past to seek other lines more promising, but we wait. Finally, after the passing of no little time, time obviously more dear to the others in the line than it is to the wielder of the coupons, the clerk announces the revised total to the woman who, after much mental calculation, grudgingly decides that she isn’t being cheated beyond reasonable expectation. She opens her voluminous purse (or, judging by size, possibly an airline carry-on bag) and begins to search for her checkbook.

We leave the disgusted shoppers to go out of the store and behold the third event. It will take place in the mêlée of shoppers leaving their vehicles to walk to the store and shoppers loading their trunks and back seats with bags upon bags of sacked goods amid the continuous flow of vehicles entering and leaving the lot. There, to the right, do you see her?-the woman who has just finished moving the fruit of her day’s food safari from the shopping cart to the trunk of her car? She slams the trunk with some satisfaction (she apparently doesn’t have one of those cars with a self-latching trunk, or if she ever did, she has ruined it by now) and pushes the cart along the line until it is directly behind the car parked next to hers. Funny, it’s only a few steps over to the area plainly marked, «Leave Shopping Carts Here.» She ignores the sign, leaves the cart, and drives off.

For the fourth event, we are driving down toward the city’s business district at a fairly good clip along a heavily-traveled street which has two lanes of traffic moving in each direction. We wish to continue straight on through the intersection we are approaching, hence we’re in the left lane because we wish to avoid the slowing of traffic in the right lane that occurs when a vehicle therein decelerates to make a right turn. Of course, we must be concerned to an even greater degree with any car in our lane that might seek to make a left turn into the coming traffic. That could slow us up considerably and we certainly would want to slide into the right lane until we passed it. We see the light turn red ahead of us, and as we prepare to stop, we check to determine the intentions of the lone vehicle in our lane that is already stopped at the light. With relief we note no turning signals, for we would then be faced with the choice of waiting a considerable time for that car to get a large enough break in the oncoming traffic to make the turn, perhaps forcing us to wait for another light entirely, or trying to fight our way into the right-hand lane traffic. With some considerable relief, we come to a stop behind the car and wait. The light finally signals that we are permitted to continue, but as the light changes, so apparently does the mind of the driver of the car in front of us. The left taillight of his vehicle is suddenly signaling the flash-flash-flash intention of turning. We glumly shake our heads and envy the flow of traffic moving swiftly by on our right.

These are the events that are going to shake up an entire city. Not such-a-much, you say? What’s new? Well, perhaps you are right. But let’s see what happens.

CHAPTER I 

He looked with some dismay at the shaggy figure facing him. He studied the tall, stooped-shouldered man in the navy-blue cardigan who stared back at him from the tinted glass stretching tightly like skin across the front of the high-rise condo complex. The reflection of the evening sun setting into the peaks of the Olympic Mountains to the west blurred his vision, and he had to squint a bit to sharpen the image. Slowly he reached into his right hip pocket and removed a cleanly-folded handkerchief with which he carefully polished the lenses of his glasses before returning them to a precise balance on the bridge of his nose at the sight-angle he favored. He looked again at his reflection. It hadn’t changed.

There was a semblance of vigor which seemed to belie the age suggested by the unruly snow white hair that never seemed to thin (and which he had permitted to grow to an unreasonable length). He wondered how long it would take to find a barber who would cut it the way he wanted it. He resolved to look for one first thing in the morning.

Turning away from the building he walked toward the setting sun, crossing first the driveway and then a narrow strip of grass to where a wooden bench had been placed for the convenience of the inhabitants of the glass and steel catacomb behind him. He was grateful to find it unoccupied for he really didn’t care to engage in small talk. It wasn’t that kind of a time. He lowered himself to the seat and shifted around to find a position that didn’t cause discomfort to his thinly-padded bones.

Satisfied that he was as comfortable as he was likely to get, he let his eyes pan from his right to his left, noting, in turn, the seemingly endless stretch of residences trailing up the sloping hill, the peaks of the Olympics, then the tall buildings of downtown Seattle. This was followed by the almost ghostly white dome of Mt. Rainier somewhat to the east of due south from where he sat. Over the span between Rainier and the downtown buildings, he saw dots in the air which he assumed to be aircraft arriving and departing at SEATAC.

He looked up and saw that the evening sky was already taking on a lighter shade of blue. He sniffed the air. He had dwelled here for a time now, but the odor was still strange to his senses. Salt air, he thought. He chuckled as he remembered the numerous references in various literary works he had read (over the six or seven decades he had been able to read) to the sailor man’s longing for one more smell of the sweet sea air before he died. He had smelled salt air on several occasions, but the last time he had smelled it before moving to Seattle was more than forty years ago. That was when his government informed him that his presence was required on the Korean peninsula. And to be truthful, he had been perplexed each time he stood in the sea air for he had difficulty in thinking of it as sweet, yet he was reluctant to relinquish the literary image.

The years had tumbled into the last decade of the twentieth century but his mind moved back in time as had become its wont to do to a moment now a decade past. My God, he thought, have I come to such an age that I measure my life, not in months or even years, but in decades? The thought sent a chill down his spine. He shrugged off the feeling, turned his mind back to the most recent thoughts, and allowed himself a mild bit of amusement over the idea that the Atlantic had smelled saltier, while the Med had seemed almost.what? He couldn’t put a finger on it. This stuff, he thought, smelled more like fish. Not quite as bad as the harbor at Bergen in Norway, but it definitely smelled like fish.

The temperature was mild for Seattle this early in June, and his sweater was warm. Almost with reluctance, he settled back to allow the rite of evening to fall over him as the sun slipped lower into the mountains. It was a ritual he dreaded, yet it was also one to which he was inexplicably drawn. Often, he couldn’t really tell whether it was love or hate. It was just the time for the memories. And pain. Always the pain. The memories would come to him unbidden, and in an order not of his making—at least, not in any order he could imagine himself choosing. They just came, and he could do no more than drift with them, feeling the laughter of events and times long past which lived no more outside his memory. Yet if this was all, he would merely welcome them with happy arms. Unfortunately, with the memories came also the despair and the haunting question which seemed to burrow into the marrow of his bones and lie aching there—what did it all mean?

As he surrendered the remainder of his being to the dominance of memories, he wondered, as he did each day, if he was getting a taste of heaven or hell. In any case, he didn’t find himself inclined toward either. If he had a choice about the whole thing, which he did not, would he choose to remember? He didn’t know. In any case, the question was moot. There wasn’t a choice anyway. Reluctantly, like a patient presenting himself at a hospital for surgery, he let go of the seat of the bench that he had been holding tightly, crossed his arms over his chest, lowered his head, and surrendered.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, for the flow of images in his memory not only spanned the scale of time, they seemed timeless. He was only aware that they ended, as they always did, without his conscious bidding, and always with the same bitter taste in his mouth embellished by the cold, frozen ball of fear in his stomach. He was once again sitting in the Spartan appointments of a waiting room outside the surgical suites of a Denver hospital. He looked again at the stooped figure of a weary surgeon stumbling towards him, fumbling to untie the mask from his face and allowing it to drop to his chest. He could see blood smeared on the front of the green garb, and one look into the approaching eyes made it unnecessary to ask the question he had been unable to ask ten years ago and had been unable to form even in the countless times he had relived that moment since.

As abruptly as that precise moment came, it also vanished—the bright lights of the waiting room, the soft squishy sound of the surgeon’s slippers, the sad and pained eyes looking down at him. All that remained was the indescribable pain in his stomach. And then that, too, eased a bit as he emerged again into awareness of his surroundings.

What returned him to the present was the cold, the chill he felt. Looking around he saw that the sun had departed; even the lighter blue of the evening sky had receded. His forehead was wet with sweat, and the slight breeze brought a chill which made him shiver. He felt weak, cold, and suddenly very old. As he struggled to his feet and turned to walk back to the building behind him, he beheld a silent figure leaning against the glass by the door.

Obviously the man had been watching him, he had no idea for how long. He felt vaguely embarrassed as if what he had just experienced was a loss of some of his manhood. Or was it his privacy which had been violated? Or, he wondered wryly, was there anymore a difference between the two? As he shuffled his way back across the grass and the driveway, he looked at the silent, watching figure sharply. The watcher was a man of some size, he realized. Oh, not so terribly tall as all that, he probably didn’t go over his own six feet or so, but his shoulders were impressive. He looked lean and hard in spite of the lines which etched the granite of his features. His hair was sparse and cropped short and he held a walking stick in his left hand. In his right hand was a glowing cigar. He decided to walk by the watcher without comment.

He was a bit disconcerted to feel the eyes of the watcher fixed upon his face as he approached, and his resolve weakened. He felt intimidated, nevertheless he tried to look away and enter the building.

The ghosts, laddie, ‘tis always the ghosts, spoke the watcher. The voice was low, resonant, and harsh yet not without kindness. ’Tis but one more battle, how oft I have prayed the last.

He hesitated with one hand holding the door open, not really knowing what to say or if to say anything. It was the quite incongruous designation of laddie which settled the matter. Are you a poet, he asked mildly, or just a misplaced Scot?

No, came the deeply resonant voice. I just read it somewhere.

He started to walk by, but then surprising himself, he paused and hesitantly turned back toward the man. You seem to know about such things. Do you have ghosts?

With a flick of a right hand, the cigar went sailing out into the driveway. More, I think, than you. And perhaps with better cause. The watcher expelled the smoke he had retained in his lungs after the last long drag and walked toward the opened door. The man went silently past him, but from the retreating figure moving firmly toward the elevators came a soft sigh.

The elevator door opened as the man reached it, and an elderly couple walked out. The watcher waited until they made their exit, then entered and poked at a button designating some unknown floor with his walking stick.

He wanted to run after the watcher and ask him how he knew. He wanted to know what was worse than losing the one being who had been the better part of him for decades, but he knew that was foolish. Old men always sat on benches in the evening to remember. It was no big trick to imagine one of them reliving events from the past. Nevertheless, he watched the numbers above the elevator door and noted that the indicator stopped at seven, one floor beneath his own.

Tony Dibretti was a man essentially without ambition. That is to say, he was not an ambitious man by the world’s standards, the operant words being by the world’s standards. In actuality, he was a man of great ambition, albeit tempered. In the world of his business, he wanted to appear as a man of some knowledge, but not too much; of some importance, but not so much as to attract a lot of attention; of use to superiors, but not to the point of being considered a threat to others who contested for places of high position. He certainly desired to be worthy of his hire, but not to a degree which would threaten anyone in authority over him. In this, he was the product, strangely, of his mentor, Staff Sergeant Michael David Howe.

Chuckling now, he remembered the years when he was a callow nineteen-year-old buck private at Fort Dix in March of 1942. He had grown up on the north side of Chicago during prohibition. His uncle Rocco had been a tail gunner on a beer truck, his father a minor bagman for the mob, but others in his extended family stood higher in the hierarchy. He remembered the year he turned ten, because that was when they told him that his uncle had died in a shoot-out with the feds. It was, up to that time in his life, the greatest shock he had ever received. It turned out to be, however, not nearly as great a jolt as the news that his father had died of a heart attack when a rival mob had shot up the joint in which he was making a pick-up. Tony had loved his uncle and feared his father. It wasn’t that he hated his father or anything like that, it was just that his father was to be feared like any father in a good Chicago Italian family of the day.

From the time he was eleven years old, Tony had run with the gang in his neighborhood. Now it occurred to him just how lucky they all were, for there were no, or at least very few, drugs in those days. All they had was the occasional bottle of prohibition booze that might fall into the gang’s hands. After the repeal of prohibition, it was just the problem of finding someone to buy it for them. The kids nowadays were something else, he muttered under his breath. He shook his head with sadness as he observed the young man on the street opposite slip something into the hand of an even younger girl before he took her purse and rummaged through it until he found what he wanted. The young man yelled at her and struck a light blow across her mouth with the back of his hand. He threw her purse on the ground and stalked away. The young girl, still clutching what he had given her tightly in her desperate hands and forgetting all about her purse, turned and ran into the dingy restaurant. She was seeking, Tony realized, a restroom in which she might in some privacy inject a foreign substance into her young body.

Tony wasn’t bitter, just disgusted. Damn these kids! It didn’t have to be this way. It hadn’t been so for him and it didn’t have to be that way for them, either. The hell with the younger generation. They could have all that youth shit and be damned to them. Yet he knew that if he had been raised on the streets today...well, he just didn’t want to think about it.

The most he had ever done was to run numbers and a few messages, yet he realized that if the war, the Big One in ‘41, hadn’t come along, he would never have met Mike Howe. He let his mind dwell on those years for a time. Why not? He didn’t have anything better to do anyway, at least not for an hour.

He came to meet Sgt. Michael David Howe as the result of an illness incurred in his preparation for war. Tony had finished basic training with his unit, but before being shipped out, he had come down with pneumonia due to a late-night stroll with full field pack in the camp’s winter woods, a walk which included fording an almost-frozen stream. The rest of his unit had been shipped to England and from there to who-knows-where. Tony, awaiting full recovery, had been assigned to work with the supply sergeant, who, as it turned out, was one Sgt. Howe.

Mike Howe was somewhat of an anomaly. A well-built man in his late twenties, Mike held a Master’s degree in business from the University of Chicago. It was because he and Tony both hailed from the same city (although most definitely not the same neighborhood) that he took the callow youth under his wing. On the other hand, it might also have been because he was a teacher at heart and responded to the quickness he encountered in Tony’s mind.

In truth, Mike could easily have been an officer. His college training would have guaranteed that. He probably could have ended up as a supply officer, or perhaps even as a staff-grade officer concerned with logistics. But Mike forcefully and successfully resisted each of the numerous efforts to convert him to an officer and a gentleman. When Tony discovered this, he was puzzled because it was obvious even at that early stage in his military experience that officers generally faired better than enlisted men.

The beginning of a turning point in Tony’s life came about because of the question he put to Sgt. Mike Howe.

Sergeant? How come you don’t wanna be no officer? After correcting the nineteen-year-old’s grammar, Mike Howe hesitated. How, he thought, could he expect this product of Chicago’s north side to understand? Nevertheless, in boredom rather than hope, he made a stab at it.

Because, you benighted offspring of prohibition’s greatest evil, I don’t want to make the army my career.

Tony chuckled to himself as he remembered trying to figure out just what the hell this strange man had actually said.

Well, what’s that got to do with anything? Officers live better, don’t they? And don’t they get more bucks?

Mike Howe groaned to himself and almost gave it up as a lost cause. For some reason that later he never could adequately explain, he persisted.

Look, kid, if I let them make me a lieutenant, the enlisted men will hate me, and I’ll be a handy fall-guy for every officer above me who ever fucks up. And if, God forbid, I should find myself promoted to a higher grade, say like eventually to major, I would have to play The Game.

Uh, what game is that, Sarge?

The game, shithead, where I have to work for promotions like everybody else, and pass the buck, and take the rap for mistakes made by colonels and generals, and chew out the asses of idiots like you, just to keep in practice. Nah, look at me here, look what I have. Mike Howe gestured to include the barn-like interior of the supply depot with its piles and heaps of gear.

Look at this. I’m in charge of it. If an officer wants something and I don’t want him to have it, I find a reg which says he has to fill out forms a ream of paper long to get it. In triplicate. But if I want to do someone a favor, I can. In the meanwhile, I’m waiting out the war in a nice safe place where I won’t be the target in some kraut’s sights.

Well you’ve got officers over you, don’t you? Everybody’s got officers.

Ah, there’s the thing. The officers over me are mostly screw-ups or they’d be running platoons and companies of rifle or armor or artillery. If I keep things running smoothly, they pay no attention to me at all. It only takes asking them for a signature now and then to keep them in their offices, as long, he hastened to add, as I make sure nothing bad comes down on them.

Tony had thoughtfully nodded at this, and Mike Howe took heart. Was it possible that this youth understood any of this?

Kid, he said with uncharacteristic intensity, you have to figure out what you want from life, what it really would take to make you happy. He peered sharply at Tony to see if any of this was sinking in and therefore justifying the expenditure of his time.

While uneducated except in the ways of the streets, Tony was an unusually bright young man. But until now, that which he wanted from life involved something like walking from the street corner where he lived to the dark alley where his gang had a meeting place without getting the crap beat out of him. Or worse. Puzzled, he realized that he had never wondered what it was that he wanted out of life.

What do you want, Sarge? he queried.

Mike Howe almost responded with anger at the upstart question, but a quick look at Tony’s eyes told him that the kid really wanted to know. So Mike told him.

I want to get out of this war in one piece. When it’s over, I want to get into a business for myself and see what I can make of it. I don’t think I really want to be rich...

Why not? demanded the kid.

Well, for the same reason I don’t want to be an officer, I guess. If you’re rich, someone is always trying to knock you down, to take away what you have. You have to fight just to keep what you own, much less to get any more. The rich people I’ve known are not all that happy.

What do you want, then? What’s enough but not too much?

Astounded at the depth of the query from the kid, he could only answer, For me? I don’t think the question can be answered with an exact figure, like accurate to five decimal places. It’s not a number at all. I want enough, I suppose, so that I’m comfortable and have the life I want, like a wife and kids and a house. And I’d like to have a successful business I could be proud of. Other than that, I don’t think I want very much.

Tony nodded at this, for he could begin to understand. For the next three and a half years the question would haunt him. Without even knowing it, what he was asking was of a profound nature, questions most people on this earth spent a lifetime never daring to ask. What is enough? What is too much? How much is enough without making it someone else’s business to take it away from you? And although he didn’t know it, he was really asking what he thought life was all about, and the answers he painfully forged in the crucible of the war did indeed satisfy that question.

Within two months, he was detached and sent to England where, because of his experience in supply, he was quite unaccountably (and in direct opposition to the army’s standard operating procedures) assigned to the one task he had learned. He spent the entire war, save for one extremely uncomfortable week, in one supply depot or another. The uncomfortable week happened when he, as a newly promoted corporal, had been sent to the supply center for the newly-moved 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, and for seven terrifying days during the Battle of the Bulge, he had been given a rifle and told to shoot at Germans. With quaking heart he did so, but to his great relief, he never could tell whether or not he had actually hit any of them. This, more than anything else, convinced him that he was not particularly well-suited for at least some aspects of life in his family.

In due course, the war, like all wars, ended and Tony, now a sargeant, was mustered out. He returned to Chicago to begin civilian life having a purpose, for he had figured out what he wanted.

Sgt. Michael David Howe never did get his own business because he died in England as a result of one of the last V2 rockets to land on those shores. Tony didn’t hear about it until three years after he was mustered out.

What was that which was to give order to Tony’s life? Tony smiled as he remembered how he felt when it all came together for him. He wanted money, quite a bit of money. He didn’t want it for the power it could give him, but for some common items of comfort it could buy. That was the first thing he wanted out of life. The second came as a revelation in a whorehouse in London (although he was by no means a virgin when he entered the army). He wanted women. Not singular—a woman—but plural—women. Marriage would be no obstacle for him, he would simply refuse to be entrapped in it.

In the army he had learned, by listening to others and through personal experience, that women could be bought, indeed, often (but by no means always) longed to be bought. Prostitutes went for a fixed price. Others could be paid for with an expensive dinner and a bottle of wine, or perhaps a more expensive bauble. Some held out for a steeper price, one which included a marriage license, a house, some kids, and position in a community. But, Tony believed, most women were sisters under the skin, and what he needed to break the skin and get at them was money.

The last two years Tony spent in the army were primarily occupied with planning. The first task, Tony realized, was to pick a position within the family structure that would fit his needs. He wavered between two he saw to be the best choices, first convincing himself that one was the most fruitful, the next week deciding upon the other.

Free time not spent in this sort of investigative activity was spent in reading, a choice of leisure that would stand him in good stead. He read voraciously, and in so doing quite unconsciously acquired the rudiments of passably decent grammar as well as a broadening of his awareness of the world which happened to exist somewhere out there beyond Chicago, the family, and the army.

He knew that he had no stomach for the life of a syndicate soldier, nor did he aspire to a place in the administrative hierarchy of the family. He wanted a position in the family which would be important, and thus lucrative, but far away from the decision-making apparatus of the mob.

From letters of his younger brothers, Tony knew that the family was expanding. It was just beginning to get into the big money. He was certain that they would need accountants, not accountants from outside the family, but members of the family who would work for its good because they directly benefited from the family’s success.

He also realized that with the growing complexity he envisioned, there would be inevitable conflicts requiring the services of members of the bar. What made the law, as well as the accounting field, interesting to him was that at least a part of his effectiveness would depend upon his separation from the normal activities of the family.

As for his aversion to achieving power, attorneys and accountants might be important in the life of the family, but no one would ever select either to head an operative branch of the family. In his eyes, both were perfect.

So, after mustering out of the Army and taking a suitable time to spend renewing acquaintances with the friends of his youth (at least those who did not rest in foreign cemeteries), Tony cast an eye about and decided upon night school as the proper way to begin. He applied himself diligently, learning that he had a strong affinity for the manipulation of numbers. His sharp but as yet uneducated mind, motivated far beyond that of a normal student, quickly devised mnemonic aids and methods whereby he was able to commit huge volumes of facts to memory. All in all, it was a bit of a marvel that he was able to finish the final four years of high school at all, but he in fact did it in little more than a year, and his teachers took inordinate, if not quite justified, pride of their roll in his accomplishments. Had any of his teachers understood the motivation behind his dedication, they would have been appalled.

But now he was finally ready. He was a twenty-three year old veteran who had access to the G.I. Bill, and with a little help from his family could attend nearly any school he desired. Some in the family had noted his determination and had discussed it with him. It was the summer of 1947, and many of the veterans of our nation’s battles were still trying to sort a lot of things out, like ceasing to dive for cover when a passing car backfired or a plane flew overhead, and learning again to refer to the spread put upon bread as butter instead of that Goddamned grease. While Tony was not alone in his thirst for knowledge and learning, he was certainly in on the ground floor. It was still a time in which nothing was too good for the boys who had won the war.

The family was quick to perceive not only the truly great skills of the young man, but also the advantage of educating this son, and expense money was no object as Tony began his collegiate career at a school of no less import than Harvard itself. This was accomplished in part by the reports of his teachers along with a not inconsiderable gift from his family to the school’s depleted building fund.

The years seemed to fly by for Tony, and he learned several things about himself and the world. He discovered that he had no taste for the law because it required almost endless hours spent in researching court decisions during which time, of course, he would not be able to pursue the young ladies of the area. True, he did not find Harvard so niggardly in availing slack time that he had no freedom at all to pursue his chosen game, but the business course