In his long career, he had ignored all the public attacks on him, except one. His first name had been Michael; when a newspaper columnist of the humanitarian clique nicknamed him Midas Mulligan and the tag stuck to him as an insult, Mulligan appeared in court and petitioned for a legal change of his first name to "Midas." The petition was granted.
In the eyes of his contemporaries, he was a man who had committed the one unforgivable sin: he was proud of his wealth.
These were the things Dagny had heard about Midas Mulligan; she had never met him. Seven years ago, Midas Mulligan had vanished.
He left his home one morning and was never heard from again. On the next day, the depositors of the Mulligan Bank in Chicago received notices requesting that they withdraw their funds, because the bank was closing. In the investigations that followed, it was learned that Mulligan had planned the closing in advance and in minute detail; his employees were merely carrying out his instructions. It was the most orderly run on a bank that the country ever witnessed. Every depositor received his money down to the last fraction of interest due. All of the bank's assets had been sold piecemeal to various financial institutions. When the books were balanced, it was found that they balanced perfectly, to the penny; nothing was left over; the Mulligan Bank had been wiped out.
No clue was ever found to Mulligan's motive, to his personal fate or to the many millions of his personal fortune. The man and the fortune vanished as if they had never existed. No one had had any warning about his decision, and no events could be traced to explain it. If he had wished to retire—people wondered—why hadn't he sold his establishment at a huge profit, as he could have done, instead of destroying it? There was nobody to give an answer. He had no family, no friends.
His servants knew nothing: he had left his home that morning as usual and did not come back; that was all.
There was—Dagny had thought uneasily for years—a quality of the impossible about Mulligan's disappearance; it was as if a New York skyscraper had vanished one night, leaving nothing behind but a vacant lot on a street corner. A man like Mulligan, and a fortune such as he had taken along with him, could not stay hidden anywhere; a skyscraper could not get lost, it would be seen rising above any plain or forest chosen for its hiding place; were it destroyed, even its pile of rubble could not remain unnoticed. But Mulligan had gone—and in the seven years since, in the mass of rumors, guesses, theories, Sunday supplement stories, and eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen him in every part of the world, no clue to a plausible explanation had ever been discovered.
Among the stories, there was one so preposterously out of character that Dagny believed it to be true: nothing in Mulligan's nature could have given anyone ground to invent it. It was said that the last person to see him, on the spring morning of his disappearance, was an old woman who sold flowers on a Chicago street corner by the Mulligan Bank. She related that he stopped and bought a bunch of the year's first bluebells. His face was the happiest face she had ever seen; he had the look of a youth starting out into a great, unobstructed vision of life lying open before him; the marks of pain and tension, the sediment of years upon a human face, had been wiped off, and what remained was only joyous eagerness and peace. He picked up the flowers as if on a sudden impulse, and he winked at the old woman, as if he had some shining joke to share with her. He said, "Do you know how much I've always loved it—being alive?" She stared at him, bewildered, and he walked away, tossing the flowers like a ball in his hand—a broad, straight figure in a sedate, expensive, businessman's overcoat, going off into the distance against the straight cliffs of office buildings with the spring sun sparkling on their windows.
"Midas Mulligan was a vicious bastard with a dollar sign stamped on his heart," said Lee Hunsacker, in the fumes of the acrid stew. "My whole future depended upon a miserable half-million dollars, which was just small change to him, bat when I applied for a loan, he turned me down flat—for no better reason than that I had no collateral to offer.
