Man Overboard (15 page)

She was wearing a low-cut dress with a plunging neckline. The producer of the panel show, which was classed as “family,” had insisted on having the dress sewn up one inch in the front before she went on the air, and she got up now and fetched a pair of scissors to remove the stitches.

“Let me do that.” Ben got up. She had taken off her shoes. She stood before him with her head on one side while he clipped at the stitches, his hand trembling a little.

When the steel of the scissors touched her bare, creamy flesh, she gave a little shiver. Ben looked up at her, but her face was
completely blank and serene. She did not feel anything, and she did not realize that she was supposed to.

Mr Peale was a tall, casually elegant and youngish man, so loosely hung together that he could not help lounging whether he was on his feet or sitting down. In a chair, he tipped it backwards, curving his relaxed spine and stretching out his endless legs, with the long feet flopping in what looked like hand-sewn shoes. Upright, which he never was completely, he could not stand without resting one hip like a tired cab-horse. His hands were often cradled in his pockets. He leaned on anything that was handy.

When Ben came into the office, Mr Peale was leaning back in a tilted chair, with his feet on the desk and a telephone in his lap. It was a large, well-lit office, with two desks and a pale fitted carpet, and watercolours of aeroplanes on the walls. The pictures were effective rather than technical, but they hit Ben with a new and disconcerting idea. He had not thought of planes. Mr Peale could not expect him to fly one, but perhaps he was to be a guinea-pig for a higher and faster flight, the man who was strapped into a bucket seat with an automatic camera taking pictures of his contorted face muscles as the cramps hit him. His imagination turned and ran, but the heavy, resourceful shoes in which he had come to meet the challenge of adventure walked on across the room, making flat dents in the carpet.

The girl in the outer office had not enquired whether Ben might come in. She had merely shown him in, opening the door and announcing Ben in an off-hand way, as if she had little respect either for him or Mr Peale. She was the girl who had answered the telephone, but her appearance did not match her husky, mysterious voice. She had an untidily cropped head with the greenish sheen of brown hair that needs washing, and a flat, unhealthy face with a few spots in the greasy areas round her nose and chin. Her figure was good, and rather consciously inviting. She was one of those girls who only comes into her own at a party when all the lights fuse.

“He’s here now,” Mr Peale told the telephone, and rang off. He dropped his long legs to the ground and stood up, propping himself on the desk with one hand, while he offered the other to Ben. “Take a pew,” he said, and collapsed gracefully back into his chair.

They talked for a few minutes about nothing at all. The victim of so many interviews, Ben recognized the technique of making friendly, meaningless conversation until the nervous applicant cannot stand it any longer, and puts himself at a disadvantage by blurting out some crude allusion to the job. Ben kept his end of the conversation going, determined to beat Mr Peale at his own game and force him to reveal, or at least hint at what was at the back of the advertisement.

But this was not courage and initiative. What would the master mind with the club tie and the spotless finger-nails think of a man who sat so humbly pretending to be interested in the Army and Navy rugger match?

“Can we get down to business?” Ben cut bravely across the small talk. He looked at his watch without seeing it. “I haven’t got too long.”

“Who has?” Mr Peale smiled agreement. “The days whizz by. Awfully good of you to come along at all, as a matter of fact.”

His manner was disarming. Ben smiled back and admitted: “I couldn’t help coming. Your advertisement was most intriguing. What is this lucrative, adventurous proposition?” He and Geneva and Amy knew the advertisement by heart, and Amy had it pinned to the wall over her bed.

“You liked the ad? Mitzi wrote it.” Mr Peale inclined his head, which was small and smooth, with a clean skin and unobtrusive features, like the painted top of a ninepin, towards the outer room. “She put in all the adjectives she knew.” He was confidential, but he had confided nothing.

“I want the job,” Ben ventured, “if it’s something I can handle.”

“Do it on your head,” Mr Peale said casually. “Money for jam. A chance for a man to do a bit of good not only for himself, but for hundreds of other poor sods. Thousands, perhaps, if the thing goes well.”

So it was to be refugees. “Tell me more,” Ben said. “Who’s going to be helped, and how?”

Mr Peale stalled. He was more cunning than he seemed with that throw-away sixth-form voice and that round face of an inbred aristocrat on top of the long neck that rose like a flower stalk out of the perfect fold of his collar. He continued to generalize. He was waiting for something, and finally the outside door of the other room opened and a man’s voice said something abrupt to
the girl, and it was obvious that this was what he had been waiting for.

It was not Mr Peale who was the master mind. It was Mr Beckett. He was a much tougher customer, a disenchanted man with a square head of curly grey hair, bright with oil, and grey eyebrows and moustache trimmed like little hedges. He was not friendly. He was not even very polite. He prowled about the room, shooting questions at Ben, and clicking his teeth as if he did not like the answers.

“Sit down, Jake,” Mr Peale urged him, but Mr Beckett continued to prowl about the carpeted room, looking at Ben from every angle. Ben was in a swivel chair. He tried to keep the chair turned to face him, so that Beckett could not give Peale the thumbs down behind his back.

Suddenly Mr Beckett stopped prowling and sat down at the other desk in the window, folding his hands as if he were waiting for dinner. “This chap’s O.K., Jimmy,” he said surprisingly.

“How about it then?” Mr Peale asked Ben.

“How about what? I’m prepared to do almost anything, but you haven’t given me a clue.”

Mr Beckett laughed. “You don’t suppose,” he said, “that we give away all the secrets of our business to every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes in here looking for an idea to steal?”

“In that case,” Ben got up stiffly, feeling anger creeping over him, “I might as well go.”

“Jake didn’t mean you,” Mr Peale said. “Sit down, for God’s sake, and don’t be so stuffy.”

“Well, all right.” Ben sat down and looked from one man to the other. “What do you want me to do?”

“What do you think?” Mr Beckett grinned at him. He had a long line of even teeth under the clipped moustache.

“God knows. You might want to shoot me on to the moon in a rocket for all I know.”

“Would you go?”

“No.”

“Why did you answer our advertisement?”

“Because it sounded like adventure,” Ben said. “It sounded like the chance I dreamed of before I got out of the Navy and found out how many dull jobs there were on the beach.”

“You were in the war. Didn’t you get enough adventure at sea?”

“That was different. Being under orders isn’t like an adventure you can run by yourself.”

“Champion,” said Mr Beckett, bringing out into the open the trace of a northern accent which ran flatly through all his speech. “Adventure is what we’re offering you, if you’re man enough to take it.”

Ben’s heart leaped. I’m in. This is it. “Tell me what I must do,” he said with simple courage.

Mr Beckett told him. After half an hour, Ben agreed to train for the job, two weeks’ probation, either side backing out if they wanted to. As he left the office, dragging his feet a little and wishing he had not worn these shoes, Ben argued with his fallen spirits: It’s something, after all. It’s better than nothing.

Mr Beckett and Mr Peale were the directors of a company which was called the Services Investment Association. They promised to servicemen an interest of ten per cent on their savings twice yearly after the first six months, and a free life and accident policy with one of the major insurance companies. The money thus acquired was invested by Peale and Beckett in foreign industrial stocks. “A profit for us and a profit for the Serviceman,” Mr Beckett said in the smooth tones which overlaid his voice like oil when he talked about money. “No one can lose.”

“Why foreign stocks?” Ben had asked. “Why not invest at home?”

“A good question, sir.” Mr Peale lit a cigarette without moving his elbows and forearms from the desk. Ben’s disappointment over the adventure was showing itself as suspicion, and they were trying to woo him back. “We’re investing abroad, because that’s where the money is. Sweden and Germany, all those chaps beaver-ing away in factories … they can’t miss. But there’s a more subtle reason too. The clients want to know what we’re doing with their money. They like the sound of foreign investments. It has that magic, millionaire ring to it, like foreign exchange. Just another come-on.”

“You mean you’re trying to trick these people out of their money?” Ben rubbed his head and frowned.

“You are very insulting,” Mr Beckett said cheerfully and without offence. “Your caution is natural, of course. I admire that in you. Jimmy shouldn’t have used that word come-on. A misleading
term, though it does mean what it says, if you get me. All we’re doing is persuading these people to let us make some money for them; to get the habit of saving instead of spending foolishly, and to put their savings to work. Our tempting offers—the high interest rate, the free group insurance, are designed to help them to take the plunge. A bank doesn’t expect to get depositors without offering them interest on their money. We operate just like a bank, you’ll find, the only difference being that we offer our clients twice as much interest.”

“How do you make any money then?”

“I assure you that we do. Very tidy profits. Very tidy indeed. Money makes money. I don’t need to tell you that. And the more investors we acquire, the greater our profits. That’s why we need you.”

Peale and Beckett, an unlikely pair of men to come together, had started the Services Investment Association in conjunction with an ex-group-captain, and were at first operating only with the Air Force. After six months, the venture had proved so successful —”Our clients have been so delighted,” was the way Mr Beckett put it—that they had decided to expand to take in the Navy as well. That was where Ben came in.

He was to work the naval bases, to start the ball rolling until word-of-mouth enthusiasm had the sailors piling up behind each other to join the money-spinning Association.

“Not Gosport,” Ben said flatly. “I know too many chaps there.”

“Of course, of course. We understand. Not that you’d necessarily be working among the officers. The seamen and petty officers are the chaps with the money these days. But start anywhere you like. The field is yours.”

The secretary slouched in with some letters for Mr Beckett to sign, her falsies pushing out her sweater like cardboard cones.

“Not now, Mitzi,” he told her, but she said: “I thought you wanted to get them in the post,” and dropped the letters on his desk.

While Mr Beckett signed them, she stood cleaning the nails of one hand with the nails of the other, and surveyed Ben with a flat-eyed and discouraging stare. Ben dropped his head and looked at his twisting hands, struggling with himself to find the snap decision that the secret-service man in the trench-coat would have made long ago and been on his way, with or without the job.

Half of him wanted to get up and tell Peale and Beckett that they could put the Services Investment Association where the bosun put the pudding. The other half did not want to leave yet one more office and go home without a job. It was not what he had hoped for. So what? Scarcely any of the posts for which he had applied unsuccessfully had been that. The Navy had not been what he had hoped for when he was a boy, and the Navy had given him a lot of good things. Could he afford to turn this down because he was squeamish about going back to his old stamping grounds as a sort of glorified insurance salesman? Beggars can’t be choosers, he would be told by Rose, who was inclined to platitudes when she was lecturing him.

It was hard to turn down Peale and Beckett in any case. They seemed to like him, which was in their favour, and made it hard for him to dislike them. They talked openly with him, as if they had nothing to hide, and charmed away his objections in an understanding and cheery way that had somehow transformed the interview into a conference, as if he were already part of the firm.

When the girl had gone out, he made one more struggle to escape.

“For a man who wanted adventure,” Mr Beckett said, “you’re surprisingly scared of the chance to make some fat commissions. There’s your gratuity too. You’ll never find anything better to invest it in than the S.I.A.”

“Leave my gratuity alone,” Ben said. “I want it for my daughter. It’s already invested in gilt-edged. I like it where it is. Is that why you advertised for ex-naval officers?” he asked Mr Peale. It was easier to say these things to him than to Mr Beckett. “So that you could get their gratuity?”

“Oh, my dear chap.” Jimmy Peale smiled tolerantly. He did not have the projecting teeth that usually go with a chinless face. When he smiled, his mouth made a rounded, empty shape, as if he had no teeth at all. “What do you think we are? Of course, later on, if you want to invest some of your money with us———”

“I said no.”

“Keep your shirt on. It’s pretty obvious why we want a naval officer. For a start, we want to help chaps like you who’ve been axed. And we want you because you know how to handle these kind of people. You’ve been nursing sailors along for—what? sixteen, seventeen years. It’s no strain to nurse them along a bit
further and show them what to do with their money. You know how to talk to them. You know the ropes, and you’ll be able to get at them. You can’t go trotting into dockyards, or swarming up the side of a battleship, but you can ferret around and find some ship’s writer or somebody who’ll give you addresses, so that you can go and see the wives.”