Fire in the Wind (30 page)

Vanessa had an insane desire to run, but she managed to stand her ground. In a bright brittle voice that fooled no one, she said, "Jean says she doesn't think you pledged anyone in the Terry Fox run, Jake! Did you?"

"I pledged Marigold," he said, his eyes steady. He had a briefcase in his hand; he looked as though he would open it and start to work the instant he got behind his desk. He looked busy and important.

"And how much did that cost you?" Vanessa demanded.

"Marigold didn't run."

Jean tittered and choked herself off, and there was a short silence.

"Well, I ran," offered Vanessa. "I'm just collecting my pledge from Jean." That let Jean off the hook for allowing Vanessa in the vicinity, she hoped. "How would you like to make a retroactive pledge?"

"For how much?" he said, as though it would be too much trouble to argue with her.

"A hundred dollars a kilometre?" Vanessa hazarded, her eyes wide as she gazed into his.

"How far did you run?"

"Ten kilometres."

"Fine." He looked over her shoulder. "Jean, would you make out a cheque to the cancer society for Mrs. Standish for one thousand dollars?" He moved toward his office door.

"Not a
company
pledge!" Vanessa said. "The company should pledge much more than that! That's your
personal
pledge! You should give me the cheque from your personal account."

He held her gaze for a long moment, his hand on the doorknob. Abruptly he opened the door and held it for her. "Come in," he said.

Her heart in her mouth, Vanessa crossed the threshold and felt him follow her in and close the door.

As she hesitated, he strode across to his desk and, laying his briefcase on it, flicked the snaps open.

"What do you want, Vanessa?" he asked.

"A thousand dollars for the Terry Fox fund."

He sank down in his stuffed black leather chair, tossed some files out of his case onto the desk, snapped the case closed and set it on the floor. He opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a flat maroon chequebook, dropped it with a little slap on the desk top. Without taking his eyes from her, he pulled a pen out of his inner breast pocket and unscrewed the lid.

He wrote the details on the cheque smoothly, without pausing, signing his name the same way he wrote the rest, without a flourish. Vanessa had sat down in the chair in front of his desk, and he ripped the paper from the book and flicked it casually across the desk. Then he sat looking at her.

Vanessa picked up the cheque with a hand that nearly trembled. "Thank you," she said, staring unseeingly down at it. His silence terrified her; at any moment he might break it to tell her to go.

"Jake, how do you want me to pay?" she blurted in a sudden rush of courage.

He knew what she meant; his hand was in her line of vision and she saw it tense on the pen he was holding. Her ring was gone, a white mark against his tan showing where it had been.

"Why, are you going to offer some sort of voluntary payment?" he asked dryly.

"Could I?" she asked, her head still bent.

"What, for example? Crawling to Calgary in sackcloth and ashes?" The sarcasm in his voice drummed against the top of her head. "Or were you thinking of something a little more personal, like becoming my mistress till I tired of you?"

Her head snapped up. "Is that what you want?" she began. Is that what he had meant—that he would destroy her emotionally the way she had destroyed him emotionally?

"No, that's not what I had in mind," he interrupted roughly. "For one thing, I am already tired of you. And for another, a voluntary payment won't be nearly so satisfying as one extracted under protest."

She shivered at the coldness in his voice. "Oh God, Jake," she protested. "You don't want to
rape
me?"

His face became a frozen mask of distaste. "My God, women!" he exploded with a mirthless laugh. "No, I do not want to rape you," he said precisely. "For one thing, I don't want you sexually. For another, since I understand these days that rape isn't sexual but political, I would consider the animal bludgeoning of the body and the spirit an extremely unimaginative method of revenge, either against society or against an individual. To say the least of it."

Vanessa was still shivering. "Who was your mentor, Machiavelli?"

Jake smiled his crooked smile. "No," he said softly. "You were. And I think I learned my lesson well. Someday I'll ask you whether you think I did."

"Jake," she begged, "if it's my heartbreak you want, you've already had it. I fell in love with you thinking I had a chance to make you love me, and found out you hated me. Isn't that enough? What else is there?"

He shook his head. "If I thought you had a heart that was worth it, that might have been enough, Vanessa. But your kind of heart, if it does in fact break, heals too quickly for what I want. When you pay me, it's going to be payment in full. I'm going to break you another way. I'm going to ruin you, Vanessa."

She gasped. It sounded like a line from a melodrama, except that it was delivered in such a matter-of-fact voice.

"Ruin me, how?" she demanded with a nervous laugh.

He looked at her. "Professionally, how else? I am going to let you go on building up Number 24 for as long or as short a time as the mood takes me, and then I am, one way or another—and I have my choice of several—going to bring it crashing down around your ears so loudly you'll never have the courage to start up in business again."

For one appalling second she was shaken to the roots, then she bit her lip and made an effort at recovery.

"How are you going to do that?" she demanded. "You're bluffing. You have no control over Number 24."

Jake raised his eyebrows. "You're more naive than I thought. I can pull the plug on you in that company from so many different directions it would make your head spin."

"What?" she gasped.

"Did you really believe that that quarter-million-dollar contract had you safe?" He shook his head and laughed softly but said no more, and Vanessa took courage. He
was
bluffing, trying to scare her.

"Of course it does," she said. "Unless you think giving me a quarter of a million dollars is making me pay." His smile was crookedly arrogant, and she snapped, "Then tell me, if you're so sure of yourself!"

"It'll be a pleasure," Jake said softly. He reached down to pull open a drawer and after a moment pulled out a file. He laid it flat on the desk.

"First," he said, "there's the little matter of the debenture that financed Number 24. If your lawyer had checked the agreement carefully, he might have noticed that the debenture can be called at any time. If the debenture were called, Number 24 would have no choice but to go bankrupt. Bankruptcy of the company is deemed in your management contract to be sufficient cause for the termination of the contract without compensation." He paused. "That's one way.

"Then there's Gilles Dufour. If Gilles and one or two—or all—of your other salesmen were suddenly to abandon your line in the middle of a season or even show very poor orders in one or two seasons running, you'd have a big deficit to catch up. I don't think you'd recover in this economic climate."

He smiled. "Then, Vanessa, there's that nice little on-going contract to supply slacks to Fairway. It's just possible that one season the store might say you hadn't made the slacks to their specifications. It might take a costly lawsuit to prove otherwise. Or the unshipped portion of a large order might be suddenly cancelled one day for reasons beyond anyone's control."

He paused and looked at her as though expecting her to speak, but Vanessa was beyond speech.

"Still not enough? Well, then, consider this: it won't be long now before you have to go down to the Canadian Consulate in Seattle to renew your temporary visa to allow you to go on working in Canada. At that time you will need a statement from your employer showing good reason for your visa extension. You'll need the same kind of statement if you apply for a permanent visa. Suppose that due to reasons beyond anyone's control that statement wasn't forthcoming?"

She stared at him, still and unbreathing, her eyes stretched wide and blinded by the afternoon light.

"Enough? There's more, Vanessa. There's the building lease at Number 24 that allows Concorp to give you immediate notice to vacate under certain conditions that Robert would never have let go by if he didn't know so well that I want your business to be a success.

"Or there's Robert himself, whom I might suddenly need back at Concorp with only a few hours' notice. Think you could manage losing him without warning?"

Jake sat back. He smiled. "There are one or two other ways, of course, the best of all—" his hand moved unconsciously on the file folder beneath his hands "—a very unexpected one that you presented me with yourself, a gift. But I think you see the point. You are about as invulnerable at Number 24 as a frangipani on a polar icecap. It might survive the few warm days of summer. But not the winter. And winter is coming, Vanessa. You just won't know when."

Vanessa stood up, distantly surprised to find that her knees held. She said, "You must be mad if you think that after being told all that I'll continue putting my efforts into something you're going to wreck. I quit, Jake. You'll have my resignation first thing in the morning."

"Good!" he said. "Just what I wanted you to feel! But you can't get out so easily, Vanessa. In fact, you can't get out at all."

His hand moved to the edge of the file folder and he opened it. It was moderately thick with documents and papers, and the top one she recognized as a copy of her management contract.

"You aren't the only one protected by this contract," Jake smiled. He looked down. "Do I need to read you the clause regarding any untimely resignation, or do you remember it?"

She was silent, and after a moment Jake began. "Seventeen. In the event that the—"

"Shut up!" she snapped. "I remember it well enough!"

"Good." Jake's voice was as flat and cool as stone. "Don't make the mistake of thinking I wouldn't take you to court, Vanessa. I would. I'd also take any potential employer to court. It just won't be worth anyone's while to try to hire you as a designer. If you resign tomorrow, or any time before this contract allows—" he tapped it lightly, almost caressingly "—you can say goodbye to any career in fashion design for at least five years."

She was frozen, staring at him. "What do you want, Jake? What do you want?" she whispered.

He looked calmly up at her. "I want you to put your heart and soul into something, Vanessa, and then I want to take it away from you, piece by piece, while you fight desperately to hang on to it."

She laughed. "After this, you expect me to put heart and soul into Number 24? You must be mad! I'll run it into the ground and make sure you lose as much money as possible while I'm doing it!"

"Maybe," agreed Jake. "Maybe you will, in spite of the clause in your contract that allows me to sue you personally for recovery of funds if wanton disregard for the good of the business can be proved. You could do it in a way that would make that hard to prove; you're more than intelligent enough for that. You'd have a chance to show how intelligent in a court of law.

"But I don't think you'll do that, Vanessa. I think you'll work twice as hard at Number 24 after this. I think your soul is invested in Number 24, and I think you'll spend your energy trying to make it such a profitable undertaking that you could refinance it with a bank, for example, when I tried to pull the plug on you. I think you'll work like a demon trying to plug every leak I've told you about and trying to find the ones I haven't. And with every day's work, I think you'll get more and more committed to Number 24, more and more convinced you can save it.

"You might even try to convince me that it's so profitable and prestigious a company for me to own that I'd be a fool to pull the plug. And it might work. You see, I haven't decided how much revenge I want. Maybe it'll be enough seeing you constantly insecure. Maybe I'll never pull the plug, Vanessa," he said softly, insinuatingly. "Maybe you can convince me, when the time comes, not to do it. There may be a way out. There are lots of possibilities. Maybe you can beat me at my own game. You'll never know unless you try."

It seemed as though she were looking down at him from a great height, as though she were floating up near the ceiling. She couldn't feel her body.

"This is evil," she thought, and heard the words being said aloud, as though her mouth had somehow produced the sounds of its own accord. "You're worse than Machiavelli, Jake, you're in a class by yourself. I think what you told me the other day is right, even if you don't know it. You aren't Jace, not the Jace I knew. Jace is dead; your soul is dead. Jake is just a distant cousin, an empty shell pretending to be a human being.

"I was wrong when I thought I loved you. There's nobody in there to love."

Somehow she turned and was moving to the door, so her legs must be carrying her. She opened the door and walked out without another word, without a backward glance, as though she were leaving an empty room.

Chapter 14