Villiers Touch (32 page)

“I didn't think it was hard to understand at all, sir.”

“Isn't it? You tell me if I'm wrong, Steve, boy—it seems unconscionable to me. They're trying to bulldoze me by using you as a lever against me. They must know it would go against my grain, against my family ties, to stand in your way. But it must have occurred to you that for me to sell out to your friends would go just as much against my grain. After all, if you become president of Melbard, what happens to James Melbard?”

“He moves up to board chairman. He's ready to retire anyway—he's said so. Nobody wants to buy
all
his stock—he'll keep his seat on the board, and he'll remain chairman as long as he chooses to.”

“A titular job, of course? You'd be in charge of operations, as president?”

“Well, yes. Of course, sir. Nuart would have a majority of the votes on the board. Naturally they'd be inclined to support me if a dispute came up between me and Mr. Melbard. But I assure you I'd be anxious to cooperate with him—after all, he knows this business better than I do.”

Rademacher closed his mouth around the pipestem; he leaned back in the high-backed leather chair and closed his eyes. Wyatt, after a little while, made an elaborate sweeping arc with his arm, and looked at his watch; finally the old man opened his eyes, straightened his chair up, and said bluntly, “No. I won't do it. I'm sorry.”

Wyatt nodded slowly. The old man took down his meerschaum and tried to work his teeth into a comfortable position. It was not beyond probability that he would, any minute now, decide to take them out.

Wyatt's eyes, which the old man could not see against the lamp behind him, expressed their contempt for Rademacher; in a quiet, slow way, his upper-crust voice slurring, Wyatt said, “Under the terms of the proposal I'm authorized to make, you'd receive stock options in the new corporation—you'd be granted the right, for ten years, to buy ten thousand shares of Nuart stock at ten dollars a share. We have every reason to believe it will be three or four times that price within a year, let alone ten years. On a cash investment of a hundred thousand dollars, you'll be able to show a capital gain of anywhere from one to five hundred thousand within a very few years. And of course, if I'm wrong, if the stock declines in price during the option period, it will have cost you nothing, since you're not required to exercise your option—you don't have to buy the stock. Heads you win, tails you don't lose. The option will be transferable to your heirs, of course.”

The pipe was back in Rademacher's mouth. Around it, he said softly, “I told you not to bulldoze me. What makes you think I'd accept an underhanded chance to increase my own fortunes that way at my brother-in-law's expense?”

“Not at his expense, sir. He'll get the same stock option you get. Nobody stands to lose.”

“Nevertheless, it's an effort to corrupt me—to bribe me with stock options. What must you think of me? An old fool, yes, perhaps—but a common chiseler?”

Wyatt's voice began to harden. “Everybody chisels, Arthur. It's only a question of need and time and motive. We all start out honest—we all see how easy it would be to give the suckers a shearing, but we're too decent to take advantage of them. Our consciences hold us back. But then some of us get pushed into a corner—bills we've got to pay, or grandchildren who need money for medical care or university tuition, or a relative who needs an expensive lawyer. Am I getting warm, sir?”

Stiff in his chair, the old man muttered, “You're a wretch, Steve boy. A scoundrel. How did you find out?”

“What does that matter? You need money, Arthur. You're not nearly as rich as you want your family to think. You need it very fast, because you don't know how long you're going to live. You've been thinking about it for quite some time. And it won't be the first time, will it? Forty years ago you saw a way to get money, and you must have explained very carefully to yourself how the suckers were just asking for it, just begging for it, and you might as well take it away from them, because if you didn't, somebody else would.”

The old man's jaws were bunched on the pipe; his eyes were closed. Wyatt bounced to his feet and spoke from a semicrouch; his voice clacked abruptly: “September, nineteen-twenty-nine—you were a member of the board of directors of the Merchants and Maritime Trust, and you were present at a company meeting where the board decided to pay a reduced dividend. While the secretary went out of the room to type up the notification to the Stock Exchange, you excused yourself by pleading a call of nature. Only instead of going down the hall to the men's room you got to a telephone and sold all your stock in the company and sold more short. You got out just in time. Half an hour later the news hit the ticker, and the Exchange was swamped with sell orders—trading was suspended for two hours, and the stock reopened down several points. You made good your short sales and cleared a half-million dollars. Isn't that how it happened, Arthur? And didn't my grandfather, who was with you on that board of directors, cover up what you'd done?”

Rademacher, eyes shut, was dry-washing his clasped hands. Mottled veins stood out on his wrists. He drew in a long ragged breath, and his gaunt old frame shuddered when he let it out.

Slowly he opened his desk drawer and put the meerschaum away in it, closed the drawer deliberately, and looked up, his eyes devoid of expression. He said, “I won't waste the energy it would take to call you names. What do you want of me?”

“Your quarter-million shares of Melbard, at the market price. And your affidavit relinquishing your option on James Melbard's quarter-million shares.”

“Of course,” the old man muttered to himself. Without further discussion, he turned to the phone and dialed a number. He composed his face into a slack-muscled smile, so forced he looked as if he had been posing too long for a slow photographer.

Wyatt picked up his attaché case and opened it on his lap. Rademacher began to talk into the phone in an exhausted, defeated voice: “Hello, James. I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour, but something's come up…. No, nothing like that. Look, James, I've done some questionable things in my lifetime, but I've never been a treacherous man, so I think I'm going to have to give you fair notice before I sell you out…. Let me finish, please. Certain facts have come to my attention which have caused me to change my mind about the Nuart tender…. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I'm going to sign my control over to them. I wanted you to know…. No. I'm really quite tired, James, can't we discuss it in daylight? Very well. I'll speak to you tomorrow. Good night.”

Wyatt pushed the documents across the desk and handed the old man a pen.

“I am tempted,” Arthur Rademacher said, “to scrawl a big fat X on this dotted line, sir.”

But he signed. Wyatt slid the papers into his case, snapped it shut, went out of the office, and shut the door softly behind him.

23. Mason Villiers

Wednesday morning at ten, looking tired and confident and pouch-eyed in a slim mohair suit, Mason Villiers concluded his phone conversation with Montreal and went directly from the phone booth to the lobby doors. Crossing to the curb was like walking through a Turkish bath. He slid into the back seat of the limousine and slammed the door before the doorman could reach it.

Sanders, at the wheel, said, “Good morning, sir,” over his shoulder.

Villiers grunted. “Hackman's. Don't dawdle.”

The car slid out into traffic. Sanders said, “Sir, if you don't mind, I—”

“Later,” Villiers said. “Not now.” He reached for a button on the armrest panel. The hard glass screen ascended from the top of the front seat and sealed itself shut with a click against the ceiling. Concealed from the world by tinted glass, he leaned back and closed his eyes. He had been on the move for seventy-two hours, catnapping at insufficient intervals; but he was pleased.

Sanders was unusually nervous. He almost clipped a truck, ran a stoplight, barely missed an errant pedestrian, and when he pulled up and double-parked outside Hackman's office building, he didn't leave enough room beside the car to allow the door to open. He looked back over his shoulder; his face twisted as if he were a small child valiantly fighting back tears. He jockeyed the car forward until there was space for the door to swing out, trotted around to open it, and tucked his chin shyly toward his shoulder.

Villiers, minding the heat, got out and said, “What's on your mind? I suppose your mother is sick.”

“She's very ill, sir. Very ill.” Sanders gave him a pained, ghastly smile. He ducked his head, birdlike, as if checking to see whether his fly was zipped. Finally he summoned the courage to speak. “I've got to have the rest of the day off, sir. Otherwise I'd like to give in my notice.”

“Come again?”

Sanders' throat worked; he blurted, “I want to quit.”

Villiers drew back. It was the first independent remark he had ever heard Sanders utter. “You don't like your job.”

“I'm an engineer, sir. Working for you, I'm just a gopher. Sir, I know I can't quit if you won't let me. I haven't forgotten. But I'm begging you, sir.”

“Why?”

“How's that, sir?”

“Why now? What's given you the backbone?”

Sanders averted his face. He said in a cold, rigid little voice, “She's dying, sir. My mother.” His mouth corners jerked up in a shy little nervous smile. Sanders presented his cheek as if he wanted it slapped; he accepted every degradation willingly, out of some black buried need for self-mortification, and he was ready once again to receive rebuff without protest. Villiers suddenly could not stand his whining dyspeptic cowardice. The game had grown dreary.

“All right. I'm sick of looking at you. Get a chauffeur to take your place—I'll want the car here to pick me up by eleven.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.” Sanders' lips were moist with eagerness. “I'll have to hire someone from one of the livery agencies.”

“At your own expense, Sanders.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

“Keep me advised of your whereabouts at all times. I may need you again.”

“Naturally, sir.”

“With you for a son,” Villiers said mildly, “she'll be better off dead.” He crossed the sidewalk into the office building without looking back, forgetting the matter instantly. He reached the Hackman and Greene door and began to push it open, heard voices inside, and stopped where he was. The English receptionist was talking too loudly: “Your wife called. She said she was returning your call.”

Hackman's voice: “My call? I didn't call her.”

“From the tone of her voice I gathered that. You must have had a very rough night.”

“Bet your bottom,” Hackman replied, hearty but guttural with hangover. “It was a doozy.”

Villiers, deliberately eavesdropping, heard a quick rustle, as if the girl had dodged Hackman's rush. The girl said in a tone like ice, “You live like a bloody sailor on shore leave. You weren't with your wife, and you weren't with me—just where the bloody hell were you?”

“You're getting just like her. I come home early, and she thinks I want something—I come home late, she thinks I've already had it. Look, I had business to do last night, okay? Christ.”

There was a snort and the quick hard tap-tap of the girl's heels. Villiers pushed the door all the way open and strode in just as Hackman growled, “Sca-rew you, doll,” at the girl's disappearing back.

Hackman turned and gave Villiers a momentary startled glance of red-faced alarm. Villiers pushed the door shut with his heel and allowed himself to smile slightly. Hackman, scowling, with a cigar in his mouth, was a picture of beefy chagrin. He removed the cigar and complained sourly, “She's just pissed because she knows she's nothin' but a piece of tail I can knock off anytime. Shit, one time she begs me for it, I may just let her hang up there and suffer.”

Eliciting no answer, Hackman finally shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Ah, she'll be okay when she cools off. They all come around, don't they? Hell. Come on inside.”

Villiers went along with him into the private office. “What did NCI open at?”

“Up a quarter. We got to talk about that.”

“Why?”

“Because right now you're in trouble either way, the way I see it.”

“Fascinating,” Villiers said, settling in a chair. “Tell me about it, George.”

“Well, look, you're holding a damn strong position in it. If it starts to slide, you'll have to start covering the accounts—you'll have people breathing down your neck for margin calls.”

You don't know the half of it
, he thought. “That's one way. What's the other?”

“You're right in the middle. Suppose it goes up instead of down? It could happen fast, any minute now. All the big firms have got computers scanning the stock lists to spot companies busting out of their usual patterns. Once some
shlock
analyst notices the uptrend, the word'll get around fast—they all eat at the same clubs, those guys, they're always on the phone with each other. One analyst starts to talk NCI up, and every guy he talks to thinks he's near the top of the list of people being told, so everybody goes out and buys because they know other guys are hearing the same story and the stock's going to go up. A broker hears the word, he passes it on to the big funds because he figures to land their commission business on it. So you start a little bull market in the stock, and it shoots up so far you can't afford to buy any more of it. What happens then?”

“I pyramid.”

“With what? You got maybe eighty, ninety thousand shares on the books here. That's a drop in the bucket. But what I'm really worried about, suppose it takes a plunge? You paid for the stuff with checks written on a dozen corporations.”