Sins of the Fathers

by Susan Howatch

  However, once the sun woke me at seven the next morning, I had no choice but to put my new dream back on ice until the circumstances were more favorable. I dragged myself off the couch in the den where I had fallen asleep. I forced myself to go through the ritual of showering, shaving, dressing, and eating. And finally, when no further postponement of the inevitable was possible, I summoned my Mercedes-Benz and set off downtown once more to the bank at Willow and Wall.

  V

  As soon as I reached my office, I buzzed for my personal assistant, greeted and dismissed my secretary, sampled my first cup of coffee, hung up my hat, glanced at the mail, scanned the headlines of The Wall Street Journal and moved to the mantel to adjust the Dresden china clock which had once belonged to Paul Van Zale. The knock on the door came just as I was opening the glass face.

  “Come in!” I shouted.

  The door opened. I saw him in the mirror, tall as his father had been before him, but spare and dark, his eyes bright in his pale thin face.

  “Yes, come in, Scott,” I said abruptly, and glanced back at Paul’s clock. It was one minute slow.

  “Do you want the correct time, Sam?” said Steve Sullivan’s son, always so anxious to help, always so eager to please.

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” Snapping shut the glass face, I turned my back on all reminders of Paul. “What’s the latest news on the Hammaco bid?”

  “Bridges McCool have definitely dropped out of the bidding, but the other syndicate’s still in the ring with us—I just checked to make sure. Oh, and here’s the market report you wanted.”

  “Thanks. You’re looking very disheveled! Have you been up all night?”

  “No, Sam, I fell asleep at my desk by mistake at two this morning.”

  “Well, never let me see you show up for work like this again! You’ll impress no one, least of all me, by looking as if you’d just walked out of a Bowery flophouse!”

  “I’ve managed to get hold of a razor—”

  “I’m not interested in how you plan to improve your appearance. Just fix it, and fix it pretty damn quick.”

  “Yes, Sam,” said Scott, faultlessly obedient, utterly respectful, and withdrew.

  I immediately regretted my abruptness. Scott had a special place in the Van Zale family; he was the stepson of Cornelius’ sister, Emily, and since 1933 Cornelius had shared with Emily the responsibility for his upbringing. Scott’s mother had died in 1929, his younger brother, Tony, had been killed in the war, and his father, once a senior partner of Van Zale’s, was also dead, so it was only natural that over the years he had drawn close to his stepmother and her family.

  I thought of his dead father, Steve Sullivan, who had fought Cornelius for control of the bank back in the thirties. I thought of Cornelius saying long ago: “Of course it’ll be difficult to eliminate him. …” And I thought of my role in that elimination.

  I had told myself afterward I had had no choice but to obey orders, but the war trials had long since put that unattractive defense in its proper place, so to ease my conscience all I could now do was attempt to forget the entire incident. However, this had proved impossible. Even if I had had the talent for forgetting what I didn’t want to remember, Scott’s presence at the bank would always have prevented me from perfecting this idyllic state of amnesia.

  To admit that I disliked his presence at the bank would have been to admit my guilt about the past, so I had always tried to conceal my feelings. In fact, I made a great effort to like him and up to a point I succeeded, but the truth was he made me uneasy, and my uneasiness not only persisted but increased over the years. Just why he made me so uneasy was hard to pin down. It was too simple to say he reminded me of a part of my past which I preferred to forget; this was undoubtedly true, but human beings tend to adjust to adverse circumstances, and I had long since reached the point where I did not automatically remember Steve Sullivan’s death whenever Scott walked into the room. It was a help that Scott bore no obvious resemblance to his father. He neither smoked nor drank, nor, as far as anyone knew, had a steady girlfriend. He worked late every night and was often at the bank on weekends. He dressed conservatively, charmed the clients with his well-informed conversation, and sent his stepmother, Emily, flowers every year on Mother’s Day. No young American’s behavior could have been more exemplary, as Cornelius was always telling me with quasi-paternal pride, but I was beginning to wonder if perhaps this was in fact the reason why Scott made me so uneasy: he was just a little too good to be true.

  With his latest market report still in my hand, I sat down and flipped the intercom. “More coffee.”

  My secretary’s secretary came running on the double. I picked up the red phone which connected me directly to the senior partner’s office below.

  “Mr. Van Zale’s wire,” said one of Cornelius’ aides.

  “Keller. Is he there?”

  “No, sir, he’s not in yet.”

  I hung up. My secretary arrived with some interoffice mail. The phone rang.

  “Hold all calls.” I skimmed the new batch of papers, shoved them aside, and turned to Scott’s report. The phone rang again and kept ringing. I flipped the switch on the intercom again. “Pick up that phone, for Christ’s sake!” The noise died. Returning to the report, I found it was immaculately written, and leaning forward, I reached again for the intercom.

  “Sam?” said Scott a moment later.

  “Get in here.”

  He arrived clean-shaven. I held up the report. “This is very good. Thank you. Now, let’s discuss how we’re going to get a line into the rival camp to see how their bid’s shaping up. We’ve got to win this Hammaco bid, Scott. A ninety-million-dollar issue isn’t a two-bit crap game. Do we have a complete list of the other side’s syndicate?”

  He had brought it with him. I was impressed but said nothing, just glanced down the list of names, but for a moment I was back in those far-off days before the Crash when I had stood where Scott was now standing and his father had been sitting in my chair. The memories snowballed. The silence lengthened. I went on staring at the list in my hand.

  “Sam?” Scott said nervously at last. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. No, it’s just fine. I was trying to figure out which of these firms is the weak link we can snap to find out what’s going on. Let me see … Bonner, Christopherson—maybe we could work out something there. Cornelius got Bonner himself out of trouble with the SEC recently in order to make up for screwing Christopherson over the Pan-Pacific Harvester merger back in forty-three. Christopherson’s dead now, of course, and Bonner wants to get back alongside us next time Harvester launch an issue. Call Bonner. He’s a tough customer, but lean on him. I think he’ll know which side his bread’s buttered on.”

  “Bonner himself isn’t involved in this syndicate, Sam. It’s his son-in-law, Whitmore.”

  “That’s better still. I’ve known Whitmore for years, and he’s got as much backbone as a jellyfish. In fact, it was he who got Bonner into such hot water with the SEC. You call Whitmore, and don’t just lean on him—squeeze him till the pips squeak, to use the immortal words of that British bastard Lloyd George. I want a line into that rival camp today, Scott. I don’t care how you do it, but get it in.”

  “Right, Sam. Will that be all?”

  I sighed, moved restlessly to the window, and looked down at the magnolia tree in the patio. I guess so. … But how times change!” I added impulsively. “When I was a young kid on Wall Street, we all sat around like gods and waited for clients to come crawling to us for money. Now the clients sit back and let us fight each other for their business. Competitive bidding! My God, Paul Van Zale must be turning in his grave!”

  Scott smiled but made no comment, a respectful young man tolerating the nostalgia of an older generation.

  “Okay,” I said abruptly. “That’s all. Check back with me when you’ve talked to Whitmore.”

  “Yes, Sam.” He departed.

  I reached for the re
d phone again.

  “Mr. Van Zale’s wire,” droned the aide.

  “Christ, isn’t he in yet?” I hung up and summoned my secretary. “I’m going to have to chair the partners’ meeting. Get me the major file on Hammaco.”

  In the conference room I found a dozen of my partners lounging around the table and gossiping about golf. In the old days at Van Zale’s, long before I had joined the firm, the half-dozen partners had sat at huge mahogany desks in the bank’s great hall while the senior partner alone had been secluded in the room which now belonged to Cornelius, but later, when the bank had merged with another in 1914, the great hall had been assigned to the syndicate division and the partners had been given their own individual rooms on the second floor. Now that the bank had expanded, the space had again been rearranged; Cornelius had kept the senior partner’s office on the first floor, and the six partners who had been longest with the firm had kept their rooms on the second, but the remaining partners had returned to the great hall, still known as the “the sin bin” in commemoration of the syndicate division. The syndicate men themselves had moved to Seven Willow Street, the adjacent building, which we had acquired during our expansion after the war.

  Cornelius had chosen his partners with typical shrewdness. First came the window dressing, six men in their sixties who could provide not only solid experience but a solid, respectable front. Then came the six men in their fifties, men who might be somewhat less orthodox but who had all resigned themselves to the knowledge that they would never sit in the senior partner’s chair. That left the three men in their forties, and these had to be watched with scrupulous care in case they acquired delusions of grandeur and attempted to annex more power than they could be trusted to handle.

  Cornelius and I were, as always, the youngest. Cornelius had not yet faced the day when he felt obliged to hire a partner younger than himself, although now we were both past forty we knew he should give the partnership a shot of youth before it became senescent. However, Cornelius disliked thinking of young ambitious men one rung below him on the ladder. People thought this was odd and said most men in his position would have welcomed the opportunity to impose their power on younger men, but I understood Cornelius’ reluctance all too well. Cornelius and I knew better than anyone just how dangerous ambitious young men could be.

  As I entered the conference room, the partners straightened their backs and stopped talking about golf. I smiled warmly at them. They smiled warmly back. Cordial greetings were exchanged as one of the Van Zale aides passed around the coffeecups, and then we all settled down to our traditional daily discussion.

  In fact, the partners’ meetings were a waste of time, and I favored cutting them back to one a week. The purpose was to keep each other abreast of our different projects and to have consultations about policy, but the partners in the sin bin always knew what everyone else in the sin bin was doing, and the select six partners upstairs with the exception of myself were all too old to be involved in work of any importance. Through various informants Cornelius and I were also well aware of what went on in the sin bin, so we would hardly have lacked information if the daily meetings had been abandoned, but like all wise dictators, Cornelius wanted to maintain the formal trappings of democracy. The daily meetings persisted under the fiction that we were all deciding what was best for the firm; occasionally we even took a vote, which Cornelius would quietly ignore if it turned out to be contrary to his wishes. Sometimes partners became annoyed, but not for long. Cornelius did not like being surrounded by discontented people, and any partner who complained was gently advised to move to another firm.

  “For, after all,” Cornelius would say solicitously, “the last thing I want is for you to be unhappy.”

  The surviving partners learned their lesson and took care to appear well content in Cornelius’ presence. Cornelius had a controlling interest in the partnership, with absolute authority to hire and fire whom he pleased, so it was only sensible to be on the best possible terms with him. Also, every partner knew he was far from irreplaceable. Van Zale’s was a great investment-banking house with a history that stretched far back into the nineteenth century, and there was never any shortage of good men who wanted to work at Willow and Wall.

  “What’s the news on Hammaco, Sam?” asked a partner, one of the forty-five-year-old mavericks who had to be watched with care.

  “Good,” I said. “The bidding closes tomorrow. Everything’s shaping up well.”

  “What exactly is this Hammaco business?” said one of the silver-haired veterans who had just tottered back from a vacation in Florida.

  “This is a ninety-million-dollar issue for the Hammer Machine Corporation, who are planning to expand into the armaments business. With the cold war hotting up, this is obviously good business, particularly for a corporation like Hammaco. The bidding conditions were tough—I’ll have a copy of the terms of sale, the preliminary prospectus, and the proposed purchase statement routed to you in the interoffice mail. We’ve had the ‘due-diligence’ meeting at the Hammaco offices, and also a preliminary meeting of our syndicate. The main price meeting is tomorrow morning, with a final price meeting at two tomorrow afternoon.”

  “How’s the rival camp?” said another maverick. Those mavericks always enjoyed keeping me on my toes.

  “I’ve got a line on them. As soon as I know what they intend to bid, I’ll make damned sure we outbid them. I see no problem.” I turned to the two partners from the sin bin who were supervising the syndicate division’s spadework on the Hammaco bid. “I’d like a word with you guys after this meeting.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Scott slipped in. “Sam, an important call.”

  I glanced at my partners. “Excuse me a moment, gentlemen.” In the corner by the phone I murmured to Scott, “Is it Neil?”

  “No, the president of Hammaco.”

  “Christ!” I picked up the receiver and found the president wanted to invite me to lunch. I accepted. “Cancel my lunch date,” I said to Scott as I hung up, “and find out if by some miracle our rivals couldn’t stand the pace and have thrown in the sponge.” I was just moving back to the conference table when the phone rang again, making me jump.

  “Keller,” I said, picking up the receiver.

  “I want to see you,” said Cornelius in a voice of ice, and severed the connection as violently as a guillotine severing a criminal neck.

  I did not stop to think what I had done. Sometimes it’s better not to think, in case one loses one’s nerve imagining disasters which have never happened. I got a cigarette alight, politely asked the eldest partner to chair the meeting, and then, unable to stop myself fearing the worst—whatever the worst was—I ran downstairs to the senior partner’s office and prepared to face the lion in his den.

  Chapter Four

  I

  CORNELIUS, LOOKING AS EXHAUSTED as if he had just suffered an asthma attack, was sitting huddled in his swivel chair behind the enormous desk. I almost inquired anxiously about his health, but when I saw the brutal line of his mouth I decided to keep silent. With reluctance I at last allowed myself to speculate about the unknown mistake which had roused his wrath.

  “If I asked you a very simple question,” said Cornelius in a tired patient voice, the one he regularly used before losing his temper, “would it be too much to hope that you might give me a very simple answer?”

  I was being invited to take the bull by the horns. “What’s wrong?”

  “I mean, if I asked you if you were in the habit of repeating confidential conversations conducted with me in this room, you wouldn’t go into some rambling evasive explanation that I’d find embarrassing, would you? I’d hate to be embarrassed by you, Sam. I’d be very upset.”

  “Cut it out, Neil. You know damned well I don’t go broadcasting our private conversations to all and sundry.”

  Cornelius immediately jumped to his feet, leaned forward with both hands on the desk, and shouted at me, “Then why the hell did you t
ell Alicia that I wanted you to marry Vicky?”

  “Because she gave me the impression she already knew all about it.” My reflexes for warding off attack were so finely developed that it was only after I had spoken that the shock made my heart thump painfully in my chest. I clasped my hands behind my back, took a deep breath to steady myself, and then made the classic move from defense to counterattack. “And why the hell didn’t you tell me,” I demanded angrily, “that Alicia thought you shared her view that Vicky should marry Sebastian? How do you think I felt when Alicia and I ended up talking at cross-purposes and she realized you were trying to double-cross her? I don’t like being embarrassed by you either, Neil, and don’t think you have the monopoly on getting upset by your friends.”

  Cornelius slumped back in his chair. Long experience of dealing with him had made me aware that when he was angry with himself he often tried to deflect his anger onto others, and long experience of dealing with me had taught him I was adept at absorbing his anger and neutralizing it by remaining unintimidated. Now his anger was spent, I saw that only the misery remained. He began to breathe unevenly, and I turned away as he produced the pills which warded off his asthma. He hated anyone to see him when he was unwell.

  “Neil, believe me, I’m sorry if this has resulted in trouble between you and Alicia, but—”

  “I’m not discussing my marriage with you, either now or at any other time,” he said, but as he paused to swallow the pills, it occurred to me that he longed to discuss it but was held back by complex emotions which I could not understand. “And talking of marriage,” he said, still breathing badly but unable to stop a second rush of anger, “Alicia tells me that you, quote, were going to have to tell me, unquote, that you couldn’t marry Vicky. That sounds like an interesting decision, particularly since you implied to me yesterday that you were willing to consider the idea. Can you possibly bring yourself to tell me more about it? I just hate having important decisions relayed to me secondhand.”