“Steve,” I said very, very carefully, as if he were a piece of pottery five thousand years old, “what exactly is this hold which Cornelius has over you?” And it was then that I first heard what had happened in 1928 when Charley Blair and Terence O’Reilly had died in Paul’s office and Cornelius had set out in his waders along the bloody road to power.
II
No story could have shocked me more. It wasn’t simply that Charley Blair had financed Paul’s death, though that was shocking enough. It wasn’t even the lawlessness of New York, where respected men took the law into their own hands and bribed the police not to interfere. What shocked me most was the thought of Cornelius, little more than a baby, effortlessly manipulating the corruption to his best advantage.
“But Steve,” I said at last when I could speak, “how could you ever have believed there would be any lasting future for you at Van Zale’s after you found out what kind of a man Cornelius was?”
“Hell, Dinah, he was just a kid!”
“All the more reason why you should have been scared out of your wits. If he was like that at twenty, what in God’s name is he going to be like when he’s forty? And what can he possibly be like now he’s twenty-six? How valid do you think his present threat is? Would he ever dare play that recording to the Morgan partners?”
“No. He wouldn’t. But what he’s really saying is that he could use his own version of the past to discredit me without damaging himself. My style’s never been popular in the most respectable corners of the Street, and Cornelius knows that. He also knows that if he started a whisper campaign by dropping a few hints to any of the Wall Street insiders my name would be mud in all the front-rank houses within six months. Then I’d be in Jay Da Costa’s shoes. An investment banker depends on his reputation, and once that’s shot he might as well blow his brains out. God damn it, Dinah, what am I going to do?”
I drank some more champagne and lit a cigarette. Then I crossed my legs, blew smoke at the ceiling and assumed my calmest expression. “Why should Cornelius be the only one to follow in Paul’s footsteps?” I inquired. “You can follow in them too. What did Paul do when he was kicked out of Reischman’s?”
“He founded his own house—My God!” He was thunderstruck by the possibility, but I saw his excitement die. “Well, there’s no way I can do that,” he said. “I don’t have the capital.”
“Would you be prepared to stay in England if you could raise the capital here?”
“You bet I would. Cornelius could whisper along Wall Street till he’s blue in the face, but he’d have to shout out loud to get the message across the Atlantic and he’s not going to go broadcasting the events of July the seventeenth through a megaphone. I’d be safe here.”
“Then your worries are over, darling. I’ll sell my business. Lord Malchin offered me two million pounds for it back in 1930, and it’s worth much more now.”
“Christ Almighty!” shouted Steve in a voice which must almost have reached Willow Street, and as everyone else in the room jumped with fright he joyously called to the barman, “Give us another bottle of champagne!”
I had to laugh because everyone was looking at him as if he had escaped from the zoo, but I did manage to say, “Steve, we must keep sober so that we can think this out.”
“You’re right,” he said and amended the order to half a bottle. “Honey, would you really do that for me?”
“I want you to be successful and happy, Steve. I want to live in England. And I really would like to learn a little about banking. Would it be possible for me to—”
“Well, of course you must be a partner in the firm!” he said hugging me. “We’ll be unbeatable! And we’ll knock the hell out of those bastards at Willow and Wall!”
“Yes,” I said, “but we must take great care and make no mistakes.” I was already wondering what Cornelius would think when he discovered it was I who was turning the tables on him by backing Steve with my money, and I wondered too if he would realize that for Steve’s sake I was prepared to fight him all the way to the very end of the line.
That was the day I ceased to be a pacifist. Most people did not start to drift away from pacifism until a year later, when Mussolini walked into Abyssinia in defiance of the League, but my change of heart took place on that June day in 1934 when I realized Steve had to fight Cornelius to survive. At first I thought my decision to fight was merely a personal one which had no broad application to the world beyond Van Zale’s, but unknown to me I was on the road to the wilderness where Churchill was already exiled, shouting advice to which no one would listen, thundering prophecies which no one would believe.
III
It takes time to sell a business for the best possible price, and I was reluctant to rush matters. Steve was also anxious to increase his roster of clients before he launched his own issuing house, since the more clients he had the more were likely to follow him when he left Van Zale’s.
We discussed our plans carefully. Steve calculated that he had at least one year and probably two before Cornelius moved against him, for after the upheavals in New York that summer Cornelius would be anxious to let the firm settle down before he risked further disruptions. Eventually we decided that Steve would work for a further year at Van Zale’s without betraying a hint of his future plans, but in the summer of 1935 I would complete the sale of my business and Steve would begin secret negotiations to establish a link with a strong secondary, or second-rank, house on the other side of the Atlantic. Since Steve was himself an American with first-class transatlantic connections and considerable European experience, it seemed foolish to ignore these assets in seeking to establish a new house, and he told me there were plenty of American firms who would welcome the chance of a reputable link with London. Only the front-rank houses could afford the luxury of having their own men in associated houses in Europe; the other firms were usually obliged to come to arrangements with independent foreign banks to help them with their European business.
When the American link had been established and the new issuing house was ready to be launched Steve would resign from Van Zale’s and open his house as near to his old firm as possible, preferably in Milk Street itself. It would be less effort for the clients if they merely had to follow him a couple of doors down the road.
“There’s only one thing that worries me,” said Steve, “and that’s this: I’ll probably have my hands so full at first that I won’t be able to offer you more than a … a …”
“Sleeping partnership,” I said amused. “Quite. No pun intended, of course.”
He laughed, but he was still embarrassed. “You mustn’t think I don’t want you to help me,” he said. “You mustn’t think I’m keeping you out in the cold.”
“I know. Don’t worry, Steve. The most important thing is that you should be free to establish the new house without distractions. Anyway I’m in no hurry because I want to rest between my two careers and enjoy the new baby.”
After the doctor had confirmed that I was at last a candidate for married motherhood, I had decided that this, my third and final pregnancy, was going to be the one I had the leisure to enjoy. Accordingly I delegated all my work to Harriet and went to the office only twice a week to make sure my friends weren’t murdering one another in my absence.
As I spent more time with the twins I was interested to discover how different they had grown from each other. Elfrida’s passion was animals; no story was worth reading unless it had an animal in it, pictures of horses festooned the walls of her room and her white rabbit which lived at Mallingham was worshiped with all the ardor that the ancient Egyptians had reserved for their animal deities. Edred, on the other hand, cared for little except the grand piano. While his goldfish remained unfed and unloved in their bowl he would thump the keyboard with a concentration which amazed me, and with anxiety I wondered if this leaning towards music could indicate a resemblance to my father. Meanwhile Alan was showing more resemblance to Paul; his new school was a success, and sud
denly as if by a wave of some magic wand he was coming top of his form in every subject and winning a place in his prep school’s first eleven. Presently he gave up reading books for schoolboys and embarked at the edge of eleven on Dickens, Scott and Thackeray. By the time he was twelve he was reading Homer in the original and his headmaster was telling me with pride that a Winchester scholarship was a certainty.
I could hardly believe the transformation wrought by Alan’s change of identity, but the best part of the new Alan was his new attitude to the twins. He was no longer hostile but indulgent, and once I even found him helping them with their reading books.
All three children were encouragingly enthusiastic about the prospect of a new baby in the family.
“I hope it’s a girl,” said Elfrida, who had just had a row with Edred about the latest corpse in the goldfish bowl.
“I don’t care what it is,” said Edred, “but if it has a good ear I’ll teach it to play the piano.”
“It’ll be nice to have someone else to run errands for me,” said Alan. “I hope it’s a girl, because girls are easier to train.”
It was a boy. I was secretly disappointed, but the baby was so good-natured that I soon forgot my regrets. He was the only one of my children who resembled me physically, for the twins were little replicas of Steve, and Alan was looking more like Paul as he grew older, but George had wisps of dark straight hair and eyes that soon turned brown and a large flappy mouth which seemed to take up half his face. He was also much fatter than my previous babies, but that only made him more cuddly.
It was Steve who decided that our son should be named after no less a hero than the patron saint of England, and he was so much enjoying being an Anglophile that I hadn’t the heart to tell him that Saint George had been a Cappadocian adventurer of dubious reputation. However, any warrior who can ride to sainthood on the myth of a slain dragon can at least claim to have been resourceful, and I raised no objection when the baby was christened George Steven at Mallingham Church.
It was soon after the christening that Steve went to the Continent to woo a potential client who had interests not only in England but in France, Germany and Switzerland. He had been a client of Reischman’s, but in March 1935 when Italy invaded Abyssinia and Hitler adopted conscription in Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, the great House of Reischman closed its doors for the last time in Hamburg and Hitler moved to annex the Reischman fortune. However the head of the house was too clever for him; Franz Reischman had already filtered the fortune into Switzerland, and still keeping one step ahead of his enemies, he and his family slipped out of Germany on their long journey west to their cousins in New York.
Sam Keller, who was now Steve’s main contact at the New York office, was enthusiastic about Steve’s decision to go to Germany and thought he could profitably explore the vacuum left by the Reischman closing.
I thought of Hitler employing men like the notorious “Judenfresser” who had once said that the head of a prominent Jew should be stuck on every telegraph pole from Munich to Berlin. I thought of Göring reviving the medieval chopping block and ax for capital punishment and declaring that the headsman must always wear impeccable evening dress. I thought of Goebbels declaring after the burning of books that Jewish intellectualism had finally been extinguished.
“Well, business is business, honey,” said Steve, “and you can’t judge all Germans by the antics of those goons around Hitler.”
“People get the government they deserve,” I said, but I said nothing else because I was a novice at banking and no one was denying that the German economy had improved.
Steve was gone for two weeks, and although we spoke on the telephone he divulged no details of his business negotiations until he arrived home.
I met him at the Aerodrome. He looked very tired and I realized he had been drinking.
“What happened?” I said upset.
He slumped in the car beside me, and when the chauffeur drove away I closed the glass partition.
“The deal fell through with the Reischman client. He wanted money for a steel foundry and was hoping I could arrange for a flotation in America via Van Zale’s, New York. It was a straightforward deal, but … Dinah, I can’t do business in that country. I talked to some of the Reischman men in Switzerland and they told me stories which made even the Time magazine paragraphs look pale.”
I was about to speak, but he gave me no time. He was saying hurriedly as if he thought I would be disappointed instead of relieved, “Don’t get me wrong. It’s wonderful how Germany’s pulling itself to its feet at last, and all the Germans I met were very friendly to me. I’m not a preacher. I don’t go around passing moral judgments and I hope I’m not the kind of foreigner who walks into a country and tells it how to behave, but Dinah, Paul trained me and Paul was trained by Reischman’s. They picked him up when he was down and out, and he never forgot what he owed them. Of all the Yankee houses in the Street ours was the most pro-Jewish, and when I think of our unwritten partnership with Reischman’s, enduring year after year and surviving even Paul’s death, I know I just can’t go raising capital for Nazi Germany. Paul would turn in his grave. It would be a betrayal of all that Van Zale’s stands for, but how in God’s name am I going to explain that to Sam Keller?”
I remembered that sociable charming voice and thought I could imagine the young man who owned it. “Sam would understand, wouldn’t he?”
“Not a chance. He’s a Nazi sympathizer.”
“Surely not!” I was genuinely shocked.
“Oh, they know all about Sam Keller at Reischman’s. Apparently when he came back from a visit to Germany in ’33 he was saying ‘Heil Hitler’ all over New York.” He reached for his hip flask, the legacy of Prohibition, and unscrewed the cap. “But I don’t want to get into a fight with Sam before I’m ready to quit Van Zale’s,” he said after a mouthful of whisky, “so I’m going to pretend that although the deal fell through the visit was a success in establishing promising German contacts. That’ll give us time to push ahead with our plans before Sam realizes I’ve been lying.”
“I’ll talk to Lord Malchin,” I said. “I really do think he might be interested in making another offer for the business. Harriet said Lady Malchin had invited her to dinner again.”
The next three months were nerveracking. Lord Malchin’s Pharmaceutical and Cosmetics Products nibbled tentatively at the prospect of acquiring the business but made an offer I refused to consider. I was determined not only to get the best price but to get the best possible deal for my friends who worked with me. I started to woo Sir Aaron Shields of Shields Chemicals, who manufactured everything from cosmetics to dynamite, but Sir Aaron looked bored. However, Lord Malchin thought he had a rival and made a better offer. After that there was a pause; Sir Aaron still yawned, Lord Malchin rested serenely on his laurels and I became rapidly more distraught.
“Oh, for God’s sake let me fix this!” exclaimed Steve exasperated, and to my astonishment extracted a large bid from a cosmetics firm in New York. Lord Malchin dropped his monocle, Sir Aaron looked winded and the two of them plunged into an orgy of competitive bidding.
The New York firm retired. They had made the bid only because they had owed Steve a favor, but Lord Malchin and Sir Aaron battled on until Lord Malchin, who was not only richer but more benign towards my colleagues, won.
Three and a quarter million pounds changed hands gracefully, and Steve began negotiations with the American investment banking house of his choice, a firm called Miller, Simon. It was a young house, founded in the twenties by men who had trained with Kidder, Peabody in Boston and Halsey, Stuart in Chicago, and it was one of the few aggressive young firms which had survived to see the dawn of the New Deal.
Our plans were progressing smoothly again, and it was not until Mr. William Le Clair of Miller, Simon arrived in London for his annual European holiday that we realized we were being watched with growing suspicion from One Willow Street.
For t
he first time in two years Steve received a direct communication from Cornelius.
Four
I
CORNELIUS SENT A LETTER. It was an extraordinary work, Victorian to the point of artificiality and calculated down to the dot of the i in his signature to drive Steve into a towering rage. The letter was typed on thick white paper embossed with a Fifth Avenue address, and I was with Steve at the breakfast table when he ripped open the envelope.
Cornelius had dictated primly,
DEAR STEVE,
I have now waited two years in the hope that you might feel constrained to offer me some explanation of your conduct when you abandoned my sister in order to pursue your obsession with Miss Slade. Unfortunately I have waited in vain. However, the purpose of this letter is neither to tell you how profoundly upset I was by the injury to my sister nor to censure you on your choice of sexual partner; the past, though iniquitous, is unalterable. On the contrary, my purpose in writing this letter is because I wish you to know that I am deeply concerned for our future professional relationship.
Your reports to Sam about your triumphant progress through Germany were, as we now realize, grossly inflated and as far as we can judge your expedition there served no useful purpose. I concede you have acquired an impressive roster of clients in London, but I am now informed by the same source which earlier reported to me the news of Miss Slade’s sixteen-million-dollar coup d’état that you have been flirting mysteriously with the senior partner of Miller, Simon. If you have a valid explanation of why you should bother to spend so much money cultivating this sound but second-rank house I should very much like to hear it.
Perhaps you should consider returning to New York to review the future of our partnership. I cannot say you should consider returning to my sister, since I am convinced she is better off without you, but she is loyal to you even to this day, and has won the unstinted admiration of all New York by her devotion to you and your children. Her heroism is not diminished simply because it is misguided. In fact the hardship of recent years has revived again in America a respect for decent moral values and other Christian concepts of which you appear to be totally ignorant. Perhaps it is time you ceased to be an expatriate in an environment of decadence and returned for a visit to the time-honored traditions of our native land.
The Rich Are Different Page 79