She laughed uneasily. “I still don’t understand, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“Yes,” he said. He was staring fixedly at her. She swallowed the last of her drink and realized she had finished it too quickly. She felt light-headed and hot.
He rose from his seat with the flowing lazy grace of a well-fed lion and came around the coffee table, put his hand at the back of her neck, and bent his head toward her. Fear quivered in her eyes; she drew back and shook her head violently. “No, Mason.”
He straightened, but his hand remained at the back of her neck, hard and heavy. For a moment, staring into his face, she could not get her breath; she was frozen with an unknown dread. She whipped away from him and went striding away to a neutral side of the room, still shaking her head. When she got her breath she said finally, “No, I won’t have it. I won’t be just another scalp for you to hang on your belt.”
“I thought we’d celebrate our success. But have it your way—we’re both grown up, aren’t we? I can hardly expect you to start breathing hard every time I come in sight. All right, I won’t make it cheap—you don’t have to be afraid. Come back and sit down. I’ll keep my distance.”
She returned to her seat, still half-consumed by disbelieving wariness. “I’m grateful.”
“Are you? I’m not altogether sure you wouldn’t have preferred to have me overpower you. Maybe you need to be taken by force, for it to work.”
“Now you’ve made me feel cheap. Is that what you really think of me?”
“I’ve never been altogether sure what to think of you,” he said. “You’ve turned down my advances three times running. Three strikes, I’m out. I won’t try it again.”
“You didn’t really try all that desperately hard, now, did you?” she said recklessly.
“Is that an invitation?”
“You know better than that.”
He sat back with his drink; his eyelids drooped. An effervescence had begun inside her, and she denied it silently, but it crept through her body, a sultry heat like alcohol in the blood; it made her body feel looser, but it conjured up at the same time an image of rutting sweat and tangled sheets, and that image was all she needed to regain her resistance. She put on a cool smile, an arch look of self-confident control, and she said, “Thank you for not pressing the point. It would have made things disagreeable if you’d forced me to throw you out.”
He put his glass down on the table. “How long has it been since you’ve had a man?”
She blanched; she bridled. “You love taking people by surprise, don’t you?”
“Sometimes it’s the best way to break through to the answers.”
“Your questions can be very crude. That one was. You don’t honestly expect me to answer it?”
“You might have surprised me.”
“I won’t. In any case, it doesn’t matter that much to me. There are some of us who think about other things than sex, hard as that may be for you to believe.”
He only smiled a little and stood up. “Can I freshen your drink?”
“A weak one.”
“I didn’t have it in mind to get you smashed.” He took her glass away, and she put her head back and closed her eyes, listening to the clink of ice cubes as he made the drinks.
When he returned and settled facing her, she opened her eyes and said, “Are you going to tell me about your magnificent coup?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Of course. It’s what you came for, really, isn’t it? To do a little genteel bragging?”
That made him laugh softly, but his eyes didn’t laugh. “Not really. You don’t know much about me, after all, do you?”
“I know you’ve always fascinated me. You’re real, I’ll give you that—the kind of violence and force most people have never remotely tasted and can never understand.”
“But you do?”
“There’s a little of the same thing in me. I’ve met only a very few people who really understand how to enjoy power. Mostly they just go after it because it’s the way they were brought up, it’s part of the value system they’ve always been surrounded by. But they don’t really comprehend it. They make money because everybody approves of you when you make money. Even millionaires—they’re just doing it because it’s a game to play, a way to pass the time. But you’re not like that, I know that much. You don’t really care about money for its own sake, do you? What counts with you is the power to dominate the world. The difference between being kept waiting and keeping others waiting. Doesn’t it come down to that?”
He drank silently, and when his eyes narrowed she had the feeling, in that brief instant, that he was unguarded; something she had said had stripped the carefully crafted armor from him and left him naked before her. She comprehended that in this precise moment she had the absolute power to get total control of him—if only she knew the right method.
He said in an odd, light voice, “It’s funny. I’ve got dozens of people involved in this thing, and all any of them can see is the Goddamned money. They look at it, and the only thing they see is the size of the risk and the dollars—they’re awed by all those zeros. All those people and all those brains, and you’re the only one who sees the point, you’re the only one who can put your finger on what I’m really after.”
The armor had rejoined; the moment was gone; and now she said uncertainly, “I don’t think you’re pleased that I know. It bothers you, doesn’t it? It was your secret.”
Instead of giving her a direct reply, he got onto his feet and went over to the front wall and stood pretending to look at the Cézanne and the Corot. With his back to her he said, “This deal of mine is going to make you very rich. Or very powerful, choose your own word. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“You told me.”
“Has it occurred to you to wonder why I went out of my way to bring you into this thing? You, rather than someone else, some other company?”
“Of course it has.”
“You haven’t asked. Not once.”
“If I had,” she said, “would you have given me a straight answer?”
He turned to face her. “I will now.”
She kept her face strict and composed.
He said, “You’ll see the beauty in the irony of it. You see, the big coup I mentioned—I’m taking your father’s empire away from him.”
It took a moment for it to sink in. Her face changed slowly as realization came to her.
He said, “It’s intriguing, in an odd way, that you’ll profit from your father’s defeat. It always appealed to me.”
She was stiff, cold; she said in a hoarse breath, “Why?”
“A Freudian nutcracker might say I was raised by nuns and I learned to hate women in positions of executive authority. I doubt it, but it’s as good an excuse as any. Of course, it might be because you turned down my advances. If you think I’m that cheap. Actually, I doubt I could give you a good sensible answer. The design of it, the composition, the balance—that’s what appealed to me from the start. Years ago I went to your father with a deal that would have made him richer and made my fortune. He turned me down flat—not because the deal was no good, but because he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Me, personally. I wasn’t good enough for Elliot Judd.” He gave her a very quiet, soft little smile and turned his hands over as if to say, You see how it is.
Watching him in horror, she became slowly enraged—flesh aquiver, eyes bulging. She caught herself; she said in a stiff low voice that trembled, “You’ll never do it. My father has hung tougher men than you out to dry!”
“Your father,” he said gently, “won’t live long enough to stop me.”
He strolled unhurriedly to the door, went through it, and pulled it shut behind him.
She walked toward the door woodenly, as stubbornly blind as a wind-up toy; she leaned both arms against the door, and after a while she heard the soft chunk of the elevator door. She went back to the drink she had left by her chair
and drained it at a gulp. Then, still moving like a mechanism, she reached for the telephone and dialed the operator and said in a voice that broke, “I want to call Arizona.”
30. Russell Hastings
By Sunday night the young prisoner was hoarse from the sixty cigarettes he had consumed in the last eight hours. He had chewed his manicure to pieces. The small room was all but empty of furniture; Hastings and Bill Burgess camped hipshot against the spindly wooden table—the room wasn’t designed for sitting.
Steve Wyatt got up after ten minutes’ graveling silence and began to stride back and forth. His eyes were pouched, his clothes punctuated by wrinkles and creases.
The room’s air was thick with heavy body heat. Russ Hastings, stripped down to a rumpled pink shirt, felt tired and angry.
Bill Burgess said, “Nobody’s after your cherry, Wyatt. Why don’t you relax?”
“Why don’t you cool yourself off? You’re melting my butter.”
“We don’t want you, Wyatt. We want the big one. Villiers.”
“Look, I’m nobody’s flunky. Not Villiers’, not anybody’s.”
Hastings drawled mildly, “It’s no time to get contentious, Steve. We’ve got enough documentation to put you away for quite a few years, if the impulse strikes us.”
“Yeah. What other heroic kinds of work do your snoops do besides inspecting the contents of vacuum-cleaner bags and wastebaskets?”
“It netted us your copies of the phony sheets you planted on your employer, didn’t it?”
“Suppose I say somebody must have planted that stuff in my apartment?”
Burgess shrugged. “You could try that on a jury. I don’t think they’d like the fit of it much, but you could try. Now, quite waltzing with us, kid. You can’t afford to—you don’t know how much we know. Go back and sit down, and let’s talk.”
“God, you’re a stubborn pair of bastards!”
“We have to be. And you’d be wise to remember it.”
Wyatt’s eyes flickered when they touched Burgess’. Finally he pulled the chair out and sat down. “Look, can I get bail?”
“If you decide to cooperate, you won’t need any.”
“You bastards make it sound easy, don’t you? You make it sound as if I’d get off free as a bird. The fact is, if I tell you what you want to know, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of mud flying, and a good deal of it will stick on me.”
“You took that chance when you threw in with Villiers,” Burgess said. “Isn’t it a little late to worry about it now? Look, we’re all tired, and if you don’t want to testify, you don’t have to. I offer my personal guarantee you’ll end up making mail sacks in Atlanta, but it’s your choice.”
Wyatt’s jaw muscles stood out like cables. He looked from Burgess to Hastings. His eyes were tired and raw. He lit a cigarette and held it in the manner of an actor preparing to turn toward the audience and deliver the line that would bring down the curtain, and Hastings felt himself tense up. But what Wyatt said was, “I don’t suppose there’d be any way of keeping it from my mother?”
“I won’t kid you,” Burgess said. “It’s going to be the biggest Wall Street news break since Robert Young went after the New York Central. I’m just stating facts, not enjoying it. You understand?”
There were signs stamped in Wyatt’s face that Hastings saw with quick and easy recognition, and a slight contempt. To prime him, Hastings prompted, “You went with Villiers and another man to a board meeting of the NCI directors. Who was the third man with you?”
“Sidney Isher. You must know that if you know I was there.”
“All right. Who’s Isher?”
In the corner, the telephone rang. Burgess went to answer it. Hastings said, “Who’s Isher?”
“He works for Villiers.”
“Doing what?”
“Keeping the flies off him, maybe. I don’t know. He’s a lawyer. He draws up papers, that kind of thing. You’d have to ask him.”
“We will. Now, what about—”
At the phone, Burgess had turned, catching his eye. Hastings went to the phone, crossing paths with Burgess, who said to Wyatt, “Ready to have your statement taken down by a stenographer now?”
“I guess so,” Wyatt said, drained.
Burgess went to the door to call outside; Hastings picked up the telephone.
“Russ? It’s Diane.”
“Hello,” he said, unable to think of anything else to add.
“It’s important, Russ.” She sounded dulled, as if she had taken a drug. “I’ve been trying to find you all weekend—I’ve been on the phone several times with Lewis Downey in Arizona. It doesn’t look as if my father’s going to last the night out, but I’m flying out there now to be with him. I’m at the airport now—I only have a minute. I hope I can get there in time. But I had to reach you—I saw Mason Villiers Friday night. You remember when you asked me about him?”
“Yes, I remember. My God, I’m shocked to hear—he seemed to be holding his own when I saw him….”
“It seems to have hit suddenly. Lewis said the doctors had warned him this could happen almost anytime. But Russ—they’re calling my plane, I must hurry—listen to me. I’ve told my lawyers to try to break off the deal with Mason Villiers, if it isn’t already too late. You were right about him, I should have listened to you. He’s a dangerous megalomaniac. But something he said the other night has been echoing around in my head ever since, and it just came to me how important the implication was. He said—let me see if I can remember the exact words—he said he was going to take my father’s company away from him, and then we argued, and I said my father would never let him do it, and then he said to me—I’m sure these are his words—‘Your father won’t live long enough to stop me.’ Do you understand what I’m saying, Russ?”
“I understand it very well. Diane, tell your father—Oh, hell, what’s the point?”
“You’ve always loved him, Russ, he knows that. I’m glad you went out to see him—Oh, God, I’ve got to run, I’ll miss my plane. I’ll call you from the ranch.”
The line went dead. Hastings hung up and turned. The stenographer was settling in a chair with her notebook; Burgess looked up at him. He said, “Villiers knows Elliot Judd is dying.”
Burgess stared at him. “So that’s it. It makes it all fit, doesn’t it? The slimy bastard, taking advantage of an old man’s sickness.”
Hastings walked over to the interrogation table and put his palms flat on it. Steve Wyatt flinched. Hastings said, “How did he find it out, Steve?”
“Okay—okay. Part of it he got from me. I found one of Judd’s letters in Howard Claiborne’s files. After that, Villiers hired some shady detective agency to burgle Judd’s doctor’s files. I think he’s been suspicious ever since Judd withdrew from public sight last year. You know what it means, of course—NCI’s always been a one-man empire, and in that kind of situation it works the same every time, the death of the tycoon always causes a tidal wave, and Villiers will be ready to buy carload lots of stock certificates when the price hits bottom.”
Burgess looked over Wyatt’s head at Hastings. “What do we do about it?”
“I’ll post a man at a phone inside the Exchange. We’ll have to brief the Exchange officials. If Judd dies and the news hits the wire, I want to be ready to suspend trading in the stock immediately, before Villiers has a chance to touch it.” He sat down on the corner of the table and put his hard glance on Wyatt. “Let’s have it now, from the beginning.”
31. Mason Villiers
Villiers came awake and saw that he had slept alone. He had thrown Ginger out two hours ago; he didn’t like to find women around when he woke up in the morning.
It was Monday morning; he felt keyed up. He rang down for breakfast and performed his morning ablutions with unusual enjoyment, a keen awareness of the roughness of the brush against his teeth, the heat of the shower spray, the scratch of the towel. He juggled plans while he breakfasted and dressed; he was downstair
s forty minutes after waking up, climbing into the limousine and telling the driver to get him to Hackman’s office fast.
The English girl gave him a frank appraisal as he crossed the office, but he was preoccupied and did not respond; he walked into Hackman’s office, slammed the door, and let his hooded glance move from Hackman to Sidney Isher. And as soon as he saw Isher’s face he knew something had gone wrong.
He looked at his watch—nine-forty. He said, “What’s the matter with you?”
Isher said, without preliminaries, “The NCI board won’t play ball. I couldn’t reach Cleland—I left a message with his answering service. He’s got a hell of a sense of timing. But I did get hold of Dan Silverstein, and he says there’s been heavy pressure put on them to stand pat and fight.”
“Pressure. From where?”
“Evidently from Howard Claiborne and the SEC and the Justice Department, not necessarily in that order.”
George Hackman said, “There’s indications some stockholders may be filing private suits demanding a full accounting of the directors’ activities. And some of your stockholders in your little companies filing suits against you personally.”
“On what grounds?”
“Charging you’ve misused company assets, that kind of thing.” Hackman didn’t look friendly. His jovial facade had crumbled.
Sidney Isher hawked into a handkerchief and said, “This could be a lot rougher than any of us bargained for. NCI’s going to fight, Mace. No question of it. It’s backfired. I say it’s time to cut our losses and get the hell out. It was a good try, but to hell with it. We’ve still got our skins.”
“If Wyatt keeps his mouth shut,” Hackman growled.
Isher frowned at him. “Why shouldn’t he? They turned him loose, didn’t they? They didn’t have enough on him to hold him.”
“That’s what he said. But I don’t like the way he went straight out to his old lady’s shack in East Hampton. He hasn’t budged off the property since. And there’s a carload of Justice Department cops watching the place.”
Villiers Touch Page 32