Resolutely, he tried to damper the rise of his revulsion by admitting to himself that he was prejudiced against the Ivanhoe. How could he help it? That was where you really saw it, had it rubbed under your nose, crammed down your throat. It didn’t matter any more who you were or what you stood for … honor, ethics, standards of conduct. The only thing that mattered now was the color of your money … the table you had in the Fontainebleau Room.
He stepped out from under the balcony and let himself be carried along by the flow of the crowd that spilled across the Square, feeling the familiarity of place and direction but oblivious to dated time. He had walked this same pavement as a boy when, home for the holidays, his father had taken him to the old Ivanhoe where, as a tradition of long standing, the prep school sons of respected patrons were served without charge on Saturdays, always black bean soup on Saturday noons, and the day that Alonzo, the old headwaiter, handed you the sherry cruet was the day you became a man and started paying for your own lunch … a dollar bill … eighty cents on the check and you left the change for a tip.
Even in ’40, when Barbara came out, a dance in the old Ivanhoe ballroom was still considered an appropriate and sensibly economical way of introducing a group of Main Line debutantes to society. The war, of course, had changed that. By the time he had married Barbara, on his furlough in ’43, the Ivanhoe had taken on a new character. The old ballroom had become the Fontainebleau Room and there was a Continental chef and a billboard menu with prices calculated to drive away the penny pinchers who would bother to look at them. The war-contract crowd did not. They were all on cost-plus.
Once, sentimentally, in that week before they were married, he had insisted on taking Barbara back to the Ivanhoe for lunch. She had warned him what would happen, but he couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t be able to get a table, certain that Alonzo would remember him. But Alonzo had disappeared with the rest of the old Ivanhoe. There was a type-cast headwaiter with a French accent, and a velvet-wrapped steel rope to hold back the commoners while the cost-plus aristocracy went their unimpeded double-breasted way. “It’s the war,” Barbara had said. “We’ll find another place for lunch.”
But the end of the war had not brought back the old Ivanhoe. The velvet rope stayed up and the passport requirements of the Fontainebleau Room remained unchanged. You had to be in the big money to make it … one of the fast-buck boys, an operator … a Harry Guizinger.
Gil Clark’s mind gagged on the memories of that week he had been forced to spend with Harry Guizinger. It had been one of his last assignments at S.F.&P., working on the organization plan for Tronic Wire & Coil, lunching every day in the Fontainebleau Room with Guizinger, sitting across the table looking at that boar’s head face, those greedy little pig eyes, his fat lips licking at the prospect of all the money he was going to make by liquidating the old Harris Wire Company and swallowing up all the profit in a tax-free transfer to Tronic Wire & Coil … “Six lawyers I had already and not one says I ain’t absolutely legal!”
Cash McCall would be another Guizinger … what else could he be?
Coming full circle, Gil Clark’s mind began to retrace the rut of tortured questioning that he had worn so deep in the last twenty-four hours. Was this the inevitable end of every small manufacturing business … to fall into the hands of some operator, to be liquidated with nothing left but a dry pulp to discard? Or, as the only alternative, be tossed into the maw of some big corporation, digested and assimilated, lost in nameless anonymity?
He found it difficult to accept the limit of those two alternatives. Acceptance impinged upon an attitude fundamental to the hope and belief upon which he had built his life. Unlike most of his University classmates, Gil Clark had not drifted into the College of Business Administration because of any inability to make up his mind about what he wanted to do after graduation. His goal was set long before matriculation—to go into business and become a key man in some manufacturing enterprise.
In the same way that the boys in the College of Medicine had somehow become dedicated to the ideal of ministering to the ills of man, Gil Clark had been captivated by the prospect of “improving the human lot through the making of better and better products to aid in the fulfillment of richer lives.” He had once written those words in a term paper that, unexpectedly, he had been called upon to read aloud. Spoken, it sounded like a pompous commercial on an institutional radio program, but the words expressed what he meant so he hadn’t been too bothered by the tongue-in-cheek grins of some of his classmates.
The intricacies of the functioning human anatomy, which so excited the medical students, were paralleled for Gil Clark by the fascinating involvements of the modern manufacturing corporation. Industrial organizations were—again as he had written in his paper—the “key structures of an industrial civilization, and it follows as a necessary corollary that the men who manage them are citizens of a high order.”
To his astonishment, he had eventually discovered that the dean of the College of Business Administration, Dr. Willis Lee Cottrell, held no such views. The dean’s senior seminar on The Modern Corporation revealed an attitude that black-marked industrialists as heartless and greedy enemies of the people. Cottrell saw the large corporation as a cancer on the body of society that must be excoriated at any cost. He preached the legitimacy of “small business” but what he regarded as small was impossibly so. Few manufacturing establishments, even the smallest, could qualify under his definition.
Cottrell’s teaching purpose, apparently, was to evangelize his students into government bureaus. He was notably successful. Many of the members of the Class of ’41—those whose physical unfitness saved them from service in the armed forces, as well as a number for whom occupational deferments were wangled—eventually landed in Washington.
Even if Gil Clark had not joined the Navy, he could never have belonged to the group that came to be called “the Cottrell boys.” He saw the dean as a despicable character, as traitorous to the College of Business Administration as Dr. Weeker of the College of Medicine would have been had he set out upon the unthinkable mission of destroying the medical profession.
Actually, Gil had been mystified that the Board of Regents, two of whose members were heads of large corporations, hadn’t booted Cottrell out of the University. Instead, both of their companies had paid Dr. Willis Lee Cottrell, large fees for his services as a “management consultant.”
The day after Gil Clark had been mustered out of service, he had gone to work for Clark-Dudley, the family-owned publishing house, and immediately undertook an analysis of its tottering affairs. One thing the study revealed was that the firm offered no opportunity for the early fulfillment of his own ambitions. Blocked, he took what he hoped would be a short cut to his war-postponed destiny by finding a place on the staff of Simonds, Farrar & Peters, a newly organized firm of business consultants and management counselors, hoping that he would be given a hand in directing the affairs of those clients who would now be turning to the manufacture of the wonderful new post-war products. Instead, he found himself one of a roomful of assistants to Nick Peters who, as the firm’s income tax expert, was the busiest man on the staff.
It was while he was working with Nick Peters that Gil had learned about the jackals and the vultures. Around the S.F.&P. office they were known by the group name of operators. There was, it was true, enough similarity to justify the group naming but they were, nevertheless, rigidly individualistic men. They worked alone, in secrecy and without confidants, their steely eyes forever alert as they stalked companies that might be turned to their highly profitable purpose.
There was never a shortage of victims. There are always businesses on the down-cycle of success and, in those days, the number was swelled by factories staggering under the problems of reconversion, others drained to weakness by high taxes, still more that were family owned companies facing estate settling problems. Nor was there a shortage of potential buyers. All that had to be done was to locate another c
ompany that, through a combination of merged asset and earning figures, could effect a favorable change in its base for the calculation of taxes. Sometimes there were “loss carry-overs” to sweeten the deal, or a profit-dripping disparity between actual and book values. The “special situations” were almost endless, limited only by the ingenuity of the operators at finding companies that could be fitted to some fine-print crack that they had discovered in the tax regulations.
Most profitable of all—although it took a special skill to pull them off successfully—were the “liquidations” in which a company was sentenced to a slow death, gradually dismembered, and then sold piecemeal as a “distribution of assets.” The end result was usually an empty factory building, often in a small community prostrated by the loss of the company payroll, but the operators didn’t worry too much about that. By then they had collected their profit and stored it away, safe from the ravages of the tax collector. Everything they did was meticulously checked for legality by the best lawyers that money could retain.
Gil Clark disliked all of the operators but he reserved a special antipathy for the liquidators, despising them in much the same way that he had detested Dr. Willis Lee Cottrell, and for the same reason—they were destroyers.
The main impetus behind Gil Clark’s shift to Corporation Associates had been his desire to escape the profit-mad scheming that pervaded the whole atmosphere at S.F.&P. By contrast, Corporation Associates’ clients were mostly long established firms, solid and substantial, and as Jack Hildreth at the employment agency had pointed out, Harrison Glenn was a man no one could fail to respect.
For a moment, yesterday afternoon, that high estimate of Harrison Glenn had been threatened for the first time. Glenn’s willingness to allow Suffolk Moulding to fall into the hands of an operator like Cash McCall had seemed a serious indictment of the president’s character. Afterwards, however, Gil had convinced himself that Harrison Glenn was right—Corporation Associates had an undeniable obligation to help Grant Austen sell his company to the best advantage—and it was Austen, not Corporation Associates, who would make the choice of a buyer. The black mark that Gil Clark had momentarily placed against Harrison Glenn’s name had been completely erased, but he had not been able to completely wipe away the accusation that Glenn had lodged against him—that his own interest in Suffolk Moulding was not as coldly dispassionate as it should have been.
Overnight, forced by Harrison Glenn’s perceptive probing, he had come to acknowledge the truth that he could never be completely happy as a business analyst. What he needed was intimate identification with his own company and the more tangible sense of accomplishment that such an association would offer. Suffolk Moulding could give him what he wanted but, after that moment of unreasoned hope when the idea had first occurred to him, he had discarded the possibility. If Cash McCall bought Suffolk Moulding, there would be no opportunity to build it into the kind of company that good management could make it.
He was across the Square now, standing at the curb, waiting for a break in traffic that would let him cross the street to the Hotel Ivanhoe. The light on the corner changed and he ran, darting behind a taxi, cutting in front of a blue Cadillac that was gliding to a stop under the marquee, hurrying on toward the revolving door.
4
“That was Gil Clark,” Lory Austen said. “I’m sure it was. He just went in the hotel.”
“Could be,” Grant Austen said. “Almost everybody eats here—not all of them up in The Wharf, of course.”
The doorman hovered. “Park your car, miss?”
“Sure, that’s the thing to do, Lory,” Grant Austen agreed. “Leave the car here and take a taxi wherever it is that you’re going.”
She slipped across the wide seat, looking back to be sure that she had left the keys.
Her father waited for her. “I don’t know what time I’ll be through, Lory, but suppose you come back—well, make it three o’clock here in the lobby. If I’m not ready by then, I’ll leave a message for you at the desk.”
“Good luck,” she said.
His eyes lighted. “Maybe I’ll have some news for you.”
He waited, not moving toward the revolving door.
The doorman’s whistle had brought a cab and he asked, “Where to, miss?”
She bridged the moment of hesitation and then gave the address of the building where Clark-Dudley had its offices. The travel agency was only a block or two away.
“You’ll get yourself some lunch, won’t you?” her father asked anxiously as she was getting into the cab.
“Don’t worry, Dad. I can take care of myself.”
She closed the door, smiling.
He returned the smile.
5
Gil Clark bought a pack of cigarettes at the newsstand and, as he was pocketing the change, caught a glimpse of Grant Austen standing in the middle of the lobby. His first impulse was to step forward to tell Austen to be certain to call him after lunch but, seeing Maude Kennard approaching Austen, he waited and watched, half hidden by the newspaper rack.
He had once discussed Maude Kennard with Ken Sullivan, who had made a Corporation Associates study of the Hotel Ivanhoe last year. Ken had said that she was “smarter than a she-fox” and Gil’s own observation of her during the time that Guizinger had been in town, and on scattered occasions since, had fully confirmed that judgment. Despite his distaste for what she had done to the old Ivanhoe, he found himself forced to admiration. The hotel business was a rough game, particularly with an old house that couldn’t make a profit on the rental of its too-large rooms, and Ken had told him what Maude Kennard had accomplished. It had been her concept—Ken had given no credit at all to Pierce, the manager of the hotel—that the only way to make big money was to concentrate on the restaurant end and attract the expense-account trade. She had knowingly driven away the patronage of Main Line society, business that any other hotel manager in Philadelphia would have crawled on his knees to hold, explaining to Ken that there was no profit in selling tea and chicken salad sandwiches to old dowagers who insisted that a luncheon check gave them the privilege of cluttering up the hotel with a bridge game afterward.
Now, watching Maude Kennard in action with Grant Austen, Gil Clark could believe what Ken had told him about the way that she could loosen up a thick bankroll … “She’s a dame that really missed her calling—could have been the greatest madame in the world.”
Maude Kennard’s voice was lost in the lobby sounds but pantomime and facial expression were enough to verify the fact that she was giving old Grant the full treatment—and was he falling for it!
A group of men came boiling in through the revolving door and Maude Kennard shifted her attention.
Gil stepped out and crossed to Grant Austen, surprised at the warmth of the greeting he received, deciding that Maude Kennard had had an uplifting effect on Austen’s spirits.
“On that matter that we were talking about yesterday,” Gil whispered, “I believe we have something that will interest you.”
“Fine, fine,” Austen bubbled. “Where can I get in touch with you after lunch?”
“I think I’ll be back at the office. If I’m not there yet, talk to Mr. Glenn.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I can’t tell you anything definite at the moment but if I were you I wouldn’t decide anything until—”
Will Atherson was approaching and Austen whispered, “I’ll call you.”
Gil had met the banker on a previous occasion but it had been some time ago and he acknowledged the introduction. Then, excusing himself, he walked quickly toward the desk.
A hand reached out to grab his arm and he turned to see a face, at first strange, then dimly recalled. Fortunately, the recollection carried the memory of a matching name. It was Dale Turner who had spent a few months at S.F.&P. as one of the rotating complement of crew-cut assistants in Nick Peters’ tax section.
They traded old-grad greetings, pointlessly hearty, and Turn
er asked, “Still in the same rat race?”
“I’m with Corporation Associates now. Have been for several years.”
“Yeh, I’d heard about that,” Turner said. “Thought maybe you’d gotten wise to yourself by now. Ought to get in my racket. Guess you know, huh—full partner with Wemberley & Fields, tax consultants? I’m manager of the Washington office.”
“That’s fine,” Gil said flatly, remembering that Guizinger had been a Wemberley & Fields client.
“It’s a living,” Turner said with a lip-twisting smile. His clothes testified to his modesty—you didn’t buy a suit like that out of a Corporation Associates paycheck, even if you were budget-stretching to impress a new client.
“Good to see you,” Gil said, glancing at the wall clock. The minute hand was racing now, only two minutes until twelve-thirty.
Turner had taken out his card case. “Give you a name to remember, Gil, just in case any of your righteous clients ever have a fire break out in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Just sound the alarm and we’ll be on the job. We’re quick on our feet when it comes to a fast hosing job.”
“Sure, Dale, sure,” Gil said nervously, glancing at the clock again. “Sorry. Got a date upstairs.”
“Got one myself,” Turner grinned sardonically. “Relieving one of our public servants of some of his inhibitions.”
The clerk at the desk greeted Gil with a look of supercilious inquiry suggesting that his presence in the Hotel Ivanhoe might well be a mistake.
“What’s Mr. McCall’s room number?”
The clerk was insolently hesitant. “May I have your name?”
“Gilmore Clark.”
The clerk lifted the telephone instrument as if it were a teacup, carefully avoiding the brush of his arm against the maroon carnation in the lapel of his morning coat. “Mr. McCall? This is Mr. Nathan at the desk. Sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s a Mr. Clark to see you.”
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