Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  Gil Clark thought of Guizinger and the half million he’d paid to have his name chiseled in granite on a hospital wing. “I guess it’s the monument urge,” he said.

  McCall nodded appreciatively. “Granted—particularly now that they can buy monuments with tax money and let the government pay most of the bill. But I think my point still stands—that money-making is generally regarded as something essentially vulgar, a secret vice indulged in by all but never mentioned in the best society.”

  There had been, up to this time, a hazy suspicion that Cash McCall was somehow, perhaps subconsciously, searching for self-justification, but his manner was such a complete denial of that possibility that Gil Clark found himself retreating to his earlier judgment that everything the man had said was a purposeful part of a sharply pointed inquisition. He wanted to give McCall what he seemed to be asking for—a denial that he was a Main Line snob—but he could think of no way to say it without making a fool of himself.

  With gratitude he heard McCall say, “You said before that you had no objection to making money—personally.”

  “I’m all for it—personally or otherwise.”

  “Would you have any moral compunctions about being associated with a low character who happened to think it was a more interesting game than golf—providing, of course, that you did a little money-making yourself in the process?”

  Gil Clark was becoming conscious that he was, almost against his judgment, being forced to like Cash McCall. “I’ve never cared much for golf,” he laughed, thinking humor a way to avoid commitment.

  McCall bent his head to his glass. “Well, let’s get off the sidetrack, Gil, and back to the vital statistics. What about college—liberal arts?”

  “No. Business.”

  “Then you weren’t planning to go into the publishing house?”

  “Yes, but on the business end.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t feel myself qualified—temperamentally—for editorial work. As for the business end—well, I didn’t agree with my uncle that there was anything wrong with making a profit in the publishing business.”

  McCall got the point and smiled. “Your uncle, I take it, believed that art shouldn’t be tainted with the sordid stain of profit.”

  “Something like that,” Gil agreed. “But my grandfather had made money in the publishing business and I didn’t see why it couldn’t still be done.”

  “In other words, you felt yourself more in sympathy with your grandfather than your uncle?”

  Gil looked at him, puzzled by the point of the question.

  “I’m not badgering you,” McCall explained quickly, making Gil realize again that his face must have betrayed him. “I’m simply trying to find out what sort of person you are. You did go to work for the publishing house—for Jefferson Clark?”

  “Yes. For about a year after I got out of the service.”

  “What service?”

  “Navy. I was a pilot.”

  “Do any flying now?”

  “No sir.”

  “Get enough of it?”

  “No chance, that’s all.”

  Cash McCall looked at him speculatively. “Maybe you could give me a hand now and then. Ever fly a B-26?”

  “No, I had all my time in—” He found his voice blocked, by the all but incredible implication that Cash McCall owned a B-26 and was using it as a private airplane.

  “Picked one up as surplus,” McCall explained. “Had an outfit out in California rebuild it. After they got through there wasn’t much left but the old airframe. Made a good job of it though. Put in a couple of new Pratt and Whitney twenty-four hundreds with reversing props. Gives me around three hundred an hour. Range of about two thousand. Makes a nice airplane.”

  “I should think so,” Gil replied with purposeful blankness, attempting to conceal his speculation as to what the plane had cost. Harry Guizinger had spent over a hundred thousand on his DC-3. To rebuild a B-26 as McCall had described must have meant the outlay of at least twice that much.

  “I know,” Cash McCall said in another disconcerting exhibition of mind reading. “It’s a lot of airplane. But it’s what I need. Gets me there in a hurry. I don’t like sitting around waiting for things to happen.” Then, as if in incongruous denial, perhaps even as an act of intentionally subtle humor, he lounged back and asked, “What happened after you came back to the publishing house? Why did you leave?”

  Gil hesitated as he reached back to pick up the thread of the conversation. “My uncle and I couldn’t quite agree on where the firm was going. Actually, it was two businesses in one—a publishing house and a printing plant. I made a study of the situation and wrote a long report on what I thought should be done. I’ll admit I was pretty much of a cub then—and I suppose it was a rather amateurish attempt at business analysis—”

  “What did you recommend?”

  “That we sell the printing plant to get the capital that was needed to keep the publishing house going, drop a lot of unprofitable kinds of books and concentrate on the juvenile field. It was my idea to merchandise children’s books through the chain grocery stores. That’s fairly common now but in those days it was a rather new approach.”

  “What happened?”

  “My uncle didn’t agree. I couldn’t see any future the way he was headed, so I decided to get out.”

  “And the publishing company—what happened to it?”

  “A few years ago my uncle got into a rather tight financial situation and sold out.”

  “Squeezed out?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say so. From what I heard he got his asking price.”

  “To whom did he sell?”

  “A New York corporation—Paper Enterprises.”

  “Who was behind it? Who owned it?”

  “I don’t know. I was out of the company myself so I wasn’t too much concerned.”

  “What did Paper Enterprises do with the publishing house?”

  “They sold the printing plant—I understand for about the same price that they paid for the whole business—and then started chain-store distribution of children’s books. They were one of the first to get into it in a big way and it worked out pretty well.”

  “In other words, they followed your recommendations?”

  “Yes, substantially,” Gil said, feeling the restraint of modesty. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”

  Cash McCall tapped the edge of his glass with his thumbnail and there was a bell sound in the moment of silence. “Paper Enterprises still own the publishing business?”

  “No, after they got it going they sold out.”

  “Probably at a nice profit?”

  “So I understand.”

  “And you still don’t know who was behind Paper Enterprises?”

  “No. As I said, I—”

  His voice cut off as he saw the leatherette cover on the volume that Cash McCall, reaching back, had lifted from a table beside the couch. It was the report he had written on Clark-Dudley! How had Cash McCall gotten hold of it … could it be that he was the man behind Paper Enterprises?

  “I’m your man, Gil. Found this in the files after I bought Clark-Dudley. I’m very grateful to you for the ideas. And you’re quite right about my making a nice profit out of it. That’s one reason I asked you to come here today.”

  Gil Clark felt himself speechless, his mind dulled with the opiate of shock.

  “Let’s go on,” Cash McCall said. “You went from the publishing house to Corporation Associates?”

  “No. I was with Simonds, Farrar & Peters for about two years.”

  “Happy there?”

  Gil hesitated, feeling that his answer involved an important decision. “No sir—not particularly.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t like their type of clientele.”

  Cash McCall studied his face, his expression suggesting that he was going to pursue the subject, but he didn’t.

  “Then you went with Corporat
ion Associates?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get that job—through what means?”

  “Means? An employment agency.”

  “Do you recall the name?”

  “Yes. Hildreth-Paris.”

  “You approach them—or did they come to you?”

  “As I recall, they wrote me a letter. Then I went in to see them.”

  Cash McCall sipped the last drop in his glass. “Just to keep the record straight, Gil, the agency approached you because I asked them to. I owned Hildreth-Paris. I still do.”

  Gil Clark felt himself groggy, unable to think, but he had to say something. “I don’t get the connection—Hildreth-Paris, I mean.”

  “I’ve found an employment agency an extremely valuable adjunct to my operations.” He reached back again, and Gil saw that now he had picked up a copy of the last Corporation Associates report on Suffolk Moulding Company. “This is a good job, Gil, excellently done, but I know quite a few things about Suffolk that you weren’t able to dig out.”

  “Through the employment agency?”

  Cash McCall nodded.

  “Someone from Suffolk looking for a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Paul Bronson.”

  “No!”

  “Surprise you?”

  “Well, I—yes, it does.”

  Cash McCall laughed. “I must say, Gil, that’s the one thing about you that doesn’t quite measure up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re too easily surprised.”

  “After today I doubt if anything will surprise me,” he said, trying to say it lightly but it didn’t come out that way.

  Cash McCall shot him a quick glance and then said crisply, rising, “Lunch is on the table. Ready to eat?”

  A door had opened silently behind them and, in the next room, a table had been set for the two of them, crystal and silver sparkling against white napery and black-red mahogany.

  As he approached the door, Gil’s eyes fell on the Lory Austen illustration that he had noticed when he had come in. Filling a moment of silence, he said, “I suppose you picked that up when you owned the publishing company?”

  He was unprepared for the odd expression that flashed on Cash McCall’s mobile face, revealing something that he had not seen before—nor now, seeing, could understand.

  “You know the book?” Cash McCall asked, the words sounding suspiciously like a blind to cover others unspoken. “Clark-Dudley published it—but I think it was after you left.”

  “Yes, but of course I’ve gotten to know Lory since. You do know that she’s Grant Austen’s daughter?”

  Cash nodded. The last evidence of whatever had momentarily disturbed McCall had now vanished. “I hope you like oysters.”

  “Very much.”

  “Good.”

  They sat and began to eat in a silence that Gil Clark, for no reason that he could understand, felt disinclined to break. Far back in his mind there was the vapor of an odd suspicion—that the face of the man in the Lory Austen drawing, the face of the knight with the falcon on his wrist, was the face of Cash McCall. He could not be sure, perhaps he was wrong, but his curiosity was aroused.

  8

  Lory Austen had waited no longer than the gear shifting to change her instructions to the taxi driver, telling him not to stop at the building where Clark-Dudley had its offices but to turn into the side street where she remembered having seen a travel agency. This minor deception of her father, slight though it was, added the rare-flavored spice of adventure and she curled back into the corner of the seat, relishing her aloneness as a prediction of the freedom that would be completely hers as soon as her father actually sold the company.

  This was not the first time she had sheltered the hope of escape—once she had even gone so far as to inspect apartments in New York—but, always before, her desire had been a nebulous thing, courted but not accepted, a fantasy that she knew would never survive translation to reality. This time it was different. Hope had been given the substance of truth and it was made more tangible with every passing moment, anticipation heightened by every ratchet click of the taximeter.

  The streets were blocked with rain-snarled traffic and the cab’s progress was annoyingly slow, but she found that her determination could not be weakened, even by the attrition of delay. The consciousness of freedom was self-strengthening and she was, almost for the first time in her life, vibrantly aware of the wonder of the free spirit.

  The cross-street corner was choked with a dense massing of noon-hour pedestrians and, facing a delay that could not be brooked, she got out of the cab, overlapping the driver because she could not wait for change, and pushed her way through the phalanx of umbrellas that jammed the street. She found the travel agency halfway up the block, exactly where she had remembered it to be, and the man who came to her when she stepped up to the counter was exactly the man he should have been, the look of far places in his gentle old eyes, the faint overtones of a foreign tongue in his words.

  “Fiascherino?” he asked after her question. “You have been there before?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are to be envied. It is a most wonderful thing to see the Ligurian Coast for the first time—and you will be there in the spring when there is no more lovely place on earth.” He paused to smile. “Perhaps now you do not believe me but when you are there you will know that I do not exaggerate.”

  “You’ve been there?” she asked, hesitating, suspicious for a delaying instant that he might be a clever salesman, then knowing that his almost reverent enthusiasm was something beyond that.

  “When I was a very young man,” he explained, his voice low and warmed with memory. “It was but one spring after D. H. Lawrence had lived in his villa on the Lerici road—and there was a very old man at San Terenzo who claimed that he could remember Shelley’s days at Casa Magni. It is the bay of the poets, you know—Petrarch and Dante and Byron. You, too, perhaps are a poet?”

  “No, I—I’m an illustrator.”

  “Ah yes, an artist!” he said with a self-deprecating gesture indicating that he should have known without being told. “How is it that you wish to go—by the boat or will you fly?”

  “I really don’t know. Is it difficult to get there?”

  “Difficult?” he asked, syllabizing the word as if it were foreign. “You mean, perhaps, is it expensive?”

  “No. That doesn’t matter. It’s—” She caught herself, stopped by the fear of ostentation. “It does matter but—”

  “I understand,” he said quickly, skirting embarrassment with courtly deference. “No, it is not difficult to reach Fiascherino. You ask for my advice?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you will go by the sea to Genoa. It is the proper approach—the Mediterranean.”

  She nodded agreement, listening as his voice quickened with enthusiasm, his expressive hands modeling the images of his words—the ship and the sea, the landing at Genoa, the road along the coast, the little studio apartment that would be ready and waiting for her in the villa that was now a hotel run by an Englishwoman who was herself a watercolorist.

  “All of that, everything, I will arrange for you,” he said. “There is but one thing you must do—tell me when you will sail. Next week? Or perhaps that is too soon?”

  “I’m afraid it couldn’t be next week.”

  “Then the sailing after that—three weeks from Saturday?”

  She hesitated, tempted. It was so easy, so simple. All that was needed was a nod and the decision would be made. “I—I think I can let you know in a day or two. Will that be all right?”

  His eyes cooled with disappointment. “For me—yes, of course, it is all right. For you—perhaps it is best not to delay.”

  “You mean that space might not be available?”

  “You will permit me to advise you?”

  She nodded.

  “You are very young,” he said sof
tly. “When you are young it is best to let the heart decide. When one is young, there should be no fear of the impulse. There will be enough years to come when that cannot be done.”

  She broke the magnetic pull of his eyes and her glance, escaping, caught a clinging eyehold on a poster that hung on the wall behind him. It pictured a Maine headland bold against the sky, the sea breaking at its base, the black-green of pines, the incised whiteness of a boat’s sail … “Lory, it can’t be … you don’t know what you’re doing …”

  “I did not mean to give offense,” the old man said anxiously, sharply concerned, and she realized then that she had let the anger of defiance flush her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and then automatically defensive, “I’m not as young as you think.”

  His smile was young-old, the smile of an old man whose eyes had lost less of youth than he imagined. “There is a line of verse—my translation is perhaps clumsy—‘It is only the very young who will protest their youth, the older claim it when it is not their due.’”

  She tried to make her smile hide her disappointment with herself for having allowed the breaking of her promise that she would never again think of Cash McCall. But more had been broken than her promise. The fragile shell of the enticing moment had cracked, letting in the gray rain-fog of Philadelphia to snuff out the imagined sunlight of Fiascherino.

  “Three weeks from Saturday?” he asked again.

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly decisive.

  The old man voiced the soft sound of pleased relief and then there was a printed form in front of her, and she was signing her name, and there was the low buzz of question and answer between ear and lip, scarcely heard because the mind-words of exultation were so much more strongly voiced. She had won the last skirmish. This was the end of the battle. Defiantly, she looked at the wall. The poster was only ink on paper.