Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

  Grant Austen’s demand for the sharing of excitement was repeated now, stronger, and Lory turned to him, seeing him in cold appraisal. There was no reason for him to come to this convention … he’d sold the company, he was out of the business … what could he hope to gain by this silly hanging on, this pointless clinging? He was an old man whose abilities had been consumed, slipping now into the first stages of bothersome senility, his ego straw-stuffed with meaningless desires, the childishness of his silly hunger for self-importance. It was a good thing that he was rich.

  Suddenly conscious of having gone beyond bounds, she flinched at the cruelty of bare thought, even attempting to feel sorry for him. But the only honest compassion she could feel was for her mother.

  The plane was turning now, out over the ocean, and she looked down, seeing the blue-gray water edged with the white ruffle of breakers on the beach. There was another turn and she saw that the earth was green, reasoning the quick explanation that by flying south they had intercepted the north-moving tide of spring. The trees that streaked under them as the plane settled to the runway were in full leaf.

  “There it is!” Grant Austen said excitedly, his face pressed to the porthole. “Look, Lory, look! You bet, that’s old Moon Beach. See it, Miriam?” He was already struggling with his seat belt, loosening its grip on his little pot belly as the plane touched down with a soft thud and rolled along the runway.

  The land was flat, the earth color that of cruelly sunburned flesh, covered with mangy patches of green-grassed hair, pockmarked by the golf course that bordered the airport. Beyond, against a file of pine trees as tattered as old scenery, was the brilliantly white and high-pillared veranda of the Moon Beach Club, the front façade an ineffectual attempt to hide the grayed purple stucco of the hotel’s back wings. There was not a living soul in sight, neither on the golf course nor on the veranda of the hotel. The hangar that had come to a stop outside the porthole was lifeless, deserted.

  Attention diverted, Lory almost missed Cash’s quick passage down the length of the cabin and, before she could loosen her seat belt and swing her chair, her father was up and heading for the door.

  She offered a hand to her mother who rose hesitantly from her seat, found her purse for her and tucked down the upturned collar of her blouse. “You’ll have a wonderful time, Mother. I know you will.”

  Miriam Austen looked at her without direct response, her face tortured with something suppressed, and Lory yielded to impulse and kissed her on the cheek. Her mother’s reaction was unexpectedly emotional, the tight squeeze of her circling arm, a tremor in her voice as she whispered, “Everything’s going to be all right, Lory.”

  It seemed an odd remark, revealingly self-centered, until Lory became aware that her mother had been looking toward the now opened door where Cash stood against the arch-topped rectangle of brilliant sunlight. Was it possible that her mother was imagining that there could be something between her and Cash? The truth was an encouragement to boldness and she let her eyes meet her mother’s, openly revealing, hiding nothing, feeling the full strength of her resolution not to be victimized by imagination, her own or anyone else’s.

  They walked together to the door, silent until her mother thanked Cash. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am, Mr. McCall. It was a wonderful trip.”

  “Glad you enjoyed it,” he said, his hand guiding her to the first step.

  Grant Austen was already on the ground, his expression one of disabling disappointment. “Where the devil is everybody?” he grumbled aimlessly into space. “They always have those little buggies down here to take you up to the club.”

  “Here comes someone,” Lory heard Cash say as he followed her down the steps.

  A turkey-necked man ambled out of the little office in the corner of the hangar, yawning, tugging at the visor of a duck-billed cap. “Morning, folks. Guess you all going up to the hotel, huh? They’ll be a coming in a minute. I called ’em when I saw you landing.”

  “Where is everybody?” Grant Austen demanded, looking out across the deserted golf course.

  “Wasn’t expecting nobody this early. You about the first I guess. Most of ’em coming this afternoon on the special.” His eyes wandered. “Man, that’s sure one nice airplane. Don’t many like that come in here. Can’t recollect even one.”

  Lory saw her father’s face brighten. “Mr. McCall’s,” he said, turning to bestow a magnanimous gesture on his host. But Cash had gone back up the steps again and was handing out the luggage. She watched him, every motion a flowing line, the line drawn in liquid fire by the strong top lighting of the high sun.

  “About time!” her father snorted.

  She turned toward the hotel, her eyes guided by the sound of tinkling bells, distant but growing closer. A pony cart was coming down the sandy lane, the carriage gaudily yellow-fringed, the ponies cockaded with red pompons, the driver in green livery and a white turban, the whole effect one of a backstage theatricalism unwisely exposed to the light of day.

  “This was what I was telling you about,” her father said, proudly possessive, and Lory managed a passable smile of approval, surprised when she glanced aside and saw that her mother had outdone her.

  Despite the driver’s frantic show of high-pitched shouts and some mild response from the ponies, the movement of the carriage toward them was excruciatingly slow. But it finally reached them, the driver losing his turban as he jumped down.

  “Sure you don’t want to come up and see the place?” Grant Austen asked Cash McCall as the luggage was being piled behind the pony cart’s single seat. “It’s really something.”

  Gratefully, she heard Cash answer. “Sorry, but I’m a little pushed today.”

  Her father clambered into the buggy after her mother was seated, sitting heavily, frightening the ponies, and they lurched ahead, their little legs back-slanted as they strained against the now weighted carriage and the drag of the loose sand on the wheels.

  Thankful that what might have been an endless leavetaking had been so fortunately terminated, Lory ran to the steps and up into the cabin of the plane. Then, mildly conscience-stricken, she bowed to duty and watched through the porthole of the plane, ready to wave. Strangely, her mother did not turn back.

  “Passenger or pilot?” Cash asked behind her.

  She swung around, still kneeling on the lounge, not understanding.

  “Want to be back here?” he explained. “Or up front with me?”

  “Whatever you want,” she said quickly.

  Cash’s eyes were fixed on her face, strangely questioning, and she was suddenly conscious of what she had said, the tone as well as the words, the totality of her offering. The urge for a denying reservation rose within her but it was beaten down by the pounding of her heart, washed away by the driving surge of blood through her arteries. It was happening again … the same way it had happened so many times before … the mad hallucination of a thousand nights … even last night …

  “We’ll have lunch in Philadelphia,” Cash said, neither as a question nor as decision but as an unalterable fact, as unopposable as the hunger of her body for the touch of his hands.

  She walked up the aisle.

  7

  Long before his taxicab reached the gatepost of the old Main Line estate that was now the headquarters of the Andrews Foundation, Gil Clark was fully appreciative of the wisdom there had been in Winston Conway’s suggestion. By taking a cab he had managed to thoroughly digest the Lockwood report on Dr. Martin Bergmann and, with the advantage of these extra twenty-odd minutes, had acquired the factual equivalent of what he might have learned in twenty years of personal friendship.

  Getting out of the taxi, telling the driver to wait, walking up the front steps of the old mansion house that now served the Foundation as its administrative center, Gil Clark was struck by a fact that he realized should not have escaped him before—the Lockwood report could not possibly have been prepared overnight. A start on collecting information about Dr. Bergma
nn must have been made several years ago, probably at the time of Cash McCall’s first interest in Cox-Farrington. The important point was that the very existence of the report was evidence that Cash McCall’s deals, seemingly blessed with enormous luck and executed with such spur-of-the-moment abandon, were actually grounded in the careful assemblage of solid fact. That awareness was as reassuring to Gil Clark as the feeling that, having read the Lockwood report, he really knew the man he was about to meet. After such a revealing exposure, no man could be a stranger. There were even pictures to prepare him for Bergmann’s odd appearance, the very tall and almost incredibly thin figure that unfolded like a carpenter’s rule as he rose from his desk, the bare-skull Teutonic appearance of his head, the high dome with its thin covering of close-cropped hair, deep-set eyes that blinked at only astoundingly long intervals.

  If anything, Bergmann seemed at first a too-perfect replica of the pictures, his face as frozen in expression as a photograph, as impassive as the grillwork of a phonograph through which his voice was heard saying, “There’s no need to explain who you are, Mr. Clark. I asked Mr. Conway if you were a representative of Mr. McCall’s. He told me that you were. I know now that I was right. This molding company is really being bought from Cash McCall. That’s true, isn’t it? The Gammer Corporation is Cash McCall?”

  The questions were knife slashes, cutting away Gil Clark’s planned approach, leaving him with a mind suddenly emptied of everything except the awareness that Allenby’s prediction of a state of extreme nervous tension was more than justified.

  Bergmann had already taken silence for an affirmative answer. “I thought it was Mr. McCall but General Danvers wouldn’t tell me. There was no other way to find out. That’s why I went to John Allenby. He told me that he didn’t know anything about it, but I was sure that if I was right word would get back to Cash McCall and that he’d get in touch with me.”

  “Well, I’m here,” Gil said, forcing a smile against trepidation, reacting to the alarming suspicion that he was in the presence of a man who was mentally ill. Bergmann’s colorless voice and unblinking stare made him seem the Hollywood mad scientist, diabolically capable of touching some hidden switch that would disintegrate the world into atoms. This man across the desk was not the Dr. Martin Bergmann he had gotten to know in the pages of the Lockwood report, the dedicated scientist who had time after time rejected the big salaries that industry had offered him, sacrificing all personal reward in order that he might live the cloistered life of the Foundation, devoting himself to the gentlehearted service of all mankind. This Dr. Bergmann who faced him now was a different man, believably capable of the most devious deception. It now seemed entirely possible that his call on Allenby was only the setting of a trap, triggered by some vindictive desire to revenge the supposed harm that Cash McCall had done him at Cox-Farrington.

  “My only miscalculation was that I didn’t expect such an accelerated reaction,” Bergmann muttered to himself, his big-knuckled hands nervously stirring the magpie-nest of papers and electrical parts on the top of his desk.

  For an instant, Gil considered diverting the conversation down some directionless side road with the hope that it might have a calming effect on Bergmann, but his experience over the years with distraught executives—the head of the Andrews Foundation was by no means the first to arouse suspicions of mental derangement—argued strongly against the circuitous approach. Resorting to pointless chatter typically produced no effect other than the arousing of suspicion. The direct and unhesitating approach was usually best and, in this instance, he had the advantage of being able to attribute the initiative to the man who was now regarding him with staring silence.

  “Well, Dr. Bergmann, what do you have on your mind?”

  From the litter on his desk, a slide rule had found its way into the scientist’s hand and the trembling rattle of the extended slide against the glass bulb of a partially dissected vacuum tube was a betrayal of rising agitation, but still with no discernible effect on Bergmann’s frozen mien or the flatness of his tone. “I understand that Mr. McCall is to receive three hundred thousand shares of Andscott stock.”

  “I believe that’s correct,” Gil said as casually as he could manage.

  “Would that mean that he’d take an interest in the management of the company?”

  “An interest in the management?” Gil repeated. “Just what do you mean, Doctor?”

  As suddenly as if the hard shell of an egg had fractured, Bergmann’s expression changed, the inner man revealed, tortured by doubt and fear. “I don’t know what I mean. All I know is that something has to be done. We can’t go on this way!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Gil said honestly.

  Distraught, Bergmann half rose from his chair, his body braced by rigid arms. “I’m probably going about this in entirely the wrong way—I don’t know how these things should be done—but we must have Mr. McCall’s help. It’s our only hope!”

  “His help?” Gil puzzled, hardly able to believe what he heard, suddenly deciding that a quick thrust was the best way to clarify the situation. “Just how did you expect to get Mr. McCall’s help by threatening to block the sale of Suffolk Moulding?”

  Bergmann reacted as if he had been slapped. “But I didn’t! I want him to have that stock. Don’t you understand, Mr. Clark—I had to be certain that it was Mr. McCall, not someone who was just out to make a lot of money for himself and ruin the Andscott Instrument Company.”

  Could that possibly be true? Did Bergmann really mean that he was thinking of Cash McCall as someone other than an operator out for a fast profit? The scientist seemed too uncontrollably emotional to be devious … but there was too much at stake to gamble on an unproved assumption.

  “You surprise me,” Gil said, cautiously casual. “I had no idea you felt that way about Mr. McCall. I’d gotten the impression that you weren’t too favorably disposed toward him.”

  Bergmann’s face blanched, “Why would you think that?”

  “Weren’t you with Cox-Farrington?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when Mr. McCall moved in, you got out.”

  The scientist’s expression twisted torturously. “Yes, I was wrong—I believed the things that were being said about him—but I know now that none of those things were true. Mr. McCall didn’t wreck Cox-Farrington. He saved it! And that’s what I must get him to do now—help me save the Foundation. He’s our only hope. There’s no other chance.”

  Bergmann’s body had straightened to full height, tall and gaunt, breaking away from the confines of his desk as if impelled by the uncontainably explosive energy of pent-up emotion. “I didn’t know how to reach him. His name isn’t in the telephone book. I found out that he lived at the Hotel Ivanhoe. They wouldn’t connect me. That’s why I went to John Allenby, trying to get in touch with him. Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do—forgive me if I was wrong—but I was desperate, Mr. Clark, desperate!”

  “Just what kind of help do you want from Mr. McCall?”

  “I don’t know what can be done,” Bergmann said miserably. “But I’m sure that Mr. McCall will know. At least he could talk to General Danvers. I’ve tried but he won’t listen to me. Perhaps he’s right—I’m not a businessman—but Mr. McCall is, he’d have to listen to him. And if Mr. McCall were a big stockholder it would surely be to his own interest to get things straightened out.” He paused, his lips trembling in abject appeal. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

  “What you want is to get those dividends coming again, is that it?” Gil asked, testing the effect of a smile.

  The reaction was far more pronounced than he had expected. Bergmann sighed as if some tremendous load had been lifted from his shoulders. “Yes, that’s it. The Foundation has no other source of support. We can’t even sell our stock—the terms of the trust prevent that—and Mr. Andrews’ will also stops us from taking any government support. We could accept private contributions, I believe, but there’s very little hope in t
hat quarter. We’re not concerned here with any of the attractively horrible diseases that touch the public fancy and open their pocketbooks.”

  “Yes, I can see your problem,” Gil said sympathetically, hoping to encourage the already evident calming of Bergmann’s nerves.

  “Without Andscott dividends, the Foundation dies,” Bergmann went on. “And all of us who are here die with it—all our hopes and dreams, everything we’ve wanted out of life, all that this Foundation could accomplish. And we can do some great things, Mr. Clark. We are doing great things. We have some brilliant men here, some of the finest minds in the world. They need what the Foundation can offer them—absolute freedom to work in their own way, equipment, facilities, enough financial support to keep body and soul together. I ask nothing for myself—I haven’t taken a cent of salary in the last year, Mrs. Bergmann has a small income that’s enough to keep us going—but I can’t let the Foundation die! Do you understand, Mr. Clark.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you,” Bergmann said as fervently as if simple understanding constituted some great personal favor.

  “Let’s talk about this Andscott situation for a minute,” Gil said, his thoughts racing ahead of his words, grappling with the evident fact that Dr. Bergmann’s ideas encompassed no more than a reformation of General Danvers, not his ejection as the corporation’s chief executive. “Doctor, what’s been the nature of your relationship with General Danvers?”

  Bergmann came back to the desk, folding his body down into the chair, slumping. The tension that had been so evident in the beginning had almost totally gone. Now he was the Dr. Martin Bergmann described in the Lockwood report. “I suppose I’ve handled that part of it rather badly—I know I have—and I’m sure I must be wrong about General Danvers. It stands to reason that he must be an able man. He couldn’t have done the things he has if he weren’t.”