It was not until Gil had reached the end of his account of the Bergmann interview and had begun to search out pertinent paragraphs in the Lockwood report, that Cash suddenly loosed a volley of rapid-fire questions. Their incisiveness proved—although, to Gil, such proof was unnecessary—that Cash McCall had picked up more with half an ear than an ordinary man could possibly have heard with the full exercise of his faculties. Cash had missed nothing, even the subtle implications that Gil had felt himself unable to convey with direct description.
Cash nodded to the last answer, shucking a cigarette out of a crumpled package. “Good work, Gil. I like the way you handled Bergmann.”
“Well, there wasn’t much to it. Everything was all set up for me.”
“It still took some handling.”
“Not too much. As soon as I found out that it was Bergmann who wanted your help, instead of the other way around—well, that was the real break, his feeling the way he does about what’s happened at Cox-Farrington.”
“And you say that he mentioned John Allenby as a possible president?”
“Oh no,” Gil said in hasty correction. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. All he said was that he hoped whoever you put in as president would do as good a job at Andscott as Mr. Allenby had done at Cox-Farrington.”
Cash finally lighted his cigarette. “But it’s an idea. I happen to know that Allenby is available. I talked to him a month or so ago. He’s bumping his head against the ceiling over at Cox-Farrington—gone about as far as he can there—beginning to get a little bored with it. You don’t know him?”
“No.”
“Extremely able man,” Cash said. “And what he’d have to do at Andscott would be exactly what his Cox-Farrington experience has proved he can do. We’d have to give him a big stock-option deal in order to interest him, I imagine, but that would be simple enough to arrange.” He stumped out his just-lighted cigarette, a gesture of final decision. “And he’d be able to handle Danvers.”
“Handle Danvers?” Gil asked blankly. “But he won’t have to—”
“Look, Gil,” Cash cut in. “I know how you feel about General Danvers—and it’s my fault, telling you the things I did this morning. I threw you and I know it. I shouldn’t have done it. He’s not a bad sort.”
“But the things that he accused you of doing?”
“That was all in the heat of battle. You can’t blame him too much. He’s an old man and in a very tough spot. There’d be no fun in cutting his neck. There’d be a lot more fun in saving it.”
“But how could you? I mean—well, you can’t possibly let him go on managing the company, not after the mess he’s gotten himself into.”
“Yes, we’d have to get him away from the financial end of things. But that wouldn’t be too difficult. With Allenby in there to keep him on the right track, it could be handled so that no one would know what was happening—probably not even Danvers himself.”
“What would you do?”
“Kick him upstairs.”
“Chairman of the board?”
“Sure.”
Gil paused, finally saying, “It might not be such a bad idea at that,” the admission grudging until he experienced a feeling that was closely akin to relief, then vaguely aware that General Danvers’ fate had troubled his conscience more than he had realized. “It would be rough on a man like that—a general who’s done what he did for the country—booting him out with a dishonorable discharge.”
Cash said gruffly, “We don’t have to wave any flags to justify it. He can pay his way—at least for the two years that he still has to go before retirement. Those Washington contacts of his are worth a lot. When we dump the television business, Andscott will need some new defense contracts to take up the slack.”
“Yes, that’s a point,” Gil agreed. “And it probably wouldn’t do Andscott Instrument any good in Washington to let the impression get around the Armed Forces that one of their own boys had gotten a rough shake up here.”
“That’s probably true,” Cash acknowledged, but so offhandedly that it seemed a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before. “Look, Gil, the way to get the most fun out of a deal like this is to work it so that everybody comes out a winner. If we take care of Danvers, we’ve just about made it. Austen sold his company for his asking price—more than it was worth—so he’s a winner. Andscott Instrument gets a new management setup—which they need very badly. Bergmann gets his dividends—that saves the Andrews Foundation. General Danvers gets out from under—and it’s my guess he’ll welcome the chance.”
“He probably will.”
“So,” Cash went on, “when we pick up our own chips, there’s no blood on them. No one got hurt. That’s the way I want it to be. It’s more fun.”
“Well, it’s a wonderful attitude—”
Cash clipped off the possibility of compliment. “Do you think Bergmann will object?”
“To what?”
“To making General Danvers chairman of the board. Or is he so prejudiced against him that he’d insist on giving him the ax?”
“Oh, I’m sure he won’t care,” Gil said quickly, recalling the coldblooded intensity with which Dr. Bergmann vowed that he would do anything to save the Andrews Foundation. “To be honest about it, I don’t think that anything you’d do at Andscott Instrument would matter in the least to Bergmann—whether General Danvers stays or goes—or anything else.”
“As long as the Foundation gets its dividends?”
“That’s right.”
Cash nodded soberly. “That’s the impression I’d gotten from what you’d said about him, but I wanted to be sure. Strange, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“How widespread that attitude is becoming, not just in this case but so many others. Maybe this isn’t a very good example—Bergmann probably hasn’t any special obligation to worry about what happens to General Danvers—but there are getting to be so many men whose only standard of personal conduct is the good of some impersonal institution.”
“I’m not certain that I know exactly what you mean.”
“Surely you’ve run into a lot of it in the companies you’ve worked with—the man who does things as a corporation executive that he wouldn’t do as a person, always justifying himself by saying that it was something that had to be done for the good of the company.”
“Of course,” Gil conceded, but his mind slipped into a groove deeply cut by his often repeated argument that the ethical standards of business, particularly big business, were so much higher than outsiders ever credited them with being. “But it works the other way around, too. Don’t you think that there are a lot of corporation executives who—well, what I’m trying to say is that a corporation’s ethical standards are usually higher than the personal standards of the men who manage it.”
“Possibly,” Cash McCall said, not with complete acceptance. “But you’ve made my point—that there are two sets of standards these days, one personal and another corporate. You say that Bergmann would do anything to get money for the Foundation. Would he do anything to get money for himself? Doesn’t that make the point that there’s a double standard?”
Remembering the scene in Bergmann’s office, Gil had no choice but agreement.
“It shows up even more clearly when you get outside business,” Cash went on. “It’s essentially the same thing but it hits you harder, seeing it in a different perspective. I ran into one a year or so ago—not too unlike the Bergmann situation—a college that stood to get about a half million dollars providing that the assets of a company that was being dissolved could be juggled in a certain way. The president of the college came here to Conway trying to get him to work out some way to make it legal. Conway turned the case down cold—it was nothing but a flagrant attempt to defraud the other stockholders. So the college got another law firm and went ahead. I happened to be involved in a minor way so I arranged to see the president and tried to point out how wrong he was in what he
was attempting to do.”
“But he couldn’t see it?”
“Oh, he could see it. He admitted readily enough that the circumstances were regrettable. But how could anyone possibly criticize him? He wasn’t doing it for personal gain—it was all for the good of the college.”
“Did they get the money?”
“Of course. They took the case to court, followed exactly that same line of argument, and won hands down.”
“And the next day, the president probably made a speech about how they had triumphed over the iniquitous forces of big business,” Gil said with a twisted smile, recalling his own college experiences.
“Right on the nose,” Cash agreed with a clipped laugh, looking at his watch. “We’ve wandered off the track here—Bergmann’s probably out there by now—but this was something I wanted to try to get across, Gil. If we’re going to go on working together, we have to think alike. When we make a deal it’s all on our own heads. There’s no umbrella. We can’t justify anything we do by claiming it was for the good of the college—or the Foundation, or the company, or anything else.”
“I know what you mean,” Gil said, driven by some uncontrollable emotion to add, “And I just want to say—well, I’m proud as hell to be associated with you.”
For an instant, Gil Clark felt that he had made the same mistake that he had made so many times before, blurting out what he felt, realizing too late that it made him sound like a naïve and unsophisticated kid.
But Cash’s hand reached out, gripping his, and there was almost the suspicion of a choke in his voice as he said, “Thanks, Gil. I won’t forget that.”
Then, as if a shutter had opened and closed, the moment of exposure was over and Cash said, “All right, go out and get Bergmann. But hold him off for about five minutes. I’ve a couple of phone calls to make.”
Gil started for the door but Cash’s voice stopped him. “I’m assuming that you’d rather stay on this job than go back to Suffolk.”
There was a lost moment before Gil managed to respond with a grinning nod. It was difficult to believe how far away six hours had made the Suffolk Moulding Company seem.
“After you bring in Bergmann, get together with Conway and tell him what we’ve talked about—Allenby and Danvers. I’m calling Allenby now. I’ll leave Danvers for you.”
“For me,” Gil exclaimed, slapped by the same shock reaction that he had experienced when Cash had told him that he was to talk to Bergmann. That hadn’t been too hard but talking to General Danvers would be a different matter.
“I’d do it myself, but I’ve something more important on my calendar,” Cash said, the flicker of an unreadable smile crossing his face.
“Do you want me to—well, are you planning to show your whole hand?”
“Why not?” Cash shrugged. “We’re holding the high cards. Don’t forget that we still haven’t agreed to sell Suffolk Moulding. But it’s my guess you won’t have any trouble with Danvers. He’ll have cooled off a lot since last night—his temperature had gone down considerably before he left—and his big complaint was that he didn’t have a chief of staff to lift the load from his shoulders. Unless I’m wrong, he’ll welcome John Allenby with open arms.”
“Of course there’d be one big advantage in having him in on it now,” Gil said, recalling Conway’s fear of the two-month waiting period before Cash McCall could receive the block of stock that would be the key to control. “If General Danvers is riding with us from the start, there won’t be any chance of a foul-up along the way.”
Cash McCall looked at him through a moment of silence, his face expressionless as he said crisply, “You’re learning fast,” but as he turned to pick up the telephone, Gil was almost certain that he saw the flash of a satisfied smile.
16
As he crossed Rittenhouse Square, Will Atherson put the final polish on the pleasantly contrived scheme to continue the deception of his wife. She thought he had brought her downtown to see the architect’s plans for restoring the springhouse on Starwood, never suspecting that this was the day when her twenty-year search of antique furniture shops would end with the discovery of a perfectly matched companion for her Randolph chest. He could, of course, have had the piece delivered to the house but that would have cost him the pleasure of seeing Helen’s face when she first saw the chest in the curtained back room of Comsey’s shop. That moment would be worth every cent he had spent and, as Helen would never be allowed to learn, he had spent a quite ridiculous sum. He had been forced to outbid a Du Pont representative who had wanted it for Winterthur, the final price made even more shocking by the necessity of paying, in addition to Comsey’s undoubtedly handsome profit, a quite exorbitant finder’s fee to this fellow Sabin who had actually located the chest in an old home in Lancaster.
If Helen ever discovered that he had spent that much money for a piece of furniture, even for something that she wanted as much as she wanted that matching chest, she would think that he had lost his mind. A very few years ago he would have shared her opinion. His father had taught him to regard any expenditure in terms of the capital required to earn a comparable sum at a reasonable rate of interest—but that had been back in the gold standard days when a man could still measure what something was worth by assigning it a value in dollars.
The proximity of the Hotel Ivanhoe brought Cash McCall to mind and Will Atherson decided that if his wife ever managed to worm out of him how much he had spent for the chest—which, unfortunately, was a distinct possibility—he would defend himself by telling her that her constant admiration of McCall had made him decide to emulate him. It was such an amusingly ridiculous idea—Will Atherson turning into a Cash McCall—that he was tempted to use it anyway.
The remnant of a fading smile was still on his face as he pushed through the revolving door into the lobby of the Hotel Ivanhoe, immediately seeing the back of a hat that was recognizably Helen’s, but not realizing until he was only a stride away that she was not alone. A young girl sat beside her, hidden by the high back of the davenport, popping up at the last minute to greet him by name.
Fortunately, Helen helped him by saying, “Lory’s been waiting to give you a message,” an assist without which he might not have recognized Lory Austen, a lapse that would have been inexcusable despite the fact that he had not seen her since that party they had given for her when she had graduated from art school. It was his immediate presumption that Grant Austen was in town again, a circumstance that called for some quickly devised side-stepping, the urgent need so occupying his mind that there was no preparation for hearing Lory say, “I have a message for you from Mr. McCall.”
“Oh,” he said, realizing after he had let the exclamation escape that he had been too obviously surprised which, unaccountably, seemed to strike Helen as being very amusing.
There was almost open laughter in his wife’s voice as she explained, “Lory and Cash flew her folks down to a convention at Moon Beach and stopped over here for lunch on their way back.”
He knew then that Helen was off on another of her matchmaking escapades and, silly as it was, that he’d be forced into submitting to whatever she had in mind. He had long since become resigned to this one imperfection in his wife’s character and the futility of attempting to do anything about it. In this mood, Helen was capable of the most absurd machinations and when Lory told him that Cash McCall wanted him to call him at Jamison, Conway & Slythe, it was his unreasoned suspicion that it was all a part of some scheme of Helen’s to get him out of the way.
She gave him all the proof his suspicion required by saying, “Cash probably wants to see you, dear, but don’t worry about leaving me alone. Lory has invited me to go up to his suite for a cup of tea. We haven’t had a talk for ages and those plans will wait until we get there. You come up when you’re finished, dear.”
He could not avoid noticing that Lory Austen was as embarrassed as he was—and equally helpless—so he walked off to make the call. By the time he had looked up the numb
er and dialed it, Helen and Lory had already gone up in the elevator so, when Cash asked him to wait for the five minutes that it would take to get to the hotel, he decided to go up the mezzanine stairs and see Everett Pierce. He had nothing in particular that he wanted to talk to the hotel manager about, but dropping in on him would be a pleasanter waste of time than sitting alone in the lobby.
He pushed open the office door and, in the split second before Pierce could react, caught a glimpse of the hotel manager slumped over his desk, his head burrowed into the crook of his arm. Pierce jerked upright, attempting an apologetic smile, but unable to hide the ashen pallor of his skin and the hard color-drained line of his lips.
“What’s the matter, man?” Will Atherson asked anxiously. “Are you ill?”
Everett Pierce seemed about to speak but gulped as if swallowing the words. Then Will Atherson saw the trembling of his hands. Instinct, reinforced by the experience of having faced more than one businessman in a state of high-pitched emotional stress, told the banker that the hotel manager’s illness was not organic but mental, that it was related to the affairs of the Hotel Ivanhoe, and Pierce’s involuntary glance at the frosted glass wall that separated his office from Maude Kennard’s was a clear indication of the source of his difficulty.
Atherson sat down and took out his pipe. He had been aware for some time that trouble was brewing at the Ivanhoe, but he had gone on hoping against hope that Pierce might somehow manage to resolve it. He knew now that he would have to step in himself. Maude Kennard was too clever for Pierce unaided. The poor devil needed help and, apparently, in a hurry. There was only five minutes before Cash McCall would arrive, but Atherson knew that he had to do what he could by way of emergency treatment.
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