The Trespassers (8 page)

“Look here, Tim,” Crown said finally. “This won’t do. These letters reveal bad things.”

“Wha—why, how do you mean, Jas?”

“They show me clearly—you’ll deny it, but it’s too clear—that you resent having me the real head of this company. You’re trying already—oh, unconsciously of course—to wrest control from me. The dates on these letters show you’ve been trying it for quite a while. I didn’t suspect it.”

“Why, you’re mad. I—”

Timothy sprang to his feet, his features working in sudden outrage. Crown remained motionless, except for the tiny tap-tap-tap of the pencil point.

“I said it was unconscious,” Crown said quietly. “But I can’t run risks, even with your unconscious. I’ve seen too many companies wrecked on disloyalty.”

“Disloyalty? Disloy—” His voice rose shrill and oddly helpless. “I’ve worked like a dog, day and night, on this—I’ve stayed here in New York for weeks on end—haven’t seen my family or home—I’ve sold you my station, because I—”

“Because you recognized that this could make a great public figure of you, Tim, and a millionaire to boot.”

“Sure. Yes, sure, that too. But you can’t ascribe all—”

“I’m not ascribing. I’m just putting two and two together. And I say—” He paused. He laid down the pencil. He looked at Tim and his eyes were motionless, stripped of all warmth. Not even anger flickered in their flat, dead quiet. “And I say I cannot and will not have any associate who’s in conflict about whether his first loyalty is to his own interests or to mine. We’d better call it quits now.”

There was anger in the other’s eyes; rage in them, in his clamped jaws, his hand clenching on the edge of the desk. Tim leaned forward; when he spoke his voice strangled with shock and fury.

“Why, you wouldn’t dare to give me the brush-off now. Mandreth would—why, if I explained to him, he’d withdraw his whole—there’d be a stink all over the Street—”

“Mandreth wouldn’t do one damn thing, Tim.” Crown stared at him patiently. “He’s in this now, for his own interests, not for the love of Tim. Go and try it. The papers will be signed, anyway.”

For one moment there was silence, as their glances held firm to each other.

“You—you bastard,” Tim shouted. “You double-crossing bastard. You bought my station—you’ve signed a year’s contract with me—”

“You’ll get a year’s salary. I never break a contract. I simply know I cannot and will not have an active associate—”

“You never break a contract, don’t you! Why you—you—I sold you my station only because—”

Jasper reached for a cigarette.

“You sold it—you and your stockholders—because I offered you the biggest dough you and they had ever seen. I acted in perfectly good faith.”

Timothy Grosvenor began to laugh. It was ugly. “Good faith. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus. Good faith.”

Jasper Crown’s face did not change.

“And after acting in good faith,” he said deliberately, “I began very slowly to discover what you’ve been doing since”—he picked up the file of letters, riffled through them patiently, competently—“since about the first of the year. Today for the first time I checked back on my hunch. I see I was dead right. So I protect myself at once.”

For long seconds there was bleak and dying silence between them. Then Timothy Grosvenor turned and left the room. Behind the softly, carefully closed door, Jasper shrugged. It was unpleasant. But only the network mattered. In war, only the result mattered. This was a war. A war with the companies that owned the field, a war with the ones in power.

He lit the cigarette. There was something deeply, primitively good about spotting an enemy and having the guts to kill him.

It was always pleasant to return to the office from a vacation, Vera Marriner was thinking, but today, her first day back after a month’s holiday, wasn’t running true to the usual lazy, talkative pattern.

Since twelve, when she had got in, she had been shoving aside everything but the new problem Ann had handed her during the morning. She didn’t suppose there was this much rush about it, but she wanted to get it under way before she got snowed under by the daily routine.

In a few moments now Larry Meany would be here, at her office. He was lunching uptown; he phoned to suggest coming there instead of asking her down to 120 Wall Street. He sounded very pleasant.

She liked his face, when she saw him. He was young and blond, not yet thirty, and his topcoat was slightly shabby. She liked the sure way he shook hands, smiled. She liked the direct, frank look of surprised appraisal he gave the entire office, as though its size and obvious rank impressed him.

“I’ve never done an affidavit,” Vee began after a moment. “Mrs. Willis said you’d ask me a lot of personal questions.”

“Yes. They’re routine. Confidential too, except for the State Department. Nothing worse than your income-tax statement.”

He started with the Vederles, the name, the age, the birthplace of each. Vera kept consulting Vederle’s letter to Ann. It was all there. Meany made rapid notes as she answered his questions, and she saw his pencil pause uncertainly for a moment when she told him that Christa Vederle was not born in Austria but in Budapest.

“In 1903, Budapest was Austria-Hungary.”

“Why, does that mean anything?” she asked.

“No.” The slight hesitation of pencil and voice vanished. “Oh, no. She goes under the same quota as her husband. Now let’s get on to you.”

He jotted down his rapid notes on the vital statistics she gave him.

“That’s that,” he said. “Now—your income?”

“The bigger it is, the better for the Vederles?”

“Sure.”

“Twenty thousand,” Vera said.

“That ought to satisfy the Visa Department, all right,” he said to his notebook. “That’s salary and dividends and all income?”

“No. Just my salary here.”

His busy pencil stopped. He smiled.

“Career women are wonderful,” he offered pleasantly. But it touched off an anger spot in her. “Career woman” was such a stupid, obvious badge, thrust upon any woman who worked for a living—and did well at it. Not the countless women and girls who slaved eight hours a day for twenty to thirty dollars a week—they were simply people who had to work. But let one of them do well in that same eight hours—

“I don’t work because I’m mad about a Career,” she said quietly. “But since I don’t take alimony, I have to support myself.” The moment she said it, she was surprised that she had needed to refute him. He looked up quickly.

“Rebuke,” he said, “if you think I need it. I didn’t mean to write an editorial about career women. I admire them—or people like you, anyway.”

“Sure. Skip it. I’m sorry if I sounded—anything.”

The unexpected small clash bothered him. He sat silent, thinking, then gave up his search for the right thing to say.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “what with your salary and the Swiss francs, there won’t be any trouble on
this
case.”

“Good. That’s what Mrs. Willis said.”

“I’ll draw up the affidavits. You sign them before a notary. Then you send the original to Vienna. Dr. Vederle will take it to our Consul there.”

“Is that all?” The simplicity of it again seemed incredible.

“Not quite. Will
you
make some notes now?”

Vera stretched out her hand to the side of the table. A concealed buzzer sounded softly, and instantly a lanky, leggy girl came in with a notebook opened and held by a rubber band.

“You must have met by now. Miss Benson, Mr. Meany,” Vera introduced. They both nodded, with the overbriskness of embarrassment. “Benny, take down some instructions from Mr. Meany, will you?”

Larry Meany dictated directly to the secretary.

“Miss Marriner must get a letter from her bank, saying she’s had an account there for so many years, that it’s sizable, that they think highly of her financial responsibility.”

“Yes.”

“Then you have to dig out income-tax vouchers. All of them paid during 1937.”

“Just Federal?” Vera asked.

“Federal and state. There’ll be seven altogether—that is if you paid in installments.” Miss Benson nodded. “Four Federal and three state. Then you paste those upon a big sheet and get two sets of photostats made. Got that?”

Miss Benson nodded again.

“Then you send one photostat of the seven checks, the letter from the bank, the affidavit original—send all that to Dr. Vederle.”

“Oh, thanks; that seems simple, even yet,” Vera said. She smiled at him confidently, and the secretary left the room.

“Just a couple of things more,” Meany said. “How long have you been here?”

“Since 1930—that’s eight years.”

“I’ll have to be rather specific about your exact position here. Can you tell me something about what your work is?”

In her years at Ralsey’s, Vera Marriner had developed as the store had grown. She was still responsible for the accessory departments, though each one had its own head buyer now, and she served more as head stylist or merchandise manager for the staff of buyers in the group. She planned special “promotions” of a new color or fabric or style, and often set trends by following some instinctive sense of what new fashion would appeal to most women. She was also charged with management duties as well; many matters of store policy on labor relations had become a special domain for her, because Mr. Ralsey felt that the employees liked and trusted her.

Meany’s question was not easy to answer, but she did it as rapidly and simply as she could. This time he listened to her without showing any reaction to what she said.

“Right, I think I get it,” he remarked when she ended. “And you’d be willing to support the Vederle family for three years. I mean, you’d be willing to sign an affidavit that you would? I’m sure it will be a nominal pledge—”

“That’s what Mrs. Willis kept pointing out,” Vera said, her voice tinged with heat. “Nominal? I’d really be
glad
to. People who
could
shut up and stay there—I think they must be terrific people—”

She broke off suddenly.

“I didn’t mean to make a speech,” she added, and looked at him, as if asking him not to smile at her naïve ardor. He wasn’t smiling. He was looking at her as if she and the office and the income and the things she had just said simply did not belong together.

“You’re swell,” he said, and rose to go. “I’ll get this stuff ready for you, as soon as possible. They’re always worried on the other side, no matter how you hurry over here.”

He was gone, and Vera walked to one of the windows looking over New York to the south. The sun was beginning to go down and the long, slanting light shone behind and between all the reaching, thrusting buildings. To the right, the Hudson gleamed its way to the Battery and the open sea beyond. Soon the four Vederles would be on a liner coming toward this city, this lovely, silly, mixed-up city, with its thousand devious moods and values.

She felt like the city itself for a moment. She too had a thousand shifting moods and values, overlaid, intermeshed. But now one mood stood apart from all the others, clear and independent and unshakable. There was something good about coming to the side of a human being who was fighting evil—coming freely and voluntarily and gladly to his side and helping him to fight. It sent a warm, alive surge of happiness through you. It oriented you better to the world you lived in and would have to, before the next decade was done, fight for. Yes, there was something good in all this, something deeply and primitively good in recognizing an ally and helping him.

Four days later, at breakfast, Vee read the morning papers with their load of nervous, crisis-laden news. Her eyes fell on a different kind of headline, and at once they lit with an odd, personal gratification.

That very day, she read, on the twenty-fourth of March, less than a fortnight after
Anschluss
, invitations were going forth
from
President Roosevelt himself to twenty South American republics and nine European countries. The President was asking if each “would be willing to co-operate in setting up a special committee for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Austria and presumably from Germany of political refugees.”

As she read, her heart swelled with a nameless relief and pride. This was the kind of thing free men could do. This was good, generous, human stuff. It was especially fine that the United States should be originating it.

A few weeks ago, this newspaper story would have been impersonal, distant. Now it touched her as personally as a good letter from a friend. It was valiant news, it made her happy.

The Vederles wouldn’t benefit by this conference—their need would be over before the meeting began. But there must be hundreds of thousands of other Vederle families who would read or hear that America was moving to help them. And those who read or heard the news would feel the pulse of renewed hope beat hard in their veins.

Listen, hopeful ones. Do you know the laws, do you know the quota laws, the visa laws? Do you know the quota-control officials who cannot, who may not, let the besieged Consulate give you the quick document that may save your life? For under the quota there is not room for people of your nationality in the three million square miles of the United States. Not now, perhaps in a few months, but now the quota is full, the quota is full.

Did you know about the quota laws, you Austrian suicides who killed yourselves in those first days and weeks after
Anschluss
? There were eight hundred of you every day, day after day, killed by your own hope-abandoned hands. The British journalists told us, the American journalists told us; Gedye of the
Times
and Shirer and Fodor, Mowrer, John Elliott, they told us how eight hundred of you each day and terror-crowded night killed yourselves rather than face a brutal tomorrow.

But perhaps the pulse of renewed hope beats hard in you fleeing ones, your faces turned toward Switzerland as the nearest place of respite, you who travel by foot, by car, by plane, by train? You there, you, traveling on skis through the forbidding and beautiful mountain passes of the Alps—you, wading the shallow reaches of the Upper Rhine—you crowding like hungry, tired beasts into the impromptu shelters at Saint Gall and Diepldsau—does it comfort you to know that in far-off Washington President Roosevelt has today moved to set up a great international committee to help you?