Trevayne (8 page)

As Ambassador William Hill droned on, summarizing his conclusions point by point, Andrew wondered if the old man really did understand. It was all so long ago; yet yesterday. There had been only one priority, one objective. To make a great deal of money; massive amounts that once and for all would eliminate the remotest possibility of ever having to experience what he witnessed his father living through in that Boston courtroom. It wasn’t so much a sense of outrage—although the outrage was there—as it was a feeling of waste; the sheer waste of resources—financial, physical, mental: that was the fundamental crime, the essential evil.

He saw his father’s productivity thwarted, warped, and finally stopped by the inconvenience of sudden poverty. Fantasy became the reality; vindication an obsession. At last the imagination lost all control, and a once proud man—moderately proud, moderately successful—was turned into a shell. Hollow, self-pitying, living through each day propelled by hatreds.

A familiar, loving human being had been transformed into a grotesque stranger because he hadn’t the price of survival. In March of 1952 the final gavel was sounded in a Boston courtroom and Andrew Trevayne’s father was informed that he was no longer permitted to function in the community of his peers.

The courts of the land had upheld the manipulators. The
best-efforts, endeavors, whereases
, and
therebys
buried forever the work of an adult lifetime.

The father was rendered impotent, a bewildered eunuch appealing in strained, falsely masculine roars to the unappealable.

And the son was no longer interested in the practice of law.

As with most histories of material success, the factor of coincidence, of timing, played the predominant role. But whenever Andrew Trevayne gave that simple explanation, few believed it. They preferred to look for deeper, more manipulative reasons.

Or in his case an emotional motive, based on revulsion, that lucked in.

Nonsense.

The timing was supplied by the brother of the girl who became his wife. Phyllis Pace’s older brother.

Douglas Pace was a brilliant, introverted electronics engineer who worked for Pratt and Whitney in Hartford; a painfully shy man happiest in the isolation of his laboratory, but also a man who knew when he was right and others were wrong. The others in his case were the Pratt and Whitney executives who firmly refused to allocate funds for the development of close-tolerance spheroid discs. Douglas Pace was convinced that the spheroid disc was the single most vital component of the new high-altitude propulsion techniques. He was ahead of his time—but only by about thirty-one months.

Their first “factory” consisted of a small section of an unused warehouse in Meriden; their first machine a third-hand Bullard purchased from a tool-and-die company liquidating its assets; their first jobs odd-lot assignments of simple jet-engine discs for the Pentagon’s general contractors, including Pratt and Whitney.

Because their overhead was minuscule and their work sophisticated, they took on a growing number of military subcontracts, until second and third Bullards were installed and the entire warehouse rented. Two years later the airlines made an industry decision: the way of the jet aircraft was the way of the commercial future. Schedules were projected calling for operational passenger carriers by the late fifties, and suddenly all the knowledge acquired in the development of the military jet had to be adapted to civilian needs.

And Douglas Pace’s advanced work in spheroid discs was compatible with this new approach; compatible and far ahead of the large corporate manufacturers.

Their expansion was rapid and paid for up front, their backlog of orders so extensive they could have kept ten plants working three shifts for five years.

And Andrew discovered several things about himself. He had been told he was a major salesman, but it didn’t take a high degree of salesmanship to corner markets in
which the product was so sought after. Instead, other gifts came into play. The first, perhaps, was the soft-science of administration. He wasn’t just good; he was superb, and he knew it. He could spot talent and place it under contract—at some other company’s loss—in a matter of hours. Gifted men believed him, wanted to believe him, and he was quick to establish the weaknesses of their current situations; to hammer at them and offer viable alternatives. Creative and executive personnel found climates in which they could function, incentives which brought out their best work under his aegis. He could talk to union leadership, too. Talk in ways it readily understood. And no labor contract was ever signed without the precedent he’d fought for in the company’s first expansion in New Haven—the productivity clause that locked in wages with the end result of assembly-line statistics. The wage scales were generous, outstripping competition, but never isolated from the end results. He was called “progressive,” but he realized that the term was simplistic, misleading. He negotiated on the theory of enlightened self-interest; and he was totally convincing. As the months and years went by, he had a track record to point to; it was irrefutable.

The most surprising asset Andrew found within himself was completely unexpected, even inexplicable. He had the ability to retain the most complex dealings without reference to contracts or notes. He had wondered briefly if he possessed a form of total recall, but Phyllis shot down that conceit by pointing out that he rarely remembered a birthday. Her explanation was, he felt, nearer the truth. She said he never entered any negotiation without absolute commitment, exhaustive analysis. She gently implied that this pattern might be traced to his observation of his father’s experience.

It all would have been enough—the airlines, the expansion, the production network that began to extend throughout the Atlantic seaboard. On balance, it should have appeared that they had gone as far as they could hope for; but, suddenly again, the end was nowhere in sight.

For on the night of October 4, 1957, an announcement was made that startled mankind.

Moscow had launched Sputnik I.

The excitement started all over again. National and industrial priorities were about to be altered drastically. The United States of America was relegated to second status, and the pride of the earth’s most inventive constituency was wounded, its people perplexed. Restoration to primacy was demanded, the cost inconsequential.

On the evening of the Sputnik news, Douglas Pace had driven out to Andy’s home in East Haven, and Phyllis kept the coffee going until four o’clock in the morning. A decision was reached that ensured the Pace-Trevayne Company’s emergence as the Space Administration’s largest independent contractor of spheroid discs capable of sustaining rocket thrusts of ultimately six hundred thousand pounds. The decision was to concentrate on space. They would maintain a bread-and-butter margin with the airlines, but retool with space objectives, anticipating the problems to merge with the larger aircraft surely to be demanded in the late sixties.

The gamble was enormous, but the combined talents of Pace and Trevayne were ready.

“We reach a remarkable period in this … most remarkable document, Mr. Trevayne. It leads directly into the area of our concerns—the President’s and mine. It is, of course, related to March of nineteen-fifty-two.”

Oh, Christ, Phyllis. They’ve found it! The “game,” you called it. The game that you despised because you said it made
me
“dirty.” It began with that filthy little bastard who dressed like a faggot tailor. It began with Allen.…

“Your company made an audacious move,” continued Big Billy Hill. “Without guarantees, you restructured seventy percent of your factories—nearly all of your laboratories—to accommodate an uncertain market. Uncertain in the sense of its realistic demand.”

“We never doubted the market; we only underestimated the demand.”

“Obviously. And you proved correct. While everyone else was still on the drawing board, you were ready for production.”

“With respect, Mr. Ambassador, it wasn’t that simple. There was a two-year period when the national commitment
was more rhetorical than financial. Another six months, and our resources would have been exhausted. We sweated.”

“You needed the NASA contracts,” said the President. “Without them, you were on dangerous ground; you were in too far to reconvert.”

“That’s true. We counted on our preparation schedules, our timing. No one could compete with us; we banked on that.”

“But the extent of your conversions was known within the industry, wasn’t it?” asked Hill.

“Unavoidable.”

“And the risks?” Hill again.

“To a degree. We were a privately owned company; we didn’t broadcast our financial statement.”

“But it could be assumed.” Hill was centering in.

“It could.”

Hill removed a single sheet of paper from the top of the file, turning its face toward Andrew. “Do you recall this letter? It was written to the Secretary of Defense, with copies to the Senate Appropriations and House Armed Services committees. Dated April 14, 1959.”

“Yes. I was angry.”

“In it you stated categorically that Pace-Trevayne was wholly owned and in no way associated with any other company or companies.”

“That’s right.”

“When questioned privately, you said you’d been approached by outside interests who implied that their assistance might be necessary to obtain the NASA contracts.”

“Yes. I was upset. We were qualified on our own.”

Ambassador Hill leaned back and smiled. “This letter, then, was really a highly strategic device, wasn’t it? You scared hell out of a lot of people. In essence, it assured you of the work.”

“That possibility occurred to me.”

“Yet in spite of your proclaimed independence, during the next several years, when Pace-Trevayne became the acknowledged leader in its field, you actively sought outside associations.…”

Do you remember, Phyl? You and Doug were furious. You didn’t understand
.

“There were advantages to be gained.”

“I’m sure there were, if you had been serious in your intentions.”

“Are you implying that I wasn’t?”

Oh, Lord, I was serious, Phyl! I was concerned. I was young and angry
.

“I arrived at that conclusion, Mr. Trevayne. I’m sure others did also.… You let the word out that you’d be interested in exploratory talks of merger. One by one you held successive conferences with no less than seventeen major defense contractors over a three-year period. A number of these were written up in the newspapers.” Hill flipped through the file and removed a sheaf of clippings. “You certainly had an impressive assortment of suitors.”

“We had a great deal to offer.”

Only “offer,” Phyl. Nothing else; never anything else
.

“You even went so far as to arrive at tentative agreements with several. There were a number of startling fluctuations on the New York Exchange.”

“My accountants will confirm that I was not in the market then.”

“With reason?” asked the President.

“With reason,” answered Trevayne.

“Yet none of the exploratory conferences, none of these tentative agreements, was ever satisfactorily concluded.”

“The obstacles were insurmountable.”

The people were insurmountable. The manipulators
.

“May I suggest, Mr. Trevayne, that you never intended to reach any firm agreements?”

“You may suggest that, Mr. Ambassador.”

“And would it be inaccurate to suggest further that you gained a relatively detailed working knowledge of the financial operations of seventeen major corporations involved in defense spending?”

“Not inaccurate. I’d stress the past tense, however. It was over a decade ago.”

“A short period of time when you’re talking about corporate policy,” said the President. “I imagine that most of the executive personnel remain the same.”

“Probably so.”

William Hill rose from his chair and took several steps to the edge of the mahogany table. He looked down at Trevayne and spoke quietly, good-naturedly. “You were exorcising a few demons, weren’t you?”

Andrew met the old gentleman’s eyes and couldn’t help himself; he smiled slowly, with a marked degree of defeat. “Yes, I was.”

“You were repaying the sort of people who destroyed your father.… March, nineteen fifty-two.”

“It was childish. A hollow kind of revenge; they weren’t responsible.”

Remember, Phyl? You told me: “Be yourself. This isn’t you, Andy! Stop it!”

“Satisfying, however, I would think.” Hill walked around the desk and leaned against the front edge between Trevayne and the President. “You forced a number of powerful men to make concessions, lose time, become defensive; all for a young man barely in his thirties who held a large carrot in front of their faces. I’d say that was very satisfying. What I can’t understand is why you so abruptly stopped. If my information is correct, you were in a position of extreme strength. It’s not inconceivable that you might have emerged as one of the world’s richest men. Certainly possible that you could eventually have ruined a number of those you considered the enemy. Especially in the market.”

“I suppose I could say I got religion.”

“It’s happened before, I’m told,” said the President.

“Then let’s call it that.… It occurred to me—with my wife’s help—that I had involved myself in the same form of waste I found so appalling in … March of nineteen fifty-two. I was on the other side, but the waste was the same.… And that, Mr. President, Mr. Ambassador, is all I care to say about it. I sincerely hope it’s acceptable.”

Trevayne smiled as best he could, for he
was
sincere.

“Entirely.” The President reached for his highball as Hill nodded and returned to his chair. “Our questions have been answered; as the Ambassador said, we were curious, we had to know. Among other things, your state of mind—which, frankly, we never doubted.”

“We assumed it to be healthy.” Hill laughed as he
spoke. “Anyone who leaves his own company to take on a thankless State Department job and then assumes the headaches of a philanthropic foundation is no ruthless Caesar of the financial world.”