Villiers Touch (11 page)

“You'll think of something.”

“What if I don't? What if I can't bring it off?”

“I don't think I have to spell it out, do I? Let's not get tedious.”

Steve Wyatt swallowed. “All right. I've never tried spying before—maybe it'll be amusing.”

“I'm sure it will,” Villiers muttered. “Now, this next is between you and me, and if it goes any further, I'll have your head in a basket, understand that. Heggins Aircraft isn't your main objective. What you're really going to look for is confidential information on Northeast Consolidated Industries. Everything there is—You'll have to get into Claiborne's private confidential files. I particularly need to have anything you can get on Elliot Judd.”

“Jesus. You want a lot.”

“With parsley,” Villiers agreed.

“Do you mean personal items on Judd?”

“Anything. His private holdings, his politics, the state of his health.”

“You think he's not well?”

“Did I say that?”

“It rings a bell,” Wyatt said. “He's been hidden away on that Arizona ranch for almost a year. He's about as accessible as Howard Hughes. I may not come up with much.”

“Howard Claiborne's his broker. He probably knows more about Elliot Judd than Judd's doctor knows. It will be in Claiborne's files.”

“Those files are locked up, damn it.”

“Do you think I'd have gone to all this trouble to nail you down if Claiborne's files were out in the open like merchandise on a dimestore counter?”

“All right—all right. You've made your point.”

“I'm glad you think so,” Villiers muttered. Without stirring in his chair, he closed his eyes and said, “You can go.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

“Through Hackman.”

“How much does he know about this?”

“Best for you to assume he knows absolutely nothing about it. You'll make appointments with me through Hackman. Other than that, you'll tell him nothing. You may get instructions from me through him from time to time. If so, don't argue with him, because he'll only be delivering messages.”

“I understand,” Wyatt said, and got up. Glancing up at him, Villiers saw he had already gained his resilient composure. Wyatt grinned impudently. “So long.” And left the office.

Villiers picked up the file of investigators' reports and folded it shut.

6. Steve Wyatt

Wyatt emerged from the office with a pulse pounding in his throat, walked forward through the corridor, and saw George Hackman in the front reception room. Hackman stood close behind the receptionist's chair, leaning forward to read something on her desk, his left forearm balanced casually across her shoulder, fingers trailing one firm high breast. When Wyatt came in sight, Hackman removed his hand quickly, and the girl gave him a saucy upward look—one lifted eyebrow and a smirking upturn of one lip corner.

Wyatt strode toward the door, but Hackman came around the desk to intercept him. Hackman beamed and put a thick arm across his shoulders to walk him to the door, talking expansively. “Glad you've joined our team, kid.”

“Sure. Welcome aboard, Ishmael.” Wyatt smiled synthetically.

At the door Hackman turned him with hand pressure. “Hold up a minute.”

“I've got to get back to the office before closing time.”

“This'll just take a sec. Stay put.” Hackman went back to the desk and rummaged through a drawer until he found a Xeroxed sheet of paper. He brought it back to the door. “Here. Long as you're joining up, be a good idea for us to get to know each other. My wife and I are throwing a little party tonight, nine o'clock. I ran off this little map to show folks how to get to our place from Thornwood. You know Thornwood?”

“No.”

“You go up the Saw Mill Parkway to—hell, have you got a car?”

“Certainly.”

“Fine, fine. Otherwise I could send somebody to pick you up at the station. Anyway, all you do is drive up the Saw Mill to Hawthorne Circle, keep going on the Saw Mill past the Circle, and it's the first exit. Take a right and go across the railroad tracks, and you're on the main drag, this street here.” He planted a stubby finger on the map. “From there, follow the map. Look, it's all sociable, bring your girl, okay? See you tonight?”

Wyatt's shrewd eyes lifted to Hackman's florid face. “Actually,” he began, but then he hesitated and pursed his lips. “I may be able to come. I'll let you know later.”

Hackman clapped him on the shoulder. “Great, kid—great. You take care, now.” He grinned affably.

Wyatt left without making an answer. He came out of the building into sweltering heat and hurried the two blocks to the baroque building at 42 Wall Street, which housed a number of distinguished brokerage firms and two investment-banking partnerships, of which one was Bierce, Claiborne & Myers, occuping the seventh and eighth floors. Wyatt went into the feudal-hall lobby and crossed the echoing marble, hurrying.

At the eighth floor the elevator doors slid open with a soft, almost soundless scrape. The hallway was wide and carpeted, broken at intervals by wide, double, carved oak doors. He looked at his watch and was surprised that it was only ten till five. He entered the bullpen by the side door, to attract less attention; coming into the big room by way of carbon-paper-filing-and-clerical country, he tightened his lips and hurried on past rows and rows of desks toward his own, near the head of the room.

The huge bullpen was a picture full of restive motion. Squads of long-haired young men bustled in and out. Scores of men at scarred enormous old desks, arranged in neat rows like military ranks, spoke into telephones or dictated to stenographers, keeping the wheels rolling within the thousands of stock positions that Bierce, Claiborne & Myers maintained on its books. Claiborne's empire was an investment bank, a brokerage, and a specialist firm all at once. It held four New York Stock Exchange seats, three American Exchange seats, and made markets in twenty-eight major stocks.

Approaching his desk, Wyatt passed the open door of the War Office, the walls of which were papered with graphs on which were plotted the movements of various stocks, watched by youthful analysts who during Exchange hours stood near telephones which were wired directly to a computer bank in Jersey City.

Progress through the ranks had moved Steve Wyatt up from the seventh floor a year ago; since then his desk position had been switched three times—each time closer to the head of the room. As portfolio manager for the Wakeman Fund, a closed-end mutual fund, he now rated a desk less than twenty feet from the splendid dark-oak door of the executive sanctum, inhabited by the old man himself: Howard Claiborne, descendant of merchant princes, Wall Street patrician, gentleman of glacial elegance honed by ancient habit, representing the quiet wealth of old money, the image of grace and comfort, well-worn elegance, and mellow tone.

Wyatt rolled his desk swivel chair back on its casters to sit down and turned to speak to the blond young man at the next desk.

“Anything come up?”

“Nothing I couldn't handle.” The blond man gave him a brash grin. “I put a few notes on your desk.”

“Thanks for covering for me, Jimmy. It was important.”

“Sure—what was her name?”

Wyatt waved a hand and smiled. “How's the Yankee Croesus? Good mood or bad?”

“Good, today. I took your report on Motors in to him, and he liked it. I heard him grunt four times while he was reading it.”

“Four times?”

“Four times. Indeed. You did a hell of a job.” Jimmy grinned at him.

“Did that seem to surprise him?”

“God, no. The last time anything gave the old man a surprise was when Truman beat Dewey. That's nothing—old man Bierce told me the last time Claiborne smiled was the day they repealed the Volstead Act. But he liked your report, even if he didn't crack a smile, and that's saying something, since it came from a man whose guiding principle is ‘No.'”

Wyatt grinned and nodded, and watched Jimmy get up to walk over to the railing that surrounded the secretary's desk just outside the door of Claiborne's office. Jimmy De Angelo was a slim, blond, northern Italian youth with the fresh open innocence of a Midwestern college sophomore; he was inoffensive and eager to be helpful. Wyatt watched him go over to the railing to speak with the girl at the desk there. She was Howard Claiborne's private secretary, but in the feudal setup of Bierce, Claiborne & Myers even a private secretary didn't rate a room of her own; her status was indicated only by the oak railing that separated her desk from the bullpen. She was a Polish girl—Anne Goralski. A small girl, dark and pretty. Smooth Indian-black hair gracefully surrounded her olive face. Jimmy De Angelo had been dating her casually for a few weeks.

She was smiling up at Jimmy while he talked; but then her eyes slid past Jimmy and came to rest on Wyatt. He let his eyelids droop when he smiled at her. She lifted her eyes to reply to something Jimmy De Angelo said; De Angelo turned, shaking his head, to come back to his desk, and the girl returned her glance to Wyatt and suddenly gave him a blinding smile. It was lovely and brilliant. Her teeth were bright, she looked happy and flirtatious.

De Angelo sat down, glum, and turned his back to make a phone call. Wyatt propped one elbow on his desk and looked past De Angelo's shoulder at the girl. She had gone back to her work. The thought which had edged into his mind in Hackman's office was still there: she was Howard Claiborne's private secretary.

Dimly he heard De Angelo, talking on the phone: “It's quoted forty-five to forty-six bid and asked, CTM…. Well, I know, but Gulfstream Investments sold a big block, you know.” Wyatt leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes closing down to slits, thinking.

Promptly at five o'clock, Howard Claiborne emerged from his cork-lined office and marched into the bullpen rather like a Buckingham Palace guard. Claiborne had nostrils like a horse; he carried his head high. He wore a carnation in his buttonhole and looked as dignified as a penguin.

The old man's appearance always had a disintegrating effect on conversation. The muted bedlam of the bullpen subsided to a low rumble, soft voices speaking into telephones. Claiborne stopped at Anne Goralski's desk to say a few words and then came forward, dropping a remark here and there—each of his words was received as attentively as a ransom note. He had a dignified core of blue ice; he carried around him an aura of melancholy antique solitude, indifference to trivialities—a gentleman of privilege with a shrewd, skilled intellect. He was the heir to one of the great fortunes, but in spite of that, he had, according to the values of his generation, chosen to start out as a page boy and runner for the family bank firm.

He stopped by Steve Wyatt's desk. “You did a satisfactory job on the Motors report.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Claiborne nodded and moved on—the evening ritual. From here he would go directly to the Wall Street heliport, where his private copter would pick him up and whisk him to his estate on Fishers Island.

When the dapper, unbent old figure had disappeared into the corridor, the bullpen erupted. Typewriters were tilted back into their desks, and the steno girls gathered together to leave in a twittering knot. The men shoved papers into briefcases, straightened up their desk tops, and went out by ones and twos. Wyatt sat back, relaxed, his arrogant high-bred face sleepy, watching bemusedly while Jimmy De Angelo made his preparations for leaving, and then, instead of heading for the hall, went to the secretary's railing, where Anne Goralski was repairing her eye shadow with the aid of her compact. De Angelo spoke; the girl shook her head; De Angelo shrugged angrily.

De Angelo came past Wyatt's desk with a downturned mouth and joined the exodus. Wyatt stayed put. The huge arena was almost empty when he left his desk and went toward the girl's little fenced-in enclosure. She was busy liberating a little sweetheart rose from the vase on her desk and pinning it to her dress. When she looked up at him with her warm brown eyes, he said, “I just wanted to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

He smiled at her. “You light up the whole room.”

It was a direct attack, but it didn't put her off; it amused her. She had put the telephone receiver on her shoulder, head tilted against it to free her hands, and now she shushed him with a gesture and spoke softly into the phone. “Yes, Mr. Bierce.” She hung up and got out of her chair. She went through the little gate and said, “I'll be back im
me
diately—I've got to hear the rest of this, it must be good.” Wrinkling her nose at him, she disappeared into the executive offices.

Glancing impatiently across the empty bullpen, Wyatt lit a cigarette and waited.

She was true to her word. Within less than sixty seconds she reappeared. She had good breasts and a provocatively outflaring rump; she was animated and vibrant—and, he thought, ready to be aroused by gentle, easy masculinity.

She settled her nice round little ass in the chair, not taking her eyes off him. “Now, then, sir.”

“Don't call me sir,” he told her. “‘My prince,' if you like.”

She wet her lips with the sharp pink tip of her tongue and said, “You were saying, my prince?”

“To begin with, I don't mean to tread on anyone's toes.”

“Whose, for instance? Mine?”

“De Angelo's.”

She only grinned at him. “Tell me, do you always talk with your teeth together?”

“That's breeding.” He glanced at the door and said, “A stock-broker with a reputation as the wildest party thrower in West-chester County has invited me to a bash at his suburban bungalow tonight, only I have a terrible problem.”

“And?”

“The invitation is for two,” he said, and turned his hands over. “You see how it is. Mr. Hackman was absolutely insistent that I bring with me the most beautiful young lady of my acquaintance. Of course, you are the most beautiful young lady of my acquaintance, and in order to meet the requirement, I would have to bring you. However, since we've hardly exchanged fifty words in three months, I don't hold out much hope of meeting the requirement. That's my problem.”