Villiers Touch (28 page)

“They didn't have the income tax then.”

“Don't be ridiculous. What do you think I brought you up to do? Waste your life working for someone else on a salary?”

“And,” he said dryly, “it is very expensive to be rich, is it not?”

“Money,” she said, “does not matter as long as one has it. But you've a long way to go before you reach that point.”

“Your trouble, mater, is you were born chewing on a silver spoon, thinking that money, because it had always been there, always would be there. Then suddenly it disappeared, and my father killed himself, and you decided to forge me into a weapon of revenge and retaliation against the world for the injustices the world had visited upon you. Now, of course, you're getting anxious because you want to see me succeed before you die. Well, you were a good teacher, and I've been a good willing student, and it won't be long at all before we'll have our fortune back. But I wish you wouldn't keep trying to marry me off to bitches like Beth Van Alstyne—I've collected enough stud fees in my time and from now on I'd rather do it my own way.”

She didn't answer right away. He lit a cigarette and inhaled too deeply.

Finally she smiled at him. “Very well. But let me remind you, your background and your social position impose certain great obligations on you—one of them being the choice of a wife. You can't afford to pick up with just any sexy guttersnipe. If you want to have flings with some hatcheck girl, then by all means have your fling—take a mistress, be discreet, and let it run its course. But that kind of marriage is out. You understand? Your position rules it out. You'll have to start thinking about marriage, Steve, and you'll have to start thinking about it in terms of girls like Beth, whether you like her or not.”

He murmured, “You're getting anxious to see your grandkids before you croak, aren't you?”

“Don't be insulting. Are you eager to have me die?”

“Sometimes I am,” he said, and grinned at her.

She laughed with easy warmth. When he came to stand beside her chair, she reached for his hand and held it gently. “In all my years,” she said, “you are the only man who's ever really loved me. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, when I was still young enough to have been capable of it, to have had an incestuous affair with you.”

“That's something we'll never find out, isn't it?” He bent to peck her cheek. “I've got to run.”

“So early? I thought you'd spend the night in your old room.”

“Can't this time. I've got things on the fire.”

“Money things, I should hope.”

“Naturally.”

He left shortly thereafter, buoyed to high spirits as he always was by these times at home; he drove the little car at high speed along the night-empty parkways and reached downtown Manhattan before three o'clock. The narrow streets held a clinging residue of heat, clammy and a little frightening; the familiar block was as empty of life as it might have been after a nuclear blast. He parked directly in front of the elegant entrance and banged on the glass door with his ring to alert the watchman, who admitted him to the lobby and watched him sign the night book. Wyatt would have preferred to come and go undetected, but there was no way to circumlocute the building alarm system; later, if necessary, he would manufacture an excuse for his nocturnal visit. He took the service elevator up, because the main block of lifts didn't run at night, and carried his thin briefcase into Howard Claiborne's walnut-paneled private office. He took ten minutes to familiarize himself by the light of his pencil flashlight with the arrangement of files inside the row of brown filing cabinets that stood to attention in the alcove off the main office. Feeling like a spy in a movie, he began to go through the folders one by one, occasionally selecting a document and taking it into the windowless Xerox room to make a copy. It was slower than making flash photographs, but he didn't know anyone with a darkroom, and he could hardly send this sort of material to a commercial photo developer. No one would miss the few sheets of Xerox paper from the supply cabinet.

While he waited over the duplicating machine he was thinking, with petulance, that it served the old man right. As a fund manager, Wyatt handled upwards of a hundred million dollars in his portfolio; Bierce, Claiborne & Myers received a percentage of the value of the fund's assets as annual payment for its “management services”—at least $750,000 a year—yet Wyatt, who did the work, was salaried at a miserable $28,000. Claiborne deserved to be robbed.

The Wakeman mutual fund had tremendous impact on the market, because of its purchasing power—and its dumping power. Vast manipulative authority was vested in its managers' hands; if Wyatt selected a stock with a limited number of outstanding shares, the mere fact that he was buying it would make its price go up. Then it was easy to unload at a good profit. It didn't matter that the result could be catastrophic. Once, he had arrived at the opening with 125,000 shares of a small stock to sell through dummies. The dump had knocked the price down to the cellar—and Wyatt had sold the same stock short. He had cleared sixty thousand on that one. Thinking of it now, he felt pleased; Mason Villiers would have applauded.

He tidied the Xerox room and switched off the light; returned to Claiborne's office and exchanged the Xeroxes for half a dozen documents from his briefcase—documents meticulously prepared by someone working for Villiers. Some of them went into the files—substitute fact sheets on Heggins and NCI and other companies, the kind of sheets a broker would take out of their loose-leaf binders to examine when he made his weekly account evaluations. Others went into the stack of newly arrived material in the In box on Anne's desk; Claiborne would have it in front of him an hour after he came in to work Monday morning.

Wyatt locked up with his duplicate keys, went downstairs, signed out, and said good night to the watchman. The entire operation had taken less than an hour. He drove to his apartment, went into the lobby past the drowsing doorman, and punched the elevator button.

Bone-tired, he let himself in—and pulled up short: the lights were on. He frowned as he closed the door, and then Anne Goralski appeared at the bedroom door in a wisp of a translucent nightie and a blinding smile.

“Jesus Christ,” he snapped, “what the hell is this?”

Her face changed slowly; she said, “What's the matter?” Her tone was small.

“How did you get in here?”

“Why—the doorman let me in; he knows me. Steve—darling—whatever's wrong?”

He shook his head. “I just don't like being taken by surprise like that.”

She said in a tiny apologetic voice, “I love you, Steve.”

“I know—I know you do. But maybe I can't take your love if I have to take this with it.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Do you know what time it is? Jesus, do you want to swallow me up? Is this your idea of love? Waiting up the whole damned night for me as if you had a set of chains for me with a lock and key?”

She looked miserable. “I thought you'd be pleased,” she said vaguely. She broke into tears. “You don't love me. You hate me.”

He crossed the room to her and held her shoulders; he said softly, “Darling, what have I got but you? What the hell's the matter with you? I've told you how I feel about you—isn't that enough?”

“No,” she said, sniffling, burying her face against the front of his shirt. “Telling me isn't enough, darling.”

He stepped back, dropping his hands, turning cool. “Then what do I have to do? You want to tie a bell on me? You want to keep me in reach twenty-four hours a day?”

She wiped her eyes with her hands and looked up, straightening, defiance seeping into her fibers; she said, “I'm sorry I went all to pieces. I guess I'm tired. But I've never seen you snappish like this—do you get like this whenever you go to see your mother? Is this the effect she has on you?”

He stared at her in slack-jawed amazement. “What the devil does my
mother
have to do with anything?”

“I don't know. But every time I mention her, you bristle.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“Then why haven't you taken me to meet her?”

The thought of such a meeting made him smile. “My dear, she'd chew you to ribbons, believe me. I'm doing you a favor by keeping you apart.”

“Why do you assume she'd hate me? Because she hates all your women? Is she jealous of them? Do you think it's an accident that by adding just one letter you can change ‘mother' to ‘smother'? I'm beginning to get very strange feelings about your—”

“That's enough,” he snapped. “That's God damned well enough. You're one hundred percent off base—let's just keep my mother out of it from now on, all right? There are things beyond your understanding, Anne dear. I have a strong feeling of loyality to my family—we Wyatts are tribal creatures in a way you could never comprehend. It has nothing to do with the cheap Freudian cliches you seem to have bouncing around in your head. My mother doesn't dominate me. I am not a concealed, mother-tyrannized homosexual. I'm not a hagridden victim of momism. Can't you trust me when I tell you it's better that you don't meet my mother for a while? She's a sixty-seven-year-old sachem, she's vicious and bawdy and hard to take, and if I'm to avoid having the two of you start scratching each other's eyes out, I'll have to pave the way with her gradually, get her used to the idea—after all, it's been at least thirty years since she last spoke to a single person, outside of shopkeepers and servants, who didn't belong to a family that was descended from Newport society or an ambassador to the Court of St. James. She's old and she's stubborn, and it's going to take me time to bring her around. Darling, I've told you all this before—you just don't seem to—”

“I'm sorry, Steve,” she said. “I don't believe you.”

He blurted, “Why not?” and immediately realized that what he should have said was,
I don't give a damn whether you believe me or not
. He tried to cover the lapse by sweeping her into the circle of his arms and murmuring, “Oh, look here, darling, let's not quarrel. I love you, you know—with all my heart.” He caressed her slowly, gently, beginning to smile at her.

She said faintly, “I wish I could understand all this. I'm afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I just don't want to be hurt.”

“I could never hurt you,” he breathed, and tipped her face up with his finger to kiss her mouth. Within his palm, through the fabric of the nightie, her nipple hardened.

“Oh, Steve darling,” she said, with a long breath escaping; she began to smile with childlike eagerness. “I'm so sorry—forgive me?”

He laughed in his throat and carried her to the bed. Happy with the cruelty of planting doubts in her mind, he made love to her languorously and quietly.

Afterward he lay back, drowsy, caressing her absently.

She said, “Talk to me, darling.”

After a pause he said, “About what?”

21. Russell Hastings

By the time Russ Hastings arrived at the airport Saturday morning, he was in a state of depressed anxiety that bordered on paranoid rage. In the past twelve hours the world had smitten him from every direction with petty, maddening annoyances. His shoelace had broken; he had tripped on it and practically brained himself tumbling into the elevator, the floor of which was four inches below where it should have been. After he had plunged to the back and narrowly regained his balance, the bored elevator operator had said, “Watch ya step, buddy,” and Hastings had wanted to strangle him. Later, thinking about it, he had burst out laughing on a crowded street corner, where passing pedestrians gave him startled glances and edged away from him.

Too restless to go straight home from Carol McCloud's last night, he had gone walking; somehow he had found himself, near midnight, on upper Broadway on the fringes of Harlem, buying an early edition of the
Times
and watching a workman on a ladder fix new letters on a movie marquee. On the dark side streets around him took place the transactions of night commerce: burglaries, furtive exchanges of money and narcotics. The lonely outcries in the hot night might have been those of people being bitten by rats in the sullen wretched tenements. He walked slowly down the gray sidewalks, avoiding refuse and shuffling bums; he passed a clutch of fags on parade, cruising for a mark, and a Spanish streetwalker wearing a loose, flowing cotton dress—he tried to ascertain her figure, but the dress made it hard to tell; she gave him a smile, and he went on, an innocent victim among innocent victims. A police van crossed Broadway, moving slowly, collecting the corpses of the ones who died in the tropical night. He felt foolish, disturbed, cowardly—like a pale dude among cowboys. If only he had seen action in the Army, he thought—it had been peacetime during his two years' service. If only he had seen the worst.
I am still naïve
. He knew these hard black faces under the Harlem street lights—violent ones, dope peddlers, muggers, thieves—but in his guts they were only dull black faces,
Yassuh boss
Nigras—shif'less and got rhythm, but violent? Impossible: he had never himself seen that kind of violence, and therefore he did not believe in it.

That had been last night. This morning he had gone into a coffee shop for breakfast, and a waiter had spilled coffee on his cuff. There was hardly time to rush back and change into an old tweed suit which he hadn't packed because it was too warm. Then, breakfastless, he had stood on a corner in ten minutes' growing panic before a taxi appeared.

Now there was the long hassle at the check-in counter—it seemed the airline had sold the same seat to another passenger as well, as airlines were wont to do. He had to pull rank by showing his government I.D. before they would let him on the plane. He knew full well the airlines had as much feeling toward their passengers as an armed robber had toward his victims, but it still enraged him.
The eternal innocent
. He made the half-mile walk down the echoing corridor, changing his carry-on suitcase from hand to hand every few hundred yards, going past the sign
No Smoking Beyond This Point
thinking of Jennys with struts and doped fabric—nostalgic for an era he hadn't even known. He reached the gate in time to hear the obligatory public-address announcement that the flight would be delayed twenty minutes “due to frammissoshemlorbesan,” and he glared at the check-in man while someone stepped on his foot and left a scuffed dent on his shoe. The high, shrill whine of a plane moved past outside, and the peculiar stench of jet-engine exhaust stung his nostrils.