Villiers Touch (6 page)

“You make it sound simple.”

“Do I? That's the disadvantaged child in me. I make profound truths sound like comic-book clichés. Now, if I had your breeding, I could make even the most nonsensical small talk sound distinguished—think what I could do with the Great Truths! Christ, I'd hang out a shingle and put a couch in my office and charge two hundred dollars an hour!”

The intercom buzzed. Diane flicked a switch, and the secretary's voice came through: “I'm going out to lunch now, Mrs. Hastings. Shall I switch incoming calls to your phone?”

“Yes, thank you, Maude.”

The intercom clicked; Cynthia said immediately, “You ought to tell her to quit calling you Mrs. Hastings.”

“Oh, I'm still Mrs. Hastings to the trade—it would be too confusing to change my name back now.”

Cynthia stopped patrolling; she stopped with her shoulder blades against the wall, folded her arms, and said, “Come off it, dahling. That's not the real reason.”

“If you're suggesting I'm still—”

“In love with Russ? No; even I am not that cornball. What I'm suggesting is that you give yourself a kind of untouchable immunity as long as you keep that ‘Mrs.' in front of your name. And I don't think it's healthy.”

“Don't be ridiculous. I simply don't want to resume my maiden name, because I've always been too proud to trade on my father's name. Really, Cynthia, sometimes I wish you'd quit jumping to conclusions.”

“Are you sure that's what I'm doing? Look, if what you say is true, why not keep the ‘Hastings' but change the ‘Mrs.' to ‘Miss'?”

“Because it just isn't done.”

“Oh! A thousand pardons, memsahib!” Cynthia bowed elaborately from the waist. “You must forgive my gauche ignorance. I have lousy table manners too.”

“The result of your disadvantaged childhood, no doubt.”

Cynthia grinned. “Okay. Touché. But if you can be defensive about sex, I can be defensive about my po'-white-trash background. Let's be fair about it.”

Diane made a face and reached for the stack of correspondence in her In tray, indicating that so far as she was concerned, the conversation was ended. But Cynthia said stubbornly, “Have you met Emiliano Upton?”

“No. Why?”

“Know who he is?”

“He paints, doesn't he?”

“You could call it that. He used to paint enormous canvases of, ah, human sexual organs—in exquisitely enlarged detail. A real howl, but it didn't find much of a market outside of a few rich voyeurs. Your ordinary dimestore-art buyer would hardly hang one on his living-room wall. I persuaded him to try something a bit more genteel, and I'm going down next week to see the results. He's a big sumbitch, really hung—I think maybe I'll fix you up with him for openers.” Cynthia grinned furiously.

“When I want a matchmaker,” Diane snapped, “I'll let you—”

The phone rang, cutting her off. She punched the blinking button and lifted the receiver. “Mrs. Hastings.”

A man's voice laughed. “Answering your own phone now? Have they knocked you down that far?”

She recognized his voice immediately but refused to give him the satisfaction of it; she said coolly, “Who is this?”

“I was hoping you'd know my voice,” he said. She gave him no encouragement. After a moment he said, “It's Mace Villiers. Remember?”

“Yes, I do.” Giving away nothing, she was trying to make up her mind whether to be pleased or angry.

“I left a message I'd call. Didn't you get it?”

“It must have slipped my mind,” she lied.

He said, “I thought we might have dinner.”

“Tonight?”

“Of course.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I have a date.” She saw Cynthia's ferocious frown and headshake.

“Break it,” Mason Villiers said. •

“Why should I?”

“Because I want to see you. It's a business matter as well.”

She thought,
As well as what?
But what she said was, “I'm sorry. I can't.” She realized she was smiling; she composed her face and added, “I'm afraid the rest of the week is blocked in quite solidly.”

“Oh, come on. Let's make it tomorrow night. Do I have to horse-trade with you? I'm altogether serious, and it's an important matter.”

“What business could you possibly have to discuss with me? We're hardly in the same line.” She ignored Cynthia's impatient scowl.

“I don't do business over the phone,” he said. Then his voice turned low and ultramasculine: “I'll pick you up tomorrow at seven, your apartment.”

“Do you always press so hard?”

“My luck? I always push that. You walked away from me once.”

“And you'd like to have me believe that never happened to you before, and you can't stand it.”

He laughed. “Exactly. I'll see you at seven tomorrow.” He hung up.

She put the receiver slowly in its cradle.

Cynthia said immediately, “Villiers?” And when there was no reply, she assumed she had guessed correctly; she said, “You're scared of him. Are you going to meet him?”

“Mind your own business.”

Cynthia grinned happily. “You are? Why, that's even better than Emiliano Upton. Hell, Mace Villiers is the world's champion fornicator. If he can't—”

“We're going to discuss a business deal,” Diane said.

“Horse shit. Admit it, why don't you? You're just as attracted to him as any other woman with all her faculties would be, but you're afraid of him because he's a man you can't control. But don't you see that's why he's just what you need? Mace Villiers is strong enough to—”

“Will you please just shut up?” Diane demanded.

“Honey, I only want to see you regain your self-assurance as a woman.” Cynthia gave an emphatic nod of her head and batted out of the room.

Diane said aloud, to her disappearing back, “May the gods save us from meddling busybodies.” But she was smiling.

4. Russell Hastings

After a dull lunch with two junior SEC attorneys Russ Hastings walked the steaming sidewalks to Chatham Square to find a taxi bound uptown through the Bowery. He waved down a vacant cab and got in.

“Well?” the driver growled. “Where ya wanna go?”

He had to look it up in his notebook. “Forty-fourth and Sixth.”

“Unh.” The traffic light was green, but the driver was busy writing the address down on his clipboard. “You got the time, mister?”

“One-thirty.”

“Thanks. I got to put it down on my ride sheet here, see, and I busted my watch last night.” The dashboard of the taxi was festooned with plastic madonnas, American flags, religious medallions. The driver finished scribbling and looked up; the light had just turned red against him. He put the shift in neutral and revved the snarling engine, startling a passing pedestrian. When the light changed, they started off with a neck-snapping jerk and careened across the intersection. Hastings sat back and tried to ignore the taxi's violent progress through the traffic; watching, from the perspective of the back seat, always made him tense with alarm.

It was a big cab, a Checker, the high old body style with jump seats. A warped sliding plexiglass window separated the back from the front seat; it was open, against the heat.

The driver was a compulsive talker: “You one of them broker guys? My daughter works for one of them guys—Howard Claiborne, maybe you heard of him. Now an' then I get tips on the stock market, y'understand what I'm saying?”

Hastings only grunted to indicate he was listening. The driver was a hulking big man with a thick brutal chin and a polished bald head; from the rear quarter he looked like a thug.

An errant car crossed the taxi's bows, and the driver roared in a voice like a bassoon, out the window: “Whassamatta with you, ya dumb asshole—tryin' to getcha stupid fuckin' balls creamed?” The driver shook his head and said in exasperation to Hastings, “Mutterfuckinsonsuhbitches think they own the road or somep'n. Y'understand what I'm saying?”

Hastings glanced at the license sign on the glove-compartment door. He made out the driver's name on the placard: Barney Goralski. The photo wasn't much worse than his own passport photograph. It gave a vague indication of a big fleshy face, nothing more.

“Yeah,” Barney Goralski was musing, “that stock market sure a hell of a place. My daughter, Anne, now, she gets all kindsa inside dope, y'know, but she's a good kid, she don't go spreadin' it around the wrong places. Y'understand? Yeah, I fool around some with them stocks myself—I'm an independent businessman, y'know, own this cab myself. Ain't one of your hired minority-group thugs what don't know how to drive a cab. It's a fuckin' disgrace the punks they put behind a wheel nowadays. Half these stupid fleet drivers ain't got no idea at all how to get from one place to another. You gotta keep movin' to make a living in this racket, mister, I can tell you—you get yourself caught in fuckin' traffic jams, and you lose your shirt. Y'understand what I'm saying?”

Hastings grunted. Goralski gunned and braked violently, slithering between cars, outwitting traffic. In the taxi everything seemed slightly loose—taximeter, doors, windows, ashtrays, plexiglass, horn ring, change counter—so that a constant din of rattles assaulted the ear, symphonic accompaniment to Barney Goralski's nonstop monologue. “One time, see, I buy a hundred shares of this five-dollar stock. So right away it becomes a three-dollar stock.”

Goralski cursed a double-parked truck, bucked loudly past it, and once more launched into his history of his battles with the stock market: “'Nother time I get this tip, so I buy a hundred shares of a six-fifty stock. I pay thirteen and a quarter commission.”

It awed Hastings that the cab driver could remember the exact figures, let alone believe anyone could conceivably be interested.

“But then I find out the fucking stock's selling at eighty times earnings, y'know what I mean? Eighty times earnings, Christ-sake. So I get shaky. The stock goes up half a point, and I sell out everything, both them stocks. I end up with a net loss of a hundred and thirty-seven bucks and seventy-five cents, thirty bucks of which is commissions to the crooked bastards that sold it to me in the first place.”

“Then I buy a hundred shares of this Trymetronex—cost me damn near thirteen hundred, time I paid the commission. And the minute I buy, it starts to slide. I put in a bunch of sell orders a point above the market—I admit I was pushin' for that extra point, y'understand what I'm saying? I figured, shit, it's bound to bounce back sooner or later. So it goes down to nine. From twelve and a half down to
nine
mutterfuckin' dollars. Then they pull some legal hocus-pocus, the bastard corporation calls its convertible debentures. You know what that does?”

Hastings grunted, which was a mistake, because Goralski had to explain.

“Well, they got convertible debentures worth ten million bucks, and when they recall them they issue shares of common stock to replace the debentures. Debentures—that's bonds. Y'understand? So they shovel out ten million bucks' worth of new stock onto the market, and naturally the price drops to seven mutterfuckin' dollars. You can bet your sweet ass those insiders knew all about the debenture recall in advance. It's little outside guys like me that get grabbed by the balls. Then I go back to the stupid asshole broker, and you know what he says to me? He says my stocks was overvalued when I bought them, he says. He says I shoulda known better.
Jesus Christ, the mutter-fucking sonofabitch didn't say that when I BOUGHT them!
”

Mercifully they had arrived at 44th Street. Hastings' ears rang. He paid Goralski, tipped him half a dollar, and got out quickly. A small old lady darted past him into the cab. He walked down 44th Street a few doors to the address the brokers had given his secretary on the phone. It was one of the medium-sized midtown hotels, not far from the Algonquin. Miss Carol McCloud—probably a white-haired old lady, like so many who lived in residential-hotel apartments, clipping her coupons and keeping miniature dogs. Miss McCloud had recently bought a large block of NCI stock. Why? Who had touted her onto it? Rumors were wildfire in the stock market, but not even little old ladies spent a quarter of a million dollars on the sole basis of rumors.

He went into the narrow lobby and found a house phone; after four rings a low female voice answered. The voice sounded younger than he had expected, but it was hard to tell. She seemed drugged with sleep. He glanced involuntarily at his watch.

“Miss McCloud? This is Russell Hastings, Securities and Exchange Commission.”

“Oh yes—of course. What time is it?”

“Ten till two. I realize I'm a little early—we did say two-fifteen. If it's not convenient, I can—”

“No. Give me five minutes, and come on up—it's ten-oh-eight. Turn right when you get out of the elevator.”

He went into the coffee shop and had a cup of coffee at the counter, finished it, and went to the elevator. It was self-service. On the tenth floor he found 1008 in an Edwardian rotunda at the end of the corridor. He recalled some literary acquaintance once telling him this old hotel had been one of Stanford White's less memorable architectural monuments. Before the war it had been the home of several Algonquin Roundtable celebrities. It appeared to have been well kept up—not luxurious, but far from dingy: a select small hotel which would not cater to conventioneers.

Her telephone voice had changed her image in his mind; he wasn't quite sure what to expect when he knocked. Nevertheless, he had a shock when she opened the door.

She was stunning.

She gave him a radiant smile. “Mr. Hastings.”

“Miss McCloud?” He felt he ought to have a hat, if only so that he could doff it. He walked in past her. The room surprised him, as well. It was large, informally divided by sectional settees and comfortable chairs, punctuated by walnut end tables, stern classic lamps, and a big fireplace that dominated one end of the room. The suite was done in shades of beige, brown, and pale green. A curved bar was built into one corner. The far end of the room opened through glass doors onto a narrow terrace rimmed by potted shrubs, big enough for two lawn chairs and a white iron table.