Villiers Touch (8 page)

“Yes.”

“What if I go broke?”

“Then I'll find another winner.”

He smiled. “Anyhow, you're honest. I'm still rich. Do you need money?”

“I always do. It takes me ten weeks to write a book, and I only get a fifteen hundred advance on it.” Her mouth twisted, and she added, “Just put it on the bed. That's the way they do it, isn't it?”

“Don't get sour, I only asked.”

She said, “When I was thirteen I laid my best girl friend's old man. I guess I've always been a whore. But not for money, Mace. Always for free, for fun. Once in a while they give me something—a bracelet or a watch. But it's not pay. I never take pay. The difference may not look very important to you, but it does to me.”

He said, not caring, “I understand. All right, you don't want anything right now, because that would be too much like taking pay. Suppose we have dinner together, say Thursday night.”

For some reason he sensed but did not comprehend, she gave him an enraged scowl and turned her back, folding her arms. She said in a low tone, “When you invite a girl to dinner, at least you could look as if you cared which way she'll answer.”

“I don't make invitations unless I mean them.”

“You could look a little less bored.”

“Suit yourself, then,” he said indifferently, and opened the door.

When he glanced back, she had turned to watch him; her eyes were too wide and too bright. She said, “God damn you, you think you can come and go like a subway train.”

He made no answer; he pulled the door shut and walked to the elevator.

He emerged from the narrow apartment building onto a Greenwich Village street and looked around, planning to ambush a taxi before he saw the limousine and remembered that Sanders was driving him today. He crossed the curb diagonally and got into the luxurious back seat. Sanders had the engine idling and the air-conditioning on; it was cool but stuffy in the Cadillac.

Sanders, via the rear-view mirror, gave his cowardly apologetic smile and said, “Where to?”

“Hackman's office.”

“Yes, sir.” Sanders looked over his shoulder at the traffic and eased out into the flow. Villiers sat back and frowned at the back of Sanders' billiard-ball head.

They stopped for a traffic light, and Sanders cleared his throat. “Sir …”

“What is it?” Villiers snapped.

“My mother, sir. She's ill, and I was wondering if you'd be needing me for the evening. I mean—”

“I may need you. I'll let you know.”

“Yes, sir.” The traffic began to move, and Sanders turned into Seventh Avenue and manhandled the limousine through heavy traffic past St. Vincent's Hospital, heading downtown toward the financial district.

Tod Sanders was becoming an annoyance, Villiers thought. For a while it had amused him to put Sanders through hoops.

Ten blocks farther downtown, Sanders said again, “I'm not looking for a chance to goof off, sir. She really is sick. My mother, I mean. I wish I hadn't brought her down here from Canada. You know, this stinking hot wea—”

“Shut up,” Villiers said. “Nothing runs out of listeners faster than a hard-luck story. You ought to've learned that by now.”

“Yes, sir. I suppose. Mr. Villiers, why is it things like this never bother you? What's the difference between you and me?”

“Difference? I dominate my world, Tod. Your world dominates you. Now, shut up, I've got thinking to do.”

But the back of Sanders' head was an irritant that badgered him and kept him from concentrating. Memory took Villiers back to the Alaska oil fields two years ago, when he had met Sanders. He had thought he'd known the man from the past, but Sanders had refused to answer to the name Villiers had addressed him by. Sanders had been a petroleum engineer, thought to be very bright by the oil company that employed him. Thinking Sanders might be of use to him, Villiers had investigated—and found out that the youth he had once known in Chicago had fled a hit-and-run homicide charge and disappeared.

He had confronted Sanders with it, broken him down with ridiculous ease, and used him to obtain inside information from the oil company, which he had been in the process of raiding.

Tod Sanders was a small shy man with inky fingernails and a hangdog face. A thirty-four-year-old mama's boy whose mother became ill every time he got serious with a girl. It had aroused Villiers' interest, as a coolly scientific experiment, to see how far the man could be pushed without stiffening to retaliate. Evidently there were no limits to the degradation he was willing to suffer. He had been convinced from the moment he was born that the world was too much for him, and Villiers' harsh treatment of him only provided him with added evidence of that which he was already convinced of. Sanders had become Villiers' valet, chauffeur, shoeshine boy, and memo pad; he spent his scuffling hours arranging hotel rooms and procuring women for Villiers. He didn't object to any of it. Sanders never seemed to be taxed by any desire to ask himself why he had to be subjected to such degrading ignominy; and because he was so unresisting, Villiers was sick and tired of baiting him.

By the time the limousine reached Hackman's building, Villiers had forgotten Sanders; he was thinking about bigger things.

The car slid in at the curb, and Villiers glanced upward past the tall buildings at the thick sky which hung heavily masked in vapor. The traffic of pedestrians was a morass of hot bodies, tramping gray sidewalks and narrow streets in an area where every square foot of ground was worth more than six hundred dollars.

Hackman and Greene were on the nineteenth floor of a building which hadn't been there three years before. The modern reception foyer reminded Villiers unfavorably of the waiting room of an airport. Beyond lay a collection of cubicles with desks, phones, and typewriters, inhabited by junior salesmen and brokers, secretaries, and the clerical staff. The firm boasted an English receptionist with high breasts and a good London accent, an elegant letterhead on twenty-weight linen bound stationery, and an acronymous cable address for clients abroad.

George Hackman, one of the big beefy hucksters of Wall Street, was standing by the receptionist's pretty shoulder, leaning forward, with her telephone at his ear. He nodded to Villiers and went on talking into the phone—evidently the call had caught him here and he had taken it rather than go back to his own desk. Talking and listening on the phone, Hackman was jotting with his left hand in a brass-framed calendar pad on the receptionist's desk. Villiers noticed Hackman's brawny forearm brushing the receptionist's breast as he wrote. The girl had a pretty face but sat with spreading heavy buttocks; Villiers wondered dispassionately why she didn't wear a girdle.

Villiers went to the window beyond and looked down at tiny New Yorkers crawling painfully across the hot pavements.

George Hackman said into the phone, “Bet your ass, Carl. You heard right, Continental's buying them out. It can't help but jack up Reuland Express, and Jackson's gonna suffer from the competition, with all that new capital behind Reuland. So what happens, you go long on Reuland, and you sell Jackson short, got it?… Sure, just give me the word. All right, then, five hundred of each. See you, Carl baby.”

Hackman handed the phone to the English girl, leered at her, and walked over to Villiers to clap him on the arm; he said heartily, “How they hanging, Mace?”

Villiers gave him a cool stare. Hackman swallowed his smile and backed up a pace. Over his shoulder he said, “No calls and no visitors until I let you know otherwise,” to the receptionist, and steered Villiers back along a corridor toward the door to his private office.

“Sidney Isher's already here,” Hackman said. Villiers went into the office and saw Isher in a chair. The lawyer nodded his red head and coughed. Hackman shut the door behind them and went around to sit behind his desk; he said, “How'd you like the new girl out front, Mace? Class with a capital ‘K,' boy. She's a pistol. Christ, I love to watch the way she shifts her carriage.” Hackman grinned and stuck a cigar in his mouth.

Villiers sat down and looked at him, not speaking. Hackman was big, meaty, hearty, with a broad red-brick face lined with broken commandments. He spoke with the rapid-fire delivery of a used-car salesman. He was the kind of man who believed his life could be measured by his number of old buddies and by his possessions, inside tips, and the athletic accomplishments of his adolescence. He was an after-office-hours alcoholic, casually unfaithful to his third wife, a former showgirl. He lived a lusty routine and threw rowdy parties in his suburban home. Isher had once described him to Villiers as a golfer who lied about his score at the nineteenth hole; it was an accurate thumbnail description.

Seated in an enormous leather chair behind his desk, Hackman pushed the office intercom button and said, “Honey, never mind that stuff on cocoa futures till later, I'll be tied up for a while. Go powder your snatch if you want.” He flicked the intercom off and sat back to light his cigar. “Christ, Mace, long time no see. How'sa Canadian operations? Jesus, I may move up there myself pretty soon; I tell you, they're running us out of business down here in the Street. The Goddamned Stock Exchange reduced our brokerage fees on big-block trades, down five percent. Going to cost me six thousand dollars in commissions this year.”

Villiers opened his mouth and said mildly, “Spare me your ululations, George.”

“The hell. Some broker down on the twelfth floor jumped out his window last week.”

Villiers shrugged. “Financial wounds aren't fatal. I've never understood bankrupts' suicides.”

Hackman exhaled a diaphanous cloud of smoke. “Country club had an antique-car auction last weekend. There was a 1913 Rolls Royce landaulet that went for twenty grand. I thought of you.”

“I know the car,” Villiers said. “I didn't come down here to talk about it. What's the market on Melbard?”

“The stock's moving around a little. Up a quarter, down an eighth—I imagine it's a few casual boys moving in, selling short, and buying it back half a point below, pushing it up and selling it again. Nothing to worry about. It's all small stuff.”

Sidney Isher cleared his throat and remarked, “Nobody's onto you, yet.”

Hackman said. “I sounded out a bank about underwriting the Nuart Galleries if they go public. They like it. The boy I talked to seemed to think the issue will be oversubscribed the minute it goes on the market. You ought to open with a nice premium, one-fifty or two dollars.”

Villiers said, “How much will they be getting?”

“The underwriters? Two and three-quarters percent, and options on ten thousand shares at two bucks above par.”

“All right,” Villiers said, without excessive interest. “I'm having dinner tomorrow with Mrs. Hastings. You'll have word from me next morning, either way. She'll probably come along.”

“Meaning she's a woman,” Hackman observed. “You do have a way with them.”

“When you get word from me,” Villiers told him, “I want you ready to roll fast. Tell the underwriters to give it a good hard sell, like bond salesmen. And we'll want to put out a nice slick report full of color photographs and expensive artwork on the heaviest coated stock you can buy. We'll need front men to go out on the circuit, Elks and Lions and Kiwanis and whatever—any of those outfits that need speakers. Send the front men up with literature and lecture material, some off-color stories, plenty of illustrated color slides to sell the company. I haven't got a year to get this one off the ground.”

“That's why I picked Fleischer's bank,” Hackman said. “They've got a network of correspondent firms. They'll get the thing moving all over the country. But of course you realize we can't tell how it'll really go until we run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.”

Sidney Isher made a face.

Hackman added, “It's a fluid situation, Mace.”

“Don't give me that crap.”

Isher said, “A fluid situation is what you drown in, George.”

Hackman flushed and puffed rapidly on his cigar. After a moment he said, “Not to change the subject, but I made contact with Colonel Butler for you—you know, the president of Heggins Aircraft. You said you wanted to talk to him.”

“I know what I said. I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what
he
said?”

“I was coming to that.”

“Anytime you're ready, George.”

“You don't have to get sarcastic. Listen, I had a hell of a time reaching the son of a bitch. He's always off on safari someplace collecting big-game trophies. I got him between planes last week. Told him what you told me to tell him. I'm not sure it worked. He thinks—”

Villiers said, “If Colonel Butler thought anything, he wouldn't be a colonel.”

“Don't underestimate him. He's a retired colonel, but that doesn't make him senile. He's maybe fifty-two or -three and he acts like one ballsy tough bird.”

“It's a bluff,” Villiers said. “He's on the ropes and he knows it. But you still haven't told me whether you set up a meeting.”

“I tried to have him here this afternoon—he's in New York right now. He wouldn't go for it. I needled him a little, and he finally admitted he didn't want to be seen going into a business meeting with you. Nothing personal, Mace, but you know you do have a rep. A guy with Butler's defense contracts on the line can't afford to be seen at a conference with you.”

Villiers gave no indication whether or not he felt slighted. He said, “You're hanging onto the punch line. What is it?”

“Well, I said suppose I could arrange a meeting on neutral ground where it would look accidental and nobody'd think anything of it. He didn't say no, so I told him I'm having a party tonight at my place, which is true. There'll be plenty of people there for camouflage. He said he'd come. He didn't sound too happy about it but I dropped the hints you told me to drop, and he won't ignore them. He won't be able to let them alone—he'll have to pick at it until he finds out what you want and what he can get out of it.”