Executive Suite (38 page)

Her eyes had been on his face until she caught the import of the question. She turned away for a moment, not long enough to debate an answer, yet long enough to make him acutely conscious of her hesitation. If she did not answer …

But she did answer and there was no undertone of reluctance. “No, he never did. I doubt if he had made a final decision—unless he made up his mind yesterday in New York.”

“I didn't know. I—”

“At least there's one person who has it all figured out,” she said with a sudden lightness that seemed in strange contrast to all that had gone before.

His mind exploded the thought of Loren Shaw and he braced himself to hear what she would say after the demanded question, “Who's that, Miss Martin?”

“Luigi. He's all ready to move
you
up here.”

It came so unexpectedly that he could not avoid a physical reaction and he could see that she had noticed it.

“I'm sorry you were so surprised, Mr. Walling. I'd hoped that you wouldn't be.”

The only response that he dared offer was a smile that could only be meaningless to her because it was meaningless to himself.

Her voice, speaking his name, stopped him at the door. “Mr. Walling, if there's anything I can do to help you, I hope you'll call me. If I'm not here, I'll be at home. My number's in the telephone book.”

He said, “Thank you, Miss Martin,”… and back of his secretary he saw the chair behind his desk … the red leather bright where it was touched by a blade of sunlight that had knifed in through the drawn curtains.

Luigi smiled when the door opened on the twenty-fourth floor.

LA GUARDIA AIRPORT, LONG ISLAND

11.02 A.M. EDT

Ronnie had said that the pilot would meet him at the Shell office and George Caswell glanced anxiously inside the glass cubicle. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of someone waving from a jeep outside and he recognized Hart, the chief pilot of the plane that Rookery Paper Corporation provided for the business use of its president. He remembered Hart from the time last year when he had flown to Canada with Ronnie for a weekend of salmon fishing.

“How are you, sir?” Hart asked genially, using precisely the right blend of respect and informality. Hart was a good pilot. Ronnie had said that there wasn't a corporation president in the country who had a pilot with a record that could match Hart's … “an Air Force colonel at twenty-six, more damned medals than there's room for on his chest … not an airline in the country that wouldn't give their eyeteeth to get him!”

As they were driven down the field, George Caswell's eyes picked out the plane by the Rookery trademark on the nose. It seemed tiny at first, dwarfed by a near-by Constellation, but when he stepped into the cabin the impression was quickly lost and he felt, momentarily, the waste of all this twin-engine-powered luxury on his own transportation. But there was the quick-covering memory of what Ronnie had said on that trip to Canada. “Sure, what the hell, it's cockeyed economically. It doesn't make sense, but the damned income tax doesn't make sense either! A big corporation can't pay its president enough after taxes to mean anything any more, so they have to give me something besides money to keep me happy. Damned good incentive plan, too. If I don't keep those earnings climbing the boys on the board will take away my plaything.”

Caswell reflected as he sat down that Ronnie must have been doing all right with his earnings lately. The plane's interior had been completely done over and redecorated since the Canadian trip.

Hart stopped beside him to ask, “Everything all right, sir?”

“Perfect.”

Hart answered with a friendly half-salute and followed the co-pilot forward.

George Caswell surveyed the new furniture with a critical eye. It was nice enough in its way … quite all right … but hardly up to what the boys down at Tredway could do for him. Give that chap Walling a chance and he'd design an interior that would be something quite special … perhaps on the order of the cabin of the ketch that Dan had brought over from Sweden. No, that was the wrong way … leave it to Walling … delegate the authority … that was the way to handle it.

The first motor coughed and then roared into full-throated vigor. Then the second. George Caswell settled into the downy cushion and looked ahead through the porthole. His new life was beginning. He was closer to happiness than he had ever been before. Millburgh was only an hour away.

Far back in his consciousness, at the very fringe of recognizable thought, was the faint awareness that his handling of Pilcher had hardly been in the Caswell tradition of gentlemanly conduct … his father most certainly would not have approved … but his father had never been a truly happy man.

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

11.14 A.M. EDT

As Don Walling drove out North Front Street, there was no longer any vacillation of his inner mind between hope and despair. That had been the preamble, the process of genesis, the creation of fact. Now it was true. He would be the president of the Tredway Corporation.

He knew that he still faced the task of forcing acceptance, but that was neither strange nor unusual. It had happened before. There had been many times in the past when he had known the truth long before he had been able to make others see it. He had known from the beginning that the back-pressure system would work on the finishing ovens, but it had taken six months to get Jesse Grimm to realize it. He had known that the Millway Federal Line would be a success long before Walt Dudley had stopped worrying … that the patent suit would be won … that Pittsburgh should drop the paint finish and concentrate on chrome … that Pearson was the right man for Chicago manager … that the union was really after company-wide bargaining … yes, he had known all of those things but still there had always been the nerve-rasping delay while he had been forced to wait for slower minds to overtake his own … but, damn it, this time it was different … there was no reason to wait! They should know … all of them!

An oddly errant thought, almost amusing enough to make him smile, made him remember that it was Luigi who had been the first to know … first Luigi and then Erica Martin. Now it had to be the others … and the first of the others was Julia Tredway Prince.

Don Walling's decision to go to Julia Tredway Prince had been almost totally impulsive, a subconsciously grasped opportunity to counteract Jesse Grimm's treachery by substituting her vote for his. Now, even though it was difficult to think of the election as anything but a meaningless ritual that would confirm what he already knew, the realization flashed that he didn't have Dudley's support. He had forgotten, momentarily, that the presidency had been the price of Walt Dudley's vote.

Had Alderson really been crazy enough to do that … to toss away the presidency for one vote? The old coot must have been insane! Julia Tredway Prince's vote was not enough … he had to have Dudley's vote, too. What was the matter with Alderson … why had he fumbled around and let Dudley slip through his fingers? Yes, damn it, it was Alderson's fault and now it was up to Alderson to do something about it!

Impatiently, annoyed at the delay that would keep him from settling things with Julia Tredway Prince in a hurry, Don Walling turned off North Front Street and headed for Alderson's home. He'd put a burr under Fred's tail … get him out there to square away Dudley. The old boy probably wouldn't like it but he might as well learn once and for always that the president of the Tredway Corporation was too damned busy to sit around and wait for a lot of fumbling vice-presidents to catch up with him.

Good God, even Luigi knew!

11.21 A.M. EDT

Frederick Alderson stared at the carved window frame but he saw neither the fat-buttocked cupids nor the bunches of grapes that were the always unattainable objects of their endlessly upward flight. He fervently wished that he had not, in a moment of lost control, started to talk to Edith about Don Walling. As much as he had needed to talk to someone, he should have remembered that Edith could never recognize … particularly when she was knitting … the end point of any conversation, the point beyond which there was nothing more that could be said.

“But, Fred, if Mr. Walling can't be elected president, why does he think that he can be?” It was a questionless question, aimlessly said in a stitch-counting voice.

“I don't know, dear,” he said repetitiously, saying the same words that he had said, spoken and unspoken, a hundred times in this last half-hour.

“Doesn't he see that it's impossible?” She was talking only for the sake of the sound, as a happier woman might have hummed while she worked. “If Jesse won't vote for him and if Mr. Dudley votes for Mr. Shaw—now where did I put that blue—oh, there it is. Doesn't he see that it's impossible, Fred?”

“I don't know, dear.”

Her voice was fading but it was a long time before he realized that the fading was not a self-protective blocking of his ears, but that he had unknowingly walked the length of the hall and was standing now in the library. The voice that faded back into his consciousness was not Edith's voice but the voice of the man in the picture frame that hung above his desk.

“I know you think it's impossible,” Avery Bullard said, “but damn it, Fred, we're going to do it anyway!”

Impossible … yes, that's what everyone had said … impossible to save the old Tredway Furniture Company from bankruptcy … impossible to pull off the merger … impossible to buy Coglan without a cent of cash … impossible to float that 1937 debenture issue … impossible, impossible, impossible … “Fred, don't you understand that by the time every slow-witted fool can see that a thing's possible, then it's too damned late?”

That was what you learned about Avery Bullard … not to argue with him … not to try to tell him that anything was impossible … not to be a slow-witted fool. You couldn't fight back against Avery Bullard because you never knew what you were fighting against. Before you could speak there was something else in his mind … the old thought fading as fast as the new one flashed … the anger of one moment lost in the next … “To hell with Jesse Grimm! I don't need him. I can …”

Frederick Alderson blinked away the blankness of his stare. That last voice had been another voice, deceptively alike but still perceptibly different. It wasn't Bullard's voice … it was Walling's. He tried to erase the difference, to force the acceptance of resurrection, to believe that death would become life, that the man who was dead would become the man who was alive.

He waited out the last slow heartbeat of a lost hope. It could never be. He should have known. He had been fooled by that intuitive feeling this morning that it would be Don Walling who would take Avery Bullard's place. He shouldn't have let himself be fooled. He should have remembered that he could never trust his intuition. He had none. It had been true all his life … was still true … he should have known.

His slumping body found a chair and he sat heavily, pressed down by the weight of his old man's knowledge that he was terrifyingly alone in this world in which he so strangely still lived. Avery Bullard was dead. The picture on the wall was only a photograph. The eyes did not see … the lips did not move … there was no command … no instruction … only the unbreakable silence of death.

A shudder ran through Frederick Alderson's thin body as he acknowledged the terrifying enormity of the error that he had committed. It was he who had given Walling the hope that he could be president. It was his fault that Walling would tear out his heart in the fighting of a battle that could never be won.

Edith's voice was in his ears now, old words twice repeated before he could believe that they were not a memory. “Fred, are you all right?”

“Yes, I'm all right.”

“Mr. Walling is here to see you.”

“Walling—here?” Hope leaped. Walling had realized it, too! He had come around to see things straight … that half a loaf was better than none … that Walt Dudley wouldn't make such a bad president after all … that it was all for the best.

A warm glow of satisfaction welled up within him as he turned to meet Don Walling, prepared to brush aside the apology that he expected to hear.

But there was no apology in Don Walling's crackling voice, not even an introductory greeting. “You took Walt home, didn't you?”

“Yes, I—”

“And you said nothing to him about voting for me?”

“Voting for—?”

“Damn it, Fred, didn't you realize that I need his vote. I want to get this thing settled in a hurry! Why let it drag on with a lot of pointless argument? If he and Shaw get together there'll be time wasted. We have to get the election out of the way. You know that as well as I do. Million things that need to be done. Get out there and talk to him, Fred—line him up—tell him what the score is!”

Halfway through the tornado of words, Frederick Alderson's bewilderment changed to a reassuring recognition. A lifetime of living with Avery Bullard had taught him that there was a calm center in every storm, and that it was his duty to drive through and find it … yes, that was his job. It wouldn't be easy … it never had been … but, afterwards it would be appreciated.

“Now just a minute,” he said, drawing out each word in the exaggerated tone that had always been so effective in slowing down Avery Bullard's word-storms.

“Fred, damn it, I can't—”

“Wait, now!” He gave his voice the sharp change of pace that he had learned to use at this point. “If you'll tell me
what
you want me to do, and exactly
how
you want me to do it—”

“Why should I have to tell you
how
to do it!” the storm howled. “I want it done, damn it, and I don't care how you do it!”