Executive Suite (6 page)

In the first months after the Tredway Tower had been built, Luigi had heard old Mr. Tredway recount the history of these rooms, stories filled with kings and queens and lords and ladies, but there had been too much to remember from the first telling and, before the stories could be retold, the teller was dead. It was Luigi who had found Orrin Tredway lying on the floor of his office, his red blood lost in the design of the Oriental rug, his outstretched hand white as chalk, the pistol glittering coldly under the blue desk-light. Strangely, for all its horror, that moment of gruesome discovery had not remained in Luigi's mind as a vivid association with the twenty-fourth floor. It had been quickly submerged by the overriding memory of that morning shortly afterward when he helped Mr. Bullard move up from twenty-three. An essential rightness was created then that gave validity to Luigi's mental association between the castle and the Executive Suite. There was a duke who had lived in the castle in Italy and there was much about Avery Bullard that reminded him of the duke.

Luigi recalled how all the children had stood in silent respect as the Duke rode past in his carriage, not because silence was demanded but because there was some aura about the Duke that made him unmistakably the man above all other men, the man who owned all that there was to own—the shining carriage and the black horses, the streets and the shops and houses, the fields beyond and even the smallest loose stones that lay upon the earth. One of Luigi's earliest memories was of his father's distress when a branch had been accidentally broken from an olive tree that stood near the hut that was their home. His mother had attempted to console him by saying that perhaps the Duke would not notice. Luigi's father knew better. There was nothing in the world that the Duke did not notice.

If it had not been for certain moral considerations which weighed heavily in his mind, Luigi could have fitted Miss Martin into the child-formed pattern of his thinking with no more effort and concern than he employed in transforming Mr. Bullard into the Duke who lived in the castle. Miss Martin even looked a little like his memories of the Duchess. There was that same up-carriage of her head, that same alert perception, that same ever-watchful anticipation of the Duke's desire. “Wine,” the Duchess had ordered on the fiesta day when the Duke had made a speech in the hot sun of the piazza, and when the wine had been brought and the Duke had drunk thirstily, Luigi had stood staring at them and trying to understand how it was that the Duchess had known. His eyes had not left the Duke's lips in all of the time that they had been there and he knew that the Duke had not spoken to the Duchess. Yet she had known. There must be, he had reasoned, some mysterious manner of silent speech between them. Now he knew that there was that same gift of wordless communication between Mr. Bullard and Miss Martin. She, too, had some way of knowing what he wanted before he asked for it. He had seen it happen many times.

Luigi had never dared to pursue the parallel because he also knew that the Duchess was the Duke's wife and Miss Martin was only Mr. Bullard's secretary. If, in the case of the Duke and the Duchess there had been some connection between the love that made them man and wife, and their ability to talk without speaking, there had to be some other explanation for the case of Miss Martin and Mr. Bullard. Luigi never tried to find that explanation because he was certain that it would require a high order of thinking of which his mind was sure to be incapable. In any event it didn't matter. Miss Martin was, above any woman that he had ever known, beautiful and intelligent and kind, and a part of the pleasure he found in coming to the twenty-fourth floor were these moments when he stood in the doorway and spoke her name and she would look up pleasantly startled, speaking his.

“Hello, Luigi.”

“Telegram, Miss Martin.”

He waited while she opened the envelope, noting the quick-flashing instant of reaction as she read the message, following her eyes as she glanced at a time-table that seemed to have been waiting for this moment, then back at the time stamp on the telegram again.

“Mr. Bullard's coming in this afternoon. Probably on the five-four.”

“You want me tell Eddie be there with the car?”

“Will you?”

“Sure, Miss Martin, I tell him.”

“And, Luigi, please ask Eddie not to have the car sitting out in the sun. It gets so terribly hot and Mr. Bullard will be worn out after two hard days in New York.”

Luigi nodded. “Mr. Bullard come back here from the train?”

“Yes. He's called an executive committee meeting for six o'clock.”

“Then I tell Maria not to wait dinner.”

“There's no reason why you have to wait, Luigi. There'll be a night man on who can take us down after the meeting.”

“No, I wait!” he said quickly. “Waiting don't matter, not for him.”

Unexpectedly, her eyes flashed up, searching his face as if she suspected some hidden meaning, giving him the uncomfortable feeling of having said some improper thing. Suddenly, his self-conscious concern seemed to be matched by hers and an instant later she was laughing.

“It's a hard life, isn't it, Luigi?” But the words had no meaning for they floated out on a wave of denying laughter. Then, as quickly as the laughter had come, she turned and was reaching for the telephone.

Walking back to the elevator cab, Luigi toyed with the temptation of trying to make himself understand what had happened—why Miss Martin had looked at him in that strange way and then so suddenly broken into laughter—but there was no explanation that came before he saw the first-floor signal glowing like a beckoning jewel from the control panel.

Going down the shaft, all that remained in his mind was the pleasantly echoing sound of Miss Martin's laughter. It was too bad that his wife did not laugh like that. But a man could not expect everything. He was very fortunate. There were men … even men who were very intelligent and had been to college … who did not have a wife.

3.11 P.M. EDT

Erica Martin hesitated, her fingertips playing nervously over the black arch of the telephone instrument. Here again was that annoying puzzle of organizational precedence. Which of the five vice-presidents should be called first about the executive committee meeting at six o'clock? It was one of those little things that should not matter but she knew that it would. If Mr. Alderson were to discover that she had called Mr. Grimm before she called him, he would be sure to give it some frightening supersignificance. It would be no better to start with Mr. Dudley or Mr. Shaw, or even with Mr. Walling. They were all vice-presidents, all equal in rank, all poised on the same knife edge of uncertainty. It wasn't their fault. You couldn't blame them. Avery Bullard should have settled the matter weeks ago by choosing one of them to be executive vice-president.

The nervous play of Erica Martin's fingers was a completely involuntary gesture of annoyance. If she had been conscious of it she would have stopped it at once, for she had long since schooled herself against any outward display of emotion, particularly where Avery Bullard was concerned and there was very little emotion in her life with which Avery Bullard was not concerned. She had been his private secretary for almost sixteen years.

At eighteen, Erica Martin had not been a pretty girl. At thirty-eight she was a handsome woman. As a girl she had been tall, heavy-boned and rather too strong-featured to match the current standards for sweet femininity. Now, at maturity, she had the compensation—inadequate and belated though it was—of inciting constant admiration. Men paid her the supreme business male's compliment by saying that she had a mind like a man's. Women, particularly those of her own age group, saw her as the strong, independent, and capable person that they might have been if they had not sacrificed themselves to the enervating demands of housekeeping, childbearing, and the constant catering to a husband's petty quirks and foibles.

The truth, which almost no one bothered to suspect, was that Erica Martin's life was not so very different from that of her long married compatriots. Her relationship with Avery Bullard, although completely platonic and totally devoid of any compensating display of even minor affection, did not differ greatly from the relationship between any intelligent and helpful wife and any dominant, driving, and brilliant husband. She was treated with slightly more respect than is usually typical in such a marriage, but that advantage was offset by the fact that there were no moments when a pleasant disrespect might be the prelude to an act of love.

As for a husband's quirks and foibles, no wife could have been subjected to more—and Erica Martin also had her moments when tolerance was difficult to summon. There were times when Avery could be a very annoying person. The silly thing about it was that it was almost always over some minor matter. Day after day, Avery would make decisions on big problems almost as fast as she could place them on his desk. She couldn't ask for better co-operation. Then, all of a sudden, some little thing would come along and, for no reason at all, he would decide to be stubborn about it, almost as if he were purposely trying to annoy her. Every week since Mr. Fitzgerald had died she had struggled to find adroit ways of nudging Avery into clearing the “executive vice-president” note from her personal reminder pad. Once she had even asked a direct question. Even then he had done nothing. That was as far as she could go. If Avery wanted to be stubborn he'd just have to be stubborn. “Elect executive vice-president” wasn't something that she could write at the top of his engagement calendar every Monday morning the way she wrote “Haircut.” The disconcerting thing, of course, was that Avery never stopped to realize the unpleasant position in which she was placed as a result of his negligence. She was the one who had to call the vice-presidents. But, of course, he never thought of that.

She glanced down and the telegram in her hand was an urgent reminder that the minutes were slipping away. It was Friday afternoon. None of the vice-presidents knew that Mr. Bullard was coming back from New York. Any one of them might be planning to slip away for an early start on the weekend. She must catch them at once … all of them. Avery would throw a tantrum if anyone missed executive committee meeting and those tantrums weren't good for him … his blood pressure had been up two points last time.

Hurriedly she slipped through the door of her office and started down the winding, medieval oak staircase that joined the two floors of the Executive Suite. The foot of the staircase solved the problem of precedence. Directly opposite was the door lettered: Frederick W. Alderson, Vice-President and Treasurer. No one could possibly place any special significance on the fact that she opened that door first.

Frederick Alderson was sitting behind his desk, his body squarely in his chair, his head held plumb-bob straight, not a white hair out of place on the high dome above his wax-pink face. He sat as if his own presence were a part of the meticulously precise arrangement of everything in his office. His smile of welcome was in the same careful pattern.

“Come in, Miss Martin.”

“I've just had word from Mr. Bullard that he's on his way home from New York. He's called a meeting for six o'clock.”

There was an almost imperceptible fading of his smile, so slight and so quickly recovered that she all but missed it.

“I hope it isn't too inconvenient, Mr. Alderson.”

“No.” He made the one syllable say that there was nothing in his personal life that could ever overshadow the importance of a summons from Avery Bullard.

“I'm sure it must be something important,” she said, “or he wouldn't have asked everyone to stay.”

“Everyone?” Mr. Alderson asked in cautious inquiry.

“The executive committee.”

“Oh, of course. Thank you, Miss Martin.”

His voice stopped her at the door. “I don't suppose you have any idea how long a meeting it might be?”

“No. I'm sorry.”

“Well, it really doesn't matter. Mrs. Alderson and I are going out to dinner at seven, but I'm sure our hosts will understand if we're a few minutes late.”

As she was closing the door she saw him pick up a newly sharpened pencil and reach for his desk pad. Nothing ever happened in Mr. Alderson's life that did not seem to require a note to himself, written in a tight bookkeeper's script that looked like copperplate engraving.

Down the hall, Erica Martin wondered if Avery Bullard ever really stopped to appreciate the sacrificial loyalty of Frederick Alderson … a nice gesture if Avery were to make Mr. Alderson his executive vice-president … no reason why he shouldn't … every reason why he should. Mr. Alderson was the oldest of the vice-presidents. There would be no organizational complications and, since he was sixty-one, he would retire in four years anyway.

She passed the blank door waiting to be lettered with the name of the new executive vice-president and went on to open the door labeled: Jesse Grimm, Vice-President for Manufacturing.

Jesse Grimm was not in his office but the odor of his pipe hung heavily in the air. Erica Martin walked through to the door of his secretary's little cubicle. “Hello, Ruth. Mr. Grimm around?”

Ruth Elkins swallowed hard, sending another chocolate-topped cookie the way of all the thousands upon thousands of tidbits that had contributed to her puffball figure. “Gosh, Miss Martin, he left just a few minutes ago.”

“You'll have to reach him, Ruth. Mr. Bullard's called an executive committee for six o'clock.”

“Six o'clock? Gosh, Miss Martin, I don't know if I can or not. He's going down to his place in Maryland.”

“How long ago did he leave here?”

“Maybe about ten minutes.”

“Was he going home first?”

“I guess so.”

“Then you still have a chance to reach him if you call immediately.”

“Sure, only—gosh, it's a shame, Miss Martin. Mr. Grimm's been at the factory almost every night and this was the weekend—”