Heartland (13 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

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Newman nodded.
“Good. Secondly, we will need to be kept informed of your itinerary, as far in advance as possible.”
“My secretary will be able to provide you with that.”
“And last of all, I would like you, and perhaps your wife and Mr. Saratt, to come up with a list of people who would like to see you harmed, and their reasons.”
“I know of no one like that.”
“I'm sure you do, Mr. Newman,” Coatsworth said with an air of authority. “All of us have enemies. No matter how farfetched you may think the idea, it would be of immense help to us. We do want to protect you.”
“That would be a potentially dangerous list. Very sensitive.”
Coatsworth smiled. “You may wish to check with the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington and, internationally, with Interpol in Paris, Geneva, or London. We are a recognized and legitimate firm, I assure you.”
“If I travel?”
“We will come with you. Are you planning on going somewhere soon?”
“Very likely. But I travel constantly, Mr. Coatsworth. All over the world.”
“We will be at your side,” Coatsworth said. He got to his feet. “I'll check with your secretary for your schedule. May we have the list by this afternoon?”
“I'll see what I can come up with,” Newman said dryly.
At the door the security chief stopped and turned back. “My technicians will be here a little later this morning to sweep your telephones and electrical circuits. They are at your house now.”
Newman nodded. When Coatsworth was gone, he sat back in his chair and shook his head ruefully.
“This time I agree with Lydia,” Saratt said.
“Two weeks, Paul, then we review the situation.”
“Fair enough,” Saratt said. “But you told Coatsworth you would be going somewhere soon. Anything I should know about?”
“I'm going to Washington to speak with Lundgren.”
“We have our licenses for stateside grain; or are you worried about the Justice Department finding out about our foreign activities?”
“I'm worried about the entire thing,” Newman said, choosing his words with care. He still hadn't thought it out completely, but it seemed as if everything was somehow missing a beat. Off kilter. Out of sync. It felt wrong to him.
“All our subsidiaries are third- and fourth-party agreements, most of them on foreign holding companies. What can go wrong?”
“It's not that.”
“What then? The Cargill and Louis Dreyfus business?”
“Partly. But it's this entire deal, Paul. I think we're being set up.”
“So did I. But Dybrovik is taking the corn as and when we ship it, and the funds are being transferred without question into our TradeCon account in Zurich. So even if the bottom fell out tomorrow, we'd be safe.”
“How close have the actual transactions been played?”
“To within a couple of hundred thousand tons on shipments, but we're going to have to start going after the futures market within the next week to ten days.”
“Which has been made a damned sight easier for us because of Cargill's troubles.”
Saratt started to say something, but then he held off, an odd look suddenly crossing his features. “You're not worried about a market manipulation. Not at all. It's something else.”
“We're talking about as much as a hundred million tons of corn. Unprecedented. The largest deal in the history
of grain trading.”
Saratt nodded.
“And no one seems to be overly excited. Least of all Dybrovik. And hardly anyone else, except for Louis Dreyfus, whose people were snooping around Abex, and Cargill, who cut their barge rates again last week. What the hell does that tell you?”
“There is interest in us. We expected that.”
“You're missing my point,” Newman snapped.
“Evidently.”
“How much current corn will we be able to ship to the Russians before the supplies bottom out?”
Saratt shrugged. “Considering his seventy-five percent restriction, perhaps as much as seven or eight million tons.”
“The rest is in futures. As much as we can nail down.”
“On margin, with Exportkhleb's funds.”
“And our reputation.”
“I still don't see …” Saratt started, but Newman cut him off.
“Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Russians have a bumper year. Suppose they harvest all the corn they need—or nearly all the corn they need—with perhaps only a seven- or eight-million-ton shortfall.”
“Then the deal wouldn't make any sense. Why purchase futures? By the time they came out of the fields, we'd all know the state of the Soviet crop, and their game would be up. So why do such a thing?”
“I can think of two reasons right off the bat. The firs would be for them not to honor their futures contracts They'd lose their ten percent, but the entire marke would go down the tubes … including our business.'
“That doesn't make any sense. What grudge do the Russians have against us?”
“The second would be that they'd go ahead and take delivery on the corn. All of it.”
“To dump it back on the market?”
Newman shook his head. “To store it within the Soviet Union. A grain stockpile.”
“To what end, for Christ's sake, Paul?”
“A siege?” Newman suggested, his stomach tight.
Saratt said nothing, although his mouth was open.
“We're stockpiling oil in old saltmines as a national crisis reserve. Why not stockpile food?”
“They wouldn't need it. Next spring they'd plant again, and in the fall they'd harvest.”
“If they could. If their transportation network was still intact. If their population hadn't been decimated.”
“Good Lord, you're talking war!”
“I don't know, Paul. I just don't know, but I think we should do what we can to find out.”
“If you make waves, the entire structure could come down around our ears.”
“I know it.”
“It's crazy,” Saratt said.
“Frightening, is more like it.”
Newman was a pragmatist who made his decisions and accomplished his tasks a step at a time. That, despite the fact his agile mind could grasp dozens of seemingly disconnected events and unrelated details, and intuitively reduce them into recognizable patterns. His mother, who had died a few years after his father, had called this ability, evident since childhood, his “artistic talent.” She had always maintained that her son would someday become a great painter, or perhaps even a poet, although she admitted he was nowhere nearly tragic enough for the latter.
His father agreed only insofar as his son's artistic temperament was concerned, but he maintained that such talent was best served in the business world.
“It's the creative ones who amass the fortunes, who build the bridges, or discover the oil, or make the
deals,” the old man said. “Not the plodders.”
Newman stood at his window watching the crew clear the dunnage from the holds of a ship which had come in this morning for powdered milk, as he thought about himself and tried to justify what he was doing. There had been nothing creative or artistic about his work this day. Through BanLine Shipping, Inc., his subsidiary in Savannah, he had secured three bulk-cargo vessels to carry paper to New York and then come empty down the St. Lawrence to Duluth for corn.
Through Abex in New York he had hired a fourth vessel, carrying flour to Buffalo, to take on corn for shipment to Gdynia in Poland.
From Masters & Kildare, Inc., a nationally recognized farm-survey firm (another of his subsidiaries), he had received the first reports on corn futures in this country; Blencoe, S.A., out of Brussels, had promised its international futures survey within a couple of days.
He had read a report from TradeCon, his financial holding company in Zurich, that another $11.5 million had been transferred from Eurobank in Geneva, bringing the total to well above $20 million.
He had perused masters' reports from eleven vessels now at sea carrying corn, heading toward seven different ports within the Warsaw Pact. He had studied the constantly fluctuating rate schedules of a dozen trucking firms, two river-barge companies, and the railroad.
The Teamsters here in Duluth-Superior were filing a series of grievances with the Port Authority that if left unchecked could blossom into a wildcat strike, so Newman had dictated a letter to Robert LaBatt, the Port Authority director, outlining his concerns and suggestions.
His secretary had secured an appointment for him with Secretary of Agriculture Lundgren at 2:00 P.M. tomorrow and had arranged for the company aircraft to be ready first thing in the morning.
One hour ago he and Saratt had put their heads together to come up with a list of people who would like to see the Newman Company harmed, and in particular Kenneth Newman himself put out of commission. It was a very short list. It did not include Dybrovik or the Russians.
And now it was the end of the day. Nothing essential had been accomplished that any one of his office people could not have managed nicely, and Newman felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction with himself and his work.
Such feelings were rare for him, and he had learned that they indicated he was on the wrong track; that he was ignoring some central problem. Yet he felt somewhat foolish that he had suggested to Saratt the possibility that the Russians were girding for a war.
Stop the deal, a voice at the back of his mind had nagged. Simply pull out. The easy part had been accomplished, or nearly accomplished. Within a month Exportkhleb would have its seven or eight million tons of corn. The big difficulties would come on the futures market, when other grain merchants began realizing that a significant portion of the available world crop had already been spoken for. The waves would begin then; the repercussions would spread like the shock from a nuclear blast. Prices would go wild. Shipping firms would revise their schedules sharply upward. But by then it would be too late. The damage would have been done. And if everything had been laid out correctly, it would be impossible to trace it back to the
Newman Company.
They would be safe. In fact, they would scream market manipulation as loudly as everyone else.
It did not bother Newman that he was violating U.S. antitrust and licensing laws. Food was food, and as long as it was being used ultimately to feed people, it didn't matter to him which people were fed. His job, as he saw it, was merely the redistribution of grain to wherever it was needed, and to make a profit as and where he could.
This deal with Dybrovik was profitable, there was no doubt about that, but the profits would not be excessive. Once the market went wild later this summer, corn prices would skyrocket, but by then he would have already sold his grain at the earlier, lower prices. The market profiteers would come later. They would be the ones to scream the very loudest.
Pull out? To what end, Newman asked himself as he stared blindly out the window. If his foolish fears were in fact groundless, he'd be the man who had backed out of the largest grain deal in history.
If he was right, however, and Exportkhleb was attempting to amass a crisis stockpile of food, then Dybrovik would not be deterred by Newman's refusal to do business. He would simply go to the other independents.
He shook himself out of his contemplations, straightened his tie, grabbed his briefcase, and went out the door.
His secretary was getting ready to leave as well, her typewriter covered. She smiled. “Have a good trip to Washington,” she said.
“Thanks. Has Paul left for the evening?”
“I believe he's still in his office,” she said, reaching for the telephone.
“Don't call, I'll stop down to see him on my way out.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said.
Newman took the elevator to the ground floor, where his two bodyguards were waiting in the reception area. They jumped up when he appeared.
“I'll be just a minute,” he said. He went into the trading room, where worldwide grain quantities and prices were constantly monitored, the figures flashed on overhead screens. The large room was mostly in darkness now. The basic work on the Russian purchase was being done by Newman Company subsidiaries around the world so that no suspicion would fall here.
Saratt was in his office at the rear of the room, talking on the telephone. He looked up as Newman came in, said something into the phone, then hung up and got to his feet.
“Ready to call it a day?”
“Just on my way out,” Newman said. “I'll call you as soon as I finish with Lundgren tomorrow.”
“You're not going to get much out of him.”
“Probably not, Paul, but it's worth a try.”
Saratt stared at him for a long moment, the expression in his eyes a mixture of concern and skepticism. “You're still worried about Dybrovik?”
Newman nodded. He found himself at this moment unable to share with his old friend the extent of his concern. “If we could get any kind of an indication of the expected Russian corn crop, it's help.”
“The President has signed the grain extension with the Russians.”
“That's small stuff, and it's in addition to what we're selling them,” Newman said.
“Then I don't know what you expect to get from
Lundgren. If the President is convinced the Russians need only ten or fifteen million tons of grain—a big mix, including wheat—then they must believe the Russian shortfall will be normal.”
“Which would prove my point. If they only need ten or fifteen million tons, why order that as well as what Dybrovik wants us to supply?”
Saratt got up and came around his desk to where Newman stood just within the doorway. “We've been friends for a number of years, Kenneth. At the risk of straining that friendship, I have to tell you that you are running scared. I don't think it's just the grain deal with Dybrovik. There's something else eating at you.”
“Lydia hasn't been involved in this at all,” Newman flared.
“I didn't mention her name, but since you did I must tell you that she—”
Newman cut him off. “Don't say it, Paul. I told you once before that I wanted you to do whatever you thought was necessary to protect our business, but if it involved Lydia, never to mention it to me.”
“Goddamn it, can't you see what's happening to you?”
“I can see what's happening to us, and I don't like it,” Newman said harshly, and he could see that the comment had hurt his old friend.
“Talk to Lundgren then, and phone me when you're finished. But for Christ's sake be careful with him. He may be an ass, but he knows the business, and he knows us. If he gets wind of what's going on here, even a whiff of it, he'll scream Justice Department and they'll be on our backs.”
“I'm going for a chat, that's all. Newman Company
is interested in licenses for the new grain extension the President signed.”
Saratt nodded. It was clear from his expression that he wanted very much to say something else, but he was holding back. Newman knew that it concerned Lydia, but he could not bring himself to ask what it was, although he had a fair idea. When Coatsworth's security people had come back here to sweep the office telephones, they had said nothing about his home phones. It was either because they had found Saratt's tap, the one he was using to monitor Lydia's telephone calls (to Buenos Aires?), or it was because they had found nothing.
“Are you staying the night?”
“No. I'm going up to New York to check in with Abex. Roger is becoming concerned that we're not making any direct deals through him.”
“You're not going to tell him, are you?”
“No,” Newman said. “I'm just going to calm him down.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
Back in the reception area, Evans and Humphrey rose to follow him out to the parking lot, and then across town to his home, where they took up position across the street.
He let himself in through the side door from the garage, and Marie met him in the vestibule.
“Good evening, Mr. Newman. Would you care for a drink before dinner?”
“That'd be fine. Where is Mrs. Newman?”
“She said that she would be traveling to Washington with you in the morning, and had some last-minute
errands downtown.” The woman obviously did not like Lydia.
“Did she say when she'd be home?”
“No, sir,” Marie said.
Newman nodded. “I'll take my drink upstairs in my study.”
“Very good, sir.”
Newman showered and changed, then went into his adjoining study which looked down over the harbor and beyond to Lake Superior, stretching to the eastern horizon. Marie had brought up a snifter and a bottle of cognac. He poured himself a healthy measure, lit a cigarette, and sat down in an easy chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Keep booze out of your office,” his father had told him years ago. “Otherwise you'll pour yourself a drink every time you make a deal, and every time a deal falls through. It's the habit that's been the death of more executives than any other cause.”
Whenever he was troubled, he thought about his father. Not really a successful man, at least not by his son's present standards, but a man full of the elusive wisdom that could only be gained through hard living.
“The school of hard knocks,” his father loved to say. “When the situation around you gets difficult, you have to roll with the punches, but never walk away from a fight. Follow your instincts, but never turn your back.”
What about now? Newman wondered.
 
It was around one in the afternoon, when the Newman Company jet, its twin-eagle logo gleaming on the vertical stabilizer, touched down at Washington's National Airport and taxied to the private aviation
terminal.
Two burly men wearing business suits stepped out of the aircraft and sharply scanned the area. Inside, Newman was putting on his jacket.
“You don't have to do this,” he said to Lydia, who stood facing him. He had a heavy feeling that he had done the wrong thing.
She smiled sadly. “You're my husband. Naturally I'll help.”
Newman had debated with himself last night, as he waited for her to come home, whether or not he should tell her about his deal with Dybrovik. In the end he had decided she would
have
to know something if he was to put an end to an impossible situation: his business partner spying on his wife for the good of their business.
He hadn't told her about that, of course, nor had he told her the extent of the Exportkhleb deal. But he had told her that he was dealing with Dybrovik, and he spoke a little about his fears that the Russians were up to something.
“So what do you expect to find out from the Agriculture Department?”

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