Institute (9 page)

“I know all about that. They’ve been propositioning me about Bagastex for a couple of years at least, and, of course, I’ve had it looked into. But the next question concerns
you.
What’s your connection with it?”

“I don’t have any connection.”

“Where’d you get your information?”

“That, I’m not free to divulge, Mr. Garrett.”

“Dr. Palmer, I have to know.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, there can be no secrets between us—not on this can there be. And for another, I have to be sure you’re not being used as a catspaw.”

“A what?”

“A means to an end.”

“You mean, I could have been fed this tip as bait, so I would pass it on to you, and—”

“Exactly.”

“I assure you, it’s nothing like that.”

“You
think
it’s nothing like that.”

When I hung up, the senator, who had heard, shook his head gloomily. “I’m sorry, Lloyd,” he said, “but I had to sew it up. I couldn’t help it. There are things I can’t go into. It could cost me my seat to get mixed up in this mess. ... Well, thanks for standing pat. I’d have expected it of you. Can’t say more than that.”

The food came and I ordered a bottle of Chablis, but he said: “Make it a split.” When the waitress brought it, she also brought the phone back, saying: “Long-distance call, Dr. Palmer. My, but you’re busy today.”

It was Mr. Garrett again. When I expressed surprise that he knew where I was, he said: “I called Hortense to find out what she knew, and she didn’t know anything except where you were and who with—which, of course, cleared up one thing right away. But while I was talking to her, Miss Immelman brought me the file, the stuff I have on Bagastex, and right now I’m looking at a memo I hadn’t seen before which makes it a whole new ball game—and how. So, Lloyd, once again, you’ve done it. Now let me talk to the senator.”

I hesitated a moment and then said: “I’ll see if he’s still here.”

Cupping my hand over the phone, I said to Senator Hood: “Do you want to talk to him? He found out I’m with you, from Hortense.”

“O.K., Paul Pry,” the senator said, taking the phone; “I’ll give you what help I can. But don’t quote me and don’t record this call. Is the bug on or off? ... O.K., what do you want to know?”

He answered questions in a quick, straight-from-the-shoulder way, and I got a glimpse of the enormous body of knowledge a big shot has to have to be a big shot. I also got a glimpse of one of the crookedest deals I’ve ever heard of—a scheme with forty angles, to defraud investors, growers, creditors, contractors, machinery manufacturers, and the government. I understood at last why he couldn’t get mixed up in it. Finally he was done and handed the phone back to me.

“Lloyd,” Mr. Garrett said in a very friendly tone; “you did the right thing in protecting the senator until he chose to break silence. On that part, no hard feelings. I’ll be down in a couple of hours to look this building over, and if I like it, I’ll move in—or try to. So will you stand by at home for my call in case I need you? And will you tell Hortense I’m on my way?”

“You want this dope I have? The lawyer and so on?”

“I’ll have Miss Immelman take it.”

I got home around three and called Hortense. I told her that Garrett was on his way to Washington, but that left us dangling. We would have to stand by as we were, with no idea when we could see each other, and especially
whether
we could. But we had reached the point where we hungered for those nights, and I told her: “I feel funny inside, as though a vacuum were there.”

“You always say it exactly the way I feel it. It would look peculiar, though, if I weren’t here when he arrives.”

“You have to be there, of course.”

So we sweated it out. But around five he called me to say that he was at the Garrett Building and to meet him at Downing’s office. I drove in. The Pell Building is on Fourteenth Street below H Street, and I put the car in a New York Avenue parking lot and walked. But who did I meet, also walking, but Mr. Garrett! He waved and fell in step beside me. But he didn’t shake hands. At Downing’s office the girls had gone.

“We have the place to ourselves,” Downing said. He was a man around forty, slightly bald, and most deferential to Mr. Garrett, telling him: “Sir, you may not remember me, but I met you once, and I’ve heard you speak once or twice. I was the one on the front row, taking notes.”

“Yes, I remember you well,” said Mr. Garrett.

We laughed, and Mr. Garrett introduced me. “Dr. Palmer will sit in on this,” he said.

“Not with me, he won’t,” Downing said. “No one sits in on this but thee and me, Mr. Garrett.”

“Oh? You’ve got to that certain point?”

“What certain point?”

“Of excluding all witnesses.”

“Okay, call it that.”

They went into Downing’s private office while I tramped around the reception room and outer offices, the doors of which were open. I examined the big framed portraits of Roger Taney, Charles Evans Hughes, William Howard Taft, Earl Warren, and Warren Burger until I knew practically every fold of their robes. I did this for an hour. Every so often the snarl of Downing’s voice told me there might be a reason for excluding witnesses. Later, I found out that what the argument was about was what had been done by Colonel Lucas, the president of Tombigvannah when Bagastex began to sag. He had sold off Tombig subsidiaries, ostensibly for cash to operate with but actually to detach them from the crash when it came, so they would stay in the Lucas family, as the buyer was Lucas’s brother.

Garrett, while offering a decent deal—cash to the building contractor and ARMALCO stock for Tombig, on a three-for-one basis—was doing it only on the condition that Tombig recaptured the subsidiaries and bought them back for what had been paid. They included a cigar factory in Charleston, a breakfast food plant in Savannah, a lumber mill in Alabama, and a power plant near Augusta. The recapture stipulation was what Downing was snarling about. But Mr. Garrett didn’t snarl. He didn’t have to. He was holding trump cards, as he usually did. As a sort of preliminary to whatever might come up, he had bought stock some time before—Tombig stock—and he now told Downing: “O.K., we let the bankruptcy suit proceed, if that’s how you want to play it. But this afternoon or tomorrow, a stockholder who happened to buy in just in case, will file a complaint alleging fraudulent disposal of assets before involuntary bankruptcy, which is a felony. And if Leonard Downing’s a party to it, if it turns out that he helped compound the fraud, something very unpleasant is going to happen to Leonard Downing.”

“I see. I see.”

So that’s how things stood—at least as I piece them together now from what was told me later—when Mr. Garrett came out, closed the door, and dialed one of the secretary’s phones, still without looking at me. In a moment he began to talk in a low, guarded tone: “Sam?”—who seemed to be Sam Dent, my friend from the Dover trip—“Sam, I’m at a lawyer’s office, man named Leonard Downing, in the Pell Building. I need you here at once. Yes, it’s on that Tombigvannah thing.”

He hung up and then sat down in a chair, still paying no attention to me. Pretty soon Downing came out, half-sat on the typewriter table, and mopped his bald spot with his handkerchief. “Well,” he said, “we’re in luck. Colonel Lucas is on his way over. He just happened to be in town.”

“I thought he might be,” said Mr. Garrett.

“We could wind this thing up tonight.”

“I just talked to Sam Dent, my lawyer. He’s on his way.”

“Yeah, I know Sam.”

They paid no attention to me then or when various people arrived, in gabardines, summer suits, and shorts. Downing would jerk his thumb as soon as a new one showed, and he would join the others in one of the inner offices. Then a big, heavyset man came in. He had that brown mahogany color that stays outdoors all the time. His name, I later learned, was O’Connor. He was the contractor. Downing introduced him to Mr. Garrett, saying: “This is
the
Richard, Garrett, Jim. We’re trying to lay a deal—a three-way thing for cash, stock, and assets—that will clear up things for you. So act respectful.”

“I would, anyway.”

“Okay, but lean on it.”

“Mr. Garrett, greetings, sir.”

“Jim, I’ve heard of you, and nothing but good.”

Then Sam Dent came in, and Mr. Garrett at once took him into one of the offices to talk. But when they came out, he looked worried. Then at last came a character who had to be seen to be believed, and even then he didn’t look real. He was about fifty, with white hair, white eyebrows, and white goatee, as well as a white sharkskin suit, white shoes, and an old-fashioned Panama hat, and he carried a gold-headed cane. Here was the genuine article, a Southern colonel with so much honesty shining out of his face that I wouldn’t have trusted him—and no sensible person would—any farther than I could throw him.

“Colonel Lucas,” exclaimed Downing, first bowing and then shaking hands; “I give you Mr. Richard Garrett,
the
Mr. Richard Garrett!”

“Mr. Garrett,” said the colonel, “the pleasure of this moment is surpassed only by its memorable nature, from the honor it accords me.” Or “accowds me,” actually, to report it as it sounded.

“Colonel Lucas,” said Mr. Garrett, “I reciprocate the sentiments you express, if not in such felicitous words, then in equal uplift of spirit. I have long looked forward to this honor.”

His face was also glowing with honesty—or, at least, with something. The two men went into Downing’s office, closed the door, and left the rest of us to twiddle our thumbs. Dent came over, and we shook hands. “Will you be seeing Mrs. Garrett soon?” he said. “Like, for instance, tonight?”

“I hadn’t expected to. Why?”

“He pays attention to what she says. You could put the bug in her bonnet to talk him out of this thing.”

“You mean Bagastex?”

“Yeah, Bagastex.”

“But what do I know about it? And what do you?”

“I know plenty about it.”

He started talking about how Bagastex had flopped and how ARMALCO was heading for trouble in loading itself down with such a headache. I interrupted to say that I was partly responsible, since I had tipped Mr. Garrett off to the deal, and besides, I felt that it tied in with the Institute I was starting. Sam kept shaking his head, but then the door of Downing’s office flew open and there was the colonel, his hat in one hand and his cane in the other, his hair falling down on his shoulders. “Sir,” he bellowed back toward the office, “what do you take me for? That you would insult me so?” Mr. Garrett strolled out, cool, calm, and friendly. “Colonel,” he said quietly, “I take you for a peach, a beautiful Georgia peach that’s been skinned, the slipperiest object yet created by God. You
are
beautiful. You
are
skinned. Bagastex saw to that. And you
are
slippery. That, you have to admit.”

“I do not admit any such thing. And I resent your remowk.”

“I was just being funny.”

“I see nothing funny about it.”

“Trying
to be funny, let us say.”

“I demand an apowlogy from you.”

“I apologize.”

“What has been said is not so easily unsaid.”

“It’s the insidious way I work.”

“Then you still mean that I am ‘slippery’?”

“I still mean that you were skinned—by Bagastex, its investors, and all the investors’ friends. I still mean that you are broke and had better make a deal before the government takes you to the cleaners. I still mean enough cash to bail you out—of the building, on a three-for-one stock deal that will give you something to fall back on, and your retirement as president of Tombigvannah.”

“It is that condition, sir, which I regowd as an insult.”

“A compliment, you should call it. In my company, I’m the big bull elephant. You may not see the tusks—”

“I feel them, sir, in my ribs.”

“And in
your
company, you’re the bull. But there’s no room for two big bulls in an elephant herd. One of us has to give ground. So—”

He didn’t finish. Flinging his hat and cane on the typewriter table and slumping into the secretary’s chair, the colonel collapsed in tears, dropping his head on his chest and sobbing uncontrollably.

Downing turned to O’Connor with a gesture that meant things were settled. At first O’Connor looked surprised, but then he nodded. Mr. Garrett put his arm around the colonel and said to Sam Dent: “Get it on paper.”

“Mr. Garrett,” sobbed the colonel, “I truly thank you.”

“My privilege, sir; I assure you.”

The two of them followed Downing and Sam into Downing’s office and the door closed behind them.

T
HE THING WENT ON
for an hour, with Downing at last popping out, a pencil between his teeth, to open the typewriter desk, put in paper with carbons, and begin pecking away, while Mr. Garrett and Sam Dent took turns popping out, whispering in Downing’s ear, and laying yellow legal pad worksheets beside him. Pretty soon Downing took the stuff he had typed back to his office, then came back out and closed the desk.

“Christ, what a night!” he said and started into his office again. But at that moment the outer door opened, and Hortense was standing there in a dark dress and green coat. Everyone seemed to know who she was and jumped up respectfully. They seemed almost excited. She saw me and waved a friendly, if baffled, greeting. Downing did it big, introducing himself and telling her: “Mr. Garrett’s in my office, Mrs. Garrett. He asked you to come down so you could look at a building he expects to acquire.”

“Oh,
that!”

“He’s right in there.”

But before Downing could escort her in, the door opened and Mr. Garrett, Dent, and the colonel came out. Each of them had a piece of typewritten paper and they all acted friendly. When Mr. Garrett saw Hortense he kissed her and said how pretty she looked, which caused twinges to go through me. He let her say hello to Sam and then presented the colonel whose finest hour it now turned out to be. He bent over, kissed her hand, and said: “Mrs. Garrett, the honor, the privilege, the thrill I feel at last, to meet a lady I have heard about, every word of it praise, completely overwhelms me.”