He stayed in his study until mid-afternoon, sitting in his favorite chair and thinking, nodding to himself occasionally as he crafted the plan in his mind. After the sun crossed over the house and began its unhurried summertime descent to the Pacific, Neil stood and walked to his desk, picking up the mirrored brass telephone. He summoned his accountant and top financial man, J. Harrison Musselwhite IV, telling him to be at Hillside at seven-thirty the following morning.
All of the solitude and rational, sober thoughts had paid off. Neil now had a plan.
CHAPTER FOUR
Neil held a steaming mug of coffee as he watched J. Harrison Musselwhite IV pace the pea gravel in the flower-enclosed sitting area. They were in the garden on the northeastern corner of Hillside, at the highest point, with the smell of lilac thick in the still, dewy morning air. The shimmering water of San Francisco bay was far below them, golden under the rising sun. An unusual southern wind had warmed the fledgling day to a comfortable temperature near seventy degrees, yet Harrison was sweating as if he were trudging through Death Valley.
Harrison stopped suddenly, sending small pebbles flying from his highly shined cordovan wingtips. His right hand gripped his hat, twirling it nervously. As he gaped at Neil, his mouth opened and closed two times. Without speaking, he shook his head and resumed his pacing. Neil watched as Harrison stopped again, mopping his brow with his handkerchief as he shot another bewildered glance at Neil. Neil wasn’t surprised at Harrison’s shock over what he had just been told. The financial man obviously thought Neil was insane.
Perhaps he was correct.
At sixty, Harrison was nineteen years Neil’s senior. Long and lanky, Harrison had more loose skin on his face than an aged hound dog. His drawn mien and periorbital puffiness gave many people the impression that he was slow and incapable. But a close inspection would reveal green, vigilant eyes that rarely missed even the smallest of details. With a degree in accounting from the University of Arkansas, sent there by a father who worked day and night in a lumber mill to make sure his son could have the things he never did, Harrison had come west as a bookkeeper for the railroad before opening his own firm in Sacramento. It wasn’t long after that when a young man named Neil Reuter recruited him for his growing Bay Area shipping company.
Neil trusted Harrison unreservedly. He was one of the brightest men he’d ever met. Harrison’s wise counsel helped Neil to grow the company beyond anything either of them would have ever dared dream.
From the tin on the Adirondack style table next to him, Neil removed a cigarette and lit it. He turned his mug up, swilling the remainder of the cooling coffee, then took a long drag of the Lucky Strike. He gestured to the adjacent chair.
“Will you please stop pacing and sit down?”
Harrison nodded curtly and sat. Unable to halt his frenetic activity, his sweaty hands twirled and wrung the blue felt hat, adding a curl to the brim.
“Promise me…” Harrison started before choking on his words. He stopped and seemed to struggle to swallow.
“Water?” Neil asked.
Harrison waved him off, collecting himself. “Neil, your parents are dead and gone. And, well, I know the situation with Emilee was traumatic, to say the least.”
“And my son.”
Harrison cleared his throat again and spoke lowly. “Yes, and your son.” He turned his body in the white garden chair and jabbed a crooked finger at Neil. “But you can’t do this, Neil. You just can’t. Not at least without taking sufficient time to think about it. You want to travel around the world, fine. Want to take a sabbatical and live in the desert like some reefer-steeped shaman, that’s fine, too. Or maybe you just ought to go out on that boat of yours and get stinking drunk.” Harrison tilted his furrowed face skyward, summoning calm. His voice settled when he resumed his speech. “You can leave everything at the business to me, or—because you know I don’t have any ego about it—we can bring in someone else to run the company.” Harrison smoothed the brim of the hat in his hands, afterward shaping its peaks. “Neil, you may see things differently in a year. Plus…and this is the most important part…the company isn’t going to fetch near the multiple it would have before the crash. You’d be committing corporate suicide to sell it right now.”
Neil nodded at Harrison, acknowledging his advisor’s point. Drawing in on the cigarette, Neil listened to the tobacco crackle under the heat created by the suction of oxygen. After picking a piece of tobacco off of his tongue, he asked Harrison a question.
“Approximately what am I worth?”
“Pardon?”
“What am I worth?”
Harrison leaned back into the angled chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “Why are you doing this?”
“Damn it, Harrison,” Neil said evenly. “Answer the question.”
Harrison snorted—the sound of a sane man forced to communicate to a crazy one. “Business and personal?”
Neil pitched the cigarette into a fully blooming rose bush and stood, creating a shadow over Harrison. “If I liquidate everything. Your best guess.”
Harrison dropped the hat crookedly onto his head. “The company, the estate, the cars, the boat, stocks, bonds, your minority interest in the bank, the property in Santa Cruz, the property in Salinas, your miscellaneous assets…I’d hazard somewhere close to two million. Maybe even two-and-a-quarter.”
Neil digested the figure and began to walk. Waving his hand, he motioned Harrison to sit still—he wanted a moment alone to think. He walked from the sitting area, through the curved path of the flower garden and onto the damp green grass of the northern plateau of the Spanish-style estate. Neil could see the towers of the newly completed Golden Gate Bridge, a thick fog bank enveloping the lower half. The top of the fog bank was visibly sheared off by the southern wind, but the land on the southern side of the mouth of the bay, near the Presidio, was protecting the lower half of the fog over the water.
“Two million dollars, maybe two-and-a-quarter,” Neil said aloud. In his fifteen years of professional business, he’d never once stopped to estimate how much wealth he had amassed. It would have been like stopping midway through a good round to pronounce his score in golf—an absolute no-no. A veritable curse.
He clearly remembered his pay when he was a young soldier at the Presidio—four dollars every two weeks.
Four measly bucks.
Then, he’d had only fifty-something dollars when he arrived back in Northern California after the Army. He recalled the men he was told to contact, then the companies they told him to work with. He remembered his first shipping order. And his second. It wasn’t long before money began to tumble in. His days were long, sometimes loading and unloading crates and cartons from sunup until sundown.
Did he know, back then, that his success was no coincidence?
Turns out, it was guaranteed. The guarantor? Uncle Sam, himself.
After dark, Neil would do as he’d been told, traveling about and reporting on the things he learned. The company—despite being a cover—had grown under his leadership. As his position in society developed, he became more influential, able to learn critical societal secrets that others could not. Despite his Indian blood—which few knew about—Neil had blossomed into one of the bay area’s most well respected businessmen.
Yet, he realized now, the vast sum of his net worth didn’t add one bit to his personal view of who he was. If anything, it cheapened his self-opinion. For years Neil had convinced himself that his success was due to his own hard work. Sure, he’d been helped along—and for the longest time he made himself believe that the success of his company, the rapid growth and the legal crushing of his nearest competitors, was borne of his own hard work. From its start, with one piddly slip down at Pier 23, to its current position as the largest shipping company in California, Neil had been consumed by the company’s growth. But the trappings of his life, like the estate at Hillside and their small yacht, had been Emilee’s desires, not his. Unfortunately, had Neil had his way,
he’d have slept at the office every night.
But now, since her death, Neil realized Emilee’s motivations—the home, the yacht, the cabin down in Santa Cruz, and all of the other niceties she’d been involved in purchasing—hadn’t been about her desires to be showy at all. Rather, those purchases had been her futile, desperate efforts to draw him closer to her. And, despite all that, he’d still put her behind his career.
“Sonofabitch,” he said aloud, tilting his head back, feeling his self-loathing welling up inside him. His money, his burgeoning company and his position in society had nothing at all to do with his own intelligence. He could have done a horrible job and the company would have still grown like a weed. The men behind his ascent even made him hide his Shoshone heritage. His entire existence in San Francisco was all a fancy ruse, nothing more than a cover—no different than a fake moustache and five and dime wig.
And what had all this cost the government? Couple of million? What’s a few million bucks to Uncle Sam, especially when the old man is protecting his interests?
And Emilee had been so damned proud. If she’d only known the truth, he thought, shaking his head.
Well, it’s all over now.
And, to Neil, blowing it all up felt good.
He strode purposefully back to Harrison, now sitting erect with his Fedora cocked in the fashion of the day.
“How quickly can you arrange for everything to be sold?” Neil asked.
“When you say everything, do you—”
“Everything, Harrison. Other than what I can pack in a suitcase.” Neil’s face was stone, his dual-colored eyes blazing as he watched his already shell-shocked right hand man register the blow of such a request.
Harrison’s tone turned formal. “You’ve lost your mind, sir.”
“Maybe so. How long?”
“Months. Perhaps more.”
“I want it done this week.”
“Pardon?”
“This—week.”
Harrison snatched the hat from his head, standing quickly. “If you do that, it’s viewed as a fire sale, and everyone will know you’ve gone utterly mad!”
“That happened a long time ago.” Neil’s face and expression softened as he gripped the older man’s bony shoulder. “Just do it, Harrison. And do it very quietly.”
“Is there a…is there a new woman that’s made you do this?”
Neil’s grip became hydraulic. “No, Harrison. There isn’t, and will never be, another Em.”
Harrison lowered his eyes and didn’t respond other than a slight nod.
“Do you want to buy the company?” Neil asked.
“No, sir.”
“I’ll give it to you at a tremendous discount.”
“No, thank you.”
Neil stared out over the bay. “Well, Eugene Remington and his partners will buy it. I have no doubt. Take your time today to determine what the entirety is worth, ships, inventory and all, then offer them a twenty-five percent discount contingent upon closing by Friday. Tell them they have to buy everything in the business, down to the lead pencils and rubbish containers, along with all my personal property.”
Harrison shook his head, clearly nonplussed but trying to follow along. “They’ll never manage to arrange financing that fast.”
Neil lit another cigarette, speaking with smoke escaping his mouth. “You don’t actually believe that.”
“Perhaps it’s hope.”
Neil smiled. “I think even I could arrange financing, especially if I knew I could make twenty-five percent at the stroke of a fountain pen.”
“Very well, sir. It’s your company, your things.”
“There’s another contingency.”
“Sir?”
“Discretion. They must keep this from their employees, and we from ours.” Neil held up his index finger for emphasis. “I don’t want a whiff of this getting out until the papers are signed. And you make sure the lawyers know that, too. There can be no escape hatches in any of the contracts.”
J. Harrison Musselwhite, IV pinched his craggy lips together and nodded. He looked taken aback and panicky.
“Call in a lawyer you trust to take care of my personal holdings and what not.”
“Fine,” Harrison said distantly.
“You’ll be well taken care of,” Neil said. “You’ve done so much for me…for our company.”
Harrison shook Neil’s hand and walked back to the chauffeured company Lincoln. Neil called after him. Harrison stopped. Neil strode over, bear-hugging his trusted advisor, clapping him on the back. Harrison pulled back after a moment, eyes wide. Neil, in all of his time with Harrison, had never done more than shake his hand.
“Neil, please tell me you won’t do something…” Harrison’s voice cracked. He couldn’t finish his sentence.
Neil smiled reassuringly. “Harrison, I’m fine. Better than I’ve been in two years.”
The elder man studied Neil for a moment before he entered the Lincoln. Neil could see his employee’s ashen face as the car headed to their offices down on Sansome.
Adding a touch of levity to the situation, Neil thought about the call Harrison would soon make to Southern California, to Eugene Remington, the able competitor based at the Port of Los Angeles. And wouldn’t Eugene be floored when he received that unexpected phone call? Neil would bet another twenty-five percent of the take that once Remington’s wife laid her eyes on Hillside, they’d be making plans for a hasty move to San Francisco.
That made Neil again think of Emilee.
He threw his cigarette on the ground, crushing it out under his black split-toe shoe. He then dropped back in the Adirondack chair and stared in silence out over the bay for a full hour.
Overriding his sorrow was the thought of hundreds of children. He didn’t know where they were hiding, but he knew it must be miserable for them. And scary.
There were 52 days remaining before they would miss their ship and come out of hiding.
~~~
Neil’s preparations were complete on August 2nd. He had just under a month-and-a-half to get to Innsbruck and lead the hidden children to their freedom. The hired car idled behind Neil. He handed his second bag to the driver, asking the man to give him a moment. Neil turned, stuffing his hands in his pockets, looking at Agnes Holloway. She stood there in the pea gravel drive, a hand over her mouth as was her habit during times of great stress. He stepped in front of her, lifting her chin with his finger. His smile was gentle—unusual for him.
“Are you going to be okay, Aggie?”
She choked on her words. “The real question is, will you be okay?”
“Of course I will.” Neil’s hand slid up her face, his thumb wiping the burgeoning tears away. “Thank you, Aggie. Thank you for all you’ve done for me, and for Em. She loved you like a mother, you know that.”
“I know she did,” Agnes answered, voice cracking.
“And, Aggie,” he waited until she joined eyes with him. “I want to apologize for the way I’ve acted since Emilee’s death.”
“Why?”
“It consumed me, made me someone I don’t want to be. I just want you to know I’m sorry. You never had a proper chance to grieve over Em for having to tend to me and my drunken escapades.”
Agnes dipped her head, shaking it.
“Was the money okay?”
“Oh…the money’s fine,” she answered, stomping one foot and sending pea gravel skittering over Neil’s shoes.
“Then what is it?”
There was a long pause as she joined eyes with him, her eyes darting between each of his eyes. “You’re never coming back. I have no idea where you’re going or what you’re planning, but I know…I know in my heart that you’re never coming back.”
Neil made no effort to convince her otherwise. Instead, he pecked her on the cheek. “Aggie, the pension I provided you is taxable.”
“I don’t know what that even means.”
“But the large box of cash that I placed under
your bed…it’s not taxable. Just don’t ever deposit it or spend too much in one place, okay? Buy a nice safe and keep it there, then use it for your spending money. It should last you many, many years.”
Agnes Holloway’s jaw ceased operations.
Neil lifted his finger for emphasis. “You’ll eventually be questioned about my departure, and that’s fine. Hold nothing back. But please, until then, not a word. And don’t mention the cash,” he said with a wink. “Don’t ever mention the cash.”
With a final wave, he entered the back of the car, instructing the driver to take him to San Francisco Municipal Airport, located south of downtown. Neil stared at Agnes Holloway, his longtime maidservant, as the car crunched out of the gravel drive and away from Hillside.
Forever.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS A FEW MINUTES BEFORE SIX IN THE EVENING IN WASHINGTON D.C. A summer thunderstorm had just blown through, racing northeast with the speed of an automobile and still trailing light rain as lightning cracked in the distance. Behind it, the bureaucratic city was left catching its breath in cooler temperatures and unseasonable wind. With its driver taking advantage of the wet roads, a speeding inky black Lincoln slid to a stop in front of the State, War, and Navy Building.
The building, like most government structures in Washington, was enormous. Decidedly old French in its design, making it somewhat unique, it had drawn the ire of many a discriminating eye over time. Mark Twain once termed it “the ugliest building in America.”
Preston Lord, the Lincoln’s primary occupant, had shown prescience years before when he lobbied to be stationed in the new government buildings down at Foggy Bottom. He knew, all too well, that the State, War, and Navy Building was inefficient in design as well as bursting at its seams. The original tenants, the War Department and the Department of the Navy, would soon be vacating because of the heavy overcrowding. It was so bad that, on the first and third floors, secretaries and low-level bureaucrats were forced to move their desks, en masse, into long rows in the hallways. Even the basement—it was nothing more than a leaky, damp, rat-infested hole—was now being used by the lowest rung of senior officials.
Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller Page 4
