Double, Double, Oil and Trouble

by Emma Lathen

  Bowman had other ideas and Miss Corsa entered in time to hear them.

  “Macklin, huh? Well, for my money, I’d keep an eye on the widow. Your Mrs. Wylie looks capable of anything to me.”

  “A very impressive woman,” Thatcher agreed.

  Being a perfect lady, Rose Theresa Corsa said absolutely nothing.

  Chapter 15

  Petrodollars

  But her trials for the day did not end with Francesca Wylie.

  “Going back to London again, are we? Well, here are the tickets for you. I only wish I were going along,” Mr. Elliman prattled. “It sounds absolutely fabulous!”

  The vision of Elliman, safari suit and all, accompanying Mr. Thatcher anywhere in the world staggered Miss Corsa, but she rallied. “There is a possibility that the hotel accommodations may be needed for a second week.”

  Elliman took notes, but his head was in the clouds.

  “Do you read the Washington Post?” he suddenly asked.

  Miss Corsa received it, logged it, renewed it. She did not read it.

  “They say this party’s going to be a bigger bash than the one the Shah of Iran threw,” said Elliman reverently. “Here, have you seen Women’s Wear Daily? Even the Times wrote it up.”

  He pawed through a stack of clippings.

  “I read the Times,” said Miss Corsa.

  “Listen to this,” Elliman burbled. “‘Invitations to the best Arabian Night of them all are in demand from London to Singapore!’ My!”

  The Times, although Miss Corsa did not care to say so, had called it “The Do That’s Got Society Quivering.”

  “‘. . . calling embassies to beg for invitations!’” Elliman read, as if from scripture. “And to think our Mr. Trinkam and Mr. Thatcher are going!”

  Between Mr. Elliman and the tittle-tattle of modern journalism, Miss Corsa was hard-pressed. “Do you think there will be any difficulty about hotel arrangements?” she asked.

  “For this?” Elliman cried. “If I had to, I’d rent Westminster Abbey.”

  Miss Corsa could reconcile herself to another business trip. But reading about beautiful people converging on London was a heavy cross to bear.

  “They’re just another by-product of petroleum,” Thatcher had commented when he caught her at it.

  “Yes, Mr. Thatcher.”

  Familiar with her uncompromising views on work, play, and travel, he added: “Don’t be misled by all this froth, Miss Corsa. Properly speaking, this party should be covered by financial reporters.”

  Thatcher knew that his forthcoming trek to London was going to involve him in festivities that could be described as social only by the preternaturally innocent.

  OPEC was hosting a party. Besides the tinsel reported in the press, the guest list included half the British cabinet, the senior advisers of the Department of Energy, oil companies from Exxon and Texaco to Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, tanker owners from Athens, construction firms from Stockholm, shipbuilders from Tokyo, and bankers from Zurich.

  OPEC, Thatcher suspected, wanted to illustrate the distinction between promise and achievement. Just as every oil well, before it is drilled, is going to be the biggest gusher ever seen, so North Sea oil might become the bonanza of bonanzas. Yields might outstrip those of the Persian Gulf, Europe might dispense with the Emirates, and world energy prices might plummet.

  But, in the meantime, OPEC was doing very well, and they had decided to prove it. Their soiree was going to show what money and power can do. In a rare moment of accord, Libya and Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran decided that neither the pedestrian pleasures of a London hotel nor the dubious delights of the West End sufficed for the occasion. An Arab chieftain does not extend hospitality in a commercial establishment. For that matter, neither does an English gentleman. Fortunately for the two cultures, the ideal site had already passed into Arab hands. This particular jewel consisted of a manor house in Twickenham, set in manicured grounds running down to a substantial frontage on the Thames.

  The best that most guests could do to meet this challenge was a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. But, for once, Elliman had surpassed himself.

  John Putnam Thatcher had been routed from the Sloan to the Concorde, from the Concorde to the Hilton as if he were a mere mortal. But then, on the night of the party, the Elliman touch came through loud and clear.

  The Sloan Guaranty Trust did better than hold its own. Its senior vice president was wafted to Twickenham under the fluttering banners of a magnificent river launch.

  “Mind the step, Mr. Thatcher,” cautioned an attentive steward upon debarkation.

  “God, it makes me feel like Henry VIII,” remarked Charlie Trinkam when his turn came.

  Thatcher examined his companion as they made their way up a gravel path lined with flaming torches. Charlie was looking his dapper best in an impeccable dinner jacket. Nonetheless Thatcher shook his head.

  “You’re not dressed for the part,” he said kindly.

  Their arrival at the main entrance hall provided Charlie with his answer. “Then I’m almost the only one who isn’t,” he said, eyeing the splendid throng eddying up the broad divided staircase.

  John Thatcher had been exposed to the domestic architecture of Regency England before and had admired its many excellences. Now he realized that there had always been a sense of incongruity, of gentle friction between dissonant elements. Those Adam ceilings, those swagged draperies, those crystal chandeliers had never been meant for men in business suits and women in tweed skirts. They had been designed as backgrounds for peacocks, and tonight the Arabs did them justice. As they ascended to the drawing room, their flowing robes and brilliant headdresses improvised unexpected harmonies with the cool celadon green of the paneled walls.

  “Yes,” Thatcher agreed, as he and Charlie attached themselves to the tail of the procession, “Beau Brummel would have been right at home tonight.”

  He was not the only one to sense the lingering presence of neck ruffles and snuffboxes. Almost the first group he recognized after leaving the reception line consisted of Paul Volpe, Klaus Engelhart, and a young woman soon identified as Betsy Volpe. Predictably, the men were slightly uncomfortable at these intimations of a more elegant past; the lady was glorying in them.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Volpe asked, unconsciously fingering his starched collar and dress tie as if expecting to encounter a jabot. “I think the champagne coolers may be solid gold.”

  Klaus Engelhart was more direct. “Surely there can be no reason for such display at what is, after all, business hospitality.”

  “You may have put your finger on it,” Thatcher said dryly. He failed to see any distinction between NDW’s lavishness in Hamburg and what was happening tonight. The Arabs simply did a better job.

  “I think it’s wonderful.” Betsy Volpe’s tanned face was aglow with enthusiasm. “Have you met Sheikh Yemen? The one in the robes?”

  Charlie Trinkam was always ready to encourage the ladies. “And which one is he?” he asked. “The whole gang is in robes.”

  “His are royal purple,” Betsy said impressively before breaking off to laugh at herself. “Only this afternoon I was worrying about what dress I should wear to such a fancy party. It never occurred to me that the competition was going to be men. The women aren’t in it at all.”

  “Some of them are.” Charlie, after one glance at Mrs. Volpe’s dinner skirt and blouse, dropped the subject of dress. “That one over there is fighting the real battle. Did you notice her diamonds?”

  The object of Charlie’s attention was a middle-aged woman who had already turned aside to cross the room. Like most trust officers, John Thatcher had a workmanlike knowledge of jewelry. Even so, he had noticed only a multiplicity of brooches and necklaces, all radiating the glitter of the genuine article. Betsy Volpe, on the other hand, proved herself to be in Charlie’s near-expert class.

  “The stones are wonderful, but she ought to have them reset. That’s what I’d d
o. I wonder who she is?”

  Klaus Engelhart, who had spent most of the last six months in London, was ready with the answer. “She’s the wife of a junior minister.”

  “Well, those diamonds didn’t come from a junior minister’s salary,” Betsy said with calm certainty. “She probably inherited them and doesn’t have the cash to get rid of those old-fashioned settings. You’d think she’d sell a bracelet and upgrade the rest.”

  This cavalier disposition of somebody else’s assets roused Engelhart.

  “I don’t see how you can be so sure of that, Mrs. Volpe. She may think it worthwhile to show she is not nouveau riche,” he began, thus swatting the entire delegation from Texas. With his usual studious precision he commenced a list of alternatives. “For all we know, those are famous heirlooms. Or maybe they came through her husband’s family and traditionally go to her son’s wife. Or it could be that. . .”

  Both Thatcher and Charlie could see that he wasn’t making a dent. Betsy Volpe was courteously waiting for Engelhart to finish speaking before she reasserted her position, as confident as ever. With one accord the two men scanned the horizon, searching for diversion. Thatcher’s cast was the lucky one.

  “Ah, Shute,” he said with real cordiality, as he spotted Macklin’s president. “And Cramer, too. I think we all know each other.”

  Both Arthur Shute and Hugo Cramer were beaming broadly.

  “A wonderful evening,” said Shute, inclining his white head with majestic approval.

  “Couldn’t be going better,” echoed Hugo Cramer.

  Thatcher did not have to search far for the source of all this satisfaction. For others, tonight might be the civilized expression of a fierce rivalry. Oil companies had to worry about the costs of exploration before a strike and the possibility of expropriation afterward. Tanker fleets had to worry about shortened ocean routes. But Macklin was in the happy position of making money from oil, no matter whether it involved port facilities in Kuwait or pipelines to Valdez, Alaska. For Shute and Cramer tonight was an anthem to the profitability of black gold, and God bless it, wherever it was.

  Klaus Engelhart answered the spirit, rather than the Content, of their remarks. “Not just for the Arabs, but for Macklin, too.” He went on generously. “I was talking to the people from Shell and they agreed that you will be a force in Europe from now on.”

  Shute was mellowed enough to become philosophic. “Strange how things turn out. This should have been a great night for Dave Wylie. The whole oil world is here, and they would have been showering congratulations on him. Instead we all know he was a criminal, murdered by his accomplice. And if he had only known there was this coup in store for him, he probably never would have bothered.”

  “Oh, come off it, Arthur.” Cramer might be happy, but his feet were still on the ground. “It turns out that Dave wasn’t interested in congratulations, he was interested in money.”

  But Shute had fabricated an explanation for Macklin’s notorious defector that was too convenient to be abandoned. “Only yesterday I said to Mrs. Wylie that we should regard her husband as a kind of mental casualty. He was working so hard that the strain became too much and he simply broke down.”

  Thatcher had no difficulty rejecting this vision of Davidson Wylie as a gallant foot soldier whose shell-shock had taken the form of feeding a Swiss numbered account. But instead of fighting, he let a moment of silence intervene before asking: “Then Mrs. Wylie has arrived in London?”

  Yes, and I felt it was only right to have a few words with her. I would have done so in Houston, but that with one thing and another,” said Shute, skipping over post-mortems, police suspicions, and hasty decampments, “she had left before I could make an opportunity.”

  Engelhart stirred restively. If Shute had bothered to ask, then he knew that Klaus and Francesca had on the same Houston-to-New York flight. “I understand Mrs. Wylie had to get back to work. You know she is dubbing the Italian on a new British film.”

  “So I understand.” Arthur Shute directed his bushy white eyebrows toward Thatcher. “She told me that was why she handed over the probate proceedings to the Sloan. Our personnel people will have to thrash his pension rights.”

  “Yes,” said Thatcher, wondering if Francesca Wylie was using his name in the same free-and-easy manner she had used Shute’s. “I’ll be putting one of our young onto it.”

  “Well, if you find a million dollars in Dave’s estate,” said Cramer with heavy jocularity, “just remember that it belongs to Macklin and not the Wylies.”

  Before Thatcher could reply, Klaus Engelhart came to Francesca’s defense. “Mrs. Wylie is as interested as anyone else in correcting the situation.”

  He spoke stiffly and his back was ramrod straight. “She had no advance knowledge of her husband’s plans and has no intention of profiting from them.”

  Too late, Cramer realized that he had stirred up a hornet’s nest. “Hell, I’m not accusing Francesca,” he blurted. “I wouldn’t have the nerve to accuse anybody after the way Dave made a patsy out of me.”

  “He tricked the rest of us, too, Hugo,” Shute reminded him.

  “It’s not the same. He tricked you long distance. Me, he did eyeball-to-eyeball,” Cramer said stubbornly. “When he had me there in Ankara, I was sorry for the poor SOB. I could kick myself now, but I thought he’d been through three weeks of hell. So I let him play me like a violin. When he said the doctors were driving him up a wall, it never occurred to me he was hiding a bunch of scars. I just thought his nerves were shot to pieces. Even in Houston, when a couple of questions from Interpol sent him diving into a bottle, I still figured he couldn’t face up to it.”

  “You even began to believe he was seriously afraid of terrorists following him to Texas,” Charlie suddenly remembered.

  “Sure I did. And what else was I to think when he got blown sky high?” Cramer spread his hands helplessly as he turned to Engelhart. “The point I’m making is that I’m in no position to blame Francesca for not figuring out what was going on. Hell, I saw more of Dave than she did.”

  Engelhart was softened enough by this appeal to drop the “Mrs. Wylie” nonsense. “Francesca, too, is puzzled by her lack of insight. She claims that this crime was totally out of character for Dave. It may be that she is technically correct. But I doubt if Francesca is attaching enough weight to that girl in Zurich. She was probably the master-mind. It would not be the first time that an older man acted out of character to the point of folly for the sake of a young girl.”

  “What’s that you’re saying?” Arthur Shute demanded. “Who’s this older man you’re talking about?”

  When Klaus patiently explained he was still referring to Davidson Wylie, Shute’s confusion merely deepened. The difficulty was self-evident to everyone except the two principals. Wylie had been ten years older than Engelhart but 15 years younger than Macklin’s president. He would have had to have lived a good deal longer before qualifying as an older man in Arthur Shute’s lexicon.

  There was general relief when Betsy Volpe broke the impasse. “Francesca can’t be as smart as I thought,” she declared. “I wouldn’t be silly enough to let Paul fool me that way.”

  Shute, still trying to work off his exasperation on somebody, frowned at her. “You’re not in the middle of divorcing your husband, young woman.”

  She grinned at him cheerfully. “No, I’m not silly enough for that, either.”

  Paul Volpe half-choked on a spurt of laughter and Shute, his good humor restored by this model corporate wife, tucked Betsy’s hand into his arm and insisted on taking her to the dining room.

  “Come on,” he invited the rest of them. “I’ve been hearing about this spread for hours.”

  Obediently they trooped forward to another breathtaking room, where the buffet was more than worthy of its rave notices. Needless to say, every luxury known to the Western world, caviar, smoked salmon, pâté, was present. But the wonders of modern transportation and refrigeration had enabled the
commissariat to plunder the East as well. There were pyramids of fruits and confections never before seen this side of Suez.

  Shamelessly Thatcher broke ranks and headed for a silver bowl heaped high with apricots, each rosy with ripeness, each still bearing its bloom. Lost in gluttony, he was oblivious to his neighbors until he finished plying a napkin over his juice-drenched chin. At first the surrounding waves of Spanish convinced him he was lost among the Venezuelans. Then he spied a familiar face emerging from another napkin.

  “Good evening, Livermore. I see you’re a fancier of apricots, too.”

  For once, Simon Livermore was wholeheartedly enthusiastic.

  “They have ripe dates at the other end. Really ripe,” he said, delightedly. “And something called sweet lemons. You shouldn’t miss them.”

  “So this is where you’ve gotten to, Thatcher,” boomed the voice of Hugo Cramer. “And Livermore. That’s great. I want you to meet our president, Arthur Shute.”

  In an instant Livermore reverted to form. Caught fast in the bone-crushing exuberance of Cramer’s business handshake, he murmured a distant greeting. Arthur Shute, with more perception, satisfied himself with the regulation two-finger salute.

  “I’m glad we’ve run into each other,” Shute said sedately enough to reassure an army of civil servants. “You’ll have heard about Dave Wylie’s death. Paul Volpe will be taking over for him. I’m sure you’ve been wondering about that.”

  “I knew you’d find somebody,” Livermore said with gentle irony. Corporations do not generally abandon multi-million dollar contracts because one employee bites the dust. “But Volpe and I have already done some work together and that will certainly make it easier to continue doing so.”

  “Well, none of us are going to be strangers by the time we get back from Noss Head.” Cramer seemed to welcome the prospect. “On that kind of site, everybody gets to know each other.”

  “Splendid,” Livermore forced himself to say.