Double, Double, Oil and Trouble

by Emma Lathen

  “Now, I don’t want to break this up,” Shute lamented, as if they were having a roaring good time, “but there are some pumping people that I want Cramer and Volpe to have a word with. And I’m sure that you’d be interested too, Livermore.”

  But Livermore was already signaling over the intervening shoulders. With a ghost of a smile he said: “I’m afraid we’ll have to make it some other time. My wife is coming this way, and nothing will persuade her to take pumping stations seriously.”

  The Macklin contingent withdrew, shadowed as persistently as ever by Klaus Engelhart.

  “Why does he want to tag along?” Charlie asked the world at large.

  “Engelhart seems unable to tear himself away from any aspect of Noss Head.” With calculated indiscretion, Thatcher continued to Livermore: “In Houston he wasn’t making any secret of the fact that he expected your department to award the contract to NDW, instead of Macklin.”

  Either Livermore did not care to match indiscretions or he was only half attending. “That’s not uncommon after a major award, Thatcher. I’ve known ... ah, there you are, dear. Having a good time?”

  When Charlie Trinkam saw Mrs. Simon Livermore and friend, pumping stations were a lost cause with him, too.

  “A smashing time!” Jill cooed. “Tell me who everybody is, darling, so that I can introduce them to Sheikh Yemeri.”

  Thatcher had already guessed it. There could not be two sets of robes like that in one building. The Sheikh was obviously the catch of the evening and, God knew, Jill Livermore had earned the right to snare him. Either divine Providence or native cunning had inspired her toilette. In a room where the overwhelming impression was that of billowing fabrics—draperies falling from eighteen-foot ceilings, silk rugs fluttering on the walls, women enveloped in clouds of chiffon, Arabs in their burnooses—she had eschewed the bouffant effect. Jill was showing not only her shoulders, but her legs as well. Her little slip of gold lamé” ended above her knees and was supported by two string-like straps. With her smooth, gliding walk she wore the minimal garment as if she had train bearers behind her. The result was spectacular. Other people were showing off textiles. Jill was showing off herself. An observer might have been excused for thinking that it was Sheikh Yemeri who had carried off the prize.

  “And you were wrong, Simon,” she continued, after the introductions. “There is dancing. They’ve hidden it off in a corner, but the sheikh showed me.”

  Simon, with a flourish of marital authority that fooled no one, said he hoped she hadn’t pestered the sheikh into partnering her.

  Her first response was a peal of laughter. “Oh, Simon,” she sputtered, “don’t you ever look at the society rags? The sheikh is more at home on a dance floor than I am. He does the hustle like an expert.”

  The sheikh’s white teeth gleamed beneath his mustache. “We try not to be too backward,” he said in fluent English honed by three years at Harvard Law School and many seasons on the Riviera. “But when I saw your wife’s dress, I was afraid we might have missed the latest craze. I thought maybe it was the Charleston.”

  Trinkam immediately protested that Jill was far too young to know about the Charleston.

  “Oh, I can do it,” she corrected him, fluttering her eyelashes outrageously. “I bet I could teach you.”

  Grinning, Charlie said it would be a pleasure. He knew he was in no immediate danger. At the moment, Jill was training her guns on the sheikh.

  And John Thatcher’s guns were trained even farther afield. “By all that’s holy, they’ve even got Leopold Grimm here,” he exclaimed.

  “Looking like a fish out of water.” Charlie, who could see what was coming, was unsympathetic.

  “It’s only decent to say hello,” his superior said inflexibly.

  “Business tonight?” Jill wrinkled her nose in a parody of distaste. “Well, not for me. I’m going to force my husband, willing or not, to dance with me.”

  Laughing over her shoulder, she swung away, an escort on either arm.

  “You’re a hard man, John,” Charlie said reproachfully, “when you ask me to trade Jill Livermore for Leopold Grimm.”

  Certainly Grimm was not contributing to the gaiety of the evening.

  “Foolishness and more foolishness,” he replied to questioning. “I have business with NDW that could best be accomplished either in Zurich or Hamburg. Instead we must both come to this extravaganza. Then Interpol says, as long as I am in London, will I please secretly observe Mrs. Wylie.”

  Charlie was less bored than he expected. “You mean, to see if she was the pickup girl?”

  Grimm flapped a disgusted hand. “Already, last week I have looked at hundreds of pictures of Mrs. Wylie. I have seen her walking, sitting, reclining. I tell them it is out of the question. Nonetheless, I must lurk in a doorway at Harrod’s for 20 minutes before they are content.”

  “I thought you said you probably wouldn’t be able to say one way or the other,” Thatcher objected. “What with all the changes in hair and voice.”

  “The hair, the face, the voice, they are all beyond me,” Grimm proclaimed. “But a Valkyrie, I would have noticed.”

  Charlie, the connoisseur, was inflamed. “Come now, Leopold, Francesca Wylie is not exactly a battle maiden.”

  “Visualize her in blue jeans and mountaineering boots,” Grimm commanded.

  Charlie blinked. “I don’t think I can,” he said finally.

  “I think we see what you mean,” Thatcher agreed. “There’s no denying the effect would be memorable. So Harrod’s was a waste of time for you. You’ll have to fall back on your business with NDW.”

  “Which we will accomplish in an uncomfortable hotel room, with briefcases in our laps,” said Grimm clinging to his grievance.

  “Then why in the world did you come?” Thatcher pressed.

  “For the same reason you did,” Grimm replied starkly. “Everyone is here tonight because of money. We have it, or we share it, or we want it, or we merely wish to be near it. But it comes to the same thing. We have been brought together by its power.”

  It might have been the voice of Mammon, so elemental was his analysis. But two hours later Charlie Trinkam, as wise in the ways of the world as any man, was quibbling with Grimm’s verdict. He and Thatcher had joined a knot of onlookers in time to see Sheikh Yemeri speak to the band conductor. Then, as the music began, the sheikh led Jill Livermore onto the dance floor, and the purple robes began flicking to the beat of the Charleston.

  “Somebody should tell Leopold that there’s more than one kind of power,” Charlie whispered.

  Chapter 16

  Blowout

  John Thatcher could take desert hawks or leave them. Bedouin splendor in Twickenham, ceremonial robes, and jeweled daggers left him essentially unmoved. OPEC was undeniably fierce and predatory. But when it came to the wellhead price of oil, the Venezuelans in their pinstripes were as wild and untrammeled as any nomad.

  So, when the Arabs struck their stately-home tent and silently faded back to the Savoy, Thatcher expected to revert to the pedestrian and colorless real world.

  Instead, he plunged directly into the Western world’s equivalent of a pilgrimage to Mecca. This did not entail donning a burnoose. A space-silver jumpsuit was protecting him from the relentless icy spray of the North Sea. His daffodil-yellow hard hat may have guarded him from falling objects. It undeniably stamped him as a visiting bigwig.

  Thatcher was trudging down a bleak stone-shingled shore along Noss Head. Through a rainy mist he could see a greasy gray sea stretching out past barren rocks to a greasy gray sky. Sound effects were provided by disconsolate seagulls wheeling overhead and scummy water slapping against a decaying rock.

  It was scant comfort that he was not alone.

  The official party inspecting the site of Macklin’s projected installations was large. Since all of them were outfitted like Thatcher, a fanciful spectator might have been reminded of a garland of buttercups carelessly dropped into an overflo
wing gutter.

  Not Charlie Trinkam. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that when it’s not raining, this is a beautiful spot,” he said to Simon Livermore, with a gesture encompassing the austere landscape, the muddy scars of construction, the derelict village.

  Livermore was becoming hardened to American idiom.

  “Exactly,” he said, without the awkwardness of three weeks ago. “Unfortunately, it always is raining.”

  “The weather’s just one of the reasons this is going to be such a tough job for Macklin,” said Arthur Shute proudly.

  “I thought that was Exxon’s line,” said Charlie, squinting into the gloom. “Say, there’s a boat out there, isn’t there?”

  Thatcher had no desire to figure as the bearer of bad tidings. But the only way to survive an endurance test is to take its measure in advance.

  “After we have seen the site of the onshore pumping facilities, which is here where we are standing, I take it, we are going to ride that launch, Charlie, out to where the tanker berths will be. Do I have that right, Shute?”

  Shute, wincing against a frozen rivulet that had tipped down his neck, nodded.

  “Great,” said Charlie.

  “That will give you a better idea of the magnitudes involved, together with the conditions the crews will have to face,” Shute explained.

  Site inspections are sacred rituals of modern capitalism. Underwriters, bankers, lawyers, and stray investors are regularly and religiously subjected to intricate technologies they do not comprehend, wastelands rich in some invisible resource, and experiments revolutionizing the unknown. In theory, these outings bridge the gap between the world of money and the world of goods. In actuality, as Thatcher had ample reason to know, they were a penance for all concerned. Chemists, metallurgists, or, as today, construction engineers like Hugo Cramer labored inarticulately to convey abstruse complexities in terms that even a vice president could understand. Some vice presidents made fools of themselves admiring big pipes, small computer banks, or deep holes. Those who kept their wits about them tagged along, too polite to remind the experts that the ultimate titanic achievement is the ring of the cash register.

  Arthur Shute, president of Macklin, and Simon Livermore, representing among other things the hard-pressed pound sterling, felt obliged to evince respect for the prodigies of drilling, blasting, and excavating that would transform this desolation into a cornucopia of energy for Western Europe. It was noticeable, however, that they were not up ahead with Hugo Cramer who was knee deep in engineers, blueprints, and survey results.

  Charlie Trinkam was always game to go through the motions, but awe was alien to his nature.

  “Well, Hugo,” he said, plodding damply onto the dock, “this all looks like a piece of cake to me. You don’t have any caribou like those poor fish on the Alaska pipeline.”

  Cramer, the only visiting fireman who looked as if he had worn a hard hat before, stuck his clipboard under an arm and detached himself from storage capacities, depth soundings, and pipeline welding.

  “Don’t you believe it, Charlie,” he said, standing aside to let Klaus Engelhart and Paul Volpe precede him through a string of puddles. “There’s some kind of rare bird that nests over there.” He indicated a rocky hillock that rose on the easternmost arm of the harbor. “Paul says people are writing letters to The Times about it.”

  His words were wind-borne beyond Trinkam.

  “Macklin has made extensive provision to respect the environment,” said Shute, puffing from his exertions.

  Simon Livermore was hauling himself up the heaving gangplank. “Yes, every attempt is going to be made to preserve the local flora and fauna,” he echoed.

  There was a dank silence, during which the party trailed aboard ship. Then Klaus Engelhart spoke up. “That is easier said than done,” he said dispassionately.

  This harmless remark produced a disproportionate reaction, attributable in part to the extreme discomfort of their new surroundings. Ordinarily, shipboard is the only comfortable portion of any amphibious undertaking. But the Macklin Star, now chugging steadily out to sea, was not much of an improvement over the receding shore. Thatcher suspected that “launch” was a misnomer. The Macklin Star was a maritime utility vehicle, part tug, part tender. Thus, six visitors, four resident Macklin surveyors, and three crewmen, most of them large and bulky, were jammed into an inadequate space. The resultant clammy body heat generated a steamy bouquet of bilge, long-dead fish, and some unknown but malodorous chemical.

  Even so, the response to Engelhart was not all atmospherics. He had been odd man out all day—asking too many questions, airing too many opinions, taking too much for granted.

  Paul Volpe was still testing his new authority. “Don’t worry, Klaus,” he said, bracing himself against the Macklin Star’s bucking. “We’ll meet our contract terms, and that includes all the ecological safeguards.”

  Engelhart’s almost colorless eyebrows sketched surprise, as he glanced quickly at Hugo Cramer and Arthur Shute.

  Cramer was hunched over, peering through the rain-spattered window, ostensibly indifferent to this interchange. But he heard all right.

  “Especially the birds’ nests,” he said, bringing a flush to Volpe’s thin cheeks.

  Arthur Shute tried to make things better, and blundered.

  “Paul’s absolutely right,” he said, clutching at the nearest prop, which was John Thatcher’s arm. “Our agreement with the British government worked out in detail our obligations, such as resodding the hills when we’ve finished construction. And the careful disposition of waste materials. Dave . . . that is, our European office, spent a lot of time on that part of our specifications during the bidding. Isn’t that correct, Livermore?”

  Livermore was embarrassed by this reference to what everyone had agreed to forget. “Yes, that’s right,” he said, literally turning his back on the subject by staring out at the featureless sea.

  The entire cramped cabin could hear Klaus Engelhart’s next contribution.

  “You forget, Mr. Shute, that my firm, NDW, also submitted a bid to the British government, to Mr. Livermore. So I know all about the performance standards and penalties.”

  This amounted to gratuitous discourtesy. Under better circumstances, Thatcher thought, it would have been met with cool silence, blank faces, then a new, innocuous subject—like drilling platforms. With all the engineers at hand, this treatment should have been easy.

  Unfortunately, the engineers had retreated into solid silence. So, as the Macklin Star shuddered into another, swoop, Paul Volpe did the best he could. “Look, Klaus, we all have to live with the fact that Macklin got the contract,” he began.

  Looking briefly over his shoulder, Cramer intervened: “Knock it off, Paul. Look, up ahead at that red buoy is where the first tanker berth is going to be. We’re running a line ...”

  The tanker berths were followed by the offshore islands, where Macklin was going to build storage tanks. By nightfall, a scarcely noticeable darkening of the western sky, when release should have been in sight, Arthur Shute made an announcement that could not have been welcome to anyone.

  “Busby’s just radioed,” he said, as the Macklin Star nosed back into harbor. “There’s some kind of snag with the plane. I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to fly back to London until tomorrow morning.”

  Charlie Trinkam groaned aloud. This morning, the Macklin plane that shuttled to Noss Head had been part of the daily grind. Now, after pumping stations and tanker berths, it was a flying carpet.

  “Don’t worry,” said Shute with a false cheer. “We can make you comfortable for the night up at the inn.”

  Ignoring a broad grin from Cramer, Charlie spoke from the heart. “You may be able to turn this place into Houston East, Arthur, but until then that’s beyond you.”

  He was correct. There are limits to what technology can do; there are even limits to what money can do. The inn at Noss Head illustrated both. Macklin had taken it over, introd
uced deep freezes and steaks flown in from Kansas City, and stocked a bar that made the natives blink.

  But the essential inn remained, a huddled, ancient structure of haphazard, low-ceilinged rooms, redolent of the smoke and damp of centuries.

  “When we get a full crew working here, we’re going to throw up dormitories and commissaries,” Cramer explained, accompanying Thatcher inside. “This is just a stopgap.”

  “I see,” said Thatcher temperately.

  “Anybody can see,” said Charlie with robust bitterness.

  “Oh, come on, Charlie, it isn’t so bad,” said Cramer, unzipping his sodden jumpsuit.

  And it was not. Macklin provided unexpected guests with emergency kits containing everything from toothbrushes to malt whisky. Food and drink were more than adequate. The public rooms were stuffy with warmth and the bedrooms were clean, if not inviting. As Thatcher pointed out, they were roughing it in reasonable comfort.

  Trinkam preferred bright lights, but he was adaptable. “It’s not the plumbing I mind, John,” he said, joining his superior in a corner of the minute taproom. “It’s all these smiling faces. I didn’t expect this jaunt to be a laugh riot, but who wants to be locked in a closet with the cast for World War III?”

  Allowing for hyperbole, Thatcher had to agree. The fine drizzle that had marked the daylight hours was now a steady downpour. Given the weather and the village, no one was tempted by an after-dinner stroll. In effect, the inn was simply an extension of the Macklin Star.

  Neither of them was a happy ship.

  “And it’s more than the clash of uncongenial personalities,” Thatcher mused aloud. If North Sea oil— or modern banking, for that matter—demanded real affinity from its followers, they could all go back to barter and rubbing sticks for fire.

  “Adversaries are one thing,” Trinkam said. “Sure, everybody’s out to protect his own interest, whether it’s Macklin, or the ministry, or NDW—”

  “Or even the Sloan,” Thatcher, no mean adversary himself, interjected. “But are these interests what they seem to be? As you once pointed out, business isn’t the only jungle, Charlie.”