Villiers Touch

by Brian Garfield

  The huge bullpen was a picture full of restive motion. Squads of long-haired young men bustled in and out. Scores of men at scarred enormous old desks, arranged in neat rows like military ranks, spoke into telephones or dictated to stenographers, keeping the wheels rolling within the thousands of stock positions that Bierce, Claiborne & Myers maintained on its books. Claiborne’s empire was an investment bank, a brokerage, and a specialist firm all at once. It held four New York Stock Exchange seats, three American Exchange seats, and made markets in twenty-eight major stocks.

  Approaching his desk, Wyatt passed the open door of the War Office, the walls of which were papered with graphs on which were plotted the movements of various stocks, watched by youthful analysts who during Exchange hours stood near telephones which were wired directly to a computer bank in Jersey City.

  Progress through the ranks had moved Steve Wyatt up from the seventh floor a year ago; since then his desk position had been switched three times—each time closer to the head of the room. As portfolio manager for the Wakeman Fund, a closed-end mutual fund, he now rated a desk less than twenty feet from the splendid dark-oak door of the executive sanctum, inhabited by the old man himself: Howard Claiborne, descendant of merchant princes, Wall Street patrician, gentleman of glacial elegance honed by ancient habit, representing the quiet wealth of old money, the image of grace and comfort, well-worn elegance, and mellow tone.

  Wyatt rolled his desk swivel chair back on its casters to sit down and turned to speak to the blond young man at the next desk.

  “Anything come up?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” The blond man gave him a brash grin. “I put a few notes on your desk.”

  “Thanks for covering for me, Jimmy. It was important.”

  “Sure—what was her name?”

  Wyatt waved a hand and smiled. “How’s the Yankee Croesus? Good mood or bad?”

  “Good, today. I took your report on Motors in to him, and he liked it. I heard him grunt four times while he was reading it.”

  “Four times?”

  “Four times. Indeed. You did a hell of a job.” Jimmy grinned at him.

  “Did that seem to surprise him?”

  “God, no. The last time anything gave the old man a surprise was when Truman beat Dewey. That’s nothing—old man Bierce told me the last time Claiborne smiled was the day they repealed the Volstead Act. But he liked your report, even if he didn’t crack a smile, and that’s saying something, since it came from a man whose guiding principle is ‘No.’”

  Wyatt grinned and nodded, and watched Jimmy get up to walk over to the railing that surrounded the secretary’s desk just outside the door of Claiborne’s office. Jimmy De Angelo was a slim, blond, northern Italian youth with the fresh open innocence of a Midwestern college sophomore; he was inoffensive and eager to be helpful. Wyatt watched him go over to the railing to speak with the girl at the desk there. She was Howard Claiborne’s private secretary, but in the feudal setup of Bierce, Claiborne & Myers even a private secretary didn’t rate a room of her own; her status was indicated only by the oak railing that separated her desk from the bullpen. She was a Polish girl—Anne Goralski. A small girl, dark and pretty. Smooth Indian-black hair gracefully surrounded her olive face. Jimmy De Angelo had been dating her casually for a few weeks.

  She was smiling up at Jimmy while he talked; but then her eyes slid past Jimmy and came to rest on Wyatt. He let his eyelids droop when he smiled at her. She lifted her eyes to reply to something Jimmy De Angelo said; De Angelo turned, shaking his head, to come back to his desk, and the girl returned her glance to Wyatt and suddenly gave him a blinding smile. It was lovely and brilliant. Her teeth were bright, she looked happy and flirtatious.

  De Angelo sat down, glum, and turned his back to make a phone call. Wyatt propped one elbow on his desk and looked past De Angelo’s shoulder at the girl. She had gone back to her work. The thought which had edged into his mind in Hackman’s office was still there: she was Howard Claiborne’s private secretary.

  Dimly he heard De Angelo, talking on the phone: “It’s quoted forty-five to forty-six bid and asked, CTM…. Well, I know, but Gulfstream Investments sold a big block, you know.” Wyatt leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes closing down to slits, thinking.

  Promptly at five o’clock, Howard Claiborne emerged from his cork-lined office and marched into the bullpen rather like a Buckingham Palace guard. Claiborne had nostrils like a horse; he carried his head high. He wore a carnation in his buttonhole and looked as dignified as a penguin.

  The old man’s appearance always had a disintegrating effect on conversation. The muted bedlam of the bullpen subsided to a low rumble, soft voices speaking into telephones. Claiborne stopped at Anne Goralski’s desk to say a few words and then came forward, dropping a remark here and there—each of his words was received as attentively as a ransom note. He had a dignified core of blue ice; he carried around him an aura of melancholy antique solitude, indifference to trivialities—a gentleman of privilege with a shrewd, skilled intellect. He was the heir to one of the great fortunes, but in spite of that, he had, according to the values of his generation, chosen to start out as a page boy and runner for the family bank firm.

  He stopped by Steve Wyatt’s desk. “You did a satisfactory job on the Motors report.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Claiborne nodded and moved on—the evening ritual. From here he would go directly to the Wall Street heliport, where his private copter would pick him up and whisk him to his estate on Fishers Island.

  When the dapper, unbent old figure had disappeared into the corridor, the bullpen erupted. Typewriters were tilted back into their desks, and the steno girls gathered together to leave in a twittering knot. The men shoved papers into briefcases, straightened up their desk tops, and went out by ones and twos. Wyatt sat back, relaxed, his arrogant high-bred face sleepy, watching bemusedly while Jimmy De Angelo made his preparations for leaving, and then, instead of heading for the hall, went to the secretary’s railing, where Anne Goralski was repairing her eye shadow with the aid of her compact. De Angelo spoke; the girl shook her head; De Angelo shrugged angrily.

  De Angelo came past Wyatt’s desk with a downturned mouth and joined the exodus. Wyatt stayed put. The huge arena was almost empty when he left his desk and went toward the girl’s little fenced-in enclosure. She was busy liberating a little sweetheart rose from the vase on her desk and pinning it to her dress. When she looked up at him with her warm brown eyes, he said, “I just wanted to tell you something.”

  “Yes?”

  He smiled at her. “You light up the whole room.”

  It was a direct attack, but it didn’t put her off; it amused her. She had put the telephone receiver on her shoulder, head tilted against it to free her hands, and now she shushed him with a gesture and spoke softly into the phone. “Yes, Mr. Bierce.” She hung up and got out of her chair. She went through the little gate and said, “I’ll be back immediately—I’ve got to hear the rest of this, it must be good.” Wrinkling her nose at him, she disappeared into the executive offices.

  Glancing impatiently across the empty bullpen, Wyatt lit a cigarette and waited.

  She was true to her word. Within less than sixty seconds she reappeared. She had good breasts and a provocatively outflaring rump; she was animated and vibrant—and, he thought, ready to be aroused by gentle, easy masculinity.

  She settled her nice round little ass in the chair, not taking her eyes off him. “Now, then, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir,” he told her. “‘My prince,’ if you like.”

  She wet her lips with the sharp pink tip of her tongue and said, “You were saying, my prince?”

  “To begin with, I don’t mean to tread on anyone’s toes.”

  “Whose, for instance? Mine?”

  “De Angelo’s.”

  She only grinned at him. “Tell me, do you always talk with your teeth together?”

  “That’s breeding
.” He glanced at the door and said, “A stock-broker with a reputation as the wildest party thrower in West-chester County has invited me to a bash at his suburban bungalow tonight, only I have a terrible problem.”

  “And?”

  “The invitation is for two,” he said, and turned his hands over. “You see how it is. Mr. Hackman was absolutely insistent that I bring with me the most beautiful young lady of my acquaintance. Of course, you are the most beautiful young lady of my acquaintance, and in order to meet the requirement, I would have to bring you. However, since we’ve hardly exchanged fifty words in three months, I don’t hold out much hope of meeting the requirement. That’s my problem.”

  “It sounds like a terrible problem,” she agreed. “Are you asking me to help you solve it, sir?”

  “I certainly am,” he said eagerly. “I’m so glad you understand.”

  “Yes, indeed,” she replied.

  “What I’m doing,” he said, “is inviting you to dinner, say, at Armand’s, and then to Mr. Hackman’s party. I have a car, so it will be no trouble getting you home afterward, unless—”

  “Unless I happen to live in some ungodly place like Brooklyn? I’m afraid I do.”

  “You wouldn’t put me on!”

  She shook her head gravely. “Brooklyn,” she said, drawing her lips back and pronouncing it with a conspiratorial leer. Then, with her face screwed up brokenheartedly, she whispered, “You see, that’s my terrible problem. You can’t imagine how many men have broken dates with me as soon as they found out I lived in Siberia. So I’m being very honest with you and giving you this chance to withdraw gracefully.”

  “I’ll risk it,” he said staunchly. “Neither fire nor flood nor sleet nor Brooklyn streets could stay me from making my appointed rounds with the most beautiful young lady of my acquaintance on my arm.”

  He saw the lift of her breath; she smiled. “Honest to God, I thought you’d never ask me.”

  Steve Wyatt took her arm like a true gentleman and walked her out.

  7. Russell Hastings

  Russ Hastings sat at the curve of the bar pushing his ice cubes around with a swizzle stick, looked at his watch and wondered if she had decided to stand him up—she was twenty-five minutes late now. Waiting laid a frost on his nerves, and he ordered another Scotch. Sunset midtown traffic crawled by outside the window. His fresh drink came and he demolished half of it at a gulp and looked at his watch again, thinking of Carol McCloud. A glamorous woman with a mysterious source of income—his lips made a lopsided wry smile, but as he began to feel the pervasive ease of the whiskey, her image came to him like a photograph printed on the insides of his eyelids.

  When he looked up toward the door, she was there.

  He gave a start and went to her. She smiled a little and said, “I’m sorry. I hope you didn’t think I’d forgotten. The phone rang just as I was leaving—someone I had a hard time getting rid of.”

  They waited by the door until the captain took them in tow and guided them to a small table. She wore a sexy black dress, sleeveless and cut low beneath lovely arms and shoulders. She moved with grace and pride.

  They were seated and a waiter hovered until they ordered drinks. There was small talk, the awkward maneuverings of strangers—the traffic, the heat, the elections. Her voice had a resonant low smoky quality, and when Hastings remarked on it the girl dipped her head with an inturned smile—her hair swung forward, swaying with silken weight. She said with a small laugh of admission, “I spent a good many boring hours at home with a tape recorder correcting my voice level. That was a few years ago—you wouldn’t have recognized the old Carol McCloud. I had a God-awful twang.”

  When he responded, she said, “That’s a nice laugh.” Her eyes smiled at him over the rim of her martini glass.

  He tipped glasses with her. “To a long and happy life.”

  “By all means,” she replied, with an inverted twist to her tone. It puzzled him, and he said, “What sort of twang was it? Texas?”

  “Kentucky.”

  “No kidding.”

  She laughed. “You know—where they have pretty horses and fast women. I’m a refugee from a one-drugstore town in the back hills.”

  “In that case,” he announced, “you certainly have got no right to look so beautiful.”

  She only shook her head, giving him the same amused look she had given him at her apartment this afternoon. She said, “Some men are afraid of beautiful women.” But when that remark only elicited his amiable smile, she laughed again. “Was that a trite old saw, or did I make it up?”

  She seemed fully at ease. He couldn’t tell if she was flirting with him, and for the moment it didn’t matter: it suited him well enough merely to look at her. Her only jewelry was a huge amethyst clip set in gold. Her elegance was all in her luxurious simplicity. She had the kind of firm-muscled, high-boned beauty that wouldn’t fade.

  They smoked and drank and ordered dinner. After a stretch of silence, he said, “I suppose we could play the old game of who do you know that I know.”

  Her eyes widened a little, and she pursed her lips. “I don’t think so.”

  “No? You keep taking me by surprise.”

  “I was born this afternoon when you met me. No past, no associations—let’s just leave it that way.”

  “Now you’re really making me curious.”

  She made no answer of any kind. A waiter took away the ashtray and replaced it with a clean one. Carol said, “You look older in this light than you did this afternoon. You’ve got a touch of snow around your temples.”

  He nodded. “My gray hair’s a little premature, but I prefer it to no hair at all. Early gray runs in my family.”

  “It must be nice to know things like that.”

  “Come again?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Only, you haven’t volunteered much about yourself.”

  “Not much to volunteer.”

  “Now you’re being demure,” she said. “It doesn’t suit you. You do interest me, you know—you caught me off guard this afternoon and I pegged you all wrong.”

  “I know. You said you took me for a—And then you stopped. Took me for a what?”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? I jumped to conclusions, which I don’t ordinarily do. But you didn’t seem to fit into the image you were trying to create for yourself. I mean, you just don’t match the ink-stained bureaucratic hack picture, the gray-faced civil-service type tangled in the typical government delirium of red tape. You’re too—I hate the word, it’s so damned emasculating, but you’re too sensitive. That’s what intrigued me.”

  His lips slowly twitched into a little smile. “I can’t tell if you’re flattering me or insulting me. The truth isn’t nearly as mysterious as you seem to think. I’m a lawyer, I used to work for a politician named Speed, and when he died I had to find a job, so now I’m with the SEC.”

  “Jim Speed?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “I knew him to—to talk to,” she said. “He was a very nice guy, compared to most.”

  “Most politicians?”

  She opened her mouth, thought better of what she had been about to say, closed it, and nodded.

  He said, “As for not fitting the image, what can I say? At least my work’s less dull than sitting in an office drawing up corporate charters.” The dinner came—filets mignon with sauce béarnaise.

  He regarded the girl from under lowered brows while she began to eat; he said suddenly, “If I ask you a direct question, will you answer it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Try another one.”

  He said, “We’re skating around each other. I don’t like it much.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, with an edge on her voice.

  He matched her tone. “If you didn’t want to know me, you didn’t have to accept my invitation.”

  “Can’t we just enjoy each other’s company? Why do we have to pry up rocks and
see what’s under them? Have I asked you about your wife?”

  It took him aback. He bridled. “I haven’t got a wife.”

  “No? You don’t act like a bachelor—you act like a man with a home who doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m divorced,” he said. “A few months ago. Does that satisfy you?”

  “If you say so.” She was eating; her eyes lifted to meet his. She had his anger up now, and he glared at her; they began to scowl at each other, silently, jaws set.

  It went on, a grim contest of wills, until abruptly Carol’s eyes began to sparkle. Hastings’ nose twitched. Suddenly they were both laughing helplessly.

  He said, “Okay—okay. I apologize.”

  “No, don’t. It was my mistake.”

  “Mistake?”

  “I thought I could try something. I can see it’s no good.”

  He said, “Damn it, you confuse me. Every time you open your mouth, I get confused.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been putting on an act with you. I deserve your anger.”

  “An act? What kind of act?”

  Her hair swung forward as she looked down; it masked her face. She said slowly, with care, “Sometimes it seems an awful waste to think about where you are—it’s so much nicer to think about where you could be.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “When you came to my apartment this afternoon you were a total stranger, you didn’t know anything at all about me, and I liked you immediately—you seemed so nice and sensitive and so Goddamned normal. I don’t meet many normal men in my life and I gave in to the stupid fairy-tale wish that I could just meet a nice normal fellow and have a nice normal dinner with him, no strings attached, no front to keep up, no tired dreary thoughts of what would come after it.”