Villiers Touch

by Brian Garfield

  “Your majesty’s attentiveness is most deeply gratifying.”

  “Can’t we dispense with the vaudeville routines, Russ?”

  Hastings grunted. “Number one, last week Villiers took control of Heggins Aircraft. Item, Heggins supplies some patented components to NCI subsidiaries under government research-and-development contracts. Item, Heggins is a small company accessible to a raider with pyramiding in mind, and Heggins is listed on the Big Board, a significant asset.”

  “Number two, Villiers wanders the Western world like a prodigal gypsy, but if you could say he had a headquarters, it’s a brokerage in Montreal which may or may not be a covering front for a high-pressure boiler-room operation. Item, a Mafioso named Senna seems to run one of the Montreal boiler rooms, and Senna recently bought a block of NCI. Item, a lot of untraceable purchases of NCI common have been made through Canadian offices in the past few weeks.”

  “Number three, last week Nuart Galleries announced it was going public. Item, Nuart belongs to my ex-wife, who is also the daughter of Elliot Judd, who is chairman of the board of NCI. Item, the power behind Diane’s decision to go public is Mason Villiers.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Diane’s head girl told me.”

  Quint said, “You’ve done a proper job of detective work, haven’t you?”

  “I wasn’t fishing for compliments. I’m fishing for more authority. I want a longer leash—I think what I’ve turned up so far justifies it.”

  “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “Maybe Villiers is an errand boy. Maybe he’s fronting for the Mafia. Maybe he’s running the whole show himself. I need to find out.”

  “What do you want, Russ?”

  “Authority to put a full-sized team of detectives on it. It’s too big for me to handle alone, and it’s no job for the lawyers and accountants on our staff. I want a trained team from the Justice Department to work under me.”

  “Justice will scream bloody murder.”

  “Not if I work through Bill Burgess. He’ll do it, if I can show him I’ve got complete backing from you.”

  “Very well. I’ll sign anything that needs to be signed. But keep careful, old cock—without evidence that will stand up in court, we can’t make overt moves. There’d be too much danger in it, the market’s perched on the point of a pin. I can’t give you authority to uncover our official artillery and begin blazing away.”

  “When I want that, I’ll ask for it.”

  “Wait, Russ. Before you go—your ex-wife. What do you plan doing about that?”

  “I’m having lunch with her. I don’t know if it’ll do any good, she’ll probably take it the wrong way. But if she’s got herself into Villiers’ hands, she’s in trouble.”

  He went down to the square, trapped a taxi, got in, and braced himself while it made its ass-jarring way north along pitted pavements. He thought about Elliot Judd’s proposition, worrying it around from all angles like a dog with a strange bone.

  An illuminated sign on a bank told him it was 96 degrees at 12:19; the traffic was stop-and-go. Five minutes late, he paid off the driver and went into the sterile tall building. When he touched the depressed plastic square at the elevator bank, it lighted up in obeisance. Presently the doors opened and disgorged a crowd, and he got into the cage and watched lighted numbers move along the row, while Muzak whispered hideously and the elevator climbed so smoothly that he had the sensation it wasn’t going to stop, it would break dreamily through the roof and carry him into space.…

  Diane kept him waiting. The receptionist asked him to be seated, but he stood, moving from painting to painting, making a circle of the room, pretending to study the oils and watercolors and gouaches. He was thinking of long ago, a vision of the young Diane stepping off a train with an art magazine in one hand and her tennis racket strapped to the outside of her suitcase. Memories crowded in, rushed together. Days of Russ-and Diane—one word, one entity. Days of increasing obsessive fervor, her evening salons at home for arty friends, the internecine gossip that crowded him out, the faces like living waxworks, until he got to feeling like just another object in the apartment—something she and her friends tried to avoid bumping into.

  She kept him waiting almost ten minutes, then came out past the receptionist and gave him her cool hand. In the bright artificial light he saw the little scar traces of time on her throat and face. “You look lovely,” he told her, feeling tense and awkward. Her skirt was three inches above the knees—a little nothing dress that had probably cost as much as a round-trip ticket to Rome. He said, “I thought we’d try the Homestead. I booked a table.”

  “Good. Isn’t the heat ghastly?” She was ready to go, carrying her bag, putting on oversized dark glasses; she gave him a jerky smile and hurried ahead toward the elevator, and for the first time it occurred to him she was as nervous as he was.

  They rode down in discomfited silence and walked toward the corner. He said with forced gaiety, “Look at all the damned cars. I once calculated the land occupied by a parked car in midtown Manhattan is worth something like a hundred thousand dollars.”

  They turned the corner. Diane said, “You’ve got sunburn on the nose. You must have found a girl who likes the beach.”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Better than to think you’ve got a girl?”

  “Better than to think I’d let anybody drag me near a beach.” He tried to smile, and held the restaurant door.

  They climbed a flight of stairs to a corner table—chip-proof, burn-proof, stain-proof. Over drinks they exchanged furtive looks and kept starting to say things and subsiding, until he said, “You’ve been well?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She had a strangely incomplete smile, one which began but didn’t become whole. “I haven’t had one headache since the divorce.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Oh, dear, now you’re angry.” She turned to the waiter: “Another old-fashioned, please. No sugar.”

  He said, “You really are looking more gorgeous than ever.”

  Unaccountably, she blanched. “Stop looking at me.” She dropped her eyes and withdrew, with a brooding, inward expression. “You didn’t call this meeting to throw roses at my feet, did you? Will you please stop looking at me?”

  “Why?”

  “You’re making overtures. Don’t be adventurous—stop acting as though you still want me.”

  “I suppose I do, when you come down to it—the way a reformed alcoholic wants whiskey. But don’t read anything into it; the truth is, you’re the one thing above all else I’ve wanted to forget.”

  “By inviting me to lunch with you?”

  “It’s not a social visit.”

  “So you said on the phone. You were damned mysterious.”

  “I apologize. I thought it would persuade you to come.”

  “All right. It worked, didn’t it?” She had composed herself, putting on her arch face. She took out a compact to inspect her lipstick. Hastings tried to fight off the feeling of intimidation—as if he were a former enlisted man confronted suddenly by a lieutenant general: a subservient reaction ingrained in moments of crisis, but which would disintegrate if given time for logical assessment.

  He tried to lighten the tone. “You’re still blushing. I remember how hot your face looked the first time I asked you for a date.”

  “Let’s not resurrect our turbulent affairs, Russ. It’s so tiresome. I’ve still got tread marks where you ran over me—I’m in no mood for nostalgia.”

  Overcome by an odd sense of defeat, he shifted his chair, feeling dismally that this cold space between them was a place where love once had been; it hardly seemed possible.

  When a waiter brought menus, he accepted the interruption gratefully. They made selections, the waiter wrote orders and went, and Diane said, “Do you suppose we could get down to cases, Russ? I’m going to have to make it a quick meal—a thousand things to do this afternoon.”

  “All right,
” he said. Gladly. “Several things. First, I spent the weekend in Arizona with your father. I mention it only so you won’t later find out and suspect me of doing something behind your back. It was purely business—you know where I work.”

  Her thin shoulders stirred; her mouth twisted. “All right. You’ve made it clear you didn’t go to him to ask him to intercede with me.”

  “To persuade you to come back to me? You’re flattering one of us.”

  “Am I?”

  “Clutch it to your breast, if it warms you. I hope this is the last time we’ll have to see each other.”

  Her look, not directed at him, was icy with scorn. Hastings looked down and said in a different voice, “Why do we always have to bicker? I’m sorry, it’s my fault. I’d like to keep it civilized. I came to see you because I want you to give me some facts which I think you wouldn’t give out to a stranger.”

  “Facts about what?”

  “You’ve gone public.”

  “That’s hardly a secret.”

  “I need to know how deeply Mason Villiers is involved.”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “You need to know? Whatever for?”

  “I work for the government, remember? Villiers is a crook, I’m a cop. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I see. Either you’re indignant because he’s a crook, or you think I’ve been seeing him, and that makes you angry.”

  “Jealousy? Maybe—it’s possible. But I don’t like seeing you involve yourself with a barracuda like Villiers. Underneath his brainy front, there’s the claim-jumping personality of a mining-camp swindler. All the professionals know enough to give him wide berth.”

  Diane began to eat hungrily. “I gather you’ve met him?”

  “Villiers? No.”

  “You’re a bit green around the edges. Look, Russ, if it gives you comfort, you can assume if I had any dealings with him I’d have him watched by the best battery of attorneys I could hire. I’m no innocent child of the woods.”

  “Maybe. But if you go swimming with sharks you need sharp teeth. I’ve got reason to suspect he’s using you as part of a scheme against your father’s corporation.”

  She gave that odd half-smile again. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Russ. He may be tough, but he’s hardly as tough as my father. There isn’t a man alive who could whip my father in a corporate fight.”

  He was taken aback. He covered his fast rearrangement of thoughts by addressing himself to his meal. Clearly she knew nothing of her father’s illness; equally clearly, Judd had deliberately withheld it from her. It was like him—Judd was curiously sentimental, but he had no patience with sentimentality when it was directed at himself. He would want his daughter’s love, but never her tears.

  There was a clear choice; he made the decision painfully. He felt a strong duty to Judd’s implied wishes. He told her nothing of her father’s illness.

  He carried on about Villiers, but she was having none of it, she seemed to feel personally assaulted, her judgment questioned. She gathered her sunglasses and handbag and said, “I really must run,” and he let it end lamely, inconclusively.

  He sat over the detectives’ preliminary reports in his bathrobe, hearing the night traffic hoot along below his apartment window, staring at the pages without reading them, and feeling as if a plug had been pulled and everything drained out of him. Once he went so far as to dial Carol’s unlisted number—he had taken it down, perversely, that last night alone in her flat. There was no answer to his ring, and when he cradled the phone he laughed harshly at himself.

  Around eleven o’clock there was a buzz at the door; he went to answer it and found Cynthia MacNee there, grinning, with one shoulder propped against the jamb and her silly hat askew. “Throw me out if I’m intruding. I was feeling a little lonely and kind of randy, and when I found out you’d had lunch with her ladyship, I kind of thought you might want company tonight.”

  “Very astute,” he said. “Come on in.”

  He watched her sweep into the room with her imperious lunging stride. She was big and tall, and long-faced with evident depression. She said, “Why don’t we get rip-roaring drunk?”

  He closed the door. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything.” She was at the window, holding the drapery back. “You really have a pointillist’s view through the smog from here, don’t you?” She turned back and sank into a chair with elaborate indications of unhappiness. “My latest pastime, duration one week, busted up last night. He gave me a little exercise and a lot of abuse, and I suddenly said to myself, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing with a motherfucking son of a bitch like him?’ So I gave him his walking papers, and now I’ve got the blues real bad. The deep indigos. Do you mind me crashing in on you? I’d love to exchange sympathetic ears with you, dahling.”

  “Sounds like a fine idea,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

  “Whatever works fastest.”

  He made drinks, and when he brought them she got up from the chair. “Sit here and let me sit at your feet. Are you nonplussed by my sudden appearance, dear Russ? Should I have my drink and depart hence?”

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Then hold my hand, dearest one.” She sat down on the floor with her shoulder against his knee; blindly her hand crept toward his. It felt cool and moist in his palm. She said, “The life of the swinging single can be most trying. I suppose you’ve found that out.”

  “I haven’t made much of an effort to swing.”

  “You ought to,” she said. “Get the bile out of your system. You’re all uptight, Russ. You’ve still got the look of a one-woman man, and that’s not much good when you haven’t got a woman. Swing a little, try some one-nighters for variety. Loosen up. Hang in there.”

  Her hair was fanned out across his knee; he kneaded it with his hand. “It doesn’t come so easy to some of us.”

  “You’ve still got her ladyship in your bloodstream? You require a transfusion, dahling.”

  “Not her,” he said. “Someone else—just as inaccessible.”

  “A married lady? For shame, dahling. I could weep—perhaps I will, given one more of these.” She waved her drink in the air.

  He let her go on thinking there was a married woman in his life; it was simpler. After a while he rebuilt her drink, and she said, “Boss lady told me you’d been out to Arizona. It must have been lovely.”

  “It was,” he said, and suddenly, for reasons he sensed but could not explain, he blurted a long monologue—how Judd had offered him stewardship of his wilderness trust.

  At the end Cynthia said, “And now you have to make up your mind. What are you going to do?”

  “I wish I knew. Indecision becomes a habit after a while. Let things ride often enough, and you contract some kind of paralysis. I’ve been chewing on it ever since I came back Sunday night, and I still haven’t made up my mind. When I was out there it seemed like a fine idea. Back here it seems unreal and stupid. It’s not that I don’t approve in principle—Judd’s right about the whole thing, no question of that. The only thing is, am I the man for the job? Realistically, the answer’s got to be no. I grew up in a Connecticut suburb, and my whole adult life has been in politics and law. I don’t know the first thing about maintaining a wilderness. Put me down on Judd’s ranch, and I’d get lost and die of thirst within half a mile of water. I can’t tell a cottonwood from a eucalyptus, I don’t know one cactus from another, I’d probably have trouble telling the difference between cow dung and horse droppings. I can’t tell a sick tree from a well one, and if I came across a brushfire I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to start putting it out.”

  “You’re avoiding the point,” she said. “Those things you could learn. The question is, do you want to?”

  “I’m a card-carrying romantic. When I didn’t really have the choice, I liked to play a little game to convince myself all I really wanted was to get away from the big bad city and settle down in the woods some
where away from all the cares and woes of the civilization I inhabit.”

  “But?”

  “But when you come right down to it and offer me what I kept asking for, I’m not sure it’s what I really want anymore. Right now I’m up to my ears in a job that depresses hell out of me because we’ve got to deal with human garbage, we’ve always got to be looking out for the worst in people. I feel like a cop working a beat in Harlem—there’s got to be all kinds of warm human reality all around you, but you just haven’t got time to look for it, you’re too busy watching the muggers and dope peddlers, and after a while you become convinced the human race is no damn good because everybody you see is peddling dope or mugging old ladies. It’s what you see because it’s what you look for.”

  “But,” she said adamantly.

  He had to laugh. “The job keeps me alive,” he confessed. “It keeps the adrenalin pumping. Right now we’re getting hot on the track of what may turn out to be the biggest stock-market conspiracy of the decade. It’s slimy and depressing to know there are creatures out there doing their damnedest to swindle thousands of people out of billions of dollars—but it’s exciting as hell to track them. I can’t deny I enjoy the chase. And stuck away in the woods somewhere I’d never have that stimulation. I see myself vegetating. Maybe it’s just too late for me to embrace the joys of pastoral solitude. Once you’re conditioned to action, you can’t live without it.”

  “But you’re still not sure?”

  “I hate this city so much,” he said vehemently.

  After a while Cynthia said, “A couple of years ago I had a wild affair with a character who got mustered out of the Air Force because the only thing he was much good at was flying jet fighters, and the service decided he was too old to keep it up. He’d been an ace in France at the end of the war, and he’d flown all over Korea, and he’d done three tours in Vietnam, and they retired him, so he went into business here on his retirement pay—some kind of air-freight operation—and the poor son of a bitch was miserable. Finally he signed up to fly antique fighter planes for some belligerent African country. The last I saw of him he was getting on the ship to Africa, happy as a clam. Maybe the poor bastard’s crashed by now, but he never had any choice, really. He always hated airplanes, you know?”