Villiers Touch

by Brian Garfield

  From the first night she had fallen completely under the spell of his lithe virility. Her tumultuous loss of self had become a drug, taken in doses of massive sensation that left her blind, mindless and uncaring, hardly aware of the passage of day and night except when they were apart; she had lived these days only for the compulsions of her flesh, swept violently into exhausting abandonment; hovering always on the point of collapse, swept into a fierce delirium of sensuous vortexes, she had taken refuge in love, allowing herself to feel only sensation, investing all her faith in the darkening drug of a craving lust that never abated. Now, at her desk, her thoughts stirred with expectant eroticism, she saw in her mind the happiness glowing in Steve’s face and felt an overwhelming love course through her, an unreasoning warm reaching out of her heart. She felt absurdly pleased with herself—she had to be the envy of every girl in the world, because she was the one who loved this man and had his love. She thought of him stretching out from the bed, his long pale hand picking past the Cartier watch to the pack, lighting a cigarette to be quietly shared; she thought of the wiry ridges of his lean body and the quiet loving amusement she always told herself lurked behind his casual air of indifference.

  The hour came; she broke a rose from her desk vase and pinned it to her bosom, and hurried to the subway….

  He came to the door wearing only his underpants. He didn’t smile; he looked as if he had never smiled and never would. She felt suddenly chilled. She said hesitantly, “Darling?”

  “What?” he snapped. “What the hell do you want now?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Christ,” he said, and crossed the living room. She followed him and watched him pour straight whiskey into a glass. His lean muscles rippled when he turned; he snapped, “Do you absolutely have to trail me around every minute? Can’t you stand to have me out of your sight?”

  “But darling—”

  “Am I supposed to dissolve with love every time you come in sight?” He threw back his head to swallow his drink, took a cigarette from the box on the coffee table, inhaled smoke, choked, recovered, and said, “I quit the job this morning, in case your boss didn’t tell you.”

  “You quit? Why?”

  “Because I had a better offer.”

  “Offer? Where?” She felt stupid and confused.

  Steve’s eyes came around irritably toward her; his expression congealed, and chilled her. He said, “You keep after me as if I’m on a witness stand. Why do you have to leech every last fact out of me? Do you have to own my soul before you’re satisfied?”

  She said witlessly, “You don’t love me.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t hide it anymore. Not when you’re looking at me.”

  His face twisted into a crooked grin. He dragged on his cigarette, and she said, aimlessly desperate, “You smoke too much, do you know that?” When he held the twisted grin and did not speak, she leaned forward and felt urgency in her throat. “We had love,” she implored. “Didn’t we?”

  “Did we?”

  She pleaded with him: “Didn’t we, Steve? What’s happened? Where did it go? I’m so confused.”

  “What we had,” he said, “and ‘had’ is the right tense, is fun. You’re a good lay, you know. Actually it’s been better than I thought it would be. But why hang on after things go sour? You’re only hurting yourself. Can’t you get the drift, Anne? It was all written down in the book before it ever even started. If you wanted to fool yourself into thinking you were in love with me, that was fine while we were banging each other. But kindly don’t hang on like a wilted flower.”

  He spoke the words as if they were part of a long-prepared speech, oft rehearsed. Her eyes slowly filled with tears. She felt a shortness of breath, a debilitating rage that flooded through all the tissues of her body. She managed to whisper, “I trusted you, Steve. I asked you not to spoil it—I asked you not to tell me lies just because you thought I wanted to hear them, because I believed what you told me, and I didn’t want us to hurt each other. And you went right ahead and lied to me….”

  She stopped because although he was going through the motions of listening to her, his eyes showed the deceit of it. Her voice broke. “Steve, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Good-bye would be appropriate.”

  She telephoned Howard Claiborne and pleaded illness; she fell on her dismal bed, with its mattress which sagged toward the center from all directions, and she clutched her pillow in her arms. When her tears dried she rolled over and lay on her side, hands under her cheek, staring sightlessly at the cracked plaster wall. The sense of loss had stunned her; she felt alone, afraid, like a bit of storm-wrecked flotsam washed up on a strange beach.

  Maybe she shouldn’t blame Steve for what he was—maybe she ought to blame herself, for not having seen it. But she had loved him so much, and she didn’t love easily. Her eyes brimmed.

  Abruptly she sat up and spoke aloud in the empty little room: “Quit pining over him. He’s not wasting any time thinking about you.” She thought back over what she was saying and she realized it was true. He didn’t care—he never had; he had only let her talk herself into what she wanted to believe. She had been too ready for love. It made her realize that the sadness she felt now was in part the sadness of knowing she would be wary from now on—probably too wary; the shock of today’s events had somehow created a temporary insight in her, the clarity of which would fade quickly. She could look ahead from this moment and see, with remarkable detachment, how this would immunize her. And there was nothing to do but wait for the vaccination to wear off. It filled her with regret.

  In the kitchen she poured a glass of milk and counted the eggs in the refrigerator door. She saw her reflection against the windowpane—she was pretty, very pretty, a tough brown-eyed girl with a dancer’s hard little body; she was tough enough to live through all this. To hell with stinking Steve Wyatt and his upper-class phony speech patterns and his sports car and his constant bragging about what a clever businessman he was. She began to remember bits and pieces of things he had said about his flashy business deals; thinking about it, she sat down slowly and absently sipped milk, with her frown darkening. Now that she thought back on it some of the things he’d said began to make sense in a curious, frightening new way. That man he had introduced her to Tuesday evening—Mason Villiers—wasn’t he a crook of some kind, a swindler? She was sure she’d seen the name in the financial newspapers. The phone calls Steve had made from his apartment, talking to tip-sheet reporters and market analysts, spreading rumors about Heggins and NCI which she knew were false; he’d explained at the time that it was something everybody did, just a game they played to see which of the reporters and analysts were honest and reliable enough to reject such rumors out of hand. But now she began to wonder. She was no longer prepared to accept anything he’d said.

  And thinking about it, she thought immediately of her employer. As Howard Claiborne’s private secretary, she was bound to him by a devotion that was more than personal; it was partly a symbiotic sense of power, a devotion that came from being part of the exciting world of Howard Claiborne’s empire. Shorthand, typing, office chores—these were duties she took for granted, paying them no more attention than she paid her morning tooth-brushing. It was her own power that moved her—the power to keep callers at bay, to lie about her employer’s whereabouts, to browbeat lesser men’s secretaries on the telephone, to demand information in Howard Claiborne’s name, to sort calls and mail with dutiful care and know it was Within her power to bring each call or letter to his attention or withhold it. Howard Claiborne had allowed her an ever-increasing share of responsibility and her devotion to him had increased along with it. Now, with realization crystallizing in her, she knew what she must do; first thing in the morning she would tell him the whole story—well, perhaps not all of it. But he had to know the manipulations Steve had performed behind his back. The more she thought of it, the surer she was that Steve was involved in someth
ing shady, unpleasant, and deleterious to Howard Claiborne’s interests. If she was being vindictive, seeking revenge against Steve, then so be it; he had asked for it. In the morning, she would tell Howard Claiborne.

  27. Mason Villiers

  A limousine, sealed against the heat, prowled southward through heavy traffic on Park Avenue. Wyatt sat with his back to the chauffeur on the flip-top jump seat, facing Sidney Isher, who crouched in the corner, resembling a middleweight boxer waiting tensely for the gong. Mason Villiers sat back with his lean legs stretched out, looking entirely at his ease, a chilled self-contained smile playing on his mouth while he talked in his resonant baritone. The face he turned to his companions had been molded by years of deliberate calculation—the face of a man who could not be frightened, appealed to, or reasoned with on a basis of personalities; a cool face, primitive, unfeelingly logical, as pragmatic in design as a steel bayonet.

  He carried a briefcase, according to habit, in which was hidden a demagnetizing jammer designed to ensure that no conversation in its range could be miked or tape-recorded. It was manufactured by a subsidiary of NCI and sold to the public for $289.50—legal, commonplace, and by now a fact of life in business.

  Sidney Isher wheezed and snorted, and said, “I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I keep wandering if—”

  “People who don’t want to be nuisances,” Villiers snapped, “seldom succeed.”

  “Your point is well taken. I’ll withdraw the preamble. The question is, will Cleland show up at this meeting? If he doesn’t, we’re wasting a morning.”

  “Cleland,” Villiers murmured, “is as likely not to show up as a corpse at its own funeral.”

  Steve Wyatt agreed: “What choice has he got? We’ve got him by the balls.”

  Isher remarked to Wyatt, “No need to smack your lips so loud.”

  Ignoring the byplay, Villiers said, “Cleland’s angry but that may be good—an angry man can make mistakes. He’ll show up. Cleland and I understand each other, I think,”

  “Like a pair of sharks smelling the same blood,” Isher observed gloomily. “If Cleland was stupid Elliot Judd wouldn’t have put him in charge of the NCI board of directors.”

  “We’ll handle him,” Villiers said, unworried.

  Steve Wyatt said, “What about Dan Silverstein? Are you sure you can trust him?”

  “I’m not sure I can trust anybody. I don’t expect loyalty from Silverstein, but we’ll get cooperation. He knows what to expect if he backs out.”

  The limousine pulled up at the curb; the three men got out and walked across the sidewalk into the air-conditioned lobby of the fifty-story building that housed NCI’s executive offices.

  The reception room on the forty-eighth floor was carpeted wall to wall, discreetly and indirectly lighted, furnished in cool Danish modern. The brunette at the reception desk was precisely groomed and tailored; her smile was impersonal. Wyatt muttered in Sidney Isher’s ear, “You could hang meat in here.”

  Isher, disregarding him, identified himself and his companions to the receptionist, and said, “I assume the directors are caucusing now? Do you mind announcing us?”

  The girl spoke into a phone, listened, and pointed to a leather-covered door. Isher and Wyatt affixed themselves to Villiers when he stepped toward the indicated door. By the time he reached it, it had swung open.

  Cleland was big and lean, tanned, his face not unattractively lined; his hair was still a deep rich brown—dyed, perhaps, for his hands were veined and beginning to show age spots. He looked muscular and trim in a way that bespoke health clubs, steam rooms, barbells, and massages. His handshake, to Villiers and his companions, was perfunctory; perhaps he disliked being touched.

  Six men stood in a knot just inside the door, not talking, looking at Villiers the way they might have looked at a prowling panther in the jungle—prepared to admire its grace and predatory strength, yet fearful and hostile lest it spring.

  When Villiers strode inside, the group parted like the waters of the Red Sea. He went straight through, marching with a calculated display of arrogance down the length of the room to the head of the conference table. Only then did he turn to stare coolly at the others. The six men had been joined by Cleland, and when Villiers had gone right by them without shaking hands, they had burst into a low-voiced babble of talk. Villiers said, “All right, let’s hold it down.”

  They gave him angry glares—all except one, a big apple-cheeked man with thin white hair combed carefully over his scalp—Dan Silverstein. The look that came onto Silverstein’s face when Villiers met his glance was like the sickly smile of a rural bank manager confronted with a surprise visit by the auditor, searching quickly and desperately through his mind for the details of his plan to cover up an embezzlement scheme, refusing to admit to himself that it was too late.

  The talk subsided and Villiers made gestures. “My associates, Mr. Sidney Isher and Mr. Stephen Wyatt. I know you, Cleland, and Dan Silverstein. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the rest of you gentlemen?”

  The board of directors was, in due course, identified and separated out as to names and faces. They distributed themselves around the table. Ansel Cleland took a pair of glasses out of a leather case, arranged papers before him, pushed his glasses higher on his nose, and said, “You’re the visiting team. You can have the first turn at bat.” He planted his elbows on the table and thrust his jaw forward stubbornly, striking the pose familiar to anyone who had seen him on the cover of Newsweek.

  Villiers, on his feet, launched into a clipped speech, the length of which was not out of proportion to what he had to say. He spoke without animation in a hard, mechanical voice; his words, delivered in a pitchless monotone, fell equally, like bricks, as if he were uttering a ritual incantation. Speaking down the length of the conference table from a widespread stance, he took the NCI directors step by step along a carefully planned route. He spoke mainly to Ansel Cleland, because in the absence of the chairman Cleland was NCI’s top man, a Cincinnati-born businessman whose career in banking and corporate law had catapulted him onto the boards of directors of eleven corporations, but whose principal interest had lain with the affairs of NCI ever since he had been hired on in 1946 as Elliot Judd’s corporation counsel. Cleland’s façade—jutting jaw, shrewd eyes, alert seated posture—was no sham.

  Villiers took them through a swift course, twice deferring to Sidney Isher, who put in legal niceties, and to Steve Wyatt, who had come armed with a briefcase full of statistics and corporate figures.

  He watched them while he spoke, gauging the temper of the group with hair-fine care; afterward he paused, and in a room whose silence was disturbed only by the thrumming of air-conditioning, he moved his eyes from face to face with an expression like that of a man who, drawing back his whip, hesitates just briefly to select the most painful spot on his victim’s naked back. And then he said, “My terms and conditions should be easy enough to understand. Either you support my campaign to persuade stockholders to trade their NCI shares for Heggins debentures, or I’ll proceed with moves to raise patent royalties and drive NCI out of the competitive marketplace. I’ve accumulated enough of a position and enough voting proxies to make a strong bid for control in a stockholders’ meeting, but if you force me to that extreme you’re only hurting yourselves and the company. Your best choice is to go along with the Heggins exchange and afterward dissolve the present board of directors so that I can replace it with my people.”

  There were no outraged cries; most of them steepled their fingers and squinted at him, making it clear they were not ready to jump for the lifeboats yet, not prepared to be easily swayed. Ansel Cleland just watched Villiers as if he were slightly crazy. Silverstein looked uncomfortable and sick; he was toying with a mechanical pencil and not meeting anyone’s glance. There were looks of stunned fascination, pained looks of indignation, dazed looks of shock. Finally Ansel Cleland spoke: “You ought to be shot,” he said, filling with red-faced anger. “I won�
��t let you get near it.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t stop me.”

  “You’ll never pull it off, Villiers. We’ll line up proxy-soliciting firms. We’ll form a protective stockholders’ committee. This firm will not be bled by a common raider!”

  “Go ahead. Insist on a proxy war. You’ll have trouble, Cleland. When I raise the patent royalties on Melbard and the others, your market picture will go sour. The big fund managers will dump NCI from their portfolios. Your own employees will get shaky and your customers will be frightened off. The competition will get brave, and you’ll get squeezed out of your outlets. You’ll destroy the confidence of your stockholders and wreck the entire company. Is that what you want?”

  “Don’t try to put words in my mouth,” Cleland said. “You know what we want. The question is, what do you want?”

  “I thought it was obvious by now. I want NCI.”

  “No. You won’t get it, and you know that. So the question becomes, what will you settle for?”

  Villiers shook his head. “You misunderstand me. I didn’t come here to bargain and negotiate and reach a compromise. There’s no middle ground here. You go along or you go under, that’s all there is.”

  “You’re playing poker—running a bluff. Don’t you think we can see that?”

  Villiers’ reply was the slightest of smiles. It had no visible effect on Cleland, but some of the others were visibly chilled; shaken, they looked away and fidgeted. Villiers nodded to Isher and Wyatt, who dragged on his cigarette and poured thick, slow rivers of smoke from his nostrils while he packed up his briefcase. Villiers walked down the length of the room to the door, turned, caught Dan Silverstein’s eye for a moment, and said to Cleland, “Our newspaper ads will be on the street Monday morning. You’ll have to make up your minds between now and then. If you’re smart, you won’t make a fight of it.”