‘Look here, Woolrich!’ F. X. leaned forward. ‘I’ve just been looking over this last lot of reports from Lisbon. I expect you’ve read ’em.’
Woolrich nodded. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I could say them over by heart.’
‘You mean,’ said F. X., ‘you know you could … Look here, there’s only one thing that worries me, and that’s Montana. You know and I know that Montana’s not square—unless it pays him to be—and is it paying him?’
Woolrich nodded. He said, with emphasis:
‘It is. If he went over to real rubber he’d never get the money. There aren’t any flies on Montana. You know that, sir, and he must realise that if he started any double-crossing he might do well for a bit but in the long run he’d get ditched. I’ve thought it all out.’
‘That,’ said F. X., ‘is my opinion too … All right, we’ll leave that at that. Now …’
They plunged into many and intricate details of business. They did, in ten minutes, so used were they to each other, as much work as most other couples in London, standing in the same relation, would have spent two hours and more upon.
F. X. rose and stretched himself. His big body seemed suddenly to tower. He said:
‘Well, that’s that! Anything else, Woolrich?’
Woolrich pondered a moment. His blue eyes narrowed as he thought and one corner of his well-cut, clean-shaven mouth twitched to a little constricted grin of concentration. At one corner of this mouth there showed a gleam of teeth as white as F. X.’s own. He pulled out a small notebook; flipped over its pages.
‘Nothing today, sir.’
‘You don’t want,’ said F. X., looking at him keenly, ‘to go down to the country this afternoon?’
A dark flush darkened Woolrich’s tan. He shook the blond head. ‘No, sir.’ He stood up. ‘If there’s nothing else I’ll go and have a bite of lunch. Busy afternoon after what we’ve done.’
F. X. nodded. ‘No, there’s nothing else.’
Woolrich walked to the door. With his fingers on its handle he turned. He said:
‘By the way, sir, I hear that fellow Marsh has been ringing up—’
‘Oh, him!’ said F. X. ‘That was before you came … All right, don’t blush. I meant to tell you, Woolrich, I’ve made an appointment with Marsh for tomorrow night. I’m going to meet him after all. And I’m going to settle with him.’
Woolrich came away from the door, back into the centre of the room.
‘Good Lord, sir!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean to say you’re going to—’
F. X. shook his head. ‘No, no, no! Woolrich, I’m not wringing wet—you know that. No, I’m going to tell Mr Marsh that if he likes to take a little douceur he can buzz off; if he doesn’t like to take it, he can buzz off just the same. I’m fed up with him … And if after tomorrow he ever rings up or shoves his face in here again, you can have him buzzed off with my love. Anyhow, we don’t want things like that blocking up the place.’
Woolrich paused on his journey to the door. He said:
‘I’ve never seen him, sir, and I don’t want to. But from what you said I should imagine you’re right.’
‘I am!’ said F. X., with feeling. ‘Anthony here yet?’
‘I’ll send him along, sir,’ said Woolrich, and was gone.
3
Francis Xavier Benedik and Anthony Xavier Benedik stood expectant just within the main doors of the Alsace Restaurant. They were waiting for Peter. Peter Rickforth was Samuel Harvey Rickforth’s daughter and did not look it. She was also—or perhaps primarily—the future wife of Anthony Xavier Benedik. She was very, very easy to look at. Her engagement to Tony Benedik had broken, at least temporarily, more hearts than any feminine decision in London for the past six months.
Peter was always late. Tony looked at F. X. ‘I think,’ said Tony, ‘another little drink.’
‘That’ll be three,’ said his father.
‘Right-ho, if you say so!’
They drank standing, their eyes fixed upon the revolving doors through which Peter would presently come. Standing there, utterly unconscious of their surroundings, glasses in hands, they were a couple which brought the gaze of many eyes to bear upon them. Exactly of a height, exactly of a breadth, with the same rather prominent-jawed, imperious nosed, hard-bitten good looks, the same deep, wide shoulders and narrow horseman’s hips, they were a walking, talking proof that heredity is not an old wife’s tale. What lineage, God knows, for F. X. himself could scarcely tell you from whence he came, but wherever this was, it and his own life had stamped their stamp upon the man, and this stamp was upon the son. They did not, these two, behave like father and son. They were more like elder and younger brother—much more. In only one particular was their aspect different. In the dress of F. X. was a careless, easy mixture of opulent cloth and ‘I-like-a-loose-fit-blast-it-what-do-clothes-matter?’ carelessness. In the dress of Tony was a superb and apparently unconscious elegance.
The revolving doors revolved. The little negro page-boy smiled until his face looked like an ice pudding over which chocolate has unevenly flowed.
‘Mawnin’, miss!’ said the page-boy.
‘’Morning, Sambo!’ said Peter Rickforth. She looked about her. She did not have far to look. Father and son were straight before her. She came towards them with her hands outstretched.
‘My dears,’ she said, ‘do not—do not say all those things which are trembling on your tongue and shooting darts of fire from your too amazingly similar pairs of eyes! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! And I’m sorry! How’s that?’
‘Very well,’ said F. X. ‘In fact, Peter, I think you are too well-mannered. After all, you know, any couple of men ought to be only too damn glad for you to lunch with them at all, let alone worry if you’re a few minutes late.’
‘Few minutes!’ said Tony. ‘Few minutes! If you do this, my girl, after we’re married, you’ll only do it once. At least, only once a month.’
Peter’s golden eyes stared at him. ‘Only a month? Why only once a month? Why not once a week?’
‘The effects,’ said Tony, ‘of the beatings will last three weeks, five days and seven hours exactly. We’ve got a table. Shall we go in, F. X.?’
‘If,’ said his father, ‘the lady wills.’
The lady did will, and presently they sat, a trio to draw all eyes, over a meal which was probably for that one day at least the best of its kind in all London.
It was over coffee that F. X. said:
‘Peter, I want to talk to you about your family.’
Peter laughed. ‘Family, sir?’ she said. ‘It’s the first I know about it!’
‘I mean,’ said F. X., ‘the other way round, backwards. Your father.’
‘Oh, Daddy!’ said Peter. ‘What’s he been doing? You don’t mean to tell me that squinting one in the Palazzo chorus has been getting Daddy into trouble, do you? She does squint, you know. She’s got the most awful cast in one eye!’
‘My good girl,’ said Tony, ‘you want a twisted snaffle in that mouth of yours.’
‘Your father, Peter,’ said F. X., ‘said nothing to me about squinting Palazzo’s. Nothing at all. He wouldn’t. He might think I’d take a fancy to them. I’m worried about your father’—his smile was gone now—‘because your father is getting worried about RYNOX.’
‘And a fat sauce,’ said Peter, ‘he’s got. Worried about RYNOX. I’ll scald his fat little ears! What d’you mean, F. X.—worried about RYNOX?’
She leant her elbow on the table and looked steadily, with a seriousness belying her words, into the eyes of F. X.
‘Have a cigar, Tony?’ said F. X. ‘All right, Peter, I’m going to shoot in a minute. There’s a maitre d’hotel with long pitchers just behind. Have a cigar, Tony, go on? … Look here, Peter, I don’t know whether Tony’s told you. Being Tony he probably has, but RYNOX is on about the stickiest patch of country we’ve ever struck. The position exactly is this—that if we can keep going for another six months, we shall be rolling alo
ng on top of the world, and right on top of the world. If we can’t keep going for six months, we shall be rolling along somewhere in Lambeth gutter. Now, I’m not joking, Peter. I’m talking dead straight. RYNOX is mine. I mean, I started it, and I don’t believe, for business purposes, in limited companies. A limited company means limited credit, and I like my credit hot, strong and unbounded. Hence the unlimited condition of RYNOX. But, Peter, do you know what an unlimited company means? It means that if the company fails, all the creditors can come down upon not only the company, but upon all the individual partners in the company. That is, upon me first, then Tony, and then your father. They can take not only the chairs and desks and pictures and carpets out of the office, but the tables and pianos and bath-taps out of your house.’
‘All right, sir! All right!’ Peter was smiling again now. A very different smile, a smile which made Tony gasp at his luck, and F. X. mentally raise a hat.
‘All right, sir,’ said Peter again. ‘Yes, I knew that.’
A good lie; she hadn’t known that. Both men knew that she hadn’t known that. Both men if possible loved Peter more than they had five minutes ago.
‘Your father,’ said F. X., ‘being, if I may say so, Peter, a very shrewd but rather timid Leadenhall Street business man, has frankly got the wind up. I keep soothing him down but I’d like you to help. I’d like you really to soothe him right down.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony, has Sam said anything to you lately?’
‘Sam,’ said Tony. ‘Sorry, Peter, Daddy thinks that if a man is under fifty he ought still to be playing with rattles. Sam doesn’t understand me, I don’t understand Sam. How on earth Peter ever managed to be—sorry, old thing! Anyway, in answer to your question, F. X. Benedik, Sam has not said anything to me. I think he has to Woolrich, though.’
F. X. laughed. ‘If he said anything against RYNOX to Woolrich, I know what he’d get! That boy’s keener on his job than anybody so fond of trips into the country’s any right to be. RYNOX is graven on his liver.’
Tony moved the glasses from before him; leaned across the table; said in a different tone:
‘Look here, Dad, we’re going to pull this off, aren’t we? Because if you think it’s too much for you … but of course you don’t!’
‘I don’t think anything,’ said F. X. ‘I know, boy, I know. By the way, did you see that friend of yours? Young Scott-Bushington?’
Tony’s lip curled. ‘I saw him all right. Cold feet though. Nothing doing, F. X.’
F. X. grinned. ‘Don’t look so solemn! That’s all right. Look here, Peter’—he turned to the woman who was going to be his son’s wife—‘I don’t know how much Tony tells you, but I’d tell you everything and then some. What RYNOX wants, Peter, is a hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.’
‘That all?’ said Peter.
F. X. smiled. ‘It sounds a lot of money, my dear, but in this sort of business it’s, well, just nothing. You know what RYNOX are doing, don’t you, Peter? RYNOX have practically chucked all their other interests into the fire to back the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company.’
Peter nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I know that. Tony does tell me things.’
‘I expect,’ said F. X., ‘he does, and if I may say so, quite right, too. Well, the Paramata Synthetic Rubber Company’s going—not west, but big. We’ve got the plant, we’ve got the stock, we’ve got the orders—some of them. We’ve got four big orders, Peter, hanging fire. They’re coming along all right; they’re German, three of them. But we’ve got to last out until they do come and then a bit, see? And that’s what your father’s worried about. He thinks we can’t hang on, and I tell him we can. I tell him we’ve damn well got to! So you get at him, Peter, and tell him so, too.’ He turned to his son. ‘Tony!’
‘Sergeant?’
‘Paris for you, my lad. I want you to go and see Menier. If we don’t recall that Valenciennes loan within the next six months we ought to be shot. I’d like it within a month. Just see what you can do, will you?’
Tony drew patterns upon the cloth with the haft of his fork. ‘Right! Yes, I know Menier pretty well. We’re rather pally, as a matter of fact. When do you want me to go?’
‘Better take the five o’clock air mail. That gets you there in time for a full day tomorrow and Saturday and as much of Sunday as you’d like. Come back Monday morning …’ F. X. looked at his son for a long moment. ‘Stick at it, Tony. And by the way …’
Tony cocked an unobtrusive ear. He knew F. X.’s ‘by-the-ways.’ They generally concealed a major point.
‘By the way,’ said F. X., ‘while you’re with Menier, you might sound him. That Caporal group of his might put up fifty thousand. You could tell him six months and ten per cent, if you like. Anyway, try.’
Tony nodded. And at that moment the faces of father and son were so alike in every line that they might have been, not elder and younger brothers, but twins.
Peter looked at the watch upon her wrist. ‘My dears,’ she said, ‘I must go. What about you? Or don’t RYNOX do any work in the afternoon?’
F. X. stood up. ‘They do. We’ve been chewing the rag here a bit too long as it is. Come on.’
They went on. Outside, father and son put Peter into a taxi; watched while the taxi purred out of Alsace Court and into the Strand.
F. X. turned to his son. ‘Going back to the office, boy?’
Tony nodded. ‘And you?’
F. X. shook his head. ‘Not this afternoon. I’m going away to think.’
Tony waved a stick—they were half-way up the court by this time—at a taxi with its flag up. ‘You have this?’ he said. ‘Or me?’
‘You,’ said F. X. ‘I’m walking.’
The taxi came to a standstill abreast of them. Tony put a foot upon its running board and fingers to the handle of its door. ‘RYNOX House,’ he said to the driver.
His father looked at him.
Tony opened the taxi door. He said over his shoulder:
‘See you on Monday then.’ He made to enter the cab.
‘Tony!’ said his father.
‘Hullo!’ Tony turned round; saw his father’s outstretched hand; raised his eyebrows. ‘Good Lord!’ he said, but he took the hand. They shook; a firm grip, each as strong as the other.
‘Do your best,’ said his father, ‘with Menier.’
Tony nodded and leapt into the cab and slammed the door. The engine churned. Tony looked out of the window. ‘So long, F. X.,’ he said.
‘Good-bye!’ said F. X., and raised his hand in salute.
COMMENT THE SECOND
ALL is not well with RYNOX. F. X. is probably not so confident even as his most pessimistic words to his son.
RYNOX is at that point where one injudicious move; one failure of judgment; one coincidental piece of bad luck, will wreck it. And it ought not—thinks F. X.—to be wrecked. For if it can struggle on for another six or seven months all his speculation, all his endeavour, will meet with incalculable success.
SEQUENCE THE THIRD
Friday, 29th March 193— 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.
F.X. sat at breakfast. Through the big French windows of his dining-room in William Pitt Street, the spring sun blazed, turning the comfortable but rather sombre room into a chamber of temporary glory. F.X., so to speak, read The Morning Mercury with one hand and with the other conversed with his man, Prout.
Prout was a short, stiff little man. There was a legend about Prout—started probably by F. X. himself—to the effect that he had nineteen hairs and that twelve of these were upon the right side of his parting and seven upon the other. He was clean-shaven—very shaven and very, very clean. He was also very quiet. There was another legend—this one having its birth with Tony—to the effect that Prout really was a ‘foreigner,’ only knowing three words of English: ‘Very good, sir.’ Prout, who had been with F. X. now for seven years—ever since RYNOX had been founded—adored F. X. In a lesser, quieter way he was fond of Tony. For Peter, he would have gone through nearly as much, if not quit
e, as for F. X. himself.
‘If you, Prout,’ said F. X., ‘were Lord Otterburn and owned the daily paper with the largest net sale (don’t forget net, Prout, there’s always a lot of holes in a net) what would you do?’
Prout put a cover upon the dish of kidneys. ‘Nothing, sir,’ said Prout.
F. X. looked at him. ‘And a very good answer too. Don’t know what it is about you, Prout, but you always say the right thing with the most delightfully innocent air of not knowing you’ve said it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Prout. ‘Excuse me, sir, but Mrs Fairburn wanted me to ask you whether you could see her for a moment before you leave for the office.’
F. X. nodded. ‘Certainly, certainly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘You’d better tell her to come in now, hadn’t you? I shall be off in a few minutes.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said Prout, and left the room so silently, so unobtrusively that the moment he was gone F. X. wondered, as he always wondered on these occasions, whether Prout had really ever been with him at all.
The door opened again. Mrs Fairburn came in. Mrs Fairburn was F. X.’s housekeeper. She, too, had been with F. X. for seven years. She, too, strictly within her very strict notions of right and wrong, would have done anything for F. X. She was, as Tony frequently said, almost too good to be true. Her hair, quite black despite her fifty-four years, was scraped from her forehead and piled high upon the back of her head. She wore black satin always. Sometimes there were bugles upon the black satin, but at other times the black satin was plain. Always when she walked the black satin rustled. About her severely corsetted waist was a belt and inevitably there dangled from this belt a bunch of keys. No one in the house had ever discovered—since nothing in this house ever was locked—what these keys were for. But always they were there, swinging and dangling and jangling. They told you, in fact, where Mrs Fairburn, moving about her duties in the tall, narrow house, could be found. You had only to stand still and listen. Presently you would hear them and then you could track Mrs Fairburn.
The Rynox Mystery Page 4
