by Emma Lathen
“Why don’t you join us for a drink?” Rutledge continued.
Thatcher was about to demur when he was struck by the warmth of the invitation. And General Cartwright was regarding him almost hopefully. He knew full well the bone-deep fatigue that prolonged negotiations can induce in the participants. Even with the best intentions in the world, they become surfeited with each other. The benevolence induced by Laura’s kiss moved him.
“Delighted,” he said untruthfully, moving with them in the general direction of the men’s bar.
“We finished up at about nine o’clock, and decided to come down for a drink,” Rutledge explained in a random fashion as the waiter took their order.
There followed an awkward pause. Rutledge, who seemed to have lost weight almost steadily since Thatcher had first seen him, stared with somnolent intensity at his drink when it arrived, while Cartwright evinced certain signs of embarrassment. The trouble, Thatcher realized, was that everybody was reluctant to raise the one topic common to all of them; National Calculating. He steeled himself to take the plunge, when the General forestalled him.
“I spent last night with Mrs. Cobb and her husband,” he told Rutledge and Thatcher. “Now there is a lady who knows about computers.” This was clearly a compliment to National Calculating, and Rutledge roused himself to reply.
“Margaret Cobb is probably the most competent scientist we’ve ever had at National,” he agreed. “She’s been with us for years.”
“I was wondering about that,” Thatcher broke in, his interview with Morris Richter fresh in his mind. “Why hasn’t she ever been appointed Director of R & D? Mind you, I know nothing about these things. Your Dr. Richter . . .”
General Cartwright looked pained by this calculated indiscretion, but Rutledge was unruffled.
“He’s not my Dr. Richter,” he replied with a smile. “Young Richter’s too bright for the likes of me.” He sounded mildly amused. “I think Chip Mason had the idea that R & D might come up with the sort of thing they came up with at Polaroid. You know, basic research that could really pay off. Naturally that means a young genius, and Mrs. Cobb didn’t fit . . .”
“She’s certainly one smart woman,” the General insisted with quiet loyalty.
“Oh, no one doubts it. And among the three of us, she’s more than kept that division together through a lot of bright young men. I suspect that she’ll be there after Dr. Richter is gone.” He paused for a moment, and Thatcher wondered if he were going to comment on Richter’s plans for a Hammond-Rutledge-Richter alliance. If he had anything to say along those lines, he thought better of it. “You know how it is. She lacks glamour.” . . .”
Surprisingly this appealed to the General. “It’s just like the service,” he said with some satisfaction. “Some years, you can’t get the time of day unless you’re a big guided-missile man. It all depends on what’s in style.” Amused by this view of the military, Thatcher looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “Now me,” Cartwright continued seriously, “I’m in style some years, then I’m out of style some years. I’m conventional ground weapons, you know, and I really hit my peak during Korea. That’s when I got my third star.”
Thatcher felt his spirits rising, whether with the brandy or the General he could not tell.
“I suppose it’s the same all over,” Rutledge drawled. “Whether it’s industry or the army. You know, in places where we’re having all of these scientific discoveries, we have a terrible time convincing people that old fogies like Margaret Cobb and me know anything at all.” He spoke with the comfortable assurance of the man who had developed the TCR, tolerant of the brash young Richters of the world.
“What I liked about Mrs. Cobb,” Cartwright continued, “is that she’s easy to be with. Doesn’t try to make you feel how smart she is, if you know what I mean. Of course, she was feeling a little low.”
“Low?” Thatcher was startled into asking. A Mrs. Cobb who was anything but calmly efficient and detached required some readjustment in his thinking.
“I think,” Cartwright said with some delicacy, “I think she and her husband were a little upset about the troubles they’re having down at National.”
Before Thatcher could press him, Rutledge interrupted with a wry smile. “General, you’ve been around National so much in the last few weeks that I think that it’s a lucky thing you can tell the police you spent last evening with the Cobbs. I was on my way home, worse luck.” He looked up at Thatcher. “I take it that you must have heard about the latest bad news?”
“Stanley Draper?”
Rutledge nodded. “They’re not at all sure they can save him,” he said. “My secretary called at five o’clock.” Gloom redescended until the General, whose instincts were kindly, broke the silence.
“I think the best thing,” he said, gesturing for a second round of drinks, “I think the best thing would be to have that lively woman turn out to be the person who killed Fortinbras. And pushed young Draper, if he was pushed.”
Rutledge and Thatcher exchanged puzzled looks.
“Lively woman? Do you mean Miss Sullivan?”
“No, no.” . . .”
“What lively woman?”
“That woman who was kicking up such a storm yesterday afternoon . . .”
“Good Lord, General,” Thatcher exclaimed as light dawned. “Did you encounter Mrs. Plout?”
“I did,” he replied simply. A wintry look of disapproval crossed his face, and a new note entered his voice. The note, Thatcher realized, of a man who had commanded. “I won’t say anything against a lady, but that woman doesn’t know how to behave. I told her so.”
“You told her so?”
“With courtesy, I hope. But it just got me pretty angry. She was shouting at me. And she said some pretty mean things to Harry Blaney . . .”
Thatcher allowed his imagination to toy with an encounter between the General and Mrs. Plout. “I wish Tom Robichaux had been there to see it,” he remarked.
“Did she turn on Blaney again?” Rutledge asked.
“She did indeed. You missed the full scene.”
“I’m like the General,” Rutledge said with a grin that transformed his rather severe face. “When I saw Mrs. Plout blowing up a storm, I sort of sidled away.”
“Wise man.”
Mrs. Plout had saddened the General, whom life had hitherto insulated from the species. “I like a little spirit,” he said, “But the things that woman said! Why, she turned on poor old Barney Young about his family! And he’s so proud. You know, I had lunch with him the day the baby came, and you never saw a man feeling so good. We picked out the cigars together. You’d think when a man has had a son after six little girls he’d get a little appreciation. It’s kind of hard luck on him.” . . .”
The elemental simplicity of this view of the catastrophes raining on National Calculating proved irresistibly appealing to Thatcher. He laughed, and after a moment Rutledge and Cartwright joined him.
“Although I don’t know why I should laugh,” Rutledge said with a rueful chuckle. “Life is pretty hard down at National these days.” He was about to continue, decided against it, and instead took another sip of brandy.
Thatcher could find nothing in the picture of National Calculating Corporation to cheer him, but again the United States Army came to the rescue.
“Well, Jay, there’s no denying that you’ve got a little trouble on your hands. And I wouldn’t want to see one of my officers behaving the way old Harry Blaney was carrying on today. But look on the bright side. You have some good people, you have a good product, and all of this will blow over. You don’t win all the battles, you know.”
The long patience of the soldier. While it did not materially alter John Thatcher’s opinion of National’s outlook, he felt, quite unreasonably, more easy in his mind about American defense policy than he had for a long time.
Chapter 15
Behind the Arras
Thatcher was quite honest when he told himself, Miss Cor
sa, and, with some detail, Tom Robichaux, that he was washing his hands of National Calculating. He resolutely beat down the flicker of sympathy roused by Jay Rutledge’s worn face, bade a cordial farewell to General Cartwright with every expectation of never seeing him again unless on the cover of Life and prepared to go about his own business.
But Fate and his own besetting curiosity had something different in store for him. He was walking back to his office after lunch the next day, hurrying a little against the first hint of winter toward the Sloan entrance on Broad Street. Thatcher, unlike some of his colleagues, Bradford Withers, for example, and Everett Gabler, was not pained by the sight of the Sloan’s commercial banking facilities in the lobby. The sight of currency passing through tellers’ cages was not inconsonant with his own view of the Sloan’s dignity, and he cheerfully took a shortcut through the bustling bank to get to the elevators, instead of walking around the corner to the more chaste entrance of the Sloan’s Executive Offices.
He was nearly at the great glass door when he came upon them: three men exuding complacent goodwill, standing in a self-congratulatory group just outside the bank, each attired in the most expensively correct business suit, and all oblivious to the lunchtime crowds eddying around them.
Public expression of ebullient spirits, however common on Madison Avenue and on Fourteenth Street, is rare on Wall Street. Thatcher well remembered old Alton Curtis, whose every additional million in soybean futures brought increased melancholy to his countenance. He had been exceptional, perhaps, but generally men of the Street aim at decent sobriety, leaving jubilation to youngsters in training programs.
What halted Thatcher was the fact that one of the men was Harry Blaney. National Calculating’s chief of Commercial Sales had seemed to him a badly shaken man, a man who could only imperfectly control himself in the face of the irritants and crises he was encountering.
But here he stood in front of the Sloan, full-cheeked and chuckling, the picture of undisturbed self-confidence. As Thatcher watched, he pumped the hand of one of his companions and joined the other, striding off in the general direction of Trinity Church, vigor and prosperity proclaimed by every inch of him.
Thatcher was roused by a peevish voice at his shoulder, wanting to know if he was going to build a house on the spot. He murmured apologies, and trailed Blaney’s companion into the marble-glassed splendor of the Sloan’s lobby.
And here he was hooked by his own curiosity as neatly as a trout. Had he nodded to Donovan the guard, strolled through the lobby to the elevators, and proceeded to the sixth floor, he could have gone about his own business with impunity. Instead he loitered in front of the check desks at the wall, and watched Blaney’s friend go up to a teller, cash a check, and exchange a pleasantry, there was a burst of laughter, then turn to leave. He passed Thatcher on his way out, a sallow-faced man of about forty wearing heavy dark-rimmed glasses. He hit a brisk pace, and disappeared through the doors into the sea of humanity beating against the bank.
Thatcher watched him thoughtfully, then without pausing for reflection, went to the floor manager’s office and let himself in.
“Mr. Thatcher!” Henley murmured, deference and surprise in his voice.
“Don’t get up. I just want to go down to the tellers’ windows.”
“Good heavens! Nothing wrong, I hope.” . . .”
“No, I just want a little information.”
Thatcher moved to the long hallway which led to the tellers’ windows, nodded to the guard who looked at him with the impersonal suspicion of his kind until reassured by a nervous Henley, and was admitted to the tellers’ offices.
“Will you ask the teller in Number One to step out for a moment?” he asked Miss Fellows, who looked up at him from her desk. She goggled for a moment, then ducked out to deliver the message, and Thatcher, irritably drumming his fingers on a filing cabinet, considered the perpetual apprehension under which most people condemn themselves to live. He was neither savage nor malevolent, yet his mere appearance reduced Henley to palpitations while Miss Fellows, a paragon of efficiency, was quite pale as she obeyed his request.
They probably compensated by bullying their subordinates.
Or possibly they were making plans to embezzle a million dollars. A disturbing thought.
“You wanted me, Mr. Thatcher?” he heard a youthful voice ask.
“Yes,” he said to the sandy-haired young man who approached, Miss Fellows hovering behind him. “You just cashed a check for a man in a dark gray business suit and horn-rimmed glasses. About forty.” . . .”
“Yes,” the clerk said calmly. He did not appear to be intimidated, or interested. “That’s Mr. Jarvey. He has a regular commercial account . . .”
“In what name?”
“Execulit, Incorporated. They have offices across the street, 15 Broad.”
Thatcher frowned, giving Miss Fellows a very nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach. Jarvey? He had heard the name before . . . of course! It was a message from a Mr. Jarvey that had roused Regina Plout to her denunciation of Harry Blaney! A message from Mr. Jarvey that Harry Blaney had been unwilling to accept in public. . . . “I beg your pardon?”
“I said,” the clerk commented, “I don’t know exactly what Execulit does.”
“I hope there’s nothing wrong, Mr. Thatcher,” Miss Fellows could not keep from chirping.
“No, no. And thank you.”
The teller did not seem surprised by Thatcher’s warmth; he could not realize that his composure had been a tonic.
Making his way out, Thatcher stopped by Henley’s office to remark offhandedly that the teller appeared to be a competent and intelligent youth, thus throwing the floor manager into a frenzy of half-sentences, suppositions, and apologies, and proceeded into the lobby bound for the elevators, the sixth floor, and the work he had promised himself.
Again he stopped short, and at the Sloan nobody protested, then suddenly turned to go out onto the street. He looked at 15 Broad for a moment, then with an impetuosity that he would have been the first to censure, set out for Execulit, Incorporated.
It was housed, on the thirty-fourth floor, in considerable style. The waiting room, a symphony in soothing beige, boasted a secretary to match.
“You don’t have an appointment?” she asked pleasantly, but with definite appraisal in her eye.
“No.” Thatcher wondered briefly how to frame his question. It was a little absurd to simply ask what Execulit did, here in its opulent quarters. He should have asked Trinkam, who could be relied on to know the blonde if he didn’t know Execulit. “I wanted . . .”
“What was your name, please?”
So bland was her well-modulated voice, that Thatcher identified himself obediently, and before he could state his purpose in coming, she had whisked herself out of sight. His appearance must have passed whatever subtle tests existed, because when she reappeared a few moments later, her smile was a shade more welcoming.
“Mr. Jarvey will be able to fit you in,” she told him. Just as his dentist’s receptionist did.
She ushered him into Mr. Jarvey’s office—this time a symphony in strong manly browns, with a piece of driftwood over a modern fireplace—and withdrew, leaving to him the problem of framing in an inoffensive way what he admitted to himself was unpardonable nosiness He was wasting his time. The initiative was not to be his.
“Well, Mr. Thatcher,” said Mr. Jarvey, rising from behind an incredible desk designed as a work of art by a thwarted Cubist, and coming to wring his hand. “Sit down, won’t you? I’m very glad to see you.” His voice was noticeably heartening, and he beamed reassuringly at Thatcher, who decided he had no alternative. He sat down.
“Er . . . yes. Mr. Jarvey, I confess I find this slightly embarrassing . . .”
Jarvey broke in with a low, musical laugh. “It always seems that way, of course, but you’ll be surprised and pleased to discover how very efficient and businesslike our operations are. It’s more or less the same thing, let
’s see, you’re with the Sloan, aren’t you? Well, it’s the same thing as writing up a mortgage.” He chuckled at his apt pleasantry.
The optimism also recalled his dentist to Thatcher. He smiled politely, and declined the box of Havanas that Mr. Jarvey was pushing toward him.
“No, thank you. I took the chance of coming up here, Mr. Jarvey, I must confess, on an impulse, and I’m not altogether sure . . .”
Jarvey sobered instantly. “It’s often that way,” he told Thatcher with a perplexing note of sympathetic understanding in his voice. “Sometimes it is a question of a fundamental, and often slow-developing sense of need. But quite frequently, it is, as you say, an impulse. Our position is that explorations are not necessarily binding, and so many people reject the notion of even considering what you have in mind because they don’t realize this, but that they are well worth launching because the possibility of rewards, and I know that you are concerned primarily with nonmonetary rewards as well as the more humdrum—or should I say bread-and-butter?—aspects of what we can do.”
He leaned back, pleased with himself, and awaited Thatcher’s comment.
“Quite so. Now, Mr. Jarvey . . .” Thatcher temporized. He recognized a speech when he heard one, but he had rarely derived so little information from such fluent communication.
“Perhaps, Mr. Thatcher,” Jarvey said insinuatingly, “Perhaps it would be smoother if I took over.” He carefully adjusted his merriment to low gear. “I know that a man in your position has become accustomed to taking command of the situation. But I know you’ll agree that, when you go to a specialist, you put yourself in his hands.”
