Lady of Fortune

by Graham Masterton

  Jimmy Byrd puffed out his cheeks. ‘I know it’s a pretty dubious kind of set-up,’ he said, ‘but you must remember that almost anything goes these days. The bull market is producing a whole heap of bullshit, if you’ll excuse my French. Did you know that Gerrard’s Bank set up the Guard-National Investment Trust solely for the purpose of unloading $17 million of dud copper and utility securities they couldn’t unload on the unsuspecting speculator in any other way?’

  ‘You mean Columbia Copper?’

  ‘That’s right, and Illinois Electric.’

  Effie said, ‘Dougal has already found out a great deal about this set-up that seems extremely suspicious. He doesn’t have any proof, and he’s having a very difficult time finding any; but it seems that these fifty-one corporations are all owned or partly controlled by three or four holding companies.’

  ‘Not unusual,’ said Jimmy. He produced a small leather-covered notebook, and a silver-tipped pencil. ‘Can you give me any names?’

  ‘The Poind Corporation, the Balmoral Trust, the Unidexter Company.’

  ‘I know Unidexter. They’re very reliable. I’ve never heard of Poind.’

  ‘It’s an old Scottish word meaning ‘to impound, or confiscate’. Dougal thinks his older brother is playing a particularly tasteless joke on him.’

  Jimmy Byrd put his notebook away again, and cleared his throat. ‘You realise what you’re faced with if all of these corporations are intermingled,’ he said. ‘Somebody would only have to start selling the stock short in those three or four holding companies, and all fifty-one companies would go down the pan in a single morning’s trading.’

  ‘But if they’re controlled and financed by Robert, how could he afford to do that?’

  ‘It’s very easy. Well, it’s not easy, but it’s not difficult. He probably acquired the companies in the first place by picking on industries whose stock quotations were grossly over-inflated, and by buying a minimal amount of common stock in them on margin, through an anonymous broker. Then, all he would have to do would be to go to the company’s board, and reveal who he was, and threaten to dump his stock at the lowest price you could think of, accompanied by the maximum publicity. It wouldn’t cost him anything. But come on, now – if you were a little old lady in Ohio, and you heard that Robert Watson was selling short the very same stock into which you’d put all of your life’s savings – what would you do? You’d sell, quick. So Robert has probably persuaded the companies to invest substantially in his holding companies – purely on the pretext of improving the mobility of their capital, or whatever other fairy-story he could think of. And there you have it – for almost no outlay, a formidable interest in fifty-one major US corporations – not based on solid investment, but simply on the fact that almost all stocks are wildly over-priced.’

  ‘I still don’t see what he would stand to gain – apart from the humiliation of his own brother.’

  ‘He would stand to gain a great deal. He’s in control, you see. He can pull strings and do what he likes. He can sell his own holding-company stocks short, and topple the whole pyramid that he’s created, and ruin Watson’s New York in a matter of hours. Dougal’s right to be worried that Robert might not honour his foreign bill until it’s too late: even if Robert was dutiful enough to send a shipload of gold bullion over from Europe, $24 million would never be enough to salvage the bank if there was a really heavy run on its deposits. Remember – the way the market is at the moment, nobody’s going to keep their money anywhere if they hear even the faintest rumour that a crash is coming. In any case, Robert could probably argue successfully in law that he was not obliged to honour the bill because Watson’s New York had so seriously mismanged his clients’ money.’

  ‘I think I know what he’s after,’ said Effie. ‘Apart from profit, I mean.’

  ‘It’s obvious to me what he’s after – supposing that any of this is true,’ put in Jimmy Bryd. ‘He wants to take over Watson’s New York as his US outlet, without paying very much for it. Once he’s done that, he can start buying back the stock he sold short, and rebuilding confidence in his fifty-one companies, and getting back what he deliberately threw away. That’s only guesswork, but from what Caldwell told me about him …’

  ‘It sounds like very good guesswork,’ said Effie. ‘But what can we do?’

  ‘First, we need some proof,’ Jimmy Byrd told her. ‘Then, we need to sit down and see if there’s any way we can use it as a lever against Robert. But we’re walking on eggshells here. Robert has all the aces, and all we have to do is let him know that we suspect him, and we’re finished. He can pick up the telephone, and sink the whole lot with one word. I can’t even advise you to liquidate your own holdings in Watson’s New York – not unless you want to see a serious run on stock prices. Look what happened when the Bank of Italy went down in June; thousands of speculators were ruined overnight.’

  ‘If you can just get me some more information on the Poind Corporation,’ said Effie.

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Jimmy Byrd. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘You know that I’ll pay you well for it.’

  ‘Well, sure: Understood. Listen, would you like some coffee?’

  ‘I don’t have the time,’ said Effie. ‘I have my family to look after.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  On the way back to her apartment, sitting in the plush upholstery of her Pierce-Arrow with the curtains drawn, she thought of Dougal again. She hadn’t been at all sure what Dougal had felt about her sudden revelation that Alisdair was not Robert’s heir, but his. He had been so seriously distressed by having to tell her about his attempt at self-castration that the news about Alisdair had seemed to do nothing but perplex him. He had muttered a peculiar apology, something about the heat, then paid the check, and hurriedly left The Curb House as if he had just learned that the bank was on fire.

  Kosczinski was humming a tune from Show Boat as he steered through the four o’clock downtown traffic. Effie thought to herself: perhaps I had no right to tell Dougal what I did. Perhaps, on the other hand, I should have told him years ago. She bit at the knuckle of her thumb, feeling guilty of the worst kinds of moral cowardice; feeling guilty of arrogance and hypocrisy and, most shaming of all, of complacency. How could she have talked so patronizingly to Dougal about his failure to give Mariella children when she herself had failed to keep her own marriage together after only one year? How could she criticize the way in which Dougal had so naively accepted Robert’s offer of financial co-operation when she herself had failed to face up to Robert time and time again? She was only here in America because Robert had used her to set up the Deutsche Kreditbank collapse. She had only retreated to California because she couldn’t face the pressures of the bull market and the idea of working with Robert again.

  She felt that it was her inability to confront Robert bravely enough that had brought the Watson family back to the very same crisis it had faced when her father had been alive, and her mother had been unable to stand up to him. Just as before, the Watsons were all viciously tangled up together by the unholy bonds of money and suspect morality, and by their own brand of flawed financial heroism. But that was all that tied them. They never once looked to one another with a love that sought no advantage. They believed, all three of them, Robert and Dougal and Effie (and probably Alisdair now, too) that being kind to each other meant nothing more than to speak to each other without anger, and to refrain from deliberately and nakedly exploiting each other to make money. Thomas Watson’s father had run desperately down the streets of Edinburgh to seek sanctuary from his creditors, and had beaten young Thomas to instil in him the ruthlessness that would enable him to avoid the same degrading fate. The echoes of those tawsings could still be heard seventy years later, in 1929, and they threatened to shatter the Watson family into fragments, and shake down a financial edifice worth billions of dollars.

  There were two messages waiting for Effie when she got back to her apartment. One was from Emily
Truscott Hornweather, saying that she would adore to have tea later in the week; the other was from Jimmy Byrd calling from home. She went through to her study, sat on the pale pink upholstered sofa under a small painting of The Children of the Médano Circus by Picasso, and asked the operator for Jimmy Byrd’s personal number Murray Hill 9-4158. Jimmy answered immediately and said, ‘Effie? Is that you?’

  ‘I’ve just got in. I had to stop to buy Kay some tennis socks.’

  Tennis socks?’

  ‘She’ll be back from New Hampshire next week.’

  ‘Oh, right. But listen. The first thing I did when I got back to the office was call a friend of mine at Sawyer, Fuchs & Weibart. I’ve known him for years, we go fishing together on Tyler Pond, Connecticut. He owes me a favour because of that Giannini business. I arranged to meet him back here at home because it was just that little bit more private, you understand?’

  ‘All right, what did he tell you?’

  ‘He knows the head guy at Unidexter, and the head guy at Unidexter is a man called Sigsby. Well, according to Sigsby, it seems that five major holding companies, including Unidexter, have now been interlinked by heavy capitalization from South America and Europe – a lot of it with money that my friend believes was smuggled out of Germany in the closing stages of the war. The overall holding company is your friend the Poind Corporation. The whole thing looks very much like a way of laundering German war profits so that the Allies don’t get their hands on them as payment towards reparations. No wonder the German steel and armaments factories appeared to be so broke when the Allies took them over: all of the money which companies like Schmaussen and Krebs and Wonlarts had been paid during the war – most of which came from British and the United States in the first place – was whisked back out of Germany in 1919 and hidden in secret suspense accounts in Uruguay and Switzerland and Mexico.’

  ‘Then Robert is doing all of this to legitimise the funds from German war profiteering?’

  ‘Don’t underestimate him,’ said Jimmy Byrd. ‘He’s not just drawing these funds out of South American banks and openly investing them in US corporations. He needs to bury the money completely; and the only way he’s going to be able to do that is to make these holding companies and 51 manufacturing companies collapse, or appear to collapse, so that the money can be spirited away altogether. If people start asking embarrassing questions about it, all he’ll have to say is, the companies crashed and it’s all gone. That’s why the name ‘Poind Corporation’ has more than just one double-meaning. ‘Poind’ can mean reparations, too.’

  Effie said, ‘What do you think Robert himself is going to get out of this? I mean, ultimately?’

  ‘A huge mountain of commission from the German banks and businesses whose money he’s managed to save. Tens of millions of dollars, I expect. Maybe more than that, who knows? You’ve seen what’s happening in Germany at the moment. Maybe the money’s going to find its way back there one day, and be used to finance a military and political reconstruction.’

  ‘Why did Sigsby let all this out?’ asked Effie. ‘I would have thought that Robert would have sworn everybody involved to utter secrecy.’

  ‘He let it out because my friend promised him several thousand dollars commission if the arrangement can conclusively be proved to be suspect; and also, and more importantly, he promised him unlimited use of the key to Suite 788 at The Walford Hotel on 51st Street, which is the residence of a young lady name Sabine Something-or-Other. Also, it doesn’t look to me as if Robert’s really too worried about secrecy. Whatever Sigsby says, the arrangement has to be proved to be crooked to the satisfaction of the law, or at least to the satisfaction of the governors of the New York Stock Exchange, and even then there are too many fingers in this one particular pie for Robert to be very much at risk. Too many German sympathisers on Wall Street.’

  Effie slowly rubbed her forehead. She could feel one of her summer headaches coming on. She had been having them more and more frequently lately, and she wondered if she was really pregnant, or simply approaching the change of life. But, she had to be pregnant. She knew it.

  Jimmy Byrd said, ‘There’s one more thing. I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to tell you.’

  ‘What is it? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Sigsby told my man the identity of the fellow who helped Robert to set this whole deal up. I don’t think he meant to, but my man has a particular way of talking to people as if he knows everything already. The man who set the deal up was Caldwell.’

  ‘Caldwell? Is this some kind of a joke?’ Effie took the telephone receiver away from her face and stared at it as if it had spat at her. Then she put it back again, and said, ‘Caldwell?’

  ‘Believe me,’ I’m just as shocked as you are,’ said Jimmy Byrd. ‘My grandmother on my mother’s side was German, and I wasn’t too hot on the United States going into the war, but believe me, if those war profits go anywhere, they ought to go back into making Europe whole again, not lining the pockets of a few exiled German millionaires, or earning interest on the New York Stock Exchange so that they can be ploughed back into another war.’

  Effie whispered, ‘Caldwell.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jimmy Bryd. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

  Effie said, numbly. ‘Thank you for everything, Jimmy. Thank you for being so prompt. If you can find out anything else …’

  ‘Sure thing. And listen, I’m really sorry …’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Effie. ‘I think, if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  She tried to telephone Caldwell, but there was an electrical storm in Los Angeles, and she could hear nothing but popping and fizzing when the telephone at Caledonia was eventually picked up. She tried to call Dougal, but his secretary told her that he had left to go back to Long Island. She tried to call Mariella, but her nerve failed her when Mariella answered, and she put down the phone again.

  She dressed carefully that evening: in a severe black Chanel suit and black shoes, with only a spray of diamonds on her left lapel and five diamond rings for jewellery. Robert arrived at seven o’clock exactly, dressed in a dark evening suit, and a purple-lined cape. He seemed to have lost a little weight, and he was fit and tanned from a week’s sailing off Cape Cod.

  ‘Well, it’s so nice to see you again,’ he said, kissing her cheek. ‘I was hoping that sonsie young daughter of yours would be here, too.’

  ‘She’ll be here next week. She’s been studying with a school friend in New England.’

  ‘But how are you?’ Robert asked, swirling back his cape and sitting himself down, uninvited, on the sofa. ‘You don’t look as if you’ve caught much of that California sun. Have you seen what young girls are doing these days? Letting down the shoulder-straps of their swimsuits to get their backs all brown. I must say there were some good things to see off the coast of Massachusetts, and they weren’t all fish and foam.’

  ‘I’m pleased you found something to titillate you,’ said Effie. She found that she could scarcely look at him; his pale colourless eyes were like a repellent magnet, from which needs and iron-fillings would fly and twitch in disarray.

  ‘Have you heard from Caldy?’ Robert inquired.

  ‘Caldy?’ asked Effie. Only she ever called Caldwell ‘Caldy.’

  ‘Well, your dear husband, whom you left so urgently to be with us this week.’

  ‘No, I haven’t heard. Not that it’s anything to do with you.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so testy, my dearie,’ smiled Robert. ‘I know why you’re here. Didn’t I always say to you that good intelligence is half the battle in banking? Knowing what your adversary is up to; knowing which currencies will float, and which will sink. Knowing when stock markets are ready to rise, and when they are right on the brink of collapse.’

  Charlene came in, and said, ‘Will you be wanting a cocktail, Miss Effie?’

  ‘No, thank you, Charlene. I understand that Mr Wats
on is taking me out to dinner.’

  Robert smiled. ‘That’s right, my car’s waiting outside. I have a table booked for us at L’Ecstase.’

  ‘Sparing no expense, I see,’ said Effie. ‘Charlene, will you fetch my coat for me?’

  L’Ecstase was on 49th Street between Madison and Park; the most costly and fashionable restaurant in New York, and probably in the world. Even at 1929 prices, with a case of twenty-year-old (prohibited) Scotch going at less than $45 the case, and a brand-new vacuum cleaner costing just $28.50, an evening at L’Ecstase rarely cost less than $60 a head, and often more. Robert’s Rolls-Royce glided to the entrance, and the grey-uniformed doorman saluted with his white-gloved hand as Robert and Effie walked across the grey-carpeted sidewalk to the restaurant’s lobby. Inside, they were accompanied and pursued by three or four flunkeys, who took their coats and capes, their hats and gloves, and guided them swiftly to the rope, where Ernesto, the imperious maître-d’, was presiding over an unhappy line of would-be diners.