Executive Suite (12 page)

He walked on toward Fred Alderson who had taken a notebook from his pocket and was jotting down something as Dudley talked. Before he could get within earshot, Alderson had closed the notebook and tucked it back in his vest pocket. Dudley stopped talking. It was a pointed silence that demanded breaking.

Shaw directed his eyes at Alderson. “Apparently things developed rather rapidly in New York, faster than we expected.”

Alderson looked at him blankly. “I—well, I don't quite know what it's all about.”

“You don't?” Shaw let his voice carry an unmistakable note of surprise, which he quickly changed to an adroitly embarrassed apology. “Sorry, Fred, I took it for granted that the old man had talked to you about it.”

He held his eyes on Alderson only long enough to be sure that the shot had gone home. The silence in the room told him that no one else had missed it either. Their faces, seen as he turned slowly to pull out a chair from the table, confirmed the importance of the impression he had made. They were licked, every one of them … and they knew it! They didn't like it but that didn't matter … there was nothing they could do about it.

The palms of his hands were damp again and he reached for his handkerchief, opening its folds with a flip that was like the unfurling of a flag

5.59 P.M. EDT

The telephone was ringing in Erica Martin's office. She answered it. The first sound of the caller's voice brought an instant reaction of annoyance to her face, but she was careful to screen it from her voice before she replied, “I'm sorry, Mrs. Prince, but Mr. Bullard hasn't arrived as yet.” She waited, only half hearing the words that buzzed in her ear like the droning of a lazy fly. “Yes, Mrs. Prince, I'll ask him to call you as soon as it's possible for him to do so.”

Erica Martin took a deep breath and then, as if she were practicing an exercise in self-control, let the trapped air escape slowly and evenly.

The droning buzz lingered in Erica Martin's ears after she had hung up, evoking memories of other times when Julia Tredway had called for Avery Bullard. Then, no matter how busy he was, Avery would drop everything and drive out to see her. The calls had always come late in the afternoon and he never returned to the office afterward. But that hadn't happened for several years now, not since Julia Tredway had married Dwight Prince. That should have ended it … apparently it hadn't … it was starting all over again.

The pencil lead snapped under the pressure of Erica Martin's fingers. A note wasn't necessary. She would remember … it would be impossible to forget … but a note would save her from the necessity of forcing her lips to repeat that creature's name.

6.00 P.M. EDT

The carillon in the lance-point of the Tredway Tower sounded an anticipatory phrase of bell tones and then struck the hour, six rolling resonant peals that vibrated the very walls of the directors' room. The architect of the Tower had failed to anticipate that the top floor of the building would prove to be a reverberation chamber that amplified the bell sound until it was all but unbearable to anyone anywhere in the Executive Suite. Orrin Tredway had endured it because the carillon had been his idea but Avery Bullard, as one of his first official acts after becoming president, had ordered that the carillon was never to be used while he was on the twenty-fourth floor. When Millburgh heard the bells, they knew that the president was not in the Tower.

Frederick Alderson, his liver-spotted fingers gripping the arm of the chair, felt the vibration so strongly that his whole body reacted to it, trembling as if he were caught up in some uncontrollable palsy. Bracing himself against the back of the chair seemed only to heighten the sensation.

The dead stillness that followed the fading of the sixth peal of the bells was something more than ordinary silence. Alderson shifted uneasily in his chair and the rustling crunch of the leather cushion made enough sound to attract the attention of the other four vice-presidents. Their anticipation forced him to say something that he had not intended.

“I hope this meeting doesn't stretch out too long. Mrs. Alderson and I have a dinner date.”

“Me too, Fred,” Walt Dudley said with a laugh that had no point. “Got a date with a flying machine—seven at the airport.”

“Chicago?”

“Yup. Preview for the chain and mail order boys tomorow. Monday we start sweating out the old market grind again.”

Dudley's tone asked for sympathy but before Alderson could respond he saw Loren Shaw lean forward from his seat at the diagonally opposite corner of the table.

“If it isn't convenient, Fred,” Shaw said casually, “I see no particular reason why you have to stay for this meeting tonight.”

Alderson flinched inwardly, recognizing the trap. He knew that Shaw would like nothing better than to get him out of the way. Then, after Bullard came, Shaw would have another chance to drive a knife in his back. Yes, that was Shaw's game … the game he'd been playing ever since Fitzgerald had died.

“Better stick around, Fred,” Jesse Grimm whispered from directly across the table, shielding his voice with the hand that was tamping his pipe.

The whisper was more than advice, it was moral support, and Alderson nodded in appreciation. Shaw wasn't fooling Jesse, not for one minute. Could Shaw be fooling the others? No … it was too obvious to miss … they all knew … they all had Shaw's number … everyone but Avery Bullard.

Alderson's glance around the table recalled the incident that rankled in his mind as the prime example of Shaw's total depravity. There were eight seats at the table, one at each end and three on each side. Avery Bullard had always sat at the west end and Fitzgerald, before his death, had sat at the east end. Alderson, as the vice-president with the greatest senority, had rightfully occupied the chair at Mr. Bullard's right and Jesse Grimm had sat at his left. In the week after Fitzgerald's death, Shaw had started his conniving. He had begun by managing to have the time of the regular executive committee meeting moved up from eleven to nine-thirty. That put the morning sun directly in Mr. Bullard's eyes and, as Shaw had undoubtedly planned in that snaky little mind of his, Bullard had shifted his seat to the opposite end of the table. That put Shaw at the said. ‘Fred,' he said to me, ‘this is the end as far as I'm concerned. There's no future in any company with a coward for a president. It's the biggest order that old Bellinger has ever seen and he's lost his nerve.'

“Naturally I asked Avery Bullard what he was going to do. ‘Fred,' he said to me, ‘Bellinger told me he didn't want the order and I could do what I pleased with it—and that's just what I'm going to do. I'll find some factory that's smart enough to see what this order might mean. Business is getting jittery and store inventories are way up. Unless I miss my guess there's going to be a panic before long—anyway, a bad slump—and a noncancellable order for a half-million dollars worth of furniture at today's prices is going to be something worth having.' Then he asked my advice. ‘Fred,' he said, ‘where do you think I ought to go with this order?'

“Right then and there I told him he ought to go over and see Orrin Tredway at the old Tredway factory in Millburgh. That was how it all started. Yes sir, that was the beginning of everything.

“A couple of months afterward I got a letter from Avery Bullard saying Mr. Tredway had made him sales manager and if I ever wanted a job to come over and see him. Edith and I were packing almost before I got that letter back in the envelope. You see, it always has been that way between Avery Bullard and me—all he ever had to do to get me to do anything was just say the word. Oh, I'll admit he has his peculiarities—some people have trouble getting along with him—but not me. Avery Bullard and I have always been mighty close.

“You remember I said that was in 1920? Well, Avery Bullard was right. The 1921 depression hit and that big order of his was the only thing that kept Tredway going. If it hadn't been—”

The reverie was broken. Walt Dudley was tapping his arm and pointing to the door. Erica Martin was standing in the doorway and when he looked up she motioned him outside. Four pairs of eyes followed him to the door—and the sharpest of those eyes, the eyes that seemed to burn into his back like the more profit that way. Well, along comes this big job—a chance to bid on all the furniture for a chain of seven new hotels. Avery Bullard went to work on it and when I say ‘work' that's just what I mean—day and night, eighteen and twenty hours at a stretch and every day in the week. He designed a lot of special stuff himself. You didn't know Avery Bullard was a designer, did you? That's something a lot of people who haven't been as close to him as I've been don't know. When you get right down to it there isn't anything that man can't do if he puts his mind to it! Well, Mr. Bullard worked out a lot of special designs to submit with our bid and they were really good—not just good-looking, you understand, but good for the factory, too, the kind of stuff you can set up for and really turn out. That's another thing a lot of people don't appreciate about Mr. Bullard—the way he understands production.

“Well, sir, we finally got everything ready and Mr. Bullard went to New York to see these hotel people. He left on a Tuesday and got back on a Friday. I can remember it like it was yesterday. The minute he walked in the door I knew he had the order. You should have seen it—a half-million dollars worth of furniture! That would be a big order today, even for the Tredway Corporation, and you have to remember Bellinger was a small outfit. I guess you know how a young salesman like Avery Bullard would feel with an order like that—and I was feeling pretty much the same way, working along with him the way I had.

“The minute Mr. Bellinger got in that morning, Avery Bullard went right into his office—but it wasn't ten minutes until he was out again. That was the first time in my life I ever saw Avery Bullard really mad. Maybe you think you've seen him on the warpath but you've never seen anything like that! For a while he couldn't even talk. He just sat there as if he wasn't ever going to tell anybody what had happened. But I kept waiting because I knew sooner or later he'd tell me, he and I being as close as we always were.

“Finally it came out. Old man Bellinger had reneged and wouldn't accept the order. I'll never forget what Avery Bullard as clearly as if he were staring at a perfectly preserved portrait, the exact expression on young Avery Bullard's face that morning he had come out of old Mr. Bellinger's office.

Alderson tipped his head back and, like the lifting of the lid of a music box, the inner voice of his mind began to repeat the words into which his frequent retelling of the story had crystallized the memory. “You probably never heard of the old Bellinger Furniture Company but it was quite a company in its day. Avery Bullard and I worked there together. I was a bookkeeper—that's what they called accountants in those days—and Avery Bullard was a young salesman who'd come with us after the war in eighteen. Well, sir, right from the start I could see that young Avery Bullard was no ordinary drummer so he and I got pretty close.

“In a lot of ways he was the same then as he still is—never liked being tied down to working with figures—so I used to help him with his estimates. The boys today don't know what estimates are—selling everything straight off the price list the way we do now—but back at Bellinger's everything had to be estimated—and right down to the last penny, too. That's where you could make or break yourself, especially on those big institutional orders, and that's what Bellinger went in for mostly—hotels, schools, hospitals and that sort of thing.

“Sometimes I'd stay up all night working out a big estimate for Avery Bullard. He wasn't much different then than he is now—he'd never stop having ideas. I'd no sooner get the figures worked up one way, than he'd think up a better idea and then I'd have to start all over again. But you didn't mind—not with Avery Bullard—because he always kept you sparked up. You always knew that you were getting somewhere. I guess you know what I mean.

“This was 1920 and we were having a terrific boom, prices sky-high and everybody scrambling to buy furniture—same thing we've had these last few years, history repeating itself—and old man Bellinger kept selling more and more case goods to the furniture stores instead of selling it on institutional contracts. You see, furniture being short, you could make a little president's right hand and he—Frederick Alderson, the senior vice-president—found himself sitting at what had suddenly become the foot of the table. He was struck then with an anger so deep-seated that it prohibited any possibility of forgiveness. Shaw had stolen the one most important thing in his life—the seat at Avery Bullard's right hand.

At sixty-one, Frederick Alderson had long since recognized that he had reached the peak of his career. It was clear that he could never be president of the Tredway Corporation. He was five years older than Avery Bullard and would be retired before him. That recognition had caused him no serious regret. He was satisfied with his status as the president's right-hand man. That was enough. He was content with what he had—but it was vitally important to his happiness that he never have less.

Frederick Alderson told himself that if Loren Shaw had been forgivable—which, of course, he wasn't—the one point that might be raised in his defense was the fact that Shaw didn't realize that if it hadn't been for what he had done for Avery Bullard back there in 1921, there never would have been a Tredway Corporation. That had been the start of everything, the beginning without which there could have been nothing.

Shaw wasn't the only one, of course … there were a lot of these younger men around the company now who didn't know that either … and some of the older men who did know sometimes forgot. There had even been times these last few years when it seemed that Avery Bullard had forgotten … but of course he hadn't. Avery Bullard was a great man. Great men did not forget. Sometimes they were too busy, or too distracted by someone else, to remember for the moment but in the end they always did remember. That was why they were great men.