Executive Suite (33 page)

The newspaper was the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
. There was a short page-three story on Avery Bullard's death. It contained only one fact that J. Walter Dudley had not known before—that Avery Bullard's collapse had been in front of the Chippendale Building in New York. He asked himself what Bullard might have been doing in the Chippendale Building, but before he could contrive an answer the melon was placed in front of him.

“Now, suh, don't you worry 'bout nothing but enjoying that melon. You all got plenty a time 'fore we get to Millburgh.”

The melon was excellent.

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

9.12 A.M. EDT

For the last hour, Loren Shaw had been dictating the memorandum that he was preparing for George Caswell. He had listened twice to the playback of every dictated paragraph, the first time to check the figures against the tabulated sheets that covered his desk, the second time to weigh the effect that every word and phrase might have on George Caswell.

He came now to the silence beyond the last word. Every error had been corrected, every mistake had been eliminated. There were no facts that were not completely verified. He was ready. Everything was planned. This time there would be none of the mistakes of impulse that he had made last night.

With a clean handkerchief he wiped away a smudge mark that his thumb had left on the polished chrome of the microphone. Then he reached over and turned the pointer from LISTEN to DICTATE.

“Center headline—summary. As can be seen from the foregoing outline—comma—the Tredway Corporation offers an unusual opportunity for a marked increase in its net earnings—period. While the writer has made substantial progress in that direction—comma—as is evidenced by the two exhibits which are attached—comma—the fact remains that the management attitude hitherto prevailing has prevented the full application of modern methods and techniques—period. As I have pointed out before—comma—the primary need is for a full recognition by the president that his first responsibility is to the stockholders with whose property he has been entrusted—semicolon—and that the measure of his management success must always be the net earnings which the corporation produces—period.”

He turned the pointer, ran back the record, and listened to the repetition of his words.

There was no need for change. No one could argue against those fundamental facts. The truth was the truth.

He took the record from the machine and glanced at his watch. It was still only eight-fifteen in Chicago. Pearson wouldn't be at the office for a half-hour yet. What in the devil had happened to Dudley? Why wasn't he registered at the Palmer House?

9.16 A.M. EDT

Dwight Prince came into the library and Julia looked up from the litter of papers on the desk in front of her. She seemed surprised, as if her husband's existence were something suddenly remembered.

“Did you want to see me?” he asked. “Nina said you were looking for me.”

“Nina? Oh, but I was only asking if you'd had your breakfast. She said you had.”

“Sorry, darling. If I'd known you were—”

“You must have been up at the crack of dawn.”

He shrugged an answer.

“Couldn't you sleep?” she asked.

“One of those nights.”

“Something worrying you?”

He added a smile to the shrug.

“What is it, dear?” Her voice had the sound of a patient mother soothing a troubled child.

His hesitance made her put down the pencil that she had kept poised over the paper.

“Nothing new,” he said. “Just another attack of the same thing—realizing how damned useless I am.”

She was at his side instantly, as a practiced nurse responds to the symptoms of a familiar illness. “Oh, Dwight darling, you know how you always—”

“I mean it, Julia. I feel sometimes that—”

She administered laughter as if it were a prescription. “All right, darling, if you insist on being useful, check these figures for me.”

He responded like a bribed child, eagerly seating himself at the desk and picking up the pencil she had dropped. She stood behind him, sober-faced as soon as his eyes were safely averted, almost trapped when he twisted his head unexpectedly and looked back.

“Julia, what is all this?”

“I'm trying to check some of the things Mr. Shaw said last night.”

“You didn't like him, did you?”

“It doesn't matter whether I like him or not. He might still be the right man to be president.”

“At least there's no doubt he wants it.”

“No, there was no doubt about that,” she said. “Maybe that's why I'm so suspicious of him.”

“I wouldn't be, if I were you. He's the right type.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's almost a double for Lynch, the man that took over our company after Dad died. I couldn't help but think of that when he was sitting here last night. They're out of the same mold—even sound alike.”

“Yes, Lynch has done a good job with your company,” she said, nodding a grudging acknowledgment.

“At least, he's making me enough money so that I'm no longer a kept man.”

“I don't like your saying that!” she flashed. “You know that money never—”

“I'm sorry, darling. I didn't mean—”

She stepped away from his reaching hand. “Then you think Shaw would be the right one?”

“All I know is that he's the type. It takes a man like Dad or Mr. Bullard to build a big company, but it takes a Shaw or a Lynch to really squeeze the profit out of it.”

She turned, sweeping a nervous arpeggio with her fingernails across a shelf of books. “I don't know—that's the whole trouble—I don't know. I should know, but I don't. If I'd gone to the directors' meetings—if I only knew what was going on—

“Couldn't you talk to some of the others?” he asked. “I mean—well, you could talk to Mr. Alderson or Mr. Grimm. Or if you want me to, I could—”

Her face came alive with a sudden thought. “Dwight, you've given me a wonderful idea!”

“I have?”

“Yes, I know now what I want to do.”

He waited patiently, watching her eyes as they reflected the flashing of her mind.

“Dwight, dear, would you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Would you mind terribly having lunch today at the Federal Club?”

He blinked.

She forced a smile. “To be perfectly blunt, I'd like to invite someone here to lunch and I want to be alone with her.”

“Her?”

“Erica Martin.”

He looked blank.

“She's Mr. Bullard's secretary.”

“Oh—yes, I suppose she would know what's been going on, wouldn't she?”

She gave his cheek a quick kiss. “Now don't ever say that you aren't an enormous help.”

He dropped the pencil and, acting on the unworded dismissal in the tone of her voice, moved toward the door. “If you want me, Julia, I'll be out in the studio.”

She was already dialing the number. When she had half dialed she cut it off, waiting out a new thought, testing it in her mind, finally nodding her approval. Yes, this way would be better—if it were an invitation to lunch Erica Martin might refuse. This way she would have to come. Lunch could be an afterthought … casual … or maybe it wouldn't take that long to know. No, it wouldn't! One look would be enough … If there had been anything between that Martin woman and Avery Bullard …

“Stop it!”

No, that wasn't why she was asking Erica Martin to come. She hadn't thought that … it wasn't a thought … only the memory of a thought … or the memory of a memory.

She dialed again and this time there was no stopping.

“I'd like to speak to Miss Martin,” she said and her voice was strong and sure.

9.19 A.M. EDT

Don Walling entered his office, relishing the release from impatience that came to him with the closing of the door. One person after another had blocked his attempt to hurry from the parking lot to his office. They had all wanted to talk about Avery Bullard's death, repeating the time-worn phrases of a litany that had long since been squeezed dry of meaning, demanding the same threadbare replies that came harder to the tongue with every repetition.

A part of the urge that had made him want to hurry to his office had been the hope that this most familiar of all surroundings would restore his ability to think clearly, something that he hadn't been able to do since the moment of his realization that he would be the executive vice-president of the Tredway Corporation.

Glancing about the office he found no fulfillment of his unconscious hope. The room seemed totally strange, something detached from experience, as if he had recently been reborn without memory and was now thinking with a new mind and seeing with new eyes.

The connecting door of Dudley's office stood open and he walked through it, drawn by the pin-marked map of the United States that hung on the wall—yellow-headed pins for the factories, orange for lumber mills and subsidiaries, blue for warehouses, red for district offices, green for distributors and sales agencies. He stared at the pinpoints of color so long that they remained as an afterimage in his eyes when he finally turned to the window and looked down at the city lying below him. Far away on the rise of the hill he saw the wide-spreading expanse of the Pike Street factory. At the foot of the hill were the old buildings that made up the Water Street plant. They were scattered along the river edge, ivy-covered stone at the turn of Front Street, red corrugated metal on the dry-kiln sheds beyond, the lumber storage yard so distant that it was almost lost in the blue river haze. And then, fading in out of the haze, his mind saw what his eyes could not see, and heard what his ears could not hear, and there were the montaged images and sounds of other Tredway factories … the steel-mill clatter and clang of the pipe-bending shop in the Pittsburgh factory … the fresh-paint newness of Houston … the biting saw-whine that came so strangely from under the Connecticut elms … the metallic screaming of the cutoff saws … the angry drone of the planers … the endlessly pulsating hiss of the sanding rooms … the air rush of the finishing lines where man-made tornadoes tried to roar down the snorting animal sounds of the spray guns—and there was a man for every sound … the man at the saw with the powder of sawdust like yellow frost on his eyebrows … the man on the finishing line with a grotesque inhalator mask for a face … a man on the lumber crane with eyes that said he could lift the earth itself if he touched the right levers … an ancient whose hand stopped trembling only when it touched a carving chisel … a youth who spewed unthought curses at the machine that did his work … a ladle-man swilling his mouth with salted water in the foundry … men, men, men.

On the wide-angle screen of his new mind, he saw not the single images that he had seen in his old mind but the sum of many images … two hundred men on a factory floor … a hundred men on a finishing line … a thousand men pouring in through the gate when a shift changed, another thousand men flowing out with the turn of the tide.

The screen of his mind broadened and there were other thousands of faces … now women, too … the girl-crowded warrens of the Tredway Tower … humanity packed behind a thousand doors on a hundred corridors … Offices in All Principal Cities … the packed rows of listening faces at the annual sales meeting … a salesman stopping a Tredway automobile to drink a coke at a filling station beside an Arkansas road … an old woman dusting furniture in the air-conditioned Chicago display room … a sweating man scaling lumber at the edge of a steaming Honduras jungle …

He let the picture fade until all detail was lost, blackened into the mass silhouette of the whole. This was the Tredway Corporation … all of this … the factories and the offices, the buildings and the machines, the men and the women … yes, most of all, the men and the women.

The whole was a thing of fearsome complexity and awesome involvement, but Don Walling was conscious of neither fear nor awe until his eyes dropped to the rooftops of the city that lay below him. Imagination stripped away the roofs and exposed the honeycombed hive of activity underneath … the milling, swarming, cell-living broods. And the cell-center spark of life in every brood was a Tredway pay check … a blue scrap of paper that became green bills in a purse … and the green bills became the endless inpouring of food for thousands of ever-emptying stomachs … clothes to cover a thousand nakednesses and flap from a thousand clotheslines … shoes for the feet of ever-running children … beer to soften a man's soul on Saturday night and a freehanded buck for the collection plate on Sunday. His wife needed soul-saving too … an uplift brassière and an honest-to-god permanent and a pink bottle full of perfumed hope. But their souls could wait for the kids. The kids come first … always … from that first day when there was no secret cross-mark on the calendar, through all the nights when they whispered the solemn oath that they'd give the kid what they never had. Yes, the kid would have a chance! It would take money but what the hell—money was only a pay check and there was always a new pay check every Saturday night.

Don Walling felt suspended in space, yet tied to the hive of the earth by the awed realization of his new-found responsibility. They were his … all of them … the uncounted thousands, born and unborn. If he failed them there would be hunger under those roofs … there had been hunger before when the man at the top of the Tower had failed them. Then there would be no food … and the belongings of the dispossessed would stand in the streets … and a man in a black coat would come to take the children to the orphans' home …

The free flow of his new mind was suddenly cut off. Where had that memory come from? Or was it a memory? No, it couldn't be … he hadn't known Millburgh in those days when Orrin Tredway had closed the factory and stopped the pay checks. Memory was impossible. Was it something that Avery Bullard had told him? No, there were no remembered words.