Establishment (28 page)

“You can walk out, Danny, if that's what you want. I can run it.”

“You've been running it.” He stared at the desk calendar in front of him. “What's this?”

“Tom called to see whether you were back. He wants to come by this afternoon and see you. I made it for three o'clock. We can have lunch and talk about things.”

“Senator Claybourne?”

“Congress adjourns at the end of the week, and then he'll be back in San Francisco. He says he'll be happy to talk to you.”

“How did he sound?”

“Friendly. We put ten thousand dollars into his last campaign, so he owes us.”

“I wouldn't give you ten cents for what an obligation by one of those political bastards is worth. They sell when the price is right and when no one can check their moves. In the old days, when we shipped out of New York and Jimmy Walker was mayor, they ran the fix out of Tammany Hall. It was strictly a no-shit thing. They had a mimeographed price list, starting with manslaughter at five hundred dollars, and right down the line, every crime you could think of. Of course, those were Depression times and prices were low. But there was something damned honorable about a fixed, calculated payoff. Or does that make sense, Steve?”

“I suppose so, in a way.”

“Did Tom say what he wants?”

“No.”

“What do you think of him?”

“I think he's a power, Dan,” Cassala said.

“You're being careful.”

“He's your son.”

“Yes, he is, isn't he.”

After lunch, Dan felt tired. He had eaten too much. Kellman had warned him about his diet, but away from Jean and sitting with Cassala in an Italian restaurant, his resistance broke down. He stuffed himself with spaghetti and veal, and then his morale collapsed so completely that he asked the waiter to bring him a cigar. Fortunately, the restaurant carried only a single box of the ten-cent local weed, and Dan was able to wave it away without too much of a sense of sacrifice. He was back in his office at two-thirty. His first day, and he was bored, disinterested.

He found himself sketching the design of a boat on his date pad. In the hospital, Jean had agreed to his dream of building a boat and exploring the bay. Now he wondered whether her willingness would hold up. She had never liked small boats—or perhaps that was because small boats were symbols of the fisherman she had married. Perhaps that would change, as other things had changed. He sketched a yawl, then eliminated one of the masts. Something with a single mast until he could teach her to sail. He closed his eyes and envisioned Jean in white ducks, rolled high to the knee, a striped jersey T-shirt, her hair blowing in the wind. It still made him half sick with desire when he thought of her.
She is fifty-eight years old
, he thought,
and it's like I saw her this morning for the first time.
His guilt began to float to the surface. He knew that through all the years with May Ling he had never surrendered Jean, never let go of her. He had read somewhere that the unadorned truth of what was called romantic love was simply the illusion that the loved one possessed what the lover lacked, and that could be said of both women who had been part of his life. He wondered whether other men were like himself, half alive without women to complete them.

He must have dozed, for he came awake to the intercom's buzz, and his secretary informed him that his son had arrived.

“Send him in,” Dan said.

Tom entered the office with assurance.
After all
, Dan thought,
we're no longer strangers
. Three times in twenty years, once at the hospital, once at the wedding, and now here. They shook hands.

“How do you feel?” Tom asked him.

“Pretty good. No different than before. From the way I feel, I wouldn't know that I had a heart attack.”

“That's good.”

“How was the honeymoon?”

“Too short. I can't stay away. The truth is,” Tom said, “that there's more excitement in doing what I do than in running away from it. Lucy feels the same way.”

“Well, a man should enjoy his work,” Dan agreed.

“Do you?”

“Do I? Do I enjoy my work?” Dan studied his son thoughtfully. So far, in all their meetings, there had been no term of address beyond the pronoun, not “pop” or “father” or “dad” or even “Dan,” as if Tom had drawn a careful line beyond which he would not encroach—or had there been? Not at the wedding, but the first time Tom came into his hospital room. Dan tried to remember, staring all the while at the tall, handsome man who was his son. He took after Jean and the Seldon line, no question about that; and just surveying the physical image in front of him, Dan found himself thinking,
If I had a son like that—
no, it was too late. Too late for anything except courtesy, and that at least was something.

“What were you saying?” Dan asked him.

“Do you enjoy your work, running this shipping line?”

“It's the only thing I do well; hell, it's the only thing I know, ships and shipping. I've had the threescore years, as they say, without learning much about anything else. It's not the Cunard Line. We operate seven tankers, four of them under Liberian registry. They're good, sound ships, and we have good contracts.”

“But do you enjoy it?”

“No, not much. I'm bored with the whole damn thing, Tom.”

“I'm glad you said that.”

“Why?”

“I'd like to buy you out,” Tom said bluntly. Then he relaxed in his chair, watching Dan and waiting.

For at least a minute, Dan stared at his son without replying. Tom's statement was totally unexpected. He was not prepared for it. He had not thought of anyone buying him out, least of all his son. Finally he said, “Are you serious?”

“Let's see if I am,” Tom said calmly. “You operate seven sixteen-thousand-seven-hundred-deadweight-ton tankers. They were built for the Maritime Commission in nineteen forty-five, so they're practically new and damn good ships. You have contracts with Orpheum Oil and Coonstown Oil. You have docking facilities here in Oakland, in Honolulu, in Galveston, and in Long Beach. You own this building and you have three storage tanks in Honolulu. I'm particularly interested in your conversations with Freeway Oil in Hawaii. I bought them out last week. I think there's the nucleus of the biggest oil operation in the Islands, and I imagine you agree with me because you proposed a merger with them.”

“You sure as hell did your homework,” Dan said.

“I like to know where I'm going. There's only one game today that's worth anything, and that's oil. Whittier never had enough wits to see it. All he could ever see was dry cargo. We had one tanker, and it went up in flames, and that scared the very devil out of him. It's true I want the tankers, but that's only the beginning. I got a lead into Germany. They're putting their shipyards into shape, and they sent me the plans for a thirty-thousand-deadweight-ton tanker, six hundred and sixty feet long, overall, eighty-five-foot beam, and she draws thirty-four feet loaded to capacity. What do you think of that?”

“That's one hell of a ship,” Dan said. He felt the prickles rise on his skin, a moment of seeing himself with a fleet of such tankers, and then the feeling was gone. “That's the size of one of the passenger giants. Is it practical?”

“I think so. I've ordered two of them, and I have leases on twelve thousand acres of land in Texas. Exploratory. So you can see why I want those tankers of yours.”

“I think I can.” Again he was silent.

“Well?”

“What are you prepared to pay?” Dan asked him.

“I know what you paid for your ships. You got them for a song. But that day is over. I'm prepared to pay ten million for everything. You can have it in cash or in GCS stock or partly in each. I think it's a fair price. What do you think?”

“It's a fair price,” Dan said slowly. “Let me think about it. I'll let you know in a few days.”

They shook hands, and Tom left. For the next fifteen minutes, Dan sat at his desk and stared at the sketch of the yawl. Then he called Cassala and asked him to come in.

“How did it go?” Cassala asked him.

“Do you know why he came here, Steve? He wants to buy us out.”

“I'll be damned.”

“For ten million dollars. My son is quite an operator.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I'd think about it. Now look, let's get this straight. When you came into this, I gave you ten percent of the deal. If this goes through, you will get a million clean.”

“For God's sake, Dan, you can't be serious. What will you do?”

“Nothing, maybe. Collect stamps. Travel with Jean. Build the kind of boat I always dreamed of owning. I'm bored with this, Steve. I've lost interest. I don't give a damn. I have enough money. I just don't care. Now understand me, our mortgages and loans come out of my nine million. I'll still be left with three million in cash, and even after taxes, it's more money than I know what to do with. On top of that, Jean isn't poor. You'll still have three quarters of a million after taxes, and that's enough of a stake for anything you want to turn your hand to. Or just to sit on your ass and enjoy life. I know I'm pulling the rug from under you, but hell, I want out of it.”

Cassala dropped into a chair and stared at the floor. When he looked up, he was fighting back the tears that clouded his eyes. “You didn't pull any rug from under me, Danny. Three years ago, when you brought me into this, you saved my life. I'll be rich, if that means anything. Only—I don't know. I remember, when pop was alive in the old days, he'd say to me, ‘Stephan, Dan is your brother.' I figured we'd be together at least a few years more.”

“Steve,” Dan said gently, “we'll still be that way. You're the only one of the old crowd that's left. All the rest are gone.”

***

Derick Claybourne looked like a United States senator, or at least what a United States senator had looked like in the twenties and thirties. In the postwar period, he was going out of style. By and large, senators no longer were hugely overweight; they no longer sported string ties and wide-brimmed hats and black serge suits, but these were Claybourne's trademark and he clung to them, as much a trademark as his sandpaper voice and his cigar. He offered a cigar to Dan now. “Seventy-five cents' worth of pure Havana, Danny boy. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, senator. I'm off them. Doctor's orders.”

“What the hell do they know! I had my coronary six years ago. Do I look any the worse for it? These little beauties keep me alive.”

“I don't have your constitution, senator.”

“Hell, you don't live right, you don't think right. Now look, Danny, I like you, always have. I guess it's twenty years since Al Smith told me to look you up. So you don't have to argue your case with me. The plain truth of it is that I can't do a damn thing. Your daughter's picked herself a peck of trouble. Damnit, I don't like those puffed up little bastards on the House committee any better than you do, but they are the wave of the future. Don't ask me how in hell it happened. It started with that damn fool executive order of Truman's—loyalty oaths for every federal employee. Then they all ran hog wild. Every pisspot bureaucrat began to run off loyalty oaths on his damn mimeograph, and then the schools and the colleges and the big hoopla in Hollywood, and God Almighty, we've just about reached a point where those little assholes on the committee and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover are running the country. There is a climate of fear,” he said slowly, leaning on each word. “A climate of fear, Danny.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Derick, that you're afraid?”

“What in hell have I got to be afraid of? I'm a United States senator. But I don't run a fix, Danny, you know that. Hell, I'm not trying to kid you. Sure there's a fix, and more than one. I know a congressman who clears ten thousand a week, runs the whole scam out of the House Office Building. But they won't touch anything red. They are afraid. Senator McCarthy is running hog wild, like some lunatic bull on a rampage, and no one has the guts to stop him, myself included. Anyway, there's no way to fix this. You'd have to get to the attorney general, and Tom Clark is not approachable. Not on this subject.”

“He's an old friend of yours, isn't he?”

“Not on this subject, Danny. We might have moved something before the House voted the contempt, but now it's in the hands of the Justice Department. And don't you think there isn't plenty of soft-shoeing right there. They are all scared shitless of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, and they watch their step careful as mice. My word, Danny, I know Barbara's no communist, but why on God's earth doesn't she name those contributors of hers and vacate the contempt?”

“We just didn't raise her right,” Dan said bitterly.

“She has notions of honor,” the senator agreed magnanimously. “The truth is, Danny, we can't afford notions of honor today. You know how I stand on these so-called witch hunts, but damnit, boy, internationally we are in a life and death struggle. A life and death struggle.”

“And what happens to my daughter promotes the national security? Is that the way you see it?”

“Danny, I told you how I see it. There is just not one damn thing I can do.”

***

Dining with Dan and Jean at their home, Barbara was far more interested in the dinner Jean had cooked than in Dan's failure with Senator Claybourne. “It doesn't matter, daddy,” she said. “I love you, I appreciate what you are trying to do, and I wish you would stop. This is my very own mess of porridge. I cooked it. I will eat it. I admit it will taste no way as good as this. What is it?”

“Pasta with ricotta—spinach, ricotta cheese, eggs, parsley, and pasta. Very fancy Italian food.”