Lady of Fortune (57 page)

Howard Odkolek, the vice-president in charge of securities, had even asked her, quite blandly, if she wanted a cigar.

‘I don't smoke cigars,' she had told him.

He had thrust his hands into his pockets of his baggy grey suit, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, that's a pity. My sister-in-law had twins last week, and my brother gave me ten V-Bs, out of sheer shock.'

But Dougal turned out to be far less easy-going with Effie than the rest of the staff. He spoke disparagingly of John Browning every time Effie mentioned his name, and he was particularly annoyed when John Browning telephoned her while she was sitting in his office, going over the week's figures.

‘Why don't you simply tell him we're not interested?' Dougal snapped. ‘If the Army isn't interested, we can't be, either. We lend money for inventions that are going to sell; not for dead ducks.'

Effie put the phone down. ‘He's invited me out to somewhere called White Plains on Friday afternoon, to see the gun for myself.'

‘Well,
go
to White Plains on Friday afternoon, if that's what you want to do,' Dougal told her, as he irritably collected up papers from his desk. ‘But make sure you don't lend him any of the bank's money; that's all.'

‘Supposing I lend him my own money?'

Dougal looked up, and stared at her, but then he shook his head in disbelief. ‘If you lend him your own money, you're a fool. You might just as well draw out $250,000 as a banker's draft, and use it to light up one of Howard's cigars.'

Nevertheless, on Friday afternoon, Effie was able to persuade one of the clerks in the investment section to drive her up to White Plains in his huge second-hand Haynes Tourer. His name was Gregory Wilbur II; and he was one of those irrepressibly cheerful young men who never stopped talking, and were endlessly obliging. He had cautioned her to wrap up warm, and so she wore her white mink coat and her white button-up boots, and a hat tied down by a long motoring-veil. He himself wore a deerstalker cap and a shabby raccoon coat, and brought with him a picnic hamper crammed with bologna sausage and fresh Vienna loaves from Zito's Sanitary Bakery on Bleecker Street, as well as a bottle of white Califonia wine.

‘Ever since we heard you were coming to join the bank, we've all been
agog
to meet you,' he said, steering the lumbering tourer out of New York City, and northwards through
the rocky suburbs. It was really autumn up here, out of the city. The sun was glittering behind the trees, and the leaves were coppery and rusty and red, bank upon bank of them, as if the world had been deluged in billions of dollars of loose change. Effie had never smelled air that was so sharp, even in Edinburgh.

‘Do I come up to your expectations?' asked Effie.

Gregory Wilbur II glanced across at her, and grinned. His eyes were blue and bright behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, and he had a cheeky snub-nosed face that reminded Effie of a Czechoslovakian puppet.

‘We didn't expect anybody quite so pretty,' he said. ‘That's if you'll excuse my impertinence.'

‘I think I can excuse anybody who flatters me so nicely,' said Effie. ‘In Scotland we call it “blowing in someone's lug.”'

‘Well, if you'll allow me, I'll blow in your lug any time you want me to,' said Gregory Wilbur II. ‘Nathan Fishman said that if you weren't a Watson, and that if you weren't a Gentile, and that if he could persuade his mother to lend him the spare room, he'd ask you to marry him tomorrow.'

Gregory knew that to talk to his lady employer so boldly was risking not only disapproval but even dismissal. But Effie laughed. She understood the difference between sly rudeness and affectionate teasing, and she knew that Gregory was only trying to show her that he liked her. She had a quality about her, a maturity and a poise that were lightened by an obvious sense of fun, that always desperately attracted young men.

John Browning, in a heavy overcoat and a fur hat, was waiting for her in a misty, muddy field off Saxon Woods Road, not far from Mamaroneck Avenue. There was a truck parked a little way away, which had brought the machine-gun and its equipment all the way from the Browning works in Buffalo, and John Browning's own car, a large shiny black Packard. Two or three of the armaments factory staff were there, in mackinaws and caps, and they greeted Effie with their breath smoking in the four o'clock chill.

‘We'd better get started before the sun goes down,' said John Browning. ‘Tom, will you take that tarp off? Richard – will you fetch over the ammunition?'

John Browning took Effie's arm and led her over to a small
natural rise in the ground, where the machine-gun had been set up on its tripod. It looked to Effie more like a black brass-cased telescope, except that at one end, it had a small muzzle, and at the other end a wooden handle, and a trigger.

This won't mean a lot to you,' said John Browning, ‘but this is a 30-calibre weapon with a muzzle-velocity of 2800 feet per second. It can fire accurately up to 2500 yards, and it's fed – as you'll see now by the ammunition that Richard's bringing over – by a belt of 30-inch M1906 cartridges. In this jacket that surrounds the barrel, this bit that looks like a telescope, there's water, which cools the barrel as the gun is fired. I hear that in the trenches in Flanders, the British Tommies often fire off a few belts of ammunition so that they can bring the water in the cooling-jackets of their machine-guns up to boiling-point, and make tea with it. Quite a few Germans have died simply, because the British troops decided it was time for a brew-up.'

At the far end of the field, a row of old wooden doors had been set up as a targets. John Browning crouched down behind his gun, and said to Effie, ‘Cover your ears.'

There was a deafening rattling sound, accompanied by a clattering fountain of used cartridges, and followed by a cloud of flat grey smoke. Effie, her hands still clasped over her ears, peered down towards the row of doors and saw that one of them had been literally sawn in half.

‘That's extraordinary,' she said.

‘Try it for yourself,' John Browning invited her.

‘Do you mean it? I couldn't!'

‘Go ahead.'

In her white mink coat, she sat cautiously down on an upturned ammunition box, and took the small wooden pistol-grip of the machine-gun in her hand. The gun swung quite easily from side to side, and through the sights she could see the row of doors. John Browning pulled back the cooking-handle, and then said encouragingly, ‘Off you go. Fire when you're ready.'

Effie took a nervous breath, and squeezed the trigger. Instantly, the machine-gun chattered in her hands like some kind of awful alligator which she was attempting to hold by the tail; but the experience was strangely and darkly exhilarating. A hosepipe of bullets poured out of the muzzle and tore the row of doors to pieces; shattered panels and
uprights and locks, cut holes and patterns and jagged zigzags. It was all over in a few seconds, but while it lasted Effie felt a terrible and exciting power. The belt of ammunition came to an end far too quickly, and when the machine-gun clicked silent, she got up rather too abruptly, knocking over the box on which she had been sitting, and presented herself to John Browning in a daze.

‘My God, Mr Browning,' she said. ‘I don't know what to say. I've never come across anything like it.'

John Browning, his hands in his pockets, turned and strained his eyes towards the doors which Effie had been spraying so wildly. ‘It's quite a thing, isn't it?' he asked her. ‘I'm glad you're impressed. But, I'd expect you to have a fully-qualified engineer look over it before you committed yourself. There might be other machine-guns in America, far better than this one, which you've never even heard of.'

‘Are there?' Effie asked him.

John Browning shook his head. ‘No. This is the only one.'

‘Well, then,' said Effie. ‘In that case, I can make the decision myself. I'll lend you what you want, and I'll lend it to you on favourable terms, too.'

John Browning offered her his arm, and she accepted it. They walked together back to the Haynes Tourer, with Gregory Wilbur II, very impressed by all the noise and the shooting, walking a few paces behind with his deerstalker on backwards. ‘Pow,' he remarked from time to time. ‘Brrrp!'

When they reached the car, John Browning said, ‘You're really so sure that America will come into the war?'

‘You don't think you will?' Effie asked him.

‘I don't know. I wish I could be as sure as you seem to be.'

Effie said, I'm sure, Mr Browning. Not because I'm a Briton, with an emotional and patriotic interest in seeing Britain and her allies win; but because I'm a banker. It wouldn't make any sense at all for the United States to let Germany succeed: there is far too much American money tied up in England and France and the other allies, and if Germany wins, the chances of that money being paid back, and all the profitable interest that goes with it, will be nil. The general public here have no conception of how terribly the war is devastating Europe; both her people and her economy. But bankers know: they have to provide the money and reckon up the costs.'

John Browning said nothing, but looked back across the field to his machine-gun, which his assistants were dismantling and carrying back to their truck.

Effie said, ‘America will
have
to go to war, Mr Browning. Whatever President Wilson is telling the public, however he's appeasing Congress. There's too much money at stake, regardless of principles.'

‘You're very cynical, Miss Watson,' said John Browning.

‘Not cynical, Mr Browning. Realistic. You're a realist, too, aren't you? A man who can design a gun which is capable of sawing living people in half can't be anything else but a realist.'

John Browning frowned, but Effie said, ‘We were shooting at old doors today, Mr Browning; but that isn't what your gun was designed to shoot at, was it?'

‘No,' John Browning admitted.

‘Well, then,' said Effie, with the sun setting behind her shoulder, burning on to John Browning's retina a stylish image of her that would hover on his eyeball long after she had left, ‘you know as well as I do that when America enters the war she will need guns like yours. Your guns. Hundreds of them. So anybody who invests their money in John Browning will not only be helping to assure the future stability of Europe, and the successful repayment of American war loans to Britain and France; but huge profits for themselves. Your guns are designed to kill people, and as far as I can see they will kill hundreds of people quite marvellously. I deplore what you do, but you are plainly the best at it, and that is why I am going to lend you anything you need.'

John Browning stared at her, unsure of what to say.

‘You mentioned a quarter of a million dollars,' she said.

‘Actually, I was hoping for a little more,' said John Browning. ‘Say, $350,000?'

Effie said, ‘I'll lend you half a million, just to make sure that you can perfect the machine-gun as quickly as possible.'

‘In that case,' said John Browning, ‘Watson's are a bank in a million.'

This is not a Watson's loan,' Effie told him. ‘I am making this loan out of my own money.'

‘It's not a Watson's loan?'

‘My brother wouldn't agree that the Browning machine-gun
is a suitable investment. I, fortunately for you, believe that he's wrong.'

John Browning hesitated for a moment, then took Effie's hand, and kissed it.

‘Miss Watson,' he said, ‘you're a gentleman.'

Effie didn't see Dougal again until the following Wednesday: he had taken May with him to Cape Cod for a long weekend, ostensibly to talk to the inventor of a new kind of canning and sterilising machine, ‘The Willco Packer'. Effie was arranging dried flowers in her office when he came in to see her. She had been given a large corner room overlooking Broad Street, and she had already ordered a new white carpet, a modernistic desk, and a suite of elegant Bauhaus-type furniture. Gregory Wilbur II had taken her out on Tuesday afternoon to several of the best New York art galleries, and the paintings and prints she had bought were stacked against the wall, ready for hanging or refraining.

‘How was your weekend?' asked Effie.

Dougal looked rumpled, and hungover. ‘Fine. The canning machinery looks promising. The hotel wasn't so hot. If it wasn't the plumbing rattling, it was the bedsprings of the people upstairs.'

‘I thought the sound of bedsprings was an essential ingredient of illicit weekends.'

Dougal glanced at her sharply.

Effie said, ‘I'm thinking of looking for my own apartment. I don't think it's fair to expect you to put me up for ever.'

‘You're welcome to stay as long as you want to. You know that.'

Effie finished arranging her flowers, and stood back to admire them. ‘I know I'm welcome, Dougal, and I thank you for it. But I don't really believe that two people in the same business should work together and live together. We're bound to have disagreements, and it would be terrible if we had nowhere to go to get away from each other.'

Dougal sat on the edge of her desk. ‘Disagreements? I don't know what you're talking about. Listen – do you think you could ask what's-her-name your secretary, to make me some coffee? Black. My head feels like a Montgolfier balloon.'

Effie said, ‘Of course.' She pressed her intercom switch and said, ‘Louise, be a friend and make Mr Dougal a pot of coffee, please. Yes, the Arabica. Strong and black.' Then she said, ‘When I say disagreements, I mean, for instance, what you're going to say when I tell you that I've lent half a million dollars to Mr Browning to build a new prototype of his machine-gun. My own money, of course. Not the bank's. But still the kind of investment we're bound to argue about.'