The Rich Are Different (55 page)

But somehow he had got hold of a set of keys. The whole phoney explanation about Krasnov hiding overnight in the building was to cover up the fact that someone had produced the keys for the Willow Alley door.

Paul had had his keys with him that morning; Peterson had used them to let us into the building. My own keys had never left my possession.

That left my five surviving partners.

I backed away in panic. That was the kind of disaster I’d never be able to keep under wraps. It would kill the bank, kill us all. If a partner were involved we were doomed.

Finishing the rye in my hip-flask I put my head in my hands and in despair tried to figure out a way we could survive.

[4]

My stomach finally rebelled against all the liquor I’d fed it, but after I was through with the men’s room I took some salts and felt I could cope again. My panic was gone. My mind was clear, so clear that it was easy for me to sit back in my chair and knock all my crazy suspicions squarely on the head.

The truth was that shock and grief had temporarily sent me over the edge. Krasnov must have been stashed overnight in the bank after all. Of course that was a big risk to take, but life’s full of little risks if you’re bent on assassination, and it was just the assassins’ good luck that nothing fouled up their scheme. The idea of a partner being involved was so ludicrous that I actually laughed, and when my laughter sounded forced I reminded myself of a fact which as far as I could see was undeniable: none of the partners had had a motive. It was true that Charley, Lewis and I all coveted the senior partner’s chair but we were hardly going to knock Paul off in order to get it; this might be Jimmy Walker’s New York but it wasn’t the Wild West and investment bankers just didn’t do that kind of thing. Also it was no use thinking that Jay’s men – Charley, Lewis and old Walter – might have plotted to kill Paul in belated revenge for Jay’s death, because the point about these three was that they had always got along better with Paul than with Jay. That was why they had stayed in the firm. Anyway respectable investment bankers didn’t go around murdering for revenge like a bunch of Chicago hoods.

I picked over a couple of other motives. It was true we all stood to gain financially from Paul’s death because his fifty per cent share of the profits would now be redistributed when we reformed the partnership, but we were all rich men already. You didn’t become a Van Zale partner and then find you were wondering where the next penny was coming from, so it was no use theorizing that Paul had been killed for his money.

The only other motive I could dream up involved some unknown eternal triangle but even that seemed far-fetched. Paul had seduced countless
wives, but he was always careful that the husband was either complaisant or indifferent, and as a matter of common sense he tended to avoid running after the wives of his partners. I won’t say he didn’t do it. I knew he had slept with Lewis’s wife a couple of times, but that was only because the wife had almost raped him and Lewis had wanted a divorce at the time anyway. I couldn’t seriously imagine Lewis feeling murderous on account of that incident, and even assuming he did I found it even harder to imagine him sitting down with that gangster Greg Da Costa, that carpet-bagger Terence O’Reilly and that Bolshevik Bruce Clayton to hash out an assassination scheme. Lewis, the arch-capitalist, was just too much of a snob to associate with such people.

I glanced at my watch. It was three o’clock, I had had no lunch and I knew my partners would be needing my help, but before I left the room I glanced at the outdoor thermometer which stood in eternal shade on the window-ledge which faced north. The mercury was glued at ninety-seven degrees.

Some time that evening I dragged myself back to my apartment in the East Sixties. I felt limp, blank and about a hundred years old.

‘Steven!’ cried my wife, scooping me into the apartment and flinging her arms around me purposefully. ‘You poor lamb, you must be so upset, what a dreadful thing to happen, why the hell didn’t you return my calls? No, don’t say a word, I quite understand, come on in and sit down, you poor, poor darling, I’ll fix you a drink.’

I slumped on the couch. I liked it when Caroline made a big fuss of me. It didn’t happen often.

‘I got here this afternoon and found Dinah encamped – you know, Steven, I think we got that girl wrong. I think she really cared for Paul, it wasn’t just the money and the glamour. She was in such a state I took her down to the ship myself to make sure she got the right one, and she was really quite warm when she thanked me, I almost forgot she was English. That little boy’s so cute – quite like Paul too, I only hope he doesn’t start having epileptic fits. Now you poor lamb, drink this up and tell me the
whole
story. Is it really true Bruce Clayton went berserk with a hatchet and ran through the main hall carving everyone up?’

‘Oh my God,’ I said in disgust, and roused myself to give her a heavily censored version of the facts.

‘Steven,’ said Caroline sternly when I’d finished, ‘are you being entirely truthful with me?’

‘Hell, yes!’ I suddenly didn’t want to talk any more. I just wanted to switch off my mind and forget. Caroline’s thigh looked up at me invitingly beneath the skimpy folds of her frock.

‘Oh no!’ she said at once as I slid a hand upwards from her knee. ‘Not until you’ve told me the whole story!’

‘God damn it, Cal, give a guy a break, can’t you?’

‘Can’t we ever conduct a conversation which doesn’t end with you suggesting I lie on my back with my legs apart and my mouth shut?’

I
groaned. ‘Jesus, why did I ever marry a woman like you?’

‘Paul told you to,’ she said. ‘Remember?’ She stroked the back of my neck efficiently. ‘And damn it, it was good advice … Steven, I’m terribly sorry about Paul, I really am – I know how you must feel. Was it a conspiracy?’

‘Nope.’

‘Are you going to be senior partner?’

‘Yep.’

‘Darling!’ cried Caroline before I could add the words: ‘But not yet,’ and began to roll down her stockings.

Thanks to her tank-sized martini, the
coup de grâce
after a day’s drinking, I was damned nearly impotent but Caroline had great technical competence and we did achieve some kind of coupling before I passed out.

There was a storm that night and the next day was cooler. However, it was still hell at the office and by mid-afternoon I was already longing for my first drink of the evening. I had made up my mind not to drink at the office that day, but when my secretary told me that Paul’s great-nephew was asking for an audience I automatically reached for my hip-flask.

‘Christ, I can’t mess around at present with a little kid just out of diapers! Pass him on to one of the other partners, for God’s sake,’ I ordered irritably, and thought I had rid myself of Cornelius, but ten minutes later there was a knock on my door and old Walter peeked in.

‘Sorry to interrupt you, Steve—’

I had been about to call the undertakers but I hung up with a crash.

‘—but I’ve just been talking to young Cornelius and he’s really most anxious to speak to you—’

‘Show him in,’ I growled. The day was obviously going to get worse before it could get better. I tried not to grind my teeth.

Walter withdrew. The door opened wider, then closed very softly. I had been pretending to read a letter but at last I had no choice but to drop it and take a look at Master Cornelius Blackett from Cincinnati, Ohio.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Sullivan,’ he said.

He was slim, slight and narrow with some sharp little features, dusty gold curls and a pair of grey eyes which would have looked well with mascara. However there was nothing effeminate about his clothes. He was conservatively dressed in black. His manner, punctuated by a meticulous Ohio accent, was both civil and charmless.

‘Hullo, Neil,’ I said. Out of respect for Paul’s memory I mustered a smile and gestured to the client’s chair. ‘Have a seat.’

He sat down. We faced each other. He waited for me to speak, but when he realized I wasn’t about to commiserate with someone who had hardly known Paul and had just walked into umpteen million dollars, he said respectfully: ‘I hear Mr Blair is to be the new senior partner, but you’re the partner who really counts, aren’t you, sir?’

This was very gratifying. I hadn’t expected him to be so smart. ‘You could say that, I guess,’ I said benignly. ‘How can I help you, sonny?’

‘Well, sir,’ he said, meek
as a bishop in gaiters and pretty as a daisy-chain. ‘I just wanted to assure you I have no intention of withdrawing Paul’s capital from the firm.’

There was a silence. I forgot the police, the press, the funeral. I even forgot the power struggles that morning at the partners’ meeting before Charley had been elected senior partner.

‘I believe the amount is twenty million dollars,’ said little Cornelius Blackett from Cincinnati, Ohio.

‘Yeah,’ I said, getting my breath back. ‘Something like that.’

‘I guess it would suit you better if it stayed in the firm.’

My lips were dry. I quickly slid my tongue around them. ‘Yeah. Well, yes. Uh … let me explain—’

‘I realize the firm’s in an unstable state right now and it wouldn’t help if there was a massive withdrawal of capital.’

‘Uh … exactly. Right. That’s it.’ I wished the other partners were listening in. We had all been so busy arguing about the redistribution of profits that it had never occurred to us to worry about a capital withdrawal. I guess we had all assumed an eighteen-year-old nonentity would just do as he was told.

‘Of course we’ll make a suitable financial arrangement with you,’ I said smoothly, deciding it was time to rev up the Sullivan charm. ‘You won’t be out of pocket, I promise you.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the kid without batting his long curling eyelashes, ‘but I’m not pressed for cash. I was thinking in terms of a place in the firm.’

‘You were?’ I said amazed. He looked like the sort of youth who would be incapable of doing anything except writing bad poetry in a garret. ‘Well, that’s nice!’ I said, remembering the twenty million dollars and swallowing my amazement in a single gulp. ‘You’ll go to Yale first, of course, and then have a year in Europe.’

‘No, sir, what I have to learn is right here at One Willow Street, and I’d like to begin my training immediately after the funeral.’

Well, it was obvious he wouldn’t last six months, but I knew I had to humour him.

‘That’s wonderful!’ I said, smiling so broadly my face ached. ‘Congratulations and welcome!’

‘Thank you, sir. Incidentally, I have a friend whom I’d like to bring with me into the firm. His name’s Sam Keller.’

I remembered Paul talking about his latest protégés. ‘Is he one of the kids who have been spending the summers with you at Bar Harbor? Keller – wouldn’t that be the caretaker’s boy? Well, I don’t know whether socially he’d be able to make the transition—’

‘Paul chose him, sir.’

It was odd to hear the kid calling him Paul. Disrespectful and too familiar. I didn’t like it.

‘Well …’ It was becoming harder to remember the twenty million dollars. I had to make a great effort. ‘I’m sure that can be arranged, Neil.’

‘Pardon me, sir, but
I prefer to be called Cornelius. Neil was Paul’s special name for me and only my Bar Harbor friends use it. Oh, and talking of names Paul wanted me to take his name when he died – so there’ll still be a Van Zale at Van Zale’s,’ he added unnecessarily, flashing me a tight triumphant little smile.

‘That’s nice!’ I said, instantly resolving to give him the toughest training any would-be investment banker ever had, but I wasn’t worried. With fifty million dollars at his finger-tips in addition to his twenty million in the firm he’d soon discover there were more amusing ways of occupying his time, and besides he was just too much of a pretty-boy to take seriously.

‘If he had balls it’d be different,’ I explained later to Caroline. ‘God knows what Paul could have seen in him.’

‘People used to make similar remarks about you,’ Caroline reminded me tartly. ‘“God, what’s Paul doing with that lout who looks like a bouncer?” I can hear them saying it now.’

‘I may not look like an investment banker,’ I shot back at her, ‘but at least no one could ever have thought I had no balls! Hell, Cal, that kid couldn’t even be a pall-bearer at the funeral – he’d be ground to dust as soon as he tried to shoulder the coffin!’

‘Talking of the funeral,’ said Caroline, ‘have you—’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Well, go and lock yourself in the library and don’t come out till you’ve done it.’

I sighed. I had to get some words about Paul down on paper and the time was coming when I could put it off no longer. Not only was the funeral looming large on the horizon – a test of endurance for anyone who’d been close to Paul – but Sylvia had gone and asked me – me of all people! – to give Paul the eulogy he deserved.

[5]

I’m not much of a one for speeches. It’s one thing to sit back at a partners’ meeting and chat for half an hour about the financial state of a big corporation, and quite another to stand up before a packed church and talk of one’s dead friend.

I tried to get out of it. ‘Perhaps Charley – or Lewis,’ I urged Sylvia. Lewis was such an expert eulogizer that he had almost reached the stage of patenting the entire performance and retiring to live on the profits.

‘I don’t want someone who just liked Paul,’ said Sylvia. ‘I want someone who cared.’

She was implacable. I gave in.

‘And for God’s sake don’t be too maudlin,’ advised Caroline as I settled down to prepare the speech. I sharpened six pencils and sat in front of a blank pad of paper. I even wrote at the top of the page:

PAUL CORNELIUS VAN ZALE: 1870–1926

*

I wrote
no more but for hours I looked at those words and thought of him.

I remembered how we had met. I was eighteen years old, I’d just been tossed out of military academy and everyone had agreed I was unmanageable – no big news since my brothers and I had been unmanageable for as long as anyone could remember. Part of the trouble was that our father died young – I was only nine at the time – and there’s no doubt three boys get into bad habits when there’s no father around to knock them into shape. I remember my father well. He was good-natured and generous, always the life and soul of every party, but if we put too big a strain on his good nature we soon lived to regret it. I can still remember not being able to sit down for two days after I’d put an egg in each of his riding boots.