catnapping at insufficient intervals; but he was pleased.
Sanders was unusually nervous. He almost clipped a truck, ran a stoplight, barely missed an errant pedestrian, and when he pulled up and double-parked outside Hackman’s office building, he didn’t leave enough room beside the car to allow the door to open. He looked back over his shoulder; his face twisted as if he were a small child valiantly fighting back tears. He jockeyed the car forward until there was space for the door to swing out, trotted around to open it, and tucked his chin shyly toward his shoulder.
Villiers, minding the heat, got out and said, “What’s on your mind? I suppose your mother is sick.”
“She’s very ill, sir. Very ill.” Sanders gave him a pained, ghastly smile. He ducked his head, birdlike, as if checking to see whether his fly was zipped. Finally he summoned the courage to speak. “I’ve got to have the rest of the day off, sir. Otherwise I’d like to give in my notice.”
“Come again?”
Sanders’ throat worked; he blurted, “I want to quit.”
Villiers drew back. It was the first independent remark he had ever heard Sanders utter. “You don’t like your job.”
“I’m an engineer, sir. Working for you, I’m just a gopher. Sir, I know I can’t quit if you won’t let me. I haven’t forgotten. But I’m begging you, sir.”
“Why?”
“How’s that, sir?”
“Why now? What’s given you the backbone?”
Sanders averted his face. He said in a cold, rigid little voice, “She’s dying, sir. My mother.” His mouth corners jerked up in a shy little nervous smile. Sanders presented his cheek as if he wanted it slapped; he accepted every degradation willingly, out of some black buried need for self-mortification, and he was ready once again to receive rebuff without protest. Villiers suddenly could not stand his whining dyspeptic cowardice. The game had grown dreary.
“All right. I’m sick of looking at you. Get a chauffeur to take your place-I’ll want the car here to pick me up by eleven.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.” Sanders’ lips were moist with eagerness. “I’ll have to hire someone from one of the livery agencies.”
“At your own expense, Sanders.”
“Yes, sir. Of course.”
“Keep me advised of your whereabouts at all times. I may need you again.”
“Naturally, sir.”
“With you for a son,” Villiers said mildly, “she’ll be better off dead.” He crossed the sidewalk into the office building without looking back, forgetting the matter instantly. He reached the Hackman and Greene door and began to push it open, heard voices inside, and stopped where he was. The English receptionist was talking too loudly: “Your wife called. She said she was returning your call.”
Hackman’s voice: “My call? I didn’t call her.”
“From the tone of her voice I gathered that. You must have had a very rough night.”
“Bet your bottom,” Hackman replied, hearty but guttural with hangover. “It was a doozy.”
Villiers, deliberately eavesdropping, heard a quick rustle, as if the girl had dodged Hackman’s rush. The girl said in a tone like ice, “You live like a bloody sailor on shore leave. You weren’t with your wife, and you weren’t with me-just where the bloody hell were you?”
“You’re getting just like her. I come home early, and she thinks I want something-I come home late, she thinks I’ve already had it. Look, I had business to do last night, okay? Christ.”
There was a snort and the quick hard tap-tap of the girl’s heels. Villiers pushed the door all the way open and strode in just as Hackman growled, “Sca-rew you, doll,” at the girl’s disappearing back.
Hackman turned and gave Villiers a momentary startled glance of red-faced alarm. Villiers pushed the door shut with his heel and allowed himself to smile slightly. Hackman, scowling, with a cigar in his mouth, was a picture of beefy chagrin. He removed the cigar and complained sourly, “She’s just pissed because she knows she’s nothin’ but a piece of tail I can knock off anytime. Shit, one time she begs me for it, I may just let her hang up there and suffer.”
Eliciting no answer, Hackman finally shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Ah, she’ll be okay when she cools off. They all come around, don’t they? Hell. Come on inside.”
Villiers went along with him into the private office. “What did NCI open at?”
“Up a quarter. We got to talk about that.”
“Why?”
“Because right now you’re in trouble either way, the way I see it.”
“Fascinating,” Villiers said, settling in a chair. “Tell me about it, George.”
“Well, look, you’re holding a damn strong position in it. If it starts to slide, you’ll have to start covering the accounts-you’ll have people breathing down your neck for margin calls.”
You don’t know the half of it, he thought. “That’s one way. What’s the other?”
“You’re right in the middle. Suppose it goes up instead of down? It could happen fast, any minute now. All the big firms have got computers scanning the stock lists to spot companies busting out of their usual patterns. Once some shlock analyst notices the uptrend, the word’ll get around fast-they all eat at the same clubs, those guys, they’re always on the phone with each other. One analyst starts to talk NCI up, and every guy he talks to thinks he’s near the top of the list of people being told, so everybody goes out and buys because they know other guys are hearing the same story and the stock’s going to go up. A broker hears the word, he passes it on to the big funds because he figures to land their commission business on it. So you start a little bull market in the stock, and it shoots up so far you can’t afford to buy any more of it. What happens then?”
“I pyramid.”
“With what? You got maybe eighty, ninety thousand shares on the books here. That’s a drop in the bucket. But what I’m really worried about, suppose it takes a plunge? You paid for the stuff with checks written on a dozen corporations.”
“Why shouldn’t I? They’re my corporations.”
“That don’t make it your money to sling around. I’d feel a lot happier if you’d sell off enough NCI shares to pay off the margin. I’m still holding your Amalgamated Elcom check to cover it, but I don’t want to put that check through-I can return it to you, you tear it up, it won’t have to show on anybody’s books. Mace, you’re too deep into the Amalgamated Elcom reserve fund. You got no legal right to draw money out of it at all. I could get in a hell of a mess.”
“Stop sweating,” Villiers said mildly. “Elcom’s as sound as granite. They’ve just discovered four hundred square miles of bauxite aluminum ore in Canada.”
“It says here. Christ, you started that rumor. How much you want to bet there’s no bauxite at all on that lease? All you wanted was to boost the price so you could issue carpets of the stock and trade it for NCI shares.”
“Sometimes you surprise me a little,” Villiers said, and as an afterthought showed a smile.
The yellowish, magnified stock tape moved rapidly across the screen. Villiers said in the same cool, even voice, “You’re wrong on one point, George. I haven’t got ninety thousand shares of NCI. That’s only the part you’ve bought in your street name. My position in NCI, as of this morning, runs to approximately one million, seven hundred thousand shares.”
Hackman just stared at him.
By the time Sidney Isher arrived at ten-thirty, Hackman was sitting back beaming with an H. Upmann cigar jutting from his mouth at a jaunty angle, his glad-handing smile pasted on as if it would never come off.
When Isher sat down, Villiers thought at first-astonished-that Isher was winking at him. Then he remembered it was a tic, a permanent affliction, the quivering of Isher’s eyelid. It flicked and drooped of its own volition, and Isher probably had long ago lost his awareness of it. What unsettled Villiers’ was that he had forgotten it. Not enough sleep, he judged.
Isher said, “I hear Farouk’s nineteen-thirty Alfa Romeo is up for sale in Boston.”
“I’m looking into it,” Villiers said. “Right now we’re going to have a conference. I want both of you wide awake.”
