The Corp - Counterattack Part 10

Maybe Steve doesn't play with himself. Marines are supposed to have women falling all over them.

When Steve Koffler walked into the Ampere Lounge & Grill an hour after that, there was proof of that theory. Dianne saw several women-all of them older than she was-look with interest at the Marine who walked up to the bar in that good-looking uniform, his hat c.o.c.ked arrogantly on the back of his head.

And then, if you wanted to look at it that way, Leonard himself was responsible for what had happened. If he hadn't gone to Steve at the bar and practically dragged him back to the table, Steve would have had a couple of drinks and gone home. Maybe with one of the women who had been looking at him.

But Leonard dragged him back to their table. And then she felt his leg. And it was all muscle. The couple of times she had squeezed Leonard's leg, playfully, of course, it had been soft and flabby. Steve Koffler's leg was muscular, even more muscular than Joe's, and Joe had played football.

And then, when she danced with him, and that happened to him, and she knew that he wanted her, too . . .

She tried to talk herself out of it. She even went so far as to put on her nightgown after Leonard took her home and gave her the standard we-can-wait-until-we're-married goodnight j kiss. But then she decided to have a nightcap, so she could sleep. And when she stood in the kitchen drinking it, the telephone was right there, on the wall, in front of her nose.

Things, she told herself, always looked different in the morning. They did this morning. What they looked like this morning was that she'd gotten drunk and gone to bed with the kid upstairs. Marine or not, that's what he was, the kid upstairs.

Christ, he can't be any older than eighteen!

And what they'd done! What she'd done, right from the start, right after the first time, when it had been all over for him before she even got really started.

Joe had taught her that, and from the way Steve acted, she had taught him. That, and some other things she knew he had never done before.

Jesus, what if he starts telling people?

She had another unsettling thought: Sure as Christ made little apples, Steve Koffler is going to show up at my door.

She got out of bed and took a shower. When she came out, her father was in the kitchen.

"I promised Joe's mother that I would take Joey over there," she said. "Can I borrow the car?"

"Sure, honey," her father said. "But be back by five, huh?"

"Sure."

When she got back, a few minutes after five, she met Steve coming out of the apartment with his mother and his mother's husband.

Steve's mother didn't like her. Dianne supposed, correctly, that Steve's mother knew what had really happened with Joe Norman. So, as they pa.s.sed each other, all Dianne got was a cold nod from Steve's mother, and a grunt from the husband.

Steve didn't know what to do. But then he turned around and ran back to her.

Dianne told him that she had to do things with her family that night and the next day. And she managed to avoid him the rest of the time he was home.

Chapter Four.

(One) Office of the Chairman of the Board Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation San Francisco, California 16 January 1942 The ten-story Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building had been completed in March of 1934, six months before the death of Captain Ezekiel Pickering, who was then Chairman of the Board. There were a number of reasons why Captain Pickering had two years before, in 1932, ordered its construction, including, of course, the irrefutable argument that the corporation needed the office s.p.a.ce.

But it was also Captain Pickering's response to Black Tuesday, the stock market crash of October 1929, and the Depression that followed. Pacific & Far Eastern-which was to say Captain Pickering personally, for the corporation was privately held- was not hurt by the stock market crash. Captain Ezekiel Pickering was not in the market.

He had dabbled in stocks over the years, whenever there was cash he didn't know what else to do with for the moment. But in late 1928 he had gotten out, against the best advice of his broker. He had had a gut feeling that there was something wrong with the market when, for example, he heard elevator operators and newsstand operators solemnly discussing the killings they had made.

The idea of the stock market was a good one. In his mind it was sort of a grocery store where one could go to shop around for small pieces of all sorts of companies, or to offer for sale your small shares of companies. Companies that you knew-and you knew who ran them, too. But the market had stopped being that. In Ezekiel Pickering's mind, it had become a socially sanctioned c.r.a.p game where the bettors put their money on companies they knew literally nothing about, except that the shares had gone up so many points in the last six months.

The people playing the market-and he thought "playing" was both an accurate description of what they were doing and symbolic-often had no idea what the company they were buying into made, or how well they did so. And they didn't really understand that a thousand shares at thirty-three-and-a-quarter really meant thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty real dollars.

And it was worse than that: they weren't even really playing c.r.a.ps with real money, they were buying on the margin, putting up a small fraction of the thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty and borrowing the rest.

Ezekiel Pickering had nothing against gambling. When he had been twenty-nine and First Mate of the tanker Pacific Courier, he had once walked out of a gaming house in Hong Kong with fifty thousand pounds sterling when the cards had come up right at chemin de fer. But he had walked into the Fitzhugh Club with four thousand dollars American that was his, not borrowed, and that he was prepared-indeed, almost expected-to lose. To his way of looking at it, the vast difference between his playing chemin de fer with his own cash money at the Fitzhugh Club and the elevator man in the Andrew Foster Hotel playing the New York stock market with mostly borrowed Monopoly money was one more proof that most people were fools.

The stock market was a house of cards about to collapse, and he got out early. And he took with him his friend Andrew Foster. So that when Black Tuesday struck, and people were literally jumping out of hotel-room windows, both the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation and Foster Hotels, Inc., remained solvent.

Of course, the Depression which followed the crash affected both corporations. Business was down. But retrenchment with cash in the bank is quite a different matter from retrenchment with a heavy debt service. Other shipping companies and hotels and hotel chains went into receivership and onto the auctioneer's block, which gave both Ezekiel Pickering and Andrew Foster the opportunity to buy desirable properties, ships and hotels, at a fraction of their real value.

There never had been any doubt in Ezekiel's mind that the domestic and international economies would in time recover. In fact, he agreed with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 inaugural declaration that the nation had "nothing to fear but fear itself," and he said so publicly. Thus, when a suitable piece of real estate went on the auction block, he put his money where his mouth was and bought it.

The Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building was both a structural and an architectural marvel. It was designed not only to remain standing after what the engineers called a "hundred-year earthquake," but to reflect the dominant position of the corporation in Pacific Ocean shipping.

An oil portrait of Ezekiel Pickering, completed after his death, was hanging in the office of the current Chairman of the Board. It showed him standing with his hand resting on a five-foot globe of the earth. The globe in turn rested in a mahogany gimbal. There were the traditional four gold stripes of a ship's master around his jacket cuff, and a uniform cap with the gold-embroidered P&FE insignia was tucked under his arm.

His lips were curled in a small smile. In his widow's view, that smile caught her late husband's steely determination. But Fleming Pickering had a somewhat different take on it: while the artist had indeed captured a familiar smile of his father, based on Fleming's own personal experience with it, that smile meant, f.u.c.k you. I was right and you were wrong; now suffer the cost of your stupidity.

He had once told this to his wife, Patricia, and it had made her absolutely furious. But when he had told the same thing to old Andrew Foster, the hotelman had laughingly agreed.

It was a quarter past two on a Friday afternoon, and Fleming Pickering was alone in his office. There was a gla.s.s of Old Grouse Scotch whiskey in his hand. He drank his Scotch with just a dash of water and one ice cube. His father had taught him that, too. Good whiskey has a distinct taste; it is stupidity to chill it with ice to the point where that taste is smothered.

While there was always whiskey available in the office-kept in a handsomely carved teak cabinet removed from the Master's cabin of the Pacific Messenger when she was retired from service and sent to the ship breakers-Fleming Pickering almost never drank alone. But the gla.s.s in his hand was the third today, and he was about to pour a fourth, when a light illuminated on one of the three telephones on the huge mahogany desk.

Since Pearl Harbor, Pacific & Far Eastern had lost nine of its fleet, eight to j.a.panese submarines and one, the tanker Pacific Virtue, at Pearl. It had been caught by j.a.panese bombers while it was unloading aviation gasoline. Three other P&FE ships were now overdue. Fleming Pickering thought it reasonable to presume that at least one of them would never make port.

He knew every officer on every crew, as well as a good many of the seamen, the black gang, and the stewards. He was not ashamed to have taken a couple of drinks.

Pickering reached over and picked up the handset of the telephone.

"Yes?"

"A Captain Haughton for you," said Mrs. Helen Florian, his secretary, adding: "A Navy captain."

I know what this sonofab.i.t.c.h is going to say, Pickering thought, as he punched the b.u.t.ton that would put him on the line. "I'm afraid I have some bad news to report, Mr. Pickering."

"This is Fleming Pickering," he said to the telephone.

"Good afternoon, Sir. I'm Captain Haughton, of the Secretary's staff."

"How may I help you, Captain?"

"Sir, I'm calling for Secretary Knox. The Secretary is in San Francisco and wonders if you could spare him an hour or so of your time."

Well, no news is good news, I suppose.

"What does he want?"

I know G.o.dd.a.m.n well what he wants. He wants my ships. He's a tenacious b.a.s.t.a.r.d, I'll say that for him.

"I'm afraid the Secretary didn't confide that to me, Sir," Captain Haughton said. "At the moment, the Secretary is on the Navy Station at Treasure Island. From there he's going to the Alameda Naval Air Station to board his aircraft. Whichever would be most convenient for you, Sir."

"No," Fleming Pickering said.

"Excuse me, Sir?"

Obviously, Pickering thought, Captain Haughton, wrapped in the prestige of the Secretary of the Navy, is not used to hearing "no" when he asks for something.

"I said no. I'm afraid I don't have the time to go to either Treasure Island or Alameda."

"We'd be happy to send a car for you, Sir."

"I have a car. What I don't have is time. I can't leave my office. But you can tell Mr. Knox that I will be in the office for the next several hours."

"Mr. Pickering, you do understand that the Secretary is on a very tight schedule himself," Captain Haughton said, and then added something he instantly regretted. "Sir, we're talking about the Secretary of the Navy."

"I know who he is. That's why I'm willing to see him if he wants to come here. But you might save his time and mine, Captain, if you were to tell him that I have not changed my mind, and I will fight any attempt by the Navy to take over my ships."

"Yes, Sir," Captain Haughton said. "I will relay that to the Secretary. Good afternoon, Sir."

Pickering put the handset back in its cradle.

If I wasn't on my third drink, would I have been less difficult? Well, f.u.c.k him! I told him in plain English that if the Navy tries to seize my ships, I'll take it to the Supreme Court. He should have listened to me.

He stood up from behind his desk, walked to the liquor cabinet, and made himself another Old Grouse and water. Then he walked to an eight-by-twelve-foot map of the world that hung on an interior wall. Behind it was a sheet of light steel. Models of the ships of the P&FE fleet, each containing a small magnet, were placed on it so as to show their current positions.

After he checked the last known positions of the Pacific Endeavor, the Pacific Volition, and the Pacific Venture, he mentally plotted their probable courses. Then he wondered-for what might have been the seven hundredth time-whether it was an exercise in futility, whether he should move the three models down to the lower left-hand corner of the map to join the models of the P&FE ships he knew for sure were lost. Almost exactly an hour later, the bulb on one of his telephones lit up. When he picked it up, Mrs. Florian said, "Mr. Frank Knox is here, Mr. Pickering. He says you expect him."

Well I'll be G.o.dd.a.m.ned. He really is a tenacious sonofab.i.t.c.h!

"Please show Mr. Knox in," Fleming Pickering said.

He opened the upper right drawer of his desk, intending to put his Old Grouse and water out of sight. Then he changed his mind. As the door opened, he stood up, holding the gla.s.s in his hand. The Hon. Frank Knox walked in, trailed by a slim, sharp-featured, intelligent-looking Navy officer with golden scrambled eggs on the brim of his uniform cap. He had to be Captain Haughton.

(Two) Before speaking, the Hon. Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, stared for a moment at Fleming Pickering, Chairman of the Board of Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping. There was no expression on his face, but Pickering saw that his Old Grouse and water had not gone unnoticed.

Christ, he'll think I'm a boozer; I was half in the bag the last time, too.

"Thank you for seeing me on such short notice," Knox said. "I know you're a busy man."

"I have three overdue ships," Pickering replied. "It's the reason I didn't come to meet you. I didn't want to get far from a telephone."

Knox nodded, as if he understood.

"Mr. Pickering, may I present Captain David Haughton, my administrative officer?"

The two shook hands. Pickering said, "We spoke on the telephone."

"I'd like to talk to Mr. Pickering alone, David, if you don't mind," Knox said.

"Yes, Sir."

"Mrs. Florian," Pickering said, "would you make the Captain comfortable? Start with a cup of coffee. Something stronger, if he'd like."

"Coffee will be fine," Haughton said, as he followed Mrs. Florian out of the office.

"May I offer you something?" Pickering asked.

"That looks good," Knox said, nodding at Pickering's gla.s.s. "d.i.c.k Fowler told me you had cornered the Scotch market."

Is he indulging me? Or does he really want a drink?

"It's Old Grouse," Pickering said, as he walked to the liquor cabinet to make Knox a drink. "And I'm glad you'll have one. I'm a little uneasy violating my own rule about drinking, especially alone, during office hours."

Knox ignored that. He waited until Pickering had handed him the gla.s.s, then he nodded his thanks and said, "Haughton doesn't like you."

"I'm sorry. I suppose I was a little abrupt on the telephone."

"He doesn't think you hold the Secretary of the Navy in what he considers to be the proper degree of awe."

"I meant no disrespect," Pickering said.

"But you aren't awed," Knox insisted. "And that's what I find attractive."

"I beg your pardon?"

"There was a movie-or was it a book?-about one of those people who runs a motion-picture studio. He was surrounded by a staff whose primary function was to say 'Right, J.B.,' or 'You're absolutely right, J.B.,' whenever the great man paused for breath. After our interesting encounter in d.i.c.k Fowler's apartment, when I calmed down a little, I realized that sort of thing was happening to me."

"I don't think I quite follow you," Pickering said.

"This is good stuff," Knox said, looking down at his gla.s.s.

"I'll give you a case to take with you," Pickering said. "I have a room full of it downstairs."

"Because I'm the Secretary of the Navy?"

"Because I would like to make amends for my behavior in Fowler's apartment. I had no right to say what I said."

"The important thing, I realized, was that you said it," Knox said. "And you might have been feeling good, but you weren't drunk. I think you would have said what you said if you hadn't been near a bottle."