The Rich Are Different (78 page)

Ten o’clock came. The big gong boomed in the great hall of the Stock Exchange, and the apocalypse began.

Huge blocks of stock cascaded on to the market like blood streaming from a fresh-killed corpse. The ticker reeled, stuttered, gasped for breath. Selling orders gushed on to the floor, inundating the drowning brokers. In half an hour the volume of trading had passed three million and by noon it had passed eight million with no end in sight. The carnage mesmerized us all, and in the crowd around our ticker there was no conversation, only the occasional hysterical laugh or muffled sob.

I remember going out with Sam briefly at one o’clock and finding Wall Street once more jammed from end to end. I remember the faces, the grey stark haunted faces reflecting the horrors of unimaginable disasters. I remember the silence, broken only by the shuffle of feet. I remember the stooped shoulders, the bowed heads, the battered slouch of defeated men.

When the closing gong brought the insane day to an end the volume of trading closed at a record of sixteen and a half million shares and the ruin was complete. The corpse of the market choked Wall Street and in the foreign markets around the world the international crisis began.

‘They should have closed the Exchange.’

‘Morgan’s told them not to.’

‘If Paul had been alive …’

The hideously unimportant bickering went on and on. No one could
face up to what had happened. We were in shock. Lives had been ruined, a whole world had been washed away, and we were still arguing about whether Morgan’s should have forced the Stock Exchange to suspend trading.

‘The public’s going to make the bankers pay for this one day,’ said Martin. ‘We did nothing but tell them what fine clothes we had and now they’ve seen we were stark naked. They’ll never forgive us and they’ll never forget.’

I was back in my office some unknown time later when the phone rang.

‘Van Zale,’ I said mechanically, still thinking of Martin’s prognosis of doom for investment bankers.

‘Cornelius, this is Luke Sullivan.’

I had a split second premonition of utter disaster. Martin must have passed me some of his psychic powers.

‘Luke,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ In the monumental avalanche of the Crash I had quite forgotten Van Zale Participations.

‘Listen, Cornelius, I’ve been borrowing up to the hilt in the hope that the market would improve and put everything right, but … hell, I’ll be honest with you. I can’t get an extension on my loans, we’re in a bad, bad jam and I’ve got to have money right away. Can you authorize a couple of million?’

The stench of danger was so strong that I nearly vomited. ‘No.’

‘Damn you, of course you can! Listen to me! This is an emergency and the bank’s just got to bail us out!’

But I knew all about that trap. I knew how easy it was to be drawn into a conspiracy to conceal a crime. I had to put the greatest possible distance between myself and the Sullivan twins and I had to do it fast.

‘Ask Steve,’ I said.

‘Jesus Christ, how can Steve sanction that kind of money from Europe? Listen to me, you stupid little kid—’

‘You’re fired,’ I said and hung up. I allowed myself one full minute to stop shaking from head to toe and then I rounded up my partners for yet another emergency meeting.

[5]

I was in a very awkward position. I knew I should have confided in my partners as soon as Greg Da Costa had provided evidence of the Sullivans’ ‘mismanagement’, yet in my eagerness to fashion a new weapon against Steve it had never occurred to me not to play a lone hand. Now I was hoist with my own petard. By concealing the information with such disastrous results I had provided Steve with the excuse to roar back from Europe and call me a harebrained young fool who had no business to be a Van Zale partner.

My only hope was to attack him so hard that in the resulting confusion my errors would slip by unnoticed.

‘But I
have to let the partners know
I
know there’s all hell going on at Van Zale Participations,’ I said in a panic to Sam. ‘Otherwise they won’t realize how important it is not to bail Luke out with their eyes closed. What in God’s name am I going to do?’

‘Say Da Costa only called you just before Luke called. You had his information but you’d had no time to act on it.’

‘But supposing they check with Da Costa?’

‘Don’t be dumb, Neil, Da Costa won’t talk. He’s going to deny he ever met the twins now the Crash has bust their racket wide open, and anyway can you seriously imagine any of the partners calling Da Costa to check up on you?’

Confidence seeped back into me. I had tripped on the high wire but my partner was catching me as I fell and jerking me back to my feet.

‘God, I’m scared,’ I said to Sam, still shaking with fright, and then somehow dredged up the courage to sally forth into battle.

The partners gathered in Lewis’s office, the double-room which had once belonged to Paul, and sat in a tense half-circle around the fireplace. I said my piece. All the partners looked as if they were about to have a stroke. I never saw a brandy bottle appear so fast at a partners’ meeting.

‘I had a sort of instinctive feeling that there was something shady going on,’ I said in a hushed voice, ‘but of course I had no idea what was involved until Da Costa called with ideas for his new meal-ticket. I mean, I never suspected – never dreamt – well, they were Steve’s brothers, weren’t they? I guess my trust in Steve was absolute.’

Everyone at once said what a fool Steve was about his brothers and how the appointments had always been eyed askance. It was remarkable how wise everyone was in retrospect. It took them less than five minutes to agree that Steve had to be hauled back from Europe to clean up the mess and only a little more than ten before a unanimous verdict was delivered that the disaster was entirely Steve’s fault.

I said in a crushed voice: ‘I feel so guilty … not finding out earlier when you asked me to deal with Luke …’

Someone patted me on the shoulder kindly and said I mustn’t reproach myself because if two sets of books were being kept there was no way I could have unmasked such infamy.

Luke was hauled before us for sentencing. He did try to embark on explanations but we cut him off. Nobody wanted to hear even a tall story, let alone the truth. Martin found out the names of the banks which had given Luke the loans, Clay jotted down the horrible amounts involved and Lewis fired Luke on the spot.

Luke had hysterics. Everyone was dreadfully embarrassed and as soon as he had been ejected from the room the brandy bottle had to be passed around again. Half an hour later after a profusely sweating Lewis had consolidated the loans and won a twenty-eight-day extension of the time allotted for repayment, somebody remembered that Matt had to be fired too and Lewis recovered himself sufficiently to make the necessary call.

A week
later Steve arrived home from Europe.

I was at the terminal to meet him. The other partners all wanted to give him the cold shoulder, and so it was natural that the most junior, least significant partner should be dispatched to the pier to represent the firm. It had been an appalling week in New York since the collapse of the market, and Emily had introduced a further grim note to the grim scene which awaited Steve when she telephoned me to say that Caroline Sullivan had died that morning in hospital after an emergency operation.

‘Poor Steve!’ was all Emily could say. ‘Arriving home to find his wife dead and his brothers disgraced – oh, poor,
poor
Steve!’

I suddenly realized that each time she said the word Steve she made it sound as if it were the most precious word in the English language. The hackles rose on the back of my neck. ‘Emily!’ I was so horrified I could say nothing else.

‘What’s the matter, Cornelius?’ she said innocently.

‘That married man you said you were in love with once – the one that took no notice of you – you don’t mean – you can’t mean – oh God, you must be crazy!’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Emily at once.

‘But Emily, he screws everything in sight! I mean – oh Christ, I’m so upset I’m saying all the wrong things. Listen, he’s – he’s very immoral, Emily. He’s not at all the sort of man Mama would want you to marry.’

‘My dear, I’ve long since discovered that I don’t care a jot for the sort of man Mama would want me to marry!’

‘But he’s eighteen years older than you are!’ I said wildly. ‘He drinks too much! He – good God, Emily, he’s on the brink of marrying Dinah Slade! He’s already got her pregnant!’

There was a silence.

‘Men don’t marry girls like that,’ said Emily at last.

‘Men like Steve Sullivan,’ I said, ‘are capable of absolutely anything.’

‘I think I’d better say goodbye now,’ said Emily. ‘I can hear one of the children calling. Excuse me, Cornelius.’

I was tearing my hair.

‘Have you gone crazy?’ said Sam incredulously as I gasped out the news to him. ‘Forget it, Neil! You know how much I admire Emily, but she’s not my type and I’m pretty sure she’s not Steve’s either. He’ll mop up the twins’ mess and disappear into Europe as fast as he damn well can. Why the big panic? You ought to be going down on your knees to thank God for Dinah Slade!’

That suggestion struck me as a trifle excessive but I did manage to tell myself I had been worrying unnecessarily. I spent a long time wondering how quickly we would be able to shovel Steve back to Europe, and then with great reluctance I dragged myself down to the docks to meet his ship.

[6]

Steven Sullivan, the
most powerful of all Paul’s people, well over six feet tall with a build Goliath might have envied and a strong blunt-featured face which reduced all women to simpering submission – was it any wonder that my fear of him was mixed with my jealousy and my hatred with a grudging admiration? He had a fast fluent charm which ensnared even the most cautious clients and a quick shrewd grasp of detail which won their confidence. Because of his florid private life the temptation to underestimate him was a weakness to which his opponents occasionally succumbed, but few people who made such a mistake survived long enough to make it again. Yet in some ways he was a simple man. He had a curious childlike devotion to his two frightful brothers, an indulgent affection for his ill-behaved offspring, and a cheerleader’s mindless loyalty to Paul. I was loyal to Paul too but at least, thanks to our one intimate conversation, I was loyal to a flesh-and-blood hero, not some imaginary high school football celebrity. Steve also had the trick of regarding himself as the only protégé Paul had ever had and that was why, when Paul made me his heir, the decision was profoundly unpalatable to him.

To do Steve justice I have to concede that he wasn’t avaricious – nor was he a fool. I doubt if he expected to inherit Paul’s private fortune, but he certainly expected to inherit Paul’s role at the office and as soon as Paul died Steve started behaving as if he were the senior partner at Van Zale’s.

To do him justice again I have to admit that his assumption of his own superiority had a strong root in reality. The surviving partners were a mixed bunch, and although they were all in their different ways able men none of them had either the brilliance or the sheer power of personality to muscle their way unchallenged into the senior partner’s chair. Steve had the advantage of being Paul’s favourite but he was only thirty-nine when Paul died and his personality was too brash to conform to the public image of a leading investment banker. To do him justice a third time – God, how hard it is for me to do Steve Sullivan justice! – he was quite intelligent enough to recognize his limitations, accept them and temporarily agree to the appointment of Charley Blair as senior partner, but I knew, just as everyone else knew, that he was biding his time. When Charley died Steve’s position was simplified. Charley had been so popular that he might have proved difficult to oust, but Walter was too old to be a threat, neither Lewis nor Martin had Steve’s muscle, and Clay Linden, though aggressive, was not that much older than Steve and as a newcomer to the firm could hardly match Steve’s twenty-year record at Van Zales. As it happened Sam and I outflanked Steve before he had the chance to outflank Lewis and Martin, elbow Clay aside and put Walter out to grass, but it was obvious to me as Paul’s heir that the day would inevitably come when Steve and I would be fighting each other for that senior partner’s chair.

I was immensely deferential to him when I first started at Van Zale’s. I had to be, since I knew he would break me in half if he thought I was too ambitious, but I bitterly resented the offhand contemptuous way he treated
me, and eventually I realized that if I were ever to progress an inch at Van Zale’s I would have to show him I was not as weak as he thought I was. Having reached that decision I saw all too clearly that there could be no half-measures. Either I crushed him or he would pulverize me. I had a slight advantage since I knew exactly how dangerous he was while he had no idea I had any strength at all, but a dwarf needs more than a slight advantage to win a hand-to-hand tussle with a giant. However, I had Sam, and with our combined strength we managed after a bloody, nerve-racking struggle to manoeuvre ourselves into a less vulnerable position.

I was on my way.

Yet I had lost my initial advantage over Steve. He no longer had any illusions about my ambition, and I knew that as fast as I scrambled for weapons to use against him he would be planning the most foolproof way to stab me in the back. We were locked together now in an unyielding fight for supremacy, and the very thought of him interrupting his European life to return no matter how briefly to New York was enough to keep me awake night after night. I went down to the docks that morning with the dread and fear knotted solidly together in the pit of my stomach, yet when the confrontation finally came the unexpected happened and my fear evaporated. I looked at him, he looked at me and in a flash all my fighting instincts had reasserted themselves as the adrenalin went shooting through my veins.

[7]

He looked wrecked. His blue eyes were bloodshot and his face was so haggard that for a moment I thought he already knew his wife was dead. But he was sober. The great difference between Steve and his brothers was that Steve always knew when to stop hitting the bottle.