Sweet and Low_An Emma Lathen Best Seller Page 14

  While Vandevanter stared, Gilligan strolled over to look out on New York’s rain-blurred night lights. Then, rocking back on his heels, he summed up: “I’m ready to leave it at that. I’ll consider the offer, Vandevanter. There are some people, including my wife, I’d like to talk it over with. But I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow. Or, Sunday at the latest. Are you staying in New York over the weekend?”

  “What . . . oh, yes. Yes, I think so. I’ll look forward to hearing from you, Gilligan. And I hope that your answer will be yes.”

  But Howard Vandevanter looked drained. He made no real effort to detain his guests with courtesies—or anything else.

  “Are you going to take it?” asked Charlie when they were crossing the lobby once again.

  “It’s an opportunity,” Gilligan told him obliquely.

  There was more than one way to interpret this, so Charlie responded in kind.

  “Well, for God’s sake, Leo, watch your step!”

  Chapter 16

  Leo Gilligan Starts for Dreyer

  To no one’s surprise, Leo Gilligan took the job. By Monday morning, he was sitting in Amory Shaw’s chair. Three days later the first returns were in.

  “I knew Leo was smart, but I didn’t realize he was that smart,” they were saying in the coffee shop on John Street.

  The president of the Cocoa Exchange was more parochial.

  “I guess we can relax now.” Wayne Glasscock heaved a gargantuan sigh of relief. “Thank God the bloodbath is over, although Gilligan certainly didn’t take the line I expected.”

  Gene Orcutt could have told him why. He had drifted downstairs from his own quarters to give the Purchasing Division the benefit of his analysis.

  “We pulled this one out of the bag by the skin of our teeth,” he said grandly. “There were moments when even I was worried, and I know a lot of people are still confused about Leo’s tactics.”

  It was the wrong note to strike. On the fifth floor, the cocoa buyers had been working double shifts since Dick Frohlich’s death.

  “But not you, I suppose,” mocked Stratton. “Gilligan was consulting with you every inch of the way.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ll tell you one thing he did,” Orcutt replied sturdily. “He never forgot who he was working for. He didn’t set out to steady the market for a bunch of speculators. He bought at the right rate to do Dreyer the most good.”

  The applause soon spread from John Street to the rest of the financial world. Bartlett Sims, Tom Robichaux, and Walter Bowman all removed their attention from Union Funding long enough to comment. By Thursday Charlie Trinkam was congratulating John Thatcher.

  “The way I hear it, Gilligan is the best thing that’s happened to Dreyer in a long time.”

  Thatcher’s frown should have been warning enough. He was standing in a corner of his office, jamming folders into an overnight case.

  “I am always happy to be of service to a client,” he began with savage precision.

  Charlie was big-hearted to a fault, but he favored a strict construction of the Sloan’s obligations. “If it comes to that, Dreyer isn’t a client,” he said.

  Thatcher refused to be sidetracked. “. . . or to the beneficiary of a trust for which I am responsible,” he swept on. “I will gladly help with locating key personnel, suggesting new credit sources, or reviewing financial statements. But . . .”

  “Yes?” asked Charlie, spellbound.

  “But asking me to dance attendance on Etruscan vases is going too far.”

  Charlie opened his mouth, swallowed, and began again. “I can see how it would be,” he said, keeping a firm grip on himself. “Is that the vase I read about in the Times?”

  “The same,” barked Thatcher. “And it is now dragging me 200 miles away from an overcrowded desk.”

  This was clearly no time for ribald sallies. Charlie proceeded with caution. “I thought the big shindig was here in New York this weekend. They said the Italian ambassador was coming and the governor of New York. And the Pope, too, for all I know.”

  The immediate crisis was past. Thatcher was not going to boil over. He even unbent sufficiently to explain. “The formal ceremonies are going ahead as planned. But, at the last minute, they discovered that the American insurance does not cover traveling. So the Italians have to pick up the vase at the museum. Apparently that is unthinkable without the presence of every living Dreyer trustee.”

  Charlie shook his head sadly. “I can see why.”

  The Etruscan vase had become headline news six months ago when some busybody discovered that one of Rome’s countless missing art objects was on display at the Dreyer Museum. The curator responsible for the acquisition was deeply shocked and insisted on telling the world how the purchase had been made in the best of faith. Bills of sale were flourished, diplomatic notes exchanged, and negotiators appointed. While governments on both sides of the Atlantic tottered, while handwriting experts testified, the basic impasse remained unresolved. Italy never questioned the curator’s status as a bona-fide purchaser, but it wanted its vase back. The museum never questioned Italy’s moral right to the vase, but it wanted its money back. Finally two Milanese industrialists had appeared on the scene, haloed in light and dowered with gold. Basta! they cried. We will buy the vase for what it cost the museum.

  “Well, you can’t blame them,” Charlie said fair-mindedly. “Somebody probably put the arm on them at a dinner party in Milan and, before they knew it, they were shelling out.”

  “Far from blaming them, I have the utmost sympathy for those two,” Thatcher retorted. “At least for me the end is in sight. I understand the Italian authorities have a number of celebrations planned in Rome and Florence.”

  “Then let’s hope that they’re real culture hounds.”

  If so, they were hiding it admirably. It did not take Thatcher long to distinguish the two Italians once he arrived in Dreyer. Dr. Mercado was vigorous and bustling, with a fluent, not to say vernacular, command of the English language. Signor Alizio moved to a different drummer. He was slow and formal, speaking meticulously correct English. In spite of these dissimilarities, both gentlemen seemed at a loss as various Dreyer officials exerted themselves during the free period before the presentation. Curators, musical directors, and administrators jostled each other to lay at the feet of their visitors the enticements of art, music, and medicine. Curiously, it was Signor Alizio who broke through the barrage with a countersuggestion.

  “You understand,” he said apologetically, “we have La Scala in Milan, we have the Uffizi in Florence. We would like to take advantage of the unique opportunities here in Dreyer.”

  “Yes, yes,” cried several of his listeners, all too willing to meet the challenge. There would be no opera and no Renaissance altar pieces, they promised. By a happy coincidence the chamber ensemble was practicing at this very instant a twelve-tone . . .

  “That was not precisely what I had in mind,” Alizio began, only to be drowned out by the claims of an exhibition of cubism and a breakthrough in cardiac research.

  Dr. Mercado decided they were not communicating. Raising his voice over the clamor, he said: “Why not show us your cocoa plant?”

  At this astonishing demand, his tormentors fell back, stupefied. One of them was ill-advised enough to protest: “But you can see that sort of thing anywhere!”

  “For instance?” Mercado rapped back.

  It was enough to bring Curtis Yeoman forward. “Of course, we’d be delighted to show you through the plant. Howard, could we set that up for tomorrow morning?”

  Experience had taught Vandevanter to be wary with guests of the Leonard Dreyer Trust. “Is there any special aspect of Dreyer that interests you?” he asked cautiously.

  The flood gates opened. Dr. Mercado had the linguistic edge, but Signor Alizio compensated with his dogged persistence.

  “Yes, yes, Umberto, rates of depreciation are most interesting. But the critical factor in all food processing must be quality control. Now the
problem we have with tomato soup in my cannery—”

  “Cannery?” Vandevanter’s head lifted alertly.

  Dr. Mercado was proud to describe his companion’s achievements. “Giorgio owns the largest cannery in Italy. It may not be as big as Campbell’s”—here Mercado’s teeth flashed in a ferocious grin—“but it’s not so small either.”

  “The Common Market and the growing demand for Mediterranean foods . . .” Alizio said earnestly.

  “How you guys manage your inventory control . . .” Mercado bayed.

  “. . . a new bar that we’ve just finished standardizing,” Vandevanter droned.

  A magic circle was clearing around the participants. The devotees of higher culture, to a man, disassociated themselves from a conversation so blatantly commercial. Only one outsider intruded himself.

  “The Dreyer bar is the result of a very simple process,” Curtis Yeoman said kindly. “After all, milk chocolate is produced with a few natural ingredients.”

  Whatever his motive, he had miscalculated.

  “I have heard people say the same thing about my tomato soup,” Alizio murmured.

  “If it’s so simple, why have fortunes been spent trying to imitate it?” asked Mercado jovially.

  Vandevanter beamed at his guests. They were turning out to be men after his own heart. “Why don’t we go over to the plant right now?” he invited. “There’s plenty of time.”

  To John Thatcher the next step was obvious. Here were three men yearning for mixing vats, conching rollers, and conveyor belts. Two of them had bought the right to ask for what they wanted; the third was in a position to deliver. He was already reaching for his coat when he was puzzled to hear Governor Yeoman raise one objection after another. It was rushing things with dinner in two hours, it was a shame to miss the medical center, and, finally, it was possible they might be part of a crowd if their visit was not scheduled.

  “You see,” he explained to the Italians, “we sometimes admit the public, and there may be tourists today.”

  “Sometimes! We have a guided tour every working day of the year!”

  The president of Dreyer was outraged. “Hundreds of thousands of people visit our plant every year. And they all love it!”

  Within half an hour it was clear that, no matter what happened on other days, this particular tour was an unqualified success. The tourists loved it. Signor Alizio and Dr. Mercado loved it. And much to his surprise, John Thatcher found it engrossing.

  The Howard Vandevanter who summarily dismissed the official guide was not the Howard Vandevanter one saw in New York. He might not know much about cocoa futures or commodity brokers, but he knew everything about the production and sale of Dreyer bars. What had been billed as the regular three o’clock tour rapidly escalated into a cram course on how to run a chocolate factory. With Signor Alizio leading the way, the tourists soon stopped ooh-ing and ah-ing over vats of cocoa butter and began to pelt their host with questions. How many pounds of sugar went into a thousand Dreyer bars? What did those machines cost?

  Which unions were represented on the line? Why were the conching rollers made of granite?

  Vandevanter met them more than halfway. He was ready to tell them everything; he was ready to show them everything; if necessary, he was ready to roll up his sleeves and do everything. His enthusiasm was infectious. Before long two teenagers, who had started as conscripts in a family party, were showing signs of dedicating their lives to milk chocolate.

  Throughout this virtuoso display, only one face registered consistent disapproval. Governor Yeoman was not the man to applaud success achieved by others. To make matters worse, he twice was saved from public humiliation when innocent bystanders, misled by his proprietorial air, addressed questions to him. Each time Howard Vandevanter good-naturedly intervened. But good-natured or not, he implied that mere trustees did not have these facts at their fingertips.

  “What do you do to the beans in there?” a tourist asked, pausing by the revolving cylinders.

  Yeoman tried to take refuge in generalities. “You see, before the cocoa beans can be used, they have to be cleaned.”

  “And roasted,” Vandevanter took over. “The air in those cylinders is heated to more than four hundred degrees. What many people don’t realize is that the cooling process is just as important as the heating. If you’ll come over here . . .”

  One of the teenage converts was responsible for Yeoman’s second embarrassment. “I think I understand how we got this far,” he said, brow wrinkled in furious concentration. “The beans are crushed between millstones to get chocolate liquor. Then you blend in milk and evaporate it to produce this dry stuff. But now you say you add more cocoa butter to make it into a paste. Well, where does the extra butter come from? We used up all there was in the beans.”

  He concluded by looking trustingly at the ex-governor of Pennsylvania.

  There was a long silence.

  “Er . . . the beans, you understand, are broken up into nibs,” Yeoman flailed about wildly, “and they have a very high cocoa butter content . . .”

  “55%,” the teenager offered helpfully.

  Yeoman rolled his eyes.

  “A lot of people are confused by that,” said Vandevanter with kindly encouragement. “They forget we have more than one product. It’s true we used up all the butter in the chocolate process. But we took out more than half of it when we were making cocoa powder. That’s where the extra comes from.”

  After that, Governor Yeoman was abandoned as a source of information by the tour party, and his temper deteriorated rapidly.

  “This is a ridiculous waste of time,” he grumbled to Thatcher. “The president of Dreyer should have more important things to do than dragging a pack of tourists through the plant.”

  “He seems to do it very well,” Thatcher said mildly. He even refrained from asking why dragging two unwilling Italians through an exhibition of cubism was a superior deployment of presidential energies.

  Yeoman snorted. “Howard likes throwing his weight around, that’s the simple truth of the matter. You’ve heard what he’s doing about Gilligan’s replacement.”

  Thatcher halted in midstride by the refining machines. “I didn’t know there was one.”

  “There isn’t yet. But when I asked him what he was doing about it, he said he was working on a list of possibles. He doesn’t expect to reach a decision for several weeks, because it’s so important to get the right man.” Yeoman gave a short laugh. “You can see what he’s up to. The right man for Howard will be the one who’ll take his orders. We can kiss good-by to any independence for the New York operation now. Howard won’t back down with a new man the way he did with Amory Shaw.”

  “He won’t have to.” Thatcher had started to march forward briskly.

  Yeoman said, “Like it or not, the whole ball game has changed. The new man will be hired by Vandevanter and act accordingly—at least at the beginning. I don’t suppose Amory Shaw was quite so regal during his first year or two with Dreyer.”

  Thatcher deliberately terminated the conversation, but not without a passing thought. This was the first he had heard about Vandevanter backing down. Presumably the confrontation between him and Shaw had stopped short of open warfare. Yet, in all the swirl of rumor about the murder of Amory Shaw, Yeoman had chosen to keep this information to himself. It would be interesting to know why.

  He caught up with his group at the packaging facilities in time to witness the first disappointment to mar the afternoon.

  “But they’re not gold!” burst out Dr. Mercado, shocked.

  Indeed, they were not. The bars whizzing past had wrappers in brilliant red, white, and blue.

  “These are our new Old Glory bars,” explained Vandevanter. “We brought them out in time for the Bicentennial.”

  Such reasoning had little appeal for citizens of Milan. Signor Alizio, who was still trying to establish product identification for his can of tomato soup, was appalled. “But is this wise? The w
hole world thinks of the Dreyer bar as gold.”

  “Just wait six months,” Vandevanter promised, “and they’ll all know about Old Glory, too. It’s going over with a bang in the domestic market. We’re already revising our production goals. By the end of this quarter we expect to be one million over estimate. By the end of the next quarter. . .”

  Chapter 17

  Brokers Take

  They were engaged in heavy counting at places other than Dreyer, New York.

  “Well, we’ve racked up the commissions, I’ll say that much,” announced Jim Mears, “but I still wouldn’t want to live through these past two weeks again.”

  He had thrown his notes on the table before sprawling in a chair, in loose-jointed fatigue.

  Russ Martini cast a lackluster eye over his partner’s figures. “It looks good to me,” he finally said as if the effort of talking were too much for him. “But, boy, I’ll be glad when the weekend comes.”

  The crisis in cocoa was over, but it had left behind men drawn with the strain and tension of continuous tightrope walking. They were not in the best condition to deal with howls from panic-stricken customers and mountains of paper work.

  “You’re coming back to the office tonight, aren’t you?” Mears asked vaguely, as if this had not been settled hours ago.

  “Mmm,” agreed Martini. “I’ll grab a bite somewhere and try to put in a couple of hours on those special accounts. I called Fran and told her I’d be staying in town tonight . . .”

  Mears’ nodding was as mechanical as Martini’s speech. All paper work has to be cleared at commodity exchanges if trading the next day is to be permitted. Even in placid weeks it was not unusual for one of the partners to put in late hours. During critical periods, they alternated the swing shift like clockwork. It was not Russ Martini’s plans for a working evening that kept the two men talking.

  Partly it was an exhausted reluctance to move. But the real brake was the garrison mentality always produced by a sustained siege. The survivors have forged a desperate camaraderie out of shared suffering. Who else knows enough to afford support and sympathy? Who else wants to rake over every insignificant coal?