Текст книги "The Villiers Touch"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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Hastings said, “You’re looking fit.”

“This country’s good for you.” Downey propped his right arm in the open window. “Have a good trip?”

“Any air strip you survive is a good trip. Look, we’re not on the phone now. How is he?”

“Improving. But better prepare for a shock when you see him.”

He shot a brief sidewise glance at Downey, but the man’s cheeks revealed nothing. He didn’t seem particularly happy to see Hastings, but Hastings was no longer a member of the family; Judd had no real obligation to him; and Downey was a man who liked to keep things neat and exact, he didn’t like complexities and muddles. He was efficient, brainy, assiduously neat and clean-otherwise unassuming and capable of immense diffidence. A superb private secretary. And like a good butler, he knew his place. He volunteered nothing.

There was no point in pumping him; Hastings would learn from Judd as much as Judd wanted him to know, and he’d never elicit any more than that from Downey.

The house was not especially large. It was single-story adobe, built around a quadrangular patio in the Spanish style, with exposed whole-log beam ends protruding from under the eaves. They approached it up a blacktopped drive that crossed a sloping grass meadow. Here and there were blocks of salt; gnats and flies swarmed around warm piles of cattle dung; the thick brown backs of steers swayed above the rippling tall grass. Beyond the summit, timbered peaks reared tier upon jagged tier.

Downey said, “Those cattle pens are new since you were here last. The one off to the left is full of seventy-dollar cows, and the little one in back of it’s full of one ten-thousand-dollar bull. Funny when you think about it-it’s the cow that does the work, giving birth.”

Russ pulled up by the house and switched the engine off. The hot steel pinged with contraction. He heard cows lowing and saw a buzzard swoop silently across the treetops on motionless wings. Getting out of the car, Hastings was amazed by the loud crunch of his own shoes. Sweat rolled freely along his face but the heat was dry and not unpleasant.

The big front door swung open and Elliot Judd came forward, smiling warmly.

The old man emerged from the house with his hand outstretched and his thin lips creased back in a welcoming smile. “Russ, I’m glad to see a human face.”

The fragile old hand felt as if it would crumble to powder within Hastings’ fist. “How are you, Dad?”

“Still taking nourishment.”

“You look fine,” he lied.

The painful smile twitched. “Like a battery-it looks just the same whether it’s fresh or all used up. By God, I am glad to see you, Russ.”

Hastings tried to keep his smile steady. His breath was caught up in his throat. The old man had lost an alarming amount of weight. The skin hung in brittle folds from the gaunt, scored face. His color had turned to a cyanotic blue and his spidery hands, once firm and powerful, shook with the palsy of age or illness-they were mottled with small brown-blue spots. But Judd’s commanding features were dignified, if anything, by pain; the eyes were still fiercely blue against the dark skin. He was a tough old man whose pride, not arrogant, was the kind that took itself for granted, like a high-caste Brahmin’s. He managed to wear a white tennis visor and a disreputable herringbone Harris tweed sport jacket without looking at all ridiculous.

Downey went by them, taking Hastings’ suitcase into the house. The old man tugged at the flap of skin that sagged beneath his jaw. “Let’s not stand here all day staring at each other like two strange dogs off their home ground. Come inside and let’s relax.” He turned, not quite steady on the balls of his feet, and led the way, talking over his shoulder: “I talked to Diane a few days ago. A regular damn tycoon I raised there-I guess she’s doing fine with her art, and I suppose it’s what she thinks she wants. But I wish I’d made more of a woman of her. No disloyalty meant to my own blood, Russ, but I’ve always taken it for granted the break-up was more her fault than yours.”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”

It was only a few steps, but by the time they entered the big front room the old man was trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard. Hastings felt uneasy alarm. Judd pressed a buzzer and waved toward a chair. He sounded hoarse when he said, “I know all about Women’s Liberation and all the rest of that Carrie Nation crap, but nothing’s convinced me yet that women are biologically designed to excel as hunter-gatherers. Physically we’re still a tool-making species of apes, and any woman who tries to hunt with the men has something wrong with her. Know what I’m driving at?”

“Sure. I’m almost old-fashioned enough to agree with you.”

The old man grinned at him. A chicken-necked old Indian woman, her parchment face as wrinkled as a prune, rustled into the room in response to Judd’s ring. Covered by a long severe black dress that was buttoned up to the chin, she carried a drink on a silver platter. Hastings scented it and watched the old woman walk out. “Always the best Scotch in this house,” he said. “Aren’t you joining me?”

“Not now,” Judd replied. “Diane’s got a wire down in her somewhere, that’s certain-and I don’t imagine she’ll find any real kind of satisfaction until she gets over trying to prove she’s better than a man.”

“Back in New York things never seem that clear-cut.”

“I know. That’s why it pays to live out here, where you can strip away the fog and see through to the core of things.” The old man, still on his feet, kept tugging at his chin. “Russ, I’m glad you came. I’ve had it in mind for a month to call you and ask you to come down.”

“About Diane?”

“No. That’s over and done with-I couldn’t handle her, and neither could you. Maybe someone else can, but it’s not up to us to meddle, is it? No, it’s something else.”

Hastings watched him with full attention. The old man sat down where he could see out through the huge plate-glass window, across the rolling miles of grass. “Russ, nowadays this country’s full of young squirts just burning to save the world from villains like me. Are you one of them?”

“I guess that depends on what you mean. I’m no radical.”

“Maybe you ought to be. It’s taken me three-quarters of a century to learn some things I should have known by instinct from birth.”

“What do you mean?”

“When a man gets as rich as I am, he gets to thinking there’s nothing left to buy but personal comforts-privacy, luxuries, people to do for him. But it’s a terrible mistake. There is, after all, something important he can buy. He can buy, or at least try to buy, survival for his species.”

“Sounds ambitious.”

“You’re skeptical-that’s good.” Judd smiled at him. “The beginning of wisdom is knowing where to look for it, Russ, and you won’t find it in Wall Street. It’s right here. Look out there-what do you see? Virgin land. Four thousand square miles inside my fence, and a National Forest backing up on it. Outside of Alaska, it’s one of the biggest tracts of its kind in the country.”

He had to wait to get his breath before he spoke again: “I thought it was a virtue to build things. I was wrong. I’ve spent my whole damn life building things that have strangled our cities with traffic, killed thousands of people on the highways, poisoned the air and polluted the water. Destroying this planet of ours not for the betterment of man but for the profit of corporate industry. Well, we’ve always thought we were carrying on the American dream-the pioneer builder. But it’s become a nightmare, the pioneer heroes have become criminal rapists. We’ve killed off the animals, chopped down the trees, grazed off the grass, furrowed the earth into dust bowls, and filled the air and water with poisons. You can’t breathe anywhere anymore-there isn’t a river I know of where a man can feel safe drinking the water. This world’s not fit to live in any more.”

“I’ve given it all my attention these past months, Russ, and I’ve satisfied myself I’m not just an old fogy demented by a senile obsession. I’ve put huge teams of trained men to studying this thing, at great expense, and the findings terrify me. We’re getting closer and closer to a catastrophe that can’t be reversed. It could happen in a dozen ways. A big pesticide spill in ocean areas where marine organisms produce most of our oxygen. An oil spill in the Arctic, to melt the ice cap. But even if that kind of thing can be held off, there isn’t enough air and soil and water left to absorb our poisons. We carry smoke in our lungs and strontium 90 in our bones and DDT in our flesh and poison iodine 131 in our thyroids. We’ve burned so much fuel the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere has increased by ten percent-and if it goes up another four percent the oxygen balance of the atmosphere will collapse. Every living thing on the face of the earth will die. We could reach that point within eighteen years. Am I boring you, Russ? Never mind-do an old man a courtesy, hear me out.”

Hastings watched him, unblinking, listening to the painful voice, the frequent pauses for breath, watching the fiery glitter of the old eyes, like the last bright coals in a dying bed of ashes.

“I’ve talked to the engineers. They think we’ll solve everything with our marvelous technology. We won’t. Technology never saved a society. The most technologically advanced nation in Europe produced the most irresponsible tyranny we’ve ever seen-and when we get as overpopulated and regimented as Germany we’ll do the same thing, count on it.”

He paused; the silence ran on while Hastings put his glass down and put his hands in his pockets. When the old man resumed, he seemed at first to have lost the thread of his thought.

“Back in twenty-nine,” Judd said, “I knew the country was in for a spectacular bust. Bloated up and ready to pop. I liquidated my stocks and put the money in short-term municipals and land and cash in my own vault. When the panic came, I waited for it to hit bottom, and then I stepped in and bought up blue-chips-oil, utilities, telephone, the things the country had to have, no matter how panicky the market got.

“Every day from my office window I could see the breadlines outside the public kitchens, men without jobs sitting like corpses in the parks, long lines standing outside the employment offices along Sixth Avenue. I gave jobs to as many of them as I could, and I thought my responsibility ended there. Maybe, in those times, it did. In any ordinary world-one that isn’t threatened with complete extinction-you need hardship. An environment of savage conflict produces one thing-it produces leadership. The Depression produced the last real generation of leaders we’ve had in this country. Today even courage has become suspect. We can’t afford to fight our enemies; we’ve got to learn to live with them on penalty of nuclear extinction, and that destroys the meaning of courage-do you suppose Roosevelt could have held this country together in forty-two if the Japanese had been armed with nuclear missiles?”

Hastings, expressionless, watched the quixotically gaunt face; the old man went on: “We haven’t got leaders with the guts to do what has to be done. I know this much, Russ-nothing worth a hoot in hell will ever be preserved for mankind unless we can stabilize the numbers of our species. I’m glad I’m old-I’d rather sit under a nuclear blast than see what’s going to happen in the next thirty years, when we’ll have twice as many people as we’ve got now. We’re going to have suffering the like of which no man has ever experienced. Right now, today, in the past twenty-four hours, ten thousand people have starved to death on this earth. If all the food in the world were evenly distributed today, every human being alive would go hungry. Is it any wonder it’s the Cubas and the North Vietnams, and not the United States, that are producing leadership?”

Judd made a half-turn in his chair so that his gaunt face picked up light from the window; it looked remotely savage. He spoke in a whisper. “What happens to the quality of human life, even in this rich country, when we’ve tripled the population of the earth, Russ?”

Then his head wheeled, and he leveled a bony finger. “You are the last generation that can save us, Russ. You, not your kids or your grandkids. For them it will be all over but the burying.”

He drew a ragged breath. His eyes stared, defiant, and he went on more gently: “We spend two thousand dollars on military hardware for every dollar we spend on population control. If we keep doing it, you’ll have no grandchildren, Russ. The race of man will be dead.”

Hastings stirred. “You’re a very wise old bird.”

“I’m just a crusty old fart with his eyes open to see. Now I had better tell you why I’ve inflicted this impassioned speech on you-I confess I’ve rehearsed it for some time. I’m going to ask you to do something, Russ, so pay attention now.” He eased himself back in his chair, heartbreakingly feeble. “My personal fortune,” he said, “is larger than the national budgets of some small countries. I’m putting it to use. I’ve set up trusts here and in Canada and Australia and several other foreign parts-because frankly I don’t trust America to survive-to work toward the rigid enforcement of population control throughout the world. I have not contributed to organizations that seek to control the conception of unwanted children, because we have got to prevent births of children whether they are wanted or not. Governments are going to have to prohibit childbearing by law, not by individual choice. I’m pessimistic, I don’t think it’s going to work, but it’s the only chance we have.

“At the same time, I’ve set up a trust to operate the land we’re standing on-about twenty-five million acres. It’s set up to maintain this land as a perpetual wilderness. No tree cutting, no digging for minerals, no construction of any buildings aside from the replacement of worn-out structures on the same sites. The place will become an inviolable park when I die. I don’t trust the National Park people-they’re subject to lobbyists, and they’d throw it wide open the minute somebody discovered gold here-and so I’m keeping it in private hands. It’s to be a completely private park. No trespassing.”

“What?”

The old man’s creased mouth had stretched into a strict, stern smile. “A few years ago,” he murmured, “the last time I was in New York, I rented a bicycle and pedaled my way through Central Park. It was a Monday morning, and the park was reasonably deserted. Do you know what I saw?”

“I can imagine.”

“Yes. The excrement of a thousand human savages. The leavings of a population of mindless animals who’d had their Sunday outing in the sun, and left their spoor behind. There wasn’t a square yard of grass that wasn’t covered with broken glass, crumpled napkins, bent beer cans, torn newspapers, spilled mustard, discarded condoms and brassieres, crushed sunglasses, bloody sanitary napkins, paper plates, half-pint whiskey bottles. All right. I believe the parks weren’t put there for savages to defile. They don’t deserve the use of it. I don’t suppose there’s any way to prevent the wildlife here from being stunned by a periodic sonic boom, but short of that I want this land untouched by human beings. The time is going to come when people will need to know there’s an untouched wilderness like this still on the map of the United States. The public parks will soon be so mobbed with campers and picnickers there won’t be room left to see the landscape, and I refuse to let that happen here. They won’t get in here, they’ll never see it with their own eyes, but they’ll know it’s here, Russ, and I believe that’s pricelessly important.”

Hastings moved to the window and swept the horizon. Finally he said, “You’re dead right, of course.”

It brought a wide smile to Judd’s face. “You can’t know how happy it makes me to hear you say that. Because I’m offering it to you.”

Hastings’ mouth dropped open. He spun on his heel and stared.

“I need a man I trust to take it over,” Judd said. “To oversee the birth-control trusts and see to it this place is kept intact. Someone to live here, on this land, and watch over it. When I set it up, I had you in mind.”

Hastings was shaking his head. The old man murmured, “Don’t say anything yet. Think about it, that’s all I’m asking.”

He had forgotten what a straightforward affair supper was at Elliot Judd’s house. Judd had always been a meat-and-potatoes man. The old Indian woman rustled in and out of the dining room, serving; the conversation, with Lewis Downey at table, was light and inconsequential.

There were fourteen rooms in the house, most of them connected to one another only by the common porch-roofed walkway that ran around the patio. The front of the house contained three enormous rooms interconnected by wide double doorways.

The dining room contained Monets, and a Renoir worth close to a million dollars; the front room was hung with postimpressionists, Leger, and Lichtensteins; the office-library contained a hodgepodge of Wyeths and Sargents and a Remington cowboy in bronze. Judd was talking about his artwork: “I loathe museums. They’re as bad as zoos. Hang a picture in a museum, and it takes the life out of it-museums are for the dead. Paintings were made for the walls of houses, where people live.”

Downey said in his irritatingly impersonal voice, “Hadn’t you better take it easy on that Rothschild?”

The old man’s hand made a claw around the wineglass. “You’re an old woman, Lewis. We’re celebrating a homecoming.”

It made Hastings feel awkward. The meal concluded, Downey excused himself and left. Hastings sat back, finishing his wine, feeling logy and inert; the wine moved like a soft warm hand across his tired joints.

The old man sat slack and indifferent, like an animal going into hibernation; he was awake, but unmoving, his breathing hard to detect, his metabolism slow in the suspended animation of the very old. He stirred and said, “Do you ever see Diane? Or did I ask you that before? I apologize-sometimes memories get stuck together like pages in a book. But the strange thing is, even now when I look in the mirror I still expect to see a young face looking back at me… I was asking about Diane, wasn’t I?”

“We-don’t see each other.”

“Just as well, of course.”

There was another stretch of silence; finally Judd said, “When I sit here dozing I like to think it passes for deep thinking. Actually, I’m distantly aware of the beating of my old heart, but that’s about all. Oh, Christ, Russ, when you’re old it takes so damned much frustrating time to do even the simple things like getting to the bathroom, reading, getting in and out of chairs. You’ve noticed I’ve pared the staff here down to nearly nothing-the old Indian woman cooks and cleans, and Lewis pretends to nurse me, and there’s a fellow who comes up from the bunkhouse once or twice a week to make repairs and do the gardening. But I got rid of the rest of them-they all started treating me with humorous amicability, which I hated bitterly. I can’t stand being patronized. I envy my late wife, you know-she died within two days of falling ill with bulbar polio. No time for the kind people to come around and croon their sycophantic sympathy. You never knew her, did you-Diane’s mother? No, of course not, she died long before. On this last page of my life I tend to confuse things in time. But sometimes I wake up in the morning and twist my head around, and I’m surprised to discover I’ve slept alone.”

After a silent while, sipping wine, Hastings said in a soft voice, “Are you all right, Dad?”

“What do you mean? I’m old, Russ. Nobody gets out of this life alive.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

The old man stared at him, his lids beginning to droop as if to cover his soul. “I know,” he said at last. “Of course, you’re right-it would take a blind man not to know. This thing I’m in, this body, it ought to be in a hospital, but I’ll be damned if I’ll lie in a stinking hospital with plastic tubes rammed up my ass and prick and nose. Too many old ones have their lives stretched out by modern medicine-what good is it? Once I lose my ability to see with my mind and think with my soul, I want to get out of it fast.”

Hastings’ hand reached the table and gripped its edge.

The bony shoulders stirred. “It’s inoperable, of course. The first doctor told me it was a medical opinion, not a fact-not then, yet. I’d want to consult another doctor, he said. So I did. Naturally I hoped for a different opinion-I do not want to die. Who does? There were tests, X rays, a biopsy. It’s a malignant melanoma-bone cancer. No way to cut it back or stop it. Once it starts moving, it’s faster than the telegraph, all through the skeleton. I can live a month or two or three. That’s all. The pain’s already damned severe, as you can imagine, but I control it with drugs. A few more days, and I suppose I’ll have to confine myself to the house, because I’ll be too doped up to walk. I’ll regret that-walking around this place has been one of my greatest pleasures the past few months.”

The old man took a breath; miserably, Hastings did not speak, but Judd saw his eyes and nodded. “We all get uncomfortable in the presence of sickness and pain. Don’t search your mind for the right thing to say-your expressions of sympathy will only make you feel stupid, and they won’t do anything for me. I can see in your face the love between us, like son and father-let it go at that. I’ve learned to live with it, if that’s the word. There are times when I get touched with panic and dread-I’m no superman. Sometimes I sit alone in a room, and I try to sit absolutely quiet, waiting for the pain to touch me again. But there’s nothing you or I can do about it. Now, then-you did come out here on some sort of business. I suppose we’d better talk about it now, since I happen to be feeling up to it.”

“I don’t think it’s important enough to-”

“Nonsense. Let’s hear about it, and then we’ll decide whether it’s important.”

Feeling morose and reluctant, he turned the wineglass in his fingers by the stem and said, as briefly as he could, “For the past few weeks a large number of dummies have been buying up blocks of NCI shares. Up to this point they seem to have accumulated about a million shares. You’ve got something over eighty million outstanding. Either a raider is moving in from outside, or somebody’s moving up from inside.”

He wasn’t sure the old man had been listening, until Judd gave him a small smile. “Interesting,” he muttered. “All right, it’s not me, if that’s what had you worried, and it’s not anyone I know about.”

“Then it’s trouble.”

“I suppose it is. I suppose I ought to work up a great deal of indignation and rage. If it had happened a few months ago I might have enjoyed winning one last fight, but I’m afraid it’s too late now, Russ. Anyhow, I’m too well protected-I’m still the chairman of NCI, only because there hasn’t been a stockholders’ meeting yet this year. I’ve assigned almost all my personal holdings to the population and wilderness trusts-I haven’t got any NCI stock left in my own name. Of course, the trusts will be able to vote the stock when the time comes, but I’m pretty much out of it. And frankly, I don’t care that much about the corporation any more. I’d just as soon have all the corporations gutted by raiders. It might destroy our civilization, but if our damned production machinery came grinding to a halt, we might have a chance that at least a few human beings would survive.”

“I’m afraid I can’t look at it that way. Putting a company like NCI in the hands of a buccaneer could never possibly do anyone any good.”

“Except the buccaneer,” Judd said dryly.

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re loyal to your hire, which is an honorable thing-though I sometimes wonder if there’s any room left in this world for values like honor and loyalty. At any rate, you do what you see fit, in your little Wall Street battles. You have my authority to get in touch with the members of my board of directors and inform them of any suspicions you have, or any facts you dig up to support the suspicions. Let the directors handle it-I’m sure they’ll want to fight. Fighting the jackals is the oldest and most firmly established of all animal activities. They’ll enjoy the struggle. And maybe that’s all there is left, now. It’s possible to enjoy a good fight, you know, even when you’re losing it.” The old man grinned, sparkling.

Hastings began to speak; Lewis Downey appeared at the door. “Bedtime,” he announced without fuss. “And you haven’t taken your medicine. It was due an hour ago.”

“Nonsense,” the old man growled. “You know what that junk is as well as I do. I take it when I feel the need, not on any hidebound pharmacist’s schedule. God, Lewis, you’ll make a morphine addict of me yet.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Downey crossed to the old man’s chair and took his arm to help him up. Judd looked over his shoulder. “Think about that proposition of mine, Russ.”

“I will. Sleep well.”

The old man went away, leaning on Downey’s arm, feeble and full of pride.

Hastings left his wineglass behind and went outside. When he hit the open air he waited for it to revive him. The night air held a chill; he rammed his hands into his pockets. Under the stars it was as if he had stepped back a hundred years through time, and he felt tensions drain out of him as if he had pulled a plug. He heard the mourning hoot of a mountain owl. Somewhere on those slopes prowled the night-hunting predators; the world here, for a brief time perhaps, was still in balance. He stood in the empty silence, not reckoning time, thinking about Judd’s offer.