Chapter 28

The highly respectable receptionist at the office of Tompkins, Wasson & Cone almost smiled at me.

“There are several gentlemen waiting for you, Mr. Tompkins,” she announced. “Some of them have been here since before lunch. Do you plan to receive them or shall I ask them to return tomorrow?”

“No, I’ll see them in a few minutes,” I replied. “Miss Briggs will let you know.”

No sooner had I settled down at my desk, however, than Graham Wasson and Phil Cone came dancing in, wreathed in tickertape.

“We’re rich! We’re rich!” they chanted.

“Where’s the Marine Band and ‘Hail to the Chief’?” I asked. “How rich are we, anyway?”

“We cleaned up,” Wasson said. “Just a bit under three million in one week. It was as you said. We went short of the market and after Roosevelt’s death, boy! did they liquidate! And thanks to Phil here, we got out before the big boys put the squeeze on the shorts.”

“That reminds me, Winnie,” Cone interrupted, “one of the mourners in the customers room who’s waiting to see you is Jim DeForest from Morgan’s. He’s been waiting here since two o’clock. You’d better see him quick, huh? We don’t want to keep 23 Wall waiting, do we?”

“Nuts, Phil,” I told him. “I’ll see them in the order of their arrival. That’s what they do at Morgan’s when you haven’t got an appointment.”

I pushed the button for Arthurjean.

“Who’s been waiting the longest, Miss Briggs,” I asked.

She consulted a little pack of memo forms. “There’s this Mr. Sylvester,” she said. “He was here when the office opened and has been waiting here all day. He wouldn’t state his business.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Send him in or he’ll faint from hunger.”

Mr. Sylvester was florid in a quiet Latin way and looked as though he might be anything from an operatic tenor to the proprietor of a gambling ship. He waited until my partners had withdrawn.

“Mr. Tompkins,” he said, speaking quietly, “I represent a syndicate that’s reorganizing the free market in meat. We need a real smart guy, well-connected, like yourself, to head it up and keep track of the money. We’ll pay a million dollars a year any way you like it--Swiss banks, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City--and no tax.”

“I’m always interested in a million dollars but I never did like Atlanta,” I told him.

“Atlanta!” He shrugged his shoulders. “We got lawyers could talk Capone outa Alcatraz and we got a fix on the Courts, too. What would you be doin’ in Atlanta?”

“I doubt that they’d make me librarian,” I said, “and I don’t think I’d make the ball-team, so I guess I’d have to work in the laundry. What’s the trouble with the black market, anyhow? Seems to me you’ve got O.P.A. right in your corner.”

“Too many amateurs and outsiders,” he told me, “just like with Prohibition. Meat’s bad and too many cops get a cut. We aim to do like the beer syndicates--organize it right, keep prices reasonable, have the pay-off stabilized, make it a good banking proposition. We’ve checked on you. You’re smart. Would a million and a half do?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got a million and a half,” I remarked.

“Okay,” Mr. Sylvester straightened up, shook my hand and gave a little bow. “Think it over!” he urged. “If you change your mind put an ad in the Saturday Review personal column. ‘Meet me anywhere, Winnie!’ That’s cute. ‘Meet’ and ‘Meat, ‘ see? Our representative will call on you.”

I asked Arthurjean to send in the next visitor and to my surprise she announced DeForest.

“Hell!” I told her. “There must have been others ahead of him.”

“There was,” she said, “but they agreed to let him see you first. They said they’d be back tomorrow. They were from Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers so they wanted to give Morgan’s first crack at you, I guess.”

Jim DeForest proved to be one of the vaguely familiar figures I had noticed flitting around the Harvard Club.

“Winnie,” he said, “I just dropped in to say that we have been pretty well impressed by the way your firm handled itself in this recent market. Mr. Whitney wanted to know whether it would be convenient for you to drop in and have a talk with him soon.”

“Today?” I asked.

DeForest glanced at his Rolex. “Today’s a little late,” he remarked, “but give him a ring tomorrow. No, damn it! He’s leaving for a short trip to Washington. Make it next week and he’ll have plenty of time for you.”

“What’s it about, Jim?” I asked. “Don’t tell me that I’m going to be offered a Morgan partnership?”

He looked as though I had burped in church.

“I hardly think so,” he replied. “If that were the case, Mr. Lamont would have seen you somewhere uptown. You know the way they gossip in the Street. No, I rather fancy that Mr. Whitney wants you to be one of our brokers for floor operations. Or, he might, since you specialize in estate work, want you to help with some of the new issues we are planning to underwrite.”

“Either way would suit me fine, Jim,” I told him. “Do you know,” I continued, “this is the second happiest day of my life. The first was when I got married.”

DeForest seemed a bit relieved and permitted himself a worldly smile.

“And today,” I continued, “I received the greatest honor that can come to an American in Wall Street. Believe me, Jim, this means more than having just cleaned up three million dollars in straight trading. After all, what is money worth if it can’t buy what isn’t for sale?”

This idea seemed to be taken under DeForest’s advisement for future consideration but he let it pass. After all, a million dollars is dross compared to the approval of the employers of men like Jim DeForest, still limping along on twenty-five thousand a year twenty years after graduation.

“Grand to have seen you, Winnie,” he said, indicating that the audience was at an end. “I’ll tell Mr. Whitney that you’ll see him next week. And of course, no talk about this. We don’t like to encourage gossip about our operations.”

I promised that I would be silent as the grave, not even telling my partners or my wife. “After all,” I pointed out, “it’s not a good idea to arouse false hopes. Perhaps Mr. Whitney will change his mind.”

“I hope not,” DeForest said solemnly, as though I had mentioned the possibility of the Black Death. “I most certainly hope not. We don’t do business on that basis, you know.”

“Well, Miss Briggs, who’s next?” I inquired, after DeForest had withdrawn with the affable air of royalty inspecting a clean but second-rate orphan asylum.

“Since those bankers left, there’s only three waiting. One’s a general but he comes after this other man, what’s his name, Patrick Michael Shaughnessy, whoever he is.”

“Send in the Irish,” I told her.

Mr. Shaughnessy was an Irish-American counterpart of the Mr. Sylvester who wanted to reorganize the free market for meat. He was a natty dresser and he spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

“Mr. Tompkins,” he told me, “I’m from, the Democratic National Committee. The Chairman--and gee! Bob’s a wonder--wanted to ask whether you’d consider a diplomatic appointment.”

“Of course, I would,” I replied, thinking of Germaine’s artless desire to be an Ambassadress, “but that depends on where I’m sent and that kind of thing. What have you in mind?”

“There’s only one post open right now,” he remarked. “That’s Bolonia or Peruna or hell, no, it’s Bolivia. That’s somewhere in America, ain’t it?”

I agreed that Bolivia was located in the Western Hemisphere. “That’s where the tin and llamas come from, Mr. Shaughnessy,” I educated him. “The capital city of La Paz is located about twelve thousand feet high in the Andes and the inhabitants are mainly Indians. I don’t think that Mrs. Tompkins would care for it.”

His face fell. “You’d be an Ambassador, of course,” he informed me, “and that’s always worth something. But the Boss said--that’s Bob, of course, we all call Bob the Boss--that if you wouldn’t fall for Bolivia to ask you what about Ottawa. That’s the capital of Canada. It’s right next to Montreal and those places and there’s good train service to New York on the Central any time you want to run down for a show or a hair-cut. Bob said Canada was a real buy.”