The Institute

10

My finding a building was purely by accident, and I got credit for brains I didn’t have. One day I woke up with a drawstring on my stomach — from the fact that I had a job to do and no idea how to do it. Hortense gave me my breakfast, there-thered me, and promised between kisses that something was bound to turn up. I called her Mrs. Micawber. She said: “Instead of glooming about it and feeling sorry for yourself, you could make some use of the day, like paying a courtesy call on Ralph — Ralph Hood, the senator. Except for writing him a note, which really isn’t much, you’ve done nothing about him. Why don’t you take him to lunch? Or at least invite him?”

So I called his office and a bit to my surprise got through to him at once. He said he’d check his calendar and see if he was free and call me back. He did, and he was free. I said I would pick him up in my car, as the only place I was known was at Harvey’s, and from his office, it would be too far to walk. He told me to put my car in a parking lot and he would “blow” me to the ride.

At twelve I stopped by his office and for twenty minutes had to shake hands and chat with the administrative assistant, the assistant assistants, and the secretaries — all in the outer office. Then for ten minutes I was admitted to his private office where the decorations consisted of framed pictures of him shaking hands with presidents Kennedy and Johnson, with the Queen of England, and with Smokey the Bear. At last we went downstairs. The guard at the door said to him: “Your car is waiting, Senator.” And sure enough, it was — at the curb, a Chrysler limousine with uniformed driver. We chatted as we rode, and I gave him the big piece of news, that the Institute seemed to be set, “and it’s all due to you, Senator. I can’t thank you enough.”

He held up a hand. “I like to be thanked, but it was due to you, not me. I’ve heard a little about it. Richard Garrett called me, and so did Hortense. You impressed him no end — and her even more, I suspect. Lloyd, I wasn’t surprised. You impressed me, too, in court that day. More important, you impressed the judge. I would even go so far as to say that you set him back on his heels somewhat.”

This left me slightly crossed up, that this reaction to me, Mr. Garrett’s reaction, I mean, which he had passed on to her by phone, had now become official. So it was being passed on to everyone. But I began to realize that it was the only reaction that could be maintained. If I was a guy whose wife would shortly be paired more or less publicly with the head of an institute he was underwriting, the only way he could play it would be straight, make noises that this friend of his wife’s was really some kind of genius, that Dr. Palmer had the job for that reason and not for reasons that might be inferred. But, of course, I said nothing about this to the senator. I merely listened while he talked on.

When we arrived at Harvey’s, which is a basement restaurant with underground parking for cars, I gave the driver ten dollars to go have his lunch. Then I led the way to my table which I had reserved by phone and which the girl, a rather good-looking maîtresse d’, had waiting when we got there. We ordered, and when Senator Hood asked for a martini, so did I. He resumed discussing the Institute and the future I could look forward to, “now that the Garretts have fallen for you.” But I must not have been paying attention, because he stopped in midsentence and asked: “What is it, Lloyd? What did I say?”

“It’s not you. Senator; it’s him. Mr. Garrett.”

“Lloyd, he’s big.”

“He’s been stuck with me, once I got her on my side, but he keeps blowing me up, making me bigger than I am. It makes me damned uneasy. A person knows his limitations.”

“Maybe he’s not blowing you up. You impressed me just as much as you apparently did him. That ghastly day in court, when you calmly took charge up there on the witness stand and got it into the record that the pot they found in Jack’s car must have been planted by the police, which, you thought, was most unlikely, or else stashed by someone else because it was hot and had to be gotten rid of, as to your certain knowledge that it was not in the glove compartment when you and the boys left the car to go to the basketball game. It was a cool, nervy performance, your making that judge listen, and once he listened, believe. It was a day I’ll never forget. So I’m not so sure that Richard Garrett overrates you. Perhaps, as they say, you don’t know your own strength.”

Though I certainly didn’t mean to, I had sounded cranky, so I started kidding along with the waitress as a way to save face. When she left again, the senator asked: “Lloyd, something’s bugging you more than you’ve been letting on. Come on, what is it? If you want to talk, that is.”

I didn’t want to, but I could hardly help it. I blurted out the whole thing — about the building, the law against renting yourself office space, which, it turned out, he had voted for, being ordered to find a building and soon. Senator Hood began to laugh.

“It’s like being given a scuba outfit and told to find the lost Atlantis,” he said. “And it also sounds like Richard Garrett, who is in the habit of commanding things to be done forthwith, and then, presto whango, they are... sometimes.” Suddenly the grin left his face, as though Marcel Marceau had waved his hand across it, and he started snapping his finger at the girl. “Miss,” he said when she sashayed over, “I’m Senator Hood of Nebraska, and something has come up. We have to leave. We’ll be gone about a half-hour. When we come back, we will want our lunch ready exactly as we ordered it. Keep our table for us, please.”

“Yes, sir,” she said as he pressed a bill in her hand.

“What is it, Senator?” I asked, wondering if he were ill.

“You’ll see. Come on, Lloyd.”

We went upstairs and out on the street. A taxi stopped for us as soon as he had raised his hand. He gave an address on K Street, and when we got there he told the driver to park, “here by the curb — we want to sit for a minute and then go back where we came from.” Through the window he pointed at the building across the street. It was still under construction. Scaffolding was all around it and out over the sidewalk. It was a beautiful modern thing of sandstone. But it wasn’t one of those buildings that look like a refrigerator with windows cut in the sides. It had windows, of course, but they were spaced in a graceful way, with stone in between. I counted ten floors. The top two were set back in a kind of mansard style, a little like the Lincoln Memorial. The entrance was beautiful — no columns, no fancy stuff, just two large bronze doors. He stared and then said quietly: “How would that do for your institute?”

“Perfect! Wonderful!”

“Let’s go back to Harvey’s, driver.”

While we rode, he talked. “You’ve heard of Bagastex?”

“I’ve heard of bagasse.”

“That’s right — Bagastex is made of bagasse — that stuff they get when they grind the juice out of sugarcane. It’s a floor covering that was developed by the Tombigvannah Corporation in Georgia. They tooled up, spent millions on it, and put up that building there, the one you just looked at. They had it made, they thought. By the end of the year they were due to line up with the big ones. And then the boom got lowered. Bagastex didn’t sell. Meanwhile, in Georgia they had had the bad judgment to fudge on their taxes. They knew they could be heading for trouble but figured that with the money they’d be making, they could square up and get on with the show without being caught. But they couldn’t. And they can’t meet their installment here, their last one on the building, with the contractor. So tomorrow in court the contractor will sue to have them declared bankrupt so their assets can be impounded and their creditors paid — perhaps. How do I know this? A certain senator came to me for help in getting a postponement tomorrow. But I can’t do a thing. There are reasons why I simply don’t dare to. But you can do something. You can phone Richard Garrett and have him get on it quick. It’s the chance of a lifetime, to pick up a building dirt cheap and perhaps do more than that. So, get on it. But remember: keep me out of it!?”

“I hear you, Senator. O.K.”

Back at Harvey’s, he paid for the cab. When we returned to our table, the maîtress d’ was there, looking at her watch.

“You were gone twenty-five minutes,” she said to the senator. “I’ll tell teacher to give you an apple.”

“Honey, I love you,” he told her.

He had her bring a phone and phone box, and we looked the numbers up, especially Tombigvannah’s lawyer, a man named Downing, who had offices in the Pell Building on Fourteenth Street. I wrote everything down on the four-by-six cards a researcher invariably carries and finally put in a call to Wilmington. Miss Immelman transferred my call to Mr. Garrett’s office. He was friendly and interested in what I was calling about. “It’s a beautiful thing,” I assured him and described the building. “It’s really something. How much of it I’ll need, I don’t know right now — two floors at least, perhaps three. But the other floors, you can rent out.” But when I tried to explain the deal and mentioned Tombigvannah, he cut in quickly and hard.

“I know all about that. They’ve been propositioning me about Bagastex for a couple of years at least, and, of course, I’ve had it looked into. But the next question concerns you. What’s your connection with it?”

“I don’t have any connection.”

“Where’d you get your information?”

“That, I’m not free to divulge, Mr. Garrett.”

“Dr. Palmer, I have to know.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, there can be no secrets between us — not on this can there be. And for another, I have to be sure you’re not being used as a catspaw.”

“A what?”

“A means to an end.”

“You mean, I could have been fed this tip as bait, so I would pass it on to you, and—”

“Exactly.”

“I assure you, it’s nothing like that.”

“You think it’s nothing like that.”

When I hung up, the senator, who had heard, shook his head gloomily. “I’m sorry, Lloyd,” he said, “but I had to sew it up. I couldn’t help it. There are things I can’t go into. It could cost me my seat to get mixed up in this mess.... Well, thanks for standing pat. I’d have expected it of you. Can’t say more than that.”

The food came and I ordered a bottle of Chablis, but he said: “Make it a split.” When the waitress brought it, she also brought the phone back, saying: “Long-distance call, Dr. Palmer. My, but you’re busy today.”

It was Mr. Garrett again. When I expressed surprise that he knew where I was, he said: “I called Hortense to find out what she knew, and she didn’t know anything except where you were and who with — which, of course, cleared up one thing right away. But while I was talking to her, Miss Immelman brought me the file, the stuff I have on Bagastex, and right now I’m looking at a memo I hadn’t seen before which makes it a whole new ball game — and how. So, Lloyd, once again, you’ve done it. Now let me talk to the senator.”

I hesitated a moment and then said: “I’ll see if he’s still here.”

Cupping my hand over the phone, I said to Senator Hood: “Do you want to talk to him? He found out I’m with you, from Hortense.”

“O.K., Paul Pry,” the senator said, taking the phone; “I’ll give you what help I can. But don’t quote me and don’t record this call. Is the bug on or off?... O.K., what do you want to know?”

He answered questions in a quick, straight-from-the-shoulder way, and I got a glimpse of the enormous body of knowledge a big shot has to have to be a big shot. I also got a glimpse of one of the crookedest deals I’ve ever heard of — a scheme with forty angles, to defraud investors, growers, creditors, contractors, machinery manufacturers, and the government. I understood at last why he couldn’t get mixed up in it. Finally he was done and handed the phone back to me.

“Lloyd,” Mr. Garrett said in a very friendly tone; “you did the right thing in protecting the senator until he chose to break silence. On that part, no hard feelings. I’ll be down in a couple of hours to look this building over, and if I like it, I’ll move in — or try to. So will you stand by at home for my call in case I need you? And will you tell Hortense I’m on my way?”

“You want this dope I have? The lawyer and so on?”

“I’ll have Miss Immelman take it.”

I got home around three and called Hortense. I told her that Garrett was on his way to Washington, but that left us dangling. We would have to stand by as we were, with no idea when we could see each other, and especially whether we could. But we had reached the point where we hungered for those nights, and I told her: “I feel funny inside, as though a vacuum were there.”

“You always say it exactly the way I feel it. It would look peculiar, though, if I weren’t here when he arrives.”

“You have to be there, of course.”

So we sweated it out. But around five he called me to say that he was at the Garrett Building and to meet him at Downing’s office. I drove in. The Pell Building is on Fourteenth Street below H Street, and I put the car in a New York Avenue parking lot and walked. But who did I meet, also walking, but Mr. Garrett! He waved and fell in step beside me. But he didn’t shake hands. At Downing’s office the girls had gone.

“We have the place to ourselves,” Downing said. He was a man around forty, slightly bald, and most deferential to Mr. Garrett, telling him: “Sir, you may not remember me, but I met you once, and I’ve heard you speak once or twice. I was the one on the front row, taking notes.”

“Yes, I remember you well,” said Mr. Garrett.

We laughed, and Mr. Garrett introduced me. “Dr. Palmer will sit in on this,” he said.

“Not with me, he won’t,” Downing said. “No one sits in on this but thee and me, Mr. Garrett.”

“Oh? You’ve got to that certain point?”

“What certain point?”

“Of excluding all witnesses.”

“Okay, call it that.”

They went into Downing’s private office while I tramped around the reception room and outer offices, the doors of which were open. I examined the big framed portraits of Roger Taney, Charles Evans Hughes, William Howard Taft, Earl Warren, and Warren Burger until I knew practically every fold of their robes. I did this for an hour. Every so often the snarl of Downing’s voice told me there might be a reason for excluding witnesses. Later, I found out that what the argument was about was what had been done by Colonel Lucas, the president of Tombigvannah when Bagastex began to sag. He had sold off Tombig subsidiaries, ostensibly for cash to operate with but actually to detach them from the crash when it came, so they would stay in the Lucas family, as the buyer was Lucas’s brother.

Garrett, while offering a decent deal — cash to the building contractor and ARMALCO stock for Tombig, on a three-for-one basis — was doing it only on the condition that Tombig recaptured the subsidiaries and bought them back for what had been paid. They included a cigar factory in Charleston, a breakfast food plant in Savannah, a lumber mill in Alabama, and a power plant near Augusta. The recapture stipulation was what Downing was snarling about. But Mr. Garrett didn’t snarl. He didn’t have to. He was holding trump cards, as he usually did. As a sort of preliminary to whatever might come up, he had bought stock some time before — Tombig stock — and he now told Downing: “O.K., we let the bankruptcy suit proceed, if that’s how you want to play it. But this afternoon or tomorrow, a stockholder who happened to buy in just in case, will file a complaint alleging fraudulent disposal of assets before involuntary bankruptcy, which is a felony. And if Leonard Downing’s a party to it, if it turns out that he helped compound the fraud, something very unpleasant is going to happen to Leonard Downing.”

“I see. I see.”

So that’s how things stood — at least as I piece them together now from what was told me later — when Mr. Garrett came out, closed the door, and dialed one of the secretary’s phones, still without looking at me. In a moment he began to talk in a low, guarded tone: “Sam?” — who seemed to be Sam Dent, my friend from the Dover trip — “Sam, I’m at a lawyer’s office, man named Leonard Downing, in the Pell Building. I need you here at once. Yes, it’s on that Tombigvannah thing.”

He hung up and then sat down in a chair, still paying no attention to me. Pretty soon Downing came out, half-sat on the typewriter table, and mopped his bald spot with his handkerchief. “Well,” he said, “we’re in luck. Colonel Lucas is on his way over. He just happened to be in town.”

“I thought he might be,” said Mr. Garrett.

“We could wind this thing up tonight.”

“I just talked to Sam Dent, my lawyer. He’s on his way.”

“Yeah, I know Sam.”

They paid no attention to me then or when various people arrived, in gabardines, summer suits, and shorts. Downing would jerk his thumb as soon as a new one showed, and he would join the others in one of the inner offices. Then a big, heavyset man came in. He had that brown mahogany color that stays outdoors all the time. His name, I later learned, was O’Connor. He was the contractor. Downing introduced him to Mr. Garrett, saying: “This is the Richard, Garrett, Jim. We’re trying to lay a deal — a three-way thing for cash, stock, and assets — that will clear up things for you. So act respectful.”

“I would, anyway.”

“Okay, but lean on it.”

“Mr. Garrett, greetings, sir.”

“Jim, I’ve heard of you, and nothing but good.”

Then Sam Dent came in, and Mr. Garrett at once took him into one of the offices to talk. But when they came out, he looked worried. Then at last came a character who had to be seen to be believed, and even then he didn’t look real. He was about fifty, with white hair, white eyebrows, and white goatee, as well as a white sharkskin suit, white shoes, and an old-fashioned Panama hat, and he carried a gold-headed cane. Here was the genuine article, a Southern colonel with so much honesty shining out of his face that I wouldn’t have trusted him — and no sensible person would — any farther than I could throw him.

“Colonel Lucas,” exclaimed Downing, first bowing and then shaking hands; “I give you Mr. Richard Garrett, the Mr. Richard Garrett!”

“Mr. Garrett,” said the colonel, “the pleasure of this moment is surpassed only by its memorable nature, from the honor it accords me.” Or “accowds me,” actually, to report it as it sounded.

“Colonel Lucas,” said Mr. Garrett, “I reciprocate the sentiments you express, if not in such felicitous words, then in equal uplift of spirit. I have long looked forward to this honor.”

His face was also glowing with honesty — or, at least, with something. The two men went into Downing’s office, closed the door, and left the rest of us to twiddle our thumbs. Dent came over, and we shook hands. “Will you be seeing Mrs. Garrett soon?” he said. “Like, for instance, tonight?”

“I hadn’t expected to. Why?”

“He pays attention to what she says. You could put the bug in her bonnet to talk him out of this thing.”

“You mean Bagastex?”

“Yeah, Bagastex.”

“But what do I know about it? And what do you?”

“I know plenty about it.”

He started talking about how Bagastex had flopped and how ARMALCO was heading for trouble in loading itself down with such a headache. I interrupted to say that I was partly responsible, since I had tipped Mr. Garrett off to the deal, and besides, I felt that it tied in with the Institute I was starting. Sam kept shaking his head, but then the door of Downing’s office flew open and there was the colonel, his hat in one hand and his cane in the other, his hair falling down on his shoulders. “Sir,” he bellowed back toward the office, “what do you take me for? That you would insult me so?” Mr. Garrett strolled out, cool, calm, and friendly. “Colonel,” he said quietly, “I take you for a peach, a beautiful Georgia peach that’s been skinned, the slipperiest object yet created by God. You are beautiful. You are skinned. Bagastex saw to that. And you are slippery. That, you have to admit.”

“I do not admit any such thing. And I resent your remowk.”

“I was just being funny.”

“I see nothing funny about it.”

“Trying to be funny, let us say.”

“I demand an apowlogy from you.”

“I apologize.”

“What has been said is not so easily unsaid.”

“It’s the insidious way I work.”

“Then you still mean that I am ‘slippery’?”

“I still mean that you were skinned — by Bagastex, its investors, and all the investors’ friends. I still mean that you are broke and had better make a deal before the government takes you to the cleaners. I still mean enough cash to bail you out — of the building, on a three-for-one stock deal that will give you something to fall back on, and your retirement as president of Tombigvannah.”

“It is that condition, sir, which I regowd as an insult.”

“A compliment, you should call it. In my company, I’m the big bull elephant. You may not see the tusks—”

“I feel them, sir, in my ribs.”

“And in your company, you’re the bull. But there’s no room for two big bulls in an elephant herd. One of us has to give ground. So—”

He didn’t finish. Flinging his hat and cane on the typewriter table and slumping into the secretary’s chair, the colonel collapsed in tears, dropping his head on his chest and sobbing uncontrollably.

Downing turned to O’Connor with a gesture that meant things were settled. At first O’Connor looked surprised, but then he nodded. Mr. Garrett put his arm around the colonel and said to Sam Dent: “Get it on paper.”

“Mr. Garrett,” sobbed the colonel, “I truly thank you.”

“My privilege, sir; I assure you.”

The two of them followed Downing and Sam into Downing’s office and the door closed behind them.