Two Much!

58

Gordon Alworthy was five feet two inches tall and as thin as the ice I was skating on. He had blond hair and blond eyebrows and an open boyish smile and a soft amiable manner of speech and a mind like an Arab oil minister. The airline’s attorneys tended to chuckle when they first met him, and to be frowning later when they left his presence. I trusted him as far as I could pay him.

We spent four days in San Juan together, with frequent conference calls to other legal minds back in the New York office of Leek, Conchell & McPoo, and at the end of it I knew I never would have been able to do it on my own. And yet how easy it had been, with Alworthy.

Which was another fact I’d never before entirely understood about money; it buys brains and expertise to supplement your own. I’d gone pretty far with nothing but my own native wit and talent for scrambling to sustain me, farther in fact than I’d ever dreamed of going, and now I was at a plateau where I didn’t have to do much of anything any more. If a drink was required, I could push a button and a drink would be brought to me. If conniving was called for, I could hire a fella who’d been taught conniving at Harvard Law School.

How much Gordon Alworthy knew or suspected I didn’t know, nor did I care. Even assuming the worst, that he had read those damaging documents before sending them to Liz, what did it matter? If he turned me in it would cost him his job. The Kerner estate would be thrown into a chaos of cousins and uncles, and Gordon Alworthy would be thrown back into the faceless mélange of young assistant attorneys at Leek, Conchell & McPoo. Would he turn me in? Would you?

Neither did Gordon Alworthy.

The airline paid off, of course. If I’d been a poor man, an insurance salesman grabbing a week in the sun with his bride, it would have cost the airline five or ten thousand, no more. If I’d been moderately well off, it might have cost them a hundred thousand. But I was rich now, I had so many lumber mills behind me I looked like an exercise in perspective, so what I cost the airline was a feeder route between two Canadian cities.

The Kerners already had a Canadian airline — Laurentian Interior Air Service — but prior to this it had been strictly a small cargo carrier, principally of goods manufactured by other Kerner holdings. I was happy that my first act as head of the Kerner business empire was to diversify into yet another area of commerce. The new passenger division of our airline I dubbed Laurentian Interior Zealandia; we did not actually service Zealandia, a a town of two hundred souls in Saskatchewan, but that way the company’s initials could be LIZ. She had, after all, made it possible; it was the least I could do.