“Oh, son!”
“I know in Britain”—Peters fumbled for words—“there’s more concern for, uh, social objectives, but still . . .” He stopped. Tredgold was laughing. “Well, what is it then?”
“My dear chap . . . my dear old chap, look about you; haven’t you ever seen a firm where one of the salesmen started to do really well selling on commission? What do they do, eh? Fire him, take part of the territory from him, possibly make him sales manager—no commission there, you know—something of the kind. Yet he was making the firm a mint and now they haven’t got it. He was a mere salesperson, you see, and they’d sooner bankrupt the place than have him make too much. Let me tell you something: the big ones, the ones with offices and works of one sort or another all about, like yours and mine, can buy profits whenever they choose just by offering a thin bit of them to the chaps who do the work. But they don’t and they won’t, and who can blame them? I mean, what would they do with the bloody stuff?”
“Build more plants, I suppose,” Peters said.
“More problems for the big pots, and the government on them too and should one of those new works not go, their reputations suffer—so why risk it? None of them know the least about manufacturing anyway.”
“Give it to the stockholders then.”
“Just makes the blighters greedy. No, quite seriously now, Peters, y’know what saved me? Potty little Portugal has to be shown in a separate column in the annual report, and we balance out the limousine thing—so I’m permitted to feather my wee nest. Besides”—Tredgold winked—“there are fringes. Here, love.”
A pretty dark-haired girl came on camera. Tredgold said, “Give us a kiss, love, and blow one to the Yank—I say, Peters, your chief is behind you; bet you didn’t know it.”
Lowell Lewis was coming through the door from the large, chair-strewn room beyond. His face, heavy and unexceptional as ever, might have been a trifle drawn. Peters put Tredgold on Hold.
“Can you get me Hastorf on that thing?” Lewis said. He named a steel company and, when Peters still hesitated, added, “Pittsburgh.” Peters keyed the number and got a secretary, who, seeing Lewis, touched a button by which she replaced her own face with the image of a white-haired man of fifty-five or sixty. Peters cleared his throat and slipped out of the console chair; the white-haired man said, “Hi, Lou.”
Lewis nodded and said, “Phil.”
The white-haired man smiled. “Just about to take myself home, but what can I do for you?”
“I don’t want to hold you up,” Lewis said.
“Any time.”
Lewis smiled. “Pittsburgh quieter now?”
“Oh, we’ve never had trouble out here, Lou. We’re twenty-five miles outside the city proper, you understand. What we say is, let them have the damn place for a while and wear themselves out on it. Employees who lived in the central city are free to bed down right here in the offices at night—of course, it’s a bit hard on them.”
“What I wanted to know, Phil, was about the planes. I was just talking to General Virdon, and he stresses the importance of having air support.”
“We’re guaranteeing fourteen fighter-bombers,” the other man said.
“Good. Couldn’t scrape up a few more for us, could you?”
Hastorf shook his head. “Not much in the way of ground crews left now, Lou. We’re sending some of our laboratory people over to the base to help out, but of course they’re mostly metallurgical specialties. Couldn’t spare a few technicians from your outfit, could you? Or some engineers?”
“Would it get me more planes tonight?”
Hastorf said, “I’ll talk to the boys.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. An engineer for every plane over the fifteen.”
“Fourteen,” Hastorf said.
“I thought you said fifteen. In fact, I’m sure of it.”
For the first time Hastorf appeared to notice Peters. “Young man,” he said, “could we hear from you?”
Peters said, “Fifteen.”
Hastorf gave him a wry smile before turning back to Lewis. “I’ve only got fourteen, Lou.”
“All right, damn it, an engineer for every plane above fourteen.”
Afterward he said to Peters, “Knew him in college. Hastorf.”
Peters nodded.
“Damn funny, isn’t it? He went with them, and of course I went with U.S., and hell, I don’t think—no, I bumped into him at some kind of trade show once. I remember having a drink with him. A machine tool show.”
Peters said, “I guess you talked over old times.”
“That’s right.” The old man turned and walked toward the door, then stopped. “Now here we are working together again.” He shook his head. “For thirty years he’s been with that steel outfit—a whole different world. Our senior year we were both on the dance committee. It’s like you were seeing somebody rise from the dead—you know what I mean, Pete?”
Peters said, “I think so. Does—— [he named the steel corporation that employed Hastorf] have the air force now?”
“Most of it’s with some oil outfit in Texas.”
Lewis shut the door behind him, and Peters touched, for an instant, the spot toward which Tredgold’s dark girl had blown her kiss. Then Peters hit Release, wondering if Tredgold had bothered to wait. Tredgold said, “ ’Lo, Peters. Recovered from my revelations yet?”
Peters smiled. “Not yet. Not quite.”
“Redbrick—did I tell you? We like to put the knife in you toffs when we’ve the chance.”
“I wanted to ask if you’d like to come—yourself—to the party tonight,” Peters said.
Tredgold whistled. “The old chap—did he endorse this bold move?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll say I suggested you drop by to make sure your girls were on the ball.”
“All right,” Tredgold said, “but I should tell you I’ve promised Mum I’ll be home before eight.”
In the main room the first guests were already drifting in, staring at the wall screen on the east wall, talking in self-conscious groups; several of them carried newspapers. Clio was handing around cocktails, and Donovan was already deep in conversation with a man who looked so much like himself that he might almost be talking to a mirror. Watching them all, Peters had the sensation of having seen just this tableau of elaborate casualness and subdued, content-free speech before. It was only when a woman in a red dress—very obviously the secretary-mistress of the Danish shipbuilder whose arm she held—entered that Peters could place it: the operatic market scene into which, in a moment, one of the principal singers was sure to come, calling for the thrill of romance or (what is much the same thing) the defense of France. Surely, Peters thought, the curtains have just parted. He looked toward the west window and saw Clio moving toward the cord even as he formed the thought.
The gray velvet rolled back to show tossing Atlantic waves. Peters wanted to incline his head toward them, a very slight bow, but someone took him by the arm and said, “You are one of the Americans?”
“Oh, yes, and you are—” He tried, and failed, to attach a name, then a nationality, to the face. Oh, well, when in Rome . . . “Senhor . . .”
“Solomos.”
“Damn glad you could come,” Peters said, taking his hand.
“What is happening in your country is so interesting,” Solomos said. “Great art will come from it—have you thought of that? Great art. The blood of a great people is stirred by such things, and there will be so much of what was old blown away.”
Someone put an old-fashioned into Peters’s hand, and he sipped it. He said, “I suppose.” He thought of the Italian industrialist who collected art, but he was reasonably sure Solomos was not he.
“The armies—do they take pains to preserve such art as your country possesses?”
“Armies?” Peters had never thought of the radicals as an army.