The Lincoln Lords: A Novel Read online

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  “Hawley’s books are realistic page-turners about the romance and drama of business.” —Marsha Enright, The Atlas Society

  Executive Suite

  “An extremely well-informed novel of the financial world and its high-echelon inhabitants.” —The New York Times

  “This is the world of business snapshotted in one of its all-out battles with no holds barred.… The reader [is] entertained by some rapid-fire storytelling.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A fine job of writing; the suspense is terrific; and when you’ve finished the book we think you’ll know a lot more about what really makes businessmen tick than most people know.” —Daily News (New York)

  Cash McCall

  “Cameron Hawley, who proved in Executive Suite that the problems and personalities of corporation management make fascinating material for fiction, has done it again.… Cash McCall … is … just as entertaining.” —The New York Times

  “The picture of what goes on in the big banks, the law offices, the clubs, and hotel suites while millions of dollars are at stake will fascinate almost any American reader.” —Saturday Review

  “Fun to read … Its account of corporation maneuvers has an air of inside savvy.… A novel that will be read and talked about.” —New York Herald Tribune

  The Lincoln Lords

  “This third novel from Cameron Hawley sustains his reputation for an honest approach to business problems—in fictional dress.” —Kirkus Reviews

  The Hurricane Years

  “Engrossing … Will keep you reading.” —Chicago Tribune

  The Lincoln Lords

  A Novel

  Cameron Hawley

  Again, as always,

  for

  Elaine

  I

  1

  Lincoln Lord turned off Fifth Avenue and entered the Greenbank Club at exactly high noon, the hands precisely overlapped on the clock above the iron-strapped door. He was aware that he was early—members of stature rarely came in before twelve-thirty—but the forenoon had been a torture that demanded ending.

  Inside the lobby, he accepted the instantaneous recognition of William, the ancient guardian of the club’s portals, and stopped to ask the old man about his granddaughter. She had been stricken with a mild attack of polio some years before and, although she had long since made a complete recovery, her health remained a staple topic of inquiry, repeatable every day of the week with no apparent diminution of its ability to incite old William’s gratitude.

  Across the lobby, he left his coat and hat with Frank, another club retainer of the same vintage as old William, to whom he addressed a no less effective question about a son who was an attorney in some small town in New Jersey.

  “He’ll be proud to know you were asking about him, Mr. Lord,” Frank beamed. “I’ll tell him the next time I see him.”

  “You do that,” Lincoln Lord said earnestly, his tone and manner as freshly sincere as if this were not the third time in five days that he had made the same response to the same statement, varied now only by adding, “He must be a fine boy.”

  “They all say he’s the best lawyer in the county,” Frank responded, giving special attention to selecting a hanger for Mr. Lincoln Lord’s custom-tailored topcoat.

  “I’m sure it’s true,” he agreed, his hand extended in the standard pretense of expecting a brass check.

  Frank shook his head. “No need for a check, Mr. Lord. Not likely I’d be forgetting you, sir.”

  And this, too, was a routine now firmly established. There was nothing unusual about it—Lincoln Lord was accustomed to being recognized and remembered—yet it was rather pleasant and, these days, carried the extra significance that there had been no deterioration in the regard with which he was held by the club employees. They were always the first to demote a member who had lost stature.

  Tall and straight, his shoulders squared, his handsome head held high, he walked boldly to the bulletin board. Although his attention was seemingly centered upon the results of last month’s progressive bridge tournament, his true interest was revealed by a guarded glance to the left, where there was a posting of the names of members whose bar and restaurant bills were unpaid. The list was the same one that had been there for five weeks, originally thirteen names, seven of which were now obliterated with heavy penciling. Apparently there was nothing too unusual about a busy member temporarily overlooking the payment of a bill. The Greenbank was, above all else, a gentleman’s club.

  Relief warmed his mind, arousing again the retrospective realization that joining the Greenbank Club had been the wisest move that he had made in the past six years. He could not, however, credit himself with foresight. Actually, his acceptance of membership had been no more than a fortunate happenstance. He had been president of the Frazer Glass Company at the time and, when Fred Foyle had asked the privilege of proposing his name, he had felt it undiplomatic to refuse, Foyle being the president of the New York bank from which Frazer Glass secured most of its short-term loans. Although even the nonresident dues were rather high, they had been a deductible item on his personal tax return and, in the bracket where his income had then placed him, the net cost had been negligible. Now, with no income, the expense was totally his own, a burden only temporarily offset by the possibility of charging his luncheon checks. Eventually there would be a day of reckoning but, if worse came to worst, there was still the possibility of borrowing on his life insurance.

  Now, again routinely, he turned right and took the three long strides that brought him to the brass-grilled wicket in front of the telephone switchboard. “Good morning, Katherine,” he said, not calling her Katie as some of the members did, speaking in the tone that he had learned to use when addressing wealthy widows in stockholders’ meetings.

  The tone of her response was, as always, incongruous with her appearance. The enforcedly sedentary means by which she earned her livelihood, coupled with an insatiable appetite for pastry leftovers spirited in from the kitchen, had turned her into a fat woman of side-show proportions, her body grown so huge that she had abandoned the standard operator’s stool and now tended the switchboard while seated in an oversized chair appropriated from the lobby. Her full-moon face led one to expect a gurgling wheeze. Instead, she spoke in the clear treble of a small girl perpetually on the verge of giggling laughter.

  “If there are any calls for me, Katherine, I’ll be in the reading room for a few minutes.”

  “And then you’ll be in the grill, won’t you, Mr. Lord?” she asked, a rush of words that made her sound like a child supplying the last line of a well-remembered fairy story.

  “Right,” he said, smiling. “And if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, Katherine, I wonder if you’d mind ringing my wife?”

  “’Course not, Mr. Lord,” she said, gaily disregarding the new club rule that all outgoing calls were to be made through the pay telephone recently installed in the corridor outside the billiard room.

  “Eldorado 5-3000,” he supplied, giving her the number of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, reducing the risk that she might, out of habit, call the number of the Waldorf Towers and thus discover that he and Maggie were no longer living in a Tower suite, but had now moved to one room in the transient section of the hotel.

  “She doesn’t answer, Mr. Lord,” Katherine finally piped. “I guess she must have run away and left you.”

  “Wouldn’t blame her if she did,” he said, an easy laugh barely covering a betrayal of the chill that went through him. r />
  Moving with the grace of complete composure, he walked through the shielded entrance to the washroom. The dead stillness reminded him again of his too-early arrival. In a half-hour this would be the gathering place of some of the biggest men in New York. With the bars of dignity and restraint momentarily dropped, formality made ridiculous by circumstances, a camaraderie would be achieved that could never be quite matched in any of the outer rooms. It was here, five years ago, that he had first met K. C. Wright. Less than three weeks later, Wright had offered him the presidency of the Luxor Pharmacal Corporation.

  Today, the washroom was deserted except for a single prior arrival, a man whom he knew only as Carpenter, a lower-rung member with no business or professional connections of any kind, his dues and bar bills reputedly paid by a wife with independent means and a desire to rid herself of the burden of an unfortunate marriage. Carpenter stood now at the long line of marble-topped and brass-spigoted lavatories, critically examining his bloodshot eyes in the mirror, an inspection self-consciously abandoned as he suddenly realized that he was no longer alone.

  “How are you, Mr. Carpenter?” Lincoln Lord asked in a tone that gave that hackneyed question a quality of genuine concern.

  “Well, not too bad,” Carpenter responded, blinking his gratified surprise that anyone could be so interested in the state of his health. “And you, Mr. Lord?”

  “Good enough,” he said, businesslike, taking off his coat, unlinking his shirt cuffs, rolling up his sleeves, vigorously scrubbing his hands and forearms, washing away the invisible grime of the morning that now lay behind him.

  Carpenter waited, pathetically hungry for any bit of attention tossed his way, anxiously suggesting a drink together at the bar. With a refusal so adroitly managed that the man could not possibly take offense, Lincoln Lord side-stepped the invitation and took the elevator to the second floor reading room. Only one lamp was lighted. As usual, old Colonel Tebbetts was in his self-assigned lair under the spreading rack of the moosehead over the fireplace. His bald dome came up over the back of the chair, a turtle head emerging from its brown shell. “Linc!” he barked, more the field commander now than he had ever been during his World War I service in the Quartermaster Corps.

  “Good morning, sir,” Lincoln Lord snapped back, his voice automatically taking on a military ring.

  “Saw your picture in the Times.”

  “Oh,” he said, troubled as always by the narrow line that separated courteous acknowledgment from immodesty. “Just one of those things, you know. I suppose the publicity people thought they had to build it up as much as possible.”

  “Good for you!” the colonel said explosively, abruptly turtling back into his shell again, the nature of his approval undisclosed.

  Lincoln Lord crossed the room, resolutely resisting the temptation to take the Times from the newspaper rack, walking to the table where the magazines were laid out, picking up the January issue of Fortune. Selecting the nearest chair, he sat down without turning on the reading light, settling into the soft leather cushions, relishing this first chance of the morning for a few minutes of cloistered rest. Wearily, he reached out and hooked the footstool with the toe of his left shoe, pulling it into a position where he could rest his tired feet. He closed his eyes purposefully, hoping that his brain, too, might be induced to relax, an end that might have been achievable if only old Tebbetts had not reminded him of the story in the Times. That was where his day had started, when that false omen of good fortune had deluded him into thinking that he was at last emerging from the eclipsing shadow that six months ago had so mysteriously fallen upon him.

  This morning, a few minutes after eight o’clock, escaping the grating spectacle of Maggie preparing a makeshift breakfast by heating coffee water over a can of Sterno on the window sill, he had gone down to the lobby for a morning paper. Leafing through the financial pages, searching for some scrap of news that might give him a clue to an opening for a high-level corporation executive, he had been abruptly startled to find himself staring at his own picture, even more surprised when he discovered that the Times had picked up two long paragraphs from the talk he had made last night to the Manhattan chapter of the Chesapeake College Alumni Association. Brooke Potter, whose fund-raising agency had arranged last night’s dinner meeting, had told him that advance copies of his speech had been sent to all of the metropolitan papers, but he had never imagined, even for a moment, that it would be reported in the most important newspaper in the country.

  Lincoln Lord was not an inordinately vain man, nor was he unaccustomed to publicity—in April, when he had received a White House appointment to the Far East Trade Mission, his picture had been on the front page of dozens of newspapers—but against the background of these last six months, this unexpected reappearance in the public eye had given him an enormous lift of spirit, last night’s effort suddenly seen in an entirely new light. Returning to the hotel after the meeting, he had felt himself badly defeated. There had, of course, been a fleeting pleasure in the standing ovation that the crowd had given him and some sensing of accomplishment in the announcement that the pledges signed afterward had totaled more than had ever before been contributed on a single evening to the Chesapeake College Endowment Fund; yet he had completely failed in his real purpose. He had accepted the invitation to speak because G. T. Ransing was on the dinner committee, a fact pertinently linked to his certain knowledge that Ransing was looking for a new president to head one of the subsidiary companies controlled by Ransing Enterprises. The Chesapeake dinner had seemingly offered a chance to get next to Ransing, literally as well as figuratively, and he had gone through some diplomatically difficult juggling of place cards at the speakers’ table in order to make sure that Ransing would be seated next to him. The effort had proved a total waste. The seat had gone unoccupied. Ransing had not put in an appearance until the dinner was half over, arriving then with a stranger from whom he refused to be separated, the two of them slipping into empty seats at one of the overflow tables in the back of the room.

  Even then something might have been salvaged if Maggie had only been quick enough to intercept Ransing and delay his departure after the end of the meeting. It would have been easy enough for her to do it—she had been seated at the next table—had she not been so anxious to talk to old Anderson Phelps about what was happening to Brick Mitchell’s new public relations agency, a preoccupation revealed by the remark that he had overheard her make when, finally shaking off the congratulatory crowd that had gathered around the speakers’ table, he had gone back to where she was still sitting with Phelps. Afterwards, in the taxi on the way back to the hotel, she had excused herself by insisting that he had never told her that he wanted to talk to Ransing and, in all fairness, he had been forced to admit that he had not done so, a lapse secretly explained by his reluctance to raise any new hope that, unfulfilled, would give her another reason to think that there was something beyond bad luck in his mysteriously persistent inability to find a new connection. He had not criticized her, yet a strain had come between them and a chill fear had hung over him as he had lain awake in the night, knowing from the sound of Maggie’s tossing movements in the other bed that she, too, was finding it difficult to go to sleep.

  He had finally succumbed to fatigue, but sleep had accomplished little. He had awakened with a mind still tortured by night fears, persistent and unshakable until the instant he had caught sight of his picture in the Times. The news story was almost unbelievably fortunate, a personal advertisement beyond valuation, perfectly written to serve his purpose, not only identifying him as the former president of both the Luxor Pharmacal Corporation and the Frazer Glass Company, but also noting that he had recently completed a term of public service as chairman of the so-called “Lord Committee” investigating trade and economic relations with the Far East. About all the Times writer had failed to say was that he was now available for another top-level assignment, but even that was so plainly written between the lines that it could
hardly be missed. Read and reread, first standing there in the lobby and then as he had gone up in the elevator, it had seemed an exciting certainty that among all of the hundreds of thousands of Times readers there would surely be one powerfully influential man who, learning that Lincoln Lord was available, would jump at the opportunity to employ him to head some major enterprise.

  That first flush of new hope had been broadly expanded in the next few minutes. He had opened the door of their room to find Maggie holding a telephone call for him, whispering the explanation as she handed him the instrument that the man on the other end of the line was Dean Whittaker, the acting head of Chesapeake College, who had stayed overnight in New York after making a special trip up from Brighton to attend last night’s meeting. In the first minute or two Whittaker’s call had seemed no more than a reiteration of appreciation for last night’s talk and another round of congratulations on the record-breaking pledge total that had resulted from it. Then suddenly he became aware that Whittaker had called with a far more important purpose. Although the dean’s cautious ambiguity made it difficult to know exactly what he had on his mind, it eventually became clear enough to be accepted as a certainty that Whittaker was leading up to some kind of offer. What he had actually said was characteristically inconclusive, yet it had been pointed enough to spark a flaring consciousness that major changes would shortly have to be made in the upper echelon at Chesapeake College. Dr. Radcliff, the old president, had suffered a paralytic stroke in October and Dean Whittaker’s temporary status as acting head of the institution presented a situation that the board of regents could hardly allow to go on much longer. Whittaker would undoubtedly be given the presidency, but a new high-level officer would surely be needed to handle the college’s financial affairs.

  There had been a moment of disappointment when Dean Whittaker had explained that he himself, unfortunately, had to return immediately to Brighton, asking him then if he would be willing to have a preliminary discussion with Brooke Potter, explaining that he had just finished breakfasting with Potter, that Potter was thoroughly familiar with his thinking and would be calling him any minute now for an appointment. Would he be willing to talk to him?