The Takeover

by Niven Busch

 

Poem

In city times like these
One never retraces steps.
Forward Is the only direction.
Beyond this corner
The wind gusts cold. . . .
What will come at me from my blind side?
-- Peter Davison

Chapter 1

Before leaving town, Jed Basco had seen his new office only in the rough, the plaster newly troweled and raw-smelling. Now everything was finished. Basco & Western had moved from Rockefeller Center to their new building on the East River. The great pale carpets had been laid and the refectory table Jed used as a desk had been set in its proper place at the end of the room with the skies of Manhattan and the mysterious smoky life of its roofs visible in the background. On the walls were photographs, theatrically enlarged, of the famous dams he had built — the Yellow Mountain Cut, the Grand Teton, the Horseshoe, and the St. Cloud Canyon. Sometimes, in a restless mood, he would stroll from picture to picture, puffing his pipe, looking at the great structures so artfully photographed with a dab of cloud in the sky and lodgepole or ponderosa pine growing in the background. He would take pleasure from such studies, remembering what segment of his life had gone into each immense bow of concrete — thinking of the problems and the battles and the great feeling when he'd worked them out, as he had this last business at American Canyon.

It was a fine office, an impressive and livable office, but it lacked one item.

"Where's my gun cabinet?" he demanded.

He put the question, rather more gruffly than he intended, to the dark, handsome girl he had found in the outer office. She was using the desk of his regular secretary, Elsie Lasof, and had introduced herself as Adeline something or other. He hadn't paid much attention, since Elsie always got a substitute from the steno pool even if she was just stepping out for coffee.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Basco," Adeline said, "I didn't know about any gun cabinet. Was there supposed to be one?"

Jed gave Adeline the quick undershot look which meant her answer had not pleased him.

"Yes, there was."

The girl hesitated. She wanted to be helpful.

"I'll check, Mr. Basco," she said. "It might not have come over in the move. Shall I check with Mr. Surabaya in transportation?"

"By all means," Jed said. "Where is Elsie?"

Adeline looked surprised. "She's on vacation, Mr. Basco. I thought you knew."

"I didn't hear anything about a vacation for Elsie."

He was now genuinely irritated. First no gun cabinet. Then no Elsie. All you had to do was leave for a few days and everything got bollixed up.

"She left you a note, Mr. Basco. I have it right here."

Adeline rummaged in the desk with one hand, dialing with the other. She handed Jed an envelope with his name typed on it.

"I have Mr. Surabaya for you."

Jed went to his own desk to take the call. He had not previously met or spoken with Mr. Surabaya, but in a corporation employing, worldwide, some twenty thousand people, you were not expected to be everyone's kissing cousin.

"Do you happen to know where my gun cabinet is?" Jed said.

Mr. Surabaya answered with careful politeness. He had a slight foreign accent, Middle Eastern or Asiatic. "I have an invoice for it right here on my desk, Mr. Basco. I'm certainly sorry, sir, if some error has occurred."

"I appreciate that," Jed said. "Now let's find out where the cabinet is, and then get it where it belongs. If you say you have an invoice for it, then somebody must have signed that invoice. Why don't we start with that?"

"The gun cabinet was delivered to your home, Mr. Basco. Somebody there signed for it, the man servant, I believe, Mr. MacNeice. If you wish it brought here I'll see to it at once."

"I do wish it brought here," Jed said evenly.

"Very good, sir. It will be delivered before noon."

"Thank you," said Jed. "Now the only point that puzzles me is this: That gun cabinet has been in my office at Rockefeller Center for two years, going on three. Why would you think I wouldn't want it after we moved?"

"Well, there was some question about the personal belongings. Some of the executives thought their things wouldn't fit with the new decor. Miss Conquest, the assistant office manager, was assigned to handle that aspect of the move. Do you wish her to call you?"

"No, I don't," Jed said. "All I want to do is get the gun cabinet back here."

"That I can take care of," said Mr. Surabaya. "It will be done immediately. And once more, sir, my apologies."

Jed hung up. There had been an annoying undercurrent in Mr. Surabaya's rather too elaborate explanation. Even his anxiety to pass responsibility along to someone else seemed to suggest — some undue propriety? The gun cabinet had initially belonged to Jed's father. It had been built by a Scotch cabinetmaker, Stewart MacKenzie, in Edinburgh, 1921, and it had held four guns. Jed kept two shotguns, a Winchester Model 21 and a Browning 16 over-and-under, and two rifles — an 8mm Drilling, custom built for him in Belgium, and his old Savage .306, equipped with a new, sophisticated telescopic sight. You didn't need such weapons in a city office — but it had always given Jed a good feeling to have the cabinet there, a sense that he wasn't tied to the refectory table desk or the blueprints in the filing cabinet or the big dams or even Basco & Western. He was Jed Basco, a fifty-two-year-old corporate executive but one who still thought of himself as an engineer, an anachronistic old prick, perhaps, by some standards — but not by his own. He still had a far piece to go, and he meant to go all the way.

He realized that he was still holding Elsie's letter. Taking it out of the envelope, he read:

Dear Boss:

I'm off — two weeks in the West Indies, all expenses paid by Basco & Western. Surprised? I am. Annoyed? I hope you're not. I tried to reach you in Dallas, but they said you'd just left for the dam. Christie Clarke, Admiral Stranahan's secretary, thought you might be there awhile.

I can almost hear you saying, since when does Admiral Stranahan's secretary give orders to my secretary? You're right, of course, but you hadn't called in for six days and the opportunity seemed too good to turn down. But if you are angry or need me (and I like to be needed) just whistle. The address is Grand Hotel, Kingston, Jamaica.

Pardon my haste. But do you realize this is the first vac (as the British would say and no doubt are saying right now in Kingston, Jamaica) that I've had since the Big Acquisition? And that, boss, was two years ago. Oh, not that I'm complaining. Honest I'm not.

With best regards,
Elsie

Jed laid the letter on his desk, placed it face down as if its true meaning was not contained in Elsie's crisp typing but must be drawn from some other source: the corporate climate around him.

The letter in essence conveyed the same message as the mislaying of the gun cabinet: there was trouble in the air.

Office administration at the command level of a major corporation permits few accidents. Too much is at stake — egos ruffled at that altitude can send shocks shuddering down, with unhappy results, through every operational tier below.

Nobody, as Jed well knew, disposes of the president's belongings except the president. Nobody gives a member of the president's staff a vacation except the president. Yet here were two such boggles in a single morning — an incredible record, unless one did not choose to regard the incidents as boggles but elected instead to identify them as the classic maneuvers initiated against an executive under fire: reduction of office status (personal property removal) and secretary got out of the way (she might detect danger and report it to her boss).

Jed drummed on the letter with his short, square-tipped fingers. He had arrived at a value judgment he was later to regret but which seemed reasonable at the time. He had decided that — rather than containing any larger implications — today's annoyances were acts of spite. And when spite was the issue he knew where to look for it.

There are men with whom you can fight and still remain friends. Steve Vishniak was not one of them. Oppose him once and you made a lifelong enemy. Knowing this, you kept your guard up, as Jed had usually kept his up with Steve. Until now. Until, busy with other concerns, at a bad point in company affairs, he had become vulnerable.

On review, he was not sure that Steve had ever been a friend, not even in the beginning when Steve was romancing Basco Precision for possible merger or acquisition. The result of that courtship had been the purchase of Basco by Vishniak's General Western. Jed had not really wanted to sell; he had not even wanted to be rich particularly, but richness — Steve Vishniak's kind of richness — was coming into style, and for getting rich the deal had been perfect. The principal issue had been control. Jed had hung tight on that and Steve had met him halfway. More than halfway it had seemed then. Steve had given him the presidency of the parent company, plus two additional places on the board for men of his choice — seats in which Jed had promptly installed his attorney, Felix Linus Rupke, a man of notable political connections, member of a prestigious Washington law firm, and Loris Dominici, an old friend who was also a large stockholder in many companies associated with the building trade.

Three places on a seven-man board. A new president could hardly ask for more. The concession was proof, if any additional proof had been needed, of how badly Steve Vishniak had wanted Basco Precision. He had paid more for it than anyone else would have paid, a price which conferred instant, fantastic personal wealth on Jed Basco while at the same time moving General Western from financial difficulty to firm and happy ground.

Vishniak loved acquisitions. A bull-necked man with steel-gray eyes and a face shaped like a shovel, he had once mailed out to shareholders a singular 33 1/3 rpm record stating his views on "The Implosion Theory of Corporate Growth." The basis of the theory was that the more companies one mashed together, the more money juiced out. Vishniak bought corporations the way his father — a Detroit junk dealer — had bought automobile carcasses: a restaurant franchise chain, a car-rental agency, a facility for making battery-powered tractors for use in coal mines, a laundry equipment factory, and firms manufacturing, respectively, fire engines, granite aggregates, hose nozzles, bedsprings, ladies' slacks and automatic sprinklers. As acquisitions speeded up, accurate data on divisional operations had to be accepted pretty much on faith; cash flow was not always what had been anticipated, and the purchase of a new business with large, liquid capitalization seemed indicated.

Basco Precision fitted this need admirably. A construction company, operating mostly on government contracts, it showed earnings of 11 percent on annual turnover of a billion and a half dollars. What was more to the point, its liquid revolving fund of some four hundred million dollars could be siphoned, with a little bookkeeping effort, into dividends flowing upstream to the parent company; even giving Jed Basco five shares of General Western for one of Basco Precision, this happy arrangement, over a five-year period, would reduce the purchase cost of Basco to zero.

The new nomenclature, Basco & Western, had been designed to lend the acquisition the facade of a merger — perfectly all right, if that was Jed's wish.

The board of Basco & Western divided down the middle like one of those before-and-after advertisements for hair dye in which, on opposite sides of a center part, one patch of the head is revealed in some glistening youthful shade, the other gray.

Vishniak, Thorpe and Pulaski were all under forty — and all well on their way to being billionaires.

Jed and Rupke were both well past forty, Dominici sixty-one.

It was a contest of age against youth, and each of the younger men was unusually aggressive and fast-moving.

Thorpe had been a Harvard Business School Whiz Kid, hired away from IBM at twenty-nine to head General Western's real-estate division at a six-figure salary.

Pulaski, inheritor of a massive third-generation oil fortune, had been a playboy until he found that securities could provide as much action as girls. He had bought his way onto Western's board in a move which, without Vishniak's wariness, could have been a takeover.

Admiral Stranahan had seemed to hold the deciding vote — and he was nearing seventy. A recently added board member (sales to the military was the coming thing), he had sat, until his retirement, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Rupke had felt that, after proper wooing, the admiral, because of his age if nothing else, could be swung into Jed's faction, thus giving him control.

It hadn't worked that way. Vishniak had kept the board firmly in hand, and the board together controlled more stock than Jed, although Jed as an individual held more shares than any other member of the board. This was an advantage, but a more important edge which Jed conceded to Steve was that Steve headquartered at the Manhattan office where the power game was played, while Jed spent over half his time out in the field. Jed, so rich now and so busy, had concentrated on his work and refused to worry. He had allowed points in the way a nationally seeded tennis player might spot a club champion thirty a game and still beat him. More important, there were quite a few men, in and out of Wall Street, who could give Vishniak thirty points and beat him for power or money, but no engineer in the world could build a better dam than Jed. Jed knew this and Vishniak knew it. What was more, Vishniak needed him. Thorpe and Stranahan and Pulaski needed him. Or so he had figured. . . . And still figured! So if it pleased Steve to refute that need with annoying little put-downs when Jed's back was turned the appropriate reaction might be to pay him no heed.

By mid-morning the irritations attending his settlement in the new office seemed less significant, and his good humor was further restored when, shortly before lunch, two men in white coveralls with B & W stenciled on their backs brought in his gun cabinet. One of them ventured a compliment on the rifles, and Jed opened the cabinet to show him the Drilling. Engaged with this, he ignored the flashing of his telephone until Adeline came in and told him Herman Pulaski was calling from Texas.

Rather coincidentally — if one related the call to the weapon Jed was holding at the moment — Herman wanted him to fly to his ranch for a deer hunt.

"The bucks are up and moving," Herman said, "and the sun is bright on the Brazos."

"You're a poet, Herman," Jed said. "That should be set to music." "Then why not dance to the tune?"

"I just got back, remember?" Jed said. "Somebody has to mind the store, even if it's only the boss."

Herman laughed in the quick, yapping way he had, as if Jed had said something very funny.

"Stop being boss for a while," he said. "It might do you good. Steve and Coleman are here now, and the admiral's flying in tomorrow."

"Tomorrow is impossible."

"Then come Saturday. I'll have a car at the Dallas airport for you."

Herman was being curiously insistent. The last remark, for instance, sounded almost like an order. But perhaps he only meant to be genial and host-like, Texas-style.

"Not much chance, Herman," Jed said. "But thanks for the invitation. Ship me a haunch of venison if you get one that isn't shot to pieces."

He fully intended to stand by his refusal, but after a productive afternoon and a good night's sleep he thought better of it. Saturday, hmmm. A hunt in the warm Texas weather, on the sweet windy range, could be pleasant, restorative. And with this came another notion, less agreeable but perhaps no less constructive. If he observed the four members of the board in the close atmosphere of a hunting party — if he checked them out (and Steve especially) he might sense what (if any) antagonisms were working against him beyond Steve's propensity for school-boyish harassments.

He got off a telegram to Herman Pulaski and sent word to Bart Quinlan, his private pilot, to have the Learjet ready for takeoff sometime Friday evening; he himself might go a little short of sleep, but by napping during the five-hour trip he would arrive reasonably refreshed and in plenty of time for an early-morning hunt.

Yes, the Learjet would do. For a real bed, if he'd wanted one, he could have preempted B & W's luxurious Gulfstream II — a regular flying motel — but the Lear was his own, and he preferred it even for trips as long as this. Handy and almost as fast as a carrier-borne fighter, the Lear's resilience made it well worth the price, close to a million dollars, that he'd laid out for it. He'd had Quinlan set it down in some places no jet aircraft was meant to go — and the last had been the worst, a sagebrush strip near a Nevada cowtown, the gateway and loading depot for the American Canyon Dam.

Jed, aloft now, pulled a light blanket around him and composed himself for sleep. As he drifted off his thoughts turned back to the crisis at the dam project and his satisfaction with the way he'd worked it out.

American Canyon was the biggest job Basco & Western had ever undertaken. It had been cursed from the outset by late-arriving materials, floods, landslides, epidemics, isolation, reckless bidding and sheer, inexplicable human cussedness.

The most recent trouble had been a strike by the high-scalers. Their union, a CIO affiliate, alleged that Basco & Western hadn't been meeting legal safety requirements. The union operated a life and accident insurance program, and the program had been paying too many claims at American Canyon, Basco & Western's compensation carrier had opposed the union's position, suggesting that if a high-scaler died after a fall which had broken a number of his bones and perhaps crushed or ruptured certain essential internal organs, it was still possible to ascribe his demise to the pneumonia he had developed while waiting in some inaccessible spot for a rescue vehicle to reach him. Anyone could see that if he had succumbed in this fashion to natural causes, the awards to his dependents would be minimal.

Jed had agreed to meet the union adjusters and the insurance people on the job. His problem was to avert both a strike and a premium escalation, either of which at this point could put the dam down the tube.

 

 • $7.99 •