When her desk was clear she paused a moment, thinking, and then dipped into the file drawer and brought out her copy of Robin’s case history. She did not open it—she knew every line in it—but sat running her fingers over the binding, wondering whether to bring it with her.
“Bring it along,” said Voisier, his eyes on the ceiling.
“I knew someone else who acted telepathic,” said Peg with a little quirk of the lips. “All right.”
The way he helped her on with her coat and handed her through the door made her feel like reaching for a lace train to drape over her arm as she walked. They did not speak as they went down in the elevator. She wanted to study his face, but he was studying hers, and strangely, she did not want to meet his eyes.
Parked in front of the hospital was a low-slung limousine, beautifully kept, not too new. A chauffeur with a young, impassive face opened the door and Peg got in, feeling the lack of a velvet carpet and a fanfare or two. Voisier followed, and the car slid silently into traffic. Voisier gave no orders to the chauffeur, which was another indication to Peg of how sure he had been that she would come out with him. She wondered if he had made reservations wherever they were going. She never knew, because they pulled up in front of Lelalo’s, and both the doorman and the head waiter greeted Voisier effusively and she realized that they would at any time, reservation or no reservation. They were shown to a very comfortable corner table. Peg asked for an Alexander; Voisier did not order at all, but a silvery cocktail was brought and set down before him.
Finally she met his eyes. He seemed relaxed, but watchful, and his gaze was absolutely unswerving. She gritted her teeth and said lightly, “Have you read any good books lately?”
His eyes dropped to the case history lying on the table between them. “No,” he said.
“Tell me what you know.”
He drummed idly on the table with long, flexible fingers. “Robin is in the trucking business,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Yes. And in insurance. Air freight. Distilling. Drugs. A few others.”
“For goodness’ sake! But that doesn’t sound like Robin!”
“What doesn’t sound like Robin?”
“Robin is almost exclusively a creative person. Business—organizing, money-making itself—these have never had any interest for him.”
“They have now,” said Voisier in a slightly awed tone.
“If he did go into business,” said Peg carefully, “it would be like that—diversification, and excellent results in everything he tried. That is, if he’s still… I mean, if he hasn’t changed. How do you know this?”
“I can’t understand how he’s doing it,” Voisier said, ignoring her question. “He has bought out a bunch of independent truckers, for example. Standardized their equipment, rerouted and scheduled them, put in the latest equipment for servicing all the way, so that he has practically delay-proof service. He pays his employees eight per cent more than… than other firms, and works them four less straight-time hours per week. Yet his rates are twelve per cent per hundredweight under those of any of his competitors. Am I boring you?”
“You are not.”
“He has hit the insurance business in an unusual way. He has a counseling service made up of insurance men so carefully chosen and so highly paid that his agency is a factor to be reckoned with by every company in the East. His specialty is in advising clients—the thousand-dollar policyholder to banking insurance—on ways and means of combining policies to get the maximum coverage from the smallest premium. His charge is nominal; it doesn’t seem to be a money-making proposition, much, at all. But he is getting an increasing power to throw large blocks of insurance business any way he wants to. He does it to the benefit of the policyholder and well within the law. In other words, what he is machinating for is influence. And since nobody can possibly predict what he is going to do next, the agency is a Damocletian sword over us… uh… over the insurance companies.”
“Mr. Voisier—wait. How do you know all this?”
“The most amazing thing of all is what he is doing in the drugs business. He has tapped a source of hard-to-get biochemicals that is something remarkable. Some sort of synthesis… nerve mind. I’m running along like a Wall Street Journal excerpt and I’m not going to start reciting things from the Journal of the Chemical Institute.”
“Have you seen him?”
“I have a picture of him. He spoke at a trucker’s union meeting with his independent chain proposal recently. It’s a good shot, and though he’s changed a little since I last saw him, there’s no mistaking him. He was using the name of Reuben Ritter—not that that’s a matter of any importance, since elsewhere he is known as Schwartz, Mancinelli, Walker, Chandler, and O’Shaughnessy. Where he goes after the meetings and an occasional dinner he attends, no one knows. He only goes out on business and he always leaves a highly competent authority behind to handle the details.”
“May I see the picture?”
“Certainly.” Voisier took out a fine-tooled Moroccan wallet and leafed through it. He pulled out a four-by-five print and handed it to her.
“It is Robin,” she said instantly, shakily; and then she pored over the picture, her eyes tearing down into it. A slight sound from Voisier made her look up; he was regarding her with a quizzical grin. She went back to the picture.
It was Robin, all right; and he stood before a flat table obviously in a loft which was converted to a meeting hall. He was half-leaning against the table, and his head and one arm were raised, and his face was turned to the right of the camera.
Yes, it was Robin, all right; but Robin subtly changed. His features were—was it older? They were the features of a young man; but there was a set of purpose about the profile that was unfamiliar to her. Two slightly out-of-focus faces in the background, watching him with something approaching raptness, added to the completely authoritative, unselfconscious pose of the speaker. And Peg knew that from that picture alone, something within her would never again let her speak of Robin as “that child.” It was a jarring realization, for “Robin” and “Childishness” were all but inseparable associations in her mind.
She became conscious of Voisier’s long white hand hovering in front of her. She looked up and clutched the picture. “You want it back?”
“I’d… oh, I have the negative. Go ahead.” The quizzical smile appeared again.
Peg slipped the picture into her pocketbook, closed it tightly, and only when she felt Voisier’s amused eyes on her hands did she relax her grip on the clasp. She said, “How do you think I can help you locate him?”
Voisier put the tips of his fingers together and eyed her over them. “In that book of yours,” he said, indicating the thick binder of prognosis carbons, “you probably have information which would help us to predict at least what sort of surroundings Robin English would find for himself. I know what businesses he’s in, and pretty much how he’s conducting them. Certainly we could draw some pretty shrewd conclusions.” He paused, and looked thoughtfully at the second joints of his fingers, one after the other. “All I have to do is see him once. Just once,” he said as if to himself. When I do, I can find out where he is living, what he is doing every hour, where he is liable to str… ah… jump next.”
“You almost said ‘where he will strike next,’ “ Peg said.
“Did I? I didn’t know. That’s ridiculous, of course.”