“Suppose I see you in Stanley’s office as soon as you finish up here, Mr. Dean.” It sounded enough like an order to annoy me. I made no response. “It was a damn shame about your brother, Dean. A shock to all of us. He was a sweet guy.” Somehow the Colonel managed to say sweet in such a patronizing manner that it made it sound as though Ken had been inane and ineffectual. I thanked him for his sympathy and he went off, his neat leather heels going clopclop-clop on the composition floor, marching to the beat of unheard drums.
I glanced at Perry and saw that the expression on her face matched the way I felt.
I saluted the doorway and said, “Yes sir, sir!”
Perry laughed her good laugh. “I guess he can’t help sounding like that, Mr. Dean.”
“Is he a regular?”
“Oh, no. He’s a reserve officer on active duty. I heard somebody say he owns a hardware store in Grand Rapids.” She reached for the intercom switch again and I told her I’d walk in on him.
Walter Granby looked up at me and grunted with surprise. His slow smile spread the deep bloodhound folds of his cheeks like someone parting draperies with both hands.
“So you finally decided to come home, boy. Sit down. You’ve been missed around here.”
I sat down and grinned at him. There was a stinging feeling in my eyes. Walter had gone to work for Grandfather Gevan at the age of seventeen. He was a link with a good past.
“I won’t try to say anything about Ken, boy. You know how I feel, I imagine.”
“I know, Walter. Somebody said something about you having a private war around here.”
“I didn’t enlist, boy. I was drafted.” He looked older, wearier than I remembered, but he did not sound as though time had dulled the sharp edge of his mind.
“Do you want the job, Walter? Do you want to run the place?”
His eyes sharpened and his laugh was a deep rumble. “Egomania at my age? Not that way, boy. I’ll try to take over just to make sure Mottling doesn’t.”
“No like?”
“You squirts don’t seem to realize that on the inside a man never thinks of himself as old. He never feels old. Mottling calls me ‘sir’ and acts like he wants to take my arm and help me up and down stairs. Some day he’s going to ask for the inside story on how Lincoln got shot. By God, I may tell him, too.”
“So you want him out because you don’t like his approach?”
“Shouldn’t you remember me a little better than that, boy? As a production man, except for certain tendencies I’d label fascist, he’s pretty sharp. Of course, by the time he finishes driving away everybody with any brains in the production end, it may be a different story. I’d define him as a hell of a good man to come in on a trouble-shooting basis and get out again, and not so good for the long haul.”
“What would you do, Walter, if it were all your baby?”
“Try to get back the production boys he’s chased away. Hell, I’m a figure man. I’d need those boys back.”
“How was Ken doing?”
He stared at me for a moment. “I think you could answer that yourself. Not good, Gev. Too soft for the job. Not enough iron in him. Not nasty like you used to be. Never came in to bang on my desk like you used to when you wanted to get your hot little hands on the reserves.”
“My God, you’d think it was your money, Walter.”
“I’m the watchdog, boy. That’s my job. And we’re in pretty fair shape right now. We haven’t had to dig as deep as I thought we would. On plant expansion, on the fixed-price stuff, we get a percentage of the total contract price as soon as production facilities are set up. Sort of a percentage-of-completion deal. Almost like an advance payment.”
“That,” I said, “sounds as if one Walter Granby had done some operating.”
“I pushed and pried a little. We’ve used short-term construction loans rather than dig down into the barrel.”
I leaned back. It was much like old times to be in this office again. On his desk, mounted on a small walnut plaque, was the first piece of war production that had come through the old shop in World War I. It was subassembly, a portion of the bolt assembly of a machine gun, Browning patent. It used to be on my grandfather’s desk over in the old office building. When my grandfather died, my father had given it to Walter. I guess the first time I ever noticed it was when I had gotten just tall enough to see over the edge of a desk.
“Finances are good, then,” I said, “but we are having a top-level feud. What else is going on?”
“In C Building we’re handling a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract with a price negotiation provision. Colonel Dolson is contracting officer and also a sort of free-lance purchasing agent for a lot of the stuff in the contract, as well as for the expansion of facilities here. And that gentleman can turn a voucher through before you can say, ‘General Accounting Office.’ I feel for the poor taxpayer, boy.”
“I didn’t know they were letting any cost-plus contracts these days.”
“They don’t, on standard items. Tanks, planes, guns, and so on. But there’s no experience factor on the item we’re making. So they’re leaving it cost-plus until we’ve been in production for a while. Then it’ll undoubtedly become fixed price, with a renegotiation clause. How about taking pity on an old man who saw Lincoln shot, boy?”
“What do you mean, Walter?”
“I’ve got all the work I can handle. Just say the word. Karch will put his weight behind you. You can vote yourself right in. Inside of a week you’ll be as nasty as you ever were.”
“It sounds as if you’d been conferring with your Miss Perrit.”
He raised his shaggy white eyebrows. “Hmm! She feel that way too? Bright girl, Gev. Very intelligent. And it sounds to me as if you’d been conferring with her yourself. She wouldn’t just up and say a thing like that.”
I hoped the flush didn’t show under my tan. Walter was as sharp as ever.
“Pretty, too,” he said. “If I was thirty years younger I wouldn’t have her around my office. Too distracting. Always had a soft spot for the reheaded gals.” He put his big white paw on the phone. “Just say the word, Gev. and I’ll have Karch on the line in three minutes. Don’t give yourself time to think.”
“I’m rusty, Walter. I’ve been out too long. Too much has happened.”
He sighed and took his hand from the phone. “When I was a wet-eared kid your grandfather hired me. Later on I worked for your dad. I was glad to take orders from both of them. They had the Dean touch. When you first came in, I didn’t think it was going to work out. You made it work. Now you’re four years older and, I imagine, steadier and stronger. I want you back here. I’ll sleep better nights.”
I picked up the gun part from the walnut plaque. I bounced it gently in my hand. The silence grew. I replaced it on the desk.
“No, Walter.”
He gave a heavy-shouldered shrug. “In the words of my granddaughter, you’ve turned chicken, boy. The job is so big it scares you.”
“Don’t try psychology, Walter.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then picked up a paper on his desk. It was an obvious dismissal. He said, “Well, run along then, and dig around and then choose between Mottling and me.” As I reached the office door he said, “I have a hunch you’ll be wrong either way.”
I walked out, angry at him. I went to my old office. Mottling’s office now. His girl was a stranger, a lean blonde with a beaver-trap mouth and opaque blue eyes, and a pair of astonishing falsies. She gave me smile number seventeen and sent me in.
Mottling had a long leg hooked over the arm of his chair and he was smoking his pipe. Colonel Dolson about-faced from the window.
Mottling waved the pipe stem at me and said in a lazy voice, “Glad you could make it, Gevan. Curt Dolson here has something he wants to get off his chest. Go ahead, Colonel.”