“Ms. Warshawski. How good of you to come on such short notice.” He held out a firm hand.
“Not at all, Mr. Humboldt.”
He motioned me to a leather armchair on the other side of the fire from him. I knew from the Who’s Who entry that he was eighty-four, but he could have said sixty without anyone raising an eyebrow. His thick hair still showed a touch of pale yellow, and his blue eyes were sharp and clear in a face almost free of wrinkles.
“Anton, bring us some cognac-you drink cognac, Ms. Warshawski?-and then we’ll be fine on our own.”
The butler disappeared for perhaps two minutes, during which my host courteously made sure the fire wasn’t too hot for me. Anton returned with a decanter and snifters, poured, carefully placed the decanter in the center of a small table at Humboldt’s right hand, fiddled with the fire tongs. I realized he was as curious as I about what Humboldt wanted and was trying to think of ways to linger, but Humboldt dismissed him briskly.
“Ms. Warshawski, I have an awkward matter to discuss, and I beg your indulgence if I don’t do so with maximum grace. I’m an industrialist, after all, an engineer more at home with chemicals than beautiful young women.” He had come to America as a grown man; even after close to sixty years a mild accent remained.
I smiled sardonically. When the owner of a ten-billion-dollar empire starts apologizing for his style, it’s time to hold tightly to your purse and count all your fingers.
“I’m sure you underestimate yourself, sir.”
He gave me a quick, sidelong glance and decided that warranted a barking laugh. “I see you are a careful woman, Ms. Warshawski.”
I sipped the cognac. It was staggeringly smooth. Please let him call me for frequent consultations, I begged the golden liquid. “I can be reckless when I have to, Mr. Humboldt.”
“Good. That’s very good. So you’re a private investigator. And do you find it a job that allows you to be both careful and reckless?”
“I like being my own boss. And I don’t have the desire to do it on the scale you’ve achieved.”
“Your clients speak very highly of you. I was talking to Gordon Firth just today and he mentioned how grateful the Ajax board was for your efforts there.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” I said, sinking back in the chair and sipping some more.
“Gordon does a lot of my insurance, of course.”
Of course. Gustav calls Gordon and tells him he needs a thousand tons of insurance and Gordon says sure and thirty young men and women work eighty-hour weeks for a month putting it all together and then the two shake hands genially at the Standard Club and thank each other for their trouble.
“So I thought I might be able to help you out with one of your inquiries. After listening to Gordon’s glowing report I knew you were intelligent and discreet and not likely to abuse information given you in confidence.”
With enormous effort I kept myself from bolting up in the chair and spilling cognac all over my skirt. “It’s hard for me to imagine where our spheres of activity intersect, sir. By the way, this is most excellent cognac. It’s like drinking a fine single malt.”
At that Humboldt roared with genuine laughter. “Beautiful, my dear Ms. Warshawski. Beautiful. To take my news so calmly and then praise my liquor with the most subtle of insults! I wish I could persuade you to cease being your own boss.”
I smiled and put the snifter down. “I love compliments as much as the next person, and it’s been a tough day-I can use them. But I’m beginning to wonder who is meant to be helping whom. Not that it wouldn’t be a privilege to be of service to you.”
He nodded. “I think we can be of service to each other. You asked where our spheres of activity intersect-a fine expression. And the answer lies in South Chicago.”
I thought for a minute. Of course. I should have known. Xerxes had to be part of Humboldt Chemical. It was just being so used to thinking of it as part of my childhood’s landscape that I hadn’t made the connection when Anton phoned.
I casually mentioned it and Humboldt nodded again. “Very good, Ms. Warshawski. The chemical industry made a great contribution to the war effort. The Second World War I’m talking about, of course. And the war effort in turn prompted research and development on a grand scale. Many of the products that all of us-I mean Dow, Ciba, Imperial Chemical, all of us-make our bread and butter on today can be traced to research we did then. Xerxine was one of Humboldt’s great discoveries, one of the 1, 2 dichlorethanes. The last one I was able to devote time to myself.”
He stopped himself with a turned-up hand. “You’re not a chemist. That won’t be of interest to you. But we called the product Xerxes, because of the Xerxine, of course, and opened the South Chicago plant in 1949. My wife was an artist. She designed the logo, the crown on the purple background.”
He stopped to offer me the decanter. I didn’t want to appear greedy. On the other hand, to refuse might have seemed rude.
“Well, that South Chicago plant was the start of Humboldt’s international expansion, and it’s always meant a great deal to me. So even though I no longer concern myself with the day-to-day running of the company-I have grandchildren, Ms. Warshawski, and an old man fancies himself reliving his youth with young children. But my people know I care about that plant. So when a beautiful young detective begins poking around, asking questions, they naturally tell me.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry if they needlessly alarmed you, sir. I’m not poking around in the plant. Merely trying to trace some men as part of a personal inquiry. For some reason your Mr. Joiner-the personnel manager-wanted me to believe they never worked for you.”
“So you found Dr. Chigwell.” His deep voice had sunk to a rumbling murmur, difficult to make out.
“Who was even more electrified by my questions than young Joiner. I couldn’t help wondering if he had a personal agenda of his own. Some transactions of his youth that weigh on his old-age conscience.”
Humboldt held his snifter so that he could look through it toward the fire. “How people rush to protect you when you are old and they want you to know they care about your interests.” He spoke to the glass. “And what problems they needlessly cause. It’s a constant issue with my daughter, one of nature’s worriers.”
He turned back to me. “We had a problem with these men, with Pankowski and Ferraro. Enough of a problem that I even know their names, you see, out of fifty-some thousand employees worldwide. They engaged in an attempted sabotage of the plant. Of the product, actually. Changing the balance in the mixture so that we had highly unstable vapor and a residue that stopped up the flow pipes. We had to shut the plant down three times in 1979 to clean everything. It took a year of investigation to find out who lay behind it. They and two other men were fired, and they then sued us for wrongful dismissal. The whole thing was a nightmare. A terrible nightmare.”
He grimaced and drained his glass. “So when you came around my people naturally assumed you were egged on by some unscrupulous lawyer trying to open these old wounds. But I knew from my friend Gordon Firth that that could not be so. So I have taken a risk. Invited you here. Explained the whole story to you. And I hope I am right, that you are not going to run back to some lawyer saying I tried to suborn you or whatever the expression is.”
“Suborn will do admirably,” I said, finishing my own glass and shaking my head at the proffered decanter. “And I can safely assure you that my inquiries have nothing to do with any suit these men might have been involved in. It is a purely personal matter.”
“Well, if it involves Xerxes employees, I can see that you get whatever assistance you need.”
I don’t like revealing my clients’ business. Especially not to strangers. But in the end I decided to tell him-it was the easiest way to get help. Not the whole story, of course. Not Gabriella and the baby-sitting and Caroline’s insistent manipulativeness and the angry Djiaks. But Louisa dying and Caroline wanting to find out who her father was and Louisa not wanting to tell.