From his desk across the room from me, McAuliffe sat surrounded by a cloud of his own pipesmoke. He had had a blower unit installed above his head, something he called his “ceiling-hung blower unit,” which had no doubt been put in to obey the smoking by-laws, but from what I could see, McAuliffe rarely bothered to turn the thing on. Wherever I went with him in the office, on any of the floors and once down into the basement to the dead-files room, Fred ignored all NO SMOKING signs posted by the elevators and stairs. He was too old to change his spots, he told me. He spent a good part of his day scraping, cleaning, reaming, filling and, on occasion, smoking one of his fifty briars. They were all a big part of him. Like the burned holes in his desk blotter and the ashes-I’ve seen them even in his eyebrows-everywhere, McAuliffe was a leftover from an earlier day. I hadn’t come into the office with any high regard for Phidias or any of its tentacles, but the fact that it gave office space to this tweedy, Dickensian character, who always had time to digress and give me the history or background on any matter that came up, made me respect it and give it the benefit of the doubt.
I had never been a whiz with figures, but Fred McAuliffe could breathe life into a ledger. He seemed to remember every entry. Sometimes he would explain the reason for a group of figures as though he were lecturing to a large class of students; another time he would close the door and whisper reasons to me that I was too thick to follow. I got the general idea that Phidias had an insatiable appetite for small companies that had expanded as far as they could on the available capital. When it came to blocks of shares and values before and after splits, I was over my head, and only McAuliffe’s gentle patience helped me keep one toe on the bottom and my nose clearing the waves.
What made working this close to Fred agreeable was that he enjoyed distraction from work as much as I did. I learned more about all four of the Welland Canals than has ever been printed in books. He was a walking encyclopedia. For instance, he told me his name, McAuliffe, came from the same word as Hamlet and that they both were fancy forms of Olaf.
I asked Fred if he knew anything about the excavations at Fort Mississauga in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He didn’t suddenly change. In fact, he smiled.
“Ah, yes!” he said. “That’s one of the Sangallo jobs. Yes, I’m glad to be associated with that. You know the supervisor is Dr. John Roppa of the RAM in Toronto, same fellow who discovered the remains of those American soldiers from the War of 1812 at Queenston three years ago.”
“What’s he finding at the fort?”
“Well, he’s keeping it very hush-hush at this stage. But I know this much: they are putting the earthworks back where they were originally, as well as making general repairs and restorations to the main structure.”
“The last time I saw it, it looked like it had a skin disease.”
“Ha! That’s pargeting,” said Mr. McAuliffe.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Parging, pargeting, covering the brick with plaster to keep the weather out. What the English call roughcast. The golf club’s lease on the property ends in 1991. After that, it will probably go to the Parks Board, like Fort George. The golf club’s moved a couple of tees and the old green beside the tower so that the historic landmarks people didn’t stage a protest. There’ve been more letters about that damned fort in the paper than there have been about the local water supply, which, to hear them, comes directly from the Love Canal over the river.”
From the records I was looking at, it appeared that the Commander had retained active control of Phidias until recently. It was only when advanced age and crotchetiness had got the better of him that he had reluctantly stepped aside in favour of his son. But Murdo Forbes was still an important shareholder. Without owning an overall majority, he could at least match with his own shares anything that Ross could put up. Teddie’s interest in the firm amounted to a tidy ten percent. I couldn’t see why she had hung on to her shares since the divorce, but Fred explained that she would need the consent of the other board members to sell, and that permission had not been expressed in the minutes.
“Oh, I’ve seen it more than once,” Fred said, “where an unwilling shareholder is kept involuntarily. It keeps the board from having to buy her out and it keeps newcomers away. On Mr. Forbes’s side, too, I think there may be something personal.”
“Like spite?”
“That’s your word for it, Mr. Cooperman, not mine. Teddie’s family is an old one in this town, you know, and Teddie herself has been a credit to her name.”
From Fred I learned that Ross had never really taken charge of Phidias, not in the way the old man had. “The boy doesn’t have the grit of the Commander. He’s never had to worry about where his next meal is coming from, eh?” he said with a grin, while sending a shower of sparks up towards the ceiling-hung blower unit. “The Commander wasn’t born to a bed of roses. He made his own way, same as I did.”
“Did Ross Forbes ever have a chance around here?”
“Chance? Why, what are you talking about? There’s an opportunity born every day. And most days Mr. Ross comes in at ten in the morning. The Commander was always deep at work when I came in at seven in the old days. Seven, eh! And he’d be still hard at it when I went home for my supper at seven at night. Oh, the Commander loved making this place tick. And he kept all the subsidiaries ticking too. Why, I remember once he bought a failing dairy. He did everything but milk the cows until it turned a profit a year and a half later. Mr. Ross isn’t a detail man like his father. He goes for flow charts and graphs and printouts I can hardly read. The Commander can call any worker by his first name and tell you his wife’s name too and how many youngsters they have. Oh, the Commander’s a remarkable man.”
“It’s a remarkable family,” I agreed. “And I guess they will all be on their best behaviour for the wedding?”
“That’s where class shows, Mr. Cooperman. There may be problems. I’m not saying there aren’t. But in public it will be smooth as silk. Oh, the Forbeses are the salt of the earth.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I lied. I was trying to cut down on sodium like the Forbeses. They were bad for my diet.
“The interesting thing, Mr. Cooperman, is that this wedding is a case of history repeating itself.”
I thought I’d heard that story before, but I thought I might learn something new. “How’s that?” I asked.
“Sandy MacCallum didn’t have a son to carry on his business, so he married his daughter to a capable young lad with lots of get-up-and-go. He could see that the Commander, even in those days, had as much stick-to-itiveness as he had himself. That’s why he became more of a son than a son-in-law. Now the Commander is looking at Mr. Ross’s girl, Sherry, as a second Miss Biddy. You see? He thinks the world of Miss Sherry’s young man, Mr. Caine. Mr. Caine will be grand for the business, Mr. Cooperman. I think he’s the Commander all over again.”