The rest of the meeting went at breakneck speed.
Hubble spent much of it railing, "Damn it, Mundin, you made me the first offer! The hell with these vultures. They'll use you and throw you away. I'm the only heavy stockholder in the company with an open mind and—"
"Nonsense!" Harry Coett said decisively. "I don't know what you're up to, Mundin, but whatever it is it'll need financing. And I'm Harry Coett. Let me handle—"
George Nelson said, "Tell him what you did to old Crowther, why don't you? He needed financing too."
Mundin never did find out what Harry Coett had done to old Crowther. As the meeting was adjourned he buttonholed Arnold, who gave him a wan smile. "Come and see me, Mr. Mundin," he urged. "I'm sure we can get together. Don't we know each other? Weren't you with Green, Charlesworth?"
"The girl, Arnold," Mundin said shortly.
Arnold said, "Miss Lavin is waiting for you in the reception room."
Trailing tycoons, Mundin raced to the reception room.
Norma Lavin was indeed there, pale and angry. "Hello, Mundin," she said, not so crisply, not so mannishly. "You took your time about it, I must say." And then she was weeping on his chest, sobbing. "I didn't sign it. I knew Don wasn't dead, I didn't sign, I—"
"Shut up, superwoman," Mundin snapped. "Stop giving things away to the eavesdroppers. Your every word is golden." But he found that he was shaking himself—from the reaction to the hours of strain. And from—Norma.
He got a grip on himself as Coett, behind him mused, "So this is the young lady Arnold horse-traded you, eh? Your principal, Counselor?"
"Maybe," said Mundin.
"Oh, come off it, Mundin," Coett said shrewdly. He tamed to Norma. "My dear," he offered expansively, "can I drop you anyplace? You too, of course, Counselor."
"Listen, Mundin," Nelson urged, "get him to tell you about old Crowther—"
"Damn it," raged Hubble, "if you vultures will step aside—"
Mundin said, "I'll lay it on the line, gentlemen. Miss Lavin and I have to stop in the waiting room to pick up an—uh—a young lady. In five minutes we will be at the front entrance. We'll go along with all three of you, or with any two of you. You fight it out among yourselves."
He swept Norma out to the visitors room. Lana was perched on the receptionist's desk, looking hostile, but not as hostile as the receptionist. Mundin asked her, "What happened to Bligh?"
"Outside," Lana said. "He said he'd already had a bellyful of Field Days, whatever he meant by that. This your girl?"
"Yes," said Mundin, "this is my girl." The three of them collared Norvie Bligh, sitting in the sun outside, and started toward the ranks of parked cars and half-tracks. They were met by an amicable committee of three.
"All settled, Mundin," Hubble said happily. "Coett and Nelson are coming with us."
"Good," Mundin said. "Where do we go to talk?"
Hubble said joyously, "Oh, my place. It's all settled. You'll like it—simple, quiet, but comfortable."
They made quite a procession: Two cars and a half-track. They didn't stop for anything, neither the Itty-Bitty checkpoint nor the customs shed.
"We'll go through Fifth Avenue," Hubble said.
"Oh, no!" Coett and Nelson groaned.
"I like it," the younger man said.
They rolled slowly through the condemned Old City, empty and dead. Mundin gasped at the sight of a car other than theirs; it buzzed across their path at 34th and Fifth, under the towering shadow of the Empire State Building. He craned his neck after they passed it and exclaimed, "There's somebody getting out. Going into the Empire State!"
"Why not?" grunted Hubble over the intercom. He was riding with Nelson and Coett, because none of the three trusted any of the others alone with Mundin and Norma for the ride.
"I'd always understand it was as empty as the rest of the Old City," the lawyer said with dignity.
"They keep it lit up at night, don't they? Well, that calls for maintenance. The man was an electrician."
Mundin was not a very good lawyer, but he was good enough to be quite sure that Hubble was lying to him.
Chapter Sixteen
Lana was tugging at Mundin's shoulder. "I want to go home," she said.
Mundin said peevishly, "Sure, sure." Norma, exhausted, had fallen asleep on his arm, and his circulation had been cut off ten miles back. The girl was a solid, chunky weight—but, he was thinking, curiously pleasant
"I mean now." Lana insisted. "I got a duty to the Wabbits."
"I'd kind of like to go home too," Norvie Bligh chimed in.
Mundin flexed his arms, considering. Lana and Bligh had done what they had bargained for. He said:
"All right. If I have the driver let you off at the bus depot in Old Yonkers, can you make it from there?" They nodded, and he leaned forward to tap on the window.
At Old Yonkers their car stopped outside an Inter-City depot. The car behind skidded to a stop beside them. Hubble, Nelson, and Coett peered out anxiously. "Anything wrong?" Hubble yelled through a window.
Mundin shook his head, let Lana and Norvie out, and permitted his driver to start up again.
And twenty minutes later they reached Hubble's home.
Quiet and comfortable it was. Simple it was not. It was a Charles Addams monster in a fabulous private park in Westchester. They rolled up its driveway and parked next to what appeared to be a 1928 Rolls-Royce limousine.
Bliss Hubble was already at the door of then: car, holding it open for them. "My wife," he explained, indicating the limousine. "She makes a fetish of period decoration. Today it's Hoover, I see; last week it was Neo-Roman. Can't say I care for it, but one has one's obligations."
"And one has one's wife," said Norma Lavin, who appeared to be back to her normal self.
"Oh, it's very nice," soothed Mundin. "So stately."
Mrs. Hubble greeted them with an unbelieving look. She turned to her husband with an "explain-it-if-you-can" air.
Hubble said hastily, "My dear, may I present Miss Lavin—"
"Just Lavin," Norma said coldly.
"Of course. Lavin. And this is Mr. Mundin; I believe you know Harry and George. Mr. Mundin was good enough to compliment the way you've fixed up the house."
"Indeed," said Mrs. Hubble, ice forming on her gaze. "Please thank Mr. Mundin, and inform him that his taste is quite in agreement with that of our housekeeper—who is no longer with us, since I woke up this morning and found she had set the house for this unsightly, trashy piece of construction. Please mention to Mr. Mundin, too, that when she left— rapidly—she took with her all the key settings, and as a consequence I have been condemned to roam through these revolting rooms until my husband chose to come home with his keys so that I might change them into something more closely resembling a human habitation." Hubble stiffened, thrust a hand into a pocket, brought out a set of keys. With them his wife swept off through the vast, bare rooms.
"Sensitive," Hubble muttered to his guests.
Coett said eagerly, "We got a couple of things straight on the way over, Mundin. Now—"
Hubble said severely, "Harry, I insist! I'm the host. Not another word until we've had dinner."
He led the way through a majestic corridor, keeping carefully to the middle. At some unnoticed sign he said sharply, "Watch it!"
The others obediently stood clear of the walls, which were coming into curious, shimmering motion. "My wife," Hubble explained with a glassy smile. "You'd think a regular bubble-house wall would be enough, but no! Nothing will do but full three-D illusion throughout. The expense! The stumbling home in the dark! The waking up in the middle of the night because the four-poster is changing into a Hollywood bed! She's a light sleeper, you see——"
The walls had firmed up now; the old furniture was fully retracted, and new pieces had formed. Mrs. Hubble's present preference seemed to be Early Wardroom—a satisfactory enough style for the flying bridge of a cruiser, but not really Mundin's idea of how to decorate a home. He withheld comment