“Moscow?” Blenault asked, bewildered.
“Oui, André,” Gérard said. “I have a feeling that our friends at Exportkhleb may be up to something.”
They called it the “trader’s nose,” Blenault thought. It was absolutely amazing, but a good grainman, such as Gerard Louis Dreyfus, could smell out a large deal in the making, often even before the principals making the deal knew that they would make one.
“I have not heard of anything…” Blenault trailed off.
Louis Dreyfus smiled. “Marie Longchamps telephoned this afternoon, said she was certain she had seen Dybrovik in Geneva last week. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t even him. But…” He shrugged.
“Where that man moves, there is trouble.”
“And profit, my dear André.”
They reached the ground floor and the doors slid open. The building’s security guard jumped up from his position by the door, and Louis Dreyfus greeted him as he and Blenault stepped outside.
The company Rolls-Royce had just come around the corner, a plain van right behind it. The car pulled up to the curb as Louis Dreyfus and Blenault stepped across the sidewalk.
Later, from his hospital bed, Blenault would be unable to say clearly what had happened next, but he did remember the plain blue van with a French-looking driver pulling up beside the Rolls.
The driver’s window was open, and as Louis Dreyfus turned to say something to Blenault, a dark, slender object was thrust out. There was suddenly a series of loud pops, as if a truck or some other vehicle were backfiring.
Louis Dreyfus was flung backward into the glass doors, a dozen holes erupting in his chest and face, blood splattering everywhere.
Someone screamed something. At the same moment a hard, very hot, compelling force slammed into Blenault’s side and right buttock, driving him sideways, down on Gérard’s already lifeless body.
“Mon dieu! Mon dieu!” some foolish woman kept screaming over and over, as Blenault tried to catch his breath.
10
The dusty white station wagon came up the deeply rutted road from the farmhouse in the hollow by the creek. As it topped the rise it stopped, and William Bormett got out.
He was a huge bear of a man. He was six foot four, and, last week on his fifty-first birthday, had tipped the scales at 275 pounds. In his younger days he had been the kid who could lift a young bull up on his shoulders; or lift the back end of a pickup truck; or toss seventy-five-pound bales of hay to the top of the hayrack all day long, then go out that night dancing and drinking.
Over the past years, however, Bormett had begun to slow down. His weight had redistributed itself, more going to his expanding paunch and less to his shoulders. But, like many succesful men, he had automatically compensated for his waning physical abilities by increasing his acumen.
He shaded his eyes now against the morning sun as he stared across his fields to the east, and he smiled with satisfaction.
Fifteen thousand acres of the finest land to corn anywhere in the world. It was an achievement rivaled by very few, and certainly equaled by no one.
It had begun with his grandfather, who had come to Iowa as a young man, where he planted two hundred acres to corn to feed his small dairy herd. Within a few years, however, the Bormett herd had died off from cow fever just at harvest time, and the corn had been sold as feed.
By the time William’s father had taken over the farm, they were planting nearly a thousand acres to corn, which they sold to area dairy farmers. And the business prospered.
To the first crude drying bins that Grandfather Bormett had put up, William’s father had added an extensive number of Butler corrugated-metal storage units, so that in time the farm began to take on the appearance of a major grain depot. As area farms came on the market, William’s father bought them, tore down the fences, and planted more and more acres to corn, ever increasing his drying and storage capabilities.
Grandfather Bormett had died at the ripe age of 93, but his son died at the age of 56, leaving William in charge of eight thousand acres at the age of 24.
That was twenty-seven years ago. Since then, William had nearly doubled the farm’s acres to corn, had purchased and maintained a fleet of twenty five semitractor trailers, and established what the Des Moines Register called the most modern corn-drying and — storage facility anywhere in the world, with a total investment in equipment, machinery, and land approaching the twenty-million-dollar mark.
The Bormett farm was definitely big business. A big business that William was justifiably proud of.
He was dressed, this morning, in a three-piece suit, with a subdued blue tie and an offwhite shirt. Looking at him, no one would have suspected he was a farmer, except that his large hands were roughly calloused.
Unlike many successful farmers who delegated all but the book work to hired hands, Bormett continued to put in his time on a tractor, on and in the silos, and in the machine sheds. He actively worked his fifteen thousand acres; he did not merely manage them, although he did have more than one hundred paid farmhands.
Pretty soon they’d be leaving for the airport, fifteen miles away in Des Moines, but before they left he had wanted to come out here and look at his fields. They were the reason he had been called to Moscow.
The invitation had come from the University of Moscow’s Department of Agriculture, through the U.S. State Department, over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and then one week ago out here in the person of Stuart Finney, a tight-assed assistant of Curtis Lundgren, the Secretary of Agriculture.
Bormett had to chuckle now, thinking back on it. Finney had come to the farm with not so much as a phone call or a howdy-do, just marched up on the porch and banged on the door.
“Hello, I’m Stuart Finney, from the United States Department of Agriculture. I’ve come to tell you that you are going to Russia to speak to the Agriculture Department at Moscow University.”
At first Catherine had just laughed at the man. Laughed right in his face. But then he had looked so forlorn, she had invited him in for some coffee and sweet rolls.
Slowly, that afternoon, it came out that he was for real, that it wasn’t some kind of a joke. Several telegrams and telephone calls to Washington, including a long conversation with Secretary Lundgren himself, finally convinced the Bormetts. The Russians did want him to come to Moscow to speak with their farm experts.
In the distance to the southeast, Bormett could see the little grain elevators at Adel. Nearly everything between where he stood now and those elevators was his land. All of it under cultivation. All of it corn, his cash crop. Except of course for the household vegetable garden.
Within a couple of years, if all went well (and everything had gone extremely well for the Bormetts for the last half-century), their holdings would be increased to more than twenty thousand acres.
If all that land were to be placed in one huge square, it would have been over five and a half miles on a side. Over thirty-one square miles of land to corn. An amazing amount of corn. A staggering pile of grain at harvest time.
As it was, his fleet of trucks had to run twenty-four hours a day during the harvest, back and forth to the railhead at Des Moines where there were large enough facilities to handle the shipment of their grain. With another five thousand acres, he’d have to think seriously about building his own rail spur to the farm. It’d be a hell of a lot more efficient and certainly a lot more profitable that way.
At his car door, he looked once again across the fields he had worked since he was a boy. Already the corn was coming up in perfect green rows. A hybrid dent, the most common corn in the country, it would by harvest time have grown to twenty feet in height, with yields per acre that would have dazzled his father and totally stunned his grandfather.