"How have you been?" Mr. Mellio asked, taking his seat behind the huge, dark, uncluttered desk. "I haven't seen you in-let's see-"
"Eight and a half months," Tucker said. "Not since the last time I had you and my father in court."
Mr. Mellio grimaced, smiled through capped teeth and said, "Yes, of course, an unfortunate afternoon."
"For me," Tucker agreed.
"For all of us, especially your father," Mellio said. "You know, Michael, he doesn't want to fight with you over this thing. It grieves him terribly to-"
"My father never grieved over anything, Mr. Mellio, least of all his son." He tried to say it without emotion, calm and easy as if he were merely reading something from a textbook, something indisputable. He thought that he succeeded.
"Your father does care about you, Michael, cares more than you-"
Tucker raised a hand and waved the words away. He said, "If he cares so goddamned much, why doesn't he turn over my inheritance? It would make things a good deal easier for me."
Mr. Mellio looked pained, like a loving father who has to teach an unpleasant lesson to a child. He leaned back in his chair, Klee looming behind him, and said, "Your mother's will specifically stated that your father was to remain the director of your trust until such a time as you matured to the point where you could handle the funds yourself."
"Until such a time as he felt I had matured," Tucker corrected. "He weaseled that out of my mother when she was sick, very sick, two weeks before she died."
"You pretend as if your father attempted to gain control of your inheritance to enrich his own estate. In the face of his own considerable wealth, that's absurd."
"I pretend no such thing," Tucker said. "He gained control of my inheritance in an attempt to gain control of me, but he lost the bet."
"Michael," Mellio said, leaning forward now, propping both elbows on the top of the desk, putting his chin in his hands, trying to look somewhat pixie-like, failing miserably in that, "you could see your father. You could make amends. I'm sure that, if you tried to work things out between the two of you, he'd soon turn the estate over into your hands."
"Fat chance," Tucker said. "Perhaps after I'd been a faithful toady for eight or ten years, he'd give me what I want. I don't wish to give up that much time to a corrupt, selfish old man."
"Michael, he is your father!"
Tucker leaned forward in his own chair now, his face slightly flushed. "Mr. Mellio, when I was a child I saw my father on the average of twice a week, for an hour each time. Once was at Sunday dinner when I was permitted to dine with the adults, the other was on Wednesday night when he quizzed me on my previous week's lessons. I was learning French and German before grade school, from a nanny who doubled as my instructor, and my father wanted to be certain that he was getting his money's worth. For a period of eighteen months, when I was twelve and thirteen, I saw my father not at all, because he was consolidating his European ventures then. My secondary schooling was at a boarding school considerably farther away from home than my first military academy had been. I saw my father at Christmas for a couple of hours. By the time I was in college, I stayed away from home on purpose. That's how much he's my father. Christ, Mr. Mellio, I don't even know the man."
Mellio said nothing.
Tucker said, "I early decided that the last thing I wanted to be was like my father. If having money meant you had to spend all of your time shepherding it and none of your time enjoying life, then money wasn't for me at all." He leaned back in his chair now, the intensity of his voice sliding away. "Money, to me, is to be spent. That appalled the old man, and it was because he found that I was unamenable that he got that clause in my mother's will. He wanted me to be an empire builder like himself. Life's too short, however, to waste in a series of boardrooms."
"To have money you must make money," Mr. Mellio said, as if he were reading the sentence from a lacquered wall plaque. "A fortune can be squandered quickly, Michael. Even one the size of your inheritance-or the much greater size of your father's estate."
"My mother left three million dollars, give or take a few thousand in small change. Even invested at a paltry six percent in tax-free bonds, that earns back a hundred and eighty thousand a year. I could live with that very nicely, Mr. Mellio."
"Your father believes you couldn't, that you'd start nibbling away at the principal."
"My father doesn't give a damn about that," Tucker said. "He simply wants me under hand so he can mold another corporate mastermind. In the next step of the court tests, or the step after that, a judge is going to agree with me. He can't continue to pay off every court official who comes up. One of them is going to be honest, especially the higher the courts get."
Mellio dropped the pixie pose and picked up the role of the shocked banker taken aback by irresponsible accusations. He was even worse at that than at playing pixie, about as believable as Elise would be if she tried to play a sexless, weary housewife in a television commercial. "You can't be seriously implying that-"
Tucker cut him short. "Can we talk about the loan, please?"
Mellio moved his lips up and down, like a man with something caught in his throat, finally closed his mouth and ordered his thoughts. He said, "Michael, there is an account in this bank composed solely of the monthly allowance checks from your trust-which you have not picked up or cashed in more than three years. I believe there are now thirty-seven deposits in the account, each in the amount of ten thousand dollars. I cannot see why you would wish to make a loan when you have these funds available."
"Credit me with at least a modicum of intelligence, Mr. Mellio," Tucker said. He sounded tired, and he was tired. This sort of fencing was something he was no good at and was, to boot, completely out of practice for. He was anxious to be done with Mellio, the bank and the city so that he could get back to the most pressing problem of all- getting Merle Bachman out of Baglio's mountain estate before the driver was forced to spill everything about the rest of them. "I am aware that my father has conditioned the delivery of those checks, and I am thoroughly acquainted with what I would be losing by meeting his conditions. I have a good lawyer. He and I have talked a great deal about all of this, all of you."
Mellio looked shocked again, apparently decided that this was not one of his better roles, gave up on it and got very businesslike. "Okay, by signing the waiver to get your allowance checks, you'd be endorsing your father's control of the inheritance. But what does that matter, Michael? It's nothing more than a formality, anyway. Your father, by virtue of your mother's will, already has control."
Tucker sighed again, slumped down in his chair, looked at his watch: a quarter of nine. The Klee was beginning to strain his eyes, and the dark teak paneling seemed to be closing in on him. "Signing for the allowance checks, I'd be signing away my right to carry on with the suit we now have in federal court. I'd be limiting myself to the position of a minor for the rest of my life-or for the rest of my father's life, anyway."
"But you've said you only care about having money to spend," Mellio argued quietly. "This way, you would have that nice monthly check."
"I said that I could get along on a hundred and eighty thousand a year, but I can't possibly make it on a hundred and twenty. One thing I did acquire from my father was expensive tastes."
"The allowances could be raised, naturally," Mellio said.
Tucker shook his head. "No. It's not just that. Once I'd signed the waiver and no longer had a lever to use against my father, he'd have more control over me than I want him to have. He could even cut back the allowances until I had to knuckle under and go through the charade of learning the business from him."
"He wouldn't do that," Mellio said.
"You're full of it," Tucker said politely, smiling.
Mellio said, "You must hate him."
"Not merely that; I loathe him."
"But why?"
"I have my reasons."
He thought of many things, but most of all he thought of the women his father had kept, a string of mistresses which, cruelly, he hadn't hidden from his wife. In fact, he seemed to take some strange pleasure in flaunting his adultery in front of her. Tucker remembered sitting with her, once when he had come home over the holidays from the boarding school, listening to her as, hating herself, she told him about his father's women. She had been a strong family-oriented woman, and this was an attack at her base, her sacred foundation. She had huddled in upon herself and cried, silently, shaking, her face cold to his touch. If only his mother had had a bit of Elise in her, less of an old-fashioned outlook and more modern fire, she would have stood up to the old man; she would have left him. Instead, she had stayed on, unable to admit it all had gone bad. Then the cancer, the long slow hospital death, when the old man was too busy to visit her for more than an hour or two a week, her knowing that it wasn't only his financial affairs that took so much of his time.
"Your father is a fascinating man and one of the kindest that I've ever known," Mr. Mellio said. "I can't imagine what reasons he would have given you to loathe him."
"Then you don't know him well."
"Perhaps I know him better than you do."
Tucker smiled frostily. "Considering that you're a banker and that my father was always more interested in money than in his son, perhaps you do."
For the first time the banker seemed to see beyond Tucker's facade and to catch a glimpse of the man behind it. He looked quickly down at the bare top of his massive desk, as if that single glimpse had frightened him, and he said, "What size loan were you considering?"
"Only ten thousand," Tucker said. "I've suddenly found myself short of operating cash."
"Collateral?" Mellio asked, looking up as his courage flooded back in the course of a conversation he must have gone through a thousand times before with a thousand different customers. Familiarity always breeds confidence, especially in men of finance.
"My trust," Tucker said.
"But you do not, strictly speaking, have the right to put up the trust-fund monies as collateral. Only the trust administrator can do that."
"My father."
"Yes."
"Then I can put up that account full of uncollected allowances."
"The same holds true there," Mellio said. "Until you sign for the checks, they aren't legally yours."
Tucker sat up straight in his chair, sensing a battle of wills that he had to win. "What would you suggest I use as collateral, then?"
"Well, you seem to be running a very profitable business," Mr. Mellio said. "You live in the style you like, without touching your inheritance, so you must have other assets."
"Forget that," Tucker said.
Mellio leaned back in his chair, testing the hinged backrest to its limits, looking at Michael across the curious perspective of his raised knee. It was evident that he felt in command of the situation once more. "Now, Michael, there isn't any sense in your attitude. If you'd give me a full picture of this art business of yours, initial capital and estimated income, sources and projections, we could get you a loan. We could make it a sweat loan on the power of your success thus far. And, I might add, if you'd tell your father exactly what you've been doing, he might very well be so impressed with your business acumen that he'd free your inheritance."
"No chance," Tucker said. "My business isn't in the empire-building mold, but erratic and highly chancy. I don't attend board meetings, float stock options or employ thousands of people. My father wouldn't be impressed the way he'd have to be to give me a free hand with my inheritance."
Mellio's voice softened into a patently false sentimentality. "You might at least let him know the nature of your art dealings, inform him of some of your more notable triumphs, as a son extending the minimal courtesy to a father. He's proud of your evident success, believe me. But he's much too proud to come and ask you how you've achieved it."
Tucker grinned and shook his head. "You're still full of it, Mr. Mellio. I'm sure you know how many times my father's had me followed by private detectives, trying to learn what dealers I work with, what prices have been paid for certain objects and what profits other sales have brought me. Unfortunately for him, I've been cleverer than any of them; I've spotted each new tail from the start."
Mellio sighed, still looking across his knees. He said, "Your father wouldn't have you followed, Michael. But, very well, forget about your work. Is there any other collateral that you can offer the bank against this ten thousand you need?"
"My furniture, automobile, some art objects."
"Inadequate, I'm afraid."
"I have some very good artwork."
"Art may be worth a fortune today, nothing tomorrow.
The critics and the connoisseurs are fickle in their approval of any talent."
"And the bank is involved in such unsound investments?" Tucker asked, feigning innocence, pointing at the Klee.
Mellio said nothing.
Tucker said, "These aren't paintings but primitive artifacts, valuable as antiquities and as art."
"I'd have to have them appraised," Mellio said. "That would take a week, maybe longer."
"I can send you to a reputable appraiser who would verify their value in half an hour."
"We'd prefer to use our own man, and we'd need a week."
"God," Tucker said, "I can't wait for the next stockholders' meeting so I can point out how you people are throwing money away on Klee paintings and other such claptrap. By your own admission-"