Onyx (46 page)

“Surprise, Tom,” she said, beaming.

Expecting some form of automotive memorabilia or award, he laughed aloud. Following his wife were Caryll and Zoe, who danced ahead to engulf him in perfume as she pressed her smooth, warm cheek to his. “Congratulations, Father Bridger.”

“Why aren't you two sunbathing in Palm Beach?” Tom asked.

“What, and miss this?” retorted Caryll, grasping his father's shoulders, hugging him. They smiled at each other, then quickly stepped apart, embarrassed at their public display of affection.

A mechanic had been cranking the quadricycle. Tom said, “Go ahead, Caryll. Show 'em how an old-timer runs.”

“I've never driven her.”

“Nothing to it. She's warmed up. Just use the tiller to steer.”

So Caryll climbed into the vibrating little mechanism, which jerked and swiveled along the snow-powdered company road as uncertain as a bird with a broken wing. Tom had added a brake. Caryll, unable to find the lever, jolted to a clattering halt against a low brick wall. Reinforced bicycle spokes crumpled. Caryll climbed out, crimson.

Tom walked up, shaking his head. “Got to teach you how to drive,” he said, trying to ease the situation with a joke. But Caryll barely smiled.

A few minutes later Tom stood on the carpeted platform of Triple E's main auditorium, fielding questions about the Seven.

“Any advance sketches?” inquired the heavyset man from
Automobile Age
.

“Brynie, you know better than that,” Tom called back. “Nobody sees her until we unveil her to the public.”

“But the prototype is complete?” boomed the man from
The New York Times
.

“Sure,” Tom lied. “And she's a beaut.” Though he had never felt comfortable at these press conferences Hugh arranged, he had learned to parry with reporters to Onyx's advantage.

From the last row a voice called out, “Who hired Justin Hutchinson away from you? Ford or General Motors?”

“When Hutchinson gets back from his vacation, come on over and ask him yourself.” Tom turned to Caryll, who sat on his right at the speakers' table. “Your turn.”

Caryll, still red about the ears from his altercation with the quadricycle, further mortified by the smirky glances that slid from him to his bride in the front row, pushed awkwardly to his feet. Tom sat, one ankle on his knee, his arms akimbo, seemingly alert, yet not listening. He had never compared his sons, he told himself, and he wasn't going to do so now, yet impinging on his brain were two images: Justin, replying to similar damn fool questions with unflappable calm; Justin, an English cigarette between his lips, smoothly handling a test car on the Woodland test track. Tom's conscious mind was fixed on the typed papers in his bureau drawer.
I asked him to sign and he took off
.

The shutdown had been one continuous foul-up in the hands of Phil and Artie Sinclair, making Tom more than ever aware of the extent to which he relied on Justin. But his hurt at the defection, so unlike Justin, went far deeper than impotent dismay at the chaos inflicted on Onyx. Though he had behaved like an employer more than a chummy mentor—
people say you don't even like him
—he had always delighted in Justin's respect and warmed to his obvious if unspoken affection. Thus it was a bitter dose of salts that Justin had never confided in him about a serious romance, had not sent a telegraph or letter informing him of the elopement. He would not have known about Justin's marriage if Hugh hadn't told him.
She's some cheap little Hollywood Jewess, and a labor organizer at that. I don't see how we can trust him anymore, not with a wife like that. She's the one who got him to bolt. He's a changed man, I tell you, Tom, a changed man
. A complete new phonograph record for Hugh. Suddenly he was dead set against Justin, because of the girl.

Tom wouldn't have cared if she were a whirling dervish or Lenin's mother-in-law.

He wanted Justin back.

As soon as he had recovered from his initial hurt and sense of abandonment, he had been filled with remorse.
I handled the whole deal all wrong
, he thought repeatedly. Why hadn't he managed to preserve the necessary ambiguities while at the same time stamping a seal of permanency on their relationship?

Tom's fingers dug into his biceps as he gazed unseeing at the audience of newsmen.
The minute Justin gets back
, he thought,
I'll get those damn shares signed, sealed, and notarized. The one important thing is to keep him tied here with me
.

“Dad?” Caryll was looking questioningly down at him. “Aren't you more qualified to answer that one?”

Tom rose. “Repeat the question slowly, will you?”

CHAPTER 21

The heavy mesh doors of Woodland's Gate One were chained shut.

The taxi's three hoots reverberated in the snowy stillness. After a minute the guardhouse door opened and a thin, boyish figure in a khaki uniform came down the wooden steps. “Sorry, no taxis inside,” he said. His small, almost delicate hand rested on the Colt .45 in his holster.

Justin, surprised at the military automatic, rolled down the window. “It's all right. I'm Justin Hutchinson, Mr. Bridger's assistant.”

The boy blinked nervously. “It's orders, sir. No cabs.”

“Righto. I'll walk.” Resigning himself to the mile or so to the Administration Building, Justin paid off the driver. “Damn,” he muttered when he discovered the pedestrian gate also locked. Trotting up the guardhouse stoop, he rapped sharply at the counter window. An elderly guard with dewlaps appeared. Justin, explaining who he was, demanded the gate be opened.

“Sorry, sir, but you need identification.” The wrinkled finger tapped an unfamiliar blue ticket pinned to his lapel below the German silver Onyx badge.

“What is this rigmarole?” Justin snapped. “I'm Mr. Bridger's assistant.”

“We recognized you, Mr. Hutchinson,” the man said appeasingly. “But since the shutdown we got new rules. Not even the top brass moves through this gate without an identification ticket.”

“Let me speak to whoever's in charge.”

The boards of the covered veranda creaked as Justin tramped up and down to keep warm. After a few minutes the window opened again and a round, bald head emerged. “They've told me the story, Mr. Hutchinson, and I'm sorry, but the rule applies to everybody excepting the two Mr. Bridgers. We're protecting the Seven.”

“I'll use your telephone,” Justin said preemptively.

“Sorry, sir. Can't let anyone in the guardhouse.”

“What is everybody shaking about?”

“You, sir,” replied the bald man. “You're a big shot, but it's our jobs if anybody gets by that's not wearing a blue badge. Mr. Keeley laid down the law to us.”

Keeley? Justin mentally scanned through Security's echelons. Keeley rang no bell.
He must be one of those underling strutters who thrive on fear
, Justin thought, and made a mental note to talk to Colonel Hazelford about firing this Keeley, then recalled that he might no longer be in a prodding position.

“I'll find a pay phone,” he said.

The hamburger joints and Coney Islands on Archibald that normally did a brisk business at all hours of day and night were closed, and across one window was whitewashed:
Out to lunch until Woodland reopens
. Justin was well aware of the disastrous ripple effects when any automotive plant closed to retool. And Onyx was the largest.
It's a long, cold winter for everybody in Detroit
, Justin thought, thrusting his gloved hands deep into his pockets.

There was nothing open until he reached the Paloverde Oil station at the corner of Jefferson: he often bought gas here and the manager, grousing about disastrous losses to his company, led him to the wall telephone.

Caryll was out of his office, so Justin asked the raspy-voiced secretary to track down her boss. “Tell him I'll be at this number.” Feeling chilled, demoralized, an unwanted outsider, yet more darkly apprehensive about the coming interview with Tom, Justin sat on a stool in the unheated garage to await Caryll's call.

II

It was past six and the secretaries were gone as Tom, rotating his tired shoulders, let himself into his private office. The lamp burning on the desk at the far end of the commodious room did not dispel the darkness. Tom, smelling cigarette smoke, peered around.

A shadow was detaching itself from near the drawn curtains. “Good evening, Tom,” Justin said quietly.

Exuberant relief and sheer manic joy socked the breath out of Tom. He gripped the oak doorjamb.

“Justin,” he called cheerfully. “You damn near scared the water out of me.” He pressed the switch, and brass-armed wall fixtures blazed.

“Sorry. I didn't mean to,” Justin said.

“Been here long?”

“An hour or so.”

“So why didn't you have Mrs. Collins ring for me?”

“She said you were watching a casting.”

“Yes, yes. The engine block. Remember? Olaf and his entire engineering crew swore up and down that it was impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine in a single block. Well, I figured out a way. And God damn if it didn't work! Two banks of four cylinders at an angle of ninety degrees, a Gothic shape. The Onyx Seven'll be as powerful as the fancy ten-thousand-buck jobs.”

As Tom explained the details of the engine, he was examining Justin, the breadth and height, the beloved inheritance of black hair and finely chiseled Roman nose, the slightly rumpled clothing that for some reason he always associated with the young man's absolute integrity. Justin's deep-set blue eyes refused to meet Tom's gaze, a reticence that Tom took as endearing proof of a newlywed's embarrassment. Worrying that he might throw his arms around the returned prodigal, he forced a dryness into his voice. “I guess there was no point interrupting me. After a month, why rush?”

“I've been in California. I'm married, Tom.”

“So Hugh tells me.”

Justin's eyes flickered oddly. “Hugh?”

“You took the plunge on the thirtieth in Tijuana, right?”

“He certainly keeps tabs,” Justin said in a level tone.

“Didn't you wire him?”

Justin carefully ground out his cigarette in an ashtray he had already filled. “Nobody except Zoe. She and Caryll were in Palm Beach, so I doubt if he heard it from her.”

“That's how it goes,” Tom said. His pulses were trotting with inane, juvenile satisfaction that his sibling had also been ignored. “Try to keep anything from my brother.”

“Her name's Elisse.”

“Elisse, eh?” Grinning, Tom went to the long table that held a scale model of the 1912 Fiver as well as a silver tray with glasses and a tantalus. “How about a drink?”

“I could use one.”

Pointing at the Scotch, Tom raised a questioning gray eyebrow.

“Please,” Justin said. “Straight.”

Tom poured the drinks and raised his glass. “To Elisse Hutchinson,” he said.

Justin tossed down the Scotch with a stiff wrist. Normally he took soda and nursed his booze.
I've never seen him with such a case of jitters
, Tom thought.
Maybe he's worried I'm going to can him
. For a pleasurable moment he visualized himself benevolently handing Justin the paper to sign—Caryll and Zoe had signed theirs last week—while a dark, biblically lovely young woman watched in the background.

“I don't have the foggiest how to put this,” Justin said.

“Don't say a word. No apologies necessary. Okay, so you took off at an impossible time, but you're back and that's what counts.” Grinning, Tom set down his glass. “I understand, Justin. There comes an hour in every man's life …”

“It's not about marrying Elisse. It's about you and Mother.” Justin reddened as he looked directly at Tom, yet he spoke in his normal incisive cadence. “I know you're my father.”

The lights struck at Tom's eyes with an unearthly glow while blood rushed to his chest, swelling the major arteries with such a stormy, violent cramp that he felt he might pass out.

Your son will never know Claude Hutchinson isn't his father
.

You can't promise that
.

The owner of Onyx can. I have money, I have power. I swear it to you on my life, Antonia
.

Tom's right hand jerked toward his chest, then dropped to his side.

In this one single battering moment he reached a decision.

That promise still stood.

Would stand forever.

In this same instant it became abundantly clear why Hugh had reversed himself against his ward, shrilly denouncing Justin's marriage.

Hugh
, Tom thought grimly.
Hugh
told
Justin. That's why Justin ran off to marry this girl
—
no wonder Hugh's so dead set against her. But there's no proof about me and Justin. It's Hugh's word against mine
.

“Tom, are you all right? It was a mistake blurting it out like that.”

Only with the severest control was Tom keeping himself in an upright position. “That's some fairy tale you've come up with there.” His voice was louder than he intended, scathing, caustic. “Hugh again, right? You really are a gullible ass sometimes, Justin. I figured you had more brains than to listen to Hugh's cockeyed inventions.”

Justin looked stunned, as if he had been hit on the head. His suddenly white lips tensed. “This has nothing to do with Hugh,” he said.

“Bullshit! It's him all over. Fits right in with that genealogical chart of his.”

“This is you and me, Tom.”

“It can't be any secret to you that he doesn't cotton to Caryll. He's elected you as heir to the kingdom.”

“Forget Hugh. Let's talk about us.”

“What's to say?”

Justin, deathly pale, gave him a long, level look.