Ride a Cockhorse (40 page)

“Everyone is to attend,” Jeannine added, but the note of suppressed triumph faded at that moment, as Emily Krok appeared, pulling on her Navy pea coat and staring at Jeannine with a gap-toothed leer that was very unsettling to look at. (Twenty minutes earlier, in the ladies' lounge, Emily had startled the life out of Mrs. Jacqueline Harvey by suddenly assaulting the pink cinder-block walls with her fists, the knuckles of which were shredded and bruised.)

“Is Matthew outside?” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

“He'd better be,” Emily said, pulling on her woolen watch cap.

The drive to Mr. Zabac's house was a pleasant six-mile tour up Route 116, over the hills of the Mount Holyoke Range, beyond the women's college, and north from there through farmland. There was an inch of snow on the high ground. Mrs. Fitzgibbons took Emily in the back seat with her this time. She had developed a liking for the hunched, pigeon-toed girl, especially for those occasions when vigorous steps were required. Emily's proclivity toward violence, combined with her doggish devotion, reinforced Mrs. Fitzgibbons's own appreciation of the felicity of settling problems in the most expeditious manner possible, with bold, blunt strokes. Since the Friday preceding, when Mrs. Fitzgibbons had invaded Neil Hooton's lake house, Emily had developed a low, ominous chuckle that persisted almost continuously whenever she was with the older woman. During the ride, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's speech was itself by now incessant. She talked every mile of the way. She hammered away on the subject of Mr. Zabac's constant questioning of her plans, policies, and actions. She was very resentful. She sat straight in her seat and aimed her invective at the road unfurling before her. The leafless trees on the roadside twisted past in a black, spidery maze; the afternoon sun was a white wafer in the sky. Matthew was behind the wheel, listening to her while driving.

“My computers are going round the clock,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons went on and on, complaining, “my staff is competent and hardworking, everyone is doing his level best to perform his duty and discharge my orders, while he, the so-called chairman of this little enterprise, goes flying off to Falmouth. I've eliminated the last of the opposition. I have the Citizens Bank on its knees. The South Valley is headed for the same. I take the man on television and pass him off as a genius to an audience of five hundred thousand people, and when I need him to ratify a merger, or to sign a check—or just to
be
there when I want to address the staff — he's long-distance! He's gone. He's whining in my ear on the phone. He's worried. Moaning away like a little coward, telling me to wait — slow down — not so fast — do nothing.” She stared fixedly through the front windshield, her face a cold tablet. “This is what the man does. He gives me the worst advice that anyone in history has ever given to another. Now, he wants to lecture my staff.”

Matthew looked over his shoulder at Mrs. Fitzgibbons and chuckled amiably. “He's okay, Chief. He's supposed to worry. That's what chairmen are for.”

“And what will I be doing while he's addressing everyone? I'll just stand there, like the rest of the galoots, just another face in the crowd, and grin and bear it, I suppose, while he delivers one of those sleeping-pill talks of his.”

Matthew praised her indirectly. “Not everyone can talk, Chief.”

“Well, he isn't going to address anybody!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons left no doubt on that point. She changed position then in her seat, her shoulders straight, her mouth set. “Little dwarf!”

Mr. Zabac's house, spotted through a cleft in the rolling farm country, was a sprawling picture-book affair, white with blue shutters and four white chimneys. The long asphalt driveway was flanked on the near side by a stand of bluish pines. Matthew halted the Buick by the front door. Mrs. Fitzgibbons ordered him to stay in the car and took Emily with her. She mounted the steps briskly and rapped on the window of the storm door. The raps of her knuckles echoed like gunshots. After a second, Mrs. Fitzgibbons opened the door impatiently and marched in. She was met almost at once by Amanda Zabac, the chairman's wife, who came rolling into view through a white doorway at the end of the foyer in a shiny, motorized wheelchair.

The invalided lady piped up at once. “Look who it is. You're Mrs. Fitzgibbons. I know you from the newspapers.”

Mrs. Zabac immediately impressed her caller as a woman of delicate sensibility. She had a pretty face and a shapely head circled with babyish white curls. Her gown was trimmed with pink lace at the throat.

“I hope there are no problems at the bank,” she said.

“None whatsoever.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons reassured the lady in the wheelchair with a salute of her upraised hand. While she had long known about Mrs. Zabac's growing paralysis, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had never laid eyes on the woman, nor would have guessed her to be such a picture of sweet refinement.

Turning her battery-driven aluminum chair about, and piloting the way into the parlor, she spoke over her shoulder to Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “You will probably think me simple and naive,” she exclaimed, “but I have been so encouraged by your promotion, and what it must mean to so many women, I've been just dying to meet you. As you know, Louis is due from the airport any minute, but what a stroke of good fortune his absence is for me.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons sauntered with unhurried footstep into the big parlor, glancing about herself at the crowded collection of yellow and pink chintz-covered armchairs and love seats, at the gracious array of shining tabletops, and canary draperies. Mrs. Zabac swiveled noiselessly about in her gleaming chair to look at Mrs. Fitzgibbons, who, in her muddied high heels and long, rather martial leather coat appeared to satisfy Mrs. Zabac's conception, not just of her husband's new CEO, but of a very capable and determined woman of the world. Her face was rosy with admiration. “Of course, I have no true quarrel with men,” Mrs. Zabac conceded playfully, “but I think they've had things too much to themselves for too long.”

As often lately, Mrs. Fitzgibbons underwent a pleasant physical reaction to the woman's honeyed words; her leg muscles tensed and a tremor flitted down her spine. Amanda Zabac was staring at her, eager to hear what Mrs. Fitzgibbons had to say on the question of the role of modern-day women. She took her eyes away just for a second, to glance curiously at Emily Krok, who hovered in the doorway in her pea coat and cap, leering.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not a disappointment. “Nothing comes without a fight. If I had waited around to be tapped on the shoulder, an eternity would have come and gone.”

“My heavens.” Mrs. Zabac liked that response very much. “You really are exciting.” Seated in her wheelchair, amid the soft, beribboned folds of her flannel gown and lap blanket, Amanda Zabac looked as helpless as a newborn waiting to be fed. “I hadn't realized what a splendid figure you make. You ought to consider sometime a move into politics, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.” With that, Mrs. Zabac looked up once more at Emily for a response, but the latter was staring at her with an expression that could hardly be construed as corroborative.

“Just because I'm able to reach out and take what's there,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons condescended a trifle, while completing her thought, “doesn't mean that somebody else wouldn't fail.”

“I'm sure you're right. I'm hopelessly naive about such things. I admire what you've done. Ever since I saw you in the paper and on television, I've been one of your most outspoken champions. It's quite a pleasure to meet you in the flesh.” While speaking, Mrs. Zabac activated her chair, turned ninety degrees to one side, and rolled soundlessly over the rug to a coffee table where she picked up a crystal candy dish of Canada mints. “I know a lot of influential people, well-to-do,” she said, “earnest and civic-minded, particularly ladies who are very rights-minded, who would support a candidacy like yours.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons declined Mrs. Zabac's candy dish with a little waggle of her fingers and turned stiffly on her heel to Emily. “Get Julie on the line,” she commanded. “Find out what's happening.”

Mrs. Zabac watched fascinatedly as the strange, grinning girl in the dark coat darted past her wheelchair with the alacrity of an attack dog and picked up the phone.

“Tell her,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons dictated in a bigger voice, “if Schreffler hasn't signed yet to notify my lawyers!”

“Is something important happening?” Mrs. Zabac set a chalky hand to her cheek. Her eyes sparkled; she couldn't take her eyes from the figure in the leather coat standing before her.

“I'm putting an end to the Citizens Bank,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “Their days of fraudulence and shady tricks, and of insulting me to my face, are coming to an end this afternoon.”

Mrs. Zabac was stunned. “I can't believe what I'm hearing.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's expression deprecated that. “If people like you knew what I was doing, I'd still be on first base.”

Emily shot up her hand for attention. “He signed the papers,” she said.

“Tell me again.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons faced Emily.

“Mr. Schreffler has signed the papers. Mr. Brouillette and Julie witnessed the signature.” Emily's pocked face shone darkly. “It's official! Julie says it's official, Chief. It's in black and white.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons laughed with her head back. “The little coward. Doesn't he know what I'm going to do to him?”

“The stupid yellow-belly,” Emily chimed in.

“I have him in my pocket!”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons and her strange young companion were expressing themselves so boisterously that their spirits annihilated Mrs. Zabac's presence for the moment.

“Schreffler!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons tossed her head, then mimicked the man with a surprisingly accurate inflection. “ ‘
I would like to remind you, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, that the Citizens Bank has a long and distinguished history
—' ”

“Will someone tell me what's happening?” Mrs. Zabac begged.

“He must have boiled excrement for brains,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons. “Doesn't he know what I'll do to him?”

Emily Krok was beside herself with gaiety. She was doubled forward, clenching her two fists. “You let me at him.”

“I'll tear him to bloody ribbons,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons.

Matthew blew his horn, signifying Mr. Zabac's arrival in the driveway. But Mrs. Fitzgibbons was too exultant to notice. The roof of the hired car winked in the sun as it drove in past the parlor windows.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons's heated mind gave a sudden redness to her temples. “He signed over an entire bank. I put the papers in front of him, and the man signed them. He took out his pen and signed them.” She repeated herself with manic intensity. “I told him to do it, and he did it. I want your bank, I said, sign on the dotted line, and he did.”

She was filled with such an adrenal rush that she could have snatched the dainty Zabac woman out of her wheelchair, and thrown her, lap robes and all, across the room.

“I have the document, I have the bank, and I have him.” She gestured excitedly. “He gave it to me. Not his car, or his house, or a whole street of houses. No, he handed me the family bank. That,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, “is the sort of cringing, gutless marvel that has been running this world for the past two hundred and fifty thousand years. ‘Give me your bank,' I tell him, and he does. I would kill first.”

“So would I,” said Emily.

“What are we all talking about?” Mrs. Zabac pleaded to be heard.

There were moments in her triumphant fervor when Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt her thoughts slipping away from her. She could retrieve and hold them in place only through the device of repetition.

“If it were me, I would have shot him dead. I swear to God, I would put a bullet in any man, woman, or child that threatened to do to me what I did to him. With his Masonic Temple cuff links! His silk socks! That schoolboy necktie. I swear,” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, looking at her fist, “by Mary and Joseph and a skyful of angels, I'm going to choke off his fucking windpipe.”

With that, Mrs. Fitzgibbons headed for the back door of the house. She was fit to take on an army. Her footsteps made booming sounds in the back hallway. Outdoors, she waited in the trellised breezeway for Louis Zabac to come to the door. Oddly, despite the light snow and lateness of the season, a considerable number of Mr. Zabac's rose blossoms clung tenaciously to life amid the climbers on the trellis. The rose garden itself, lying adjacent, with its gravel pathways and artificial dells and promontories, and a decorative gazebo, was covered with an evenly spread cloth of snow. As Mrs. Fitzgibbons awaited the chairman, Emily and Mrs. Zabac emerged behind her from the house. Mrs. Zabac stopped her motorized chair at the top of a low, specially built ramp that led into the garden. Clutching the handles of Mrs. Zabac's wheelchair, Emily hovered behind her, her watch cap pulled over her ears.

When Louis Zabac came stepping his way briskly up the path from the drive, the expressions on his and Mrs. Fitzgibbons's faces portended conflict. Both appeared determined, but of the two, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, being the taller and clearly the more angered in aspect, might well have been the wagering favorite, as she stood in the breezeway, blocking his way to the door. Notwithstanding her heated frame of mind, her thinking was not so disorganized as to obscure the fact that the prancing little man in the tweed overcoat had attempted to thwart her will on the telephone just as she was bearing down on her victim. Mr. Zabac had overstepped himself. It was time for him to swallow some strong-tasting medicine.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons spoke first.

“You look like you've seen the Holy Ghost,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“I was delayed by the snow.” At once, Mr. Zabac got to the point. “We're going to have a talk, Mrs. Fitzgibbons, and it's not going to be a pleasant one, I'm afraid.”