Once, when FMA Headquarters Tower was new, Ben Rosselli had brought his executives this way. Heyward was one of them, and they had exited by another small door, which he could see ahead. Heyward opened it and went out, onto a narrow balcony almost at the building's peak, high above the city. A raw November wind struck him with blustering force.
He leaned against it and found it somehow reassuring, as if enfolding him. It was on that other occasion, he remembered, that Ben Rosselli had held out his arms toward the city and said: "Gentlemen, what was once here was my grandfather's promised land.
What you see today is ours. Remember as he did that to profit in the truest sense, we must give to it, as well as take." It seemed long ago, in precept as well as time.
Now Heyward looked downward. He could see smaller buildings, the winding, omnipresent river, traffic, people moving like ants on Rosselli Plaza far below.
The sounds of them all came to him, muted and blended, on the wind. He put a leg over the waist-high railing, separating the balcony from a narrow, unprotected ledge.
His second leg followed. Until this moment he had felt no fear, but now all of his body trembled with it, and his hands grasped the railing at his back tightly. Somewhere behind him he heard agitated voices, feet racing on the stairs. Someone shouted, "Roscoe!" His last thought but one was a line from I Samuel: Go, and the Lord be with thee. The very last was of Avril. O thou fairest among women… Rise up, my love, my fair one and come away… Then, as figures burst through the door behind him, he closed his eyes and stepped forward into the void.
25
There were a handful of days in your life, Alex Vandervoort thought, which, as long as you breathed and remembered anything, would stay sharply and painfully engraved in memory.
The day little more than a year ago on which Ben Rosselli announced his impending death was one. Today would be another. It was evening.
At home in his apartment, Alex stin shocked from what had happened earlier, uncertain and dispirited was waiting for Margot. She would be here soon. He mixed himself a second scotch and soda and tossed a log on the fire, which had burned low. This morning he had been first through the door to the high tower balcony, having raced up the stairs after hearing worry expressed about Heyward's state of mind and deducing from swift questioning of others where Roscoe might have gone.
Alex had cried out as he hurled himself through the doorway into the open, but was too late. The sight of Roscoe, seeming to hang for an instant in air, then disappear from view with a terrible scream which faded quickly, left Alex horrified, shaking, and for moments unable to speak.
It was Tom Straughan, who was right behind him on the stairway, who had taken charge, ordering the balcony cleared, an order with which Alex had complied. Later, in an act of futility, the door to the balcony had been locked. Below, returning to the 36th floor, Alex had pulled himself together and gone to report to Jerome Patterton.
After that, the rest of the day was a melange of events, decisions, details, succeeding and merging with each other until the whole became a Heyward epitaph, which even now was not conduded, and there would be more of the same tomorrow.
But, for today, Roscoe's wife and son had been contacted and consoled; police inquiries answered at least, in part; funeral arrangements overseen since the body was unrecognizable, the coffin would be sealed as soon as the coroner agreed; a press statement drafted by Dick French and approved by Alex; and still more questions dealt with or postponed. Answers to other questions became clearer to Alex in the late afternoon, shortly after Dick French advised him that he should accept a telephone call from a Newsda:y reporter named Endicott.
When Alex talked to him, the reporter seemed upset. He explained that just a few minutes earlier he had read on the AP wire of Roscoe Heyward's apparent suicide. Endicott went on to describe his call to Heyward this morning and what transpired. "If I'd had any idea…" he ended lamely. Alex made no attempt to help the reporter feel better.
The moralities of his profession were something he would have to work out for himself. But Alex did ask, "Is your paper still going to run the story?" "Yes, sir. The desk is writing a new lead. Apart from that, it will run tomorrow as intended."
'When why did you call?' "I guess I just wanted to say to somebody I'm sorry." "Yes," Alex said. "So am I." This evening Alex reflected again on the conversation, pitying Roscoe for the agony of mind he must have suffered in those final minutes.
On another level there was no doubt that the Newsday story, when it appeared tomorrow, would do the bank great harm. It would be harm piled on harm. Despite Alex's success in halting the run at Tylersville, and the absence of other visible runs elsewhere, there had been a public lessening of confidence in First Mercantile American and an erosion of deposits. Nearly forty million dollars in withdrawals had flowed out in the past ten days and incoming funds were far below their usual level. At the same time, FMA's share price had sagged badly on the New York Stock Exchange. FMA, of course, was not alone in that. Since the original news of Supranational's insolvency, a miasma of melancholy had gripped investors and the business community, including bankers; had sent stock prices generally on a downhill slide; had created fresh doubts internationally about the value of the dollar; and now appeared to some as the last clear warning before the major storm of world depression.
It was, Alex thought, as if the toppling of a giant had brought home the realization that other giants, once thought invulnerable, could topple, too; that neither individuals, nor corporations, nor governments at any level, could escape forever the simplest accounting law of all that what you owed you must one day pay. Lewis D'Orsey, who had preached that doctrine for two decades, had written much the same thing in his latest Newsletter.
Alex had received a new issue in the mail this morning, had glanced at it, then put it in his pocket to read more carefully tonight. Now, he took it out. Do not believe the glibly touted myth [Lewis wrote] that there is something complex and elusive, defying easy analysis, about corporate, national or international finance.
All are simply housekeeping ordinary housekeeping, on a larger scale. The alleged intricacies, the obfuscations and sinuosities are an imaginary thicket.
They do not, in reality, exist, but have been created by vote-buying politicians (which means all politicians), manipulators, and Keynesian-diseased "economists." Together they use their witch doctor mumbo-jumbo to conceal what they are doing, and have done. What these bumblers fear most is our simple scrutiny of their activities in the clear and honest light of commonsense.
For what they the politicians, mostly on one hand have created is Himalayas of debt which neither they, we, nor our great-great-great-grandchildren can ever pay. And, on the other hand, they have printed, as if producing toilet tissue, a cascade of currency, debasing our good money especially the honest, gold-backed dollars which Americans once owned.
We repeat: It is all simply housekeeping the most flagrantly incompetent, dishonest housekeeping in human history. This, and this alone, is the basic reason for inflation. There was more. Lewis preferred too many words, rather than too few. Also, as usual, Lewis offered a solution to financial ills. Like a beaker of water for a parched and dying wayfarer, a solution is ready and available, as it has always been, and as it always will be.
Gold. Gold as a base, once more, for the world's money systems. Gold, the oldest, the only bastion of monetary integrity. Gold, the one source, incorruptible, of fiscal discipline. Gold, which politicians cannot print, or make, or fake, or otherwise debase. Gold which, because of its severely limited supply, establishes its own real, lasting value. Gold which, because of this consistent value and when a base for money, protects the honest savings of all people from pillaging by knaves, charlatans, incompetents and dreamers in public office.
Gold which, over centuries, has demonstrated: without it as a monetary base, there is inevitable inflation, followed by anarchy; with it, inflation can be curbed and cured, stability retained. Gold which God, in His wisdom, may have created for the purpose of curtailing man's excess.
Gold of which Americans once stated proudly their dollar was "as good as." Gold to which, someday soon, America must honorably return as its standard of exchange. The alternative becoming clearer daily is fiscal and national disintegration.
Fortunately, even now, despite skepticism and anti-gold fanatics, there are signs of maturing views in government, of sanity returning… Alex put The D'Orsey Newsletter down. Like many in banking and elsewhere he had sometimes scoffed at the vociferous gold bugs Lewis D'Orsey, Harry Schultz, James Dines, Congressman Crane, Exter, Browne, Pick, a handful more.