W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps 03 - Counterattack

And then, if you wanted to look at it that way, Leonard himself was responsible for what had happened. If he hadn’t gone to Steve at the bar and practically dragged him back to the table, Steve would have had a couple of drinks and gone home. Maybe with one of the women who had been looking at him.

But Leonard dragged him back to their table. And then she felt his leg. And it was all muscle. The couple of times she had squeezed Leonard’s leg, playfully, of course, it had been soft and flabby. Steve Koffler’s leg was muscular, even more muscular than Joe’s, and Joe had played football.

And then, when she danced with him, and that happened to him, and she knew that he wanted her, too . . .

She tried to talk herself out of it. She even went so far as to put on her nightgown after Leonard took her home and gave her the standard we-can-wait-until-we’re-married goodnight j kiss. But then she decided to have a nightcap, so she could sleep. And when she stood in the kitchen drinking it, the telephone was right there, on the wall, in front of her nose.

Things, she told herself, always looked different in the morning. They did this morning. What they looked like this morning was that she’d gotten drunk and gone to bed with the kid upstairs. Marine or not, that’s what he was, the kid upstairs.

Christ, he can’t be any older than eighteen!

And what they’d done! What she’d done, right from the start, right after the first time, when it had been all over for him before she even got really started.

Joe had taught her that, and from the way Steve acted, she had taught him. That, and some other things she knew he had never done before.

Jesus, what if he starts telling people?

She had another unsettling thought: Sure as Christ made little apples, Steve Koffler is going to show up at my door.

She got out of bed and took a shower. When she came out, her father was in the kitchen.

"I promised Joe’s mother that I would take Joey over there," she said. "Can I borrow the car?"

"Sure, honey," her father said. "But be back by five, huh?"

"Sure."

When she got back, a few minutes after five, she met Steve coming out of the apartment with his mother and his mother’s husband.

Steve’s mother didn’t like her. Dianne supposed, correctly, that Steve’s mother knew what had really happened with Joe Norman. So, as they passed each other, all Dianne got was a cold nod from Steve’s mother, and a grunt from the husband.

Steve didn’t know what to do. But then he turned around and ran back to her.

Dianne told him that she had to do things with her family that night and the next day. And she managed to avoid him the rest of the time he was home.

Chapter Four

(One)

Office of the Chairman of the Board

Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation

San Francisco, California

16 January 1942

The ten-story Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building had been completed in March of 1934, six months before the death of Captain Ezekiel Pickering, who was then Chairman of the Board. There were a number of reasons why Captain Pickering had two years before, in 1932, ordered its construction, including, of course, the irrefutable argument that the corporation needed the office space.

But it was also Captain Pickering’s response to Black Tuesday, the stock market crash of October 1929, and the Depression that followed. Pacific and Far Eastern-which was to say Captain Pickering personally, for the corporation was privately held- was not hurt by the stock market crash. Captain Ezekiel Pickering was not in the market.

He had dabbled in stocks over the years, whenever there was cash he didn’t know what else to do with for the moment. But in late 1928 he had gotten out, against the best advice of his broker. He had had a gut feeling that there was something wrong with the market when, for example, he heard elevator operators and newsstand operators solemnly discussing the killings they had made.

The idea of the stock market was a good one. In his mind it was sort of a grocery store where one could go to shop around for small pieces of all sorts of companies, or to offer for sale your small shares of companies. Companies that you knew-and you knew who ran them, too. But the market had stopped being that. In Ezekiel Pickering’s mind, it had become a socially sanctioned crap game where the bettors put their money on companies they knew literally nothing about, except that the shares had gone up so many points in the last six months.

The people playing the market-and he thought "playing" was both an accurate description of what they were doing and symbolic-often had no idea what the company they were buying into made, or how well they did so. And they didn’t really understand that a thousand shares at thirty-three-and-a-quarter really meant thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty real dollars.

And it was worse than that: they weren’t even really playing craps with real money, they were buying on the margin, putting up a small fraction of the thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty and borrowing the rest.

Ezekiel Pickering had nothing against gambling. When he had been twenty-nine and First Mate of the tanker Pacific Courier, he had once walked out of a gaming house in Hong Kong with fifty thousand pounds sterling when the cards had come up right at chemin de fer. But he had walked into the Fitzhugh Club with four thousand dollars American that was his, not borrowed, and that he was prepared-indeed, almost expected-to lose. To his way of looking at it, the vast difference between his playing chemin de fer with his own cash money at the Fitzhugh Club and the elevator man in the Andrew Foster Hotel playing the New York stock market with mostly borrowed Monopoly money was one more proof that most people were fools.

The stock market was a house of cards about to collapse, and he got out early. And he took with him his friend Andrew Foster. So that when Black Tuesday struck, and people were literally jumping out of hotel-room windows, both the Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation and Foster Hotels, Inc., remained solvent.

Of course, the Depression which followed the crash affected both corporations. Business was down. But retrenchment with cash in the bank is quite a different matter from retrenchment with a heavy debt service. Other shipping companies and hotels and hotel chains went into receivership and onto the auctioneer’s block, which gave both Ezekiel Pickering and Andrew Foster the opportunity to buy desirable properties, ships and hotels, at a fraction of their real value.

There never had been any doubt in Ezekiel’s mind that the domestic and international economies would in time recover. In fact, he agreed with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 inaugural declaration that the nation had "nothing to fear but fear itself," and he said so publicly. Thus, when a suitable piece of real estate went on the auction block, he put his money where his mouth was and bought it.

The Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building was both a structural and an architectural marvel. It was designed not only to remain standing after what the engineers called a "hundred-year earthquake," but to reflect the dominant position of the corporation in Pacific Ocean shipping.

An oil portrait of Ezekiel Pickering, completed after his death, was hanging in the office of the current Chairman of the Board. It showed him standing with his hand resting on a five-foot globe of the earth. The globe in turn rested in a mahogany gimbal. There were the traditional four gold stripes of a ship’s master around his jacket cuff, and a uniform cap with the gold-embroidered PandFE insignia was tucked under his arm.

His lips were curled in a small smile. In his widow’s view, that smile caught her late husband’s steely determination. But Fleming Pickering had a somewhat different take on it: while the artist had indeed captured a familiar smile of his father, based on Fleming’s own personal experience with it, that smile meant, Fuck you. I was right and you were wrong; now suffer the cost of your stupidity.