“If I ever live with you, I’ll remember that.”
It was the first time either of them had mentioned the possibility of living together since the night they had talked about it several months ago.
“Have you thought any more?”
“I’ve thought,” she said. “That’s all.”
Brett waited while he threaded traffic at the Jefferson entrance to the Chrysler Freeway, then asked, “Want to talk about it?”
She shook her head negatively.
“How much longer will the film take?”
“Probably another month.”
“You’ll be busy?”
“I expect so. Why?”
“I’m taking a trip,” Brett said. “To California.”
But when she pressed him, he declined to tell her why.
19
The long, black limousine slowed, swung left, then glided smoothly, between weathered stone pillars, into the paved, winding driveway of Hank Kreisel’s Grosse Pointe home.
Kreisel’s uniformed chauffeur was at the wheel. Behind him, in the plush interior, were Kreisel and his guests, Erica and Adam Trenton. The car’s interior contained—among other things—a bar, from which the parts manufacturer had served drinks as they drove.
It was late evening in the last week of July.
They had already dined—at the Detroit Athletic Club downtown. The Trentons had met Kreisel there, and a fourth at dinner had been a gorgeous girl, with flashing eyes and a French accent, whom Kreisel introduced merely as Zoë. He added that she was in charge of his recently opened export liaison office.
Zoë, who proved an engaging companion, excused herself after dinner and left. Then, at Hank Kreisel’s suggestion, Adam and Erica accompanied him home, leaving their own car downtown.
This evening’s arrangements had been an outcropping of Adam’s weekend at Hank Kreisel’s lakeside cottage. Following the cottage affair, the parts manufacturer telephoned Adam, as arranged, and they set a date. Inclusion of Erica in the invitation made Adam nervous at first, and he hoped Kreisel would make no references to the cottage weekend in detail, or Rowena in particular. Adam still remembered Rowena vividly, but she was in the past, and prudence and common sense dictated she remain there. He need not have worried. Hank Kreisel was discreet; they talked of other things—next season’s prospects for the Detroit Lions, a recent scandal in city government, and later the Orion, some of whose parts Kreisel’s company was now manufacturing in enormous quantities. After a while Adam relaxed, though he still wondered what, precisely, Hank Kreisel wanted of him.
That Kreisel wanted something he was sure, because Brett DeLosanto had told him so. Brett and Barbara had been invited tonight but couldn’t make it—Barbara was busy at her job; Brett, who was leaving soon for the West Coast, had commitments to finish first. But Brett confided yesterday, “Hank told me what he’s going to ask, and I hope you can do something because there’s a lot more to it than just us.” The air of mystery had irritated Adam, but Brett refused to say more.
Now, as the limousine stopped at Kreisel’s sprawling, ivy-draped mansion, Adam supposed he would know soon.
The chauffeur came around to open the door and handed Erica out. With their host following, Erica and Adam moved onto the lawn nearby and stood together, the big house behind them, in the growing dusk.
The elegant garden, whose manicured lawn, well-trimmed trees and shrubs wore the patina of professional care, sloped downward to the uncluttered, boulevarded lanes of Lake Shore Road, the roadway offering no interruption—except for occasional traffic—to a panoramic view of Lake St. Clair.
The lake was still visible, though barely; a line of white wavelets marked its edge, and far out from shore, lights of lake freighters flickered. Closer at hand a tardy sailboat, using its outboard as a hurry-home, headed for a Grosse Pointe Yacht Club mooring.
“It’s beautiful,” Erica said, “though I always think, when I come to Grosse Pointe, it isn’t really part of Detroit.”
“If you lived here,” Hank Kreisel answered, “you’d know it was. Plenty of us still smell of gasoline. Or had grease under our fingernails once.”
Adam said dryly, “Most Grosse Pointe fingernails have been clean for a long time.” But he knew what Kreisel meant. The Grosse Pointes, of which there were five—all separate fiefdoms and traditional enclaves of great wealth—were as much a part of the auto world as any other segment of Greater Detroit. Henry Ford II lived down the street in Grosse Pointe Farms, with other Fords sprinkled nearby like rich spices. Other auto company wealth was here too—Chrysler and General Motors fortunes, as well as those of industry suppliers: big, older names like Fisher, Anderson, Olson, Mullen, and newer ones like Kreisel. The money’s current custodians hobnobbed in socially exclusive clubs—at the apex the creaking, overheated Country Club, with a waiting list so long that a new, young applicant without family ties could expect to be admitted at senility. Yet for all its exclusiveness, Grosse Pointe was a friendly place—a reason why a soupçon of salaried auto executives made it their home, preferring its “family” scene to the more management-oriented Bloomfield Hills.
Once, older Grosse Pointers looked down patrician noses at automotive money. Now it dominated them, as it dominated all Detroit.
A sudden, night breeze from the lake stirred the air and set leaves rustling overhead. Erica shivered.
Hank Kreisel suggested, “Let’s go in.”
The chauffeur, who appeared to double in butlerage, swung heavy front doors open as they approached the house.
A few yards inside, Adam stopped. He said incredulously, “I’ll be damned!”
Beside him, Erica, equally surprised, stood staring. Then she giggled.
The main floor living room into which they had stepped had all the accouterments of elegance—deep broadloom, comfortable chairs, sofas, sideboards, bookshelves, paintings, a hi-fi playing softly, and harmonious lighting. It also had a full-size swimming pool.
The pool, some thirty feet long, was attractively blue tiled, with a deep end, shallow end, and a three-tiered diving board.
Erica said, “Hank, I shouldn’t have laughed. I’m sorry. But it’s … surprising.”
“No reason not to laugh,” their host said amiably. “Most people do. Good many think I’m nuts. Fact is, I like to swim. Like to be comfortable, too.”
Adam was looking around him with an amazed expression. “It’s an old house. You must have ripped the inside out.”
“Sure did.”
Erica told Adam, “Quit making like an engineer and let’s go swimming.”
Obviously pleased, Kreisel said, “You want to?”
“You’re looking at an Island girl. I could swim before I could talk.”
He showed her to a corridor. “Second door down there. Lots of swimsuits, towels.”
Adam followed Kreisel to another changing room.
Minutes later, Erica executed a dazzling swallow dive from the highest board. She surfaced, laughing. “This is the best living room I was ever in.”
Hank Kreisel, grinning, dived from a lower board. Adam plunged in from the side.
When they had all swum, Kreisel led the way—the three of them dripping—across the broadloom to deep armchairs over which the butler-chauffeur had spread thick towels.
In a fourth chair was a gray-haired, frail-appearing woman, beside her a tray of coffee cups and liqueurs. Hank Kreisel leaned over, kissing her cheek. He asked, “How was the day?”
“Peaceful.”
“This is my wife, Dorothy,” Kreisel said. He introduced Erica and Adam.
Adam could understand why Zoë had been left downtown.
Yet, as Mrs. Kreisel poured coffee and they chatted, she seemed to find nothing strange in the fact that the others had had a dinner engagement in which—for whatever reason—she was not included. She even inquired how the food had been at the Detroit Athletic Club.
Perhaps, Adam thought, Dorothy Kreisel had come to terms wit
h her husband’s other life away from home—his various mistresses in “liaison offices,” which Adam had heard of. In fact, Hank Kreisel seemed to make no secret of his arrangements, as witness Zoë tonight.
Erica chatted brightly. Obviously she liked Hank Kreisel, and the evening out, and now the swim, had been good for her. She appeared glowing, her youthfulness evident. She had found a bikini among the available swimwear; it was exactly right for her tall, slim figure, and several times Adam noticed Kreisel’s eyes stray interestedly Erica’s way.
After a while their host seemed restless. He stood up. “Adam, like to get changed? There’s something I want to show you, maybe talk about.”
So finally, Adam thought, they were coming to the point—whatever the point was.
“You sound mysterious, Hank,” Erica said; she smiled at Dorothy Kreisel. “Do I get to see this exposition too?”
Hank Kreisel gave his characteristic twisted grin. “If you did, I’d like it.”
A few minutes later they excused themselves from Mrs. Kreisel who remained, placidly sipping coffee, in the living room.
When they had dressed, Hank Kreisel guided Adam and Erica through the main floor of the house, explaining it had been built by a long-dead auto mogul, a contemporary of Walter Chrysler and Henry Ford. “Solid. Outside walls as good as Hadrian’s. Still are. So I tore the inside apart, put new guts in.” The parts manufacturer opened a paneled doorway, revealing a spiral staircase, going down, then clattered ahead. Erica followed, more cautiously, Adam behind her.
They walked along a basement passageway, then, selecting a key from several on a ring, Hank Kreisel opened a gray metal door. As they entered the room beyond, bright fluorescent lighting flooded on.
They were, Adam saw, in an engineering experimental workshop. It was spacious, organized, among the best-equipped of its kind that he had seen.
“Spend a lot of time in this place. Do pilot stuff,” Kreisel explained. “When new work comes up for my plants, bring it down here. Then figure out best way of production at cheapest unit cost. Pays off.”
Adam remembered something which Brett DeLosanto had told him: that Hank Kreisel had no engineering degree, and his only training before beginning business for himself was as a machinist and plant foreman.
“Over here.” Kreisel led the way to a low, wide work table. An object on it was covered by a cloth which he removed. Adam looked curiously at the metal structure underneath—an assemblage of steel rods, sheet metal, and connected internal parts, the size about equal to two bicycles. On the outside was a handle. As Adam turned it, experimentally, parts within the structure moved.
Adam shrugged. “Hank, I give up. What the hell is it?”
“Obviously,” Erica said, “it’s something he’s submitting to the Museum of Modern Art.”
“Maybe that’s it. What I ought to do.” Kreisel grinned, then asked, “Know much about farm machinery, Adam?”
“Not really.” He turned the handle once again.
Hank Kreisel said quietly, “It’s a threshing machine, Adam. Never been one like it, or this small. And it works.” His voice took on an enthusiasm which neither Adam nor Erica had heard before. “This machine’ll thresh any kind of grain—wheat, rice, barley. Three to five bushels an hour. Got pictures proving it …”
“I know enough about you,” Adam said. “If you say it works, it works.”
“Something else works, too. Cost. Mass-produced, it’d sell for a hundred dollars.”
Adam looked doubtful. As a product planner, he knew costs the way a football coach knows standard plays. “Surely not including your power source.” He stopped. “What is your power source? Batteries? A small gas motor?”
“Thought you’d get around to that,” Hank Kreisel said. “So I’ll tell you. Power source isn’t any of those things. It’s some guy turning a handle. Same way you did just now. Same handle. Except the guy I’m thinking of is an old Eastern geezer in a jungle village. Wearing a slope hat. When his arms get tired, a woman or a kid’ll do it. They’ll sit there, hours on end, just turn the handle. That’s how we’ll build this for a hundred bucks.”
“No power source. Too bad we can’t build cars that way.” Adam laughed.
Kreisel told him, “Whatever else you do. Do me a favor now. Don’t laugh.”
“Okay, I won’t. But I still can’t see mass-producing, in Detroit of all places, a piece of farm machinery”—Adam nodded toward the thresher—“where you turn a handle, for hours on end, to make it work.”
Hank Kreisel said earnestly, “If you’d been to places where I have, Adam, maybe you would. Parts of this world are a long way from Detroit. That’s half our trouble in this town: we forget those other places. Forget that people don’t think like we do. We figure everywhere else is like Detroit, or ought to be, so whatever happens should be our way: the way we see it. If others see different, they have to be wrong because we’re Detroit! We’ve been like that about other things. Pollution. Safety. Those got so hot we had to change. But there’s a lot more thinking left that’s like religion.”
“With high priests,” Erica put in, “who don’t like old beliefs challenged.”
Adam shot her an annoyed glance which said: Leave this to me.
He pointed out, “A good many who are moving up in the industry believe in rethinking old ideas and the effect is showing. But when you talk about a hand-operated machine—any kind of machine—that isn’t a forward change; it’s going backward to the way things were before the first Henry Ford.” He added, “Anyway, I’m a car and truck man. This is farm machinery.”
“Your company has a farm products division.”
“I’m not involved with it, and don’t expect to be.”
“Your people at the top are. And you’re involved with them. They listen to you.”
“Tell me something,” Adam said. “Did you put this up to our farm products people? Did they turn you down?”
The parts manufacturer nodded affirmatively. “Them and others. Need someone now to get me in a board room. So I can raise interest there. Hoped you’d see it.”
At last it was clear precisely what Hank Kreisel wanted: Adam’s help in gaining access to the corporate summit of his company, and presumably the ear of the president or chairman of the board.
Erica said, “Can’t you do it for him?”
Adam shook his head, but it was Hank Kreisel who told her, “He’d have to believe in the idea first.”
They stood looking at the contraption with its handle, so alien to everything in Adam’s own experience.
And yet, Adam knew, auto companies often did become involved in projects having little or nothing to do with their principal activity of producing cars. General Motors had pioneered a mechanical heart for use in surgery, and other medical devices. Ford was working on space satellite communication, Chrysler dabbling in planned communities. There were other examples, and the reason for such programs—as Hank Kreisel shrewdly knew—was that someone high in each company had taken a personal interest to begin with.
“Been down to Washington about this thresher,” Kreisel said. “Sounded out a lot of guys in State. They go for this. Talk of ordering two hundred thousand machines a year for foreign aid. It’d mean a start. But State Department can’t do manufacturing.”
“Hank,” Adam said, “why work through another company at all? If you’re convinced, why not build and market this yourself?”
“Two reasons. One’s prestige. I don’t have the name. Big company like yours does. Has the marketing setup, too. I don’t.”
Adam nodded. That much made sense.
“Other reason is finance. I couldn’t raise the dough. Not for big production.”
“Surely, with your track record, the banks …”
Hank Kreisel chuckled. “I’m into the banks already. So deep, some days they think I held ’em up. Never had much cash of my own. Surprising what you can do without it.”
Adam understood that, too. Plenty of
individuals and companies operated that way, and almost certainly Hank Kreisel’s plants, their equipment, inventories, this house, his place at Higgins Lake, were mortgaged heavily. If Kreisel ever sold his business, or a part of it, he could reap millions in cash. Until he did, like others he would continue month by month with cash flow problems.
Again the parts manufacturer turned the thresher handle. Inside, the mechanism moved, though accomplishing nothing now; what it needed was grain to bite on, fed into a quart-size hopper at the top.
“Sure this is offbeat. Could say it’s been a dream with me. Had it a long time.” Hank Kreisel hesitated, seeming embarrassed by the admission, but went on, “Got the idea in Korea. Watched guys ’n dames in villages, pounding grain with rocks. Primitive: lots of muscle, small results. Saw a need, so started figuring this gizmo. Worked on it, on and off, ever since.”
Erica was watching Hank Kreisel’s face intently. She, too, knew something of his background, having learned it partly from Adam, partly elsewhere. Suddenly a picture took shape in her mind: of a tough, hard-fighting United States Marine in an alien, hostile land, yet observing native villagers with such understanding and compassion that, years afterward, an idea born at that time could stay with him like a flame.
“Tell you something, Adam,” Kreisel said. “You too, Erica. This country’s not selling farm machinery overseas. Leastways, not much. Ours is too fancy, too sophisticated. It’s like a religion with us—the way I said: everything has to be powered. Must be electric, or use an engine, or whatever. What’s forgotten is, Eastern countries have unending labor. You call for a guy to turn a handle, fifty come hurrying like flies—or ants. But we don’t like that idea. Don’t like to see dams built by coolies carrying stones. Idea offends us. We figure it’s inefficient, not American; we say it’s the way the pyramids were built So what? Fact is: situation’s there. Won’t change for a long time, if ever. Another thing: out there, not many places to repair fancy machinery. So machines need to be simple.” He took his hand away from the thresher whose handle he had continued turning. “This is.”
Adam thought: Strangely, while Hank Kreisel had been speaking—eloquently for him—and demonstrating what he had built and believed in, he had a Lincolnesque quality which his tall, lean figure emphasized.