Bitter Business

nutcase?”
    “ I’m not a nutcase,” Lydia’s attorney protested, “and neither is Mark Hoffenberg and the bankers at First Chicago. Now that I think of it, Lydia’s husband Arthur’s no slouch either. I’ll grant you that my client is a little... well, shall we say, emotional. But that doesn’t mean she’s not capable of making a good business decision.”
    “You mean, with you pushing and Hoffenberg pulling?”
    “Let me give you a little bit of advice, Kate. If you don’t want to see a big chunk of your client’s stock being sold to an outsider, I’d get busy and come back with a respectable offer—and pronto.”
     
    Once I make up my mind about something, I stick to it, and since I had definitely decided to end my brief tenure as counsel for Superior Plating and Specialty Chemicals I wasted no time in going to Daniel Babbage’s office to tell him of my decision. I didn’t intend to go into my feelings about the Cavanaughs but would merely explain that my caseload was too heavy for me to give the file the attention and the hours that it was obviously going to require. I wanted, in all fairness, to tell him immediately, before events moved ahead and I billed any more hours to the file.
    But when I arrived at Daniel’s office, I found it empty. I went in search of Madeline, his secretary, and found her hunched over her desk weeping over a stack of unopened mail. Babbage, she explained in a halting whisper, had been rushed to the emergency room in the middle of the night. She wrote down the number of his room at Billings Hospital and I trudged back to my office filled with a sense of resignation mingled with dread. For some reason, instead of making it easier, news of Daniel’s illness made bowing out seem cowardly and impossible. From that point on there was no turning back.
     
    Dagny Cavanaugh came to the door of her lovingly restored brownstone dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. She looked about sixteen. After learning of Daniel’s relapse, I’d called her and asked for an urgent meeting and she’d agreed to see me that evening provided that I’d be willing to come to her house. She had, she explained, another commitment, but she thought there would still be time for us to talk. Besides, she’d added cryptically, there was a good chance I’d find it interesting.
    “Welcome to the Mount McKinley Expedition planning meeting,” she said with a smile as she swung the heavy oak door wide. From somewhere inside the house I heard the faint tinkle of laughter. “We’re just finishing up and then we’ll have dinner. I hope you haven’t eaten yet. Here, let me take your coat. Why don’t you take your shoes off, too? We’re very casual in this house.”
    “I didn’t realize that you live right across the street from your father,” I exclaimed, handing her my coat.
    “Oh, it’s even worse than that.” Dagny laughed. “It’s hard to see in the dark, but Philip and his wife, Sally, live in the brick house next door to Dad and Lydia lives right across the street. Eugene’s house is next to Dad’s on the other side. My grandfather may not have known how to run a company, but he knew a bargain when he saw one.
    He bought all the property at the end of the Depression for pennies on the dollar.”
    “When Daniel told me that you were a close-knit family he wasn’t kidding.”
    “After today it’s beginning to feel like a variation on a Sicilian knife fight. You know, where they take two guys who want to kill each other, tie them together by their left hands, and give them each a very long dagger for their right. We’re having some problems with one of our chrome plating lines. I spent the whole afternoon locked in the conference room with my father and brothers. Right now we’re very long on blame and very short on solutions. Anyway, enough about that. Come on in and meet the gang and I’ll get you a drink.”
    The house was very pretty, with floors of polished oak and beautiful woodwork that had been meticulously stripped and refinished. There was a gorgeous stained glass window that I glimpsed at the top of the stairs.
    “When I said Mount McKinley Expedition I wasn’t kidding,” Dagny declared as we came to the end of a long hall. “I don’t know how I got talked into taking a bunch of juvenile delinquents on a climbing trip this summer, but that’s what I’m going to do—provided the three of them can figure out how to read a topographical map between now