“Nothing like that.”

“Have you asked Elliot Judd?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you?”

Hastings said, “I don’t think I ought to upset him unless I’ve got something concrete to show him.”

“It could be a fight for control from inside, you know. If one of the top men in the company wanted to take it over, he might use dummies to buy stock for him, to avoid alerting Judd. Or it might be an outsider.”

“A raider.”

“He’d have to be big. Very big. A Howard Hughes would have trouble buying control of NCI.”

“There are other ways to get control of a company. You don’t have to buy it.”

“Hard to do, with a strong company,” the old man said. “Has it occurred to you there may be dummies buying the stock on behalf of an insider who knows something exciting is going to happen within the company-something that will raise the price of the stock? A new contract, perhaps? An oil discovery?”

“NCI doesn’t deal in oil very much. And as far as I know, they’re not getting ready to announce any big news. That’s what intrigues me. Somebody has a reason to buy big chunks of the stock through front men, and all the reasons I can think of are the ones we’ve just ruled out.”

“Then either one of your assumptions is wrong, or you’ve missed something.”

“Sure,” Hastings said. “I was hoping you’d spot it for me.”

“I’m sorry, my boy. I’m only a broker, not an oracle, after all.” Saul Cohen began to smile; his telephone rang.

Hastings stood up. “I don’t want to kill the rest of your morning,” he said. “The market’s about to open. I’ll see you soon.”

“Take care,” the old man said, flapping a hand at him and reaching for the phone. When Hastings left the office he could hear Saul’s magpie voice chattering gloomily into the telephone.

11. Diane Hastings

When Mason Villiers lifted his lighter to Diane’s cigarette, she drew the smoke slowly into her mouth and kept a rigid, nervous smile on her face: Villiers’ stare unsettled her.

He kept watching her over cognac and demitasse, looking relaxed and at ease, sated after the fine meal. The headwaiter came by, gliding like a cobra; he had greeted Villiers by name and given them a choice table and since then had fawned over them effusively. Diane brought her attention back from that distraction and found Villiers’ eyes on her, his guarded smile repellent and fascinating at once. His magnetism was uncanny. She found it masculine, erotic-and frightening.

He was turning his cigar slowly in the flame of his lighter; his slate eyes studied her, and when he clicked the lighter shut he said, “You’ve had time to think it over. What do you say?”

“I haven’t decided. It’s short notice-I’m honestly not sure. Not yet.”

“It’s the sensible thing for you to do. All the new stock issues are drawing investors like flies. Last week nine companies went public, and seven of them closed Friday at premiums more than a point above the offering price. One of them shot up seven dollars. If you go public and price your shares at ten dollars, they’ll probably be selling for fifteen before you know it.”

“It sounds attractive,” she said. “I admit that. But I can’t help wondering what your angle is.”

His smile seemed genuinely amused. “Does everybody have to have six fingers, Diane?”

“I can hardly ignore your reputation, can I?”

“I know you don’t approve of me-is it bad form to notice? But you’d be smart not to judge a case by its advocate.”

“Really?”

“I’ve told you what I stand to gain by it. I’ll go over it again, if it will help. I undertake to write the Nuart tickets, take care of preparing your prospectus, arranging to have the issue underwritten, all those details. In return I get an option on a specified number of your shares at the offering price, exercisable for three months, and I’ll also want use of a portion of your capitalization to trade into other companies. Look, I’ve developed a Jesse James reputation, and it’s hard for me to make trades in my own name-nobody wants to sell to me. I need companies to front for me. I’m being honest about this, you see. But you’ve got to understand the contracts will be drawn up so that you’ll have absolute control of Nuart at all times. You’ll have your own lawyers go over every step of it and make sure it’s set up in such a way that I can’t possibly get control away from you. You’ll retain an absolute majority of voting stock in your possession.”

“You sound like a lawyer.”

“I should-I’ve argued with enough of them. But I’m trying to lay it out without legalese double-talk. Your lawyers will examine everything. If they find anything at all to object to, you can withdraw anytime without losses. I’ll even pay the legal fees. You want to know what I’m getting out of it? Easy. I can raise capital to buy into any company, but it can be messy and costly-a lot of money gets eaten up in taxes. But if I buy in through a corporation-through Nuart-then the picture changes completely. When one company buys another, it can be reported as a pooling of interests. A merger. The buyer’s assets don’t have to reflect the cost of purchase, which would reduce his reportable profits, and he doesn’t have to pay any tax on the exchange of stock-Does this bore you?”

“No. It does confuse me. You’re handling me with kid gloves. The smile on the face of the tiger. You’re clever, Mason-I’m not. You’re an astute judge of weakness, and I can’t escape feeling you’re putting something over on me.”

“Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you? Isn’t it the way you work? Caveat emptor?”

“I’m not selling you a bill of goods, Diane. What do I have to do to convince you?”

She inspected him coolly. His suit displayed its good London tailoring, if a bit showy-he tended to wear his money on his lapels, but that hint of crudity was attractive in its way; it set off his magnetic power. He was like a natural force, not possible to control; like a volatile explosive. He surrounded himself with an electric aura of excitement-violence held precariously in check.

She pursed her lips. “Granting it’s the wise thing for me to do at this point-going public-what makes you think I won’t just take the idea to my father and let him handle it for me?”

“You won’t.”

“Why not?”

“You never have. You could have done that anywhere along the line, from the time you opened your first gallery on Third Avenue. But you didn’t. You’ve got too much pride-your ambition’s too personal, too private. I get the feeling somewhere along the line you decided you had to prove you were just as good a man as your father.”

“That’s silly. I’m not competing with my father.”

“Aren’t you?”

He let it drop softly between them and hang in the air until she heard herself utter a brief and unconvincing nervous laugh. Villiers said, “I don’t know anything about your ex-husband, but from what I hear, you had to choose between him and your business, and you chose the business. Doesn’t that suggest an unusual sort of drive?”

“That’s ridiculous. Russ and I broke up for a lot of reasons that were far too complex for you to boil down into half a dozen words. Maybe we were just two incompatible people-it happens.”

“It happens,” he agreed. “But not everybody’s father is Elliot Judd. And not every daughter of a billionaire has to prove she can succeed in business on her own, without her daddy’s help.”

“Where did you come across all this cockeyed information about me?”

“I never go into things blindfolded,” he said. “I know a great deal about you. Enough to be sure you won’t take the proposition to your father. You’ll do it with me or not at all. You may turn me down, but you won’t take it behind my back-and particularly you’ll never take it to him.”

“You’re so damned sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. I learned a long time ago that only a fool goes into anything without doing his homework.” He turned his hand over and gave her a brief hard smile.