Read Online The Trespassers by Laura Z. Hobson - Free Book Online Page B

to ‘own’ London, say.”
    “That’s the honey of an idea, Tim.”
    “Old Jacques sat there, almost rubbing his hands. ‘You mean you’re going to have regular sponsored news programs from all over Europe every single day?’ That took a while to sink in.”
    “Sure, it always staggers them. They can’t see ahead.”
    “But that was only the first part. The real thing that got them was the splitting up. ‘And you mean you’re going to split up those programs and sell sponsorship of all the news for a year, let’s say, out of Berlin?’ He kept asking that over and over.” Grosvenor slapped his knee with delight.
    Jasper nodded, smiled. He listened to every word. But he was thinking, too.
    “They couldn’t visualize my idea at all, Jas. Just because it’s different,” the happy, chubby man went on. “The idea that maybe an international crisis might ‘belong’ to just one advertiser on the newest network—”
    Jasper listened. He seemed to be all listening. But the question. was prowling around his mind, like some furtive marauder.
    “Let’s see the whole file on Mandreth sometime, will you, Tim?” he finally said. So casually he said it, so easily, in his deep, throaty voice, with all the pleasant, well-bred deference to a colleague and partner. “I ought to get up to date on Mandreth.”
    Tim had nodded his promise, and then had been out of town almost constantly since giving it. Jasper himself was gone when he returned to New York, gone, his secretary merely said, “for a few days’ rest down south.” He had returned only that morning and Timothy had pleaded for an immediate meeting. The documents for purchase of stock by Mandreth were being drawn. They would be signed tomorrow or the next day. Jasper agreed that there was no time to be lost.
    The complete file of Timothy’s correspondence with Mandreth now lay on Jasper’s desk. Idly he glanced through it, as they talked. Only when he came to the most recent exchange of letters did Jasper fall into silence and give his whole mind to reading.
    Phrase after phrase leaped out to him from the laconic lines of typewriting. He reached for a pencil, in an impulse to underline each one, then thought better of it, and sat drumming a tiny tap-tap-tap accompaniment on the desk. Tap-tap-tap; tick-tick-tick.
    “I have given my most pointed attention to your proposal,” was one such phrase of Timothy’s. “I can assure you without hesitation that you will always have the opportunity, indeed the right, to…” “My plan is simple here…” “You will be glad to hear, I hope, of an idea I am developing…”
    As he read, Jasper Crown felt something tighten and square off in his mind, his feelings. His suspicion had been intuitive, but now it was documented. Why, this fat, pink Tim Grosvenor was getting ahead of himself. The file itself showed the gradual abandonment of the tone of his early letters— they had carefully and consistently related every idea, every suggestion, every implication of the future to Crown himself. “Mr. Crown’s plans are…” “I talked with Jasper Crown at length since yesterday, and his decision is…” “Jasper Crown is in Washington, so I shall have to wait until Friday to answer…”
    Those phrases had discreetly salted all the early correspondence. Then they had begun to fall away. A sentimentalist might feel that it was a natural transition, since Timothy Grosvenor had been seeing Mandreth so constantly that it was inevitable he should wish to stand more and more on his own. A sentimentalist would yield to Timothy the innocence of his human wish to appear on an equal footing with Jasper Crown.
    But sentimentalists were hateful, frightened little men, afraid of seeming bold and hard. They were guileless, trusting everybody’s goodness until they were trapped by enemies who wanted to emasculate them. Then they whined, too late, that they had been betrayed by their friends.
    “Look here, Tim,” Crown said