Executive Suite by Cameron Hawley Read Free Book Online Page A

you could hardly hear even when you were listening for it. The trouble with George was that he didn’t really know Mr. Bullard, not the way Luigi knew him. There wasn’t a thing in the whole world that Mr. Bullard didn’t notice, not one thing.
    The cab leveled at twenty-four and the door ghosted open. Luigi locked the controls and stepped out. There was a slide that would have carried the telegram to Miss Martin’s desk but he ignored it as he always did on days when Mr. Bullard was out of town. It was much more pleasant to walk around the corner and deliver the telegram to Miss Martin hand to hand.
    He walked slowly, his eyes savoring the surroundings. Even after all of these years, and the thousands of times that he had experienced it, there was no diminution in the aesthetic pleasure that Luigi Cassoni derived from the twenty-fourth floor.
    As a boy he had lived in a tiny Italian village at the foot of a hill that was crowned by a castle. Looking up at its impregnable walls, he had often engaged in boyish imaginings of the wonders that must be inside. There was an unbreakable link between those childhood dreams and the reality of the top floor of the Executive Suite, a linkage that persisted despite the incongruity of the castle having been in Italy and the fact that old Orrin Tredway had created the twenty-fourth floor by transplanting a sixteenth-century English manor house.
    In the first months after the Tredway Tower had been built, Luigi had heard old Mr. Tredway recount the history of these rooms, stories filled with kings and queens and lords and ladies, but there had been too much to remember from the first telling and, before the stories could be retold, the teller was dead. It was Luigi who had found Orrin Tredway lying on the floor of his office, his red blood lost in the design of the Oriental rug, his outstretched hand white as chalk, the pistol glittering coldly under the blue desk-light. Strangely, for all its horror, that moment of gruesome discovery had not remained in Luigi’s mind as a vivid association with the twenty-fourth floor. It had been quickly submerged by the overriding memory of that morning shortly afterward when he helped Mr. Bullard move up from twenty-three. An essential rightness was created then that gave validity to Luigi’s mental association between the castle and the Executive Suite. There was a duke who had lived in the castle in Italy and there was much about Avery Bullard that reminded him of the duke.
    Luigi recalled how all the children had stood in silent respect as the Duke rode past in his carriage, not because silence was demanded but because there was some aura about the Duke that made him unmistakably the man above all other men, the man who owned all that there was to own—the shining carriage and the black horses, the streets and the shops and houses, the fields beyond and even the smallest loose stones that lay upon the earth. One of Luigi’s earliest memories was of his father’s distress when a branch had been accidentally broken from an olive tree that stood near the hut that was their home. His mother had attempted to console him by saying that perhaps the Duke would not notice. Luigi’s father knew better. There was nothing in the world that the Duke did not notice.
    If it had not been for certain moral considerations which weighed heavily in his mind, Luigi could have fitted Miss Martin into the child-formed pattern of his thinking with no more effort and concern than he employed in transforming Mr. Bullard into the Duke who lived in the castle. Miss Martin even looked a little like his memories of the Duchess. There was that same up-carriage of her head, that same alert perception, that same ever-watchful anticipation of the Duke’s desire. “Wine,” the Duchess had ordered on the fiesta day when the Duke had made a speech in the hot sun of the piazza, and when the wine had been brought and the Duke had drunk