The Woman in Black

1The rain streamed steadily down the translucent plastic brick walls of that miracle, or monstrosity, of structural sleight-of-hand on M Street in Washington known as the Executive Building of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. Inside on the fifth and top floor, Ellery B. Seymour, Chief Assistant Executive of the Enterprises, sat behind the plastic simulated-birchwood desk in his private office. The rain gave the outside wall a gray wavering unreality that was heightened by the shadowy mass of the ailanthus tree in the alley. It was a blinded, fish’s-eye view of a narrow universe, insulated against sight and sound. Ellery Seymour frowned. If the rain did not stop and the ceiling rise, Enoch B. Stubblefield’s private plane bringing him from Chicago would have to go on, to New York or Richmond, and it was important for him to be in Washington that night. Seymour frowned again, glancing at the wall that divided his office from the open space beyond it, where lesser Executives and the Chief Assistant Executive’s secretarial staff were soundless shadows, efficient ghosts moving against an illuminated screen. It seemed to Ellery Seymour, inventor of the process which had built these walls, that he had created a world of monstrous pantomime. He felt it when he went down in his private elevator and through the Executive Corridor to the street, finding the shadows suddenly endowed with substance and life and color. He felt it when his personal secretary materialized through the door that looked like a door only because neatly printed on it was “Ellery B. Seymour, Chief Assistant Executive.” She seldom materialized, however. If he flicked the second lever under the edge of the plastic desk, her face appeared on the small screen beside him and her voice came through the communication box underneath it. Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises were the ultimate in depersonalized contact. There were other levers he could flick and be in instant touch with any of the dozen plants of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. If he flicked down still another, he could talk to Enoch B. Stubblefield himself, riding high in the sky somewhere out of Chicago. It was supposed to be down always whenever Enoch B. Stubblefield was aloft. It was up now, however, and would stay up until Ellery B. Seymour finished the work he had to do. He picked up the blue-covered document on the desk and looked at it. Across the top was typed “Last Will and Testament,” under that his name, “Ellery B. Seymour.” He took a pen from the desk holder, drew a line through the initial “B,” wrote the word “Richard” above it and put the initials “E. R. S.” beside it. He put the pen down, opened the Last Will and Testament of Ellery Richard Seymour, and read it through. It was a single page, with only two paragraphs after the ritualistic preamble. The first paragraph reaffirmed the terms of the Ellery B. Seymour Trust, established to make grants to graduate engineering students under thirty-five, married and in need of financial aid. The second paragraph bequeathed to the Treasurer of the United States all interest held in the name of Ellery B. Seymour in Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. Seymour took a sheaf of thin legal paper, closely typed, from his inside coat pocket, released the staples on the will, put the typed sheets in place under the narrow blue flap with the will on top, and stapled them together. He turned back the single sheet, prepared by the Legal Division of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises, and read through the addendum that he had spent the morning preparing for himself. “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.—Aware that the most carefully thought-out plans may fail, from unpredictable circumstances, and that I may as easily fail as succeed in the culmination of the plan I have worked on for a number of years, I am making the following statement. I make it in this form because I realize that in the event of failure there is no probability of my individual survival. 1. I propose to bring about the financial and personal collapse of Enoch B. Stubblefield. 2. I have been in a position to do this many times in the last few years. I did not do it, because the country was at war. The war being over, I am now under a peculiar obligation to proceed. 3. My reasons for doing this are not entirely personal, though I would be deceiving myself if I pretended that an intense personal animosity was not the basis of my action. My relations with Stubblefield began nineteen years ago, when I had invented a plastic process which he developed under the trade name ‘Structoplast,’ and from which all his buildings, including the one in which I now sit, have been constructed. At the time he refused to give me an interview. ‘If that damn fool comes here again, kick him downstairs and call the police,’ I heard him bellow at his secretary. Six months later, his wife went to a fortune teller-astrologist, who happened to be also my landlady. She told her to tell her husband to watch for a young man with the same initials, born under the same sign of the zodiac, who would bring him great riches. She was trying to get me a job long enough to pay my back rent. I changed my middle initial, moved my birthday up under Sagittarius, and went back to see him. He had a new secretary and saw me. In the eighteen years since then I have found Stubblefield a cunning, crafty and enormously able individual, a first-rate, absolutely callous promoter. I have also found him childishly vain, an egotist to the point of megalomania, arrogant to his supposed inferiors, incredibly superstitious, completely cold-blooded, cold-hearted and ruthless, and concerned solely with his own self-interest. That is Enoch B. Stubblefield as I know him. Enoch B. Stubblefield the genial, warm-hearted humanitarian, the industrial wizard who builds the workers’ recreation center and hospital before he builds the plant, is the product of one of the most high-pressure publicity campaigns any organization has ever conducted, and one of the most expensive. It has been so effective that he now believes it himself, and actually points with self-righteous pride to press releases that he has just paid to have written in his own office. If that was all I have against him, there would be no point here except personal animosity, and no justification for my writing this. 4. In the last sixteen years, Enoch B. Stubblefield has operated on a big-time basis almost exclusively on public funds. Working on cost-plus in a period of emergency, the sky has been the limit. He is now, however, preparing to organize investor-financed industries which will suck in thousands of small holders who have been fed his daily press releases, and who from the mail already received in these offices, are eager for the slaughter. The collapse, when it comes, will make Insull look like a public benefactor. I am therefore needling the collapse before one dollar of private capital has actually been contributed. One-third of the seven million dollars which I intend to take him for, and which is the total amount of free capital this fabulous figure is able to command without borrowing, is my own interest in Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. If I succeed in my plan, it will be non-existent. If I fail, it becomes the property of the United States Treasury, which can in due course step in and reorganize without a total loss of public money. 5. I regret the few individuals who are necessarily involved in the carrying out of my plan—all but one of them quite innocently, and that one innocently except as she embodies the two qualities that Stubblefield maintains in private conversation motivate all members of the human race: vanity, and cupidity. That has been his successful working hypothesis to date. I have always counted on those qualities in him for the success of my own experiment. If the rain stops, tonight begins the culminating phase.” Ellery Seymour flicked the third and fourth levers under the edge of the desk. In the translucent brick wall he watched two shadowy figures rise and move, merge into one at the door marked “Chief Assistant Executive,” materialize into solid substance as two young women came into his office. He smiled at them. “I want you to witness my will.” He signed the top page, moved it up until the blank line for his signature, under the last sheet, was in view, and signed again. The two young women wrote their names. “Thank you both.” He smiled at them again. When they had merged into shadows he opened the desk and took out a carbon copy of the single-page will. On it he wrote the number of a safety-deposit box and the name of a small bank in Georgetown. He put it in an envelope, sealed it, put it in another envelope and addressed it to the Legal Division, Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. He wrote “Private—For Safe Keeping” across the top and signed it “E. B. Seymour.” He looked at his watch. It was half-past one. A taxi would get him to Georgetown before the bank closed. He put the signed will in his pocket, wondering for an instant whether either of the young women had noticed the change from “B” to “R” in his middle initial. It was unimportant, except in the sense that trivialities can assume enormous weight in any delicately and dangerously balanced scheme of things. At the private elevator he pressed the concealed button. It was all set. Everything but the rain . . . and the rain had to stop. He wanted Enoch B. Stubblefield in Washington that night. They were scheduled to dine at half-past eight with three members of the War Assets Administration in charge of the disposal of a thirty-five-million-dollar plant in Graysonville, Louisiana. Thirty-five million dollars’ worth of surplus property . . . going for seven and a half million, cash on the barrel head.