The Inheritors by Harold Robbins Page A

we had enough of the snow, so we went up to Boston and caught a plane for Bermuda. We spent a long weekend in the sun and the water. For the first time in three months I was able to fall asleep without wheels in my head. I went back to the office on a Monday morning.
    Fogarty followed me into the office, almost staggering under the pile of papers. She put them down on my desk. “You’ve got great color, Mr. Gaunt.”
    “Thank you. I’ve been in the sun. How’s everything going?”
    She made a face. “Panicsville. Nobody knew where you were and everybody believed that I knew and wasn’t talking.”
    “Sorry if it made it rough on you.”
    “That’s my job. I told them I was your secretary, not your keeper.”
    “Good girl.”
    She gestured toward the papers. “Where do you want to begin?”
    I looked at the small mountain, then I picked them up and dropped them into the wastebasket. I looked at her. “How’s that for a beginning?”
    “Fine,” she said, unflustered. She glanced at her notebook. “Now, about the telephone calls. Mr. Savitt wants you to call him as soon as you arrive; Mr. Gilligan—”
    “Never mind the phone calls.” I got to my feet and went to the door.
    In spite of myself, the question popped to her lips. “Where are you going?”
    “Upstairs,” I said.
    There was a look of surprise on his face as I came into his office. I had walked right past his secretaries. “I was just about to call you,” he said. He held a sheet of paper toward me. “Congratulations.”
    I didn’t look at the paper in my hand.
    “Saturday night held up,” he continued. “We averaged a better than thirty-eight percent audience share the second week. I think you’ve made your point.”
    I put the paper back on his desk without looking at it. “No, Mr. Sinclair,” I said. “You’ve made your point.”
    “I don’t understand,” he said.
    “I didn’t either at first, but now I do,” I said. “And I don’t like any of it. I quit.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    He stared at me for a long silent moment. Then he nodded slowly. “Just like that?”
    “Just like that,” I replied.
    “Am I entitled to ask why?”
    “You are,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll understand.”
    “Try me,” he said.
    “I don’t like being used,” I said. “I came here to do a job. Not to be dropped in a ring and aimed at someone’s throat so that you could turn on.”
    He was silent.
    “That business with Dan Ritchie need never have happened,” I went on. “You could have let him out with his dignity. There was no reason to destroy him.”
    His voice was soft. “You believe that?”
    I nodded.
    “Dan Ritchie had to be destroyed,” he said in the same tone. “I thought you, more than anyone else, could see that. You said he was too old when you came here.”
    “I didn’t advocate euthanasia,” I said.
    He turned cold. “There’s only one way to deal with a cancer. Cut it out. If you don’t, you die. It’s as simple as that. Dan Ritchie was a cancer. He had been with this company twenty-five years and he went sour. You knew that. I knew that. But the board of directors did not. They thought he was the same as he had always been. And more than one of them were quite willing to believe him when he said that you were wasting the company’s money and assets.
    “Sure, I could have let him go. But that wouldn’t have convinced them that he was wrong. There was only one way to do it and only one person who could. You.”
    “And if I had lost?” I asked. “What would have happened then?”
    “You couldn’t lose. I stacked the deck when I let you spend the money.”
    He hit the buttons on his desk and all the television screens leaped into life on the wall behind me. “Look at that,” he said.
    I turned and he pressed the buttons again and the channels began flipping like a kaleidoscope. “There it is,” he said. “The greatest medium of influence the world will ever know. And we’re just beginning to