Mile High

by Richard Condon

  “Who is it?” All partners leaned forward.

  “At this moment the name is unknown to me. If you wish, I’ll have another talk with Kelly. However, Kelly’s client is said to be a well-known figure in the shipping business. I thought perhaps you might be able to deduce who he might be.” The law firm had been in publicly fought litigation for nine years with the Evans-Dwye Steamship Lines and had won, so far, eleven of the seventeen law suits filed. The litigation and its bitterness had seldom been out of the financial pages. Heller banged his fist down with force on the arm of his chair. “It’s Evans!” he yelled. “Let’s break his goddam back!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Arnold Goff’s finished brief was delivered directly to Mr. West by Goff’s fiancée, Miss Bella Radin, to his apartment in the Buckingham Hotel on Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street in one day less than the maximum bonus period—completed in fifty-nine days. It was five weeks after West had rescued Pick, Heller & O’Connell and, in a way, identified their oppressor. (“Because I value your son’s friendship, Mr. Pick,” and “I am an attorney before I am a banker, Mr. Heller, and I ask you to banish from your mind any possibility of rewarding me for what is nothing more than professional courtesy,” and “If there is the slightest repercussion from Paul Kelly or whoever his client may be I will depend on you to ring me at once, Mr. O’Connell.”)

  The Goff brief was magnificently comprehensive. It comprised eleven volumes of about five hundred pages each, neatly typed in double spacing and bound sensibly, volume by volume, in buckram. A sixty-three-page précis accompanied it as well as a bibliography. Eddie was pleased. It was a Friday afternoon. Before she left he asked Miss Radin to please tell Mr. Goff to come to see him at the hotel on Sunday at noon.

  Eddie untied his tie slowly as he stared down greedily at the massive brief, standing in the center of the high-ceilinged, enormous room that had been combined from two apartments to recreate the feeling of the interior of an English country house of the first third of the nineteenth century (just about the time his father was escaping the Irish famine by teaching himself to chew and swallow English corn). He had installed a nine-foot-high white marble fireplace. The facing sofas were deep-dimpled black leather, each with hundreds of shiny black buttons. He worked at a heavy, wide library table that stood on a thick Chinese rug with royal blue markings on a field of gold. The room had two large, square standing safes, each covered with a Spanish shawl, each wired to explode five seconds after forced entry, each holding nests of locked strongboxes, because the West operation took in and paid out large amounts of cash at all hours of the day and night.

  He took a bath, put on silk pajamas, a dressing gown, woolen socks and slippers, poured himself a glass of ginger ale, then settled down at the table to begin examining the brief. He read until three-fifteen the following morning, then slept until nine o’clock, when he showered, shaved, dressed and had a light breakfast. He read again until ten that night, slept until five the next morning, then read until eleven forty-five. Goff arrived promptly at noon, wearing the same mauve necktie he always seemed to wear.

  “Don’t you have any other ties?” Eddie asked as greeting.

  “I only wear mauve ties. I have twenty-two mauve ties.”

  “Why?”

  “My fiancée likes mauve. Besides, it goes with black suits and white shirts and I collect those too.”

  Eddie asked him to sit down and offered him a drink.

  “I don’t drink,” Goff said.

  “I don’t either.”

  “Let the chumps have it.”

  “I liked your brief.”

  “Good.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  Goff handed Eddie an envelope. Eddie removed the bill and studied it.

  Bonus

  $1500

  Assts. (4)

  16 wks at $15

  960

  Typists (5)

  12 weeks at 112

  720

  $3180

  “What’s this sixteen weeks for assistants?” Eddie asked. “You did it in eight weeks.”

  “You authorized four for a hundred and twenty days.”

  “And that’s a lot of money for typing.”

  “Is it? Can you buy a typist for only twelve dollars a week?”

  “You haven’t charged me for supplies and typewriter rentals.”

  “My treat, Mr. West.”

  “All right. This is a fair statement. I’ll pay it.” He took out his wallet and tossed it across the room. Goff caught it. “Keep the wallet as a memento,” Eddie said. “My treat.” Goff took the money out of the wallet and counted it. His face flushed deeply. “This is exactly three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars,” he said slowly.

  “So long as it’s correct.”

  “Now I guess you expect me to ask you how it happened that there was exactly three thousand one hundred and eighty dollars in the wallet.”

  Eddie shrugged.

  “You put a plant on me.” Goff was deeply offended and it showed. “Were you trying to tell me something?”

  “I thought you might like to work for me,” Eddie said. “And I like to have suspicious people working for me. Plants don’t happen to suspicious people, not to careful people. For instance, as I told you the day I retained you, I don’t think you should have told your girl who your client was.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “I want a man to handle money. We do informal short-term financing. There are other payments and collections.”

  “Is it legit?”

  “No.”

  Goff drummed on the arm of the chair with his white fingers. “Then it isn’t something I could do as a lawyer, is it?”

  “Entirely up to you.”

  Goff stared at him with those hard, hard eyes.

  “You said you wanted to be a professional gambler. I own three gambling houses. I need one manager for all of them. I’d want you to see that you got yourself publicized as a gambler. I’d like it if everyone thought of you as Arnold Goff, the sportsman.”

  “Why?”

  “Gamblers are always handling large amounts of cash-passing it from hand to hand.”

  “What’s the pay? I assume I could keep what I win.”

  “You may keep it if you bet your own money, and you’re not likely to get any of mine for that. I’ll pay you two percent of all the money you handle, going out and coming in. Until you learn the trade you can have five hundred a month on a drawing account.”

  “I’ll need to talk it over with Bella, Mr. West.”

  “Marry her, sure. But why tell her my business?”

  “Because we want to be a family. Because sometimes life is nice. Maybe most of the time. I wouldn’t be giving her my respect if I only shared the good things with her.”

  “She was my plant.”

  “What?”

  “I said your fiancée was my plant with you. I paid her a hundred dollars. She told me how much the bill would be when she brought the brief Friday afternoon. She told me how you refused to charge me for the rent of the loft because it was your father’s and you got it for nothing. Now, that was chump stuff. That was silly and sentimental.”

  Goff looked stricken. He didn’t speak. His right hand pressed hard on his diaphragm. He looked as though he were going to be sick.

  “A plant is a plant,” Eddie said. “Anybody can set a plant, because money is grease and I’ve got the grease.” He stared down at Goff with ice-water contempt. “Never tell anyone anything. Never trust anyone. When you told her who the client was she was in business for herself.”

  Goff’s face was sunken. He gripped his whole lower face with his widely opened right hand and clung to it tightly as though his head were himself, all of himself, and he needed to grip hard to hold everything together.

  When he spoke, minutes later, he said, “When do I start?”

  “Wednesday night. Be here at eight. We’ll have dinner, then I’ll take you on the rounds. Would you like
some tea?”

  “No, thank you, Mr. West.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  After Goff left, West went out for some air. He strolled up Fifth along the Park, then down the other side of the avenue, apparently window shopping but actually preoccupied with the problem of concealing his youth at the moment of the key confrontations, searching for some technical way he could get around this serious disadvantage. But the answer would not come. When he got back to his flat he assembled pads and pencils and editing crayons in schizoid order, then at 2:23 P.M. he began the editing for publication.

  When rum became the currency of the slave trade in the last half of the 18th century, Americans drank more than at any time in history and this thirst grew as rum became one of the important factors in the colonial economy …

  Eddie grinned with pride in himself for conceiving exactly how it could all be accomplished as he read that the first prohibition law had been passed in the colony of Georgia in 1735 and that all those for whom the law ostensibly had been passed immediately neglected their work and devoted themselves to plotting how they could insure a free and ample supply of ardent spirits. The first moonshine stills ever operated had started to work. Rum runners from the Bahamas began an extensive trade. Blind tigers sprang up in every Georgia settlement until there were as many drinking places per capita in the colony as there were in London, and bootleggers worked in all districts selling rum from peddler’s packs.

  … the movement to prohibit alcohol must be seen, in the largest sense, as a struggle between rural and urban America. The first colonists brought with them the doctrine that rural life was good, that city life was wicked. The farmer was the backbone of the nation. The new Constitution was written to protect rural rights, i.e., disproportionate representation in the U. S. Senate of the rural countryside as against the cities. State capitals were founded in isolated rural villages such as Albany and Harrisburg. State taxation gave the power to the rural people, whose taxes were not sufficient payment for it. Birth in a log cabin was essential to the suitability of presidential candidates.

  By eleven o’clock that night Eddie was marveling and making carefully separate sidenotes on such things as the most famous medical man of his time, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Surgeon General of the Continental Army and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his pamphlet of 1785, “An Inquiry into the Effect of Spirituous Liquors on the Human Body and Mind,” laying out fundamental lines on which all prohibition efforts to follow would be argued.

  … for the transition period between drunkenness and temperance Dr. Rush recommended the use of laudanum or opium mixed with wine.

  In 1788, Fisher Ames, the man who had defeated Samuel Adams for Congress, campaigned on this statement: “If any man supposes that a mere law can turn the tastes of people from ardent spirits to malt liquor, he has a most romantic notion of legislative power.”

  However, the College of Physicians in Philadelphia was influenced by the Rush Report to send recommendations to Congress in December 1790, when the legislature was considering new revenue laws against West Indies rum and the Rush Report caused the formation of the first temperance associations in America.

  The first temperance society in the world was organized in March 1808 by Dr. Billy J. Clark, “a young and intrepid physician” of Moreau, Saratoga County, New York. Within the next decade temperance societies were formed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Pennsylvania. Only candidates who guaranteed to support a prohibition law, state-wide, were endorsed for the legislature, and it was demonstrated that the people would vote for him regardless of party lines. The individual response of these citizen-voters, however, was so overwhelmingly in favor of hard liquor and against all laws that sought to prohibit their manufacture and sale that every manner of bootlegging and moonshining was resorted to until the temperance movement lost all it had gained.

  Eddie was awed by the stultifying emotion that managed to wreck perfectly sound plans decade after decade. He had solid admiration for the firm grip of the temperance movement on the schoolbooks used in all public schools that taught from the earliest grades that alcohol was evil, but he deplored that none of them seemed to see the path by which they could follow up and consolidate such gains. The profit motive was missing, he decided. No American movement could hope for success unless great numbers of people could be helped to share in the clearly available profits from their work. “… 122,000,000 copies of McGuffey’s Reader were in the schools and they formed the minds of rural Protestant America,” and “In 1873 the Women’s Christian Temperance Union persuaded the Congress and state legislatures to pass laws requiring temperance teaching in all public schools. By 1902, every state and territory except Arizona had such a law but, as a foremost critic wrote: ‘There can be no indoctrination without misrepresentation.’ A sample instruction in all schools: ‘A cat or dog may be killed by causing it to drink a small quantity of alcohol … it often happens that the children of those who drink have weak minds or become crazy as they grow older.’”

  Clearly alcohol in the cities was the terrible threat to the nation from the point of view of the temperance societies. The census figures showed that wicked city dwellers and the foreign-born were nearly half the population of the United States. This made the drys desperate and entreated urgency. The old rural America was being attacked.

  … Frances E. Willard, 34, Dean of Women at Northwestern University, was elected president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1879 when the Union was organized in twenty-three states. Within a decade she had established branches in every state, city, town, village and hamlet, and the total prohibition movement took over the control of the most vigorous part of the prohibition industry. These gallant helpers praised the mothers and the schools that indoctrinated the young for thirty years. They pointed out the great evils ascribed to the Pope, atheists and the devil, to jazz and to bootleggers, expressed the dread of the great social change and the struggle as to whether citizens shall be free to drink alcohol as a test of strength between social orders. Through this great trumpet it was established, hopefully forever, that the determined rock of prohibition was the granite base on which the evangelical church militant is founded, and with it are involved an entire way of life and an ancient tradition. The overcoming of prohibition will mean the emergence of the cities as the dominant force in America—as dominant politically as they are already dominant economically.

  When he finished editing, West called Willie Tobin to have him begin to choose a printer-binder whose price would be right in consideration of the city printing business Eddie would be willing to swing his way. He asked Willie to have such a printer at the hotel at nine-thirty the next morning. He awoke his secretary by messenger to her father’s house at one-fifteen in the morning. His note asked her to assemble five typists for emergency work on day and night shifts and asked her to come to the hotel the next morning at nine forty-five with two strong office boys and a wagon to transport eleven volumes of typescript to the assembled typists at the bank.

  At a quarter to four in the morning he changed his mind. He called Arnold Goff at the 38th Street gambling house and asked him to please secure the use of his father’s loft for emergency typing, then he sent another messenger to awaken Miss Mechanic’s family so that she could receive the revised instructions.

  After he had discussed the project with Miss Mechanic and the people from the printer-binders and they had all left with the typescripts to take them to the loft, Eddie donned police-issue storm rubbers, a warm scarf and a greatcoat and went out in the rain to march with the Tammany contingent in the procession of fifty thousand people mourning the deaths of one hundred and forty-three women who had been trapped in the Triangle shirtwaist fire.

  After the parade he and John Kullers went to Delmonico’s for a business meeting. They ate downstairs. The Leader was still touchy about not having been warned about the Pick, Heller & O’Connell plan. Kullers was a
bulky, pink man who wore silver-rimmed glasses and examined everything he touched—plates, napkin hems, handshakes and cigarettes. After holding a short beer up to strong light for minute analysis he sipped it.

  “What do you expect to find when you stare at beer that way, John?” Eddie asked.

  “You never know. Eleven years ago some smart guy slipped a goldfish into a beer on me. And I caught poison ivy from a baseball bat. Always look is best, Eddie.”

  “You know a man named Arnold Goff, John? A lawyer?”

  “I don’t think so. But bring him in here, let me look him over top to bottom, and I’ll tell you exactly.”

  “I’ll send him to you tomorrow. He’s going to run the gambling and some of the payoffs for me.”

  “Is that so? How’ll I know him? We don’t want me talking that kind of business to the wrong guy, do we, Eddie?”

  “He’ll be wearing a mauve necktie, John. A middle-sized, pale man.”

  “Got you.” The waiter set a steak down in front of Kullers, who pierced it at one end with his fork (which he had previously scrutinized) and lifted it slowly off the plate, watching it closely.

  “What do you think you might find there, John?”

  “It could be anything, Eddie. A man in Twin Lakes, Pennsylvania, put itching powder on a steak and gave it to his brother-in-law as a joke. The man choked to death before his eyes. What can I do for Goff, Eddie?”

  “Get to know him. Put the word out that I sold out the houses to him. After he operates for four or five months I think we could recommend to the other leaders that he handle all their contact work for police payoffs and like that. It could mean cleaner politics on election day. What do you think, John?”

  “I like it. And I think the boys’ll go fer’t.” He lifted a huge baked potato out of its dish and slipped a jeweller’s loop over his right eye to go over the surface of the potato skin carefully. “Your father, God rest his soul, coulda told you what the blight did to the potatoes in Ireland. The blight come from right in this country, you know.”