Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Just before Christmas, Willie got full confirmation that the poison-pen letters which had been sent to Irene, almost shattering the West marriage, had been sent by agents of the Soviet government. The revelation was shocking, staggering, mind-tilting news to Edward: for its starkness alone, as well as for its gargantuan implications.

  He could not believe the documentation that Willie laid out so nervously before him. The story was there however, and in fact undeniable. Willie explained with a shaking voice that after the detective agencies had found only dead ends, he had, on a hunch, veered to friends in the American labor movement—Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, for example. In time, and through Lepke’s connections, he had come upon certain implications that he had not liked at all.

  “What implications?” Edward had demanded sharply.

  “We discovered that more and more left-wing elements—I mean far left Commie elements—had it in for you.”

  “I should goddam well think they would. I’ve taken their goddam unions away from them.”

  “Not that sort of thing at all, Eddie,” Willie said. He seemed to have gained confidence after Edward’s reaction to the initial announcement. “This is all a matter of the feel for this thing that I’ve developed. At my own expense, so that you couldn’t possibly be connected with it, I put operatives on this in Europe—and when I say Europe, I mean Moscow.”

  Actually, Edward had suspected what was coming at him for a long, long time—since his first deep, confidential talks with Mitchell Palmer. Then had come the overthrow of the Russian government by the Bolsheviks, and he had devoured miles of newsprint and ticker tape and State Department reports on how those bandits had torn apart the wealth and culture of centuries in a mad scream of “revenge,” as their leaders called it. The Wobblies had been an even more threatening experience within the United States, and he had been appalled to look into the minds and hearts of fellow human beings and see hatred and envy of himself in there. When the big strikes had been attempted, strikes at industries as vital to the heartbeat of America as big steel and other great industries, in which he and many of the invisible Horizons partners were particularly committed, the entire pattern of the Soviet’s blueprint for world power had become clear to him.

  The USSR had launched her plan to annex the United States. Then, combining that with her own land mass, and resources such as minerals and cheap labor, and adding to it the power and prestige of the United States plus the wealth that would be stripped from Edward Courance West and his friends, Soviet Russia intended to take over the world as a possession of a handful of men in the Kremlin. Edward Courance West had stopped them. It was he, working with Horizons gang affiliates that provided the manpower from big cities, who had been able to organize the tough, mercenary civilian soldiers, the army of capitalism that had smeared the Commies across metal gates and speared them on pike fences, breaking backs and legs as they broke the concept of Moscow-inspired strikes for a fourteen-year period, which had been long enough to take them up to the war and to turn back, then paralyze Soviet Russian plans.

  Here was the evidence in connected report upon written report that the Soviets not only knew who had stopped them but that they were now out to stop him. Here was immutable proof that Soviet agents had sent those poisonous letters to Irene, based upon material and information that Arnold Goff had given them. Goff was a Jew and undoubtedly a Communist, and he would do anything for power or money. The Kremlin had destroyed Irene. The Kremlin had tried to wreck his life. The Kremlin could have as many as five hundred counterespionage people investigating every (visible) cranny of his life, and if they could find out what they thought they could find out, they were going to try to crucify him on the tallest cross in history.

  “What are they after?” he asked Willie shrilly. “What do they think they can find out?”

  “Ed, take a good, hard look at yourself. You are one of the greatest Americans of your time—perhaps of any time. Forty years old—forty years old, but a banker among bankers, an industrialist, a visionary, a patriot—above all, a towering leader.”

  “But what—”

  “Listen to me, Eddie. What do you think it would do to the capitalist system if such a man were exposed as having plotted prohibition for America—”

  “I didn’t plot prohibition. The people wanted it. The churches wanted it. The press wanted it!”

  “No, Ed! I’m with you. What I am trying to do is to bring the picture to you from their point of view. So I will ask again—trying to put it in their words—What do you think it would do to the capitalist system if such a man as you were exposed as having plotted to bring prohibition to the United States for reasons of self-profit, thereby causing more graft and corruption, more crime and lawlessness and loss of respect for all law and authority than any other event in the history of the world? What do you suppose would be the effect on the capitalist system if Soviet Russia could produce facts proving that this same leader had conducted the American labor movement as an industry for private gain and private profit? What would be the effect on the capitalist system if they could show that this man had crashed the Western economic system down upon the heads of the world, causing untold and uncountable hardship and misery? That is how they are trying to paint you, Eddie. Not with truth, but with slime, claiming that you have sold out mankind for power and money. My God, Eddie, that’s the case they are trying to build and that’s why they’ve got to be stopped.”

  Edward got up and began to pace, asking piercing questions, giving orders to begin to set up the information network that would reach into every country on earth and would earn him many tens of millions of dollars as well as becoming the shield that would protect him from the enemy. He stood before Willie and vowed upon his beloved mother’s name and spirit that he would fight Russia to his last breath and that before he was done he would bring her crashing down to her knees broken and dying. He vowed on the Constitution of the United States, which he had always preferred for oath-taking over the Bible, to sacrifice himself, his reputation and his entire meaning to the world in pursuit of that cause.

  He took three powerful sleeping pills from Willie, for the first time voluntarily, and sat, drugged and upright, in a high-backed chair until midday the next day. Most of that time Willie sat across from him, adoring him.

  In 1932, working it all out with the West public relations people so that the conferences could take place on the same day, Yale and Harvard simultaneously offered Edward honorary degrees—Yale, Doctor of Humanities; Harvard, Doctor of Laws. Total press silence was imposed after the arrangements had been settled, but Willie had driven to Gelbart to visit Dan over a weekend and had confided the news to him, and within three days the ancient, collapsible Professor Gelbart himself was removed from some entombed glass case by the trustees of the school and somehow transported from New England to the West National Bank in New York. He was wheeled into Edward’s office by his great-grandson, one of forty-six. Professor Gelbart was said to be one hundred and three years old, but he could still speak quite clearly. He congratulated Edward on winning his G in life and was wholeheartedly happy about the dual degrees that were about to be conferred upon him. Then he asked, simply and irresistibly, if Edward would come back to Gelbart on the day before he would receive his degrees from Yale and Harvard to accept Gelbart honors first, at the side of his own graduating son. Yale and Harvard withdrew their plans for Edward for that year.

  The Gelbart degree became the commencement news. By the act of accepting Dr. Gelbart’s invitation Edward raised $1,319,812 for the building fund of the school, to which he added two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  Commencement Day was organized among the press, newsreels, radio, wire services and trade journals of those industries in which Edward Courance West was a leader, and for the student body and alumni, for June 17, 1932.

  In April 1931, for the second time in his life, Edward had almost fallen in love. He thought of it as “almost” because he had pledge
d in his heart that there could never be a love that might even seem to equal the love he had felt for Irene. The girl’s name was Mary Lou Mayberry. She was a showgirl in the Cotton Club revue, which was a great big joke on the management of the club because she was not a nigger. She had proved that to him the first night they had been together. For one thing, she did not have purple fingernails or gums. His own mother had had purple fingernails and she was as white as the Virgin Mary (in a racial sense). His mother had been quite dark, Sicilian dark. Mary Lou had exactly the same coloring as his mother, the same long ectomorphic body with the same swelling, full chest. Mary Lou, just as his mother had, dreamed of becoming a dancer someday. Mary Lou, it was revealed under probing, was a Sicilian herself. She had been reluctant to say that at first, she had told him, because she was sure he wouldn’t like Sicilians. She couldn’t speak the dialect because she was second-generation and had grown up in California. Her parents were dead. Around the Cotton Club (he was there only twice) she spoke in the patois of Harlem as protective coloration so that her bosses wouldn’t find out she was not a nigger, which would make her lose her job. She was a terribly exciting girl and like some insane gamefish in bed. He thought she was deeply in love with him until June 16, 1932.

  He had established her in an apartment on Madison Avenue, at the corner of 70th Street, that he had had decorated by José Maria Sert, which Willie Tobin had leased under the fictitious name of Professor Julian Smith. Edward visited the flat—an elegant graystone private building having two other luxury flats, no doorman and a self-service elevator—only after Mary Lou finished work uptown, so that no one made him Mary Lou’s great and good friend. As had been the policy since Baby Tolliver had run a private little cathouse right under his nose, Mary Lou had been assigned a chauffeur (male) and a secretary (female), who took her to work and back and who stood guard over her in one way or another throughout each twenty-four-hour day. Mary Lou loved it. At the Cotton Club she was much more important than the star of the show.

  Mary Lou’s bodyguards had been engaged by Willie. The only possible flaw in the plan to shield Edward’s identity would be if Mary Lou told the secretary or the chauffeur or anyone else who her lover was, but that certainly didn’t seem likely. The girl was head over heels in love with him, and he had explained clearly and well why it was necessary for his name to remain secret, and what difference did that make anyhow?

  As time went on and Edward remained raptly interested in the girl, Willie became more and more restive.

  On June 16, at a quarter to one in the morning, as Edward was changing from dinner clothes into street clothes after a pleasant dinner and evening with Clare Padgett, first Horizons investor and now president of the investment bank for whom he had made such a historic connection, Willie arrived at the 55th Street house greatly agitated. “I have some very bad news, Ed,” he said and had difficulty in getting even those words out.

  “What is it?” Edward’s voice was querulous. He was due uptown in forty minutes. And he considered himself beyond other people’s conceptions of what was bad news. Except for Dan. “It isn’t Dan?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What is it, goddammit?”

  “It’s Mary Lou.”

  “What? What happened?” He was suddenly enormously interested.

  “I have just come from one of my regular, routine conversations with the driver. As you know, we pay each of the two of them a little extra on the side, as it were, as though it weren’t a part of their salary, to keep an eye on the other one. It’s just good security, if you know what I mean.”

  “What is the bad news?” Edward had grown pale and seemed all at once very tense.

  “He offered to prove to me tonight that Mary Lou has been having this lesbian relationship with Miss Williams, the secretary we’ve had on the job.”

  Edward swayed as though stricken by a rush of fever. His face became mottled, more lack of any color than its accent. He breathed with difficulty and his eyes became filmed with fixed horror. He moved diagonally and sideways like a drunk crab toward the bathroom, but he couldn’t get there in time. He vomited on the floor, then sat on the carpet beside the pool he had made, falling heavily, then leaning back against the wall. “I have to be alone, Willie,” he said in a ghastly voice. Willie left the room and the house. He watched the house from across the street.

  Edward contemplated this information called by Willie “bad news” when he knew well that his money and his power had placed him far behind common annoyances like that, and he saw it as the worst blow of his life. The second worst blow, then. Worse than the loss of Irene. Worse than what Goff had said to him that last day at the bank. Second only to the nightmare of his mother fleeing from him with her arms around that woman—and all of this had come back to him as the blade of a guillotine falls upon the neck. As he sat on the floor, dazed and unclean with vomit, he imagined he could see his mother’s note, gigantic as a billboard, floating upon a shimmering ocean: THIS IS GOODBYE. I AM LEAVING YOU FOR A WOMAN. I LOVE THIS WOMAN. I AM A WOMAN LOVER AND I HATE YOU. GOODBYE. His father had cradled his own head in his thick arms on the kitchen table and Eddie had read the note. He had read it again and again and he had snatched his father’s arms out from under his head and had screamed at him to tell him what the note meant.

  He had never believed that the note had been written to his father. It had been written to him. She would never have bothered to say goodbye to his father. She felt nothing for him. Hate was too intense a recognition for his father from his mother. She had written to him. All that time she had hated him. She had run away from him, leaving him powerless and without meaning—without any power to help himself, without any meaning to anyone else in the world.

  Edward screamed beside the pool of vomit and pulled himself with desperate need to his feet. He changed his clothes. He looked at the clock. It was two-seventeen. Where had Willie gone? He left the house and walked from 55th to 70th Street—Willie following a block behind. Edward was talking to himself and to his mother, telling her this was the end, that she should never again frustrate him into heartbreak, that he had tried to withstand from her more than any creature of God’s was meant to withstand. He entered the elegant graystone building, took the elevator up to Mary Lou’s apartment, let himself into the flat with a key and murdered her brutally.

  Willie followed Edward back to the 55th Street house, and when he was sure he was safely within, took a cab to his own apartment and called Congressman Rei in Chicago. He gave the names and addresses of the chauffeur and secretary and explained that he felt it was something of a rush job. That done, he had but one thing on his mind. Edward had to get to the commencement exercises at the Gelbart Academy, because an extraordinary concentration of the national press would be there.

  He went to the 55th Street house at a quarter to eight in the morning, bringing the early editions of the newspapers. He went directly to Edward’s room. The room had been aired and the messes cleaned up by the valet. Edward was asleep, in his pajamas. When Willie touched him on the shoulder he came awake at once and said, “Oh, my God! Oh, God, what a terrible dream. I couldn’t get put of it. I couldn’t get out.”

  With sad, sympathetic eyes Willie handed him the newspaper. “That dream happened, Eddie. It’s real.” Edward took the paper and stared at it. His hands were shaking violently. “What am I going to do?” he asked.

  “There’s only one thing you must do. The Gelbart commencement exercises are today and you have got to be there.”

  Edward began to weep. Willie went quickly to bolt the doors. Eddie stopped weeping. He stared at Willie through his pale blue eyes. “They’ll trace the apartment to you,” he said. “They’ll try to put the blame for this on you.”

  Willie shivered. He said, “There is nothing to trace, and I have called Congressman Rei about the chauffeur and secretary, just to be sure.”

  “Oh, God, Willie!”

  “It’s my fault, Eddie. If you can ever forgive me.
It’s not your fault, not any of this. It’s all my fault.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I got a written operative report yesterday afternoon late. I didn’t open it or read it. I don’t know why. I suppose I was busy with something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I opened it this morning. It was all there in black and white. The chauffeur and the secretary were both Communist agents. The woman seduced Mary Lou to try to drag information out of her.”

  “But she didn’t know anything!” Edward screamed. Willie went to the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. He gave it to Edward, then shook two large red pills out of a vial he had in his vest pocket.

  The sun was bright and hot upon the open platform facing Gardner’s Green at the Gelbart Academy. The flashbulbs of the massed news cameras seemed more blinding and insistent than the sun. The microphone had been lowered to the level of Dr. Gelbart’s blank, serene face as he read from the parchment scroll sitting in a wheelchair.

  “Here, then,” he read, “is the meaning of America, hallowed upon an altar within the spirit of Edward Courance West. He has lived out before the very eyes of our world the multiple meanings of the humanities. Here, then, beside us, in our midst, always welcoming our touch, is America itself in the meaning of Edward Courance West, this Atlas whose shoulders lift up and support the significances of our modern society, arching our glorious future above him, keeping it for us, lifting toward a heavenly tomorrow for all because of his deeds. A titan of democracy, the quintessence of all that truly is America—Edward Courance West!”