Mile High

by Richard Condon

  CHAPTER THREE

  Edward West’s habit of collecting intelligence (which began for the most intelligent supervision of American gangsters and the American government for Horizons A.G.) grew to international proportions when the menace of world communism revealed itself to him, then doubled and redoubled within industries and governments of countries throughout the world in personnel, equipment and expenditure as his responsibility grew for reinvesting his gigantic sums of capital and credit in the business and industry of the planet. His facilities for gathering intelligence anywhere were so prodigious, his paranoiac need to confirm/ allay suspicion so deep, that he used this suborganization for all manner of things, things beyond politics and industrial espionage. Among these investigative interests was Walter Wagstaff West, then in her turn, Mayra Ashant.

  When he received a report that his son had dated a nigger seven times in three weeks, Mr. West was indignant and not a little hurt. At Mr. West’s own instructions to Charles Pick, Jr., the boy had been raised and trained to understand that the slightest nuance of change in his public posture could be misinterpreted by the press and the heroic West reputation made to suffer. The idea of his own son being attracted to a nigger was both degrading and viciously exciting to Mr. West, and he resented the boy’s power over him in both respects.

  Then photographs of the girl arrived, together with a detailed statement of her background, career and interests; and staring at that dark face (and actually believing for a second that he was seeing his own mother again), then reading that she was a gifted painter—an artist as his mother had been an artist-thrilled him and revolted him more distinctly. He had Willie assign a photographer to her for fullest hidden coverage. She was photographed on the streets, in restaurants, in her bathtub, in Walt’s arms, painting, dressing, undressing, dressed and naked—for three years, from the time she met Walt until they left for Bürgenstock West—in London, in Paris, in Rome and in many lovely country towns and grubby cities in between. The photographer, Bryson Johns, had become so accustomed to espionage photography that it is to be doubted whether he could still take a successful straightforward portrait in the sunlight. He used infrared, masked cameras screwed permanently within fixtures inside her flats, which he serviced daily, removing film and reloading, while Mayra did household shopping. Consequently, of the two thousand-odd photographs of her in Mr. West’s files there were none showing her with grocers or butchers.

  Mr. West would sit in the library at Bürgenstock West and go over Mayra’s lovely body inch by inch with an enormous magnifying glass, spending a half hour studying her haunch, staring for twelve or fifteen minutes as she sat on the toilet seemingly staring directly at the camera. He had details of her anatomy greatly enlarged: her long hands, her mons Veneris, her ear, her eyebrow, her bottom, her mouth. His passion was renewed all over again when he was told that she was studying Italian, and Bryson Johns was then assigned to make tapes of her speech, which was capable of exciting Mr. West strangely as he had never been stirred before. His years seemed to melt away. He became capable of erection, and once again—but surely the last time in this short final period of his life if he could bring this black woman to him upon the Bürgenstock—he had Willie fly whores in from New York, and he survived two orgies in which he poured champagne into the girls, every part of them, then drank it out of them.

  A leading Italian architect was hired through the West Information Services in Rome to become acquainted with Walter, then to invite him and the black girl to dinner at the architect’s villa, where Bryson Johns had rigged up a secure sound motion picture recording unit and was able to expose one and a half hours of uncut movies of Mayra complete with sound track. Mr. West screened it again and again. He had it scored with wailing Sicilian music, unmusical music but moving nonetheless. He had the right to these things. Nothing in his life meant anything if, with the fruits of his prodigious labors, he could not bring his mother back to him in the form of youth, moving with such frightening grace, speaking hoarsely in the speech of her people, which, if not quite Sicilian speech, was close enough, Italian enough. This was his right. This was what each man should give his life to—his own past, his own youth, the few precious moments of utter, total untarnished happiness with his mother before she left him. But she had left him. She had gone forever. Forever. FOREVER. She had to be punished. She had to be found and fondled. All the joys that she was so capable of giving needed to be abstracted from her, then she had to be punished because of the word “f o r e v e r,” embedded so inextricably in his soul. But he must not hasten the time. Savor everything slowly.

  Gradually Bryson Johns worked out techniques whereby sound motion picture installations were possible and effective in her bedroom, in her workroom and in her bathroom. The man was a wizard, and Mr. West saw to it that he was bountifully rewarded. As the film was shipped into Bürgenstock West, expert editors would shape it into many separate forms, into features and featurettes, as it were, so that if it were Mr. West’s mood to enjoy her walking across Paris, in parks, entering and leaving shops, he could do so; with this went a narration by Mayra herself, a narration taken from the recordings of her accounts of the day to Walt. If it was Mr. West’s whim to hear them rage together in quarrels over why she would not marry him or to listen to her heartbreak when she discovered that he had once been a priest, this was on film with words and music and really excellent photography. He luxuriated with her in her bath, he agonized with her at her easel. He would run close-up after close-up of her gasping twisted face during orgasm after orgasm. The cost-accounting sheets allocated one million three hundred nineteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-four dollars and nineteen cents to the project. The films of her asleep were the most serenely rewarding because sleep, in its external essence, is so much like death, and he would dig the nails of his fingers into his thighs in the screening room and often cry out to the screen in his need to punish her and bring death to her, because she was an artist, because she was his mother, because she spoke in that ancient and evil tongue and because, most of all, because she was a nigger.

  He would lead her to the mountaintop, drugged into a twilight sleep. He would remove her clothes slowly and he would enter her. Again and again. Over and over, as long as his power was there. Then he would beat her. He would smash her face and break the bones of her arms and her chest and her legs as he had been forced to do so many times before when they needed punishment. But she was his mother and a nigger, and he would drag her to the edge of the mountaintop, then cast her down, down into the pit, down into the ultimate punishment. Then he would be renewed and he would start again, wholly cleansed, his mother ripped out of his sensibilities forever. When he finished her nigger punishment he would start again and cause white America to rise up and tear and break and smash down the sickening threat of the nigger living everywhere within the America he owned and loved, threatening white America like an invidious disease.

  He did not tell Willie his plans. He was not as sure of Willie’s loyalty or judgment any more. He would wait. When the punishment was over, his mind would be clearer. Some sign would be given to him to know what he was to do and whom he should choose to help him in his crusade.

  As his archives expanded with her image and her voice, her grace in movement and her beauty, she came to be everywhere he turned. The black woman was there. And the black man was behind the black woman—all Communists, all animals. She was everywhere he turned, and the nigger was more and more everywhere across America, possessing what was not his, threatening the home, the farm, the blood strain. His mother must be kissed and loved, but the artist she had reached out so feebly to become must be denied, because the soul is not free, the soul is bounded and baled by the strong cables of religion, which long, long before had mapped the way of the soul’s journey through all life. The soul was not free. Art is a lie. The mother must be cherished, art denied, and the alien-animal nigger punished. Punished wonderfully and terribly. More than terribly. Worse than ter
ribly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Willie looked elegant and as outdoorsy as a cigarette commercial in a green and white hounds tooth-check jacket over a trendy Norwegian sweater with a long, trailing green woolen scarf that he called his Cratchit. He wore a Tyrolean hat at a jaunty angle and extra-long, narrow hiker’s knickerbockers and high-laced moccasin boots. They walked up the sloping road toward the funicular plaza and Willie identified buildings as they went. They strolled past the Park Hotel to the Palace, and he turned them into the building to show her part of the West automobile collection. “I started it in 1923,” Willie said, “then he saw it and made me sell it to him. He gave me his watch collection—as though that could make it all up. However, it is an unusual watch collection—watches of only people who have appeared on the covers of Time.”

  The main hall of the Palace was seventy by forty feet. Nine twenty-two-feet-high pink marble pillars supported the ceiling, six large paintings were hung over deep-bellied Louis XVI commodes under massive Lobmayr chandeliers. Three automobiles relaxed like lazy cats on Persian rugs. A white Dusenberg stretched out in the foreground. Beyond that was a highly polished, robin’s-egg-blue Dobles steamer, and beyond that a rich Lincoln-green 1907 Compound. “Except for the mechanics and polishers, every guest on every floor of this hotel, and on nine floors sunk into the ground, is a vintage automobile.”

  They walked along the path to a reproduction of a dark brown, wooden eighteenth-century tavern, where Willie put them both aboard a Vespa that he rode along an ascending left-hand fork in the path, past a small, exquisitely beautiful church, then upward into the forest. “We’ll take the Hammetschwand lift to the top of the mountain,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the finest view in the central Adirondacks, just as the real thing is one of the finest views in Switzerland.”

  The shaft of the lift was enclosed in glass. It was illuminated at night, Willie explained, and looked like a pillar of golden fire when seen from the pier on the opposite side of the lake, six miles away. “The Hammetschwand lift at the real Bürgenstock is the fastest elevator in Europe. This is a precise duplicate of the one Herr Frey built when he was outraged to hear that Adolf Hitler’s elevator at Garmisch was said to be the fastest anywhere.” They got off the Vespa and into the elevator car. “It’s straight up now for six hundred and thirty feet to the mountaintop, which puts us at about twenty-one hundred feet above the lake. And the fall on this side of the mountain is as straight down as the sides of two and a half Empire State buildings, one on top of the other.”

  The view was breath-taking. Below them, along the mountain ridge that was the high, narrow spine of land between the emptiness above the lake itself and the soft, green valley mantled with snow on the other side, balanced the buildings of the Bürgenstock. They sipped icy cold Dezaley wine at a tiny replica of the souvenir stand and café that rested on the Swiss Tritten Alp, and Willie showed Mayra the footpaths by which one could descend to the the ridge without taking the towering lift. Willie looked at his watch and said they must go down soon to join the others at the entrance to the church for Christmas services, which, as Mr. West performed them, meant instant slumber for all.

  The concierge of the Grand Hotel leaned across and wrapped Mr. West warmly in the beaver robe. He closed the door, and the heavy Rolls glided silently for two hundred yards down the hill, where, at the end of the road, the driver turned the car around. Walt could look downward at the helicopter’s landing pad at the foot of a long escalator stairway. Walt and his father had not spoken to each other beyond their greeting in the hall of the hotel. When the car stopped they could hear the sound of the chopper and their eyes followed it down. Walt stood on the brow of the hill in the clear sunshine, deep in snow, and watched Dan get out of the plane.

  Dan was wearing a black homburg, a white silk scarf and a black overcoat with satin-faced lapels over a dinner jacket and black tie. His face was a high color. He glided up the escalator, talking as he came. “Where’s your wife?”

  “Willie took her out on a special morning tour.”

  “How is you-know-who behaving?”

  “Fine. He’s right here.”

  “You look great, kid.”

  “You look pretty fit yourself.”

  “Don’t believe it. I flew in straight from an all-night party at Rockrimmon. I’m not exactly dressed for a Christmas day lunch.” They embraced, then Dan leaned into the car and shook hands with his father. “It’s a long climb,” he said, grinning. “Can’t we get a high-speed escalator?” Mr. West took up a dictaphone from inside the arm rest and spoke into it. “Investigate high-speed escalators,” he ordered into it. The driver packed them in under the beaver robe. Dan smelled of the very best bourbon. Mr. West said, “What does State have to say about Roncalli?”

  “He’ll make a good Pope, Father.”

  “My people say he’s some kind of a liberal.”

  The driver got behind the wheel. The car moved sedately up the hill. “De Gaulle was elected with a seventy-eight-point-five percent edge over Communists. Maybe sanity has come back to France.” To Walt their conversation seemed coded, as if they were speaking in some private shorthand. But the timbre of his father’s voice had changed: He no longer sounded like a querulous old man. “There are nine hundred and eighteen computers in use in this country. My companies operate one hundred and seventy of them. There are a hundred and fifty-four computers working in Europe and my people operate sixty-three of those. All those computers and my own sure sense tell me that we’re going to make a real killing in France in the next five or six years, and I don’t want your State Department rocking the boat.” The car stopped at the Grand Hotel. “No, no,” Mr. West said. “We’re going on to the church.”

  “Not me, Father,” Walt said, opening the car door. “I’ll look for you at lunchtime, Dan. In the bar?” He shut the door, and the car moved forward as Walt went into the hotel.

  “I have my doubts about your brother,” Mr. West said. “An unfrocked priest who marries a nigger and refuses to go to church sounds like a Commie to me.”

  “Please,” Dan answered wearily. “No communism. It’s Christmas. Why did you invite them here?”

  “He’s my son. I am entitled to curiosity about my son.”

  “After thirty years? After my appealing to that curiosity three dozen times in the past fifteen years? Why did you invite them here?”

  “Did you invite yourself all the way here just to ask me that?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. West shut his eyes. “I am old, Dan,” he said. “I’ll be dead soon. I wanted to make my peace. Maybe I made a terrible mistake with what I did to that boy. I don’t know. I have to find out. I wanted to see him here and in a little while to be able to talk to him. Maybe he has big dreams. He’s young. Why not? Maybe I can help him. That’s what fathers are supposed to be for. That’s why I invited him here at Christmas time. That’s why I’m so confused for one of the few times in my life.”

  “I hope that is why you invited him here.”

  Mr. West turned the full power of his eyes upon his oldest son. “And if it isn’t? Are you threatening me? Do I hear that in your voice?”

  “Yes, Father,” Dan said, regarding at him steadily. “You do. If anything wrong is done to that boy or his wife, you and I will break apart and I will fight you from their side.”

  “You are a silly man to volunteer a thing like that, Dan,” his father answered and closed his eyes.

  Mayra and Willie and Dan filed into the church with the small congregation of hotel employees. It was a strikingly beautiful church interior, an exact replica of the church at the original Bürgenstock. It was simple beyond simplicity. Hand-carved, painted statues stood in elevated niches. The altar was a multicolored triptych illuminated by the sun. All around was immaculate white plaster upon which the sunlight fell from stained-glass windows on either side and high behind the altar. The congregation seated itself, then folded up its collective mind and tucked it
away. Dan went to sleep immediately. Willie sighed and settled himself for shock waves of boredom as Mr. West appeared wearing a long, black robe and moved to a place behind a lectern.

  He gazed out fiercely into the blanked faces of his audience and intoned. “On this supreme of all birthdays, let us pray.” He led them in the Lord’s Prayer, then opened the large Bible in front of him. His eyes shone. He spoke only to Mayra, but the other three dozen people had been so turned off by previous sermons that no one was aware of the intensity of the attention he paid to her. What he said was written in the Bible, but he seemed to know the words as though they were his own: “Let her kiss me with the kisses of her mouth, for thy love is better than wine. Draw me, we will run after thee, the king hath brought you into his chambers and we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee. Set me as a coal upon thine arm: for love is as strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”