Mile High

by Richard Condon

  She felt fear. She heard her mother tell once more about Mary Lou Mayberry, a coffee-bean girl. His eyes glowed above the Bible, and only Willie, excepting Mayra, had come to life with what was happening, following the beam of his master’s eyes to Mayra and connecting it, all of it, backward in time, with Mary Lou Mayberry, with Baby Tolliver and with all of what Rhonda Healey had called “Eddie’s black dagoes.” Mayra could not break her own gaze fixed to West’s. He no longer stood before them as a peculiar old man, but as a bull god. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it: Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like a roe to a young hart upon mountains of spice.”

  Mayra knew she was more alone in the white, white world than she had ever been before.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She asked the concierge to tell Walt that she had had a sudden headache and would he please lunch with Dan and she’d see them both later? She lay staring at the ceiling, and her bewilderment increased. Three days before, she had been a safe painter married to a safe architect who was doing well. They had a dinky apartment behind Harrods in London, an even smaller one in Rome, and a bigger one in Paris. They had good friends. All of it was more than she and Mama had mapped out together, because it was a helluva lot better than civil service. The way it had worked out up to three days ago had added up so right that she wanted this baby as a magnet to fling at the moon at the end of a rope of hope that everything would stay exactly as it was. Then had come the private transatlantic airplane and after that Mama’s news. Now they were on top of the mountain and Walt was sitting as wary as a leopard and they were walled in until the afternoon of New Year’s Day. She rubbed her belly longingly and said aloud, “Come on, little baby, grow up and come outta there.”

  Willie stared at West, who was listening to sounds in the room upstairs through large, padded earphones, which he took off with impatience and tossed on the table in front of the monitoring equipment. “What is your impression of the young people?” Willie asked blandly, but West knew him too well. This sly man was up to something, he had some axe to grind.

  “You’ve been with her all of the morning, what is your impression?” West answered, just as blandly.

  “I am very favorably impressed,” Willie answered with deliberate emphasis.

  “What impressed you?”

  “They are both first-class young people. She is about to be a mother, and that in itself is a wonderful thing.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “By George, I wish they were my young people. What a thrill it is to watch something really constructive and worthwhile when it gets started on its way.”

  “How can you tell? What have you ever observed that was constructive or worthwhile?”

  “I have my instincts, of course. And I read a lot.”

  “What is all this blather leading to, Willie?”

  “Idle curiosity. I wondered what you had planned for them.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “I’d have you give them your blessing and send them back home to get on with their lives—after a merry Christmas and a happy new year here, of course.”

  “What is so extraordinary about that?”

  “I haven’t suggested it was extraordinary.”

  “You have engineered an entire conversation about the obvious.”

  “Yes. So I have. Forgive me, Ed.”

  “What did you think I planned to do with them?”

  “Well, I knew you had been spending a great deal of time with your collection of photos and films of Walt’s wife that the Intelligence Department had gotten together and—”

  “Do you begrudge me that little indulgence, Willie? Since my pride has not allowed me to bring myself to talk to my son, do you begrudge me this pathetic attempt to observe his life from afar, at second hand?”

  “No, no. I do not. I think you have shown a father’s interest and hope in a most discreet and characteristic way. But she is dark, isn’t she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I meant to say that we are much alone up here. It is my belief, as your dearest friend, that those photos and films of Walt’s wife excite you and—”

  “Excite me? That is disgusting!”

  “You qualified it, not I, Ed. In fact, I am certain that those films and photos excite you, because it has been several years—several years before these photos of Walt’s wife began to arrive—since you asked me to assemble girls here for your pleasure. You seem to have had your manhood renewed by something, Eddie. And it is my belief that the cause of that renewal was the photos and films of Walt’s wife.”

  “What if I proved to you that I have cause to believe Walt’s wife is a Communist? That I had to make sure? That everything in my life forced me to make sure whether she was or she was not?”

  “Years ago and until this moment, Ed, you put me in charge of that active part of our operations, and I can assure you again, as I have assured you before, that during the months before she and Walt were married I devoted almost all of my time to convincing myself, and you, by every test and inquiry, that she was not a Communist.”

  “Willie, exactly—I mean precisely—what is it you have on your mind?”

  “I am worried, that’s all.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “About you.”

  “Me? You have been talking about Walt and his wife.”

  “I remember very bad trouble we almost had. Mary Lou, for one. I know how excited you get, how charged up you can force yourself to be—”

  “Now, just a moment here, Willie—”

  “My only concern is you, Ed. Only and always you. You are all that counts in this world, and I cannot stand by to allow even you to harm yourself.” Willie got up. He took a small brown bottle from his side pocket and poured a glass of water from a carafe. “And you know I’m right, Ed. You know in your heart that I am right.” He extended the small pill to West, who put it on his tongue. He gave West the glass of water and West drank it down.

  Sergio, the bartender, was telling Dan and Walt about the Arab party that Dan had arranged through the State Department to visit Bürgenstock West for family business reasons.

  “You should have seen what they did to the second floor, Senator West,” he said. “The prince brought four wives this time, so the bodyguard was bigger, and there were all those kids. The prince always ate downstairs with Mr. West, but all the others cooked on the floors of their rooms. They just made fires on the rugs and they burned through the wood to the concrete. And they did everything else on the floor. Every night your father would bring the prince down here to drink champagne, a religious slip, and they would sit here and work on the oil leases all night. When they left, after ten days, he gave everyone on the staff a Patek-Philippe watch that had his portrait on the face in four colors. Two hundred and forty Patek watches, but it took the crews eight days to clean up and restore.”

  Christmas dinner was very quiet. Mr. West did not appear throughout the day or evening after the church services, and Dan left for Washington the next day without seeing him. On the night following Christmas night, at a quarter to twelve, after Walt and Mayra had retired to bed, Walt was summoned to his father’s apartment by a telephone call from Willie Tobin. He dressed, grumbling. Mayra said the main thing to remember was that there were only about five more days to go. When Walt finally found his father, having been passed from his father’s apartment to Willie’s quarters on the other side of the hotel, to the library off the main hall, Mr. West was serene and even Olympian, nearly jovial. They sat as strangers in the large square room among copies of Rubens and Frans Snyders, and Mr. West began by explaining what really fine copies all the paintings at Bürgenstock West were and how, when the copies were made, he had had them follow scrupulously the system of separate painters doing parts of each painting, just as in the Rubens atelier, where Rubens had done the figures, De Voz the animals, Snyders the food and produce, and Wildens the landscapes. Then he asked Wal
t if he was or had ever been a Communist. Walt said his mind didn’t run that way. “I am only a liberal in politics,” he explained, “which Mayra says means that I wish well for all sides providing there is no inconvenience to me.”

  “Mayra says? Did you find yourself a Negro to do your thinking? Are you an ant?”

  “In many ways. I am industrious and patient. I have a keen attention span. Are you an ant?”

  “No forced humor, please.”

  “As for being a Communist—if I were one I’d have to give all my money away. Don’t you think?”

  “Is your wife a Communist?”

  “No. She has over four thousand dollars in the bank. And she’s a painter and she examines the world piece by piece.”

  “Can you arrange your affairs so that you could practice architecture in the United States?”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  “I have acquired three large tracts of land. One is between Washington and Baltimore. The second is in the Midwest. The third will serve Los Angeles, San Francisco and Nevada. I want new cities to be built on the land and a first-class feeder plane or monorail system devised that will keep them safely decentralized.” He watched Walt closely. Walt was wide-eyed with fascination. West said, “I’ve averaged out at about one hundred and eighty dollars an acre, and if the labor force can move in at the moment the housing and the factories are ready, we’ll get forty thousand an acre for the industrial sites and a relative markup for the homesites plus the banking and construction business. Do you want the job?”

  Walt and Mayra went walking along the high path to the Hammetschwand lift and he told her about the offer. There wasn’t much either of them could think to say against it because it was precisely the work Walt had been pointing toward since he and Derek had gone into business. There would be a lot of traveling among the three sites, but Derek could handle that until the baby was born, and while they waited for that, while they got an American office together they could find a house on Long Island somewhere near Mama. In fact, the more they talked about it the better it sounded. They decided Walt should seize the chance. He said he would have to leave for a few days to look over the land sites with his father’s partner, the former Congressman Rei, who was a Midwest banker, but he’d be back by Saturday, and they would leave for good by Monday noon to return to New York. He said she probably wouldn’t see much of his father, who, Willie said, spent much of his time in his rooms, but Willie looked forward to entertaining her, and there were movies every night, bowling, indoor tennis and squash and swimming and a lot of heroic visions to be painted. Mayra said that sounded fine.

  Congressman Rei had done such a great deal to advance the cause of international aviation that Walt looked forward eagerly to meeting him. In the twenties and thirties, to an almost legendary degree, the congressman and his widely publicized personal pilot, Captain Guill Rael, had flown great and greatly reported distances in the Rei Ford Trimotor, almost always with a passenger list of the most delicious sort of celebrities. And these feats of glamour had kept aviation in the forefront of the news. The plane would show up in Havana, Mexico, Canada, throughout the Caribbean, and Rei had a press agent waiting at every stop. What was not as widely known as his keen interest in aviation was his even keener interest in the importation of narcotics. Every plane the congressman ever had could carry up to sixty kilos of heroin or cocaine in concealed compartments, and the consignments always whooshed past the customs in a blur of celebrity dust.

  On the morning of Walt’s departure to join Congressman Rei for a tour of the new city sites, he and Mayra were greatly surprised, when they entered the car that was to take them to the pad, to find Edward West seated there, dressed for travel. “I have business in Chicago and Washington,” Mr. West said. “I do not want State to upset General de Gaulle in any way.” Mayra saw them off, waving at the helicopter as it rose into the sky, then set off toward the West airport at Hawk Bay.

  At lunch time she called Willie, but the room did not answer, and Gubitz, the concierge, told her he thought Mr. Tobin was busy with the mechanics at the car collection in the Palace Hotel. He asked if she would like him to locate Mr. Tobin, but Mayra said not to bother him. She decided not to have lunch in her apartment because she wanted to feel what it would be like to have an entire dining room brigade available to serve her alone, so she went to the dining room, where she chose lightly from the enormous menu. At three o’clock, six vague and formless hours after Walt and his father had flown away, she slung her portable painting kit over her shoulder and set out along the mountain trail to the Hammetschwand lift and the magnificent view.

  For the first time in her three visits, there was no one in the Berghaus. The colored post cards were in the racks. The bar stood gleaming inside the plate glass window and the tables were set for the snack lunches that were so rarely served, but there was no staff. The sun had begun to hint at departure within the hour but its low angle and her high place gave her magnificent color and light and shadow in the forest and snow below her. She felt alone on top of the world, and because it was a temporary feeling, it gave her a sense of exultation, as though she had survived alone the hydrogen bomb, the viscous pollutions of water and air, and the voraciousness of politicians. It made her sad for Mama and Walt, because it was an exalting game to play. Then she set up the easel, propped up the canvas and began to think about what she would paint.

  She watched the colors shift and heard the low wind and began to sketch the complex of Bürgenstock buildings far below. She worked quickly and surely. Very soon it was clear what she had set out to do. Then she heard the voice behind her. It said, “Why did you marry my son?” She turned in fright because the voice was very frightening, not only in its unexpected suddenness. Mr. West was standing on the shallow porch of the Berghaus, ten or twelve yards away. He wore a coachman’s hat and a half-cape overcoat that had a collar he had pulled around his face, whose lower part was already muffled in a heavy black wool scarf. His face was beyond paleness. It was dead white. His mustache was white on white. She stared at him. He spoke again. “Why did an Italian-speaking nigger marry my son?”

  “That only matters to Walt and to me,” she said. Her voice shook. Her eyes were widely opened. She gripped the paint brush with both hands as though it were a railing upon a very high, swaying place.

  “You deserve to be punished for what you’ve done,” the cold-eyed old man said. He stood stiffly, with his head and torso thrust slightly forward, his ungloved hands clenched tightly, his arms rigid at his sides, and each time he paused he chewed on his lower lip. “My family is the most honored American family in this country’s history, which means it is the most honored in the world. You are a nigger. You have shamed my family’s name.” His voice carried harshly across the hastening darkness. They did not move toward or away from each other. “You are a nigger Communist. Niggers are sex-crazy. My son had a life that was meant to be devoted to God, and you dragged him into your bed, and you must be punished for that. Punished in this life.” She could watch the thin line of spittle march out of the left side of his mouth. “I had photographs taken of what you do with him. I have over a hundred photographs of every bed you’ve dragged him into and I know. I know niggers are sex-crazy, and I have the proof of what you did with my son, whose life was meant to be spent in the service of God.”

  She thought of wide spaces of blue sky and deep sunlit depths of crystal water to clear her mind of panic. She concentrated on remembering that Willie Tobin had said that there were cowpaths going down from the mountaintop into the valley behind her. She tried to resolve that she would not run from him. He was an old man. She was Ashanti.

  “You should be beaten until your bones are broken and you bleed from every orifice of your body. Until you scream with pain and want to die. Then you should die. You must be cast down from the heavens. From this mountaintop. That is my right and my duty, to cast you down from the highest place into the pit, where you will enter hell to receive
eternal punishment for thinking only of satisfying your body, for using your body again and again and again for pleasure under a white man of God. Because you degraded my son and degraded my name and because you live for your body and its insatiable appetites.”

  He began to move toward her slowly. His eyes were glassy, shiny but not shining. His eyes seemed to be looking inward as he moved toward her, and the spittle was freely running out of the side of his mouth. She tried not to cry out, but she did. She tried not to run away from him, but she was spun by the force of her fear and sent running away from him with her hands clasped over her ears. The winter dusk was closing in, but she came upon the clearly defined path immediately. She did not look back. Two miles down toward the valley the long, high ridge on which Bürgenstock West was settled stretched out, and as she began to run, its lights came on like a beacon. Fifty yards down the path she halted to look upward and back, but no one was behind her. He was no longer on the mountaintop, but she didn’t know how the other paths on the mountain ran or if he had ways to head her off, so she ran. She fell over bushes and ran into trees as she descended. She was more apart than together when she reached the level of the ridge. She couldn’t remember when the dogs were set loose to roam the estate, so she kept running, gasping for breath, but she didn’t weep, and twenty yards before she reached the entrance to the Grand Hotel she stopped and did her best to put her hair in place and catch her breath. She walked slowly and with dignity to the revolving door, entered the hotel and asked Gubitz to find Mr. Tobin and ask him to join her, if he could, in her apartment.

  When she got upstairs Gubitz telephoned. He said that he had located Mr. Tobin in the Palace garages and that Mr. Tobin would be happy to join her in a half hour.