“Dan and I can have him committed. Maybe I couldn’t do it all alone without a big fight and without its taking a long time. But if Dan and I both sign the papers, we’re the only sons. And Dan is a United States senator. I can convince Dan—I know I can—because over the years he’s as much as said that Father isn’t right in the head. We can get it all done in twenty-four hours—the court order committing him, the psychiatrists, and we can come back here with all of it, and his whole force of security police won’t dare go against the law.”
“That’s it. That’s how we could do it.”
“But—but, I can’t. I can’t leave you here. I can’t do it, Mayra.”
She was trembling violently, so she sat down suddenly. She sat on her hands, and that held her arms rigidly at her sides, so that he could not see that she was shaking with fright. “It’s the only way,” she said, as easily as she could. “If we don’t do that, honey, we are cooked. We dead.” Her face seemed gaunt from all the morning retching as she stared up at him, and her eyes were desperate, but the steadiness of her intelligence and her courage overwhelmed all that. “Fix it up to get out of here Monday morning,” she said lightly, “and we’ll have all day tomorrow to figure out how he can’t get near me.”
CHAPTER NINE
After Walt told Willie he had to go to New York, Mr. West called Walt to say that two psychiatric nurses would be standing by to return with him, but until they got there, how did Walt think his wife could best be protected from herself? Walt said Mayra was quite calm, that she reacted marvelously to sedation, and that he thought the best plan would be to post a security officer in the hall outside her door.
Walt and Mayra spent Sunday inside their apartment. They ate only unpeeled fruit. They talked about fashioning weapons, but Mayra said she wouldn’t know how to use them and that she would rely on her own agility to defend herself.
“That’s not enough. We have to hide you.”
“Where?”
“This is an enormous hotel. I’ll get a set of skeleton keys from the desk late tonight and sometime before dawn we’ll plant you in one of the smaller hotel rooms and you’ll stay right in there until I get back.”
“I can’t hide until the mail comes tomorrow. I’ve got to have Mama’s scrapbook because it’s a tremendous weapon. The best defense is an offense. Man, that scrapbook is really an offense.”
“How is it a weapon?”
“No use trying to tell you unless you see it. But it’s what he did to women a long time ago. Mama knows. She worked for the women. He thinks it’s all blown over. He thinks nobody ever connected him with what happened. If he can get the idea that somebody knows he killed a woman—yes, he did, baby, yes, he did”—Mayra held her hand over Walt’s mouth as he started to press for more explanation. “I say, if he knows somebody knows he murdered that woman, then his head is gonna be so full of the fear of that that he isn’t gonna come for me—man, not the first night anyhow, he’ll be so shook up—and you’ll be back here before the second night, and then it will be over.”
“But how are you going to tell him? How can you tell him you know and expect to get away from him, to hide from him?”
“I’m going to tape pages from that scrapbook up on his door, then I’m going to be out of there before anyone knows I’ve ever been there.”
“But why? How can that help anything?”
“Baby, how can I make it clearer? Suppose you were the safest man in the world, then all of a sudden everywhere you looked there was a big poster that told everybody you had killed a woman. Suppose you knew, all of a sudden, that somebody near you knew you were a killer. What would you do? I’ll tell you. You’d start thinking only about yourself and stop playing games with black girls until you could get this first bad thing all straightened out. Dig?”
The scrapbook came from Mama as promised, and because Willie had cleared it days before, after West had played back the tapes of Mayra’s call to Mama, it was handed right over by Gubitz, unopened. Walt called Willie’s room. He was told Willie was in the lobby waiting for him.
“Why do we want Willie?” Mayra asked. Walt said he had been told that Willie would be riding with him to New York and that Smadja and Herr Zendt would be riding with Willie. “The explanation is,” Walt said in a thin, shaking voice, “that we’re coming to the time in the staff contracts when one-third of them are revolved back to Switzerland, and they are going into New York to line up replacements. But that’s better than it’s bad. I’ll get you a key to Willie’s room so that you’ll have a second place to hide if he flushes you out of the first.”
They couldn’t use the elevator because of the sound it made. They ran together along the carpeted corridor to the red light over the exit staircase at the end of the hall on the top floor. Mr. West’s apartment was directly below theirs. He took her to a single room at the end of the long hall on the floor below his father’s. “You know where Willie’s place is?” Walt asked her at the door to the small room. “The floor below this? Placed the same as our apartment and my father’s, directly facing the stairs?” She nodded. He kissed her desperately. She locked herself in the room, then Walt sprinted two floors up, then along the corridor to his apartment. He telephoned his father to say he was leaving and that he’d like to be sure a security guard would be posted outside Mayra’s suite before he left. “How does she seem this morning?” his father asked.
“She’s fast asleep. She promised to take the same medicine when she wakes up.”
“Good.”
Walt waited until the security man knocked at the door, then he left the apartment and locked the door behind him. The man carried his suitcase to the lift, and Walt told him that Mrs. West was resting easily and that undoubtedly she would be as quiet as a mouse all day.
Willie, Smadja and Herr Zendt were waiting in the lobby. They were all driven to the helicopter pad. As he said goodbye to his father in the hotel lobby Walt had difficulty in controlling his trembling. He looked as though he were going to be sick.
“What’s the matter with you?” his father asked. “You look terrible.”
“My breakfast must have disagreed with me,” Walt said. “How do you feel, Father?”
“Never better.” Mr. West looked remarkably fit and quite sane. Walt stared into his father’s face, examining every part of it, peering into his father’s clear, rational eyes. He was overcome with the conviction that what he was doing was all wrong, that Mayra could be just as ill as the three doctors had said and for the reasons the doctors had said. Her stories were calm and cool but what they said were wild. That scrapbook. His father appearing on the mountaintop when he knew himself—had seen with his own eyes—that his father was with him in Chicago. This was all as crazy as both of them were working so hard to prove it was. One of them had to be right. If Mayra was mad, perhaps it was she who had decided, in this terrible insanity, that it was her duty to kill his father, just as she had proved to him so craftily that his father had decided to murder her—working step by step as she developed her case against his father while he developed his case against her, as though they had become the synthesis of all white Americans opposing through riot and fire unto death all black Americans. Just as all blacks had been driven mad in their desperate need to defend themselves and their meaning and, by the force of a collective, murderous syndrome, had set out simultaneously to destroy.
Insanity was irrational. White against black was irrational. Could both his father and his wife have gone mad? But he stared into his father’s face and knew it could not be so. And he saw the great roll of honor that was his father’s history and America’s history and he knew it could not be so. But he could remember Mayra too. He could see her face and hear the strong, sure rhythms of her voice and knew, too, that she could not be mad. He could remember too much, too many moments of her ever to be able to believe that she was mad. What was the right thing to do? Where should he stay?
“Helicopter’s waiting, Walt,” his father s
aid.
“I’ve been thinking hard all day yesterday, Father. I think I’ll let Derek wait in New York and I’ll take Mayra out to a New York hospital today.”
“That is out of the question.”
“I don’t think so. And as her husband, I’ll decide these things if you don’t mind.”
“No.”
“You can continue to say no, but it is my decision.”
“It was the decision of three distinguished, experienced doctors. They decided that it could be fatally dangerous for her to travel, and she is not going to travel. You have your job to do. Go and do it.”
“Yes, Father,” Walt said grimly. “I have my job to do.” He turned away without farewell and began to descend on the helicopter.
CHAPTER TEN
At ten o’clock that night, standing behind a heavy plum-colored drape, Mayra looked up the sloping road that led to the funicular plaza and the Park Hotel, where the staff lived, and watched people in civilian clothes move out of the hotel to the funicular station by multiple dozens. The Bürgenstock was being evacuated. Soon a skeleton crew and the security police would be the only people scattered at different stations around the grounds. By now, except for security police, perhaps, she and Mr. West were the only two people in the Grand Hotel.
She waited for night to come. She pulled a small bed lamp down to the floor. She put it under the bed before she lighted it so that none of its glow could be seen through the window outside the hotel, then she began carefully to take apart the scrapbook. The words of the past seemed as eerie and terrible as the scenes themselves must have seemed to Mama. Pictures of dark, shapely, somehow Italianate women were displayed prominently on the pages. Miss Baby looked like a slut. Miss Pupchen looked like a child. Miss Mary Lou Mayberry—well, it was fairly possible that Miss Mary Lou Mayberry did look a little like her. But the eerie and uncanny thing, with her perceptions now so frightened and heightened, was that all of them, somehow, looked in some way like each other, so they must have looked like someone else who was buried deep, deep, deep within Edward West’s tenebrous mind.
She had transparent acetate tape. She took up two pages of brutality, viciousness and murder, put out the light under the bed and moved toward the doorway that led into the corridor. She unlocked the door. It clicked heavily. She began to tremble, leaning against the wall. She could not make herself open the door. She talked to herself. She told herself that she had to go out into the corridors and do her work. She was so soaked with sweat that her hand slipped as she tried to turn the doorknob. But she opened the door.
The corridor was softly lighted. She was at a far end on the first floor. The other end was approximately eighty yards away. The door into Mr. West’s apartment was on the second floor, positioned at the center of the corridor, facing the staircase and the entrance to the elevator. The building was as silent as a mortuary. She stayed close to the wall and glided silently along the heavy carpet to the staircase. She hugged the wall of the staircase as she moved herself, against her will and against her fright, down the stairs—impossibly slowly. She made herself think of what she had to do and how she must study well, in advance, how it must be done, so that she could flee to her hiding place again. This time to Willie’s room. She reached the second floor. She was facing the door to Mr. West’s apartment. She started to move toward it when she heard a sudden sound just above her and she almost cried out. She felt physical pain from the tension of the muscles of her neck and face. She clung to the wall, waiting for light to fall on her. Moments passed. She remembered the security guard Walt had said he was going to post outside her door. He had kicked his chair or had leaned it against the wall.
She made herself move again. She chose the full newspaper page, mounted on black cardboard. A screaming headline said: SHOWGIRL BRUTALLY MURDERED. POLICE VOW CAPTURE OF KILLER. There was a three-column portrait of Mary Lou Mayberry.
She tore off a strip of tape and fixed the page to Mr. West’s door. She anchored it there with two more pieces of tape. She backed away to the elevator door and taped Miss Baby’s newspaper page on it. She held her hand tightly across her mouth and lower jaw and gripped hard, so that she could not cry out, and moved like an undersea diver across the corridor again. She came up to Mr. West’s door as though she were in a trance. She pressed the door bell heavily. The dog barked frantically inside the apartment. She turned and ran. She went down the staircase and disappeared. She was on the second floor landing and was moving swiftly and silently downward when she heard Mr. West open his door. She reached the first floor before she heard his scream of horror. She ran desperately along the first-floor corridor to Willie’s apartment. Fumbling with the skeleton key, she let herself in, then locked the door behind her, gasping for breath. She moved into the living room. Willie was sitting there, smiling up at her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mr. West opened his door. The wolfhound padded out into the corridor, searching in both directions. West moved into the hall to look to his right and left, and as he turned to enter his apartment, he saw the yellowing newspaper page hanging on his door. He flicked on the light switch in the entrance hall and looked at the page closely. He screamed. He slammed the door into the wall violently, pushing it away from himself with both arms. The security guard who had been posted outside Mayra’s door came bounding down the staircase.
“There is someone in this building,” West said hoarsely. “Find him. Bring him to me.” He took the page down and entered his apartment, slamming the door. The security man ran down the stairs.
West sat on a low hassock in front of a coffee table, the dog sitting alertly beside him. He stared downward at the large portrait of Mary Lou Mayberry as a show girl, beautiful and nearly nude. The doorbell rang. He shouted to come in and turned the page face down on the coffee table. Arno Ehrlich, the security chief, glided into the room, alarmed. Two subordinates remained in the background as Ehrlich held out a mounted newspaper page to Mr. West. “What’s that?” West asked shrilly.
“It was taped to the door of the elevator, sir.”
“Why are you here? Get out of here,” he screamed at Ehrlich. “Find the man who was able to break through the most perfect security of all time and who is waiting out there to murder me.” Ehrlich left at once, on the double, the two men right behind him.
He wanted them out of the building. He didn’t need them. He knew who had done this reckless and capricious thing. Willie had decided to blackmail him to get the nigger girl. Willie had done this. Only Willie could have saved these crumbling records for all these years, because from the beginning he had meant to use them for blackmail. Blackmailers must be dealt with. Blackmailers must be put down and broken, never to rise again. He left the apartment, the gigantic dog at his side, and moved to the lift. When he entered the lift with the dog he pressed the button for the first floor. He left the lift and crossed the hall to Willie’s room, to Willie who had so carefully said he had to go to New York with Smadja and Herr Zendt to recruit the new hotel staff people. West took the master key from his pocket.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mayra’s legs gave way as she stared at Willie. She had no adrenaline left to hold her on her feet, and she slid on her spine down the lintel of the door to Willie’s living room and collapsed into a sitting position on the floor. He darted across the room to her. He rubbed her wrists and murmured to her soothingly. He ran across the room to an elaborate bar and poured cognac into a large glass and brought it back to her. He made her drink it.
“You went to New York,” she gasped. “You were sent out of here with everyone else—why are you back?”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right and nothing nor anyone will harm you. Walt will be back tomorrow. Dan will be with him. I know. That is why I went to New York with them, so I could call Dan to tell him that the time had come to commit his father to institutional restraint—as I had promised him I would when that became necessary. Then I ordered the plane t
o take me back here, so that I could stand between you and him until this night was over. You have nothing to worry about. I can handle him. I have spent my life handling him.”
They heard the key in the lock. Willie pulled her to her feet and jammed her behind a heavy drapery at the nearest window, then moved out into the center of the large area to face his visitor.
“Willie, we’ve come to the end of the road,” West said. “You’ve done what you thought you had to do and I am sick and tired of you.”
“What was it I thought I had to do, Ed?” The two old men were about eleven feet apart. Neither moved closer to the other. The huge dog sat at West’s side and watched both of them.
“You’re too big, Willie.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“You are trying to blackmail me. You are trying to get that nigger girl for yourself. You are trying to bring me down. After all these years. After I made you a multimillionaire and a friend of some of the most important people in this country. What would your father have said? He would have touched his cap to you. And if he knew you had accepted everything I brought to you and then plotted to bring me down—he would have died of a broken heart.”
“Ed, you’ve got to take a pill. The veins on each side of your head and across your forehead have become throbbing pieces of rope.”
“Never mind that. You’re finished, Willie.”
“Finished, Ed?”
“Your life. It’s finished.”
“At least sit down while we chat. Sit down and rest.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Why? Please—sit down and tell me why?”
“Don’t talk to me as if I were an old woman who had to be humored. Beg. Beg me. Do you want to die? Plead with me to let you live. Tell me what you have done for me. Soften my heart. Confess your lifelong devotion, you two-faced messenger boy.” Mr. West was breathing irregularly and shallowly. He seemed to totter for a moment. Willie backed up toward the side of the room, away from Mayra’s feet where they seemed to be hung from the draperies at the windows. West appreciated Willie opening a greater distance between them. He came farther into the room and sat down heavily on the, nearest chair.
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