Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  The sharp raw pine scent made him think of his childhood in rural Oregon. He noticed a hawk circling above him. Nearby to the right, a sumac bush displayed deep autumnal red leaves. When he looked at it, the leaves trembled, as if his gazing had caused the bush to shiver.

  He took in a deep breath, then coughed. Slowly and with careful deliberation over word choices, he began cursing.

  Krumholtz was a freelance journalist and had been assigned by Success magazine to interview the subject of February’s cover story. Just as Playboy always had a foldout, Success always had a Winner. The title always appeared in uppercase format. February’s Winner, James Mallard, lived back in this forest somewhere in a large compound of his own design, Krumholtz had been informed. His article on Mallard was to include a combination of background information and personal narrative—the rise to fortune, lifestyle choices, opinions, etc.—along with anecdotes about the winner’s current well-being. To deserve a place in Success, the subject had to have made a significant mark measured in dollars. These feature articles, celebratory but not effusive or craven, would have as their subtext an understanding of the complexity of achieving great wealth. Seasonings of wit and irony were acceptable if dropped knowingly here and there throughout the article, but even a hint of skepticism in the face of affluence would be ruthlessly blue-penciled. “Vogue does not mock fashion, and we do not mock riches,” Krumholtz’s editor had told him. “The amassing of a large fortune is to the readers of our magazine a sweetly solemn thought.”

  James Mallard, pronounced Mallard, British style, accent on the second syllable, had been difficult to research. The biography was paltry. He was almost an unknown. The Wikipedia article on him was “under revision,” and several other Web articles on him had been withdrawn or were impossible to access. The print media had mostly ignored him. Mallard appeared to have lived and worked in the shadows. He “valued his privacy,” according to one source. Colleagues of his had been reluctant to discuss anything about him over the phone. Voices dropped melodramatically when Mallard’s name was mentioned. “I haven’t talked to you, and you haven’t made this call,” one of Krumholtz’s interviewees said to him.

  A photographer, a stringer, would supposedly be sent out to do portraits-and-poolsides a few days after Krumholtz’s interview, but that prospect now seemed unlikely, even preposterous, given the remoteness and isolation of Mallard’s compound.

  Krumholtz had never heard of Mallard before getting his assignment but was glad to have the work. Given the current economic climate, feature-article jobs like this one were drying up, as subscription levels plunged and newsstand sales declined. Even Success itself had experienced its first red-ink quarter, as if the act of reading about fortunes had become too laborious for the average would-be winner to master.

  He checked his watch: two thirty. The hawk was still circling above him, and from the west a breeze touched his face. He heard a distant songbird, a melancholy warbling. He felt as if the song might be directed to him or against him.

  According to the bits and pieces of information that Krumholtz had cobbled together, his subject, James Mallard, had been born on a farm in Iowa. The young man had lettered in football and had quarterbacked the hometown team in his senior year to a conference championship. He had been named prom king and class valedictorian before attending Dartmouth on a full scholarship, where he had participated in intramural sports including water polo and rugby. He had graduated cum laude with honors in economics. His nicknames had been “Duck” and “the Duckster.” After having dropped out of business school at Northwestern, Mallard had attended Columbia Law (graduating in ’93, specialty: patent law). Soon after receiving his law degree and passing the bar exam, he had married the former Jane Estes (Columbia, Class of 1992), with whom he had had two children, James “Jiminy” Mallard Jr. and Mary Stuart “Gubbie” Mallard. His hobbies were listed as mountain climbing and art collecting. Using finance capital borrowed from a fellow student at Dartmouth, Mallard had bought several apartment buildings in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. He had fixed them up, converted them to condos, sold them for a good profit, and then had escaped from the real estate market before the bottom fell out of it. As a consequence, he had won the annual King Midas Award from the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. A year later, with an electrical engineer as partner, he had founded a privately held medical tech start-up; this company, InnovoMedic, had formulated a proton-based imaging device now commonly used for diagnoses in hospitals worldwide, the financial rewards for which—Mallard owned the patent; he had bought out his partner—were in the high nine figures. After acquiring these great riches, Mallard had divorced Jane Estes, and in 2004 had married Eleanor “Ellie” Bacon-Starhope, no college degree listed, and had fathered two more children, the twins, Angus and Gretel, both homeschooled. He owned several houses, including a brownstone on the Upper West Side in New York, another one in the desert Southwest, and this one, near Lake Superior and the city of D———. Mallard also owned a freshwater yacht, the Temps Perdu, which apparently he rarely sailed. He was noted as a fund-raiser for the Democratic Party. He served on the boards of several hospitals and charities; however, he had not appeared in public for eighteen months.

  Krumholtz’s typical procedure was to research the winner and then to do follow-ups after the face-to-face interview. Most winners left behind them a slime trail of ex-wives and embittered business partners. But neither Mallard’s ex-wife nor his business partners would agree to speak to Krumholtz.

  He was watching the hawk, circling slowly above him. Aloud, Krumholtz said, “I am lost. I am nowhere.” He took out his cell phone to check the time. No signal.

  Several hours before, sitting in an airport lounge before his flight to D———, attended by a pleasantly overweight server with ketchup stains on her apron, Krumholtz had searched through his fact sheet for an angle. Certainly the medical device. Perhaps the art collection? The trophy wife with the preposterous name? The failed ambition to be a business-school student? The trick of buying out his partner before the medical device began to spout gobbets of cash? The rural Iowa upbringing? The liberalism? The house outside of D———? None of it seemed particularly promising. In fact the entire biography was anti-promising. Mallard might fall into that dangerous category of rich people who were non-narratable, who were story-unworthy: invisible, bland Olympians with no apparent personality and no social graces and no worldly interests of any kind apart from the amassing of treasure. Hearing the announcement of his plane’s departure, Krumholtz had tossed back his scotch, taken one last bite of his veggie-everything pizza, signaled to the server for the check, and, after having paid with the company’s credit card, had made his way down to the gate, stumbling against a refuse container near a water fountain.

  Nervously he had combed his hair on the jetway before getting on board. This ritual had kept all his airplanes aloft.

  Seated in row 27, wedged in between a manufacturer’s rep and a dozing matron, Krumholtz had felt an aurora of pain around his heart. He took two antacids from a roll in his pocket. After chewing and swallowing the tablets, which tasted of drywall, he felt the aurora diminish for a few moments before it returned with greater force, burning down his arm. He groaned inwardly as the plane hit an area of turbulence and the passengers were instructed to fasten their seat belts. The matron sitting next to him woke up and screamed once, quietly.

  In D———, Krumholtz had picked up the keys for the rental car from an agent wearing rainbow suspenders. As soon as he found himself in traffic, he knew he had been misdirected. His goal had been Happy Valley Road, which led north out of the city in the general direction of Mallard’s compound, but somehow he had detoured onto a collection of chain restaurants and stores on Sam Wallis Boulevard, which was not actually a boulevard but a narrow two-way street with left-turn lanes that appeared out of nowhere and traffic lights that turned red almost without warning. On both sides Krumholtz saw slumped drivers, their faces shadowed w
ith glumly placid Christian resignation. He was used to the honking of defiant urban car horns, but here in D———, traffic proceeded within an ominous defeated silence. The GPS in the rental car had been disabled, but Krumholtz decided he wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. After stopping at a FirePower gas station for directions, he asked the kid behind the inside counter where Happy Valley Road was.

  “You from here?” the kid asked. He did not make eye contact with Krumholtz.

  “No.”

  “You want to get to Happy Valley Road?”

  “Yes.”

  “Business?” The kid unwrapped a Charm Skool candy bar, then bit into it.

  “Yeah. I’m going to see James Mallard.”

  The kid whistled between lips browned by milk chocolate. “You’re going to see him? No one sees him. He’s like Baron von Dracula or somebody. Also I heard he’s blind.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Krumholtz said.

  “Huh. Reason I ask about Happy Valley,” the kid said, “is that it’s hard for outsiders to find.” He took another bite of the candy bar and chewed thoughtfully. “You gotta turn around, go past the Señor Big Cheese and the On Spec! Glasses place, then angle past the curve where the U-Store-It thing is, and then you have to watch carefully, because Happy Valley Road is just past the Au Secours MegaDrug, there on the right.”

  “Thanks,” Krumholtz said. “Thanks a lot. By the way, you’ve got a bit of chocolate, right there, on your chin.”

  “That’s what I meant to do,” the kid said. He turned around and opened the till, counting the singles, giving his back to Krumholtz.

  Once out of D——— and headed up Happy Valley Drive, Krumholtz had consulted his directions. He was supposed to turn off Happy Valley onto Eitel Avenue, which would take him to County Road M, and then to Valhalla Road, where Mallard lived. But now, having twisted and turned on the roads that seemed to have no destination at all in mind, that wandered through swampy areas and then back up to rocky plateaus before descending again, he had found himself in this post-wilderness spot that looked as if the first-growth trees had been cut years ago before the spruce and maples had replaced them. He had never been in northern Minnesota before, but the manufacturer’s rep on the airplane headed toward D——— had told him that there were still wolves up here. He could believe it. “Wolves,” his fellow passenger had said. “And moose.” The passenger sat back. “Oh, and the bears. I forgot to mention the bears. And they all eat things.”

  How many places could you find in the world where a cell phone wouldn’t work? Krumholtz checked his watch again, a cheap drugstore brand, and noticed that it had stopped. The time was still two thirty and would be two thirty from now on. He was very late. Folding himself back into his car—he was a big man, and the top of his head had almost continual bruises and bumps from lintels and beams and overhead luggage racks and doorframes—he started the engine and edged forward back onto the road. Overhead, the hawk circled away.

  Ahead of him the road began another series of indecisive twists and turns, heading into a forest so dense that a desolate canopy of branches blocked the sky and shielded the road from the sun. He felt as if he were drifting into a tunnel of vegetation where the usual norms had been reversed. Here the trees were permanent, but the route was temporary and subject to disappearance. At almost exactly the moment when Krumholtz thought he should turn the car around and head back, he came upon a long expanse of hurricane fencing with razor wire at its top. He saw a driveway on the right-hand side, and a high gated barrier with the word MALLARDHOF carved in wood at the top. The driveway, behind the fencing, angled up to a high bluff. A sign in front of the gate announced VALHALLA DRIVE. The hurricane fence stretched away in both directions, north and south.

  An intercom with a white button stood in front of the gate. Krumholtz drove up in front of it and pressed the button.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice.

  “It’s Jerry Krumholtz.” He waited. The silence continued for five seconds, ten seconds, almost half a minute. “From Success magazine. I have an appointment? With James Mallard?”

  Now he might have a story: Mallard, perhaps emulating Howard Hughes, feared the world’s toxicity.

  “It’s been arranged. I’m here to interview James Mallard.”

  From the forest came an insucking breath of wind.

  “This interview was set up a long time ago. And … and a photographer will be here in a few days for the artwork.”

  He waited. The engine of the rental car hummed quietly.

  “This has all been arranged. It’s been agreed to.”

  “You don’t have to plead,” the voice on the intercom said. “Do you believe in angels?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “Well, it may be simple, but I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if you believe in angels?” Just then, the gate lifted as if on invisible wires, and Krumholtz drove in. He had the impression that video surveillance cameras were trained on him as his car made its way up a switchback dirt road around the bowl of a valley to the crest of the bluff, where he saw the house splayed out lengthwise across the top.

  The house, Mallardhof, built of concrete and glass, commanded a distant view of Lake Superior in one direction and the forest in another. A green Jeep speckled with dried mud sat in the driveway along with a car whose make Krumholtz didn’t recognize. A small perennial garden had been planted to the right of the garage. From where he had parked, Krumholtz could not quite see where the house ended; it just went on and on. It was in Martian Embassy style: ostentatiously inhuman. Near the front door was a display area consisting of a fragile-seeming pile of rocks, like a cairn, possibly a sculpture of some kind, encircled by bricks. The austere lavishness of the house presented the viewer with showy neutrality, as if the old styles of grandiose display—Italian palazzos, Tudor palaces, and castles—had given way to a nondecorative fortress brutalism of glass and stone. How the floor-to-ceiling glass supported the concrete roof was a mystery, unless the glass was thicker than it appeared to be and was load-bearing, as required by law. Krumholtz did not feel like getting out of his rental car, but when he saw a woman emerging from the front door, he thought he had better get to work.

  “Hello hello hello!” she said, smiling with what must have been forced cheer, but the smile was so dazzling that Krumholtz thought for a moment that she might actually be happy to see him. She wore beige capri pants and a simple gray blouse, and she looked, as the wives of the rich usually did, like a professional beauty. In fact she was terribly beautiful, so much so that he could hardly keep his eyes on her. Beautiful women had always made him shy, and gazing at this one was like looking at the sun. After a few seconds, he had to turn away. “Mr. Krumholtz,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Ellie Mallard.”

  “Jerry,” he said. “Please call me Jerry.”

  “I shall call you Mr. Krumholtz,” she said, holding her ground. “For the sake of your dignity.” Her skin, which at first he had assumed to be deeply tanned, he now saw had a permanent attractive darkness to it. Did she have an African-American mother or grandmother? Or was her family Persian? How to ask such a question? Her black tangled hair fell down to her shoulders, and gold hoop earrings sparkled against her skin in the fading light. “Please come in,” she said, holding the door open for him. “You must be tired out.”

  “Well, I got lost,” he said.

  “Everyone does. Absolutely nobody knows how to get here. I still get lost myself sometimes, when I’m not paying attention. But anyway you’re here now, and welcome to Mallardhof.”

  “Why is it called Mallardhof?” he asked.

  “No reason at all!” she said with a practiced dry humor. She moved fluidly, like the perfect beauty she was. “We just decided that it needed a name and that’s the name we gave it. Maybe we should find another name. It’s so German. What would you call it? Did you like the sculpture out in front? It
’s a Rocco Steiner.”

  “Very impressive,” Krumholtz said absentmindedly. He was looking down the front hallway into the depths of the house: the corridor disappeared in the distance as if replicating the geometry of infinity. “My goodness,” he said, under his breath.

  “Goodness had nothing to do with it,” she said, quoting Mae West, “but it is rather stupendous, I’ll grant you that.” The diamond on her finger was the size of a grape. “Of course we love it, but sometimes it’s simply white-elephant time around here, especially on cleaning days and wash days.”

  “Yes. I’ll bet. So. How many square feet is this house, anyway?” he asked, feeling her hand on his back as she guided him toward a living room—which he imagined to be the first of many—down the front hallway.

  “No idea,” she said. “Quite a few, but we never counted them up. Would you like a drink? Something to eat?” From invisible speakers came the sound of music: Bach, or Handel. Baroque something, performed on the original instruments: court music, yes, The Water Music, that was it. “You must be starving.”

  “No, thank you.” On the wall, a flat-panel video screen showed a man’s face contorting in agony, relaxing, smiling, then contorting in agony again. Hung next to it was another screen showing a woman who appeared to be shouting soundlessly for help. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, that diptych? That’s an installation by Herb Cello, the video artist. He’s a wonderful guy, do you know him? He’s become such a good friend. It’s called Agony #6. It’s a poor title. I begged Herb to change it, but I do love his work, and after all Herb’s a thoughtful guy even with his irony, and he has the right to name his pieces, because he’s the artist. But, you know, there never was an Agony #5. Isn’t that odd? Maybe it was the wrong kind of agony.” The face on the video screen began to smile and then froze into that genial expression, as if shocked suddenly by open displays of sodomy. The effect was terrifying. “You see? It’s not agony at all. You have to think about it. You’re sure you wouldn’t like something to drink? The sun’s almost past the yardarm.”