Mile High

by Richard Condon

  West’s carriage rolled past medieval monuments and chirragesque buildings, across the city through the hot sunshine, up the slope higher and higher until he could see out across the pavonine harbor and feel the ancient sleepiness of the crumbling city that had been founded by the Phoenicians, occupied by the Romans in 254 B.C., conquered by the Byzantines in 525 A.D., taken by the Saracen Arabs in 830, overrun by the Normans, sacked by the Spanish, absorbed by Italy in 1860 and was presently owned by the Mafia.

  He was greeted on the threshold of the rich Sicilianbaroque palazzo by his host, who spoke to him in Sicilian. He was taken to lunch in a tree-shaded, fountain-cooled, flowerscented patio. They spoke of the world, of American politics, and of the ballet (about which West was most authoritative) while they ate pasta al sarde, melanzane alla siciliana, spada a Ghiotta and a rush of exuberant Sicilian sweets more baroque than the city’s architecture. West felt his mother’s presence overwhelmingly through the food more strongly than music could bring back any other memories of her. They sipped coffee. West refused a cigar.

  “It was good to hear from Don Paolo,” Don Vito said. “He has done well in America.”

  “He has won the respect of all people,” West answered.

  “Why did he send you?”

  “He has introduced me to you so that I may tell you about a new business I am developing.”

  “Please,” the elegant old gentleman urged, “you must tell me about that.”

  He did not speak again for fifty minutes. He listened intently. When West had finished he said, “What you say is very interesting. If I may say so, you speak a very good Sicilian.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I like big thoughts. But yours are a hero’s thoughts, and I found that I was asking myself if they were not too big.”

  “America is big.”

  “You mean Sicily is small. You are right. I agree. Sicily is small and I am old. But I am experienced. I have had long tenure. The Honored Society is over three hundred years old and it forgets nothing, so I am that much more experienced by serving it. What there is to know about the business we do I have learned well.”

  “Are you telling me that what I have described to you cannot be accomplished?”

  “Only you can prove that. I want to see that it can be accomplished. I am only telling you that none of us could ever have had such a magnificent conception of business as you have shown me today.”

  “Thank you.” West allowed almost fifty seconds to pass before he spoke again. “Prohibition, Don Vito, is most peculiarly American. It could not be carried out anywhere else, and I say that with pride. Americans are split in half into nature and content. Not the nation, but the people. The nation is totally and mystically unified, but each American is split into two halves—on one side his origins, on the other side the enormous opportunities that confront him.

  “We are people who fled civilizations. Think of that. We are the offspring who could not succeed under the established, civilized circumstances, whatever they were—and all the backgrounds varied. We struggled through hardships to get to the new land, then we found a fantastically rich world. Having left the old countries penniless and hungry, our fathers had to convince themselves that they would build a better place. They taught that to their children. It created tremendous idealism. It created tremendous gullibility. The prohibition movement is, after all, only lip service to idealism. We want the ideal of prohibition while knowing at the same instant that when we get it we will continue to live as we have always lived: the wine drinkers will go on drinking wine, the people from the beer countries will have to have their beer, the rest will want liquor. But they must serve the ideal. They must seem to be striving for yet a better world, carrying on their father’s dreams.

  “But it is such a rich country! It can grow anything, feed and fuel the world, realize any whim for any man. And because we are split in half as I have explained, one half does not know what the other half is doing. Poverty may bring faith, but riches bring things. We must have faith, so Americans have achieved a faith in things. Therefore, what the American people are faced with is a craving for reassurance that they have kept the true faith, the universal faith, the faith of loss and deprivation—which is prohibition. Simultaneously the other half is a quivering maw of national sensuality—sensation, tactilities, gluttony, satiety—the essence of total self—all making us dependent upon our riches, faith’s opposite. That is why what we have been discussing is good business, Don Vito. Truly, it is not a question of the size of the opportunity but only a question of having been born, then trained to understand the market.”

  “Formidable!”

  “Thank you.”

  “We will help you.”

  “Thank you. Before I ask your help I must tell you what I am prepared to pay for it.”

  “Before I can tell you if what you offer to pay is enough, I must know how much help you want.”

  “I want from you one trustworthy man who is bound to you as well as he will be bound to me. That man must have your powers to call on the obedience and the trust of five hundred, perhaps a thousand, other men of respect. I want to know only the one man, because it is important to the survival of the plan that only one man know me.”

  Don Vito was silent. He poured more cognac in his glass. “I understand,” he said.

  “For the one man, then—to support the work of that one man—for helping him to find the unquestioned loyalty of the five hundred other men—that is the help I have come to ask for.”

  “What does this one man do? What do the five hundred do?”

  “There are three major divisions in the work we will have. Finance for the work of the one man plus five hundred men plus five thousand more they will find. Next, procurement of stocks to be sold by the one man and the five hundred men and the thousands—tens of thousands of others—whom they will find. I have my finance officer. I have my procurement officer. The one man will be in charge of distribution, sales and—very important—enforcement. The five hundred men who are loyal only to him will do all that for him.”

  “How much will you pay?”

  “Two percent of my net.”

  “To him or to me?”

  “Two percent to you. Two percent to him.”

  Don Vito leaned forward extending his open hand. “We have made a deal, my friend.”

  Irene was waiting for him in bed when he got back to the hotel, naked and pink, smiling, they both thought, rather lewdly. “Did you have a good meeting, dear?” she asked huskily.

  “Excellent,” he said, stripping off his clothes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They went to Rome the next morning. Then to Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Paris and to Zurich for meetings with the Horizons A.G. bankers. It was one of these bankers who told them about the Bürgenstock. A letter from the cardinal had preceded them to the Vatican, and they lunched with the Pope: a salad, cold chicken, a glass of Frascati and black coffee. Chatting, Irene said she had seen photographs of Queen Elena and thought she was quite the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, and suddenly it was arranged that they should meet Queen Elena (and the king) at a court ball.

  The king wore the uniform of a general and the Collar of Annunziata. Irene wrote to Clarice that night to say that she was seriously thinking of asking Edward to buy Clarice an Italian title for Christmas.

  In Vienna everyone was abuzz about the war everyone was sure was about to start. Edward and Irene drank their morning coffee at Konstantinehügel and bowled along the Hauptallee in their carriage, and the bankers led them gingerly through Viennese society, called “the haughtiest in Europe.” She wrote to Clarice to say that no one was received at court unless he had sixteen quarterings or unless he were an Army officer, and all unmarried girls smoked Havana cigars. They were there in the last days of June. Although they had missed the Derby by three weeks, the gambling season was at its height, but Edward was a priss and wouldn’t gamble. In a letter to Clarice Ir
ene pretended to have visited Sigmund Freud “in the hope that he would be able to recommend something to do about your case.” At the end of the six-page letter she attached a postscript saying, “I was only fooling about Freud, actually there is no hope for you.”

  The Wests did not enjoy St. Petersburg after a thirty-seven-hour train journey. They were annoyed by the customs officers, baffled by the language and were utterly bored with the constant gossip everywhere about the coming war. Irene thought the Russians would do very well in a war. Almost every man they saw on the street was in some sort of a uniform, the policemen being the most splendid of all in black, with orange or bright green lapels and dashing astrakhan caps. Building janitors wore gorgeous scarlet blouses and caps with brass plates. They spent an entire morning at Fabergé’s wonderful shop. Edward bought her a beautiful gold cigarette case and she bought him a jewel-encrusted scent flask. He pretended to believe it was meant for brandy and said she had bought it only to shock Bishop Cannon.

  Berlin was miraculously gay and not in the slightest apprehensive about everyone’s keenly anticipated war. They stayed at the Adlon, which was only five years old. The Kaiser called it “my hotel.” Everything in it was so solid and massive: dark-yellow, clouded marble pillars ornamented with precious metals, and twenty page boys lined up like toy soldiers, always ready for the Kaiser to pass in review, which he did, regularly, once a week. Lorenz Adlon told them that there were a quarter of a million bottles of wine in the cellar, and Edward used the reference half-humurously in the mass interview he granted to the German press on his special subject, America and prohibition. He was quoted as saying, “What we are doing in America is, in a sense, very good for the Adlon Hotel, because in a very few years’ time Americans will have to journey to the Hotel Adlon’s quarter of a million bottles if they want to drink the alcohol that can poison their minds and bodies.” He also commented, in passing, on the new German army tax of 1½ percent on all property, saying, “Americans simply would not tolerate such taxation.”

  To enrage Clarice, Irene took special lessons in dancing the minuet and the gavotte from the official court dancing teacher. The Kaiser did not approve of modern dances, and although the Wests were not invited to a court ball because, as it turned out, the Kaiser did not approve of prohibitionists either, a banker friend was happy to arrange for the Tanz Probe and the minuet instructions. Clarice wrote Irene (the letter reached her in London) that this was “the silliest thing you’ve ever done and a wanton waste of money. Who in the world will you ever find to dance the minuet with?”

  Berlin most certainly was not all fun. Because of what he had said in the press about the “intolerable German Army tax” Edward was challenged to a duel by an Army officer who felt deeply that the Army’s honor had been impugned and that only blood could remove the stain. Edward chose pistols, asked Herr Gabel, a German banker, to be his second and was very cool about going through with the whole sinister business. He most certainly could have been killed if Frau Gabel had not told Irene. The two women rushed to the field, in the Tiergarten, with four policemen. The Kaiser himself had taken a stand against dueling just two months before. The party rocketed through the dawn behind steaming horses and got there just as the two men had begun to pace away from each other, Edward (he said later) thinking cold-mindedly of Aaron Burr. Irene began to yell, then ran across the field, the police behind her, and threw herself not at Edward but at the bald, scarred Army officer (“He must have been in fifty duels!” she wrote to Clarice), who stood at attention and permitted himself to be arrested providing no policeman dared to lay a hand upon him. The Wests were escorted back to the hotel to pack, then were taken to the railroad station by the police and told to leave the country at once. They boarded a train for London. The whole escapade excited Irene so much that she jerked down the window shades of their railway compartment, threw off her clothes and had Edward mounting her before the train was out of the station.

  London was marvelous! It simply couldn’t have been better, Irene wrote Clarice, even though Berlin had to be recognized as the high point. She told Edward later that she gave the Berlin adventure credit for the conception of Daniel, who arrived at precisely the right moment of the human gestation cycle figuring from the time that German train had chugged slowly out of the station.

  Cabarets ruled London. Irene was able to keep Edward on a dance floor for every night of the three weeks they were there, then hardly ever again in his life. They met the Asquiths who were friends of Walter Wagstaff’s, and they met Emily Pankhurst who was a friend of Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler’s. They stayed at the Savoy Hotel. Irene had never seen such enormous bathtubs. At her request the hotel sent the bathtub manufacturer’s representative to see her and she ordered six of the great white boats and, keeping two for themselves, had the others sent to her father, the cardinal and the Leader to arrive at Christmas.

  There was a heat wave. Mr. Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James, may not have been rich (for he was only a book publisher), but he refused to allow his family to live in what the American government had provided as housing for its envoy—a hovel in Carlos Place. Irene told the ambassador that she was totally and absolutely on his side, but when she wrote to Clarice about it, Clarice wrote back asking what Mr. Page and the American government planned to do about the living conditions of the American Indian.

  While in Paris, Edward decided to visit some people living outside the city who sold cognac, and Irene wanted to do her best to decide among Poiret, Worth, Cheruit, Lanvin and Pacquin (all well within Paris), so they were separated for three days. Not that it was the very first time. Edward had had to rush off to Scotland to see some men who sold whiskey and they had been separated for two days. Irene wrote to Clarice, “I have bought three sets of pale, flesh-colored tights that I must wear under transparent Persian trousers and a brightly colored silk tunic that is cut very low in front. My oriental slippers curve up almost two inches, and for my turban Edward has somehow managed to imprison a live mouse with deep pink eyes in glass as a living ornament. The difficulty is that we cannot see how we are to feed him now that he is locked in there.” Clarice did not write to her sister again. When the Wests returned to New York she refused to call on Irene. When Irene went to find her she hid, and they had to give a ball to lure the offended girl into the open where Irene could explain that it had all been a hoax.

  Edward had a new Cadillac Torpedo sent from New York to surprise her and they drove it to Zurich. The business in Zurich was over too soon for Irene, who thought it the most civilized city she had ever been in. Then the weather became unusually hot, and Herr Boos, the managing director of the Forster-Appenzeller Bank, suggested that they should enjoy a respite at the Bürgenstock before the time came to embark for New York. They drove from Zurich to Zug to Lucerne. They left the car in Lucerne and boarded the lake steamer for Kehrsiten and because they were approaching the absolute peak of their lives, all unknowingly of course, everything seemed to expand to heroic proportions of euphoria. They stood in the bow of the lake steamer with their arms around each other’s waists.

  All the strange newness of being married and the peril within the small and large adjustments that had been made from the moment they met seemed to vanish as they were pulled up the mountainside by the cable railway. Even Edward accepted the extraordinary sense of serenity. He had been under pressure from the day they had left New York, worrying about the boobs who would be fumbling with the prohibition movement at home, coping with seasickness, dreading failure at the meeting with Don Vito, preserving circumspection in the careful, not entirely tentative meetings with distillers and vinters, and writing daily, even thrice daily, throughout the travels, to Willie Tobin, Arnold Goff and Pick, Heller & O’Connell. He had not ever become impatient with Irene or short-tempered. Throughout the tour he remained almost a caricature of a man in love.

  They were settled in a large suite in the Grand Hotel after Irene had patted the group of stuff
ed animals in the reception hall and they and the porters had choked and sneezed on the clouds of dust that the pats had brought up. The rooms were above a wide terrace at the edge of a cliff above the cerulean lake that seemed so far below them that, twenty years later when he stood beside Al Smith at the top of the Empire State Building and Irene had been dead for almost four years, he had said, to no one at all, “Only halfway up to the Bürgenstock.”

  They had walked up the back pathways to the top of the Tritten Alp and they had soared to its summit on the Hammetschwand lift, which was enclosed by a glass shaft and was the highest and fastest lift in Europe. He had read to her from Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates (containing the history of the world to the summer of 1885) under gaslight as they sat on wicker furniture painted blue and white in the great main hall of the hotel. They had dined with all other guests at long, common tables, with a bearded, authoritative, portly guest, who would be either a doctor, a lawyer or a clergyman, presiding at the head of each table, and the maître d’hôtel would watch over it all with eagle eyes and snap his fingers peremptorily for the waiters to rush in with the changes for each of the six courses.

  After they left the Bürgenstock they held to the illusion that they had been the only people on the mountain: the food and wine had appeared, but one did not remember how; the three hotels on the long estate were filled to the last room with guests, but one did not remember them as having been there. Only they were there, facing each other and striving by constant copulation to repopulate the planet. There was the final illusion that eternity would be too short a time but that, since youth is well known to last forever, they would double eternity when they had the moment to get around to it.