Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Next to Edward and Daniel, the house at West Wag-staff was Irene’s greatest pride. It was so perfect from every perspective of space and decoration, or gentling therapy against the world, that Walter Wagstaff was convinced that “someone used a wand on this place.” It was a close reproduction of Willmott House in Wells, England, for the building of which Lady Evelyn Willmott had left to the architect, Robert Adam, an “open credit with my bankers” before going off to Italy with Lord Hunt of Ludlow and scandalizing England. Adam had created “a small, sweet house” within and without. The first floor had a living room, drawing room, library, den, terrace, dining room, bar, kitchen and service rooms. The second floor had a paneled Georgian drawing room, seven bedrooms with carved wooden fireplaces, six master baths, sitting rooms and dressing rooms. The third floor had seven servant’s rooms and baths.

  It was an exquisite, femininely beautiful house whose classic Doric columns on the front side had lengthened capitals; its frieze and pediments were softened and lightened by delicate wooden swags across the upper portico. All of the proportions throughout the house were treated and flattered and made more wondrously deceptive by the artful entrance of light from unexpected places: the south side of the house was one-third glass and the window on the stair landing had been placed to use light as a cosmetic on the main hall. All the proportions were Adam harmonies.

  The ceilings were delicate stucco forms connected to painted medallions of white touched with gilt against backgrounds of pastel green, lilac or blue. The curtains and furniture and carpets followed the sweet designs of the rooms, which followed the embracing design of the graceful house. The rooms were octagonal, circular, square or rectangular, but they seemed to have been conceived as a single unit that made ineffable use of all available space. Some rooms had apsidal ends or arcaded columns, which Adam had used if he considered a room too narrow or too long.

  Irene burbled with joy as she pulled Edward along behind her from room to room—so proud was she of what had been accomplished—telling him that the house would stand forever, would be a monument to Daniel’s children and Daniel’s children’s children.

  There were many touches of fantasy. They had an enormous canopied bath with walls of yellow Siena marble and a tub carved from a block of the same stone, having four gold goose heads as faucets. In an adjoining alcove, off the bath, stood a modern barber chair where Edward was shaved and trimmed every morning by his valet and where Irene’s hair was “done” by her extraordinary French maid.

  As he grew older, Edward grew more and more devoutedly Irish and even restored things to give his old father retroactive comforts he had not had. The dining room was finished in warm opalescent satinwood and the furnishings were arranged to face two principal paintings by Jack Keats, “Kerry Market” and “Home of the Heart,” which were set into two large wall panels. Edward had never bothered to mention it even to Irene, but when he had had his grandfather’s house, or rather his dwelling within the piggery at Kilflyn, Kerry, entirely restored, the architect-builders had battled him vehemently but had of course at last had to give in to his insistence that two bathrooms be included in the perfect little restoration.

  The chandelier in the dining room when lit looked like a blanketful of diamonds that had been tossed, then frozen in mid-air. Adjacent to the dining room was the two-hundred-year-old barroom that had been bought, packed, and transported from an old tavern to Kilflyn and that Edward somehow managed to imply had come from his father’s house there. Its dimensions, which were thirty-two feet by forty feet, were something more than double the size of the sleeping room of the piggery in which the entire large West family had lived before the famine.

  Outside, on sixteen acres, were gardens on several levels going down toward the Sound, one secret garden totally enclosed in sculptured walls with stairs leading to hidden grottoes. Twelve Italian cypresses, each weighing five tons, had been barged into West Wagstaff from the sea and had been replanted along the silver-stoned driveway that wound through billiard-table lawns and parterred gardens to the great door, which opened to show the superb flying staircase, cantilevered as it wound upward past Boucher wall tapestries woven in the royal factory at Beauvais at the time of Louis XV.

  Edward had asked for a house in which they could entertain. He had got that and much more. Beginning with the summer of 1914 they began to entertain at the rate of hotel keepers. Edward saw it as solid, good business policy. Irene enjoyed it. People sweated out the arrival of West invitations, because Edward had studied how to balance guests with the same Burrian objectivity that Paddy had brought to his science of choosing college roommates. The Wests entertained in their houses, aboard a chartered yacht, at beach picnics in summer and winter, at dinners, musicales, masked balls, teas, lunches, at the race track and, twice a year, in a string of field boxes that were provided by Mr. John McGraw at the Polo Grounds.

  The Wests did not entertain at restaurants or cabarets, first, because Edward was so prominently identified with the prohibition cause that they did not think it correct to play host in the midst of public drinking, and second, because that sort of entertaining might possibly be necessary or proper in some foreign city but surely not in the city of one’s homes. However, after prohibition people just didn’t seem to want to stay at home any more. Cabarets, with their formal floor shows, gave way to nightclubs, where the customers entertained each other just by being there.

  Edward had not continued as an officer of the League after victory had been won. Everyone knew that he had devoted seven of the most crucial years to the movement in the most electrically effective manner in spite of a demanding business life and purely out of the strength of his convictions. Nonetheless the Wests continued to entertain at home in the old way, and people were delighted to accept because the bag was always such big game—the Vice-President or Enrico Caruso or Legs Diamond or Mary Miles Minter or a Russian grand duke. But soon guests began to get restless earlier in the evening and would wonder aloud to the hostess what might be happening out in the night.

  In 1919 Edward became interested in a subject that was to absorb him over the years until it became the single, major fixation of his life. It began with his acquaintanceship with A. Mitchell Palmer, who was Wilson’s Attorney-General and had approached Edward to sound him out concerning possible League support of Palmer’s possible candidacy for the presidency in the 1920 elections. Palmer had been extremely active in warning the nation about subversive aliens and threatening to disclose Socialist/Communist plots of which he had proof. Edward, although secretly committed to Harding’s candidacy, had been terribly upset, even disproportionately upset, by the intensive propaganda campaigns the Soviets were carrying out following the dread Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and when an identical Workers’ party was established in the United States he saw it almost as a personal threat to everything he had not yet accomplished. He was chatteringly grateful to Palmer for his country-wide mass arrests of all dangerous political and labor agitators.

  He was himself then deeply involved with helping the American labor movement to open up and express itself through the use by the business world of armies of strike-breakers. It had been an extremely profitable venture and it had kept his organization in touch with the leaders who provided the strong-arm divisions. But it had also occurred to him—it occurred first to Willie Tobin, as a matter of fact—that if a Workers’ party were to foment a revolution in the United States, among their first targets would be Edward Courance West. The rag-tag section of labor representing Communists and Wobblies had been fiercely against the whole successful strike-breaking movement because it had thwarted their own Bolshevik plans. He pressed on, nearly frantically, in Congress for criminal syndicalist laws to be invoked against radicals. In 1919 he declared a war against Communists and all they stood for, and that militancy was to be enforced for the rest of his life.

  By 1924 Willie Tobin had completed his massive transference of helpless love to Irene, the safest object of a
feeling he could not otherwise have coped with. Serving her in any way, just being there as a good spaniel would be there, became a way of life for him, and when the three of them could be together sharing the intimacies of the day’s occupation, it was all sheer heaven sur glace. While Edward had to be in Washington, or traveling, or working late, Willie served as the family friend to escort Irene to dinner parties or the opera. Irene was very fond of him. She knew Edward and Bill had been boys together and she understood that Bill was the American representative of some Swiss company Edward was interested in. Once or twice she had tried to match Bill with Clarice, but then Clarice had gotten married; then she had tried Bill and someone else and the someone else had gotten married, and so on. Soon she forgot she had been made vaguely restless over the fact that Bill was single.

  One night in the winter of 1924, after a dinner party the Wests had given in 55th Street for a film tycoon named Winikus, they all found themselves seated at a huge table at the Silver Slipper, a Broadway nightclub whose partners included Arnold Goff and Frankie Marlowe. Irene had tried to raise objections about going there because she knew it made Edward uncomfortable, but there was no getting out of it. Mrs. Winikus was fascinated by gangsters. The main problem was how to seat sixteen people in the most popular nightclub in the city at midnight on a Saturday. And they were the hosts. People made telephone calls to all sorts of other people in some very odd places but to no avail. Edward, seeing that Irene was becoming distressed at her guests’ disappointment, said to Willie, “You knew some of those people, didn’t you, Bill?” Tobin said he did. He went to the telephone and called Arnold Goff at Lindy’s.

  “Arnold, I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “Any time, Bill.”

  “I find myself in one of those things.”

  “Anything.”

  “I’m with Ed West and his wife and about fourteen other people and they all want to sit ringside at the Silver Slipper.”

  “I’ll handle it personally. Don’t even bother to call me back. When will you be there?”

  “Forty-five minutes?”

  “Plenty of time. Fine.”

  They were seated at ringside center and Tobin was regarded with awe by Irene and Mrs. Winikus—Irene because she had had no idea that Willie could be so effective and Mrs. Winikus because she wondered if possibly Willie could be one of those “underworld higher-ups” people always seemed to be talking about in her husband’s pictures, who, of course, she knew did not really exist. Irene was at one end of the table, Mrs. Winikus was at her left, facing the dance floor. Bill was on her right. “Do you know any gangsters?” Mrs. Winikus asked him in a careful, low voice.

  “I suppose everyone knows a gangster or two,” Willie said.

  “Well, I don’t. Not outside the film business, that is. In fact, you’re the only one I know who does.”

  Irene was very pleased that her guest of honor was so entertained so she said, “Which ones are the gangsters, Bill?”

  “If I remember my American Weekly,” Mrs. Winikus said, “that lumpy man in the corner is a terrible killer.”

  “Which one?” Irene’s eyes peered through the heavy tobacco smoke. It was very difficult to see or to breathe. The music was very loud and the waiters kept bumping into everything. “I can’t see a thing, dammit. What’s his name? I may remember him from the newspapers.”

  “I think its Frenchy Marton.”

  “Oh, dammit! He’s notorious!” She kept looking, focusing on closer tables. “Bill, who is the man with the terribly hard black eyes and the chalk-white face? Over there, at the table with the two men who seem to be smoking the same cigar?”

  Willie turned in his chair to look where she was indicating. “Uh-oh. That’s Arnold Goff.”

  “No!” Mrs. Winikus said incredulously.

  “The sportsman?” Irene asked.

  “Sportsman!” Mrs. Winikus snorted the word.

  “The—uh—gambler,” Willie said.

  “He has fixed everything there is to bet on, and he certainly looks like he takes dope,” Mrs. Winikus said.

  “Oh, I suppose these people take dope on crackers,” Irene said. “I read somewhere that they call Mr. Goff ‘Mr. Underworld.’ Isn’t this thrilling, Jane? We are embedded in gangsters. Do you know him, Bill?”

  “Well, yes. That is, I’ve met him.” Reflexively, he looked down the table to where Edward was lighting someone’s cigarette. Tobin felt extremely important, which was extremely rare for him. Important in Irene’s eyes. He thought, if this is what happens when she hears I know Arnold Goff, whatever would she do if I introduced her to Pal Al, the people’s darling, Capone?

  Irene’s interest, somewhat reluctant, was the polite response she felt it proper to show, just as, in a drawing room, where the hostess has said casually that she and Chandler have just acquired Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” would she like to see it? Irene would have had to show great interest, not because she was all that wild about Rembrandt but because it would mean so much to her hostess. Here was old Bill positively alight with all this new-found attention, and here was one of her guests of honor enjoying every second of everything she thought was happening around them, so Irene decided she would have to pretend that Arnold Goff was Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.”

  “Do you know him well enough to invite him to join us, Bill?”

  “Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Goff was the chap I called to get this table.”

  “Then do ask him to come over, and please get him to bring his dreadfully sinister friends.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mrs. Winikus said, “I can’t stand it!”

  Bill got up and made his slender, elegant way through the mire of yacking, yelling yahoos just as one of the men at Goff’s table slipped off into the smoke.

  “Everything okay?” Goff asked Tobin.

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  “Meet Herm “Hot Horse” Levin, a great handicapper and a prime manufacturer of twenty-nine-ninety-fives, in case you have a friend you’d like to outfit in a few classy dresses at wholesale.”

  “Any time,” Levin said.

  “This is Mr. William Tobin,” Goff told him.

  “I came over to invite you fellows to join our little party,” Bill said.

  “Has anybody consulted Mr. West on that?”

  “I am here as courier from Mrs. West.”

  “Oh. Well, who can say no to that? Right, Herm?”

  “Anything you say, Arn.”

  The three men struggled back to the West party and Tobin made the introductions at Irene’s end of the table. The others were unreachable back in the thick murk.

  That night, as they were preparing for bed, Edward said, “Why was that cheap gambler sitting at my table tonight? How did he get there?”

  “Cheap gambler? Mrs. Winikus said he had arranged for the only crooked World Series every played. And he seemed a very nice man.”

  “I asked you: How did he get there?”

  “I asked Bill to bring him over.”

  “How did you know Tobin knew him?”

  “He told me. Jane had pointed out this notorious gang-leader, Frenchy Marton, who was actually too far away for anyone to see, then I saw Mr. Goff and for something to say because Jane was so fascinated, I asked Bill who that was, then one thing led to another, then Bill, who just does things because he’s so sweet, said it was Mr. Goff whom he had called to get the table, so I asked him to ask Mr. Goff and Mr. Levin to join our table. We thought Mr. Levin was some heinous gangster, but he turned out to be a dress manufacturer, which I thought was very amusing.”

  “Irene, never do that again.”

  “But what was wrong?”

  “This is what was wrong. Those places are nothing but low marketplaces and—”

  “But they’re marketplaces for everyone. All the men at our table tonight were doing business except Bill. The most sinister thing that happened was that Mr. Levin gave me his card and made a mysterious mark at the corner of it th
at means, he told me, that I will get the real wholesale price if I buy dresses at his place.”

  “Irene, Arnold Goff is about as low a specimen of human life as anyone can find anywhere. He is a suborner, probably a murderer, a cheat, a fence and a narcotics peddler and a few dozen other rotten things. He lives in a state of multiple mortal sin and if I were asked to name the lowest living American I would unhesitatingly name Arnold Goff. Now do you see what was wrong?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “But it was not your fault, Irene, it was Tobin’s fault.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll see him tomorrow morning.”

  “Edward, I said no. Bill is a gentleman who saw that Jane and I were hopelessly, childishly diverted by all the goings-on at the Silver Slipper nightclub, and he did what he did because I asked him and because he is gallant.”

  “Well, he won’t do it again.”

  “Edward, when I make a mistake I have a right to the blame. I will not share the blame. You simply have to promise me you won’t mention this to Bill.”

  “All right, goddammit.”

  “Edward! I don’t think that taking the name of the Lord in vain makes you very much better than your estimate of Mr. Goff.”

  “Aaaarrrgggghhhh!” He kicked a wastebasket across the room.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The year 1928 opened well. Transfers to the Horizons A.G. account in Zurich had averaged out at a steady $25,917,154.19 weekly for 1927, to be reinvested as foreign capital in the booming stock markets in Europe and the States. The liquor industry had stabilized well. The organizational shape-up of fewer and fewer small gangs in the national market areas and more and more large outfits had continued nicely and desirably. They were well into Phase Four, the national return to American distilleries. The country was prosperous, and this had meant a sharp increase in the public consumption of entertainment, gambling, narcotics and vice. The demands for the excitement of it all had helped shylocking and had expanded extortion activities and labor organization. Sickeningly, the Bolsheviks had seemed to gain a strong foothold in Soviet Russia, but Edward’s European informants said this could not last, while that goddam Willie Tobin kept bringing in what he called “proof” that communism was not only permanently established in Russia but that the Russian government was determined to send it on the march to overthrow the United States. Tobin was like some babbling schoolgirl about it. He kept insisting that his “information” showed that Edward Courance West was not only a prime target but a lever and that they had many secret agents trying to get “information” that would “expose” Edward Courance West. He refused to believe it, but it made him sick, nonetheless. It could not be true, but if it were true, he would fight them as they had never been fought in their rotten lives.