Mile High

by Richard Condon

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eddie was on the phone to Tobin. The girl said “Gee, I’m sorry, Eddie.”

  “It’s not your fault, Alouette,” he said grimly. Into the phone he said, “Willie? Be at the Palm Court at the Plaza in thirty minutes.” He hung up. “I’m going to send you a little check by messenger, Alouette. It will be here by noon. Can you be packed and out of here by five tomorrow?”

  “But, honey, what’s the difference? She knows. I mean, why should we quit?”

  “‘Read the check I’m going to send, then get out of here by five. Okay?”

  “Where’ll I go?”

  “Try Hollywood. You’ll do great in Hollywood.”

  “Honey, I don’t know anybody in Hollywood.”

  “I’ll send you train tickets and a letter of introduction with the check. Okay?”

  She shrugged. “Okay. Listen, who knows? I might make a great little actress.”

  Willie was waiting when he got to the Plaza. He had ordered a bottle of ginger ale and two glasses. He told Edward that Carmela Palermitano had called him to say that Irene had been to see her in the hospital. Edward sent Willie to get to West Wagstaff as quickly as he could and told him to get a police escort to make sure. “Irene likes you. She trusts you. If you can get her talking, you might just save her from making a terrible mistake.” Edward’s back-chamber Gelbart accent had gotten thicker with the emotional strain.

  Irene got to West Wagstaff after Willie arrived there. She had been talking with a priest, who had said that she must continue to live with Edward because marriage was forever. She wanted to talk to the cardinal. She said it didn’t seem possible that any intelligent, humane religion would force her to allow herself to crumble into ashes to be scattered over the ice of their feelings so that Edward wouldn’t slip. “But what can I do, Willie?. I have this sense of duty and this contract to respond positively. Is all that merely a substitute for what passes for thinking with atheists?”

  Tobin was helpful just by listening. She was able to push out some of the shock and shame and the crippling pain of betrayal that had come to her as quickly as a train wheel comes to the leg that it severs on the track. At the end she said she would agree to meet with Edward if there were only the two of them and if Edward was prepared to listen to her ultimatum.

  They met at the seal pool in Central Park at eleven o’clock in the morning two days later. Willie was able to watch them from above as they greeted each other stiffly, as they walked slowly and awkwardly around and around the circular pond.

  “… I have even talked to the cardinal, who says exactly what Father Corkery says. But I cannot. Perhaps a year from now. Do you know what those letters called you, Edward? And they were accurate. A pervert. You paid a woman to beat her, and you almost killed her by beating her for your sexual—sick, insane emotional—pleasure. I might have been able to adjust to infidelity. But that isn’t any form of love.”

  He was ready. “Would I beat a woman? You know me. Would I beat a woman for such reasons? Have you inquired what she had done to me, Irene? Have I ever as much as raised my voice to you? She inflicted the most incredible and unexpected pain on my—on me, and I struck out reflexively. She fell. She hurt me, but almost entirely she hurt herself.”

  “No.”

  “How else could it be?”

  “I have been to see her three times at the hospital. She is mentally retarded. She can respond only to money. I paid her. We talked.”

  “You paid her and she told you what she thought you wanted to hear. That is her work!”

  “No. She explained that there were quite a few girls who wanted to turn lump tricks, as they are called in your milieu, because you were known to pay so very well. She sees nothing wrong in it. She said that was the way you liked to make love. She was being very considerate of you, she thought.”

  “You’ll have to believe her or me. A whore or the man you’ve lived with for fifteen years.”

  “I believe her.”

  “Then why are we here? Why are we talking?”

  “Because we have a son. And because we are Catholics. I tell myself that if you were an alcoholic or a paralytic I would stay with you and love you and that, in those terms this—this disease you have—” She had to turn away from him and pretend to watch the seals for a while.

  He said, “I will put myself in the hands of a psychiatrist.”

  “Will you?”

  “Immediately.”

  “Are you ready to tell a man all the secrets of your life, all the terrible things you have done somewhere that have brought you to the need to maim women with your fists?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Edward, do you have any conception of what psychiatric treatment is? A doctor has to know everything so that he can help you.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Oh, Edward, Edward,” she sobbed.

  “Has anyone—I mean beyond those letters—has anyone even suggested that I could have anything to hide?”

  “I think it is I who must go to a psychiatrist. I have the habit, but I will not continue the habit with a priest. I told him what you had done and he insisted that my place was with you.”

  “The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Irene.” He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away with a gasp of fright, as if it were the touch of a leper. “We’ve got to give all this a chance to heal, Irene,” he pleaded.

  But he had been warned. He would not go near any psychiatrist. They had designed all of this to box him in, to force him to walk toward the converging lines of the triangle, where they would have their psychiatrist waiting to pump him of every shred of information, preserving all of it in his own voice on recordings so that they could expose him on the national networks and, by pulling him down, bring communism to America.

  “Why don’t you beat me?” she said in a broken voice that was loud enough and so hopelessly entreating that it startled people at the railing ten feet away, who turned to stare with shock. Edward reversed their course, holding her elbow, walking them away from the seal pond. She let herself be led. “The difference between you and me is that if I had known that you had to beat a woman, I would have urged you to beat me. You would have accepted that as a fair, a safer offer. But if I had needed to beat someone almost to death, it would not occur to you to askme to beat you. But that was four days ago. I understand you now. I can see that you want to be beaten and I shall beat you. Not with my hands, not with a club—I’m not strong enough to please you—”

  “Irene, don’t talk like this! You’ll make yourself ill.”

  “You had better listen to me, Edward, because I am going to hurt you more than you have hurt all those poor little whores in the darknesses of your life.” They stopped walking. There was no one near them for many yards around. “I remember somebody you told me was the lowest slime alive. Do you remember that?”

  “Now, please, Irene—”

  “I am going to find him. And I am going to be with him everywhere that people gather to hate each other in this rotten city.” She was entirely unpracticed in hitting people, so she did it badly, even gracelessly. She pulled her right hand far back and looped it in a long arc and crashed her palm into his face.

  It excited Willie Tobin more than he had ever been excited as he watched them through binoculars from his Fifth Avenue window.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Food made her ill. She forced herself to get out of the house. She walked four miles every day. She had an electric bicycle sent from Abercrombie’s. She volunteered for work at the Great Neck Hospital, and she stopped going to church because prayer had the effect of driving her back into herself. The exercise helped her appetite. The hospital got her mind engaged. After five weeks she noticed that the detectives Edward had assigned to watch her movements had gone away. He must have decided that she would remain in seclusion at West Wagstaff and had put aside her threat to humiliate him.

  Edward telephoned many times,
but she hung up when she heard his voice. He came to the house several times, but she would not see him and had the locks changed on the doors. Danny was at summer camp because he had said all the other boys would be there and he just couldn’t afford to be left out. As the end of the camp season came around she decided she would call for him there and they would drive up to Canada for a few weeks. Then he could go directly to school and wouldn’t have to come home to that empty house until she had become more used to it herself. He probably wouldn’t even mention his father, because normally they met only about two times each year, and the boy wouldn’t be likely to miss him.

  The house gave her solace. It helped her to remember what “transitory” meant. The house would go on and on for centuries after she and Edward had escaped each other in death.

  But the long Canadian visit with Danny changed everything. Totally. All the strength of her terrible resolve left her. He made her see her selfishness. This trundling from camp to school to camp couldn’t go on. Let attendance at the Gelbart Academy be Edward’s illusion, and let him have the chance to see his son and live with him. Thanksgiving Day would be there soon. Danny would be home. She would have to try explaining the inexplicable. She had to practice now seeing Edward as a guest in the house—her house—not as a stranger but as a person removed from her feelings and entitled to her best courtesy. She must work at this until a habit formed and until a hard shell grew over the habit. Everything had changed. She had to make her peace with the fact that life never had been meant to be what it had been before. Change was the only consistency. Change was a masquerade. Some change seemed cruel, some even brutal. Some changes were sweet and most changes invisible, but there was only change from nothing into the human form—from nothing to life, then to death, then from death the change underwent its own change.

  Edward had changed. If he had died she would not have sat beside his corpse for years, but in this change he had died for her and yet she would not leave his corpse.

  She called Bill Tobin and asked him to drive out for dinner. She talked it all over with him. He was more helpful and understanding than the priests had ever been. He saw clearly why she must accept the essence of change and open the doors of her house to Edward again, forgetting conceits and the tyranny of regulating his life if he were to be allowed to stay. Either he had been sick and was now cured by their joint experience—just as she had been cured of her innocence—or he was still sick. If he was sick she and his son had to help him. She would take Danny out of that damned school and send him to the school down the road where they could see Edward together every day.

  She would have called Edward the day she decided all that, but it was a Thursday. Monday would be the first day of a new month. The letter arrived on Saturday morning, typed on the same defective typewriter. She opened it casually, because she knew that nothing like this could touch her any more. He had done the worst and it was over, no matter what this note would say.

  The letter said that Edward owned eight of the principal brothels in New York, three of the largest gambling houses, that his long tenure as a leader of the prohibition movement had been criminally insincere, because he had been active in that movement only in order to profit from the criminal organizations he controlled throughout the United States. Had she read about Owney Madden, Legs Diamond, the Purple Gang, Al Capone, Little Augie Orgen, Egan’s Rats? They worked for her husband. “All these are startling allegations,” the letter said, “and most certainly require substantiation. Therefore, if you will show this letter to William Tobin, executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., with offices in the West National Bank Building, your husband’s employee in charge of illegal liquor procurement, and to Arnold Goff, Park Central Hotel, Seventh Avenue at 58th Street, New York, your husband’s employee in charge of all underworld financing, you will learn that this letter is accurate and true. Sincerely, A Friend.”

  She remembered the Silver Slipper and Goff, and Edward’s frightened reaction to Goff, and Bill’s telephone call to Goff to book the table. Irene solved the newest rats’ maze by getting pneumonia.

  Time became a blur. Edward and Danny and priests were there. She thought she had spent time with Clarice and wept when she came out of the fever and remembered she would never see Clarice again. One afternoon Bill was beside the bed. She had been asleep. She opened her eyes and he was there with such pathetic sadness in his face that it seemed as splintered as a broken mirror.

  “Bill?”

  “Irene!”

  “What does Horizons do?”

  “We are a Swiss company.”

  “What kind of a company?”

  “A holding company.”

  “Do you control gangsters?”

  “Irene!”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t understand the question. You’ve been very ill. You’ve been delirious. Do you know how long you’ve been here?”

  “No.”

  “Five weeks. You almost died.”

  “I tried to die.”

  “Irene. Please, no.” His face had fallen into shards again. She realized then what had happened to him. He was in love with her. She compressed time so that she could feel the past. Yes. He had always been in love with her. She must not torture him any more. She went to sleep.

  She returned from Arizona in April. She was very thin and very brown. She looked very, very fit but quite dead. The outside was flawless and there was no inside. She let the house at West Wagstaff run into her emptiness for two days, then she called Arnold Goff.

  “Mr. Goff, this is Irene West. Do you remember me? Edward West’s wife?”

  “I most certainly do.” He had been weighing heroin on a jeweler’s scale with three wholesalers with whom he was about to close. He could not turn his back on the three men, not with nine kilos of heroin on the table, yet he could not have them see his shock, so he relied on moulinage, the process whereby the raw silk becomes processed silk and reels itself around the bobbin.

  “I called to ask if you would give me a card to your friend, that darling Mr. Levin. I would adore to get some of his clothes at the true wholesale prices.”

  Goff was almost unmanned until he realized what had come over her. She was bored with her husband and had gone gangster-happy. She was in that wicked, romantic-pirate stage of fifty other women whom he had allowed to take him into their beds, and he was possessed concomitantly with the keenest pleasure at the thought of surrendering to E. C. West’s wife. He thought of Bella. He thought of five million dollars worth of Liberty bonds. He thought of Joe Masseria and Frankie Yale and Frankie Marlowe.

  “Mrs. West, nothing would give me more pleasure. Shall we meet at one at Moriarity’s tomorrow?”

  “That would be simply wonderful, Mr. Goff.”

  “Please call me Arnold.”

  “If you’ll call me Irene.”

  Jane Winikus told Edward that she had seen Irene lunching with Arnold Goff at Moriarity’s. He told her she must be mistaken. She replied that she had thought she must be mistaken herself, so she had stopped by the table and had spoken with them. She had called Edward because someone else who hadn’t talked to Irene might have called him, and she wanted to be sure that he knew that the lunch was entirely innocent. Mr. Goff was going to take Irene to Levin’s Covered Buttons & Sequins Dresses Inc. to buy clothes wholesale, and every woman enjoyed buying clothes at wholesale once in a while.

  West put watchers on Irene for the second time, but it would take a sandstorm to hide a tail out in the country.

  Propinquity is a reliable aphrodisiac. Goff became so absorbed in getting Mrs. Edward Courance West into bed in order to have it on her husband that he convinced himself she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen. But the more he pressed forward to climb her thighs the further she retreated. Irene became intensely aware of her extraordinary desirability, and it thrilled her so fulfillingly that she began to feel dizziness about this man who could find her so desirable. She could taste lust at the ba
ck of her throat. She could feel talons digging into the floor of her stomach. But if she got into bed with him before she found out what she had to know, she was afraid he would fall slackly out the other side, a free man. She had to keep a lock on him, but, in a manner that she had never felt before in her life, she had to have a man soon—any man, anywhere.

  After three weeks in which Irene and Goff had been seeing each other five and six times a week at race tracks, in nightclubs until dawn with gunmen and con men, West sent for Goff even though in four more days they would have been having their regular quarterly business meeting.

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “With your wife, you mean?”

  “Answer me!”

  “I am trying to screw her.”

  West started involuntarily out of his chair, but he caught himself. He settled back, trembling. “Have you forgotten Joe Masseria?”

  “You did that once, West. You can’t make it stick now. All I care about is screwing your wife. And the crazy thing is I am so crazy about her that I can sense a lot of things about her and one of them is that you can’t even understand what it is I feel about her because you never felt it yourself.”

  West looked like death, death that was dying and death that brings death. At last he spoke. “I love her. Can you say that?”

  “I think I probably loved Bella the way you think you love your wife. But if that’s all it is, then nobody would have had any kids from the beginning. I mean I don’t want to live without your wife, and if she doesn’t want me, then go ahead and have me killed and do me a big favor. You go right ahead and tell how you love her. That’s how I feel about her.”

  “I may do you that favor.”

  “That’s fine. Good. That’s the best way. No horseshit. Whoever wants her the most gets to keep her.” He stared at West contemptuously. “You’re just another hoodlum to me, E.C. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em. And hear me, pal. You aren’t the only one who can hire a gun. And let me tell you something else before you remind me how you made my fortune. I have enough on you in my files at the hotel to blow up this whole nice, big bank you have here. And I happen to have figured out exactly how to use it.”