Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Carrying the capital of his two sons as casual baggage, Edward West had provided the bulk of the financing in England, through the unidentifying and unidentifiable resources of his own bank, for the illegal Clarence Hatry operations, a vast industrial and financial empire that was built around vending machines and that had expanded into investment trusts, then to higher finance, then to the issuance of unauthorized stock, and even to the forging of stock certificates. When Edward West suddenly withdrew his entire investment, without warning and without risk to his own reputation, he left Hatry behind in England in a maze of peculiarly financed investment trusts, to collapse in September 1929, shaking world confidence in the highly speculative American stock market. Then, operating from his New York base at the West National Bank and buying from seven other offices in the United States and Europe, Edward West helped to drive up the value of the shares in Boston Edison to prices so far beyond their true values that the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities refused to allow the stock to be split four for one and consternated the stock market on October 11, 1929, with the words, “Due to the action of speculators no one … on the basis of earnings … should buy it.”

  Mr. West took the short position in the market on September 5, 1929, and played it like world championship billiards through the next six weeks, taking his son’s legacies along with him. He worked well hidden behind the screen of the West National Bank, as always before he had worked behind the scenes in all of the extraordinary enterprises that had originally provided his extraordinary capital. He liquidated everything, from two high-leverage investment trusts to several companies he had built from two-thousand-dollar investments into stock issues worth thirty-seven million dollars, dumping shares onto the New York Stock Exchange, the Curb Exchange and onto markets in Boston and Cincinnati. On the afternoon of October 27 he gave Mr. Pick twenty-three checks made out to Walter’s trust fund, and he sailed for England that evening, telling ship news reporters that he was “seriously concerned with the immediate financial future of the country.” Hundreds of thousands of investors in all parts of the world were selling wildly behind him, hoping desperately to save something, but there was nothing left to save.

  In following the demands of his acquisitive, not to say rapacious, nature and in acknowledging his respect for his dead wife’s last will and testament, he met his responsibility as Walter’s father for the first and last time. Walter at eight months of age had become the sole owner of one of the toweringly great American fortunes at a time when all investments at every single level of the American financial structure had become “bargains.” However, Mr. West instructed Pick, Heller & O’Connell not to reinvest Walter’s funds until he issued instructions. Twenty-three months after the collapse of the stock market he told them to begin to reinvest. They did, and the trust held outstanding interests in stocks, real estate and bonds, as indicated by Edward West, all through the thirties, all through the war economy.

  When Walter reached his majority in February 1950 (while he was in Korea as an infantryman) his estate had multiplied to proportions nearly immeasurable, because it insisted on growing even while battalions of accountants and bankers tried to count it. In a desperate caricature of the allegedly traditional system of opportunity offered in his native country, Walter West not only had enough to feed, clothe and house entire cities of crippling slums but he had not earned a penny of his fortune nor was he able to comprehend either what he owned or how he had acquired it. He personified the motto of the United States, E pluribus unum—one out of many.

  In March 1929, through Natural le Coultre of Geneva, Switzerland, Pick, Heller & O’Connell purchased a comfortable seven-acre property for Walter—Les Haubans—on Lake Genève, between Hermance and Anières. It was a large, sturdy house with a sizable barn that was renovated and extended into a gymnasium, and a tennis court, squash court and indoor swimming pool. The law firm then caused the infant Walter Wag-staff West to emigrate from New York in the charge of Dr. Abraham Weiler, a young pediatrician, and a baby nurse, Evelyn Gonkums.

  At the age of three Walter’s training was taken over by an English nanny of formidable reputation, Miss Rosie Currie, firm but fair, who trained his straight hair into a natural wave. She returned to England after a four-year tour with Walter, the last two years of which had been conducted in German and Italian; English was spoken only at meals and on Sundays. Walter learned French and Spanish from the housekeeping stewards of Les Haubans, Henri and Louise Emmet, who, after he had reached ten, taught him the grave distinctions among cheeses and wines; after he was fourteen Mr. Emmet taught him the embellishing distinctions of dress. Because of Mr. Emmet, Walter was never to travel in later years without packing two dinner jackets, in the event that sauce mousseline or any other staining agent was spilled on one of them.

  Mr. Pick brought Gordon Elphinstone and Mr. Takamura to Walter on the boy’s sixth birthday. Gordon Elphinstone was an associate professor of education at Columbia University and held a doctorate in American history. During the two years he spent at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton he wrote his brilliant analysis of the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy that won the Keifetz Prize. Professor Elphinstone (calculating Mr. Pick’s options) signed a ten-year contract to educate Walter that provided grants and research assistance, as well as salary deposited in New York, which would enable him to publish every two years. He was to teach Walter all formal subjects except languages and physical culture. For his own enlightenment he began his tenure with the preparation of a history of the flaws in the American credit and currency structure that had brought about the panic of 1907 and had been directly responsible for the passage of the Aldrich-Vreeland Act—which is to say, to specialists of American history if not entirely to all others, he was a stimulating man. He was short, thirty-six years old, a bachelor and intensely aggressive. He was white and Presbyterian—perhaps superfluous information.

  Y. Takamura took charge of Walter’s physical training and renewed his Italian and German. For twelve years, until Walter was eighteen, Mr. Takamura taught him calisthenics, baseball strategy, tennis, skiing, bowling, pétanque and curling, mountain climbing, figure skating, billiards, ballet, swimming, boxing, trampoline, small-boat handling, karate, ballroom dancing, automobile operation and maintenance, flower arranging, photography, gliding, fencing, controlled concentration, and how to watch bull fights and court tennis.

  Pick, Heller & O’Connell had assembled a small surrogate family for their client. Elphinstone interpreted the passage of time, past into future; the uses of pen, speech and mind; mysteries and humanities. Takamura brought control and uses of the body. The Emmets introduced the essentials of sensuality, perpetual and life-lasting. Pick, Heller & O’Connell leased to him a conscience and judgment. Together all of them built a steady and reliable, if dull, young man.

  Walter Wagstaff West cannoned out of adolescence to become an architect and was determined to show his father that he, too, was an achiever. He was a gifted architect who applied himself through late hours. When he had decided how he wanted to practice his profession he asked Pick, Heller & O’Connell to locate Derek Adler, a friend from the United States Army in Korea who had studied architecture with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

  It took the law firm’s London detective agency two days to locate Derek Adler. When found he was trying to decide whether to accept a job in U. S. Army Ordnance as an architectural consultant/maintenance engineer or to become a playwright, which his British wife favored. As Adler had become more and more British his wife had become more and more American, until by the second year of marriage his only concession to American mores was to use peppermint-flavored toothpicks at $3.50 per thousand to dislodge his wife’s cooking, which consisted almost entirely of things like Two-Alarm Texas Chili and frozen hush-puppies. The Adlers had met through the Marriage Herald, a monthly magazine published in Chalcot Road, N.W. 1, that stated its sixty-two-year-old institutional purpose was “to arr
ange marriages between ladies and gentlemen of suitable character, tastes, attainments and intellectual standards,” maintaining at all times an awareness of “undesirable characters and adventurers who would bring the agency into disrepute.”

  Derek Adler confirmed his disciplines for architectural design by believing in the logic of brokered marriages. His parents and grandparents had met and married by such means. One could be far more certain of making a successful marriage, because both partners would have demonstrated the degree of their interest in marriage by advertising for it; therefore both were more likely to be ready for marriage than partners acquired at random. Adler did not believe in the single life. Single, he felt like a magnificent recipe that had been torn in half before it had been savored, and he sought to find, the completion of the recipe when he advertised in the Marriage Herald in 1955:

  American architect, bachelor, age 27, height 6 ft. 1 in., dark-to-olive coloring, athletic build when dieting, Jewish parents, comfortable income, wishes to correspond with/meet attractive, healthy, non-kinky, Jewish, Gentile, Mohammedan, Zoroastrian, or agnostic girl who does not smoke, is well-groomed writer, painter, architect, musician or even sculptor, income unimportant, must be willing travel anywhere; object, matrimony.

  He got four responses. One criticized him for wanting to mix religions; one was looking for a mate who would be willing to become one-half of a ballroom dancing team; one got lost or stolen en route to a meeting that they had scheduled; and the fourth was the woman he would have designed for himself if architects had been given the power to breathe life into quarter-inch specifications.

  Jane was a writer perpetually at work on an exhaustive biography of Cardinal Newman, author of Lead, Kindly Light and more than any other individual credited with the expansion of Roman Catholicism in Britain and the United States—which, in her view, was an invidious record indeed. She was a fine cook, he a splendid eater. She was a writer, he was a reader. Jack Sprat and his wife never had it so good in so many ways as did the Adlers. In fact, the only way their union could have been more perfect would have been if she were a transvestite and could have worn his hats, of which he had an extraordinarily representative collection.

  Between her immersions in the biography of Cardinal Newman, Jane Adler was a free-lance journalist who happened to be entranced with trompe-l’oeil painting. She met Mayra Ashant at Battersby’s studio in Brighton. Mayra was about to try to break out as a professional painter in London and Jane invited her delightedly to stay with them while she looked for a permanent place to live. It was Jane’s theory that the more art surrounded her husband the more he would be likely to turn down the job in Army Ordnance and become a playwright. Six week later, at tea time, while she and Mayra were hammering at him to make him agree to write a play on the experiences of the lewd rector of Stiffkey who had passed on in 1936 as a result of having been partly eaten by a vaudeville lion, Walter West rang the Adler doorbell. When the door opened Mayra was standing there. At lunch the next day he and Adler worked out the details of their partnership. To be licensed in a foreign country would be next to impossible, but they could operate as consultants to a licensed firm.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pick, Heller & O’Connell opted to secure a large bank loan for the operations of the new firm called West & Adler, Consultants to Perkins & Flicker, and yet another business manager was installed by them to operate West to West Ltd., a realty firm simultaneously established.

  “I think I should meet the client,” Adler said.

  “Why?”

  “If I don’t meet the client, then I’m the inside partner, and the inside partner is always the heavy.”

  “What’s wrong with that if you never meet the client?”

  “Also, I’d like to try to get a feel of what the client will instinctively try to botch up.”

  “We’re the client,” Walt said abruptly;

  “Did your father—uh—?”

  “No.”

  “Who?”

  “Questions can make a lot of trouble, Derek.”

  “Answers make the trouble. And I’m your partner. I got a right, right? What I mean is, suppose you’re hit by a car, God forbid, and I have to run everything. Does Charley the business manager know who the client is?”

  “Not really. It’s sort of a chain. We hook onto him and he hooks onto another business manager at a realty company who hooks onto an English law firm who hooks onto a New York law firm who hooks onto a bank who hooks onto the client.” Walt rumpled his hair, pinched his nose, stared out the window and made a face. “But you’re right. You have to know. I’m the client.”

  “You’re the client?”

  “Derek, now hear this. What I’ve told you is very confidential information. First, it won’t do the firm much good if people know we’re our own clients. Next, I don’t want people to think of me as anything but an architect, and that includes being known as Edward Courance West’s son. I don’t want to be known as that either. You’ve got to respect that and you’ve got to keep all of it as a confidence.”

  “Sure, Walt. Certainly.”

  “It’s just a piece of land and a lot of lawyers. We have to create something of value on the land—design it and see it built. That’s all that matters. Do you see that, Derek?”

  “Sure, Walt. Absolutely.”

  Walt felt the way he thought his father must have felt when he had put his first great big deal together, and this exhilaration was even more heightened when he found a message at his flat that Dan was waiting for his call at the Savoy Hotel. He called before he took his hat off, to be ready to rush right out again. Dan sounded tired. He said he was in town for about two days and that he’d been tied up at the embassy all day. He asked if Walt could get free to join him for dinner in his hotel suite. Walt said he was on his way.

  Dan looked tired. He drank three fairly dark-brown highballs before dinner and most of a bottle of Haut-Brion with dinner while Walt ate everything in sight and talked excitedly and with a considerable amount of triumph about West & Alder, Consultants to Perkins & Flicker and West to West Ltd. He said, “I think even Father would agree that this is sure-fire stuff. And I hope you’ll pass the word along.”

  Dan had been staring blankly over Walt’s shoulder across the river at the lights of the Royal Festival Hall. “I don’t have to tell him anything any more, Walt,” he said. “He knows everything that happens to you and to me every hour of the day and night.”

  Walt was startled and not a little thrilled. “How do you mean?”

  “He’s built the largest private intelligence organization anywhere in the world and he has to keep it working. His new men probably practice on you and me.”

  “Why does he have that?”

  “To protect himself from the Communists—what else?”

  “But what does he need to do that for?”

  “Because he’s become insane—if he wasn’t always insane.”

  “Now, just a minute, Dan—”

  “He’s the whole wind behind Joe McCarthy. I won’t even speak to McCarthy, and McCarthy thinks that’s very, very funny, because most of his money comes from my father, who is the sure-thing backer of any and every crackpot anti-Communist scheme they can dream up. He’s scared out of his mind about Communists in Washington and Communists in Moscow, and someday someone is going to whisper to him that it could be that the Vatican is packed with Communists, and he’ll race into the breach with another five million bucks.”

  “Oh, well,” Walt said, “that’s just national fermentation. It’s the usual historic process that made the nation great.”

  “What the hell do you know about it?” Dan’s voice was tight and his eyes were hard. “I live with it in the Senate. I live with it under his hate. You should get a good close look at how great America has become—in the same room with Joe McCarthy drunk and clowning and the old man so certifiably insane that he should have been committed five years ago except that he’s too rich to be committed and y
ou and I don’t have the nerve to sign the papers anyway.”

  “Dan, don’t talk like this. He’s our father. We should be defending him.”

  Dan shook his head and stared at the floor. “Maybe you’ll find out someday,” he said bitterly. “I’m chained to him. I can’t get away and I’d give anything to get away. You’re as free as a bird and you want to be chained to him.” He stood up and trailed off unsteadily toward the bedroom. “Good night, kid. I’m sorry I talked so much. I’m sorry about a lot of things.”

  Mayra and Walt began by seeing each other for dinner once a week. Then he’d call her and ask if she could have lunch because he had an idea for interior patios high up (and once a plan for a waterfall that was to fall from the roof of a sixty-story office building into a gorge and would create all the electricity used by the building). Then they saw each other for lunch on Tuesdays and Saturdays and dinner Mondays and Thursdays, and by that time they had found out that they were in love so they began sleeping with each other, and in the third month Walt moved into her basement flat permanently. He brought one suitcase.

  “You sure travel light,” she said.

  “Oh, I keep a few things at the office.”

  Mayra cooked. They ate in restaurants on the same two evenings each week and lunched in restaurants on the same two days, but she cooked and kept the flat in shape and made the beds and handled the laundry, and they were happier than either of them had ever been in their lives. It wasn’t a very big flat. It had a large living room-studio that had good light in the afternoon, a small bedroom, a good-sized kitchen and a hallway. Walt asked her if maybe she’d like to have him find her a studio with a north skylight, but she said she worked better at home where the heavy work was, so he brought her a set of elaborate architectural blue-white Da-lites.

  Jane Adler was a very good journalist. This required excessive curiosity and physical pain if the curiosity wasn’t satisfied. From the day Derek took her to see the enormous piece of property on which West & Adler, Consultants to Perkins & Flicker, were to build a multiple dwelling for five hundred families, she had to know how they had suddenly happened to land a commission like that.