Mile High

by Richard Condon

  The engines stopped. The steward opened the door. Mayra flew down the ramp, across the cement and into her mother’s arms. Mama gave Walt a big kiss straight off and he blushed five shades of red and pink. “He may not be black,” Mayra said, “but you got to admit he’s colored. How’s the credit, Mama?”

  “Perpetual at last. I got a food store that sells everything. Big, fat German fella from Dover, New Jersey. His wife says he eats cold spaghetti. I swear. I started him off with a cash deposit of a hundred, then second time I give him one-fifty, then third time round he says why bother to pay it in front, my credit is good with him, and I tell you he sure could give lessons to that Relleh on Manhattan Avenue.”

  When they got to Mama’s house she made them tea but she backed it with gin, Scotch, beer, ice and setups. They sat around the dining room table grinning at each other, Walt shy and Mayra manic, Mama calm and happy. They talked about the housing Walt’s firm was working on and Mayra’s hat and dress and Mama’s hat and dress and mink stole. “How about that stole,” Mama said. “Did that almost knock you down? You know where that came from? Remember Miss Lily the—the lady on Madison Avenue and Sixty-fourth a long time ago?”

  “The blonde one?” Mayra asked. “The one on cocaine?”

  “That’s the one. Well, she died about five months ago and she remembered me in her will. I cried like a baby. She left me that beautiful fur thing.”

  After a short while Mayra lied. “Walt, I know you have to see Mr. Tobin and don’t you worry about Mama and me—we have plenty to talk over after all these years—and maybe if you go now you’ll be able to be back in time for dinner.”

  Walt knew that Mayra knew that Willie Tobin wasn’t waiting for him anywhere, but he got the drift. Anyway, it was a chance to have a good uninterrupted look at the Seagram Building, so he said, “I can get back here by six. Will six be all right?”

  “Then is the hour,” Mama answered.

  “Looks like you got a good man,” Mama said.

  “Maybe better than that.”

  “What about that plane? What about that Rolls?”

  “Belong to his daddy.”

  “Who his daddy?”

  “That’s the crazy part. Our name is West because his daddy is Edward Courance West.”

  Mayra expected her mother to be startled, agape with awe, wholly astonished and maybe even speechless for a little minute. But she hadn’t ever expected to see the shock and then the fear that came over her mother’s face. “Mama! What’s wrong?” Mayra asked quickly. The older woman shook her head slowly but did not speak. Mayra could hear clocks ticking. Mama reached out and poured some gin into a glass. “I know that man, honey. He’s a bad man. Baddest there ever was for women. I know him. He even screwed me once on the floor of Miss Baby’s john—and that’s a long time ago, when he was the most famous man in America, and he’s bigger than that now. He put her in that pad and she moonlighted on him. He maybe figured she’d sew or like that between the times he felt like stopping in. He didn’t put bodyguards and secretaries on his meat in those days and he had chicks all over. A little guy name of Willie Tobin used to come around and pay off. Miss Baby was careful not to ball him and I didn’t wear no uniform when we knew he was coming. I played like I was the cook and cleaner. Miss Baby was greedy, that’s all. She got that pad and clothes and a lot of roommates to stay on with her because, like she told Mr. West, she got lonesome—plus he gave her a thousand bucks a month, and that’s in the Depression. Well, Mr. West found out and, man, he wrecked her, and he knocked me around plenty too. Then he calls up the cops. He rates, I mean. The place was full of police inspectors and assistant DAs, and they work, out of me a statement that Miss Baby had been running a house of prostitution and trafficking in drugs and compulsory prostitution and fencing stolen goods—and those last ones were just dreams. He dropped everything on her. Then they took her downtown and they made it all stick in court, and she died in jail with tuberculosis after she done six years. And why? Because she cheated on Mr. West, that’s why.”

  Mama began to cry. She hunched over in her chair sobbing and mopping her face with a napkin. “Then he almost killed Miss Pupchen. For nothing. She didn’t do anything. He just came in with crazy eyes and he broke her into pieces, and when it’s all over he’s clear-eyes. Yeah, Mr. Clear-Eyes. He give me five hundred bucks, because he said he lost his temper when he come on me and screwed me the time before at Miss Baby’s, then beat the shit outta me. But this time he didn’t do me nothing. He give me a check for a thousand and he say, ‘Take care of the kid,’ and he start out. I run after him. I say I can’t, I don’t know how, and she’s hurt bad. She’s all wrecked. He says for me to call Willie Tobin, and he strolls out, all clear-eyes.”

  “Walt’s not like that. Walt’s not anything like that. And he’s never seen his father in his whole life.”

  “His father killed Mary Lou Mayberry. Murder, I’m talking about. He killed her, and I know that, and he’s so bad I wouldn’t be alive right now if he knew I knew that. I found her. I come in at ten in the morning and I found what was left. She hired me one day before, and for once he didn’t know I was going to be on that job. She told me who was paying all those bills, and I come in and I saw that mess of brains and blood and I run outta there before they could put my name in the papers and he could know I knew. His girls got darker and darker. Mary Lou Mayberry was a beautiful black girl. A beautiful black girl just like you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Edward Courance West finished dining alone in the main salle of the Grand Hotel at Bürgenstock West. It was an L-shaped room holding sixty-one tables to seat one hundred and seventy diners. All the tables were set with gay flowers, silver, elaborate service plates, linen and glassware—but there were no other diners. The maître d’hôtel stood near and behind Mr. West. Six chefs de rang and eight commis were at their stations. The very tall, very thin sommelier waited with his two apprentices to respond instantly on signal. A carver wearing a tall, white starched hat stood at a silver serving cart. Nine large crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, tall plants stood in each corner, and ancient Chinese porcelain bowls looked out from niches in all the walls. Eleven heroic oil paintings of princes and battle lords looked down hungrily at the central serving buffet, nine feet by nine feet, which was laden with hors d’oeuvres, salads, cold meats and fowl, cheeses, fruits and desserts. Flanking the outer edge of the L were high glass doors leading to gardens and high terraces.

  Mr. West lifted his napkin to his mouth, then placed it beside his plate. The maître d’hôtel withdrew the chair gently from under him as he rose. He walked unhurriedly across the forty-foot diagonal to the door leading to the main hall, held open by a chef de rang, who said, “Good night, Mr. West.”

  He continued slowly along the corridor. Ahead of him the main hall, ninety feet long and forty-two feet wide, was a sea of vast Persian rugs on which floated sixty-one Louis XV and XVI chairs, eleven settees and sofas and twenty-five tables—but it was empty of people. The room was brilliantly lighted by five chandeliers. The chairs had been set to draw a long scarlet line down its center, flanked on the four walls by fifteen majestic oil paintings. The high ceiling was touched by a white colonnade of six arches that made a graceful aisle along one side.

  At the end of the corridor, the beginning of the main hall, Mr. West turned left into the compact reception hall of the hotel. The uniformed concierge hastened out from behind his desk bringing with him a goose-down-lined greatcoat and a hunter’s hat with earmuffs. As he dressed the upper part of Mr. West a porter put his feet into high, warm, insulated boots. “It is getting colder, Mr. West,” the concierge said.

  Mr. West left the lobby through the revolving door and stood looking out at the floodlights that were fixed on high poles placed thirty feet apart, seventy yards away from the entrance, seeming to curve on both sides of the long line of poles as though encircling the whole property. It was raining, and the tall lights transformed the falling
drops into ropes of tinsel. Beyond the light there was blackness, as though Edward Courance West and his building were all that were left in the world; as though this were a way station on the sunless road that led downward and downward into the tenebrous, rock-locked regions of the underworld. It was as cold as Nifleheim, that ancient German concept of hell; by morning or sooner, the rain would change to snow. It was snowing only twenty-one miles to the north, and heavy snow could slow down the car he was waiting for.

  The Rolls-Royce glided to a halt in front of him. William Tobin opened the door from the inside. Mr. West got in. The concierge tucked a beaver robe well around them, then closed the door. The car started up the long, gentle, sloping road.

  “The first checkpoint telephoned,” Tobin said. “They are right on time.”

  “Good.”

  The car drove two hundred yards to a wide plaza and turned on the circle so that it was pointed back toward the Grand Hotel. There was no one in the plaza. Mr. West had come there to stand at the edge of the cliff fifteen hundred feet above the lake and search the formless horizon, hoping to see the lights of the car appear as it climbed the mountainside or to see the lights of the helicopter above the car to tell him that they were coming closer and just how close they were. He knew that as intently as he would look he would see nothing, but he could not have waited for them all that time, sitting in the hotel. When he had stared at the night and had seen nothing he would go back to the library and wait for them to appear on the closed-circuit television screen, watching while his chief guard at the second checkpoint did what he had been told to do with his hand-held dummy camera. He wanted to see them unadorned, in a clutch, as it were, unaware that they were being studied.

  Mr. West got out of the car at the center of the seven thousand two hundred and twelve acres of forest he had leased from the State of New York. Tobin got out on the other side. Mr. West walked toward the cliff. He felt Irene’s presence all around him. He felt forcefully her approval of the arrangement that it would be only the family gathered for this Christmas dinner. Everyone would be there except Irene’s physical manifestation. But she was there.

  He watched a guard who wore shining black rubber and held two police dogs on leash, straining to see something beyond the night, something that had departed from him decades before, something he willed to return.

  He took the watch with the two faces out of his jacket pocket to check elapsed time. It was the only watch of its kind in the world, built for him for sixteen thousand dollars by Patek-Philippe in Geneva in 1913 when he had taken Irene on their honeymoon to the Bürgenstock. It had taken two years to design the watch, seventeen months to build it. It could deliver fifty-three separate calculations of time and tide simultaneously, making it as unique as its owner, Irene had said.

  It would be forty-one minutes more before they could reach the lower funicular landing. As he returned to the plaza Tobin fell into step beside him. They began to talk about the impending installation of a desalination plant on the western coast of Morocco.

  They got into the car and glided along the two hundred yards to the Grand Hotel. The concierge opened the front door just as Mr. West stepped down from the car, his green and black uniform colors giving Mr. West inner satisfaction. He and a porter helped Mr. West to take his coat and boots off and Mr. West walked into the main hall, turning right to go to the library as Tobin turned left to telephone the police detail about restricting the dogs and to get the kitchen started thinking about the Christmas menu.

  The library walls held books with green and black bindings. It was almost a square room, about thirty by thirty-two feet, with a mural-sized Rubens painting, “Diana, the Huntress,” all pink bosoms and flying teats that sped across the canvas like wind, and two large oils by Frans Snyders, the meat-and-produce painter of the Rubens assembly line, “In the Larder” and “The Game Merchant.” It was an exact reproduction of the room where he had sat with Irene at the Bürgenstock forty-six years before.

  He pushed against the center panel of a book shelf, reversing it, showing several hundred other books on the shelves within. He chose a book carefully, closed the panel and sat down to enjoy what he thought of as “lust of the eye.” As he turned the pages slowly, savoring the extraordinary illustrations, he could feel the carnality stir in him, but he could not concentrate on that lesser pleasure. His mind was on the car that was moving up the mountain on the far side of the lake. He looked at his watch, then clicked on the television receiver of the closed-circuit channel.

  The car stopped in a brightly lighted area where the road had widened to three lanes, directly across from the guardhouse of the second checkpoint. Two men wearing shining, black rubber coats and hats, holding machine rifles, appeared at either side a dozen feet ahead of the car, their breathing creating clouds of vapor.

  A third man came out of the guardhouse, his rubber coat hitched up at the side so that the bone handle of a big revolver showed. He walked with tiny steps, placing one riding boot directly in front of the other, girlish and comical. His shoulders were so squared he could have been wearing a clavicular cross-splint. He rapped sharply on the window at Walt’s side. Walt pressed the switch that rolled the window down. The guard’s scarred face stared in at them, then withdrew to examine the driver.

  He minced back to the guardhouse, laying his pointed toes down like a high-wire walker. He dialed a wall telephone, talked to somebody, then lifted up a black box they could see clearly. The box was attached to a heavy cable. He carried it across the road nearly to the open window of the car, then he lifted it and pointed it at Walt and Mayra. He touched a switch. An intensely bright light hit them with the force of a punch. Mayra cried out. Walt yelled at the guard and shielded Mayra from the light until the guard lowered the box and leaned into the car. “Y’all ‘spectin’ tuh go on up tuh the main house?” he asked nastily. Walt glared at him, going into a rolling boil.

  “Ahm gunna trah again,” the guard said. “An’ this tahm don’ you go blockin’ the broad’s face.”

  “Broad?” Walt was incredulous. “The—the broad?” He threw open the door with all the force of his body and it staggered the man backward and knocked the camera to the ground. Walt jumped out of the car, grabbed the man’s tie with one hand and began to punch his face splinteringly with the other. The guard fell backward with such force that Walt had to release the tie, but he stood over him and kicked him steadily in the ribs and head, wholly lost inside his fury, as though the two of them were the casts of all the television shows ever produced.

  The driver came tumbling out of the car yelling at the two riflemen who had started their sprint toward Walt, holding their guns as clubs. The driver was yelling, “Easy, boys! Watch it! This is Walter West! This is the boss’s son and Tex musta been outta his mind.” He talked them into a slow pace, then into a full stop, their eyes dumb with confusion. The driver and Mayra pulled Walt back into the car, then the driver jumped behind the wheel and the car moved away up the dark mountain road.

  “You were wonderful. Oh, you were wonderful,” Mayra said, holding his face and kissing it again and again. “Where you been keeping that terrible temper, man? You like a double tiger. Oh, baby, that’s who you are, my double tiger.”

  Mayra stared at the pillar of light far across the lake, perhaps seven miles away, which seemed taller than any city skyscraper. It glowed as it towered as though it had been stuffed with ancient angels or with all of Mr. West’s gold. It was a shining shaft as long as the sword of the Avenging Angel. Walt stood behind her and stared with her. “That is Hammetschwand West,” Walt said. “It’s a glass elevator shaft to the top of the Tritten Alp West. It is nine and a quarter miles away.”

  They left the launch and boarded the funicular on the other side of the lake. The car moved them backward on its stunningly steep ascent, drifted them upward away from the lights of the launch and pier, backing into the darkness of the mountain.

  They were afraid. They were afraid for differe
nt reasons, but Mayra had never felt such fear.

  The funicular car stopped. They were at the top of the mountain. They walked into the floodlighted plaza. Across the plaza the tall, gaunt, old man left the huge automobile and began to walk toward them. He shouted something at them but the wind took the words away.

  BOOK THREE

  The Labyrinth

  CHAPTER ONE

  What had seemed an evil amusement park lighting up the top of a mountain changed into something more unreal and sinister. The contrasts were overpowering. As they had begun the ascent in the cable car, to give Walt strength in the presence of this legend they were about to greet—a skyscraper filled with newsreel clips, picture magazine covers, radio decibels, newspaper front pages; a fountain of honorary degrees, medals, international foundations, foreign decorations, authorized and unauthorized biographies, libraries, gigantic possessions, exalted national art galleries; of pomp beyond the captains and the presidents; the Defender of the Republic against the Communist beast, the richest man in the world and also, remotely, her husband’s father, then, more remotely, a religiously devout sadist and a murderer, the punisher of black women—she had given Walt the news that was more than two months overdue, the news that he was going to be a father soon—if she escaped from this place on the mountain top.

  The lights that blared as intensely as the sound of cities struck upon the snow and banished shadow. It was black-enclosed night light, as perpetual and shadowless as the glow through which Proserpina had Walked into Hades. The snow fell through the light as though the air were Geldwasser, just as though Mr. West had ordered it for this jolly Christmas season from Abercrombie & Fitch, an old-fashioned Yuletide-confirming machine fixed to pour out longed-for white Christmases from just above the lights where the blackness enclosed everything.