Mile High

by Richard Condon

  Willie was in the blandest good spirits when he arrived, apologetic that he had been tied up in the garage all day and hadn’t been able to lunch with her, but looking forward to a gala dinner. He explained that two really fascinating cars had joined the collection that morning and that he just had not been aware that so much time had sped away.

  “I went up to the Berghaus this afternoon to paint a little bit, and a sad and frightening thing happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mr. West followed me up. He must have come up just about ten minutes after me on the big elevator, and he said a lot of sick things. Like he said he was going to punish me. What’s the matter?”

  Willie was looking at her with dismay that was mixed with anxiety and even consternation. “Mayra, dear,” he said “when did this happen?”

  “About an hour and a half ago.”

  “But it couldn’t have happened an hour and a half ago.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mr. West is in Chicago with your husband.”

  “He is like hell.”

  “Yes. He is.” Willie wet his lips. He rubbed his hands together. “Now, there is nothing to be concerned about here. You’re pregnant. You’ve been traveling a great deal unexpectedly and you’ve had all kinds of contrasts. The fact is this sort of thing happens with many pregnancies.”

  “Not this sort of thing. But, okay, never mind. We’ll let it go. Where can I call Walt?”

  “They’re all at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.”

  “Will you put the call in for me?”

  “Certainly.” Willie glided across the room to the telephone and gave the instructions to Gubitz. They waited somewhat uneasily for ten minutes, then Gubitz reported that Mr. Edward West and Mr. Walter West were out of the hotel. “They’re probably out looking over the housing site,” Willie said. “In fact, I’m sure that’s where they are,” he said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece.

  “Please ask when they’ll get back.”

  Willie asked. “They’ll be back for dinner,” Willie said after Gubitz had fed the question to the hotel in Chicago.

  “May I speak to the hotel, please?”

  “Certainly.” Willie extended the phone.

  Mayra spoke to the desk clerk and asked him to be certain to leave word that Mr. Walter West was to call his wife as soon as possible.

  Mayra said, if Willie didn’t mind, she thought she’d rest for a little bit while she waited for Walt’s call. Willie started to reassure her again that it most certainly must have been a trick of light and the wind, and she listened so patiently and nodded so compliantly that he lost heart and began to leave, asking her to call him, please, after she had talked to Walt and saying that he hoped they could have dinner together.

  Walt called at eight o’clock, which was seven o’clock Chicago time, three and a half hours after she had come down from the mountain, four and a half hours after she had been threatened by Mr. West.

  “Walt?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “How’s everything?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Your daddy with you?”

  “He’s in the hotel, not with me, but down the hall somewhere.”

  Mayra shut her eyes tightly. Then she spoke again after a long pause. “Were you out to look at the site?”

  “Just got back. Marvelous piece of land.”

  “Walt?”

  “Yes, love.”

  “Did your daddy go out to the site with you?”

  “No. We had an early lunch, then he decided to take a nap and make some calls. He’s too old to go tramping around the countryside.”

  Her eyes popped open. “What time you finish lunch?” she asked.

  “About twelve-thirty. Why?”

  “You just get back?”

  “Yeah. Just now.”

  “Been in to see your daddy since lunch?”

  “No. Say, what kind of a crazy conversation is this?”

  “Don’t pay me no mind. I just wanted to talk. The words don’t matter, do they? So long as we just can talk. I guess I’m lonesome.”

  “Well, not for long, you won’t be. This is Wednesday. I’ll be back Saturday. We’ll be having dinner with your mama on Monday night in New York.”

  “Call me right after dinner?”

  “Sure will.”

  “I’ll be waiting right here now. Love you, baby.”

  “I love you, sweetheart.”

  She called Willie and apologized. She said he had been quite right. Mr. West was in Chicago, and she felt very bad about what she’d said. Willie implored her not to think about it, please not to think about it, it was their secret and everybody knew these things happened all the time, and she simply was not to give it another single thought. Mayra promised not to, but she said the whole experience, even though imaginary, had tired her out and she thought that maybe the best thing was to turn in early and have a real good rest.

  Walt called from Chicago at ten-twenty. Everything was fine. His father was in the best spirits and was really very, very enthusiastic about the project. Walt and Congressman Rei would be flying out to California early in the morning. His father would be going on to Washington and he hoped to get back to Bürgenstock before they had to leave.

  “Walt?”

  “Yes, baby.”

  “You have more money than most countries, so why do you need this deal with your daddy? You can buy land. I mean, why do we need him even a little bit?”

  “It’s not just the land, hon. I could have done that years ago, but you know this new city stuff is my whole dream. If it was just buying land, hell, I could have done that with Derek instead of building the same apartment complex all over Europe. But it’s very tricky stuff. Mostly connections. Connections to swing tremendous financing. For instance, nobody but my father or some insurance company could have lined up three of these enormous projects simultaneously. It takes connections more than financing to bring the residents who are the labor force into the houses at exactly the time when the factories are ready—sometimes chemists, sometimes lens grinders, sometimes just ten or twelve thousand wig makers—who knows? Everything has to balance, and it takes connections and special merchandisers, everything very special and solid but very organized. They have to match and be at the same place at the same time. It takes political connections. All kinds of specialists have to be recruited and right there, not only ready to work but ready to be paid, like teachers and butchers and movie projectionists and golf pros. I’m just an architect. I have the money for the openers, but I wouldn’t know where to go to line up the dovetails. So that’s why I need my father if this kind of work is the work for me. That’s how it is.”

  “It’s going to be a damned interesting winter,” Mayra said. “How long between when you left your daddy after lunch and you met him for dinner?”

  “I don’t know, maybe about seven hours. Didn’t you ask that before?”

  “That’s how the whaling captains’ wives passed the time. Imponderables. You sure were’re going to do all this out of New York?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe better out of Chicago.”

  “Oh. Sure. Chicago. Hurry on back here, Walt.”

  “At the very latest, Sunday morning.”

  Mayra sat up, staring at the lovely wood fire that had been made in her sitting room. She didn’t believe they would be allowed to work in New York or Chicago. She didn’t believe Edward West intended for them ever to work anywhere else, except maybe Walt for a short time, and then mostly traveling, for all the most convincing reasons in the world. So she had to convince Walt. Nothing easy about that. Maybe Mama could just fall out of a barber chair and win that kind of an argument, and if she could do an hour or two of figuring the scam out with Mama she knew she could beat it—but forget it. If she called Mama she’d be talking through a bug, and as soon as she began to lay out the problem she’d get cut off, then with the kind of loot this cat had, in twenty minutes some high-pr
iced mimic who sounded exactly like Mama would call back, and nobody wanted Mama’s advice that secondhand. She’d just have to study up on how to think like Mama or she’d be dead and this little thing who wasn’t even formed into a baby yet would be dead. If anybody could ever learn to think like Mama it should be her. Never mind this Ashanti shit. That kind of high-chin swanning could get her right to the bottom of the cliff under the Hammetschwand. She had to sleep on it. Man, she had to think on it and dream on it and maybe send out for a Ouija board to cone in on Mama. Mama would hear. Mama would transmit. It was just a matter of locating the tuner.

  The answer didn’t come until the next afternoon, and then—even though what they began to do to her was, for them, so hopelessly debasing and demoralizing because of the rotten misery it brought and the murderous hypocrisy that attended it—the extra-special Mama-wave came through and she was able to begin to form a clue about what she was going to have to do. At least a tiny part of what she would have to do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After breakfast the next morning Mayra became about as miserably ill as if she had the worst kind of seasickness. She retched continuously and couldn’t find any position that gave her any comfort. By two o’clock she decided that the only way to pass the intelligence test would be to see if the place had a doctor, so she called Gubitz, and in ten minutes a steady, reassuringlooking man named Dr. Garrison arrived with Willie Tobin. The doctor asked Willie to wait until he had completed an examination, then he talked to Mayra in a calm, confident way, explaining that he was Mr. West’s staff physician and mentioning the various glorious hospitals at which he had been chief of staff, then he asked her questions, discovered she was pregnant, took medicine from his satchel, made her swallow it, and in no time at all she felt safe for the first time in almost six hours.

  Willie was deeply concerned, and conveyed that he felt himself to be responsible for Mayra while Mr. West and Mayra’s husband were away, in that order, and seemed to be listening to Dr. Garrison’s prognosis, while his hands clenched and his feet were drawn tightly together. Mayra couldn’t piece it out why they hadn’t let Willie in on the plan. Dr. Garrison said, “What Mrs. West has been suffering is a rather pronounced form of morning sickness. Usually these things happen somewhat earlier on—she’s never had the slightest symptom of morning sickness before, she tells me—and usually the mother-to-be is well over this sort of discomfort by the end of the third month—which Mrs. West tells me is about two weeks way—but this morning’s attack was so acute that we’ll just have to wait to see if it recurs or whether, possibly, she has been afflicted with some form of food poisoning—although she tells me she had cinnamon toast and tea for lunch yesterday, and nothing for dinner last night but tea, so that doesn’t seem likely. We’ll just watch and wait for these subsequent mornings to see what happens.”

  Mayra thought she knew what was happening, and when, the next morning, she was even more violently ill, and Dr. Garrison said that the best treatment would be for her to remain right in bed until the usual time for that condition was passed, she thought she ought to ask him if there was any guarantee that it would be all over by the end of the third month of pregnancy. He said, not necessarily. He said that frequently—in fact, it was amazing how frequently—expectant mothers remained in bed throughout their pregnancies and never did get over being violently ill until the day of birth. He said they’d just have to see that she had the best obtainable care and that he knew that, if required, Mr. West would fly in the best obstetrical team in the United States for the duration, and that she was not to worry.

  So that afternoon she called Mama.

  “Mama? Mayra.”

  “Hey!”

  “How’s everything?”

  “We’re winning. How’re you?”

  “You know. A little baby-wonky. In the morning.”

  “Miserable, but standard.”

  “But they got a fine doctor here, and he says if I rest it out in bed I’ll beat it.”

  “Oh, you’ll beat it.”

  “But I will be in bed for a while and”—Mayra took a deep breath—“I thought maybe you’d send me up in the mail the old family scrapbook and I could pass the time leafing through it and maybe filling in a couple few pages of snaps of Walt and me that I been lugging around.”

  Mama dug. Mayra could tell by the change. Not a big take. Not a power hose of questions. Just “The scrapbook?” softly, no emphasis in particular, but just like she wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing.

  “Yes. The family snapshots and your diploma, and all like that.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Think maybe you could get it in the mail today? Special delivery, registered, would be the quickest, and mark like Scrapbook right on the front of the package. The best way.”

  “Uh-huh. How’s Walt?”

  “He’s just fine. He had to go off on a business trip, but he’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “You meet his father?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Is he like they say?”

  “Oh, yes. Just like you thought. But he’s away right now too.”

  “That’s nice. Well, I’ll get right on out to the post office. Think you could phone me every day at about this time?”

  “That would be just fine, Mama.”

  “Okay then.”

  “If you don’t hear from me, maybe you could call Walt here, because if I’m feeling poorly he’ll take the message and pass it on. It’s Hawk Bay number one, Herkimer County, and Information has it.”

  “What if I can’t get you or Walt?”

  “Then maybe I could ask you to call Walt’s brother? The senator? In Washington?”

  “How do I get him?”

  “Just call Information and tell her you want the number of the Senate Office Building, I guess.”

  “You all right so far?” There was alarm in Mama’s voice for the first time. It was naked and off guard.

  “Just that little bit of morning sickness. ‘Bye now, Mama.” Mayra hung up before Mama could say anything else, because she was sure the room was bugged. She knew what to look for and where to look because Mama had once gone out with a police captain, and the captain was an electronics man who talked about nothing else. He’d told them two dozen times that most of the rooms of the world were bugged, and he would lead them all around and show where and how and keep describing the different ways. Come to think of it, Mama had been friends with two different police captains in her time.

  Mayra went over the room carefully, inch by inch, but she didn’t find anything until she started unscrewing the mouthpieces of the four telephones in the two rooms and the one in the john. Every one of them had a cadmium-nickle miniaturized transmitter packed in under the mouthpiece, and it was the kind of a gimmick that picked up whether the telephone was on or off the hook. She let them be. When Walt got home and she had figured the whole damn mess out and was ready to talk, she could handle all of them with a few pillows.

  She got back in bed and turned on the radio. She noted that the sick feeling left almost the moment she took the medicine. She also noted that they were working to pin a bad pregnancy on her—like it had made her blow her wig because the first thing Willie had said to explain why she had thought she had seen and heard Mr. West, who everybody in their right mind knew was in Chicago, was that everybody also knew that those kind of hallucinations were just an everyday part of being pregnant. Now they were laying on a little mild breakfast poison. Well, she had to play. Then she heard what the radio was saying.

  “… reports that the private aircraft of Edward Courance West, which was carrying Mr. West’s younger son, Walter, age thirty, and former Congressman Benito Rei, the prominent Chicago banker and great friend of American civil aviation, together with pilots A. Ehrlich and C. Anderson and Chinese steward Mat Sun, was reported missing today in a flight between San Francisco, California, and Washington, D.C.”

  She stared at the radio. The doorb
ell began to ring hurriedly, then the door opened and Willie came into the living room, pale with fright. She watched him cross the room toward her before she was able to nail down into her consciousness what the radio had said.

  “Mayra,” Willie gasped, “I have bad news. I just talked with Mr. West in Washington. Walt—”

  “I know. I just heard it on the radio.”

  “No, we must not panic. Mr. West was very clear about that. The fact that the plane is missing does not mean that there has been an accident. It is entirely possible that it was just forced down by some mechanical demands, and Mr. West has a country-wide search of the flight pattern being made right now by the air force and civil authorities.”

  “How could it be forced down? I mean, where could it land that there wasn’t a telephone?”

  “But that’s just it. Mr. West even anticipated that question by saying what reason would they have to telephone when they wouldn’t even have known anything had happened to them? The pilots would naturally figure they could radio the changed ETA when they were airborne again.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Please rest. Please let Dr. Garrison help you to rest.” He sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand. “Please try not to think about it.”

  “I’ll think about it. I can’t not think about it.” She watched Dr. Garrison through the open door as he proceeded with stately pace across the living room carrying his black satchel. “But I won’t believe it.”

  “That’s good. That’s fine.” Willie said.

  “I won’t believe it because I know it hasn’t happened. It’s just another stunt. It’s just one more sadistic trick.” She watched Dr. Garrison slide the needle of the hypodermic syringe into the ampoule. Willie wasn’t just holding her hand to pat it, she noticed. He was holding her arm. So it was okay. Walt was safe and sound, and it was all done just to move her around a little bit more, to set her up so that nobody, not even her own precious, wonderful Walt, could believe that she was all right in the head. Going crazy is just a part of being pregnant, Mrs. West, she told herself as Dr. Garrison slid the needle into her vein.