The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  But there are such things as blizzards that bury mountain highways, and the only way to be sure the roads are always open is to stay away from the mountains unless it is summer. Since that first trip, John and Janice have often invited us to join them on the slopes, or even to use their time-share when they can’t. Kimmer has gone twice, once with the Browns and once, just last year, ostensibly alone: “Some time apart to think will do us both some good, Misha, honey.” I have stayed home both times, honoring my oath never again to try to get into Aspen in the winter. But the Lord, we all know, has ways of confounding proud mortals who swear oaths too lightly. So here it is February, and here I am on my way to Aspen in another snowstorm, flying in defiance of my own rules, the small jet buffeted by the gusty Rocky Mountain winds, the skiers drinking hard, the rest of us turning green.

  The plane lands safely, and, by the time we roll to a stop, the mid-afternoon sky even begins to clear. It occurs to me, as I scurry across the tarmac to the small but modern terminal building, that the people who live here year-round are not as crazy as I have always thought. The snow-dappled mountains are gorgeous in the winter sunlight, which picks out the details with a crystal clarity. The evergreens marching toward the summit are, if anything, more dramatic in February than in August, like winter-weather troops wearing green-and-white alpine uniforms. Most of my fellow passengers are wearing uniforms too, after a fashion, and their brightly colored ski parkas look very serious indeed.

  I have time to savor this vision only until I turn toward the baggage claim area and find waiting there the lean bodyguard I remember from the cemetery, whom I know only as Mr. Henderson. The temperature is in the teens—the very low teens—but he is wearing only a light wind-breaker. He summons a dazzling smile and even a few words: “Welcome to Aspen, Professor,” delivered in an eerily familiar voice, a voice so sleek, so velvetly delicious, that I can readily imagine anybody he tries to seduce sliding willingly downward to oblivion. Yet there is nothing of the voluptuary about Mr. Henderson. He is, instead, rather standoffish—as a good sentinel surely must be—as well as alert, energetic, feline in his compact grace, somehow complete.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” I reply.

  Mr. Henderson nods politely. He does not offer to take my bag.

  Moving on remarkably light feet, he leads me out to the car, which, this being Aspen in winter, is a silver Range Rover. He reminds me to buckle my seat belt. He tells me in his sinuous voice that Mr. Ziegler has been looking forward to renewing our acquaintance. All of this while, apologizing for the necessity, he runs a hand-held metal detector over my clothes and then, when I assume the indignities are done, repeats this activity with a small rectangular device complete with LED digital readout, perhaps to discover whether I am broadcasting. I keep my tongue in check: the meeting, after all, was my idea. “It will take us half an hour or so to get up to the property,” Mr. Henderson says as we pull out of the parking lot. Not the house, I register. Not the estate. The property. A good Rocky Mountain word.

  I nod. We exit the airport onto Route 82, which parallels the Roaring Fork River into the town of Aspen. At first the scenery is broad white fields and scattered houses and the occasional gas station or convenience store, always against the backdrop of some of the most glorious mountains in North America, which frame the valley on every side. Then the clusters of dwellings grow thicker . . . and, on the distant highlands, noticeably larger. Bunched townhouses announce the city limits. Even before entering the town, one can see, to the north, the garish homes along the ridges of Red Mountain, looming over the town like a kitschy reminder of the yawning chasm between money and taste. Then we are inside Aspen proper, home to what might be the most expensive real estate in the United States. I watch the town pass by, almost too neat and picturesque in its bright frame of sun and snow. As always, I gawk at the tiny, perfect Victorians of the West End, painted a happy variety of earth tones, each selling at probably ten times what the same building, on a larger lot, would bring in Elm Harbor. Realtors refer to the Aspen housing market as “sticker shock for the rich,” swapping gleeful stories of well-to-do couples who break down in tears upon realizing how little a four-or five-million-dollar nest egg will buy. It is said that one of every eleven year-round residents works at least part-time selling real estate, and no wonder. A single six-percent commission can make your year. The median price of a home in Aspen is more than two million dollars, which is perhaps a fifth of what the medium-sized estates on Red Mountain fetch. On the mountain, prices of twenty million or more are not uncommon.

  Jack Ziegler lives on Red Mountain.

  The Range Rover sails into downtown Aspen, where every pedestrian seems to be carrying skis. The police wear jeans and drive sport-utility vehicles or sky-blue Saabs. Mr. Henderson steers swiftly and confidently through the snow. The only American cars I see are Jeeps and Explorers and Navigators. We pass a couple of filling stations, then three or four short blocks of restaurants, town offices, and shops. In the center of town, we hang a sharp left, turning north. (For some reason, maps of Aspen are usually drawn upside down, with Red Mountain, which lies to the north, at the bottom, and Aspen Mountain, which lies to the south, at the top.) We pass one of the town’s two supermarkets, cross a short bridge, take another sharp left, and, suddenly, we are climbing the winding road that is the only way up Red Mountain.

  “I assume the meeting is just the two of us,” I say.

  “As far as I know.” His battle-hard gray eyes never leave the road. I realize that Mr. Henderson has not given me quite the reassurance I need, perhaps because I did not ask quite the right question.

  “Nobody else knows I’m coming?”

  “Oh, I would guess that everybody does.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Mr. Ziegler is a popular man,” he says cryptically, and I realize that I am not going to get any more information than I already have, but what I already know is enough to keep my nerves humming.

  The Range Rover corners hard to the right at a switchback and then, moments later, hard to the left at another. All around us lies the tawdry evidence of the madness of the nouveaux riches. To describe the mansions surrounding us as large does not quite capture the phenomenon of Red Mountain. They are immense testaments to misspent wealth, decorated with enough multi-tiered fountains, tennis courts under all-weather bubbles, four-car garages, turrets, indoor pools, and terrorist-proof gates to fill several museums, as perhaps in the future they will—the Museum of American Waste, our grandchildren’s grandchildren might decide to call it. Further confirmation, my favorite student, Crysta Smallwood, would likely say, of the determination of the white race to destroy itself—in this case, by spending itself to death.

  The Range Rover makes another sharp turn, and suddenly we are facing a heavy gate and Mr. Henderson is whispering seductively into a speaker along the side of the road. A tiny light turns green, and the gate rolls back. A wide, unmarked road stretches upward. At first, I imagine that we are entering Jack Ziegler’s estate, which I have never seen but have always imagined to be sprawling and walled. I realize a moment later that I am mistaken. We are inside a private development, a subdivision for people whose wealth is in nine figures. Mailboxes are all clustered together near the entrance, and, moments later, individual driveways appear. The houses are no smaller than elsewhere on the mountain, but they are quieter somehow, less gaudy, their residents concerned more with privacy than showing off. Turning a wide corner, we pass a Grand Cherokee marked with the logo of a private security firm, and the two hard white faces inside look more like Green Berets than ordinary rent-a-cops.

  We are in a cul-de-sac. The second driveway on the right is Jack Ziegler’s.

  Uncle Jack lives in what is sometimes called an upside-down house, because you enter on the top floor. From the outside, it is rather unpretentious, flat and rectangular with unassuming stucco walls and a garage that holds a mere three cars. But the secret, it turns out, is on the inside. We are admitt
ed to the house by another quiet bodyguard, this one named Harrison, who is very nearly Henderson’s twin, not in appearance but in behavior, for their affects are as confusingly similar as their names. The marble-floored entry hall is actually a balcony from which one looks down into the main part of the house; the dwelling is built into the side of Red Mountain, and to descend the stairs to the lower level, which is where they lead me, is to descend the mountain itself. The windows looking out on the town below and Aspen Mountain beyond are two stories high. The view is alarmingly beautiful.

  I do not generally suffer from vertigo, but as I pick my way down the stairs I cannot resist the sensation that I am strolling into thin air, right off the side of the cliff, and one of the interchangeable bodyguards seizes my upper arm because I begin to sway.

  “Everyone has that reaction at first,” Mr. Henderson says kindly.

  “Almost everyone,” corrects his partner, who looks like a man who has never been dizzy in his life. Harrison is skinny, the wide receiver to Henderson’s linebacker. I would figure Henderson as the intimidator, Harrison as the silent killer. They share the same dead eyes and cold, pale stare. But my imagination is running away with me: Uncle Jack is, after all, retired.

  From whatever.

  “Don’t let the illusion deceive you,” adds Henderson in his smooth voice, as though reciting to a group of tourists. “There is plenty of solid rock underneath us, and the ground outside is mostly flat.” He points toward the window, probably to indicate a lawn, but I am unable to follow his gesture without having my head begin to reel.

  “Mr. Ziegler will be with you momentarily,” Harrison grumbles before trudging off down one of the two hallways that run from the immense ground-floor room into the wings of the house.

  “Perhaps you should sit down,” Henderson suggests, gesturing toward the several seating arrangements in the vast room: one white leather, another some brown tweed fabric, a third a bright floral print, all sharply distinct, yet blending somehow into a harmonious whole.

  “No, I’m fine,” I assure him, speaking for the first time since entering the house, and pleased that my voice is steady.

  “May I offer you something to drink?”

  “I’m fine,” I repeat.

  “At altitude, it is important to stay hydrated, especially the first few days.”

  I look up at him, wondering if he is after all, as I first suspected on the day we buried the Judge, not a bodyguard but a nurse.

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  “Very well,” says Henderson, withdrawing down a different hallway from the one that swallowed Harrison, and suddenly I am alone in the lair of the beast. For Jack Ziegler, I have come to realize, is not simply a source of information about the misery that has overtaken my family; he is, in some sense, its author. Where, after all, would my father turn if he wanted to hire a killer? There was really only one possibility, and that is the reason I am here.

  I circle the room, admiring the art, pausing here and there, waiting. In the air is the scent of something zesty—paprika, perhaps—and I wonder whether Uncle Jack plans to offer me lunch. I sigh. I do not want to stay very long in this house. I do not want to stay very long in this town. My preference would be to talk to Uncle Jack and immediately leave again, but the depressing magic of time zones and the mundane obstacle of finding a flight out have combined to make that impossible. Uncle Jack, fortunately, made no offer to put me up for the night, and our rickety family budget would never bear the price of an Aspen hotel room in the high winter season, even were one available. So I have arranged to use John and Janice’s time-share for this one night; it isn’t their week, but they ascertained that it would be vacant and switched with whoever is scheduled to occupy it.

  Other than my wife, nobody in Elm Harbor knows that I have made this trip. I hope to keep it that way. I am not technically exceeding the rules Dean Lynda laid down—it is Friday, so I am missing no classes—but I do not imagine she would be thrilled to discover that I have flown off to visit . . . the man I have flown off to visit. Being the helpful fellow I am, I would rather not add needless complications to Lynda’s job. So I am not planning to tell her.

  I glance at the window again, but the view is as disturbing as ever, and I hastily turn away to continue my circuit of the room. I pause in front of the fireplace, where the wall is dominated by a huge oil painting of Uncle Jack’s late wife, Camilla, the one he is supposed to have killed, or had killed. The portrait is at least seven feet high. Camilla wears a flowing white gown, her jet-black hair piled on her head, her pale face surrounded by an unearthly light, probably in an effort to suggest an angelic nature. It reminds me of those idealized paintings of the Renaissance, when the artists took care to make their patrons’ wives glow. I am willing to bet that the portrait was done after Camilla’s violent death, for the artist appears to have worked from a blown-up photograph, so that the result appears not so much ethereal as fake.

  “Not one of his better works, is it?” sighs Jack Ziegler from behind me.

  (II)

  I DO NOT STARTLE EASILY. I do not startle now. I do not even turn around. I lean over to squint at the artist’s name, but it is an illegible scrawl.

  “It’s not bad,” I murmur generously, pivoting to face Abby’s godfather, and recalling the answer that ended my father’s chance for the Supreme Court. I don’t judge my friends based on rumors, he said when they asked about Camilla; then he folded his arms, signaling his contempt for the audience.

  Jack Ziegler’s arms are folded, too.

  “He’s not a real artist anyway,” Jack Ziegler continues, dismissing the painting with a flap of one trembling hand. “So famous, so honored, yet he paints my wife for money.”

  I nod, not sure, now that I am facing Uncle Jack, quite how to proceed. He stands before me in bathrobe and bedroom slippers, his face thinner and grayer than before, and I wonder whether he has more than a few months left. But his eyes remain bright—mad and gleeful and alert.

  Jack Ziegler slips his skinny arm into mine and conducts me slowly around the room, evidently assuming that in my desperation, or perhaps my fear, I will be fascinated by what his illicitly obtained wealth has purchased. He points to a lighted display case holding his small but impressive collection of incunabula, some of them doubtless on Interpol watch lists. He shows me a small tray of magnificent Mayan artifacts that the government of Belize certainly does not know have left the country. He turns me to look back the way I came in. The wall below the balcony is covered by a huge fabric hanging, all multicolored vertical lines that attract and confuse the eye. There is a pattern hidden there, and the brain’s stubborn determination to work it out holds the gaze. The piece is enormously beautiful. Uncle Jack tells me with unfeigned pride that it is a genuine Gunta Stölzl, and I nod admiringly, even though I have no earthly idea who, or even what sex, Gunta Stölzl is, or was.

  “So, Talcott,” he wheezes when our guided tour of his little museum is over. We are standing before the window once more, neither of us wanting to be the one to begin. As we measure each other, recessed ceiling speakers bark the hard musical edges of Sibelius’s Finlandia, which has always struck me, despite its energetic pretensions, as one of the most depressing compositions in the classical repertoire. But it is perfect for the moment.

  When I say nothing, Uncle Jack coughs twice, then moves swiftly onward: “So, you are here, you have made it, I am pleased to see you, but time is short. So, what can I do for you? You said on the telephone that the matter was urgent.”

  At first, I can manage only a nervous “Yes.” To see Jack Ziegler so close up, his near-twin bodyguards waiting in the wings, his eyes glittering, not quite mad but not quite sane, waiting impatiently for me to explain myself, is quite different from sitting on an airplane planning how the dialogue will go.

  “You said you had some trouble.”

  “You could say that.”

  “You said that.”

  Again I hesitate. What I a
m experiencing is not so much fear as a reluctance to commit myself; for, once I enter upon a serious conversation with Uncle Jack, I am not sure I can pull free of him.

  “As you might or might not know, I’ve been looking into my father’s past. What I’ve found has been . . . disturbing. And then there are other things, things that have happened over the past couple of months, which are also disturbing.”

  Jack Ziegler stares silently. He is prepared, it would seem, to wait all afternoon and into the night. He does not feel threatened. He does not feel afraid. He does not seem to feel anything—which is part of his power. I wonder afresh whether he really murdered his own wife, and whether he felt anything at all if he did it.

  “People have been following me,” I blurt out, feeling idiotic, and when Uncle Jack still refuses to be drawn, I simply tell the whole story, from the moment he left me in the cemetery to the fake FBI agents to the white pawn to Freeman Bishop’s murder to Colin Scott’s drowning at Menemsha to the book that mysteriously reappeared. I omit Maxine, perhaps because keeping at least one secret in the face of Jack Ziegler’s demanding glare is all the victory I am likely to win.

  When he is sure that I am finished, Uncle Jack shrugs his shoulders.

  “I do not know why you are telling me this,” he says gloomily. “I assured you on the day of your father’s burial that you are in no danger. I will protect you as I promised Oliver I would. You and your family both. I keep my promises. Nobody will harm you. Nobody will harm your family. It is impossible. Completely impossible. I have seen to it.” He shifts his weight, evidently from physical pain. “Chess pieces? A missing book? Men hiding in the woods?” He shakes his head. “These are not disturbing, Talcott. I had frankly hoped for better from you.”