Vanishing Point

by Morris West

  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Harper Collins Publishers Pty Ltd

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1996

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: iStock

  ISBN 978 1 76029 774 9 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 853 5 (ebook)

  For my family,

  who, like all travelers,

  have heard the storm winds rise

  and learned the perils of strange shores.

  This book—with love.

  Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.

  —Robert Browning, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”

  Contents

  Author's Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is the novel I believed I would never write. Its genesis was a puffy little piece which I clipped some years ago from a magazine in a hotel room in Zurich.

  I did some desultory research on what is in fact a highly developed worldwide service industry: making people vanish. I found I could raise neither energy nor enthusiasm for an idea which seemed to me to belong in another genre of writing than mine.

  The impulse to develop the theme came from quite another quarter. I had, over many years, a close acquaintance with the phenomena of depressive illness, the impulse to flight from intolerable reality, and the impulse to absent oneself from the burden of life. The two themes began to knit themselves into a pattern which clamored for expression.

  The urge to write this book became as irresistible as that which drove my characters to “the dangerous edge of things.”

  I offer my thanks to all those who have helped me to write it by sharing their expert knowledge or their very private experiences of suffering.

  Morris West

  1

  MY FATHER, A FORMAL MAN but a kind one, calls me a certifiable eccentric.

  He can call me anything he wants, because it was he who provided me with the freedom and the means to do what I do now: which is to live in a great whitewashed barn in the hills above Cagnes, work during the winter on a history of architectural art, and in spring take to the road with camera, sketchbooks, and canvases to provide another batch of up-to-date original illustrations.

  My father is Emil Strassberger, one of the most respected names in New York banking. I am named Carl Emil. I am his only son. Our ancestors came from Alsace, where the business was founded in the mid-nineteenth century to raise money for the Industrial Revolution in Europe. It is perhaps significant to our relations and to our history that I still call him, in the old-fashioned mode, ‘Father.’

  I know he was sadly disappointed when I chose to break with tradition and follow the gypsy road of the arts. Yet, gentleman that he is, he gave me my liberty on a golden dish. I would retain my shareholding in the company, which would pay me enough in dividends to maintain me in bachelor comfort. The position reserved for me in the company and on the board would pass to my sister Madeleine’s husband, Laurence Lucas, Harvard-educated in commercial law, coopted immediately after graduation into the rising band of hopefuls at Strassberger & Company in New York. My fath
er liked Larry and, more importantly, admired him. In his second year at Harvard, both his parents had been killed in an automobile accident. He was left with a modest legacy and a few distant relatives who lived on the West Coast. Somehow he had managed to survive the ordeal and finish his courses with high commendations and a promising future. On his marriage to Madeleine, my father endowed him with a directorship and a parcel of shares. My sister, Madeleine, made her way, as my mother did, with a quiet grace of care and authority. I treasured them both. They were, after all, my passport to the life I had chosen.

  It was a good life, if a completely selfish one. I was thirty-seven years old. I had income to cover all my reasonable needs. I had work that pleased me and earned me both money and a reputation that was growing quietly among a small but influential group of connoisseurs. I liked the rustic life, which kept me healthy and my table well supplied. I had a thirty-foot sloop riding at a safe mooring in Antibes. I had an agreeable and intelligent friend, one Arlette Tassigny, who ran one of the best galleries in Nice with an impressive list of patrons and a stable of respectable talent. She was good-looking, good-tempered, and could summon up a party before you could murmur “Matisse.”

  She was also a very commonsensical lady. After our first night together she told me; “Chéri, I have been married once and had a lot of men on approval. The notion of a permanent arrangement does not appeal to me at all. Tomorrow will be what it will be. Therefore, I am very happy to have a friendship with you. It costs me no effort. You are an agreeable and confident man. We match well in bed. You have your work; I have mine. You can visit me here in Nice; I can visit you in the country. You paint for me there; I sell for you here. If either of us needs a change of company, we say so, sans blague. What could be better, eh?”

  That was the way things stood when the first winds of spring stirred over the foothills of the Maritime Alps. My father was in New York. My mother, though frail, was still able to preside over his private dinners, for guests he chose with elaborate care. My sister, Madeleine, was kept busy with two young children and a domestic staff in their house on East 80th Street. Larry was commuting to Paris every week as mastermind to a five-billion-dollar takeover of properties owned by the old Suez Company. I, Carl Emil Strassberger, was scoring the final burin strokes on an etching of a Vanvitelli which I had copied in the Palatine Gallery in Florence: a view of the Tiber with the apse of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in the right foreground and Castel Sant’ Angelo in the background.

  Then the telephone rang. It was my father calling from New York. He was in what we used to call his high business mode. He wasted no words.

  “Carl, we have an emergency. I need you in New York as quickly as you can get here.”

  “Of course, I’ll come immediately. But what’s the emergency?”

  “Nothing we can discuss on an open line. Just accept that the matter is very urgent. Make your reservations and call me back. You will be picked up at Kennedy. Please come first to the office.”

  I knew better than to prolong the discussion. I hung up and began to make travel arrangements. They were simple enough. An evening flight on Air France from Nice to London, overnight at a Heathrow hotel, and the first Concorde to Kennedy in the morning, which would put me on the ground at 9:30 A.M. I called my father to confirm the schedule. He was relieved and grateful. That gave me courage to ask him again.

  “Please, can you give me at least a hint of what’s going on?”

  “Let me put it this way. Your mother is well. I am well. Your sister and her children are well. Let me say only that suddenly I don’t know as much as I thought I did and I need some help from my son.”

  “You have it, Father. Give everyone my love. See you in the morning.”

  I hung up, made the last few strokes on the etching plate, and went into the bedroom to pack. I didn’t know then—how could I?—that I was making my first steps toward that dangerous edge of things where all lines and all roads converge to a vanishing point.

  * * *

  My father was waiting for me in his office. He still carried himself straight as a grenadier but when I entered his eyes lit up and he came, arms outflung, to sweep me up into a bear-hug embrace. When finally he released me and held me at arm’s length, I saw that he was thinner and grayer and that the fire had gone out of his eyes. His voice was tired and he seemed to have difficulty in framing his story.

  “Today is Friday, yes?”

  “Today is Friday.”

  “So your brother-in-law has now been missing for seven days.”

  He announced it as if it were an item in an auditor’s report. I gaped at him foolishly.

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “Nobody knows what it means yet, Carl, but the chronology begins with this.” He turned back to his desk and picked up a heavy file of indexed transcripts. “This is the deal we brokered for the Suez Company. It was signed, sealed, and delivered in Paris on Wednesday of last week. The deal is worth five billion dollars, and our take in commissions, fees, and service charges is something over fifty million dollars. Larry has been going back and forth to Paris every week for the past six months. In the end he put everything together beautifully. He flew in with the documents signed and sealed and laid them on my desk last Thursday. On Friday he was to come into the office again. The members of the board were waiting to offer their congratulations and a handsome bonus for his efforts.”

  “So?”

  “He left home at eight-thirty in the morning. Madeleine kissed him at the door and saw him heading toward Fifth Avenue to pick up a taxi. Nobody’s seen or heard of him since that moment.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Officially, we have made no report.”

  Suddenly he was in his negotiating mode, cryptic and cagey. I was angry with him and told him so.

  “Don’t do this to me, Father! You asked me for help. I’m here to give it. Please don’t make mysteries.”

  He shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture of defeat.

  “Forgive me. At this moment I make little sense even to myself. We are not trying to make a mystery but to avoid creating a scandal or, worse still, a situation of danger for Larry himself. For the moment Madeleine and I have agreed to keep the police out of it and to entrust the first inquiries to Consec, a security company whom we retain for Strassberger business.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “If you call in the police you get the press as well. Consider a moment: The director of a famous banking house disappears. What are the first thoughts in everyone’s mind? He’s run off with a woman and possibly absconded with bank funds. As early as last Monday I ordered a secret internal audit. It’s almost finished. Larry checks out clean all along the line; there’s not the slightest indication of anything criminal or unethical. Next possibility, a kidnapping—but for what? No ransom demand has been made. Our investigators discount the possibility. An accident? A mugging? An amnesiac incident, perhaps? Extensive hospital checks have been made. The results are negative.”

  “So we are left with the simplest and most vulgar explanation. Larry Lucas has walked out on his wife and children.”

  “I don’t believe that. Larry has just brought off a deal which will make his name in financial circles around the world. From here on, he can write his own ticket. I believe he’s too smart and too ambitious to risk his career for any woman.”

  “What does Madeleine think?”

  He had difficulty dredging up his next words.

  “Madeleine blames me and only me for Larry’s disappearance. The sad thing is your mother agrees with her. Prima facie they have a good case.”

  “What is their case?”

  “This!” Once again he reached for the thick volume of documents on his desk. He held it up before his face as a minister might hold a mass-book or a lectionary. “This, they say, was too much labor to lay on one man. They say I broke him by impossible demands.”

  “And what’s yo
ur answer to that, Father?”

  “What can I say? It was a big job. I offered him all the help he needed, and he had an open budget to hire the best brains. But I didn’t drive him. Madeleine now confesses he had demons of his own that drove him further and harder than I ever could.” A tinge of anger crept into his voice. “But what can I say? I’m not prepared to defend myself to my own wife and daughter!”

  “I’m sure that’s not what they want. They’re hurt. They’re scared. They’re using the wrong words. We all do that sometimes, even you. I love you, Father. We all do. But sometimes you can be very formidable. Tell me what I can do to help.”

  “Just listen! Listen to all of us! Try not to be angry when they say things you don’t expect.”

  “Like what?”

  “That I am insensitive and you are selfish and Larry is a victim of the righteous Strassbergers.”

  “Does Mama say that?”

  “Not in those words. She says I judge people instead of trying to understand them. I tell her everything I do depends on making a judgment of people. She just shakes her head sadly and says, ‘Emil, my love, you are a good father, a good husband, but unless you can think differently about Larry, you may well lose your daughter and her children. They will not tolerate you if you treat him as an enemy.’”

  Before I had chance to digest that, there was a knock at the door and Madeleine came in. I held out my arms and she came running to embrace me. She was trembling and very close to tears.

  “Oh, Carl! I’m so glad you’re here!”

  “How could I not be? I’m still family.”

  “How much has Father told you?”

  “Just the outline. Larry comes home, delivers the deal, and disappears on the way to the office Friday morning. You decide together not to make a police report but to use private investigators. Father calls for an immediate internal audit of Strassberger. Larry checks out clean, the investigators come up with zero. Father’s upset because he thinks you and Mother blame him for Larry’s disappearance. He wants you to tell me the rest of the story. I want to tell you that I love you all. I’m a free agent. I’ll do anything I can to help.”