Vanishing Point

by Morris West

  I floated through that evening on a white fluffy cloud of well-being. I was happy with Ellie Milland. I was even happier with Edgar Francis Benson, in whose cardboard identity I was masquerading. I admired his skill in fielding awkward questions about his family history and his career. He managed to turn Ellie Milland’s shrewd inquisitions into a kind of chess game. There were, however, a couple of questions which even so smart a fellow as Edgar Francis Benson could not avoid answering.

  “Where do you exhibit, Edgar?”

  “I don’t. I have a number of people in Canada and the United States and France who commission works from me.”

  “And that’s enough to pay for this kind of lifestyle?”

  “Hell, no! I have a private income.”

  “Lucky Edgar!”

  “And how do you market your designs for jewelry?”

  “Pretty much as you do, I guess. I have two big-name houses, one in New York, one in LA, who contract with me for design work. I do a circuit of lectures each year on jewelry design, and that with my academic work keeps me eating. I’d love to find a way into one of the big Italian houses, like Bulgari or Buccellati.”

  “At a glance I’d say that ring you’re wearing is a Buccellati.”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “It’s a Buccellati design. I modified it for myself. I even did the casting and setting. I was very proud when I had finished it.”

  “You should be. May I take a close look at it?”

  And that, of course, was followed by a short interlude of hand-holding across the table while we waited for the next course to be served and studied the new arrivals in the dining room. They were watching us too. Lovers’ games are a very public matter in this city of Romeo and Juliet. This one was going well because we were both familiar with the rituals and played them happily like well-schooled actors. Ellie made a sidelong comment on that too.

  “How come you never married? You’ve obviously been around the traps more than once.”

  “They’ve all been women traps, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

  “It’s something women have to worry about these days. You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “My mother used to quote Thomas Moore, who was a friend of Byron and no mean poet himself. ‘The more you have known o’ the many, the less you can settle to one!’ I’ve always had women in my life. I’ve managed to make friends with most of ’em. So marriage was never an urgent question.”

  “You’ve had it too easy, Edgar Benson. I hope you haven’t given up looking.”

  “Hell, no! Why else do you think we’re here?”

  I remember that little indiscretion very well. I remember the swift glance she gave me and how I was happy to see the waiter advancing with our next course. I remember also that it made me realize I was floating very high indeed on my fluffy cloud and that I’d better not have too much more to drink. This Edgar Francis Benson with his scruffy beard and his reckless talk was a very risky game player.

  When the meal was over we declined the coffee and liqueurs and rode upstairs clasped in a silent embrace. When she saw the configuration of the rooms and the flowers and the dressing gown laid on her bed, Ellie stood, hands on hips, and gave a small whistle of approval.

  “Well, you have to hand it to him! The man has style!”

  She gave me a long passionate kiss and then thrust me away.

  “Now get the hell out of here and give me a chance to get ready. You know the rule. Safe sex or no sex! After that, anything goes.”

  By now the fluffy white cloud was riding high in a sea of moonlight and starshine, but the sea was wild and we were tempest tossed to exhaustion. When I woke it was seven in the morning and Ellie Milland was singing in the shower.

  By nine we were out on the road and heading toward Vicenza, which is the city of the architect Palladio and the gateway to the lush country between the Adige River and the Brenner Pass. Even the barbarian developers of the twentieth century have not managed to spoil it utterly. Between the windbreaks of acacia trees there are still the spreading acres of sugar beet and corn and orchard trees and the garlands of vines strung between the elms.

  We took the back roads, stopping from time to time so that Ellie could photograph and I could sketch. We were timing ourselves to arrive in Vicenza before the Olympic Theater and Civic Museum closed at lunchtime. The open-air work was good for me. I needed to break the crust of architecture and let my drawing flow freely and my colors run wild. Even so I found myself working to method: formal sketch, color notes, and abstraction afterward.

  After watching me for a while, Ellie remarked, “You’ve had good academic training.”

  “I had, yes. I know all the old adages: You have to put in before you take out…construct before you demolish…It’s not always an advantage.”

  “That shows too. Not that you can’t free yourself, but in a way you’re wedded to the first ceremony. You’re like a conjurer. You have to make the passes over the hat before you let the pigeons flutter out.”

  I was laying down a swift gouache abstract of a drawing I had just completed: a foreground of cornfields with the roll of foothills toward the distant purple of the Alpine ridges. Four broad brushstrokes and it made a sudden sense. I turned it to Ellie for inspection. She nodded a curt approval.

  “Good! Why didn’t you let it come straight out like that, without the sketch?”

  “I want the sketch for future reference. Anyway, what’s the problem? It comes more comfortably this way.”

  “Perhaps it would come better and more quickly if you were less comfortable.”

  “That, my dear Ellie, is pure academic gobbledegook! Your jewelry doesn’t take shape with a random bashing of metal. You work through the process—”

  “It’s not the same thing!”

  “Why don’t you kiss me instead of trying to prove a point?”

  She hesitated a moment; then, with a reluctant grin, she surrendered. We climbed back into the car and headed for Vicenza.

  As we drove, Ellie lectured me on Palladio, his special contribution to architecture, and in particular the famous trompe-l’oeil stage set which is the glory of the Olympic Theater: archways which seem to open onto the streets and alleys of a whole city and which are, in fact, only a few feet deep. Ellie’s information was accurate and extensive. She talked with genuine enthusiasm. I listened in silence, distracted all the time by the irony of the situation.

  Her bailiwick was art history, and she was walking me up and down all its paths and byways. Mine was architectural art. I had chosen it as a lifetime study, but I couldn’t say a word because it was an integral part of the very identity I was trying to shed.

  Another, more subtle, irony insinuated itself slowly. Ellie Milland was herself a divided soul. In bed she was a passionate and practiced lover. Outside it, she was something of a bluestocking, eager to affirm what she knew and careful to conceal the gaps in her knowledge. More, she had been once around the matrimonial traps and was sedulous to establish that any future mating games would be played by her rules.

  Not all of this was immediately evident. I wanted to enjoy myself with her, so I pushed the vagrant thoughts far back in my head and hoped they would stay there. One thought did linger a little longer than the others. My relationship with Arlette had honed itself down to a considerable comfort. We had learned to converse in shorthand—we no longer had to spell the words or analyze the arguments. If she declined to marry me, what then? Was I ready for a new clipping and shaping to fit myself to another woman? And if I weren’t ready? Then, good solid Strassberger sense told me, I shouldn’t get too addicted to bed play with Ellie and I shouldn’t let her get addicted to the company of the fictional Edgar Francis Benson.

  The Olympic Theater provided a cheerful little interlude. We trod the stage, we tried our voices in a short duet. I did a swift sketch of Ellie emerging from the classical gateway with the foreshortened streets behind her. Then we left, with
an apology to the guardian for keeping him late for his lunch and a tip to add savor to his meal.

  We had just time enough to pay a visit to the dwarfs at the Villa dei Nani. A sad little legend says that they were set on the walls of the garden by a doting father whose daughter was herself a dwarf. He wanted to persuade the child that the world was inhabited by little creatures just like herself. When she discovered the sad truth—that the world was full of monsters—she killed herself.

  The story was sad, but inside the villa the frescoes by Tiepolo and his son created another world of fantasy, secure against any intrusion of reality. Once again, Ellie delivered her cheerful little lecture, but this time I surrendered myself with every appearance of pleasure to the steady flow of her eloquence. I have never been happy with verbal expositions of the visual arts, so I still claim a certain merit in my smiling patience.

  After the dwarfs and Tiepolos, we turned off the main road into a country lane, where we ate our picnic lunch on the grassy verge of a cornfield under a pale blue sky. Afterward we made love on the grass—a quiet playful love this time, which for both of us, I think, pushed the haunting questions further and further into the darkness of the unconscious.

  In the quiet of the afterglow, while a speckled thrush cocked an inquisitive eye at us, Ellie made an ingenuous confession.

  “This is the best part. Desire’s satisfied. There’s no more passion to spend. You’re full of each other. You’re empty of yourself. There’s nobody to compete with, nothing to prove. I can even believe I may come to like myself one day. Then I tell myself not to ask too much and to enjoy this single moment.” Before I had time to answer, she closed my lips with her fingertips. “You don’t have to say anything. You’re a good lover and you make me feel good too, but there’s another you, living in another room. I know he’s there. I hope he’ll invite me in one day.”

  When finally she let me speak, I told her gently, “You’ve just shown me another Ellie Milland.”

  “I’m glad I have some mystery for you. That’s what frightens me, I think. What’s left when the mystery is gone?”

  “Don’t ask to know. Just lie there. Don’t move!”

  I hurried back to the car for my sketchbook. When I returned she was lying just as I had left her, sprawled on one side on the grassy verge, her breasts exposed under the open shirt, one hand under her cheek, the other extended along her flank, holding the unzipped Levi’s down from the curve of her belly…I took time over it and it turned into a very sensual little study about which there hung the exhalation of relief and abandon after a coupling of lovers.

  I showed it to Ellie. She said simply, “It’s good. It’s a pretty compliment too. Keep it for me. Show it to me when I need a morale booster. Now help me up and let’s get on the road.”

  It was still only midafternoon and Padua was a bare twenty kilometers away, so we decided to push on and give ourselves at least a taste of the town and perhaps touch the tomb of its most famous citizen, Sant’ Antonio. One of his specialties is the discovery of lost objects, so I had a faint hope, which, regrettably, I could not reveal to Ellie, that the saint might point me on my way to Larry Lucas.

  Ellie flinched from the sight of the great rectangular tomb and the steady stream of devotees sidling along it, touching it with their hands, trailing scarves and handkerchiefs against the stones, to draw into them some of the virtue of the long-dead wonder-worker. I persuaded her to join me in the little pilgrim rite, just so she could say she had done it. She was still reluctant but she did it with me, shivering with some revulsion from a primal dread.

  After that we were ready for another kind of pilgrimage, to the fabulous Giotto frescoes in the Scrovegni chapel, which are a picturebook of the life of Christ and the Blessed Virgin. Ellie was stunned into silence by the simple splendor of the frescoes and the awesome miracle of their preservation in World War II while the nearby Augustinian church was hit by British bombers and every one of the Mantegnas was destroyed.

  We drank coffee in the Caffè Pedrocchi, where once the heroes of the Risorgimento had gathered. We paused briefly to salute the great Erasmo da Narni, whom the Padovani call Gattamelata, arrogant and triumphant as the day Donatello created him. There was no time left to tour the university, sacred in the history of European medicine since the thirteenth century. I promised Ellie that when I delivered her to Venice to rejoin her friends we would make that our special visit. For now we had to fight our way out of the city and find ourselves the least traveled roads back to Verona.

  Ellie was drowsy with fatigue, and somewhere near Vicenza she fell asleep, her dark head pillowed against my shoulder. It was a pleasant end to a companionable day, which I hoped might well end with a long hot tub and supper in our suite.

  Arrived back at the Due Torri, I left my gear locked in the trunk and paid the doorman to have one of his boys refill the tank and hose down the country dust in preparation for the next day’s excursion, which we thought might take us down to Ferrara and on to Ravenna.

  When I stopped by the concierge’s desk to collect our keys, I was handed two messages. The first was from Sergio Carlino; it said simply; Call me most urgently, Sergio. The second had come a couple of hours later: Mr. Benson senior called from New York. He would like you to call him at his office. I shoved them in my pocket. Ellie gave me an inquiring look.

  “Your agent?”

  “Yes. He wants me to call him back.”

  “There were two messages.”

  “The other was from New York. Personal business. I’ll deal with them both when we get upstairs.”

  “I hope this isn’t going to foul up our plans.”

  “I hope so too. It was a good day, wasn’t it?”

  “It was a friendly day, a loving sort of day. Thank you, Edgar Benson.”

  “Thank you, Ellie Milland.”

  “If this isn’t private business, you can make your calls while we’re in the spa together.”

  “We’d probably scandalize the people at the other end. You get in first. I’ll join you when I’ve made the calls.”

  “That’s the other man talking now, the one I don’t know.”

  “Run along, woman, and stop teasing me. You slept on the way home. I drove. You can be the bathhouse girl and scrub my back tonight.”

  She padded through my room on her way to the tub, while I was punching out Sergio Carlino’s number. When she turned on the taps, I called to her to shut the door. She slammed it hard. After the usual interval for rerouting, Sergio came on the line. He was excited.

  “We’ve flushed our fox! On the date his letters were written, he was staying at the Flora Hotel on the Via Veneto. In the evening he checked out, to fly from Rome to Zurich. He was in a wheelchair and was accompanied by a Swiss doctor. At Zurich airport a wheelchair was again ordered, and an ambulance was in attendance. The ambulance was sent from the Burgholzli Clinic, which is the most famous place in Switzerland for mental cases. And that, my friend, is a piece of investigative work of which my colleagues and I are very proud, even though we could be arrested for some of it. You may now express your appreciation by prolonged applause.”

  “My compliments, Sergio. My thanks to your diligent staff. Now can you give me any idea of what this means and what led to it?”

  “The information is sparse. The Flora’s hotel register showed a Dr. Alois Langer, Swiss nationality, who arrived and departed with him. We checked back to the Villa Estense in Sirmione and found that Dr. Langer had been there too. Same arrival, same departure.”

  “So, he’s sick and in custodial care.”

  “More precisely, he is now in institutional care.”

  “That means, or may mean, that his trustee is empowered to act in his name. I don’t like the smell of that at all.”

  “Neither do I. You’ll like this next part even less. Your father called our New York office today to institute a market watch on worldwide transactions in Strassberger shares.”

  “That sounds ominou
s. I have a message to call him. I’ll do it after we’ve finished here. What suggestions do you have about our patient?”

  “None that I want to discuss now. You and I should talk face-to-face as early as possible tomorrow. I’ll be in my office at eight. Check out of the Due Torri and drive into Milan. We’ll have your car delivered back to the rental agency.”

  “I’ll leave at six in the morning.”

  “Allowing for traffic, I’ll expect you between eight and nine…I hope you can handle the lady.”

  “So do I. It’s not going to be easy. Until tomorrow, then.”

  I called my father in New York. Before I had time to tell him what I had just learned, he was launched on his own list of complaints.

  “The sharks are circling round us, Carl. This morning there was a line of bidders in the Paris Bourse, in London, and in New York. There are also a few bids from the West Coast. It’s too early to say yet what the backwash is going to be. I’ve already had a call from the SEC, asking whether I have any explanation for the stock movements. I told them I didn’t. I don’t, either, but I’ll swear that somehow Larry is connected with what’s happening. You’ll remember I told you from the very first, you might raise a wolf instead of a fox.”

  “I remember, but it so happens our wolf is hospitalized in Switzerland in the Burgholzli Clinic.”

  “God almighty! When did you hear this?”

  “Just now from Sergio Carlino. I’m checking out of here first thing in the morning to confer with him in Milan.”

  “This has to mean a radical change in your plans—in all our plans, perhaps.”

  “I know that, but it’s too soon to make decisions, and we can’t do our planning on open telephone lines. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve heard more from Carlino. Meantime, you beat off the sharks in New York.”

  “I’ve put out buying orders on all available stock. The company will top any bid.”