Mile High (41 page)

The view was breath-taking. Below them, along the mountain ridge that was the high, narrow spine of land between the emptiness above the lake itself and the soft, green valley mantled with snow on the other side, balanced the buildings of the Bürgenstock. They sipped icy cold Dezaley wine at a tiny replica of the souvenir stand and café that rested on the Swiss Tritten Alp, and Willie showed Mayra the footpaths by which one could descend to the the ridge without taking the towering lift. Willie looked at his watch and said they must go down soon to join the others at the entrance to the church for Christmas services, which, as Mr. West performed them, meant instant slumber for all.

The concierge of the Grand Hotel leaned across and wrapped Mr. West warmly in the beaver robe. He closed the door, and the heavy Rolls glided silently for two hundred yards down the hill, where, at the end of the road, the driver turned the car around. Walt could look downward at the helicopter's landing pad at the foot of a long escalator stairway. Walt and his father had not spoken to each other beyond their greeting in the hall of the hotel. When the car stopped they could hear the sound of the chopper and their eyes followed it down. Walt stood on the brow of the hill in the clear sunshine, deep in snow, and watched Dan get out of the plane.

Dan was wearing a black homburg, a white silk scarf and a black overcoat with satin-faced lapels over a dinner jacket and black tie. His face was a high color. He glided up the escalator, talking as he came. “Where's your wife?”

“Willie took her out on a special morning tour.”

“How is you-know-who behaving?”

“Fine. He's right here.”

“You look great, kid.”

“You look pretty fit yourself.”

“Don't believe it. I flew in straight from an all-night party at Rockrimmon. I'm not exactly dressed for a Christmas day lunch.” They embraced, then Dan leaned into the car and shook hands with his father. “It's a long climb,” he said, grinning. “Can't we get a high-speed escalator?” Mr. West took up a dictaphone from inside the arm rest and spoke into it. “Investigate high-speed escalators,” he ordered into it. The driver packed them in under the beaver robe. Dan smelled of the very best bourbon. Mr. West said, “What does State have to say about Roncalli?”

“He'll make a good Pope, Father.”

“My people say he's some kind of a liberal.”

The driver got behind the wheel. The car moved sedately up the hill. “De Gaulle was elected with a seventy-eight-point-five percent edge over Communists. Maybe sanity has come back to France.” To Walt their conversation seemed coded, as if they were speaking in some private shorthand. But the timbre of his father's voice had changed: He no longer sounded like a querulous old man. “There are nine hundred and eighteen computers in use in this country. My companies operate one hundred and seventy of them. There are a hundred and fifty-four computers working in Europe and my people operate sixty-three of those. All those computers and my own sure sense tell me that we're going to make a real killing in France in the next five or six years, and I don't want your State Department rocking the boat.” The car stopped at the Grand Hotel. “No, no,” Mr. West said. “We're going on to the church.”

“Not me, Father,” Walt said, opening the car door. “I'll look for you at lunchtime, Dan. In the bar?” He shut the door, and the car moved forward as Walt went into the hotel.

“I have my doubts about your brother,” Mr. West said. “An unfrocked priest who marries a nigger and refuses to go to church sounds like a Commie to me.”

“Please,” Dan answered wearily. “No communism. It's Christmas. Why did you invite them here?”

“He's my son. I am entitled to curiosity about my son.”

“After thirty years? After my appealing to that curiosity three dozen times in the past fifteen years? Why did you invite them here?”

“Did you invite yourself all the way here just to ask me that?”

“Yes.”

Mr. West shut his eyes. “I am old, Dan,” he said. “I'll be dead soon. I wanted to make my peace. Maybe I made a terrible mistake with what I did to that boy. I don't know. I have to find out. I wanted to see him here and in a little while to be able to talk to him. Maybe he has big dreams. He's young. Why not? Maybe I can help him. That's what fathers are supposed to be for. That's why I invited him here at Christmas time. That's why I'm so confused for one of the few times in my life.”

“I hope that is why you invited him here.”

Mr. West turned the full power of his eyes upon his oldest son. “And if it isn't? Are you threatening me? Do I hear that in your voice?”

“Yes, Father,” Dan said, regarding at him steadily. “You do. If anything wrong is done to that boy or his wife, you and I will break apart and I will fight you from their side.”

“You are a silly man to volunteer a thing like that, Dan,” his father answered and closed his eyes.

Mayra and Willie and Dan filed into the church with the small congregation of hotel employees. It was a strikingly beautiful church interior, an exact replica of the church at the original Bürgenstock. It was simple beyond simplicity. Hand-carved, painted statues stood in elevated niches. The altar was a multicolored triptych illuminated by the sun. All around was immaculate white plaster upon which the sunlight fell from stained-glass windows on either side and high behind the altar. The congregation seated itself, then folded up its collective mind and tucked it away. Dan went to sleep immediately. Willie sighed and settled himself for shock waves of boredom as Mr. West appeared wearing a long, black robe and moved to a place behind a lectern.

He gazed out fiercely into the blanked faces of his audience and intoned. “On this supreme of all birthdays, let us pray.” He led them in the Lord's Prayer, then opened the large Bible in front of him. His eyes shone. He spoke only to Mayra, but the other three dozen people had been so turned off by previous sermons that no one was aware of the intensity of the attention he paid to her. What he said was written in the Bible, but he seemed to know the words as though they were his own: “Let her kiss me with the kisses of her mouth, for thy love is better than wine. Draw me, we will run after thee, the king hath brought you into his chambers and we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee. Set me as a coal upon thine arm: for love is as strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

She felt fear. She heard her mother tell once more about Mary Lou Mayberry, a coffee-bean girl. His eyes glowed above the Bible, and only Willie, excepting Mayra, had come to life with what was happening, following the beam of his master's eyes to Mayra and connecting it, all of it, backward in time, with Mary Lou Mayberry, with Baby Tolliver and with all of what Rhonda Healey had called “Eddie's black dagoes.” Mayra could not break her own gaze fixed to West's. He no longer stood before them as a peculiar old man, but as a bull god. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it: Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like a roe to a young hart upon mountains of spice.”

Mayra knew she was more alone in the white, white world than she had ever been before.

CHAPTER FIVE

She asked the concierge to tell Walt that she had had a sudden headache and would he please lunch with Dan and she'd see them both later? She lay staring at the ceiling, and her bewilderment increased. Three days before, she had been a safe painter married to a safe architect who was doing well. They had a dinky apartment behind Harrods in London, an even smaller one in Rome, and a bigger one in Paris. They had good friends. All of it was more than she and Mama had mapped out together, because it was a helluva lot better than civil service. The way it had worked out up to three days ago had added up so right that she wanted this baby as a magnet to fling at the moon at the end of a rope of hope that everything would stay exactly as it was. Then had come the private transatlantic airplane and after that Mama's news. Now they were on top of the mountain and Walt was sitting as wary as a leopard and they were walled in until the afternoon of New Year's Day. She rubbed her belly longingly and said aloud, “Come on, little baby, grow up and come outta there.”

Willie stared at West, who was listening to sounds in the room upstairs through large, padded earphones, which he took off with impatience and tossed on the table in front of the monitoring equipment. “What is your impression of the young people?” Willie asked blandly, but West knew him too well. This sly man was up to something, he had some axe to grind.

“You've been with her all of the morning, what is your impression?” West answered, just as blandly.

“I am very favorably impressed,” Willie answered with deliberate emphasis.

“What impressed you?”

“They are both first-class young people. She is about to be a mother, and that in itself is a wonderful thing.”

“Do you think so?”

“By George, I wish they were my young people. What a thrill it is to watch something really constructive and worthwhile when it gets started on its way.”

“How can you tell? What have you ever observed that was constructive or worthwhile?”

“I have my instincts, of course. And I read a lot.”

“What is all this blather leading to, Willie?”

“Idle curiosity. I wondered what you had planned for them.”

“What would you have me do?”

“I'd have you give them your blessing and send them back home to get on with their lives—after a merry Christmas and a happy new year here, of course.”

“What is so extraordinary about that?”

“I haven't suggested it was extraordinary.”

“You have engineered an entire conversation about the obvious.”

“Yes. So I have. Forgive me, Ed.”

“What did you think I planned to do with them?”

“Well, I knew you had been spending a great deal of time with your collection of photos and films of Walt's wife that the Intelligence Department had gotten together and—”

“Do you begrudge me that little indulgence, Willie? Since my pride has not allowed me to bring myself to talk to my son, do you begrudge me this pathetic attempt to observe his life from afar, at second hand?”

“No, no. I do not. I think you have shown a father's interest and hope in a most discreet and characteristic way. But she is dark, isn't she?”

“What do you mean?”

“I meant to say that we are much alone up here. It is my belief, as your dearest friend, that those photos and films of Walt's wife excite you and—”

“Excite me? That is disgusting!”

“You qualified it, not I, Ed. In fact, I am certain that those films and photos excite you, because it has been several years—several years before these photos of Walt's wife began to arrive—since you asked me to assemble girls here for your pleasure. You seem to have had your manhood renewed by something, Eddie. And it is my belief that the cause of that renewal was the photos and films of Walt's wife.”

“What if I proved to you that I have cause to believe Walt's wife is a Communist? That I had to make sure? That everything in my life forced me to make sure whether she was or she was not?”

“Years ago and until this moment, Ed, you put me in charge of that active part of our operations, and I can assure you again, as I have assured you before, that during the months before she and Walt were married I devoted almost all of my time to convincing myself, and you, by every test and inquiry, that she was not a Communist.”

“Willie, exactly—I mean precisely—what is it you have on your mind?”

“I am worried, that's all.”

“Worried about what?”

“About you.”

“Me? You have been talking about Walt and his wife.”

“I remember very bad trouble we almost had. Mary Lou, for one. I know how excited you get, how charged up you can force yourself to be—”

“Now, just a moment here, Willie—”

“My only concern is you, Ed. Only and always you. You are all that counts in this world, and I cannot stand by to allow even you to harm yourself.” Willie got up. He took a small brown bottle from his side pocket and poured a glass of water from a carafe. “And you know I'm right, Ed. You know in your heart that I am right.” He extended the small pill to West, who put it on his tongue. He gave West the glass of water and West drank it down.

Sergio, the bartender, was telling Dan and Walt about the Arab party that Dan had arranged through the State Department to visit Bürgenstock West for family business reasons.

“You should have seen what they did to the second floor, Senator West,” he said. “The prince brought four wives this time, so the bodyguard was bigger, and there were all those kids. The prince always ate downstairs with Mr. West, but all the others cooked on the floors of their rooms. They just made fires on the rugs and they burned through the wood to the concrete. And they did everything else on the floor. Every night your father would bring the prince down here to drink champagne, a religious slip, and they would sit here and work on the oil leases all night. When they left, after ten days, he gave everyone on the staff a Patek-Philippe watch that had his portrait on the face in four colors. Two hundred and forty Patek watches, but it took the crews eight days to clean up and restore.”

Christmas dinner was very quiet. Mr. West did not appear throughout the day or evening after the church services, and Dan left for Washington the next day without seeing him. On the night following Christmas night, at a quarter to twelve, after Walt and Mayra had retired to bed, Walt was summoned to his father's apartment by a telephone call from Willie Tobin. He dressed, grumbling. Mayra said the main thing to remember was that there were only about five more days to go. When Walt finally found his father, having been passed from his father's apartment to Willie's quarters on the other side of the hotel, to the library off the main hall, Mr. West was serene and even Olympian, nearly jovial. They sat as strangers in the large square room among copies of Rubens and Frans Snyders, and Mr. West began by explaining what really fine copies all the paintings at Bürgenstock West were and how, when the copies were made, he had had them follow scrupulously the system of separate painters doing parts of each painting, just as in the Rubens atelier, where Rubens had done the figures, De Voz the animals, Snyders the food and produce, and Wildens the landscapes. Then he asked Walt if he was or had ever been a Communist. Walt said his mind didn't run that way. “I am only a liberal in politics,” he explained, “which Mayra says means that I wish well for all sides providing there is no inconvenience to me.”