Vertical Run (2 page)

Apache padded away on her morning rounds. “
Au revoir
, Apache,” Dave whispered, thus satisfying in some small way a sense of honor sullied by too many concessions.

Thinking improper thoughts about the difference between cats and cattiness, Dave retrieved the morning’s
New York Times
from outside the apartment door. For the next several minutes, he sat at the dining room table nursing his coffee and flipping through the newspaper. He did not read it closely. His early morning ritual of scanning the paper was merely an excuse to enjoy the day’s first cup of coffee.

As he turned to the business section he noticed that, quite unconsciously, his right hand had crept up to pat
the left side of his chest. Dave grimaced. A sly, sardonic inner voice—Dave always thought of it as his guardian angel—whispered,
Still looking for a pack of cigarettes. Twelve years after you quit, and the body still wants its morning hit of nicotine. Say, pal, maybe you should get back into tobacco stocks after all
.

“Mornin’, Mr. Elliot. Nice day for a run.” The doorman believed it to be his duty to assure the building’s joggers that every day was a “nice day for a run.”

“Good morning, Tad. Anything in the papers today about Lithuania?”

Tad’s ancestors had migrated to the United States in the 1880s. As far as Tad was concerned, it had been only yesterday. He was staunchly nationalistic about the land of his ancestors. Dave did not think that one day had passed, in the three years since he and Helen had purchased their apartment, upon which Tad had not had something to say about Lithuania.

“Nothin’ in the
News
or the
Times
, Mr. Elliot. But I get the papers from Vilnius, you know, by mail. They usually show up on Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll letchya know what’s happening tomorrow.”

“Great.”

“Say, whatchya do to your hand?” Tad pointed at the gauze pad taped around Dave’s left palm.

“An employee bit me.”

Tad blinked. “Ya gotta be kiddin’ me.”

“Nope. We … my company that is, bought a research outfit out on Long Island. I was there yesterday on a tour. One of the … production workers expressed its disapproval of the new management.” Dave grinned wryly. “And it wasn’t even a hostile takeover.”

Tad guffawed as he pushed the front door open. “You’re makin’ this up, right?”

“Nope. You get a lot of that in corporate life—biting the hand that feeds you.”

Tad chortled again. “I guess I’m glad I’m just a doorman, Mr. Elliot. Have a nice day.”

On Saturdays and Sundays, Dave ran west, jogging across Fifty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue, then north to Central Park. On those days, the running was purest pleasure. There were fewer menacing crazies on the street—or so it seemed—and the runner could concentrate on the running. Best of all, it was on the weekends that Mark came down from Columbia University to run at his father’s side. Mark, his son, his and Annie’s, was Dave’s special pride. Running with Mark was the best part of Dave’s week, the thing to which he most looked forward.

Dave always made a point of asking Helen to join them on their weekend runs. She never accepted. Helen found a jogger’s sweat lacking in gentility, favoring instead chic perspiration extracted by pricey exercise centers, by even pricier private trainers.

No matter. Mark was with him, and, rain or shine, the running was a delight.

Less so the weekdays. No matter how you ran, no matter where you ran, watchfulness was called for. Certain blocks were to be avoided; alleys were a risk; none but the reckless jogged beneath bridges and overpasses; nor did the prudent begin their runs before dawn. On a morning run even a man like David Elliot, a man who did not have an enemy in the world, sometimes glanced warily over his shoulder.

His workday route took him east on Fifty-seventh to Sutton Place, then north on York Avenue until he reached a pedestrian bridge across FDR Drive. He ran up the path by the East River until he reached the high Nineties. Once there, he turned south again, retracing his steps. After crossing the bridge a second time, he jogged west to Park Avenue, and then south to the corner of Fiftieth and Park.

It usually was just after 7:00
A.M
. when he entered his office.

As an executive vice president of his company, David Elliot was entitled to, and enjoyed, the perquisites of rank. His forty-fifth floor suite consisted of eight hundred square feet of expensively understated space, a walk-in closet, a discreet wet bar, and a full bathroom with tub and shower.

Dave liked his water hot. Steam filled the bathroom as he lathered himself from top to bottom twice over. Still in the shower, he took a Gillette safety razor and a can of shaving cream from the shelf above the spigots. He never used a mirror when shaving, and hadn’t for so long he couldn’t remember. It was another habit he had picked up in a war unwillingly remembered.

7:20
A.M
.

David Elliot, with a towel around his waist, stepped out of the bathroom and into his office. On the mahogany credenza behind his matching mahogany desk, a Toshiba brewer, the twin of the model at home, beeped three times, signaling that his coffee was ready. Dave filled a chocolate-brown mug with it. The cup was decorated with a raised, angular, silver-enameled design: the Senterex corporate logo.

Dave took a sip and sighed. Life without coffee is too awful to contemplate.

He noticed,
damnit
, that the watercolor over his credenza was askew. Every week or two, some dust-rag-wielding vandal from the nightly cleaning crew knocked the thing sideways. It was a minor irritation, but one that was growing in its power to annoy.

He put his coffee cup on a brass coaster (also embossed with the Senterex logo), and straightened the painting—Hua Yen, a portrait of a sleeping tiger dating from the mid-1700s—quite lovely, quite valuable, one of the nicer perquisites of working for Senterex. The company’s chairman, Bernie Levy, savvier than most corporate moguls, let the purchase of executive artwork fall into the hands of neither high-priced interior designers
nor, worse, his corporate officers’ wives. Rather he demanded that quality art, only the work of masters, decorate the company’s headquarters offices. For this reason a sextet of Leonor Freni chalks decorated the forty-fifth floor reception area. Orozco, Rouault, Beckmann, Barlach, and Ensor could be found in the hallways. Elsewhere, on the walls of various corporate offices, a visitor could find Picasso, Munch, Thomas Eakins (in the office of Senterex’s chief counsel, of course), a most expensive Matisse, and a startlingly abstract Whistler. Bernie himself had a special affection for Camille Pissarro, two of whose oils hung on proud display in the corporate boardroom. Of course Bernie, being Bernie, denied that Senterex acquired art for aesthetic reasons; rather, when guests commented on the company’s collection, he boasted of how much it appreciated in value, and the cash the company could accumulate were it sold. But Bernie lied. He’d never sell the Senterex collection, not a single piece of it. He loved it too much.

Dave stepped back, eyeing the tiger. It was straight again, or straight enough.

And now for a little music. He switched on his stereo. The opening bars of Ding Shan-de’s
Long March Symphony
came softly through the speakers. Idly, Dave wondered why the American music establishment ignored the Chinese romantics.

Having no answers to his own question, and caring about cultural politics even less than he cared about the civic kind, Dave put the thought out of his mind. Instead, he reached for his coffee cup and took another sip.
God, that’s good!

Almost invariably Dave was the first person in the office—or at least the first in the executive suite. Bernie Levy, master of the corporate ship, didn’t show up until 8:00 or so, his limousine leaving Short Hills, New Jersey, at 6:50 sharp. The rest of the executive cadre drifted in between 8:15 and 8:45, depending on what train they caught from Greenwich, Scarsdale, or Darien, and always much conditional upon that train running on
time. The first of the secretaries arrived at 8:30 punctually.

For this reason, Dave knew he could, as was his unvarying morning habit, lounge buck naked (but for a towel) at his desk, savoring the day’s second cup of coffee, and studying the pages of
The Wall Street Journal
.

Several peaceful minutes later, with a third cup of coffee in his hand, he ambled into his walk-in closet to select his suit for the day.

Today he chose a lightweight tan, almost khaki, number. Although the brutal humidity of the past summer had broken, the late September weather was still warm. Dave’s wool suits would remain on their hangers for a few weeks longer.

With suit pants donned and belted, and feet comfortably placed in soft, glove leather Bally loafers, Dave unwrapped a fresh, starched white shirt. He put it on, and after some consideration selected from his tie rack a pale yellow tie with a blue motif. A full-length mirror backed Dave’s closet door. He pulled the door three-quarters closed so that he could study himself.

Never learned how to knot a tie without a mirror, did you?
his guardian angel asked.

He looked himself over carefully.
Not bad. Not bad at all
. His waistline hadn’t changed since college. Forty-seven years old, but looking younger than that.
Oh, you handsome dog, you’re going to live forever
. Dave nodded as if in agreement. The daily jogging, the two nights a week workout with weights, no smoking but for an occasional and much prized cigar, a diet about which even Helen couldn’t complain, alcohol consumption that was modest by any …

“Davy?”

The questioning voice came from the office behind him—Bernie Levy’s voice, its gruff Brooklyn accent unmistakable. Dave glanced at his Rolex. 7:43. Traffic must have been light this morning. Senterex’s chairman and CEO was in the office well ahead of schedule.

Dave shrugged on his jacket, nudged his tie knot imperceptibly
to the left, and gripping his coffee cup, pushed open the closet door.

“Yes, Bernie. What’s up?”

Bernie was facing away from the closet. Dave didn’t see his gun until he turned around.

Here in the jungle there are two kinds of time—long time and slow time. Long time is what you usually get. You sit beneath a tree or in a hooch or in a field tent, or maybe you’re tiptoeing Indian file through the boonies, and nothing happens. Hours pass, and nothing happens. Then you look at your Timex and discover that it has only been five minutes since the last time you looked at it. Long time.

The other kind of time is slow time. There’s a flat metallic snap, the receiver of an AK-47 chambering a round. Then there is fire and explosions and screams and the whine of bullets all around and each one aimed at you for unending eternity. And when, after hours of hot terror, and no little rage, the shooting stops, you come back from hell and glance at your Timex.

Guess what? Five minutes have passed since the last time you looked at it.

Slow time. The clock gets choked with molasses. Men weep at how slow the seconds pass. They are MACVSOG. Their shoulder patch is a fanged skull wearing a green beret. They are the hardest of the hard, the baddest of the bad. Nothing fazes them. They look at their watches. They weep.

One afternoon, the smell of cordite and hot brass still fresh in the air, First Lieutenant David Elliot places his blued-steel Timex on a rotten tree stump, slaps a full magazine into his Model 1911A Colt .45 automatic, and blasts the watch to fragments.

The pistol in Bernie Levy’s hand seemed preposterously tiny. Bernie was five inches shorter than Dave and twenty
pounds heavier. His hands were large and fleshy. The gun was almost lost in his grip. It was nickel-plated. Dave was willing to bet that the grips were ivory.
Small caliber
, Dave’s guardian angel whispered.
Twenty-five? Maybe a
.22.
Not much stopping power. Enough at this distance, though
.

“Bernie, why do you have …”

Bernie looked exhausted. His eyes were red and ringed with dark smudges, as if he had been too long without sleep. His face, once all sharp and hawklike, had gone flabby with age. His jowls quivered with some emotion that Dave couldn’t read.
How old is he? Sixty-three, isn’t it?
Dave thought he should know precisely.

“… a gun?”

Bernie’s eyes were empty, the lids half closed. They looked reptilian, cold and empty. There was nothing in them at all. Dave expected to see something in them. He didn’t know what.

“Why, in God’s name?”

Bernie inched his hand forward, lifting the pistol.

Holy Christ, he’s going to pull the trigger!

“Bernie, come on, speak to me.”

Bernie rolled his lips, tightening them and then loosening them. Dave watched his hand tense.

“Bernie, you can’t. Not without saying something. Bernie, for the love of God …”

Bernie’s shoulders twitched. He licked his lips. “Davy, this is … If I only had a choice … You don’t know, Davy … Bernie Levy blames himself, and God will not forgive. Davy, Davy, you can’t know how bad this makes me feel.”

Oddly enough, Dave almost felt like snickering. Almost. “This is going to hurt you more than it will me, huh? Is that what you are trying to say, Bernie?”

Bernie sighed and pursed his lips. “Always with the funny stuff, Davy, always with the
wisenheimer spritz.
” The hand holding the gun went tense again.

Slow time. Though the coffee wasn’t scalding, it was hot enough. It seemed to take forever to reach Bernie’s
face, his wide-open eyes. The coffee burned right into them. Bernie yelped. Dave took one, two, three steps forward, his left arm low and straight. It took him hours to do it, walking straight into the muzzle of Bernie’s wavering gun.

He swept Bernie’s arm up, wincing at the pain in his bandaged hand. He drove a knee into Bernie’s groin. Bernie made a noise like a punctured tire. The pistol tumbled loose. Dave snatched it from the air. Bernie was bent forward, his head at Dave’s waistline. Dave brought the pistol butt down on the back of his skull. Hard. Twice.