Escape the Night (19 page)

Clayton stepped inside. The Montgomery Ward catalog lay atop the refrigerator where his father kept it; the sampler still asked God's blessing.

His father's notebook was open to John Carey's name.

He turned.

Staring down into the dead face, he saw with pain and loathing that he looked no more pathetic than he had for the last two years. Greyhound eyes, a smile so eager it was craven …

As they took him away, Clayton began imagining John Carey's face.

Ten people had come to his father's funeral.

Afterwards, he packed his clothes and his father's notebook and drove to Oklahoma to live with an uncle he despised. That night, alone in a strange room, he wrote John Peter Carey.

For three weeks he had gone to the mailbox. The day he found the envelope inside he stared for a long moment at the “Van Dreelen & Carey” printed in gold leaf in the upper left-hand corner above an address on Fifth Avenue, mysterious yet potent. Carefully, he opened it with a penknife: the terse letter inside—denying coverage for his father's suicide—ended, “dictated, but not read, by Mr. Carey,” and had no signature.

He stood by the mailbox, quivering with rage at his father's impotence, too filled with shame to tell his uncle.

Two days later he walked to a small, dusty library in the treeless town and found John Carey's name in the index to periodicals. He went to the shelves …

John Carey's eagle visage stared at him from the cover of
Time
magazine.

He had found his real father.

He began reading any article that mentioned him, asked the salesman who visited the local bookstore for details of their meetings, until he knew how John Carey dressed, looked and acted. Clayton's gestures became that of a bigger and older man, his face, so hatefully like his father's, assumed a harder cast. His grades in high school rose dramatically. That he was friendless bothered him no more: John Carey was enough.

At Oklahoma he worked forty hours a week and carried a fulltime load; on nights when he felt too tired to study, he would recall that John Carey rose from nowhere …

He ran out of money his junior year; at the last moment an anonymous donor funded a new scholarship, to be granted to this promising young business major. Somewhat grandly, he entitled his senior thesis, “The Role of Autocracy in Creating Van Dreelen & Carey.”

It was 1952.

Clayton Barth graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and promptly discovered computers.

In the process he began discovering his own infinite variety: Barth was forced to reinvent himself as a salesman.

His sole intention had been to raise cash to start a business; to his dismay, the quickest route was to sell computer services. Bending his festering inwardness to his will, he acquired the jokes and banter to oil a keen knowledge of the product, his borrowed patter ringing in his own ears like the banalities of a game-show host. What sustained him was the knowledge that Black Jack Carey had started out in sales. He imagined their first meeting, millionaire to millionaire: Barth would reveal who he was, smiling, and then offer his career as the sign of his forgiveness. John Carey would reach for him, tears in his eyes …

When John Carey died, Barth wept alone, as he had never done for his father.

The next week he began Barth Services.

Its business was to provide computer backup to companies too small to fund their own: Barth organized his employees into teams of crew-cut janissaries who would march into a customer's office and churn records into computer runs that exposed business structures like an X-ray. Suddenly, Barth saw that he was learning the weaknesses of others.

He began preying on his clients.

As he did so, Barth perfected Black Jack Carey's principle of corporate obedience. New employees were forced to observe strict dress and moral codes; adultery was punished by termination.

At thirty, Clayton Barth was still a virgin.

It was part of his sense of policy, he told himself: even the most visceral acts—sex or murder—should be the extension of his purposes. He began recruiting former officers of the CIA to act as his lieutenants. Barth was their commander-in-chief: their presence imbued him with
gravitas
.…

Now Barth's suits were pin-stripes, his movements slower and more majestic.

He began imagining himself as President.

This fantasy was the secret pleasure of his nights. Yet he did not envision the tumult of adoring crowds or the silver image of his face on television, but presiding in the White House Situation Room at midnight, surrounded by cold-eyed men whose loyalty he owned, ordering the murder of some foreign ruler …

He could not acknowledge his father's suicide.

The explosion of the computer industry only heated Barth's imaginings. His legions appeared throughout the Southwest; by 1965, he was many times a millionaire. The electronic map of the world hanging in his office traced a ruthless trail of acquisitions capped by a cover story in
Business Week
entitled “The Sunbelt Marches North.” He designed a thousand-acre headquarters near Dallas as a snare for those who worked there: each movie or game of tennis caught them tighter in his grasp. His key executives lived on the premises in mansions modeled after Williamsburg and secretly equipped with wiretaps; all employees took a yearly lie-detector test modeled on the CIA's. Those who survived received salaries and incentives unmatched in the world: preparing to own John Carey's firm, Barth had built a conglomerate one thousand times its worth. Yet artists and statesmen and men of power and polish—those whose lives had placed them beyond the need for money—still shunned him, as if he were his father. He did not speak at Harvard, or know the President. The East did not call out for him …

Phillip Carey governed in his place.

Slowly adding new facets to his own uniqueness, Barth waited, the better to succeed John Carey, and at last to become himself. He listened to taped diction lessons until his accent became divorced from his father's; it now hovered between Boston and New York. He took an office on Fifth Avenue, repressed all memory of his father's weakness, the very mention of his name …

He began breaking his own rules.

Curiously, it was a portrait by Picasso which revealed this as a virtue. In the late 1960s he began to appreciate the symbolism of culture: he fancied those who met him discovering layer upon layer of his
persona
, astonished at his complexity, until they granted the acceptance that he craved. Purchasing for his office a rather abstract painting by Picasso, he had wondered whether this left-wing Spaniard, so revered among artists, could paint anything real. Some months later he stumbled on a very early and startlingly literal Picasso portrait of a woman. He saw at once that Picasso had first submitted to the rules of drawing so that he might later manipulate them to a purpose distinctively his own. So it was, he decided, with the morality he forced on his employees: this was another sign of his uniqueness only to the extent that he alone could violate it.

Two days later he paid the honey-haired wife of his chief computer programmer ten thousand dollars to sleep with him. Afterwards, he fired her husband. The new fear of his employees gave him more pleasure than the first woman he had ever had: taking her had served the highest policy.

There were women all around him.

From them he learned the terror of unexpectedness and the pleasure of his own anticipation. He liked teasing himself with whether he might choose one, when that might be and what rules he might impose. Soon after he had slept with the programmer's wife, an interviewer looking for an offbeat question asked whether he had ever imagined himself as some species of animal: suddenly he saw himself an eagle, omniscient and untouchable, watching above a field for mice …

So it became with Van Dreelen & Carey. For four long years he teased himself by watching the two remaining Careys, as foolish and unknowing as the mice in his field. He could feel the day approaching when John Carey's firm would need the money which only he could provide, and their manifest failure would at last seal his transcendence.

But when his acquisition people first approached Phillip Carey, in 1976, Phillip expressed no interest in even meeting him.

Enraged, Barth demanded reasons.

Phillip had been polite, his people reported: only forty-nine percent was his, and although there was some trouble with his nephew, that was a family matter, as the firm itself had always been. As trustee, he was flattered by Barth's interest, but Peter would not sell.

Still Barth waited: Phillip Carey, unworthy son and symbol of the East, would come to him.

His acquisition team brought him trinkets: there were other houses, perhaps even the
New Republic
, if he wished to dabble in the arts …

Only Barth knew what he wanted, and why.

Sometimes, at night, he stood outside Van Dreelen & Carey.

His spies, gathering bits and pieces of information, etched a portrait of the Careys ruthless in its clarity. Phillip lived too high and hard; haunted by amnesia, Peter clashed with his much older uncle as if born to replace his father: whether the battle was over writers or money or the future of the firm, they could agree on little. Where Phillip Carey affected ease, his nephew was a driven man, ice-cold on the surface, who would suddenly lash out at him in anger.

Barth saw that he might count on Peter Carey.

His uncle was boxed in, castrated by John Carey's will and running short of money: as his power slipped away, Peter Carey would at last push him too far, and then Phillip would help Barth take from Peter what was rightly his.

For six years, Barth had waited.

It became his pleasure to wait for Phillip, driven by his nephew and the cruelty of his father's will, at last to come to him …

The alarm buzzed on his desk. He looked at the fluorescent dial of his wristwatch, and read 7:25.

Phillip Carey had come early.

As Noelle and Carey emerged from the subway exit at Spring Street and Sixth Avenue, it was snowing more heavily: silver flakes fell through the rays of streetlights and then swirled at their feet, becoming soot and water on the cobblestones. Carey pushed up his collar. “Mind walking for a while?”

“Maybe a few blocks.” She took his arm. “It's cold, you know.”

Carey nodded. “Ten minutes.”

They began wandering down Spring Street, past the restaurant where they would eat. Carey was not sure why he wished to walk: SoHo depressed him at night—darkness worked against it. Six-story warehouses on both sides turned its crabbed streets to canyons etched with a skeletal maze of fire escapes. The sidewalks were bare and treeless. SoHo had not been meant to live in; a few years back some artists, hoping to live cheaply, had begun converting the drafty floors of warehouses into lofts. They had succeeded too well: SoHo became chic, and developers followed, turning the dingy warehouses into co-ops which the artists could not buy. Carey, who dealt enough with writers to be embarrassed by his wealth, disliked this cycle of creativity and greed …

“Bastards,” Noelle spat suddenly.

She had stopped to stare at a corner warehouse plastered with a peeling movie poster: the burly torso of a man dressed in jeans and work boots, brandishing a bloody butcher knife in one hand and the freshly cut scalp of a woman in the other, blood dripping from its long blond hair. The man's crotch bulged. “I warned you not to go out tonight,” the artist had scrawled across his chest in the crooked letters of a maniac.

“Remind you of that reporter?” Carey asked. “The one who got stabbed?”

“Not just that.” Noelle stuffed her hands in the pockets of her coat and kept staring. “It's the worst kind of pornography—this slime will end up causing the deaths of five women in Manhattan alone, count on it.”

Carey found himself listening for footsteps. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the shadow of a lone man against the window of a gallery across the street. He glanced down Wooster Street. The pavements were silent, the wind lashed his face. Across the street, the shadow had not moved. “Let's go,” Carey said softly. “I'm spoiling your night.”

Noelle turned to him. “It's just that sometimes I can't reach you. It gets
old
, always reacting to someone's moods. It makes me feel passive …”

“Like your father did?”

“All right, yes—like that. If there was some way I could help …” The sentence trailed off. “You caught me imagining our night, that's all. I wanted to be touched.” She shivered. “It's
cold
, Peter. Let's go eat.”

They headed toward the restaurant.

Moving back down Spring Street, they passed garbage bags and the corrugated doors of unloading docks, three garish posters screaming “Lethal Is Coming,” a window filled with twisted sculpture next to a yellow civil defense sign that marked a bomb shelter. At night, Carey thought, SoHo had the stark, ruined quality of postwar Berlin. He said this to Noelle as they passed a jazz bar and then looked through a large window casting pale light onto the sidewalk. Inside a transvestite in a gold lame dress glided across a vast wooden floor as a crowd of men watched avidly from folding chairs. “Maybe
pre
war Berlin,” Noelle murmured.

Carey smiled. But as they crossed the street to the SoHo Charcuterie, he looked over his shoulder.

The streets were bare and dark and silent.

The restaurant was small and almost Mediterranean: the floors were a light-grained wood, the walls painted cream. Its tables, covered with white cloths, were bathed in the pale light reflected from dimmed track bulbs overhead, creating intimacy from a pleasant contrast of whites and shadows. They ordered dinner and a bottle of red wine. Carey raised his glass. “Sorry.”

She sipped, looking over the rim. “I guess I'm not quite sure what's getting you. Just Phillip?”

He shrugged. “It's a hard thing to explain. With anyone else, I wouldn't even try …”