Mile High (36 page)

“Sure, Walt. Certainly.”

“It's just a piece of land and a lot of lawyers. We have to create something of value on the land—design it and see it built. That's all that matters. Do you see that, Derek?”

“Sure, Walt. Absolutely.”

Walt felt the way he thought his father must have felt when he had put his first great big deal together, and this exhilaration was even more heightened when he found a message at his flat that Dan was waiting for his call at the Savoy Hotel. He called before he took his hat off, to be ready to rush right out again. Dan sounded tired. He said he was in town for about two days and that he'd been tied up at the embassy all day. He asked if Walt could get free to join him for dinner in his hotel suite. Walt said he was on his way.

Dan looked tired. He drank three fairly dark-brown highballs before dinner and most of a bottle of Haut-Brion with dinner while Walt ate everything in sight and talked excitedly and with a considerable amount of triumph about West & Alder, Consultants to Perkins & Flicker and West to West Ltd. He said, “I think even Father would agree that this is sure-fire stuff. And I hope you'll pass the word along.”

Dan had been staring blankly over Walt's shoulder across the river at the lights of the Royal Festival Hall. “I don't have to tell him anything any more, Walt,” he said. “He knows everything that happens to you and to me every hour of the day and night.”

Walt was startled and not a little thrilled. “How do you mean?”

“He's built the largest private intelligence organization anywhere in the world and he has to keep it working. His new men probably practice on you and me.”

“Why does he have that?”

“To protect himself from the Communists—what else?”

“But what does he need to do that for?”

“Because he's become insane—if he wasn't always insane.”

“Now, just a minute, Dan—”

“He's the whole wind behind Joe McCarthy. I won't even speak to McCarthy, and McCarthy thinks that's very, very funny, because most of his money comes from my father, who is the sure-thing backer of any and every crackpot anti-Communist scheme they can dream up. He's scared out of his mind about Communists in Washington and Communists in Moscow, and someday someone is going to whisper to him that it could be that the Vatican is packed with Communists, and he'll race into the breach with another five million bucks.”

“Oh, well,” Walt said, “that's just national fermentation. It's the usual historic process that made the nation great.”

“What the hell do you know about it?” Dan's voice was tight and his eyes were hard. “I live with it in the Senate. I live with it under his hate. You should get a good close look at how great America has become—in the same room with Joe McCarthy drunk and clowning and the old man so certifiably insane that he should have been committed five years ago except that he's too rich to be committed and you and I don't have the nerve to sign the papers anyway.”

“Dan, don't talk like this. He's our father. We should be defending him.”

Dan shook his head and stared at the floor. “Maybe you'll find out someday,” he said bitterly. “I'm chained to him. I can't get away and I'd give anything to get away. You're as free as a bird and you want to be chained to him.” He stood up and trailed off unsteadily toward the bedroom. “Good night, kid. I'm sorry I talked so much. I'm sorry about a lot of things.”

Mayra and Walt began by seeing each other for dinner once a week. Then he'd call her and ask if she could have lunch because he had an idea for interior patios high up (and once a plan for a waterfall that was to fall from the roof of a sixty-story office building into a gorge and would create all the electricity used by the building). Then they saw each other for lunch on Tuesdays and Saturdays and dinner Mondays and Thursdays, and by that time they had found out that they were in love so they began sleeping with each other, and in the third month Walt moved into her basement flat permanently. He brought one suitcase.

“You sure travel light,” she said.

“Oh, I keep a few things at the office.”

Mayra cooked. They ate in restaurants on the same two evenings each week and lunched in restaurants on the same two days, but she cooked and kept the flat in shape and made the beds and handled the laundry, and they were happier than either of them had ever been in their lives. It wasn't a very big flat. It had a large living room-studio that had good light in the afternoon, a small bedroom, a good-sized kitchen and a hallway. Walt asked her if maybe she'd like to have him find her a studio with a north skylight, but she said she worked better at home where the heavy work was, so he brought her a set of elaborate architectural blue-white Da-lites.

Jane Adler was a very good journalist. This required excessive curiosity and physical pain if the curiosity wasn't satisfied. From the day Derek took her to see the enormous piece of property on which West & Adler, Consultants to Perkins & Flicker, were to build a multiple dwelling for five hundred families, she had to know how they had suddenly happened to land a commission like that.

“I courageously stopped a runaway horse carrying the only daughter of the richest man in Europe.” Adler shrugged. “Naturally, he demanded to be allowed to discharge the obligation by rewarding me somehow and—”

“Oh, bosh!”

“Watch it. You're sounding more British than American.”

“How did you
get
the commission, Derek?” She asked him in bed, while dancing, during friendly quarrels and once while they were making love. She pushed, pressed and cajoled. She got tough. She got hysterical. Her purpose was so much stronger than his that, at last, as she had known he would, he got bored with the inquisition and told her (swearing her to eternal secrecy on the pain of their loss of everything held dear) who Walt was, who his father was, how Walt operated as his own client and how they might just keep on expanding forever.

The only thing that impressed her was that Walter, her friend Walter, her guest, her companion, the man she had introduced to her friend, was the son of Edward Courance West.

“Do you have any
idea
who Edward Courance West is?”

“Sure. I read the
American Weekly
.”

“Bosh! No matter what you read—by God, I think he owns our newspaper!—no matter what you've heard, you couldn't remember it and put it all together and see it in one piece.”

“What am I, an obit writer?”

“To begin with, he's the richest man in the world.”

“Big deal. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

“Walt is his son? I mean, you
know
how I love Walter West, but—”

“I didn't say he was Walt's father.”

“You did too.”

“I said Walt said the man was Walt's father. Walt may be a secret masochist.”

“Bosh!”

“You've got to quit these obscenities, Jane. No kidding. Besides, Walt's father is a complete nut.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“He and McCarthy and about a dozen other hustlers are practicing right now to put everybody in jail. By me that's a nut. And I am beginning to have the horrible feeling that I must be some kind of a nut myself for telling you that that nut is Walt's father.”

So Jane told Mayra and Mayra took it big. Mainly because she hadn't known, and she was hurt and angry because Walt hadn't told her. And because Walt hadn't told her (because he didn't feel he should recognize his father if his father hadn't recognized him) Mayra decided that Walt must certainly have thought that she would lunge at his money if she knew, and she got into a sick rage, lost her head and bolted. A firm in Beauchamp Place came into the flat and in two hours had emptied it of everything except Walt's packed suitcase. She left London on the three-o'clock flight to Rome, where she stayed for two nights in a hotel off the Via Condotti. Then, through a restaurant cashier, she found an apartment off St. Agnes in Agony Street, behind the Piazza Navona, and grimly set to work to see if she could paint herself out of any memory of ever having known the son of a bitch.

She left complete demoralization behind in London. Walt strolled from the bus in Sloane Street to Hans Place, whistling merrily off-key, carrying two bottles of pink (Swiss) champagne because it was the luniversary of the day they had met, trooped lightly down the outside staircase, let himself into the flat—and she was gone, the place was stripped and his suitcase had been packed untidily. He called Derek Adler.

“Mayra's gone.”

“Gone where?”

“She moved every stick out of the apartment except my packed suitcase.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. When I left this morning she was—she was—”

“Hysterical? Angry?”

“No! She was very happy. She was ecstatic.”

“Maybe she got a cable from home. Somebody could be dying. Maybe she had to fly out.”

“And take all the furniture and twenty-three paintings, fahcrissake?”

“Take it easy. Let me think.”

“I don't want opinions. If you don't know where she is, that's all I want to know.”

He slammed the telephone down. He called C. L. Pick in New York. Mr. Pick was in Washington but Mr. Heller was there. Would Mr. West speak to Mr. Heller? He asked Heller for a detective agency in London. Heller said he'd have someone call him from London. Walt said please rather have them send their best man or men to him at 19, Hans Place instantly, basement apartment. Heller asked if the matter were serious enough to require legal assistance. Walt said no.

Derek sat Jane down and pulled a chair across from her so that she would have to face him. “Everything's busted wide open,” he said.

“Where?”

“Mayra's gone. She cleaned out the flat. Everything's gone.”

“Why?”

“You tell me.”

She began to cry, and she didn't cry easily.

“Did you tell her about him?”

She nodded, sobbing.

“When? I mean, Jesus, when did you have a chance? I didn't tell you until one o'clock this morning.”

“Ten o'clock—no, a quarter to ten—this morning.” She looked at him, frightened and appealing. “I thought she'd be proud! I never thought she'd leave him just because—”

“Some mess. I don't even know what to do. Anyway, it's not your fault. He told me not to tell anybody and I did. It's my fault, honey.”

“Now you quit that, Derek.”

“We'll just have some coffee and wait here. No booze. We'll need clear heads.” He poured them each a short glass of whiskey. “He'll come here and we'll tell him what happened.”

“Oh, Derek!”

“It's okay. I can always write a musical about the rector of Stiffkey.”

“It's pronounced Stew-key.”

“For that matter, Walt can always shoot himself.”

When Jane had telephoned to tell her who Walt was, Mayra had felt cold hostility cover her like hair spray and hold her in a rigid net. He was the son of the West Foundation. They'd been together for three months and she had thought they'd been everything it was possible to be to each other, but he had been afraid she would find out who he was, because she was black and he was ashamed of her. So many things he did habitually began to convince her more and more that he had just been using her until he got tired of using her. Like the way he was so cheap, pretending to like Swiss champagne more than French, or always taking buses, or having two suits of clothes to his back, all so she wouldn't think he was that rich man's son and try to take him the way he figured that's what she'd do the minute she found out. And the way he babbled about astrology, and theosophy and faith cures and nature healing, just like he was some goddam idiot who never got out of grade school and who had to cover up and show off like a little boy how smart he was, all so she wouldn't know he was that rich man's son with a mess of colleges behind him. And how he never knew anything about the West Foundation. And the way he'd look at her Foundation check when it came on the first of every month and keep turning it over in his hands and looking at both sides of it and saying he'd get it cashed for her. Then when she packed his goddam bag she found all three Foundation checks tucked right in there, never used, like he thought his rich goddam honkie father could trace them to a nigger girl if he cashed them.

The agency men found her in thirty-two hours. Walt chartered an Executive Jet and went to Rome. Mayra had been in her new flat in the Via Parione for fifty-three minutes and was already painting hard, thinking hard, not a stitch unpacked, when he knocked at the door. She knew someone was making a mistake, knocking at the wrong door, so she answered it.

“What the hell happened?” Walt said. Her jaw dropped. She stood and stared. “What made you run out of London like that?” He entered the apartment and she offered no resistance. He shut the door. “Christ, Mayra, you scared hell out of me,” he kept on. “You should have left a note or something.” Mayra began to cry softly. He put his arms around her and she let her forehead rest on his lapel and she bawled. They got it all straightened out in about ten minutes. She found out what his father felt about him and she began to get clues about how he felt about his father and she forgot all about all the things she had dreamed up against him, felt sorry for him on the one hand and very proud of him on the other, but most of all, gloriously most of all, she knew who he was, not by name, not by baptismal label, but who he was.

There was also an indirect consequence of their reconciliation. West & Adler, Consulenti à Di Georgio e Bonetti was formed by a Roman lawyer retained by Pick, Heller & O'Connell together with estate agents who found a large very desirable piece of property on the far side of the Villa Borghese. Derek and Jane Adler flew in from London to set up offices and crews that would duplicate the construction of the building being designed in London, insofar, that is, as Roman building laws would permit the design without modification.