Outerbridge Reach (7 page)

The documentary had been no different from a hundred other programs that had offended Browne with their liberal humility and left-wing bias. But the vision of its imagined country, a homeland that could function as both community and cause, was one that remained with him. Browne felt his own country had failed him in that regard. It was agreeable to think such a place might exist, even as home to the enemy. But no such place existed.

The war would never be fought because the enemy had proved false. All his fierce alternatives were lies. Surely, Browne thought sleepily, this was a good thing. Yet something was lost. For his own part, he was tired of living for himself and those who were him by extension. It was impossible, he thought. Empty and impossible. He wanted more.

Ward had said, “I need some love in my life.”

Ward, Browne thought, would make a good minister. A decorous man who knew the secrets of the heart. But what about me, Browne wondered. Which was the very question he had sought to elude. For a moment he felt as though he were standing at the edge of a great darkness with an ear cocked to the wind, attending silence. It was a place he dared not stay.

He remembered walking as a stranger in the ruined terminal. For a moment he became a stranger in his own house, in his own bed, beside his own woman—a stranger but without a stranger's freedom. On the other side of darkness, he imagined freedom. It was a bright expanse, an effort, a victory. It was a good fight or the right war—something that eased the burden of self and made breath possible. Without it, he felt as though he had been preparing all his life for something he would never live to see.

S
TRICKLAND
had been asleep only a few hours when the phone woke him. A drab sun addressed Manhattan at a late morning slant. Pamela, his visitor the night previous, was gone.

He picked up the phone and said, “Hold on.”

Hurrying to the studio door, he put the police bolt in place. He glanced about him as he went back to the bedroom, wondering if she had been pilfering. He had been too tired to see her out. Pamela had mainly learned to keep her liberated fingers under control around his property but he had once caught her with a six-thousand-dollar zoom lens.

“Yes,” Strickland said to the person on the phone. He stood in the long window, pulling on his trousers, squinting in the sunlight. A bright young voice hailed him.

“I have Mrs. Manning of Hylan, Mr. Strickland.”

“That's great,” Strickland said. He sat down on the bed and reached for a cigarette and his Rolodex file.

“Mr. Strickland,” an older woman's voice declared, ‘Mrs. Manning of Hylan.”

The Hylan people, Strickland had observed, tended to offer their surnames as possessed by the corporate suffix. It suggested foggy glens and Celtic heraldry.

“How are you, Mrs. Manning?”

“Just fine. Will you be coming to see us today?”

“Yes I will, ma'am. I have an appointment.”

“Mr. Hylan himself can't make it,” Mrs. Manning of Hylan informed him. “But we've arranged a schedule.”

Strickland decided he did not care for the sound of it. His annoyance occasioned him his first stammer of the day.

“But ma'am,” he began, and stuck on the next sentence. “I . . . I came back a week early to meet Mr. Hylan. We set this up months ago.”

“It'll be all right,” Mrs. Manning said. “We'll make it up to you.”

The unusual promise intrigued him. He waited for her to go on.

“We'll show you Shadows,” she said flirtatiously. “We'll give you the tour. You can look at tapes. Hello, Mr. Strickland?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Really,” she assured him. “You'll have a good time.”

Strickland considered that it was early in the day for Mrs. Manning's wry alertness.

“Hey,” he told her, “I'm having one already.”

Strickland kept his car on the second level of a pier on the Hudson, a priceless midtown spot, convenient and secure. The car was a 1963 Porsche with austere lines and black leather upholstery. The fittings were rusty but the engine reported like a Prussian soldier on the first turn of the key. Strickland gave a little whistle of satisfaction.

At the Twelfth Avenue barricade, he paid his parking bill to an unkempt youth of Caribbean Spanish origin.

“I'm looking for storage space,” he told the young man. “I don't need a lot of it. I'd like to talk about renting some.”

It was desirable, Strickland felt, to rent from the same waterfront outfit who ran the garage. Their property had a way of avoiding violation. The young man gave him a card with a number to call.

On the drive upriver, he thought about Matthew Hylan, the young merchant-adventurer who had engaged him to record his next voyage. Strickland had amassed a dossier of Hylan clippings. There were pieces in
Fortune, Harper's
and
Manhattan, Inc.
There were admiring profiles in the yachting press, dippy puffs in the weeklies, poisonous anecdotes in the upscale celebrity magazines. Hylan was forty-four and supremely rich. He had inherited a North Shore Boston mortuary business worth a couple of million dollars and parlayed his legacy into a late-century colossus of fun services and real estate. He appeared vain and lippy, a millionaire vulgarian in the contemporary mode. He was single, dressy and apparently heterosexual. He liked a party. His chosen image seemed that of a sailor. There was nothing in any of the material to engage Strickland's insight. Hylan of Hylan resembled many others.

Physically, Hylan was more or less conventionally handsome. His jaw was large and emphasized in caricatures. His eyes were slightly protuberant and fleshily hooded. His mouth was large and suggestive of the appetites. Strickland had never witnessed the face in motion.

He made it up to Hylan headquarters in little more than half an hour, over the George Washington Bridge and up the parkway. Hylan Corporation headquarters occupied an old estate called Shadows, on the right bank of the river, opposite a sugarloafshaped hill called the Plattsweg. The main house was an odd structure, built in the middle of the nineteenth century to the eccentric designs of a disappointed matron who squandered her husband's dishonestly acquired fortune in its construction. The house was enormous, with carved buttresses and much gingerbread and a roof that curved upward at both ends with the thrusting violence of a Viking chapel. The lady founder had called it Shadows because of the way the surrounding hills abridged the sunlight. She affected to rejoice in the changing patterns they cast. There was plenty of light to be seen on the river, though; the prospects, upstream and down the Hudson, were sublime.

The old building had a modern wood-paneled reception room with a security guard on duty at a circular desk. When Strickland had been announced Mrs. Manning came promptly to claim him. She was a handsome, high-colored upper-class woman in her forties.

“Mr. Strickland,” the woman cried, “I'm Joyce Manning. Welcome to Hylan.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Strickland said humbly.

“Too bad about Matty. He'd have loved to meet you. He's a great admirer of your outstanding work.”

“Yes,” Strickland said. “Too bad.”

“It just wasn't on. Things are in chaos today.”

“Why's that?”

“Meetings. Arrivals and departures. Excursions about.”

Strickland smiled politely.

Joyce Manning conducted him to a man called Thorne, whose name occurred often in the more serious of the Hylan articles. Harry Thorne, a hard case from the Boston construction wars, vice president of the corporation, was said to be Hylan's mentor and partner. Journalists liked to contrast Thorne's dangerous manner with the hail-fellow glibness of his younger pal.

Thorne received Strickland in Matty Hylan's office. He was ugly, vigorous and sixty-odd. There was absolutely no more to his face than function required: it was spare and brutal, with an impatient squint and a lipless pseudo-smile that emphasized the lustrous melancholy of his black eyes. Great mug, thought Strickland. Thorne's shirt was white on white, his suit funereal and superbly cut.

“How are yez?” Thorne asked with faint insolence. His voice suggested gulls over India Wharf. Strickland had no trouble recognizing his manner, which was that of a man who equated documentary films with souvenir napkins or balloons and had other things on his mind. Beyond that, Strickland thought, Thorne looked distinctly weary and irritated, as though their meeting represented a particularly unwelcome irony. He was not offended.

“Fine and dandy, sir. How about yourself?”

Joyce Manning bustled nervously, like a good witch.

“Harry,” she insisted, “you've got to let Mr. Strickland see the view from Matty's office. He may want to use it.”

Thorne looked blank. “Use it?”

She laughed solicitously. “In the film, Harry.”

Thorne curled his lip and stepped aside. Easing past him, Strickland inspected the room. It was enormous and high-ceilinged, obviously the renovation of one of the mansion's ceremonial chambers. There were fine windows over the river, well-placed watercolors, and Navaho rugs on the hardwood floor. There were sunny boat photographs and Acoma pottery on the blond shelves along each wall.

The office's working desk was off to one side, as though put there out of indifference to the room's prodigality. It was a small desk of indeterminate wood, cluttered and mean, like that of a bureaucrat or petty accountant. Beside it, Strickland formed his very first organized impression of the Hylan Corporation: as a feverish, unhappy place, missing its master. Business might be bad. He began to walk up and down, wondering how the room might be photographed.

“Have you had the chance to see any of Mr. Strickland's films yet?” Joyce was asking Harry Thorne. “Shall we set one up for you?”

Harry watched Strickland's pacing with an air of impatience and declined to be helpful.

“No,” he said. “Not for me.”

Strickland turned to him.

“Too bad your Mr. Hylan couldn't make it, Mr. Thorne. It would have moved things along. It would have been constructive, if you know what I mean. I would have liked to talk t . . to . . .”

Thorne watched without sympathy as Strickland fought to complete his sentence.

“We would have liked to talk to him too,” Thorne said finally. “But he didn't have any time for us today either.” He turned to Joyce Manning. “Did he, Joyce?”

The secretary laughed airily.

“Now that I'm here,” Strickland asked, “what have you got for me?”

“How about lunch?” Joyce Manning asked. Thorne looked at his watch.

“I don't eat lunch,” Strickland said. He kept smiling. “I'm here to work.”

“Show him the sailing stuff,” Thorne suggested. “Show him the boat. Before you go, ask Mr. Livingston to come see me.”

About a dozen men and women stood silently outside Hylan's office as Strickland and Joyce Manning emerged. Strickland thought they looked like gloomy corporate officers. The corporate dimension might be interesting, he thought, looking them over. Ten men, two women. Puffy faces, nice clothes.

Following Mrs. Manning down to the boathouse on the river, he saw cloud shadows play on the broad lawns, just the way they were supposed to.

Back in the main building, Harry Thorne was watching his executives file into Matty Hylan's office. His man Livingston was at his side—red-faced, sweaty, as full of humor as Thorne was dry.

“Step right up,” Thorne told them, acting the showman. There were a few sad smiles.

“What a bunch of zombies,” Thorne said. “Eh, Livingston?”

Livingston sighed.

“We go on from here,” Harry Thorne announced when they were lined up in the office. “We're all existentialists here. We go forward.” He pointed the way ahead with an extended arm and an arched wrist, like a lineman claiming possession of a fumbled football. “We're mobile. We're moving. We're going ahead.”

A few throats were cleared. There was slight scattered applause.

“As you will soon see,” Harry went on, “I have informed the press that we are very much in business and we expect things to stabilize. As I have informed the press, so I will inform the board. Tomorrow.”

A deeper silence followed mention of the board.

“Questions?” Harry asked.

Questions seemed to hover. None were asked.

“We expect the board's support,” Harry said in answer. “We have been led to believe we will have the board's support. Questions?”

“Where's Matty?” asked a voice from the crowd. A prankster disguising his voice. A couple of people turned to see who it was.

“Somewhere warm,” Harry said. “With a broad.” A moment later he said, “I apologize to the women for that remark. A function of age. Sorry.”

There was nervous laughter, dental hisses, faint groans.

“What's the official story?” a younger woman asked.

“Private family considerations,” he said, enunciating carefully. “Personal matters of no interest to the public.”

He drew himself up and addressed the room.

“I understand your concerns,” Thorne said to his executives. “I'm sure they're the same as mine. The first is—pardon the expression—criminal liability. The other is how solvent are our component organizations. Who can tell me something I don't know?”

He looked about the room.

“No one? Good. Then everyone go have lunch in the dining room. Everyone except the legal department. If you want a hot tip on the market I suggest you buy Hylan. It's seriously undervalued.”

There was more dutiful laughter. People filed out until only Thorne, Livingston and the two lawyers remained.

“How's it look?” Thorne asked them.

“Matty's gone, all right,” one of the lawyers said. “He hasn't sent any postcards.”

“What about foul play?” Mr. Livingston asked. “Given some of his—”