Mile High (15 page)

He and Mr. Wagstaff shared a half bottle of Poland water. The two Wagstaff daughters entered the room together. One was more lovely than the other, depending on the lighting each one found to settle in, and the lighting that fell on Irene was superb.

Within the week E. C. West had convinced himself that it was time he married. He was impressed by Walter Wagstaff. Marriage would lend another dimension to his position both as a banker and as a crusader and it would permit him to undertake more formal entertainment, which was becoming really quite necessary. It would aid in dissembling the impression he gave of being too young. And he had fallen in love with Irene. They became engaged three months after they met, Irene was quite pleased too.

Irene saw her fiancé (and everything else within her view) in the same manner that she saw the church: as he and others represented him to be; as the church and others said the church would be forever. She wanted serenity above all else, and she would not countenance deceit and gossip and scandal about others. A great storm of the period was caused by the findings of the Pujo Committee of Congress, which her father and Edward and her sister Clarice discussed over and over again at dinner until she had had to register her own belief that the committee must be mistaken, that what it charged could simply not be true. The committee's report had stated that a dozen men, headed by J. P. Morgan, James Stillman, George Baker and the Rockefeller family, controlled the money markets of the United States. It asserted that they controlled: “a hundred and eighteen directorships in thirty-four banks and trust companies having total resources of two billion, six hundred million, seventy-nine thousand dollars; thirty directorships in ten insurance companies having total assets of two billion, two hundred and ninety-three million dollars; a hundred and five directorships in thirty-two transportation systems having total capitalization of eleven billion, seven hundred and eighty-four million dollars; sixty-three directorships in twenty-four producing and trading corporations having a total capitalization of three billion, three hundred and thirty-nine million dollars; twenty-five directorships in twelve public-utility corporations having a total capitalization of two billion, one hundred and fifty million dollars.” Altogether the twelve men represented three hundred and forty-one directorships in one hundred and twelve corporations having aggregate resources that were four times the size of the British national debt.

Irene deplored. Mr. Wagstaff justified. E. C. West envied but did not despair, because among the twelve men were some of his partners in Horizons A.G.

Not being in the remotest way paranoiac, Irene's reactions to Edward were not at all like his to her. He acquired the fixed idea that he was being persecuted by “them” because “they” separated him from her for three days each week. He experienced heady delusions of grandeur when Mr. Wagstaff put his private railroad car at his disposal for his journeys to and from Washington—a private car that had gold dinner service, wine bins, jewel safes, a sunken marble bathtub, nine complete and different sets of slip covers for the furniture, electric partitions to enclose or widen rooms, a staff of four uniformed by Wetzel, a parlor organ and a garage for a car at one end with its own ramp and sleeping space for a chauffeur and a mechanic. And her religious devotion induced him to falsify and pretend to the Wagstaffs that he had been a ravenously devout Catholic all his life, even though he paid for that in vicious responses of memory that made him see his mother shuffling under that black shawl on her way to seven o'clock Mass every morning of all the years.

Irene loved him. At first she liked what she saw and what she was told about him. Then she liked it all better and better. He was handsome in an imperial way and a stunning dresser. Her sister, Clarice, crooned over his name and proclaimed that he was “the absolute dark-horse catch of the year,” so Irene began to improve on what she saw and made him trim his moustache to something less formidable. Slowly, through her father's eyes, she began to see also a remarkable achiever, a young bank president whose board of directors held a collection of some of the most important men in the United States. For such an unneurotic, unfragmented woman respect was the only solid frame of love a woman could feel for a man. And her father had said, “He is young to achieve such an eminence among such doctrinaire people, that's one thing. But the main thing, the important thing, is that a man of his age is able to see the vision of a nation no longer reeling under the yoke of alcohol. Youth knows idealism, yes. Youth is the time for idealism. But to be so determined to move that idealism into tomorrow, to
give
one-half of his time with no hope for direct profit at his stage of life, at an age when other young men feel that every second must be used to further only themselves—by God, Irene, that is admirable.”

Two days before the wedding the groom went uptown to see Paolo Vacarelli. They sat in the wagon in front of the poolroom to have their meeting.

“Hey, Eduardo,” Vacarelli said. “What's all this bluenose stuff you're doing?”

“I'm going to tell you soon, but not now. Only one thing: it's good.”

“Good for what?”

“Good for business.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I'm getting married. We're going to Europe for the honeymoon.”

“I read about it.”

“We land at Naples, then we go to Palermo.”

“That's the way you going, hey?”

“I want a yellow handkerchief from you to Don Vito.”

“Yeah?”

“It's a little soon for what I have in mind, but my people think there's a war coming, so I've got to talk to Don Vito soon, while I can. Can you do it?”

“You mean will I do it?”

“Yes.”

“But you don't want to talk about it? You just want me to send you in blind.”

“It's going to be a very good thing, Paolo. Before I get back, Don Vito is going to tell you that too. Okay?”

“Okay, Eduardo. You got it.”

“Send it to the bank tomorrow.”

“You got it.”

They were married by the cardinal at St. Patrick's at a nuptial High Mass with a
fantastic
organist and choir (Irene thought), and it was a most important social event for Catholic New York. Irene was thrilled to hear the cardinal call Edward “Eddie” and to speak so fondly of his father. In all the time she had been going to St. Patrick's they had never met the cardinal, who was now—as Clarice put it—“an old friend of the family.”

Bishop Cannon and Wayne B. Wheeler came to the church. They approved of his projected sixty-day “holiday” because he would receive the press at all European capitals to provide an “intimate explanation” of the prohibition movement. Mr. Wheeler said jokingly, “I'd go easy on those European wines if I were you.”

On their wedding day, June 17, 1913, they sailed for Naples aboard the
Conde di Orselino
for a grand tour honeymoon.

Don Vito Cascio Ferro,
capo di capi
of the Sicilian Mafia, a charming, cultivated gentleman of immense dignity with a long, white beard, was wearing linen knickerbockers and a gray, piped Norfolk jacket when he entertained E. C. West at luncheon in his palazzo facing the Bay of Palermo from the higher base of Monte Pellegrino.

In 1909, as a “personal response” to the effrontery of the police commissioner of New York, Theodore Bingham, who had sent police lieutenant Joseph Petrosino to investigate the Mafia, he had personally shot Petrosino to death at the center of the Piazza Marina in full view of more than one hundred witnesses, then had returned to his carriage to be taken back to the dinner party from which he had excused himself, a party attended by the high aristocracy of the city. Of the twenty murders of which he was acquitted in his lifetime Don Vito admitted to only the Petrosino affair, for which he was never charged. “It was a challenge,” he would say. “My action was a disinterested one, taken in response to a challenge that I could not afford to ignore.”

E. C. West put the yellow silk handkerchief marked in one corner with a large
V
for Vacarelli into a heavy manila envelope. He sealed the envelope with a wide band of wax, marked the wax in three places with his signet ring, allowed it to harden, then took it to the hall porter of the hotel to ask that it be delivered by hand. The porter summoned a page, then noticed the addressee's name on the envelope. He stared at West. He waved the boy away. He put on a flat cap with a shiny black visor and left the hotel to deliver the envelope himself. He returned with an invitation to lunch for the following day written in Don Vito's hand on heavy parchment, rolled and tied with a striped green, red and black ribbon.

West's carriage rolled past medieval monuments and chirragesque buildings, across the city through the hot sunshine, up the slope higher and higher until he could see out across the pavonine harbor and feel the ancient sleepiness of the crumbling city that had been founded by the Phoenicians, occupied by the Romans in 254
B.C.
, conquered by the Byzantines in 525
A.D.
, taken by the Saracen Arabs in 830, overrun by the Normans, sacked by the Spanish, absorbed by Italy in 1860 and was presently owned by the Mafia.

He was greeted on the threshold of the rich Sicilianbaroque palazzo by his host, who spoke to him in Sicilian. He was taken to lunch in a tree-shaded, fountain-cooled, flowerscented patio. They spoke of the world, of American politics, and of the ballet (about which West was most authoritative) while they ate pasta al sarde, melanzane alla siciliana, spada a Ghiotta and a rush of exuberant Sicilian sweets more baroque than the city's architecture. West felt his mother's presence overwhelmingly through the food more strongly than music could bring back any other memories of her. They sipped coffee. West refused a cigar.

“It was good to hear from Don Paolo,” Don Vito said. “He has done well in America.”

“He has won the respect of all people,” West answered.

“Why did he send you?”

“He has introduced me to you so that I may tell you about a new business I am developing.”

“Please,” the elegant old gentleman urged, “you must tell me about that.”

He did not speak again for fifty minutes. He listened intently. When West had finished he said, “What you say is very interesting. If I may say so, you speak a very good Sicilian.”

“Thank you.”

“I like big thoughts. But yours are a hero's thoughts, and I found that I was asking myself if they were not too big.”

“America is big.”

“You mean Sicily is small. You are right. I agree. Sicily is small and I am old. But I am experienced. I have had long tenure. The Honored Society is over three hundred years old and it forgets nothing, so I am that much more experienced by serving it. What there is to know about the business we do I have learned well.”

“Are you telling me that what I have described to you cannot be accomplished?”

“Only you can prove that. I want to see that it can be accomplished. I am only telling you that none of us could ever have had such a magnificent conception of business as you have shown me today.”

“Thank you.” West allowed almost fifty seconds to pass before he spoke again. “Prohibition, Don Vito, is most peculiarly American. It could not be carried out anywhere else, and I say that with pride. Americans are split in half into nature and content. Not the nation, but the people. The nation is totally and mystically unified, but each American is split into two halves—on one side his origins, on the other side the enormous opportunities that confront him.

“We are people who fled civilizations. Think of that. We are the offspring who could not succeed under the established, civilized circumstances, whatever they were—and all the backgrounds varied. We struggled through hardships to get to the new land, then we found a fantastically rich world. Having left the old countries penniless and hungry, our fathers had to convince themselves that they would build a better place. They taught that to their children. It created tremendous idealism. It created tremendous gullibility. The prohibition movement is, after all, only lip service to idealism. We want the ideal of prohibition while knowing at the same instant that when we get it we will continue to live as we have always lived: the wine drinkers will go on drinking wine, the people from the beer countries will have to have their beer, the rest will want liquor. But they must serve the ideal. They must seem to be striving for yet a better world, carrying on their father's dreams.

“But it is such a rich country! It can grow anything, feed and fuel the world, realize any whim for any man. And because we are split in half as I have explained, one half does not know what the other half is doing. Poverty may bring faith, but riches bring things. We must have faith, so Americans have achieved a faith in things. Therefore, what the American people are faced with is a craving for reassurance that they have kept the true faith, the universal faith, the faith of loss and deprivation—which is prohibition. Simultaneously the other half is a quivering maw of national sensuality—sensation, tactilities, gluttony, satiety—the essence of total self—all making us dependent upon our riches, faith's opposite. That is why what we have been discussing is good business, Don Vito. Truly, it is not a question of the size of the opportunity but only a question of having been born, then trained to understand the market.”

“Formidable!”

“Thank you.”

“We will help you.”

“Thank you. Before I ask your help I must tell you what I am prepared to pay for it.”

“Before I can tell you if what you offer to pay is enough, I must know how much help you want.”

“I want from you one trustworthy man who is bound to you as well as he will be bound to me. That man must have your powers to call on the obedience and the trust of five hundred, perhaps a thousand, other men of respect. I want to know only the one man, because it is important to the survival of the plan that only one man know me.”