Mile High (45 page)

“It takes two and a half hours to fly to Chicago. I didn't see him for six and a half hours,” Walt said dazedly.

“Oh, sure. No doubt about it.”

“But what did he
say
to you?”

“He said I was a sex-crazy nigger and that I had to be punished for marrying you. I had to be beaten until I bled from every orifice, then thrown off the mountain down the cliff beside the elevator shaft—'cast down,' he called it—so I could be punished through eternity.”

“But why would he say such things, Mayra?”

“You ever see me have morning sickness?”

“No.”

“I don't think anybody in my family ever had it. That's for true. But tomorrow you're going to have it.”

“Me?”

“You're going to have it right after you eat my breakfast, then I'll give you the antidote and you won't have it any more unless you eat my breakfast the day after that. You know about the dogs here?”

“Yes.” He felt sad. He could never be found by his father now. His eyes had turned inward upon his grief, but his grief was being suffocated by his rage. Mayra was pulling at his lapels. “They got nine killer shepherds. All bigger than wolves. All trained to tear anything that moves into dead, bloody pieces. They're loose all night. But I walked from this hotel to that Hammetschwand elevator and nothing bit me. And there was deep snow, but my slippers weren't wet and my feet weren't cold. How come?”

“How?”

“Because they doped me to make it look like I'm in psychiatric shock because your plane was missing and me being in a very delicate condition as any doctor will shortly prove, then they rode me up the trail and put me in that elevator car and stopped the car halfway up the shaft.”

“Why? Why?”

“I told you why. Because he's crazy. And because he wants you to think I'm crazy so when they find me dead at the bottom of the mountain everybody can say poor girl, too bad.” She closed her eyes and began to sway. He held her tightly by the shoulders. “But why would all these people conspire with him to kill you?”

“Not all these people. Just Willie Tobin. Willie fixes up my morning breakfast before it comes in here. Willie brainwashes that dimwitted Dr. Garrison. Willie took me up the mountain to make sure I'd know the way if I wanted to paint up there. He's done it all before. Your father has murdered Italian-speaking niggers before.”

“Mayra!”

“Mama's scrapbook will be in the mail Monday morning. When I can show you that I'll tell you all about it.”

“What's in the scrapbook?”

“I can't say it until you see it under your own eyes. Nobody could believe what I have to tell you unless they can look right at this scrapbook.”

“What are we going to do?”

“First, you have to believe him or me. One of us is crazy.”

“I believe you. I believe in us.”

“Then everything has to be okay. He can't kill me if you believe he's trying to kill me. Next, you've got to believe that he can keep us here as long as he wants us here. He controls all the transportation. All the cops. And he controls the telephones, so we just aren't about to call out to your brother Dan to send in an air force and some troops.”

Walt looked ill. “But I can get out,” he said. “If you can stand to take the chance to stay up here alone with him, then I can get out and get all this finished.”

“How?”

“Business. I'll tell him I've got to meet Derek in New York to line up a drafting crew. I won't even tell him. I'll keep it casual and just ask Willie to arrange to have the plane take me into the city.”

“Then what will you do in New York? What can you do? I mean, if you bring Dan back here with you, then he'll just be one more prisoner.”

“Dan and I can have him committed. Maybe I couldn't do it all alone without a big fight and without its taking a long time. But if Dan and I both sign the papers, we're the only sons. And Dan is a United States senator. I can convince Dan—I know I can—because over the years he's as much as said that Father isn't right in the head. We can get it all done in twenty-four hours—the court order committing him, the psychiatrists, and we can come back here with all of it, and his whole force of security police won't dare go against the law.”

“That's it. That's how we could do it.”

“But—but, I can't. I can't leave you here. I can't do it, Mayra.”

She was trembling violently, so she sat down suddenly. She sat on her hands, and that held her arms rigidly at her sides, so that he could not see that she was shaking with fright. “It's the only way,” she said, as easily as she could. “If we don't do that, honey, we are cooked. We dead.” Her face seemed gaunt from all the morning retching as she stared up at him, and her eyes were desperate, but the steadiness of her intelligence and her courage overwhelmed all that. “Fix it up to get out of here Monday morning,” she said lightly, “and we'll have all day tomorrow to figure out how he can't get near me.”

CHAPTER NINE

After Walt told Willie he had to go to New York, Mr. West called Walt to say that two psychiatric nurses would be standing by to return with him, but until they got there, how did Walt think his wife could best be protected from herself? Walt said Mayra was quite calm, that she reacted marvelously to sedation, and that he thought the best plan would be to post a security officer in the hall outside her door.

Walt and Mayra spent Sunday inside their apartment. They ate only unpeeled fruit. They talked about fashioning weapons, but Mayra said she wouldn't know how to use them and that she would rely on her own agility to defend herself.

“That's not enough. We have to hide you.”

“Where?”

“This is an enormous hotel. I'll get a set of skeleton keys from the desk late tonight and sometime before dawn we'll plant you in one of the smaller hotel rooms and you'll stay right in there until I get back.”

“I can't hide until the mail comes tomorrow. I've got to have Mama's scrapbook because it's a tremendous weapon. The best defense is an offense. Man, that scrapbook is really an offense.”

“How is it a weapon?”

“No use trying to tell you unless you see it. But it's what he did to women a long time ago. Mama knows. She worked for the women. He thinks it's all blown over. He thinks nobody ever connected him with what happened. If he can get the idea that somebody knows he killed a woman—yes, he did, baby, yes, he did”—Mayra held her hand over Walt's mouth as he started to press for more explanation. “I say, if he knows somebody knows he murdered that woman, then his head is gonna be so full of the fear of that that he isn't gonna come for me—man, not the first night anyhow, he'll be so shook up—and you'll be back here before the second night, and then it will be over.”

“But how are you going to tell him? How can you tell him you know and expect to get away from him, to hide from him?”

“I'm going to tape pages from that scrapbook up on his door, then I'm going to be out of there before anyone knows I've ever been there.”

“But
why?
How can that help anything?”

“Baby, how can I make it clearer? Suppose you were the safest man in the world, then all of a sudden everywhere you looked there was a big poster that told everybody you had killed a woman. Suppose you knew, all of a sudden, that somebody near you knew you were a killer. What would you do? I'll tell you. You'd start thinking only about yourself and stop playing games with black girls until you could get this first bad thing all straightened out. Dig?”

The scrapbook came from Mama as promised, and because Willie had cleared it days before, after West had played back the tapes of Mayra's call to Mama, it was handed right over by Gubitz, unopened. Walt called Willie's room. He was told Willie was in the lobby waiting for him.

“Why do we want Willie?” Mayra asked. Walt said he had been told that Willie would be riding with him to New York and that Smadja and Herr Zendt would be riding with Willie. “The explanation is,” Walt said in a thin, shaking voice, “that we're coming to the time in the staff contracts when one-third of them are revolved back to Switzerland, and they are going into New York to line up replacements. But that's better than it's bad. I'll get you a key to Willie's room so that you'll have a second place to hide if he flushes you out of the first.”

They couldn't use the elevator because of the sound it made. They ran together along the carpeted corridor to the red light over the exit staircase at the end of the hall on the top floor. Mr. West's apartment was directly below theirs. He took her to a single room at the end of the long hall on the floor below his father's. “You know where Willie's place is?” Walt asked her at the door to the small room. “The floor below this? Placed the same as our apartment and my father's, directly facing the stairs?” She nodded. He kissed her desperately. She locked herself in the room, then Walt sprinted two floors up, then along the corridor to his apartment. He telephoned his father to say he was leaving and that he'd like to be sure a security guard would be posted outside Mayra's suite before he left. “How does she seem this morning?” his father asked.

“She's fast asleep. She promised to take the same medicine when she wakes up.”

“Good.”

Walt waited until the security man knocked at the door, then he left the apartment and locked the door behind him. The man carried his suitcase to the lift, and Walt told him that Mrs. West was resting easily and that undoubtedly she would be as quiet as a mouse all day.

Willie, Smadja and Herr Zendt were waiting in the lobby. They were all driven to the helicopter pad. As he said goodbye to his father in the hotel lobby Walt had difficulty in controlling his trembling. He looked as though he were going to be sick.

“What's the matter with you?” his father asked. “You look terrible.”

“My breakfast must have disagreed with me,” Walt said. “How do you feel, Father?”

“Never better.” Mr. West looked remarkably fit and quite sane. Walt stared into his father's face, examining every part of it, peering into his father's clear, rational eyes. He was overcome with the conviction that what he was doing was all wrong, that Mayra could be just as ill as the three doctors had said and for the reasons the doctors had said. Her stories were calm and cool but what they said were wild. That scrapbook. His father appearing on the mountaintop when he knew himself—had seen with his own eyes—that his father was with him in Chicago. This was all as crazy as both of them were working so hard to prove it was. One of them had to be right. If Mayra was mad, perhaps it was she who had decided, in this terrible insanity, that it was her duty to kill his father, just as she had proved to him so craftily that his father had decided to murder her—working step by step as she developed her case against his father while he developed his case against her, as though they had become the synthesis of all white Americans opposing through riot and fire unto death all black Americans. Just as all blacks had been driven mad in their desperate need to defend themselves and their meaning and, by the force of a collective, murderous syndrome, had set out simultaneously to destroy.

Insanity was irrational. White against black was irrational. Could both his father and his wife have gone mad? But he stared into his father's face and knew it could not be so. And he saw the great roll of honor that was his father's history and America's history and he knew it could not be so. But he could remember Mayra too. He could see her face and hear the strong, sure rhythms of her voice and knew, too, that she could not be mad. He could remember too much, too many moments of her ever to be able to believe that she was mad. What was the right thing to do? Where should he stay?

“Helicopter's waiting, Walt,” his father said.

“I've been thinking hard all day yesterday, Father. I think I'll let Derek wait in New York and I'll take Mayra out to a New York hospital today.”

“That is out of the question.”

“I don't think so. And as her husband, I'll decide these things if you don't mind.”

“No.”

“You can continue to say no, but it is my decision.”

“It was the decision of three distinguished, experienced doctors. They decided that it could be fatally dangerous for her to travel, and she is not going to travel. You have your job to do. Go and do it.”

“Yes, Father,” Walt said grimly. “I have my job to do.” He turned away without farewell and began to descend on the helicopter.

CHAPTER TEN

At ten o'clock that night, standing behind a heavy plum-colored drape, Mayra looked up the sloping road that led to the funicular plaza and the Park Hotel, where the staff lived, and watched people in civilian clothes move out of the hotel to the funicular station by multiple dozens. The Bürgenstock was being evacuated. Soon a skeleton crew and the security police would be the only people scattered at different stations around the grounds. By now, except for security police, perhaps, she and Mr. West were the only two people in the Grand Hotel.

She waited for night to come. She pulled a small bed lamp down to the floor. She put it under the bed before she lighted it so that none of its glow could be seen through the window outside the hotel, then she began carefully to take apart the scrapbook. The words of the past seemed as eerie and terrible as the scenes themselves must have seemed to Mama. Pictures of dark, shapely, somehow Italianate women were displayed prominently on the pages. Miss Baby looked like a slut. Miss Pupchen looked like a child. Miss Mary Lou Mayberry—well, it was fairly possible that Miss Mary Lou Mayberry did look a little like her. But the eerie and uncanny thing, with her perceptions now so frightened and heightened, was that all of them, somehow, looked in some way like each other, so they must have looked like someone else who was buried deep, deep, deep within Edward West's tenebrous mind.