“You’ll have a stroke if you don’t watch out,” Willie said. “Dr. Tumulty warned you. He said that if you agitate yourself, as sure as nightfall you’ll have a stroke.”
“A stroke could save your life,” West gasped. “Pray that I have a stroke.”
“If I thought you should have a stroke, there are things I could tell you, Ed,” Willie said. “If I thought you had set yourself to beat and break that girl, I’d give you a stroke—for all you’ve meant to me and mean to me.” The two men were talking in the accents of the New York streets of their boyhood with overtones of Paddy’s brogue and Jiggs’ Galway speech. Gelbart Academy had not been forever.
“When you’re dead I’ll go for her,” West said. “She’s all of them. She’s Mary Lou come back and my mother too. She tore my son away from the church, and she has to be punished. She’s a nigger Communist and she lives for her body, so she has to be punished.”
“Then you must have your stroke,” Willie said. “Do you know how I used you all these years and led you around by the nose?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well—the Communist reports from our operatives all over the world. I wrote them all. I copied them out of newspapers. I fed silly Joe McCarthy’s vomit back into you with a spoon.”
“You’re a liar.”
“I did it to get you up here. Safe up here. To get you out of the world before you began to kill all the women you met and had to be put into a crazy house. Because you’re starkers, Ed. You belong behind bars, not for what you’ve done—you couldn’t help that. For what you are—sick and insane.”
West shouted out at him, his face blue, his eyes popping out of his head, but his strength had left him. He clawed at his tie and got it pulled away from his throat, then he ripped open his collar and breathed in heavy, broken gasps.
“Did you ever wonder who sent Irene those letters, Ed?”
“Who? Who did?” West made himself ask thickly but with renewed life, as though the hope of finding the answer to that secret would lead him to the greatest vengeance of his life.
“I sent them. And every time it seemed as though Irene would give in to her compassion and forgive you, I sent another and another. Too bad for Goff. Too bad for Irene. But not too bad for you. I saved you. I had to get you away. I had to tear you out of that insanity that was overwhelming you and separate you from the world, to get you to this mountaintop so that I could save you.”
West pulled himself to his feet. “You killed Irene?” he mumbled hoarsely. “You did that to—Irene?” He shambled toward Willie, his face jerking, his face lined with the need to bring death. Willie took a pistol out of his jacket pocket. “Stay right there, Ed,” he warned. “Don’t move one step closer to me. I’ll kill you if I have to, Ed. I’ll kill you. You know it.”
The Irish wolfhound fastened his upper and lower jaws on Willie’s hand and crunched them together. The pistol dropped out of Willie’s hand as he cried out in pain.
“Bring him,” West said to the dog and turned away, walking to the door. Willie cried out to wait, to wait until they could talk all this over so he could show the reasons why he had to do what he had done. The dog pulled him along. They followed West out into the corridor. West walked unsteadily ahead. Willie’s hand bled heavily on the rug along the way. “Ed, for God’s sake,” he shouted after West, “please call this dog away from me. He is taking my hand off. The pain is terrible.” West neither answered nor turned. “Where are we going? What are you going to do?” Willie screamed at West as he was dragged forward down the main staircase to the main hall. The dog dragged him to the lake side of the hotel, where a locked glass door led out to the terrace upon the bluff, fifteen hundred feet above the lake. The burning, brilliant lights on their high poles made the whole area pitilessly shadowless. West unlocked the glass door.
“Eddie!” Tobin screamed. “No! Jesus Christ, no, Ed! The dogs!”
West took him by both lapels and threw him backward to sprawl upon his back out on the floodlighted terrace, then shut the door and locked it. Willie scrambled to his feet with frenetic, desperate fright and began to beat on the double glass doors, pleading with West to let him in. His face was distorted with terror and the blood gushing out of his right hand stained the glass as it smudged and streaked downward.
Two dogs came loping in from the left. One came sprinting from the right. They all leaped for his throat, knocking him to the ground. The lone dog got to his throat first and ripped it out. The other two tore at his face and arms.
Mr. West placed the mounted newspaper page showing Baby Tolliver beside the beautiful page showing Mary Lou. He sat down slowly beside the low coffee table, staring with enormous pleasure at Baby’s sluttish face. He could remember their contrasts sharply, as though he had just been with each of them.
All of the faces he had ever beaten came funneling into his mind, and he saw for the first time that, in this little way or in that large way, each of them had been somehow like his mother. The faces began to stack themselves neatly on top of each other, the long, full-breasted bodies registering their outlines upon each other. His sight darkened. His left arm hurt terribly. He could hear himself making lowing, guttural sounds deep in his throat, but he saw his mother’s face, then her body, come to rest on top of the towering sculptured stack, and his only meaningful past with this horde of dark women fused into one face and one body, and he saw that this new woman whom his son had brought to him was his mother, returned to trick him again. She was hiding from him. She had to be punished before she ran away from him again. He wheeled upon the hassock, then stood up, his strength renewed. He ran out of the apartment with the great dog beside him, straight up the staircase before him. He stood swaying and gasping for air at Mayra’s door. He fumbled for the master key. He entered her apartment. The lights from the high poles poured upon everything, but she was not there. He crashed open the door to her bedroom, smashing it into the wall and shouting out obscenities to begin her fright. She was not there. He ran from bathroom to dressing room. There was nothing. He ripped one of her dresses from the closet and held it under the dog’s muzzle. The dog darted out of the room ahead of him. He took up an iron poker from the fireplace as he went through to the main door, then followed the dog as he went down the staircase, breath coming to him in shattered sobs. He watched the dog circle around and around outside of the West apartment, then go to the elevator door, as West clung to the balustrade, then the dog began to descend the stairs again, turning right along the corridor on the first floor and padding parallel to the long line of blood that Willie’s hand had dropped upon the carpet. West staggered behind him, striking at the doors of the rooms with the iron poker and yelling as he splintered the doors that her punishment was at hand and that she would be flung into the pit.
The dog turned at the end of the hall and doubled back. West had pulled himself into fanatic energy. The dog halted outside Willie Tobin’s apartment and began to bark.
Mayra heard the key slide into the lock. She stood erect in the center of the room. There was no place to go. She waited for him. The door crashed open. He careened into the room, his face greenish-white. He lifted the poker over his head and ran at her. Then he fell. The poker rolled out of his hand. She ran to him and rolled him on his back to help him breathe. He stared at her. His eye could move. He was alive. He could see her.
She leaned closer to him. “Blink once for yes, and twice for no,” she said. “Can you move?”
The eyes blinked twice.
“Can you talk?”
The eyes blinked once, feebly. There was a rustling sound from his throat as he tried to speak. She came still closer and put her ear just above his lips. “Volevo essere un ballerino” he said to her.
Acknowledgments
The writer acknowledges with appreciation and gratitude his indebtedness to the authors of the following books, who are historians of the events leading to and coming after the Eighteenth U.S. Constitutional Am
endment:
KENNETH ALSOP The Bootleggers and Their Era (Doubleday, 1961)
HERBERT ASBURY The Great Illusion (Doubleday, 1950)
ALFRED CONNABLE and EDWARD SILBERFARB Tigers of Tammany (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)
VIRGINIA COWLES 1913: The Defiant Swan Song (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1967)
K. GUNTER Prohibition (Walter Neale, 1931)
JOHN ALLEN KROUT The Origins of Prohibition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1925)
ANDREW SINCLAIR Prohibition, the Era of Excess (Little, Brown, 1962)
CRAIG THOMPSON and ALLEN RAYMOND Gang Rule in New York: The Story of a Lawless Era (The Dial Press, 1940)
CLARENCE TRUE WILSON and DEETS PICKETT The Case for Prohibition (Funk & Wagnalls, 1923)
Special acknowledgment is made to Norman Lewis, The Honored Society (Collins, London, 1964)
About the Author
Richard Condon was born in New York City. He worked in the movie business for more than twenty years before beginning to write fiction in his forties. The author of twenty-six books, he is best remembered for The Manchurian Candidate and four novels about the Prizzis, a family of New York gangsters. Condon passed away in 1996.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by Richard Condon
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2774-8
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Richard Condon, Mile High
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