Mile High Read online

  Mile High

  Richard Condon

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For Our Mexican Leader

  Benito-Juarez Bennett

  “The vocabulary of horror

  is as limited as that of lust.”

  JAMES POPE HENNESSY,

  Sins of the Fathers

  BOOK ONE

  The Minotaur

  CHAPTER ONE

  On December 22, 1958, only two days before, they had been safe in London. On that morning one of the sixteen Phantom IV Rolls-Royces in the world had driven them to Heathrow where they boarded his father’s Learstar, whose cabins were decorated to appear like the favorite rooms of the last empress of China. The Learstar had flown them to New York and Walt had made love to her twice on the way. In New York he had met her mother for the first time. The next day, in a private railroad car decorated to appear like the favorite San Francisco brothel of the Nevada silver barons, they had been taken to Hawk Bay, New York, in the central Adirondacks, where one more of only sixteen Phantom IV Rolls-Royces in the world had begun the last leg of the journey up the mountain to Bürgenstock West for the first meeting either of them had ever had with his father.

  The headlamps of the enormous car paved the rainpolished road with light. A helicopter carrying a pilot and a man riding messenger with a machine rifle erect between his knees hovered above and behind the moving car, following its glow. Car and helicopter moved across a state forest of two million, two hundred thousand acres of furred hills and a hundred lakes.

  The driver’s uniform was black and green, the car was black and green—the West racing colors, the colors of West’s signal when he put to sea; the color of money. The driver moved the car with care through the first checkpoint as though the armed road guards were of a different feudal rank. He seemed to sit warily behind the wheel until he heard the heavy slap of the guard’s hand on the car’s flank.

  The Phantom IV glided out of the light into the dark forest and began its climb toward Edward Courance West.

  The sun seemed to sing, the birds glowed like neon in green and silver trees and the air was stinging exhilaratingly that morning, March 30, 1911, the day after his father’s grand funeral. Red-headed Eddie West stared at his long, bony, Mick face in the bathroom mirror with pale, hungry, gray eyes. He appraised himself—right profile, then left. He pulled back his thin lips in a grimacing counterfeit of a smile, the best he could do at any time. He watched his long, pink hands rub snowy lather into his red stubble. He was twenty-three years old, his father’s only heir, and as of this current week he owned a small, sound, working-man’s bank, eleven saloons, three gambling houses, eight bordellos, downtown real estate between Fulton and Wall, four hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash and a membership at the bar of the State of New York, in whose practice he would be his only client.

  Everyone in his father’s wide world had been at the funeral. The White House had sent the Vice-President (Republican) and two Supreme Court justices (Democrat). The governor had been there and the mayor and every alderman able to stand after three nights of waking. There had been both U. S. senators, eleven congressmen, state senators and state assemblymen and so many judges that the courts must have had to close. Sixty-one thousand people had lined the way from St. Jemma’s to Calvary Cemetery. He remembered endless hedges of beards and wreaths, six feet tall, all around the grave in ever-increasing concentric circles of the Knights of Columbus, the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the Woodmen of the World, the National Bimetallic League, the Young Men’s Library Association, the Holy Name Society and thirty-one other fraternal, cultural or religious organizations. The cardinal himself had conducted the requiem high mass for the soul of the man who had done so much to help the church acquire from the city the site of St. Patrick’s Cathedral for only eighty-three dollars. Two bishops had prayed with contingents of the Holy Name at the wake, and there had been prayers by leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, four rabbis and the Church of Christ, Scientist. The New York Sun wrote that it was the most impressive funeral since the death of General Grant. Max Emanuel Noah, great-grandson of Mordecai Noah, first Jewish Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, had proclaimed at graveside that “the brains and heart of Tammany are buried in Calvary today.”

  Paddy West had been interred in a fine suit of evening clothes with a wing collar and a white silk tie, all made for him twenty-three years before by Edward J. Dillon, tailor of aristocrats. The biggest bail bondsmen of the county had stood honor guard through the three nights of the wake in the house in Oliver Street. Every big-timer of sports and the theater came into the house (and not for the first time, either) to pay his respects. The leaders of all labor were there. Paul Kelly, vice-president of the International Longshoremen’s Association and owner of the Garbage Scow Trimmers’ Union, a man whom Paddy West had saved from a murder sentence, came three nights in a row. Dopey Benny Fein, Monk Eastman and all the top men of the important West Side Irish gangs, Ignazio Saietta, president of the Unione Siciliane, and Little Johnny Torrio from Navy Street in Brooklyn all mourned with the rest.

  They were all there because Paddy West had been the kind of a district leader who took care of his people—all of them, not only big shots—making sure they got coal in the winter, shoes and food and a place to live when they were burned out in tenement fires. He had come to the city from across the sea as an immigrant boy and he had helped it to grow into a great city with flaming fireboxes on the elevated trains and subways roaring north to 34th Street. He’d helped men of every kind and color and birth. There had been hundreds of thousands of them, all kinds—Paddy West’s assembly district had them. Little Italy was his. The Lower East Side was his. Some of the West Side Irish gangs overlapped into his district. All of them—Italians, Irish and Jews—had come from countries where they’d had to fight like tigers to defend themselves from the steady wars declared on them by their own governments. The Irish were bashed and starved by the English; the Jews got it in the head from the Cossacks and the czar; the whole citizenry of the south of Italy, and particularly Sicily, were looked on like some dumb and wild beasts by all the Italians in the north. They had to be against authority to survive. And when they got out and made it to the City of New York, where Tammany offered nothing but help and shelter in exchange for their votes, their inward-supported leaders took the guidance and the dignity. It was the most natural alliance in the world once it could get settled in. It was a democracy contained and sustained by the politicians in good working partnership with the gangs who would man the polls on Election Day with knucks and clubs and knives and guns and guide their own ethnic groups through to vote the straight ticket. It wasn’t just New York. The alliance extended everywhere across the country, in all the big cities. The gangs needed the politicians for protection against the courts and the police and the law, and the politicians needed the sure vote. It was to be a long and increasingly successful marriage, perhaps never to end.

  Every summer Paddy would take his people up the Hudson on day steamers to the picnic where thirty thousand glasses of beer were drunk, two to four hundred young women were laid—thus bringing about hundreds of marriages and thousands of children—dozens of noses were broken, a lifetime of memories renewed and others made. “Men and women, Eddie,” he taught his boy. “That’s all you need to know.”

  He was buried from St. Jemma’s, the church he’d been married in, but very few remembered that. He was taken out to Calvary in a Springfield Metallic Casket held in a new Baker Burglarproof Vault that had a Fearnaught Grave Signal to release a flag and sound a bell if the body were to move. It was fitted with a patented device of the Clover Coffin Bomb Manufacturing Company of Columbus, Ohio, containing a charge of explosive that would go
off if the coffin were tampered with by resurrectionists. He was carried upon a mosque-decked, square-ended, closed, six-columned hearse drawn by six horses wearing tragic-black cockades. The hearse was followed by forty-one official carriages (there was no counting the unofficial ones jammed behind the procession for the status-sting of it) and a robed choir of six men who sang, at graveside, “Not Lost but Gone Before” and S. W. Foss’s “Hullo!”

  Every measure of every second of it had befitted the memory of the man whose hero had been Aaron Burr, founder and builder of the Tammany machine, the first professional American politician, a man whose accomplishments were so great that they were passed along intact to Paddy West’s only son, Edward, until it seemed to the father that Burr’s spirit had found a dwelling place within the boy.

  It was Burr who had barred John Jay’s way to the ambassadorship to England because the man was too favorable to British interests. It was Burr who had rushed into the White House demanding an embargo against England when she had gone to war against France. It was Burr who had enfranchised immigrants to create the broad and then broader base of new voters, thus breaking British colonial control of New York State. He had been the only politician to see how to use the working-man’s vote in order to produce and harness political power. “The Revolution hasn’t broken Britain’s rotten grip,” Burr said. Burr, the cold-eyed, dispassionate, objective man of the world, a Princeton graduate, Washington’s aide-de-camp, and the soldier who had organized the masterly retreat from Long Island. A lieutenant colonel when he was twenty-one years old, the highest-paid lawyer in the city, and he’d spent as many nights in the beds of brothels as he had in his own bed—when he was well over seventy he’d swept a girl fifty years younger off her feet and slipped her two babies.

  “Burr is the man for you, Eddie,” Paddy would say every week of his son’s life. “Imagine him, the first campaign manager of American politics, handling the campaign for Jefferson and to his own dismay finding himself tied even with his candidate for the vote for the office of the third President of the United States, then stepping down into the vice-presidency because in the runoff he never lifted a finger for himself! Now. Think on that. Let that be the big lesson, son. Always let the other guys stand out in front and take the glory. You keep back, far out of the strong light, and win the power and the money.” Paddy grinned with the joy of it, and the effect was so unexpected that the boy flinched. But the smile rarely happened again.

  As Eddie whirled the boar’s-hair shaving brush within the shamrock-spattered shaving mug that had been his father’s he began to expand in his mind the tremendous idea that must surely have been settled upon him by his father’s spirit at some time during the three days of the wake, because it was so much of a Paddy West idea to the marrow of its being, so gloriously American, that it glowed like great masses of gold in his mind. And he could see all of it so clearly. He knew how to move it and he knew it would make him a far greater man than Aaron Burr.

  In Ireland the Wests had been a Catholic Norman family, originally De l’Ouest, although Paddy had never known the shame of that. They were among the last families to resist Robert Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, in the Cromwellian rebellion. The West castle at Clogleigh was surrounded by artillery, then “all the garrison put to the sword” in 1642. Their lands confiscated, the remnants of the West family settled as tenant farmers in Kilflyn, in Kerry, where they wallowed in the present, deftly freed from the gentilities of the past, until the famine came.

  When it came, Paddy’s mother was dead (God rest her soul), and the family of nine, opposed to washing, slept and stank in the single room of their father’s windowless mud hut, mixing their own rich smell with the smells of the pigs who shared the room and the pile of manure at the door.

  The blight came on in ’45. The famine began in ’46. Dysentery and relapsing fever followed. Thousands roamed the countryside praying for food, eating thistles to stay alive. They began to leak out of their country. First to Liverpool, Glasgow and South Wales, then to Australia, last but most powerfully to the United States, jammed starving and diseased into unseaworthy ships.

  A million died at home before Paddy West got away, including three brothers and four sisters. The British at last had begun to issue corn, but the Irish didn’t know what it was and most of them couldn’t or wouldn’t eat it. Paddy filled his pants and a sack with it and made himself eat it after he saw how they cooked it, but on the road from Killarney to Cork he preferred to eat weeds. But he had luck. He came on two drunken English soldiers and in the right place for it, so he clomped them both on the heads with a flat rock and found six shillings in their pockets, all unaware that he had started on his life’s work. He ate the corn, cooked or raw, and watched for lonely soldier drunks at night until he earned enough for his Cunard passage—about twenty American dollars’ worth. Then he bought steerage space aboard a three-hundred-tonner, although it was known that in the year before, thirty-eight thousand of the fleeing Irish had died at sea or soon thereafter. But he didn’t die at all. He found himself on the other side of the Castle Garden immigration shed in New York with eight shillings in his pocket. He walked along South Street, dizzy, looking at the thickets of ships’ masts standing against the sky along the quay as far as the eye could see, their jib booms thrusting across the width of the street, almost touching the buildings.

  He had thought he had forgotten what the smell of food could be like, what it could do to the belly and all concentration of will. He had survived forty-two days of ocean crossing on only the food he had brought aboard the ship because that would be the only food there was. Now, as he walked and goggled, he could smell oysters and hot clam chowder. It shook him. All his usual indifference to food was replaced by such longing that his hands shook, but one of his great strengths of character was his suspicion. He would not risk getting a short rate for his eight shillings when he turned them into American money. He’d wait until he could be sure he was getting an official rate from a bank or a mercantile counting room. He’d heard plenty about waterfront, big-city crooks aboard the Marriam Murphy for forty-two days. He stared the fine food smells down and set out to find a bank, wandering dazedly past pubs and ship’s chandlers, boardinghouses and sailors’ slop shops, street stands, horses, whores and sailmaker lofts. Someone was playing a piano somewhere.

  Paddy West was seventeen years old, tall and strong. Gold had been discovered in California five months before, and the news was emptying the port of seamen as soon as the ships touched the piers. The men only wanted to ship out to California, around the Horn or across the Isthmus, so crimping had become an industrial necessity and overnight there sprang up sophisticated systems for shanghaing sailors. Crimps were the civil equivalent of the naval press gangs which had roamed England in search of naval manpower during the Napoleonic Wars.

  Paddy West knew all about crimps. He had crossed next to a man and woman who had lived in Liverpool and had lost three sons to the bastards. On that crossing Paddy had promised himself, writ in vomit, never to go to sea again or set his feet on anything that floated. The man and the woman had been talking about the South End and Lime Street in Liverpool, but he was here now and he could see what was happening, and he knew if he answered any greeting from a warm and friendly stranger he’d find himself on the floor of a foc’sle bound for China.

  He moved warily and got his first job as a fish-market porter on the very day he landed. He became a citizen of the United States on the second day. They paid him twenty-five cents to take the oath along with sixteen other men, all of them crouched and huddled sideways to be able to lay but one fingertip on the Bible to swear allegiance. There just weren’t enough Bibles to go around. The witnesses who that day swore they had known every one of the applicants for eight years or longer, all those years spent in the City of New York, had good, steady work out of it, but the Tammany judges in the State Supreme Court were often hoarse swearing them all in. All the new citizens had to promise to vote the straigh
t Tammany ticket of course. It was a thrill to be a new American, and he was never to forget that. Still and all, he spoke to none of his fellow indoctrinates. Paddy West wouldn’t talk to anyone except his employer because any man on the street might be a crimp.

  The two flourishing crimping organizations were those of Fernando Wood, a U.S. congressman, and Ma “the Casker” Steinet. She was called the Casker because if something slipped and a shanghaied man died on her hands she’d stuff him into a cask and send him off to sea that way, collecting her fee nevertheless. Fernando Wood owned a tobacco shop in Pearl Street, then he acquired seven sailing vessels while trading with a pack of cards, and so entered the shipping trade. When his crews began to desert in order to make their way west to California he immediately began his eventually extensive crimping business as a sideline. Meanwhile, forging ahead in city politics, he rose to be chairman of the Tammany Young Men’s Committee, then won the Democratic Congressional nomination in 1840. In Congress, Wood crusaded for Navy drydocks and for full pay for overseas consuls. And despite complete indifference on all sides, he encouraged a nut professor to string wires from the Wood Congressional committee rooms to corresponding rooms on the other side of Capitol Hill, and thus Professor Morse’s amazing telegraph was demonstrated publicly for the first time.

  Congressman Wood was skillful with guns, knives, clubs, fists and pokers—widely admired. In 1848, when 212,000 immigrants arrived in New York, including 117,000 Irishmen, Wood, who was always dreaming and planning for Tammany Hall, organized the Instant Citizenship Committee that had so flattered Paddy. While Wood went well on his way to becoming mayor he was also establishing himself as one of the two top crimps. He did indeed become mayor in 1854, and moved instantly to attack municipal problems by banning the driving of cattle through downtown streets, by putting the police into uniforms against their will, and before settling down with his and Tammany’s ideas of the real business of being mayor, established the seven hundred and seventy-six-acre Central Park in Manhattan at a projected cost of three million dollars.