Summitt

Chapter Seven

After Mass and breakfast that Saturday morning, when the fogs lifted and the sun was sparkling on the river, three men walked the cloisters at Mount Olivet.

The Most Reverend Terence Waring wore a soutane that glistened with silken lights. On his curly white head slanted a purple biretta, the color signifying his episcopal rank. A cleric in a black cassock, Brother Fabius, strolled respectfully behind him.

The third man was Simon Correll, whose mother lived at the Convent of Mount Olivet. A daily communicant, she was assisted to the altar rail by a nun who carefully blotted the spittle from the old woman’s lips before the priest, on occasion His Excellency himself, graced her tongue with the consecrated host.

As the years passed, Mrs. Correll’s interests had diminished and her only concern and vanity now were the small clay objects she sometimes modeled in the convent therapy shop and the trim of tiny seed pearls she enjoyed sewing along the edges of her numerous black shawls.

When Ellyvan Ybarra Correll first came to Mount Olivet, she had been a young woman in her thirties. At that time the nuns administered only a ten-bed hospital on a few acres of rocky soil. Their garden supplied their table; corn, a few bushels of root vegetables and, in the humid summers, crops of squash and small, pitted tomatoes on rambling vines.

The convent now embraced a dozen or more buildings on several hundred acres, with gerontological and research laboratories, nurses’ training facilities and a new chapel with stunning panels of stained glass.

The overall architectural style was light and graceful, arched windows and entrances decorated with pilasters and braced with fluted columns. As a child in Portugal, Ellyvan Ybarra had once received a postcard from an aunt on holiday in the Loire Valley; the card showed one of the famous river chateaux, slim and purple in the sun and winds. Simon Correll knew his mother loved that picture. It had been propped in a place of honor on the altar in her bedroom in New York all through his childhood.

Years later Mount Olivet would reflect the tone of that faded postcard, low, gray buildings with balanced cupolas morticed in white, and parks and flower beds spreading through groves of trees down to the Hudson.

On a river site near the chapel stood a walled dwelling with a garden, a pool and powerful, protected generators. The house, with its own extensive communications facilities and stocked for year-round use, was reserved exclusively for Correll and his staff.

When he was in residence the security was of a high technological sophistication; the river launch, cars and vans in various parking areas, bulky men strolling through the grounds — these were Correll’s things and Correll’s people.

A man named Marvin Quade was in charge of this security. He had other responsibilities and functions, but the protection of the person of Simon Correll was Quade’s overriding concern, since it followed that a failure there would make any other problem academic.

Quade was of average height with a clear, smooth complexion and restless eyes. He wore dark suits and never an overcoat or gloves. His hands were wide and thick, and his hair in certain lights was almost white, the color of cornsilk or wheat.

It was Quade who monitored within the last hour the calls George Thomson had placed through Philadelphia and New York to Simon Correll.

In 1972, Fortune magazine listed Simon Correll as one of the ten wealthiest men in America. An illustration accompanying the article pictured the Correll Group’s resources in the form of a pyramid — at the base stood Correll’s international operations in petroleum and machinery parts. In the middle were the holdings in airlines, trucks and sea transport, and the geological and electronic systems that supported them. At the top were real estate and corporate assets — office buildings in various major cities, apartments and condominiums for convenience and entertainment, executive jets, a courier service, a hunting and fishing complex on the Maryland shore and even the parklike acres of the Mount Olivet convent and hospital on the banks of the Hudson River.

When the Fortune article appeared Simon Correll was in Europe overseeing the building of a four-thousand-mile highway complex which would eventually carry supplies from England and northern Europe to the product-starved but cash-gorged nations in the Middle East. The concept had been Correll’s from the outset. Nature did not abhor vacuums; in Correll’s view it was just the opposite, the vacuums abhorred nature (strength) and thus were always the force to be reckoned with — in the human heart or in the world, synergistic power was rooted in weakness, Correll believed.

Competitors might ask what difference did it make, chicken or egg, what did it matter if things rushed into a vacuum in response to their characteristics as things, or if they were sucked into the vacuum in obedience to laws governing the nature of the vacuum? It all came to the same, didn’t it?

Correll was driven and compulsive that season in Europe, supervising the building of docks and canals, the drilling of mountain tunnels and construction of interlocking national highways which could connect west to east and become (in terms of gross tonnage) the greatest overland freight route in the world.

Forty-ton, five-axled trucks bearing the red-and-white initials of the Correll Group ran northwest to roughly southeast, clutching and breaking their way through six time zones and across more than a dozen national borders. From Italy, from Sweden and Germany, and from England and France, the roads converged like streams into great rivers flowing across Austria and Yugoslavia and Romania to Istanbul and the Bosphorus area into Asia. East to Iran and Afghanistan, south to Kuwait, and through Syria to the Arab Emirates... Copenhagen to Tehran, Bremerhaven to Baghdad, the big rigs traveled month after month, sucked toward the vacuum in the desert and beyond.

What difference did it make? Chicken or egg? The difference, Correll knew, was whether you wanted to be in front of an avalanche or behind it. In the path of an invading army or in its wake. Safety was in one place, profit in another.

But about that time Correll had begun to suspect that there was something profoundly irrational and dangerous in what he was trying to accomplish. His goals were not unique or peculiar. Everybody was after the same thing, developers, drillers, dredgers, shapers, levelers. A Zeitgeist howled around them all. What did it profit a man to gain the whole world? It profited him enormously, as everyone knew. But beyond this fiduciary absolute, something else nagged Correll.

Even if he succeeded in controlling everything he wanted — power, people, money — the winds tramping the world might still sweep him and his empire away. He recalled the Yugoslavian partisan who had said those identical words. But Mihailovich hadn’t been granted time to reflect in that philosophical vein to his grandchildren. He had made that statement in the prime of his life to the captain of Tito’s — then Josip Broz — firing squad.

Correll was especially reminded of his doubts one afternoon in London’s Piccadilly Circus while he observed a crew with jackhammers and an iron wrecking ball demolishing an old stone building near the Criterion Theatre. Fine, chalky silt had settled over everything in the vicinity, from the statue of Eros to the tall, red mailboxes. In the reduced visibility, a two-decker bus had rammed solidly into a taxi.

A man had been struck by the caroming cab. A woman screamed and the wreckers’ ball slammed again into a standing wall, bringing down tons of stone and mortar.

A black Labrador seeing-eye dog had been thrown into a panic. After one pathetic effort to protect his mistress by placing his body between her and the waves of noise, his training and discipline had broken. He dropped on his belly and tried to claw a hole in the street, bloodying his paws on the tarred and rocky pavement.

His terrified lunges had jerked the lead from the blind girl’s hands. She frantically called out his name, “Kipper, it’s all right, good Kipper, good Kipper...”

But Kipper had snapped viciously at her hands, drawing blood from her fingers and terrified screams from spectators.

A policeman warned the crowd back. “The dog is dangerous,” he shouted. Kipper’s mouth foamed white. The wrecking ball smashed its way through still another mass of stone, sending geysers of dust and shale shooting high about the fountain of Eros.

Minutes later the Metro Animal Squad shot and killed Kipper, and blind — in more ways than one — chance alone was responsible for the ricocheting bullet that had blown away one of the blind girl’s kneecaps.

The random incident somehow polarized Correll’s earlier thoughts... chaos, pain, human confusion... and no preplanned, predictable reason for any of it.

That incident gave him a glimpse of something he was convinced the world — and everyone in it — desperately needed and wanted. Discipline, order, creating in turn serenity, peace of mind. No chance, erratic and uncontrolled, to destroy senselessly what had been carefully built and presumably was safe. That was what was needed, and that became his philosophic energizer and overriding purpose.

Certain changes occurred then in the direction of the Correll Group. An emphasis was placed on chemical acquisitions and pharmaceutical combines.

Simon Correll took an unusually close and proprietary interest in one of the smaller units of his diverse enterprise — the model plant and town in Summitt City, Tennessee. Delegating much of his European and African operations to Lord Conestain in London and the Van Pelt family in Belgium, Correll moved his personal headquarters to the United States and even set up small offices in the pollution-and crime-free town of Summitt.

In the convent cloister, Suffragan Bishop Waring, whose special title exempted him from the duties of the local Diocesan See, spoke with warmth of Simon Correll’s mother.

“Her appetite is good, praise God. Mother Superior tells me she is especially fond of poached chicken and peas with fresh mint.”

A gray overcoat slung around his shoulders, Correll nodded thoughtfully. From his father he had inherited height, blue-gray eyes and a realistic view of life. Alex Correll had once told his son, “Remember this. You are the one person you can never get rid of, can never refuse to see...”

Correll had received something more exotic from his mother, Ellyvan Ybarra — a Mediterranean sultriness, his dark, olive-toned coloring and thick, black hair. More significantly, he had inherited from her the linchpin of his character, a pervasive but powerfully motivating sense of despair about man’s ability ever to be rational. It would follow from that, then, that only an external force, carefully controlled by the wisdom of a man such as himself, could save man from his own hopeless folly...

The bishop went on in his deliberate fashion, “I’m certain your mother knows you’re here, Mr. Correll. There are, after all, areas of spiritual communication that even your most advanced scientists can’t explain. I see a special expression on her dear face when I tell her we are expecting a visit from you. Isn’t that true, Fabius?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.” A small man with gentle eyes, Brother Fabius had been nodding in approval to the bishop’s comments.

“A mother’s happiness,” the bishop said with a sigh, “is a devoted son’s supreme reward. Never mind whether you feel worthy of it, Mr. Correll. The church has never distinguished between those who obey out of love and those who obey from fear.”

Earlier Correll had visited his mother in the park above the river where the sturdier residents of the convent rested after Mass. A few could get about on their own, tottering with canes along the level gravel walks. Others sat on benches near a quiet pond, swaying gently with the breeze, almost as if in unison with the lily pads.

Correll studied the list of names Quade had given him. Van Pelt. Kraager. Lord Conestain. Adam Taggart. Senator Mark Rowan. George Thomson.

He told Quade whom he wished to speak to and in what order, then stood alone watching his mother.

She wasn’t aware of him, hadn’t been for decades. By the time Correll was sixteen his mother had gone wholly mad. She prayed the night long in a high keening voice that had terrified not only her son but the servants and everyone else in the household, including the cats and dogs and caged birds.

Kneeling on shards of stone, Ellyvan Ybarra Correll had begged God to bring her husband home once — once might have soothed her shredded pride — without the scent of other women on his body. A psychiatrist was consulted when Ellyvan tore her rosary apart and stuffed the large beads into her bodily orifices, not neglecting her nose and ears and vagina.

Simon had been nineteen, at college in England, when his mother was first sent to Mount Olivet to recuperate from a series of electroshock treatments. Her stay at Olivet had been regularly extended over the years by her doctors and family; on the death of her husband, Mrs. Ybarra Correll became a permanent resident.

Her hair was now smooth and white and abundant, her dark skin unblemished by care or thought or emotions of any kind.

The park oppressed Correll. The scene conveyed only futility — the patient nuns wasting their gentleness on burnt-out women, meaningless repositories of forgotten loyalties, residues of spiritual exhaustion.

Yet many still played at living, waving at the boats on the water, smiling at birds and falling leaves, distracted like children by sudden movements and sounds. Some chattered to the nuns near them, remembering the names of long-dead pets, kittens, dogs and birds. Others held dolls and rocked them.

Senility was considered a harmless state, a time of comic antics and lapses, but Correll knew it was a living sentence to be served in the mine fields of distant childhoods, where any misstep could trigger explosions of buried guilts and terrors. Yet a kind of radar, an early warning system, guided these old people through the worst of it. Their shields, it seemed, were the deceit of memory, the blur of time...

“But your mother will fast when she’s receiving Communion,” Bishop Waring was saying. “Holier than the Church, you know. But Sister Clare is patient, and your mother is most happy with us.”

“I’m very grateful, Your Excellency.”

Bishop Waring led the talk into other areas. He was interested in politics and world affairs, and it gratified him to evaluate Simon Correll’s responses to his notions. He insisted on these exchanges; the bishop had too strong an ego and too wide an intellectual curiosity to be content in the role of a spiritual baby-sitter.

Bishop Waring spoke of the significance of human life. “... If we posit a God, we posit — do we not? — by the very nature of our longing, a perfect Creature...”

Correll’s attention was the price he paid for his mother’s security and well-being — an offering in kind, because one didn’t pay for spiritual comforts in the same coin one used for cellars of sacramental wines, new buildings and the like.

Marvin Quade appeared at an entrance to the cloisters, the wind stirring his light, sandy hair. Correll checked him with a slight headshake.

The bishop noticed Correll’s signal and was flattered to be given precedence over whatever Quade wanted to bring to Correll’s attention.

With a smile he said, “The important question, my son, is not whether God exists and will give us a sign to let us know He’s thinking of us. No, the important question is, has there been any discernible progress or true evolution over the ages? Is the lap dog an improvement over the extinct Siberian wolf? You liberals, or conservatives, or whatever you call yourselves, generally take the short view. You don’t see what’s already been accomplished. You consider social aggression to be an aberration. You believe in either bigger jails or bigger welfare budgets, or some other kind of behavioral engineering. But social violence serves a purpose.”

Brother Fabius couldn’t hear everything the bishop was saying, though he could follow the gist of it. His excellency was veering toward Herr Hegel. Oppression was therapeutic, it nourished revolt. Terrorists strengthened healthy middle-class values. The pendulum swung back and forth. Slaves created democracies, action and reaction, grains of sand in bivalves fashioning pearls.

But Correll was presently in no mood to play the bishop’s game. Something else was on his mind, and Fabius wasn’t surprised — although the bishop, he noted with satisfaction, was both surprised and disappointed — when Correll excused himself and returned with Quade to his quarters.

Correll took the call from Senator Rowan in his study, where there was a view of the trees and river. He was asked by an operator at St. Joseph’s to hold for a moment: a nurse was attending the senator.

Senator Mark Rowan was chairman of a joint subcommittee which screened military appropriations for the House and Senate. The function of his committee was thought to be largely clerical, an operation designed to control the endlessly proliferating flow of paper to the Congress.

But Rowan’s initials on a request for action in certain categories were the equivalent of an affirmative rubber stamp. His approval also guaranteed fiscal anonymity, since the senator’s special projects were so deeply buried in the appropriations of the full House committee that only a hostile in-depth audit would ever be likely to blast them to light. Even then, their destination and disposition — the sensitive questions of who got the money and what it was for — would be forever blanketed under security classifications.

The senator’s voice sounded weak with pain. “Mr. Correll, the doctors don’t want me to tire myself. It’s about a month, give or take a few days. That’s the word the path lab sent back.”

Correll had known this. Marvin Quade had been advised of the pathology report before it had gone to Rowan’s doctors.

“Senator, if there is anything you want for yourself or your family, please tell me.”

“Thanks to our long relationship with the Correll Group, I want for nothing, Mr. Correll. Except perhaps that those bloody doctors have misread my X-rays. So shall we get down to business? I took the king’s coin, I’m still the king’s man. By and large I’ve delivered what I was paid for. But my usefulness will be over in a week or so. Senator Lester will chair the committee then. He’s senior, there’s no way to prevent it. His people have already been zeroing in on Harlequin and the general’s operation at Saliaris. Most of their expenditures we’ve camouflaged, no seams showing, but somehow Lester managed to get a line on them. He has his own people, you know. We can’t touch them. Which is to say we can’t buy them.”

Quade came in and put a paper in front of Correll. It read, “Holding now: Van Pelt. Lord Conestain. Taggart. Thomson.”

Correll said, “Senator, you’ve earned a rest from our problems. Remember, if there’s anything you need, be sure to let us know.”

Afterward, Correll analyzed the conversation. A vacuum would exist with Rowan’s death, and Senator Lester was rushing in to fill it. But it was probable that someone was prodding him in that direction, possibly an important aide in the Oval Office. Or someone who moved with authority in other official areas. Bittermank perhaps, Ferdinand Bittermank, who also happened to be a social friend of Bishop Waring...

Jennifer came in then from the garden, carrying in each hand a shiny glass globe. She wore a white bathing suit, black sunglasses. Her blond hair was tied back with a ribbon.

Smiling at Correll, she placed the twin globes on his desk with a ceremonial gesture. “Gifts from your mother, Simon,” she said.

Each globe enclosed a statue of the Virgin Mary dressed in blue plaster robes and crowned with pink-and-white plastic chips set in wreaths of flowers.

“Fabius brought them by. The nuns helped, but your mother did the painting — the robes, those little red dots on the cheeks.”

The globes rested on heavy bases of polished black plastic, trimmed with silver and finished off with beveled edges. Tipping one gently, Correll watched a miniature storm of white flakes fly about the colorful statue.

“The Snow Virgin...” Jennifer shifted in her chair and the sunlight ran in a golden flash along her slimly molded legs.

“Now what can you tell me, my dear?”

“Jarrell Selby found me agreeable, I think. Certainly credible. I convinced him we’d met somewhere at a concert and that I was in Memphis on business.” She shrugged. “He was gentle and pleasant. To say he was grateful would be immodest, I guess. I suggested we’d have more time together if he asked his brother to stay at the motel in Memphis instead of with him at Summitt City.”

She took off her glasses and with the sun on her tanned face, her eyes were strikingly blue and clear. “Do you want to hear all the details, Simon? I don’t mind, but I never know for sure what you want. This is the first time you’ve asked me to—” She shrugged. “Well, it’s up to you. You wanted me to keep him distracted and involved...”

Correll smiled. “Listen to me, Jennifer. If you’re asking if I’m jealous, of course I am. If that pleases you, so much the better. I would have preferred to do this some other way. As you point out, it was the first time and it will be the last. But since it’s done, we might as well get to the point. What happened between you and Jarrell Selby isn’t the point, although I can well believe he found you attractive. You must have been an entertaining and fascinating surprise, the stuff of lonely soldiers’ dreams, the fantasy sex adventure in the middle of an air raid. I’m sure he attended you with care, poured wine for you, sang your praises and then went about fucking you with enthusiasm.”

She clearly didn’t like this; her full lower lip flattened slightly and gave an aggressive cast to her expression.

She said, “Well, if it’s not important, there’s no point in writing a scenario about it, is there? But it wasn’t like you described it. He did offer me some wine, as a matter of fact. And he told me I was beautiful, that’s true. But sleeping with him was—” She shrugged again, pausing for words. “It was comfortable, and that’s about all, but I liked him for being... gentle and, well, sort of unsure.”

Correll said, “Let’s leave that. Jarrell’s reaction to his half brother is what concerns me. I want every detail you can remember.”

“Okay. Jarrell seemed confused or frightened at first. Maybe a little of both.”

And then she told Correll about the first meeting between the brothers, the lunch at the Summitt commissary that same day, and the party in the evening at Jarrell’s with Sergeant Ledge and his wife (“healthy cow-eyes”), the Stoltzers, Froelich Nash and the others. She emphasized that Harry Selby and his brother were alone for only a few minutes that night. Which was the desired result of her efforts. That’s what she reported, and Correll liked what she had to say. She knew he would...

“Stoltzer and Ledge pumped me casually about where I’d met Jarrell, how long I planned to stay at Summitt and so on. But I did what you said. I explained I had to leave on Friday night at the latest, and that cooled it... I’m not particularly maternal, I don’t collect wet kittens or broken-winged creatures, but after the party was over and everyone had gone Jarrell was so miserable that it bothered me some. He wouldn’t tell me why. He just seemed very frustrated, and nervous. When his brother called from the motel, Jarrell told me to tell him that he was asleep.

“I don’t know when I got him to bed, but I could feel it in his body, like a fever. He lay there for what seemed like hours, staring at the ceiling. He wouldn’t make love to me. Suddenly he jumped up and put on his clothes. He was so upset that I could hardly understand him. He said he was in danger, that he had to leave, that it wasn’t safe for me to be with him.”

“What time was this?”

“Four-thirty, maybe five. It was still dark. I tried to keep him from going but he said he had to get to his brother, to talk to him. He left by the patio door. The last I saw of him he was walking toward the lake area. Running. I figured he knew a shortcut to the parking lots. Sergeant Ledge called, about a half hour later. Then Stoltzer called to find out if Jarrell had told me where he was going.”

Correll was studying the Snow Virgins.

“How did Harry Selby strike you? Tell me about him.”

She hesitated a moment, then picked up a cigarette. “I’m not sure. He’s a man, very manly looking. We weren’t alone very long but I talked too much, I’m afraid. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was nervous. He didn’t talk much. So I guess he knows more about me than I know about him.”

“That tells me considerable about him.”

“Well, I’m not trying to hold back anything. I’m trying to tell you what I felt about him, what kind of man he is.” She lit her cigarette and snapped the lighter shut. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“Yes, please go on.”

“Well then, if I had to use one word about Harry Selby, I would say he’s ready. That’s what impressed me when I first met him, that he would be ready for just about whatever might happen. Not that he was expecting anything in particular, but he made me feel that I’d better be careful. As a woman I’ll tell you what that means. If I wanted him, he’d be ready. Not necessarily excited, maybe not even interested, but he would be ready.”

A red light blinked on Correll’s phone console. “Thank you, Jennifer. We’ll lunch together, if you like.”

When she left the study he watched the sunlight shift in streaks across her brown shoulders, then put the tips of his fingers to his temples and exerted a steady pressure. His muscles felt coiled like tight springs. The smoky black glasses Jennifer wore created an unwelcome image of his mother, reminding him of her black shawls and unrevealing eyes. He picked up a Snow Virgin and tipped it back and forth, grateful for these distractions — the snowflakes, the beads of tiny seed pearls on his mother’s shawls — because he now faced a decision of significant and dangerous consequences, and once he’d made that commitment there could be no turning back from it.

Virtue, however you defined it, was irrelevant in evil times, he thought with gloomy satisfaction, which was probably why tyrants generally took care to make sure their times were as evil as they could make them. They knew the frustration of moderation, and would risk anything to escape the burden of tolerance.

“Yes, Mr. Correll?” George Thomson’s voice was alert and expectant.

“Thomson, I’ve advised you now and then not to underestimate me. I’ve also told you not to overestimate me. I depend on you people for information. But for the past eighteen hours you haven’t put us in the picture about Harry Selby’s daughter. The information I have comes from a fragmentary police report our people picked up in Philadelphia.” This was a deliberate untruth; Correll’s source had been a deputy inspector in Philadelphia. “But I want a report now, Thomson. What exactly happened?”

After Thomson answered, Correll said, “All this seems highly coincidental. To be as plain as possible, was there a causal relationship? Did someone working for you have anything to do with what happened to the Selby girl?”

“No, sir. I’ve checked that personally. The police have kept me up to date. We’re not implicated in any way.”

Correll glanced at the stretch of river beyond his study, the waters shadowed and dappled by swaying trees.

Picking up a Snow Virgin, he watched the flakes floating around the blue statue, then said, “Thomson, this won’t change our plans. Call General Taggart now and tell him that.”