Dom Lorso coughed hard for an instant but when the burn of color faded from his face, he lit another cigarette. “So I drove out here early this morning and checked out the garage. The Porsche was gone. I went to a pay phone and called Earl’s private number here. When he answered I hung up and went home. I was scared then, but not now. I can’t smell garlic anywhere, Giorgio. He was home when it happened.”
“That’s all I wanted to know, Dom.”
Thomson was relieved because his fears had apparently been unfounded and because Lorso’s nervous and superstitious talk of garlic and devils had been a therapeutic reminder of how far they had come from the old times when Harlequin Chemicals had consisted of only a rented, run-down warehouse and a few mortgaged trucks.
“Just one thing,” he said. “Where did that talk of a red sports car come from?”
“There were some scratches on the girl’s bike that looked like red paint. At least, that’s what the Selby kid thought. I mean the girl’s brother, I don’t know his name. Slocum had the bike picked up and they checked it out at the police lab.” Lorso coughed again and put his cigarette out. “But there was no red paint, nothing but mud and gravel.”
“What about the police report on Earl’s car?”
“I’ll take care of it, Giorgio. The kid forgot, I’ll tell them. Or better, I’ll tell them what Earl told us. I’ll call Slocum, give him the details. No, I better do it personally. I’ll call you after I talk to Slocum.”
When Dom Lorso left, Thomson sat watching the birds on the lawn and listening to the faint bursts of laughter from his wife’s suite.
Sometimes, when he was out of touch with the world of Simon Correll, as he was now, it was tempting to think of kinder worlds, where the devils that threatened you were as casual and familiar as a trace of garlic on the night air.
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.