Hunger of the Wolf (19 page)

Pausing in Monaco just long enough to lose his life's savings at baccarat, Jack Taggart proceeded, as ordered, to London. Dale showed him the books: The money flowing in from NWM serviced debt on an undeferrable schedule. The North American property had soaked up the oil funds. Lee had imposed strict internal controls to prevent leveraging the information management divisions. They had bought too much too recently and had no obvious institution from whom to borrow.

“Fallis doesn't know we're gambled out,” Jack said.

“He thinks we're buying things with our own money. That's my guess.”

Jack snorted. “Couldn't get laid in a bucket of dicks,” he said, a nostalgic turn of rudeness. “How much do we need?”

“Eighteen million pounds and change.”

For a week, Jack and Dale retreated to Abermarley, to the old stone cottage on the edge of town, where they stalked the antique forests of Lord Fallis's grounds and concocted what would turn out to be their contribution to the history of money: the interior bid. The idea was to combine stock with debt obligations. Instead of cash, the parties would
be sold second-class nonvoting stock that could be purchased back by the first-class stockholder if the terms of debt repayment were completed. The sale of dreams: Jack and Dale found a way to buy a company with the idea of its own future profits.

The rest was patience and secrecy. Any hint of the coming bid, any suspicion of its mechanism, and stock market speculators would instantly rip the throat out of the deal, feast on the exposed entrails. The bid had to be negotiated with the
Record
's board of directors, and their offices were all on Fleet Street. Fortunately, nobody knew Jack Taggart, the emissary. Dale, like an Egyptian deity embraced by the impenetrable darkness of a granite naos, waited in his Abermarley cottage. Six weeks he waited, drugged by television, waiting for day. Then the light broke. Jack called. The Wylies owned
The Record of London.

London took a sudden and appalled intake of breath. Instantly, Dale Wylie was the foremost newspaper proprietor in the country. A cheapskate American upstart had bought off Lord Fallis himself. The British press understood Dale Wylie so little that on the day of the transfer of ownership photographers bunched at the front doors expecting a triumphal procession. The day before, Lord Fallis hadn't shirked providing the tabloids with a bit of drama when he had personally supervised the removal of his desk, a nineteenth-century oak battleship of furniture. As he was overseeing the grand decline into a moving van, he declared: “The oak heart has been in my family for two hundred years. No one will ever convince me that I've sold it.” The reporters didn't notice Dale arriving because the bus stop outside the offices of the
Record
dispensed passengers on the other side of Fleet Street. Only one photographer, a refugee from the first round of firing at
The Abermarley Gazette
, recognized the man stooping to pick up a happy jagged silver moon in the street, a crooked sixpence—the image that defined the Wylies ever after.

Through the back door, held open for him, into the private elevator, held open for him, into his office doors, held open for him, Dale found Jack Taggart sitting on the floor, because there was no desk, examining the books.

“You're not going to believe this,” Jack said as Dale entered. “All four kids have cars and drivers.”

“I believe it.” He turned to his secretary. “Fire all the drivers on staff. Fire everyone who held a door open for me. Fire the other secretary.”

Dale and Jack had passed so much time guessing at the rot in the
Record
's systems, but they had guessed wrong. “Look at this. They have a bureau in the Ukraine. Can you imagine? You have three reporters living off your fat in Kiev. It's a hell of a world. You have work to do here, buddy,” Jack said.

“I think you mean that
you
have work to do.”

“I don't think so, Dale. It's going to be tricky. You won't be able to run it like
The Atkinson Register
.”

“Nonsense. Everything I've ever bought runs like the
Register.
”

“Not by me, sunshine.”

“When will I see you again?”

“I'll catch you at your funeral,” Jack said quickly.

Dale called back his secretary. “Bring me a desk the newsroom has thrown out.”

*  *  *

In New York, George showed Lavinia his true nature in a cage in the Presidential Suite of the Plaza. Three days later, he woke up in Lavinia's arms. She had crawled into the cage with him, and he could half remember, in potent unconsciousness, a woman smoothing his flanks.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She eventually answered, “It's like a fairy tale.” The smooth post-bestial satisfaction, aglow with its new relaxation and the city light and a woman he loved who knew his nature, may have been the happiest morning of George's life.

New York in 1964 was the city at the end of metaphysics. Nobody questioned the eccentric beautiful foreign woman who led a quite wolflike dog on a stout chain out of the hotel into the park in the evenings. She took him into the bank when she needed money, and into Macy's when she needed shoes, and into a chophouse, where the animal gnawed rare steak and bloody bones at her feet. For the rest of the time, George and Lavinia walked together as people, as lovers, drifting and roaming, allowing surprises to surprise them, boredoms to bore them, fears to frighten them. “I can't tell,” she said one morning, when they were snaking through Sheep Meadow, among the lounging picnickers in the bright day of all possibility.

“What can't you tell?”

“I can't tell whether I prefer to walk with you as a man or a wolf. Right now, I think I'd rather you were a wolf. I could let you off the leash to run through all these picnickers.”

“Don't ever let me off the leash.”

Love turned the beast into a game. They could pretend, for a while, that even monsters are put on this earth to be happy.

*  *  *

George and Lavinia stayed in New York until Lavinia became pregnant, then moved to Pennsylvania. Lavinia adored the house in Champlain even though the roof was dripping and the rooms were barren and dust-clotted and the wallpaper had begun to peel from the corners.

George resumed his tour of the family companies that fall. The executives
found his blandness terrifying, provoking furies of cost-cutting. Once he accidentally showed up to tour a cardboard box plant he no longer owned. Lee had sold it and George hadn't noticed. The mistake added to his legend. The Wylies owned more than they themselves could remember.

And every month the wolf brought George home. The rise of the beast was almost a pleasure. Lavinia would bring down flesh and water. She would wait until he turned, and three days later he would wake up naked in her arms. Six months after they moved back to Champlain, however, George woke up alone. The house was silent and a terror flushed over his cold flesh. He pulled on clothes and stumbled up the stairs to find her waiting on their bed, holding an infant. “He came early,” she said. She was apologetic even though he was the one who couldn't be there for the birth.

Tenderly confounded, he picked the boy from her arms. To hold a son, to have another of your name, is to know how many fates worse than death there are, how many numbers less than zero. How are you supposed to live, to breathe air and eat food and drink water, with your heart wandering out there in the wild world?

Dale Wylie

Kensington Palace Gardens

May 4, 1965

Dear George,

A boy. Terrific. But you know what a boy means. We must prepare for what he has in him.

Some notes on inheritance. Now that we have the
Record
the English will love us. I assume they'll give me a title, and it will be hereditary, and the nature of the agreement means that you will take
over the company and the lordship and all the rest of it. That's the will I made. I could tell you that it was for death duties or I could say it was to avoid taxes or I could say that I bound your future and Ben's future and Ben's grandson's future to my own little moment in time in some purely financial logic, but we both know it would be a lie. I made the contract because of the wolf. I have gambled with all of us, I recognize that.

Where you live is up to you, but I advise you to stay in America. I can't tell if it's the war that has made the English so contemptible but I've met the queen now and I've been to Buckingham Palace, and the palace is a prison and the queen has the sadness of the prisoner-in-chief. I've met whores in Atkinson who are more fully human than her. I miss lumberjacks. The last lumberjack I met must have been a decade ago. That was a man. He asked for nothing and he gave nothing.

The British are waiting here to be bought and sold. No wonder the colonies are shrugging them off.

I admire so much your ability to listen to people who know. So few rich kids can.

Love,

Dale

In May of 1968, Dale abandoned his American citizenship in order to be knighted the First Lord Wylie of Abermarley.

The celebration that followed the ceremony was at the Dorchester hotel, which then possessed the largest ballroom of any luxury hotel in London. Seven hundred and twenty-three guests passed an honor guard of Beefeaters. On the Park Lane side of the hotel, a wall-sized photograph of 17 Flora Avenue filled forty-five feet by nine and a half feet.
On the other side, a similarly sized photograph of the house in Kensington Palace Gardens. And in between, the room had been filled with spruces, the trees from which newsprint is made, imported from the American West. The opulence was literally wild.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson arrived early, pausing to discuss the unrest in France, youth in London, the history of revolution and its causes, the possibility of having to foot De Gaulle's bills again. Jack Taggart showed up. His tuxedo looked rented, cheap, borrowed off a prom kid. Bedraggled in his age by never-slowing fits of lust and losses, he must have been out of money again.

“How much is all this costing us?” Jack asked, looking around, shaking Dale's hand.

“Business expense,” Dale offered.

“Champagne and claret are business expenses in England? How many waiters did you hire for this affair? These look like professionals, too. We should have brought in the reporters from the
Record,
had them scrounge around. Make 'em work for their checks.”

“The day I take advice on expenditures from Jack Taggart is the day they come to take me away.”

“I don't know,” Jack said, inspecting the rafts of canapés circulating among the spruces, and the ruffled, gilded tables, each a travesty of lavishness. “I'm starting to worry. This looks like exactly the sort of thing I'd do.”

“The bar's free,” Dale added, gladhanding his old buddy forward. Rita Hayworth was next in line, and after her the shadow minister of defense, and after the shadow minister of defense, the Earl of Duquesne. Far down the long line of beauties and powers, terrestrial deities of celebrity and the marketplace, he noticed a couple waiting their turn, the man smiling mildly, the woman draped in an extravagant scarlet dress that, even
within the glittering of London society, rose like lipsticked lips pressed against train station glass. Between them stood a small, confused boy in a gray flannel suit, a lost pup among the knees of the grand old world. Dale recognized his own in the boy: his first glimpse of Ben Wylie.

“Dad, I have some introductions. My wife and son.”

The woman was beautiful, eager to meet him but slightly afraid, too. Ben looked so much like Max, Dale tried to pick him up. The boy struggled in the stranger's arms, moaning and howling, and Dale quickly returned him to the earth. “Poor kid, I'm sorry he had to meet me among all these people.”

“We thought we'd bring him to see you in all your glory,” George said.

“At least there are trees,” Dale said.

Lavinia smiled. “We'll all feel right at home.”

Then Prince Charles, at the time a young, awkward guardsman, strolled up and Dale automatically extended a hand. “Hello, Charles. I'm Dale.” By the time he turned back, his son and grandson had slipped away into the crowd.

After the meal—maple-glazed duck with orange rice and Christmas salad—Dale gave himself a brief toast, from under an arbor of expensively imported evergreen:

Ladies and gentlemen,

If I may speak a few brief words.

I came to England after my sixty-fifth birthday, because I didn't want to be bored in my old age. I have lived among you for only a brief time, though I hope indeed that the master of ceremonies allows me a little longer. I can say, in all honesty, that you have never bored me.

My first newspaper I bought in Atkinson, on the border between Minnesota and North Dakota. I am still, I fear, an Atkinson man. But I hope that I have managed at least to coat myself with a good London veneer. The lessons from those early days remain. I remember once, in the province of Alberta, I was caught in a hailstorm. Hailstorms in Alberta can be a serious business and a neighboring field of dairy cattle were murdered where they stood. I survived with my brother by hiding under thick newspapers. Then after the storm, we went through the field gathering the stones into our rolled-up newspapers. I can still recall the taste of those hailstones. Life has no more savory delicacy. If only I could order for all of you here a rolled-up newspaper full of hailstones from Alberta. But I'm afraid even the Dorchester lacks that chain of supply.

I tell this story because it encapsulates what I believe about newspapers. Many of you have asked me why I don't use the paper or NWM to espouse the perspective on affairs that I share with many of you, although I'm afraid not you, Prime Minister. I have lost friendships because of my refusal but I keep my nose out of my editors' business because I believe that newspapers are not for politics even though they must be political. Newspapers are to keep the hail off your head and to gather up the hail once it's fallen.