Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

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.