propriate to someone wishing to appear pleasant under trying circumstances. As Jim opened the building door, he nodded in the direction of a half-dozen reporters—some with videotape cameras, others cassette recorders, still others with only notebooks—sitting at the far end of the lobby. “Your mother said you shouldn’t talk to them,” Jim whispered to the couple. It was too late, though. The reporters looked up as they entered then literally pounced. “Hey, you’re the Vreeland kids, aren’t you?” one man shouted, rushing forward with his camera.
Jim blocked him. “Mrs. Vreeland said no interviews.”
A newspaper woman managed to block Elliot. “Please,” she said, “just tell us the cause of death.”
Elliot glanced at Denise helplessly. “A heart attack late this morning,” Denise told the woman.
Immediately the others began throwing out more questions, but Jim held them back as Elliot and Denise fled the lobby to the elevators. Luckily, one was waiting for them. They rode it up to the fiftieth floor and walked to their apartment, a gray steel door at the corridor’s far end with the number 50L and the Vreeland name.
It was a warm, luxurious apartment with oriental rugs, many fine antiques, body-sensing climate control, and numerous paintings—mostly acrylic gouache by their mother, Cathryn Vreeland, who had a moderate artistic following. In typical New York fashion, the windows—and a door to the apartment terrace—were covered with Venetian blinds, now lowered to darken the apartment from the afternoon sun.
As Elliot and Denise entered the apartment, they heard the muffled sound of voices coming from the master bedroom.
“…political suicide, sheer madness,” Elliot overheard a hushed whisper. They continued through an L-shaped hallway into the master bedroom, where Dr. and Mrs. Vreeland were bending over a large FerroFoam suitcase on the bed, trying with 28
Alongside Night
noticeable difficulty to close it.
Whatever doubts remained in Elliot’s mind vanished in shocking relief.
The elder Vreelands did not immediately notice their offsprings’ entrance, engaged as they were with their discussion emphasizing each attempt on the suitcase. Dr. Vreeland said,
“You would think they would at least be bright enough to follow EUCOMTO’s policy, rather than this regression to further insanity.” His speech retained only a trace of his native Vienna.
“They’re trapped by their own logic,” said Mrs. Vreeland, pressing hard on the suitcase. “You predicted this and prepared for it, so stop berating yourself about something you couldn’t control.”
“I didn’t take the possibility seriously enough, Cathryn. I had no business risking my family—” Dr. Vreeland looked up.
“Thank God you’re finally home. Did they give you any trouble at school?”
Denise shook her head. Elliot said with some difficulty, “No.”
Dr. Vreeland looked at his son with sudden compassion. “I’m terribly sorry, Ell. We had to catch you off guard to make my cover story credible. You know I wouldn’t have done this if it weren’t necessary.”
Elliot forced a smile. “Uh—that’s okay, Dad.”
His father smiled back. “Good. Now,” he said briskly, “do you two think you can help us get his damned suitcase closed?”
Alongside Night
29
Chapter 3
Perhaps the single most important element guiding Martin Vreeland was a meticulous study of history.
He had learned the lessons of politics well, therefore harboring few illusions regarding to what extent those with power would go to maintain it—and fewer illusions respecting by whom and for whose gain political power was always exercised. Had he not believed the incorruptible were statistically insignificant, he would have been an anarchist. His latest bestseller, Not Worth a Continental, stated his views on the current crisis clearly:
The true cause of the general rise in prices that is usually called inflation is one of history’s best-kept secrets: it is known to almost everybody but its victims. To listen to most political debates on the phenomenon, one would think that it was some malarious fever—
still incurable—which is to be treated with the quinines of joint sacrifice, Maoist self-criticism, and liberal doses of governmental controls. Yet, even today, one can look up “inflation” in most dictionaries and find in its definition a proper diagnosis of the disease and by that diagnosis an implied cure.
Inflation is the process whereby central bankers in collusion with politicians—to mutual benefit—have counterfeited warehouse receipts for a commodity the public have chosen as a medium of exchange, and traded those counterfeits to those they have defrauded and forced them into accepting them.