Falcons and Seagulls: A Utah Tale

Copyright © 2015 David Taylor Johannesen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All characters bear no resemblance to persons living or diseased, with the exception of Howard Hughes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and Harry Oppenheimer, of South Africa both well-known public figures in their times, also known to the author many years ago.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1076-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1074-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1075-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901585

Archway Publishing rev. date: 2/26/2015

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Prologue

Chapter One: Exodus

Chapter Two: Joseph

Chapter Three: Esther

Chapter Four: Daniel

Chapter Five: Elijah

PART TWO

Chapter Six: Deborah

Chapter Seven: Isaiah

Chapter Eight: Joshua

Chapter Nine: Lucifer

Chapter Ten: Romans

Chapter Eleven: Ezekiel

Epilogue

About The Author

Acknowledgement

For

Helen Taylor Johannesen

and

Robert Campbell Taylor

DEDICATION

In Memoriam

Beverley Taylor Sorenson

She made the call

And

For fifty-two passengers lost in the sinking of

Andrea Doria

July 1956      •      Nantucket Sound

Heartfelt thanks to my Editor

Vrinda Condillac

and

My Muse and Wife

Linda Adelman Johannesen

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

William Shakespeare

PART ONE

Shine out fair sun till I have bought a glass,

That I may see my shadow as I pass

[Richard III]

"How can we tell the difference between

an image and an act of will?"

[Antoine de Saint-Exupery]

PROLOGUE

Desert Inn, Las Vegas

A meeting atop the Desert Inn with Hughes sealed their covenant, Solomon remembered. He, along with his uncle Rory and his cousin Phil, stepped from the private elevator into a small vestibule with a single door. Rory had a key and they walked into a vast, darkened apartment. Two steps down took them into an area filled with sofas and tables, arranged randomly, with no attention to decoration. The draperies were pulled together and only two floor lamps lit the far side of the room where loose papers and black folders were stacked or scattered about. Half a dozen doors to other rooms were closed, and a curious fetid smell, almost sweetly medicinal, hung in the airless place.

Howard! Where are you? Rory spoke into an intercom attached to a wall. Solomon heard his voice trail in a faint recitation through the interior of the apartment and into the other rooms. Then it was silent save for the lame throttle of the air-conditioning repeating itself, louder then softer, struggling to find the proper temperature for this tomb they were about to excavate. Rory opened one of the doors and stepped into complete dark, closing the door behind him. There was, finally, a dim exchange of voices, dark growls followed by spurts of coughing, then silence. Ten minutes went by before Rory emerged guiding the dark emperor, his stringy hair tattered nearly completely over his eyes. He wore long khaki pants which turned under his bare heels and walked with a limp. He searched the large room as if he had not seen the three of them. He pulled at a shabby terrycloth robe against the chill of the air conditioning which Solomon began to notice was tracing an icy finger along his own spine. Phil turned away from Hughes’ piercing eyes, unable to look at the man. Even in this state of deterioration, he had a faded power which filled the room.

You remember my nephew, Solomon, and his cousin Phil Taylor, Rory said swiftly as he introduced them, although one was not introduced to Hughes so much as one submitted to his presence. He stared closely at Solomon before taking a chair as Phil stepped back several feet.

We’re here to talk about the project at Ipabah, Rory continued. It’s time to bring everything to a conclusion—don’t you think?

Hughes turned to Solomon and in a long, broken phrase uttered somewhere high in his throat, without much breath, I remember you when you were just a boy.

That’s right, we were all up at Ojai together! Rory exclaimed, wondering perhaps if his grim mentor would recall that this was also the place where his wife, Jean Peters, had encountered his mistress Rita Hayworth who was pregnant at the time. However badly Hughes had bruised him, testing his fealty over the years, Rory could only remember the fondness Hughes seemed to show Solomon. They talked about the Fairchild School that Solomon attended, which Rory still disapproved of because the Fairchild family in Boston had taken the young boy from his home in Utah and his religious sheltering.

Hot bed of snobs, Hughes growled. What’s your best memory of the place? he asked Solomon.

"The day in Assembly, in front of the entire school and faculty, when the headmaster told me I had received fifteen ‘demerits’ in one week, a school record for bad conduct marks, and then asked what I had to say for myself. I stood erect by my desk and said, ‘I do not accept them!’"

After I left the school at fifteen, Hughes laughed, my father put me in school up in Ojai for a year. We lived in Pasadena, and I hated it there, but I loved it in Ojai. He turned to Rory as if waiting for him to continue for him. He had a shaded, haunted look of not being present in his own skin, which was sallow and deeply creased—not with age so much as with the disappearance of any determinable features. Solomon noticed that the acrid smell of medicated decay, which had pervaded the room, now grew insistent.

I’ve watched your work at MacLeod Brothers, he went on. And it’s been right on the mark, right on the mark. Not just with my business, but in everything you’ve done. And you, too, Phil, he gestured across as if seeing him for the first time. I believe there will be a place for you in our organization some day soon. Take your uncle Rory’s place now that he’s devoting himself to that church project, eh?

Rory pulled back with an involuntary start and drew one hand through his sleek, white hair which, as Solomon had been told, had turned grey from its dazzling black soon after his sister’s, Solomon’s mother’s, death. Solomon could feel Rory’s wish to disengage and not further Phil’s and Solomon’s activities with Hughes. They had come for that purpose, to make MacLeod Brothers independent from this insidious partner who influenced almost half the firm’s business without even being present.

I don’t know about that, Howard, Rory finally said. Both these fine young men have important stakes at MacLeod Brothers, and Solomon has a family on the way.

I don’t ‘spect ‘em-a move down here to Las Vegas, Rory! he growled, his voice rising in greater clarity to almost a high-pitched wail. Los Angeles’ll do fine. As he said this, he stood abruptly and shuffled over to the table littered with files—some in expanding cardboard folders, others in microfilm canisters–and sank, as if before an altar, to his knees. He peered over the surface of the table, scanned the papers and said, What is it you want to do about the testing grounds at Ipabah, then? Return it to the Indians? Hand everything over to Israel? Can we do that now??? Tell me, Mr. Solomon Fairchild!

Yes—yes, they have the capabilities, Solomon said. In those days, Israel frequently used ‘black’ countries abroad for its intelligence purposes and was interested in secretly acquiring the weapons enhancement and delivery systems Hughes had been developing at Ipabah in Utah’s western desert, in what was known as The Masada Project—so named by the high councils of the Church and the Mossad. There’s no telling when they will have another war, Solomon remembered saying just two years before Yom Kippur, 1973.

Then let’s make it go away! Rory knows I have enough trouble taking care of an airline. Now the government wants to break up TWA, and I’ve got these Vegas casinos! Where is my food, Rory? They were supposed to bring it up an hour ago. This can’t go on!

Rory moved quickly to a phone on the wall beside the entrance to the suite.

And I need a damn barber up here! Look at me! When we started out together, Rory, d’ya ever think I’d look like this? he almost screamed. Then after a moment, he looked around at the empty suite and asked, Where is everybody?

He was used to having four or five assistants in attendance—some waiting for instructions, others bringing news—and later, according to Rory, two or more doctors visited him almost daily. There was great secrecy about his health and the medications he took, and even Rory was given few explanations. Solomon remembered saying to Phil that Hughes did not look as if he would last the year. But he did—for five more years.

Come over to the table, and let’s sort through some of this stuff—I want it all organized and outta here tonight! You can take it back with you to Salt Lake—first, there’s, there’s—

He spoke in a stumbling stream and pulled his shirt collar away from his throat, shaking his head sideways as if clearing water from an ear. He slumped to a chair beside the table and began knocking one of his bony hands quietly in a furtive beat. The bell rang twice and four waiters wheeled in a cart whose centerpiece was a huge tureen, surrounded by plates and dark, green carafes.

Or I s’pose you could put it all in the vault downstairs, he suddenly said. Then he turned to them and said, We’re having some kind of soup today. Rory—will you taste it to make sure it’s all right. I’m sure the bread will be fine.

After he offered this invocation, he turned his chair away from Phil and Solomon as Rory went to the table. First, the waiter ladled a bowl for Rory and stood by as he sipped it slowly, nodding each time. He lowered the spoon in elaborate yet doubtful motions following an arc from his face to his waist. He was faintly sketched against the figure of his ancient mentor in an adumbrated outline of the two. After that strangest of meals was over, Solomon told Phil that he saw in that scene of Rory and Hughes together—one standing faithfully to the end over the other slumped over in his torn bathrobe—mentoring and supplication through all the years of their irregular career.

The room began to carry a sharp odor of parsnips, sweet and disturbing. Puree of parsnips, potatoes and carrots, Rory confirmed as Hughes bowed his head low over the tureen to breathe in the venting steam as if it was a reviving cure for a head cold. Solomon half expected a towel to be draped over his head. After ladling a bowl for his long-time master, Rory indicated to Phil and Solomon to take seats at the table but did not make a move to serve them. They were simply there to observe Hughes’s supper as sentinels, digesting all they had done for him.

Yes, you may help yourself to bread. Hughes nodded to the basket rolls as he and Rory continued to eat, hovering reverently above their bowls. Within an hour they were dismissed, having gathered the required detritus of paper into four boxes provided and wrapped by messengers summoned from somewhere in the deep interior of the hotel, the host organism for all of the man’s needs and spirit.

The files from Ipabah, from the entire Goshute experiment, were then taken from the Desert Inn in Las Vegas to MacLeod Brothers’ offices in Salt Lake. Two days later, Solomon met Rory there at five am to help transfer the documents—all the evidence of Howard Hughes’ very existence at their firm—on to a Hughes plane for a flight to Boston. That would be the end of their involvement in the Masada Enterprise.

We’re taking this material together, Solomon. We’re bound up in it, we were both midwives to its beginning and now its afterlife. I want to add my journals, lock them up in that deep vault, trusted to withstand all inquiries and inspections. Only when I die— he tried to finish, but Solomon hurried him into the private elevator and out of that life.

As he and Phil left, ahead of Rory, Solomon noticed a young man close to his age sitting in a far, dark corner of the room. Boys, you may as well know, Rory whispered. This is Arnan Milchan. He works for an arm of Israeli intelligence called LAKAM which neither the CIA or Mossad knows anything about. Only the Prime Minister of Israel. Let that guide you quietly.

It was years before Solomon encountered the Masada Project again. Howard Hughes died in 1976, airborne en route to Houston. He was buried in Jerusalem, beneath the Children of Abraham Center, erected by the Mormon Church and Brigham Young University for which Hughes had donated half the cost, having finally been baptized by Rory MacLeod as a Mormon. The Yom Kippur War had come and gone, but Israel was prepared with the bomb Hughes had given them.

His epitaph was plainly etched above an un-marked stone, from a poem Paul Célan:

Denk Dir (Think of it):

the bog soldier of Masada

teaches himself home, most

inextinguishably, against

every bomb in the wire.

CHAPTER ONE

Exodus

S olomon had again tossed all night in an old spool bed to find patches of hard-won sleep, struggling against what was usually a soothing moonlight and the sound of a fast-raking ocean three hundred yards outside his cedar-shingled, 1875 cottage. He found himself sitting up starkly and asking himself whether to get involved with this accounting of old business, or whether to just forget everything about the Masada Project and settle down to his life back here in New England with his twin sister Lee in Boston, and his daughter Fiona in Providence.

He kept coming back to his difficult days in Utah. He kept hearing his wife, Grace, ask, Why on earth are you dreaming of going back to Utah? They were living separately, not yet separated legally—he supposed himself an estranged husband, a term promising a sardonic illness such as ‘running amok’ or ‘going berserk’—and he imagined himself, the sailor he was, charting an unfamiliar life. Grace lived in their 1840 federal residence on Benefit Street in Providence, where their daughter, Fiona, twenty, was in her second year at Rhode Island School of Design, down the street. Solomon kept his and his twin sister Leah’s Marshall 22—a catboat from Padanaram, Massachusetts, which slept four and hoisted a single gaff sail of four hundred square feet—docked at a marina near their summer cottage in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where Solomon lived, facing the beach known as Barney’s Joy.

It’s a family matter, he had told Grace. Uncle Rory is dying. The surviving MacLeod patriarch and Solomon’s long-ago business ally was ailing and Solomon had been called to see him. He knew he did not have to go, or write any of this, but it may have helped him to forgive himself.

For Solomon, flying back to Utah genuinely began when the plane passed the Front Range of the Rockies, east of Denver and promptly descended to the Wasatch Front. The last hour was always one of keen expectation, either of dread or thrilling return as a lost son, one of two living members of his mother’s tribe whose father’s family were from Massachusetts and had been Quakers in a Puritan world. As a child, often flying from Boston alone, he arrived as a dark celebrity, a vaporous ghost famous for attending a private boy’s school and not having even a reliquary to contain his lapsed Mormon faith. Beset by a narrow panic, he would look at the white spine of the High Uintas that score the sky at thirteen thousand feet—the only mountain range in the Rockies extending East to West. For him they were a heraldic reminder of his mother’s tribe flourishing in Utah, and his deep paternity barely alive in Boston. Now in his fifties, the prospect of returning with a vague contingency hanging over his head still persisted.

From the ages of ten to fourteen—1956 to 1960—he had slept through most of those long flights on a DC-6, or DC-7 lasting an afternoon and an entire night as the propellers made a steady murmur in the darkened cabin. He would curl up on a circular sofa aft in the plane where grown-ups had drinks and smoked after take-off, and once he had woken up during a stop at Omaha thinking it was Salt Lake and no one had come to meet him and that he was going to be lost in the skies west of the West.

Later, crossing those great, perfect circles of irrigation and onto the endless steppes of Wyoming he walked to the lavatory, peering with pride and fear at shapeless valleys and basins where his mother’s people had trudged over six generations before as his father’s family sedated themselves with inheritance back East. He had stared at his face, looking for a plausible or even a courageous expression to begin answering the voices of expectation he heard. He had slapped himself very hard several times—left side, right side, East to West in punishment. ‘Stop it!’ the reddened face commanded from the mirror. He used to drink on airplanes, but gave it up later. He’d land with burning cheeks and tears in his eyes.

S olomon—you’d better fly out here right away. It’s Rory—he’s back in the hospital. Another transfusion. Estelle MacLeod Briggs had telephoned two weeks ago, still April, the time to roto-till horse manure into his seaside garden, part of a two-acre property with a two-bedroom cottage carved from a large farm which had belonged to his father’s mother in Boston. After coming back decades before from Utah, disbarred, he had worked for fifteen years at a bank in Providence. It had been recently taken over by a large bank in Boston in a ‘hostile takeover’ and he was left with two-years’ salary, a modest pension, and a very substantial figure in stock of the acquiring bank; he had been betting on such a merger. For the past few years Solomon had been a consultant to small banks seeking to avoid such an event—or to attract one by getting their balance sheets in shape for a suitor.

Now he listened for further diagnosis from his late mother’s younger sister, who was the twin of his Uncle Rory. Rory suffered from an obscure blood disease—Wagner’s—the medication for which was so toxic that other medicines were necessary to reduce his bloating and to heal the lesions which sprang up over body of the tall and graceful tenor of days-gone-by.

"Rory said your mother’s spirit visited his bedside today. Even though he’s so bloated up. He was very lucid and emphatic that you must get out here. ‘Help Solly—help my boy’ she told him. Are you in some kind of trouble I haven’t heard about? I have the same sense about these things that my father had—the way he knew your mother went down with that ship—"

"You must mean he thought he heard her, or saw her appear."

He said he had to get some things off his chest with you, she rushed ahead, and even give you some documents from when—

"I know all this, ‘Stelli. I lived through it, if you remember, when you and your Church pals tried to commit me to St. Ida’s hospital. But that’s not something I’m going to talk about on the phone. Just tell Rory I have my own, vital exchanges with my mother’s spirit, and he should have left those ‘documents’—his confessions—in Howard Hughes’s vault at the Desert Inn in Vegas thirty years ago!"

You’ve become so heartless! Is that your New England pride?

It’s my New England common sense—and before I hang up, I might remind you that Grandpa’s visions sought a New Jerusalem, not the sentimental excavation of our family misfortunes.

But you’ve got to see Rory, she whimpered. He counts on you, more even than his own children. He defended you and poor Phil long after Hughes was dead and the FBI stopped caring—

Then tell me more about how he is actually doing. He held the portable phone amid masses of divided plants, their straggling bulbous roots waiting to prosper in new soil.

He was doing fine at home until Tuesday. Then he couldn’t get up, and then he couldn’t wake up. Her voice rose feverishly now. Solomon, I think we might be losing him.

It was then that Solomon knew he had to go, cash in some frequent-flyer mileage and bargain a hard-won peace-of-mind that only meeting Rory could bring. If he didn’t go now, he might never see Rory again.

"I’ll send you a ticket now—I can have an electronic ticket waiting for you tomorrow—there’s a direct flight on Delta tomorrow, yes, every day! she marveled, which drove him into a hapless alcove of childhood. Remember my father’s prophesy—it’s your legacy!" Estelle cried.

Grandpa’s prophesy, a well-loved family chronicle, was that the Mormon church would one day be in Jerusalem. Solomon’s uncle Rory would become responsible over twenty years for building a Mormon facility in Jerusalem, named the Brigham Young University center for Middle Eastern Studies, carved from fourteen acres of Mount Scopus below Hebrew University. It was not permitted to house any missionary activities—this was the deal struck with the Knesset by Rory and his chief ally, Mayor Kolleck.

My dad showed us what Rory had to do! she affirmed brightly, never doubting the celestial footing of the work. Please come soon. There’s a suite right off the garden from which you look up at Mount Olympus. And please bring Grace with you. Oh, Solomon, we’ll all be waiting for you—even those who have…. passed over to the other side.

The flight attendant looked carefully at him as he came out of the lavatory. Are you all right? Were you ill? We’ll be landing in ten minutes. He took a seat quickly, hoping she hadn’t suspected seizure.

As the plane circled wide to the west over the spectral salt sea whose tiny waves nearly lapped the runways, Solomon found comfort in wondering, how could it be evaporating yet so nearly swamp the airport? Could it have something to do with the Wasatch Fault? Some said a quake was long overdue in Salt Lake City. Even his great grandfather who, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was asked as an engineer to come there and advise on re-construction of the city.

After landing, he walked out to see Estelle waiting at the curbside in her Lexus.

Guess who’s here to met you?

Estelle waved her hands towards the back seat to a surprise: Her mother, aged a hundred and three, was smiling out the window and eating a dish of ice cream from Polar Freeze. Nana wore a soft blue pearl sweater over a blue and white Polka-dot dress.

"Well, bless your heart, Solly! his grandmother cooed as he bent to kiss her. She smelled of layers of vanilla upon vanilla from layers of powder, soft age, and ice cream. Your mother’s been home to visit, too! Won’t it be grand to have the two of you back together!" She patted Solomon’s arm, and her bracelets nearly fell off her thin, blotchy hands, bruised in the daily trials of now negotiating a bed with rails and a walker—a woman who often had driven a team of horses between Salt Lake and her husband’s ranch sixty miles east to situate her family for the summer in the High Uinta Mountains.

There was a set of twenty-four dramatized tapes playing about the exodus of the Mormons from Missouri to Utah a century and a half ago. I told her about Rory and your mother visiting in the hospital, Estelle added, slapping her hands to the steering wheel in time to the tapes.

You’re home from school again, his grandmother continued, as the decades confused themselves in her vivid mind. Solomon’s whole body ached to be with this woman who had raised him after his mother’s death until the Fairchilds had pulled him back to Boston to the Fairchild School.

Well, dear, you look thin: don’t they feed you there? Nana went on. He could only submit, and lean over the front seat to accept a taste of her ice cream and then surrender to the reminder of all he had lost or forsworn in becoming a successful man in the effete East: a father, a banker yet not a sufficient Mormon. He pulled back sharply into his seat beside Estelle, feeling trapped yet at home between the two older women.

‘Stelli, couldn’t you turn off that radio? I can’t hear myself think, Nana asked as she patted Solomon’s shoulder with her free hand. He took her hand in his but fixed his eyes ahead on the Wasatch Front, still covered in snow in April. Estelle and his grandmother were very different in temperament, but they closed about him in the same embrace. He opened the window to let the cold air fill him with a sense of protection and joy. He savored what they did not know about him, yet he wanted them to be the same, to be familiar, available and to let Solomon know about their every whim, scorn, joy or doubt.

The aroma of thickening white gravy rose in Aunt Estelle’s vast, bright kitchen like a drapery rising. It pulled up everyone’s appetites after long hours in Church. Today was Fast Sunday, first of the month, when abstinence from food before services was customary. During the Sacrament, or Communion Meeting, members of the congregation stood to ‘bear testimony’—somewhat as the Quakers did—but with a hand-held microphone and much passion.

He never knew—who knew?—how many families would turn up for the midday meal. Unlike in his grandmother’s day, when a smaller and closer-bound group always gathered at home after church, it was now conceivable to go out to a restaurant on Sunday, forget Sabbath. His grandmother was already back at her nursing home, where Solomon wanted to go later in the day and sit with her and see what they both remembered. Usually, during such visits, she would grab his arm and whisper, "Get me out of here!" and it was enough to drive to Marie Callender for fresh boysenberry pie, which she would order first, before soup or salad, and her grateful old lips would work eagerly as a baby nursing, eyes nearly closed but cracked to confirm the presence of a mother’s breast.

In Estelle’s vast sitting room next to the kitchen, the afternoon’s deity to Solomon’s eyes was Mount Olympus, highest of the peaks on the Wasatch Front, a shaggy and rocky sweep up from the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, filling the thirty-foot windows. It is my mountain, Estelle would sigh with the modesty of a Prophet’s great granddaughter. She sparingly sliced tomato and onion into her salad, always saving a chunk of each to put away. When she grew phobic about spending money—her husband’s ten percent tithing to the church was calculated against earnings from a billion dollar fortune—she laughed about her parsimonious Scots heritage. But once she overcame these inhibitions to feel no concern about owning the biggest Mercedes or Lexus, its possession was no more important to her than her washing machine. Mount Olympus filled the house; several cousins came in and stood in tableaux before the great, inward-gleaming windows.

As Estelle attended to the preparations and the barbequed beef spread out over the cooking island, a stranger came into the room from the garden, where she had been strolling, unseen by the others. She smiled and came over directly to Solomon.

Hello, I’m Leah Adelman. You’re Solomon Fairchild, aren’t you? she whispered in a husky alto voice, filled with assured vigor. I’m from the Jerusalem press office. I am handling advance preparation for Mayor Kolleck’s visit next month. Most people just call me Lee.

She was fair-skinned, the pallor of her face and neck was like a swath of pale alabaster as it met her tangle of auburn hair starkly yet shyly. But then Solomon saw the blazing flash of her smile and eyes, as if set in another woman. She was tall and full-figured, but athletic, almost with a military alertness.

Oh, yes, Solly! Estelle called from her cooking. Teddy’s getting an honorary doctorate from BYU for facilitating the Children of Abraham Center. Lee is here to prepare for the press coverage! Rory should get one too, and will, if I have anything to say about it! I’m giving a big reception for Teddy and Rory—and the doctors tell me he’ll even be out of the hospital and fit to attend. Dinner’s almost ready. Solly, will you offer a blessing while the rolls are in the oven, she added before he could speak, as a mother might have called to a son.

Solomon folded his arms and intoned, as all present gathered around the serpentine kitchen: