He should be
feeling aggressively confident now.
Macho, fit, on top of the
world.
But for some reason he didn’t fully understand, he felt afraid.
Maybe his
terror of his father still pursued him. His father had been a grocery-store
owner in Westville, Virginia–a tall, spare, uncompromising man who had believed
in work for its own sake and the severity of the Lord. After school, young
Gcrard had stacked shelves and weighed out bags of sugar until nine or ten
o’clock at night; and before school in the morning he had bicycled around town
and delivered orders. The only free time his father had allowed him was
Saturday afternoon, after a whole morning of serving behind the counter.
Those Saturday
afternoons had been golden and precious. Gerard had walked almost every week to
the tobacco plantation outside of town, meeting his friend Jay Leveret for
hours of games and adventures. They had played the Green Hornet in and out of
the long pungent sheds where the tobacco leaves were hanging to cure; and they
had run for miles across the fields, under skies that Gerard always remembered
as indelibly blue.
When Saturday
afternoon was over, Jay Leveret would return to the big white plantation house,
to warmly lit lamps and the bright sound of laughter, while Gerard would trudge
home along the dusty twilit road for a silent supper of fatback and beans with
his parents, always concluded by a doleful hour of reading from the Bible.
His first
introduction to drink had been a mouthful of surgical spirits in the back of
the store.
His first
sexual experience had been with Ada Grant, a cheerful big-breasted woman whose
husband had left her to go pick oranges in California, and who gladly took
young boys into her high brass bed for three dollars.
Until he was
sixteen, Gerard had been a hick.
Rural-minded easygoing, and
innocent.
But on his sixteenth birthday, his life had been turned upside
down. Jay Leveret’s father had written to say that there was a place for him on
his tobacco plantation, if he cared for it. But Gerard’s father had sourly
refused. Gerard was to work in the store. Never mind if it was hard and
unprofitable. To labor without reward was a blessing of the Lord.
After three
miserable weeks of sweeping up, unloading sacks, and scooping beans, Gerard had
had enough. One chilly mid-September dawn had found him thumbing a ride on the
highway south. He had been bound for Florida, and eventually for Cuba. He
didn’t think about those years of his life very often. Not these days. He
talked about them even less. But it was during those years that he had begun to
make his money, first by fixing boats on the Florida
keys
,
and later, in the last days of President Batista, by dealing in drugs and girls
in Havana.
In six years,
he had grown from a hick to a hard and knowledgeable young wheelerdealer. He
had been shot at, stabbed in the left thigh, and beaten up. He had contracted
gonorrhea eight times. He had spent
days
dead drunk in
shanty whorehouses on the outskirts of Havana, days which in latex years would
wake him up at night, sweating and shaking. He had put his life and his
determination on the line, and at the end of it all he had built up Crowley
Tobacco into what it was today–a tight-knit, highly profitable corporation with
a reputation for tackling unusual and different orders. Not all of those orders
were concerned with tobacco. Some of the most successful deals were those
Gerard called “capers.”
Gerard’s
father, embittered by his son but well prepared for the Lord, had died of
emphysema in 1958. Gerard had attended the funeral, although his mother had
refused to speak to him.
Four years
later, she had died, too. Gerard had become an orphan.
A
wealthy, experience-hardened orphan.
On the bed,
Francesca stretched. Her sex parted like a pink flower. Gerard continued to
listen to the news. A busload of old folks had dropped off the edge of
Slum-gullion Pass, Colorado. Francesca sat up and pulled at her tangled hair. “What
time is it?” she asked.
“Seven-thirty,”
said Gerard, without taking his cigar out of his mouth.
“I must have
fallen asleep.”
“Uh-huh.”
She yawned. “Do
you mind if I call room service and get some Perrier water? I have an unnatural
craving for Perrier water these days.”
“You’re not
pregnant, are you?” Gerard asked her.
She laughed.
Her breasts bounced. “Don’t you know the rhyme? There was a little goil, and
she had a little coil, right where it mattered most.”
“I don’t know
why you’re laughing,” said Gerard. “I wouldn’t mind if you were pregnant.”
“You don’t want
another child,” she said, although it was more of a question than a statement.
“No, I don’t.
But I still wouldn’t mind if you were pregnant.”
Francesca stood
up. “Are you more chauvinistic than flesh and blood can stand, or am I missing
something?”
“You’re missing
something.”
She leaned over
and kissed him on the parting of his dark hair. He smelled of cigars and
medicated shampoo. “I could be persuaded to love you,” she said.
He smiled.
She walked
across the bedroom and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the windowsill. She
took one out, lit it, and stood looking out through the nylon net drapes at the
sparkling dusky lights of downtown Los Angeles. Gerard watched her
appreciatively. She was an unusual girl.
Not clever, but
strong-willed almost to the point of ruthless-ness.
And
pretty, and unquenchably fierce in bed, and to Gerard that was all that
mattered.
She appeared so aloof and elegant. She always dressed in pure
silk. And yet she would do anything, and take it anywhere. That turned Gerard
on.
She said, as
calmly as if she were asking him what he wanted to eat for supper, “Have you
decided what you’re going to do about Evie yet?”
Gerard took out
his cigar. “Do?” he asked her. “What do you mean?”
“Well, she’s
not going to let you get away with it.”
Gerard
shrugged. “What can she do? She can only divorce me, and she won’t do that.
She’s too insecure; too dependent.”
“She seemed
very upset.”
“She’ll cool
down. She’ll drink the house dry, and then have a damned good weep, and that’ll
be it.”
“Do you want
her to cool down?”
Gerard looked
at Francesca closely. She had wide green eyes.
Green as
glass.
“Yes,” he said
in a measured voice. “Of course I want her to cool down.”
“So you want to
stay with her?”
“Does it make
any difference if I do?”
“Of course it
does. Your home is still with her, instead of with me.”
Gerard watched
her for a while. Then he said: “As far as I’m concerned home is where I spend
the most time. You and I see each other all
day,
we
spend two or three nights a week together.
We go to the
theater. We have dinner.”
“But you belong
to her.”
“That’s where
you’re wrong,” replied Gerard. “Evie belongs to me.”
Francesca drew
on her cigarette. “I don’t really see the distinction. A slaveowner has just as
many responsibilities to his slave as his slave has to him. And besides, you
still sleep with her.”
Gerard set his
cigar down in the ashtray and stood up. Francesca came nearer, and he rested
his hands on her bare shoulders. He was smiling at her, and yet his eyes were
so remote and expressionless that she was unable to smile back.
“You’re
jealous,” he said. She wasn’t at all sure if he was joking or not. “No,” she
whispered. “I’m just demanding.”
“Demanding?”
“I want you. I
want your time.”
He ran his
fingers down the length of her naked back. He cupped one cheek of her bottom in
his hand, so that his fingertips just touched her in a sensitive place. He
kissed her, so lightly that their lips scarcely grazed.
“Right at the
moment, my time is preempted,” he said.
“I know.
By Esmeralda.”
He nodded.
“Esmeralda is just as demanding as you.
More demanding, if
anything.
He seems cute, and old-fashioned, but underneath that
bandleader’s clothing he’s a goddamned man-eating alligator.”
She turned her
face away. “He frightens me.”
“He frightens
me, too. But his money’s good.”
Gcrard thought
of Esmeralda, the very first day that Esmeralda had come into his office, and
the arrogant way in which the Colombian had carefully tugged up one trouser leg
so that he could perch himself on the edge of Gerard’s desk. “I have a proposal
for you, Mr. Crowley,”
Esmeralda had
said.
“Very unusual, but very profitable.”
Gerard had eyed
Esmeralda coldly. “I’m too busy for any new contracts. I’m sorry.”
Esmeralda had
smiled warmly. “You weren’t too busy last October 24th to run twenty cases of
AK-47 Russian machine guns into San Salvador, were you?”
Gerard had
remained hard-faced; but he had been deeply disturbed. He was relying heavily
these days on a confidential government contract to supply the rebels in
Afghanistan with ammunition for their M-60 machine guns, smuggling them over
the Pakistani border in convoys of jeeps, and the very last thing he needed was
a public revelation that he had also armed Marxist-Leninist guerrillas in El
Salvador.
“What do you
want?” he had asked Esmeralda pointedly. “No screwing around. What do you
want?”
“It’s very
simple,” Esmeralda had smiled. “‘I have a Japanese client who is looking for
research facilities in California...
somewhere private where he can undertake a little medical work.”
“What kind of
medical work? What are you talking about?”
“Well, it’s not
much more than a health farm, really. Perhaps a little bit more than a health
farm.
You see, my
client is a physiologist; and he discovered during the Tokyo Olympics that a
certain combination of chemicals and anabolic steroids could develop an ordinary
athlete into a super athlete...
tireless, aggressive, and unstoppable.”
“I thought
anabolic steroids were banned by most athletics associations,” Gerard had
interrupted.
“They are,”
Esmeralda had agreed. “Yes, they are. But my client has been clever enough to
apply his knowledge to another field, a field of prime concern in the United
States, and in many parts of the Middle East, and that is personal security.
Using the techniques he developed at the Tokyo Olympics, my client now wishes
to develop a stable of bodyguards, superbodyguards, who will be rented out to
anybody who needs them. They will be available to protect industrialists,
politicians, even senior
mafiosi
. They will be
bodyguards of invincible strength, crushing capabilities. If Reagan had only
had one when John Hinckley shot at him, Hinckley would have been torn to tiny
shreds! You can call them killer bodyguards, if you like. They will terrify
anyone who comes near them.”
Gcrard had
said, “I stopped believing in fairy stories when I was seven years old, Mr.
Esmeralda.”
“You think I’m
telling you a fairy story? You want some kind of proof?’’
“I don’t want
anything from you. I just want you to leave.”
‘‘Look at
this,’’ Esmeralda had said, and produced from the inside pocket of his coat a
manila envelope. He had opened it, and taken out a 5 x 4 glossy black-and-white
print, which he had passed over to Gerard in a hand that trembled ever so
slightly.
Gerard had not
looked down at the picture at first: but then he had slowly lowered his eyes and
taken in a blurred, overexposed scene of a short, stocky man holding something
up over his head. The picture must have been taken in the mountains somewhere:
the ground was sloping, and there were conifer trees and rocks. It was only
when Gerard had peered closer, though, that he had begun to understand what it
was that the stocky man was holding up. It was a deer, or the remains of a
deer, which looked as if it had been torn apart like a gory telephone
directory. Its guts hung between the man’s outstretched arms, and its head was
falling back at a grotesque angle.
“This could
have been staged,” Gerard had said cautiously.
“Of course it
could.” Esmeralda had smiled. “But it was not. That man tore that deer to
pieces with his bare hands.”
Gerard had
handed the photograph back and looked at Esmeralda with great suspicion. He had
not yet wholly believed. But he had been prepared to listen.
Esmeralda had
admired his well-polished fingernails, and then added, “My client needs
somebody who can manage his interests in California.
Someone
to help him with organization and transportation; someone to fetch and carry.
Someone sophisticated and unscrupulous.
And that
someone will be you.”
Gerard had
stood up and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. “Mr. Esmeralda,” he
said fiercely, “I want you to get out of my office.”
“Of course you
do.” Esmeralda had smiled, and his voice had been as oily and soothing as warm
coconut milk. “But you’ve been running risks for years now, selling arms and
drugs to whichever client will pay you the most money, and there always comes a
time in lives like yours when chickens come home to roost. This is it, Mr.
Crowley. This is when your chickens come home.”
Gerard had
slowly closed the door of his office, and then he and Esmeralda had talked in
private for three hours. At the end of that time, Gerard had agreed, grudgingly
but curiously, to supervise the day-to-day fetching and carrying that was going
to be needed by the men who were running the program, and to liaise with
whomever else Esmeralda might appoint to assist him. “I have already chosen an
interpreter, a Japanese woman,” Esmeralda had informed him.
“Also,
a traffic-control expert, a retired naval commander.
You will be in
excellent company.”