Chances

by Jackie Collins

  Lucky glanced quickly at Dario. Wondering! She was shitting bricks!

  “I gotta take a little vacation,” he continued, “somewhere out of the country.”

  What was so earth-shattering about that? Lucky reached for a cigarette.

  “Maybe I’ll be gone a few weeks, maybe a few months. It’s difficult to say right now.”

  “How come?” Lucky asked, suddenly very alert.

  Gino shrugged eloquently. “How come? That’s a good question.” He fingered the faded scar on his cheek, barely visible now. “Hey, Costa, you wanna tell the kids what this is all about?”

  Costa nodded and formally cleared his throat. “Your father has to leave America for a while,” he said dourly. “A short while, we hope; it all depends on… certain circumstances.”

  “Yeh, yeh, we’re getting the picture,” Lucky said impatiently. “He has to go—but why?”

  Gino frowned in her direction. “Just shut up and listen.”

  Costa cleared his throat again. Lucky noticed that his hands were shaking and she felt sorry for him. He certainly looked twenty years older since Aunt Jen had gone.

  “You see, it’s like this,” he said. “For some years now the Internal Revenue Service has been after Gino for what they describe as tax avoidance on what they see as concealed assets. This all goes back some time, but as I am sure you both know, the IRS never lets up.”

  “Dirty sonsofbitches!” Gino interrupted bitterly. “I’ve paid enough goddamn taxes to run the White House for twenty years!”

  “Things have come to a head,” Costa continued. “I won’t bother you with the details, but we have it on excellent authority that a grand jury is being set up specially to investigate his tax affairs. They’re going to subpoena him, and it’ll mean a jail sentence for sure.”

  “But if you’ve paid your taxes,” Lucky said in a puzzled voice, “I don’t understand—”

  “Don’t be so dumb!” Gino snapped. “I thought you were a smart girl Sure I’ve paid taxes—more than enough. But there’s plenty I haven’t paid on. Plenty.”

  “So if you pay it now….”

  Both men laughed.

  “It’s not as simple as that, Lucky,” Costa said gently. “It’s far too complicated for you to even begin to understand. I’m just telling you the bare facts. If I started to go into it properly, it would take me a solid week.”

  “Yeh,” agreed Gino, “but it ain’t nothin’ that can’t get worked out. And I don’t plan to sit in some crummy jail while it’s fixed. That’s why I’m leavin’.”

  “Where will you go?” she asked anxiously.

  “Maybe London—we got a piece of the casino action there. Maybe France. I don’t know yet.”

  Her eyes sparkled. Suddenly she saw an escape route. “Can I go with you, daddy?” She hadn’t called him daddy in years.

  “What are you talkin’ about? Go with me? What a suggestion! You got your life here, and a pretty good one at that.”

  “Who says?” she muttered darkly.

  Ignoring her, Gino turned toward Dario, who was toying with a spoon. “Hey, you’re very quiet, kid, don’t you have no questions?”

  Dario jumped. He hadn’t been concentrating. It didn’t bother him if Gino had to leave the country. He never saw him anyway. “No questions,” he said quickly. “I understand.”

  “Good.” Gino rose from the table and walked to the window. “As a precaution,” he said, “I’m signin’ over a lot of things to you two. Nothin’ to bother yourselves with—you’ll just have to put your signature on some papers occasionally. Costa will have my power of attorney, he’ll be takin’ care of everything. Dario”—he stared at his son—“I want you to move to New York. There’s a lot of things I want you to know about. Costa’ll start teachin’ you.”

  At last Dario showed some emotion. “Move to New York!” he cried. “Why?”

  “I just told you why,” Gino said patiently. “You’re my son, that’s why. You’re a Santangelo, that’s why. And you’ve been pissin’ around at that dumb art school for long enough. It’s time you came into the business.”

  “But I don’t want to live in New York,” Dario objected. “I hate New York.”

  Gino’s eyes were bleak and cold. “Ain’t askin’ you, kid, I’m telling you. Get it?”

  Nervously Dario nodded.

  “What about me?” Lucky demanded.

  “What about you?”

  “Well, if Dario’s going to learn the business I want to as well.”

  “Don’t be a silly girl,” Gino said mildly.

  She felt four years of frustrated rage boiling up inside her. Her black eyes were as bleak and as cold as her father’s. “Why not?” she demanded. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a woman,” Gino replied calmly, “a married woman who will stay by her husband’s side and behave like a proper wife.” He paused, then added, “And it’s about time you had a baby. What are you waiting for anyway?”

  “What am I waiting for?” she exploded. “I’m waiting to have a life first—that’s what I’m waiting for.”

  Gino looked to Costa and threw up his hands in mock despair. “A life. She wants a life. It isn’t enough that she’s had the best that money can buy—”

  “Including a husband,” Lucky yelled angrily. “You bought me a husband with your lousy money. You—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “It’s not enough. I want more,” she screamed. “Why should Dario get a chance and not me?”

  “Cut it out, Lucky,” His voice was like ice.

  “Why should I? Why the fuck should I?”

  His black eyes were as deadly as hers. “Because I’m tellin’ you, that’s why. And watch your language. Ladies don’t talk like you.”

  She put her hands on her hips and arrogantly faced him. “I ain’t no lady,” she mocked. “I’m a Santangelo. I’m just like you—and you ain’t no gentleman.”

  He stared at his wild black-eyed daughter and he thought, Christ! What have I raised here? I’ve given her everything money can buy. What more does she want?

  “Why don’t you just shut up and sit down?” he said wearily.

  This made her even angrier. “Oh, sure! Shut her up. She’s only a woman, what does she matter? Shut her up and marry her off, and who cares whether she’s happy or not?” She took a deep breath and hissed, “You’re a fucking male chauvinist who thinks women are only good for screwing and cooking. Keep ’em in the kitchen or the bedroom where they belong. Is that what you did with mommy before she was murdered? Did you lock—”

  He cut her words off abruptly by hitting her across the face with all his strength.

  Costa jumped up from the table. “Gino!”

  Dario watched uneasily but did not move.

  Lucky was desperately trying to control the burning tears which threatened to slide down her face. “I hate you,” she hissed. “I really hate you. And I never want to see you again.”

  “Lucky—” Gino began.

  She stormed from the room. Behind her she heard him say, “Kids! What can you do? You try your best…. A woman in business… you gotta be nuts…. Emotional…. Jeeze, they’re all so goddamn emotional….”

  She wasn’t emotional. She was full of hard cold anger.

  Why had she run? Why hadn’t she stayed to state her case? Why hadn’t she convinced him to give her a chance?

  I don’t want to be married, daddy. I don’t want to stay by Craven Richmond’s side and behave like a proper wife. He can’t fuck properly. He can’t do anything properly.

  You made me marry him. I did it to please you and because I was too young to realize that your word wasn’t law. Now I want out. I want to be like you.

  And I will.

  Oh, yes, I will.

  Nobody’s going to stop me. I promise you that.

  Yes. I’m your daughter. And haven’t you always said that a Santangelo’s word is their bond?

  You’ll see.

 
Everyone will see.

  Steven

  1971

  Since reconciling with his mother, Steven had been busier than ever. It was difficult to resist her wish that he go into private practice. He did owe her—especially after the Zizi business. So, to please Carrie, he joined Jerry’s law firm as a partner. He stuck it out six months and then—splitting amicably with Jerry—returned to public service.

  “I know what you want for me,” he told his disappointed mother, “and believe me, I want it too. But I have to feel that I’m doing something worthwhile—and representing rich ladies suing even richer corporations is not my idea of worthwhile.”

  Carrie tried to understand. It wasn’t easy when she saw Jerry getting richer and more important, while Steven slogged away at what he considered worthwhile.

  Recently he had started dating again. “Your pecker’ll fall off if you don’t give it some use!” Jerry had complained. Good friend Jerry who had fucked his wife. Best to forget about that.

  Tentatively he reentered the sexual rat race. He proceeded slowly, carefully. The first girl he took to bed was a law student with a magnificent afro. The first girl since Zizi. He had been celibate for a year—not such a big deal. It was like sticking your toe into lukewarm bath water after months without a wash. He enjoyed it. He could also live without it.

  After Afro, girls crept back into his life on a purely disposable basis. Never again would a woman lead him around by his cock. Never.

  He worked hard, dated when it suited him, and saw a lot of Carrie to make up for lost time. As glamorous and assured as she appeared, Steven did not feel that she was really happy. He tried to talk to her, but she put up barriers when it came to talking about her life.

  Then the Bert Sugar case occurred, and the course of Steven’s career was radically changed.

  Bert Sugar was a no-account petty criminal. Arrested for the brutal rape of a fifteen-year-old girl, he was locked up and the arresting officer told him, “You’re going to whack off for the rest of your life, you bastard. ’Cause when they finish splittin’ open your dirty ass in the pen, you can bet you won’t ever wanna do anything else.”

  “I’m innocent, Mr. Berkely,” Bert Sugar told Steven tearfully at their first meeting. “It’s a frame.”

  Looking at the miserable pathetic man, Steven was prepared to believe him. He didn’t look like he had enough strength to take a piss, let alone commit rape.

  So Steven defended him, brilliantly. And got him off, in spite of the fact that the prosecution thought they had enough evidence to lock Bert up and throw away the key forever.

  Steven was convinced that Bert Sugar was innocent. He discredited witnesses, spoke movingly of the pitifully deprived life Bert had led, and persuaded the jury to give the man a chance.

  Bert Sugar walked out of court a free man.

  The victim’s mother, a black woman, accosted Steven outside the courtroom. Her eyes were full of fire as she gripped Steven by the arm and wailed, “Brothah! May God forgive you for what you done today.”

  He tried to pull his arm free, but she had a grip of steel.

  “You is wrong,” she continued to wail. “You let the white devil go free. You will pay. We all will pay.”

  He had extracted his arm from her grasp finally and walked away. Of course she didn’t want to admit that Bert Sugar was not the man that had attacked her daughter. She wanted a fall guy. Bert was perfect. He lived near them; he had no job, therefore was home all day; he had been seen near their apartment within minutes of the crime. All circumstantial evidence. The girl couldn’t even identify her attacker. He had gained entry to the apartment through a window, sneaked up on her while she was asleep in bed, blindfolded her, tied her up, and beaten and raped her repeatedly.

  Steven was glad he had defended Bert Sugar. With anyone else, the pitiful little man wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  Within twenty-four hours, Steven’s sense of triumph turned to sick horror. Bert Sugar, upon his release, had gone straight to a neighborhood bar. There he had sat, downing bottles of Budweiser and boasting about the “little black cooze he had fucked good” and “the dumb nigger lawyer who had got him out of jail.”

  Drunk, Bert had reeled from the bar at eleven o’clock. He had returned to his victim’s apartment, knocked the mother unconscious with a length of piping he had picked up in the basement, entered the place, and proceeded to attack the petrified girl, ripping her nightdress viciously off and trying for another rape. Only this time Bert Sugar couldn’t get it up. Bert Sugar had had far too much to drink.

  The police arrived in time to pull him off of the hysterical girl. They did not arrive in time to save her mother. She died from head injuries on the way to the hospital.

  Steven was destroyed. It was his fault, his misjudgment. Because of him a woman was dead. He was an accessory to her murder.

  Nobody could calm him down. Eventually Carrie persuaded him to take a vacation. A friend of Elliott’s had a cottage in Montauk, and it was arranged that Steven could stay there as long as he wanted. Carrie said she would go with him.

  He insisted that she didn’t. “Please, ma, I just want to be alone, think things out.”

  He liked the solitude. The wind, the rain, the long walks on the deserted wintry beach.

  He thought long and hard about his life, what he had achieved, what he hoped to achieve.

  He thought about his relationships with people. Carrie, who was she really? He loved her but he didn’t really know her. Somewhere in the back of his mind he could remember things long ago. Women, lots of them, singing “Happy Birthday.” Where was that? He had asked Carrie. She had shrugged. The same when he asked about a skinny man called Leroy. He remembered being with someone called Leroy. The name stuck. Carrie said she had never heard the name in her life.

  Zizi. One long bad dream. He was over her with a vengeance.

  When he returned from Montauk he had made a big decision. “I’m changing sides,” he told Jerry. “No more defense. In future I’m going to be a prosecutor. I think I can do more good. So many things in this town need cleaning up, and if I can do my bit to help…”

  Jerry noticed the glint of the zealot in Steven’s eyes. “Private or public?” he asked, as if he didn’t already know the answer to that question.

  “Public, of course,” replied Steven frowning.

  “Of course.” Jerry laughed. “So what else is new?”

  Lucky

  1970-1974

  When Gino left town in 1970, it was not a quiet exit. Headlines screamed gleefully about getting rid of one of America’s most powerful criminals. Photographers jostled and fought at the airport to get the best shots of him.

  He wore his customary dark suit, a fedora hat pulled low over his forehead, and oblique dark glasses. He did not smile, or turn, or react in any way at all to the hordes of photographers. It pissed him off that they knew about his departure.

  Once aboard the airplane, he was furious to discover that some of his traveling companions were reporters. He should have realized then and there that something was up.

  The flight to Rome was uneventful. What happened after they landed was not. It was the beginning of a nightmare that Gino would never forget.

  He was refused admittance into Italy on the grounds that he was an undesirable alien. Italy! The country of his birth! From there he joined a flight to Geneva, where the same thing happened. On to France. There they kept him waiting in a dingy room for seven and a half hours before turning him away. It was unbelievable!

  He was by this time exhausted and humiliated. And all the while the press danced attendance, recording his every embarrassment.

  He had of course contacted Costa, who said there’d been a leak and that the whole idea of the harassment was to force him to return to America. But Costa had not been idle. He instructed Gino to fly to London, where there was a slim chance he would be admitted. “If not, try Israel—you understand me?”

  Yeh. Gino understood
him. What Costa was trying to say was that Israel would take him—but things had to be worked out. They had plenty of contacts in Israel. Plus Gino had made a very prudent contribution of one million dollars with more to come to a prominent Israeli children’s charity.

  He went through the motions of trying to get into England. He sat and fried in another little room while various officials came and went. He thought about his meeting with Dario and Lucky. It had not turned out like he had hoped. Dario, sulky and withdrawn. Lucky, as wild as ever. An emotional kid who didn’t know what she wanted. It was a shame they had had to part bad friends, but he would be back soon. He would spend some time with her, make everything all right.

  It turned out to be the same old story in England. Undesirable alien. Christ! They made it sound like he came from another planet!

  Forty-two long weary hours after leaving America, Gino was granted entry—on a temporary visitor’s visa—to Israel. He took up residence in a penthouse in the Dan Hotel for three months and then moved to a house near the beach, where he lived quietly with two bodyguards, a housekeeper, two Alsatian dogs, and an occasional girl friend.

  He was waiting to go home.

  Negotiations to arrange this were not proving easy.

  As soon as Gino left, Lucky returned to the Bahamas, finished off her vacation with Craven, and then it was back to Washington and the same old routine. She was still seething with fury about her father’s attitude toward her, and she was determined to think of some way to show him that he was wrong. How dare he treat her like some dumb little kid. Women are too emotional for business, huh? She would find a way to show him.

  The Richmonds were embarrassed by Gino’s publicity. She was an embarrassment to them. So when Costa sent her some papers to sign a few weeks later, she decided to take a trip to New York and deliver them personally.

  On the plane she read them through, and as she read she realized with a tingle of excitement that she had been appointed a director of Gino’s companies and businesses. She glanced quickly at Costa’s brief note again. You don’t have to bother reading them… just sign by the pencil mark… purely a formality.…