Anne and Jack left their bedroom and checked the living room and dining room. Everything was ready. Priscilla, who wore a black uniform with white apron and white cap, plucked up from the floor a leaf that had fallen from a pot of gold chrysanthemums. Since there would be only twelve at table, Priscilla had suggested that Mrs. Lear need not hire a butler for the evening. The cook would take care of everything in the kitchen, and Priscilla would serve. By now Anne was confident that the maid would handle everything to perfection.
Curt and Betsy were the first to arrive.
Anne waited for them in the living room, where she stood before the fireplace. Behind her, a huge mirror half shrouded in drapes hung above the mantel. She wore a full rose-colored silk taffeta skirt, calf-length, and a black cashmere sweater with mid-length sleeves and a scoop neckline that displayed the Arthur Emerald in a setting of diamonds and white gold.
Jack greeted Curt and Betsy in the foyer. “Anne looks . . . regal, Jack,” Curt observed.
“I’m very proud of her,” Jack said simply.
“My God, what an emerald!” Betsy exclaimed when she took Anne’s hand.
“It’s the only significant piece of the Weldon family collection I brought with me,” Anne explained. “I have it on loan, so to speak. It has to go back, eventually. King George the Third gave this emerald to Arthur, Fifth Earl of Weldon, who had supported him in some political dispute or other. The Eighth Earl commissioned the present setting, with the diamonds.”
Jack nodded toward the voluptuous teenage nude hanging on the wall to the right of the fireplace. “Don’t think the Earl and Countess of Weldon are cheap for wanting the emerald back. The painting is a Boucher, and it was their wedding present to us.”
“I’ve never seen a Dürer quite like that one,” said Betsy, pointing at a framed sketch.
Anne explained. “Albrecht Dürer didn’t like to go to the doctor, so he did sketches like this of himself nude, pointing to the place where he hurt—hoping the doctor could diagnose from that.”
“The painting on wood over there—of the Annunciation—is a fragment of a Grünewald altarpiece,” said Jack. “Anne looted Europe.”
“Just Berlin,” Anne said with a sly smile.
The Morrills arrived, and the Sullivans. Then came the California Lears.
Erich, at sixty-one, was now completely bald and heavier than the last time Jack had seen him.
He was accompanied by a nineteen-year-old girl with flaming red hair, big blue eyes, and a red-painted mouth. “Jack,” he said, “let me present a gal with a great future in pictures. Miss Barbara Tracy.”
Barbara Tracy was wearing a black sequined dress that clung to her. Jack sensed that she was embarrassed—though for which of several possible reasons he did not try to guess.
Erich stared into the living room and saw Anne. “Well, Jee-zuss Christ! You seem to have a talent for one thing, anyway. And a countess no less.”
“She’s very beautiful,” said Dorothy Lear, Jack’s dowdy sister-in-law. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she was not an unattractive woman but one with an uncanny knack for choosing unflattering styles. Unfortunately, she was entirely without Mrs. Roosevelt’s winning personality.
“Oh, is that a Christmas tree I see?” Bob asked. “And a menorah, too. Aren’t we broad-minded?”
“Eclectic,” said Jack.
Anne greeted her in-laws with skilled and practiced warmth. If Erich expected to detect any suggestion of approval or disapproval or even of surprise, he had to be disappointed. She gave nothing away.
“How do I address you?” Erich asked with a slightly sardonic smile.” ‘Your Ladyship’?”
“Really, Mr. Lear, why don’t you try ‘Anne’? I’ve been known to respond to it.”
Erich grinned and tightened his grip on her hand. “You’re gonna make a great American!”
“With all due respect, Sir, I am going to try to avoid doing so.”
“Okay. Right. Jack didn’t become an Englishman when he spent some time in England, and you’re not going to turn into an American.”
“Precisely.”
Erich nodded. “I, uh, I’ve never seen a home furnished with such taste.”
“It wouldn’t suit everybody,” said Anne. “But it suits us.”
“I hope you come to California soon and see the California style. It wouldn’t suit everybody either.”
“I’m sure I’ll admire it, Mr. Lear.”
“I hope you will. Everybody calls me Erich. Why don’t you?”
Anne nodded. “Erich. I’m so glad we’ve met at last.”
A little later Jack spoke with his father. “Some girl you brought,” Jack said dryly.
“Don’t kid yourself,” said Erich. “What you’re lookin’ at is talent That gal’s got talent. She’s a natural.”
“Natural redhead?” Jack asked with a grin.
Erich laughed. “She’s no redhead!”
“Bob have her under contract?”
Erich pointed a finger at Barbara Tracy. “If I bang ’em, he signs ’em. Family obligation. He may even put her in a picture,”
At dinner, Curt was seated beside Erich.
“How many radio stations does my son own?” Erich asked Curt.
“You’ll find this hard to believe, Mr. Lear, but I don’t know for sure. I’m a journalist and a broadcaster. Mickey knows. Herb knows. I think LNI has twelve stations now. I understand we may pick up one more in January and another a month or so later.”
“He’s a damned aggressive corporate raider,” said Erich grimly. “I know something about the Richmond station. Jack went to the stockholders. Their stock could bring $15.25 a share. He offered $17.00. Management found another investor who was willing to bid $17.25. Jack stuck at $17.00 and sent a mailing to the stockholders. He told them their stock was not worth even the $15.25 but he had offered $17.00 because he knew he could make the station more profitable and increase their dividends. When the stockholders met, he owned 38 percent. The owners of 14 percent voted for his management, and Jack took over. He fired every damned executive in the house, as a warning to others who might resist him sometime. He even fired their goddamned secretaries! He fired two announcers because he didn’t like their voices. He put the word out that southern accents were out; the station was to sound like a station in Washington or Philadelphia, if not a station in Boston. The local congressman had been getting free political ads. Jack told him that was illegal and from now on he’d have to pay for any ads he ran. The congressman told Jack he’d give him trouble with the FCC. Jack told him to go screw himself. In the 1946 election, the congressman scraped through with less than seven hundred votes. He ain’t going to give nobody trouble, now. My son’s a chip off the old block.”
“I’ve heard that,” Curt said blandly.
“He never learned a damned thing from me,” said Erich, who was a little fuzzy from what he’d had to drink. “He ignored me, never figured I knew anything he needed to know. But guess what. It was born in him! He’s just as big an asshole as I am.”
“With a different style, I believe you’ll admit.”
“Yeah, but style doesn’t count. What counts is results, and my son knows how to get results.”
After dinner Barbara Tracy, the redhead, talked with Betsy Frederick. “Erich tells me Anne is his second wife and that the first one was just as beautiful and refined as this one. Erich says that the first wife—what was her name?”
“Kimberly.”
“He says Kimberly disliked him.”
“I think there was mutual antipathy between them,” Betsy remarked.
“I got the impression there were bad feelings between father and son, but they seem to get along all right.”
“Each of them would gladly kill the other,” Betsy said mordantly, with a trace of a smile on her lips.
Four
IN PARIS, ANNE HAD FOUND TWO SUPERLATIVE ETCHINGS BY Mario Tauzin that had apparently been taken from a portfolio and professionally mat
ted and framed. They were deftly executed line drawings of an innocently nude pubescent boy and girl. In one the girl smiled lazily as she welcomed the boy to use a finger to explore her spread-open furrow. In the other drawing the boy grinned as the girl gripped his shaft in one hand and lifted his balls with the other. Anne had bought the etchings for their bedroom, and they hung there now.
She and Jack had showered together and now lay on their bed and talked.
“I don’t like to say anything negative about Basil,” she said, “but he never did appreciate anything like the Tauzins. He was a man of very straightforward tastes and wouldn’t really have appreciated even this . . . .”
She meant what she was doing: gently fondling Jack’s penis with her long, slender fingers.
“Englishmen have many admirable qualities,” said Jack. “They make bold soldiers, not bold cooks or lovers. Now, English girls, on the other hand—”
“Bawstard!” Anne laughed, and she bent forward and kissed his glans. She flicked it with the tip of her tongue. It seemed never to have occurred to her to do more, and he had decided not to suggest she should. If she found her way—He would let her find it.
She turned on her back and spread her legs. With her fingers she stretched her cunt open and showed him her delicately colored folds. She rolled her hips and smiled as she watched him stare at her cunt flower.
No woman had ever done this for him before. Tonight, for the first time, he bent forward and kissed what she was showing. He couldn’t resist doing that. He touched her folds, then the little finger of her clitoris, with his tongue. She moaned.
“Come in, Jack! Come in! I want you. Hey! No rubber. Let’s make a baby! It’s time we made a baby!”
NINETEEN
One
1947
JACK FLEW TO NEW ORLEANS BECAUSE CAP DURENBERGER insisted it was important, and he had learned to place some trust in Cap’s judgment. He had asked Curt to come with him. At about six o’clock he sat down with Cap and Curt in the living room of the hotel suite Cap had reserved. Cap poured drinks.
“What’s the deal, anyway?” Jack asked Cap. “Let’s get specific. We can acquire nine stations all at once?”
“Not acquire,” said Cap. “Affiliate. They’ve got nine stations—Dallas, Shreveport, Memphis, Lexington, Kansas City, and so on. Their stations are not for sale. The company’s not for sale. But they might listen to a proposition for a merger. They play a lot of bluegrass and country music, and they broadcast a stream of market reports—pork bellies, cattle, grain, and cotton. They’re losing market share in some of their cities because the population wants to hear just so much bluegrass and then wants something more. On the other hand, they don’t want network affiliation, even if they could get it, because they’d have to give more time to network programs than they want to give. We could offer them a looser relationship. They—”
“Well, what’s the deal tonight?” Jack interrupted. “How come we—”
“If your flight had arrived earlier, they’d have asked us to meet in their lawyers’ offices. But since you got here after four in the afternoon, they seem to figure an evening meeting in a club, where we can all get better acquainted, is a good idea.”
“What kind of club?”
“Ray l’Enfant is taking us to his club. For dinner and . . . whatever.”
“What’s ‘whatever’?” Curt asked.
“I’m not really sure. Anyway, he’s picking us up at seven.”
L’Enfant came to the hotel for them in a sixteen-cylinder Lincoln Continental. Billy Bob Cotton was with him.
Since no one but Ray knew the city at all, they had no real idea where he was taking them. For a while Ray l’Enfant drove along the river, chatting blandly about the weather and about the varying scents that reached them through the open windows of the car, particularly the unique smell of the lower river: the stench of death on a saltwater tide combined with the singular oily stink of Mississippi mud. Then he turned into a neighborhood of what looked like antebellum mansions, though it would have been difficult to describe the houses in any detail, since each was hidden by a tall hedge or a wall and by thick oaks festooned with Spanish moss. The scents there were stronger, so much so as even to be oppressive, like heavy perfumes.
“This is an area of myths and legends,” said l’Enfant. “Some of the houses are said to be haunted . . . some with things worse than ghosts.”
“Like?” Jack asked.
L’Enfant chuckled. “Zombies. Vampires. Werewolves. All the things simple minds can imagine when they hear strange noises or see unexpected lights.”
“Like Christians.” Cap laughed. “When they can’t explain something, they figure Satan has been at work.”
“I take Christianity a bit more seriously than that,” Billy Bob Cotton said reprovingly.
Billy Bob Cotton had appeared for their evening meeting in a light gray suit, with a champagne-colored Stetson, and snakeskin boots. If to an easterner he looked and sounded like a country boob, he needed to say only a few words to disabuse anyone of that notion.
“We are not going to see any ghosts or devils, vampires or saints, tonight,” said l’Enfant.
Raymond l’Enfant was the youngest man in the car. He was tall and slender and had shiny burn scars on his left cheek and left hand. As Jack would learn, he had flown a P-47 Thunderbolt in Europe during the war and had been burned over much of the left side of his body when he landed his flak-damaged plane on a field in France. He had won the Distinguished Service Cross and wore the ribbon in his lapel.
Somewhat abruptly he pulled off the street and drove up to a Gothic wrought-iron gate, where he stopped and blinked his headlights.
A big Negro emerged from the shadows. “Monsieur l’Enfant. Welcome,” he said.
L’Enfant got out of the car and beckoned his guests to do the same. The Negro slid behind the wheel and backed the car into the street. He would park it somewhere out of sight.
The five men walked up a short driveway bordered by lush and malodorous shrubbery, then mounted the wooden steps to a broad veranda.
A woman, probably alerted by a buzzer the Negro had sounded, opened the double doors of the mansion.
“Messieurs . . .”
“Bon soir, Antoinette,” said l’Enfant. “We’ll sit in the big room tonight and see the show.”
Antoinette, who was fifty years old at least, and wearing a clinging red dress, led them to a table in a dining room with about twenty tables. A quartet—trumpet, saxophone, piano, and drums—played New Orleans jazz, but not so loud as to inhibit conversation.
The big round table was set for six, but a busboy quickly removed the sixth setting, almost before the five men were in their chairs. The linen was thick, the silver heavy. A crystal vase in the center of the table held a dozen white roses.
A waitress appeared. “Ah’m Polly,” she said. “What’s your pleasure, gentlemen?”
Except for red shoes and dark stockings held up by red garters, Polly was stark naked. She had an angelic face, light brown hair, and a fleshy body with swelling breasts that seemed to stretch her skin almost to the breaking point. L’Enfant ordered a bottle of bourbon and one of Scotch, and Polly hurried off to fill the order.
“Nevah git enough of this place,” said Billy Bob.
“I don’t think I ever will either,” Cap added.
“I’ll propose each of you for membership,” Ray said. “It costs $1,500 initiation fee and $150 a month minimum. ‘Course, out of town guests pay only $25 a month minimum.”
“I’d be honored to be a member,” said Jack. “What’s the name of the club?”
“That’s one of the beauties of it,” said Ray. “It’s got no name. Your monthly statement will come from the New Orleans Cotton Exchange Club, but don’t ever ask a cabdriver to take you to that. Tell him to take you to the No-Name Club.”
Jack laughed. “The No-Name Club. Curt, don’t we have anything like this in New York?”
Curt
shrugged, but Cap grinned and said, “I can introduce you to a place on West Forty-seventh Street. But my suggestion is, it’s a dumb dog who shits in his own bed. You want something like this, find it out of town. Right, Ray?”
“Or find it in N’Awleans, where we know how to keep secrets.”
Cap spoke to Ray. “I won’t make any decisions for him, but I’ll suggest to you that Jack may not want to take advantage of the best the No-Name Club has to offer. He’s recently married to the most heavenly creature you could ever hope to see—an English countess.”
Jack laughed. “In return for the favor, I’ll report that Cap recently married a heavenly creature of his own. A girl from Lubbock, Texas, which is his hometown.”
“I’ll suggest we don’t take advantage of what the club offers in that respect,” Ray said. “I’d rather have mine in circumstances a good deal less public. ’Course if our waitress gives you a hard-on—”
“I come to look, not to touch,” said Billy Bob. “The two are to some extent mutually exclusive.”
“You can do your touching back at your hotel,” said Ray. “I can arrange something if you want, but you can arrange for yourselves easy enough.”
“The food here is out of this world,” said Billy Bob.
“If you’ll allow me, I’ll order,” said Ray. “I warn you, though. It won’t be what you’re used to.”
Jack smiled.
“Give me escape from what I’m used to.”
They drank sparingly from the bourbon and Scotch, because Ray put in an order for their appetizer and entrée, with the appropriate wine—a musty red Bordeaux.
“We might talk a little business,” Ray suggested. “You must understand, Mr. Lear, that my partners and I are not interested in selling our stations or our company. There are nine of us. We call ourselves partners, but in fact Broadcasters Alliance is a corporation, and each of the nine partners owns one-ninth of the stock. The stations and their licenses belong to the company. Of course, if five of us sold our stock to you, you could take control of the company. But I don’t think any five of us will.”
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