When he sat down again he unobtrusively moved his chair so that their legs could touch. Later he found her hand under the table and placed it on his hardness. And all the while he kept making light conversation as if nothing at all was going on.
After the main course, the orchestra began to play another tango. He looked at her. “Our dance?”
She nodded and started to get up. Suddenly she stopped and sat down again. “Damn!” she said furiously.
“What is it?”
She glanced at the other girls, then at him. “I knew I should have worn panties. I’m all wet and it’s gone through the dress. Everyone will see.”
“What will we do?” Maggie asked.
“We could sit here until they close,” Joan said.
“Don’t be a damn fool, the restaurant doesn’t close until two in the morning.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Sergei smiled. “I can handle it. No one will know.”
“You can?”
“Sure.” He leaned toward her. As if by accident his hand knocked over the glass of champagne, which flowed down into her lap.
“Oh, I’m so terribly sorry!” he exclaimed in a voice loud enough to be heard at the nearby tables. He got to his feet dabbing at her with his napkin. “A thousand apologies for my clumsiness!”
Sue Ann began to smile as the waiters hurried up solicitously. She got to her feet the two girls and the waiter surrounding her. “You will come up to the suite for coffee and dessert, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
He remained standing until they had left the room, then sat down again and called for the check. He signed it with a flourish. As he was crossing the lobby on his way to the elevators, Kurt walked up to him. “Well?”
“Don’t worry, this one will pay the rent.”
Joan opened the door for him. He entered the room. Sue Ann was seated on the couch in a negligee. “Everything all right now?” he asked, smiling.
She nodded.
“I took the liberty of ordering coffee and sweets. Then a pot of caviar and more champagne.”
“Caviar and champagne?”
“It’s the best thing for a long happy night.”
Maggie got to her feet. “We’ll go to our rooms.”
Sergei spoke to her but kept looking at Sue Ann. “What for? I thought we were going to have a party.”
“But there’s only you.”
“Why do you think I ordered caviar and champagne?”
Sue Ann began to laugh. This was the kind of language she understood. “You think you’re pretty good.”
He smiled, looking down at her. “I’m the best there is.”
“Enough for all of us?”
“I’m a very simple man. It’s the only sport in which I indulge. Everything else is a waste of time.”
Sue Ann looked at the other girls. “What do you say, kids? I’m willing.”
Maggie and Joan looked at each other hesitantly.
“Come on, what are you waiting for?” Sergei laughed. “I always put on a better show when there’s an audience.”
“I’m hungry,” Sergei said.
“So am I.”
“You two go ahead,” Maggie said sleepily. “I can’t keep my eyes open.”
“What about—” Sergei never finished his question, for Joan was fast asleep. He looked at Sue Ann and grinned. “It looks like just the two of us.”
“That’s the way it would have been,” she said with a slight edge of sarcasm, “if you weren’t such a showoff.”
He laughed again and got out of bed and padded naked into the sitting room. He sat down on the couch and began to spread the thin toast with butter, then liberally covered it with heavy spoonsful of grosgrain caviar.
He looked up as Sue Ann came in and stood beside him. “Help yourself,” he said, gesturing, his mouth full.
“You’re a pig!”
He didn’t answer. He picked up another slice of toast. “I thought you Continentals were supposed to be such gentlemen.”
“If you want to be treated like a lady go put some clothes on,” he retorted.
She stared at him for a moment, then turned and went into the bathroom. When she came back she was carrying two white terrycloth robes. She tossed one at him while she shrugged into the other. She sank into the chair opposite him. His robe still lay where it fell, across his lap.
“What are you staring at?”
“Nothing.” She hesitated, then asked, “Just between the two of us, what were you trying to prove?”
He stared back at her, suddenly aware that she was brighter than he had thought. “What do you mean?”
“O.K., so Dax is your friend. But he wasn’t the only man I ever went to bed with.” He didn’t answer.
“Were you trying to show me that you were a better man than Dax?”
He grinned. “No, you were right the first time. I’m a pig. I just thought it would be fun to bang all three of you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t buy that. You’re not that stupid.”
“O.K.,” he said, suddenly angry, “so I was trying to prove I was a better man.”
“You don’t have to get angry. You are, you know.” She smiled. “You’ve made your point. You’re the most man I ever had.”
He relaxed suddenly.
“I’ve never known anything like you. I kept coming all the time. Even while you were with them. Each time they did, I did. After a while I got mad. I wanted you for myself. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him. “What are you going to do about it?”
He got to his feet suddenly. “Come on, get some clothes on.”
“Where are we going?”
“To my place, where we can be alone.”
She looked at him, hesitating. Then she gestured toward the other bedrooms. “What about them?”
“Fuck them,” he said, “let them find their own. You’re the only one I want.”
101
The March sunshine bounced off the snow, sparklingly blinding. It poured through the open window into the room, where they sat at breakfast.
“I think you’re going to have to marry me, boy.”
Sergei picked up his glass of orange juice. “What for?”
“The usual reasons. I’m knocked up.”
He was silent.
“You never figured on that, did you?”
“I thought about it,” he said, “but I figured you’d taken care of things.”
She smiled. “Who had the time? Are you angry?” He shook his head. “Then what are you thinking?”
“I know a doctor. He’s very good.”
This time it was Sue Ann who didn’t speak. After a moment he could see the tears hovering just behind her eyes. Her voice was flat and dull. “O.K., if that’s what you want.”
“No,” he answered harshly, “that’s not what I want. But can’t you see what they’ll do to you?”
“I don’t care. I’m not the first girl that ever went to the altar carrying a package.”
“That’s not what I mean. Look, it’s O.K. for you to be having fun and games with a phony prince. But marrying one is another story. They’ll make you a laughingstock!”
“My grandfather left me fifty million dollars, which I get all of when I’m twenty-five or I marry, whichever comes first. With that kind of money we can piss on all of them.”
He stared at her. “That’s just what I mean. That makes it worse.”
Suddenly she was angry. “What the hell kind of a gigolo are you anyway? Isn’t my money as good as anybody else’s? That old man in Monte Carlo, whatever his name is, or that woman who keeps sending checks from Paris?”
He stared at her. “You know?”
“Of course I know. Don’t you think my father’s bankers were after me the minute they found out I hadn’t gone back to school and was living with you? They gave me the whole dossier.”
He fell silent. After a moment he
said, “And you still want to marry me?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Why? I don’t get it.”
“You’re a fool then. You know what I’m like. I used to think there was something the matter with me before I met you. One man was never enough. There were times I used to do it with three men in a day, one right after the other. I was beginning to think there wasn’t a man alive who could give me all I wanted. Then I found you.”
“And that’s reason enough to get married?”
“It’s enough for me. What other reason do you need if two people can make it together like we do?”
“There’s something called love.”
“Now you’re beginning to sound like an idiot. Maybe you can tell me exactly what love is?”
He didn’t answer. A kind of sorrow came over him, together with a pity for her. Then he looked into her eyes and saw the naked terror revealed there. That he might refuse her. And suddenly he understood. The fear of what she was, had been, and would be if there weren’t one man she could cling to.
A kind of smile crossed her lips. “We’re very much alike, you and I. We’re doers. All the rest are talkers. If what we have isn’t love, then it’s the nearest thing to it that either of us will ever know.”
The pity in him overpowered his reason. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that the very reasons she advanced were the things that would destroy their relationship. He knew deep inside that in time neither of them could keep from seeking satisfaction with others.
“O.K.” he said, wondering which of them would be the first to succumb, “we’ll get married.”
It was planned as a quiet little wedding in a small church just outside Saint Moritz but it turned out to be something entirely different. The Daley money was just too important to be ignored, and in the end it was held in the cathedral with a hundred guests and throngs of reporters.
“You don’t look happy,” Robert said as they waited in the vestry.
Sergei came back from the door through which he had been looking into the crowded church. “I’ve yet to see a happy bridegroom.”
Robert laughed. “You’ll be all right once we start down the aisle.”
Sergei looked at him. “I know, but it’s not that I’m worrying about. It’s after.” Robert didn’t answer. He, too, had his doubts.
Sergei turned back to the door. “Dax should have been here. He would have been amused by all this. I wonder if he ever got the invitation. You haven’t heard from him, have you?”
“Not one word, not since he left Cambridge a year ago. I wrote him several times but he never answered.”
“It’s a strange, wild country, I guess. I hope nothing has happened to him.”
“He’ll be all right. Much more will be happening to us.”
Sergei shot him a quick look. “You still think there’ll be war?”
“I don’t see how they can stop it. The war in Spain is almost over. The Germans have finished their warmup. That much you know from your father’s letters.” Robert laughed. “So now Chamberlain is going to Munich to talk to that madman. It’s all a waste of time. Nothing will do any good.”
“What does your father say?”
“He’s transferring everything he can to America. He even wants Caroline and me to go back there.”
“Are you?” Robert shook his head. “Why not?”
Robert shrugged. “For two important reasons. I’m Jewish, and I’m French.”
“What can you do? You’re not even a soldier.”
“There will be something,” Robert said. “At least I can stay and fight. There are too many of us fleeing before that monster already.”
The sound of the organ came into the room. Robert peeked out the door, then turned back. “Allons, mon enfant. Now it is your turn to be a man.”
The wire-service reporters were standing at the back of the church as the couple knelt before the altar. “Think of it,” the AP man said. “In ten minutes he walks out of here gone from broke to fifty million bucks.”
“You sound jealous.”
“You’re damn right I am. At least it should have been an American boy. What’s wrong with good old American boys?”
“I don’t know,” Inna Andersen, who was covering the nuptials for Cosmo-World, whispered cattily from his right, “but from what I heard she tried them all and they were found wanting.”
“Now, now.”
“I wish I could afford that caviar-and-champagne kick,” the INS man said. “It really must do the trick.”
“Don’t get big ideas. Us poor people better stick to oysters.”
The AP man looked at him and smiled. “That’s fine, but what are we going to do all summer?”
102
The rustling of fallen leaves brought him from sleep and he reached out, his hand closing over the rifle lying on the blanket beside him. From the corner of his eye he saw Fat Cat, already on his feet, blending silently into the trees. Muffling the sound with his blanket, he pumped a cartridge into the firing chamber of the rifle and waited.
There was silence all about him. He squinted up at the sky. He didn’t have to check his watch to know it was around five o’clock in the morning. He put his ear to the ground and listened.
The footsteps had ceased. He took a deep breath. Fat Cat had intercepted whoever it had been. He still did not move. There was a faint hum of voices, and the mere sound reassured him. If it were anything dangerous there would be no conversation. Just the noises of death.
The footsteps began again. Dax raised his head and peered down the trail from the small cave in which he lay. Just as a precaution he raised his rifle and leveled the sight on the corner of the trail.
The bright red and blue uniform of the soldier appeared first. Behind him, Fat Cat, his revolver still in his hand, was almost invisible in his faded and nondescript khaki. Dax waited until they were almost upon him, then got to his feet.
The soldier started nervously, his face still pale from the encounter with Fat Cat. Then he pulled himself together and saluted. “Corporal Ortiz, Capitán,” he said formally. “I come with dispatches from el Presidente.”
“Sit down, corporal.” Dax squatted. “We don’t stand on ceremony here. Besides, you make too good a target in that uniform of yours.”
With a sigh of relief the soldier sank to the ground. “I have been trying to find you for almost a month.”
Dax squinted at him. “You did well. One hour more and we would have been gone.” He looked at Fat Cat. “How about some coffee?”
Fat Cat nodded and set about making a small fire, where the wind would disperse the smoke before it could rise into the air. He looked down curiously as the soldier opened his knapsack and handed Dax a number of envelopes tied neatly together with a string.
Dax settled his back against the rock and opened the first envelope. He took out an engraved card. He glanced at it for a moment and then began to chuckle. He held it up for Fat Cat to see. “Mira! We are invited to a wedding!”
Fat Cat looked at him over the coffeepot. “Bueno, there’s nothing I like better than a good fiesta. Food and music and pretty girls. Who’s getting married?”
“Sergei. To Sue Ann Daley.”
“The blond one?”
Dax nodded.
“She’ll fuck him to death. Maybe there is still time to warn him?”
Dax looked at the soldier. “What is the date?”
“April twelfth.”
“Too late; the wedding took place two days ago. In Switzerland.”
Fat Cat shook his head sadly. “Too bad.” Then he and Dax looked at each other and began to laugh.
Ortiz stared at them in amazement. Was it for this nonsense that he had been sent to find them? To risk his life in these terrible mountains against all manner of unknown terrors merely to bring an invitation to a wedding which they could not even attend? Truly the life of an ordinary soldier was a sorry one.
Quickly Dax opened the remaining e
nvelopes, saving until last the official one bearing el Presidente’s seal. One after the other they disappeared into the fire. When he had finished the last he looked up. “El Presidente wishes us to come in.”
“What for?” Fat Cat poured steaming black coffee into a tin cup and gave it to Dax, then filled others for Ortiz and himself.
“He does not say.” Dax looked at Ortiz. “Do you know why?”
“No, Capitán,” Ortiz replied quickly. “I am but an ordinary soldier. I know nothing.”
Fat Cat swore angrily. “For three months we have lived like animals in these hills and now that we’re almost finished with the job we are told, ‘Come in.’ Why couldn’t you wait two more days to find us? Just two more days.”
The soldier paled at the anger in Fat Cat’s voice. He seemed to shrink inside his uniform. “I—”
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Dax said reassuringly. “Days have a way of getting mixed up out here in the mountains. The good corporal really didn’t find us until the fourteenth, did you, corporal?”
Ortiz stared from one to the other. He could not make up his mind which of the two was more mad. The young one with his face burned almost black by the sun or the fat one who came upon you as silently as a puma. But there was one thing he did know. If they said he did not find them until the fourteenth, that’s when he found them. What difference could two days make out here in the jungle? Especially when it was a matter of life and death. His own.
He cleared his throat. “But of course, Capitán. The fourteenth.”
Dax smiled. He got to his feet. “Let’s get going then. We have still a hard march to where we will meet with el Condor.”
El Condor! Ortiz could feel his intestines shrivel. So that was what they were up to! El Condor, the bandolero, who had been terrorizing the mountains for the last five years and who had sworn to put to death any man who fell into his hands wearing the uniform of the army. “I think I’ll be getting back now,” he said, starting to his feet.
“I don’t think so,” Dax said quietly. “You’ll be safer with us.”
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