Intercontinental stock began to fall.
III
Alexandra was in disciplinary lockup once more, for three days, for “smarting off.” She hung on the bars of her cell and sobbed. This meant certain forfeiture of whatever small chance she’d had to be paroled on her first hearing.
She might have had a parole hearing in 2000. Now the first possible hearing would come in 2002, and they would flop her. She couldn’t control her mouth. She controlled herself, but she couldn’t control her mouth. God, she might have to serve her max! That would keep her in until 2012, when she would be sixty years old!
The best years of her life. What should have been the best years of her life.
What she could not guess was that Dave was seriously trying to get her a commutation. He had a politically connected lawyer working on it. The argument was that she had acted in a fit of anger, after a whole life in which she had never committed another crime. She had spent six years in prison for a few minutes’ hysteria. She was a capable, intelligent woman, extremely unlikely to commit another crime.
“What am I to tell them about what she will do when she comes out?” the lawyer asked.
“Tell them I’ll give her a job. Emphasize that I forgive her.”
He did not tell the lawyer that Alexandra’s trust fund, in Zurich, was worth more than ten million dollars, with accumulated interest. Also, he had transferred some of it to Hong Kong. He figured that out there he would place her beyond any inquiry into anything she might know about his early business. He had discussed it with Chen Peng on their secure line, and Chen had agreed he would get her a Hong Kong passport. Released from prison, Alex andra would disappear. She would, in fact, be unable to return to the States, since conditions of any commutation would undoubtedly be that she remain in New York State and report periodically to a parole officer. She would be a fugitive. She would be under Dave’s control, and Chen’s.
“Tell them I will give her a responsible position. She will be entirely self-supporting. Tell them it’s a waste of a human life to keep her in prison, especially when the man who was her victim forgives her and is willing to help her.”
“It is not impossible, Mr. Shea,” said the lawyer. “Do not in any way suggest a bribe, which would not work. On the other hand, it would not hurt if you laid some money around, politically.”
“Arrange it,” said Dave. “Tell me where it should go, and you can be my agent for distributing it.”
IV
APRIL, 1998
Dave’s father died. He was just sixty-eight years old. Janelle was in Hong Kong, and he asked her mother, Alicia, to go with him to Wyckoff. His mother and brother knew Alicia and liked her. It was acceptable for her to accompany Dave as Janelle’s surrogate.
Dave paid for the funeral, so it could be more elaborate than the family could afford. He sat and stood through the uncomfortable rituals: not just those at the church and graveside but also the horror of receiving guests at the funeral home during two sessions of “viewing.” Nothing was done in the simple and abbreviated way he would have done it. Everything had to be done “properly,” lest people should talk. That included exposing the body to public view.
“He was a hard worker,” one woman said. “I guess it just wore him out.”
“The town will never be the same without him.”
“I’ll never forget the last time I saw him—”
Dave nodded solemnly and thanked each guest.
Dave reviewed his mother’s financial situation. The house was paid for. She would receive a monthly check from Social Security. Dave called on Cole Jennings and handed him a check for $250,000. He instructed him to establish a trust fund for her, receive the income, and deliver the monthly checks to her himself.
“Tell her it’s from a savings account he kept on the side and didn’t talk about. Tell her he’d been quietly slipping money into it for years, just in case. Tell her he’d made you trustee for it. If it needs more, let me know.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“I don’t see you much anymore. When Janelle comes back, you must come over and have dinner with us. Somewhere. You can stay in our guest room.”
Through all of this Alicia was at his side, and many people assumed she was his wife.
“You certainly did marry well, Dave. This time.”
“Alicia is my mother-in-law. Janelle is in Hong Kong, on business.”
“Oh …”
“I’d be lucky to have a wife like Alicia, if I weren’t married to her daughter.”
Alicia overheard, of course, and squeezed his hand.
They had intended to drive back to Manhattan after the funeral, but the funeral had to be followed by a reception at the house and that had to be followed by a family dinner. It was almost ten when they could get away, and they still had to check out of a Holiday Inn.
“What the hell,” Alicia said as Dave drove her toward the motel. “One more night won’t hurt us.”
They sat down in the bar before going to their rooms. Neither of them had had a drink all day. Dave had supposed there would be drinks at the reception, but there hadn’t been.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you, Alicia,” he said.
“It was the least I could do for you, Dave. You held up very nicely, but I could tell you were under a hell of a strain. Your father was a fine man.”
“What’s the old phrase? ‘A life of quiet frustration.’”
“Which inspired you to—”
“Never live that way.”
“Well, you sure as hell don’t.”
“Alicia … I said back there that I’d be lucky to have you as my wife. I meant that. You have been a tremendous comfort to me. Could I in any way encourage you to be one more comfort?”
“For Christ’s sake!”
He put his hand on hers. “I know … There are reasons why not. But—”
“Goddamnit Janelle—”
“Must never know, of course.”
“Am I to understand you want to establish a now-and-then thing when she’s out of town?”
“No. Here’s what let’s do. I’ll give you a thousand dollars. That way it’s the other kind of relationship. A night’s satisfaction and no obligations on either side. Clean. No emotions. No regrets. Once. Never again.”
“Bluntly stated, you want to buy me as a hooker.”
“Let’s think of a euphemism for that. What word do you use, really?”
“I don’t use any word. I try not to think about it.”
“But guys don’t fall in love with you and come slobbering around afterward, do they?”
“No …”
“Well, neither will I. A quick, clean relationship. Starting now and over when we check out in the morning.”
Alicia shook her head, but a small smile came to her face. “You’re a real bastard,” she said. “Janelle has told me you are. I’m damned glad she knows it. If she didn’t, I’d manage some way to do what your second wife failed to do.”
V
Dave and Chen.were not interested in acquiring control of Intercontinental Petroleum, only in driving its stock down.
Chen, through confidential agents in Washington, supplied counsel to the Senate committee with information and misinformation. Executives of the company were grilled before the committee, some of the hearings being televised. As always in congressional hearings, information and misinformation became inextricably mixed, and all of it went out as information.
Chen had agents in the Middle East. They supplied oil suppliers with newspaper clippings and suggested that loading oil onto Intercontinental tankers risked very bad public relations, not just in the States but in Europe as well. A few of the suppliers continued willingly to sell oil to Intercontinental but insisted it be shipped in other companies’ tankers.
The stock continued to fall.
Willard Drake had notes out: the mortgage on his home and one on his laboratory property. Enterprise Bank bought that pap
er. For the moment, all it did was notify Drake that his payments were to be made to Enterprise from then on.
“What the hell is going on here?” Drake asked his wife over breakfast, as soon as the children had left the table.
“We are in deep, deep shit,” said Julie. “Somebody has decided to have us. And whoever it is, it’s no small deal.”
“They think they’re going to take my system away from me? No goddamned way!”
“We have to think this through,” she said. “They’ll offer you big money. Big money. To work for them. Like I said before, think of it as a compliment. If they’re willing to go to these lengths to acquire your work, they must have confidence in it.”
“I’m an Independent man!”
Julie shook her head. “No man is.”
VI
Most nights Janelle and Chen slept together in the suite in the Mandarin Oriental. Not every night. Twice he had dinner brought. Usually, though, he took her out to introduce her to restaurants. One evening they ate on a terrace on The Peak, enjoying a view of all Hong Kong. Another evening they went on his yacht to a small island where they had their dinner in a distinguished fish restaurant, where Chen chose their entrée from among the fish swimming in huge tanks near the entrance.
That was a Chinese custom. To middle- and upper-class Chinese, fresh fish meant alive when the diner selected it. The same was true of chickens. When a diner ordered chicken, the chicken was beheaded and prepared while the diners were having their hors d’oeuvres.
On these occasions she always dressed in one of her growing collection of cheongsams. Tonight on the island, this one was yellow.
Janelle was acutely conscious of the bodyguards that hovered near, wherever they went. Gurkhas. Chen’s Rolls-Royce limousine was armored, and always there was at least one other car preceding or following, carrying the fierce-looking little men. A short, ugly automatic rifle lay on the seat beside the chauffeur. Chen was determined not to be kidnapped.
On the evening when they went to the island for the fish dinner, Chen asked, “Would you like to try another of the Glorious Postures tonight?”
“Yes … Lord Yang,” she said simply.
He spoke to the captain of his yacht when they went back aboard. The captain used a cell phone to make a call—the purpose of which would become apparent to her when they reached the hotel suite.
He had told her he had the special furniture some of the Glorious Postures required, and while they were on their way there servants had set up a piece of it.
It was a frame, consisting of sturdy vertical posts at either end, plus two horizontal bars. The top bar was an ordinary round rod, of polished black wood. Below that some eighteen inches was a thickly padded, silk-upholstered board, about four inches wide.
“You see?” he asked. “You climb on a chair, grip the upper bar with both hands, and I will help you lift your knees over the lower bar. You hang there. You see what the posture does? It offers you deliciously. And I promise you it will not only be I, but you, who will find the experience delicious.”
Janelle was skeptical but she slipped out of her cheongsam and shoes and climbed on the chair as Chen instructed. She gripped the upper bar tightly with both hands. She thrust her chin forward over the bar, between her hands. He helped her lift her knees over the lower bar and let her weight settle. He gently pushed her knees apart. She hung there, spread open. The posture was not as comfortable as the first posture had been, but it was not entirely uncomfortable either. She was aroused by it.
“My Lord Yang will do the thing quickly,” she suggested. “I could not wish to remain this way very long.”
He undressed quickly and stood in front of her.
“Fragrant Lady Yin,” he murmured as he put his face down to her and sniffed at her parts. “I would not think of doing it to you, but the woman’s wrists are usually bound to the bar.”
“Making her helpless.”
“Yes. But I would not even think of doing that to you.”
He stood erect and shoved himself into her. He did not prolong the set as he had with the other Glorious Posture, but proceeded quickly. This posture produced an angle of penetration that gave Janelle two shuddering orgasms.
TWENTY-NINE
I
JULY, 1998
Cole Jennings came to see Dave in his office at Banque Suisse. He sat down across the desk from Dave and suddenly covered his face with his hands and began to sob.
“Cole! For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
For a minute Cole could not speak. Then he lifted his red, tear-streaked face and said, “Emily is dying …”
“Oh, my God, Cole! How? Why?”
“Cancer. It’s terminal. She’s on chemotherapy. She’s wasting away. She’s lost her hair. She has two months, maybe three.”
Dave turned and stared at the big saltwater aquarium that stood not far from his desk. It had been installed and was maintained by an aquarium service. The colorful fish glided around placidly and were a relaxing sight to him. He sometimes wondered if they knew anything or understood anything. Tears filled his eyes.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“There is nothing anyone can do.”
“Jenn is at home, right?”
Cole nodded. “It’s having a horrible impact on her. Not to mention what it’s doing to Cole. Fifteen years old …”
“Would you like to send the kids out to Hong Kong until it’s over? It would be a hell of an experience for them. I’ll go with them, or Janelle will. It might distract them from—”
“I’ll mention it to them. I don’t think they’ll go.”
“To be away during an ordeal …”
“No. I don’t think they’ll go.”
II
SEPTEMBER, 1998
Emily died on September 18. Dave and Janelle were there for the final days, then for the ceremonial anguish that followed until she was cremated and the urn of ashes buried. Cole did not allow a “viewing.” People talked, but that was the way it was.
Jenn did not return to Ann. Arbor for that semester. She accepted Dave’s invitation to go with him and Janelle to Hong Kong, where they stayed ten days in the Mandarin Oriental and Janelle saw to it that she saw as much as possible of the fascinating city while Dave met with Chen and they planned their strategy for taking over Willard Drake’s company and system.
When they came home, Dave and Janelle invited her to spend evenings with them in Manhattan. She was a fully developed, beautiful girl. Janelle took her shopping for clothes. When she returned to Ann Arbor after the holidays she was a more sophisticated young woman than she had been. And marked as she always would be with the agony of her mother’s death.
III
DECEMBER, 1998
“Ho, Shea.”
Alexandra had lost her office job and was mopping, wearing blue dungarees. She looked up into the face of the officer who had written her up for “smarting off.”
“Ma’am?”
“Going to the super’s office,” the officer said.
An hour later, after a long wait in the superintendent’s waiting room, Alexandra was allowed into the office.
“Shea, hmm?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Every year at Christmas the governor issues a very limited number of pardons and commutations. I can’t imagine why, but you got one. Your sentence is commuted to time served, subject to certain conditions. You’ll be on probation, so to speak. Meet the conditions and you won’t have to come back here.”
The release process was not easy, and it took a week. The probation department found her a modest room and a job as a waitress in a coffee shop. She left the prison in what she might have called slops, a dress the prison provided since she had gained so much weight in the past six years that the clothes she came in with would not fit her.
She moved into her room. The shared bathroom was down the hall. She went to work. In point of fact, she was not sure she was any better of
f. Somewhere she had millions of dollars, but it was not apparent what good that was going to do her.
Then—
Janelle appeared outside the coffee shop when Alexandra left work.
“You … ?”
Janelle went into the street and hailed a cab. “C’mon,” she said. “We’ve got places to go and things to do.”
In her uniform as a coffee-shop waitress, Alexandra felt conspicuous as she entered the apartment building and rode up in the elevator. She entered the apartment, wonderingly. It overlooked the East River and was more spacious and luxurious than anything she and Dave had ever shared.
She felt shabby. She was shabby, and slovenly.
“Here,” said Janelle. She handed Alexandra a silk dressing gown. “Change into that. You want to take a shower first? What do you drink?”
“I haven’t had a drink for so long I hardly remember. Scotch.”
“Well … relax. The shit’s over. As from now, you’re a probation violator. But don’t worry about that. Dave and I are going to take care of things. You’ll sleep here tonight. In the morning a woman from Saks will be here to outfit you. She’ll bring a hairdresser and cosmetologist. Then—”
“If I don’t show up at that job tomorrow—”
“It’s all worked out, Alexandra. You know Dave. When he decides to work something out, it’s worked out. I mean, after all, a woman with your money is not going to live in a room and work as a waitress, no matter what the State of New York says. Trust us.”
“He got me out?”
“Well, you didn’t think it was Santa Claus, did you?”
Alexandra did take a shower. She washed her hair with shampoo and not bar soap for the first time since she was arrested. She studied herself in the mirror and decided, tentatively, that the damage could be repaired, in time.
When she came out into the living room again, Dave was there. He took her in his arms and kissed her on the cheek.
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