In retrospect, I’d done the guy a big favor. Pulpy women are great to fuck, but the Leos and Barneys of this world, who don’t have the time or desire to take care of a woman’s needs, should have women who are more interested in doing their nails than their husbands. That way the women don’t get bored and roam.
But despite my good deed, Leo intensified his hatred of me. I’ve never known the original source for it. I can only believe the basis for his dislike is that I like to have fun. Leo hates fun. He loves work. And money. He can’t understand why everyone doesn’t love work and money. I don’t have a problem with that, different strokes for different folks, to each his own, one person’s treasure is another’s junk, and all that crapola. But Leo carries it a step farther. He resents anyone being happy, and at the same time is determined not to let a little thing like having a life get in his way of making money that he never spends.
A dealer he’d been dickering with got up to leave as I sat down at the table. Leo’s assistant, Karen, was there. Leo barely glanced at me before tapping in a number on his phone. I wasn’t important enough to have him give a nod. I took the phone away from his ear.
“What’re you doing?”
“I’m going to butt-fuck you.”
“Wha—what?”
I jerked my head at Karen. “Get out of here. This is family shit.”
She got out. Fast.
Leo’s face glowed red. “You have no right—”
“You fucked me, stepbrother, now I’m going to butt-fuck you. You know what that is, don’t you? It’s a prison term. Low guy on the totem pole gets butt-fucked. You’re not even going to have to take a shower to get fucked.”
“You’ve gone crazy.”
“Naw, I’ve gone broke. You know, as in no money. You fucked over Bernie, took the jerk for a ride, got him into a bullshit mine deal, and cleaned him out. I don’t think you gave a shit about Bernie, it was me you wanted to break. That fat trust account and me having fun was too much temptation for you, wasn’t it, Leo? You just can’t stand anyone being happy. You also have to pay for Bernie. I wasn’t crazy about Bernie, but he deserved more than a nosedive out a window.”
“Fuck you. You’ve been too busy sticking your dick into anything that walks to pay any attention to business. What I got from Bernie I got fair and square and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“You made a big mistake, pal. If it had been a stranger that cleaned me out, I’d have shrugged and said I deserved it for not minding the store, but you’re family.”
“I’m not your fucking family. Your old man—”
“What about my father?” My temperament went rabid.
“We’re not related by blood,” he stammered.
“You’re right, you’re not real family, but check this out.” I leaned closer and whispered. “I’m going to be out there, waiting for you. I know how to hurt you and I’m going to do it. Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I’ll be there, you cocksucker, and when you’re least expecting it, I’m going to get you.”
After I left, I said kaddish for Leo. Jews say kaddish for the dead. From now on, I’d only think of Leo in the past tense.
8
“Where the hell is Angola?” Katarina asked.
“Tsk, tsk,” I clicked my tongue. “Such ignorance, Katarina. Angola is a country on the west coast of Africa. Everyone knows that.” I was a little drunk. I picked her up after a photo shoot and took her to Verdi’s on Seventy-fifth. I was working on my fifth or sixth vodka martini—or maybe my tenth, I’d lost count.
She squeezed my thigh. “I’m really happy it wasn’t a money problem with Bernie. God, I couldn’t sleep thinking you might be broke.”
I didn’t have the heart—or guts—to tell her all I had was a Bugatti and a mine that took in more money than it puked out. I made it sound like Bernie was a financial genius and had ended it because he suddenly found out he was terminal with the Big C. She bought the whole act. Besides, her mind was on Hollywood.
“I’m going to miss you.” She gave me a wet kiss, fucking my mouth with her tongue.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to be bicoastal.”
“You going to buy that place in Malibu we talked about?” she asked.
“Hell, yes, and a chain of movie theaters that only plays your flicks.”
She giggled and kissed me some more.
“You know what I like about you?” she said. “You’re the only rich guy I know who’s fun and real at the same time. I mean, rich guys in this town are a dime a dozen and they all want to be seen with models, but they’re all jerks. None of them talk about anything but how much money they made or what they shot in golf. But you’re different. You know how to treat a woman.”
She moved her hand to my jade stalk and squeezed, causing it to pump wildly. Somebody told me that a man only had enough blood at any one time for his dick or his brains, and like a little kid, he couldn’t chew gum and walk at the same time. That was my problem, I never had enough blood to handle a woman and a simple math equation—like how much money I should spend.
“My Hollywood agent was really jazzed when I told him my boyfriend had an apartment in the Dakota. He wanted to know if it was the one that Rosemary’s Baby was filmed in. I told him you had Lauren Bacall and Yoko Ono for neighbors.”
“Tell him to drop by, I’ll introduce him to John Lennon’s ghost.”
Yeah, I’m a hell of a swinger in this town. The Dakota at Seventy-second and Central Park West was the best address in town. Trump’s Tower was a ghetto project in comparison. I didn’t tell her there was an eviction notice tacked to my door when I got home from my lawyer’s office. The building staff shied away from me like I came in ringing a leper’s bell. Worse than being ostracized was the looks of loss on their faces—I was the most generous tenant in the place at Christmastime.
“Hollywood’s a tough town, tougher than New York,” she said, “because you’ve got to put up a front. People here are real, no one cares what kind of car you drive or where you live. Few people have a car, anyway, and we all live like ants crowded into the same hole. But it’s all front on the West Coast, all about what you’ve got—people drive a more expensive car than they can afford, have an apartment with a view they can’t afford, designer clothes.”
I tossed the keys to my Bugatti in her lap.
“What’re you doing?”
“That will get you an apartment on the beach, bitching clothes, a cherry-red convertible, everything you need to put up a front in L.A. The registration’s in the car, I’ll sign it over to you. Tomorrow you take the Bugatti to the exotic car dealer where I bought it and they’ll write you a check for a hundred grand.”
“God, I was so worried about leaving the right impression out there. What are you going to do, buy another one?”
“Sure, tell the guys in the showroom I’ll be in.”
“Jeez, Win, you’re so good to me. How can I ever repay you?”
“Fuck my brains out when we get back to my place. A going-away present.”
“Why wait?”
She slipped beneath the table. I spread my legs as she got between my knees. Her head hit the underside of the table and she went “ouch” and giggled. I quickly scanned the room. Verdi’s had that typical dark ambiance, designed so you couldn’t see the print on the check or be easily recognized if you were with someone besides your spouse, but it wasn’t a blackout. Katarina was wearing a red shimmery dress that literally glowed in the dark, but I figured someone would still have to bend down to see her under the table—so I relaxed to enjoy the ride.
Her hands fumbled with my zipper and I sat up a little to give her a hand. As soon as the zipper went down, her hand went in, searching for the opening to my jockey shorts. She found the exit hole and my phallus shot out.
“Hmmm,” came from under the table, “I found a diamond in the rough.”
She stroked it like it was a new mink stole. Her tongue flicked at my cock’s head, snakelike. Kat
arina had a cat’s tongue, not reasonably smooth like the rest of us, instead of slipping up and down like she was licking ice cream, her tongue clung to my skin and pulled at it. With each lick, a jolt of pleasure hit me.
“Hello, Win,” a voice female sang.
I almost shit my pants. Mrs. Greenberg, the mother of a guy I went to school with, came up to my table. She didn’t speak words, but had an annoying habit of singing them, as if she was a bird. Two other people were with her.
“Hi,” I stammered as that cat’s tongue took a big lick.
“I want you to meet friends of mine. This is the Reverend Paul Davis and his wife, the Reverend Mary Davis. They’re in the city raising money for their missionary school in Indonesia.”
I gurgled a listening response. The husband-wife missionary team looked like prudish Katherine Hepburn and her missionary brother in African Queen.
The cat’s tongue took another big lick, one that started at the head of my dick and slowly moved around the ridge separating the glans from the stem. I nearly went airborne off the seat as she stopped licking and her warm mouth swallowed my cock.
“I’ve having a fund-raiser for the school,” Mrs. Greenberg said, “and we would certainly love to have you attend.”
I would rather sit in a hot bath and cut my wrists that spend more than three minutes in the same room with the woman.
“Busy,” I got out, smiling weakly. Katarina was chomping down on my dick, pumping it with her mouth. I couldn’t talk, I could only sit there with a frozen smile on my face. I was going to explode any second. If I didn’t, I would spontaneously combust and there would be pieces of me splattered on the walls.
“You must make time,” Mrs. Greenberg said. “It’s such a worthy cause, such needy children—”
A groan slipped by my lips as Katarina sucked and licked.
“Are you all right, Win? You look positively feverish.”
I shook my head, unable to speak. Her mouth was hot and wet and molded around my penis like a glove full of night cream. The top of the table began to vibrate from Katarina’s head hitting it. The three people stared at the table like it needed an exorcism.
A spoon slipped off the edge and landed at the Reverend Davis’s feet.
“Oops,” he said. He bent down to get the spoon and froze as he stared under the table. His eyes went wide and his jaw unhinged.
I’d swear on a stack of bibles that I could see the reflection of Katarina’s glowing red dress in his eyes.
9
I woke up at the crack of dawn in my Dakota apartment with Katarina getting out of bed.
“I have an early shoot,” Katarina said.
She sat on the bed and kissed me. I spread open her unbuttoned blouse and kissed her strawberry-like nipples. She pushed me away. “Stop it, you’ll make me late. Did you really mean it about the car?”
“I signed the registration over to you. Take it with you.”
I got out of bed naked and went into the bathroom to take a leak.
Katarina suddenly appeared at the bathroom door. “You got people in the living room, some woman with flaming red hair claiming to be Scarlett O’Hara.”
“Go to your shoot, I’ll take care of it.”
I knew who the woman with a head of fire and a famous name was. Scarlet O’Hara owned an art gallery and was my art procurer. I knew as much about art as Henry Ford did. I left it up to Scarlet to put pieces on the walls.
What the hell she was doing in my apartment and how she got in were a mystery.
She had her back to me when I came into the room after taking my leak. She was directing two workers who were removing a Picasso from the wall.
“What the fuck’s going on?”
Scarlet swung around, startled. She gawked at me. I hadn’t bothered to put on clothes. The red hair Katarina mentioned was the woman’s trademark. It came straight out of a bottle.
“Win—I—I—we’re repossessing your art. The check your trustee wrote bounced. I heard you’re, uh . . .”
“Broke. How’d you get in?”
“Through me.” The speaker was an uniformed officer. He was on the other side of the room when I walked in and I didn’t see him. “I have a court order for the repossession.” He stared at me. “You’re naked.”
“You’re a regular fuckin’ rocket scientist. Now get out of my place.”
After the repo crew left, I lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling. I didn’t give a damn about the artwork. If I had, I would have chosen it myself rather than leaving it up to Scarlet. I only got it because walls were supposed to have stuff on them. I had more of a connection to the car because I chose it, but giving it to Katarina wasn’t a drunken act—it was connected to my folly, a reminder that I had been so stupid, letting Bernie take full responsibility for my money. The truth was, I never gave a damn about money—it was just something that got me what I wanted at the moment. Money was a fickle bitch who never gave a damn about me, either, because it fled the first chance it got.
What are you going to be when you grow up? rolled in my mind.
I remembered that question; it was the only question on a classroom essay that we had to write when I was in the eighth grade. My father had died a few months before and I wrote one short sentence on the paper and threw it on my teacher’s desk as I walked out of the classroom: “It’ll never happen.”
Well, I’d certainly managed to achieve my ambition. I didn’t have the faintest idea of what I was going to do. I had no education, no profession, no talents. I wouldn’t even make a good companion for a rich woman because I wasn’t handsome enough or servile enough.
There was something else stunning I discovered about myself. I had no real friends. No college pals, no business contacts. It never occurred to me until now that I was a loner. There had been a lot of women in and out of my life, but nothing that stuck. I had Katarina, but she was on a different planet than I. What I had was a bunch of acquaintances, guys around the yacht club I raced against, the mechanic who took care of my plane, the salesman who kept me supplied in fast cars, bartenders, and headwaiters. But no real friends. No running buddy. No one to back me up if I had trouble coming front and back. And right now trouble was an avalanche. Bernie had even taken cash advances on all of my credit cards, to the tune of a couple hundred grand.
What are you going to be when you grow up?
I wondered what it would be like if I went to a dealership and picked up a car and drove it into a freeway bulkhead at a couple hundred miles an hour. Would I feel any pain as the car accordioned into the size of a shoe box with me inside? Was that the only way out for someone who had managed to completely screw up his life without much effort? What the hell else could I do? Pump gas?
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I’d rob banks before I’d give up the ghost just because I was broke. And I’d kill that little fucker Leo first.
There was really only one way out for me. And the more I thought about it, the better I liked it. I never figured I’d live long. My game plan would just speed up the process.
The phone rang. Katarina’s wrecked the car was my first thought. Hell, I don’t remember if she even knew how to drive. Jesus H. Christ, she could take out a city block if she punched the gas pedal to the floor.
“Yeah.”
“Win?”
A man’s voice. With a foreign accent. Not Eastern European like Katarina’s, but something warmer, French maybe, or Spanish or Portuguese.
“Win Liberte?”
“Who wants to know?” I was getting irritated now. A bill collector already?
“This is João. Do you know who I am?”
I thought for a moment. “Sure, you got me my first dirt bike, a Honda, top of the line, when I was thirteen.”
It had come after my father died. João Carmona was a diamond dealer in Lisbon. He had been a business associate of my father, a guy my father met during the Second World War when he was in Portugal. I recall Bernie mentioning him, too, so he p
robably kept up the relationship.
He chuckled. “I didn’t think funeral flowers meant a great deal to a child but the motorcycle might occupy your mind.”
“I rode it only once. Into a tree. But yes, it was a hell of a memory.” I rubbed the scar on my chin. “Did I ever say thanks?”
“You can now. Drop in and see me on your way to Angola.”
I froze with the phone to my ear. I had made the decision to go to Africa just about thirty seconds ago.
“You must be a psychic,” I said.
“I might be.”
“Or you know more about me than you should.”
He chuckled. It wasn’t the sound of amusement, but more of a listening response from someone whose sense of humor ran toward the macabre.
“I was your father’s chief source of diamonds during most of his lifetime, and Bernie’s source, until Leo started leading him around by the nose. You know, Leo encouraged Bernie to get into the mine deal and when it went sour, he bailed out and left Bernie, ah, as you Americans put it, holding the bag.”
Yeah, I had figured that one out myself. But what I didn’t know was João’s game. He wasn’t an old family friend calling up to help me out. Other than the ill-fated dirt bike, I hadn’t heard from the guy since my father died nearly twenty years ago. I remembered that my father used to refer to João as a ladráo, a thief, and crime organizado, the Portuguese version of the Mafia. But I’m sure much of that was just hyperbole because he continued to do business with him. Calling other diamond dealers thieves was a common practice around the office. It was just part of a business that was competitive, profitable, and ultrasecretive.
Heat of Passion Page 5
