“What would you like to do?” I asked. We’d filled up on bar munchies enough that the prospect of dinner didn’t entice.
“My roommate’s away. Why don’t we go over to my place?” she suggested.
“And what would we do there?”
“Well…” she said. “Are you into kinky sex?” That was out of the blue, for sure, but DeeDee didn’t seem depraved. Whatever kinkiness she might come up with wouldn’t likely go amok.
“Try anything once,” I said enthusiastically. “Tell you what, let’s make a party out of it. Is there a liquor store around here?” There was, and I was feeling flush just then. We went in and came out with a magnum of cold Dom Perignon champagne. Then over to Marina del Rey. Sports cars and muscle wagons crammed the parking areas, so we wound up in a space far-removed from her pad. She took me by the hand and led me over and in. Your typical bachelorette digs, no need for detailed description. Imagine a mid-scale motel room with a little extra frou-frou.
“Okay, we’re here,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
Confronted with the reality of her offer, she flushed and fished for words. “Gee, I don’t know, it was just something clever to say. Cosmopolitan has these articles about things to try… let me think.” She thought a little. “I know, why don’t you tie me up? That’s kinky, isn’t it?”
“Tie you up?”
“You know, strip me and tie me to the bedposts.” I didn’t know, but what the heck? I shucked off her clothes and she lay back, and I bound her wrists and her ankles to the bedposts with some belts and scarves we’d dug up out of her dresser. Not “dangerous prisoner” tight, of course, but immobilizing enough.
“You okay with this?” I asked.
“Actually, it’s sort of exciting,” she said. “What’s gonna happen next, you know?” Surveying her spread out there, I could see the situation had possibilities.
Then I remembered that cold bottle of champagne. We’d left it in the Cherokee, and it was a hot summer afternoon. “Just a minute,” I said. “I’ll run down and get the champagne and put it in the fridge. Otherwise it’ll be too warm, and when we open it we’ll look like a winning World Series team in the locker room celebration. I’ll be back in a sec. In the meantime, get your mind fired up for some wild, insane sex. You are in my power, heh heh heh.”
“Hurry back,” she said.
I jogged over to the car, collected the bottle and started back, only to realize that I’d not noted her door number. There were scores of doors, and all the places looked alike. I wasn’t even sure which block it was in. Now what to do? Start knocking on random doors? Find the security office and have them look up DeeDee (if that was really her name, and she’d never given me her last one)? And if by chance they located her they’d open the door to find a naked women tied up on her bed… and what are you doing here, mister?
What to do but beat it for home and hope for the best (I’d not given my last name either, thank God—at least they couldn’t track me down). For the next two weeks I searched through the L.A. Times each morning for stories about stewardesses found tortured and starved to death in their Marina del Rey apartments, and APBs out for the perp. But no such stories turned up, nor did TV news report anything like that. Finally I added it to my long list of Things I Wish I’d Never Done and put it out of my mind.
So, some months later Dana was back as good as new (and she being the quintessence of California blonde beach-bunniness, that’s mighty good indeed!). We were approaching the portals of a steakhouse in Santa Monica when who should come out but DeeDee, on the arm of a dude who looked like, whatever he did for a living, it paid well. She stopped and looked me up and down. Recognition beamed across her face. She gave me a grin and a wink and chirped, “Kink-eee!”
“What was that about?” Dana asked after DeeDee and dude had passed out of earshot.
“It’s L. A.” I said with a puzzled shoulder-shrug. “Who knows?”
*
One Saturday evening in July Eddie Lipschitz (Edward LeGrande to his Tinseltown peers) took me along to a big Beverly Hills bash celebrating a studio mega-merger… or maybe it was a mega-spin-off, Eddie wasn’t clear on that. Anyhow, the point of the party wasn’t the point: as usual it was all about schmoozing. Some of those Hollywood parties Eddie took me to had a more than passing kinship to Walgreen’s—lineups of crystal bowls offering a buffet-style rainbow of pills, and guests gulping them by the fistful hoping some new kind of buzz would kick in. Not to mention the cocaine lines. This soiree could have been catered by Merck, Pfizer and Lilly together, for all that was on offer. Myself, I avoid recreational pharmaceuticals; too much risk for someone in my line of work.
An old Indian chief once was asked why he didn’t drink firewater like the braves in his tribe did. “I have to deal with the White Man,” he replied. “Why would I want to make myself stupid?” Likewise me with pills, lines and tokes: I have to deal with crooks, assassins and spies. Why would I want to make myself crazy?
Stoners floating along in their own exclusive worlds bore the hell out of us on the outside, and I was feeling out of the flow. I hit the bar for another Dos Equis when a couple of guys weaved over to me. They’d been sampling the goodies—that was obvious.
One of them, once-athletic but now saggy around the jowls, exclaimed to his buddy, a sun-bleached, leather-tanned, wiry guy, “I told you it was him! Meet my old compadre, Max Rummage.” He meant me. “God damn, Max, long time no see. When was the last time? Doing stunt work for Waterworld, wasn’t it? Man, what an all-time clusterfuck that shoot was, hey? We were in that bunch of bad guys on jet-skis,” he asided to his pal. “Nobody can handle a jet-ski like Max Rummage! Remember when ya saved my life? One of the rehearsals went way wrong. My ski turned turtle and started sinking, and Max dove down and pulled me off it.” Then back at me, “How’s life in Topanga Canyon these days, Max?”
“Pretty good, from what I hear, but I live in Malibu,” I told him.
“Coming up in the world, are you? Or down, as the case, topographically, may be,” he chortled. “You dyed your hair, Max? You was a carrot-top last I saw you.”
“Well, you know...”
He looked me up and down. “Hey, are you shrinking, or am I getting bigger?” he said. “Seems to me you were above six feet, weren’t you?”
“Must be the lighting in here,” I said.
“Man, the times Max and I had. Remember that costume gal, Cindy Whatshername? Nobody could give head like good old Cindy Whatshername.”
This was getting out of hand. “Look, friend,” I said, “I think there’s some mistake. I’m not Max Rummage. I’m Jake Fonko.”
He put a gleeful elbow in his friend’s ribs. “Didn’t I tell ya Max was a hoot?” he exclaimed. “The sonofagun even changed his name!”
With that I excused myself and wandered away through the jabbering throng. It’s L. A., I thought. Who knows?
In the atrium by the indoor pool I found Eddie talking to a sharply-dressed, swarthy man. He spotted me and waved me over. “Jake,” he said, “here’s somebody you need to meet. Jake Fonko, shake hands with Mr. Fawaz…? Al Sabah…? Did I get the pronunciations right?”
“Close enough, Mr. Edward,” he said with a smile. He turned to me and extended a hand. “Mr. Jake, I am delighted to meet you.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Mr… . Sabah?”
“My countrymen customarily use the honorific with the first name, so Mr. Fawaz will be fine for now.”
“He’s a prince from Kuwait,” Eddie put in.
Well he could have been. He was slender, about my height (5’ 10”) and several years older, with a handsome face that would have looked even better without the Cuban-gigolo mustache and the patch of short chin whiskers. His dark-olive complexion and closely-trimmed brown-black mop reminded me of the folks I’d tangled with on my Iranian gig. “You’re a long way fr
om home,” I said. “What brings you to Los Angeles?”
“Various business on behalf of my government. In fact, one assignment is to see about hiring you to perform a service for my government. I was going to try and contact you tomorrow. Knowing of your Hollywood connections, I mentioned your name to several people here, and I was referred to Mr. Edward, and it is my good fortune to find you in attendance.”
“Eddie and I go back a long way,” I said. “What is the nature of the service you have in mind?”
“Now is neither the time nor the place to discuss it. If you could meet me at my hotel, that would be best. I’m staying at the Beverly Wilshire. I apologize for the short notice, but if it is not inconvenient, could you meet me there tomorrow at, say, two in the afternoon?”
Kuwait + Prince + Beverly Wilshire = Money. “Could we make that a little later, say 3:15? I can juggle my schedule to be available after that.”
“3:15 it will be, Mr. Jake. I look forward to seeing you then. Ask at the desk for me. Now, I see someone else I must talk to, if you will excuse me…?” and he smoothly slipped away through buzzing clumps of movie biz thrusters, hangers-on and desperados to join a clump of sober-looking finance guys in the next room.
“You think he’s legit?” I asked Eddie.
“If that suit cost him less than $3,000, I’m out of touch with Savile Row. Either he’s what he says, or he’s a damn good actor and I’ll get him under contract for my next wog flick. He’d make a hell of a Palestinian terrorist.”
*
So in the morning I went for a three-mile run along the surf line, splashing through the backwash, and after lunch took care of things around the house until two in the afternoon. Then I donned a tropical-weight business suit left from when I posed as an investment banker in the Philippines, slipped my Patek Philippe wristwatch on and set out for Beverly Hills.
It was one more gorgeous July day in southern California, a sunny Sunday, so I took the long, scenic route, Sunset Boulevard through the hills. By that hour everybody was where they wanted to be, so traffic was tolerable. Looping through the sinuous road curves awash with the pungent smell of sage and chaparral made me rue having dumped my convertible Vette in favor of the Cherokee. I hit my destination with time to spare, so I parked at a mall near UCLA and strolled around for a few minutes. Being summer, there wasn’t much student traffic, but the Westwood wives and bachelorettes going about their weekend shopping were pleasant enough to mingle with. At 1514 hours I turned the car over to the Beverly Wilshire valet.
The desk clerk put me through to Mr. Fawaz, who directed me to his room. He answered my knock with an invitation to come in, and as I entered he rose from his seat at the desk. He’d dressed more casually than he had for last night’s party, but the duds on him were every bit as pricey. “Mr. Jake,” he said with a welcoming smile, “how good of you to come. It is a pleasure to see you again. I am glad you were able to make time for me on such short notice, as there is some urgency in the matter I need to discuss with you.”
“No problem, Mr. Fawaz,” I assured him. “A couple phone calls took care of it.” He occupied a suite of rooms, well-appointed it goes without saying. “My friend, Mr. LeGrande, mentioned that you are a prince in Kuwait. Should I be addressing you as ‘your highness’ or something like that?”
“Oh no,” he said. “No need for that at all. Arab princes are a dime a dozen, as your saying goes. We are sons of ruling tribes, that is all. We don’t go around kissing sleeping beauties or slaying dragons. We’re lucky if we even have legitimate jobs. Many of my cousins have little to do in life except luxuriate. Did you have a pleasant drive over from Malibu?” he asked. “My sources told me you have a beach house there.”
“Yes, I took Sunset through the hills, a more scenic ride than the freeways.”
“Isn’t it just so! I sometimes regret that I have not the leisure time to experience the pleasures of driving around California, as my Maserati would surely be up to it. The climate and the natural beauty here are objects of envy for anyone from my region of the world.”
“You visit California often then?”
“From time to time. Kuwait has many interests in America, and so I am called to New York, Washington DC, Texas…but California is my favorite destination. I took the liberty of having room service lay out some refreshments. Would you like anything? Please help yourself.”
He indicted a trolley laden with fruit, biscuits, cookies, and drinks—coffee, iced tea and assorted carafes of juice, nothing alcoholic. I took a nut-festooned cookie, poured a cup of coffee to wash it down with, and we moved to a sitting area. Middle East etiquette, I have learned in my travels, dictates that one does not launch into business immediately upon convening, nor does the guest bring it up. So we sipped and nibbled and small-talked about his travels, my home in Malibu, the California weather, the prospects of the Dodgers that year, the latest BMW models, current happenings in Kuwait, a rundown on his family and, of course, current dish on Hollywood stars. Being in no particular hurry, I appreciated the chance to sound him out.
Finally he got around to his agenda. “Your name is known to some of my associates from your work with the late Shah, peace be upon him,” he said.
“I wish I could have done more to help him,” I said.
“He was a good man, the Shah,” said Mr. Fawaz. “Not like those fanatics who deposed him. You aided him more than most. Many others turned their backs and a blind eye to his plight, out of fear of that shaytan Khomeini. Also, I gather that you have considerable experience in international finance.”
“I’d hardly call it considerable,” I demurred.
“Plus an exemplary record in covert espionage work, our intelligence specialists tell me. So my ministry sent me to investigate whether you might be able to help us with a certain task.”
“Describe the task, and we’ll see,” I said.
“Kuwait, as you may know, is a small country with considerable petroleum reserves,” he began. “Among the most extensive in the world, in fact. Our oil fields bring in vast amounts of money, so much that we sometimes have trouble figuring out what to do with it. We are not like some other Arab nations, where a few lavish in unimaginable riches while the many remain impoverished. Since we are small we can provide many comforts for all our citizens, yet we invest most of our revenues with an eye toward the future—our oil fields, large as they are, won’t produce forever. But we have been blessed with wealth only for a few decades, barely a generation in fact, and so we have scant history of experience in managing large scale financial matters. Sometimes the lessons we learn about wealth cost us dearly.
“You may have heard of our stock market debacle just a few years ago. We instituted an unofficial, over-the counter stock exchange, Souk al-Manakh, listing 45 companies in Arab nations around the Gulf. The Quran forbids gambling, with good reason, because soon our people had caught the scent of easy riches and piled money into stocks with a vengeance. With huge and hungry sums chasing a small number of stocks, well, you can imagine the result. Naïve plungers punted in their cash and, making some profits in the initial rush, then started trading with post-dated checks, counting on their holdings rising enough to cover the checks when they came due. The prices of stocks ramped up and up and up, more than 300%, until the Biggest Fool arrived and the whole enterprise collapsed in ruin. Ultimately, government investigators discovered that there were 29,000 checks, totaling 27 billion dinars, or about $91 billion, outstanding. It was a sobering experience.
“Subsequently we have taken pains to diversify, investing in solid assets rather than chasing paper wealth. One avenue we’ve followed is buying foreign businesses. Recently the Kuwaiti Investment Office in London reported that they’d identified promising Spanish businesses, and apparently billions of dollars have gone into dozens of those enterprises, comprising chemicals, food, and real estate among others. However, it is not clear how
much was spent in Spain, nor into what businesses, nor whether all the funds were legitimately invested. One Spanish man, Javier de la Rosa, has particularly come under suspicion as having diverted assets in his own favor. Managers of the Investment Office claim he victimized them, but their own innocence in the situation has come into question.
“So, what I have come here to ask you is: Would you be available to help my ministry get to the bottom of this situation?”
“As you describe the situation, it sounds like a job for lawyers and accountants,” I said.
“In America it well might be, but Kuwait does not have the same rules of law, nor have we strictly followed accountancy procedures and standards, nor even routine financial controls for that matter. What we need is a man who can ferret out information, including if necessary by means of interrogation, in a variety of settings and countries. Once that man obtains the requisite information, we can then engage the lawyers and accountants to settle the details. The thing is, Kuwait is a closely-knit country, an intricate fabric woven of family and tribal loyalties. Therefore you as an outsider could conduct investigations and make inquiries that would be delicate in the extreme for a native Kuwaiti to conduct. And there is the fact that the situation involves not only Kuwait, but three different countries, which speaks to your wide range of experience.”
Once again, my international rep was strides far ahead of reality. My “financial expertise” consisted of fencing stolen books from BCCI, the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and impersonating an investment banker for the benefit of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. No doubt whispers about my deep cover CIA exploits, fictitious as they were, had reached Kuwait. But it was true that I navigate easily in foreign countries as long as somebody in the vicinity spoke English, and most people of importance did. Plus intel was my training, though some of the field interrogation methods we’d used in Nam couldn’t very well be applied in civilized settings… if the Middle East was civilized, a proposition some disputed.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 44
