Her father spoke in a stilted, fancy language. “You will perhaps not mind my saying that your father does seem to have some … how shall I say? Some remarkable friends. You do not mind?”
“Not at all,” I said, facing him where he sat by his enormous fireplace sharing Napoleon brandy with me. “My father had to struggle for everything he has achieved. He had no advantages. Family … education … whatever he’s done, he simply did it. On his own.”
“Yes. I quite understand.”
But of course he didn’t understand that my father made his own opportunities.
To have become an associate in the firm of Hale & Dorr was the fondest hope of every man or woman who ever graduated from any law school. There were better-known firms, but none with the quiet dignity of Hale & Dorr. There were more flamboyant law firms and more flamboyant lawyers. There were no more lawyers’ lawyers than the partners at Hale & Dorr.
I would gladly have taken an associateship there if it had been offered me. Realistically, I knew it wouldn’t be offered.
And it wasn’t.
I took the bar examinations and got myself admitted to the practice of law in the states of New York and Connecticut. That made me a lawyer—in theory, at least.
The question then was, what should I do? My father immediately suggested that Cheeks needed full-time counsel. I hope I convinced him I was grateful but that I had valid reasons not to become counsel to his company.
I hope I don’t need to explain that. By then I had complete respect for my father. But I lived a cliché. I didn’t want to remain dependent on him. I wanted to demonstrate—or to find out, anyway—that I could make it on my own.
My father arranged for me to meet for lunches with several Manhattan lawyers. After two or three weeks one of them offered me a job. I suspected my father had placed me with that firm as surely as he could have placed me as general counsel to Cheeks. But I expected to have at least a degree of independence, and I accepted.
The firm was named Gottsman, Scheck & Shapiro. Besides the three partners, there were three associates. I became the fourth associate. Our offices were in the Empire State Building. My office was tiny, but it had a north-facing window, from which I could see all of northern Manhattan and in fact all the way out to Connecticut. I could see the planes landing and taking off from La Guardia and Kennedy.
When my father saw my office, he declared the furniture, left behind by an associate who had failed to make partner, inadequate; and he completely refitted that office with a Herman Miller desk and credenza made of zebra wood, with an ergonomically designed chair. When Sam Gottsman, the senior partner, looked at it, he remarked that furniture like that belonged in the offices of Deveboise, Plimpton, not at Gottsman, Scheck & Shapiro.
The old story is that a new young lawyer spends his first six months finding the men’s rooms at the courthouses. In fact, he spends that time learning what paper is filed where and why and discovering which clerk will look over something offered for filing and kindly point out the minor defect that would render the filing ineffective. He totes a briefcase and rides the subways, carrying files here and there. In short, he learns what he did not learn in law school.
Sue Ellen did not want to live in New York City, so we leased a small house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I became a commuter. I had a lawn to cut, trees to trim, leaves to rake, gutters to clean, snow to shovel, firewood to lay up, a fireplace that wouldn’t draw, shrubs that wouldn’t blossom, bulbs that wouldn’t sprout, tomato plants that bore no tomatoes, brats who rode their motorbikes across my lawn or climbed my trees and broke off limbs …
I caught the 6:45 express each morning and was in my office before eight. I rarely reached home before seven and soon came to wonder if I should not have accepted the job my father offered, after all. Independence had its grim side.
29
My father is monogamous. That is, essentially he is, meaning he has one woman at a time. After my mother died, he established a relationship with the model Melissa Lamb. Melissa was absolutely devoted to him, and I could not object to a companion for him who so perfectly suited him as she did.
She was beautiful. She was ingenuous, the kind of woman who had given rise to the silly stereotype that a beautiful woman is likely dumb. You had to give her a chance, but given a chance she would establish that she was not as innocent as your first impression had suggested. In fact, I don’t think my father would have lived with a dull woman.
He didn’t feel comfortable living with her in the apartment that had been my mother’s home, so they moved into a two-bedroom place on the forty-fifth floor of a building on Third Avenue.
The apartment was small, but it was luxurious. It had parquet floors and two marble baths—plus a powder room, also marble. Their view over the East River was spectacular. They hired a designer to choose furniture and art. I know for a certainty that my father had no idea what he had paid for—prints and mobiles and forty yards of books in cases—and that he regarded the art as effete and ostentatious. He was, in fact, embarrassed by what hung on his walls and from his ceilings. Since he had left Melissa to work with the designer, he supposed she liked it all, never guessing that she was neutral and had no better idea than he did of what the designer had imposed on them. He did read many of the books. At this point in life my father discovered a new source of pleasure—besides which he hugely increased his store of learning.
Sue Ellen loved it all. It changed her opinion of my father. I remember her breathlessly telling her father that my father had an original Calder mobile in his living room.
“Can you imagine? An original Calder mobile! Hanging in his living room.”
Her father nodded gravely. “That’s very impressive. It shows excellent taste.”
My father didn’t know Calder from Caldor. He didn’t know the artist from the discount chain.
He called me one afternoon at my office.
“I want you for dinner tonight. Be at our apartment. Seven.”
“I’ll call Sue Ellen.”
“No, no. Don’t tell Sue Ellen. Just tell her you’ll be late. In fact, tell her you may be spending the night in our guest bedroom. I don’t want her coming in to be with us on this particular night. This is a business matter.”
“Well, I—”
“Do it, Len. See you at seven.”
It was, in fact, a business matter. When I arrived, the business matter was already there. She was a tall, slender, black-haired woman of maybe forty or forty-five, wearing a clinging black dress and a simple strand of pearls. Her eyes were dark. Her lips were full, colored with red lipstick. She wore a perfume with a pronounced odor. She was drinking a martini up, with a twist.
“Let me introduce my son, Leonard. Len, this is Vittoria Lucchese. She is looking for a lawyer.”
“Call me Vicky,” she said. “Everyone does, and I much prefer it.”
She offered her hand, not to be shaken, but high, to be kissed. I did it, and she nodded to the couch. We sat down. The woman was calm and completely self-possessed. Lucchese. I had heard the name, of course. I wondered if—
“Vicky lost her husband a few months ago,” my father said as he poured me a Scotch on the rocks. “This left her the chief stockholder of Interboro Fruit, Incorporated. You may know the company. You buy a piece of fruit imported from overseas, likely it came into this country through Interboro.”
“We don’t deal in apples and pears,” she said, cooly picking up the recital. “We deal in pineapples, Israeli oranges and strawberries, guava, kiwi fruit, mangos … We import from all over and distribute in the tri-state area. We have warehouses and a fleet of trucks, plus, of course, all the things that go with running a business: an office with all the personnel and equipment that takes. We actually just bought a computer, if you can imagine. I hope you know what that is good for. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“I have heard the name Interboro Fruit,” I said. “And the name Lucchese.”
She nodded
, still totally cool. “My late husband retained as counsel a firm I don’t like. I am interested in finding someone to represent me. You are very young and inexperienced. I understand your firm includes some experienced lawyers, shrewd lawyers. If you brought me to your firm as a client, it would be to your distinct advantage in the firm, would it not?”
This was how she would always talk. Vicky was direct. She was never subtle.
I was no less direct. “That would be to my very definite advantage,” I said.
My father beamed. “Then we can have dinner and talk about it some more.”
We had dinner at Four Seasons. By then my father had a regular table there, at which no one else was ever seated either at noon or in the evening until it was plain that Mr. Cooper was not coming. A telephone was always placed at his table, though he never used it; I never saw him use it. People did know who he was, though, and he got a lot of greetings—not from celebrity types, beaming in their glow, but from people prominent in business and money.
Melissa was tolerant of the conversation, in which she could not participate at all, and pretended she found it all hugely absorbing. Melissa had a talent for that sort of thing.
“I offered Len the position of general counsel to my company,” my father said to Vicky. “But he wanted to try his hand at what he calls the real practice of law.”
“He wanted to be independent,” she said dryly.
“I know,” my father said, equally dryly.
“I can respect him for that.”
Vicky sat beside and very close to me. Shortly I felt the heat of her hand on my leg, gently caressing. I looked at her. She fixed an ingenuous, coquettish gaze on me. I put my hand on hers. She seized my hand and moved it to her leg.
My father stared at me, mock-innocently. He knew what he had gotten me into.
He and I went to the men’s room. “The two of you will sleep in the guest room tonight,” he said. “She has a sixteen-year-old son at home in her apartment, and she doesn’t want him to see her bringing home a man only ten years older than he is.”
“Is this such a good idea?” I asked. “I mean, isn’t a lot of complication implicit in this?”
“You better believe it’s a good idea. I’ve known her for years, first by name only, then personally. I did some business with her father. Her maiden name was Castellano. I imagine she’s a first-class piece of ass, to start with, and she likes you. Besides which, she makes you a rainmaker at Gottsman, Scheck and Shapiro and the way I understand it, that’s what you’ve got to be if you expect to go anywhere. Suppose you bring in Interboro Fruit as a client. Doesn’t that make you a rainmaker? They’ll kiss your ass!”
“She’s old enough to be my mother.”
“Well, she’s not your mother,” he snapped impatiently. “You’re a big boy. Act like one.”
No one was subtle. I doubt that Vicky knew how to be. In fact, there was no way any of us could have been subtle. We chatted as we drank final brandies; then Vicky got up and went to the guest bedroom. I followed her.
The rooms in the apartment were not very large, but there was space in the guest bedroom for a double bed and for a love seat, which faced a coffee table. An Impressionist landscape hung above the love seat. The room seemed to have been designed for cozy shacking up. I went immediately to the window and pulled the drapes.
When I turned around, Vicky was on me, clasping me in her arms and kissing me fervently. She kissed with her tongue, using it to caress mine and thrusting all the way to my throat.
“Unzip my dress,” she whispered huskily.
I did and helped her pull it over her head. Under her dress she wore nothing but goodies from Cheeks. Everything was black, of course: a bra cut to expose her nipples, crotchless panties over a shaved pussy, and a lacy black garter belt trimmed with red, holding up sheer dark stockings.
She paraded around the room to show me herself and her undies. Then she said, “Let’s take a shower together. There’s no better way in the world for two people to get to know each other than to take a shower together.”
She helped me out of my clothes, shedding the intimate Cheeks things at the same time. Then she grabbed my hand and led me into the bathroom.
I needed to use the toilet and turned toward it. “Just a minute,” I murmured.
“No, no!”
In a moment we were in the shower stall, under the stream of warm water. When we were wet she grabbed the soap, soaped her hands, and soaped my hard and rigid penis.
Then—“Pee on me, Lenny,” she whispered hoarsely. “Pee all over me.”
She stepped away from the stream and faced me. I accommodated her. I pissed on her belly, her cunt, and her hips, then on her legs—giving her a thick, hot, yellow stream. She laughed. She shoved me out of the shower water, tipped her hips back, and pissed on me.
“You got any left, honey?” she asked.
I nodded. I had a little. She dropped to her knees and offered her face. She held her eyes tightly closed while I pissed on her forehead and nose and cheeks and chin. Some of it went between her lips and into her mouth—and she was in no great hurry to open her mouth to the shower stream and rinse it out.
And that was just the beginning.
* * *
Before that night was over we had settled a great many things. I knew in the first place that this would be no ordinary relationship, that it was going to be a relationship with levels of complexity I don’t think my father had guessed.
In the intervals between the things we did, Vicky told me a lot about herself. She was forty-four years old, and knew that I was twenty-six. She told me her maiden name was Castellano—which meant that she was connected. She talked frankly about that:
“It’s not like The Godfather. It’s not like—People are family; people are friends. They try to take care of each other. Look. If we didn’t take care of each other, who would take care of us, in the face of other people who are taking care of themselves? That’s the way of it. It’s a network. It’s not just Italians. The Jews did it, the Irish, and now the blacks—everybody who’s scorned and put down.”
“The Boston Brahmins,” I said, “came to this country because they were scorned and put down in England.”
Vicky nodded. As I was to learn, she had given a great deal of attention to this topic. “Well … sometimes mutual-protection societies make wrong turns. Sometimes—I don’t have to name names. The most respectable of respectables do things they shouldn’t do. People get killed? How many people were killed by the Robber Barons a century or so ago? So Arnold Rothstein gets whacked out. Dutch Schultz. Bugsy Siegel. How many men and women were whacked out on the orders of Andrew Carnegie? John D. Rockefeller?”
We coupled again. I plunged into her as deep and hard as I could. Then she sucked me. She was as good as Sue Ellen or Mollie. I returned the favor. That I did that was a measure of how enthusiastic I had already become about Vicky. I pushed my tongue as deeply as I could where my cock had been. She guided me to her clit, and I licked that until she stiffened and moaned.
She was obsessed with me, which was staggering. I was bewitched by her, drawn to her, irresistibly. We were very different people, but the differences got submerged. This was no one-night thing. It was not just passion. I knew that Vicky Lucchese was going to be an important part of the rest of my life.
Before morning we settled it also that Gottsman, Scheck would represent Interboro Fruit.
30
Bringing Interboro Fruit to my firm as a client made me a rainmaker. A rainmaker is a lawyer who brings business to his firm, and is more valued than one who does competent work. Getting business is more important than doing business.
Most of Interboro’s work was assigned to other lawyers, specialists in the various legal problems such a company would have. We even assigned its problems with interstate truck licensing to another firm. Under Hugh Scheck’s supervision, I handled the company’s corporation problems. I should have spent another year toting b
riefcases, but having brought in a good client I got special consideration. Scheck took a liking to me and became my mentor.
Hugh Scheck was one hell of a lawyer. He was one hell of a man. He’d taken a spinal wound in Vietnam and lost 70 percent of the use of his legs. But the gutsy bastard would not sit in a wheelchair. He stumbled around on two canes, red-faced and huffing and determined. He took no crap from anybody and was a good enough lawyer that he didn’t have to. He was one of the few men I’ve ever seen who could simply stare someone down. The power of his personality, plus the power of his intellect, were formidable.
“Y’know what this fruit company is, don’t you?” he said to me one day within a month after I brought in the client. “I mean, I suppose you know its history.”
“I’ve got my suspicions. Suppose you tell me.”
“Okay. Selling high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables has been taken over by the Koreans. Oh, you can get the same in supermarkets but not like the quality the Koreans offer. Those bastards work their tails off to run their little stores. They drive downtown every morning before dawn to buy their kiwi and mangos and what all, plus the apples and tomatoes they get from New Jersey. They buy the very best. They buy the imported stuff from Interboro.”
“So?”
Hugh sighed, as if he supposed I should know what he was about to say. “Louie Lucchese was a Carlino. There was a time when most grocers didn’t buy from anybody else what they could buy from Louie. You can guess why. Then he got it through his head he didn’t have to use muscle. Interboro is a respectable business now. I wouldn’t have let it in here as a client if I didn’t think so. But watch out for the widow, Len. Vicky’s maiden name was Castellano—Vittoria Castellano. Do I have to introduce you to that name?”
The Secret Page 12
