The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  He shook Ice Cream’s hand, bowed perfunctorily, and murmured, “Don Napolitano.”

  Ice Cream was a fleshy man, nattily dressed in a black cashmere overcoat and matching cashmere suit. His bald head glistened. His remaining hair was coal-black. He had a scar in his right eyebrow, as if someone had just missed blinding him. The handkerchief in his breast pocket matched his necktie. He wore a monogrammed white silk shirt. His pointy black shoes were mirror-shined.

  “Mr. Nero. And Mr. Cooper. Sit down. The steaks are good here. Unfortunately, it’s all they have that’s good. Try the filet mignon. That’s what I’m having. And they know how to broil them right, too: just rare enough and not too rare.”

  He had already made a heavy inroad on the basket of crusty French bread and the plate of butter, and on a bottle of red wine as well. He raised a finger and by gesture ordered replenishment of the bread and butter and a second bottle of wine. Obviously they knew him here. His bodyguards kept eyes like the eyes of snakes on Sal and me.

  “Do you have a wife, Don Napolitano?” Sal asked.

  “Yes, of course,” said Ice Cream. “And five children, three boys and two girls. They are the pride of my life. I tell you, the pleasures of family life are not exceeded by anything else life can bring us. I accept no dinner invitations. I gather my little group around our table every evening, and we enjoy one of life’s other great pleasures: first-class Italian cooking with first-class Italian wine.”

  “We have brought along a gift box of Cheeks merchandise. For your wife, or … for a friend, as you may choose.”

  He would find $10,000 in cash in the package, as the Chef had. We could figure he knew about that and maybe the Chef would hear about this, so the amount had to be the same.

  “It is thoughtful of you,” said Ice Cream. “It will go to someone who will appreciate such things.”

  We knew that meant they would go to a girlfriend. After he had enjoyed the incomparable pleasures of family life, he would slip out to know the pleasures of another life.

  Over lunch the talk was about the difficulties of running a business: union problems, how hard it was to find trustworthy managers, taxes, regulations.… Ice Cream described himself as being in the produce business, supplying fruits and vegetables wholesale to local markets in Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. He said not a word that suggested he was a Mafia don. Until—

  “Perhaps you understand why I was concerned that you might be affiliated with my dear friend Don Enrico. He is a great man, a very great man, but he and his group control too many things in our city. Of course, who sells what you sell is not a matter of concern for me. I was only worried that you might be something different from what you were represented to be.”

  “Jerry didn’t understand the meaning of the abbraccio,” Sal explained. “He did not mean to pledge his allegiance.”

  “Of course. I understand entirely. You do not need my blessing to do business, but you have it, in any event. For whatever little it is worth, you have it.”

  “Thank you, Don Napolitano,” I said. “It is our business to be friends with everyone and to intrude on no one else’s business. We sought out a business we could enter without intruding on anyone else’s business. I hope we have guessed right about that.”

  “I tell you, though,” Don Napolitano said finally. “I got more truck capacity than I need. If sometime you need trucks to deliver your stuff to your stores, I’d appreciate your business. Whatever you can give me, you know. Anything.”

  “You got it,” said Sal. “You understand, it’s not a lot of stuff. But what we got, the business is yours.”

  “I might have people you could use. You know, store clerks. Like that. I mean, gals would love to move out of the produce business and into a fine, perfumed type of shop like you run. In my business I always have a surplus of young people looking for good jobs. Besides, it’s hard to find people you can trust.”

  “You’re too good to us, Don Napolitano,” said Sal. Soapy as Sal could be, he could not conceal the sarcasm behind that statement. He didn’t even try.

  I interjected. “With an understanding, Don Napolitano,” I said. “We had a problem in Connecticut with a few girls who were hustling on the side. We know you would never send us a girl who intended to hustle out of our stores. If you knew it. But if one happened to deceive you, we know you would expect us to send her back.”

  Ice Cream smiled. “Absolutely. I’d put her to work tearing the spoiled leaves off the outside of cabbage heads.”

  We shook hands. Significantly, we did not embrace or exchange the kiss. If we had, it would have been reported to Don Enrico within the hour.

  “The shit piles deeper and deeper,” Sal groused on our return flight to Westchester Airport. “Don Enrico thinks you’re his man. Don Napolitano has us committed to using his trucks and taking his gals into our stores. Christ, Jerry! We better pull out of Philly.”

  * * *

  And maybe we should have. Ice Cream’s girls began to appear and apply for jobs. They were attractive, generally, and intelligent. They asked for more money than we were paying our other girls. It was only little more, and we decided to pay all our clerks what the don’s girls asked, to keep peace.

  It wasn’t so simple. The manager of our downtown store was a woman named Wanda, and one day Wanda asked me to go back to her little office for a talk.

  “We got a problem,” she said.

  “Which is?”

  “The Boiardos sent us a girl named Franny. Well … Franny calls herself a collector and is telling the non-Boiardo girls that they have to pay what she calls dues. It’s just five dollars a week, and of course they all got that five-dollar raise when the Boiardo girls started coming in, so they’re paying it. I’ve got eleven girls on the payroll, so the Boiardos are collecting fifty-five dollars a week.”

  “A hundred fifteen,” I said. “If they’re doing it here, they’re doing it at the other store, where we’ve got twelve girls on the payroll.”

  “Nickel-and-dime business,” Wanda said scornfully.

  “Maybe. How many other businesses do you figure have got Boiardo people on their payroll and pay dues?”

  Sal didn’t like it. He said the dues would go up in time. “It’s a classical extortion,” he said. “It’s just like paying protection. No difference at all.”

  “So what can we do about it?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. Let me talk to Jimmy Lead Eyes.”

  I have no idea what he said to Jimmy Lead Eyes or what Jimmy Lead Eyes said to him. Whatever it was, it didn’t do us any good. Ice Cream kept on collecting dues.

  Even so, Philadelphia was a prime market for us. We did so well there that, after four months, I decided to open a third store.

  So far we had not called on Ice Cream to provide us any trucking service. Furnishing and stocking a new store gave us the opportunity to call on Ice Cream. We did. I figured the shit would be in the fan if we didn’t.

  There was almost trouble when a Pennsylvania-licensed truck with the sign BOIARDI PRODUCE showed up in the garment district to pick up a load of merchandise. The New York teamsters didn’t like that a little bit. But somehow the driver convinced their muscle man it was cool—probably by handing over an envelope—and the truck left for Philly carrying an inventory of scanties and nighties.

  It never made it. Between Exits 7a and 7 on the New Jersey Pike, the truck blew up. The driver, shielded by the steel between the cab and the cargo compartment, was not severely injured. Our merchandise was blown out of the torn-open truck and scattered along half a mile of highway. Much of it was burned, but much of it was intact. We did not recover a single carton. Hundreds of cars stopped, and delighted travelers looted everything in sight. Worse than that, we learned later that half a dozen state police cars left the scene with their backseats littered with panties and bras, garter belts, negligees, nightgowns, strip sets, and what have you.

  I had no chance to ask Ice C
ream what insurance he carried. Two days later his car blew up and scattered bits of Don Napolitano Boiardo along half a mile of Frankford Avenue.

  Six weeks later, old Don Enrico Boiardo was literally cut in two by blasts from a twelve-gauge shotgun. I elected for the time being not to tell Len what had happened to the man who had bought his Gucci shoes for him.

  The newspaper accounts of the gang war made something of the fact that the blown-up truck had been delivering merchandise to stock the city’s third Cheeks store.

  We were left orphans in Philadelphia, so to speak. What to do now? For example, did we tell our managers to stop the business of collecting dues from our employees? I decided to take a chance on that. I told them to stop it. We’d find out how badly demoralized the Boiardo family was. Or if it wasn’t.

  35

  LEN

  Sue Ellen and Mollie returned from China. I went to Kennedy Airport to pick them up. I had received cards and even a couple of calls from China and knew they were having the time of their lives. I had very realistic notions of just what kind of time that was—bedtime, lover time.

  Well … I was living with Vicky. On the other hand, I was a man and Vicky was a woman, for Christ’s sake! Sue Ellen and Mollie had become woman-woman lovers. I could guess why they were happy with their trip. They had discovered a new kind of experience, one that suited them very well.

  Both of them had to submit to a strip search at customs. I think they raised suspicion by their dog collars, which they were wearing even on their long flight. A customs agent had me paged in the waiting hall, came to me, and showed me Sue Ellen’s passport.

  “That young woman says she’s your wife, Sir. Is that young woman your wife?”

  “Yes. What’s the difficulty?”

  “I’m afraid she fits a profile for people who enter the country carrying narcotics. That doesn’t necessarily mean she really is, but we have to search her thoroughly. Also her companion.”

  I was pissed. “If she’s carrying anything, she’s in deep shit and on her own,” I said. “If she’s doing that—” I softened. “I’m pretty damn sure she’s not doing that. Not her thing.”

  “May I ask what occupation you are in, sir, and where you live?”

  “I am a lawyer in New York, with the firm of Gottsman, Scheck & Shapiro. I live in Greenwich, Connecticut.”

  “It’s probably nothing, Mr. Cooper. It’s just that they tend to look like the kind of people we have to worry about.”

  Ultimately, Sue Ellen and Mollie came out, pulling their wheeled suitcases and laughing.

  “You won’t believe this!” Sue Ellen chortled. “Naked. Nak-ed. The poor Hispanic woman who had to do it was embarrassed out of her skull.”

  “They didn’t miss anything,” Mollie laughed. “I all but came. Hell, I thought I was going to. To have a stranger’s fingers up—”

  “Enough!” I snapped. “I don’t think it’s funny. If they’d found anything, it would have hurt me as much as you. You two are … you’re half sloshed.”

  “You’re no fun,” Sue Ellen protested. “You’re more like my father every day. Lawyer!”

  When I told Vicky, she was grim. “Your wife … It would have been up to you to prove you weren’t…”

  Sue Ellen and Mollie got in the car. When we were out on the Van Wyck, I turned to Mollie in the backseat and asked, “Where do I drop you off?”

  She smirked.

  Sue Ellen answered my question. “She’s going to bunk in with us for a while.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re family, aren’t we? I mean, after all, what else can you call a girl who gave you the best blow job you ever had and taught me to do it, too?”

  I knew what this meant. If not for the fact that I had been sleeping every night—and would continue to sleep as often as I could—with Vicky Lucchese, I would have said flat no. As it was, I simply shrugged.

  “Tai-barng-le!” said Sue Ellen. This was something else I would have to put up with, that this pair would communicate with each other in Chinese, knowing I couldn’t understand a word of it. They had it on me that they were fluently bilingual and I wasn’t, and they amused themselves at my expense constantly.

  They had no more surprises for me. I had expected that during their month of living together in hotel rooms they would not only share sex but would fall in love with each other. In fact, it had happened before they traveled to China.

  I think of Mollie as my means of escape from my marriage to Sue Ellen.

  Sex is an important part of my life. It always has been. It had become an overpowering obsession with Sue Ellen. I thought I had married a somewhat placid little girl who was embarrassed by her oversized breasts. Not gradually, but rather abruptly—since, after all, I’d been married to her only four years when she fell in love with Mollie—she turned into a lesbian.

  But not a very clever one.

  I don’t know why she wanted to show me what she and Mollie did. All I know is that she was an exhibitionist, too. She wanted me to watch while she shoved her face into Mollie’s crotch and vigorously licked Mollie’s woolly pussy. Sometimes she would have to back off and pull a hair out of her mouth. When Mollie had come two or three times, they would change positions, and Mollie would lick Sue Ellen.

  They giggled and joked while they did it.

  —“Dammit, you need a haircut. I’m getting a mouthful of cunt hair.”

  —“So-o-o wet! It’s dripping off my chin.”

  She wanted Mollie to watch when she and I coupled and wanted to watch when Mollie gave me head.

  Sue Ellen and Mollie were kinky and got kinkier.

  They wore their dog collars pretty much all the time. I would come home from New York and find them naked and chained together by some four feet of chain that ran from one dog collar to another, locked on them with laminated padlocks, and they would give me the key. They thought it was sexy that they were chained together. I was supposed to think so, too. I might have if they had been a couple of hookers; but, dammit, Sue Ellen was my wife.

  Then … I made some kind of excuse and stayed in the city with Vicky three nights. When I came home, I found that my wife had had both her nipples pierced—as, of course, had Mollie. Both of them were in a little pain, and I had to daub their tits with an antiseptic that stained and stung. They wore rather crude-looking steel rings, something like key-chain rings, which they called “training rings.” Fortunately, no infection set in, and shortly they swore all pain was gone and the rings were comfortable.

  After a couple of weeks they went back to the man who had pierced them and had him install permanent platinum rings, fastened with solder, that could not be removed except by cutting them. They were about the size of a nickel and as thick as the lead in a pencil. They hung in visible holes in their nipples.

  After that they never wore their clips. They didn’t have to. They hung tiny silver chains between their nipples and suspended ornaments from them. Sue Ellen wore her engagement ring hanging between her breasts. I am not sure if she was mocking me or not.

  Of course, they went topless all the time. I never thought I would get tired of looking at women’s boobs, but I got sick of looking at Sue Ellen’s and Mollie’s.

  Then they began to talk about labial rings. The man who had pierced their nipples would pierce their inner labia, and they could wear rings there, as described in The Story of O. They had read the book, and the idea excited them. I did not bother to remind them that the rings installed on O’s most private parts were installed by and for a man. There was no point in talking to them.

  They even asked me to get the skin of my penis pierced and to wear a pearl stud.

  I’d reached a point where I confided a lot in Vicky. I had to be careful about that. I had to avoid reminding her that she was eighteen years older than I was—old enough, as I had objected to my father, to be my mother. I had to be careful not to treat her as a trusted older adviser.

  She shrugged. “I know a young
woman who wears rings in her pussy,” she said. “Gross!”

  “The only thing worse, that I can think of, is piercing your tongue,” I said.

  “If this kid wants to have her cunt pierced, she’s weird, Len.”

  I nodded.

  Vicky smiled. “Hear what I’ve just said. I called your wife, who’s your own age, I suppose, a kid.”

  She put her hands to her own shaved crotch and separated the fleshy lips. “To punch holes in there … Too painful for me.”

  “I’ve got to get rid of her, Vicky.”

  “Both of them,” she said.

  Suddenly it occurred to me that we’d just said something significant. If I got rid of Sue Ellen, did that mean…? I think it occurred to Vicky, too. We dropped the subject.

  My wife was not bright. Or maybe it was Mollie who was not bright. More likely, neither one of them was. They simply handed me my opportunity, carelessly. I imagine they thought I would never act against them.

  Maybe I should have tried to evict Mollie and worked to save my marriage. Maybe I would have, if not for Vicky. Vicky had taken the place Sue Ellen had once had and could have had still.

  I came home one night to find Sue Ellen and Mollie naked and making video tapes of each other. They had bought a camera.

  They put a tape they had made on the VCR and pushed me down on the couch to watch it.

  It was pretty tame. They had not yet figured out a way to photograph themselves together, so the tape showed only one of them at a time. Each one stripped. Then she posed, showing herself off. They had focused on their crotches, then on their anuses, each spread apart with fingers. Even they were disappointed in the results.

  “What we need is a cameraman,” said Mollie.

  They made me the cameraman. While I aimed and focused, my wife shoved her face into Mollie’s crotch and licked her labia and clitoris. The camera recorded sound, and they recorded talk as well as pictures: