Somebody Else's Music
Page 49
“At least. I should think that would be enough. I should think that would be enough of me for you, to be precise. What is it you really want here, Charlotte?”
“I want you to give it up.”
“Give what up? You haven’t discovered anything I’m doing that I could give up. There isn’t anything to discover. And you can’t want me to go back to sleeping with you. You barely stood it the first time.”
“I want you to give him up.”
“David.”
“Yes, David. I want you to give him up.”
“Why? Or do you now imagine that I’m sleeping with David? God only knows when he’d have the time, considering the fact that he’s sleeping with half the debutantes in Philadelphia and three-quarters of the debutantes in New York. At last count. And he’s completely in control of the Price King mess, which is a mess, and which is likely to get messier very soon.”
“I don’t see why you stick up for him,” Charlotte said. “He’s not just in charge of Price King now; he set that whole thing up to begin with. He’s managed it from day one. And what did you get? There’s going to be a bankruptcy any day now and you know it. I can’t stand the sight of him. He makes my skin crawl.”
“Why?”
“How should I know why? He’s insidious. And I don’t care who his family is. He’s not—right. I don’t know how to put it.”
“You never did have much of a talent for words.”
“I don’t need that kind of thing from you now, Tony. I really don’t. I need him out of my life. At the very least you can stop inviting him to where I am.”
“David is my confidential assistant. We’re in the middle of a major crisis. You’re behaving like a spoiled brat.”
“You’re always in the middle of a major crisis. To hear you tell it, there’s nothing in life but major crises. The story of American banking.”
“Often, yes.”
“Get rid of him, or I’ll get a very public divorce.”
“Nonsense.”
“Maybe I’ll do something better. Maybe I’ll leak it to the press. Not the press you own, the other kind. The tabloids. I’ll say you are sleeping with David Alden. You know they’ll believe it.”
“The tabloids aren’t interested in me. Their readers don’t know who I am, and wouldn’t care if they did.”
“Maybe I’ll leak it to that man. Michael Harridan. The one with the web site.”
“Michael Harridan is taken about as seriously as Bugs Bunny.”
“You don’t take me seriously. And that’s a mistake, Tony. I promise it is.”
“We’re getting off the turnpike,” Tony said. “We’ll be home in less than twenty minutes.”
Charlotte turned her face away, her long neck straining against the stiff white collar of her linen shirt. She was too thin, the way all these women were. The muscles in her neck looked like ropes. He was not afraid of her. There was nothing she could do to him, and nothing she would really want to do, once she thought about it. She made him tired, so that all he could think of was …
… sleep, endless sleep, black sleep, the kind that was supposed to come over you when you drowned in the waters of Lethe.
Still, if he’d been somebody else, somebody poorer, somebody less hedged in by security and position—he would have wrapped his hands around her neck and ripped her windpipe out.
SOMEBODY ELSE’S MUSIC
Copyright © 2002 by Orania Papazoglou.
Excerpt from Conspiracy Theory © 2003 by Orania Papazoglou.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / June 2002
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / April 2003
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Cover photo © Laura Johansen/Nonstock.
eISBN 9781429904933
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001058899