Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

…

“What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?

What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?”

So her voice becomes cultured. Deeper, fuller, lower. It’s all part of the package. Like the clothes Haley takes her shopping for. The books Haley makes her read. The daily newspaper. “And not the fashion page, kiddo, or the arts,” Haley says. “A courtesan reads the sports section first, then the financial pages, then maybe the news.”

So she starts showing up at school with the morning paper. Her friends are out in the parking lot having that last-minute bong hit before the bell rings, and Nora’s sitting there checking out the scores, the Dow Jones, the editorial page. She’s reading the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, the freaking Christian Science Monitor.

And that’s about the only time she spends in the backseat.

Nora the Whora goes to Cabo and comes back Nora the Ice Maiden.

“She’s a virgin again,” is how Elizabeth explains it to their bewildered friends. She doesn’t mean it unkindly; it just seems to be true. “She went to Cabo and had her hymen reattached.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” their friend Raven says.

Elizabeth just sighs.

Raven asks her for the name of the doctor.

Nora becomes a gym fiend, spending hours on the stationary cycle, more hours on the treadmill. Haley hires her a personal trainer, a fascist health-freak chick named Sherry whom Nora dubs her “physical terrorist.” This nazi has a body like a greyhound, and she starts whipping Nora’s body into the tight little package that Haley wants to market. Gets her doing push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and starts her on weights.

The interesting thing is that Nora starts to dig it.

All of it-the rigorous mental and physical training. Nora is, like, into it. She gets up one morning and goes to wash her face (with the special cleanser Haley buys her), looks in the mirror, and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?” She goes to class, she hears herself discoursing about current affairs and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?”

Whoever she is, Nora likes her.

Her dad doesn’t notice the change. How could he? Nora thinks. I don’t come in a Baggie.

Haley takes her on a drive up to the Sunset Strip in L.A. to show her the crack whores. Crack cocaine has hit the country like a virus, and the whores have caught it. Big time. They’re on their knees in alleys, on their backs in cars. Some of them are young, some old-Nora is shocked that they all look so old. And so sick.

“I could never be one of these women,” Nora says.

“Yes, you could,” Haley says. “If you don’t stay straight. Keep off dope, don’t let your head get fucked-up. Most of all, put the money away. You’ll have ten to twelve peak earning years, if you take care of yourself. Tops. After that, it’s all downhill. So you want to have stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Real estate. I’ll hook you up with my financial planner.”

Because the girl is going to need one, Haley thinks.

Nora is the package.

When she turns eighteen, she’s ready to go to the White House.

White walls, white carpet, white furniture. A pain in the ass to clean and maintain, but worth it because it quiets the men the moment they walk in. (There’s not one of them who wasn’t as a boy scared shitless of spilling something on his mother’s white whatever.) And when Haley is in attendance, she always wears white: The house is me, I am the house. I’m untouchable, my house is likewise untouchable.

Her women always wear black.

Nothing else, always stark black.

Haley wants her women to stand out.

And they’re always fully dressed. Never in lingerie or robes-Haley’s not running some cheap Nevada mustang ranch. She’s been known to costume the women in turtlenecks, in business suits, in basic little black frocks, in gowns. She dresses her women in clothes that the men can imagine removing. And she makes them wait to do that.

They have to jump through hoops, even at the White House.

On the walls hang black-and-white renditions of goddesses: Aphrodite, Nike, Venus, Hedy Lamarr, Sally Rand, Marilyn Monroe. Nora finds the pictures intriguing, especially the one of Monroe, because they look a little alike.

No kidding, they do, Haley thinks.

She’s billing Nora as a young Monroe without the body fat.

Nora’s nervous. She’s staring into a video monitor of the sitting room, looking at this party of clients, one of whom is going to be her first professional lay. She hasn’t had sex in a year and a half anyway, and she’s not even sure she remembers how to do it, never mind do it five hundred bucks’ worth. So she’s hoping she gets this one, the tall, dark, shy one, and it does seem that Haley is trying to steer things in that direction.

“Nervous?” Joyce asks her. Joyce is her polar opposite, a flat-chested gamine in a 1950s Paris outfit-Gigi as whore-who’s been helping with her makeup and clothes, an open-neck black blouse over a black skirt.

“Yes.”

“Everyone is the first time,” Joyce says. “Then it gets to be routine.”

Nora keeps looking at the four men sitting awkwardly on the big sofa. They look young, only in their mid-twenties, but they don’t look like rich spoiled college kids, and she wonders how they got the money to come here. How they got here at all.

Callan wonders the same thing.

Like, what the hell are we doing here?

Big Paulie Calabrese would shit blood if he knew Jimmy Peaches was out here connecting the pipeline that will suck cocaine like a giant straw from Colombia through Mexico and on to the West Side.

“Will you relax?” Peaches says. “I set a place for you at the table, will you fucking sit down and eat?”

“ 'You deal, you die,’ ” Callan reminds him. “That’s what Calabrese said.”

“Yeah, 'You deal, you die,’ ” Jimmy says. “But if we don’t deal, we starve. Is fuckin’ Paulie giving us a taste of the unions? No. The kickbacks? No. Trucking? Construction? No. Fuck him. Let him give me a taste of those businesses and then he can tell me don’t deal. In the meantime, I deal.”

The doors haven’t shut on the bellhops’ behinds and Peaches says he wants to go to this cathouse he’s heard about.

Callan’s not into it.

“We flew three thousand miles to get laid?” he asks. “We can get laid at home.”

“Not like this we can’t,” Peaches says. “They say they got the best pussy in the world at this place.”

“Sex is sex,” Callan says.

“What do you know about it?” Peaches asks. “You’re Irish.”

It’s not like Callan ain’t tempted here, it’s just that this was supposed to be a business trip, and when it comes to business Callan is just that-business. Tough enough keeping the Brothers Piccone from stepping on their own dicks on the job, never mind when they’re dogging women.

So he says, “I thought this was a business trip.”

“Jesus, will you lighten up?” Peaches says. “You’re gonna die, on your headstone it’s gonna say you never had no fun. We’ll get laid, we’ll do business. We might even take a minute to get a meal if that’s okay with you. I hear they got great seafood here.”

Yeah, this is real smart of Peaches, Callan thinks. Looking out the window at nothing but ocean, he figures someone out here might have figured out how to cook a fish.

“You’re a grim bastard, you know that?” Peaches adds.

Yeah, I’m a grim bastard, Callan thinks. I’ve punched what, five guys’ tickets for the Ciminos, Peaches tells me I’m a grim bastard.

“Who gave you the number?” Callan asks. He doesn’t like it. Peaches calls this number, some bimbo tells him, Sure, come over, they get to some warehouse where all that’s waiting for them is a shit storm.