Joe Gores: Glass Tiger

As he slid back down under the covers, he wondered if she still had old Charlie’s bearskin.

The Sierra Foothills, Northern California

The 26-year-old woman stood looking out the open door of her cabin three miles from the Casa Loma general store. Her eyes were a startling blue in a tawny face with a strong nose and high cheekbones; utterly straight raven hair flowed down to the middle of her back. This had been her parents’ cabin under her father’s long-since discarded name of Roanhorse: now it was hers. Pale blue moonlight showed her a muledeer doe and a yearling fawn browsing at the edge of the snow-clad clearing. She raised a steaming cup of coffee to salute them.

‘Happy New Year, guys,’ she said aloud. They ignored her, as was right between old and trusted friends.

Her bare feet were frigid on the pine planks, but she stood there a moment longer, feeling the night. A New Year, a year of change. She would write the letter, first step toward building a new life. After all, there had been nothing from Hal since he had left her hospital room on the eve of the elections. What had he done since? What might he still do?

She shivered, stepped back, shut the cabin door, and crawled into her bunkbed under the bearskin he had given her.

Rockville, Maryland

A cigar smouldered in an ashtray on the bedside table. The motel had a king-size bed and a dirty movie channel on the TV for nine bucks a night. Pale moonlight filtering through gauzy curtains showed a burly bear of a man in his late thirties, sitting on the edge of the bed with his pants off. Dense black hair covered his head, back, chest, belly, groin.

The platinum-haired black whore crouched between his thighs had long limbs, dangly breasts and very full lips and white teeth. She drew back her head momentarily to speak.

‘It’s starting to get there, baby,’ she crooned. ‘Oooh, baby, it’s gonna be sooo good!’

But it wasn’t. He had thought, after that night two months ago, that this would never happen again. One thing he knew for sure: it was all this ugly black bitch’s fault.

‘Aw hell, lady, this ain’t working.’

He stood. His big fisted right hand struck her in the face, breaking her nose and mashing the suddenly hateful lying red lips flat against her teeth. She scrambled backwards away across the threadbare rug like a frightened spider, platinum wig down over one eye. But he followed, relentless, kicking her in face, belly, breasts.

Panting, spent, he stared down at the sobbing woman. There would be no repercussions: just in case, he had prepaid Sharkey out in LA enough to assure her silence here in D.C. In just twenty more days he would start to savor the power he had worked so hard to get. Then he wouldn’t need bitches like this one any more.

He wiped himself with a handful of Kleenex, put on his pants and left.

Happy New Year.

Arlington, Virginia

Happy New Year? The upscale tract house occupied a half-acre of prime real estate on a twisty, winding blacktop road off the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The tall, very fit African-American saw the last of their party guests out into the winter night. When he turned back to ruefully survey the damage, Cora was giving him her patented dissatisfied look.

‘We’ll clean this mess up in the morning,’ he told her.

Cora’s gleaming hair was artfully styled; in her heels, she was just three inches shorter than his six-one. She had cool eyes and the haughty, brown, fine-boned face of that Ethiopian fashion model who had married the rock star a dozen years before.

‘We’ll get the cleaning service to do it in the morning.’

At double or triple rates, of course. He stifled his irritated response. His crack FBI Hostage Rescue/Sniper team had been out in the boondocks on special assignment for all of November and December. He seriously needed to get laid. He put an arm around his wife’s waist to guide her toward the stairs.

‘Sure thing, baby. But tonight we got some lovin’ to do.’

She went with him, but might not have heard him.

‘Now you’re going to be home more, I think we should start looking for a bigger house, further out.’

Translation: an acre of land where they could keep a horse and pretend to be landed gentry. Was that any different from ten acres and a mule? Cora didn’t want kids to ruin her figure; she was all about appearances, as ambitious for money and social position as he was for power and political access. Now if something would just happen in the next twenty days to keep him and his team on that same detached duty to the Chief of Staff for the foreseeable future, that would make it a Happy New Year for sure.

Something did.

January nineteenth. Hal Corwin crossed the Truckee Post Office parking lot with the slightest of limps, gingerly, as if not sure of his footing on the just-plowed surface. Here, at nearly 6,000 feet of elevation on the Cal-Nev border, the frigid air bit hard at his bullet-damaged lung.

Janet Kestrel stepped down from the driver’s side of her old dark-green 4-Runner facing out from a far corner of the lot. Its motor was running as if for a quick getaway. Her tawny face was as brown as his, but from genetics, not weather. Today her ebony hair was piled on top of her head under a furlined cap.

Hal put his left hand on her arm, tenderly. The hand was missing two fingers. ‘Delivery tomorrow morning, guaranteed.’

‘Know why that doesn’t make me happy? Tomorrow afternoon he’ll have all of the world’s resources at his command.’

‘Doesn’t matter. He has to feel it coming.’

Before that night last November she had been avid, urging him on. She knew little about the deaths and was afraid to ask. Afraid to know what she might have helped drive him to.

They hugged. He was a rangy six feet, the top of her head fit just under his chin. Her blue eyes were tight shut. During four months last year, he had become the father she had lost, she had become the daughter he had... oh God, what had he done?

She had driven up here as he had asked, would go home and wait for his call. But she had written the letter. She stepped back from his embrace, schooling all emotion from her voice.

‘Page my cellphone when you need the 4-Runner.’

‘I will. Just bring it back here and catch the first bus down the mountain. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing.’ He laid a gentle palm on her cheek. ‘I’ll call you afterwards.’

She climbed into the 4-Runner. He bowed slightly and swept a courtly arm to usher her away. Any chance of seeing her again was probably nil, but setting it up now meant there could be no possible danger to her later.

Gustave Wallberg didn’t have George W.’s little-boy smiley-eyes, nor Clinton’s testosterone-drenched good-old-boy appeal. Instead, he had the rugged good looks of, say, a retired pro quarterback, just right for this 300-channel sound-bite era.

Protocol demanded that he wear a diplomat’s gray cutaway, but he had wanted a snap-on bowtie. Emily had insisted on hand-tied. Once in a lifetime, after all.

He pulled the offending tie apart yet again and said, ‘Dammit anyway,’ without turning from the mirror. Emily appeared behind him in her Bill Blass original.

‘Yes, dear,’ she said gaily. ‘Turn around.’

The anteroom door banged open and Kurt Jaeger surged in like a charging bear, bigger than life. He had an unlit cigar in one hand, a flat blue and white Post Office EXPRESS MAIL envelope in the other. Seeing Emily, he slowed, found a grin.

‘So, Emily. Ready for the big moment?’

‘Yes, if this man would only stand still long enough for me to’ — she gave her husband’s tie a final jerk — ‘get this right...’