Гарольд Роббинс - The Raiders

Angie was seventeen when Damone was arrested and the newspapers revealed the true nature of his business. The charges were dropped, but Angie was so humiliated that she never went back to school. She asked Damone to give her a job with a bookie, but he adamantly refused. For a year she did nothing. She avoided her old friends and made a group of new ones among the unemployed and malcontented element of the young people of White Plains.

One of them was a young man named Jerome Latham. Considered handsome, he had a square face with a long, strong jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, and slicked-down hair usually covered with a snap-brim hat. He always had money to spend, and no one was sure how he got it, which lent him a dim aura of mystery and glamour. Angie fell in love with him; and, since she was by far the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, Jerry — She couldn't say Jerry fell in love with her. She was an ornament to him, or a trophy. But they became a pair. They were seen everywhere together. He spent money on her. He bought her clothes.

Her mother and stepfather did not like Jerry Latham. Damone called him a hoodlum, to which Angie replied angrily that Damone was an odd man to be calling another man a hoodlum. That exchange soured the relationship between her and her mother, as well as that between her and her stepfather. She went to Jerry and told him she wanted to live with him.

Jerry took her in. He lived in a room, just one room, but shortly he rented a small apartment, and in July of 1937, when she was nineteen years old, they married.

She learned how Jerry made the money he was never without. He was a distributor of counterfeit money. He bought the money from a counterfeiter in New Rochelle, paying him eight dollars apiece for twenty-dollar bills. Then he traveled throughout the New York metropolitan area, making small purchases and tendering counterfeit twenties, in a typical transaction he would buy five dollars' worth of something, hand over a twenty, get fifteen in change, and make seven dollars profit. He would ride a bus, say to Paterson, New Jersey, pass half a dozen twenties in the course of an afternoon, and come home fifty dollars richer. He might make more if he could sell the merchandise he bought. Often he hocked it and never redeemed it.

He was never caught. The secret was that he wasn't greedy. In 1938 a family could live quite comfortably on a hundred fifty a month. He went out no more than once a week. Also, he kept careful track of where he went. He never returned to the same merchant, usually not even to the same block.

The ease with which her husband got money fascinated Angie. She suggested he let her try it. She went with him a few times, then went out on her own. She was useful to him. She could go back to stores where he had been, where he wouldn't return, and take the same business for another hit.

In February of 1940 something terrible happened. Treasury agents raided the New Rochelle print shop. Their counterfeiter went off to federal prison.

Jerry had to find a new racket. He began to loot mailboxes. She helped him. They poured bags of mail out on their kitchen table, sometimes finding cash, sometimes checks, sometimes money orders, occasionally a stock certificate or a bond. He was an artistic forger, too. When he found a good-sized check, made out to, say, Arthur Schultz, he would forge a driver's license in the name of Arthur Schultz, and use it as identification as he offered the check at a bank. If the check was made out to a woman, Angie cashed it.

The Selective Service law went into effect on September 10, 1940. Jerry Latham had one of the first numbers picked. Before the year ended, he was at Fort Dix, undergoing basic infantry training.

Angie was desperate. She had no real idea how to make a living, except by doing the kind of thing Jerry had done. On March 11, 1941, federal agents entered her apartment, arrested her, and seized more than four hundred pieces of mail. They found driver's license blanks and even a few counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. On June 20 she entered the federal reformatory for women at Alderson, West Virginia.

They brought the telegram to her cell. Sergeant Jerome Latham had been killed in action on June 6, 1944. She received her parole in September.

During her three years in prison she had learned to take shorthand and to type.

She never worked for Boise-Cascade or for the California state auditor. Her parole officer helped her obtain a job as secretary to the War Ration Board in White Plains. Before long she met the man who was to become her second husband, Ted Wyatt. He was exactly the kind of man Jerry Latham had been: a grifter whose specialty was counterfeit ration stamps. As a secretary to the board, she could learn what stamps would be authorized for use next month, which was useful information for a man who needed to know what stamps to print.

Her term of parole ended in September 1945. She married Ted Wyatt, and they set out for California, where both of them hoped to be free from the reputations they had made in the New York area. He did introduce her to gambling, as she had told Jonas. He took her to Reno, then to Las Vegas, and when casinos like the Flamingo and The Seven Voyages opened, they were familiar figures in the gaming rooms.

Wyatt lost money. Too much money. He disappeared. She was not sure if he'd been taken out in the desert and killed or if he had run. Either way he was gone, and she divorced him on the grounds of abandonment.

She got a job as a secretary in a Las Vegas automobile agency. She became the officer manager. Nights, she picked up extra money as a shill in the casinos. She was never a B-girl. Ten men a week propositioned her and offered everything from straight cash to European vacations, but she never accepted.

Two years ago Morris Chandler had offered her a job as his secretary, and she had left the automobile agency, for more money. What Chandler had done was send up his own secretary to become Jonas's. Of course she did not owe him five hundred dollars on a gambling chit. Chandler had been surprised when Jonas called and told him to put Mrs. Wyatt's account on his bill. He went along, amused. He did not suggest to her that she act as a spy. He only suggested, diffidently, that she might find out something it would be to their mutual benefit to know.

Morris Chandler did not suspect that she saw in this job with Jonas Cord a chance, not just to do something better with her life at long last, but to do it with a man any woman could be glad to be with.

One more thing about Angie pleased Jonas immensely. Over the years he had found he most appreciated women who would give him oral sex. It was not only that he enjoyed the act — which he most assuredly did — but he had found, too, that women who were willing to do it were bold and playful not just in bed but in their approach to life in general. They were the kind of women he most liked and was most ready to respect.

"Say, Angie," he whispered to her one night during their second week together. "You're great in bed, but — "

" But ?"

"No, not 'but.' You're great. I wondered, though, if you ... if you'd take me into your mouth."

She lifted herself up on one elbow. "Seriously? I don't know. I don't really know. I've never done it." She reached down and lifted his penis in her hand. "I could never get all that in. I'd gag."

"Getting it all in is not the point," he said.

"What is the point? How would I do it?"

"Like eating a lollipop," he said.

She laughed. "Like eating a lollipop! Well ... Is it a big deal for you?"

He drew a deep breath. "I'd like it. I don't demand it."

She stared at his crotch for a few seconds. "Will you wash it first?"

"For sure."

"Well, then ... I'll try."