Гарольд Роббинс - The Raiders

"Excuse me, Mr. Jonas," said Robair. "Actually, that was written in a letter by a Frenchwoman named Madame Comuel. ' Il n'y a point de heros pour les valets de chambre .' "

"Damn! My valet de chambre is better educated than I am."

"No, Mr. Jonas," said Robair with a faint smile. "I've just made a point of studying my trade."

They sat at the table after dinner. Jonas sipped bourbon. Bat sipped Courvoisier brandy.

"I've got several things I want to talk to you about," Jonas said. "First, and simplest, why don't you move into this apartment? I'm only here two or three nights a month and sometimes not that much. It's here, available to you."

"I couldn't afford to keep it clean," said Bat.

"Look. I leased it because Monica wanted it, because she spent so much time in New York. She asked for it in the divorce, but she didn't get it. I keep suites in hotels in Chicago and Los Angeles, so when I come to a city I'll find things the way I want them. Like, I've got my own telephone scramblers on the phones in all these places. I've got safes with papers locked inside — with combinations only I know." He shrugged. "I've got my brand of bourbon. I've got clothes. You don't have to clean the place. It is cleaned. You can save whatever you're paying. Besides" — he grinned — "think of what impression you'll make on a broad if you ask her to shack up and this is the shack."

Jonas and Monica had not put much of a mark on the apartment. Bat reflected. Likely they had bought the furniture from the previous occupant. The apartment was handsome but impersonal.

"Well?"

"Let me think about it," said Bat.

"Your gratitude is overwhelming," said Jonas sarcastically.

"I — Well, all right. And thanks." He didn't want to be beholden to his father, didn't want to be drawn within his orbit either, but it was true he could use the money he would save. Wilson, Clark & York didn't pay generously, and he didn't want to have to ask his mother to send him money. "I do appreciate it."

Jonas lifted his glass, looked at the remaining bourbon for a moment, then put it down. "Which brings up the next thing I want to talk to you about. Are you going to Cordoba for Christmas?"

"I don't think so."

"Well, I have a proposition. Come out to the home place, the ranch in Nevada. I'd like for you to see where we come from. I want you to meet Nevada Smith. Uh ... I was wondering about that girl. Suppose you could talk her into coming, too?"

"I don't know. I doubt it."

"Her senator will be reelected. She's been working her ass off and is entitled to a vacation. Also, she isn't committed to anybody else."

"How do you know about her? What the hell have you done ?"

"Easy, son, easy. Phil Wallace knows Senator Holland. To use an expression you seem to favor, we asked straight questions and got straight answers."

"I don't remember that I even told you her name. She's none of your business."

Jonas smiled. "I plead guilty to a little snooping. She's a fine girl. You could hardly do better. Well — Okay, it's none of my business. But I'd like for you to spend a few days with me in Nevada, and Toni Maxim is invited too, if you want to ask her."

Bat hesitated for a moment, then said, "I'll think about it."

"About both parts of the invitation?"

"Well, I accept for myself. Whether or not I invite Toni is what I'll think about."

Christmas Eve. Toni had never before felt such an energy on such an occasion. The Cords. They made an electricity. The vigor of these people and the tension among them was unique in her experience.

Standing in the living room of the ranch house, Toni wondered where Jonas Cord really did live, since it was apparent he did not live here. She had seen the apartment in the Waldorf Towers twice since November, and it was apparent he did not live there. The places where he was supposed to live were too tidy, too sleek; they looked like hotel suites. He had an office in the Towers apartment and one here, and in those she could see some mark of the man; but she saw none in the living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms.

The decor was too resolutely Western, saying this was not really a Western home lived in by a man of the desert and mountains, but was the simulacrum of a ranch house, its furnishings assembled to make the effect.

Only one item said something. Sitting on the crude mantel above the huge smoke-stained fieldstone fireplace was a small framed photograph, a snapshot actually, of a grim, solid man in his fifties or sixties. He wore a no-nonsense expression, glaring disapprovingly at the world but not at the photographer. He wore a dark three-piece suit, not very well tailored and not well cared for, plus a gray hat set squarely on his head. He sat at a rolltop desk in a wooden swivel chair. If you knew what you were looking for in the picture, or used a magnifying glass, you could identify a bottle of bourbon on the desk. On a table at his side were two candlestick telephones. That was Jonas Cord the First.

She sipped Scotch and spoke to Bat and his half sister Jo-Ann. "Your father is not what I imagined he would be."

She had seen pictures of Jonas Cord, so his appearance was no surprise. What she had not seen in his newspaper and magazine pictures was that he swaggered. Yet ... he carried it off well, and it was not offensive. A man who had achieved what he had achieved had to be engaging; an ugly, aggressive man could not have won the kind of success he had won, could not have enticed all the women he was said to have seduced. He was aggressive, beyond doubt, but besides that he was easily, naturally charismatic.

"Our father is no end of surprises," said Jo-Ann acerbically.

Bat hadn't been able to take his eyes off his half sister, from the moment they arrived. Toni could have become jealous, except that she understood his fascination had its origin and motive strictly in curiosity. She knew Bat was struggling to read Jo-Ann. The girl had reason to resent him, but if she did she concealed it.

Jo-Ann was about eighteen years old, as Toni understood it; and she was extraordinarily beautiful. She was a student at Smith College. From her father she had inherited poise and self-confidence, obviously. What she had inherited from her mother would be difficult for Toni to guess, since she had never met Monica Cord. She could guess that an element of it was a sense of style, since Jo-Ann wore a cherry-red cocktail dress with bold decolletage and a flared skirt that was shorter than this year's styles dictated.

"For example," said Jo-Ann, continuing her response to Toni's comment that Jonas was not what she had expected, "look at the dish he's brought with him. I don't know what made me think he wouldn't bring his new girlfriend to this party. But I didn't. I didn't think he'd have the nerve. Jesus! Look at her!"

Toni had decided that Angie Wyatt was the most beautiful woman at the party, in her thirties and older than Toni or Jo-Ann. If she was not the most beautiful, she was the most self-possessed — conspicuously pleased with herself and with her place in life. She worked for Jonas Cord and slept with him, too, as Bat had confided. She was handsomely dressed, from the spike-heeled shoes that tightened the muscles in her sleek legs, to the tight cream-white silk brocade dress that clung to her figure, to the emerald necklace — likely a gift from Jonas — that hung around her neck.

Jo-Ann spoke to Bat. "Make a point of getting to know Nevada Smith. Nevada knows more about the Cord family than anybody, including Jonas himself. If he chooses to talk to you, he'll give you plenty of ammunition to use when you have to deal with our father."

"Ammunition?" Bat asked. "Will I need ammunition?"

"The way I see it," said Jo-Ann, "you have three choices: to let him run your life the way he runs everybody else's, to back away from him and go your own way, or to fight him. Nevada knows his weaknesses ... but probably won't tell you."