Гарольд Роббинс - The Raiders

As Bat read the letter, he lowered his chin slowly to his chest, and his eyes flooded with tears.

Not until two days later was Jonas able to communicate in anything but an incoherent mumble. He smiled on Jo-Ann and Angie and thanked them for their concern, then said he wanted to talk with Bat alone, about business.

Bat drew a chair up to the bed. "I'm sorry about this," he said. "The doctor says you're going to be okay."

"Cut the shit and listen to me," said Jonas. "Lean over this way, so I don't have to yell. Now listen. Morris Chandler is talking to guys he shouldn't be talking to. Carlo Vulcano, Pietro Gibellina, and John Stefano."

"How do you know?"

"When I was living on the fifth floor. Chandler hooked me into his private telephone system. I didn't trust him, so I had my people rewire the whole system, unbeknownst to him. He routes his calls through a telephone drop in San Diego, so FBI types tapping those guys' phones won't figure it out they're talking to a hotel in Vegas. Of course, they never use names. They talk in codes. Chandler's code name is Maurie. Nevada called him that, so it's got some kind of meaning."

"What do you think they're doing?"

"They want to block us from putting up the Intercontinental Vegas. They don't want the competition. They want to use the casinos their way, and we're an embarrassment to them."

"What do you think they'll do?"

"Give us trouble getting building permits. See if they can arrange some strikes. Who knows? I don't think they'll try violence. Do you carry a gun?"

Bat shook his head.

"Well, I have for many years, on and off. I suggest you think about it."

THE SECOND WEEK AFTER JONAS SUFFERED HIS HEART attack, Sonja flew to New York. Bat met her at Kennedy Airport and took her to the apartment in the Waldorf Towers. She went the next day to visit Jonas at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Bat offered to drive her, but she insisted she would take a cab. She wanted to do some shopping, too, and would meet him for lunch at the 21 Club at one-fifteen. Her first cab driver, a Puerto Rican, took a sympathetic interest in her when she spoke Spanish to him and suggested she remove a diamond ring and an emerald bracelet she was wearing and carry them in her purse. She thanked him for his advice and did what he said. He could not have guessed she was wearing a jeweled platinum belt worth more than the combined value of the ring and bracelet, plus his taxicab.

Jonas was grateful to her for coming. He was sitting up now, propped up by pillows and the mechanical bed. He was thinner already and looked a bit fragile. He had a better color, just the same. Maybe that was because this was the first time since his hospitalization after the crash of The Centurion that he had gone twelve whole days without a drink.

He was in a mood to speak earnestly, driven undoubtedly by his brush with mortality. "Do you have any idea how grateful I am to you for rearing our son to be the man he is?" he asked her. "Here I am, out of it. Bat is a godsend for me. Who else could I trust to take responsibility for everything?"

"You have a loyal staff," she said.

"They are not Cords," said Jonas with a tone of finality in his voice that suggested that was a complete answer.

"He is ," she said. "I can see that."

"But Sonja ... He doesn't like me. Why doesn't he like me?"

"Because the two of you are of a piece," she said sharply. "Both of you ought to see that."

"Christ, I've offered him the world! I've given him ..." He stopped, shrugged.

Sonja nodded and did not comment. She was trying to assess the damage this man had sustained. Her memories of him were — first, of the twenty-one-year-old stud she had accompanied to Europe: handsome, muscular, filled with optimism and enthusiasm; and, second, the matured and self-confident entrepreneur she had met for the second time four years ago. He was fifty-two years old now, young to have suffered a heart attack. It was apparent that he knew it. He had planned at least twenty more vigorous years, without limitations, and now he had to reassess his plans.

"I would like to ask a favor of you," he said.

"Of course," said Sonja.

"Your Uncle Fulgencio knows my name. On Bat's recommendation, I have invested money in a casino in Havana. I depend on a man your uncle also knows to keep the operation honest."

"Meyer Lansky," she said.

"You know — Well ... It would be in everyone's best interest — Uncle Fulgencio's, Bat's, and mine — if your uncle were to look sympathetically on an application Meyer Lansky will be making for a license to open a casino-hotel in Havana. He will adhere to the customs, if you follow my meaning."

"He will pay my uncle such bribes as are customary," Sonja said dryly.

"Whatever is customary," said Jonas.

"Will you have money in this?"

"Bat will make that judgment," said Jonas.

"You're letting Bat make judgments? That's something new, isn't it?"

Jonas shrugged weakly. "What else can I do? Anyway, he's smart. He's a Cord ... and a Batista, of course."

"Do you want a word of advice?" she asked.

"Why not?"

"Invest a little more in your relationship with your son. It will pay a better return than any other investment you ever made."

"I do . I let him have his head on that television show. I put money where I shouldn't have put it. We'll be damned lucky if we break even on it."

"I'm not talking about money, Jonas. Investing money is your whole life. It's what you do , and you do it well. What you don't do is invest yourself . You don't commit yourself. Do you love our son?"

"Of course I do."

"Then why don't you tell him?"

"He's never said anything of the kind — " He stopped abruptly, and for a moment Sonja thought he'd felt a hard twinge in his chest. " — to me ..." His voice trailed off, and Sonja was alarmed.

"Jonas?"

"It isn't easy. My father died without ever having said he loved me. He never heard it from me either. He died, and we never ... told ... each other. That was a huge mistake, Sonja, a horrible mistake. My god, am I making it again?"

"You have pride, Jonas. So has Bat. I could wish you were not so very much alike."

Sonja surprised Bat at "21" by ordering steak tartare. "They know how to do it here," she said.

"You've been here before, then."

"Did you suppose I had never been to New York before?" she asked with an amused smile.

Of course she had been in New York before. He should have remembered that. She had been in Europe, too, and not just when his father took her there. She had been in Cuba and most of the countries of Latin America. She had decorated two rooms in the hacienda outside Cordoba with pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru. Hanging in her own bedroom, instead of the crucifix that hung in the bedrooms of most dutiful wives, was a print by Picasso and a Calder mobile. She was no longer the innocent girl his father remembered. In fact, she was not the placid, compliant woman he thought he remembered as his mother. He should have thought before of being proud of her.

At age fifty, she was a memorably striking woman, who drew glances from men at nearby tables. His father had a taste for women who were beautiful when they were young and then aged well. Though he found it difficult to like Monica much, he could see why his father had married her twice. And the latest of them, Angie, was a fit successor to the two others he knew about.

His mother had ordered an appetizer of caviar, with Stolichnaya vodka so cold that it was not absolutely liquid but had begun to change consistency to something thicker. He had never tried it but had duplicated her order and found it surprisingly good.