Гарольд Роббинс - The Raiders

He sighed again. "Look. Jimmy Hoffa is a thug . Am I supposed to let thugs destroy my business?"

"Would you kill him?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I won't have to."

"That's not the answer. Would you? Could you?'

"No."

Toni lay silent for a moment, not sure if she believed what he had just said. "What does your father think?"

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. "I had a Catholic friend once who used rubbers so his girlfriend wouldn't get pregnant. I asked him if that wasn't against the rules, and he said, 'The pope doesn't know everything.' "

"So ... You out-Jonas Jonas."

Bat reached for the glass that sat on the nightstand and took a sip of Scotch. "Toni," he said. "Don't try to make judgments about what I do in business. Sure I mean to out-Jonas Jonas. I'm gonna out-Jonas him. I'm going to take it away from him. When he dies. Or sooner."

"Which would you rather?" she asked.

"Sooner," he said.

JONAS SAT ON THE COUCH IN HIS SEVEN VOYAGES SUITE facing a stack of files and two telephones on the coffee table that by now had become his favorite of all the desks he'd ever had. It was ten at night, and the suite was closed now to everyone but him and Angie. He still wore the blue blazer and crisply creased slacks he had worn during the business day. Angie was naked. That was what he wanted. He still had Bat on the telephone from New York, where it was 1 a.m., but his eyes were on her.

"He's gone," he said to Bat. "Gone like the legendary Arab who folds his tent and disappears in the night. It's good riddance, of course, but I imagine it has some meaning."

He was talking about Morris Chandler. During the day, Chandler had simply disappeared. His clothes were gone from his suite. He had taken little from his office, but Jonas surmised he had copied any papers he wanted. He had left no word. His departure had been abrupt and unexpected.

"What? Well, let me ask Angie." Jonas turned from the telephone and asked her, "Bat wants to know if we can supply anything that would have a clear set of Chandler's fingerprints on it. In his office, you think?"

"We don't have to look in his office," she said. "He left a bottle of absinthe under our bar. His private stock. He had the damned stuff smuggled in from Hong Kong, you know. Nobody else ever touched those bottles, except maybe me when I poured him a drink."

"Angie says we can send you a bottle that will have his fingerprints on it. I'll have her wrap it so the New York courier can deliver it to you in the morning. So ... You can go to bed now. I'll talk to you in the morning."

Angie had already gone to the bar and was looking underneath for the bottle of the illegal liquor. She slipped a paper napkin under it and lifted it by the cork.

"Absinthe," Jonas muttered. "The stuff is supposed to fry your brains. I always wondered why he liked it."

"Why do you suppose Bat wants Chandler's finger-prints?" Angie asked.

She had picked up another bottle and was pouring them two bourbons. Jonas was aware of her little trick. She knew he would want a drink about now, and if she poured it, it would be smaller than if he poured it himself.

"He didn't say, and I didn't ask," said Jonas. "But if I were Morris Chandler I'd watch my ass. Bat's got a mean streak in him."

"Like you never did." Angie laughed.

Glenda opened her new club show in the Nacional Hotel in Havana. Sam Stein had tried to book her into the Riviera, but Meyer Lansky vetoed the idea. "The long arm of the Cords," Sam complained.

Glenda told Sam she was tired of television and wanted to do a bold act, in the kind of costume she used to wear, doing a monologue with words and subjects that were taboo on the little tube. Sam was dubious, but she swept aside his cautions, wrote her own lines, and designed her whole production.

"I'm gonna be a sensation ," she told Sam.

For the first half of the show, she returned to a costume that had always worked very well for her and was something of a Glenda Grayson signature: a simple black dance leotard, this one cut very high on her hips, dark sheer stockings, blood-red garters, and black hat. Her hips and upper legs were bare, emphasizing as always the theatrical contrast between white skin and black costume.

After she had danced and sung, she climbed on a stool, took off her hat and shook her blond hair, then put the hat on again, now on the back of her head.

"God, I feel like I've come home!" she cried. "Do any of you have any idea how goddamn boring making a television show is? The first guy who yells 'About as boring as watching it' is gonna get a kick in the nuts. Anyway, I feel like I'm back where I belong, entertaining a live audience. And, hey, you are alive! And I thank you."

Her audience applauded.

"Television is supposed to be family entertainment. But if you make any reference as to how families come to be, they cut that from the script. Right? The TV father nearly faints with surprise when the wife tells him she's preggers. 'Really? Really, honey? Gee, that's great! I can't believe it!' What the hell did he think was gonna result from what he's been doin' three times a night for the past six months?"

The audience laughed, then applauded again.

"Margaret Mead, I think it was — you know, the anthropologist — writes that some primitive people just don't make any connection between doin' it and getting pregnant. But ... Americans , in the twentieth century yet? Television. Jesus!"

She took a break, while an act featuring trained chimpanzees amused her audience.

When she appeared on the stage for the second half of her show, she walked out into the beam of a spotlight wearing fifty strings of tiny glittering black beads that cascaded from her neck to her ankles. Under the thousands of beads she wore a diaphanous straight black gown. When she moved, the strings of beads shifted, and her audience could see she was wearing nothing under the gown. The sheer fabric blurred what they saw of her, but no one doubted they were seeing everything. The applause rolled up as a roaring wave before she sang a note.

She did not dance in the second half of the show. Or do a monologue. She walked around the stage singing, while four handsome, muscular young men in skin-tight flesh-colored panty hose danced a balletlike routine behind her.

The audience called her out for two encores and four extra bows.

"I'm better than ever!" she exulted in her dressing room afterward. "Thirty-six friggin' years old, and I'm better than ever!"

"You're dead for television," said Sam grimly. "That deal that was made for you is dead. No network will touch you. You're too hot."

"I'm too good! "

"That, too. But television won't dare. This is the time of Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, and of President Eisenhower, who thinks this country is a 'God-fearing one.' Presley appears on the Sullivan Show, and they don't let the cameras show him below the waist. You just went out there naked , sis. You're using bad words on stage. You think a network is going to let you in front of its cameras?"

"The great unwashed won't even know about it," said Glenda. "Only the people who can afford to come to clubs like this will know — and they will appreciate it."

"Let us hope you're right. And this act has got to be toned down before you take it back to the States."

"Never mind, never mind, never mind," said Jonas to Ben Parrish. "And I didn't put a fix in. Get that idea out of your mind. You see to it that Jo-Ann cooperates one hundred percent with those guys I've assigned to her. Until this mess is straightened out."