Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

“If there has to be more trimmings, Mr. Russo will provide them. A motel witness. Look at it this way. In the clear you can afford to give her big alimony. If they nail you, she might have to work waitress to support those kids.”

He sat on the couch, elbows on his knees, forehead resting on the heels of his hands, shoulders hunched high. Did not know he was weeping silently until he felt the tickle of the tears. Ruth McGann was pulling out the interconnecting jacks, putting the equipment into fitted cases.

On one inhalation he made a loud and inadvertent snorting sound. She sat beside him and said softly, “Hey. Hey, now.”

“I can’t... can’t...” Voice gritty and strangled.

Strong grasp pulled the nearest hand away. Warm hand against his far cheek, turning his face toward her.

“Poor sad sorry bastard,” she whispered, her face soft. Hand still on his cheek, she ran the ball of her thumb across the wetness under his eye. “Is it for real?” she asked.

“That’s... the worst part, Ruth. I don’t know... how much I mean it... or if I mean it at all.”

“I know. So later on you can tell yourself that when it happened, you cried.”

“How do you know so much?”

“When I was fifteen I was the voice of seventeen or eighteen rotten little animals in cheap commercials, dearie. It kept me from ever having anything of my own to say.” She leaned close and put her mouth on his, her lips soft, clever, unendingly sweet.

After he had his arms around her, tilting her back, she pushed him away. She mocked herself with her smile. “Okay, so I have this Earth Mother kick. The sky fell on your head, and you are pretty rotten. Go yank those draperies across, honey.”

Then after they were in the bed, her exhalations explosive at each readying caress, her body lifting and wanting, she stopped him as he moved to enter her, her face sweaty in the half light, seen through the tumble of her hair.

Breathing like a runner, she said, “The worst part. Sure. Not knowing how much I mean this. Or. Or if I mean... if I mean it at all, dearie. Or. Or ever can.”

“Shut up. Shut up.”

“I don’t like. Don’t like either one of us, love. Is that why I’m so ready? Is that how? How I know I’m going to make it?”

“Shut up.”

“All right. Come on then, Chief Executive Officer of Everything.”

Four months and four days later, he awoke from a Sunday afternoon nap in the beachfront cabana at the new hotel in Puerto Rico. The dream had sweated him, soured his mouth. In the dream he stood small before a judicial bench so high that he could not see the face of the sentencing judge. Hollow, solemn, echoing voice. “Wyatt Rutherford Ross, this Court finds you guilty of hannenframmis in the first, second, and third degree.”

Terror. “Your Honor! Your Honor! I don’t understand the charge.”

“And sentences you to three consecutive terms of life imprisonment. May God have mercy on the soul you should have had.”

“Your Honor! I can’t even see you.”

He got up and padded into the bathroom and rinsed his mouth. He looked at his sunbrown holiday face in the mirror and said, “I plead guilty to hannenframmis in all the degrees you got, baby.”

He went back into the bedroom and found his damp swim trunks and pulled them on. Tuck the dream away. Hide it behind the well-remembered newspaper features. Ross cleared on stock manipulation charges. Executive’s wife implicated in information leak. Surprise tapes played in closed committee session. Mrs. Wyatt Ross denies love affair, says evidence is faked. Surprise witness heard in closed session. Hotel registrations subpoenaed. Wife refuses to reveal identity of mystery man, denies his existence.

SEC clears officers of Wyro International Services. Trading in Wyro resumed. Divorce action filed. Kallen acquisition plans dropped by Wyro owing to drop in price of Wyro common after release of earnings report. Wyatt Ross announces spin-off of three earlier acquisitions, concentration on the most profitable product lines and services, improved future earnings through internal growth instead of acquisition route.

Done. For half a million dollars fed cautiously into the channel that ran from New York, to Miami, to Nassau, to Zurich, and into the proper account, the number furnished by a small, quiet, dead-faced man named Willy Russo. So he’d moved his own through the same pipeline, what he had left after Russo’s bite, into the number account he’d set up three years ago, along with orders to keep the money working, make it grow. The Swiss have a talent for it.

All done. And the old strike force had dropped away, one at a time. Stanley Silverstaff first, taking the best of the outstanding offers. Then Stannard going back into private practice. Then Haines leaving to go into that think-tank mystique in California at a fifth of what he was worth in industry.

Just as well. That team had been geared to acquisition, to making the careful stalk, the daring pounce. Different ball game now. Chop away at all the costs, direct and overhead. Expand existing markets. Improve the products and services. Needed a different type. Dogged, methodical men. No noisy celebrations in the private jet on the way home from victory. In fact, no company jets at all. Dwindling need. Cut the costs.

No need for the hearty devices that create the kind of team spirit that used to be so useful. Stay remote. It is too difficult to fire your friends. Easy to fire uneasy strangers. Set the goals. Promote the men who can meet them, fire those who can’t. And keep upping the goals.

Heard the stealthy key in the lock. Door opened. Geri Housner came in. Dark blue bikini with white ruffles. Canvas beach bag. Last one left. Incomparably loyal and efficient executive secretary. Incomparably elegant lady, slender and cool and unconsciously provocative. Four years of her executive secretarial services had left him, at times, in such a rage of desire it had taken the last fragment of self-control to keep it all on the polite, affable, impersonal basis which guaranteed her continuing efforts.

She was one of the rare ones, so good at any task he gave her that he knew he would never find another as useful. And he was all too aware of the implacable rules of the game. The day you tumbled a good one into bed was the day you started to lose her. The office marriage was a transient arrangement. It might take a year, or two, or possibly three at the most. Then she would leave or you would crowd her out.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re awake, darling.”

“Just about to come beach-walking, looking for you. Have a good swim?”

“Lovely. Absolutely lovely. Have a nice nap?”

“Not so lovely.”

She patted her dark hair and came toward him with a look of concern. “What do you mean? What’s wrong, Wyatt?”

“A dream. A dumb dream. Woke me up tired.”

“Poor darling.”

He caught her wrist and tugged, sat on the bed and stood her in front of him, between his knees, hands on her slender tanned waist. He grinned up at her, watched with clinical interest the way her mouth softened and sagged open, the way her head seemed to become too heavy for the slender throat. She had been so constrained, so stiff and awkward and shy, for the first week he had begun to think that her look of sensuality held under control had been ironic illusion. And then, all in a rush, she had come on, found it all, relished it all, living on that edge of readiness that needed only his touch to start the flowering.

“I should take my shower,” she said in a small blurred voice.

He pulled her across him, onto the bed, and in the lazy light of the late afternoon, peeled her out of the bikini and slowly, indolently, knowingly made love to her. In one slow, sweet, cantering pace, the time when a ubiquitous commercial song about manly cigarettes would sometimes come into his head, instead there came the Ruth-Mary Lou voice saying, “Maria gets so all gloomy and dramatic when there’s any kind of family trouble, especially financial problems. Especially fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull. Fye-nance-you-wull.” Timed to thrust and riposte.