Harold Robbins Thriller Collection

by Harold Robbins

  Dax was surprised. He hadn’t realized it was common knowledge. “You know Sue Ann?”

  Jim nodded. “I know her. I went with her when she first came up here last year. I lasted about a month. She was too much for me.”

  They both laughed, and the ice was broken. Then Jim’s face turned serious again. “We’ve heard a great deal about you.”

  “I’ve also heard about you.”

  Jim shook his head. “You don’t mean me, you mean my father.”

  Dax didn’t answer.

  “My father was curious about you. He thought you did a terrific job the way you filled in after your father died.”

  “I didn’t do much. I just hung around until they could get someone else.”

  “My father says any time a man can hold a job like that for six months without doing anything wrong, he’s a wizard.”

  “Thank your father for me, but it’s easy to do no wrong when there’s so little to do. And with only four ships between Corteguay and the rest of the world there isn’t very much commercial activity.”

  Jim looked at him shrewdly. “You think my father made a mistake when he pulled the freight lines out?” he asked bluntly.

  “You’ve been quoting your father,” Dax answered quietly, “so let me quote mine. The boycott of Corteguay was not only an act of economic reprisal. It was also an act of cruelty. It condemned a small country to starvation.”

  Jim Hadley was silent for a moment. “You don’t like my father much, do you?”

  Dax met his eyes evenly. That was one thing he had already learned. The norteamericanos were all alike. They twisted everything around and made it personal. If you approved of their actions, they automatically assumed you liked them; if you didn’t, the opposite assumption was equally automatic.

  “The answer to that is the same as the answer to your first question. I don’t know. I’ve never met your father.”

  “Holy cats!” Jim said. “You’re brutally honest.”

  Dax smiled. “If I may quote my father again, never tell a lie when the truth will serve you as well.”

  Jim stared at him for a moment and then broke into a grin. “I’m beginning to wonder if it’s safe to ask you to have another beer?”

  “Try me and see.”

  97

  Robert was waiting for them as they came out of the classroom. He was carrying a newspaper, and his face was serious. “Have you seen the latest?” Jim shook his head.

  Robert showed them the bold-face headline: MADRID UNDER SIEGE!

  “Oh-oh,” Jim said, “that didn’t take long.”

  Robert read aloud: “General Mola, in command of the attacking forces, says the end of the war is not far off. In addition to the four attacking columns surrounding the city, he claims there is a fifth column within Madrid itself, helping with the liberation.”

  “A fifth column,” Jim said. “That’s a new word for spies and traitors.”

  “Hey, Jim!” They all turned as Jeremy Hadley came running up.

  “What is it, younger brother?”

  “Can I use your car tonight? I got a real heavy date.” Jim fished in his pockets for the keys. “Sure. Just don’t crack it up. Dad made me work all year for it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Come on up to my place for a beer.” Jeremy looked at Dax. “Me, too?”

  Dax grinned. “You, too. We have no personal objections to freshmen.”

  Jeremy looked at his older brother questioningly. “It’s O.K. You’re eighteen now. Dad won’t object.”

  They cut across the yard silently. A strange but closely knit family, Dax thought, observing the two brothers as they walked side by side. There was no doubt that their father ruled with an iron hand and yet it was clear that the boys worshipped him. Everything had been spelled out for them.

  James, Jr., the eldest, was going into the law school after he graduated, and then into politics. Then came one daughter, followed by Jeremy. He was going the same road, only he would stay in the practice of law. Two more girls and a third brother, Thomas, who was only twelve but destined for the Harvard Business School. It was he the father had decided would carry on with the business interests of the family. One more girl and then the baby of the family, Kevin. Two years old and already they were calling him “Doc.” Somehow the girls didn’t seem to matter. Dax wondered whether all Irish families were like that.

  “What a joint!” Jeremy said enthusiastically as he sank back into a chair with a bottle of beer clutched in his hand. “I go for a place like this.” He looked at his brother Jim. “Why don’t you talk to Dad? Now that we’re both in school, why should we have to go home every night? You can sell him on it; you can wind him around your finger.”

  “Not me.” Jim laughed. “You do your own dirty work.”

  “I haven’t got the nerve,” Jeremy admitted. He turned to Dax. “I could never crack a book in a joint like this. How do you do it?”

  “It’s not easy,” Robert said. “You should see some of the girls marching in and out of here. You’d think you were watching a parade.”

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” Dax protested.

  Jeremy shook his head in wonder. “Now I know where you got your rep with the girls. You got a place to take them.” He turned to his brother. “The back seat of your car isn’t the greatest place in the world for romance.”

  “Dad will romance you if you don’t get your marks up to where they should be!”

  “O.K., O.K., I get the message.” Jeremy turned to Robert. “What were you guys looking so grim about when I came up?”

  Robert showed him the headline. The younger boy made a face. “Oh, that. So what?”

  “It could mean war in Europe,” Robert said. “Germany and Italy are openly helping the Falangists. How long do you think we can keep out of it?”

  The boy’s face turned serious. “That’s true. I didn’t think of that.” He turned to his older brother. “What do you think will happen?”

  “I don’t know, but Dad thinks there won’t be any war yet.”

  “But I hear a lot of guys talking about joining up with some kind of international brigade they’re forming. And the ROTC boys are yelling to join up now and get all the cushy jobs when the war comes. Personally, I think they can’t wait.”

  “You haven’t done anything foolish?” Jim asked sharply.

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Don’t, that’s all. Let them shoot off their mouths all they want but don’t you do anything. Time enough to get killed in our own wars.”

  The telephone began to ring, and Dax picked it up. “Oh, hello, honey.”

  “He’s at it again!”

  “No, honey,” Dax said, “there aren’t any girls up here. Just a couple of fellows.” He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Will you guys shut up?”

  “There goes the weekend,” Robert said.

  “Can’t be much. Probably just some Radcliffe girl.”

  “I don’t care what kind of a girl it is,” Jeremy said seriously. “I just wish it was me she was calling!”

  “Make friends,” el Presidente had written in one of his letters. “Meet all the people you can. Someday the gringos will want to come back to Corteguay and you will have made the contacts that will make it easier for them to do so. This is most important, my boy, more so even than your studies. It is in this way you will help our beloved Corteguay most.”

  Dax remembered that on his way down to the luncheon meeting with the elder Hadley. He had done as el Presidente asked, though it would have been difficult for him to do anything else. Ever since he arrived, the Americans had sought him out. He was for them a new kind of celebrity. His Continental manners and the fact that he had been born in a country of great violences where life was held cheaply seemed to lend a strange attraction to his charm.

  Especially for American girls. After a while he almost always knew that each new invitation meant that some girl would be waiting anxiously to find out whethe
r he was actually all that primitive in bed. There were times he wondered about this curious compulsion to sexual challenge. In many ways these encounters—and that was really the way he came to think of them—turned bed into battlefield, rather than a place of romance. The main thing seemed to be to prove the traditional male superiority. And then somehow when this happened there seemed always to be an undercurrent of resentment. Most of the time he never saw the girl again.

  Meanwhile with each new conquest his reputation as a Casanova grew. At times he thought of it with a wryness that helped him absorb the jokes and joshing of his friends. He never thought of himself as they did, and he once remarked to Robert that if the Americans thought of him as a Casanova what would they think of Sergei, whose only purpose in life seemed to be to fuck every woman he met.

  That this interfered with his studies went without saying. His grades were barely above passing, and had it not been that his being at Harvard had certain diplomatic undertones, he might have been dropped. It wasn’t that he was a bad student; there was just never enough time for him to apply himself.

  During the summer just past, his second in the States, he had played polo for the Meadowbrook team, and at the end of the season the great Tommy Hitchcock himself had complimented him. But then he had jokingly taken cognizance of Dax’s reputation.

  As they stood together in the shower after the last game he had said, “You could be one of the greatest polo players in the world if you didn’t do all your training in bed.”

  Dax had merely laughed. He was still too shy in the presence of Hitchcock, despite having played all season with him, to protest.

  The snow began to fall as the taxi crossed Boylston Street and the cabdriver turned. “Here it comes, the first real storm of winter.”

  Dax grunted in answer. From now until it was gone Fat Cat would leave the house only for the most dire of emergencies. This man who had faced death and survived so many dangers was more frightened of tiny flakes of snow than of anything else. The white blanket of hell, he called them.

  Dax pulled his coat tightly around his throat as he paid the cabby. He didn’t much care for snow either. He looked up at the building where he and James Hadley were to have lunch. Americans were strange people. They held business meetings at lunch time when they should be relaxing and enjoying their meals.

  “Dad’s been wanting to meet you for a long time,” Jim, Jr., had said on the phone. “He thought it might be a nice idea if you could meet him at the Club tomorrow for lunch.”

  Dax didn’t have to ask which club. There was only one for the important people of Boston and to lunch anywhere else would have been sacrilegious.

  A gray-uniformed flunky met him at the door and took his coat. “Mr. Xenos?”

  Dax nodded.

  “Mr. Hadley is already at his table. Please follow me.” He led Dax past the bar, already crowded with men having a pre-luncheon drink, into a large dining room.

  As he walked through the busy room, Dax recognized many of the locally important men. Former governor, now mayor again, Jim Curley sat at a large table in the dead center of the room, where people could always drop over for a word with him. As usual there was a priest at the table. Idly Dax wondered which one this was, nothing less than a bishop or a cardinal, probably. At another table he recognized another politician, James “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, together with one of Boston’s leading business lights, Joseph Kennedy.

  Then they were at the table and Jim, Jr., was getting to his feet. “Dax, I’d like you to meet my father.”

  “My pleasure,” Dax said, his hand reaching out automatically.

  But it wasn’t at the senior Hadley he was staring. The other man at the table was Marcel Campion.

  98

  “Well, I have to get back to the office,” James Hadley said, getting to his feet. He gestured with his hand. “No, don’t get up. There’s no reason for you to rush off, Dax. I’m sure you and Mr. Campion have many things to talk about besides the business we discussed.”

  Young Jim also rose. “I have a class, so I’ve got to run along too.”

  A silence fell between them after the others had gone. Dax looked at Marcel. He had changed. No longer did he seem the ordinary little clerk that Dax remembered. There was something about him that was more positive and self-assured. Perhaps it was the carefully British tailored suit, but it seemed more to be in Marcel’s eyes. They mirrored the confident look of a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it.

  Marcel was the first to speak. “It’s been a long time, Dax, almost two years.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of him?” Marcel asked, with a gesture indicating he meant their host.

  “He’s everything I heard he was and more,” Dax answered sincerely.

  Marcel slipped into French and Dax followed automatically.

  “You know what he said?” Marcel leaned forward confidentially. “That their Mayor Curley could have been President of the United States, only he came thirty years too soon. Someday he claims they will have a Catholic as President.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “En vérité,” Marcel continued. “I think that is what he plans for his eldest son.”

  “Jim?”

  Marcel nodded. “The man plans ahead many years. Even now he is entrenching himself deeply in the Democratic party. That is why he is so insistent on the boy entering politics.”

  Dax stared at Marcel thoughtfully. After the other things he had heard at this luncheon he could believe almost anything. “How did you come to him?”

  “It was simple. He had ships for sale, and I wanted them.”

  “But how did you get interested in the ships? I thought you went to Macao to run the casino.”

  “I did. But it wasn’t long before I found out that ships were available.”

  “How was it that you were able to get them when the De Coynes couldn’t?”

  “De Coyne is a fool,” Marcel said emphatically. “He leaves everything to that English cousin, whose only purpose seems to be to hinder the growth of any line that threatens his own. It is my belief that he joined the deal only to sabotage it.”

  Marcel leaned toward Dax, his voice lowering. “When I learned this I remembered the need your father expressed for ships. I borrowed money from some Chinese friends and so was able to get twenty. Then I looked about for more, and there was Hadley with fifty to sell. Naturally I went to him. But that one is no fool either. He guessed my intentions immediately. My impression is that by then he had regretted his hasty decision to join the British in a boycott of your country.”

  “You mean he regretted the loss of money.”

  “In the end it is the same thing. Anyway, he was willing to sell me the ships, but only under the condition that his company would remain their worldwide freight agents. Before I could undertake such a thing I realized immediately that I would have to get a firm commitment from Corteguay. Without that I should have no use for the ships.”

  Dax looked at him. “I don’t know how el Presidente would feel about doing business with an American.”

  “Your president is a practical man,” Marcel said. “By now he must realize he can expect no more from De Coyne.”

  “But there is still the five million dollars that was paid for the franchise,” Dax pointed out, “and it runs for twenty years.”

  Marcel took a thin cigar from his pocket and lit it. The clouds of blue smoke rose slowly around him as he stared at Dax. He did not speak until the cigar was glowing evenly. “Don’t make the same mistake that your father did,” he said quietly. “Your president is not a man of integrity like your father. Do you know what happened to that five million dollars? Do you really think it went into the treasury of your country?”

  Dax did not answer.

  “I can tell out what happened to it. It is in a bank account in Switzerland in el Presidente’s own name.”

  Dax was shocked. If Marcel knew, then surely his father
must also have known. “Did my father…”

  “Your father knew.”

  “Then why didn’t he—”

  Marcel didn’t let him finish the question. “What could he have done? Forsake his post? That would not have helped Corteguay. And getting more ships would have. So he kept his mouth shut though in a way I think it hastened his death.”

  Dax shook his head. He felt a tightening in his throat. His poor father. If he had only known! But then, what could he have done? Nothing.

  Marcel took advantage of his continued silence. “Why else do you think we are willing to pay another five million for a franchise? Because we are sure el Presidente will accept it. Dax, it is time for you to grow up and become a realist. If the deal is made, you will be taken care of most handsomely. It is time for you to begin to think about yourself. Unless you also intend to bankrupt yourself paying the bills of thieves.”

  “I don’t know,” Dax said hesitantly. “It’s hard for me to believe—”

  Again Marcel interrupted. “What is hard to believe? Can’t you see that is exactly why your president sent you here? Just for something like this, to make it easier for the United States to return to Corteguay? Don’t you think he already is aware that he has received all the aid he can get from Europe?”

  Dax was silent.

  “If I were not so positive would I offer to become a citizen of Corteguay?”

  Dax stared at Marcel. “You mean you would live in Corteguay and give up your French nationality?”

  Marcel laughed. “Who said anything about living in Corteguay? I merely said I would become a citizen.” He glanced around the room, which was almost empty now. “I like the United States, especially New York. That’s where the business is and that’s where I intend to live.”

  Later that night as el Presidente’s voice crackled metallically over the long-distance wires, Dax knew that whether Marcel had told him the truth or not did not matter. The only objection to the proposition that el Presidente offered was that he thought the amount to be paid, really an indemnity to Corteguay for the misery caused by the boycott, should be ten million dollars instead of five. And when he finally put down the receiver he knew that his job here was done. It was time for him to return home.