The only decent piece in the entire room was the television—a giant, forty-inch picture tube Mitsubishi.
Probably fell off a truck, Sonny thought sardonically. Either that, or Carmine bought it for her.
Carmine!
What was it she'd said? Something about Carmine's room . . .
Christ, Carmine!
His heart began knocking excitedly against his rib cage. Talk about a golden opportunity. I might even discover the assassin's identity! he thought euphorically.
He crossed to what must be a bedroom door, and opened it. Maybe this was Carmine's room.
The first thing he noticed was the acrid, lingering odor of recent cigarette smoke. A day or two old, no more.
Sonny carefully lowered the blinds before switching on the lights.
Nothing ornate or frilly in here. Oak and mahogany, an old brass bed kept lovingly polished, a bookcase groaning with titles. Atop a dresser rested a portable Sony television, a VCR, and a stereo set with a record changer.
The bed was freshly made, and one nightstand held a reading lamp, a clean ashtray, an open pack of Camels, a well-worn missal bound in black leatherette, and a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus. On the other was a matching lamp, a telephone, an answering machine, and a silver- framed, eight-by-ten photograph of Mama Rosa.
Sonny felt a wave of euphoria. Carmine's room! he thought, barely able to contain himself. It's got to be!
Aware that a person's taste in reading is one of the best reflections of his personality, Sonny made a beeline for the bookcase.
The first thing that struck him was the almost pathological sense of order. Carmine had categorized the nonfiction books by content, and had shelved the biographies alphabetically by subject and the works of fiction alphabetically by author.
He scanned the titles.
The histories included The Civilization of the Middle Ages by Norman Cantor, and Winston Churchill's four-volume The World Crisis series; the biographies, on the other hand, consisted entirely of grandiose warped minds: Attila the Hun, Caligula, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Joseph Stalin.
Lovely, Sonny thought sardonically. Birds of a feather flock together.
But most surprising were the works of literature. They ranged from the likes of James Agee and Vladimir Nabokov to Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, and Emile Zola.
The bottom shelf was devoted exclusively to LPs. There were boxed sets of Italian operas. Caruso and Mario Lanza on 78s. Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday on 33s. Plus Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, and Sinatra.
Sonny smiled to himself. Slowly but surely, a picture of Carmine was emerging.
If the photographs were any indication, the assassin was dark-haired and would be approximately thirty years of age. Judging by the books on his shelves, he was an intellectual and a history buff, and harbored a morbid bent for real-life monsters. The missal indicated he probably attended Mass sporadically, if not regularly.
He was also highly organized, smoked unfiltered Camels, and liked listening to opera, jazz, and Italian crooners.
It's a beginning, Sonny thought. Now to flesh him out even further . . .
Sonny checked out Carmine's closet next.
Strong smell of cedar. Wooden hangers all facing in the same direction. Clothes sorted according to season—spring wardrobe on the left, summer and fall in the middle, winter on the right.
A cursory examination of the labels showed they ran the gamut. Armani and Cerutti overcoats. Custom-tailored suits by Huntsman and Son of Savile Row. Sportswear from the Gap, Banana Republic, and Calvin Klein. Knock around gear from J. Crew, Tommy Hilfiger, and Champion.
The jackets were 41 long, the pants 30 in the waist and 34 in length.
So he's probably six foot one, Sonny thought, and in top physical condition.
Hardly surprising, considering Carmine's profession.
Neckties on the rotating rack ranged from Fendi and Hermes to Jerry Garcia, and a slant-fronted, three-tier rack on the floor contained Italian custom-made lace-ups and Gucci loafers, size IOV2. Each pair was polished, fitted with shoe trees, and lined up with military precision. Sneakers were Mephistos and Nikes.
Sonny shut the closet door. Next on the agenda was Carmine's dresser.
The first two drawers he tried contained freshly laundered Turnbull and Asser shirts in poplin, linen, and cotton. The middle ones were devoted exclusively to immaculately folded underwear and perfectly aligned rows of expensive, rolled-up socks.
But it was in the bottom drawers that he hit pay dirt.
Squatting on his haunches, Sonny stared, unable to believe his eyes. He hadn't known what he might find—but this—this!
His head spun with the magnitude of the evidence before him and its implications.
Both deep drawers contained a veritable arsenal of disguises. Grist for the mill for a slippery chameleon. Hair dye, toupees, self-adhering moustaches and beards. Grist for the mill for a slippery chameleon. Tinted contacts, foam pads to fill out cheeks and jaw, various styles of eyeglasses fitted with plain glass lenses. Grist for the mill for a slippery chameleon.
Sonny's mental picture of Carmine fragmented, dematerialized back into shadow. The assassin would be impossible to recognize. Hair, eyes, age—chameleon. Like an actor switching roles, Carmine would simply shed one skin and slip into another, morphing himself into characters and personalities too numerous to follow.
Sonny felt a grudging admiration for the assassin. Clearly no fool, Carmine was not a man to be underestimated.
Or trifled with.
Closing the left-hand drawer, he was about to push the right one shut when a flash of vivid red in the back left corner captured his notice.
Red, the color of blood.
It's impossible! he thought, his pulse quickening. It can't be!
He took a deep breath, hesitated only briefly, and pulled the drawer further open.
But it was. Right there in front of him. A neatly folded stack of Carmine's silk neckties—the calling cards the assassin left behind at the scene of each job.
'By all gods great and small!' Sonny whispered in the Chiuchow dialect.
Unable to help himself, he reached a hand inside, his fingers trembling as they made contact with the silk. It felt soft and smooth and almost obscenely luxurious, the red, bright as the blood it symbolized, linking killer and victim as participants in that most unholy communion of all, sharing life's final and most intimate moment—death.
Death . . . Carmine . . . silk . . . death . . .
Sonny snatched his hand back as if the silk burned. Quickly he pushed the drawer shut and stood up. Fear pounded against his rib cage—no, not fear, he told himself; a kind of adrenaline-induced excitement.
Turning away, the telephone answering machine attracted his notice.
God only knows what that tape contains, he thought.
The temptation to hit the Playback button and listen to its possible trove of unerased messages was overwhelming. But consulting his gold Rolex, he ascertained that he'd pushed his luck far enough.
The last thing I need is for Mama Rosa to catch me red-handed.
Prudently Sonny Fong switched off the lights, raised the blinds, and left the room, shutting the door behind him.
It was time to clean the living room—lest Mama Rosa suspect he'd been up to no good.
And shedding his jacket, Sonny rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
More than two hours passed before Mama Rosa trudged heavily up the stairs.
Finally! Sonny thought sourly as she lowered her bulk into a recliner. He glanced around. The living room sparkled, and there wasn't a speck of dust in sight.
'Well?' he asked. 'What do you think? Looks pretty good, huh?'
'It'll do,' she said wearily, not bothering to look around.
It'll do? Sonny was incensed. After working his ass off and all but ruining his Armani, this was the thanks he got?
'About Carmine,' he said.
'Oh
, yeah,' she said. 'I'm glad you reminded me. He dropped by the restaurant and told me to give you something.'
She groped around in her apron pocket and handed him a wrinkled, unsealed envelope.
Sonny opened it. Inside it were two folded sheets of paper. Laser- printed on the first was the name of a bank on Grand Cayman Island, instructions for bank wire transfers, and an eight-digit account number. The second sheet was blank.
Sonny gnashed his teeth in frustration. For this I waited around for over two hours and played maid? Concealing his disgust, he thrust the paper into his suit pocket.
'No.' Mama Rosa shook her head. 'Carmine said you're to memorize it.'
I'm to what? He appraised her closely to see whether or not she was joking. From her answering stare, it was clear she wasn't.
'All right.' He sighed.
'And I'm to burn it before you leave,' she added, digging around in her apron pocket for a Mama Rosa's Ristorante matchbook. When he handed the sheet of paper back to her, she held it by the top, scratched a match, and lit the bottom corner.
Greedily the flames consumed it, the charred end curling and flaking. Before it burned her fingers, she dropped it into the ashtray on the table next to the recliner.
'Carmine said to write down the job you want done on the blank sheet. Then put it in the envelope and seal it. As soon as the money's in the account, he'll get started.'
Sonny produced a gold Meisterstuck fountain pen, wrote down the name, folded the paper, and slid it back inside the envelope. Inwardly he grimaced as he licked the dirty gummed flap and sealed it.
'Here,' he said, holding it out.
But Mama Rosa didn't take it. Nor was she even listening. Her head was tilted sideways.
She had nodded off.
20
Same hotel, different room.
Was it a sign of her perverseness that the squalor actually added to her excitement? That everything in the room reeked deliciously of sex, of thousands upon thousands of sordid, illicit acts?
If walls could only talk, Gloria thought dreamily, I wonder what tales these could tell.
She wondered, too, at the molten ease with which lies flowed smoothly, silkily, off the tip of her tongue. Getting into the Lincoln, she had instructed Laszlo to take her to the St. Francis.
'I'm having tea with a friend, and then I may do some shopping,' she told him as he pulled up outside the Union Square entrance. 'I don't know how long I'll be. I'll phone you when I want to be picked up. I'll be right up front here.'
Before Laszlo could respond, Gloria jumped out of the car, went up the front steps, and through the heavy revolving door. Unerringly she cut across the hotel lobby as quickly as dignity would permit, heedless of the golden gloom, the flower-patterned carpet, the soaring granite columns capped with gilded Corinthian capitals.
She strode rapidly down the long corridor to the right, not noticing the well-dressed guests raising their eyebrows at her single-minded determination to cleave through the crowd. The fresh bouquets at the flower stand, the latest fashions on display in the mall-like boutique windows— nothing caught her eye as she bore down on her objective, the Post Street exit through which she sailed back outside.
She hopped into the back of a waiting cab. 'Mission between Seventh and Eighth,' she said breathlessly.
The driver, surprised at the destination of his exceedingly well-dressed passenger, flicked a glance in his rearview mirror. 'You're sure that's the address you want, lady?'
'Am I sure? Of course I'm sure! Damn this weather—you'd think people would be used to it by now! Instead, it slows everything down.' Gloria, for once more intoxicated on rampant anticipation than on booze, was only the slightest bit tipsy. 'Now step on it. I haven't got all day, you know.'
'It's your neck,' the cabbie grumbled, switching on the meter.
The distance between the two hotels was ten short blocks and about a hundred million dollars. No gilt-topped columns here, no great modern towers with glass elevators supplementing the old-fashioned facade. Just grimy brick and broken neon and—there! Christos, her Christos!— waiting just inside the iron-barred front door, the cracked glass of which was held together with strips of masking tape.
Gloria didn't bother putting up her umbrella. Her Burberry raincoat and Hermes scarf were sufficient for darting from cab to hotel to Christos's warm, inviting arms.
'Am I glad to see you!' she sighed, happily yielding to his embrace.
'Hey!' he said. 'That was supposed to be my line.'
She laughed with utter sweetness. Then he kissed her deeply and she was drowning in sensations, in the yin and yang of him: the raspy designer stubble and the smooth moist hungry mouth and the callused but gentle hands and his eyes like shadowy cobalt. And his touch—dear sweet Jesus, like a blast furnace it was, igniting her insides!
'Enough!' she whispered suddenly, extricating herself from his clinch. Her eyes were shiny. 'I purposely didn't wear panties, and I'm already all wet! If I don't watch it, my skirt'll get soaked!'
He laughed. 'In that case, we'd better go see about a room.'
She discreetly slipped him a thick envelope. 'Take it out of this.'
And then they were upstairs, frantically tearing at each other's clothes. Giving the walls one more tale they could have told.
Ah, how she basked in this sordidness! How she reveled in the vileness of these grim, sex-consecrated surroundings!
Was it indicative of degeneracy that she should find slumming so thrilling a luxury—and paying for sex more arousing and titillating than any she had ever experienced?
Legally it was a crime to pay for sexual services.
Legally it was a crime for room-by-the-hour whores' dormitories like this one to exist, let alone flourish. And yet flourish it did: weren't the moans and groans filtering in from neighboring rooms proof positive?
So she was the wife of a prominent politician. So what? Gloria couldn't care less. Let Hunt, followed by a veritable army of politicians, campaign on platforms of law and order and cleaning up the streets; she, Gloria Winslow, had discovered the most exciting, gratifying, and dangerous liaison of them all.
As for the fact that any scandal on her part could ruin her husband's career neither goaded Gloria on nor gave her pause, quite simply because sex with Christos was the most exciting thing to have happened to her in years. He was at once her passion and her boy toy, a living, breathing sex object of incomparable physical perfection, a male she could procure whenever the mood possessed her, who could awaken in her all the urges for which her body had been starved.
Now, gazing at him in the nude, she was once again amazed at the sheer reality of him, for she hadn't painted him nearly as scrumptious in her memory as he was in the flesh.
She wondered how that could be possible. Surely it should be the other way around, shouldn't it? After all, one's mind was wont to embellish one's heartthrob with characteristics he didn't possess—airbrushing a physical flaw here, adding a soup9on of flesh there, perhaps rendering his small firm buns as, well, smaller and firmer than they actually were.
But no. Astonishingly, she had retained an under imbued memory of him, and especially in the department where it counted the most, right there between his legs.
Well, goodness me, Gloria thought as she regarded the already hard member protruding proudly from its curly dark nest. It was prodigiously long, stupendously thick, and so preeminently well shaped it could have served as the model for the ideal dildo.
How could she have remembered it as something less when it was the very quintessence, the absolute idealization of the perfect penis?
He turned up the megawatts of his blinding whites. 'Well?' he said, with obvious amusement. 'You just gonna stand there and stare? Or what?'
Holding his gaze, she reached out slowly and placed the tips of her fingers in his mouth. She watched him close his lips around them, felt the surge of suction, then the ever-so-gentle nibbles of lupine teeth.
'Hmmm, wha
t big healthy teeth you have!' she observed.
He let go of her fingers in a flash. 'The better to eat you with, my dear!'
And with a playful growl, he grabbed hold of her buttocks, slid to his knees, and buried his face in the wetness of her mound.
'Christos!' she gasped, thrusting her hips forward and clutching his shoulders for support. 'Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, sweet—'
Suddenly words no longer sufficed in this sexually charged atmosphere of pure vibrating energy. Words held no meaning for bodies hurtling into the very vortex of a great cosmic collision. Only sounds existed: the incoherent cries, bestial grunts, and drawn-out screams of pure, undiluted pleasure.
Gloria cried out the instant his mouth sealed itself over her secret lips like an airlock.
She cried out again as his hands, cupping her buttocks, brutally pulled her deeper into his face.
And she cried out again and again as his tongue, that craftiest of all pleasure-seeking appendages, flicked and probed her innermost sanctum.
It was more than she could bear—and less than she desired.
More, more, more! Down there where her cavern guarded the treasure of her womanhood. Where his tongue was an oral cock sending wild electrical pulses zipping and zinging, and nothing, not life or even death, could sunder them!
Never, never in her wildest fantasies had she imagined being this completely crazed, this totally and erotically possessed! Even yesterday had been a mere prelude, a foretaste, a preview of coming attractions.
But this! This carnal abandon was more than just sex. It was some¬thing deeper and headier, infinitely stronger. The chemistry that bound her to his gravitational pull, the thrill of liberation that filled her to bursting—as if she had sprouted enormous white wings and were on the verge of taking flight—nothing had prepared her for passions so fierce, needs so fiery, joys so uncontainable.
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