“What have you got worked out, Dave?” she asked.
“I’ve got to have a picture of you,” he said. He had a Nikon camera and took several shots. A young man was waiting in the foyer and took the film cartridge away to be developed.
“Why?” Alexandra asked.
“Your passport has expired. The photo has to be laminated in your new passport.”
“I haven’t applied for one.”
“Taken care of. Did you ever hear of Lucinda Harker?”
Alexandra shook her head.
“Get used to the name. She’s you. She was born in London, educated at Cambridge. You can fake that. I know you can. She went out to Hong Kong in 1979, to work for Barclays Bank. Seeing the approach of the Handover, she applied for Hong Kong citizenship. It was granted. She carries a Hong Kong passport. She doesn’t need a work permit for Hong Kong; she’s a citizen. If you stay here in New York, the millions you have in trust will do you little good, because you’ll have to work at a menial job and live in squalor. If the district attorney figures out you have major money, you’ll be in deep shit—because you emphatically denied to Tabatha Morgan that you had any such thing. Maybe that will put me in deep shit, too. So … you go out to Hong Kong as Lucinda Harker. I’ve transferred part of your money there. You can live damned well. In an exotic place. All you have to do is stay out of the States, where somebody might see you and recognize you. Alexandra Shea is dead. Welcome, Lucinda Harker.”
“How much money have I got?”
“More than you can ever spend. I’ll give you a detailed accounting—where it is and how much.”
“Lady of leisure …” Alexandra murmured skeptically.
“We’ll find something for you to take part in at one of our enterprises. You won’t be bored.”
“I’ll do what you say, it can never be worse than where I’ve been.”
“Where you’ve been will never be again. As soon as you’ve got a wardrobe, we’ll drive you to Boston, where Lucinda Harker will board a flight for Vancouver, where she will transfer to a flight on Cathay Pacific. Some young American friends will meet you at the airport in Hong Kong, settle you in a hotel until you find an apartment, and show you around the city. You’ll love the place. You have a facility for languages and will learn Chinese. A whole new life … Lucinda.”
IV
JANUARY, 1999
Janelle knew Dave occasionally visited Tabatha Morgan. She accepted that. She accepted his judgment that it was an expedient thing to do. He had shown her the pictures of the naked Tabatha, clad only in handcuffs. She remembered resentfully how the woman had made her sit in handcuffs in her office, and she took satisfaction in knowing that Dave was making a complete fool of her.
In preparation for Dave’s visit, Tabatha had donned a new String, consisting of nothing but a cluster of beaded cords that hung to her knees and swung when she walked, alternatively exposing and covering her crotch. She wore thigh-high black fishnet stockings and her black patent-leather shoes with stiletto heels.
Tabatha poured drinks. From the kitchen she said, “I suppose you know Alexandra has disappeared.”
“You had to expect that,” he said casually.
He stared at her through the kitchen door. At the counter pouring drinks, her back was to him. Nothing covered her ample buns.
“You wouldn’t know anything about it?”
“She never contacted me. I wouldn’t have known she was out except that I read it in the paper.”
“You worked on her release.”
“I did try to help her get out. I thought she had done enough time and that keeping her in prison was a waste.”
“I have something for you,” she said.
After she put their drinks down on the coffee toble, she went in her bedroom and returned with a file folder. She handed it to him.
“What are these?” he asked as he ruffled through some twenty or twenty-five sheets of paper.
“My God! You rifled the file? Can’t that get you in trouble?”
“No one but me knew what I had. It was my case. If someone inherits my files, they won’t get that.”
“Why did you do that, Tabby?”
“Do I have to tell you I’m in love with you? I have never been in love before, except for puppy love for boys who abused me when I was in high school. I have never been treated like a woman. I know it’s hopeless. You’re married to a glamorous genius. But if you’ll see me now and then and let me kiss your feet—”
Dave looked at her. “You never have to kiss my feet, lady. You’re all woman, those others didn’t know what to do with that.”
V
FEBRUARY, 1999
Willard and Julie Drake sat across a desk from Ben Haye, CEO of Enterprise Bank.
“It’s a relatively simple matter,” said Haye. “I’m afraid you owe two overdue payments on your mortgages, Mr. and Mrs. Drake. This is a bank. I have to know when we may expect payment.”
Drake slumped. “My Intercontinental stock, my inheritance, has gone to hell …”
“I am aware of that. A few months ago we would have been willing to let you hypothecate that stock as additional security on your mortgages. Now … Intercontinental seems to have too many problems. And without the dividends on that stock, we don’t see any income for you, Mr. Drake. We don’t want to foreclose, but—”
Julie spoke. “My husband developed and owns the finest computer program in the world.”
“At the moment generating no income that I can see.”
“It will It will.”
“When?”
Drake sighed. “I can’t say.”
Haye shook his head. “Then what security have we, against your notes?”
“I know,” said Julie. “I know what you’d like to have.”
“And what is that?”
“Our stock in Drake Research Services, which owns all the rights in my husband’s system.”
“Which is worth … ?”
“Billions, potentially,” she said. “Billions.”
“Potentially.”
“Yes,” she said.
Haye drew a deep breath. “Would you be willing to place this stock in a trust?”
“A trust doing what?” Drake asked.
“It occurs to me, Mr. and Mrs. Drake, that you are not businesspeople. The trust, controlled by the bank, would try to market your idea on a sound basis. Your potential billions might then become real billions.”
“Who votes the stock?” Julie asked.
“The trust,” said Haye.
VI
MARCH, 1999
Not yet quite eighteen, Jenna had the experience she had long wanted: to be a nude dancer in a club. In Detroit, in a club called Blue Magic.
“Something has got to be understood, kid. My girls do not turn tricks. I run a dance club, not a whorehouse. You do it once and I find out about it, it’s bye-bye.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Jenn. “And what’s more, I won’t do lap dancing. Look, no touch.”
“A girl after my own heart,” the man said.
Thereafter, she caught a bus into Detroit early each evening and returned on the last bus, at one in the morning.
She had sat in the club and watched several shows, to learn the moves. She came on the stage wearing a pleated, plaid microskirt and a tight sweater. She was billed as “Sweet Terry Coed.” No such thing as striptease existed anymore. Within her first half minute on the stage, she took off the sweater, exposing a sheer bra, then the skirt, exposing sheer bikini panties. Within another two minutes, they were gone, and she performed nude.
A polished steel pole held the center of the stage. Performers climbed it and hung on it. Clinging to the pole, they could spread their legs and show their shiny pink parts. They would lie on the floor and spread again, showing even more, using their fingers to open themselves wider.
Some performers gripped thick candles, burning, and poured the hot candle wax over their brea
sts. One poured cream over herself and licked it off her nipples. Between performances the stage had to be mopped.
Jenna resorted to no such gimmicks. She did not pretend that she danced. The blaring music was incidental and had nothing to do with her performance. All she did was show herself off, completely naked and completely unashamed. Immediately she was one of the favorites of the Blue Magic. She was conspicuously young. She was beautiful. And she conspicuously enjoyed herself. She conveyed to the men who watched her that she enjoyed showing herself to them.
Newspaper ads for the Blue Magic featured her name and photographs of her. Oddly perhaps, no one at Ann Arbor identified the Sweet Terry of the ads as Jenna Jennings.
She received fifty dollars for each performance. Usually she appeared twice a night and went back to Ann Arbor with a hundred dollars cash in her handbag. She established a bank account, hired an accountant to see to her taxes, and accumulated money.
Within a few weeks Jenna’s motive for dancing nude changed completely. She had wanted the experience, but boredom set in. Now it was the money that counted. She was depositing five or six hundred dollars a week. She decided to talk to “Uncle” Dave about investing. When she went home for the spring break, she transferred most of her money from her Michigan bank to Banque Suisse.
Her father knew nothing of this.
VII
APRIL, 1999
Gaining control of Drake’s corporation and his voice-recognition program was a coup for Dave Shea and Chen Peng. The Drake software was the most valuable property in the high-tech industry—or potentially so, if properly exploited. It could make DRS a competitor for Microsoft. Suddenly the two partners were major players in the computer field.
They kept low profiles, but who controlled was unmistakably clear.
They named Willard Drake as CEO of DRS and set him up with a large salary and a golden parachute. They named Julie Drake vice president and set her up with the same.
Drake gave up his notions of being an independent man and turned all his attention to continuing development of his system.
VIII
“My mother! My mother, for Christ’s sake! Is there no goddamned limit to you?” Janelle screamed.
“She told you?” Dave said calmly.
“No. Your brother told me.”
“Why … ? A whole year later.”
“Don’t go blaming him. He didn’t mean to tell me. I just found out, that’s all.”
“How?”
“Mother has a friend. She was taking care of Mother’s apartment and her dog while mother went to New Jersey with you. Well … the goddamned dog died. He’d been sick. That’s why Mother asked this friend to take care of him, rather than put him in a kennel. This friend tried to call. Mother had told her she’d be in the Holiday Inn. They rang her room repeatedly, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t mention this to me for a long time. But she’s a gossip. And she told me. So I called your brother. I asked him where you and my mother were the night after the funeral. He said you two came to the reception and then went back to New York. I called the Holiday Inn. He lied for you. He knew perfectly well you had not gone back to the city. You didn’t check out until the next morning.”
“We were out to dinner.”
“At two A.M.? Anyway, I called him again. I told, him I knew you had not left the motel that night. So … your brother thought you should have a photo of your father, which he had forgotten to give you. He came to your room about midnight and knocked on the door. You wouldn’t let him in. You accepted the picture through the door and said thanks. It was obvious there was a woman in your room. He went to my mother’s room and knocked. She did not answer. Dave … You were fuckin’ my mother!”
“What does she say about this?”
“Faced with it, she admits it. She says it was just once and just a hooker John relationship. But she’s my goddamned mother! You son of a bitch!”
“Are you saying you haven’t done something with Chen Peng?”
“He’s not your father!”
“Janelle …”
“You’re doing it with Tabatha Morgan. That’s business. Chen Peng is business. But not my mother!”
“I—”
“You haven’t got a goddamned grain of decency in you. This marriage is over.”
“We’ve got an awful lot tied up together.”
“And I want my share. We’ll go on having a business relationship. But the marriage is over!”
IX
She called Chen Peng from a pay phone. A private line where she would not be asked to identify herself. A receptionist with a soft oriental voice answered, “CP Enterprise, may I help you?” It didn’t matter whether she gave her name or not, the receptionist knew her voice.
“Chen Peng,” Janelle said, trying to stop her tears. She didn’t know whether she was crying from anger or sadness.
Peng’s voice came through the phone. “What a nice surprise to hear from you, Janelle.”
She minced no words. “I’m leaving my husband.”
Peng sat thoughtfully for a moment. “You sound very upset.”
“Oh, yes, I am very upset, Peng …”
“You are a smart woman, Janelle. It’s sometimes better to let your anger run its course, then make decisions.”
She couldn’t control herself any longer. “He slept with my mother.”
“I see,” he replied.
“I want to destroy him,” she said. “Can you help me?”
“If that’s what you would like,” he answered. “But it will take some time.”
After he hung up the phone he sat quietly and thought, Americans have very peculiar ways.
Harold Robbins left behind a rich heritage of novel ideas and works in progress when he passed away in 1997. Harold Robbins’s estate and his editor worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Harold Robbins’s ideas to create this novel, inspired by his storytelling brilliance, in a manner faithful to the Robbins style.
Forge Books by Harold Robbins
The Betrayers (with Junius Podrug)
Heat of Passion
Never Enough
The Predators
The Secret
Sin City
Blood Royal
FORGE BOOKS PRESENTS
SIN CITY
by Harold Robbins
For more than five decades, bestselling author Harold Robbins has thrilled millions of readers with tales heavy in action, ruthless characters, international intrigue and the sexiest characters ever captured in print.
Now in SIN CITY, he takes us to the town famous for all these, Las Vegas.
The following is a preview of SIN CITY …
ONE
In the beginning, God said,
“Let there be light.”
The first time I saw the Strip I thought God lived there. I was twelve years old in 1966 when Betty and me came down on a Greyhound from northern Nevada. We’d left Mina that morning, a little alkali-mud flat town with U.S. 95 for a main street, the kind of dry-rotted little desert town that even rattle snakes shied away from. When we got off the bus in Las Vegas, we put our bags in a dime locker and walked from the bus depot to the Strip. I hadn’t had anything to eat except a Baby Ruth candy bar since Tonopah and my stomach was growling. Along the way Betty had dropped the three days pay she collected before we left Mina, plunking it into slots, a quarter at a time, whenever the bus made a stop. She only had a dollar left when we arrived in Vegas but she was sure she could get a job waitressing right away. Just walk in and go to work—Vegas was that kind of town. By the end of her shift, she’d have enough tips and maybe even an advance on her wages to get us a room and something to eat.
While Betty went into a restaurant to ask for work, I wandered up the Strip alone. It sounds corny, but I got stardust in my eyes the first time I saw the boulevard. It was Times Square, the Arabian Nights, a hundred carnivals, all thrown together and lit up at the same time—the Dunes, Aladdin, Sahara
, Caesars Palace. The lights struck me first, a brilliant neon collàge, rocking on the Silver Slipper, blazing at the Stardust, beaming to the heavens from the giant searchlights atop the new Aladdin Hotel.
And the people—holy mackerel, it was the first time I saw guys in those monkey suits they call tuxes and women in slinky dresses that sparkled. In Mina women smelled of talcum powder and wore loose fitted flowery dresses Betty called flour sacks, and men had mud on their boots and sweat under their arms. These women in Vegas had dresses that molded to their bodies and exposed the luscious curves of their breasts. They smelled like expensive sex, Chanel No. 5 and Fleur de Rocaille. Even the men had an expensive smell, not like the Old Spice lotion that miners splashed on after showering.
Flesh and glitter, that was Vegas, flesh and glitter and the song of money. I had never heard the song before, not this loud at least. Nickels and dimes dropping in slot cups were the money sounds in places like Mina and Tonopah, but on the Strip the music was numbing, seductive, putting you in a dream state and robbing your senses, the forbidden tune played by Lorelei to lure Rhine sailors to their doom, the beckoning of the Sirens to tempt Odysseus. It filled your ears all the way down the boulevard—the rattle of dice and cries at the craps, cards being shuffled at the blackjack tables, the clatter of a roulette ball bouncing around the wheel, the hum of thousands of slot reels spinning, silver flushing from them.
Something spiritual entered my body and glowed inside me that night. I guess it was like the religious experiences that Holy Rollers in Mina talked about, when they woke up in the middle of the night and heard Jesus speaking to them. I only went to the Holy Roller church once and it scared the hell out of me, all that shouting and hysterical laughing, people talking in Tongues. That’s what it was like on the Strip, too, people shrieking and laughing and shouting mysterious utterances. “Bless these bones!” “Holy Mother, com’on six, gimme a six.” “Jesus H. Christ, I hit the big one!” “Oh my God, my God, my God”
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