Wicked Pleasures

by Penny Vincenzi

  Max smiled at her, his most guileless, beautiful smile. ‘All part of the service. Honestly.’

  Titus came over. ‘We’re going to move along to the beach for the next shot. We’ll need transport. And somewhere for the girls to change. Do we have that Campervan, or not, Jennifer, that I asked you to organize?’

  ‘Well, we did,’ said Jennifer, looking helplessly into the car park. ‘It was here last night. But it seems to have vanished.’

  ‘Oh Jesus H. Christ,’ said Titus. ‘Darling, are you in charge of this shoot or are you some kind of kindergarten teacher along for the ride? Look, ask in reception, will you, and get something organized. We really need it.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Max.

  The girl in reception was regretful but unhelpful. Another client had taken the van; it was hotel property, Miss Collins hadn’t made it clear she needed it every day. She could have it tomorrow, but not today.

  ‘Could you try Hertz maybe?’ said Jennifer. She looked distracted.

  ‘No hope,’ said the girl. ‘I just rang them for this other client. They don’t have anything. Sorry.’ She returned to the brochure she was studying. Jennifer looked as if she might cry.

  Max stepped forward. He put his hand on the girl’s.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there are other car-hire firms. I can see you’re terribly busy. But would you let me use your directory and see what I can do?’ He smiled; the girl looked at him.

  ‘I’ll do it for you,’ she said and picked up the phone without moving her eyes from his face. Half an hour later an Avis Campervan pulled into the forecourt of the hotel.

  ‘You’ve been marvellous,’ said Jennifer. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

  They were eating lunch at a table on their own; Dodo occasionally shot them a resentful glance.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ said Max. Jennifer looked up startled, nervous. He grinned at her. ‘It’s all right. Nothing like that. I need to get down to Key West. Just for a day. Could you help me fix that?’

  He flew down to Key West in a tiny plane early on the third day. The girls were all outraged; Dodo threatened to go on strike.

  ‘Listen, babe, I’ve worked for this.’

  ‘Oh yeah? In her bed? Virginal cow.’

  ‘No,’ said Max quietly. ‘On the set, with you lot of animals.’

  He got out of the plane and took a taxi into town; he was enchanted by it, its narrow streets, the trolley car with the ringing bell that served as a tourist transport system, the white board houses with the wide verandas, hung over with palms, the technicolour painted shops and restaurants, the swinging signs that said ‘Dentist’ or ‘Attorney at Law’, the lack of cars, the smiling, lazy crowds.

  ‘It looks like a film set,’ he said to the cab driver.

  ‘Better than that. It’s a little country. Called the conch republic. Casts a spell on you. You can’t hurry here.’

  ‘OK,’ said Max. ‘I’ll get out and walk. Where’s the Parrot House? And will it be open yet?

  ‘Parrot House is always open. ’Cept between four a.m. and breakfast. It’s two blocks down, on the left. Now don’t miss sunset in the Square.’

  ‘I’ll try not to, but why?’

  ‘Everyone goes there to watch. If it’s a good one they clap.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ said Max.

  He found the Parrot House easily; it was a restaurant, with a rainbow-coloured (or rather parrot-coloured, he supposed) frontage, a deep dark interior and a wide courtyard at the side, with tables set amongst the palm trees. A large and splendid parrot swung in a ring outside the door.

  Max sat down and ordered a beer; a very pretty boy brought it to him. ‘Thanks. Is the manager here?’

  ‘Not yet, sir. Too early. Give him an hour or two. Who shall I say?’

  ‘Say a friend of Michael Halston’s.’

  Shit, thought Max, this is going to take more than all day.

  A fat, smiling man with a great deal of curly grey hair eventually appeared in the courtyard. He walked over to Max, holding out his hand.

  ‘Hi. Johnny Williams. I understand you know Michael?’

  ‘Yes, I do. He suggested I see you.’

  ‘Any friend of Michael’s is a friend of mine. How can I help you?’

  ‘I think once you might have known my mother.’

  ‘Young man, I’ve known a great many mothers. Created a few as well.’ He laughed, his great belly heaving. Max felt sick.

  ‘Well, my mother’s name was Virginia Caterham. She used to come here a lot, apparently. Had a circle of friends.’

  ‘Virginia! Virginia. What does she look like?’

  ‘Well, reddish brown hair. Very tall. Um – very beautiful. American.’

  ‘Most of my customers are American.’

  ‘Yes of course.’ Max felt foolish.

  ‘When would this have been? Here, let me get you another drink, and we can talk.’

  ‘Thank you. It would have first been oh, about eighteen years ago. And I think she came back occasionally from time to time. But I believe her friends still come here. Quite often. It’s a base of theirs.’

  ‘Tell me some more about your mother. Where is she now, that you can’t ask her yourself about these friends?’

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Max quickly.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry. When did she die?’

  ‘About four years ago. She was killed in a car crash. In England.’

  ‘Why was she in England – I’m sorry, what is your name?’

  ‘Max. Max Leigh. She lived in England. She was married to an Englishman.’

  ‘Called?’

  ‘Lord Caterham.’

  He had been saving that. Americans still loved lords. Johnny’s eyes lit up. ‘Lord Catherham? Lady Caterham. Ah, now I begin to hear some bells. She never came here with him, did she?’

  ‘No. No I don’t think she did.’

  ‘What did she do, your mother?’

  ‘She was an interior designer.’

  ‘Ah! Virgy! Virgy Caterham. Of course I remember her. She was a real lady. A very lovely lady. She hasn’t been here for – oh, ten years. Ted Franklyn’s crowd, that’s who she was with. Oh, she was amazing. Beautiful. Beautiful! She used to dance, didn’t she? Tap dance. She taught Ted to dance. And sing. Oh, they were good times. We used to go off on Ted’s boat, oh, for days sometimes. Out to the reef, down to the Bahamas. Life was one big party. They were great days. I miss them, I really do.’

  ‘So – where could I find Ted Franklyn?’ asked Max, his heart thudding very hard in his chest.

  ‘I’m afraid the same place as your mom. He died. Oh, about three years ago. Too much of everything.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I see. And was he her greatest friend?’

  ‘Yes, he was. Although she did have a kind of a penchant for Tommy. Tommy Soames-Maxwell. They were very fond of one another. He was a great guy. Wonderful fisherman. I have a picture of him somewhere. Wait, I’ll go find it.’

  He disappeared. Max sat thinking, imagining, seeing his mother with these people, these idle, self-indulgent, hedonistic people. It was so unlike her. And yet – was it? Who was to say what she was like, who she had been? And who she had been with, and to bed with and drunk with and danced with. Ted Franklyn. Tommy Soames-Maxwell. The names alone told a story. Soames-Maxwell – what a name. What a – Oh God. The implication of it suddenly hit Max hard. Charlotte and her Charles St Mullin. And now him and Tommy Soames-Maxwell. It could, it almost had to, make sense, add up. He looked up suddenly; the courtyard seemed to have blurred, the indistinct figure of Johnny looming out of the shadows. He was coming towards him, smiling, a photograph in his hand. Max took it, shaking slightly. An old, smudgy torn photograph, inscribed ‘To Johnny. Remembering fun. Tommy.’ Max sat and looked at Tommy Soames-Maxwell. Tommy Soames-Maxwell stood and looked back at him. Tall, smiling, blond, with a look in his eyes that invited danger. Hanging onto a huge rod, with a massive fish strung up beside him. Max fe
lt sick, excited, almost awed.

  ‘And where could I find Mr Soames-Maxwell? Does he live here?’

  ‘No. Tommy lives in Vegas. He’s a gambling freak these days. He used to do battle with fish, now it’s the wheel. Sad, really.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘very sad. Do you have an address for him?’

  Chapter 27

  Charlotte, 1984

  Charlotte knew exactly when she had fallen in love with Gabe Hoffman. One minute she had been thinking how much she loathed him, how much she couldn’t wait to be rid of him, away from his office, and the long, miserable boring days with him; and the next she had been staring at him, fiercely and almost painfully aware of the extraordinary dark brown of his eyes, the wild unruliness of his hair, the oddly rakish way he smiled, the thick dark hair on his arms, right down to his wrists (she normally loathed hairy men), the urgent impatient way he moved around, the size of him, oh God, the size of him. Charlotte imagined, very briefly, lying underneath Gabe Hoffman and felt faint; allowed her mind to linger, more briefly still, on the particular part of his anatomy that might be most intimately engaged with hers, and felt first hot and then chilled with horror at herself. What was she doing, thinking, reacting to him like this, in precisely the way the entire female population of Praegers did? At – she glanced up at the array of clocks on his wall, showing the time in New York, Tokyo and London – at half past ten in the morning, for God’s sake, stone cold sober. Then she forced her mind back onto what he had just said to her, what she was supposed to be replying – and she realized what had made the difference, what had done this to her, what had turned all the emotions she had in a great tumbling heap inside her head. Or rather her body. Oh well all right, her head and her body.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ he had said. ‘That’s it. You’ve fucking got it. You’re a fucking genius.’ And he had picked up the telephone and stabbed out a number, staring at her at the same time with an expression of profound and almost awed admiration. Charlotte stared back at him, still only half understanding, but understanding also that this was what she had been waiting for, looking for ever since she had been handed this bank, her legacy, at her grandfather’s birthday party, all those years ago, ever since she had been working, day after day, on the seemingly endless boredom of her apprenticeship. The real world, the heady world of deals, of buying and selling and grabbing and protecting: a sense of tension, excitement, urgency; the smell of money in the air, an almost tangible feeling of greed. And she was part of it now, as Gabe was, she was no longer a trailing, reluctant accessory, she was in there, part of it, adding to it. And as if almost in celebration, she had toppled over into love with him. Just like that.

  It hadn’t even seemed to her that she had said anything particularly clever. Gabe had been wrestling for days over a hostile bid, unable to establish quite why the target company – a paper manufacturer that was only modestly successful – should be so attractive: Charlotte had looked up casually from her desk and made the observation that one of the company’s original parts – small stationery goods and office equipment – had to be of almost inestimable value in terms of customer good will – ‘greater than its whole, in a way,’ she said. And Gabe had stared at her, very white and still, his hand frozen on the keyboard of his Quotron. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘of course. Of course. Crown jewel sell-out situation.’ And then he made his pronouncement. And then she fell in love with him.

  Gabe explained to her about crown jewel sell-outs. ‘You sell off the one bit of a company that’s most valuable. Quickly. So it isn’t really very desirable any more.

  We do that, and the others’ll drop their bid. It’s the customers they want. Watch.’

  The crown jewels were sold; the bid was duly dropped. Everyone was very excited. Gabe was very fair and told Fred III it had been her idea about the retail outlets. Fred told her he hoped she wouldn’t start to think she was the best thing in banking since the invention of the dollar bill. Charlotte assured him she wouldn’t. He was smiling at her as he spoke; Freddy was in the room, and she saw his face suddenly, coldly furious. It almost frightened her.

  Charlotte had watched in a state of acute excitement as Blackworth sold off its stationery division, and Wrightson dropped their bid. She was invited to the celebratory lunch. She thought how dull it would be without the deal and that afternoon she found herself beginning all over again, on a new bid, for another company, a new set of stockholders, a new buyers’ list. She wondered how she could ever have thought Praegers was boring. Her own work had scarcely changed, but she was suddenly completely enraptured by the process. Gabe was, along with the rest of Wall Street, deal-obsessed. The stream of negotiations, of bids and counter-bids, of rumours and counter-rumours, of leaks and denials, was like a physical presence in the office. Gabe sat at his computer, hour after hour, like some large restless bird of prey, watching it with his brilliant dark eyes, ready to swoop into its permanently shifting network of information, opportunity, challenge. For the first time, she was aware of the bank as a vital, living force. Its ability to convert money into power and thus to manipulate people seemed to her almost mystical. It held her in thrall. She knew it was a huge factor in her new, helpless passion for Gabe; but that seemed to her irrelevant. The two things, the two excitements were two halves of a whole. She was constantly if uncomfortably happy.

  Gabe had shown absolutely no signs of reciprocating her feelings. Apart from saying ‘well done’ when a particularly difficult deal had been finally accomplished, he treated her exactly as he treated the other people who worked for him – carelessly, arrogantly, thoughtlessly. Charlotte didn’t care; if anything it intensified the way she felt. She was uncomfortably aware she was feeling rather like a schoolgirl with a crush on a prefect, but she didn’t really care about that either. She didn’t care about anything, except getting to the office in the morning, and being with Gabe. Physical proximity to him was all she asked. Occasionally his hand would brush against hers, and once he put his arm round her shoulders, to move her out of the way; Charlotte could not believe he wouldn’t recognize the scorching hunger in her reaction. Her only anxiety was that he might, in some dreadful way, realize what she felt. It was hard to imagine that such feeling, such highly charged sexual intensity, could go unremarked. She tried to make sure that her behaviour was, if possible, cooler than ever, and told herself he was too arrogant, too insensitive to see beyond the end of his desk.

  As far as she knew, he had no regular girlfriend; he never mentioned one, and the office gossip was simply of an endless stream of long-legged cool beauties seen waiting for him, with commendable patience, in the reception area of the bank. Charlotte being neither long-legged, nor even, strictly speaking, beautiful, found this slightly disturbing; but so long as none of them moved into his Upper West Side apartment for longer than a night at a time, she felt she could stand it.

  She was still living with Fred and Betsey, but she had made a friend at last, a real friend, someone to talk to, and to laugh with, to spend at least some of her very limited spare time with, and that had given her confidence: a girl called Chrissie Forsyte who was a trader on the foreign exchange floor. Charlotte had noticed her first in the queue at the staff restaurant in the basement, handing over her polystyrene box of salad to be weighed at the check-out with a confident ‘324’.

  ‘That’s 331, Chrissie,’ said the girl behind the till, ‘you did good.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Charlotte, intrigued, from behind her, ‘but what did that mean?’

  Chrissie turned and smiled at her. ‘I was betting on the weight. Want to share a table?’

  ‘Yes, that’d be nice. Thank you,’ said Charlotte. Her difficult situation at Praegers meant she didn’t often find someone to eat with; people were still either suspicious of her, or nervous. Most days she carried her own box of salad back up to her office, rather than sit conspicuously alone in the restaurant.

  ‘I don’t normally sit down here,’ said Chrissie, ‘I eat at my
desk. But it is really quiet today, and I guess I can take a fifteen-minute break.’ Her voice was light and pretty, her accent Southern and musical, straight out of Gone with the Wind. She smiled at Charlotte. She was tall and very thin, pale, with long brown hair and thick, wire-framed glasses. Most of the traders wore glasses.

  ‘Do you always bet on the weight of your lunch?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘Traders bet on everything,’ said Chrissie. ‘The floors the elevator will stop at – not that that amounts to much here – the number of wrong buses that come by before the right one arrives, the number of messages waiting when you get back from lunch. Or even the bathroom.’ She laughed. ‘We’re wildly superstitious too. There are lots of stories about people who won’t make a single trade until three people have said good morning to them, or who’ve bought or sold on the toss of a coin. My boss always makes his first trade of the day on multiples of the change he got from his cab fare. We’re all a little crazy.’ She smiled at Charlotte again. ‘You spent any real time on the trading floor?’

  Charlotte shook her head. ‘Only whizzing through on my first day.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. Come and spend some time there one day. It’s really fun. I still love it and this is my sixth year. Only problem is my eyesight. When I started on this I had forty-forty vision. Now I have two new prescriptions a year.’

  Charlotte had been up several times since then, and sat enthralled at Chrissie’s side in her small empire, measuring roughly three metres by three metres, watching her as she stared for long hours at the screen on which her destiny was fixed, talking into one of her three telephones, another tucked beneath her chin, a half-drunk can of Coke and a half-eaten sandwich on her desk.

  ‘All you have to be in this game,’ she said to Charlotte, ‘is quick, efficient, bossy and aggressive. For some reason I don’t find that too terribly difficult.’ She grinned. ‘It’s a war between yourself and the market. The trading floor is the cutting edge. It’s the centre of the universe, I tell you.’