The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  He was my grandfather. I have almost no memory of my French grandmother. I do remember my Aunt Therèse, because my father confided in me about her.

  “You’re old enough to know this,” he said. “But don’t tell your mother I told you. Therèse, who is your mother’s elder sister, lived with a German officer during the war. She was what we call a collaborator. When the Germans were driven out of Lyon, the people of the Resistance stripped her naked, shaved her head, and marched her through the streets—she and half a dozen or so others. And … well, let me tell you for sure, your mother never did anything of the kind and was never treated that way. Your mother had no relationship whatever with any German, of any kind. She did not betray her country. I don’t judge Therèse. But that’s in her history.”

  Whenever I looked at Aunt Therèse during the remaining few days the family visited, the image came to my mind of her bald and naked, and that image made my little dick stiffen and stand. Aunt Therèse gave me the first erections I ever had.

  I would see Therèse again. One evening over chocolate and cognac she talked to me about her punishment—

  “Eet ees relief, you must understand. We are afraid they are going to shoot us. We are afraid they are going to flog us. In some town, like in Corsica, they streeped girls naked, shaved them, and drove them out of the town, throwing rocks at them as they ran along the road. We feared zees, and when all they did was march us through the street and let us go home, we shook and cried because we have escape such thing.”

  “And how did you live in Lyon after that?” I asked.

  “Weeth scorn. Weeth some hate. But alive and let to leef in our house.”

  “My mother…”

  “She has nothing to do with thees. She never deed what I deed. But … she ate the sugar and drank the coffee my Boche brought. And so deed my family. I performed a service for zem.”

  7

  When my father arrived at the Lodge School, I was still in the VIP suite being cosseted as the poor boy who had lost his mother. I was, in fact, a poor boy. I was in shock. I couldn’t imagine what life would be like without my mother. She had been my stabilizing influence, and I had loved her deeply.

  I loved my father, too. But that had been different. He was a giant figure, to be respected—actually even to be feared—and he had been absent much of the time. When he talked to me, usually it was to give me words of advice, which he expected me to remember. I respected him, but my mother had stood as a buffer between us, and I had to wonder how it would go between us without her.

  He had begun to treat me like a man before I was old enough to be treated like a man. He did it because he didn’t know how to deal with a little boy. When he told me about Aunt Therèse, for example, he told me something a boy of nine didn’t need to know.

  He had the good sense not to tell me certain other things I definitely didn’t need to know.

  He told me a funeral was a burdensome thing, and that my mother had left specific instructions that she was not to have one. He’d had her buried in France according to Jewish custom, though she wasn’t a Jew, so by the time he arrived at Lodge she was in the ground. That was how he operated—decisively, abruptly. He decided I did not need to see my mother’s body—in which he was absolutely right.

  He took me to dinner and saw to it that I drank wine. He talked to me about women.

  “Do you understand why I loved your mother so very much?” he asked me.

  “I loved her, too.”

  “Yes, but … the love between a man and woman, a husband and wife … is not the same. How much do you know about what men and women do?”

  “I know what they do.”

  “I’ll arrange for you to have an experience,” he said. “What you boys do in dorms is not the kind of experience I want you to have. I want you to have the kind of experience your mother and I shared, though for the first time you may have to share it without the love she and I felt for each other.”

  “Then is it any good?” I asked him. “If it’s just … physical, is it any good? Have you done it with a woman you didn’t love?”

  “Yes. And so will you.”

  I nodded and said nothing.

  “I don’t want you to imagine that what boys do in dorms in boarding schools is—”

  “I haven’t had that kind of experience either—except once.”

  “Tell me.”

  I told him about Brad.

  In a minute he was on the phone. He summoned Brad, gave him twenty minutes to be at our room in the inn. I could hear only our end of the conversation, but I understood that Brad’s protest only made my father angry.

  A timid knock on the door. Brad. Flushed. Afraid.

  “I swear before God Almighty, Mr. Cooper, that I—”

  “Strip down, fag,” my father said coldly. “I don’t talk to faggots with their clothes on.”

  “Mr. Cooper, I swear to you, nothing improper happened between me and Len. The boy was and is distraught—”

  “We can discuss it when you’re naked.”

  “Mr. Cooper, please!”

  My father had a bottle of Scotch on the desk. He went to it and poured himself a drink, standing with his back to Brad.

  I’d threatened Brad with my father, but I’d had no idea what fear the name Jerry Cooper could invoke. In the next few minutes I learned to know my father in a very different way.

  Brad hurried to strip out of his somewhat shabby, tweedy clothes and in a moment stood stark naked.

  My father poured a stiff drink and handed it to him.

  Brad accepted the glass and, hands shaking, drank the Scotch.

  “I wanted my son to have his first experience with a nice little girl, a nice little girl showing pink knees at the hem of her plaid skirt, with a navy blue cashmere sweater and a single strand of pearls. Who gets his virginity instead? You!”

  “I gave it to him,” Brad muttered tearfully. “I didn’t take anything from him.”

  “Oh, perfect,” my father said with the most complete scorn I have ever heard come from anyone’s mouth.

  “Mr. Cooper…”

  “Not much of a cock, you got there. Hold it up. Pull on it. Let’s see the best you can show.”

  Brad tried. It was true he wasn’t well hung, and being terrified didn’t help.

  “Let’s see you make it come, queer. Jerk off. Here. Have another drink. Then let’s see you jerk off.”

  My father poured me a splash of Scotch, too, and another drink for himself. Then we sat on the couch and watched Brad struggle to masturbate.

  He did not manage to come. Instead he began to sob. I had not expected to feel sorry for Brad, not anytime, for any reason, but I felt sorry for him then.

  I spoke to my father. “Let him go,” I said.

  My father shrugged. “Okay, fairy. Get your clothes on and get out of here. And don’t you ever come anywhere near my son again. Don’t even say hello to him.”

  When Brad was gone, my father looked down at me and said, “Sympathy is a fine sentiment. But it’s like money. Be hesitant about spending money and also about extending sympathy. When that fag gets to thinking about it, he’ll conclude you were weak. Count on it. But I don’t think he’ll bother you again.”

  8

  JERRY

  Paul brought Giselle and her two girls to New York. He told me why he had urged me to stay put and not fly to France.

  “In France we put a suspect in jail and keep him there until the authorities can figure out whether there is enough evidence to bring him to trial.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that I am a suspect in the death of Jean Pierre?”

  Paul nodded. “The Martins accuse you. And you may not be surprised to hear that Jack accuses you.”

  Jack had been Jean Pierre’s lover for many years. “I suppose I need not be surprised at that,” I said dryly.

  Paul went on. “They think, of course, that you hired someone to do it.”

  I hadn’t, of course, but Fran
k Costello’s words sprang to my mind—“A Frog fairy mixed up in a scheme to screw us, who’s already screwed you. I’ll have to pass the word along.”

  “I sent the telegram from Turin,” Paul continued, “because I knew any telegram sent to you from France would almost certainly be intercepted and read by GIGN—”

  “GIGN?”

  “Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale. A tough police organization.”

  “It’s their goddamned counter-terrorist organization!” I said. “What the hell…?”

  “Just police nastiness,” Paul said with a Gallic shrug. “Their suspicion was all the more aroused because I’d driven Giselle and her girls across the Italian frontier almost before J. P.’s body was discovered. I thought that a wise precaution. They thought it was something other than a precaution.”

  “You’re a resourceful man.”

  “I’m Corsican. Anyway, I hope you don’t forget that Giselle is my niece.”

  “So you told me, finally, after letting me believe for years that you were just a friend of the family.”

  “Anyway, l’affaire J. P. is over. He left heirs, and you’ll have to send them back to France sooner or later.”

  Giselle and I slept together her first night in New York. Things were the way they’d been before. Almost. She remained a delicately beautiful woman, adroit at love-making and filled with enthusiasm to be in my bed once more. It was a memorable night, maybe the most memorable of my life.

  Giselle was not a typical Frenchwoman. In the first place, she was blond. There was no way to tell if that was natural or not, since she kept her pussy shaved, always had. When she was dancing naked in Paris, her pussy was naked. Also, in my observation, Frenchwomen tend to be flat-chested, or at least have small, firm breasts. Giselle’s were not huge, but they were more than the typical Frenchwoman had. They were pendulous, too—which is to say, they hung rather loose from her chest and swung a little, this way and that, as she moved. She had a flat belly, broad hips, and gorgeous legs. Her face was perfect: perky nose, luscious lips, a strong chin. She was an acknowledged beauty. Everyone thought she was beautiful.

  We took no precautions against pregnancy because we had already agreed that we would marry and start a family as soon as possible. We both wanted that.

  After her two girls were asleep that night, we put on records, and Giselle did an erotic strip for me. She had not forgotten how to do it. She was thirty-four years old. My God, she’d been only seventeen when I first saw her dancing nude in Paris!

  Later she told me my cock tasted good. “Jerr-ee … I never have taste a cock that taste like yours. You should have come to me in France. When we had two daughter, no son, J. P. lost interest. It could have been that I would have been licking your balls many time. Like this.”

  I couldn’t honestly tell her that her cunt felt better to my cock than any other cunt I’d ever put it in. I couldn’t even tell her it felt different, or that it felt familiar. They say all cats are gray in the dark, but that is not so. They say it’s not how much cock a man has but how he uses it that makes the difference, and that is so. Well, it’s true with a woman, too. The equipment is the same, but how they handle it is not. She knew how to welcome me in, then to tighten her muscles and grip me. I don’t think I could have pulled out if I wanted to, sometimes.

  She was a vocal lover. Frenchwomen often are. I don’t mean she heaved and panted and shrieked like those bimbos who fake orgasms on porno tapes. I mean, she moaned softly and purred and let me know what pleasure she was taking. I always knew when I was doing what she liked most.

  There was another way in which she was no Frenchwoman. She was clean. She showered at least once a day. On the other hand, she had lived in this country several years before she began to experiment with deodorants. And she, who shaved her pussy at least once a week, didn’t shave her armpits. Her pungent, musty odor was part of her attraction. I think she knew it.

  I thought I’d settled into the love and marriage that would last the rest of my life. We’d have two or three kids. I bought a house in Scarsdale. We’d need it for the family. We would need more than a city apartment, Giselle and I.

  After some discussion, we invited Uncle Harry and Lila to our wedding. They didn’t come. Not long after that, Harry was found with his throat cut. They found him, sprawled half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter on the street outside a small-time book-and-crap game he was running. The police didn’t press the investigation very hard. Too many people wanted him dead.

  I went to his funeral. Somebody said to me that he’d been a broken man, anguished by disappointment and frustration, having seen everything he’d built during his life come crashing down. The man who said it knew part of the story. I told him not to waste his sympathy. Harry had fucked everybody, and finally life fucked him.

  9

  So there I was, sitting with two million dollars spread out in six banks and with no sure idea what I was going to do with it.

  Buddy had ideas. I could fund the biggest numbers operation in town. The biggest bookie.

  “C’mon, Buddy. The Families got all that. Even if I invest in partnership with the Carlinos, the other Families are going to come after me. What I need is a business the Families haven’t thought of and don’t want.”

  In fact, the Families hadn’t forgotten me. I had a call summoning me to another meeting with Frank Costello at the Waldorf, in the same room at the same time. But when I sat down with him this time, I had a real surprise coming.

  Sitting at the table with Costello was a pallid, wizened little man with bushy black eyebrows, deep lines around his eyes and mouth, and a wide mouth with a fleshy lower lip.

  Direct as always, Costello opened the conversation by saying, “Here’s the man who can tell you how to invest that two mill wisely. Meet Meyer Lansky.”

  It was big-time to sit down over lunch with Meyer Lansky. Costello was big, but Lansky, who was sometimes called the Chairman of the Board, was bigger. A Russian or Polish Jew, he could not be a member of the Honored Society, exactly, but he was acknowledged to be the brains behind a wide variety of highly profitable businesses. A story was told of him that he was once overheard saying in an FBI-bugged room, “My God, we’re bigger than United States Steel!”

  Big. Not physically. He was also called the Little Man. Reputed nearly all his life to be a major gangster, he had never spent any major time in any pen. His personal specialty for a long time had been what were called “carpet joints”—that is, illegal gambling houses fancy enough to have carpets on the floors, in towns all the way from Florida to upstate New York. He had achieved his ambition in Cuba, where he had established a plush casino hotel. Gamblers flew into Havana on flying boats from Miami and played at the high-stakes tables of Lansky’s Riviera Hotel.

  I knew he had just been expelled from Cuba and his casino hotel had been confiscated by the new Communist regime of Fidel Castro. I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that he had plenty of other assets stashed here, there, or somewhere.

  Lansky looked tired, exhausted in fact. He would suffer a near-fatal heart attack not long after. The sudden loss of the Riviera had damaged him.

  He did propose an investment, but in a half-hearted way that inspired no confidence. The term was not yet in use, but what he suggested was that I buy into a money-laundering scheme. I didn’t understand it at the time, and I don’t understand it now. I said as much, and Frank Costello said, “Hey, that’s just the point, Jerry. Meyer does understand these things. I figured, you being a Jew like him, the two of you would get along just great.”

  “There’s heavy risk in this kind of thing, isn’t there, Mr. Lansky?” I asked.

  “All profitable enterprises involve risk,” said Lansky. “The man who is not ready to take a risk condemns himself to being a small-timer all his life.”

  “My problem is that I’ve worked all my life to get this two million dollars, and if I’m going to risk it, I think I’d rather risk it in som
ething I understand.”

  “Put in a hundred thousand, Jerry,” Costello suggested. “You can afford that.”

  I did. Then Lansky had his heart attack and nearly died, and I wrote off my hundred thousand. But after almost a year there came a knock on the door one evening at my place in Scarsdale. A young man handed me a package.

  “That’s from Mr. Lansky,” he said. “You should count it. It’s $165,000, what you got coming from your investment. Mr. Lansky suggests you take the $65,000 and reinvest the $100,000.”

  I handed the package back. “Tell Mr. Lansky I’ll reinvest the whole schmear,” I said.

  I got another payoff a year later. It didn’t come to $272,250, as it would have if my investment had done as well the second time as the first, but it came to $205,000, which still wasn’t bad at all.

  I figured this couldn’t go on forever, and I was right, it couldn’t. But I stuck with Lansky, and the next time I got a payout I sent $100,000 to Frank Costello.

  All well and good, but I wasn’t in a business of my own, and I damn well had to have a business of my own.

  10

  Buddy was a smart fellow. “The way to make money in business,” he said, “is to sell people something they want.”

  What he meant was sell them opportunities to gamble, sell them prostitutes, sell them protection, or—the coming business in the 1960s—sell them narcotics.

  Fine. Except that the Five Families had gambling and prostitution tied up in New York, and other families of Cosa Nostra had it tied up in other cities. I think Frank Costello could have arranged to let me buy into a piece of the gambling action in Manhattan, but the Families were fighting turf wars, which meant a chance of losing everything, including your life, in one hellish night.

  So far as prostitution was concerned, I didn’t want anything to do with it. Exploiting girls was not my idea of a way of turning a profit. I had scruples. You could never be sure if a girl came to the life because she wanted to, or because necessity pushed her, or—worse—because some guy forced her. I didn’t want to have to worry about that. Besides, more and more, girls were entering the life because of addiction. It was the worst of all possible combinations.