The telephone rang about five. "Señor Cord? Momenta. Señora Escalante."
"Jonas?" A small voice. Familiar? He was not sure.
"Sonja? Do you remember me?"
"Remember you? What would you suppose, Jonas?"
Her English was as it had been: only faintly accented. The image of her that he had retained in his memory all these years was vivid; and he wondered if she was anything like that image anymore.
"I deeply regret ..." His voice caught.
"What do you regret, Jonas?"
"That so many years have passed. That I didn't come looking for you."
"I wouldn't have received you," she said with a firmness in her voice that he had only rarely heard but still vividly remembered. "I have always known where you were. You might have had a little difficulty finding me, but I would have had none finding you. Your name is in the newspapers constantly."
"I'd like to see you, Sonja."
"It's all right now," she said. "You will be welcome for dinner tomorrow night. My husband knows about you and will be glad to meet you."
"I would like to meet your husband, Sonja. Might we, though, meet for the first time ... alone?"
"Where?"
"In a public place. In a restaurant. It's your city. Tell me where."
"Harry's American Bar," she said. "I don't go there often. Make a reservation for nine tomorrow evening."
"I will. And I — I will be there at nine."
4
He was on time. She was on time. She recognized him. He recognized her. He stood. She came to the table, let him kiss her hand, and sat down.
The years had not changed her much. He had not seen her for twenty-five years, but she was Sonja Batista, just as he remembered her. She smiled. She'd always had a beautiful smile. She'd always had a strong, symmetrical, beautiful face.
Changed — Well, she did have a bit more flesh on her face, softening the lines of her high cheekbones and her firm jaw. Her face was incised with very fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth but with no others. If he could judge through her clothes, her breasts were a little more generous than they had been before. They had always been generous enough to win his attention and admiration.
Unchanged — Her dark-brown hair framed her face and fell to her shoulders, a little unruly as always. When he met her, bobbed hair had been in fashion, but Sonja had never bobbed hers. She had been too proud of it. Her brown eyes confronted the world with challenging skepticism, just as he remembered. He remembered too and saw again a stalwart face that did not flinch from reality.
"Twenty-five years," he said. He shook his head. "It's unbelievable."
"I have followed your career," she said. "The newspapers mention you often."
"But what of you, Sonja? I am embarrassed to have to say I have not followed your life."
"That would have been difficult," she said. "I have lived a very quiet, very private life, very different from the way it was when you knew me."
"I told you to call me if you ever needed anything."
For an instant her warm smile turned mordant, but quickly it returned to the open, welcoming smile she had shown him since she sat down. "I never wanted anything from you, Jonas," she said. "I thought of calling you once and decided not to."
He glanced down at the huge diamond she wore on her ring finger. She wore a wedding band also.
She saw the glance and said, "I have been married for twenty-four years."
5
The chastity belts Jonas had heard rumored were in fact worn by a few very traditional, typically very wealthy Mexican women. Sonja wore one.
It could not have prevented her having sex with a man not her husband, if she wanted to. All it did was identify her as the wife of Virgilio Diaz Escalante y Sagaz and was more in the tradition of the name-embroidered silk ribbons some Islamic women wore around their waists in the Middle Ages than the iron belts some prankish women were condemned to endure. It was exquisitely crafted, forbiddingly expensive, and entirely comfortable to wear. Two fine and flexible diamond-studded platinum bands circled her upper legs, another circled her hips, and a supposed shield joined these three bands. Nothing guarded her rear. She could easily have broken the thin metal and taken it off, and if she had, Virgilio would almost certainly not have suspected anything ill. On the other hand, if she didn't break it she could not have removed it; it was locked on her. Virgilio took it off when they had sex, or whenever else she asked him to.
She had worn it for more than twenty years and was proud her husband had never had to return it to the craftsman to be enlarged — as did most husbands who had fitted their wives with these belts.
The man sitting with her, Jonas Cord, could not have understood why she consented to wear the belt. Such a thing was beyond his norteamericano comprehension. A Yankee, he was deficient in the warm, sympathetic understanding, man for woman and woman for man, that so much characterized the Latin peoples. She had once admired his unsentimental Yankee practicality — and maybe did yet, a little — but she was glad her son had been reared in a different tradition.
Her family tradition could not have been more different from the Cord tradition. Her uncle was Colonel Fulgencio Batista y Zaidivar, once President — dictator — of Cuba and likely to be again. Jonas Cord could not begin to comprehend what that meant. When she met him, in 1925, not long before the death of his father, her uncle — her father's baby brother, much nearer her own age than her father's — was a fugitive, and so was her father. They would have been summarily shot if the then Cuban government could have laid hands on them.
She herself might have been shot. At the very least, if she had been caught in Cuba, she would have been — well, it would have been a painful experience. Her uncle's ambition and what he did in pursuit of it had interrupted her education and forced her to accompany her family into exile, first in Florida, then in Texas, finally in California.
When she met Jonas Cord she was nineteen years old. He was twenty-one. She had been educated in a convent and was confused and frightened, not just by the world but by this strange, bustling yanqui world into which she had been precipitated. She was so naive that she did not understand that norteamericanos did not apply the word Yankee to the residents of Florida, Texas, or California. It was all Yankee to her. The nuns had taught her English — but not the kind of English she heard spoken. They had taught her that America was a land of big men and big women.
The women ... They dressed outlandishly in short skirts and tight bodices and were aggressively bold, the nuns had said. They painted their faces. They smoked little cigars. (The nuns didn't know about cigarettes.) They drank distilled liquors. Unmarried girls went abroad in the streets day and night, without dueñas. They went to theaters and to dance halls without escorts. Some of them drove automobiles. Some of them lived in flats they shared with other girls, without parents or brothers to supervise and protect them. As a result, American men had no respect for American women, and any woman's virtue was constantly at risk.
Arriving in the United States, she had found that what the nuns had taught her was true, mostly. Girls her age did indeed wear their skirts above their knees, and they cut their hair so short their ears were exposed. They smoked and drank like men. They lacked elementary grace and seemed to know little of common courtesies. Worst of all, in their country they were not strange; she was.
Her father and her uncle traveled, where she did not know; but they were not often at home. A Mexican family somehow involved in her uncle's plans to seize power in Cuba were glad to offer Sonja and her mother a place in their home in Los Angeles, and they lived there for two years.
The daughters of this family were thoroughly Americanized, and they urged Sonja to dress as they did, to bob her hair, and to learn to smoke cigarettes. The pressure to conform gradually overcame her resistance. Over a few months she became half Americanized. She would not bob her hair, but she began to wear short dresses, to smoke, and — very cautiously at fir
st — to venture into the noisy, uninhibited society of young Americans. She was, she realized painfully, neither fish nor fowl. She was no longer the timid, convent-educated girl who had come to Los Angeles from Cuba; but neither had she become a hard-edged, giddy American. She was deeply curious about American ways and wanted to learn more about them and selectively adopt more of them, but she remained confused and embarrassed by the conspicuous difference between her and the young people around her.
Oddly, they did not attach any importance to the difference. Another American habit, it seemed, was to be welcoming and uncritical. They accepted her.
She met Jonas Cord at a party held aboard a yacht. It was an evening she had been looking forward to ever since she heard about it — to go aboard a yacht and mingle with people who could afford yachts. Jonas was a handsome young man, exceptionally virile as she saw him. His manifest virility, plus his air of self-confidence, set him apart from the other young men aboard the yacht that night. She had observed of other young American men that many of them were ambiguous about their masculinity. In their exuberant gaiety some of them were as giddy as girls. Also, many of them lacked confidence in themselves. More accurately, they lacked confidence in anything.
It seemed Jonas Cord had nothing he needed to prove. He knew who he was. He knew what he wanted. He looked around the partygoers on the rear deck of the yacht and walked directly to Sonja Batista. He asked her to dance. He offered a drink from his pocket flask. After an hour or so he suggested they leave the party and go for a drive.
He explained his car to her. It was a Bentley, imported from England, and the driver sat on the right. It was dark green, with nickel plating on the frame above the radiator and on its big lights and its wheel hubs. The windshield folded down, so the wind blew in your face. The hood was fastened down with a strong leather strap. The seats were upholstered in fine leather and had the odor of leather.
Sonja put her foot on a stirrup and climbed in. The frame of her seat folded around her in a sort of U, as did the body of the car, so she felt secure enough; but there were no doors, and if she leaned forward a little she could see the road rushing underneath. Jonas removed a delicate silk scarf from the glove box and helped her tie it around her head to control her hair. He handed her a pair of goggles to protect her eyes.
He drove her where she had never been: into the mountains north of Los Angeles, from where they had beautiful views of the lighted city and of the Pacific Ocean.
"I want to learn to fly an airplane," he told her. "So I can have a view like this of any city."
It seemed a glorious dream. "I would fly with you," she said. "I would not be afraid."
Then the question was Of what would she be afraid? Would she be afraid to allow him to kiss her? She was, but she allowed it.
From the moment of that kiss, Sonja ceased to think she was a virgin. She ceased to think she was pure. Not because he had violated her, of course — she was not so naive as to think he had. It was the way she had welcomed and enjoyed his kiss that had debased her. It was the fact that she wanted him to do it again that corrupted her.
He touched her breasts and her legs. She shook her head. She was frightened. He stopped, smiled, lit a cigarette, and offered it to her.
When they returned to the yacht, the party was still going. Hardly anyone had noticed they had been gone.
She was naive. She had no doubt he would want to see her again, that he would pursue her — court her, after the old-fashioned term. She expected probably he would propose marriage.
He did not. She didn't see him for several weeks. When she did see him, it was at another party, this one in the courtyard in the center of a block of small attached stucco houses. When he approached, she was standing by a fountain lighted with red and blue spotlights.
"Sonja! How nice to see you."
"Señor Cord ..."
"I got that airplane we talked about," he said. "Are you ready to go flying?"
"I am not certain," she said. "Maybe I am afraid after all."
Jonas Cord was a perceptive man. He recognized hesitancy in this young woman who had been so forthcoming before. He understood why. "The world has changed for me, Sonja," he said. "That is why I did not call you again before now. You see ... my father died suddenly."
"Oh, Jonas!" (She pronounced his name Hoe-nass, as she pronounced her own Sone-yah.) "If I have known ... such sympathy I would have extended!"
"I knew you would. You are a wonderful girl, Sonja."
She knew he was bold. He was direct, in the yanqui way. She had not guessed his boldness and directness would extend so far as the proposition he made before the evening was over.
They were in his car once again. He had kissed her again as he had done before, and she was aroused. She let him slip her dress off her shoulders and down around her waist. She allowed him to unhook her brassiere. He kissed her nipples, licking them and sucking them between his lips. She knew if he suggested it she would allow him the ultimate privilege. She wanted that and had ceased to fear it.
Instead — "Sonja, I inherited my father's business. Shortly before he died he committed our company to a major venture in a new product called plastics. I have to go to Germany for two months, Sonja ... Would you come with me?"
6
She went. Her mother was appalled, but her father and uncle encouraged her to go. They knew who Jonas Cord was. They envisioned a perfect alliance: Cords and Batistas. Sonja would play the traditional female role: a marker in a game, her body would cement the alliance.
1925 was an important year. Jonas's father died. Jonas's stepmother sold him all her claim to the Cord estate, leaving Jonas in complete control of the Cord businesses. A man who seemed to be his dearest friend, named Nevada Smith, left Jonas and went off to run a Wild West show.
Calvin Coolidge was inaugurated President of the United States, for a full term in his own right. A squat, pockmarked, obviously brutal man who called himself Josef Stalin took control of Russia. An elderly retired field marshal by the name of Paul von Hindenburg was elected President of the German Republic. A man named Clarence Birdseye froze fish fillets so hard they were like small oak planks, in which condition they would last indefinitely and were tasty when thawed. Jonas took an interest in the process but decided not to invest in it. What interested Americans most that year was a spectacular courtroom trial that resulted in an odd little schoolteacher named Scopes being fined a hundred dollars for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee school.
The two months in Germany was a dream. Jonas traveled first class. They crossed the Atlantic on the Aquitania, which had to be like living in the palace at Versailles; certainly no palace in Cuba was as elegantly appointed as the cabins, lounges, and dining rooms of the ship. They flew to Germany on a Domier flying boat that lifted off from the Thames and landed in the harbor at Hamburg. In Berlin they took up residence in the Adion Hotel, one of the city's finest.
Luxury and privilege did not come without its price. She was expected to give herself to Jonas without reservation. That was expected by her father and uncle as well as by Jonas. She gave herself to him without reservation: whatever he wanted, whatever he suggested. She never said no to him, not once. It was no high price. She had not imagined what rapture she would find in the most animal of human relationships.
Some of the Germans took him for a playboy. They were wrong. Jonas Cord was an astute, even a Machiavellian, businessman.
One of the Germans introduced him one evening to a strange little man who walked with a limp, smiled too readily and too broadly, and spoke of a Führer, a man who would lead the German nation to glory. The little man's name was Dr. Josef Goebbels, and a week or so later he arranged for Jonas and Sonja to meet his Führer, an oddly charismatic man named Adolf Hitler. Neither Jonas nor Sonja thought much of the encounter at the time. They would later search their memories to try to reconstruct the conversations.
On the way home on the Berengaria — the former German
liner Imperator — they discovered that the Prince of Wales was a fellow passenger. Everyone sought his company. Jonas did not. Perhaps it was as a consequence of his refusal to intrude on the privacy of the prince that he and Sonja were invited to dine at the prince's table the third night out. They found the personable, gracious Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David a far more memorable fellow than the two peculiar Germans. For years Sonja would talk about the evening when she dined with the Prince of Wales.
As they neared the end of their journey, Sonja began to wonder when Jonas would propose marriage. She felt sure he would. For more than two months they had lived together as though they were a married couple. She utterly failed to realize they were like a married couple in another way. He was becoming a little bored with her.
Aboard the Berengaria he openly courted the daughter of a Massachusetts banker — or, said more accurately, he tried to seduce her. Sonja was aware but failed to understand. It was not unusual for a married man to have his little flings on the side. That was understood and accepted both in Cuba and in yanqui land. She was troubled but not alarmed.
They reached Los Angeles. He took her home — that is to the home of the Mexican family and her mother — and left her there. He said he had to travel to Nevada and then to San Francisco and would call her when he was next in Los Angeles.
During the three weeks before he called she learned she was pregnant. She would not tell him on the phone and asked him to come to the house. He said he was only passing through and would be leaving for Texas in an hour or so. She did not see him until eleven days later, when he returned from Dallas. Then he took her to lunch.
All he wanted to talk about was what they had done in Germany. She could not endure his chatter and finally asked him, "Jonas, what of the future?"
"Future? What future?"
"Ours," she said simply.
The Raiders Page 10