He frowned. "I'm not sure ... My god, you don't mean marriage!"
"We have been together as husband and wife."
Jonas shook his head. "You slept with me for two months. It was great. I appreciated it. I took you to Germany. We went first class. Did I ever mention marriage?"
"No."
"Well, then."
Her eyes filled with tears. "Then ... the lovely traveling, the ships and all, were meant as ... payment?"
Jonas smiled. "I wouldn't put it quite that way."
"The payment for the services of a puta," she said bitterly.
"Sonja! No."
She got up and walked out of the restaurant. He didn't follow her.
7
Her father and uncle were angry. Her father spoke of horsewhipping Jonas Cord, better yet of killing him. Her uncle demanded that she be married immediately, so quickly that her husband would believe the child she was carrying was his. He knew who she could marry: the son of Don Pedro Escalante. The Escalante family was not as rich as the Cords, but an alliance between the Escalantes and the Batistas could be mutually profitable. Fulgencio Batista traveled to Mexico and arranged the marriage.
Two days before the wedding Sonja contrived a private meeting with Virgilio in the garden of the hacienda near Cordoba. She told him she was pregnant. He was already in love with her.
8
"Twenty-five years," Sonja murmured. "And now for some reason you called. You didn't telephone me for sentimental reasons. I don't think you do anything much for sentimental reasons."
"Sonja, I —"
"You're being divorced again," she said with a thin smile. "So, are you going around looking up old girlfriends?"
Jonas shook his head.
"If you like kidneys," she said, "there is no place in Mexico where they do them better. Nowhere in this hemisphere, I should say." She shook her head. "You still do favor that foul norteamericano whiskey, don't you? Bourbon. Whiskey flavored with maple syrup. Anyway, you came to see me about what?"
"It can wait," said Jonas.
"You've bought a casino-hotel," she said. "You want to buy one — or build one — in Havana. Right? Uncle Fulgencio —"
"Maybe," he interrupted. "We can talk about it another time. Right now, I want to know about you. I am told your husband is a very wealthy man," said Jonas.
"No. But of a very old family," she said. "The Escalantes are hidalgos, if there is any such thing anymore."
"Do you live in Mexico City?" Jonas asked. "I mean, all year round."
"We have an apartment here, where we spend most of our time. Our chief residence, in theory, is a hacienda near Cordoba."
"Do you have children, Sonja?"
She frowned, as if the question distressed her. "Yes," she said. "I have two sons and two daughters. My elder daughter is married and has made me a grandmother."
"You're too young to be a grandmother."
"I was too young to be a mother when I first became one," she said. She opened her purse. "Here. Here is the business card of my elder son."
Jonas took the card and looked at it.
jonas enrique raul cord y batista
Abogado y Jurisconsulto
gurza y aroza abogados
1535 Avenue Universidad
Jonas's lips parted. He blanched. For a long moment he stared at the card, and then he turned his eyes from the card to Sonja's face.
"Our son," she said quietly.
9
1
"BUT WHY? MY GOD, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?"
Sonja raised her glass and sipped champagne. "When you left me, you said the affair was over. You were most emphatic about it." She shrugged. "Need I tell you I was not feeling very positively toward you at that time, Jonas? Besides, I had my pride. I didn't want you thinking I was asking for an allowance."
"Allowance? I'd have been happy to send ... to send money, to send presents. I'd have come to visit."
"I didn't want you interfering in his upbringing," she said bluntly, coldly.
"Meaning you didn't want him to be like me."
"I never had to worry about that. He isn't."
"Does he know —"
"He knows who his father is," she said. "He has read every news story about you. For a long time he was not sure if he liked you, if he ever wanted to meet you. I can tell you now that he would have sent a letter to your office before much longer. He wanted to be firmly established in his career before he contacted you. He didn't want you to think he asked anything of you."
"My god, he's twenty-five years old!"
"Almost twenty-six. He graduated from Harvard Law School with honors. His law firm is an international firm. Mexico does not allow American firms to open branch offices in our country. But there is a brotherly relationship between his firm and a prominent firm in New York. They exchange young lawyers for a year's training. Jonas will be spending next year in New York. He expected to see you during that year."
"Tell me more about him," said Jonas quietly.
"My husband and I saw to it that he had every advantage, a good education, foreign travel, exposure to the better things of life. He is perfectly bilingual. In fact, he is fluent in French and German also. He graduated from a private secondary school in 1943, when he was seventeen. He completed a year at Harvard before he enlisted in the United States Army."
"United States Army?"
"He is your son, Jonas. He is a citizen of the United States. He would have been drafted early in 1944. He was with A Company, Seventh Armored Infantry Battalion, and crossed the Remagen Bridge on March 7, 1945 — one of the first hundred Americans across."
"Why did I never hear of him?"
"He enrolled at Harvard as Jonas Batista."
"Was he hurt in the war?"
"Yes. He was wounded twice, nearly killed the second time. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He was a lieutenant when he was wounded. They made him a captain then."
Jonas felt a burning weight in his stomach. A son ... A war hero. A Mexican lawyer. He looked into Sonja's face and saw a look of unalloyed satisfaction she was making no effort to conceal.
"I have to meet him, Sonja. When can I meet him?"
She nodded toward the bar. "He is sitting there. He came here with me. He decided to have a look at you, whether I introduced you this evening or not."
She raised a beckoning hand, and a young man slipped off his seat at the bar and walked toward their table.
Jonas rose, not entirely steadily. He was like a man who'd been hit with a sucker punch: trying to regain his equilibrium and be ready for a new and harder blow.
Then abruptly the young man stood before him and extended his hand. "I am your son," he said simply.
The younger Jonas was taller than his father. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow, and Jonas could guess he was solidly muscled and probably played some sport or other. It was his face, though, that was impressive. It was long and strong and open, with sharp, bright-blue eyes and a broad, expressive mouth. His hair was blond. He didn't look like either of his parents. He looked like the sort of young man found among the officers of British guards regiments. He had been staring from the bar long enough to have satisfied his curiosity, and now he showed no sign of emotion, none of any kind.
Jonas had feared his voice would fail. He was right; it did. He was hoarse and whispery as he said, "I would have contacted you a long time ago, if I had known of you."
His son smiled — but only a measured smile, a polite smile, not a friendly one. "Perhaps it is better that we did not meet until now," he said quietly.
Jonas ran his hand across his eyes, wiping tears. "Well ... in any case, I am so very pleased ... so very, very pleased."
"As am I," said the younger Jonas blandly.
2
Never in his life did the young Jonas suppose he was the son of Virgilio Diaz Escalante. From the time when he became aware of such things, he understood that another man was his father. He was invited to call his m
other's husband Padre, and he did; but he knew what it meant that his younger brother's name was Virgilio Pedro Escalante y Batista while his own name was Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista.
He was baptized Cord y Batista. The family never deceived anyone about his origin. But the word bastardo was never used about him. That would have incurred the wrath of Don Pedro Escalante, and Don Pedro was a hidalgo whose wrath no one wanted to incur. Don Pedro, it was well known, was the father of several children outside his marriage. It was extremely unusual for a woman of good family to bear an illegitimate child and acknowledge it; but in this case the man involved had been a man of wealth and position, and the child had probably been conceived in a first-class cabin on a luxury liner, or if not there then in Berlin's finest hotel. The circumstances made it all acceptable to Don Pedro. His daughter-in-law had not succumbed to any cheap adventurer but to a man like himself, like his son Virgilio. And if Virgilio did not object, why should he?
The boy was always intensely curious about the man who was the origin of his names Jonas and Cord. Madre was never reticent about it. She told him that his father Jonas Cord was a wealthy American businessman. They had loved each other for a time, she said. Unfortunately, differences between them were very great, and they had not been able to marry.
What really mattered, she told the young Jonas often, was that she loved him, Padre loved him, and Abuelo — Grandfather — loved him, which was very important. As the family grew, he was always older brother. His brothers and sisters knew he was different, but they, too, had been reared to understand the difference didn't matter.
His brothers and sisters, when they were old enough to understand, watched Jonas struggling over the Sunday edition of The New York Times, which came in every Thursday's mail. Sometimes his mother marked stories and told him to be sure to read them. They were stories about Jonas Cord.
Padre was often away from the hacienda on business, Abuelo stayed at home. From the time Jonas learned to talk, his mother spoke to him sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, and his grandfather did the same. Jonas Cord, they told him, was a norteamericano, and he must learn to speak his father's language, not just as it was spoken by educated Mexicans but as it was spoken by the yanquis themselves. When norteamericanos came to the hacienda, for whatever reason, they were asked to talk with the boy, to let him study their accents.
Abuelo became his grandson's closest friend. He told him who Sonja's family was. To many Mexicans, Fulgencio Batista was only an upstart colonel and maybe worse. But Don Pedro Escalante, though he was a hidalgo, had secretly sent money to Pancho Villa. And now he was secretly giving money to his daughter-in-law's uncle.
He was catholic in his political predilections but not Catholic in his religious ones. Little Jonas was baptized by a priest, but he was not reared a Catholic. His father was not a Catholic, so Grandfather deemed it would be inappropriate someday to present a devout Catholic son to a non-Catholic father — and he had no doubt the family would someday present the son to the father.
Grandfather sent the boy to the grammar school in Cordoba. Boys there knew he was a bastard and not only that but the son of a yanqui, but they dared not torment the grandson of the hidalgo. One did and suffered a broken nose for his effrontery.
Abuelo carried a pistol on his hip. He taught his grandson to shoot, and when Jonas was only eight years old he gave him a .22-caliber seven-shot Harrington & Richards revolver. Jonas practiced with it, under the careful tutelage of the old man, and he became accurate, so accurate that his targets were spent shotgun shells set up on a sawhorse to be fired on from twenty meters.
One of the boy's proudest moments came when he was nine years old. His little sister Maria was a toddler. She had been in the kitchen, where the cook had given her a slice of pie, and she wandered out through the back door, across the dooryard and beyond. Shortly Jonas heard the cook scream. He was in his room reading, and before he ran out to see what was wrong he grabbed his revolver. He had an instinct that if some sort of danger was threatening, a gun might be useful.
He ran into the dooryard. The cook stood flushed, trembling, terrified, pointing at the little girl. Maria sat on the ground, ten meters beyond the dooryard fence. She too was frightened. Not two meters from her a coiled rattlesnake buzzed its warning. She had wandered near it when it was shedding its skin and was in a foul, aggressive mood. Whether or not it would strike was uncertain, but it might if she moved. It almost certainly would if anyone else came near.
Jonas closed his left hand around his right wrist and took steady aim on the rattlesnake. Its head was as big as four of the shotgun shells that were his usual targets. Still, this was no easy shot. He held his breath, which he did not usually do when he was shooting. He fired. The .22 slug split the head of the rattler, and it writhed and thrashed as the boy rushed up and grabbed his little sister to drag her away from it.
He was a hero. It was a fine thing to be a hero. He enjoyed it.
3
The next year, 1936, he did not return to the grammar school in Cordoba. Instead, he and his mother went to live in Mexico City, in a flat maintained by Virgilio Escalante for his convenience in his frequent visits to the capital. The family had used its considerable political and economic influence to secure a place for Jonas at La Escuela Diplomatica, an international school for the children of diplomats. There he would study with Europeans and improve his English and learn French and German.
He learned something else: that Mexico was not one of the world's great nations, not in wealth, not in military might, not in cultural achievement and influence. No. The Estados Unidos to the north was all these things. Mexico was not. Mexico was a respectable nation but not a leader of the world. At the grammar school in Cordoba the teachers had taught otherwise.
His mother smiled when he asked her about this. The nuns had never taught her, she said, that Cuba was one of the great nations. They had taught her that Spain was the greatest nation of the world, with the world's supreme culture, admired and envied by everyone. The poor silly women had believed it, she said. And the teachers at Cordoba had believed what they taught.
At La Escuela Diplomatica it meant nothing that he was the illegitimate son of Jonas Cord, nothing that he was the grandson of Don Pedro Escalante. No one there had ever heard of either of them. He was Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista, and all that counted was that his family had enough money to pay his tuition — that and the fact that he was bright enough to meet the challenge of a singularly demanding school.
During his first year at the school he lived at home in the Escalante apartment. In 1938, when he was twelve and no longer in the grammar-school department, he moved into the boys' dormitory.
The boys lived two to a room. His roommate was Maurice Raynal, a boy one year older than he was, who was supposed to act as a sort of mentor in the realities of school life. Maurice was the son of the naval attaché at the French embassy. Though a year older, he was no bigger than Jonas, who was tall and muscular with a man's voice, no longer a child in any sense.
Maurice's Spanish and English were heavily accented, as for that matter was his German. The teachers were constantly at him about it. The teachers asked Jonas to help him. They suggested that the two boys speak only English and Spanish in their room. Jonas was happy to do that, especially the English. The more he spoke English, the better.
Maurice complained that Jonas did not speak English the same as their English teacher. Eventually he understood. "Ah, Jonas, c'est Americain! Ce n'est pas Anglais! Vous parlez Americain!"
Jonas could not have been happier. He was not English. His father was not English. He wanted to speak his father's language, and his father spoke American.
Maurice was the source of a problem, and also of an education. He took off his clothes when they were alone in their room and the door was bolted. He walked around naked. Jonas never did. Usually when he did it, Maurice had an erection. Jonas was mature enough to know what that was.
And then one evening Maurice lifted his penis in his hand and asked, "Dites-moi, mon ami. Est le votre si grand?"
Jonas glanced casually at the stiff organ. "Oui," he said. "Plus grand."
"Vraiment? Me montrez."
Jonas considered for a moment, then stood and unbuttoned his pants and pulled out his own penis. "Voila," he said. "Assez grand?"
Maurice grinned and nodded. "C'est beau."
Jonas stuffed his back in, buttoned his pants, and turned his attention to a problem in plane geometry.
He had supposed what Maurice had in mind was a competition. That was not what Maurice had in mind at all. The next evening he asked Jonas if he ever had wet dreams. Jonas admitted that he did.
Maurice spoke English. "A pleasure, no? But you need not wait for that pleasure. You can make it happen."
That was an interesting idea. Jonas had guessed as much but had not experimented.
Maurice saw he was interested. "I will show you how," he said solemnly, and he proceeded to masturbate, casting his ejaculate into a handkerchief. "See? Shall I do it for you?"
"I will do it for myself," said Jonas.
"Do. Let's see how much time you need."
Aroused, Jonas did what Maurice suggested, wetting his own handkerchief.
"It is good, no?" Maurice asked. "It is better when we do it for each other — at the same time."
The next evening Jonas consented. The two boys stretched out naked on Maurice's narrow bed. They rubbed their penises together until both of them were on the verge of their orgasms; then, cued by Maurice's urgent cry, they grabbed at each other and finished with their hands.
What followed was inevitable. He would learn not long afterward that there were ugly names for boys who did what he and Maurice did, and he never did it again, but he would never hate the memory of Maurice Raynal.
The Raiders Page 11