The Raiders

by Гарольд Роббинс

  A week had passed before she actually brought him to an orgasm in her mouth.

  Now — comfortable with it, and practiced — she worked rhythmically with her tongue and lips. She had her own way of doing it: without vigor, without bobbing her head up and down, without using her hands, using only her mouth, expertly finding his most sensitive nerves and flicking her tongue over them, drawing the shaft in and sucking on it to tighten her wet caressing lips. "Don't you dare come," she said. "It's too soon."

  "I'll try not to spoil your fun," he said.

  She murmured a small laugh. "It is fun ... sort of," she said. "But you — you love it, don't you?"

  Bat put both hands on her head, gently caressing. "What I love is you, Toni," he said solemnly.

  She pulled her head back and held his penis between her hands. "I love you too, Bat. You know how much I love you."

  She was in her senior year at Radcliffe, he in his junior year at Harvard. They had met in a psychology class about six weeks ago. She was the same age as Bat, but she was a mature woman with mature ideas about what she liked and what she wanted.

  2

  Antonia did not remember when there hadn't been a boat. Her memories of the 1930s were of days of sunshine, many of them spent on the blue water. She remembered nothing of the Depression, but she remembered that there had always been a boat hanging from the davits or tied at the canalside dock behind their home in Fort Lauderdale. The first one she remembered was a nineteen-foot utility fisherman, powered by a gasoline engine. She remembered always wanting to go fishing, insisting she must not be left behind, then growing bored and a little sick and sometimes frightened as her father and mother fished. They would not let her take off her life jacket, ever. She remembered the humiliation of having to squat over a jar to pee, since the boat had no head.

  She remembered the day when the alligator waddled out of the canal behind their house and snapped up her cocker spaniel puppy. Her father had come running from the house with a baseball bat — and also a pistol — but by the time he reached the shrieking Toni the gator had dragged the puppy into the water. That, after all, was how it killed the dog; it drowned it.

  She remembered her mother and father driving her to the rail at the bow of the boat while they landed a lunging, snapping shark on the stern deck. Her father had brained the shark repeatedly with his baseball bat, but even after it was quiet it was still dangerous, they said; and Toni had to cling to the bow in terror that it would come to life and do to her parents what the gator had done to her dog.

  She learned to swim before she was three. They had a pool behind the house. Sometimes you had to drive off the big birds before you could use the pool. Her mother bought chicken necks and hand-fed them to herons and pelicans, with the result that the Maxim family had more birds than other people had, which did not endear them to their neighbors. Her father built a chain-link fence around the backyard, so no more gators could come, and Toni's next puppy thrived. She called her Pupp'l, and so the dog remained, even when she was old — Pupp'l.

  The next boat was a forty-one-foot offshore twin-diesel fishing cruiser, which they called Maxim's. On Maxim's they could stay at sea an entire weekend. Toni loved that boat. It had a galley and a head, and when she was tired she could nap in her own bunk. The fisherman who hooked a big one would shift into the rotating fighting chair in the cockpit and sometimes fight a fish for more than an hour. That was exciting.

  Even Pupp'l went to sea. It was Toni's duty to clean up after her.

  Toni was eleven when she caught her first big fish, a four-foot mackerel, and thirteen when she caught her first sailfish. The sailfish was mounted in the den.

  Dr. Jean Paul Maxim was a handsome, personable man, a psychiatrist. Toni observed early that a psychiatrist made a lot of money, that Dr. and Mrs. Maxim were well off, even among people who lived along the Fort Lauderdale canals. It was much later before she figured out what a psychiatrist did to make that money. Later she would tell that and add a quip that she still didn't understand it.

  Her mother, Blanche Maxim, was a formidable woman with sun-tanned skin and sun-bleached hair, cold pale-blue eyes, and large prominent teeth.

  Toni did not go to the public schools. Her parents sent her to a girls' school called Seaview Academy. In her high school years she became an editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, a member of the drama club, and president of Le Cercle Français. She played basketball and tennis.

  In at least one way, Antonia was an odd girl at Seaview. Her parents remained married. She was one of few girls who had both parents at home. Then that oddity evaporated. She had heard the arguments around the house. But she was surprised when, at fourteen, she found herself being interviewed by a kindly blue-haired woman with great thick eyeglasses, who asked her whether she wanted to live with her mother or her father.

  What Toni wanted — Later, when she thought of it from a more mature perspective, she recalled a child's brutal cynicism. What she wanted was to continue to sleep in her own room, with Pupp'l, to swim in her own pool, and to go cruising on Maxim's. That meant living with her father, and that is what she chose.

  She had no sense of guilt about her choice; and later, when she might have thought that way, she understood that in fact her mother had been relieved. Blanche had had a ten-month affair with a Miami lawyer before Dr. Maxim found out. The lawyer, as Toni would learn in the course of visits with her mother, was contemptuous of psychiatry and offshore fishing. His own tastes, which her mother now proclaimed were her own as well, ran to golf and tennis.

  Within a year Dr. Maxim married another tall, tanned, sun-bleached blonde named Morgana, who admired his boat and said she loved his daughter and his daughter's dog. She seemed sincere. She extended herself to become a friend to Antonia, and Toni accepted her. The exchange of mothers, after the initial shock and curiosity, was not painful.

  3

  When Antonia was fifteen years old, her years of innocence, the simplicity of loving Pupp'l, swimming in a backyard pool, and fishing off Maxim's, going to school at Seaview, and beginning to take an interest in boys, with nothing more troubling to worry about than the mysteries of trigonometry, came to an abrupt end — on December 7, 1941.

  She had been interested in the war, of course — enough interested to have thumbtacked a National Geographic map of Europe on her bedroom wall and to push in red and white pins to mark the advances and retreats of armies. But it had all been remote, thousands of miles away. Within a few days of December 7, Maxim's was lifted from the water and trucked to a warehouse, where it would remain for — a term she learned to hate — "the duration." Worse — On a night in January she woke to the sound of a distant rumble and a dull red glow on the eastern horizon. A tanker had been torpedoed by a German U-boat, not twenty miles off the coast, in waters the Maxims had fished twenty weekends a year. It was too easy to say the war had come home. It had come into their very yard.

  The beaches were closed. National Guard soldiers patrolled them day and night, stretching barbed wire and building barricades against raids by Nazi commandos. Fort Lauderdale was certain to be bombed or attacked by submarine-home commandos, and the town had to be prepared. Her father was summoned to a hospital, where he trained as a member of a Civil Defense medical emergency team. Her stepmother practiced as an emergency telephone operator at the Civil Defense communications center. When they went to these training exercises, Antonia was left alone in the house — as she would be if a raid happened. What was more, she was left behind heavily curtained windows — blackout curtains — and could not see what was happening outside. She switched off all the lights in the house and climbed through a trapdoor onto the roof, where many nights she sat alert and worried. Twice more she saw ships blow up off the beach.

  Everything in life was in suspension for "the duration." She did not resent it. She was a patriotic American. Yet — Yet she realized she was losing an important part of her life. It was a little enough sacrifice, but it was real
. For instance, her father had promised her he would buy a new car when she was sixteen and would give her his old Plymouth station wagon. Now he could not buy a new car, or buy enough gasoline to drive this one much.

  She was introduced to sex about the same time, that is, when she was a little short of seventeen. Two boys somehow had accumulated enough gas to take two girls out into the Everglades in a big old dark-blue Packard. They parked, and the couples took turns walking along the road and looking at the flowers and wildlife, leaving the back seat of the car to the other couple. Half an hour, each couple promised the other. Toni was intoxicated by the feelings the experienced young man could induce in her, and she went further with him than she had intended.

  Then she decided he had taken unfair advantage of her and would not see him again. She developed an affection for another boy, and for a few weeks they were intimate on the couch in her family living room — assured of their privacy by the despised blackout curtains. Twice they even did it on the roof while Piper Cubs checking the completeness of the Florida Atlantic Coast blackout flew overhead not more than two hundred feet above them. The darkened houses that did not silhouette ships for German submarines leaked no light to afford the pilots a clue as to what was happening on that roof.

  4

  In May 1944 she graduated from Seaview Academy, first in her class.

  Her mother wanted her to go to Rollins College; her father's first choice was Emory University; and her stepmother urged her to apply to Radcliffe. She applied to all three, and others, and she was accepted at every college she applied to. She chose Radcliffe.

  The photos she sent with her applications showed that she was an exceptionally pretty girl. She had by then lost the baby fat around her face. She wore her hair in a loose, careless style that obviously took only an occasional whip or two of the brush to control it. She was pretty but no contrived glamour puss.

  The second Mrs. Maxim was active in Democratic politics. She was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1944. She saw to it that Antonia met as many as possible of the prominent Democrats who came to south Florida, and so Antonia was introduced to Senator Harry Truman, the peppery little man running for Vice President with President Roosevelt. He said he had a daughter her age — in fact, Margaret Truman was two years older than Antonia Maxim — and told her he hoped she would be as loyal a Democrat as his daughter was.

  In the fall of 1944 she arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and within no more than a day she developed a troubling, even frightening sense that she was hopelessly narrow and provincial, inexperienced, naive, and ill-educated. After a month or so she amended her initial pessimistic judgment and decided she was provincial and inexperienced, not narrow or naive or ill educated. Before the semester ended she realized she was not provincial either, no more provincial anyway than the other girls in the college. No one, she observed, was more provincial than New Yorkers, followed by New Englanders. She learned that she could compete very handily with them.

  Only when they spoke of their travels was she at a disadvantage. She had never seen Paris or London, or even Texas or California, but they had and could talk with brittle gaiety about this hotel and that restaurant and about how they hoped these places would survive the war. When they told stories of how they abandoned their virginity, Toni conveniently forgot the back seat of the Packard and said she had given up hers on a flat roof during a blackout, with low-flying planes buzzing overhead. None of them topped that story.

  She was an excellent student. She majored in history, with minors in political science and languages. Her mother wrote her a letter suggesting she make an appointment with a Boston cosmetician recommended by a friend and have herself done over. She was so beautiful, her mother said, that she should make the most of herself and consider a career in modeling and maybe even acting.

  She made few male friends. The boys who hadn't been in service were ... well, boys. Many of the returned GIs were married. Others were moody, and some were aggressive. She dated two of them and allowed one to be intimate, but they drifted apart, finding no great attraction in each other.

  Her stepmother arranged to meet her in Washington during the spring break of her junior year, to take her around and introduce her to senators and congressmen. She also took her to the offices of The Washington Post, where she introduced her to the publisher and editors. In their hotel room, Morgana and Toni talked about what she would do after she graduated. Was there a marriage in sight? No. Was she interested in government? Yes. Did she like Washington? Yes. Well then — maybe she could come to Washington as a congressional aide. Morgana would inquire around.

  5

  For the fall semester of her senior year she enrolled in a class at Harvard in abnormal psychology, just to round out her education, just because it was something she thought she ought to know something about. It was an eight-o'clock class, and people came in carrying paper cups of coffee, smoking their first morning cigarettes. Toni put her coffee on the writing arm of her chair and snapped her Zippo to light a cigarette. She was wearing blue jeans rolled up to mid-calf and a man's white shirt, tail out and collar open, also brown-and-white saddle shoes with white cotton socks. Of the eight young women in the class, only two were dressed otherwise than in this uniform.

  By his first words the professor announced that smoking would be allowed in his classroom only so long as the weather permitted them to keep the windows open. After that, no smoking would be the rule.

  "Why wait till then?" asked a voice from behind Toni.

  She turned around and saw a tall, handsome man, looking at her with intimidating bright-blue eyes. He too wore a white shirt, but his shirttail was tucked into khaki corduroy pants. She had meant to look at him defiantly, maybe even to blow smoke in his face; but she decided not to. They stared at each other with eyes equally steady. He was smiling faintly, very faintly.

  "I like the idea, Mr. —"

  "Batista."

  "Oh, yes, Mr. Batista. I like your idea, but I guess we'll stick with my original plan, to postpone the onset of nicotine fits."

  Toni had heard of Jonas Cord y Batista, who was nicknamed Bat. He was known in Cambridge. The story about him was that he was an illegitimate son of the rapacious tycoon Jonas Cord and was somehow related to the former and perhaps future president of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. He was of course one of the returning GIs, and the rest of the story about him said that he had been wounded and decorated. He had been in Cambridge for a whole year, but this was the first time she had seen him.

  She stopped outside the classroom later and said to him, "I hope my smoke didn't drift up your nose."

  "I hope my suggestion didn't spoil your pleasure," he said dryly.

  She grinned. "I'm Antonia Maxim, and I'm usually called Toni."

  "I'm usually called Bat," he said. "Because a lot of people are uneasy with my name — which is Jonas. Do you have a nine-o'clock?"

  "No."

  "Neither do I. Let's go across the street and have some doughnuts."

  Two nights later he took her to dinner and a movie.

  Two months later word circulated among her friends and his that Toni Maxim and Bat Batista were in love and planned to be married. Some noted scornfully that she had stopped smoking and wearing blue jeans with her shirttail out.

  When his mother, Señora Sonja Escalante, came to Boston for one of the only two visits she would make to the States to see her son while he was at Harvard, she stayed at the Copley; and Toni Maxim was her guest for dinner two of the five nights she was in town.

  6

  Some other friends could not imagine Toni could fall in love with Jonas Cord y Batista. Oh yes, he was handsome, and apparently he was rich, but he was a queer duck. He took courses that had no apparent aim — lots of history and government, some economics, chemistry, physics, psychology, philosophy, literature, and art. He was seen on the Yard during the day, sometimes in the library at night, but he lived as far away as Lexington, as though he ma
de a conscious effort not to associate himself with the college any more than necessary. He didn't seem to care about much of anything — about anything, that is, that other people cared about. He didn't go to football games. He didn't go down to the river to watch the rowing. It was as if he went out of his way to make it clear he was not in awe of Harvard and didn't think himself privileged to have been admitted.

  Toni shrugged at this talk. So? A lot of the returning GIs were like that. They had seen too much, experienced too much, to go rah-rah at football games. So far as being admitted to the college was concerned, Bat was an outstanding student. So far as she was concerned, if he was privileged to be at Harvard, Harvard was privileged to have him.

  She had met his mother but not his father. He told her, finally, that he'd never met his father and wasn't sure he wanted to. Mexico City and Cordoba were too far away for him to go home often. He had gone last summer, but would not go home for Christmas. He accepted her family's invitation to spend Christmas with them in Florida.

  Dr. Maxim was not pleased to have his daughter talking about marrying the illegitimate son of Jonas Cord but was reconciled to the idea after he watched Bat land a big tarpon. The young man had fished from a boat out of Vera Cruz and was experienced and skilled at fighting a big fish. What was more, he passed a test put to him by Dr. Maxim — he backed Maxim's smoothly into its slip, steering with its twin screws more than its rudder. The doctor was prepared to accept him after watching him do that.

  Morgana liked him better after several evenings of dinner and after-dinner conversation. When he said he thought President Truman might be reelected — and backed his judgment with reasons — she decided she liked him very well indeed.