"I just can't believe the voters would trust the country to those people," said Nick.
"Neither can my stepmother," said Toni. "But we have to face it."
"Toni ... I won't have a job if it happens. I think I can stay in Washington, though. I've talked with Reuther. I think there'll be a job for me with the United Auto Workers. I've got no promise, but I do have encouragement. I'm going to drive out to Oklahoma next week. I'll be back in two weeks. I was hoping you'd come with me. I'd like to introduce you to my family."
Toni stared at the table, smiled, and shook her head. "I'll be spending a lot of time in Florida between now and November. My senator is on the ballot, after all."
"Besides, I'm getting ahead of things, huh?"
"Nick, I didn't say that. I simply said I have obligations."
"Well — Yeah, sure. Of course. Obligations."
They didn't go back to Washington that night. They spent the night in a motel on the highway between Baltimore and Washington. She had to change clothes before she could go to the office, so Nick dropped her at her apartment, very early in the morning.
She went in. The two young women with whom she shared the apartment were asleep. She took a shower and stretched out on her bed in her panties and bra, thinking she might doze a little but not meaning to go to sleep. She did though.
"Hey, kiddo!"
She came awake and glanced at the clock. Oh, my god, it was after eight! Time to get moving.
"You had a call last night. You know a guy in New York by the name of Bat something? He wants you to call him. I left his number on the back cover of the phone book, the number in a heavy square. Okay?"
3
Bat's call to Toni had been prompted by an invitation from his father. It had been made over dinner in Jonas's apartment in the Waldorf Towers.
"I haven't yet congratulated you on the way you got the Senate subpoenas quashed," said Bat.
"Months ago," said Jonas.
"When we had dinner before, I knew they had been withdrawn, but I didn't know how you did it."
"Phil Wallace is a good lawyer," said Jonas, "but in all modesty, the way we got the Senate politicians off our back was my idea."
"A triple-damages anti-trust action," said Bat, nodding.
"Right. I figured all along that the senators didn't care about gate positions for Inter-Continental Airlines. The problem was that certain senators were in the back pockets of certain airline executives. Hell, I've got a couple on the string myself. So I had Phil and his co-counsel dig around a little, looking for evidence of collusion on the part of three airline companies. They found enough to justify the suit. I don't know if we would have won, but for the next three or four years we'd have been dropping subpoena after subpoena on them and digging through their files. Besides, their attorney fees —"
"What about your own attorney fees?"
"I don't pay fees," said Jonas. "I pay retainers. Phil Wallace and his partners get a flat one million dollars a year from me, whether they do any work for me or not — though I always have plenty of work for them. I've got other firms on smaller retainers, like Wilson, Clark and York and Gurza y Aroza. Besides which, I've got a dozen staff lawyers on my payroll. The antitrust suit wouldn't have increased my legal costs much."
"Anyway, you scared them off," said Bat.
"Anyway, I scared them off. They asked the senators to drop the investigation, which the senators were glad to do."
"Everybody in the office talks about it," said Bat. "With a certain amount of — Awe, I guess I'd call it."
"I guess you're entitled to congratulations yourself, in a sense," said Jonas. "Your great-uncle is President of Cuba again."
"I'd like it better if he'd been elected," said Bat. "It was a military coup d'etat, or as the Germans would call it, a putsch. He'll loot the country."
"That's the way things are done in Latin America, isn't it?" Jonas asked.
"All too often," said Bat.
They were served at the table by a tall, spare black man named Robair. Jonas had explained earlier that Robair had been houseman to the first Jonas, so had served the family for something like forty years. Now, as Robair was pouring wine, Jonas remarked that he knew more about the Cords than the Cords knew about themselves.
"No man is a hero to his valet," said Bat.
"Lord Chesterfield," said Jonas.
"Excuse me, Mr. Jonas," said Robair. "Actually, that was written in a letter by a Frenchwoman named Madame Comuel. 'Il n'y a point de heros pour les valets de chambre.' "
"Damn! My valet de chambre is better educated than I am."
"No, Mr. Jonas," said Robair with a faint smile. "I've just made a point of studying my trade."
They sat at the table after dinner. Jonas sipped bourbon. Bat sipped Courvoisier brandy.
"I've got several things I want to talk to you about," Jonas said. "First, and simplest, why don't you move into this apartment? I'm only here two or three nights a month and sometimes not that much. It's here, available to you."
"I couldn't afford to keep it clean," said Bat.
"Look. I leased it because Monica wanted it, because she spent so much time in New York. She asked for it in the divorce, but she didn't get it. I keep suites in hotels in Chicago and Los Angeles, so when I come to a city I'll find things the way I want them. Like, I've got my own telephone scramblers on the phones in all these places. I've got safes with papers locked inside — with combinations only I know." He shrugged. "I've got my brand of bourbon. I've got clothes. You don't have to clean the place. It is cleaned. You can save whatever you're paying. Besides" — he grinned — "think of what impression you'll make on a broad if you ask her to shack up and this is the shack."
Jonas and Monica had not put much of a mark on the apartment. Bat reflected. Likely they had bought the furniture from the previous occupant. The apartment was handsome but impersonal.
"Well?"
"Let me think about it," said Bat.
"Your gratitude is overwhelming," said Jonas sarcastically.
"I — Well, all right. And thanks." He didn't want to be beholden to his father, didn't want to be drawn within his orbit either, but it was true he could use the money he would save. Wilson, Clark & York didn't pay generously, and he didn't want to have to ask his mother to send him money. "I do appreciate it."
Jonas lifted his glass, looked at the remaining bourbon for a moment, then put it down. "Which brings up the next thing I want to talk to you about. Are you going to Cordoba for Christmas?"
"I don't think so."
"Well, I have a proposition. Come out to the home place, the ranch in Nevada. I'd like for you to see where we come from. I want you to meet Nevada Smith. Uh ... I was wondering about that girl. Suppose you could talk her into coming, too?"
"I don't know. I doubt it."
"Her senator will be reelected. She's been working her ass off and is entitled to a vacation. Also, she isn't committed to anybody else."
"How do you know about her? What the hell have you done?"
"Easy, son, easy. Phil Wallace knows Senator Holland. To use an expression you seem to favor, we asked straight questions and got straight answers."
"I don't remember that I even told you her name. She's none of your business."
Jonas smiled. "I plead guilty to a little snooping. She's a fine girl. You could hardly do better. Well — Okay, it's none of my business. But I'd like for you to spend a few days with me in Nevada, and Toni Maxim is invited too, if you want to ask her."
Bat hesitated for a moment, then said, "I'll think about it."
"About both parts of the invitation?"
"Well, I accept for myself. Whether or not I invite Toni is what I'll think about."
4
Christmas Eve. Toni had never before felt such an energy on such an occasion. The Cords. They made an electricity. The vigor of these people and the tension among them was unique in her experience.
Standing in the living room of th
e ranch house, Toni wondered where Jonas Cord really did live, since it was apparent he did not live here. She had seen the apartment in the Waldorf Towers twice since November, and it was apparent he did not live there. The places where he was supposed to live were too tidy, too sleek; they looked like hotel suites. He had an office in the Towers apartment and one here, and in those she could see some mark of the man; but she saw none in the living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms.
The decor was too resolutely Western, saying this was not really a Western home lived in by a man of the desert and mountains, but was the simulacrum of a ranch house, its furnishings assembled to make the effect.
Only one item said something. Sitting on the crude mantel above the huge smoke-stained fieldstone fireplace was a small framed photograph, a snapshot actually, of a grim, solid man in his fifties or sixties. He wore a no-nonsense expression, glaring disapprovingly at the world but not at the photographer. He wore a dark three-piece suit, not very well tailored and not well cared for, plus a gray hat set squarely on his head. He sat at a rolltop desk in a wooden swivel chair. If you knew what you were looking for in the picture, or used a magnifying glass, you could identify a bottle of bourbon on the desk. On a table at his side were two candlestick telephones. That was Jonas Cord the First.
She sipped Scotch and spoke to Bat and his half sister Jo-Ann. "Your father is not what I imagined he would be."
She had seen pictures of Jonas Cord, so his appearance was no surprise. What she had not seen in his newspaper and magazine pictures was that he swaggered. Yet ... he carried it off well, and it was not offensive. A man who had achieved what he had achieved had to be engaging; an ugly, aggressive man could not have won the kind of success he had won, could not have enticed all the women he was said to have seduced. He was aggressive, beyond doubt, but besides that he was easily, naturally charismatic.
"Our father is no end of surprises," said Jo-Ann acerbically.
Bat hadn't been able to take his eyes off his half sister, from the moment they arrived. Toni could have become jealous, except that she understood his fascination had its origin and motive strictly in curiosity. She knew Bat was struggling to read Jo-Ann. The girl had reason to resent him, but if she did she concealed it.
Jo-Ann was about eighteen years old, as Toni understood it; and she was extraordinarily beautiful. She was a student at Smith College. From her father she had inherited poise and self-confidence, obviously. What she had inherited from her mother would be difficult for Toni to guess, since she had never met Monica Cord. She could guess that an element of it was a sense of style, since Jo-Ann wore a cherry-red cocktail dress with bold decolletage and a flared skirt that was shorter than this year's styles dictated.
"For example," said Jo-Ann, continuing her response to Toni's comment that Jonas was not what she had expected, "look at the dish he's brought with him. I don't know what made me think he wouldn't bring his new girlfriend to this party. But I didn't. I didn't think he'd have the nerve. Jesus! Look at her!"
Toni had decided that Angie Wyatt was the most beautiful woman at the party, in her thirties and older than Toni or Jo-Ann. If she was not the most beautiful, she was the most self-possessed — conspicuously pleased with herself and with her place in life. She worked for Jonas Cord and slept with him, too, as Bat had confided. She was handsomely dressed, from the spike-heeled shoes that tightened the muscles in her sleek legs, to the tight cream-white silk brocade dress that clung to her figure, to the emerald necklace — likely a gift from Jonas — that hung around her neck.
Jo-Ann spoke to Bat. "Make a point of getting to know Nevada Smith. Nevada knows more about the Cord family than anybody, including Jonas himself. If he chooses to talk to you, he'll give you plenty of ammunition to use when you have to deal with our father."
"Ammunition?" Bat asked. "Will I need ammunition?"
"The way I see it," said Jo-Ann, "you have three choices: to let him run your life the way he runs everybody else's, to back away from him and go your own way, or to fight him. Nevada knows his weaknesses ... but probably won't tell you."
Nevada Smith fascinated Toni even more than Jonas did. As a little girl she had gone to as many of his movies as she could. He was everything anyone might have expected of him: the tall, rawboned, sun-wrinkled Westerner, probably seventy years old. He dressed like the movie cowboy he had been — more like William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy than like one of the singing cowboys.
Smith was a neighbor, with a ranch of his own not far away. The connection between him and the Cords was greater than that, but what it was was not apparent. Bat himself didn't know what it was.
Bat had explained who Robair was. Tonight he was a guest. He had come to Nevada from New York two days ahead of everyone else and had decorated the house for Christmas. A tree, which reached the ceiling, was strung with popcorn and hung with dried fruits and simple paper ornaments, no silvered glass balls, no colored lights. Complimented on it, Robair said that Nevada had helped him. It was amusing to think of those two old men solemnly stringing popcorn.
They sat down for dinner. A pair of ranch hands in white jackets served awkwardly.
When the wine was poured, Jonas rose and offered a toast. "To my daughter and my newfound son." He nodded at Nevada and Robair. "To old friends." He nodded at Toni and Angie. "And new. I'm happy we're all together."
After dinner the evening turned painful for Toni. Not knowing who would be there, she had come with small presents for Bat and his father but none for anyone else. Jo-Ann was in the same situation. So, for that matter, was Angie, though she seemed comfortable with it.
It was embarrassing to receive gifts from the hands of people you had just met — particularly such gifts as they were. Nevada Smith gave her a .30-30 Winchester lever-action carbine, telling her he would take her out and teach her to shoot before she left Nevada. The old man's innocence in giving such a gift was endearing and at the same time ominous — in that it meant he expected she would be spending a lot of time in Nevada.
Robair gave her a pair of tight, tapered blue jeans, a blue-and-white-checked wool shirt, and a Stetson hat: riding clothes. This, too, assumed she was not just a one-time guest.
Jonas Cord gave her a pair of handmade snakeskin Western boots. And a bracelet set with rubies and diamonds. For a moment she was tempted to say no, she couldn't accept it.
Bat gave her a silver and turquoise squash-blossom necklace.
Her father and stepmother, apart from disliking her being in Nevada and not in Florida for Christmas, had warned her that going out there implied a commitment. Apparently the Cords thought so, too. She was being treated like a Cord.
Jonas gave Bat a Porsche automobile, saying he ought to have one in the States, since he drove so well. He gave another one to Jo-Ann, telling her Bat would teach her to drive it. He gave a third one to Angie. They were identical, and they carried Nevada license plates: CORD ONE, CORD TWO, CORD THREE.
Toni had brought "the basic little black dress," this one of silk satin, supported by spaghetti straps, with a skirt ending exactly at her knees. The heavy silver squash-blossom necklace would be incongruous with the dress, but Bat wanted her to put it on. His father wanted her to wear his gift, too: the jeweled bracelet. She went to their room — and it was their room, not hers alone: another manifestation of the assumption behind her invitation — to leave the little string of cultivated pearls and don her extravagant new jewelry.
Bat followed her to the room.
"Bat ... You and your father are more alike than I could have dreamed."
"What do you mean?"
"You arrange things. So that people can hardly back away from them. He is manipulative. And so are you."
"We can talk later," he said.
5
"I am not your fiancée, Bat," she said when they were in bed, a little after midnight. "Your father has made an assumption. Have you?"
"No. I've been reminded how much I love you."
"But your fa
ther assumes —"
"Yes, he assumes we are going to marry. He also told me I was a fool not to accept the idea you should have a career of your own."
"He did?"
"I grew up in a different tradition," said Bat. "I am an American in all but the basic things: family and so on. I'm learning."
She put her hand to his crotch and fondled his erect penis. "I've missed you, Bat," she said softly. "If we — Are you going to be in New York? That is, New York and Mexico City?"
"I'm not certain," he said. "I think my father is going to offer me a retainer as attorney for some part of the family business."
"My god, you can't take it!"
"That's what I've thought. Give me your reasons."
"Your father is a fine man, Bat. He's not what I expected. But he's like a — What is he like? What can I say? Everything that comes within his reach becomes his. If you go to work for him, you'll belong to him."
"But I'm his son. If he and I can get along together, I could inherit —"
"Forget what you'll inherit! Think about what you can be and what you can build on your own. Think what you will give your own children, not what you'll get from him!"
"Toni, he's not exactly what you think."
"Okay, he's a great warm-hearted, generous spirit — and he'll crush you. You've got ability of your own, Bat. You don't need him."
"Maybe he needs me."
"Sure he does. The question is, do you need him?"
"I can cope with him," said Bat grimly. "I know more about him than you do, and I can cope with the son of a bitch."
"You'd better read the history," she said. "The fields are strewn with the corpses of people who thought they could cope with your father and grandfather. What a horrible cliché! But there's truth in it. You can't cope with him. Nobody ever did."
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