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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
About the Author
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Leningrad
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Caribbean
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Rum, Cigars and Women
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Dominican Republic
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Paradise Lost
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Historical Note
Forge Books by Harold Robbins
Praise
Copyright
Harold Robbins
left behind a rich heritage of novel ideas
and works in progress when he passed away in 1997. Harold Robbins’s estate and his editor worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Harold Robbins’s ideas to create this novel, inspired by his storytelling brilliance, in a manner faithful to the Robbins style.
For Robert Gleason
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Kruger, M.B.E., René Kruger, Elizabeth Winick, Hildegarde Krische, and Jann Robbins
1
Havana, Cuba, 1958
She had nightheat, the sensuous quality in a woman that made men ache with desire. A body made for sin, skin the color of light cinnamon, fire-green emerald eyes, wet red lips. Her legs were long and slender, legs that would strap a man and squeeze while he made love to her.
Havana was the most sensuous city in the world, exotic, erotic, filled with beautiful women who had virgin-whore complexes—hot Latin blood that made them intensely passionate while their cultural and religious training had told them sex was sin.
Regardless of the sexual conflicts put on them, there were no women as sexually provocative as the women of Havana. They came in all shades, from light brown to the sheen of ebony, though a few had skin as white as a Swedish winter. Whatever their skin color, there was fire between their legs. When men entered them, they became one with the male, cocking their legs back so the men could get in tight and hard, grabbing flesh with long nails and pulling the male stalk in harder and harder. That was why the best whores in the world were in Havana, too—they enjoyed their work.
We were on the balcony of my room above the Malecón, the broad thoroughfare that ran along the waterfront. Flowing in from our right was a narrow, twisted Old Town street filled with centuries-old colonial buildings draped with overhanging balconies. It was early evening. A cool breeze skimmed across the bay and flowed up to my balcony.
She was leaning dangerously over the railing, enjoying the colorful insanity of the La Habanas at carnival time, a sea of colorful costumes, bizarre floats and loud music. Old Town was rocking—drums, rumba music, and a band playing La Cucaracha competed for air time on the streets below. Muñecones, satirical figures of famous faces, led the big parade, with a caricature of Sergeant Batista, the rank that the dictator of Cuba held when he led the 1933 Sergeant’s Revolt, drawing cheers and jeers as it came down the waterfront street.
The streets were filled with flashy costumes, exciting music, swaying hips and conga lines, and most of all the soul of the Caribbean, all on a sultry summer night—along with enough beer and rum to float the U.S.S. Maine. Por los santos, “for the saints,” was the salute given for the first drink out of a bottle. And the saints were very thirsty this carnival night.
Fireworks burst over the harbor as I stood behind the woman and stared at her. I had never made love to a woman like her. Most women either made love to me because of lust, or they wanted something—clothes, jewels, the good life or the protection money buys. None had ever gotten under my skin. Until tonight.
This woman was impressed with neither my money nor what I packed in my pants.
It was a man’s world from frozen pole to pole, and nowhere was it as much of a man’s world as the hot Latin regions of the Caribbean where women were either pampered and kept in golden cages—or abused by being treated as sex objects or work animals.
Once in a while some seer, usually a woman with a man’s job, would predict that there would be a time when women would be sexually and economically equal, but I was sure I’d never see it in my lifetime.
But this woman was different from any woman I’d met. It wasn’t just that she conveyed an aura of independence, but that she knew she was my equal in every meaning of the word. I sensed it the moment I had seen her across the arena at a cockfight. Not a very auspicious place to find a woman who set my world on fire, but this was Havana.
She was neither saint nor whore—she wasn’t someone who could be pigeonholed as a type. Rather, she was pure female, unaffected by what the male of the species wanted her to be.
She leaned against the railing, bent over, her hips vacillating to the music, her buttocks grinding up and down in the skintight dress. She was in her early twenties, a time in life when a woman’s body was still fit and firm. My juices boiled as I watched the sensuous movement of her body, imagining her with no clothes on, my own nakedness pressing up against her.
I had once seen a ram in rut run up from behind an ewe and jump on her as if he needed a fuck for dear life.
That’s how I felt about this woman—I needed her for dear life.
Her sequined white dress was several inches above the knees, her long legs were covered by black silk net stockings, her white cloth shoes had silver-plated spiked heels.
I came up behind her and put my hands on her hips, pushing myself against her. She felt my hardness and turned to look at me. If eyes were windows to the soul, my eyes revealed the good, the bad and the ugly, some dirty deals, some midnight meets, some things I wouldn’t want to brag about in mixed company. Hers were temple doors, hiding secrets.
Our lips met and I kissed her gently at first, just brushing her lips, then pressed harder, my cock jerking up another notch as our tongues found each other.
I pulled her dress up above her hips and lifted her onto my hardness. There were a thousand people below, hell, maybe there were ten thousand, but they were all drunk—and so were the saints.
As I entered her, I knew I was violating my most sacred principle—never fall in love. I had spent most of my life avoiding the pain of loss. It was a sickness—to love and lose and never want to love again.
But I knew this was the one. I hadn’t chosen her, hadn’t thought about what life would be like with her—or without her—or even if she thought the same about me. It had just happened. I saw her across the arena and I knew that I couldn’t hide behind my fears anymore, that I wouldn’t be able to live without lying in bed at night with her at my side, without seeing her body naked beside mine, running my hand down her body to the feminine mystery between her legs.
As I held her, as our bodies flowed with the erotic rhythm of lovemaking, her tight body squeezing my phallus that had entered between her legs, I had a terrible thought, a moment of precognition, that made me both sad and frightened.
I would love her.
Yet I knew I would lose her.
LENINGRAD
THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD
In scale, the tragedy of Leningrad dwarfs even the Warsaw ghetto or Hiroshima.
The siege was the longest a great city has undergone since Biblical times.
It was endured by more than three million people, of whom just under one-half died … most of them in six months—from late October 1941 through mid-April 1942—when the temperature went from 20 to 30 degrees below zero, and there was no heat, no light, no transport, no food or water; the front was still active; bombs and shells rained down; and the cannibals—some say—became king.
HARRISON E. SALISBURY,
THE 900 DAYS
During the terrible winter of the siege:
With his back to the post, a man sits on the snow, tall, wrapped in rags, over his shoulders a knapsack. He is all huddled up against the post. Apparently he was on his way to the Finland Station, got tired, and sat down. For two weeks while I was going back and forth to the hospital, he “sat.”
1. Without his knapsack
2. Without his rags
3. In his underwear
4. Naked
5. A skeleton with ripped-out entrails
They took him away in May.
CYNTHIA SIMMONS AND NINA PERLINA,
WRITING THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD
(DIARY OF VERA SERGEEVNA KOSTROVITSKAIA,
BALLERINA AND DANCE TEACHER)
2
Nicholaus Cutter, February 1942
They took me out of Leningrad on Wednesday in a truck loaded with other children. I planned my escape from the truck so I could start back to the city to find my mother.
We had ridden out of the city in the dump bed of a sand-and-gravel truck. We drove in the darkness, the thump of the truck’s old pistons keeping pace with the artillery the invaders were using to rain death all night upon the city. When the sun came up, Nazi bombers would join the murderous assault.
There were twenty-five or thirty of us, boys and girls, all under thirteen years old, bundled in winter coats and packed into the truck bed. Lena, a girl beside me, trembled as artillery shells pounded a district the truck rumbled through. Like all of us she was pale and bone-thin. We spent two days together back at the departure station and I knew that she had lost both her parents. Most of us had lost at least one parent. Some had lost their entire families, mother and father, brothers and sisters, even grandparents. A few whose mothers had died still had fathers fighting at the front.
“Why do they hate us?” she asked.
Her question was barely audible. It wasn’t meant to be heard, anyway. We were all weak and tired from months of hunger and sometimes thoughts just dribbled off our lips like drips from a leaky faucet.
“They don’t hate us,” I said. “They think we’re animals. People kill animals.”
That was what my mother had told me. The Germans thought of themselves as a master race and Russians as animals that could be bred and trained to serve them. But first they had to kill enough of us so the rest obeyed. “They think they can whip us like dogs, that we will just lie down and whimper,” my mother had said. Our people had staggered from blows but had not fallen. Some people said we fought too hard, that if we just gave up they would kill fewer of us. “But then they would be right,” my mother had said. “We would not be human.”
A light drizzle of ice followed us out of the city. As I sat on the cold metal truck bed, rocking back and forth as the truck went from one rut to another, I thought about what it was like the year before, a time before the war started. I thought about how I greeted the first snow of winter with laughter and glee, of snowball fights and a trip to the country where we rode on a horse-drawn sled.
That was before the invaders came, before hunger and cold death stalked us, a time when we went to a warm bed with our bellies full, a time before the world turned rabid.
The Hun had come in September, destroying everything that stood in their way. The Germans called their sudden, overwhelming attacks using tanks, war planes and fast moving troops “blitzkrieg,” lightning war. Neither our soldiers nor our generals had experienced anything like the mechanized fighting units that came at them like a storm of murderous steel demons from hell. The brutal war machine sent our troops reeling back. Our armies were crushed by the blitzkrieg, trampled beneath the onslaught of steel and bullets. The German advance was not stopped until they were in the suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad.
We heard rumors that the Poles, Baltic peoples and even Russians had greeted the invaders as liberators, assuming that they would be an improvement over the regime we lived under, but soon those whispers of glee were replaced by ones of horror as word spread of atrocities committed by the conquerors.
That invasion began five months ago, and the war had raged on, with Leningrad violated and abused by the struggle between ruthless armies. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode with the invaders, malevolent storms of death, disease and famine gripping Leningrad as a violent winter lashed the city while enemy artillery and bombs rained murder from the skies.
The worse fate was not to die quickly from the explosion of a bomb or murderous shrapnel from artillery—it was to die slowly of starvation and lost hope, as you watched family, friends and neighbors wither and drop like leaves on a dying tree.
Have you ever seen anyone starve to death? Have you seen someone you love get thinner and weaker everyday, fading like sand slipping between your fingers, too weak to keep the flame of life glowing? That was how my mother was when they pulled me away from her, pale and weak, sand slipping between my fingers.
I had to get off this truck that was carrying me out of the city, further away from my mother, and make my way back to help her.
* * *
Peter the Great had built our city atop rivers and swamps two and a half centuries earlier with the Baltic Sea on the west and Lake Lagoda, the largest lake in Europe, to the east. The Germans had not been able to completely surround the city because of the two bodies of water. But the Baltic was no help to us because the German navy would be waiting for our ships if they tried to leave the harbor. Besides, the sea froze in the winter, trapping our fleet anyway, making the ships sitting ducks for the Nazi fighter planes and bombers that swarmed overhead.
But the lake was different. When winter howled, the lake froze in places solid enough for trucks to cross under the cover of darkness. Daredevil runs by truckers carried a little food into the city and children out, the drivers praying for moonless nights as they raced across the frozen lake to the Soviet forces on the other side.
I didn’t know how far we were from the city when the truck stopped. We had left late at night and drove slowly with the truck lights of
f, but we never made it across the lake. We had to stop because enemy fire had hit a convoy earlier and the burning hulks were blocking the road. Once the debris was removed, we would have to wait for night to fall again because we wouldn’t have time to get across the lake before the sun rose, making the truck an easy target for the Messerschmitts that would scream overhead.
“We wait for darkness,” the driver told us, after he pulled the truck to the side of the road and got out. “Otherwise we have no chance of making it.”
No one said a word. We huddled under a stiff white canvas used as camouflage and waited for our ration.
The driver brought a cotton duffle bag out of the cab and set it on the snow. He opened one end of the bag to expose long loaves of bread. It was black bread, coarse and usually with a little sawdust added at the plants to increase the number of loaves. No one cared about the taste. We would have eaten dirt if we were told it was nourishing.
Drawing out a loaf at a time, he tore off pieces and handed them up to us. Each of us watched the driver intently, waiting for our piece. A few months ago, it would have been a piece of bread, not very inviting, perhaps not even eaten because it didn’t come with a slab of butter or spread with sweetened fruit. Now a little bread was life itself.
“Roast chicken and borscht,” he said, as he carefully tore off a portion.
It was his idea of humor. I could not remember what a piece of chicken or a bowl of borscht tasted like. The words didn’t even make my mouth water. Starvation had left my body numb. No one around me smiled at the words, either.
Over two million people were in the city when the war started. Five months ago the streets were filled with cars and trucks and trolleys, the sidewalks crowded with people rushing and bustling, talking and arguing, leaving trails of cigarette smoke behind them and sometimes vodka fumes. Half of the people in the city, a million souls, had already died, mostly from hunger. It was now a quiet city—when the bombs and shells weren’t raining—cold and quiet with snow covering everything, with few nonmilitary vehicles moving, no trams or trains rattling down tracks, no chatter of conversation on the streets, no loud voices, not even the smell of cigarette smoke in the crisp clean winter air as you walked past people on the sidewalks. A city of people with white, haggard faces, people without smiles and hope, without light in their eyes—people who would surrender without a fight when death came knocking.
The Betrayers Page 1