hidden passion for both degradation and domination. It was as if the sixties had returned, when everybody took their sex seriously and orgasm ranked right up there with Zen archery as a topic of serious discussion. He had been struggling with his shipping line then, married to a stern Greek woman whose passion was business, so he’d missed the revolution.
Miss Pym had blasted Moll Dalton right out of his sexual consciousness, made him wish he’d never heard of Moll Dalton, made him glad Moll Dalton was no longer around. Miss Pym knew nothing of Atlas Entertainment business, but she was shrewd in her suggestions for besting his enemies.
Right now she was sprawled sideways across his thighs in utter exhaustion and abandonment, her pale hair lank with sweat.
“Champagne,” he snapped. She leaped up, he watched her bottom wobble-flex across the room. As she went through the open doorway to the hall, he yelled after her, “Hypothetical!”
“Hypothetical” was a new game between them. She kept going without response so that tomorrow he would chastise her for ignoring him. She liked to be chastised. He liked the sixties a lot, even on rerun. But he was not obsessed by Miss Pym.
Oddly enough, his new obsession centered around Dante Stagnaro. He knew it was all projection, the guy was just another fucking cop, for Chrissake; but he couldn’t shake the feeling he had to do something about the man before Stagnaro somehow got into the Atlas Entertainment books.
He couldn’t have Stagnaro taken out, Mr. Prince had spoken. So he had to diminish him as a force. As a man.
The guy’s wife. Do something to her, that would cut his nuts off, geld him. Well, ever since the random thought about screwing her had entered his mind, he hadn’t gotten it out. He doubted he’d have much trouble seducing her, he seldom did with women. But there was that fucking Stagnaro lurking around like a leopard in the bushes.
But he had a plan. That’s why he was here with Miss Pym today. To check out his plan with her. At this sort of thing, she was excellent.
She returned with two fluted glasses and an icy bottle of Cordon Rouge put in the freezer an hour before. Sitting naked and cross-legged on the bed, he stripped the foil and untwisted the wire, gripped the cork as he turned the bottle beneath it. The cork came out with a dull thunk! and no spilled champagne. He poured them each a glass. They tinked.
“All right,” she said, eyes alight. “Your hypothetical.”
“There is a business rival a man is having trouble with.”
“Personal or professional?”
“Both.” He drained his flute, refilled. She drained hers, held it out for more. “His business associates have ruled out physical recourse…”
“So, no direct attack. What does he hold dear?”
Kosta held up a hand, three fingers open, marked off the possibilities. “Job, family, wife. Job, he could be compromised, but it would be difficult. His reputation is good. Even if well done, it might not stick.”
“Family?”
A second finger was folded down. “A son at home, a daughter in her first year at Cal.”
“Berkeley can be a very dangerous place,” murmured Miss Pym, her rather horsy face serious with thought. She licked her lips. They were dry and chapped from the various uses she had been putting them to during the last two hours.
“I believe our businessman was thinking more along the lines of his rival’s wife,” said Kosta.
“You want to fuck somebody’s wife!” she burst out.
“Not me. Hypothetical. And not just fuck. Our hypothetical businessman wants to rape somebody’s wife.”
She was frowning in concentration. “One sort of man would blame the wife…”
“Not this man,” said Kosta.
She met his gaze. “But… should he and his wife get an endless series of naughty phone calls afterwards, spelling out in precise detail exactly what was done, and how…”
“Excellent, Miss Pym!” Kosta cried. He fell silent, picturing it, all of it, his gaze turned inward.
“May I watch, then?” she asked, her eyes gleaming like a wolfs by torchlight.
“All of this is hypothetical, remember?”
“I insist you describe it to me afterwards, in detail.”
“Why-since it’s hypothetical?” he asked. She smiled almost shyly, and put her hand between her own legs. “Yes, of course.” The thought of watching her while he told her about it was exciting to him.
“Will it be soon?”
“Soon.” He could have told her tonight but didn’t.
His member was stiffening at the thought of what he would do tonight. Miss Pym gave a low throaty laugh and tossed aside her champagne flute to reach greedily for Kosta’s flute.
Martin Prince was getting a massage also, but it wasn’t sexual. The masseur gently pummeling him at the Xanadu’s health club was a black ex-NFL linebacker who had blown out his knee in a divisional game against Dallas three years before.
“A little on the backs of the legs if you could, Troy.”
Troy laughed and bobbed his head. “Overdid it on the thigh-curling machine today, Mr. Prince.”
“I can’t hide anything from you, Troy.”
“What I’m here for, Mr. Prince. What I’m here for.”
Prince relaxed, let his mind drift.
Half his Family’s income was legitimate these days; companies like Atlas Entertainment gotten for money- laundering purposes had proved to be income-producers in their legitimate guise. There would be more money to launder in the new year also, with the upsurge in heroin, dust and crank usage. The Latinos had no foothold in those areas.
Nothing more on the Gideon Abramson matter, and it had been two months. Myra had called to tell him that Gounaris had gone to Gideon’s wake or whatever the Jews called it, after Prince’s strict orders not to. Significant. But since no Family people had been there, Atlas Entertainment hadn’t been compromised.
But even so, now that Gideon was no longer around to keep him in line, Gounaris was a loose cannon. The cop, Stagnaro, less of a one. But still bothersome. Sounded like he was smart and got on good with the feds. Maybe… maybe he was a problem Prince didn’t want around any more. After the first of the year he’d have to make hard decisions about both of them.
Meanwhile, in another two weeks he would be in Hermosillo, dove hunting. Where he went, there were no bag limits. You stepped out of the plane, threw fifty pairs of sneakers on the blacktop beside the plane, local kids rushed in to grab them. Then you killed until your shotgun felt red-hot. Fifty, seventy-five, a hundred a day-it didn’t matter. The kids, in return for those sneakers, flushed the live birds, collected the dead ones. He went every year, he loved it. Maybe he’d buy a new shotgun for it.
Then, La Paz to meet the new governor of Baja, pay his respects. His seventy-eight-foot powerboat Tosca would take him from La Paz to the little sport-fishing hotel Pez Grande, forty miles north of Cabo, where he always spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s fucking and fishing while Tosca waited for him at Cabo. Last year he’d boated a record blue, had made the sports section of the LA. Times standing in front of his huge strung-up fish with Tosca in the background.
Time to send Red Grant to L.A. to make sure the boat was ready and then take it to Cabo as he did each year.
Finally, back to Vegas the first week of January to start the new year of work. Maybe he should make those hard decisions now, so his holiday season would be a carefree one. With the shift in emphasis, maybe this would be the last time he’d have to resort to such old-fashioned remedies…
His mind drifted off as Troy pummeled gently away.
It was 10:00 p.m. and Greenwich Street slanting down the side of Telegraph Hill was silent and deserted. The night was clear, cold. Kosta, dressed in black and with a black ski mask rolled up on his head like a Navy watch cap, was waiting in the deeply shadowed entryway of the three-unit apartment building uphill from the Stagnaro
