We drank to that.
I’d neglected to mention to Tavish that Pearl Lorraine was someone I’d known for years. I knew her so well, in fact, that she was the one who drove me to the airport that Friday after my night at the opera—in her emerald-green Lotus two-seater.
Everything about Pearl reeked of emeralds, from the improbably green eyes set in her jet-black face, to the skintight emerald suede pants she was wearing, to the real emerald pendant dangling in the cleavage exposed by her extremely low-cut sweater.
Pearl was a racy lady but, to my taste, a bit too fast behind the wheel. Now I was wondering if she was trying to break the sound barrier as she whizzed past a blur of eucalyptus, shot into a gear I didn’t know existed, and took the freeway ramp on two wheels.
“Gee, I’d have had you drive me to New York, if I’d known we could get there faster than by air,” I told her, gripping the door with my fingernails.
“Sugar, don’t buy a fast car if you can’t drive one,” she said, then hit her horn and sucked some paint off a taxi that was crawling along at eighty. “Besides—I took off work early so we could take some time, sit down, have a drink, shoot the breeze. You’ve become such a hermit, I never see you anymore.”
“I think we’ll have plenty of time for all that,” I assured her. “We’ve just passed the international date line. Looks like they don’t have remedial drivers’ ed in Martinique.”
“When the world loves a wise-ass, sweetheart, you’re going to be on top,” she informed me blithely as we screeched up before the gate. Pearl leaped out as the dust was still settling, tossed her keys and a ten-dollar bill to the astonished porter, and gave him her dazzling smile. “We’ll get the bags.” She bustled me inside.
“They have valet parking?” I asked.
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” said Pearl, maneuvering me into the lounge—a nightmare of Polynesian bric-a-brac that looked as if it had been designed by a team of Mormon architects from Guam.
Pearl had ordered Bloody Marys and was already munching her celery stick when I returned from checking my bags.
“Thanks for getting me into the job with Karp—that wet fish,” she said between crunches. “Anytime you want a return favor …”
“Let’s wait till you’ve been there a few weeks; you may want to pay me back differently,” I told her as I tentatively took a sip of watery tomato juice. “Tavish told me you wanted to work there—to take over Karp’s job—though I can’t imagine why. I heard he was a bigot. This isn’t some sort of vendetta? But that hardly seems your style.…”
“Sue him for discrimination, you mean?” Pearl laughed, and flagged down the waitress for another round. “Of course not; I hate that stuff—mingling with lawyers and all. I’ve always thought there must be some reason why the French words for ‘attorney’ and ‘avocado’ were the same. No, I don’t give a fig about Karp. It’s power—reins, sweetheart—that’s the name of the game. I have a master’s in economics—and that means I can add up the digits on my paycheck. Karp earns twice as much as I do, but all he produces is trouble. Before I’m done, I’ll put his ass in a Singapore sling and shoot it into outer space.”
When I’d first met Pearl in New York ten years earlier, her father had been a top broker of African and Oceanic art, a field just entering its golden era as museums clamored for the goods he’d collected over the past forty years. He’d started from nothing as a runner—some say smuggler—and he died when Pearl, only twenty, was an economics major at NYU. There she’d acquired her taste for salty Yankee slang, fast cars, hard-driving feminism, and the color green, which she said reminded her of money. Papa had left her plenty of green. That had helped, more than all her education, to break down the doors in her ever-upward quest for power.
Though Pearl was more aggressive than I, we had this much in common: money was far from what we were after.
As if she’d read my mind, she said: “It’s not the money, it’s the principle. I mean the ethical kind—not the kind that earns interest. What difference does it make if I’m rich and don’t need the job? No one at the bank except you knows that anyway. I deserve that job, and Karp doesn’t. I’ve been running foreign exchange for years, and made millions for the bank. If I were only after money, I should have retired when I stepped off that boat from Fort-de-France; I’d have saved myself ten years of hassles.”
“Sure, but how do you plan to get his job by going to work for him, when before, he had to keep you happy by providing systems for you?” I wanted to know.
“He’ll slip up eventually,” Pearl said with a mysterious grin as our second round of tomato-flavored water arrived, “but I always keep a banana peel in my back pocket, just for such contingencies. Now, let’s get off this topic; I want to know how long you’ll be in the Big Apple, and what you’re going to do. After all, it’s practically our old hometown!”
“A week is all I have time for,” I told her.
“Get real,” said Pearl, crinkling her nose. “Why don’t you take time off—hang loose? Everyone knows you’re a slave driver, but why drive yourself this way? Hit the theaters, buy some exotic rags, meet new faces, eat designer food—get laid—you know what I mean?”
“Don’t you think this conversation is rather personal?” I said.
“We’ve known each other ten years,” Pearl informed me, “and besides, I’m not known for my discretion. I wasn’t born in a gray flannel suit—with a pencil between my teeth, and my legs cemented together—as you were. I may be fucking men
