The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (16 page)

“Guess that depends on how you define paradise, and for which of us. I love both of you guys, too; goes without sayin’. But you can bet your ass on this; Bisque draft board or not, she ain’t about to become Mrs. Mason.”

Pete laughed, giving the waiter the high-sign. “So it comes down to that.”

“Bull’s eye. I know we can’t afford her gettin’ a snootful and opening up to the wrong person, but there’s got to be a better way to do it then marrying her ass off to me. If that’s what you had in mind.”

Pete sighed, his eyes losing their ball-bearing sheen. “No, buddy, I didn’t. Maybe she did, or does, but I doubt it. Takin’ you back to Bisque on Striker was her brainstorm. I’d a hell of a lot rather you’d flown back, so you and I- well, the three of us- could’ve spent that time together. We had a lot of catchin’ up to do- still have-  but between what she had to say to me about y’all’s New York shenanigans all those years, and jumpin’ in the sack with you as soon as you showed up, I figured that you both needed to get it, whatever it’d gotten to be by now, out of your systems.”

It was Jack’s turn to laugh. “Well, we seem to have done that. Hey.”

“What?”

He spoke quickly, before second thoughts could, once again, shove this particular evil genie back in its bottle. “If we’re gonna talk about what happens with Linda from here on out, there’s one big card that it’s not on the table yet.”

“And that is?”

“You and Linda. ‘in the sack’, that is.”

They paused to let the waiter, who was now bringing Daíquiris unbidden as their predecessors disappeared, deliver a fresh round. Preceding his response with another sigh and slight shake of his head, Pete said, “I was sure that she’d told you by now. And I wasn’t going to let you leave before we’d talked about it.”

“And I was sure that you’d get around to it. So what happened?”

Pete took a sip of the top of the fresh Daíquiri. “Johnny called me. It was a couple of months, I guess, after Dieter was gone. Word had gotten back to him that Linda was a regular customer at the
Capri’s casino, and that she’d caught the attention of Barker, among others. He asked me to put a stop to it.”

“Which you did,” Jack said, acknowledging the irony with a brief, tight smile.

“Sure did. Matter of fact, she might never’ve started flying if Dieter hadn’t gotten killed. She loved that guy, no question about that. But the change in his life, from KGB officer to tropical playboy, was pretty damn drastic. He had freedom in
Havana
that he’d never known before in his life, and he was determined to make the most of it.”

“And from what I remember you telling me when I first came down here, he was doing a pretty good job of it.”

“That he was. Fact is, he felt free to carry on with Linda and diddle any number of Cubanitas at the same time. Not that he didn’t think the world of her, and loved her, in his way. But he didn’t return anything like the sort of love that she felt for him. And she knew it- we’re agreed on the fact that she’s anything but stupid- but love has a way of encouraging blind spots where its object is concerned.”

“You’ve always had a gift for understatement,” Jack said, thinking of the aborted ten-year affair that Pete, as the love-struck Moses, had carried on with his mother, to Moses’ perpetual, and finally complete, frustration.

“Teutonic trait,” Pete said, the corners of his mouth drooping momentarily in a rueful smile that Jack had rarely seen before. “One of a very short list, according to Herr Professor Doktor Weller. ‘In a crisis,’ ole Dad would say to me, ‘your Jewish side immediately takes over.’ In retrospect, seems like he was right, as he was about a lot of things. Didn’t endear him to me then. Doesn’t now. But when you’re right, you’re right. You’ve got to remember, hers and my relationship during the war years in
Baltimore
was a lot like yours and mine in Bisque. She was the bright young daughter of the woman I loved- briefly, to be sure- and I did what I could to help her deal with the fact that she’d seen very little, and was likely to see even less, of her father. Made sure she had movie passes, sent her to Johns Hopkins, and pretty much everything dad-like in between. Because when her mother wasn’t working, she was drinking. Didn’t take me that long to conclude that if I didn’t look out for Linda, she’d be in hot water up to her neck, pretty much overnight.”

Jack nodded, draining his glass. “‘Mose to the rescue’ does have a familiar ring to it.”

Pete acknowledged the remark with a quick grunt and an eyebrows-up glance at the ceiling. “She did so well in high school that she had her choice of three, four scholarships by Christmas of her senior year. The better she did, the more matter-of-fact Sarah’s reception of the good news of the moment would be. I was feeling more than a little murderous toward her by the time Linda left for Johns Hopkins, so I left soon after she did. Neither of us made that much of an effort to keep in touch, so about all that I knew was that she burned ’em up scholastically and took her brand-new cum laude degree in art history to
New York. That’s where things sat when you and I drove up there in ’53.”

“Straight into a hornets’ nest,” Jack said, smiling in spite of himself.

“Based on what I know about it, I’m not sure that’s the metaphor I’dve chosen. But what the hell; I’m not trying to put myself in the same spot that you were in at sixteen. Far from it. But I will say that I had no more idea of what to do with her than you had when you walked up that boat’s gangway four years before.”

“But it seems that we’re both pretty fast learners.”

“Jack, you know damn well that neither of us had a Chinaman’s chance to hold that woman off. I tried to hold on to the image of her as a smart little Baltimore kid whose parents didn’t give a shit about her, but she wanted more than that- hell, needed it-  and it wasn’t too much of a problem for that desire to rub off-  I’ll speak only for myself-  on me. Feel free to speak for yourself, pardner.”

“Well, aside from the fact that she finally got around to telling me pretty much what you just did during the boat ride back down here, it’s not too hard for me to put myself in your shoes. Linda wants what she wants when she wants it, that’s for damn sure. Hell, I certainly had no claim on her, then or now. We hadn’t seen each other for four years; I’m not real sure why she made such a big thing out of getting back with me. Not after spending the last couple years with you.”

“We could play guessing-games about that until you’re as old as I am. I can’t do much better than reminding myself, and you, that she went through a pretty rough patch in
Cuba. I think that hooking back up with you let her go back to a more carefree time in her life, even if it was only by comparison to what I ended up dragging her through.”

“Well, I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy it. Parts of it, anyway. But by the time we got back here, I was sure of one thing- I didn’t want to be one of any kind of a long-term twosome with her, legal or otherwise.”

“J’you get the idea that was what she was looking for?”

Jack didn’t speak for a few seconds. Then he said, “Well, hell, sure I did. That’s the way these things usually go, isn’t it? You fuck around for awhile, and then it’s time to ‘get serious,’ right? And Linda’s not getting any younger.”

“Neither are we, for that matter,” Pete said. “But I don’t think that we’ll get too far with her by looking for what we might call orthodox feminine instincts. They certainly weren’t that strong in her mother. Actually, I think we’ll do better thinking of her as another guy.”

Jack grinned in sardonic rejection of that notion. “You can say that, having been in bed with her?”

Pete returned the grin, but without the edge. “I know that you aren’t exactly inexperienced, buddy, but Linda won’t be the last woman you meet with a serviceable pussy that thinks like a guy.” Hell, he thought, you were raised by one.

Pursing his lips, Jack looked upward momentarily, then back at Pete. “Does your theory have a place in it for this penchant for being fucked up the ass?”

More than I’m about to tell you, sonny, Pete thought, since it was Serena, your mama, who introduced me to it. Elbows on the table, he nested his fingers into a chinrest, training gunsight-gray eyes on the boy. “I think we just hit the limit of what we should say about that without her being a party to the conversation. If you really want to talk about it, let’s wait’ll she can have her say. I didn’t propose a theory, anyway; hard-nosed women are fact.”

Chuckling, Jack said, “Meaning that we’re not likely to have a three-handed ass-fucking seminar anywhere in this lifetime. That’s OK,” he said, taking his turn at raising his hands in mock surrender, “I’m not sure how much it needs talking about anyway; I just know that she didn’t pick it up from me. Now that I’m thinking of her as a ‘hard-nosed woman,’ don’t guess it matters much who gets the credit. Hell, we could even lay it at Cordelia’s door.”

Extending the waiter’s latest drink-drop to include two orders of stone crab claws, Pete responded, his mind skipping back to Bisque in the ’40’s. “Not that I’d put much past her ass,” he said, eyes still riveting Jack, “But that seems a little far-fetched, even for her.” It actually fit in rather well, he thought, remembering Serena’s laughing reprise of Cordelia’s “hissy-fit” when she learned that the Reverend Osborne Abercrombie had seen the nude bust of her that Serena had done, tongue-in-cheek, for Cordelia’s and Buster’s anniversary. Serena had decided to punctuate one of the numerous hiatuses in her relationship with him by seducing the recently-widowed pastor of Bisque’s
First
Baptist
Church, of which her father was a deacon. He’d seen the bust himself, much earlier and incomplete, on the night that he first made love to her in the rooftop studio atop the Bisque Hotel. “How’d you arrive at that ‘theory’?”

“See how this stacks up for you. As soon as Cordelia found out Rick was headed to the Army, nothing would do but for her to throw him a farewell party.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that. A typical Cordelia-Buster bash. I know the drill; Buster passes out, and Cordelia gets her ashes hauled by her fucker du jour. You didn’t say so, but that night’s FDJ was obviously Rick.”

“Right. And God knows how many times that scenario’s played out. But what I didn’t tell you was how excited Linda got watching it happen. Hell, I just barely held her off ’til we got back to the house. We kept it up for half the night; then I drag my ass out of bed to get down to the office the next morning, and who’s waitin’ to come down the driveway?”

“The lovely, if bedraggled, Cordelia.”

“Bingo. And from that day ’til we got back on Striker, Linda went her way- with Cordelia, that is- and I went mine. I had plenty to do, of course, and as it turns out so did she.”

“Well,” Pete said, “You know as well as I do that she likes to do a little night-crawling. And she picked the right partner to find whatever night-crawling there is to be found in Bisque.”

“And
Augusta, and the rest of the goddamn countryside as far west as
Atlanta.”

“Jesus! And she’s reporting all this to you?”

“Oh yeah! She’d give me a play-by-play a couple of times a week, but I also heard it from Rick.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yep. Well, as close as he’d come to what I see you thinking. He went out with them one night; seems they went back to Cordelia’s for a nightcap, and things got, in his words, ‘a little out of hand.’ He was trying to laugh it off, but at the same time, as a friend, to let me know what I had on my hands.”

“In other words...”

“He drilled ’em both. I couldn’t get him to say it, but that’s exactly what happened.”

Pete’s face flirted with the vestige of a smile, his head slowly oscillating. “J’you bring it up to her?”

“No! I wouldn’t give her the fucking satisfaction.” The unintended humor of his response quickly replaced frustration with the manic hysteria best known to drunks, rendering both Jack and Pete speechless with florid, wheezing laughter.

Jack was the first to recover. “Hey.”

“What?” Pete said, wiping tears from his eyes.

“The jai-alai boys interrupted you. You were about to tell me your new idea. About her.”

Pete sat mute for a moment, waiting for his head to clear. “Oh. Oh, yeah. Back to the plane. I was thinking about what to do with it. Once we’re all checked out, that is.”

“And?”

“Well, we need some kind of business- at least I do-  to keep the IRS from getting curious about where the money’s coming from. That wasn’t a problem in
Cuba, but here it’s only a question of time. I thought we could start an air charter operation, and make Linda president.”

Jack had time to digest Pete’s proposal, and to wonder how long it had taken him to come up with it, while the waiter deposited large oval plates of correspondingly huge stone crab claws along a with a fresh round of Daíquiris. “You think she can handle it?”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that she can. With half her brain. Plus, it’s time she made some money for herself out of this whole process. I’ve paid all the bills and kept her in spending money up to now, but this is a proud woman we’re talking about. She won’t continue to just tag along that much longer; we need to get her hands full, and keep them that way, doing something that she enjoys.”

Picking up his nutcracker and inserting half a foot of claw in it, Jack squeezed judiciously, extending the opening crack, put there in the kitchen, all the way around the claw’s circumference. “Well,” he said, “that should certainly do it.” Pulling the thick shell free, he dipped the large clump of succulent white meat that it had protected in the pot of drawn butter at his elbow and bit into it, pulling it away from the thin supporting cartilage running through its center. Chewing thoughtfully, he added, “Have you brought this up to her at all?”