Pale Gray for Guilt (14 page)

"Have you gotten too accustomed to total humility on all sides, Santo?"

"Hush, now!" said Mary Smith. "You both hush. You're both right. Don't you two go all ballsy and wicked when you're going to be helping each other."

Santo threw his head back and laughed his boyish laugh. "Her biggest trouble is making sense. By Wednesday… that will be…"

"The tenth," said Mary Smith.

"… phone her and she'll have the Yes or No on it, and give you a probable figure."

"Will do," I said.

He smiled down into her face. He said to her, "I think I like your new friend, Mary. I think he's maybe brought us another winner." He took out his bill clip, slipped some bills out of it, and put them quickly into her purse. "I'm so sure, here's an advance on your bonus. Use it to take him to where the steaks are."

She looked at her watch. "Yes, you'd better start moving it, Gary. Ben will be out there with your luggage. Kiss Bonnie Bea for me."

He made the smallest of gestures and people came on the run to pull the table away, hand him the check for signature, bow the three of them out and away.

We went up the beach in her little red car to what she called one of "her" places, a little bar dark as pockets. Once we were sitting across a very low and narrow little table from each other, so that we had to hunch over it in intimate arrangement, she figuratively rolled up her sleeves and went to work. She had awaited the pass, and for once there hadn't been one.

She had put the strange hat aside. She shook out her gleaming hair. A stray pattern of light rested on a long diagonal across her face, from eyes to lips.

She dipped into her shot like a moth, put it down, picked up the stray lip-drop with tongue tip. "Want to know, Travis? Want the crazy message?" It was half whisper, her voice dragging.

"Message by special delivery. Sure, Mary Smith." She made her eyes very wide and solemn. Her lips parted. She reached and took my hand in both of hers and pulled it slowly to her side of the table. She turned my slack fist over, then put the nails of her right hand high on the inside of my wrist, and slowly drew her nails along my wrist and over my palm, uncurling my slack fingers as she did so. Holding my fingers down, she dipped her head suddenly, pressed the mouth moist against my palm, lifted her head very quickly and stared at me, her face both sly and fake-frightened.

"Is there more?" I asked.

She turned my hand over and formed it into a fist and, holding it in both her hands, lifted it, held it, her elbows braced on the table. She bumped her chin into the knuckles, closed her eyes.

"Pow," she whispered. "Like right off, the first minute. Pow. I'm never like that."

"Comes a time," I said.

"There does indeed, Mr. Travis McGee." She tilted my fist slightly for a better angle, and went across the knuckle ridge with her warm little mouth, taking a gentle little bite at each knuckle and kissing the space between each knuckle. With each kiss, her tongue tip flicked at the closed apace between fingers.

"When it's going to be what it's going to be, there's that message, don't you think? An old-timey thing, way deep, that's been waiting for it special. So very rough crazy everlasting special. And you know it too. Don't you? Don't you?"

She sat back there someplace behind those swarming eyes, listening to herself pant, in such a soft little wondrous way. She watched herself work herself up, no doubt measuring the bra-tickle of the nipples becoming erectile, sensing the new softness of thigh and belly. This was one of the new breed who assist the manipulators. Gary Santo, being a manipulator in a large way could be expected to have one who would know her business backward and forward and upside down. He might have two, three or a dozen in the retinue. He would keep them loyal not only with money but with the feeling of being part of an operating team and performing a function for the team.

Sex with a particularly skilled and desirable woman who could convince you that you were the greatest thing since fried rice was a marvelous gadget for one of the manipulators: The bedazzled male is incautious, mazed, thunderstruck. In that condition he can provide the maximum benefit to the manipulator and the least problem. He will come trundling along in the entourage just to be near his brand-new love-light. He will tell her all he knows and all he hopes, and in a frenzy of team spirit and accomplishment, she will bang him out of his mind and drop him right back where she found him when the manipulator has the last crumb of information he can use. But while he's getting the treatment, he tags along with the team, with the group but not really a part of the group, aware that the team knows the basis for the attraction, aware of a team attitude of kindly contempt for him but so enthralled in his doggy, lolling, bitch-trailing way he will endure the little humiliations to keep getting what becomes more instead of less necessary to him the more he gets of it.

The role requires a woman exceptionally confident and decorative, a woman of a hearty and insistent sexuality, a woman who understands that serving the manipulator in this way is part of the price of the ticket on all the best flights to the best places, and if you want to be coy, or choosy or chicken, you can drop right back to the posture chair and the old electric and the girl's room scuttlebutt about who might get promoted to what. It takes special gals to travel with the team, so dig in and enjoy the special assignments, because between the romps the guy will talk and you tote the crumbs back to Gary and he fits them together.

The manipulators are the brash gamblers putting little corporations together to make big ones, and they are the talent packagers who stick a half dozen special abilities together and end up with the percentage off the top of the network serial show, and they are the showboaters who take on the tax cases of the mighty and fight the Fed to a draw-or a cheap compromise-and they are the inventive money men who direct the conversion of hoodlum funds into legitimate enterprise, and they are the whiz kids who tear down the honest old buildings and stick up the glittery new boxes on the leaseback, write-off, tax shelter kick, and they are the ones that boost the market price of a stock up and unload and then kick it back down and buy back.

They buzz around the country and the world in little groups, where everybody is always laughing, and at the resorts and airports and executive dining rooms, at the padded bars and the swinging casinos, in the groups there are always the Mary Smiths, pert, tidy, high-style, voracious and completely with it, eyes a-dance, freed by The Pill to happily pull down the game the manipulator fingers for her, the new Gal Friday who has become the Gal Friday Night.

It is a new breed that did not exist a few years back, but cultures seem to have an uncanny way of spawning creatures to fill any need. So situation ethics, plus profitable manipulation, brought this merry regiment out of the wings, as if they had been waiting there all along. It would be pointless to conjecture about immorality or amorality, or make analogies about whoredom, that word with the ring of biblical accusation. A Mary Smith would not even be upset, merely puzzled.

In the diagonal light she rested her chin against my fist, her two warm and shapely little hands holding it there, elbow-braced, and made her eyes huge, then dipped and turned her head first one way and then the other, to slowly drag first one sheaf of the dense and fragrant hair across the back of my hand and then the other.

I remembered the shaggy and ancient joke of the young man in the strange city who had arrived with the phone number of a hundred-dollar girl. He called her up and was invited up to her luxurious apartment, where she cooked him a gourmet meal, recited French poetry, played the piano for him and sang with professional skill. She mentioned that she spoke six languages, had a master's degree in psychology, and had designed and made the gown she wore on her lovely body. At last as she led him in toward the canopied bed he had to ask. And so he said, "Please would you tell me how a girl like you got into… a business like this?"

She twinkled up at him and sighed and said, "Just lucky, I guess."

Mary Smith took a deep and shivering breath and said, "There is a steak, darling, and it is not frozen and never has been, and it is in the meat-keeper thing in my apartment, which is, God help us, a condo-min-i-um, which will never cease to sound like a dirty word, and the apartment is twelve and a half minutes away, give or take ten seconds, and the steak will keep for us, darling, until three A.M., or until twelve noon tomorrow for a Texan's breakfast for us because I don't have to tend the store until Monday morning, and that twelve and a half minutes might just be the longest twelve and a half minutes in my life up till now."

The temptation was to accept the whole con. But there is an immense perversity in the male animal at the most unexpected times. And why didn't you climb Mount Everest, Sir Hillary? Because it was there, fellow. And I could see her in memory in an other bar, by daylight, teeth set in that meaty little underlip, eyes half closed, listening to Tush, and turning her head slowly from side to side in a denial as definite as the slam of a door and clack of the lock. She would be exquisite in all detail, from earlobes to cute little toes to the dimples at the base of the spine. She would be fragrant, immaculate, prehensile and totally skilled, and she would ring all the changes, and pace herself beautifully, and draw me to her pace, and inflate my ego with her breathless astonishment at how it had been the most fantastic and lasting that had ever happened to her and how she had thought it could never even be equaled again, but lo and behold, when it had happened again, it was even more so, and if it ever got to be any more than that, she just couldn't stand it at all; it would blow her out of her mind, and how did we get to be so great, darling, so that really and truly it is as if it was the very first time ever with anybody.

The temptation was to take the man's Ferrari around the track a few times, just to prove to yourself you couldn't get hooked on a great piece of machinery or on the whole speed competition bit.

But it was right there and it was buzzing with it, and how do you sidestep without creating some unhappy suspicions about the whole approach? It would have to be some fancy footwork, and it would have to be on her terms, something she could comprehend immediately.

I slipped into my elk-hide ring-shoes just in time, just as her eyes narrowed and she said, "You're not exactly overwhelming the girl with enthusiasm, old buddy."

"Decisions, decisions, decisions," I said. "I seem to have this hex lately."

She let my hand go. "What's to decide?"

"There is this very pigheaded man sitting in a hotel suite and looking at the phone and getting madder and madder by the minute. I have been trying to unload this and that for cash money so I can get the maximum out of our little gem of opportunity. And he flew down from Chicago because this particular item happens to be worth about twenty thousand more to him than to anybody else in the world, for reasons I will not go into at the moment. So I told him I had to delay our meet because of something that came up, and I would try to get there by eight. And right now it is quarter to nine, and he is the type who feels unsure of who he is right down in the gut where it matters most, the type who to prove he is who he thinks he is might wait about one minute more and cut off his nose to spite his face, or he may have cut it off already and be on his way to the airport. I have been looking at you and trying to get a little controlled piece of amnesia about him, but it doesn't seem to work so good."

She sat taller and gave a little shake like a toy poodle who has just been lifted out of her doggy-bath, and gave her hair a few pats, and gave a hitch at her complicated sweater and said, "Darling, you are an absolute idiot! Why didn't you say something? Didn't you think I'd understand? I'm all grown up and everything."

"Let's say I was enjoying myself. I was listening to the message of the Poo Bear Smith."

She reached and patted my arm and with a crooked little smile and a bawdy wink said, "Let's put it Us way. The twenty grand won't keep. You hustle and phone him. There's a phone at the end of that hallway over there that goes to the biff."

I went to the phone and lit a match and looked up a random number and dialed it and asked a nasal woman if I could speak to Mr. Bannon. She told me

I had a wrong number and hung up, and so I talked for a while over the empty wire to Tush and told him the news of the moment, with a few comments on the weather. He didn't have a thing to say.

I went back to the table and told the chicklet that my man was very frosty, very frosty indeed, but still available for negotiation. She said, "Darling, if you'd lost him on account of me, I was sitting here deciding I was going to make one hell of a try at being worth the whole twenty big ones, but no broad in the world carries a tag like that. I might have choked up and blown the whole match."

"I like a practical woman." "Can I drop you at his hotel?"

"Thanks, but I gave myself time to go pick up my car at the Sultana, if you want to drop me there."

"And wait for you, I hope, I hope?"

"I guess you better wait at your place, because I am not exactly together on price with this clown yet." She lifted her purse onto her lap, opened it and dug around inside and took out a little flashlight. She gave it to me and I held it for her while she took out a little golden notebook with a snap fastener. She opened it and slipped the little gold pencil out of the little gold loop and said, "I just realized I'm absolutely starving, dear, so let's say it'll be ten before I get home. This is the unlisted number. And this is the address, on Indian Creek Drive, on the west side going north. Look for a raspberry-colored thing with a white canopy and white awnings and white balconies. Call me first, love, because I want the delicious feeling you're on your way 'to me."