The Lure (33 page)

That last remark irritated him. He wanted to grab her and tell her she was talking bullshit, Pollyanna nonsense. But her simple solution cut through his overwhelming confusion like Alexander the Great’s sword slicing through the Gordian knot.

Alana must have been aware of what was passing through his mind; she looked down at him as though her beauty and sympathy would lead him exactly right.

“No sex for a while,” he said. “And I won’t try to kiss you.”

“You’ll feel better. Believe me.”

“Maybe.”

“You will.” She sat up and leaped off the rock. “Now! Let’s go to lunch. Then we will see Eric and tell him.”

“Tell him what?” Noel asked warily.

“That you’ll come back to the house. That we’ll all go to the Hamptons together, which he needs so badly right now. And that we’ll all be friends. Come on, lazy. Get up.”

Glancing at her as they strode arm in arm back through the park, Noel wondered how she would take the news when it finally came, as it must, of the kind of monster Eric was. He knew it would be shattering to her. His only consolation was that he would be there, a friend and potential lover. She would need and want him to be there, to help her get over the shock.

“You look better already,” she said. “You see how easy it is?”

Eric joined them in the sidewalk café attached to an elegant hotel on upper Fifth Avenue. He sauntered in so casually, sat down so naturally, that it was a full minute before Noel registered it as an intrusion on the lovely afternoon he’d been enjoying with Alana.

“I asked Paul-Luc to call me if you came here,” Eric explained, ordering a Zubrowka vodka on the rocks from the slightly embarrassed waiter. “I thought you might be here. This is Alana’s favorite afternoon spot.”

She kissed Eric lightly on the cheek. Noel stared for an instant, which Eric didn’t seem to mind. Then Eric said exactly what would have infuriated Noel three days ago. Now, it only seemed unnecessary:

“I know you were fond of Randy. I’m very sorry to hear about what happened to him. I can’t think of anyone who deserved it less. It was rotten. Everyone liked him.”

His words were innocuous enough, expected, given the situation. Yet they held an unexpected anger that Noel couldn’t quite understand. Could it have been a mistake, and Eric really was sorry it had happened? He had always liked Randy, Noel knew. Or was he a consummate actor? Or even worse, did Eric have some kind of psychosis that allowed him to sanction such an act and then to blot it out so thoroughly that he could be sorry later?

“I guess that’s the danger of places like Le Pissoir,” Noel replied, conventionally enough. “Anyone can be the target.”

“But why Randy?” Eric insisted. “With all the real shits around.”

“No more, please,” Alana begged.

Even an Oscar-winning performer wouldn’t go that far, Noel guessed. The psychosis theory, then.

“Just one thing more,” Eric apologized to her. Then, to Noel, “I don’t think Randy was the intended victim. I think he was mistaken in the dark for you.”

First Loomis, now Eric. It freaked him. “For me? Why me?”

Eric’s drink arrived, he sipped at it. Slowly turning the glass in his hands and avoiding Noel’s eyes, he said, “To get at me. That’s why. That’s what it’s going to be like staying with us—with Alana and me. You’ll be in constant danger. All of us will be.”

“Eric!” she pleaded. “You said you wouldn’t.”

“I have to tell him that.” He turned to Noel. “Now you know the worst.”

Noel was so twisted by the new tack Eric had taken, he almost couldn’t answer. He felt disarmed by the warning, then angry, then thrown back into confusion: the psychosis theory wasn’t working. Maybe it had been a mistake. A freak killing. Both Eric and Alana were looking at him for some kind of response, so he said:

“The police think I did it.”

“That’s what Reed said. Don’t worry, we’ll get you the best attorney if it comes to that. I doubt that it will. They have no case. By the way, what the hell were you doing in there anyway? That was the real shock to me.”

It was too long and complicated to go into, so Noel told him it was research for his book.

“Oh, Christ! I might have known. Well, you sure did a good job of it.”

“Why? Did people talk?”

“People always talk.”

“What did they say?”

“That you were stoned, hot, trashy, outrageous. Don’t worry. All that’s good for your reputation.” Suddenly his lips opened in a smile. “I’m sort of sorry I missed it. It must have been like the Virgin Mary losing her cherry at an Elks convention.”

“You bastard,” Noel said, but he laughed, too, and soon all of them were laughing at how Noel had in one night turned around his previous aloof, distant, cold reputation.

They were still laughing when Alana glanced at her watch. It was nearly six o’clock.

“I thought we’d get out of town for the next few weeks,” Eric said, suddenly sobered, “until all this blows over.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Noel admitted, “the police.”

“Dorrance fixed it. You can. How about it?” Eric asked, looking closely at Noel.

I think he was mistaken in the dark for you.
“All right,” Noel said.

They paid the bill and walked out onto the street. Eric and Okku would fly out tonight: would Noel mind driving with Alana?

Noel would be delighted, he said, as Eric stopped half a block away from the sidewalk café at a flat, waist-high silver coupe parked at the curb.

“How do you like it? I just bought it.”

It looked more like a piece of contemporary sculpture than an automobile. “What is it?” Noel asked, trying to read the stylized nameplate set into the vents of the front grille.

“A Lamborghini. Like it?”

“It looks like it belongs on the lawn of a suburban museum,” Noel said. “It’s extraordinary.”

Eric got in and the window shot down. Then he signaled for Noel to bend down for a final word.

“Drive carefully. If you have any trouble at all, there’s a loaded gun in the Benz. Inside a fake ceiling in the glove compartment. Alana knows where it is.”

Alana bent to kiss Eric. He waved, and with a single light touch of the steering wheel, pulled out of the spot and roared down Fifth Avenue.

“What I don’t understand is why you need a place like Le Pissoir?” Noel said.

It was their fourth day at the villa. Noel and Eric had just finished a leisurely jog up and down the mile-and-a-half-long driveway. Eric’s house was off the double lane road that ran from Springs to Amagansett. Now, they lay on rafts in the large circular pool, talking, floating under the shade of three large trees that had been left at one end of the pool when the compound was constructed. If they stood, they’d be near the only open portion of the terrace—a balcony overlooking a several-hundred-foot drop over rough rock cliffs. Northeast, there was a magnificent view of Napeaugue Bay and Gardiners Island. On clear days, standing at the railing looking due east, you could see as far as Montauk Point, and north to the Connecticut shore.

“I’m involved with both Bar Sinister and Le Pissoir because if I didn’t run them someone else would. Only I do it better,” Eric said. “There have been back-room bars since the early sixties. I’ve upgraded the whole thing. I sell liquor at uninflated prices. I have a controlled membership so there aren’t too many undesirables. I’ve made the atmosphere cleaner, sexier, more attractive, safer—yes, Noel, safer—fire exits, sprinkler systems. A dozen ways out of each place in an emergency. Check out some of the competition. Firetraps, pigsties, cleaned once a month, if at all, and staffed with insolent, gay-hating slobs.”

“It’s still exploiting a weakness,” Noel said.

“Or fulfilling a need,” Eric came back. “There are two sides to it. If you add Clouds and Window Wall, it all changes. You know how special their clientele is. Movie stars call up for memberships. And the Window Wall has the best party crowd in the country. You’ve been there. You’ve seen. That’s exploiting, too, according to your theory. And I’m in business, I admit it, even though I feed all the income from the clubs right back into them, or into new ones. But in my places people get what they pay for—and a little more: quality. That’s not the way the mobs run their places. All they’re interested in is skimming the cream off the top and letting the place go to pieces in a year or two. My clubs have reputations. Each is unique. They endure.”

“But why have them at all?”

“The discos? There’s a need for great entertainment places where people will party. It’s the same with the fuck bars.”

“But why is it all so back street, so seedy, so sleazy?”

“At first it had to be that way. People didn’t want to see gays congregating for any reason. They still don’t. You’re aware of that, aren’t you, Noel, despite your ivory tower existence?”

“It’s become a ghetto.”

“Maybe so. But now it’s a voluntary ghetto. A place where teenagers can’t gang up on one drunken queen; if they do, a vigilante group forms and keeps the kids in line. The kind of place that just doesn’t exist except in a few spots: Fire Island, parts of San Francisco, Manhattan’s West Side.”

“But it’s all so underground. And the connections with crime, why that?”

Eric smiled. “Everything I do is a crime in this state. I live with a woman I’m not married to. I sleep with men and can be busted for sodomy. I take drugs, most of which are illegal. Everything I do is considered a crime, and I am a criminal. You, too. All of us. You tell me why gays have traditionally allied themselves with organized crime even when they knew they were getting ripped off. How were you treated by the police a few days ago?”

Noel didn’t have to be reminded of that.

“You see,” Eric said, taking Noel’s silence for assent. “And you’re a valued member of society: a university professor. You have to begin
there,
with the oppression, to understand why the gay subculture is the way it is, otherwise your book is going to be another crock of academic shit.”

“If that’s so, then change it, don’t reinforce it.”

“We’re trying to do that. What we are reinforcing is a common identity and shared interests so that gays don’t see themselves as abnormal criminals but as a justifiable minority. Through laws and politics we’ll move on. We’re only at these first steps, baby. The Mattachine Society is only twenty years old, you know.” Eric looked up sharply as Noel was about to speak. “Hold on. Looks like we have company.”

Noel followed his glance across the pool where Okku had led a burly, suntanned young stranger out onto the terrace.

Before Noel could get a good look at him, Eric shouted: “You’re one hour late, McWhitter.”

“You don’t look like you’re going anywhere.” The stranger walked alongside the rim of the pool toward them, Okku following.

As he advanced, Noel recognized him as the bouncer at a private discotheque in Southampton he and Eric and Alana had gone to the night before. Eric had talked to McWhitter at one point, buying him a drink during the bouncer’s break. At first, Noel had thought it was merely a pickup. The overmuscled, baby-faced, big-bodied McWhitter definitely looked as though he liked his action rough. But Eric had come home alone.

“That’s the second mistake you made so far, McWhitter,” Eric said in his most menacing manner, without moving an inch from his position on the float. “Care to try for number three?”

For a second, Noel thought McWhitter was going to jump into the pool and attack Eric. His features settled into a tight, prognathic grimness; his clear green eyes darkened suddenly, as though some protective opaque membrane had come instinctively down over them. His hands tensed at his sides. He said nothing, made no move for what seemed a long while, a looming presence at the poolside, until Eric broke the silence.

“I see you’re sulking. That’s mistake number three, McWhitter. Get lost.”

“You said you had a job for me.”

“I said to come at eleven o’clock to talk to me about a job. It’s past noon now. Get out.”

“You said you had a job.”

“Okku, throw him out,” Eric said, and began to turn over onto his stomach, at the same time paddling the water on one side to face the float toward the two men.

“What about my job?” McWhitter complained.

“Try sitting on it,” Eric suggested.

McWhitter looked back and forth between Eric and Okku, as though trying to make up his mind which to tear apart. Then, raising one fist high in the air, he charged right into the manservant.

The rest was very fast. Okku sidestepped him, spun around, grabbed McWhitter’s arm and shoulder, and threw him forward. McWhitter fell hard, but leaped up again as Okku came crashing down on him, feet first. McWhitter siderolled, rose, and catching Okku off balance, spun him off the ground like a corkscrew, punctuating it with a probing karate chop to Okku’s lower abdomen. Okku seemed to fall back in great pain, then suddenly jumped forward with two open-handed blows, one to McWhitter’s head, the other to his body. The bigger man dropped to his knees and seemed to grip Okku at the hips while the blows rained down on his neck and head and back. But in a second, Okku was up in the air, lifted by McWhitter and swung by his calves over the railing.