“Had an accident,” La Roche explained. “Gun went off in his mouth.” What disturbed Francine wasn’t so much the story of the suicide — she’d seen enough of those in her time— but the way Jay told it. He enjoyed it. A lot. And she knew what was bugging him about Lana. Though Francine had never met her, only knowing what she looked like from the photo he kept in the New York penthouse and from some of the old magazine photos of the wedding before the war, Francine figured it was Lana’s very resistance to La Roche that drew him to her. She was the only “piece of ass” next to his male secretary, La Roche had told Francine, who had been “stupid” enough to run away from him. By “stupid” Francine knew Jay meant Lana had been the only woman who’d had the guts to try to run from him. But to an ego like Jay’s, the very fact that somewhere in the world, in this case in Dutch Harbor, there was somebody — anybody, especially a woman — whom he couldn’t own “tit-to-toe” and “right through,” as he delicately put it, wasn’t merely galling, it was intolerable.
Now he was telling the stories of how he’d beaten Uncle Sam — how though he was the largest supplier of chemical warfare agents to the United States, he was also the sole supplier of GB, Sarin, and VX nerve gas to Asia. Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese — La Roche didn’t care who he sold it to, and when the Congress passed legislation forbidding U.S. citizens to trade with the enemy, La Roche’s army of lawyers had gone on the march, as he gloatingly explained it, finding, Jay boasted to Francine, “as many loopholes” as “chickens in a barnyard.”
If La Roche’s metaphors were mixed as he told the story, everyone on his private jet knew that “chickens” meant child prostitutes, of either sex, whom Jay frequently used as “dawn breakers.” Just as his lawyers had found a way out of Congress’s restrictive legislation by the use of “front” nonenemy Asian companies, primarily in Burma, through which to ship the poison-gas-producing liquids to Iraq, North Korea, and China, so too had the lawyers protected him from the slightest whiff of “chicken” scandal. The lawyers’ hands were strengthened by La Roche’s ownership of his tabloid chain in North America and western Europe. If a decent paper went up against La Roche, as his wife had once done when she told him she’d sue for divorce, they would soon find themselves, as she had, up against not only La Roche’s battery of experts but against threatened tabloid “exposes”, of their families. Lana had been so naive at first, La Roche boasted to Francine, that she actually believed that if the stories he’d threatened to publish about her parents weren’t true, the papers couldn’t print them.
“How about this for a headline?” he’d threatened her. “ ‘Retired Admiral Brentwood Denies He is Homosexual!’ “ Occasionally, he’d told Francine, “someone like that fool Hailey,” who couldn’t use his influence in Congress to have Lana transferred, would snuff it rather than have his family smeared across the tabloids. But usually it worked.
“That’s enough,” he said, pushing the hair dryer away, checking the back and sides of his lean, darkly handsome face in the mirror, pulling out his gold mouthwash nebulizer, squirting it, rolling his tongue around and showing off his immaculate white teeth.
As the plane began to descend, Francine’s sulkiness increased. Till now she’d been under the illusion that she was what he called his “number one pussy”—with all the lavish goodies and status that attached itself to the scrum of sycophants surrounding him.
“Moment we land in this burg,” he instructed his flunkies, “I want lots of pictures in that Army PX. You know the kind of crap — corporate sponsor visits to thank our boys and gals at the front.” The fasten seatbelts sign was on, but Jay ignored it. “You got it? La Roche Chemicals pays tribute to our brave boys wounded in battle. Pile it on. And Francine — keep your fanny off the corporate gifts there.” There was loud, raucous laughter. “And for Chrissake cross your legs. I don’t want to see your beaver all over the New York Times.” There were more loud guffaws.
“How about in the Investigator, Mr. La Roche?” It was one of the La Roche tabloids.
“Hey! Now you’re talking. Legs wide apart, Francine.” There was another snorting, snuffling run of laughter. Francine watched him as he bent low, slightly off balance, looking out the window. If she knew anything, he was on something — not booze, nothing you could smell. She’d seen him like it often enough — before he’d hand her the strap for her to play “Mommy.”
“Maybe Lana’s on duty?” someone said. La Roche turned around, his face thin stone. “Hey, joker. This little soiree I told you to fix up with our gallant boys in the sticks is costing me change. I told the army, the navy, the fucking air force I wanted to meet all the nurses. If she isn’t there, joker, I’m gonna throw someone outta the fucking plane.”
The laughter died.
After the Lear touched down on the rain-slashed runway, droplets streaming against the Perspex, the plane taxiing toward the small, but obviously busy, terminal, Francine saw a row of heavy khaki overcoats and navy blue uniforms. She recognized Lana before the plane came to a stop. You could spot her at once, Francine thought — one of those women who looked beautiful even if you draped them in a sack. Gorgeous figure that was flattered, not flattened, by the Navy Waves’ dark blue uniform. And the spiffy little white hat with the snappy upturned brim made Francine sick. And Lana’s dark hair — that was the last straw. Whipped with rain and it just sat there, full and behaving itself. Ten minutes in that weather and Francine knew her own hair would be a wet mop.
Francine slipped on her siren-red coat, but despite the cold she left enough of it open so there’d be no mistake about her cleavage. Hell, she had to do something. She followed Jay out. He shook hands with the base commander, but ignored the rest of the staff, particularly Lana, as he and his party were ushered into the waiting USO army cars. With Lana left back on the tarmac, Francine was starting to feel better already.
Colonel Rodin, the commanding officer of Dutch Harbor, loathed La Roche and his ilk, but he was a professional and he wasn’t a fool. La Roche had splashed a lot of money and publicity around — and God knew the men posted in “America’s Siberia” deserved a little attention. Besides, if La Roche wasn’t happy and leaned hard enough on the Alaska congressman for Dutch Harbor and environs, there was a very good chance the CO could find something he loathed even more than La Roche: pushing a pen back in Washington. Even so, he afforded La Roche professional military hospitality but no more.
After the photo session, during which a bunch of reporters from Anchorage, including a photographer and reporter from Stars and Stripes, got their shots of the multinational financier shaking the CO’s hand, Colonel Rodin excused himself. In the crowded PX he sought Lana out and told her that Washington had “requested” that they be as cooperative as possible to La Roche Chemicals, “a major military contractor.”
“I’d prefer not to, Colonel,” Lana said rather grimly.
“I understand, Lieutenant. I’m merely conveying Washington’s wishes. Tell you—” He hesitated but said it anyway. “None of my business but I don’t blame you. They don’t look my sort of people either. Must be at least six guys there of draft age.”
“Health exemptions,” Lana said knowingly. “Four-F.”
Colonel Rodin grunted. “I guess. Well, please yourself, Lieutenant. Whatever you do is okay by me. Walk out if you want.”
“Thank you, Colonel. I appreciate that.” But she knew she had to at least say hello or some toady back in Washington was going to get paid to complain to the Pentagon about Colonel Rodin’s unhelpfulness.