Tucker recalled the night that, watching a two-hour network special sponsored by a soap company, they saw three commercials featuring Elise, played three times each, which had earned her an additional five hundred and forty dollars under the residuals clause in her contract. Most weeks, she averaged between a thousand and two thousand dollars as one of the most popular current commercial faces, all of it from work already finished and on the air weeks before; and when she worked on a new one, she doubled that particular week's take with her initial payment. It almost seemed to Tucker that he should give up a life of crime and start hawking toothpaste.
He finished his Scotch, stood up and put the glass on the stand. He looked at her and said, "Do you feel like practicing?"
"Practicing what?" she asked.
"The pickle commercial, of course."
Much later, finished with that practice and a number of others, having eaten a late dinner and practiced some more and having fallen asleep together in the big bed in the front room, Tucker woke, his heart beating like a sledge driven against an iron block, the rhythm ringing along his bones. He had been frightened by some nightmare that he could not recall, and he reached out and touched Elise's warm, bare buttocks, concentrated on her until he could see her lines draped across with sheeting. As her nearness sank in, as he realized he was not alone, his heart slowed and his mouth grew moist again, the fear subsiding. In a moment he was even able to remember what the nightmare had been about: his father.
Even for the president of a Fifth Avenue bank, Mr. Mellio's office was too rich, paneled in too much teak, carpeted in too deep a pile, furnished in much too luxurious a style. The painting behind his desk was clearly an original Klee, and even though it was surely on loan from the bank's investment art collection and had not been purchased solely for Mr. Mellio, it gave you the feeling that these people were not managing your money very properly and were, in fact, almost throwing it away on personal aggrandizement, baubles and unnecessary luxuries.
Mr. Mellio himself, however, countered this impression so completely that you could almost forget entirely about the riches of the room and about the fate of your fortune. He radiated confidence and ability. He was a tall, wide-shouldered man, and he would have fit right into an early John Wayne movie as one of those non-speaking cowpokes who step forward to stand behind the Duke, grim-lipped and resolute in the name of good and honor. At fifty his hair was more white than brown, full enough to be combed over the tips of his ears but certainly not mod. His face was blocky, with a slab of a forehead, rocky cheekbones, a stiff straight nose, a chin like an expertly carved piece of granite. He thrust that chin forward and offered Tucker his hand. The hand was enormous and applied just enough pressure to avoid the extremes of a fish shake and a bone crusher. Like the handshake, everything that Mr. Mellio did seemed planned; you had the feeling he didn't take a breath until he had assessed the need for it. Despite the decor of the room he worked in, such a man would handle money as a priest handled the Eucharist.
"How have you been?" Mr. Mellio asked, taking his seat behind the huge, dark, uncluttered desk. "I haven't seen you in-let's see-"
"Eight and a half months," Tucker said. "Not since the last time I had you and my father in court."
Mr. Mellio grimaced, smiled through capped teeth and said, "Yes, of course, an unfortunate afternoon."
"For me," Tucker agreed.
"For all of us, especially your father," Mellio said. "You know, Michael, he doesn't want to fight with you over this thing. It grieves him terribly to-"
"My father never grieved over anything, Mr. Mellio, least of all his son." He tried to say it without emotion, calm and easy as if he were merely reading something from a textbook, something indisputable. He thought that he succeeded.
"Your father does care about you, Michael, cares more than you-"
Tucker raised a hand and waved the words away. He said, "If he cares so goddamned much, why doesn't he turn over my inheritance? It would make things a good deal easier for me."
Mr. Mellio looked pained, like a loving father who has to teach an unpleasant lesson to a child. He leaned back in his chair, Klee looming behind him, and said, "Your mother's will specifically stated that your father was to remain the director of your trust until such a time as you matured to the point where you could handle the funds yourself."
"Until such a time as he felt I had matured," Tucker corrected. "He weaseled that out of my mother when she was sick, very sick, two weeks before she died."
"You pretend as if your father attempted to gain control of your inheritance to enrich his own estate. In the face of his own considerable wealth, that's absurd."
"I pretend no such thing," Tucker said. "He gained control of my inheritance in an attempt to gain control of me, but he lost the bet."
"Michael," Mellio said, leaning forward now, propping both elbows on the top of the desk, putting his chin in his hands, trying to look somewhat pixie-like, failing miserably in that, "you could see your father. You could make amends. I'm sure that, if you tried to work things out between the two of you, he'd soon turn the estate over into your hands."
"Fat chance," Tucker said. "Perhaps after I'd been a faithful toady for eight or ten years, he'd give me what I want. I don't wish to give up that much time to a corrupt, selfish old man."
"Michael, he is your father!"
Tucker leaned forward in his own chair now, his face slightly flushed. "Mr. Mellio, when I was a child I saw my father on the average of twice a week, for an hour each time. Once was at Sunday dinner when I was permitted to dine with the adults, the other was on Wednesday night when he quizzed me on my previous week's lessons. I was learning French and German before grade school, from a nanny who doubled as my instructor, and my father wanted to be certain that he was getting his money's worth. For a period of eighteen months, when I was twelve and thirteen, I saw my father not at all, because he was consolidating his European ventures then. My secondary schooling was at a boarding school considerably farther away from home than my first military academy had been. I saw my father at Christmas for a couple of hours. By the time I was in college, I stayed away from home on purpose. That's how much he's my father. Christ, Mr. Mellio, I don't even know the man."
Mellio said nothing.
Tucker said, "I early decided that the last thing I wanted to be was like my father. If having money meant you had to spend all of your time shepherding it and none of your time enjoying life, then money wasn't for me at all." He leaned back in his chair now, the intensity of his voice sliding away. "Money, to me, is to be spent. That appalled the old man, and it was because he found that I was unamenable that he got that clause in my mother's will. He wanted me to be an empire builder like himself. Life's too short, however, to waste in a series of boardrooms."
"To have money you must make money," Mr. Mellio said, as if he were reading the sentence from a lacquered wall plaque. "A fortune can be squandered quickly, Michael. Even one the size of your inheritance-or the much greater size of your father's estate."
"My mother left three million dollars, give or take a few thousand in small change. Even invested at a paltry six percent in tax-free bonds, that earns back a hundred and eighty thousand a year. I could live with that very nicely, Mr. Mellio."
"Your father believes you couldn't, that you'd start nibbling away at the principal."
"My father doesn't give a damn about that," Tucker said. "He simply wants me under hand so he can mold another corporate mastermind. In the next step of the court tests, or the step after that, a judge is going to agree with me. He can't continue to pay off every court official who comes up. One of them is going to be honest, especially the higher the courts get."