Jonas stood up to greet an auburn-haired woman who had literally trotted across the room to his table.
"Jonas, dah-ling!" she boomed in her all-but-patented smoky voice. "Back in town! And this is that mysterious son of yours who doesn't go where people go — which has deprived me of the pleasure of meeting him."
Jonas kissed her hand, then introduced her to Bat. "This is Tallulah Bankhead, in case you hadn't already figured that out."
"In the gossip columns again, naughty boy," she said, shaking her head. "Thank Gawd that wretched woman Lorena Pastor never found out about you and me!"
"Found out what, Tallulah?" Jonas asked, smiling and frowning at the same time.
"That we never did it!" She laughed. "That would have been a much more scandalous story than if we had." She turned to Bat. "Give me a ring, dah-ling. Come up to my place and play bridge sometime. Well ... ta-ta."
As she hurried back to her own table and Bat and Jonas sat down again, nearly every eye in the room was on them.
"Whatever you do, don't go to her apartment and play bridge with her," said Jonas.
"Any particular reason?"
"She takes off her clothes and plays bridge nude. Not always, just when the spirit moves her. She's casual about it, makes no big drama. She goes on playing bridge as if nothing were different. Sometimes it's embarrassing as hell — depending who's at the table with you. She did it in front of David Sarnoff one night. He's a man not easily embarrassed, but she took him completely unawares, and he began to cough and turned red, and I thought maybe he was having a heart attack."
"She mentioned the Lorena Pastor column," said Bat. "How did Angie react to that?"
"Angie's realistic," said Jonas. "And if your personal life is none of my business, mine's none of yours."
2
Angie loved the black Porsche that Jonas had given her for Christmas in 1952. The hotel garage kept it washed and waxed, and she liked to go for drives in the desert. She'd had it up to 125 miles per hour and had sensed it had more in it when she eased off on the accelerator. Once she'd been chased by a Nevada highway patrolman, and he had simply given up after a few miles. He was getting all he could out of his special police Ford, and she was opening more distance between them. He knew who she was and meant only to give her a warning anyway, so he pulled off the road, and when she passed him on her way back to town, he just blinked his lights, and she blinked hers playfully.
Usually she drove alone, though sometimes Jonas rode with her. Today Morris Chandler sat in the right seat.
"Haven't you got it figured out?" he asked her. "You can't trust him. Nobody can trust him."
"He can sleep with another woman if he wants to," said Angie, staring at the road, not glancing at Chandler. "He never said he wouldn't. He made no commitment of that kind."
"He's not a nice man," said Chandler. "Nevada Smith was a good man, a true friend. He asked me to take Jonas in to help him duck a subpoena, and the next thing I know he owns the hotel and I'm his employee. And so are you. And you're sleeping with him."
"He's been good to me," she said firmly.
"Yeah, but Jonas giveth and Jonas taketh away. Whatever you've got from him, he can take away any time he feels like it. You've got no security, honey. What are you, forty years old? His new girlfriend is barely twenty."
"Twenty-two," said Angie dryly. "Where you gonna be ten years from now?"
"What are you trying to say, Morris? Spit it out."
"I have friends who could do some very good things for you, Angie," said Chandler.
"Who are they? And why would they want to do anything for me?"
"Never mind who they are. They're the kind of people that, if you do something good for them, they'll take care of you for the rest of your life. Hell, that's what they've done for me. I'm gonna be seventy-six years old this year. If Jonas fired me, they'd take care of me. It's what you call loyalty."
"If I do 'something good for them,' huh? Just what do they have in mind?"
"They want information, that's all. Maybe copies of some papers."
"In other words, they want me to betray Jonas," she said coldly.
"The bastard has betrayed you!"
She shook her head. "No. He hasn't."
"Be realistic, Angie."
"The answer is no, Morris."
"Better think about somethin'. These guys I'm talking about are loyal and all that, but they're also the kind of guys you don't say no to. They have ways of getting what they want."
"That's a threat, I suppose."
"Angie, let's don't use bad words! You're being offered a good deal."
"The answer is no, Morris."
He sighed. "Jesus ... I suppose you'll tell Jonas about this conversation."
Angie shrugged.
3
Dr. Maxim was at the wheel of Maxim's III, taking the boat home at the end of a half day's fishing, during which nobody had caught anything but a bonito. Nobody was unhappy about that. They had come out to fish, but their real purpose, of getting to know each other better, had been accomplished.
Morgana Maxim had arranged the afternoon. As a prominent Democrat, she wanted to know all other prominent Democrats so far as possible and be influenced by personal judgment, not by what she read in the newspapers. Tanned and sun-bleached as always, she sat in the rear of the boat, relaxed and sipping from a gin and tonic.
Toni sat beside her stepmother, dressed almost identically in a red polo shirt and brief white shorts.
Sitting in one of the two fishing chairs, wearing tennis whites — shorts and shirt — with a Red Sox baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, smoking a small cigar, his face deeply wrinkled from squinting into the sun, was the man Morgana had wanted to meet: Senator Jack Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Senator Kennedy had barely failed to take the 1956 vice-presidential nomination away from the farcical Estes Kefauver, and it was widely supposed he would claim a spot on the 1960 Democratic ticket. He had only one hurdle to leap: reelection in Massachusetts in the fall.
Morgana had been impressed, as Toni had told her she would be. Toni had known Jack Kennedy from the time of his arrival in the Senate in 1953, when she was still an aide to Senator Holland. More recently she met with him from time to time as a political reporter for The Washington Post. She had learned to mimic his Boston-Harvard accent, and one time he had overheard her doing it. From that time, they counted each other as friends.
"You should hear Toni do me," he had said to Dr. and Morgana Maxim just after they came aboard the boat. "If I wanted to do a radio speech, I could let her do it, and I could take a day off."
Toni had laughed. "Let him explain to you that there's no such thing as a Harvard campus, just the 'Haa-v'd yaad,' " she had said. "Sometimes he takes his daag for a ride in the caa."
Kennedy had laughed heartily. "See? A little change in voice, and she could take my place at any microphone."
He had caught the bonito. They had tossed it back.
"Plans?" Morgana asked Kennedy.
He shrugged. "Life is short," he said. "Art is long. Who knows?"