Heloise and Bellinis (5 page)

Custer had just come back to the office after lunching on marvelous green cannelloni at Harry’s Bar. He had spent an amusing half-hour admiring Harry’s skill in preparing fifteen martinis at once. The cigar was an after-lunch gift from Arafat Jr., who was always well supplied with original Cuban products.

General Custer was at peace with himself. In a phone conversation a few minutes earlier, he had offered his condolences to the general in command of the Italian expeditionary corps, who was grieving because a missile had blown up his arsenal. Fortunately no one had been on guard at the time, so there were no casualties. Nice fellows those Italians, Custer thought, but they did take everything too seriously Custer was a Vietnam veteran and knew that what was essential in the military was to do only what was … essential. By following this rule he had become a highly respected officer, and what’s more, he was still alive after all those years at war.

There was a knock on the door. ‘‘Come in!” he said.

‘‘Lieutenant Eyland reporting, sir/”

He couldn’t stand this Ryland—a little chap with gold-rimmed glasses who looked like a bookkeeper— and forever fretted in disapproval of his work. Among other things, Ryland always picked the worst moment to arrive, and every time he appeared he brought bad news. It was Custer’s impression that Ryland wore an impassive expression on his face to mask the sadistic pleasure he took in announcing catastrophe.

“What is it?’ Custer asked impatiently.

“May I call in Private Tom Margitai? He has something interesting to report, General, sir.”

“What is it about?”

“Private George Smith.”

“They found him.”

“Eh?”

“Yes sir, General.”

“Alive?”

“Yes sir, General.”

“Wounded?”

“Seems not, sir.”

“Where is he now?”

“May I call Private Margitai in now, sir?”

“Come in!”

Tom came in followed by two military police.

“Who are you?” General Custer asked them.

“Sergeant Nobel and Sergeant Amundsen, sir.”

“Speak up.”

“We’re responsible for the jeeps in the vehicle pool, and- we noticed that Private Tom Margitai checked out five jeeps in less than a week.”

“What do you have to say for yourself?” the general asked Tom.

“Two of them blew up, sir, one had a flat, and I’m driving the fifth one, sir.”

“So, what’s the problem?” the general asked.

“The fourth jeep, sir,” Amundsen muttered.

“What fourth jeep?” It suddenly dawned on him then that one jeep was missing from Tom Margitai’s story “What happened to jeep number four?”

“1 lent it to Private George Smith,” Tom replied reluctantly. “He needed it.”

“When?”

The general started feeling a bit uncomfortable. Something seemed to be out of kilter.

“July twenty-eighth, sir.”

“But Smith died on July nineteenth!” Custer ex-

There were two possibilities, he thought. Either this Margitai was lying because he sold the jeep, or they had made one of the biggest blunders of the war.

He had received a sympathy telefax from the President the day before, and he himself had penned a handwritten letter to Smith’s aunt. If he was still alive, it could mean the end of Custer’s career and early pension.

“If youVe made this whole thing up, I’ll put you behind bars for the rest of your life!”

Tom swallowed with difficulty and then said, ‘T assure you, General, sir, I saw George Smith on July twenty-eighth near Harry’s Bar. He asked me for the jeep, and 1 gave it to him. I thought he was with military intelligence, so 1 didn’t ask any questions.”

“Was he alone?” the general asked,

“No sir.”

“Whom.was he with?”

“A woman.”

‘Ah!”

“A real looker, excuse me, sir.”

Custer remained silent for more than a minute, his head in his hands and his elbows resting on the table. Then he said: “Listen, Private Margitai. If you don’t bring Private George Smith back here within twenty-four hours, together with your goddam jeep and this beautiful girl, IT1 have you up for court martial on grand larceny Twenty years In jail, minimum. Now get out!”

“Yes sir, General, sir.”

Tom went out in the custody of Nobel and Amundsen.

“What are you looking at?” Custer yelled at Ryland.

Eyland clicked his heels and got out as fast as he could, leaving poor General Custer frowning with terrible thoughts.

The general suddenly stood up and went out, slamming the door behind him. He decided he would go to Suzy’s. She would console him. He got behind the wheel of the first jeep he found in the courtyard and roared past the guard, who disappeared in the dust he raised in passing.

Near the Avenue de la Liberté he got caught in a horrible traffic jam. He was stuck for half an hour trying to get rid of a gang of kids who wanted to trade him pistol bullets for chocolate bars. He finally reached the outskirts of Beirut and drove past a row of little houses on a little cedar-lined street. He drew up outside a little white villa, got out of the jeep, and rang the bell. Suzy opened the door. She had come from the swimming pool behind the house and was wearing a beach robe. A large breast, still moist, was visible between its pink lapels. They embraced, and Suzy asked, “Whafs the matter, General? You look depressed/”

He took her arm and drew her into the garden.

John Custer sank into a cane chair and said, “Get me a whiskey sour, will you?”

Suzy prepared a giant whiskey sour with lots of ice, sat down beside him, and softly caressed his head. She listened patiently to the whole story that threatened to blow up in his face.

END OF CHAPTER SEVEN

Dear Abelard,

You’ll have to admit that the reason I’ve got you to read this far is mainly your indolence, not to mention how irresistibly you are drawn by the subtle fascination of investigating, imagining, and reading any detail concerning what is ultimately the subject nearest to your heart: in a word, sex. But I have already told you that this sort of intimate detail was rarely if ever included in what I was told.

I can assure you, however, that George and Heloise—at least so I was told—made love practically every time they had a chance, which is to say any time they were alone long enough to attend to the almost spasmodic attraction that constantly brought them together.

That is all I can tell you for now. Besides, I am sure that their relations involved the normal abnormalities of normal love affairs. And I consider it pointless to discuss that sort ofthing. I have never understood, for example, the point of basing the main theme of a film plot on the extremely boring and banal sexual performance of an aging Marlon Brando with a little brunette whose big hairy pubic triangle is easier for me to remember than her name. The movie was called
Last Tango in Paris
for purely contingent reasons, to make it seem Art Deco. Ill tell you quite frankly that I am afraid I actually missed what everyone told me was the most interesting scene, the butter scene, because I fell fast asleep right after the first exhausting carnal encounter, when Marlon Brando, who shouldn’t have been subjected to that kind of stress at his age, made love standing up in his raincoat with the little brunette, who still had her fur coat on.

So there you have it. There are some things I prefer not to write about, though if anyone who lives for sex or earns a living from it should read this book and be curious to learn the details of what George and Heloise actually did together, I might be willing to oblige him— but only orally, just to teach him a thing or two that would convince him at once that the least he should do is change his business.

Getting back to the origin of Harry’s Bar—even you have probably read that it was founded in Venice in 1931 by Giuseppe Cipriani, that he was my father, and that he was a genius in his line. And he probably would have been a genius in any other line he might have gone into, but he was not a genius in that particular field of endeavor known as high finance—anything but. It is true that I too, for example, am clearly a product of one kind of genius he had, because if he hadn’t had a son, Harry’s Bar would not have continued to exist, at least not in the same way we are trying to run it. It would have become one more imitation of all the poor imita-tions there are around the world. As his son 1 should naturally have turned out to be the opposite of him; that is to say, I should have at least had a talent for being either very poor or very rich. This is the quality that, especially in recent years, has distinguished the igure of every honest and dishonest financier alike.

Instead, at least so far, I don’t think there has been any substantial change in what I have.

What I am trying to tell you is that every partner our family has ever had has always cheated us in a very partnerly fashion—except for Harry Pickering, the man who financed Harry’s Bar at the start. That was after he repaid a loan my father had given him after the crash in 1929, a loan without any collateral or guarantee, offered so that Pickering could get back to America.

Let me give you one example: my own. For many years I was an unpaid employee of my father’s partners, and the only tangible recompense I received in the end was a fly-fishing rod manufactured by Hardy, the famous English company. The rod was made of Holy-coona, a material that is only slightly less expensive than Palakoona, and I tried in vain to sell it for the modest sum of $100,000, which is what I thought I deserved for ten years of honest work. What irritated me most in the whole business is that, instead of giving me the finest rod available, they gave me one that when you take a close look is really quite mediocre.

But don’t let that surprise you, because this kind of behavior was part and parcel of the modus operandi of the people who became my father’s partners when he built the hotel on the Giudecca island in Venice. To give you another example: One of the lady partners decided to build herself a yacht designed by a great English marine architect. It seemed a little expensive, even if she was a millionaire, so she gave orders for it to be shortened a few feet to save a hundred thousand dollars or so. This made the yacht too short for the high seas, and every time she crossed the ocean there was a serious risk of sinking.

I also remember that this lady took a personal interest in provisioning the crew before every cruise, usually in the company of her second husband, an aging Czech gigolo and former RAF pilot. They would question me very carefully about the price of bottled beer, for example. They always preferred the brands that gave a deposit back to the slightly more expensive no-return brands. And they never ordered more than twenty bottles or so at a time, with a saving of maybe a couple of dollars. She thought very highly of me as a specialist in writing telegrams, because I often saved her a few words without changing the meaning of the messages. I have met a lot of poor people in my life, including you, the poorest of them all, but nobody whose poverty was worse than that of a great many rich people.

END OF THE INTERMEZZO BETWEEN CHAPTERS SEVEN AND EIGHT

Suzy fixed herself a glass full of gin and tonic and sat on a small sofa by the general.

“So George Smith is alive?”

‘Apparently alive and kicking.”

“Where has he been all this time?”

“With some woman/”

“Where?”

“I don’t know/”

Suzy suddenly broke out in the silvery laugh that had so often put him in a good humor. This time, however, it did not remove the worried expression from his face.

“So he’s really not dead!”

“No,” he replied gloomily.

“Not even wounded?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do now?” Suzy asked.

“Hm. IVe got to think. In any case, we’ve got to find him. Then well see.”

“You mean, you still don’t know where he is?”

“No.”

“Who’s looking for him?”

“Ryland.”

“Oh Lord!”

“Exactly!”

Custer gulped down the rest of his whiskey sour. Suzy got up to fix him another. She thought he needed it. She came back and, handing it to him, said, “Darling!”

Suzy was wonderful. Custer always remembered the day she first knocked on the door of his office. He had said, “Yes,” and she poked her head around the half-open door and asked, “May I come in?”

A vision, he thought. Maybe he was hallucinating. Then when she was all the way into the room, and he had taken in the rest of that marvelous body, he was moved to stand up. Hats off to beauty! And the senses!

He asked: “Whom do 1 have the pleasure … ?”

“The pleasure and honor are all mine, General Custer. I’m your new secretary. My name is Suzanne Sweet.” Two hours later they were at her house sipping whiskey at poolside. He did not go back to headquarters until the following day

He had heard all kinds of things about her. She had been to bed with almost everyone in the United States Army She did, however, have one great gift. When you were with her, she made you forget the past at once, and you felt that as far as she was concerned, you were the only man in the whole world. A splendid creature.

He called her the faithless faithful Suzanne. As long as you blotted out the constant suspicion of betrayal, you could be perfectly happy with her. And he was— when he wasn’t overwhelmed by devastating waves of jealousy

“Darling!” Suzy had said. And at that moment he was sure that her love was true, and that she truly understood him.

“I have to get back to headquarters.” Custer said,

“I’ll come too.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks for what? This is when you really need a secretary!”

She dressed quickly in front of him. While he looked at her naked body, he thought of the prudish-ness of his wife, a Swiss woman he hadn’t once in all their years seen with her girdle off. He silently cursed Ryland and tenderly kissed Suzy’s cheek as they walked to the door.