The Power Of The Dog (18 page)

Haley wants her women to stand out.

And they’re always fully dressed. Never in lingerie or robes—Haley’s not running some cheap Nevada mustang ranch. She’s been known to costume the women in turtlenecks, in business suits, in basic little black frocks, in gowns. She dresses her women in clothes that the men can imagine removing. And she makes them wait to do that.

They have to jump through hoops, even at the White House.

On the walls hang black-and-white renditions of goddesses: Aphrodite, Nike, Venus, Hedy Lamarr, Sally Rand, Marilyn Monroe. Nora finds the pictures intriguing, especially the one of Monroe, because they look a little alike.

No kidding, they do, Haley thinks.

She’s billing Nora as a young Monroe without the body fat.

Nora’s nervous. She’s staring into a video monitor of the sitting room, looking at this party of clients, one of whom is going to be her first professional lay. She hasn’t had sex in a year and a half anyway, and she’s not even sure she remembers how to do it, never mind do it five hundred bucks’ worth. So she’s hoping she gets this one, the tall, dark, shy one, and it does seem that Haley is trying to steer things in that direction.

“Nervous?” Joyce asks her. Joyce is her polar opposite, a flat-chested gamine in a 1950s Paris outfit—Gigi as whore—who’s been helping with her makeup and clothes, an open-neck black blouse over a black skirt.

“Yes.”

“Everyone is the first time,” Joyce says. “Then it gets to be routine.”

Nora keeps looking at the four men sitting awkwardly on the big sofa. They look young, only in their mid-twenties, but they don’t look like rich spoiled college kids, and she wonders how they got the money to come here. How they got here at all.

Callan wonders the same thing.

Like, what the hell are we doing here?

Big Paulie Calabrese would shit blood if he knew Jimmy Peaches was out here connecting the pipeline that will suck cocaine like a giant straw from Colombia through Mexico and on to the West Side.

“Will you relax?” Peaches says. “I set a place for you at the table, will you fucking sit down and eat?”

“ ‘You deal, you die,’ ” Callan reminds him. “That’s what Calabrese said.”

“Yeah, ‘You deal, you die,’ ” Jimmy says. “But if we don’t deal, we starve. Is fuckin’ Paulie giving us a taste of the unions? No. The kickbacks? No. Trucking? Construction? No. Fuck him. Let him give me a taste of those businesses and then he can tell me don’t deal. In the meantime, I deal.”

The doors haven’t shut on the bellhops’ behinds and Peaches says he wants to go to this cathouse he’s heard about.

Callan’s not into it.

“We flew three thousand miles to get laid?” he asks. “We can get laid at home.”

“Not like this we can’t,” Peaches says. “They say they got the best pussy in the world at this place.”

“Sex is sex,” Callan says.

“What do you know about it?” Peaches asks. “You’re Irish.”

It’s not like Callan ain’t tempted here, it’s just that this was supposed to be a business trip, and when it comes to business Callan is just that—business. Tough enough keeping the Brothers Piccone from stepping on their own dicks on the job, never mind when they’re dogging women.

So he says, “I thought this was a business trip.”

“Jesus, will you lighten up?” Peaches says. “You’re gonna die, on your headstone it’s gonna say you never had no fun. We’ll get laid, we’ll do business. We might even take a minute to get a meal if that’s okay with you. I hear they got great seafood here.”

Yeah, this is real smart of Peaches, Callan thinks. Looking out the window at nothing but ocean, he figures someone out here might have figured out how to cook a fish.

“You’re a grim bastard, you know that?” Peaches adds.

Yeah, I’m a grim bastard, Callan thinks. I’ve punched what, five guys’ tickets for the Ciminos, Peaches tells me I’m a grim bastard.

“Who gave you the number?” Callan asks. He doesn’t like it. Peaches calls this number, some bimbo tells him, Sure, come over, they get to some warehouse where all that’s waiting for them is a shit storm.

“Sal Scachi gave me the number, all right?” Peaches says. “You know Sal.”

“I don’t know,” Callan says. If Calabrese’s gonna hit them over this drug deal, it would be Scachi who’d set it up.

“Will you relax?” Peaches says. “You’re starting to make me nervous.”

“Good.”

“ ‘Good.’ He wants me to be nervous.”

“I want you to be alive.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Callan, I do.” Peaches reaches over, grabs Callan by the back of the head and kisses him on the cheek. “There, now you can go tell the priest you committed a homosexual act with a guinea. I love ya, ya mick bastard. I’m telling you, tonight’s strictly pleasure.”

Nevertheless, Callan straps on his silenced .22 before they go out. They pull up to the White House and a minute later they’re all standing in the foyer just gawking.

Callan figures to drink a beer, then stand back and keep an eye on things. If anyone’s scheming to take Peaches off the count they’ll wait until Jimmy’s humping away and then put one in the back of his head. So Callan’s going to drink his beer, grab O-Bop and set up some kind of security. Of course, O-Bop will tell him to fuck off, he wants to get laid, so security is going to be pretty much Callan’s job. So he sips on his beer as Haley sets several black three-ring binders on the glass coffee table.

“We have a number of ladies here tonight,” she says, opening a binder. Each page has an 8x10 black-and-white glossy photograph in a plastic sleeve, with smaller, full-body poses on the reverse side. Haley’s not about to parade her women out like a livestock auction. No, this is classy, dignified, and it serves to fire the men’s imaginations.

“Knowing these ladies as I do,” she says, “I’ll be happy to assist you in making an appropriate match.”

After the other men have made their selections, she sits next to Callan, notices that he’s fixated on Nora’s head shot and whispers in his ear, “Her eyes could make you come.” Callan blushes to his toes.

“Would you like to meet her?” Haley asks.

He manages a nod.

Turns out that he would.

And he falls instantly in love.

Nora comes into the room, looks at him with those eyes. He feels a charge that goes from his heart to his groin and back again, and by the time it does he’s a goner. He’s never seen anything so beautiful in his life. The thought that something—someone—so lovely could be his even for a little while is something he didn’t think was possible in his life. Now it’s imminent.

He swallows hard.

For her part, she’s relieved it’s him.

He’s not bad-looking, and he doesn’t look mean.

She puts out her hand and smiles.

“I’m Nora.”

“Callan.”

“Do you have a first name, Callan?” she asks.

“Sean.”

“Hello, Sean.”

Haley’s beaming at them like a yenta. She wanted the shy one for Nora’s first time out, so she manipulated the others to select the more experienced women. Now everyone’s paired off into the couples she wanted, standing and chatting, getting ready to go to the rooms. She slips out back to her office so she can phone Adán and tell him his customers are having a good time.

“I’ll take care of the bill,” Adán tells her.

It’s nothing. It’s tip money compared to the business the Piccone brothers could bring him. Adán can sell a lot of cocaine in California. He has plenty of customers in San Diego and L.A. But the New York market would be enormous. To put his product onto the streets of New York through the Cimino distribution network … well, Jimmy Peaches can have all the whores he wants, on the house.

Adán doesn’t come to the White House anymore. Not as a customer, anyway. Bedding even high-class call girls doesn’t fit his persona as a serious businessman.

Besides, he’s in love.

Lucía Vivanca is the daughter of a middle-class family. Born in the USA, she’s “won the Daily Double,” as Raúl puts it; that is, she has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Only recently graduated from Our Lady of Peace High School in San Diego, she’s living with an older sister and taking classes at San Diego State.

And she’s a beauty.

Petite, with natural blond hair against striking dark eyes, and a trim little figure that Raúl obscenely comments upon at every opportunity.

“Those chupas, brother,” he says, “poking out of that blouse. You could cut yourself on them. Too bad she’s a chiflona.”

She’s not a cocktease, Adán thinks, she’s a lady. Well-bred, cultured, educated by nuns. Still, he has to admit that he’s frustrated after countless wrestling matches in the front seat of his parked car, or on the sofa of her sister’s apartment the rare times the watchful bruja gives them a few minutes alone.

Lucía will just not give it up, not until they’re married.

And I don’t have the money to get married yet, Adán thinks. Not to a lady like Lucía.

“You’d be doing her a favor,” Raúl argues, “by going with a whore. Not putting all that pressure on her. In fact, you owe it to Lucía to go to the White House. Your morality is a selfish indulgence.”

Raúl certainly isn’t selfish in that regard, Adán thinks. His generosity is more than abundant. My brother, Adán thinks, hits the White House the way a restaurant cook raids the pantry and eats up all the profits.

“It’s my giving nature,” Raúl says. “What can I say? I’m a people person.”

“Keep your giving nature in your pants tonight,” Adán says to him now. “Tonight is about business.”

He hopes things are going well at the White House.

“Would you like a drink?” Callan asks Nora.

“A grapefruit juice?”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t drink,” Nora says.

He has no clue what to do or say, so he just stands there, staring at her.

She stares back at him, surprised. Not so much by what she feels, but by what she doesn’t feel.

Contempt.

She can’t seem to work up any contempt.

“Sean?”

“Yeah?”

“I have a room here. Would you like to go?”

He’s grateful to her for cutting through the bullshit. Keep him from standing there feeling like a jerk.

Hell yes I want to go, he thinks. I want to go up there and take off your clothes and touch you everywhere and be inside you and then I want to take you home. Take you back to the Kitchen and treat you like the Queen of the West Side and have you be the first thing I see when I get up in the morning and the last thing I see at night.

“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

She smiles and takes his hand and they are turning to go upstairs when Peaches’ voice comes across the room.

“Yo, Callan!”

Callan turns to see him standing in the corner beside a small woman with short black hair.

“Yeah?”