The Secret (2 page)

Fat chance!

He was what he thought a boarding-school academic should be: tweedy, toady, and chummy.

He was also a fairy, as we then called them—something the naively straight Dr. Billings did not suspect.

Brad was nervous. He glanced up and down the hall before he entered my room.

Brad was a handsome blond guy. If I saw him today I’d write him off in an instant. Not because he was a fag. Because he was a professional failure.

He was wearing a robe and slippers and pajamas. He was the proctor on my floor in the dorm.

As a proctor he was entitled to administer minor punishment—meaning he could paddle us. Which he did, often. He was proud of the fraternity paddle he had brought from college. I remember it well. It bore the Greek letters—

Δϒ

—of which he was, for some unfathomable reason, proud.

Anyway, he loved to use it, and he never used it on anything but a bare ass.

He’d take us to his room, order us to take down our pants and underpants, and have us grasp our knees with our hands. With our cheeks in the air and our balls and pricks in view, he would walk around us and lecture us on the advantages of upright conduct and the penalties that awaited the unrighteous. Three or four whacks followed. He never hit hard. We would dutifully sob and whimper. Then we had to stand and face him with hangdog expressions, with our clothes around our ankles, and promise to be better boys in future.

Not one of us above the age of ten failed to understand the true meaning of these sessions. That he did it to boys as young as eight told us something.

“My poor boy!” he whispered hoarsely as soon as he was inside the VIP suite and I had closed the door.

I knew what was coming. The only question for me was would I resist it?

“I brought you something,” he said. “You must never tell anyone about it.”

From the pocket of his robe he took a flask of brandy. He screwed off the cap, and I took the first swig of brandy I had ever tasted. I think he was surprised. In the past I’d swigged Scotch and bourbon and gin, and the brandy did not make me choke or turn red in the face.

“Feel better?” he asked.

I surprised him again. I tipped back the flask and slugged down about half of what he’d brought.

Well … what then? What to be expected?

As I said, he was tweedy, toady, and chummy. He explained to me he was going to do something for me because he was my friend and wanted to comfort me. He was bigger than I was and led me rather firmly to my bed. He shoved down my pajama pants, shoved me back on the bed, and took my half-erect dick into his mouth.

I was fourteen. His educated tongue ran around and around my eager glans, he sucked, and he needed only minutes to bring me to raging spasms of ejaculation. I filled his mouth, apparently, because my come ran down his chin.

Oh, more ignorant than that. He wiped his chin on his pajama shirt and said, “Now you do it for me, Len. That’s how it goes. Two guys. One does it for one, then the other does it—I mean, that’s the way it goes: total friendship, one man for another.”

“Forget that,” I interrupted.

“You can’t say that to me! I’ve already done it for you. You
can’t
refuse me!”

“The hell I can’t. How do you think Dr. Billings would—?”

“He wouldn’t believe you! You little piece of shit, you think you can—?”

“My father will be here tomorrow or the next day,” I said. “You want to argue it out with Jerry Cooper?”

He ran the back of his hand over his mouth, wiping off more of my come; or maybe not, maybe he imagined it was there. His eyes bugged. He shook his head.

“You don’t need me to make you come, Brad,” I said. “You get it off pounding some poor kid’s bare ass. Well … you can forget that with me. Never again. I may want you to suck me off once in a while, now that I know you do it. When I want you, I’ll let you know. But don’t expect me to take your cock in
my
mouth.”

I got away with it. I didn’t know what my father would have said or done. Neither did Brad. But he would take no chances.

That’s the way it is, always. Some have got guts. Most don’t.

3

JERRY

When Uncle Harry handed me the cashier’s check for two million dollars, he was a happy man. He figured he’d fucked me. Again.

It was nothing personal. Uncle Harry fucked everybody. Everybody he did business with. People he worked for, people who worked for him especially; Uncle Harry fucked them all. He might have been a bigger man if he hadn’t been so blatant about it.

That I was family gave him more satisfaction, not less.

To start with, he fucked me out of what my father had left me. He even fucked me out of the life insurance. When my Aunt Lila died, Uncle Harry married my girl—whom he’d been fucking in the other sense for some time—and encouraged her to screw me out of the little bit of money I’d let her deposit into her account for me.

He fucked the Kastenbergs, Fat Rita and her brother, out of their seltzer-water bottling business. In the process he fucked me out of a little money I’d invested with them.

Hey, I was no innocent, always getting fucked. My father had been a numbers runner, and Uncle Harry ran a numbers store and a bookie besides. I was a hustler from the word go. What else could I be? I worked for Harry. I fucked him a little. He fucked me big-time.

While I was away in the army, first in Detroit, then in Paris, he got himself affiliated with the Carlino family. He was not a Sicilian, though, and to the Honored Society that fucked him. He was a condemned small-timer.

I’m a veteran, I was in the war, but I never saw or heard a shot fired in anger. In Paris in ’44 and ’45 I cooperated with a hustler colonel in a small-time racket that made both of us good money. It was then that I met Paul Renard, who introduced me to the great love of my life: the beautiful, then-seventeen-year-old Giselle. She was a nude dancer, but she was not a hooker, not a bar girl. It seems odd to say, maybe, but a nude dancer can remain entirely innocent.

I stayed in France after the war with my darling Giselle, and spent months and years learning the ins and outs of the French spring-water business.

Hey! There was a day, once, when if you wanted a bucket of Plescassier water, you just walked over to the spring and dipped it out. I suppose it was the same with Perrier and Evian.

Promotion was what made spring water as pricey as wine. I saw the opportunity to import it into the States. Perrier and Evian would, and Plescassier could.

We tried twice. Once in New York. Once in L.A. Each time we were screwed by … oh, all kinds of things, chiefly union problems, dock theft, and once by straight muscle applied to our vendors, threatening death if they continued to sell Plescassier water.

It took me a little time to figure this out, but the problem was, once more, Uncle Harry. He’d stolen the Kastenbergs’ seltzer-water business, and knew something about selling designer water.

Finally I had a chance to fuck Uncle Harry—and fuck him good. I sold him my company, Plescassier America, for two million dollars. Plescassier America had just one valuable asset: its contract with the Martin family to sell the water to us. I assigned that contract to him.

Only Uncle Harry didn’t understand one thing. Under French law that contract bound the Martins only, not their successors if they sold the company. And they were selling the company. The buyer would not be in the least bound by the Martins’ contract.

Uncle Harry paid me two million dollars for nothing. Worse for him, it wasn’t his money. It was the Carlinos’ money. When the Carlinos figured it out that Uncle Harry had been screwed out of
their
two mill, they put muscle on him for the money, out of his own pocket. He had it and paid it, but it ruined him.

Uncle Harry never recovered. The Five Families scorned him more than ever after that. They never trusted him again. He was a small-time punk once more, just like he’d been when he stole my inheritance. There is something like justice in this world.

I’d got him good. And the best part of it was, Uncle Harry knew it.

Actually, that was the second-best part. I was not yet forty and had two million dollars. What could I buy with two million dollars? I would have a little problem with that.

I got a summons, one I had expected. I was to meet Frank Costello for lunch, again in the Norse Room at the Waldorf, again at twelve-thirty. People who never met Frank Costello personally remember a raspy-voiced witness taking the Fifth before the Kefauver Committee and think of him as a menacing mafioso, like Lucky Luciano. In fact, Costello disliked violence and was known to Cosa Nostra as a conciliator. He was a rather good-looking man, black hair, a tan.

“Sit down, Jerry,” he said. He was always one who went straight to the point. “Somebody tried to do us dirt,” he said.

“I know. They were gonna do me dirt. I didn’t know it, but they had it all figured. They knew when they sold Plescassier, its contract to sell water to Plescassier America would be null and void. But I swear to you, Mr. Costello, I didn’t know that.”

I’d never lied so skillfully in my life. I’d never had so much at stake in a lie. I didn’t have to wait to hear what he said to know he believed me. I could see he believed me.

“I’ve got a cashier’s check for the two million, made out to you,” I said to him.

Costello shook his head. “We got the two mill off your uncle.” Then he shrugged. “You wanta hand the money to Harry, that’s your business.
We
don’t need to double up.”

I smiled. “I don’t think I’ll offer it to Uncle Harry. He owes me that much, all things considered.”

Costello laughed. “Didn’t figure you would. Harry’s a small-time grifter from the word go.”

“Exactly.”

“Which you’re not,” said Costello. “That two million ought to set you up in something good. I have an idea you’ll come up with something. When you do, let me know. Partners can do a lot better than a guy working alone.”

There was the problem I’d figured would come. Partners. An affiliation, whether I wanted it or not.

“Uhh … this French guy … Jean Pierre Martin. Was he giving us a screwing all along?”

“Hard to say,” I lied.

Costello fastened on me a look of amused skepticism. “I hear he married your girl.”

I nodded. “He did that.”

“I hear he’s a fairy.”

Again, I nodded.

“A Frog fairy mixed up in a scheme to screw us, who’s already screwed you. I’ll have to pass the word along.”

I didn’t really guess the significance of that. I should have. I was still naive.

4

Having the two million dollars was fine. But it was nothing compared to what I wanted much, much more. Giselle. My darling Giselle. I had to endure for a long time, and then …

Giselle was the mother of my son, Len.

But almost wasn’t.

I arrived in Paris shortly after it was liberated and immediately became involved in the kind of racket that hustlers like me always found. Briefly said, because this is history, the army had scores of thousands of Jeeps in Europe. When a vehicle became too badly damaged to be repaired, the army would authorize its destruction. But if you had enough of these Jeeps, plus skilled mechanics, you could salvage parts from them and build a few serviceable Jeeps. Which you could sell for good money. The French automobile industry was down and would be a long time recovering, and the French wanted cars. Jeeps were perfect for them. They were rugged, dependable, and burned little gas. Europeans thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, no, since that was a cliché that Europeans didn’t know and didn’t use.

Because I’d lost an eardrum somewhere along my way, I was disqualified for combat service. That’s why the army made a mechanic out of a dumb New York kid who’d known nothing about machinery. And I, with some others, built a profitable business out of scrounging parts from damaged Jeeps and making condemned Jeeps run. The business involved little risk and very respectable profit.

Of course, it did involve certain problems, chiefly officers. I learned a new level of corruption. Officers, when they found out about this illegal racket, did not want to prosecute; what they wanted was a share. Pretty soon I was sharing too much, but it kept me in business. I made less and less but still did all right.

I learned, too, that the Corsicans were the most dangerous mob in the world. Even the Mafia was afraid of them. And still is.

Other guys ran crap games, smuggled, forged orders, and did a whole lot of other things. Some guys actually fought the war.

In connection with my business I met a man named Paul Renard, a Corsican hustler, who was the proprietor of a sex club on Montmartre. Giselle was a stripper there. She was not involved in the S-M things that went on in that club, and she was not for sale. She just stripped and danced nude.

As an American I was naive about these things. When I say Giselle danced nude, I mean she danced
naked,
one hundred percent, stark, staring naked, without even shoes. It was not so much a strip—she came out wearing a little but soon rid herself of that little—as it was simply a nude dance. Not under dim lights. Not under colored lights. Her dance was so completely naked and so completely bold that it was innocent.

And she was an
angel!
She was beautiful!
God,
I had never seen such beauty. And—I had never before been, and would never again be, so fascinated with a woman, so drawn to her.

Well … My good fortune. I was working with Renard in the Jeeps business. He owned the club. He introduced me to Giselle. More than introduced. He suggested we should become a pair. He owned an apartment we could share, for rent a little high for either of us but not high at all for us together.

We shared that homey apartment, simply as a practical matter at first; then, shortly, we were in love. I couldn’t help myself about that. The French are an eminently practical people, and maybe she could have stayed out of love. But she didn’t.

Through Renard I also met the Martin family, whose fortune was the mineral-water spring that produced Plescassier water. Generation after generation, the Martin men were homosexual. They married women only as much as needed to generate the heirs that were necessary to keep the family going. Otherwise, they were strictly homo. The Martins loved their boyfriends and made babies with their women. It was a practical arrangement, typically French.