She sat bolt upright like a bright and obedient child and smiled at me with wide eyes and careful mouth, and told Santo she would have the regular, which turned out to be a straight shot of Wild Turkey with water, no ice, on the side. When she got it, she went at it with frequent little sippings, each of which must have been three or four drops by volume.
Santo turned finally, after some in-group jokes and conversation I couldn’t follow, and faced me across Mary Smith, his back squarely toward the kraut lady.
“Our little Poo Bear here gives you a good mark, MCGee.”
“Poo Bear Smith?” I asked.
“It’s an office thing,” she said. “I have this instinct or something. He says what about this one and I say Poo. And that one, and I say Poo. Then the next one I say okay for brownie points.”
“She’s got a nose for it. Questions, McGee. If I go for it, if I like the flavor of it, how much do you have to know?”
“The day you start and how much you are going to spring for altogether.”
“Have you taken a position in it?”
“About the same way porcupines make love, but I’m nowhere near as far in as I want to be. It’s been moving in a narrow range and I’ve been buying on the downs.”
“Will you need to know my orders?”
“No. I’ll have a man tape-watching it.”
“There’s one place where we have to be coordinated on it, and that’s getting off it.”
“As carefully as we get on, I hope.”
“And the last thing, of course, is the name of it.”
“Right here?”
“The other two can’t hear, and Mary is the best you’ve ever seen at keeping her mouth shut. About anything.”
“Fletcher Industries. American Exchange.”
“Want to brief me a little?”
“Why should I? It’s a duplication of effort If your people can’t see why it’s as good as it is, you need new people.”
“You have your full complete share of mouth, McGee.”
“Have you gotten too accustomed to total humility on all sides, Santo?”
“Hush, now!” said Mary Smith. “You both hush. You’re both right. Don’t you two go all ballsy and wicked when you’re going to be helping each other.”
Santo threw his head back and laughed his boyish laugh. “Her biggest trouble is making sense. By Wednesday… that will be…”
“The tenth,” said Mary Smith.
“… phone her and she’ll have the Yes or No on it, and give you a probable figure.”
“Will do,” I said.
He smiled down into her face. He said to her, “I think I like your new friend, Mary. I think he’s maybe brought us another winner.” He took out his bill clip, slipped some bills out of it, and put them quickly into her purse. “I’m so sure, here’s an advance on your bonus. Use it to take him to where the steaks are.”
She looked at her watch. “Yes, you’d better start moving it, Gary. Ben will be out there with your luggage. Kiss Bonnie Bea for me.”
He made the smallest of gestures and people came on the run to pull the table away, hand him the check for signature, bow the three of them out and away.
We went up the beach in her little red car to what she called one of “her” places, a little bar dark as pockets. Once we were sitting across a very low and narrow little table from each other, so that we had to hunch over it in intimate arrangement, she figuratively rolled up her sleeves and went to work. She had awaited the pass, and for once there hadn’t been one.
She had put the strange hat aside. She shook out her gleaming hair. A stray pattern of light rested on a long diagonal across her face, from eyes to lips.
She dipped into her shot like a moth, put it down, picked up the stray lip-drop with tongue tip. “Want to know, Travis? Want the crazy message?” It was half whisper, her voice dragging.
“Message by special delivery. Sure, Mary Smith.” She made her eyes very wide and solemn. Her lips parted. She reached and took my hand in both of hers and pulled it slowly to her side of the table. She turned my slack fist over, then put the nails of her right hand high on the inside of my wrist, and slowly drew her nails along my wrist and over my palm, uncurling my slack fingers as she did so. Holding my fingers down, she dipped her head suddenly, pressed the mouth moist against my palm, lifted her head very quickly and stared at me, her face both sly and fake-frightened.
“Is there more?” I asked.
She turned my hand over and formed it into a fist and, holding it in both her hands, lifted it, held it, her elbows braced on the table. She bumped her chin into the knuckles, closed her eyes.
“Pow,” she whispered. “Like right off, the first minute. Pow. I’m never like that.”
“Comes a time,” I said.
“There does indeed, Mr. Travis McGee.” She tilted my fist slightly for a better angle, and went across the knuckle ridge with her warm little mouth, taking a gentle little bite at each knuckle and kissing the space between each knuckle. With each kiss, her tongue tip flicked at the closed apace between fingers.
“When it’s going to be what it’s going to be, there’s that message, don’t you think? An old-timey thing, way deep, that’s been waiting for it special. So very rough crazy everlasting special. And you know it too. Don’t you? Don’t you?”
She sat back there someplace behind those swarming eyes, listening to herself pant, in such a soft little wondrous way. She watched herself work herself up, no doubt measuring the bra-tickle of the nipples becoming erectile, sensing the new softness of thigh and belly. This was one of the new breed who assist the manipulators. Gary Santo, being a manipulator in a large way could be expected to have one who would know her business backward and forward and upside down. He might have two, three or a dozen in the retinue. He would keep them loyal not only with money but with the feeling of being part of an operating team and performing a function for the team.
Sex with a particularly skilled and desirable woman who could convince you that you were the greatest thing since fried rice was a marvelous gadget for one of the manipulators: The bedazzled male is incautious, mazed, thunderstruck. In that condition he can provide the maximum benefit to the manipulator and the least problem. He will come trundling along in the entourage just to be near his brand-new love-light. He will tell her all he knows and all he hopes, and in a frenzy of team spirit and accomplishment, she will bang him out of his mind and drop him right back where she found him when the manipulator has the last crumb of information he can use. But while he’s getting the treatment, he tags along with the team, with the group but not really a part of the group, aware that the team knows the basis for the attraction, aware of a team attitude of kindly contempt for him but so enthralled in his doggy, lolling, bitch-trailing way he will endure the little humiliations to keep getting what becomes more instead of less necessary to him the more he gets of it.
The role requires a woman exceptionally confident and decorative, a woman of a hearty and insistent sexuality, a woman who understands that serving the manipulator in this way is part of the price of the ticket on all the best flights to the best places, and if you want to be coy, or choosy or chicken, you can drop right back to the posture chair and the old electric and the girl’s room scuttlebutt about who might get promoted to what. It takes special gals to travel with the team, so dig in and enjoy the special assignments, because between the romps the guy will talk and you tote the crumbs back to Gary and he fits them together.
The manipulators are the brash gamblers putting little corporations together to make big ones, and they are the talent packagers who stick a half dozen special abilities together and end up with the percentage off the top of the network serial show, and they are the showboaters who take on the tax cases of the mighty and fight the Fed to a draw-or a cheap compromise-and they are the inventive money men who direct the conversion of hoodlum funds into legitimate enterprise, and they are the whiz kids who tear down the honest old buildings and stick up the glittery new boxes on the leaseback, write-off, tax shelter kick, and they are the ones that boost the market price of a stock up and unload and then kick it back down and buy back.