She tumbled onto the pillow satiated, and let out a lusty growl. “Tom, ohhhh, Tom,” she purred.
“Tim,” he corrected, a tremor in his voice.
Melanie looked at him out of the corner of her eye and grinned mischievously, like a child.
He raised a brow and grinned back.
They tangled their glistening bodies like knotted snakes and laughed out loud.
He first caught Melanie’s attention earlier that evening in the Hotel Dorset Bar, an elegant watering hole on West Fifty-Fourth Street, a short walk from the City Center Theater where she worked as a modern dance choreographer. The Dorset catered to a professional clientele, and Melanie often went there on nights she needed to be with someone — preferably someone from out of town.
As it turned out, Tim-Tom was a local brat, and Melanie decided to wait until morning to tell him she wouldn’t be seeing him again, and why.
Chapter Four
Ten hours had passed since Churcher’s call to the Soviet Embassy in Washington triggered the cable to Gorodin in Cuba. The exchange of coded communications between Havana and Moscow that had followed got the Houston business magnate the meeting he wanted.
In preparation, Churcher had spent most of the night scrutinizing paintings in his underground museum. He moved from Renaissance Masters to Dutch Realists, to French Impressionists, to canvases that spanned the history of great art. He skipped right past some, and went directly to others, knowing which, if any, might bear the same stigma as the Van Gogh. Though not an expert, once alerted, he had enough knowledge to make cogent evaluations. To his anger and disappointment, his efforts confirmed his suspicions rather than eliminating them, as he had hoped.
He left the museum well before the beep of the Rolex. The elevator door hadn’t finished opening before he was out of it, and dashing through the kiosk toward a limousine.
A uniformed chauffeur opened the rear door with an economy of movement, and nodded.
“Stand on it, son,” Churcher barked.
Without breaking stride, he jackknifed at the waist, and propelled his taut six-foot-three frame into the big car. His attire blended with the gray velvet interior, where tinted glass concealed the face but not the identity of its well-known passenger.
Many of Churcher’s wealthy friends and associates had long ceased using personalized license plates for security reasons. His still read CHURCHCO. It was, he proudly boasted, a conscious measure of his arrogance.
The antenna-studded limousine rocketed down the drive and through the electrically operated gates. The wrought iron tour de force had once greeted the major film stars of the thirties and forties at the studio now owned by Churchco Communications.
The stretched Lincoln accelerated east onto the 290 Freeway, and in less than thirty minutes was hard into the curving interchange where Texas 610—the heavily trafficked ribbon that rings the Houston suburbs — meets the Katy Freeway to downtown.
Characteristically, Churcher was evaluating the problem at hand and the men with whom he would soon meet: Gorodin, a pleasant, accommodating fellow, but cunning; Beyalev, cold, ambitious, and inexperienced, therefore dangerous and not to be trusted; Deschin, an old friend who had the power to make things right — if he wanted to. Churcher hadn’t seen Deschin in almost six years. Not since the last problem with their arrangement. Not since the Nugent report.
He slouched in the backseat of the limousine, and shuddered at the memory. Overdone, heavy-handed, he thought. Typically Russian. He felt sickened whenever that rainy night in Deschin’s Moscow apartment came to mind, sickened by the fear and confusion that he imagined on Dick Nugent’s face the night of his death.
The limousine was on the Katy Freeway where it swings across Texas 45, and fast approaching the North Main off-ramp, the major street-level artery that cuts through the heart of downtown.
The Rolex started chirping and brought Churcher back. The repetitious beeping reminded him, over and over again, how he’d been manipulated and used. He let it continue a long time before he clicked it off.
Andrew Churcher flipped a stirrup over the saddle horn and reached beneath the horse’s heaving belly. He pulled hard on the cinch loosening it, and slid the hand-tooled saddle from the white Arabian’s back. The momentum carried the saddle in a wide arc onto the rail of a weathered fence. A whistle sent the animal romping off into the pasture.
His father’s horse had been watered, saddled, and ready to go at 7:15 A.M. sharp, as always. A half hour later when Churcher still hadn’t shown up at the stables, Andrew took the Arabian for a run himself.
He was squaring the saddle on the fence when he spotted a rooster tail kicking into the air behind a car in the distance. Andrew ducked between the whitewashed rails and ambled through the mesquite to the road that split thousands of acres of fenced pasture.
Ed McKendrick’s car approached at high speed, and nosed to a stop in a dust cloud.
“Good news, Drew!” he boomed, unfolding from behind the wheel of the red Corvette. “Contracts for European distribution just came through.”
Andrew jammed his gloves in the back pocket of his jeans, and latched onto the hand McKendrick offered. “That’s great,” he replied.
“Sure is, kid,” McKendrick rumbled. “The old man did a hell of a job convincing the commies that he could sell their Arabians to Wops, Squareheads, and Micks, not to mention the Limeys and Frogs. Didn’t leave anybody out, did I?”
McKendrick was Churchco’s ramrod. A good-looking iron pumper, and all-American linebacker with a PhD in economics from Notre Dame. Five years ago, Churcher pirated him from the Rand Corporation, the Los Angeles based think tank, as a replacement for Dick Nugent.
Andrew disliked McKendrick’s style but knew that beneath the locker-room bluster hummed the most disciplined mind he’d ever encountered next to his father’s.
“Geezus, Ed, you’re the worst,” he said in response to McKendrick’s ethnic shorthand.
“Shit,” snorted McKendrick, gesturing to the expanse of uninhabited land. “Who the hell’s going to hear me out here? Besides, I love ’em all. You know that. Got some great numbers for you, too.”
“Numbers?” queried Andrew.
“Yeah. Before you go to Russia, you’re going to have to swing through Rome,” McKendrick explained. “And yours truly can recommend some flesh-crazed madonnas you can slip right into.”
Andrew shook his head from side to side in mock despair.
“When you’re not screwing your brains out, you can sell Arabians,” McKendrick went on. “There’ll be buyers up the ying-yang at the International Horse Show. And we have a direct line to the guy who organizes it every year. His name’s Borsa, Giancarlo Borsa. He’s a government honcho, runs the Defense Ministry when he isn’t breeding Arabians. He’ll be expecting your call. He and your old man go way back.”
“I know. Dad introduced me when we were there last year,” Andrew replied. “I’ll look him up as soon as I get in.”
McKendrick pulled a bulging file folder from the Corvette and dropped it on the hood with a thud. “Everything you need’s in there,” he said.
Andrew hefted the file as though he were weighing it. “That’s a lot of numbers,” he shot back, teasing.
“Bet your ass,” McKendrick said deadly earnest. “Get familiar with ’em.” He had completely missed the entendre. His computerlike mind had reset, and he was all business. “This is your shot, kid. Don’t blow it.”