It was during this period that Agatha’s father suffered a heart attack and died. With Amos bedridden, that left it up to Agatha to step in and run the foundry. She’d been running it ever since.
Amos had long since resigned himself to being no more than her lackey. Once in the catbird seat at work, it was easy for her to tyrannize him twenty-four hours a day. Yet, despite the fact that Amos was rarely out of her sight, Agatha didn’t trust him.
She had inherited her mother’s outsize jealousy. And she had added to it her own sense of inferiority as a woman. The combination made her positive that even a worm like Amos wouldn’t hesitate to cheat on his marital vows if given the chance. So she kept up a constant vigilance to make sure that such a chance would never come his way.
In one sense, she judged Amos correctly. While he never would have dared make the slightest move in the direction of cheating on his wife, he had still managed to arrange things so that mentally he was the king of adulterers. Very early in his marriage he had discovered that a degree of sexual stimulation was available to him in the form of reading matter. Thus,. for more than twenty years, he had been sublimating with the works of such authors as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Rabelais.
He lived vicariously the thrills of the gamekeeper making the earthiest of love to Constance Chatterly. He reveled in the womanly flesh of the Tropics. He panted after Fanny Hill, flayed along with DeSade, and became a connoisseur of the joys of the Kama Sutra. And he managed to do it without Agatha’s ever finding him out.
The book he held in his hands this night as he lay alone in the big double bed in the room at the Marlowe Hotel was a typical example of his duplicity. The lettering on the cover, in the most staid Bodoni Bold, proclaimed it to be A Study of Accounting Methods and Procedures for the Small Businessman. The book under the cover was actually the current sizzling best-seller, Candy. Amos was avidly reading the part where the heroine seduces the hunchback.
Agatha had gone downstairs to the hotel drug store. Indigestion, stemming from her propensity to over-eat, was so constantly with her that by now it had become a part of her personality. It fit in well with the other components of her aggressive nature. However, this evening her distress was even more pronounced than usual.
This was probably because the business trip which had brought her and Amos to Caldwell involved the negotiation of certain contracts. Ostensibly, Amos was the head of the firm and it was up to him to bicker over the terms of the contracts. Agatha, of course, would never allow him to conclude any such deals unsupervised, but she was a good enough businesswoman so that she’d kept her mouth shut while the negotiations were going on. She’d briefed Amos carefully in advance, but nevertheless her frustration had been great at what she considered to be his ineptness during the talks. Even the subsequent tongue-lashing she’d given him hadn’t helped soothe her gaseousness. And so she’d left him alone while she went to dicker with the drug clerk over the price of Pepto-Bismol.
That’s how Amos got the opportunity to read a few pages of his book. Those. few pages were like a permissive balm spread over his frightened libido. He read them over again and shut his eyes. He was trying to form a mental image of the inimitable Candy. But the image he formed was more his than the author’s, and it looked suspiciously like the images he’d formed in the past of such heroines as Amber St. Clair, Moll Flanders, and Allison of Peyton Place.
It was an image of a naked girl, tall, large-busted, and a trifle heavy around the hips. The girl had a high, tight derriere that undoubtedly wiggled when she walked, and her legs were the long, slender legs of a dancer. Her hair was golden brown, her eyes seductively dark, her cheekbones high, and her lips formed in a permanently sexy pout. It was the image of Amos’ ideal, and it couldn’t have been more unlike his wife. Now he kept his eyes lightly closed and concentrated on the vision of the girl.
There was a slight clicking sound, as of a doorlatch closing. It wasn’t much of a noise, but it was enough to make Amos Tweedlebert open his eyes. The vision was still there. He blinked. It remained. He blinked again. Hard. Still there. Now he simply stared.
Naked, and exactly to specifications-—how often does a man’s ideal appear in the flesh with not so much as a mole to flaw it? Not often. So Amos Tweedlebert just kept staring. He was afraid to move. He was afraid that if he did it would dissolve.
Llona, having stepped through the bathroom door and closed it silently behind her, was likewise afraid to move. She was afraid of what the little, frightened-looking, middle-aged man in the bed might do once he got over his initial shock at having her materialize naked in his bedroom. So she just stood absolutely still until, a moment or two after her entrance, there came the sound of the hotel detective trying the door from the bathroom side. Llona had already latched it from her side, and when it didn't give the detective discreetly stopped trying to open it. However, the sound made her start and this in turn prodded Amos Tweedlebert so speak.
“Are you real?” he asked. Somehow the question seemed uppermost in his mind.
Llona nodded.
Amos thought about the nod a moment. “Flesh and blood?” he asked finally, still doubtful.
She nodded again.
“Then who are you?” he asked, beginning to be convinced that he wasn’t dreaming.
“Llona Mayper.” She took the question literally and answered it that way.
“How do you do?” Amos said politely. “I’m Amos Tweedlebert.”
“I’m fine. I’m glad to know you.”
“I'm glad to know you,” Amos answered honestly, his eyes beginning to dance over her nudity.
There was a long pause.
Amos finally broke it. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
“No. It’s really quite warm tonight.”
“Yes, isn’t it? Somewhere in the eighties, I should think.”
“Eighty-eight at noon, according to the weather report I heard on the radio,” Llona told him.
“But of course it’s not that warm any more. It always gets a little cooler at night.”
“That’s true. It’s prob’ly down in the seventies by now.”
“At least. Are you sure you’re not cold?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Oh.”
Another long pause.
“Wouldn’t you like to sit down?” Amos asked finally. He’d been wanting to ask her for a long time, but he'd been afraid that any suggestion that she change her position might prod her into leaving.
Such was not the case. “Yeah,” Llona replied. “Thanks.”
She sat down.
“Ummm . . . Would you like a drink of water?”
“No thanks.”
“Uhh . . . Is there anything I can get you? I could call room service.”
“No thanks.”
“Oh. Well, is there anything I can do for you?”
Llona thought about that for a few minutes. “If I could just stay here for a little bit,” she said. “That would be a real favor.” She was thinking to herself that if she could stay put until the coast was clear she might go back through the bathroom into Herbert Lansing’s room and get her clothes.
“Why, sure,” Amos started to reply enthusiastically. “Stay as long as you—Ohmigosh!” He had just remembered his wife. “Oh, golly! I'm sorry. But you can’t stay here. You see, my wife —”
Llona reacted to his change in attitude quickly. It was a defensive reaction, but it took an aggressive form. Experience had taught Llona that when you wanted something from a man and he didn’t want to give it to you, the best way to change his mind was to act as if you were prepared to swap him something he obviously wanted. And Amos’ eyes had told her what it was he wanted from the moment he opened them.