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  Tucker kissed her, felt it turn into something else as she began to kiss him.

  "How'd it go?" she asked when he went to make himself a drink.

  "It's not finalized. I've got to go back in the morning."

  "For how long?"

  "A couple of days, no more."

  "Was something wrong with the bells?" she asked.

  He said, "It's a question of which century they're from-last half of the fifth or early part of the sixth. I think they're more modern than the seller says they are, and I'm having them evaluated by Heinenken in Chicago. He'll even do a carbon dating on them, if he has to."

  The lies came so easily, though he hated lying to her. He'd told her he was going to Denver to negotiate the sale of a good set of Javanese temple bells, and then he had gone to Pittsburgh to meet Bachman and Harris and Jimmy Shirillo.

  In all other aspects, their relationship was an honest one. They both came and went as they pleased, with no phony jealousy between them, no lies or deceptions about whom they might be seeing, where they were going, their plans for the future. She gave him a check every month to pay her portion of the rent and other bills, and when he had not cashed the first two of these she had made him see that, unless they shared responsibilities, they could not share anything else. There was a respect and trust between them that Tucker had never found with anyone else-and yet, when it came to the real nature of his business, he had to lie to her. Not because he didn't trust her but because he didn't want her involved in anything where a court might find her an accomplice or contributing party.

  Besides, neither had professed a Great Love for the other, merely a sweet affection. When this finally came to an end, if it did come to an end, he would feel much better knowing that she was completely ignorant of his criminal reputation.

  He sat down at the foot of her chair on the thick shag carpet, kissed her knees and then went to work on the drink that he'd built. He said, "How about you and Madison Avenue?"

  "I got a call," she said, grinning. "You're never going to guess what I'm selling this time."

  "They're allowing that to be pushed on television now?" he asked.

  "Gutter mind," she said.

  "I apologize. What are you selling?"

  "Pickles."

  "Pickles?"

  "Peter Piper Pickles," she said, chuckling. He was always delighted with that chuckle, almost a giggle, because it was so out of place in a woman as big as Elise, as sophisticated as Elise, and it gave her another dimension altogether.

  "I thought pickles were-what do you call things like that?"

  "Family goods," she said.

  "That's it. You always say you can't get jobs pushing family goods even in your breathless teenager role."

  Elise had once explained, in detail, that housewives were the purchasers of family goods-foodstuffs, kitchen utensils, waxes, soaps and the like. Housewives didn't want to see a stunningly attractive woman or precocious, budding teenager selling them products, because they were reminded of their own spreading behinds and gradually bulging middles. They didn't want to feel as if they were competing with the women in the commercials; therefore, family goods were sold by cutesy women or plain types. Bombshells like Elise were reserved for pitches aimed at men: cigars, automobiles, beer and hair-grooming preparations.

  "They've come up with a different approach for this one," she said.

  "Who has?"

  "Marcus, Marcus, Pliney and Plunket," she said.

  To Tucker the name of the ad agency always sounded like the first line of a children's nonsense rhyme.

  "What's the approach?"

  "Fellatio," she said.

  Tucker almost spat out a mouthful of good Scotch. When he did at last manage to swallow it, he coughed and cleared his throat. "Beg pardon?"

  "It's another one of Plunket's brainstorms. My agent's gotten work for me with Plunket before, both times for crazy things. Plunket's convinced the Peter Piper Pickle people to try something different in hopes of boosting sales. He's cooked up quite an argument for making a sexy pickle commercial, family goods or not."

  "I'd like to hear it."

  "Plunket says, with the new wave of female awareness, modern housewives are more and more dissatisfied with their husbands as bed partners and, more and more, have sex on the mind, either subconsciously or consciously, and he uses polls, sociological studies and tons of other data to make his point. He's sold the pickle people on the idea; he says they can't go wrong by showing a sexy girl, full-face, slowly devouring a nice big Peter Piper dill while the voice-over announcer gives the regular sort of pitch." She chuckled again, finished her drink and put down the glass. "Plunket says that it'll implant, in the woman's mind, the notion that pickles from Piper are a sensual experience. A pickle is very phallic, you know."

  "I never noticed."

  "Oh, yes, indeed."

  He said, "Will the average housewife really go for this, though?"

  She shrugged. "It's to be a limited approach, just one commercial, playing only in a few selected test areas. No national exposure unless it proves workable. So, I don't get any residuals, but a pretty good flat fee for a day's work."

  Tucker recalled the night that, watching a two-hour network special sponsored by a soap company, they saw three commercials featuring Elise, played three times each, which had earned her an additional five hundred and forty dollars under the residuals clause in her contract. Most weeks, she averaged between a thousand and two thousand dollars as one of the most popular current commercial faces, all of it from work already finished and on the air weeks before; and when she worked on a new one, she doubled that particular week's take with her initial payment. It almost seemed to Tucker that he should give up a life of crime and start hawking toothpaste.

  He finished his Scotch, stood up and put the glass on the stand. He looked at her and said, "Do you feel like practicing?"

  "Practicing what?" she asked.

  "The pickle commercial, of course."

  Much later, finished with that practice and a number of others, having eaten a late dinner and practiced some more and having fallen asleep together in the big bed in the front room, Tucker woke, his heart beating like a sledge driven against an iron block, the rhythm ringing along his bones. He had been frightened by some nightmare that he could not recall, and he reached out and touched Elise's warm, bare buttocks, concentrated on her until he could see her lines draped across with sheeting. As her nearness sank in, as he realized he was not alone, his heart slowed and his mouth grew moist again, the fear subsiding. In a moment he was even able to remember what the nightmare had been about: his father.

  Even for the president of a Fifth Avenue bank, Mr. Mellio's office was too rich, paneled in too much teak, carpeted in too deep a pile, furnished in much too luxurious a style. The painting behind his desk was clearly an original Klee, and even though it was surely on loan from the bank's investment art collection and had not been purchased solely for Mr. Mellio, it gave you the feeling that these people were not managing your money very properly and were, in fact, almost throwing it away on personal aggrandizement, baubles and unnecessary luxuries.

  Mr. Mellio himself, however, countered this impression so completely that you could almost forget entirely about the riches of the room and about the fate of your fortune. He radiated confidence and ability. He was a tall, wide-shouldered man, and he would have fit right into an early John Wayne movie as one of those non-speaking cowpokes who step forward to stand behind the Duke, grim-lipped and resolute in the name of good and honor. At fifty his hair was more white than brown, full enough to be combed over the tips of his ears but certainly not mod. His face was blocky, with a slab of a forehead, rocky cheekbones, a stiff straight nose, a chin like an expertly carved piece of granite. He thrust that chin forward and offered Tucker his hand. The hand was enormous and applied just enough pressure to avoid the extremes of a fish shake and a bone crusher. Like the handshake, everything that Mr. Mellio did seemed planned; you had the feeling he didn't take a breath until he had assessed the need for it. Despite the decor of the room he worked in, such a man would handle money as a priest handled the Eucharist.

  "How have you been?" Mr. Mellio asked, taking his seat behind the huge, dark, uncluttered desk. "I haven't seen you in-let's see-"

  "Eight and a half months," Tucker said. "Not since the last time I had you and my father in court."

  Mr. Mellio grimaced, smiled through capped teeth and said, "Yes, of course, an unfortunate afternoon."

  "For me," Tucker agreed.

  "For all of us, especially your father," Mellio said. "You know, Michael, he doesn't want to fight with you over this thing. It grieves him terribly to-"

  "My father never grieved over anything, Mr. Mellio, least of all his son." He tried to say it without emotion, calm and easy as if he were merely reading something from a textbook, something indisputable. He thought that he succeeded.

  "Your father does care about you, Michael, cares more than you-"

  Tucker raised a hand and waved the words away. He said, "If he cares so goddamned much, why doesn't he turn over my inheritance? It would make things a good deal easier for me."

  Mr. Mellio looked pained, like a loving father who has to teach an unpleasant lesson to a child. He leaned back in his chair, Klee looming behind him, and said, "Your mother's will specifically stated that your father was to remain the director of your trust until such a time as you matured to the point where you could handle the funds yourself."

  "Until such a time as he felt I had matured," Tucker corrected. "He weaseled that out of my mother when she was sick, very sick, two weeks before she died."

  "You pretend as if your father attempted to gain control of your inheritance to enrich his o
wn estate. In the face of his own considerable wealth, that's absurd."

  "I pretend no such thing," Tucker said. "He gained control of my inheritance in an attempt to gain control of me, but he lost the bet."

  "Michael," Mellio said, leaning forward now, propping both elbows on the top of the desk, putting his chin in his hands, trying to look somewhat pixie-like, failing miserably in that, "you could see your father. You could make amends. I'm sure that, if you tried to work things out between the two of you, he'd soon turn the estate over into your hands."

  "Fat chance," Tucker said. "Perhaps after I'd been a faithful toady for eight or ten years, he'd give me what I want. I don't wish to give up that much time to a corrupt, selfish old man."

  "Michael, he is your father!"

  Tucker leaned forward in his own chair now, his face slightly flushed. "Mr. Mellio, when I was a child I saw my father on the average of twice a week, for an hour each time. Once was at Sunday dinner when I was permitted to dine with the adults, the other was on Wednesday night when he quizzed me on my previous week's lessons. I was learning French and German before grade school, from a nanny who doubled as my instructor, and my father wanted to be certain that he was getting his money's worth. For a period of eighteen months, when I was twelve and thirteen, I saw my father not at all, because he was consolidating his European ventures then. My secondary schooling was at a boarding school considerably farther away from home than my first military academy had been. I saw my father at Christmas for a couple of hours. By the time I was in college, I stayed away from home on purpose. That's how much he's my father. Christ, Mr. Mellio, I don't even know the man."

  Mellio said nothing.

  Tucker said, "I early decided that the last thing I wanted to be was like my father. If having money meant you had to spend all of your time shepherding it and none of your time enjoying life, then money wasn't for me at all." He leaned back in his chair now, the intensity of his voice sliding away. "Money, to me, is to be spent. That appalled the old man, and it was because he found that I was unamenable that he got that clause in my mother's will. He wanted me to be an empire builder like himself. Life's too short, however, to waste in a series of boardrooms."

  "To have money you must make money," Mr. Mellio said, as if he were reading the sentence from a lacquered wall plaque. "A fortune can be squandered quickly, Michael. Even one the size of your inheritance-or the much greater size of your father's estate."

  "My mother left three million dollars, give or take a few thousand in small change. Even invested at a paltry six percent in tax-free bonds, that earns back a hundred and eighty thousand a year. I could live with that very nicely, Mr. Mellio."

  "Your father believes you couldn't, that you'd start nibbling away at the principal."

  "My father doesn't give a damn about that," Tucker said. "He simply wants me under hand so he can mold another corporate mastermind. In the next step of the court tests, or the step after that, a judge is going to agree with me. He can't continue to pay off every court official who comes up. One of them is going to be honest, especially the higher the courts get."

  Mellio dropped the pixie pose and picked up the role of the shocked banker taken aback by irresponsible accusations. He was even worse at that than at playing pixie, about as believable as Elise would be if she tried to play a sexless, weary housewife in a television commercial. "You can't be seriously implying that-"

  Tucker cut him short. "Can we talk about the loan, please?"

  Mellio moved his lips up and down, like a man with something caught in his throat, finally closed his mouth and ordered his thoughts. He said, "Michael, there is an account in this bank composed solely of the monthly allowance checks from your trust-which you have not picked up or cashed in more than three years. I believe there are now thirty-seven deposits in the account, each in the amount of ten thousand dollars. I cannot see why you would wish to make a loan when you have these funds available."

  "Credit me with at least a modicum of intelligence, Mr. Mellio," Tucker said. He sounded tired, and he was tired. This sort of fencing was something he was no good at and was, to boot, completely out of practice for. He was anxious to be done with Mellio, the bank and the city so that he could get back to the most pressing problem of all-getting Merle Bachman out of Baglio's mountain estate before the driver was forced to spill everything about the rest of them. "I am aware that my father has conditioned the delivery of those checks, and I am thoroughly acquainted with what I would be losing by meeting his conditions. I have a good lawyer. He and I have talked a great deal about all of this, all of you."

  Mellio looked shocked again, apparently decided that this was not one of his better roles, gave up on it and got very businesslike. "Okay, by signing the waiver to get your allowance checks, you'd be endorsing your father's control of the inheritance. But what does that matter, Michael? It's nothing more than a formality, anyway. Your father, by virtue of your mother's will, already has control."

  Tucker sighed again, slumped down in his chair, looked at his watch: a quarter of nine. The Klee was beginning to strain his eyes, and the dark teak paneling seemed to be closing in on him. "Signing for the allowance checks, I'd be signing away my right to carry on with the suit we now have in federal court. I'd be limiting myself to the position of a minor for the rest of my life-or for the rest of my father's life, anyway."

  "But you've said you only care about having money to spend," Mellio argued quietly. "This way, you would have that nice monthly check."

  "I said that I could get along on a hundred and eighty thousand a year, but I can't possibly make it on a hundred and twenty. One thing I did acquire from my father was expensive tastes."

  "The allowances could be raised, naturally," Mellio said.

  Tucker shook his head. "No. It's not just that. Once I'd signed the waiver and no longer had a lever to use against my father, he'd have more control over me than I want him to have. He could even cut back the allowances until I had to knuckle under and go through the charade of learning the business from him."

  "He wouldn't do that," Mellio said.

  "You're full of it," Tucker said politely, smiling.

  Mellio said, "You must hate him."

  "Not merely that; I loathe him."

  "But why?"

  "I have my reasons."

  He thought of many things, but most of all he thought of the women his father had kept, a string of mistresses which, cruelly, he hadn't hidden from his wife. In fact, he seemed to take some strange pleasure in flaunting his adultery in front of her. Tucker remembered sitting with her, once when he had come home over the holidays from the boarding school, listening to her as, hating herself, she told him about his father's women. She had been a strong family-oriented woman, and this was an attack at her base, her sacred foundation. She had huddled in upon herself and cried, silently, shaking, her face cold to his touch. If only his mother had had a bit of Elise in her, less of an old-fashioned outlook and more modern fire, she would have stood up to the old man; she would have left him. Instead, she had stayed on, unable to admit it all had gone bad. Then the cancer, the long slow hospital death, when the old man was too busy to visit her for more than an hour or two a week, her knowing that it wasn't only his financial affairs that took so much of his time.

  "Your father is a fascinating man and one of the kindest that I've ever known," Mr. Mellio said. "I can't imagine what reasons he would have given you to loathe him."