California Fire and Life (31 page)

“Think about it, Jack,” she says.

“Stay out of my file, Sandra.”

Hansen decides to give it one more try.

“Get on the team, Jack.”

“What team?”

“You want to be a claims dog the rest of your life?” Sandra asks. “With your background, you could be SIU. Mayhew’s retiring at the end of the year. There’ll be a slot open …”

“You offering me a deal, Sandra?”

“Whatever.”

“I don’t do deals.”

This pisses Hansen off.

“You’re either with us,” she says, “or you’re against us.”

Jack takes Sandra by the shoulders. Gets right in her face.

“If you want to pay this claim,” he says, “I’m against you.”

He lets her go and walks away.

“That’s not where you want to be!” she yells after him. “That is
not
where you want to be.”

Jack keeps walking as he flips her off over his shoulder.

Leaving Sandra Hansen thinking what a big, brainless, dumb stud Jack Wade is. She’s thinking that Jack’s surfboard has landed on his head once—make that twice—too often.

And that she’s going to have to take him down.

Three years.

She has three years and God only knows how much of her budget sunk into a long-term investigation of Russian organized crime and she’s not going to let one stubborn M-4 of an adjuster flush it down the toilet.

Dead woman or no dead woman.

She feels bad about that.

It makes her sick that Vale gets away with murdering his wife, but that’s the way it is.

Pamela.

Nicky’s biggest break from Mother Russia.

A break with the old code, but Nicky’s inaugurated the new code and the brothers are marrying now.

But not California girls—Russian women.

Women of the same culture and language, usually with family ties in the mob. These are wives who understand the way things work, who help bind their husbands to the mob and the code, whose families back home in Russia can be used as hostages if hubby suddenly develops a desire to transgress against the mob.

Not American wives, not California girls.

Who don’t know the code, who ask questions, who make demands, who can’t keep their mouths shut, who get unhappy and when they get unhappy get divorces.

Marry a Russian girl
, Dani tells him when he sees Pamela on his arm two, three, four dates in a row.

“I want children,” Nicky argues.

“Have Russian children,” Dani advises. He whips open a catalog of Russian would-be brides eager to immigrate. “Pick one out.
Any
one and she’s yours. There are some real beauties here.”

And there are, Nicky agrees. Stunning Russian women, but that’s the point. He doesn’t want a Russian woman. He wants an American
woman. He doesn’t want to strengthen the bond, he wants to break it.

And they don’t get it.

Mother does.

She sees exactly what’s happening.

“It is a slap in the face,” she says.

“No, it isn’t.”

“You are a Russian.”

“I’m an American.”

Nicky Vale.

The turnaround in one generation, but to make that a reality he needs to regenerate. To have children.

American children.

Besides which, he
has
to have
her
. She’s driving him insane. He knows she dresses to provoke him. Shows him the tops of her white breasts, her long thighs. Wears perfumes that make him hard the second she walks into the room. Kisses him with full warm lips and swipes her tongue across his in a way that makes him feel that tongue on his cock, and then she breaks away and smiles at him to let him know that she knows exactly what he’s thinking, and
laughs
at him.

Or she’ll press against him. Press her breasts into his arm or his back, or worse—no, better; no, worse—press her pussy against the front of his pants and say, “Oh, baby, I wish we could.”

“We can,” he’ll say.

“No,” she’ll say, frowning. Then a little whimper, her lips in a frustrated pout. “It’s against my beliefs.”

Then she rolls against him, sighs, pouts and steps away.

Sometimes even touches herself over her dress and looks at him with sad eyes and he
knows
what she’s doing. Knows that she is a cockteaser extraordinaire, knows this, but can’t help himself.

Maybe because she represents to him everything that is so close but just out of reach.

America.

California.

A new life.

A turnaround inside one generation.

And he can see her as the mother of his American children. She is beautiful, free, happy in that careless California way that just doesn’t carry the long tragic burden that Russians bear. And if his children
come from her, in his mind they come somehow cleansed of all that history.

And besides, he has to have her.

“Then have her as a mistress,” Mother says. “If you absolutely must have the little tease, then set her up in an apartment, give her money, give her presents, screw yourself silly until you’re tired of her, then give her more money and say goodbye, but
don’t marry her
.”

If you marry her, Mother says, she will take your heart, your money and your children because this is America and in America the father has no rights. She will ruin you. She’s a gold digger.

“Marry this piece of trash,” she says, “and she will leave
you
in the rubbish in her place.”

Which, of course, cuts it.

Nicky gives Pam a ring that night.

They marry two months later.

On their honeymoon, on the lawn of the private villa on Maui, she sheds her flowered dress for him. Invites him inside her.

Where she is hot sweet honey.

Liquid gold.

Nicky remembers her neck, the smell of vanilla in the nape of her neck as he stood behind her and put his lips and his tongue against the sweet-smelling white skin below her ear, below her black hair. How she moved against him so he ran his hand down the scooped neck of her dress and felt her breast. Felt the flimsy bra give way and then he rolled her nipple between his thumb and finger and she didn’t object so he slid the dress down over her breasts then held them in his hands and slid his thumbs back and forth across the nipples and how she brought her hand around—to stop him, he thought at first, but she just held her palm to the back of his head—so he took one hand and ran it down her stomach, and down, and she was wet.

He remembers the sound she made—mmm-
hmmm
, a sound of unashamed pleasure—and he rubbed her with a finger and she sank back into him.

It’s funny what you remember, he thinks again, because what he remembers most is the smell of her neck and the flowered dress. What it looked like as he pushed it over her breasts, and down around her hips, and how it looked lying rumpled at her feet as she stepped out of it, and laid down on top of it, and held her arms up to invite him to come into her.

Strange, he thinks, but that moment was America to him, was California
to him, that open-armed, open-legged invitation to unabashed pleasure. The sound of California to him is and always will be: mmm-
hmmm
.

And he remembers her wide purple eyes when later she wrapped her legs around him and pushed him deeper in and held him there as she climaxed, and then he did, and then he laid his face into her neck.

And how she said, “Kiss my neck and I can’t stop you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this much,
much
earlier?”

“Because then I couldn’t have stopped you.”

Then she scratched his back with the diamond of the engagement ring he’d given her.

Mmm-hmmm
.

For quite a while they’re happy in their California life.

The money rolls in as they ride the top of the real estate boom. She becomes a south coast housewife. Mornings in the gym, lunch with the ladies, afternoons harassing the interior decorators who come to make the house a showpiece. Or getting her hair, her face, her nails done at this salon or that, usually with the same ladies with whom she’d lunched.

Parties in the evening. Lovely friends, beautiful people.

She becomes pregnant quickly, as he sensed she would, her body a lush field of spring wildflowers. Natalie is born with Daddy in the delivery room doing that American thing, coaching his wife’s breathing. But little coaching is needed. Pamela was serenely pregnant—cheerful, relaxed, happy. The birth is as easy as births can be.

“I am a Russian peasant woman,” she jokes. “The next baby I’ll just drop in a wheat field.”

“You are hardly a peasant,” Nicky says.

She reminds him that she grew up on a farm.

“Knock me up again,” she tells him.

He’s delighted to.

Michael’s birth is also easy.

Pamela, Nicky thinks, is made to be a mother. She is inseparable
from the children. He has to cajole her to get a sitter and go out even once a week. He feigns annoyance, but secretly it pleases him.

That his American wife is a homebody. Content to be with her children. To take them on long walks, play with them in the backyard gym that he has constructed. She paints when they take naps. In the little studio he has built for her beside their bedroom. She stands by the easel and looks out the window and paints watercolor seascapes.

Her paintings are not very good, but she’s happy.

And it leaves him free to fuck around.

He has a wife, now he starts collecting mistresses. He still finds Pamela attractive, but now that she is a mother she has lost a certain erotic edge. He seeks it elsewhere, finds it everywhere. Pam is all curves and bosom and hips—he goes for sharp edgy women at the tennis club. Takes them to the Laguna Hills Resort or the Ritz for sweaty postmatch sex. Pamela is sweetness and
Goodnight Moon
—he picks up hard cocktail waitresses and gives them coke and fucks them sometimes on top of the car hood parked at Dana Strand Beach. He takes an especially perverse delight in seducing her friends, not that the seduction is generally a difficult matter, thank you—so while Pamela is committing her mild offenses against art in the sunny room while the children sleep, he is in one of her friend’s bedrooms, in one of her friends, in point of fact, and
they
seem to delight in asking, Does Pam do
this
for you? Does Pam do
this
for you? And then doing this and this and that and the other thing and then one of Pam’s friends decides to have the ultimate thrill and tell her all about it.

He arrives home that evening and all is well until she puts the kids to bed and then she walks up to where he’s sitting and slaps him across the face.

“And that would be for?” he asks.

“Leslie,” she says. “If you ever do it again, I’ll divorce you and take the children.”

He grabs her by the wrist, forces her to her knees on the floor and patiently explains that there have been, are, and will be a lot of Leslies—and Leslie
again
if he has a stirring in that direction—and that she will most definitely not divorce him.

“Here is the deal,” he says. “You have the house, the children and all the money and luxuries you could want. All this comes with your position as my wife. Enjoy it. Be happy. Listen to me:
There will never be a divorce. You will never take my children
. You will be their
mother
and
my wife
and
my lover. And I will have other women as I wish.”

“How about me?” she asks angrily. “Do I get to have other men?”

Which is the first time he hits her.

A ringing slap across the face.

Then he tells her to go up to the bedroom, change into something sexy and be in bed when he gets there. He sits and looks at a furniture catalog for a while and then goes up. She’s on the bed, as he told her, in a blue corset, as he told her, looking almost defiantly sexual.

Stunningly beautiful, truly. Black hair shining on her white shoulders. Her neck long and inviting. Her breasts pushed up and glowing white in the soft light. Her black pubic hair naked for him.

As if she could take him back with pure sexual power.

Like, Have your other women, you’ll never have anything like
this
.

And that beautiful face with those violet eyes shining with anger and fear and defiance …

He lifts her up and flips her over. Places her hands on the headboard and then takes her in the way he saw convicts take the scared young
zeks
in prison.

Does Pam do
this
for you?

Pam does what I tell her
.

Pam starts drinking shortly after that.

And things fall apart.

They thought the boom would last forever.

In the land of sunshine and blue water where only good things happen to beautiful people.

But the real estate market slows, then comes to a halt, and Nicky is leveraged to his eyeballs. Nothing is selling, nothing is even renting. Nobody is investing and the creditors want their cash.

Which Nicky doesn’t have.

He’s gambled it all on the come and it isn’t coming.

Condo complexes, apartment buildings, raw land.

All sitting as still as a dead summer day.

And the other business, well, every business needs tending, and Nicky’s been neglecting the organization. The two units are pretty much operating on their own, sending a share of their profits up to Nicky and skimming a little more off his share every day. Schaller, Rubinsky and Tratchev are conspiring to do just the thing that Nicky had intended to do
for
them before the recession shut down his cash pipeline—leave Nicky’s organization and become independent.

And there are grumblings: Nicky’s not putting anything back into the business, Nicky’s gotten sloppy, Nicky’s gotten soft.

Nicky has gone American.

Dani and Lev try to warn him. Dani tells him to take back control while there’s still time. Give his security force something to do, keep them sharp, keep the weapon honed. Nicky tells them no.

Things will turn around. The economy will bounce back. To this extent they’re right in what they’re saying about him—he has gone soft. He doesn’t relish a return to the gun and the knife and the chicken chop.