Princess Daisy (38 page)

Pat Shannon was a born risk taker who understood that the ability to cope with an occasional failure was a vital part of successful risk taking. But his failures, few as they
were, had been business failures, and they had never been due to lack of effort or preparation. Since it was clearly possible to learn to ride, ride he would.

Short had said that he had some “fairly pleasant trails” on his place. Shannon had had one of his secretaries check the place out and discovered that it was called Fairfax Plantation, covered eighteen hundred acres, boasted a private jet airstrip, housed twenty servants and was worth, conservatively, four million dollars.

Shannon didn’t have to be very clever to realize that if he were to go hacking about on almost two thousand acres, he had to count on fairly long hours in the saddle. And Shannon was clever, indeed exceptionally so. And a clever Irishman can be counted among the cleverest kind of man the human race produces. Hadn’t Shannon’s favorite Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, said, “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on Earth.” Pat Shannon grimly reminded himself of these words as he gave his horse the signal to canter for the fiftieth time that evening.

“You’re making progress,” Chuck Byers said drily, in a tone of voice which took any approval out of the remark. He had never had such a pupil before. He hoped never to have such a one again. Shannon had told him he wanted to learn to ride. Fair enough—lots of people did. But no one else had ever demanded that he be able to trot at the end of the first lesson, canter at the end of the second, and gallop at the end of the third.

Byers had told him it was impossible. Byers had said he’d break a bone at the least and he had made Shannon sign a paper saying that the stable wasn’t responsible for any injuries to the man and that Shannon was responsible for all injuries to the horse. But the bastard had galloped after three lessons although Byers could tell by the way he walked back to his car that every muscle in his body was killing him.

The man was a demon, Byers thought. After the third lesson Shannon had sent out a crew of electricians to rig up lights around the ring so that he could ride late into the night, and he had insisted on a three-hour lesson every single night, paying so much that Byers had had to accommodate him in spite of his family’s objections. He hadn’t spent any time with his wife and kids since Shannon had started this nonsense.

Something about the single-minded way in which Shannon tackled the business of learning to ride made Byers feel downright vindictive toward the man. To Byers riding was the last vestige of chivalry in the world, a realm of magic which linked the past to the present as nothing else did, a sport that was both his religion and his romance. He grew more and more disgruntled as he watched Shannon make incredible progress of a mechanical kind, but without falling in any way under the spell of horses—the son-of-a-bitch acted as if mastering horsemanship was simply another form of locomotion. And not for him the ritual, pleasant half-hour of discussion after the lesson was over. No, the man just said a brief goodnight and disappeared into that big black Cadillac in which his bored driver had been reading all the while, and sped off to the city. Byers was a proud, sensitive man, and he knew he was being treated as a mere convenience. If a robot could teach riding, he was convinced that Shannon would have preferred it. He never realized, nor did Shannon tell him, that Pat Shannon didn’t think of learning to ride as a human occupation which made human contact with his instructor necessary. It was merely a challenge he had chosen to confront, an obstacle which he had to conquer, a necessary nuisance which he had to put behind him. He went at it with total concentration, as if he were breaking rocks on a chain gang with an overseer watching him. He resented having to spend these hours in the ring just as much as Byers resented teaching him.

They had only one moment of non-instructional discourse in the past month. Shannon was limping badly, Byers noticed, in his new boots from M. J. Knoud, Inc., the venerable firm which had also made his handsome riding clothes.

“Trouble with the boots, Mr. Shannon?” Byers remarked, not without malice.

“My ankle bones are bleeding,” said Shannon in a matter-of-fact fashion. “I suppose it’s always like that when you break in new boots.”

“Not necessarily—people don’t all go at it the way you do.”

“What size foot do you have, Byers?”

“Twelve-C.”

“That’s my size. Will you sell me your boots?”

“What? No, Mr. Shannon, you don’t want these boots.”

“It happens that I do—they’re exactly what I want
Beautiful leather and well-broken in. We wear the same size and you certainly have other pairs.”

“I do indeed.”

“I’m willing to pay whatever you ask, but I want your boots, Byers. I’ll give twice what you paid for them, hell, make it three times.”

“You’re absolutely sure about that, Mr. Shannon?” Byers didn’t show he was offended.

“My God, they’re not sacred objects, man, just boots. What’s all the fuss about?” Patrick demanded, more harshly than he realized. He’d been in considerable pain for three hours, although he would never have admitted it.

“They’re yours,” said Byers curtly. “No charge.” He had been many things in his life but never had he bargained over second-hand boots.

“Thanks, Byers,” Patrick said. “I really appreciate it.” As far as he was concerned, it was the least the man could do, although he would not have grudged him any profit he cared to take. Business was business. He had no conception of the cult of tack, the preoccupation with all the leather appurtenances which belong to the equestrian world.

As Byers handed over the worn pair of boots he thought to himself, screw you, Pat Shannon. Who the fuck do you think you are?

It was a thought many people had had about Shannon in the course of his life, and all of them had eventually realized that whoever Shannon thought he was, he turned out to be. This had not endeared him to a rather large
group
—and if he’d bothered to consider this he would not have been astonished. Particularly since he’d forgotten all their names in the course of his climb to the top. A dedicated nonconformist, a maverick by deepest instinct, his success had depended on his following no one’s plans but those he chose for himself, without consultation.

There were only a few men Patrick Shannon considered his equals in the corporate world. No man, no matter how powerful, who had inherited his business, belonged in his peer group. They had to have made it on their own. God knows he had.

From the orphanage in which he’d grown up he had won a scholarship to St. Anthony’s, a minor Catholic boys’ prep school. The scholarship had been established by a
former student, now an elderly and childless millionaire, for a parentless boy who showed equal excellence in academics and athletics.

At St. Anthony’s, Patrick saw immediately that he had found his first world to conquer. Nothing about the upper-middle-class East Coast boys he found himself among was familiar; their points of reference and the things they took for granted were all unknown territory to him.

For the first two years, he watched, listened and learned, always more comfortable with the adults in the school constellation than with boys of his own age. His speech had always been correct, taught, as he had been all his life, by nuns, and fortunately, the school required a uniform so that all the boys dressed alike. He learned that his black hair had always been cut too short, that his aggressiveness on the football field and the baseball diamond was acceptable, and as much as he relished the exercise of his brain, it was preferable to save demonstrations of intelligence for exams and term papers rather than display it in the classroom.

By junior year he was ready to emerge from the unobtrusive place he had taken everywhere except in sports. Pat Shannon had carefully marked out the boys he wanted to become friends with, singling out from the herd of his classmates the half dozen who displayed excellence, not merely in their achievements but in their character. By the end of his four years at St. Anthony’s, he had made six friends he would never lose. Loyalty was his religion. If any of his friends had asked Pat to meet him in Singapore by noon on the day after tomorrow, with no explanation given, he would have been there. And they would have been there for him. Lacking a family of his own, he had created a family from strangers. The flavor of his soul had always been tough but loving. However, his strength concealed that love from all but a few.

He was a tall boy, big boned, and fast as a leopard. His coloring left no question about his ethnic origins: it was classically Black Irish, blue black hair, dark blue eyes and white skin that flushed easily. His forehead was broad, his eyes set wide apart under heavy brows, and his open smile was so winning that it was easy—though dangerous—to forget how bright he was.

By senior year he was president of the class, captain of the football team and first in all his classes. He won a full scholarship to Tulane from which he graduated in three
years by taking an extra class load, going to summer school every summer, and restricting his sports activity to football. At twenty-three, Patrick Shannon was a graduate of the Harvard Business School and ready to conquer the world.

A week before graduation he had been hired by Nat Temple, the man who had founded Supracorp many decades before. Shannon gave himself ten years to make it to a position close to the top in the corporate structure. He allotted the first three years to absolutely unrelenting work. Pat Shannon was perfectly aware, from visiting his friends, that living
well
took time and money and he would have neither to spare, by his calculations, until he was twenty-six. Although he felt an impatience to enjoy the good things in life, his self-discipline and bred-in-the-bone motivation were strong enough to make him keep to his plan. He never considered marrying money—he had met many of his classmates’ sisters who would have provided it—but everything about the idea displeased him. He
had
to do it on his own—that need to prove himself was stronger than any other he had ever experienced, and each victory only led to new challenges which had to be met. In Shannon’s life there were no plateaus, no resting places from which to look back and contentedly relish the victory gained, the game won, the achievement completed.

Now, at thirty-eight, he was saturated with success. Nat Temple, the man who had first seen his potential, had retired as president of Supracorp three years before, retaining the title of chairman of the board, leaving Shannon to run a conglomerate that, from the time he was put in charge, started the expansion that had recently doubled its earning per share. His own salary and bonuses were in excess of three quarters of a million dollars a year.

A fair number of the powerful and conservative men among the major Supracorp stockholders were still not at all sure they approved of him. He had his enemies, watchful ones, who resented the firmness with which Nat Temple had backed Shannon and given him his head, who envied him his youth and his achievements, men who didn’t like to take chances of any sort. These enemies were quiet for the moment but they were waiting and watching, ready to push Shannon out if he ever gave them the opportunity.

Shannon had acquired all the material things that go with this sort of success: an apartment high up in the
United Nations Plaza, decorated by John Saladino in what he told Shannon was a style of “elegant alienation,” a style that Shannon found out—too late—that he didn’t enjoy although he admired it in the abstract; memberships in the Century, River and University clubs; the house in East Hampton which he almost never had time to use; and the inevitable divorce from a woman he should have known better than to marry: a socialite and beauty who had one of those dark, sensuous, syrupy, knowing voices which other women dislike and mistrust instantly and for good reason.

There had been no children. If there had been, perhaps there would have been no divorce, for Shannon, although not a religious man, never forgot the loneliness of being brought up without parents. After his brief marriage was over, he permitted himself only a series of second-string girls whom he took with such intense, entire, purely physical thoroughness that it was as if they had been consumed by a brush fire set by a carelessly flung match in late autumn. The finality of falling truly in love, the possible pain of it, was something he avoided with ease. Love, he sensed, was a greater risk than even he cared to take.

Supracorp, with its web of companies—cosmetics, perfumes, foods, magazines, liquors, television stations and real estate—was his baby. His children were the boys of the Police Athletic League, with whom, unknown to anyone in his world, he spent as much of every weekend as he could. With these boys, an observer would have seen uncritical, undemanding, extravagant love pouring from him. To his boys, being with him was like being in a brisk sea breeze on a day of blue sky. He made them aware of life’s possibilities, and he tried to give them as much as he could of any knowledge he possessed, whether it was how to hit a ball, how to fly a kite, or how to do long division. The years had not changed his smile; it was still open, still winning, and his eyes were still of that blue which proclaims a victory, but now he had deep vertical lines on either side of his mouth and deep horizontal lines on his broad forehead over which his dark hair always fell no matter how often he pushed it back.

Patrick Shannon had propelled himself right past and through his youth, and he would never be able to recapture a time—not even in memory—that simply hadn’t existed for him. He had never been really young. He had
never played. He had never had time for irresponsibility or carefree freedom. It was quite enough, he told himself, that he had accumulated success, power, money, information and a small group of friends, without also having reaped a harvest of nostalgia for fun and games.

And what’s more, now he could—more or less—ride a goddamned fucking horse.

When Hamilton Short, a shrewd, tough real-estate manipulator, made his first, second and third million he put them in treasury bonds and forgot about them. At forty-two, already paunchy and bald, his tenth million safely behind him, he had little trouble in convincing Topsy Mullins, a timidly luscious eighteen-year-old from an ancient but impoverished Virginia family, to marry him. During the next eight years, as business took the Shorts to Dallas, Miami and Chicago to live, Topsy produced three children, all girls, and Ham produced more millions; by his estimate he was worth twenty-five million, and the real-estate business had never been better.