JC2 The Raiders (13 page)

"I am calling for Señora Sonja Escalante. I am Jonas
Cord, from the States."

"The Señora is not at home at this time. Would you like
to leave your number?"

He did. He was not willing to take the shower he wanted, for fear she
would call and he would miss her. He drank some more whiskey. He
walked around the room. He stared down from the windows at the
bustling streets below. He wished he had asked how long she might be
out, when he might expect her to call.

The telephone rang about five. "Señor
Cord?
Momenta.
Señora Escalante."

"Jonas?" A small voice. Familiar? He was not sure.

"Sonja? Do you remember me?"

"Remember you? What would you suppose, Jonas?"

Her English was as it had been: only faintly accented. The image of
her that he had retained in his memory all these years was vivid; and
he wondered if she was anything like that image anymore.

"I deeply regret ..." His voice caught.

"What do you regret, Jonas?"

"That so many years have passed. That I didn't come looking for
you."

"I wouldn't have received you," she said with a firmness in
her voice that he had only rarely heard but still vividly remembered.
"I have always known where you were. You might have had a little
difficulty finding me, but I would have had none finding you. Your
name is in the newspapers constantly."

"I'd like to see you, Sonja."

"It's all right now," she said. "You will be welcome
for dinner tomorrow night. My husband knows about you and will be
glad to meet you."

"I would like to meet your husband, Sonja. Might we, though,
meet for the first time ... alone?"

"Where?"

"In a public place. In a restaurant. It's your city. Tell me
where."

"Harry's American Bar," she said. "I don't go there
often. Make a reservation for nine tomorrow evening."

"I will. And I — I will be there at nine."

He was on time. She was on time. She recognized him. He recognized
her. He stood. She came to the table, let him kiss her hand, and sat
down.

The years had not changed her much. He had not seen her for
twenty-five years, but she was Sonja Batista, just as he remembered
her. She smiled. She'd always had a beautiful smile. She'd always had
a strong, symmetrical, beautiful face.

Changed — Well, she did have a bit more flesh on her face,
softening the lines of her high cheekbones and her firm jaw. Her face
was incised with very fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth
but with no others. If he could judge through her clothes, her
breasts were a little more generous than they had been before. They
had always been generous enough to win his attention and admiration.

Unchanged — Her dark-brown hair framed her face and fell to her
shoulders, a little unruly as always. When he met her, bobbed hair
had been in fashion, but Sonja had never bobbed hers. She had been
too proud of it. Her brown eyes confronted the world with challenging
skepticism, just as he remembered. He remembered too and saw again a
stalwart face that did not flinch from reality.

"Twenty-five years," he said. He shook his head. "It's
unbelievable."

"I have followed your career," she said. "The
newspapers mention you often."

"But what of you, Sonja? I am embarrassed to have to say I have
not followed your life."

"That would have been difficult," she said. "I have
lived a very quiet, very private life, very different from the way it
was when you knew me."

"I told you to call me if you ever needed anything."

For an instant her warm smile turned mordant, but quickly it returned
to the open, welcoming smile she had shown him since she sat down. "I
never wanted anything from you, Jonas," she said. "I
thought of calling you once and decided not to."

He glanced down at the huge diamond she wore on her ring finger. She
wore a wedding band also.

She saw the glance and said, "I have been married for
twenty-four years."

The chastity belts Jonas had heard rumored were in fact worn by a few
very traditional, typically very wealthy Mexican women. Sonja wore
one.

It could not have prevented her having sex with a
man not her husband, if she wanted to. All it did was identify her as
the wife of Virgilio Diaz Escalante y Sagaz and was more in the
tradition of the name-embroidered silk ribbons some Islamic women
wore around their waists in the Middle Ages than the iron belts some
prankish women were condemned to endure. It was exquisitely crafted,
forbiddingly expensive, and entirely comfortable to wear. Two fine
and flexible diamond-studded platinum bands circled her upper legs,
another circled her hips, and a supposed shield joined these three
bands. Nothing guarded her rear. She could easily have broken the
thin metal and taken it
off
, and if she had, Virgilio would
almost certainly not have suspected anything ill. On the other hand,
if she didn't break it she could not have removed it; it was locked
on her. Virgilio took it off when they had sex, or whenever else she
asked him to.

She had worn it for more than twenty years and was proud her husband
had never had to return it to the craftsman to be enlarged — as
did most husbands who had fitted their wives with these belts.

The man sitting with her, Jonas Cord, could not
have understood why she consented to wear the belt. Such a thing was
beyond his
norteamericano
comprehension. A Yankee, he was
deficient in the warm, sympathetic understanding, man for woman and
woman for man, that so much characterized the Latin peoples. She had
once admired his unsentimental Yankee practicality — and maybe
did yet, a little — but she was glad her son had been reared in
a different tradition.

Her family tradition could not have been more different from the Cord
tradition. Her uncle was Colonel Fulgencio Batista y Zaidivar, once
President — dictator — of Cuba and likely to be again.
Jonas Cord could not begin to comprehend what that meant. When she
met him, in 1925, not long before the death of his father, her uncle
— her father's baby brother, much nearer her own age than her
father's — was a fugitive, and so was her father. They would
have been summarily shot if the then Cuban government could have laid
hands on them.

She herself might have been shot. At the very least, if she had been
caught in Cuba, she would have been — well, it would have been
a painful experience. Her uncle's ambition and what he did in pursuit
of it had interrupted her education and forced her to accompany her
family into exile, first in Florida, then in Texas, finally in
California.

When she met Jonas Cord she was nineteen years
old. He was twenty-one. She had been educated in a convent and was
confused and frightened, not just by the world but by this strange,
bustling
yanqui
world into which she had been precipitated.
She was so naive that she did not understand that
norteamericanos
did not apply the word Yankee to the residents of Florida, Texas, or
California. It was all Yankee to her. The nuns had taught her English
— but not the kind of English she heard spoken. They had taught
her that America was a land of big men and big women.

The women ... They dressed outlandishly in short
skirts and tight bodices and were aggressively bold, the nuns had
said. They painted their faces. They smoked little cigars. (The nuns
didn't know about cigarettes.) They drank distilled liquors.
Unmarried girls went abroad in the streets day and night, without
dueñas.
They went to theaters and to dance halls
without escorts. Some of them drove automobiles. Some of them lived
in flats they shared with other girls, without parents or brothers to
supervise and protect them. As a result, American men had no respect
for American women, and any woman's virtue was constantly at risk.

Arriving in the United States, she had found that what the nuns had
taught her was true, mostly. Girls her age did indeed wear their
skirts above their knees, and they cut their hair so short their ears
were exposed. They smoked and drank like men. They lacked elementary
grace and seemed to know little of common courtesies. Worst of all,
in their country they were not strange; she was.

Her father and her uncle traveled, where she did not know; but they
were not often at home. A Mexican family somehow involved in her
uncle's plans to seize power in Cuba were glad to offer Sonja and her
mother a place in their home in Los Angeles, and they lived there for
two years.

The daughters of this family were thoroughly Americanized, and they
urged Sonja to dress as they did, to bob her hair, and to learn to
smoke cigarettes. The pressure to conform gradually overcame her
resistance. Over a few months she became half Americanized. She would
not bob her hair, but she began to wear short dresses, to smoke, and
— very cautiously at first — to venture into the noisy,
uninhibited society of young Americans. She was, she realized
painfully, neither fish nor fowl. She was no longer the timid,
convent-educated girl who had come to Los Angeles from Cuba; but
neither had she become a hard-edged, giddy American. She was deeply
curious about American ways and wanted to learn more about them and
selectively adopt more of them, but she remained confused and
embarrassed by the conspicuous difference between her and the young
people around her.

Oddly, they did not attach any importance to the difference. Another
American habit, it seemed, was to be welcoming and uncritical. They
accepted her.

She met Jonas Cord at a party held aboard a yacht.
It was an evening she had been looking forward to ever since she
heard about it — to go aboard a
yacht
and mingle with
people who could afford yachts. Jonas was a handsome young man,
exceptionally virile as she saw him. His manifest virility, plus his
air of self-confidence, set him apart from the other young men aboard
the yacht that night. She had observed of other young American men
that many of them were ambiguous about their masculinity. In their
exuberant gaiety some of them were as giddy as girls. Also, many of
them lacked confidence in themselves. More accurately, they lacked
confidence in anything.

It seemed Jonas Cord had nothing he needed to prove. He knew who he
was. He knew what he wanted. He looked around the partygoers on the
rear deck of the yacht and walked directly to Sonja Batista. He asked
her to dance. He offered a drink from his pocket flask. After an hour
or so he suggested they leave the party and go for a drive.

He explained his car to her. It was a Bentley, imported from England,
and the driver sat on the right. It was dark green, with nickel
plating on the frame above the radiator and on its big lights and its
wheel hubs. The windshield folded down, so the wind blew in your
face. The hood was fastened down with a strong leather strap. The
seats were upholstered in fine leather and had the odor of leather.

Sonja put her foot on a stirrup and climbed in. The frame of her seat
folded around her in a sort of U, as did the body of the car, so she
felt secure enough; but there were no doors, and if she leaned
forward a little she could see the road rushing underneath. Jonas
removed a delicate silk scarf from the glove box and helped her tie
it around her head to control her hair. He handed her a pair of
goggles to protect her eyes.

He drove her where she had never been: into the mountains north of
Los Angeles, from where they had beautiful views of the lighted city
and of the Pacific Ocean.

"I want to learn to fly an airplane," he told her. "So
I can have a view like this of any city."

It seemed a glorious dream. "I would fly with you," she
said. "I would not be afraid."

Then the question was Of what
would
she be
afraid? Would she be afraid to allow him to kiss her? She was, but
she allowed it.

From the moment of that kiss, Sonja ceased to think she was a virgin.
She ceased to think she was pure. Not because he had violated her, of
course — she was not so naive as to think he had. It was the
way she had welcomed and enjoyed his kiss that had debased her. It
was the fact that she wanted him to do it again that corrupted her.

He touched her breasts and her legs. She shook her head. She was
frightened. He stopped, smiled, lit a cigarette, and offered it to
her.

When they returned to the yacht, the party was still going. Hardly
anyone had noticed they had been gone.

She
was
naive. She had no doubt he would
want to see her again, that he would pursue her — court her,
after the old-fashioned term. She expected probably he would propose
marriage.

He did not. She didn't see him for several weeks. When she did see
him, it was at another party, this one in the courtyard in the center
of a block of small attached stucco houses. When he approached, she
was standing by a fountain lighted with red and blue spotlights.

"Sonja! How nice to see you."

"Señor Cord ..."

"I got that airplane we talked about," he said. "Are
you ready to go flying?"

"I am not certain," she said. "Maybe I am afraid after
all."

Jonas Cord was a perceptive man. He recognized hesitancy in this
young woman who had been so forthcoming before. He understood why.
"The world has changed for me, Sonja," he said. "That
is why I did not call you again before now. You see ... my father
died suddenly."

"Oh, Jonas!" (She pronounced his name Hoe-nass, as she
pronounced her own Sone-yah.) "If I have known ... such sympathy
I would have extended!"

"I knew you would. You are a wonderful girl, Sonja."

She knew he was bold. He was direct, in the
yanqui
way. She had not guessed his boldness and directness would extend so
far as the proposition he made before the evening was over.