JC2 The Raiders (18 page)

"You looking for a roommate?" asked Dave.

"Sure."

"You have a car. So have I. That means we can look for a place
outside Cambridge. Maybe Lexington. We can get more space for less
money, and it'll only be a five- or six-mile drive."

"Deal," said Bat.

"Before we can live together, though, I've got to have the
answer to a question. The story in the outfit used to be that you
were a mysterious guy. We weren't even sure what your name is."

Bat faced Dave with a wry smile. "My name is Jonas Enrique Raúl
Cord y Batista."

"
Cord
! Jonas ... Jonas Cord!"

"My father. And my great-uncle is Fulgencio Batista."

"And you use the name Batista, not Cord?"

"Accident. Batista is the last name on the string, so people
tend to call me Batista."

"Which would you rather?"

"I don't care."

"What does your father think?"

"I've never met him."

"Good enough. That was the last question."

They agreed to drive to Lexington the next day. That afternoon they
rented the second floor of a big old white frame house. It was
furnished, but they told the landlady they would rather store her
furniture and buy new. They furnished their apartment — living
room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and bath — and moved in.

Bat thought about contacting his father. Jonas Cord was constantly in
the news. In the hospital in Antwerp, Bat had read newspaper stories
about how his father had crashed a huge flying boat in the Pacific
off San Diego and lost seventeen million dollars. Then, when Bat was
in the hospital in Paris, a story appeared saying his father had
remarried. Odd, he had remarried his ex-wife. Another news account
said he was going to manufacture television sets, devices that would
receive pictures the way radio received voices and music; and he was
quoted as saying that millions of American families would own
television sets within the next ten years. A busy man. He might not
want to meet a son he didn't know he had.

In any case. Bat didn't want to meet him while he was a student. When
he was somebody — doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief — maybe
he would confront this peripatetic tycoon. He would confront him when
he was established, and his father could not suppose he had come to
beg for something. Putting the matter more simply, Bat didn't want to
meet his father until he could, if he chose to, tell him to go to
hell.

"TONI, TONI,
TONI, TONI ... I
LOVE
YOU, Antonia Maxim. Will you marry me?"

Antonia Maxim — she pronounced her name
Ahn-toe-NEE-a — glanced up into his eyes, a playful expression
on her face. "You didn't even have to ask, Bat. You
know
I'll marry you. You know I love you. I've proved it, haven't I? It's
been a whirlwind courtship, but you have to know I love you."

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, in the fall, when many Harvardians
and Radcliffe girls had gone to the football game. Dave had gone to
the stadium — more as an accommodation to his friends than
because he was interested in the game — so Bat and Toni were
alone in the bright, spacious, comfortable living room of the
second-floor apartment in the house at Lexington.

He was naked. She had learned not to stare at the ugly purplish scar
where a German bullet had crashed through his lower right ribs and
nearly killed him — or at the lesser white scar in his left
armpit, the mark of a flesh wound. She knew she was welcome to stare
at what hung between his legs: oversized, at least in her experience,
and straight and powerful. He was tanned. He had spent the summer
before — that is, the summer of 1947 — at home in Mexico
and had spent a great deal of time in the sun, playing tennis and
lounging around a pool. He was a trim, sleekly muscled man, not
lacking in self-confidence.

She was naked, too, except for a pair of white rayon panties. Antonia
was exquisitely beautiful. Her hair was dark-brown, her eyes big and
brown, her mouth narrow but her lips fleshy, and her face was
stretched over well-defined cheekbones and a firm jawline. She
carried no extra flesh, except perhaps for her breasts, which were
large and firm and tipped with big rosy nipples. Her panties covered
a commodious shiny-pink cleft, with which he had become profoundly
intimate.

He had learned of Toni that she was comfortable exposing to him her
legs and hips and belly and breasts and was never in any hurry to
cover them but that she was not comfortable exposing her crotch and
would not pull down her panties until absolutely necessary.

Right now she did not need to have her panties down.

She ran her tongue around his scrotum, then up the length of his
penis to the tip. He drew a deep breath and let it out in a low moan.

"You really like that, don't you?" she asked, grinning.

"I had to teach you how," he said, squeezing her shoulder
affectionately.

"Well ... if somebody had asked me two months
ago if I'd
ever
do it, I'd have told them hell no, and you're
crazy if you think I will."

"That's about what you said when I suggested it."

He had suggested it because they were in bed
together and had just discovered they had no condoms; the package was
empty. She had shaken her head indignantly. "You mean you want
me to
fellate
you?" she had sneered. "What do you
think I am?" Even so, she had lowered her head and impulsively,
also a little sullenly, kissed his penis. The next afternoon, after
they had coupled, she had pulled off his condom, wiped him with
Kleenex, and kissed him again. Then very tentatively she had licked
him — including his foreskin which again gleamed with his
fluid. She had looked up at him, frowned, then quickly and decisively
opened her mouth and shoved half his length into her mouth. She had
held it there for ten seconds or so before she pulled away. "Just
what you always wanted," she had said. "Your own personal
fellatrix."

A week had passed before she actually brought him to an orgasm in her
mouth.

Now — comfortable with it, and practiced — she worked
rhythmically with her tongue and lips. She had her own way of doing
it: without vigor, without bobbing her head up and down, without
using her hands, using only her mouth, expertly finding his most
sensitive nerves and flicking her tongue over them, drawing the shaft
in and sucking on it to tighten her wet caressing lips. "Don't
you dare come," she said. "It's too soon."

"I'll try not to spoil your fun," he said.

She murmured a small laugh. "It
is
fun
... sort of," she said. "But you — you love it, don't
you?"

Bat put both hands on her head, gently caressing. "What I love
is you, Toni," he said solemnly.

She pulled her head back and held his penis between her hands. "I
love you too, Bat. You know how much I love you."

She was in her senior year at Radcliffe, he in his junior year at
Harvard. They had met in a psychology class about six weeks ago. She
was the same age as Bat, but she was a mature woman with mature ideas
about what she liked and what she wanted.

Antonia did not remember when there hadn't been a boat. Her memories
of the 1930s were of days of sunshine, many of them spent on the blue
water. She remembered nothing of the Depression, but she remembered
that there had always been a boat hanging from the davits or tied at
the canalside dock behind their home in Fort Lauderdale. The first
one she remembered was a nineteen-foot utility fisherman, powered by
a gasoline engine. She remembered always wanting to go fishing,
insisting she must not be left behind, then growing bored and a
little sick and sometimes frightened as her father and mother fished.
They would not let her take off her life jacket, ever. She remembered
the humiliation of having to squat over a jar to pee, since the boat
had no head.

She remembered the day when the alligator waddled out of the canal
behind their house and snapped up her cocker spaniel puppy. Her
father had come running from the house with a baseball bat —
and also a pistol — but by the time he reached the shrieking
Toni the gator had dragged the puppy into the water. That, after all,
was how it killed the dog; it drowned it.

She remembered her mother and father driving her to the rail at the
bow of the boat while they landed a lunging, snapping shark on the
stern deck. Her father had brained the shark repeatedly with his
baseball bat, but even after it was quiet it was still dangerous,
they said; and Toni had to cling to the bow in terror that it would
come to life and do to her parents what the gator had done to her
dog.

She learned to swim before she was three. They had a pool behind the
house. Sometimes you had to drive off the big birds before you could
use the pool. Her mother bought chicken necks and hand-fed them to
herons and pelicans, with the result that the Maxim family had more
birds than other people had, which did not endear them to their
neighbors. Her father built a chain-link fence around the backyard,
so no more gators could come, and Toni's next puppy thrived. She
called her Pupp'l, and so the dog remained, even when she was old —
Pupp'l.

The next boat was a forty-one-foot offshore
twin-diesel fishing cruiser, which they called
Maxim's.
On
Maxim's
they could stay at sea an entire weekend. Toni loved
that boat. It had a galley and a head, and when she was tired she
could nap in her own bunk. The fisherman who hooked a big one would
shift into the rotating fighting chair in the cockpit and sometimes
fight a fish for more than an hour. That was exciting.

Even Pupp'l went to sea. It was Toni's duty to clean up after her.

Toni was eleven when she caught her first big fish, a four-foot
mackerel, and thirteen when she caught her first sailfish. The
sailfish was mounted in the den.

Dr. Jean Paul Maxim was a handsome, personable man, a psychiatrist.
Toni observed early that a psychiatrist made a lot of money, that Dr.
and Mrs. Maxim were well off, even among people who lived along the
Fort Lauderdale canals. It was much later before she figured out what
a psychiatrist did to make that money. Later she would tell that and
add a quip that she still didn't understand it.

Her mother, Blanche Maxim, was a formidable woman with sun-tanned
skin and sun-bleached hair, cold pale-blue eyes, and large prominent
teeth.

Toni did not go to the public schools. Her parents
sent her to a girls' school called Seaview Academy. In her high
school years she became an editor of the school newspaper and
yearbook, a member of the drama club, and president of
Le Cercle
Français
. She played basketball and tennis.

In at least one way, Antonia was an odd girl at Seaview. Her parents
remained married. She was one of few girls who had both parents at
home. Then that oddity evaporated. She had heard the arguments around
the house. But she was surprised when, at fourteen, she found herself
being interviewed by a kindly blue-haired woman with great thick
eyeglasses, who asked her whether she wanted to live with her mother
or her father.

What Toni wanted — Later, when she thought
of it from a more mature perspective, she recalled a child's brutal
cynicism. What she wanted was to continue to sleep in her own room,
with Pupp'l, to swim in her own pool, and to go cruising on
Maxim's.
That meant living with her father, and that is what she chose.

She had no sense of guilt about her choice; and later, when she might
have thought that way, she understood that in fact her mother had
been relieved. Blanche had had a ten-month affair with a Miami lawyer
before Dr. Maxim found out. The lawyer, as Toni would learn in the
course of visits with her mother, was contemptuous of psychiatry and
offshore fishing. His own tastes, which her mother now proclaimed
were her own as well, ran to golf and tennis.

Within a year Dr. Maxim married another tall, tanned, sun-bleached
blonde named Morgana, who admired his boat and said she loved his
daughter and his daughter's dog. She seemed sincere. She extended
herself to become a friend to Antonia, and Toni accepted her. The
exchange of mothers, after the initial shock and curiosity, was not
painful.

When Antonia was fifteen years old, her years of
innocence, the simplicity of loving Pupp'l, swimming in a backyard
pool, and fishing off
Maxim's
, going to school at Seaview, and
beginning to take an interest in boys, with nothing more troubling to
worry about than the mysteries of trigonometry, came to an abrupt end
— on December 7, 1941.

She had been interested in the war, of course —
enough interested to have thumbtacked a
National Geographic
map of Europe on her bedroom wall and to push in red and white pins
to mark the advances and retreats of armies. But it had all been
remote, thousands of miles away. Within a few days of December 7,
Maxim's
was lifted from the water and trucked to a warehouse,
where it would remain for — a term she learned to hate —
"the duration." Worse — On a night in January she
woke to the sound of a distant rumble and a dull red glow on the
eastern horizon. A tanker had been torpedoed by a German U-boat, not
twenty miles off the coast, in waters the Maxims had fished twenty
weekends a year. It was too easy to say the war had come home. It had
come into their very yard.

The beaches were closed. National Guard soldiers patrolled them day
and night, stretching barbed wire and building barricades against
raids by Nazi commandos. Fort Lauderdale was certain to be bombed or
attacked by submarine-home commandos, and the town had to be
prepared. Her father was summoned to a hospital, where he trained as
a member of a Civil Defense medical emergency team. Her stepmother
practiced as an emergency telephone operator at the Civil Defense
communications center. When they went to these training exercises,
Antonia was left alone in the house — as she would be if a raid
happened. What was more, she was left behind heavily curtained
windows — blackout curtains — and could not see what was
happening outside. She switched off all the lights in the house and
climbed through a trapdoor onto the roof, where many nights she sat
alert and worried. Twice more she saw ships blow up off the beach.