The Crasher (6 page)

Johnny couldn’t think of how to respond to that. There was silence, his father waiting expectantly. Before he could make some
kind of intelligent answer, Quentin Peet lost patience. “Okay, then, you go to Albany and write a fucking funny story for
the travel department,” he exploded. “About the Rome of the North.” He paused to chew the last piece of meat off the chop.
“You do know there is a Rome near Albany, don’t you?”

By the time coffee came, Johnny felt as if he’d been tossed around in a cement mixer. He could hardly think straight as his
father spelled out for him his dismal future life on the
Times
if he didn’t accept the Albany post. “They can’t fire you
because of that union deal made back in the sixties, but you’ll be shunted into one dead-end job after another.”

“Perhaps I should leave now?”

“Where would you go?”

“Oh, I don’t know, television, a magazine.”

“Vogue?”
sneered his father.

As so often happened at the end of a terrible evening, his father abruptly changed the subject. “Pity Dolores isn’t Colombian.”

“Why?” This was a surprising switch.

“I’ve got a hunch there’ll be a lot of interesting stories coming out of Colombia now. If Dolores was Colombian, she’d be
able to introduce you to the place, might inspire you into a little action, to get on the case.”

He drained the last drop in his second glass of wine. “There’s a war going on down there, a particularly nasty, violent war
that few people realize is happening. D’you know the drug kingpins carried out nearly three hundred bombings last year, killing
nearly two hundred people, not including those on the Avianca jet they probably blew up? And what kind of news was it here?
Not even an m head story. I tell you these drug lords live in the kind of luxury the United States has forgotten ever existed.
I think I’m going to pay a little visit to Bogotá myself to see what I can cook up.”

It was nearly ten o’clock. “Time to go, son. I’ve hardly seen your mother since I got back from the Middle East. It’s a wonder
she remembers who she’s married to.”

It was a well-worn joke that always made Johnny shudder inside, because it was so near the truth.

As they went downstairs, his father threw an arm casually around his shoulders. “Good to talk to you, Johnny. It’s always
good to get together and—”

He stopped as, at the bottom of the staircase, an attractive, stocky, Italian-looking man opened his arms wide and said, “I
can’t believe it! QP himself. I called you earlier this evening. You’re just the man I want to see.”

“Mario!” Quentin Peet allowed himself to be embraced in
a bear hug, then said, “You’re just the man I want to see, too. Meet my son, Johnny. Johnny, meet the governor of our magnificent
state, Mario Cuomo…”

As Johnny shook the governor’s hand, his father winked at him. “Governor, I want you to remember Johnny. In a couple of months
you may run into him up in your neck of the woods. He’s with the
Times,
you know, and they’re dangling the Albany Bureau under his talented nose…”

Johnny Peet would never admit it, but the intensity of Dolores’s moods, her volatility or seismicity, as he liked to describe
it to himself, always turned him on.

Perhaps it was because she was the antithesis of his very proper, low-key mother, Catherine Ponsoby Peet, who, in and out
of the hospital with a tricky heart valve, never complained, although she had plenty to complain about. Perhaps it was because
he’d inherited from his father, at least, the desire to live dangerously, if nothing else.

Whatever it was, although his common sense occasionally warned him his parents were right and Dolores could easily lead him
over a precipice, tonight, as on many nights, his common sense was nowhere to be found.

He was already excited with the events of the day, so much so he realized he could even be reckless enough to talk to Dolores
about spending the rest of their lives together.

In the hallway of her exotic East River apartment, sublet from a Third-World member of the U.N., she’d met him like a tigress,
spitting out her fury that he was half an hour late, although punctuality was hardly what she was known for.

He’d recognized the signs. Tonight, the fourth night of the new year, she was dying to be tamed… and he’d been dying
to tame her, on the floor just inside her front door, before he’d even thrown off his overcoat, across the bar in the living
room, where she’d run, pretending to ignore him, pouring herself a glass of champagne, and finally on one of her own prized
Chinese Chippendale dining chairs, where he’d pulled her to sit astride him, and where they’d rocked together so violently
as they came, the chairback cracked with a sound like a rifle shot.

Now she lay langorous, still, on the white suede chaise longue in her bedroom. Naked, she was as white as the suede, as white
and as curvaceous as a swan, Johnny thought, and just as unpredictable.

Unlike most women he’d known, Dolores had never sunbathed and the pallor and smoothness of her skin from top to toe showed
it, emphasizing the black curls surrounding her head like a halo and the tiny neat triangle of black pubic hair, which, she’d
told him more than once, she would let grow into a beautiful bush just for him—he had only to say the word.

Even after such a wild hour, his penis reacted to her lightness and darkness, but he wasn’t ready again, yet. He looked forward
to the next game she would most likely play, acting like an innocent, aloof little princess, making him wait for it, hoping
he would even beg a little.

Before that, he had something to tell her, something to discuss, and on the phone she’d said, in her usual mysterious Mata
Hari manner, she had something to discuss with him, too.

He went to the bar to get more champagne and grinned at the unholy mess they’d made as they’d wrestled to find each other,
sweeping everything on the countertop to the floor, an upturned bottle of Cristal still dripping out its contents.

He cleaned up and took another bottle from the fridge. Dolores only drank Cristal. Dolores wanted and expected only the best.
It was one of their major problems. She wouldn’t even consider flying business class, anywhere, let alone coach.

He came back to the bedroom with two glasses. She was reading
Time
magazine. “Recognize her?” she said.

He gave her a glass and, sitting on the chaise longue at her feet, looked at a full-length photograph of a stunning Brunhilde
of a woman in a bikini, only her face hidden in shadow.

“Yes, I do…” He looked at the caption. The name meant nothing to him. He laughed. “I recognize the face…”

Dolores pinched him hard.

“All right, all right. I recognize the body. Once seen, never forgotten. I know we’ve met, but I can’t remember where or who
she is and frankly right now, Ms. Scarlett, I don’t give a damn.”

Dolores made a soft, purrlike sound, which meant she was sated with sex and happy. “I’m glad you don’t remember her. I thought
you were bowled over by her when I introduced you last summer. Then she was called Rosa Brueckner, but apparently that wasn’t
her real name. If you read the story you’ll understand why.”

Johnny lazily lay back, his eyes closed, in heaven, feeling Dolores’s softness, inhaling the strange, slightly orangey, slightly
musky fragrance made specifically for her in Paris by someone she said made fragrances for Chanel. “I don’t want to read any
goddamn
Time
articles… I don’t want to read anything right now. Would any man in his right mind?” He reached back and made contact with
her perfect, full nipple, massaging it until, as he guessed she would, she pushed his hand away.

“What did you want to discuss?”

He sat up and clinked his glass against hers.
“Next!
magazine has been after me again. Don’t know why. Certainly not because of my tell-all stories from Albany…”

Dolores giggled. She knew only too well she’d come back into his life just in time to disrupt it. For more than eighteen months,
it had cost him a fortune trying to keep in touch with her, commuting to the city from upstate New York, often to find she
was out with somebody else.

All the same he’d tried to follow his father’s advice and
turn the place into a story, but the result was that the Albany Bureau, thank God, had gone to someone more worthy.

He’d been lucky. Between the Gulf War and the drug wars in Colombia, his father had been too busy to pay much attention, and
by the time his periscope focused again on his only son and heir, Johnny had found himself some kind of niche on the paper,
working for the Weekend section, writing profiles or stories, like the one appearing yesterday, about fashionable food in
the nineties, post-nouvelle cuisine.

Dolores was playing with his hair. He hoped he was wrong and there wasn’t the beginning of a bald spot at the back; even more,
he hoped she wouldn’t find it.

“So what did they say?”

“I had lunch there today. Beautiful offices, beautiful girls…”

She removed her hand abruptly. He grabbed it back and put her fingers in his mouth. “Mmmm, delicious! Nobody as beautiful
as you, my swan.” He sat up to drink more champagne. “It’s a little like a ballet, this job market. Two steps forward, two
steps back. This is about the third call I’ve had asking me to come in… so this time I went and round and round the conversation
went… ‘We like your recent Weekend pieces,’ one says… ‘We know you know the world,’ another guy says. ‘Are you interested
in investigative pieces, like your father… or would you like a regular people profile type of assignment?’ ‘Look, you asked
me to lunch,’ I said. ‘What do you have in mind?’”

“Did they talk about money?” Dolores was shocked, or so she said, by how little she considered he received from the
Times.
“Pocket money,” she called it.

“The ball’s in my court. They’ve asked me to come up with a proposal.”

“So come up with one… a million dollars a year with no limit on expenses…”

Johnny laughed, although he knew Dolores was totally serious. She was so far off the ground, no wonder his parents disapproved.

The idea of working for
Next!,
which was fast becoming a
hot read, intrigued and excited him, although how he would ever break the news to his father—that he might consider leaving
the
Times
for such an upstart magazine—was beyond his comprehension. But then, with no promotion in sight, he didn’t know how long
he could go on doing what he was doing at the paper. The idea of his own column… investigative reporting… covering what
he wanted to cover, instead of following orders from a female editor who didn’t bother to conceal her lack of admiration for
his work; who wouldn’t be intrigued, excited?

Dolores pulled his hair. “Listen to me, Johnny, ask for a million and maybe you’ll get seven fifty and in return you’ll investigate
and…”

He turned to bury his face in her neat little triangle, his tongue on its own tour of investigation.

She tried to push him away, but she showed she didn’t really want to.

It wasn’t until about one-thirty they thought about dinner. As far as Dolores was concerned that meant Le Cirque or La Grenouille
or, at this time of night, caviar, foie gras, and more Cristal from the fridge.

Johnny picked up
Time
as she went to the kitchen. Wow! Now he remembered Madame Brueckner and yes, he had been bowled over. He’d been in the Hamptons
with Dolores and gone to one of her Latino multimillionaires’ estates for lunch.

La Brunhilde Brueckner had been one of the guests, and Dolores and she had fallen into each other’s arms like long-lost sisters,
although it turned out they’d only met a couple of years before, when Dolores had been living part of the time in Los Angeles.
She’d told him Rosa wasn’t a playgirl. On the contrary. Apparently she was considered to be one of the most brilliant financial
consultants around.

So what piece of business had she landed to merit attention from
Time?
As Johnny began to read, his interest grew. This was the kind of story he would have given anything to write.
This was the kind of story every journalist would want to go after. Indeed, Rosa Brueckner wasn’t a playgirl and besides that,
her interest in the richest of the rich had nothing to do with making more money for herself.

Rosa Brueckner, the story revealed, was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, working under this pseudonym
for two and a half terror-filled years, operating a sophisticated money-laundering operation on the West Coast, through a
network of bank accounts and shell companies. So successful had her double life been, she had penetrated the cocaine industry
more deeply than any DEA agent before her, leading to the recent arrest of Luis Uchobo, top money manager for the drug lords
of Cali, Colombia.

“Brueckner’s triumph is a milestone for women in federal law enforcement,” Johnny read, “boosting the morale of her sister
agents, much as the performance of military women during Desert Storm buoyed their female colleagues.”