The Last Don - Mario Puzo [59]
“I’m on a public beach, there’s a fence in between us, and I’m in a bathing suit. Do I look like I’m harassing her?” Boz said.
Losey had a sympathetic smile on his face. “Hey, look,” he said, “if I was married to that broad, I couldn’t stay away from her either. How about if I take a look in your beach bag?”
Boz put the beach bag beneath his head. “No,” he said. “Unless you have a warrant.”
Losey gave him a friendly smile. “Don’t make me arrest you,” he said. “Or just beat the shit out of you and take the bag.”
This aroused Boz. He stood up, he offered the bag to Losey, but then he held it away from him. “Try and take it,” he said.
Jim Losey was startled. In his own estimation he had never met anybody tougher than himself. In any other situation he would have drawn his blackjack or his gun and beaten the man to a pulp. Perhaps it was the sand under his feet that made him uncertain, or perhaps it was the utter fearlessness of Skannet.
Boz was smiling at him. “You’ll have to shoot me,” he said. “I’m stronger than you. Big as you are. And if you shoot me, you won’t have probable cause.”
Losey admired the man’s perceptiveness. In a physical struggle the issue might be in doubt. And there was no cause to draw a weapon.
“Okay,” he said. He folded up his chair and started to walk away. Then he turned and said admiringly, “You’re really a tough guy. You win. But don’t give me a good probable cause. You see I haven’t measured your distance from the house, you may be just out of range of the judge’s order. . . .”
Boz laughed. “I won’t give you cause, don’t worry.”
He watched Jim Losey walk off the beach to his car and drive away. Boz put his blanket into the beach bag and returned to his own car. He put the beach bag in the trunk, took the car key off its ring, and hid it under the front seat. Then he went back to the beach for his swim around the fence.
CHAPTER 5
ATHENA AQUITANE HAD earned her way to stardom in the traditional way that the public seldom appreciates. She spent long years in training: acting classes, dance and movement classes, voice lessons, extensive reading in dramatic literature, all necessary to the art of acting.
And of course the scut work. She made the rounds of agents, casting directors, mildly lecherous producers and directors, the more dinosaur-like sexual advances of studio wheels and chiefs.
In her first year she earned her living by doing commercials, and some modeling, as a skimpily clad hostess for automotive expositions, but that was only her first year. Then her acting skills began to pay off. She had lovers who showered her with gifts of jewelry and money. Some of them offered marriage. The affairs were brief and ended on friendly terms.
None of this had been painful or humiliating to her, not even when the buyer of a Rolls-Royce assumed she came with the car. She had put him off with the joke that she had the same price as the car. She was fond of men, she enjoyed sex, but only as a treat and reward for more serious endeavor. Men were not a serious part of her world.
Acting was Life. Her secret knowledge of herself was serious. The dangers of the world were serious. But acting came first. Not the tiny movie roles that enabled her to pay expenses, but the great acting parts in great plays put on by local theater groups and then the plays at the Mark Taper Forum that finally propelled her toward major film roles.
Her real life was the parts she played, she felt more alive as she brought her characters to life, carried them around inside her while living out her ordinary existence. Her love affairs were like amusements, playing golf and tennis, dining with friends, dreamlike substances.
Real life was only in the cathedral-like theater: putting on makeup, adding one splash of color to her costume, her face contorting with emotions of the lines of the play running through her head, and then, looking into that deep blackness of the audience—God finally showing his face—she pleaded her fate. She wept, fell in love, screamed with anguish, begged forgiveness for her secret sins,