I drove her over to La Riviera Hotel, a newer hotel with a nice layout, all roof garden and terrace; the food was a fancied-up but tasty version of Mexican, and — despite the business nature of our trip — we found ourselves flirting and acting like honeymooners. Vera could do that to you.
When we got back, I checked the bar and the Fischettis were not present — which was no surprise. They would almost certainly be in the nightclub, which provided a great view of the Mirador’s main attraction: the famed local boys who took heroic dives into the shallow inlet from the hotel’s high rocky cliff, risking their lives — nightly... four shows.
Vera and I caught the ten-fifteen show from a little spot of our own on the rocky hillside, below the balustrade that was down several sets of steps from the parking lot. We sat on the grass, hand in hand, watching as the boy — bearing a torch, and guided by newspapers set afire and adrift below — hurled himself forty feet into a breaker. Then he climbed the opposite, higher cliff, diving a good hundred feet into a narrow ravine lined with jagged rocks.
This went on for a while, and later the boys came around up on the balustrade, where tourists were watching, to collect coins and sometimes even paper money. Vera urged me to go up there and give them something, which I did — a buck — and Vera squealed at my generosity and gave me a big kiss.
She had her hand in my hair, looking at me like I was as beautiful a man as she was a woman — deluded girl — and she said, “I think I like you blond.”
“Thanks. Maybe you oughta try it.”
“Like Jean Harlow?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Maybe I will.”
We necked there on the hillside for quite a while; it was overwhelmingly romantic — I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, not the glimmering ocean in the moonlight, the crashing waves against the jagged rocks, or that incredible blow job.
That night we had room service bring us several
“How do I look?” Vera asked, spreading her arms.
She was in a bikini, a couple of blue scraps that together might have comprised a decent handkerchief.
“Even my tongue is stiff,” I said.
That made her ooze delight, and she came over and hugged me and kissed me and put her Pepsodenty tongue in my mouth.
“Not now,” I said, incredibly enough. “We have work to do.”
I was registered under the name Joe Samuels. The hotel management had been alerted to the fact that I was a pinup photographer, and (we’d been told ahead of time) they had no objection to my taking photographs of my model, around the pool, down on the beach, anywhere around the hotel, in fact.
“You really think my picture will be in the papers?” she asked, batting her lashes over those big hazel orbs.
“Oh yeah. This will make Miss California look like a footnote in your portfolio.”
“You know, I can splash around in the pool, and lose my top. I can make it seem real natural.”
I savored the image for a moment or two, then said, “That I can’t get in the papers, sugar. You understand, this man... these men... they can be vicious.”
“But they do like girls.”
“I wouldn’t say they like them exactly. They like fucking them — and, later, they like batting them around.”
She was nodding. For all her cartoony sexiness, this was not a dumb girl.
“Nate, I understand — they’re dangerous. But you’re right there with me. My protector.”
That gave me a twinge. I hadn’t been much of a protector for somebody else, where the Fischettis had been concerned...
I peeked around the closed curtain, onto the pool area. Bright, sunny, beautiful — just another day in paradise. Beyond the little fence at the far end of the pool, enormous waves threw themselves on massive rocks, followed by massive waves throwing themselves on enormous rocks. Just for variety.
And out on that patio area around the pool — two of several dozen hotel guests either sitting around the water or down splashing in it — were Charley and Rocco Fischetti, in deck chairs.
I released the curtain, backed away, saying to Vera, “We just got lucky.”
“Really?”
“They’re out there — right now.”
“It’s showtime?”
“It’s showtime.”
We exited through the sliding glass doors of our room out onto the patio around the pool. The Fischettis were down to the left, sitting under a yellow umbrella. The showgirls were not with them; a pair of burly bodyguards, however, were. The bodyguards — an interchangeable pair of flat-nosed, cauliflower-eared, dead-eyed dagos — sat on either side of the brothers, but back a few feet.
