Book Excerpts

Excerpt: Storm Prey by John Sandford

2010-05-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

Storm Prey (Lucas Davenport Series #20) by John Sandford

The latest Lucas Davenport thriller from the New York times-bestselling author John Sandford. (Release date: May 18, 2010)

To read more about the book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt contains the complete first chapter of Storm Prey.

Chapter One

Three of them, hard men carrying nylon bags, wearing work jackets, Carhartts and Levis, all of them with facial hair. They walked across the parking structure to the steel security door, heads swiveling, checking the corners and the overheads, steam flowing from their mouths, into the icy air, one of the men on a cell phone.

As they got to the door, it popped open, and a fourth man, who'd been on the other end of the cell-phone call, let them through. The fourth man was tall and thin, dark-complected, with a black brush mustache. He wore a knee-length black raincoat that he'd bought at a Goodwill store two days earlier, and black pants. He scanned the parking structure, saw nothing moving, pulled the door shut, made sure of the lock.

"This way," he snapped. "Yalla."

Inside, they moved fast, reducing their exposure, should someone unexpectedly come along. No one should, at the ass-end of the hospital, at fifteen minutes after five o'clock on a bitterly cold winter morning. They threaded through a maze of service corridors until the tall man said, "Here."

Here was a storage closet. He opened it with a key. Inside, a pile of blue, double-extra-large orderly uniforms sat on a medical cart.

The hard men dumped their coats on the floor, and pulled the uniforms over their street clothes. Not a big disguise, but they weren't meant to be seen close-up — just enough to slip past a video camera. One of them, the biggest one, hopped up on the cart, lay down and said, "Look, I'm dead," and laughed at his joke. The tall man could smell the bourbon on the joker's breath.

"Shut the fuck up," said one of the others, but not in an unkindly way.

The tall man said, "Don't be stupid," and there was nothing kind in his voice. When they were ready, they looked at each other and the tall man pulled a white cotton blanket over the man on the cart, and one of the men said, "Let's do it."

"Check yourself..."

"We don't hurt anyone," the tall man said. The sentiment reflected not compassion, but calculation: robbery got X amount of attention, injuries got X-cubed.

"Yeah, yeah..." One of the men pulled a semi-automatic pistol from his belt, a heavy, blued, no-bullshit Beretta, stolen from the Army National Guard in Milwaukee, checked it, stuck it back in his belt. He said, "Okay? Everybody got his mask? Okay. Let's go."

They stuffed the ski masks into their belts and two hard men pushed the cart into the corridor. The tall man led them further through the narrow tiled hallways, then said, "Here's the camera."

The two men pushing the cart turned sideways, as the tall man told them to, and pushed the cart through a cross-corridor. A security camera peered down the hall at them. If a guard happened to be looking at the monitor at that moment, he would have seen only the backs of two orderlies, and a lump on the cart. The tall man in the raincoat scrambled along, on his hands and knees, on the far side of the cart.

The big man on the cart, looking at the ceiling tiles go by, giggled, "It's like ridin' the tilt-a-whirl."

When they were out of the camera's sight-line, the tall man stood up and led them deeper into the hospital — the three outsiders would never have found the way, by themselves. After two minutes, the tall man handed one of the outsiders a key, indicated a yellow steel door, with no identification.

"This is it?" The leader of the three was skeptical — the door looked like nothing.

"Yes," said the tall man. "This is the side door. When you go in, you'll be right among them. One or two. The front door and service window is closed until six. I'll be around the corner until you call, watching."

He'd be around the corner where he could slip out of sight, if something went wrong.

The other man nodded, asked, "Everybody ready?" The other two muttered, "Yeah," tense now, pulled on the masks, took their pistols out. The leader put the key in the lock and yanked open the door.

Weather Karkinnen had taken a half-pill at nine o'clock, knowing that she wouldn't sleep without it. Too much to do, too much to think about. The procedure had been researched, rehearsed, debated, and undoubtedly prayed over. Now the time had come.

Sleep came hard. She kept imagining that first moment, the first cut, the commitment, the parting of the flesh beneath the edge of her scalpel, on a nearly circular path between the skulls of the two babies — but sometime before nine-thirty, she slipped away.

She didn't feel her husband come to bed, at one o'clock in the morning. He took care not to disturb her, undressing in the dark, lying as unmoving as he could, listening to her breathing, until he, too, slipped away.

And then her eyes opened.

Pop.

Dark, not quite silent — the furnace running in the winter night. She lifted her head to the clock. Four-thirty. She'd been asleep for seven hours. Eight would have been the theoretical ideal, but she never slept eight. She closed her eyes again, organizing herself, stepping through the upcoming day. At twenty minutes to five, she got out of bed, stretched, and headed to the en-suite bathroom, checking herself: she felt sharp. Excellent. She brushed her teeth, showered, washed and dried her short-cut blond hair.

She'd laid out her clothes the night before. She walked across the bedroom barefoot, in the light of the two digital clocks, picked them up: a thick black-silk jersey and grey wool slacks, and dressy, black-leather square-toed shoes. She would have preferred to wear soft-soled cross-training shoes, like the nurses did, but surgeons didn't dress like nurses. She'd never even told anyone about the gel inner-soles.

She carried her clothes back to the bathroom, shut the door, turned on the light again, and dressed. When she was ready, she looked at herself in the mirror. Not bad.

Weather might have wished to have been a little taller, for the authority given by height; she might have wished for a chiseled nose. But her husband pointed out that she'd never had a problem giving orders, or having them followed; and that he thought her nose, which she saw as lumpy, was devastatingly attractive, and that any number of men had chased after her, nose and all...

So, not bad.

She grinned at herself, turned to make sure the slacks didn't make her ass look fat — they didn't — switched off the light, opened the bathroom door and tiptoed across the bedroom. Her husband said, in the dark, "Good luck, babe."

"I didn't know you were awake."

"I'm probably more nervous than you are," he said.

She went back to the bed and kissed him on the forehead. "Go back to sleep."

Downstairs in the kitchen, she had two pieces of toast, a cup of instant coffee and a yogurt, got her bag, went out to the car, backed out of the garage, and headed downtown, on the snowy streets, across the river to the Minnesota Medical Research Center. She might be first in, she thought, but maybe not: there were forty people on the surgical team. Somebody had to be more nervous than she was.

At the hospital, the yellow door popped open and the three big men swarmed through.

Two people were working in the pharmacy — a short, slender man older man, who might once in the 60s have been a dancer, but no longer had the muscle tone. He wore a skuzzy beard on his cheeks, a soul patch under his lower lip. First thing, when he came to work, he tied a paper surgeon's cap on his head, for the rush he got when people looked at him in the cafeteria. The other person was a busy, intent, heavy-set woman in a nurse's uniform, who did the end-of-shift inventory, making sure it was all there, the stacks and rows and lockers full of drugs.

Some of it, put on the street, was worthless. Nobody pays street prices to cure the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Most of it, put on the street — on more than one street, actually; there was the old-age street, the uninsured street, the junkie street — was worth a lot. Half-million dollars? A million? Maybe.

The three hard men burst through the door and were on top of the two pharmacy workers in a half-second. The woman had enough time to whimper, "Don't," before one of the men pushed her to the floor, gun in her face, so close she could smell the oil on it, and said, "Shutta fuck up. Shut up." Soul-patch huddled into a corner with his hands up, then sank to his butt.

The leader of the three waved a pistol at the two on the floor and said, "Flat on the floor. Roll over, put your hands behind your back. We don't want to hurt you."

The two did, and another of the men hurriedly taped their hands behind them with grey duct tape, and then bound their feet together. That done, he tore off short strips of tape and pasted them over the victims' eyes, and then their mouths.

He stood up: "Okay."

The leader pushed the door open again and signaled with a fingertip. The tall man stepped in from the hallway, said, "These," and pointed at a series of locked, glass-doored cupboards. And, "Over here..."

A row of metal-covered lockers. The leader of the big men went to the man on the floor, who looked more ineffectual than the woman, and ripped the tape from his mouth.

"Where are the keys?" For one second, the man on the floor seemed inclined to prevaricate, so the big man dropped to his knees and said, "If you don't tell me this minute, I will break your fuckin' skull as an example. Then you will be dead, and I will ask the fat chick."

"In the drawer under the telephone," soul-patch said.

"Good answer."

As the big man retaped soul-patch's mouth, the tall man got the keys and began popping open the lockers. All kinds of good stuff here, every opiate and man-made opiate except heroin; lots of hot-rock stimulants, worth a fortune with the big-name labels.

"Got enough Viagra to stock a whore-house," one of the men grunted.

Another one: "Take this Tamiflu shit?"

"Fifty bucks a box in California... Take it."

Five minutes of fast work, the tall man pointing them at the good stuff, sorting out the bad.

Then the old guy on the floor made a peculiar wiggle.

One of the hold-up men happened to see it, frowned, then went over, half-rolled him. The old guy's hands were loose — he'd pulled one out of the tape, had had a cell phone in a belt clip under his sweater, had worked it loose, and had been trying to make a call. The big man grunted and looked at the face of the phone. One number had been pressed successfully: a nine.

"Sonofabitch was trying to call 911," he said, holding up the phone to the others. The old man tried to roll away, but the man who'd taken the phone punted him in the back once, twice, three times, kicking hard with steel-toed work boots.

"Sonofabitch... sonofabitch." The boot hit with the sound of a meat hammer striking a steak.

"Let him be," the leader said after the third kick.

But the old man had rolled back toward his tormenter and grasped him by the ankle, and the guy tried to shake him loose and the old man moaned something against the tape and held on, his fingernails raking the big guy's calf.

"Let go of me, you old fuck." The guy shook him off his leg, and kicked him again, hard, in the chest.

The leader said, "Quit screwing around. Tape him up again and let's get this stuff out of here."

The old man, his hands taped again, was still groaning as they loaded the bags. That done, they went to the door, glanced down the hallway. All clear. The bags went under the blanket on the cart, and the three big men pushed the cart past the security-camera intersection, back through the rabbit-warren to the utility closet, replaced the orderly uniforms with their winter coats, picked up the bags.

The leader said, "Gotta move, now. Gotta move. Don't know how much time we got."

Another of the men said, "Shooter — dropped your glove."

"Ah, man, don't need that." He picked it up, and the tall man led them out, his heart thumping against his rib cage. Almost out. When they could see the security door, he stopped, and they went on and out. The tall man watched until the door re-latched, turned, and headed back into the complex.

There were no cameras looking at the security door, or between the door and their van. The hard men hustled through the cold, threw the nylon bags in the back, and one of them climbed in with them, behind tinted windows, while the leader took the wheel and the big man climbed in the passenger seat.

"God damn, we did it," said the passenger. He felt under his seat, found a paper bag with bottle of bourbon in it. He was unscrewing the top as they rolled down the ramp; an Audi A5 convertible, moving too fast, swept across the front of the van and caught the passenger, mouth open, who squinted against the light. For just a moment, he was face to face with a blond woman, who then swung past them into the garage.

"Goddamnit!"

The leader braked, and looked back, but the A5 had already turned up the next level on the ramp. He thought they might turn around and find the woman... but then what? Kill her?

"She see you guys?" asked the man in the back, who'd seen only the flash of the woman's face.

The guy with the bottle said, "She was looking right at me. Goddamnit."

"Nothing to do," the leader said. "Nothing to do. Get out of sight. Shit, it was only one second...."

And they went on.

Weather had seen the man with the bottle, but paid no attention. Too much going through her head. She went on to the physicians' parking, got a spot close to the door, parked, and hurried inside.

The tall man got back to the utility closet, pulled off the raincoat and pants, which he'd used to conceal his physician's scrubs: if they'd been seen in the hallway, the three big men with a doc, somebody would have remembered. He gathered up the scrubs abandoned by the big men, stuffed them in a gym bag, along with the raincoat and pants, took a moment to catch his breath, to neaten up.

Listened, heard nothing. Turned off the closet light, peeked into the empty hallway, then strode off, a circuitous route, avoiding cameras, to an elevator. Pushed the button, waited impatiently.

When the door opened, he found a short, attractive blond woman inside, who nodded at him. He nodded back, poked "1," and they started down, standing a polite distance apart, with just the trifle of awkwardness of a single man and a single woman, unacquainted, in an elevator.

The woman said, after a few seconds, "Still hard to come to work in the dark."

"Can't wait for summer," the tall man said. They got to "2," and she stepped off and said, "Summer always comes," and she was gone.

Weather thought, as she walked away from the elevator, No point looking at the kids. They'd be asleep in the temporary ICU they'd set up down the hall from the operating room. She went instead to the locker room, and traded her street clothes for surgical scrubs. Another woman came in, and Weather nodded to her and the other woman asked, "Couldn't sleep?"

"Got a few hours," Weather said. "Are we the only two here?"

The woman, a radiologist named Regan, laughed: "No. John's got the doll on the table and he's talking about making some changes to the table, for God's sakes. Rick's here, he's messing with his saws. Gabriel was down in the ICU, he just got here, he's complaining about the cold. A bunch of nurses..."

"Nerves," Weather said. "See you down there."

She was cool in her scrubs, but comfortably so: she'd been doing this for nearly fifteen years, and the smell of a hospital, the alcohol, the cleaners, even the odor of burning blood, smelled like fresh air to her...

No point at looking at the kids, but she'd do it anyway. There were two nurses outside the temporary ICU, and they nodded and asked quietly, "Are you going in?"

"Just a peek."

"They've been quiet," one of the nurses said. "Dr. Maret just left."

Moving as silently as she could, in the semi-dark, she moved next to the babies' special bed. When you didn't look closely, they looked like any other toddlers, who happened to be sleeping head-to-head; small hands across their chests, eyes softly closed, small chests rising up and down. The first irregularity that a visitor might notice was the ridges in their skulls: Weather had placed a series of skin expanders under their scalps, to increase the amount of skin available to cover the skull defects — the holes — when they were separated.

There was really no need for her to look at them: she simply wanted to. Two babies, innocent, silent, feeling no pain; their world was about to change. She watched them for a minute, and Ellen sighed, and one foot moved, and then she subsided again.

Weather tiptoed out.

The old man in the pharmacy was moaning, the woman trying to talk, and the old man heard the woman fall down against a chair, after trying to get up, and then somebody was rapping at the service window and they both tried to scream, and they were loud, but muffled. He was chewing at the duct tape on his mouth, and finally it came loose from one side and he spat it away from his face.

"Dorothy, can you hear me?"

A muffled "Yes."

"I think I'm hurt bad. If I don't make it, tell the police that I scratched one of the robbers. I should have blood on my hand."

She replied, but the reply was unintelligible. He'd been working on the tape on his wrists, and eventually pulled one free... he tried to get up, but was too weak. He couldn't orient himself; nothing seemed to be working. He fumbled at the tape over his eyes, failed to get it free, moaned, moaned...

More time went by and the old man felt himself going dark; didn't know what was happening, but his heart was pounding and he told himself, calm down, calm down. He'd had heart and circulatory problems, clots, and he didn't need a clot breaking free, but his heart was pounding and he was sweating and something was going more wrong than it should be, more wrong than rolling around on a tile floor gagged and blinded and beaten. Hurt bad.

Then the door rattled and he shouted and he heard an answering shout, and he shouted again and Dorothy tried to scream through her gag, and some time later the door rattled again, and he heard it open, and somebody cried out, and then more people were there.

He blacked out for a moment, then came back, realized he was on a gurney, that they'd put a board on him, they were moving down a hallway. Somebody said, a few inches from his face, "We're moving you down to the ER, we're moving you..."

He said, as loud as he could as the world faded, "I scratched him. I scratched him. Tell the police, I scratched him..."

The operating room had been reworked for the separation operation. Maret had stripped out all the general surgery stuff, put in more lights, brought in the custom table. The table had been made in Germany, and lined with a magic memory foam that would adapt to the kids as their bodies were moved this way and that.

Sara and Ellen Raynes were joined at the skull, vertically, but slightly turned from each other. If an observer was standing at Sara's feet, looking at her face, and Sara was looking straight up, then Ellen's face was upside down and rotated to the observer's left. Imaging studies, done by Regan and her associates, indicated that their brains were separate, but they shared a portion of the dura mater under the skull, a kind of fibrous lining that protected and facilitated the drainage of venous blood from the brain.

The in-coming blood, in the arterial system, was good in both babies; but if the blood couldn't be drained away, and recirculated, it would put increasing pressure on the brains, eventually killing them.

Sara and Ellen were eighteen months old. Their parents had known the babies were conjoined before birth. The option of abortion had been proposed, but rejected by the parents, Lucy and Larry Raynes, for religious and emotional reasons. The children had been delivered by caesarian section at seven-and-a-half months. Sara had been born with a congenital heart defect, which further complicated matters.

Weather pushed into the OR and found three surgeons working with the baby-doll — a life-sized, actual-weight dense-foam model of the Raynes twins. They had it on the table, and were rolling it against the foam.

"So... no change," Gabriel Maret said.

Maret was a short man, with a head slightly too large for his body, the size emphasized by a wild thatch of curly black hair, shot through with silver. He was dark-eyed, olive-complected, with a chipped front tooth. He favored cashmere in his carefully-tailored, French-cut winter suits, and the women around the hospital paid close attention to him: He was French, and the observing women agreed that his accent, in English, was perfect.

Maret had come to dinner with Lucas and Weather every week or so over the winter, enjoying the kids and the family life. He was divorced, with four children of his own. He and his wife still shared an apartment in Paris, and, sometimes, he said, a bed. "It's insane," he said. "She is more stubborn than one of your mules."

"More stubborn than you?" Weather had asked.

He considered the question: "Maybe not that stubborn," he said.

He and her husband, Lucas, who got along improbably well, once spent an hour talking about men's fashion, nearly driving Weather crazy with the inanity of it. She'd said, "Fifteen minutes on loafers? Loafers?"

"We were just getting started," Lucas said. She wasn't sure he was joking.

"So... no change," Maret said.

"Not as long as everything goes right," said John Dansk, a neurosurgeon. "If we run into trouble splicing the six vein, if we lose it, we may have to take out another piece and that means rolling Sara this way and Ellen will torque back to the right."

The six vein was a vein shared by the twins. They'd tie it off on Ellen's side, and attempt to splice it into the five vein on Sara's, the better to move blood out of Sara's brain. The vein numbers simply came from imaging charts prepared by the radiologists.

"So what are you suggesting?" Maret asked. He glanced at Weather: "You are gorgeous this morning."

"I know," she said, to make him laugh. As did the other women around him, she liked to make him laugh.

Dansk scowled at them and said, "I'm suggesting that we slice a few wedges out of the base of the mold, so that we can use them as shims if we have to brace one of the kids."

"Why not have a nurse hold her?" Maret asked.

"Because we might be talking a couple of hours, if worse comes to worse."

"You know how much that mold cost?" Maret asked.

"About one nine-thousandth of your annual salary," Dansk said.

Maret shrugged. "So, we cut a few wedges. Why not? If we need them, we have them, and if we don't, it won't matter."

"Should have thought of this before now," said Rick Hanson, an orthopedic surgeon who would make the bone cuts through the kids' shared skull. He seemed shaky; he'd invented a half-dozen little saws for this operation, and would be the focus of a lot of attention. Because of the way the children's skulls intersected, they formed a complex three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle — basically, an oval ring of bone — of which he'd be removing only a few pieces at a time. Normally the cutting would have been done by the neurosurgeon, with drills and flexible wire saws. Hanson, from Washington University in St. Louis, had developed his own set of electric saws matched to jigs — cutting templates — for complicated bone cuts. Maret had decided that Hanson's technique would be ideal, and would make it possible to prepare perfectly fitted composite plates to cover the holes in the babies' skulls.

"We're just nervous," Maret said now. "That's normal." Maret was the team leader, the one with all the experience. He'd done two other craniopagus separations, one in France, one in Miami. Of the four children involved, two had survived — one from each operation. When he talked about the work, he talked mostly about the children who'd died.

Another doc pushed into the room, followed by a second one. They had all kinds — anesthesiologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, cardiologists, plastic and orthopedic surgeons, and a medical professor who specialized in anatomical structures of the skull, as it pertained to craniofacial reconstruction. They had twenty nurses and surgical assistants.

Weather said to Dansk, the neurosurgeon, "If you want to cut those wedges, you better get it done: they've got to start cleaning the place up."

Dansk said, "I'm on it," and, "I need a scalpel or something. Anybody got an X-Acto knife?"

Above the table, in an observation room behind a canted glass wall, people were beginning to filter into the stadium seating.

A nurse came into the OR — one of the sterile nurses — and said, "I wanted to see if we could make the move one more time."

She wanted to practice breaking the tables apart, so that when the final cut was made, and the twins were separated, they could be moved to separate operating areas for the fitting of the new composite skull shells.

"Why don't we visually check the linkage..." Maret began.

It was starting; Weather didn't think it, but she felt it, felt the excitement and the tension starting to build. She worked almost every day, cutting, sewing, cauterizing, diagnosing. This was different.

She thought, "Remember to pee."

The Raynes twins were a rare and complicated medical phenomenon. Craniopagus twins comprise only about one percent of conjoined twins. Because of the rarity of the condition, experience with separation surgery was limited. One of the twins, Sara, suffered from defects in the septum of the heart — the wall that divides the right side of the heart from the left side — and the defects were already causing congestion in the circulatory system.

The type of surgery usually favored for craniopagus separation might take place over several months. The most critical part of most operations was doing a staged separation of the brain's blood-drainage system. Each operation would isolate the drainage systems a bit more, and would allow the bodies to create new bypass channels.

In the Raynes' case, surgeonsÊfeared that a protracted series of operations would weaken and possibly kill Sara, which would also threaten the stronger Ellen, especially if Sara were to go into a rapid decline.

The additional factor in the Raynes' case was that the conjoined area was relatively small — the hole left behind in the babies' skulls after the separation would be no bigger than the diameter of an orange. That meant that a single operation was possible — even with some shared venous drainage, it was thought that one continuous operation would be the best chance for saving both twins.

The surgical team would do the separation, and once separated, the team would break in two, each working on an individual twin. The joint surgery was expected to last up to twenty hours.

The team was committed to saving both twins.

Weather did aesthetic, reconstructive and microsurgery. Her availability in Minnesota, and a paper she'd done on a thumb reconstruction, had caught Maret's eye when he began to consider the Raynes twins.

In Weather's case, a young boy had caught his thumb in a hydraulic log-splitter: the thumb had been pulped. After the wound healed, Weather had removed one of the boy's second toes, and used the toe to replace the thumb. Since a thumb represented a full fifty percent of the function of the hand, the reconstruction gave back the kid the use of his hand. As he used the new thumb, it would strengthen and grow, and eventually come to resemble a normal thumb, except for the extra knuckle.

As part of the eleven-hour operation, Weather had hooked up two nerves, two tiny arteries and two even smaller veins — veins the size of broom straws. The photomicrographs of the sutured veins had particularly attracted Maret's attention. The more veins that could be hooked up, the better off the twins would be — and Weather could do that work, even on the smallest vessels.

He'd also been attracted to her sheer stamina: eleven hours of microsurgery was a super-marathon. He sold her on the idea of joining the team, which also made her available to study the twins, to get to know the parents, and to place the skin expanders under their scalps.

Weather had turned away from Maret and the argument — "Remember to pee" — when they heard a commotion outside the operating room.

"What is that?" Maret asked. Dansk had just come back with a large scalpel, and he turned to look. A few seconds later, an anesthesiologist named Yamaguchi burst into the room. He looked, Weather thought, like someone who'd just come to the emergency room to see his child: panicked.

He said, urgently, to Maret, Weather, and the others, "It's off. The operation's off. We've got, we've got..."

Weather caught his sleeve and said, "Slow down, slow down."

"It's off," Yamaguchi said. "Some guys just raided the pharmacy and cleaned the place out. Everything is shut down. Everything."

Maret's face clicked through a series of expressions, from, "Is this a joke?" to astonishment: "What?"

"Some guys with guns," Yamaguchi said. He was flapping his arms, like a loon trying to take off. "Robbers. They robbed the pharmacy. The police are here. There's nothing left, they took everything... That old guy who works there, the one who wears the surgical hat..."

"Don," said Weather.

"Yeah, Don — he's hurt pretty bad. They're taking him into the ER."

"You must be shitting me," Maret said with a non-Gallic precision, looking around at his astonished crew.

Alain Barakat stood at the back of the emergency operating room, mask dangling around his neck, watching the work: the surgeon was cursing at the nurse, who was fumbling the gear, and they were all watching the blood pressure dropping and the surgeon was saying, "Get it in there, get it in there, get some pressure on it," and the nurse stood on a chair and lifted the bottle of saline and somebody else said, "Two minutes for the blood." The surgeon said, "I don't think we have the time, I don't think we've got it..." and the anesthesiologist said, "We're losing him man," and the doc said, "Fuck this, I'm going in," and he cut and cut again and again, going in through the beginning of a brutal black bruise on the old man's belly, and the anesthesiologist said, "Hurry it up, man," and the surgeon said, "Ah, Jesus, I've got no blood, I got no blood here," and he hurled the scalpel into a corner and it clanged around and he said, "It must've been his goddamn kidneys, let's see if we can roll him..." and the nurses moved up to help with the roll and the anesthesiologist said, "Man, he's arresting..."

Barakat, standing in the corner, said, "Shit shit shit shit shit shit..."

One minute later, the old man was gone. No point in trying to restart the heart — there was no blood going through it. They all stood around, shell-shocked, and then the surgeon said, "Let's clean up."

One of the nurses said, "We had no time. He was going too quick."

They all looked at the body on the table, worn Adidas sneakers pointed out at 45-degrees, chest flat and still, the bloody gash on the gut. The anesthesiologist turned to get something and saw Barakat, a tall man, standing in the corner, hands pressed to the side of his head, and the anesthesiologist said, "Wasn't you, man. You did good. Everybody did good. He was gone when we got him."

And Barakat thought: Now everybody will be here. Now the police will tear the place apart.

Because he really didn't care about the old man.

The separation team was standing around, repeating what Yamaguchi had said, when Thomas Carlson, the hospital administrator, came hurrying down the hall. Carlson was wearing his white physician's coat, which he often did on public occasions, to remind people that he had an MD in addition to the MBA; but for all that, not a bad guy, Weather thought.

He went straight to Maret: "Gabe, you've heard."

"I've heard there was a robbery."

"Unfortunately. The problem is, we've also got a man down. He's hurt pretty badly, and we won't have access to your drugs — any drugs, except in an absolute emergency, and then we'll be crawling around on the floor trying to find them. The place is completely wrecked. They threw everything out of the lockers, what they didn't take..."

"So: everybody is here," Maret said.

"But you're going to have to wait," Carlson said. "God, I'm sorry, man. But this is an incredible mess. As long as the kids are stable..."

Maret nodded: "Well. I guess we can wait."

Weather and Maret went together to tell the Rayneses. The parents were waiting in what the team called the "separation lounge," once a meditation room, which had been converted for family use and for team conferences.

The Rayneses were sitting on a couch, looking out over a table full of magazines: neither one was reading. They were in their early thirties, and except for their sex, as alike as new marbles: honey-blond, tall, slender, from the small town of New Ulm in southern Minnesota. Larry worked in a heating and air-conditioning business owned by his father; Lucy worked at the Post Office. Neither had lived outside of New Ulm. Both of them spoke fluent German, and went to Germany every summer, to hike. They had no other children.

They'd conferred with Maret on the separation process, but had worked more with Weather than any other physician, because of Weather's involvement in the preliminary surgery.

They were astonished by the news. "What does it mean? It's off? For how long?" Lucy Raynes blurted. "I mean...?"

"We'll go tomorrow," Weather said, patting her arm. "Same time. This whole thing is so bizarre... there are police everywhere, I guess. The girls are fine, no change for them."

"I can't believe it," Larry Raynes said. "After we got this far..."

His wife put an arm around his waist and squeezed him: "We'll be okay. It'll be all right."

Of the two Rayneses, Lucy was the most demanding of information, had studied the details of the separation, used terms like Ôsuperior sagittal sinus' and Ôcalvaria,' read medical papers on other separations. She'd spoken to the media on a number of occasions, both televised and print. Larry, on the other hand, mostly talked about timing, and the children's development; and often, to Weather, seemed to simply want to get it over with it. He wasn't stupid, but swept along in a current too strong for him, part medical science, part circus. He wanted to go home.

Maret had warned everybody about the circus. "Whenever this is done, we get the media, because of the drama and the sympathetic aspects. You have to be prepared. In Miami, we had reporters following the surgeons home, knocking on doors, waiting in the streets."

Now he said to the Rayneses, "I'll talk to the media in ten minutes or so. I'd like you to be with me."

Larry Raynes said to his wife, "You go. I'll go sit with the kids."

Weather left them talking, and went back to the locker room to change back into her street clothes.

By the time she got back, most of the team had drifted away. The OR nurses were shutting the place down. Weather stopped to talk with her surgical assistant, when one of the team's cardiologists, Alan Seitz, who'd been called to the ER, came ambling down the hall, looking distracted. "What?" Weather asked.

"That Don guy died," Seitz said. "One of the robbers kicked him to death. Broke up his kidneys. He was soaked in Coumadin. He bled out before we could get anything going. We were dumping fluid into him fast as we could, nothing to do."

Weather stepped up and gave him a squeeze. Seitz was an old friend. "Nothing to do. You only do what you can."

"Yeah." Seitz looked around and said, "I mean, Jesus Christ: kicked to death. In the hospital."

This concludes the excerpt from Storm Prey by John Sandford.

Would you like to read this book? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.

Excerpt: Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk

2010-05-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk

This is the latest novel from the most famous American transgressional fiction novelist, Chuck Palahniuk.

To read more about the book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt contains the first two chapters of Tell-All, entitled Act I: Scene One, and Act I: Scene Two.

ACT I, SCENE ONE

Act one, scene one opens with Lillian Hellman clawing her way, stumbling and scrambling, through the thorny nighttime underbrush of some German schwarzwald, a Jewish baby clamped to each of her tits, another brood of infants clinging to her back. Lilly clambers her way, struggling against the brambles that snag the gold embroidery of her Balenciaga lounging pajamas, the black velvet clutched by hordes of doomed cherubs she’s racing to deliver from the ovens of some Nazi death camp. More innocent toddlers, lashed to each of Lillian’s muscular thighs. Helpless Jewish, Gypsy and homosexual babies. Nazi gestapo bullets spit past her in the darkness, shredding the forest foliage, the smell of gunpowder and pine needles. The heady aroma of her Chanel No. 5. Bullets and hand grenades just whiz past Miss Hellman’s perfectly coiffed Hattie Carnegie chignon, so close the ammunition shatters her Cartier chandelier earrings into rainbow explosions of priceless diamonds. Ruby and emerald shrapnel blasts into the fl awless skin of her perfect, pale
cheeks. . . . From this action sequence, we dissolve to:

    Reveal: the interior of a stately Sutton Place mansion. It’s some Billie Burke place decorated by Billy Haines, where formally dressed guests line a long table within a candlelit, wood-paneled dining room. Liveried footmen stand along the walls. Miss Hellman is seated near the head of this very large dinner party, actually describing the frantic escape scene we’ve just witnessed. In a slow panning shot, the engraved place cards denoting each guest read like a veritable Who’s Who. Easily half of twentieth-century history sits at this table: Prince Nicholas of Romania, Pablo Picasso, Cordell Hull and Josef von Sternberg. The attendant celebrities seem to stretch from Samuel Beckett to Gene Autry to Marjorie Main to the faraway horizon.
    Lillian stops speaking long enough to draw one long drag on her cigarette. Then to blow the smoke over Pola Negri and Adolph Zukor before she says, “It’s at that heartstopping moment I wished I’d just told Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘No, thank you.’ ” Lilly taps cigarette ash onto her bread plate, shaking her head, saying, “No secret missions for this girl.”
    While the footmen pour wine and clear the sorbet dishes, Lillian’s hands swim through the air, her cigarette trailing smoke, her fi ngernails clawing at invisible forest vines, climbing sheer rock cliff faces, her high heels blazing a muddy trail toward freedom, her strength never yielding under the burden of those tiny Jewish and homosexual urchins.
    Every eye, fi xed, from the head of the table to the foot, stares at Lilly. Every hand crosses two fingers beneath the damask napkin laid in every lap, while every guest mouths a silent prayer that Miss Hellman will swallow her Chicken Prince Anatole Demidoff without chewing, then suffocate, writhing and choking on the dining room carpet.

    Almost every eye. The exceptions being one pair of violet eyes . . . one pair of brown eyes . . . and of course my own weary eyes.
    The possibility of dying before Lillian Hellman has become the tangible fear of this entire generation. Dying and becoming merely fodder for Lilly’s mouth. A person’s entire life and reputation reduced to some golem, a Frankenstein’s monster Miss Hellman can reanimate and manipulate to do her bidding.
    Beyond her fi rst few words, Lillian’s talk becomes one of those jungle sound tracks one hears looping in the background of every Tarzan film, just tropical birds and Johnny Weissmuller and howler monkeys repeating. Bark, bark, screech . . . Emerald Cunard. Bark, growl, screech . . . Cecil Beaton.
    Lilly’s drivel possibly constitutes some bizarre form of name-dropping Tourette’s syndrome. Or perhaps the outcome of an orphaned press agent raised by wolves and taught to read aloud from Walter Winchell’s column.
    Her compulsive prattle, a true pathology.
    Cluck, oink, bark . . . Jean Negulesco.
    Thus, Lilly spins the twenty-four-carat gold of people’s actual lives into her own brassy straw.
    Please promise you did NOT hear this from me.
    Seated within range of those fl ying heroic elbows, my Miss Kathie stares out from the bank of cigarette smoke. An actress of Katherine Kenton’s stature. Her violet eyes, trained throughout her adult life to never make contact with anything except the lens of a motion picture camera. To never meet the eyes of a stranger, instead to always focus on someone’s earlobe or lips. Despite such training, my Miss Kathie peers down the length of the table, her lashes fluttering. The slender fingers of one famous white hand toy with the auburn tresses of her wig. The jeweled fingers of Miss Kathie’s opposite hand touch the six strands of pearls which contain the loose folds of her sagging neck skin.
    In the next instant, while the footmen pass the finger bowls, Lillian twists in her chair, shouldering an invisible sniper’s rifle and squeezing off rounds until the clip is empty. Still just dripping with Hebrew and Communist babies. Lugging her cargo of Semitic orphans. When the rifle is too searing hot to hold, Miss Hellman howls a wild war whoop and hurtles the steaming weapon at the pursuing storm troopers.
    Snarl, bark, screech . . . Peter Lorre. Oink, bark, squeal . . .Averill Harriman.
    It’s a fate worse than death to spend eternity in harness, serving as Lilly Hellman’s zombie, brought back to life at dinner parties. On radio talk programs. At this point, Miss Hellman is heaving yet another batch of invisible babies, rescued Gypsy babes, high, toward the chandelier, as if catapulting them over the snowcapped peak of the Matterhorn to the safety of Switzerland.
    Grunt, howl, squeal . . . Sarah Bernhardt.
    By now, Lillian Hellman wraps two fi sts around the invisible throat of Adolf Hitler, reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as Leni Riefenstahl, her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliament cigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed.
    Bray, bark, whinny . . . Basil Rathbone.

    Lilly throws the terrified, make-believe Hitler into the center of tonight’s dinner table, her teeth biting, her manicured fingernails scratching at his Nazi eyes. Lillian’s fists clamped around the invisible windpipe, she begins pounding the invisible Führer’s skull against the tablecloth, making the silverware and wineglasses jump and rattle.
    Screech, meow, tweet . . . Wallis Simpson.
    Howl, bray, squeak . . . Diana Vreeland.
    A moment before Hitler’s assassination, George Cukor looks up, his fingertips still dripping chilled water into his finger bowl, that smell of fresh-sliced lemons, and George says, “Please, Lillian.” Poor George says, “Would you please stuff it.”
    Seated well below the salt, below the various professional hangers-on, the walking men, the drug dealers, the mesmerists, the exiled White Russians and poor Lorenz Hart, really at the very horizon of tonight’s dinner table, a young man looks back. Seated on the farthest frontier of placement. His eyes the bright brown of July Fourth sunlight through a tall mug of root beer. Quite the American specimen. A classic face of such symmetrical proportions, the exactly balanced type of face one dreams of looking down to find smiling and eager between one’s inner thighs.
    Still, that’s the trouble with only a single glance at any star on the horizon. As Elsa Maxwell would say, “One can never tell for certain if that dazzling, shiny object is rising or setting.”
    Lillian inhales the silence through her burning cigarette. Taps the gray ash onto her bread plate. In a blast of smoke, she says, “Did you hear?” She says, “It’s a fact, but Eleanor Roosevelt chewed every hair off my bush. . . .”

Through all of this—the cigarette smoke and lies and the Second World War—the specimen’s bright brown eyes, they’re looking straight down the table, up the social ladder, gazing back, deep, into the famous, fluttering violet eyes of my employer.

ACT I, SCENE TWO

    If you’ll permit me to break the fourth wall, my name is Hazie Coogan.
    My vocation is not that of a paid companion, nor am I a professional housekeeper. It is my role as an old woman to scrub the same pots and pans I scrubbed as a young one—I’ve made my peace with that fact—and while she has never once touched them, those pots and pans have always belonged to the majestic, the glorious film actress Miss Katherine Kenton.
    It is my task to soft-boil her daily egg. I wax her linoleum kitchen floor. The endless job of dusting and polishing the not insignificant number of bibelots and gold-plated gimcracks awarded to Miss Katie, that job is mine as well. But am I Miss Katherine Kenton’s maid? No more so than the butcher plays handmaiden to the tender lamb.

    My purpose is to impose order on Miss Kathie’s chaos . . . to instill discipline in her legendary artistic caprice. I am the person Lolly Parsons once referred to as a “surrogate spine.”
    While I may vacuum the carpets of Miss Kathie’s household and place the orders with the grocer, my true job title is not majordomo so much as mastermind. It might appear that Miss Kathie is my employer in the sense that she seems to provide me funds in exchange for my time and labor, and that she relaxes and blooms while I toil; but using that same logic, it could be argued that the farmer is employed by the pullet hen and the rutabaga.
    The elegant Katherine Kenton is no more my master than the piano is master to Ignace Jan Paderewski . . . to paraphrase Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who paraphrased me, who first said and did most of the dazzling, clever things which, later, helped make others famous. In that sense you already know me. If you’ve seen Linda Darnell as a truck-stop waitress, sticking a pencil behind one ear in Fallen Angel, you’ve seen me. Darnell stole that bit from me. As does Barbara Lawrence when she brays her donkey laugh in Oklahoma. So many great actresses have fi lched my most effective mannerisms, and my spot-on delivery, that you’ve seen bits of me in performances by Alice Faye and Margaret Dumont and Rise Stevens. You’d recognize fragments of me—a raised eyebrow, a nervous hand twirling the cord of a telephone receiver—from countless old pictures.
    The irony does not escape me that while Eleanor Powell lays claim to my fashion signature of wearing numerous small bows, I now boast the red knees of a charwoman and the swollen hands of a scullery maid. No less of an illustrious wag than Darryl Zanuck once dismissed me as looking like Clifton Webb in a glen plaid skirt. Mervyn LeRoy spread the rumor that I am the secret love child of Wally Beery and his frequent costar .
   Currently, the regular duties of my position include defrosting Miss Kathie’s electric icebox and ironing her bed linens, yet my position is not that of a laundress. My career is not as a cook. Nor is domestic servant my vocation. My life is far less steered by Katherine Kenton than her life is by me. Miss Kathie’s daily demands and needs may determine my actions but only so much as the limits of a racing automobile will dictate those of the driver.
    I am not merely a woman who works in a factory producing the ever-ravishing Katherine Kenton. I am the factory itself. With the words I write here I am not simply a camera operator or cinematographer; I am the lens itself—flattering, accentuating, distorting—recording how the world will recall my coquettish Miss Kathie.

    Yet I am not just a sorceress. I am the source.
    Miss Kathie exerts only a very small effort to be herself. The bulk of that manual labor is supplied by me in tandem with a phalanx of wig makers, plastic surgeons and dietitians. Since her earliest days under a studio contract it has been my livelihood to comb and dress her often blond, sometimes brunette, occasionally red hair. I coach the dulcet tones of her voice so as to make every utterance suggest a line of dialogue scripted for her by Thornton Wilder. Nothing of Miss Kathie is innate except for the almost supernatural violet coloring of her eyes. Hers is the throne, seated in the same icy pantheon as Greta Garbo and Grace Kelly and Lana Turner, but mine is the heavy lifting which keeps her on high.
    And while the goal of every well-trained household servant is to seem invisible, that is also the goal of any accomplished puppeteer. Under my control, Miss Kathie’s household seems to smoothly run itself, and she appears to run her own life.
    My position is not that of a nurse, or a maid, or a secretary. Nor do I serve as a professional therapist or a chauffeur or bodyguard. While my job title is none of the preceding, I do perform all of those functions. Every evening, I pull the drapes. Walk the dog. Lock the doors. I disconnect the telephone, to keep the outside world in its correct place. However, more and more my job is to protect Miss Kathie from herself.
    Cut direct to an interior, nighttime. We see the lavish boudoir belonging to Katherine Kenton, immediately following tonight’s dinner party, with my Miss Kathie locked behind her en suite bathroom door. From offscreen, we hear the hiss and splash of a shower bath at full blast.
    Despite popular speculation, Miss Katherine Kenton and I do not enjoy what Walter Winchell would call a “fingersdeep friendship.” Nor do we indulge in behavior Confidential would cite to brand us as “baritone babes,” or Hedda Hopper describes as “pink pucker sucking.” The duties of my position include placing one Nembutal and one Luminal in the cloisonné saucer atop Miss Kathie’s bedside table. In addition, filling an old-fashioned glass to overflowing with ice cubes and drop-by-drop pouring one shot of whiskey over the ice. Repeat with a second shot. Then fill the remainder of the glass with soda water.
    The bedside table consists of nothing more than a stack of screenplays. A teetering pile sent by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, asking my Miss Kathie to make a comeback. Begging, in fact. Here were speculative Broadway musicals based on actors dressed as dinosaurs or Emma Goldman. Feature-length animated versions of Macbeth by William Shakespeare depicted with baby animals. Voice-over work. The
pitch: Bertolt Brecht meets Lerner and Loewe crossed with Eugene O’Neill. The pages turn yellow and curl, stained with Scotch whiskey and cigarette smoke. The paper branded with the brown rings left by every cup of Miss Kathie’s black coffee.
    We repeat this ritual every evening, following whatever dinner party or opening my Miss Kathie has attended. On returning to her town house, I unfasten the eye hook at the top of her gown and release the zipper. Turn on the television. Change the channel. Change the television channel once more. Dump the contents of her evening bag onto the satin coverlet of her bed, Miss Kathie’s Helena Rubinstein lipstick, keys, charge cards, replacing each item into her daytime bag. I place the shoe trees within her shoes. Pin her auburn wig to its Styrofoam head. Next, I light the vanillascented candles lined up along the mantel of her bedroom fireplace.
    As my Miss Kathie conducts herself behind the en suite bathroom door, amid the rush and steam of her shower bath, her voice through the door drones: bark, moo, meow . . . William Randolph Hearst. Snarl, squeal, tweet . . . Anita Loos.
    In the center of the satin bed sprawls her Pekingese, Loverboy, amid a field of wrinkled paper wrappers, the two cardboard halves of a heart-shaped candy box, the pleated pink brocade-and-silk roses stapled to the box cover, the ruched folds of lace frilling the box edges. The bed’s billowing red satin coverlet, spread with this mess, the cupped candy papers, the sprawling Pekingese dog.
    From out of Miss Kathie’s evening bag spills her cigarette lighter, a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes, her tiny pill box paved with rubies and tourmalines and rattling with Tuinal and Dexamyl. Bark, cluck, squeak . . . Nembutal.
    Roar, whinny, oink . . . Seconal.
    Meow, tweet, moo . . . Demerol.
    Then, fluttering down, falls a white card. Settling on the bed, an engraved place card from this evening’s dinner. Against the white card stock, in bold, black letters, the name Webster Carlton Westward III.
    What Hedda Hopper would call this moment—a “Hollywood lifetime”—expires.
    A freeze-frame. An insert-shot of the small, white card lying on the satin bed beside the inert dog.
    On television, my Miss Kathie acts the part of Spain’s Queen Isabella I, escaped from her royal duties in the Alhambra for a quickie vacation in Miami Beach, pretending to be a simple circus dancer in order to win the heart of Christopher Columbus, played by Ramon Novarro. The picture cuts to a cameo by Lucille Ball, on loan out from Warner Bros. and cast as Miss Kathie’s rival, Queen Elizabeth I.
    Here is all of Western history, rendered the bitch of William Wyler.
    Behind the bathroom door, in the gush of hot water, my Miss Kathie says: bark, bray, oink . . . J. Edgar Hoover. My ears straining to hear her prattle.
    Fringe dangles off the edge of the red satin coverlet, the bed canopy, the window valance. Everything upholstered in red velvet, cut velvet. Flocked wallpaper. The scarlet walls, padded and button tufted, crowded with Louis XIV mirrors. The lamps, dripping with faceted crystals, busy with sparkling thingamabobs. The fi replace, carved from pink onyx and rose quartz. The entire effect, insular and silent as sleeping tucked deep inside Mae West’s vagina.
    The four-poster bed, its trim and moldings lacquered red, polished until the wood looks wet. Lying there, the candy wrappers, the dog, the place card.
    Webster Carlton Westward III, the American specimen with bright brown eyes. Root-beer eyes. The young man seated so far down the table at tonight’s dinner. A telephone number, handwritten, a prefix in Murray Hill.
    On the television, Joan Crawford enters the gates of Madrid, wearing some gauzy harem getup, both her hands carrying a wicker basket in front of her, the basket spilling over with potatoes and Cuban cigars, her bare limbs and face painted black to suggest she’s a captured Mayan slave. The subtext being either Crawford’s carrying syphilis or she’s supposed to be a secret cannibal. Tainted spoils of the New World. A concubine. Perhaps she’s an Aztec.
    That slight lift of one naked shoulder, Crawford’s shrug of disdain, here is another signature gesture stolen from me.
    Above the mantel hangs a portrait of Miss Katherine painted by Salvador Dalí; it rises from a thicket of engraved invitations and the silver-framed photographs of men whom Walter Winchell would call “was-bands.” Former husbands. The painting of my Miss Kathie, her eyebrows arch in surprise, but her heavy eyelashes droop, the eyelids almost closed with boredom. Her hands spread on either side of her face, her fi ngers fanning from her famous cheekbones to disappear into her movie star updo of auburn hair. Her mouth something between a laugh and a yawn. Valium and Dexedrine. Between Lillian Gish and Tallulah Bankhead. The portrait rises from the invitations and photographs, future parties and past marriages, the flickering candles and half-dead cigarettes stubbed out in crystal ashtrays threading white smoke upward in looping incense trails. This altar to my Katherine Kenton.
    Me, forever guarding this shrine. Not so much a servant as a high priestess.
    In what Winchell would call a “New York minute” I carry the place card to the fi replace. Dangle it within a candle flame until it catches fi re. With one hand, I reach into the fireplace, deep into the open cavity of carved pink onyx and rose quartz, grasping in the dark until my fingers find the damper and wrench it open. Holding the white card, Webster Carlton Westward III, twisting him in the chimney draft, I watch a flame eat the name and telephone number. The scent of vanilla. The ash falls to the cold hearth.
    On the television, Preston Sturges and Harpo Marx enter as Tycho Brahe and Copernicus. The first arguing that the earth goes around the sun, the latter insisting the world actually orbits Rita Hayworth. The picture is called Armada of Love, and David O. Selznick shot it on the Universal back lot the year when every other song on the radio was Helen O’Connell singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” backed by the Jimmy Dorsey band.
    The bathroom door swings open, Miss Kathie’s voice saying: bark, yip, cluck-cluck . . . Maxwell Anderson. Her Katherine Kenton hair turbaned in a white bath towel. Her face layered with a mask of pulped avocado and royal jelly. Pulling the belt of her robe tight around her waist, my Miss Kathie looks at the lipstick dumped on her bed. The scattered cigarette lighter and keys and charge cards. The empty evening bag. Her gaze wafts to me standing before the fi replace, the tongues of candle flame licking below her portrait, her lineup of “was-bands,” the invitations, all those future obligations to enjoy herself, and—of course—the flowers.
    Perched on the mantel, that altar, always enough flowers for a honeymoon suite or a funeral. Tonight features a tall arrangement of white spider chrysanthemums, white lilies and sprays of yellow orchids, bright and frilly as a cloud of butterflies.
    With one hand, Miss Kathie sweeps aside the lipstick and keys, the cigarette pack, and she settles herself on the satin bed, amid the candy wrappers, saying, “Did you burn something just now?”
    Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands, or one of those new miracle pills.
    As if human beings—men in particular—need yet another way to lie.
    I ask, Did she misplace something?
    Her violet eyes waft to my hands. Petting her Pekingese, Loverboy, dragging one hand through the dog’s long fur, Miss Kathie says, “I do get so tired of buying my own flowers. . . .”
    My hands, smeared black and fi lthy from the handle of the fireplace damper. Smudged with soot from the burned place card. I wipe them in the folds of my tweed skirt. I tell her I was merely disposing of some trash. Only incinerating a random piece of worthless trash.
    On television, Leo G. Carroll kneels while Betty Grable crowns him Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Pope Paul IV is Robert Young. Barbara Stanwyck plays a gum-chewing Joan of Arc.
    My Miss Kathie watches herself, seven divorces ago—what Winchell would call “Reno-vations”—and three face-lifts ago, as she grinds her lips against Novarro’s lips. A specimen Winchell would call a “Wildeman.” Like Dorothy Parker’s husband, Alan Campbell, a man Lillian Hellman would call a “fairy shit.” Petting her Pekingese with long licks of her hand, Miss Kathie says, “His saliva tasted like the wet dicks
of ten thousand lonely truck drivers.”
    Next to her bed, the night table built from a thousand hopeful dreams, those balanced screenplays, it supports two barbiturates and a double whiskey. Miss Kathie’s hand stops petting and scratching the dog’s muzzle; there the fur looks dark and matted. She pulls back her arm, and the towel slips from her head, her hair tumbling out, limp and gray, pink scalp showing between the roots. The green mask of her avocado face cracking with her surprise.
    Miss Kathie looks at her hand, and the fingers and palm are smeared and dripping with dark red.

This concludes the excerpt from Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk.

Would you like to read this book? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.

Excerpt: The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle

2010-05-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle

This is the last part of the trilogy about Henry Smart. Roddy Doyle has told the whole history of Ireland in the twentieth century. And in the person of his hero, he has created one of the great characters of modern fiction.

To read more about this novel and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt of The Dead Republic contains Chapter One.

Chapter One

It looked the same. There was a break in the clouds, and the sea was gone. There was green land down there. A solid-looking cloud got in the way – the plane went right in. It was suddenly colder. I stopped looking for a while and when I looked again it was back down there. The green thing. Ireland.

I’d left in 1922. I was flying back in, in 1951. It was twenty-nine years since I’d left, and five since I’d made up my mind to come back.

The plane dropped a bit more. It shook and rattled. The ground was getting nearer; there were no more clouds. I looked down at my country and felt nothing.

It landed – there were the jumps on the tarmac, and the burst of clapping from passengers in front and behind me, cast at the front, crew at the back. Me, in the middle. I didn’t clap. The engine died. The propellers became visible, and stopped. I watched two big-faced lads push the steps towards the plane. I heard the door open, and the rush of real air, and gasps of excitement. There was sea in the air.

My face hit the wind. I went down the steps. Ford was surrounded by the Company and the hangers-on.

    —Welcome home, Mister Ford.
    —A hundred thousand welcomes.
    —You brought the weather with you, Mister Ford.

The red faces on them, wet grins for the Yanks with the heavy pockets. They had him standing on the Pan American steps, with John Wayne on one side, a few steps down, and Barry Fitzgerald above, the three of them waving and smiling. Wayne’s wife and brats were beside me, cold and waiting.

I walked.

   I heard the voice.
   —Where’s Henry?
   I kept walking. I didn’t wait for my bag.
   —Where’s Henry?

He wanted me standing beside him, with his hand on my shoulder. He was the man who’d brought me home. The man who’d pulled me out of the desert. The last of the rebels, with the last of the rebels.

—Where’s Henry?

   He’d paid for my suit and for one of my legs. I was his I.R.A. consultant, my wages paid into my hand by Republic Pictures.
   I got into the back of a taxi.
   —Welcome to Ireland, sir.
   —Don’t fuckin’ talk, I said.—Just drive.
   To the nearest bed for rent in Limerick, and I fell face down on top of it. I lay there and felt the country crawl into my lungs. I felt it bubble and turn. I’d been living too long in dry air and deserts. I coughed.
   —For fuck sake.
   It was an Irish cough – I’d forgotten – the big hack, the rattle. The sheets, the mattress, the wall to my left – they were fat with old breath, and soaking. I coughed again, and heard a voice through several walls.
   —Ah, God love you.
   I lay on the bed. I felt the rejection and let it slide over me. I felt it rub and pull at my skin.
   I slept.

   The wooden leg creaked and whispered. I pulled up my trouser leg and looked. It was fatter, expanding – I could see the wood grow as I watched. The wet air was seeping into it. The varnish was already giving up. It was peeling away, and the shin was getting pale and blotched.
   I stepped out into rain. It was already adding weight to my suit. It all came back, the slant of its fall, the touch of each drop on my skin, its dance on the black stone around my feet. I fuckin’ hated it.
   I held up the sagging brim of my fedora and saw the black car crawl out of the lightless rain. I couldn’t hear the engine but it was getting slowly nearer. The approaching car and its low hiss over the water brought back pictures that had never gone away. Model Ts prowling the country, men in trenchcoats moving in to kill me. But the Civil War was three decades gone, and it was just a Limerick taxi. I stayed still and waited for it.
   —Good morning, sir.
   —I’m not American.
   —Where d’you want me to take you?
   —Roscommon, I said.
   —You’re joking.
   —No.
   —Is it not wet enough for you here?
   I looked at him.
   —Will you take me or won’t you?
   —We’ll need a map.
   —We won’t, I said.—I know the way.
   He still hadn’t moved.
   —The old homestead, is it?
   —No, I told him.—Someone else’s. Will you take me?
   —Right, he said.—I will. I’m curious.
   He was young, half my age.
   —But you’re the navigator, he said.
   —Fair enough, I said.—Let’s go.
   —Will I be bringing you back?
   —No.
   —You’ve no bag or nothing.
   —No.
   —And you’ve got the money?
   —Yeah.
   —Right.
   He leaned forward, like he was giving the car the first push. We began to crawl into the rain.
   I should have been going to Cong, in County Mayo. I should have been there already. That was why I was in Ireland. I was the I.R.A. consultant, come home to watch the filming of my life. But first I was going to Roscommon, to the house my wife had come from. I had to see the house.

   It wasn’t there. The house was gone. It had been burnt out when I’d seen it last, just before I’d left Ireland for good. My wife’s mother, Old Missis O’Shea, had moved into the long barn, and I’d slept in the kitchen, under a tarpaulin roof. But the wall that had held up the tarpaulin, and the other walls – all the walls – were gone. And the barn – it was gone too. I was standing in the right place, but there was nothing. I wasn’t there to find anyone; I wasn’t that thick. But it felt like another death.
   My bearings were exact. The few bits of trees, the yellow furze, even the cows had stayed more or less put, where I’d left them in 1922. But it was as if the house and the outhouses had never been there, or the well, or the low stone walls that had kept the cows out of the bog.
   I walked to where the door had been. I knew exactly where I was going, where there’d once been a stone step. I could feel it in my muscles; I could feel the knowledge sing through me.
   I stopped. There was no hint that there’d once been a door there, not a thing. I stamped my foot. I felt nothing under the grass. I walked around, to the wall we’d been put against, myself and my new wife, Miss O’Shea, with her cousin Ivan and the other cousin, as we were photographed on our wedding day, in September 1919. I could feel that day’s heat and shine as I turned the corner. I knew exactly where Ivan had placed his lads, to guard our normality for that one afternoon in the middle of the war. But there was no wall, no hint of dry clay where the wall had fallen, or hardness in the ground where it had stood. My trousers were wringing. It wasn’t raining but it must have been just before I’d paid the taxi driver and got out. I was in the middle of a field, in good wet grass. Not the edge of the field, where there’d once been a wall surrounding the kitchen garden. I could have coped with that, the walls knocked and covered, topsoil thrown over the map of the house. That would have made sense; it had been a long time. But this was just weird. My angles were perfect. I’d walked exactly here, trying to feel running water, with my father’s wooden leg held in front of me, and I’d heard her voice – Two and two? – and I’d seen her boots and the laces made fat by the muck. But there wasn’t even muck here.
   I walked back now through the field. My own wooden leg was groaning, protesting, biting into the folded flesh. I could feel no water under me, and the well I’d found that day was gone. But I grabbed the gate and the top rung was there, exactly as cold as it should have been. I’d held that gate before, even if the path from the gate to the house was gone. The gate was real; it felt like sanity.
   I walked out onto the road. I left the gate open. They weren’t my cows. They were Ivan’s cows, probably. If Ivan Reynolds was still around and living. On the drive from Limerick I’d passed dozens of abandoned farmhouses, falling in on themselves, left standing beside the newer, brighter houses. But this was different. There was no new house, and no ruin. Ivan had razed the house, then he’d buried it too deep to be remembered.
   I’d paid the taxi driver and sent him back to Limerick. I was alone on the road. The heat was picking up the morning’s rainfall. The rest of the day was going to be hot.
   They were all dead – my wife, Miss O’Shea, and my children, Saoirse and Rifle. All three were dead. I’d never thought that they were going to come running to find out who the man was, getting out the taxi. I never thought I’d see my wife or daughter looking out the window, over the window box, as I marched up to the door. My son wasn’t going to be mending an outhouse roof or gelding a fuckin’ greyhound in the yard. They were dead, somewhere. They’d been dead for years.
   I’d come to see the wall, maybe put my hand against it, break off a piece of whitewash, put it in my mouth and taste it. But just to see it – that would have been enough. To find its foundation in the grass, to feel it in the sole of my good foot.
   Proof.
   I had sat in front of the wall. I had held my new wife’s hand. I could have started from there and worked my way forward, to the old man standing in front of the fallen wall, or squatting in the grass, picking up pieces of clay. That was me, what I’d come to this place to be. I was the old man. I was only forty-nine, but not many would have believed it. I wasn’t sure, myself, what I believed – if I believed. The wall would have helped.
   I sat down beside the gate.
   I’d cycled every inch of every lane of this county. I’d lobbed bombs from most of the ditches. Bullets had slowed me down, but nothing had ever stopped me. Thirty years ago. Only thirty years. It wasn’t a lifetime. I looked at my hand, at yellow, knuckled bone. The hand had once held guns and women. I closed my fingers and felt nothing.
   I used to be heard. My eyes used to kill.
   There was no white wall.
   I was once a man called Henry Smart. I was born in Dublin, in 1901, and I fought for the freedom of Ireland. I married a beautiful woman and we tried to save Ireland together. There was a baby, a girl called Saoirse, born when I was hiding. I went into exile when my comrades decided that they needed me dead. My wife was in jail. I went alone to England, then to the United States, with a false passport and a wedding photograph. I hid again, for years. I changed my name and cities. I found my wife again – she found me – in Chicago, when I broke into a house with Louis Armstrong. But I had to run again. My old comrades – a man who might have been called Kellet – had caught up with me. They put me against a wall. But my wife shot the men who were going to shoot me. I ran and, this time, we ran together. I had a family, and it grew. We had a boy we called Séamus Louis, and I called Rifle. We rode the boxcars through the years that became the Great Depression. We never stayed still for long. We were rebels again and we were happy. But I lost them. We were boarding a moving train. Rifle slipped. I caught him, saved him and fell. The train moved on, taking my family and my leg. I recovered. I learned to walk with a wooden leg. But I never found them. I searched for years. I heard stories about them and I followed the stories. The stories stopped, and I stopped searching. I crawled into the desert to die. I lay down and let the sun burn me to nothing. I died. I came back from the dead when Henry Fonda pissed on me. He was acting in a film called My Darling Clementine, emptying his bladder between takes. I was brought back to life, and I met John Ford, the man who was directing the film.
   This had happened five years before, in 1946.
   Ford knew me – I didn’t know how. He knew all about me. He knew my scars and how I’d got them. He looked across the darkness, straight at me.
   —You’re the story, he’d said.
   He was going to make the film of my life. That was why I was there now, in Ireland, sitting against the stone wall. I remembered it like quick pain, like the anger that was my real blood. I remembered the decision: I’d go home. I’d go home and tell my story. I was an old man – the bullets and grief had caught up with me – but I felt bright and new. We shook hands. Ford was an old man too; he understood. I looked up at the black-blue sky, at all the dead and wandering stars, and I shouted.
   —My name’s Henry Smart!
   I stood up now. I got up, away from the wall. I knew where I was going, and I knew what I was going to do.
   I was going to kill John Ford.

This concludes the excerpt from The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle.

Would you like to read this novel? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.

Excerpt: Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings

2010-05-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings

With this book, Max Hastings, provides readers a vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime.

To read more about this book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt of Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 contains the Introduction of the book.

Introduction

Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, indeed of all time. Yet, beyond that bald assertion, there are infinite nuances in considering his conduct of Britain’s war between 1940 and 1945, which is the theme of this book. It originated nine years ago, when Roy Jenkins was writing his biography of Churchill. Roy flattered me by inviting my comments on the typescript, chapter by chapter. Some of my suggestions he accepted; many he sensibly ignored.

When we reached the Second World War, his patience expired. Exasperated by the profusion of my strictures, he said: “You’re trying to get me to do something which you should write yourself, if you want to!” By that time, his health was failing. He was impatient to finish his own book, which achieved triumphant success before his death.

In the years which followed, I thought much about Churchill and the war, mindful of some Boswellian lines about Samuel Johnson: “He had once conceived the thought of writing The Life Of Oliver Crom - well . . . He at length laid aside his scheme, on discovering that all that can be told of him is already in print; and that it is impracticable to procure any authentick information in addition to what the world is already possessed of.” Among the vast Churchillian bibliography, I was especially apprehensive about venturing anywhere near the tracks of David Reynolds’s extraordinarily original and penetrating 2005 In Command of History. The author dissected successive drafts of Churchill’s war memoirs, exposing contrasts between judgements on people and events which the old statesman initially proposed to make, and those which he finally deemed it prudent to publish. Andrew Roberts has painted a striking portrait of wartime Anglo-American relations in his 2009 Masters and Commanders. We have been told more about Winston Churchill than any other human being. Tens of thousands of people of many nations have recorded even trifling encounters, noting every word which they heard him utter. The most vivid wartime memory of one soldier of Britain’s Eighth Army derived from a day in 1942 when he found the prime minister his neighbour in a North African desert latrine. Churchill’s speeches and writings fill many volumes.

Yet much remains opaque, because he wished it thus. Always mindful of his role as a stellar performer upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after May 10, 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity.Within months of his ascent to the premiership, however, he told his staff that he had already schemed the chapters of the book which he would write as soon as the war was over. The outcome was a ruthlessly partial six-volume work which is poor history, if sometimes peerless prose. We shall never know with complete confidence what he thought about many personalities—for instance Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Brooke, King George VI, his Cabinet colleagues—because he took good care not to tell us.

Churchill’s wartime relationship with the British people was much more complex than is often acknowledged. Few denied his claims upon the premiership. But between the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and El Alamein in November 1942, not only many ordinary citizens, but also some of his closest colleagues wanted operational control of the war machine to be removed from his hands, and some other figure appointed to his role as minister of defence. It is hard to overstate the embarrassment and even shame of the British people, as they perceived the Russians playing a heroic part in the struggle against Nazism, while their own army seemed incapable of winning a battle. To understand Britain’s wartime experience, it appears essential to recognise, as some narratives do not, the sense of humiliation which afflicted Britain amid the failures of its soldiers, contrasted—albeit often on the basis of wildly false information—with the achievements of Stalin.

Churchill was dismayed by the performance of the British Army, even after victories began to come at the end of 1942. Himself a hero, he expected others likewise to show themselves heroes. In 1940, the people of Britain, together with their navy and air force, wonderfully fulfilled his hopes. Thereafter, however, much of the story of Britain’s part in the war seems to me that of the prime minister seeking more from his nation’s warriors than they could deliver. The failure of the army to match the prime minister’s aspirations is among the central themes of this book.

Much discussion of Britain’s military effort in World War II focuses upon Churchill’s relationship with his generals. In my view, this preoccupation is overdone. The difficulties of fighting the Germans and Japanese went much deeper than could be solved by changes of commanders. The British were beaten again and again between 1940 and 1942, and continued to suffer battlefield difficulties thereafter, in consequence of failures of tactics, weapons, equipment and culture even more significant than lack of mass or inspired leadership. The gulf between Churchillian aspiration and reality extended to the peoples of occupied Europe, hence his faith in “setting Europe ablaze” through the agency of Special Operations Executive, which had malign consequences that he failed to anticipate. SOE armed some occupied peoples to fight more energetically against one another in 1944–45 than they had done earlier against the Germans.

It is a common mistake to suppose that those who bestrode the stage during momentous times were giants, set apart from the personalities of our own humdrum society. I have argued in earlier books that we should instead see 1939–45 as a period when men and women not much different from ourselves strove to grapple with stresses and responsibilities which stretched their powers to the limit. Churchill was one of a tiny number of actors who proved worthy of the role in which destiny cast him. Those who worked for the prime minister, indeed the British people at war, served as a supporting cast, seeking honourably but sometimes inadequately to play their own parts in the wake of a titan.

Sir Edward Bridges, then cabinet secretary, wrote of Churchill between 1940 and 1942: “Everything depended upon him and him alone. Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” This remains the view of most of the world, almost seventy years later. Yet there is also no shortage of iconoclasts. In a recent biography Cambridge lecturer Nigel Knight writes contemptuously of Churchill: “He was not mad or simple; his misguided decisions were a product of his personality—a mixture of arrogance, emotion, self-indulgence, stubbornness and a blind faith in his own ability.” Another modern biographer, Chris Wrigley, suggests that Sir Edward Bridges’s tribute to Churchill “may overstate his indispensability.”

Such strictures seem otiose to those of us convinced that, in his absence, Britain would have made terms with Hitler after Dunkirk.

Thereafter, beyond his domestic achievement as war leader, he performed a diplomatic role of which only he was capable: as suitor of the United States on behalf of the British nation. To fulfil this, he was obliged to overcome intense prejudices on both sides of the Atlantic. So extravagant was Churchill’s—and Roosevelt’s—wartime rhetoric about the Anglo-American alliance that even today the extent of mutual suspicion and indeed dislike between the two peoples is often underestimated. The British ruling class, in particular, condescended amazingly towards Americans.

In 1940–41, Winston Churchill perceived, with a clarity which eluded some of his fellow countrymen, that only American belligerence might open a path to victory. Pearl Harbor, and not the prime minister’s powers of seduction, eventually brought Roosevelt’s nation into the war. But no other statesman could have conducted British policy towards the United States with such consummate skill, nor have achieved such personal influence upon the American people. This persisted until 1944, when his standing in the United States declined precipitously, to revive only when the onset of the Cold War caused many Americans to hail Churchill as a prophet. His greatness, which had come to seem too large for his own impoverished country, then became perceived as a shared Anglo- American treasure.

From June 1941 onwards, Churchill saw much more clearly than most British soldiers and politicians that Russia must be embraced as an ally. But it seems important to strip away legends about aid to the Soviet Union, and acknowledge how small this was in the decisive 1941–42 period. Stalin’s nation saved itself with little help from the Western Allies. Only from mid- 1943 onwards did supplies to Russia gain critical mass, and Anglo- American ground operations absorb a significant part of the Wehrmacht’s attention.

The huge popularity of the Soviet Union in wartime Britain was a source of dismay, indeed exasperation, to the small number of people at the top who knew the truth about the barbarity of Stalin’s regime, its implacable hostility to the West and its imperialistic designs on eastern Europe. The divide between the sentiments of the public and those of the prime minister towards the Soviet Union became a chasm in May 1945. One of Churchill’s most astonishing acts, in the last weeks of his premiership, was to order the Joint Planning Staff to produce a draft for Operation Unthinkable. The resulting document considered the practicability of launching an Anglo- American offensive against the Russians, with forty-seven divisions reinforced by the remains of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, to restore the freedom of Poland. Though Churchill acknowledged this as a remote contingency, it is remarkable that he caused the Chiefs of Staff to address it at all.

I am surprised how few historians seem to notice that many things which the British and Americans believed they were concealing from the Soviets—for instance, Bletchley Park’s penetration of Axis ciphers and Anglo-American arguments about launching a Second Front—were wellknown to Stalin, through the good offices of Communist sympathisers and traitors in Whitehall and Washington. The Soviets knew vastly more about their allies’ secret policy making than did the British and Americans about that of the Russians.

It is fascinating to study public mood swings through wartime British, American and Russian newspapers and the diaries of ordinary citizens. These often give a very different picture from that of historians, with their privileged knowledge of how the story ended. As for sentiment at the top, some men who were indifferent politicians or commanders contributed much more as contemporary chroniclers. The diaries of such figures as Hugh Dalton, Leo Amery and Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall make them more valuable to us as eyewitnesses and eavesdroppers than they seemed to their contemporaries as players in the drama.

Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, for much of the war the British Army’s director of military operations, kept a diary which arguably ranks second only to that of Gen. Sir Alan Brooke for its insights into the British military high command. On January 26, 1941, in the darkest days of the conflict, Kennedy expressed a fear that selective use of accounts of the meetings of Britain’s leaders might mislead posterity:

It would be easy by a cunning or biased selection of evidence to give the impression for instance that the P.M.’s strategic policy was nearly always at fault, & that it was only by terrific efforts that he is kept on the right lines—and it would be easy to do likewise with all the chiefs of staff. The historian who has to deal with the voluminous records of this war will have a frightful task. I suppose no war has been so well documented. Yet the records do not often reveal individual views. It is essentially a government of committees . . . Winston is of course the dominating personality & he has in his entourage and among his immediate advisers no really strong personality. Yet Winston’s views do not often prevail if they are contrary to the general trend of opinion among the service staffs. Minutes flutter continually from Winston’s typewriter on every conceivable subject. His strategic imagination is inexhaustible and many of his ideas are wild and unsound and impracticable. . . but in the end they are killed if they are not acceptable.

These observations, made in the heat of events, deserve respect from every historian of the period. Another banal and yet critical point is that circumstances and attitudes shifted. The prime minister often changed his mind, and deserves more credit than he sometimes receives for his willingness to do so. Meanwhile, others vacillated in their views of him. Some who revered Churchill in the first months of his premiership later became bitterly sceptical, and vice versa. After Dunkirk, Britain’s middle classes were considerably more staunch than some members of its traditional ruling caste, partly because they knew less about the full horror of the country’s predicament. History perceives as pivotal Britain’s survival through 1940, so that the weariness and cynicism which pervaded the country by 1942, amid continuing defeats, are often underrated. Industrial unrest, manifested through strikes especially in the coalfields and in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, revealed fissures in the fabric of national unity which are surprisingly seldom acknowledged.

This book does not seek to retell the full story of Churchill at war, but rather to present a portrait of his leadership from the day on which he became prime minister, May 10, 1940, set in the context of Britain’s national experience. It is weighted towards the first half of the conflict, partly because Churchill’s contribution was then much greater than it became later, and partly because I have sought to emphasise issues and events about which there seem new things to be said.

I have written relatively little in this book about the strategic air offensive, having addressed this earlier in Bomber Command and Armageddon. I have here confined myself to discussion of the prime minister’s personal role in key bombing decisions. I have not described land and naval campaigns in detail, but instead considered the institutional cultures which influenced the performance of the British Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the three services’ relationships with the prime minister.

To maintain coherence, it is necessary to address some themes and episodes which are familiar, though specific aspects deserve reconsideration. There was, for instance, what I have called the second Dunkirk, no less miraculous than the first. Churchill’s biggest misjudgement of 1940 was his decision to send more troops to France in June after the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the beaches. Only the stubborn insistence of their commander, Lt. Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, made it possible to overcome the rash impulses of the prime minister and evacuate almost 200,000 men who would otherwise have been lost.

The narrative examines some subordinate issues and events in which the prime minister’s role was crucial, such as the strategic contribution of SOE (as distinct from romantic tales of its agents’ derring- do), the Dodecanese campaign and Churchill’s Athens adventure in December 1944. I have attempted little original research in his own papers. Instead, I have explored the impression he made upon others—generals, soldiers, citizens, Americans and Russians. Moscow’s closure of key archives to foreign researchers has curtailed the wonderful bonanza of the post–Cold War period. But much important material has now been published in Russian documentary collections.

It seems mistaken to stint on quotation from Alan Brooke, John Colville and Charles Wilson (Lord Moran), merely because their records have been long in the public domain. Recent research on Moran’s manuscript suggests that, rather than being a true contemporary record, much of it was written up afterwards. Yet most of his anecdotes and observations appear credible. The diaries of Churchill’s military chief, junior private secretary and doctor provide, for all their various limitations, the most intimate testimony we shall ever have about Churchill’s wartime existence.

He himself, of course, bestrides the tale in all his joyous splendour. Even at the blackest periods, when his spirits sagged, flashes of exuberance broke through, which cheered his colleagues and contemporaries, but caused some people to recoil from him. They were dismayed, even disgusted, that he so conspicuously thrilled to his own part in the greatest conflict in human history. “Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?” he exulted to Australian prime minister Robert Menzies in 1941. It was this glee which caused such a man as the aesthete and diarist James Lees- Milne to write fastidiously after it was all over: “Churchill so evidently enjoyed the war that I could never like him. I merely acknowledge him, like Genghis Khan, to have been great.”

Lees-Milne and like-minded critics missed an important aspect of Churchill’s attitude to conflict in general, and to the Second World War in particular. He thrilled to the cannon’s roar, and rejoiced in its proximity to himself. Yet never for a moment did he lose his sense of dismay about the death and destruction which war visited upon the innocent. “Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime,” he wrote as a correspondent in South Africa in January 1900. “If modern men of light and leading saw your face closer simple folk would see it hardly ever.” Hitler was indifferent to the sufferings his policies imposed upon mankind. Churchill never flinched from the necessity to pay in blood for the defeat of Nazi tyranny. But his sole purpose was to enable the guns to be silenced, the peoples of the world restored to their peaceful lives.

Appetite for the fray was among Churchill’s most convincing credentials for national leadership in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain had many weaknesses as prime minister, but foremost among them was a revulsion from the conflict to which his country was committed, shared by many members of his government. One of them, Rob Bernays, said: “I wish I were twenty. I cannot bear this responsibility.” A nation which found itself committed to a life- and- death struggle against one of the most ruthless tyrannies in history was surely wise to entrust its leadership to a man eager to embrace the role, rather than one who shrank from it. This book discusses Churchill’s follies and misjudgements, which were many and various. But these are as pimples upon the mountain of his achievement. It is sometimes said that the British and American peoples are still today, in the twenty-first century, indecently obsessed with the Second World War. The reason is not far to seek. We know that here was something which our parents and grandparents did well, in a noble cause that will forever be identified with the person of Winston Churchill, warlord extraordinary.

This concludes the excerpt from Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings.

Would you like to read this book? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.

Excerpt: Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides

2010-05-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides

Acclaimed bestselling author Hampton Sides gives a taut, intense narrative about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history.

To read more about this book and the author, click HERE.

This excerpt of Hellhound on His Trail contains Chapter One entitled "City of White Gold"

Chapter 1

City of White Gold

   In early May 1967, three hundred miles downstream from St. Louis, the citizens of Memphis stood along the cobblestoned banks, enjoying the musky coolness of the river. Seventy-five thousand people, dressed to be seen, waited in the twilight. They'd come from all the secret krewes — from the Mystic Society of the Memphi, from Osiris and RaMet and Sphinx. They'd come from all the clubs — Chickasaw, University, Colonial, Hunt and Polo, the Memphis Country Club — and from the garden societies. The good families, the old families, in their finest James Davis clothes, bourbon flasks in hand, assembled for the start of the South's Greatest Party.

   The brown Mississippi, wide with northern snowmelt, was a confusion of crosscurrents and boils. In the main channel, whole trees could be seen shooting downstream. A mile across the river lay the floodplain of Arkansas, a world of chiggers and alligator gars and water moccasins that lived in swampy oxbow lakes. On the long sandbars, feral pigs ran among graveyards of driftwood and rotten cypress stumps.

   But in the clearings beyond these wild margins were hundreds and hundreds of miles of cotton fields. Cotton as far as the eye could see, row after perfect row. Gossypium hirsutum. White gold, mined from the world's richest alluvium.

   Memphis was built on the spot where the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, in 1541, became the first European to lay eyes on the Mississippi River. The city was founded 278 years later by Andrew Jackson and a group of his investor cronies, and named for the ancient Egyptian capital near the Giza pyramids. Memphis didn't really take off, however, until the dense hardwood forests along the river began to be cleared in the mid-nineteenth century, finally making farmable the flat, rich floodplain known as the Mississippi Delta. As the country slid toward Civil War, Memphis became the capital of a region that was constructing a last frenzied iteration of Southern planter society. If the Delta came late to cotton, it came to it with a vengeance, and with all the defiant desperation of someone following a wounded creed.

   Cotton had grown along the Nile near the original Memphis, and cotton was what modern Memphis had come to celebrate on this fine humid evening of May 10, 1967. In the fields of Arkansas, and down in nearby Mississippi, the little darlings had already begun to push through the dirt, the crop dusters were preparing to rain down their chemicals, and the old true cycle was in the offing. Now it was time for Memphians to pay homage and to bless another season in cotton's splendid realm.

   The thirty-third annual Cotton Carnival, Memphis's answer to Mardi Gras, was about to begin. Later in the week, there would be luncheons, trade shows, and charity balls. A beauty contest would declare the fairest Maid of Cotton. Many thousands would visit the giant midway and attend parades with elaborate floats, some of them spun from cotton, depicting the gone-but-not-forgotten Old South and the treachery of the long-snouted boll weevil. All week there would be parties on the rooftop of the Peabody Hotel, where mallard ducks lived in a scaled-down mansion when they weren't marching down a red carpet to splash around in the lobby fountain.

   Tonight was the high pageant that kicked off the whole week — the majestic arrival of the King and Queen, sitting upon their thrones with their sequined court all around them, on a great glittery barge that was scheduled to nudge into the Memphis harbor shortly after sunset. It was a celebration not only of cotton but also of the peculiarly settled life that thrived on it — the life of dove hunts and pig roasts and debutante balls, the genteel agrarian world that could still be found in the fertile realms surrounding Memphis.

   Cotton, cotton everywhere. Crane operators, hoisting dozens of five- hundred-pound cotton bales, had constructed colossal arches that spanned the downtown streets. All attendees were urged to wear cotton, and they did: party girls in crinoline dresses, dandies in seersucker suits, children in starched oxford cloth. People even ate cotton candy while they waited with the crowds for the Royal Barge to arrive.

   Representatives from all echelons of the Delta cotton world had joined the masses on the river — the factors, the classers, the ginners, the brokers, the seed sellers, the plantation owners, the compress owners, the board members of the Cotton Exchange, the loan officers from the Union Planters Bank, the chemical engineers who'd learned how to tease out the plant's oils and secret compounds for every industrial purpose Mammon could devise.

   Cotton's presence, and cotton's past, could be felt everywhere along the shadowed waterfront. Behind the cheering crowds, high on the magnolia-lined bluff once occupied by Chickasaw Indians, sat Confederate Park, with its bronze statue of Jefferson Davis, who'd made his home in Memphis after the Civil War. A block from the park was the place on Adams Avenue where Nathan Bedford Forrest once operated a giant slave market, said to be the South's largest, that boasted "the best selected assortment of field hands, house servants, and mechanics . . . with fresh supplies of likely Young Negroes."

   Running lengthwise along the same bluff lay Front Street, cotton's main drag. In the upstairs classing rooms, sharp-eyed savants still graded cotton samples by pure intuition under north-facing skylights — judging according to quaint industry distinctions like "strict low middling" or "strict good ordinary." Memphis remained one of the largest cotton markets in the world, with massive fortunes made and lost and made again. Many of the names were legends — Dunavant, Cook, Turley, Hohenberg, Allenberg — high rollers in a vaguely druidic enterprise. In October, during harvest time, the skies above Front Street still swirled with snows of lint.

   Cotton cotton cotton. Memphis couldn't get enough of it. Cotton was still king. It would always be king.

   In truth, though no one wanted to talk about it on that roistering night in 1967, the old world of Delta cotton was in serious trouble. Life on the plantations had changed so fast it was hardly recognizable. Soybeans had made inroads as the new mono-crop of choice. Polyester had encroached upon the American wardrobe. Massive mechanized cotton pickers, along with new soups of pesticides and herbicides, had rendered largely obsolete the life of the Delta sharecropper. Thus demoted by petrochemicals and machines, many thousands of black field hands and their families steadily left the plantations over the decades and came to Memphis — the nearest city, and the only American city of any size named after an African capital.

   Other than mule skinning or chopping cotton, though, most Delta field hands had little in the way of marketable skills when they came to the city. Some found success playing the blues on Beale Street — the central thoroughfare of black Memphis. But most settled into low-end jobs that merely recapitulated the racial and socioeconomic hierarchy they'd known on the plantations. Many became maids, janitors, waiters, yardmen, cooks, stevedores. Some had no choice but to take the lowest- end job of all: they reported to the Public Works Department and became garbagemen.

   At least they'd come to a city with a history that was rich and gothic and weird. Memphis, this city of 600,000 people wedged in the southwestern crotch of Tennessee, had always had a touch of madness but also a prodigious and sometimes profane sense of humor. It was a town known for its outlandish characters and half-demented geniuses: wrestlers, riverboat captains, inventors, gamblers, snake-oil salesmen, musicians high on some peculiar native vibe that could be felt but whose existence could not be proved. For 150 years, all the pain and pathos of the river seemed to wash up on the cobblestoned banks. In 1878, the city was nearly completely destroyed by a yellow fever epidemic, but the Metropolis of the American Nile had recovered, madder and stranger and more full of brawling ambition than ever. Memphis, as one writer famously put it, "was built on a bluff and run on the same principle."

   It was a city that, since its very inception, had been perched on the racial fault line. The first mayor, Marcus Brutus Winchester, created a major scandal by falling for, and eventually marrying, a "woman of color." One of the area's most fascinating citizens in the late 1820s, a Scottish-born utopian named Fanny Wright, created an experimental commune of slaves whom she sought to educate and bring into full citizenship. Several generations later, Memphis gave the world Ida B. Wells, an early titan of the civil rights movement, a woman of profound courage who, in the 1890s, repeatedly risked assassination with eloquent protests against lynching. Then there was the ever- cryptic Mr. Forrest, who quit his slave mart and took up a sword in the Civil War, becoming one of the most wickedly brilliant generals in American history. After the war he returned to Memphis, where, after briefly serving as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, he apparently experienced an epiphany — renouncing the Klan with seeming genuineness and calling for racial reconciliation shortly before his death.

   But music was the city's greatest gift and particular genius: the blues of W. C. Handy's Beale Street, the soul of Stax Records, and a certain interracial sound stew that a redneck wizard named Sam Phillips cooked up in a tiny studio on Union Avenue, less than a hundred yards from where Forrest lay buried. At its essence, the music of Memphis was about the fecund intermingling of black and white. Elvis Presley, coaxed and prodded by Phillips, found a way to transmute the raw sound of Beale Street into something that would resonate across the world. The stars, white and black, who had passed through the studios and nightclubs of Memphis were as numerous as they were legendary: not just Elvis, but Rufus Thomas, Johnny Cash, B. B. King, Albert King, Carl Perkins, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Roy Orbison, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Redding, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim. The phantom- like Robert Johnson, perhaps the greatest of the Delta bluesmen, lived in and around Memphis much of his short, tragic life. It could be argued that over the decades, Memphis's musical ferment had done more to integrate the country than a hundred pieces of legislation.

   In a way, cotton was at the center of the ferment, for cotton had spawned the blues, and cotton had built the city that gave the blues its first wider expression. But there was no mistaking the fact that most black folks in Memphis were good and done with cotton, and they hated most everything about the hairy prickly shrub that had so long enslaved them. Certainly not many black people were to be found on the banks of the river on that May night in 1967, awaiting the arrival of the Royal Barge.

   The skies over Arkansas ripened to a final brilliant red before closing into darkness. It seemed as though the sun had literally buried itself in cotton fields. An orchestra played strains of Vivaldi, and the heavens crackled with fireworks.

   Then, from under the bridge, the dazzling vessel slipped into view, with the crowds gasping in wonder. At first it was just a burst of bright light, a diaphanous vision floating out on the currents. As it drew nearer to the harbor, the ravishing details began to emerge. The barge was the size of a football field, with a giant art deco cotton boll rising over the sparkling set. Egyptian motifs were woven into the decorations — pyramids, sphinxes, hieroglyphics: the Old South meets the land of the pharaohs.

   Seated on their thrones high up in the towering boll were King Joseph and Queen Blanche, 1967's monarchs, wearing their crowns, holding their scepters. As always, they'd been chosen in secret, by some obscure protocol known only to the Mystic Society of the Memphi. As always, he was an older man, a business potentate, while she was a nubile paragon of Southern pulchritude, college aged and presumably a virgin. They were blindingly white people, in blindingly white clothes, sitting high in their resplendent perch. In unison, they cupped their gloved hands and gave the crowds tiny swiveling waves, as if to say, Here we are! . . . There you are! . . . We're all here!

   More than a hundred people made up the royal court, all posed together on the barge like the largest wedding party ever assembled. There were the duchesses, the counts, the pages, the princesses and their tuxedoed escorts. There were the young girls, who curtsied with labored formality and attended the train of Her Majesty's gown. There were the weevils, the masked green jesters whose identities were unknown. On one side of the Royal Barge stood the Ladies of the Realm — belles from plantation towns all over the Mississippi Delta. On the other side were the Ladies-in-Waiting — belles from the city, from good families, and of marriageable age.

   The court moved about the barge in a carefully choreographed promenade. Everyone was smiling, bowing, waving, beaming. "Don't get wise with me," the king warned, "or I'll have you all beheaded." When the music reached a fever pitch, King Joseph and Queen Blanche rose and took a bow. All along the bluff, the seventy-five thousand loyal subjects erupted in thunderous cheers: Hail, King Cotton and His Queen!

   Then, in a swirl of lights, the court began to parade off the stage, and off the barge, and onto the old cobblestones, the royals closely gaurded by uniformed young men dressed as Confederate colonels. Like Peabody ducks, the revelers strutted down a long red carpet to a waiting convoy of Cadillac convertibles and were whisked away to the first parties of the season.

This concludes the excerpt from Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides.

Would you like to read this book? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.

Excerpt: Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

2010-05-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

This is Isabel Allende's latest novel in which she tells of slavery, forbidden relationship and rebellion in Haiti, and includes struggles over secret children, racial castes and family heirs in Louisiana.

To learn more about this novel, click HERE.

This excerpt from Island Beneath the Sea includes Prologue entitled "Zarite" and Chapter One, entitled "The Spanish Illnes".

Prologue

Zarite

In my forty years I, Zarité Sedella, have had better luck than other slaves. I am going to live a long time and my old age will be a time of contentment because my star —mi z’etoile— also shines when the night is cloudy. I know the pleasure of being with the man my heart has chosen. His large hands awaken my skin. I have had four children and a grandson, and those who are living are free. My first memory of happiness, when I was just a bony, runny-nosed, tangle-haired little girl, is moving to the sound of the drums, and that is also my most recent happiness, because last night I was in the Place Congo dancing and dancing, without a thought in my head, and today my body is warm and weary. Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me. With the drums the everyday Zarité disappears, and I am again the little girl who danced when she barely knew how to walk. I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles. Rhythm is born on the island beneath the sea; it shakes the earth, it cuts through me like a lighting bolt and rises toward the sky, carrying with it my sorrows so that Papa Bondye can chew them, swallow them, and leave me clean and happy. The drums conquer fear. The drums are the heritage of my mother, the strength of Guinea that is in my blood. No one can harm me when I am with the drums, I become as overpowering as Erzulie, loa of love, and swifter than the bullwhip. The shells on my wrists and ankles click in time, the gourds ask questions, the djmbe drums answer in the voice of the jungle and the timbales with their tin tones. The djun djuns that know how to speak make the invitation, and the big maman roars when they beat her to summon the loas. The drums are sacred, the loas speak through them.

In the house where I spent my earliest years the drums were silent in the room we shared with Honoré, the other slave, but they were often taken out. Madame Delphine, my mistress then, did not want to hear the blacks’ noise, only the melancholy laments of her clavichord. Mondays and Tuesdays she gave classes to girls of color, and the rest of the week she taught in the mansions of the grand blancs, where the mademoiselles had their own instruments because they could not use the ones the mulatta girls touched. I learned to clean the keys with lemon juice, but I could not make music because Madame forbade us to go near her clavichord. We didn’t need it. Honoré could draw music from a cookpot; anything in his hands had beat, melody, rhythm, and voice. He carried sounds inside his body; he had brought them from Dahomey. My toy was a hollowed gourd we made to rattle; later he taught me to caress his drums, slowly. And from the beginning, when he was still carrying me around in his arms, he took me to dances and voodoo services, where he marked the rhythm with his drum, the principal drum, for others to follow. This is how I remember it. Honoré seemed very old to me because his bones had frozen stiff, even though at the time he was no older than I am now. He drank taffia in order to endure the pain of moving, but more than that harsh rum, music was the best remedy. His moans turned to laughter with the sound of the drums. Honoré barely could peel sweet potatoes for the mistress’s meal, his hands were so deformed, but playing the drum he never got tired, and when it came to dancing no one lifted his knees higher, or swung his head with more force, or shook his behind with more pleasure. Before I knew how to walk, he had me dance sitting down, and when I could just balance myself on two legs he invited me to lose myself in the music, the way you do in a dream. “Dance, dance, Zarité, the slave who dances is free…while he is dancing,” he told me. I have always danced.

Chapter 1

The Spanish Illness

Toulouse Valmorain arrived in Saint-Domingue in 1770, the same year the dauphin of France married the Austrian archduchess, Marie Antoinette. Before traveling to the colony, when still he had no suspicion that his destiny was going to play a trick on him, or that he would end up in cane fields in the Antilles, he had been invited to Versailles to one of the parties in honor of the new dauphine, a young blonde of fourteen, who yawned openly in the rigid protocol of the French court. All of that was in the past. Saint-Domingue was another world. The young Valmorain had a rather vague idea of the place where his father struggled to earn a livelihood for his family with the ambition of converting it into a fortune. Valmorain had read somewhere that the original inhabitants of the island, the Arawaks, had called it Haiti before the conquistadors changed the name to La Española and killed off the natives. In fewer than fifty years, not a single Arawak remained, nor sign of them; they all perished as victims of slavery, European illnesses, and suicide. They were a red-skinned race, with thick black hair and inalterable dignity, so timid that a single Spaniard could conquer ten of them with his bare hands. They lived in polygamous communities, cultivating the land with care in order not to exhaust it: sweet potatoes, maize, gourds, peanuts, peppers, potatoes, and cassava. The earth, like the sky and water, had no owner until the foreigners, using the forced labor of the Arawaks, took control of it in order to cultivate never-before-seen plants. It was in that time that the custom of killing people with dogs was begun. When they had annihilated the indigenous peoples, the new masters imported slaves, blacks kidnapped in Africa and whites from Europe: convicts, orphans, prostitutes, and rebels. At the end of the 1600s, Spain ceded to France the western part of the island, which they called Saint-Domingue, and which would become the richest colony in the world. At the time Toulouse Valmorain arrived there, a third of the wealth of France, in sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and cocoa, came from the island. There were no longer white slaves, but the number of blacks had risen to hundreds of thousands. The most intractable crop was sugarcane, the sweet gold of the colony; cutting the cane, crushing it, and reducing it to syrup was labor not for humans, as the planters maintained, but for beasts.

Valmorain had just turned twenty when he was summoned to the colony by an urgent letter from his father's business agent. When the youth disembarked, he was dressed in the latest fashion—lace cuffs, powdered wig, and shoes with high heels—and sure that the books he had read on the subject of exploration made him more than capable of advising his father for a few weeks. He was traveling with a valet nearly as elegant as he, and several trunks holding his wardrobe and his books. He thought of himself as a man of letters, and planned upon his return to France to dedicate himself to science. He admired the philosophers and encyclopedists who had in recent decades made such an impact in Europe, and he agreed with some of their liberal ideas. Rousseau's Social Contract had been his bedside book at eighteen. He had barely got off the ship, after a crossing that nearly ended in tragedy when they ran into a hurricane in the Caribbean, when he received his first disagreeable surprise: his progenitor was not waiting for him at the port. He was met by the agent, a courteous Jew dressed in black from head to foot, who informed him of the precautions necessary for moving about the island; he had brought him horses, a pair of mules for luggage, a guide, and militiamen to accompany him to the Habitation Saint-Lazare. The young man had never set foot outside France, and had paid very little attention to the stories—banal, furthermore—his father used to tell during his infrequent visits to the family in Paris. He could not imagine that he would sometime visit the plantation; the tacit agreement was that his father would consolidate his fortune on the island while he looked after his mother and sisters and supervised the business in France. The letter he had received alluded to health problems, and he supposed that it concerned a passing fever, but when he reached Saint-Lazare, after a day's march at a killing pace through a gluttonous and hostile nature, he realized that his father was dying. He was not suffering from malaria, as Valmorain had thought, but syphilis, le mal espagnol, which was devastating whites, blacks, and mulattoes alike. His father's illness was in the last stages; he was covered with pustules, nearly incapacitated, his teeth were loose and his mind in a fog. The Dantesque treatments of bloodletting, mercury, and cauterizing his penis with red-hot wire had not given him relief, but he continued them as an act of contrition. Just past his fiftieth birthday, he had become an ancient giving nonsensical orders, urinating without control, and passing his time in a hammock with his pets, a pair of young black girls who had barely reached puberty.

While slaves unpacked his luggage under the directions of the valet, a fop who had barely endured the crossing on the ship and was frightened by the primitive conditions of the place, Toulouse Valmorain went out to look over the vast property. He knew nothing about the cultivation of cane, but the tour was sufficient for him to understand that the slaves were starving and the plantation had been saved from ruin only because the world was consuming sugar with increasing voraciousness. In the account books he found the explanation for his father's bad financial condition, which was not maintaining his family at a proper level in Paris. Production was a disaster, and the slaves were dying like insects; Valmorain had no doubt that the overseers were robbing his family, taking advantage of the master's deterioration. He cursed his luck and set about rolling up his sleeves and getting to work, something no young man from his milieu ever considered; work was for a different class of people. He began by obtaining a generous loan, thanks to the support and connections of his father's business agent's bankers. Then he ordered the commandeurs to the cane fields, to work elbow to elbow with the same people they had martyrized, and replaced them with others less depraved. He reduced punishments and hired a veterinarian, who spent two months at Saint-Lazare trying to return the Negroes to some degree of health. The veterinarian could not save Valmorain's valet, who was dispatched by a fulminating diarrhea in fewer than thirty-eight hours. Valmorain realized that his father's slaves lasted an average of eighteen months before they dropped dead of fatigue or escaped, a much shorter period than on other plantations. The women lived longer than the men, but they produced less in the asphyxiating labor of the cane fields, and they also had the bad habit of getting pregnant. As very few children survived, the planters had concluded that fertility among the Negroes was not a good source of income. The young Valmorain carried out the necessary changes in a methodical way, quickly and with no plans, intending to leave very soon, but when his father died a few months later, the son had to confront the inescapable fact that he was trapped. He did not intend to leave his bones in the mosquito-infested colony, but if he went too soon he would lose the plantation, and with it the income and social position his family held in France.

Valmorain did not try to make connections with other colonists. The grands blancs, owners of other plantations, considered him a presumptuous youth who would not last long on the island, and for that reason they were amazed to see him sunburned and in muddy boots. The antipathy was mutual. For Valmorain the Frenchmen transplanted to the Antilles were boors, the opposite of the society he had frequented, in which ideas, science, and the arts were exalted and no one spoke of money or of slaves. From the Age of Reason in Paris, he had passed to a primitive and violent world in which the living and the dead walked hand in hand. Neither did he make friends with the petits blancs, whose only capital was the color of their skin, a few poor devils poisoned by envy and slander, as he considered them. Many had come from the four corners of the globe and had no way to prove the purity of their blood, or their past; in the best of cases they were merchants, artisans, friars of little virtue, sailors, military men, and minor civil servants, but there were always troublemakers, pimps, criminals, and buccaneers who used every inlet of the Caribbean for their corrupt operations. He had nothing in common with those people. Among the free mulattoes, the affranchis, there were more than sixty classifications set by percentage of white blood, and that determined their social level. Valmorain never learned to distinguish the tones or proper denomination for each possible combination of the two races. The affranchis lacked political power, but they managed a lot of money, and poor whites hated them for that. Some earned a living in illicit trafficking, from smuggling to prostitution, but others had been educated in France and had fortunes, lands, and slaves. In spite of subtleties of color, the mulattoes were united by their shared aspiration to pass for whites and their visceral scorn for Negroes. The slaves, whose number was ten times greater than that of the whites and affranchis combined, counted for nothing, neither in the census of the population nor in the colonists' consciousness.

Since he did not want to isolate himself completely, Toulouse Valmorain occasionally had interchange with some families of grands blancs in Le Cap, the city nearest his plantation. On those trips he bought what was needed for supplies and, if he could not avoid it, went by the Assemblée Coloniale to greet his peers, so that they would not forget his name, but he did not participate in the sessions. He also used the occasion to go to plays at the theater, attend parties given by the cocottes—the exuberant French, Spanish, and mixed-race courtesans who dominated nightlife—and to rub elbows with explorers and scientists who stopped by the island on their way toward other more interesting places. Saint-Domingue did not attract visitors, but at times some came to study the nature or economy of the Antilles. Those Valmorain invited to Saint-Lazare with the intention of regaining, even if briefly, pleasure from the sophisticated conversation that had marked his youthful years in Paris. Three years after his father's death, he could show the property with pride; he had transformed that ruin of sick Negroes and dry cane fields into one of the most prosperous of the eight hundred plantations on the island, had multiplied by five the volume of unrefined sugar for export, and had installed a distillery in which he produced select barrels of a rum as good as the best in Cuba. His visitors spent one or two weeks in his large, rustic wood residence, soaking up country life and appreciating at close range the magic invention of sugar. They rode horseback through the dense growth that whistled threateningly in the wind, protected from the sun by large straw hats and gasping in the boiling humidity of the Caribbean while slaves thin as shadows cut the cane to ground level without killing the root, so there would be other harvests. From a distance, they resembled insects in fields where the cane was twice their height. The labor of cleaning the hard stalks, chopping them in toothed machines, crushing them in the rollers, and boiling the juice in deep copper cauldrons to obtain a dark syrup was fascinating to these city people, who had seen only the white crystals that sweetened coffee. The visitors brought Valmorain up-to-date on events in a Europe and America that were more and more remote for him, the new technological and scientific advances, and the philosophical ideas of the vanguard. They opened to him a crack through which he could glimpse the world, and as a gift left him books. Valmorain enjoyed his guests, but he enjoyed more their leaving; he did not like to have witnesses to his life, or to his property. The foreigners observed slavery with a mixture of morbid curiosity and repugnance that was offensive to him because he thought of himself as a just master; if they knew how other planters treated their Negroes, they would agree with him. He knew that more than one would return to civilization converted into an abolitionist and ready to campaign against consumption of sugar. Before he had been forced to live on the island, he too would have been shocked by slavery, had he known the details, but his father never referred to the subject. Now, with his hundreds of slaves, his ideas had changed.

Toulouse Valmorain spent the first years lifting Saint-Lazare from devastation and was unable to travel outside the colony even once. He lost contact with his mother and sisters, except for sporadic, rather formal letters that reported only the banalities of everyday life and health. After his failure with two French managers, he hired a mulatto as head overseer of the plantation, a man named Prosper Cambray, and then found more time to read, to hunt, and travel to Le Cap. There he had met Violette Boisier, the most sought-after cocotte of the city, a free young woman with the reputation of being clean and healthy, African by heritage and white in appearance. At least with her he would not end up like his father, his blood watered down by the Spanish illness.

This concludes the excerpt from Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende.

Would you like to read this novel? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.

Excerpt: Reckless by Andrew Gross

2010-05-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

Reckless by Andrew Gross

This is a great new thriller novel from Andrew Gross. It is released on April 27, 2010.

If you want to find out more about this novel, click HERE.

The following excerpt contains the first three chapters (Prologue, Chapter One and Chapter Two) of Reckless by Andrew Gross.

Prologue

London.

Beep, beep! Beep, beep!”

Amir, “Marty” al-Bashir’s six-year-old son, raced his motorized Formula One model around the dining room table, almost crashing it into Anna, the Lebanese housemaid, as she brought out their Sunday lunch of flatbread and spiced lamb.

“Amir, watch out!” his mom, Sheera, yelled. “You’ll run Anna over. Marty, is it not possible for you to tell your son to stop?”

“Amir, listen to your mother,” Marty called from the den, distracted. He and his older son, Ghassan—they called him Gary—were crouched in front of the wide-screen TV in the midst of a crucial football match. Manchester United versus Chelsea. The match was scoreless with only seconds remaining in the first half, and Man U was his son’s favorite team—they had just acquired Antonio Valencia, his favorite winger and the hottest foot in the game.

“Oh, no, look!” Gary shouted as Marty focused back on the screen. A Chelsea attacker had curled a thirty-meter beauty just inside the left post, an inch beyond the Manchester goalie’s outstretched

dive.

“Damn, now look what you’ve made me miss, Sheera,” Marty groaned, deflated, “a goal!”

“A goal, big deal. Your son is driving that thing around the house like Jenson Button. Amir, listen . . .” Sheera’s voice grew firm. “If you don’t stop this instant, you can forget about going to Universal Studios when we are in L.A. Do you hear?”

As if on autopilot, the model race car came to a stop. From the floor, Amir caught his father’s amused gaze and grinned sheepishly. “Yes, I hear, mama.”

“Come on, boys, your mom’s gone to a lot of trouble for us. Let’s eat.” Marty rose and the family drew chairs around the sleek van der Rohe table in the stylishly decorated town house.

Outside, the view from the wide third-floor window of their fashionable Mayfair Georgian was over Hyde Park, among the most desirable views in town. The home cost close to six million pounds, but as the chief investment officer of the Royal Saudi Partnership, a sovereign fund of Marty’s native Saudi Arabia, it was hardly more than a rounding error on the daily tallies of one of the largest troves of investment capital in the world.

“Marty,” which al-Bashir had been called for years, was simply an Americanized form of Mashhur, his birth name, given to him in his undergraduate days when he had studied under Whiting and McComb at the University of Chicago and followed up with stints in portfolio strategy at Goldman and Reynolds Reid, and in private equity at Blackstone in New York.

It was only back home in his native country that Marty was called anything else.

Now he oversaw a giant fund with interests that stretched to every point on the globe and every conceivable type of asset. Stocks. Mezzanine capital. Currencies. CDOs. Complex derivatives. They also had vast real estate holdings—in New York’s Rockefeller Center and London’s own Trafalgar Square. When the price of oil rocketed, they bought up ethanol-producing sugarcane fields in Brazil. When the commodity fell, they bought up offshore U.S. development leases and massive tankers. Royal Saudi’s holdings were more than a trillion dollars. Their hands were in everything. In times of crisis, they had even been called on to prop up many national treasuries around the world.

He and Sheera had met in the U.S. while he was at Reynolds and she, a daughter of a prominent law professor from Beirut, was studying economics at Columbia. They’d been married for twelve years. The job had given him ease—most would say luxury—and over time, they acquired many Western ways. They had a flat on the Côte d’Azur, a penthouse in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; they took the family skiing at Gstaad and Aspen; Gary and Amir were enrolled in the finest schools. His only regret was that, to appease the royal family’s wishes, his wife had had to give up her own career to raise her family. Sometimes he wished that despite his rise to the top of the financial world and the important responsibilities that had been bestowed on him, if only she could handle the investments and he could manage the kids, both their home and the Saudi royal portfolio would be in better hands.

Sunday was their traditional family meal. Afterward, they might head a few blocks away to Hyde Park and kick the football around a bit. On the way back, they might stroll along Shepherd Market window-shopping the fine antiques and new fashions. These days, with teleconferencing and the financial network set up here, he jetted home barely twice a year, mostly to see his folks. He had been away from Riyadh for so many years, distanced himself from their customs, that Marty pretty much thought of the royals as clients now rather than brethren. And he knew, because of the results he produced, his overseers looked the other way.

“Okay, who wants first?” Marty picked up a plate and looked around. “The cook!” he said proudly, and spooned some of the stewed lamb over the yogurt and bread and handed it to his wife, serving her first in the Western way. If his parents ever saw him, they’d be horrified.

The trill of his cell phone sounded from somewhere in the house. His office.

Sheera shook her head and groaned. “Now on Sundays too?”

“I’ll make it short. Promise.” Marty got up. “You just make sure you save me some of that lamb.” He winked a warning at Amir, whose appetite seemed to never end.

With the vast amount of activity Royal Saudi controlled there was no such thing as boundaries when it came to nights or weekends. Their interests ran every day, 24/7, across the globe. Though the aroma of lamb and fresh baked bread made ignoring the call momentarily tempting.

Marty followed the ring to his office and shut the door, stepping over the cables to the Wii video game attached to the TV. Gary’s Christmas gift—another Western concession! The BlackBerry was vibrating on the coffee table and Marty sank himself onto the couch, tightrope-walking over the brightly colored Lego Transformer that had been left on the floor; this one was Amir’s.

Never ends, he sighed.

He expected it to be Len Whiteman, his second at the firm, but Marty’s mood shifted when he checked the digital readout and saw “Private Caller.” His stomach clenched. Cautiously, he drew the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“I hope this call finds you well, Mashhur al-Bashir.”

The use of Marty’s Saudi name jolted him. He knew immediately who it was. The first call had come six months ago, preparing him. He had just been hoping against hope, as time marched on, as their lives grew and prospered and became more acclimated, that the real call would never come.

“I am well,” Marty replied, his throat dry, returning the greeting in Arabic.

“Our sons and daughters around the world require your service, Mashhur al-Bashir. Are you prepared to do what is asked of you?”

Marty thought to himself that it had been so long. His views, passions, had all been so different then. Never religious, or even political. It was simply more about pride in his culture. The dismissive manner in which his nation had been treated by the West. They had given him his start, his education. Now he had lived among them for years and had changed.

Six months ago the first call had come. Reminding him of his duty. What he was expected to do. In a flash, all the prosperity in his life and the good fortune he had earned seemed a universe away. There was no turning away from this. He realized he owed them everything. All his good fortune. He had made his bed a long time ago.

“Yes,” Marty al-Bashir answered dutifully.

“Good. The tide of events is evolving,” the caller said, “don’t you agree? Global opportunities have shifted. We, here, are not happy with certain signs. We feel it is time for a change in direction. In strategy. Do you understand?”

“I have a new plan already drawn up,” Marty replied. He knew the ramifications that would result from it and he closed his eyes.

“Then begin it,” the caller said, “starting tomorrow. Execute your job, Mashhur al-Bashir. The rest is already set.” The caller paused a second. “Shall we say, the planes are in the air.”

They hung up, the sounds of his family, laughing, returning from outside. Marty remained on the couch for a while.

All he knew and had grown used to was about to change.

He got up and stepped over to the window, accidentally kicking over his son’s Transformer, the Lego pieces flying about. “Damn.”

Tomorrow, the world would wake up, go to school, to work, laugh, love, eat with their family, everything seeming the same. But by day’s end there would be a change like the world had never seen.

He bent down and picked up his son’s broken Transformer, the brightly colored pieces all around.

“God, help us all,” Marty al-Bashir muttered in perfect English.

Chapter One

They entered the house through the sliding glass doors in the basement, which Becca, their fifteen-year-old, sometimes left ajar to sneak in friends at night.

Upstairs, April Glassman stirred in her bed. She always had an ear for noises late at night. The curse of having a teenager. Marc could go on snoozing forever, through fire alarms, she would joke, but April had a built-in antenna for the sounds of Becca tiptoeing in past curfew or Amos, their goldendoodle, on guard at the living room window, scratching at the glass over a late-night deer or squirrel.

The house was a large, red-brick Georgian at the end of a private drive off Cat Rock Road in backcountry Greenwich. Every bend in the wood seemed to magnify at night. She opened her eyes and checked the time on the TV cable box. Two thirteen a.m. She lay there for a few seconds, listening. She definitely heard something—creaks on the floorboards, muffled voices—in the foyer or on the stairs.

Suddenly Amos started barking.

“Marc . . .” She nudged her husband.

“Honey, what?” Marc Glassman groaned, mashing his pillow into a ball and rolling over.

She leaned over and shook his arm. “I heard something.”

“Probably just Amos. Maybe he spotted a deer. You know those bastards never decide to come out before two a.m.”

“No,” she said, alarmed. “I heard voices.”

“Okay, okay . . .” Marc exhaled, giving in. He opened his eyes and took a peek at the clock. “Grrr . . . I’m sure it’s just Becca . . .”

Their daughter now had a boyfriend at the high school, a junior on the wrestling team, who drove, introducing a whole new set of complications to their lives. Lately she’d been sneaking out after the two of them had gone to sleep, or on weekends, sneaking in her friends at all hours of the night.

“No. It’s a Sunday, Marc,” April replied, recalling how she had kissed her daughter good night hours ago and left her curled up in bed with Facebook going strong and a chemistry textbook on her lap.

“Not anymore . . .” Groggily, he sat up, rubbing a hand across his face, flicking on the light. “I was just gonna get up and check out the overnights anyway.”

As the chief equities trader at Wertheimer Grant, one of Wall Street’s oldest firms, it had been months since he slept a whole night through. Singapore opened at midnight, Australia an hour later. Europe and Russia got going at four. Six months ago he might’ve made it undisturbed till morning. But that seemed like a lifetime ago. Now the bottom had fallen out of the market. The whole subprime mess, Fannie and Freddie reeling, AIG. The banks teetering. Not to mention the company’s stock: a year ago it was over eighty and he and April could have gone off and planted tomatoes somewhere for the rest of their lives. Last Friday it had closed at twelve! It would take him another decade to recoup. Immediately flashing to his positions, his stomach wound into its usual two a.m. knot.

Now April was hearing voices . . .

“I’ll go take a look.”

In the last months, April had watched as her husband dropped ten pounds from the stress. She knew that something was wrong. She knew the firm was hurting and how much they were relying on him. How much he was expected to produce. Marc never shared much about his positions anymore. The pressure on him was crazy.

She leaned over and put her hand on his shoulder. “Honey, will this ever go back to normal?”

He threw off the covers and grabbed his robe. “This is the new normal.”

That’s when they both heard another noise.

A creak on the stairs. Marc put a finger to his lips for her to keep quiet.

Then another. Closer. A knife slicing through them.

Someone was coming up the stairs.

“Marc . . .” April caught his eyes. Her look was laden with worry. “Amos stopped barking . . .”

He nodded, feeling the same thing inside. “I know.”

The next creak seemed to come right from the upstairs landing. April’s heart skipped a beat. Her husband’s gaze was unmistakable.

Someone was in the house.

“Just stay there,” he said, nodding to the bed, raising a hand for her to stay silent.

They all knew about the recent rash of home break-ins going on in the backcountry. They were all just talking about it last Saturday night with the Rudenbachs at Mediterraneo. Marc listened closely at the door. They never put on the alarm. What the hell did they even have the damned thing for, he’d asked himself a hundred times. Just wasting all that stupid money. Truth was, he couldn’t even remember the damn code—or even where the panic button was.

“Marc . . .”

He turned. He stared at April’s freckled face, her soft, round eyes, hair raised in a nighttime ponytail. Except now, he saw only fear in it. And helplessness. “Becca, Evan . . . ,” she whispered.

Their rooms were just down the hall.

He nodded firmly. “I’ll go check it out.”

He took a step, and suddenly the bedroom door flew open. Two men, wearing ski masks and plain blue work uniforms, pushed their way into their room.

April let out a scream.

“What the hell is going on? What are you doing in here?” Marc stepped up to them.

The first one in the overalls suddenly knocked him with a fist to his face back onto the bed.

“Marc!” April reached out to him.

Her husband removed his hand and stared at his fingers. There was blood on them.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded.

“Shut up,” the first one said. The man was large, his voice husky. A tuft of red hair peeked out from behind his mask. He had a gun, accounting for the blood in Marc’s mouth. “Just shut the fuck up and you might just live.”

“Oh, God, Marc, please . . . ,” April murmured, her heartbeat now accelerating wildly. Her thoughts flashed to her children sleeping down the hall. Just keep them away.

The second man shut the bedroom door behind him. The one with the gun came over and pulled April off the bed. “Get up. Put your hands behind your back.” His accomplice took out a roll of duct tape from his uniform and twisted April’s wrists behind her back, binding them tightly. She looked at her husband with fear in her eyes as he ran a second piece of tape across her mouth.

“What do you want with us?” Marc pleaded, helpless, watching his wife being bound. “Listen, I’ve got a safe downstairs. We’ve got some money . . .” He shot April a steadying look, as if he was trying to say, Hang in there, honey. It’ll be okay. That’s why they’re here. For the money.

This isn’t the first one. No one’s been hurt so far.

“Where?” the one with the gun demanded.

“Downstairs. In the study. I’ll show you. Look, we haven’t seen your faces. We don’t know who you are. Just take what you want and let us go, okay?”

“Show me.” The man with the gun grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up.

That was when, to both their horror, the bedroom door opened again and their daughter, Becca, half-asleep, wearing a baby-blue Greenwich High sweatshirt and rubbing her eyes, wandered in. “What’s going on, guys . . . ?”

Before she could even let out a scream, the second intruder grabbed her and covered her mouth.

“Please don’t hurt her!” Marc begged, seeing his daughter’s face turn white with alarm. “She’s just a kid . . .”

Eyes wide, April struggled against her binds, trying to go to her. Oh, baby, no, no . . .

Becca tore the man’s hand away. “Mom!”

They watched, unable to do a thing, as the second intruder wrapped the tape around Becca’s mouth and roughly bound her hands. Her uncomprehending eyes were round with fear.

“Throw ’em in there,” the man with the gun directed his accomplice, pointing to the master closet. Becca, who had always had a fear of small spaces, twisted her head back and forth, trying to resist. Unheeding, the accomplice shoved the two of them in. April fell to the floor, twisting against her binds. Don’t do anything foolish, she tried to say to Marc, desperation in her eyes. Just give them what they want. Please . . .

They shut off the lights in the closet and closed the door.

Her daughter let out muffled screams, writhing against April in the dark. All April could do was huddle as close as she could, trying to convey with all her strength that everything would be okay. Just stay calm, baby. They’re only here for money. They’re going to leave and this will all be okay. Daddy will come get us. I promise, honey, please . . .

Tears glistened in her teenage daughter’s eyes. April put her head against hers, trying to transfer all her conviction and strength, and she began to think, Her hair is so soft and she smells so pure, my little girl . . . Now she’ll remember this the rest of her life. You bastards. You’ve stolen the innocence from her. Her trust. Her thoughts flashed to Marc downstairs—Marc, please, just give them anything! Don’t do anything heroic. Just let them go—and then to Evan, only seven, sleeping down the hall, her sweet little baby. Just sleep, honey, through it all. It’s going to be okay . . . Please, Evan, please. It’s—

That was when she heard the sound: two far-off pops, coming from downstairs.

April and Becca looked at each other. She’d heard it too. April’s heart began to leap with fear.

Marc.

Panicked, tears started to run down her cheeks. What did you do, Marc? What did you fucking do?

Suddenly, there were footsteps. Heavy ones, pounding back up the stairs. Becca squealed, her large eyes doubling in size. The whole house seemed to shake.

What did you do?

Desperately, April fought against her binds. She looked at her daughter. All she could do was simply press herself into her as tightly as she could, panic building in her daughter’s eyes.

My babies . . . April started to cry, her thoughts flashing to Evan as the approaching thuds entered the room. Oh my God, what’s going to happen to him, my poor little sleeping boy? Do whatever you have to do to me, but please, not him. Not to Becca.

The closet door flung open. Light burst into their eyes.

Not my babies, April tried to scream. She threw herself in front of Becca. Not them, not them . . . She stared back at the hooded faces with eyes that were both begging and defiant.

Please . . .

Chapter Two

Remind me again,” Annie Fletcher asked, wiggling out of her navy U of Michigan T-shirt. “Why is it they always call it blue Monday?”

“No idea,” Hauck gasped, his breaths quickening, gulping in air.

She rocked above him, hands balanced against the rattling headboard, swaying in perfect rhythm to the thrust of his thighs. Annie’s body was small and light, but her breasts were full, and her short, dark hair fell over her face, still messy from sleep.

In the background, the newscaster on the early morning show announced brightly that it was going to be a clear and sunny day.

“Never gonna think that way again,” she said, starting to really heat up. Because of the demands of her restaurant and Hauck’s new job—not to mention her son, Jared, moving east with her and boarding five days a week at a nearby school for kids with special needs—they only got to see each other a couple of days a week, and so things tended to be very physical between them.

“Me either,” Hauck huffed, cupping her thighs, the rush of climax coming on.

They had been together for six months now—on and off, mostly on—Annie’s responsibilities at the restaurant clashing a bit with Hauck’s commitment to the new job. She didn’t push for more. He didn’t offer. Annie was trusting and open. It wasn’t so much a relationship as it was a loose, easy friendship—with benefits—what time would allow.

Their rhythm grew faster and faster. Sweat coated their skin. “Thought you had to get to the market . . . ,” he said to her, feeling her breaths beginning to deepen and knowing she was only a few accelerating tremors from letting out.

“Damn arctic char are just gonna have to wait . . .”

The voice from the TV said stock futures were trending down again for the fourth day in a row.

But Hauck and Annie weren’t listening. Their IRAs could have been in total free fall and right now neither of them would have given a damn.

Finally, with a last gasp, Annie arched, stiffening, then fell back onto him, joyfully spent of breath, draping her satisfied body over his, her chest feeling about a thousand degrees. “Damn,” she sighed from her head all the way down to her little toes, “now that’s the way to start the workweek. That was a good one.”

“That was three.” Hauck flung back his arms in mock exhaustion. “I’m an old guy. You’re killing me.”

“Three?” She rested her chin on his chest. “Two, I think.”

“Two since they talked about the transit fares going up,” he told her. “One more since traffic and weather.”

“Oh, yeah, three,” she purred contentedly, releasing a long, slow sigh. “Math was never my strong suit.”

Hauck turned and focused in on the digital clock. “Damn. Look at the time! I’ve got to scoot.”

Annie restrained him as he tried to wrestle free, digging in her chin more sharply. “You know, I’m happy, Ty . . .” She smiled, a kind of coy, amused grin, being purposefully annoying. “Are you happy? You don’t always look so. I know you’re sort of a tough nut to crack.”

“Apparently not,” he said, chuckling at the lame joke. “And yeah, sure, I’m happy . . .” He tried to roll her off. “I’ll be happy if I can get you off of me and hop into the shower.”

“Oh, right,” Annie chortled, “like this wasn’t exactly what you had in mind when you snuggled over to me before the alarm went off . . .”

“Alright, maybe,” Hauck admitted a little guiltily. “One . . .”

“You’re just a glass-half-empty kind of dude, aren’t you? Never show too much of yourself. Never trust the moment.”

“I’m not half-empty at all.” Hauck finally spun her off and faced her sideways. “I’m actually completely half-full. It’s just that it’s buried. Very, very deep.”

“Right; if it were any deeper, you’d find oil in it,” Annie said, and deciding it was funny, twisted his nose.

“Laugh-out-loud,” Hauck said, screwing up his face. But then he laughed too.

That was because, truth be said, he was happy. The lines etched in his face might not have shown it, but Annie had brought things out in him he had never let surface before. The uncomplicated will to just enjoy life. To relax, stay in the moment. For the first time, it seemed things that had weighed heavily on him for so long—the deaths of his daughter, eight years before; his brother, only last year; and Freddy Munoz, his protégé on the force—all seemed to have been pushed back into some closed, time-locked vault he no longer felt compelled to open and to which he had momentarily lost the key.

Not to mention the fact that he had suddenly left the force and gone into the private sector. After fifteen years.

Now he traded up to a jacket and tie every day and had spiffy new digs in an office park on the water. Earning three times what he had before. He had colleagues in Europe and Asia on his speed dial. He even glanced through the Wall Street Journal every morning, pretending he was keeping abreast of business news, after he checked the sports scores on ESPN.com, of course. He had opened himself up to a new feeling, the arc of his new life seeming to work out. He was, like Annie pushed him to do, trusting the moment. Okay, maybe like she’d said, it was somewhere down deep, somewhere that didn’t come up to the surface very often. But it had been a long time since he felt this way. Boundaryless. Free of regret.

“Really, I gotta get up,” he said. He lifted her off. “I’ll do the coffee.”

Annie fell back against the pillows, groaning loudly, “Alright . . .”

The news anchor came back on. “And now, back to our lead from the top of the hour . . .”

The congestion on the Merritt Parkway had given way to something far more serious.

“In Connecticut, the town of Greenwich is waking this morning to a horrifying triple murder. An equities trader at a prestigious Wall Street firm was brutally shot to death during the night along with his wife and daughter in their expansive home in backcountry Greenwich. Cindy Marquez is on the scene . . .”

Hauck sat up, his years as head of detectives taking over, as the attractive reporter, bundled against the cold, stood in front of two large stone pillars leading to a typical Greenwich home.

“Kate, the local police believe that the motive behind this family’s tragic end was simply a robbery gone bad. A string of break-ins up here has rocked this affluent community for months. But until now, none had ever turned so violent.

“Marc Glassman”—a photo flashed on the screen—“who was forty-one and worked as a lead equities trader for troubled Wall Street giant Wertheimer Grant, was found shot downstairs in their posh five-bedroom

home off of Cat Rock Road . . .”

Hauck sat up. A tremor knifed through him.

“Hold it a second,” he said, disentangling from Annie’s legs. He stared, his heart rate accelerating, as he edged closer to the screen.

“The bodies of his wife, April, who was well known in local charities and schools, and their teenage daughter, Rebecca, were found in an upstairs closet. A younger son . . .”

Hauck fixed again on the photo. A shot of the family in happy times. His mind raced as the reporter described the grisly scene; he fixed on the husband—slightly receding hair, in a fleece pullover and sunglasses, one arm around his daughter, who was wearing an oversized college sweatshirt and had long brown hair, and the other arm around another child, a son, younger, a mop of yellow hair and smiles.

Then he focused in on the wife.

Pretty. Happy looking. In a green baseball cap, her light-brown hair, in a ponytail, peeking through the vent. A beautiful smile that was both proud and tragic at the same time.

“Oh, God . . .” Hauck groaned, sucking in a fortifying breath.

“I know, it’s horrible,” Annie said. She came up behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder, staring past him at the screen. “Are you okay?”

He nodded silently, not an answer as much as it was all he could do. A heavy weight fell inside him.

“I knew her,” he said.

This is an excerpt from a novel Reckless by Andrew Gross.

Would you like to read this novel? You can buy it on Amazon by clicking HERE.