The Secret Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Teaser

  Forge Books by Harold Robbins

  Praise

  Copyright

  1

  LEN

  We were not supposed to play cards for money in our dorm rooms. We were not supposed to drink or smoke. We were not supposed to have copies of Playboy or Penthouse. We were not supposed to jerk off. We were not supposed to sit around in our underwear, without robes.

  In fact, we were not supposed to gather in groups of more than three.

  When the loud knock sounded on the door, this is how we were—

  —I was playing poker with Joe and Lou and Bill, which was not allowed, even if we had almost no money on the table, and we sat in our T-shirts and shorts, without robes.

  —Gus and Ted had their cocks in their hands while staring at a copy of Hustler. They were talking about how far they had gotten with girls the last time they were home—lying, of course, but making it sound very exciting, how they had touched this one’s bare tit and that one’s curly crotch hair. Ted claimed he had some pussy hair in an envelope at home but had not brought it to school. When they heard that awful knock, Ted had just come and had to jam his spurting cock down in his underpants.

  —A bottle of gin sat on the poker table.

  Knock! The gin went out the window. Hustler went under the mattress. Robes were tossed in all directions, one in mine, fortunately.

  * * *

  Bill opened the door, confronting Brad, the dorm monitor for our floor.

  “Cooper. Headmaster’s office, on the double. Get your goddamn clothes on.”

  Called so abruptly to the office of the headmaster, I knew something was terribly wrong. I went over in my mind what I might have done this time but couldn’t think of anything so bad as to have me called from the dorm to confront the headmaster.

  I mean, having been reported for masturbating in a toilet stall would not have produced such a summons. Besides, I had put a dark blue lump on the forehead of the last boy who had pretended he had seen me doing that. The word had gone around—beware of your back if you make bad words about Len Cooper; don’t bend over the faucet when brushing your teeth; you may find your forehead slammed hard against the plumbing.

  I was in my final year at Lodge. It was a boarding school, good enough I guess, but not in a class with schools like Choate, Groton, and Andover—the famed New England prep schools that my father held in contempt. Some Lodge graduates claimed the title “preppie.” Most didn’t. I didn’t and wouldn’t.

  Anyway, the headmaster liked to be called Dr. Billings. He also liked to appear in academic regalia for chapel and assemblies—gaudy hood and mortarboard with gold tassel.

  Chapel. That I was a Jew didn’t excuse me from compulsory chapel. It was an excuse, though, for reading during the prayers. I had made peace with Episcopal Christianity, and Episcopal Christianity had made peace with me. So long as I read textbooks and not novels. Catcher in the Rye was okay classroom reading but not chapel reading.

  I arrived at the walnut-paneled office of Dr. Billings, a big fellow with a square face and looming eyebrows. He tried to affect a mixed persona of kind and understanding, plus stern and disciplining. He did not entirely succeed in affecting either, much less the difficult mixture.

  He wasn’t wearing his academic gown now but only a dark gray suit spattered with cigarette ash. He came out from behind his desk and shook my hand: also an ominous sign.

  “My dear boy,” he said. “I am afraid I have the most terrible news for you.” That oversized old man was on the verge of tears. He handed me a telegram:

  PLEASE ADVISE MY SON THAT HIS MOTHER PASSED AWAY THIS AFTERNOON IN LYON STOP ADVISE HIM ALSO THAT I WILL FLY TO NEW YORK ON THE EARLIEST AVAILABLE FLIGHT AND THENCE ON TO VERMONT TO BE WITH HIM STOP COMFORT THE BOY AS BEST YOU CAN UNTIL I CAN BE THERE STOP

  JEROME COOPER

  Lodge School kept a VIP suite on the second floor above the commons. Officially it was for the bishop when he made his occasional visit. Mostly it was for distinguished commencement speakers and for generous contributors. But it had a more ominous use. When a boy suffered the death of a parent, or both parents, he would be moved into the VIP suite, where he could cry alone, absent his roommates. We called it the funeral parlor.

  I was moved into the funeral parlor. My masters came. My friends came. The boy whose head I’d banged on the bathroom faucet came. I had to hold back my tears, which was no easy thing to do; I was genuinely devastated by the death of my mother, which would force me to live with just one parent: my forbidding father.

  I was in shock. My mother couldn’t be dead! I was young. I should have been more sensitive. I should have understood the symptoms that had been there for me to see.

  I should have read them more in my formidable father than I read them in her. Formidable. Yes, he was. She weakened before my eyes, but she was brave and did not let it occur to me that I was about to lose her. He was brave, but this required more than courage. When they went off to France on that final visit, I had no idea it was a final visit to her homeland and her family.

  I suppose it was something my mother and father meant to spare me. I would learn of it soon enough, and it would be bad enough when it came; no need for me to suffer until it was necessary.

  “Got somethin’ for ya, Len.”

  He had something for me, all right. His name was—God help him!—Beauregard, of course called Bo. He was not one of my roommates, but he was the only boy I ever mutually jerked off with. You
know what I mean? Boarding-school ha-ha. Boys thinking they were being bad.

  Anyway, Bo had brought me something. It looked like a bottle of hair tonic. It wasn’t. It was a little bottle of Scotch! And, God, did I need that!

  Old Dr. Latrobe came. The school chaplain. He was an Episcopal divine and offered to pray with me—and took no offense when I said thank you, no. He was well meaning but I couldn’t take him right now. His doctorate, as I learned later, was phony. He was a D.D., doctor of divinity.

  He had brought a tray with a pot of tea, cups and saucers, sugar and cream. I hadn’t drunk my Scotch, but I was compelled to sit there and listen to that old man talk about life and death. I shouldn’t be too hard on him. He was inoffensive.

  “Death, you see, is only a part of life. It awaits us all. Mourning is painful. Sometimes it seems more than we can bear. But think of this—there is a certain way that we can avoid the agony of mourning, and that is never to love. Because we don’t mourn because our loved one is dead; we mourn because we loved that person. So, if you would never mourn, you can escape it easily. All you have to do is never love. But, you know, we will go on loving and go on mourning, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  I thanked him when he left. It was the only decent thing to do.

  2

  I know something about funeral customs, now. They are designed to keep people from being alone in their grief. You can’t very well cry in the company of others. So … wakes and all the rest of it. The religions know something.

  They brought me dinner in the suite—pot roast and mashed potatoes, string beans, tossed salad, and chocolate cake. With milk. They did not suppose I drank coffee.

  What the hell? I’d tossed off half the Scotch in the hair-tonic bottle as soon as the chaplain left—saving the rest for later when it would help me sleep.

  The headmaster came, and two masters—so called. My roommates came and sat uncomfortably.

  The headmaster encouraged me to talk about my mother. It would be good for me to talk, he said. I did talk, if only to get rid of these intrusive men.

  I could tell them this much—

  She was French, from Lyon. Her name was Giselle. My father was her second husband, and I have half-siblings in France named Martin—pronounced Mar-teen in the French manner, not Mar-tun, à l’Americain. The French Martins were quite wealthy. They were, in fact, the original bottlers and exporters of Plescassier Water, which rivaled Perrier and Evian and was sworn to by many, as a benefit to the skin and overall good health, not just when drank but when poured over the face and body. I have tried it. In my experience, Plescassier Water has a mildly laxative effect, and if that is what you need for your overall good health, God bless you.

  At one point in his life, my father had been the American importer of Plescassier Water. That is how he came to know my mother’s first husband, Jean Pierre Martin, and how he came to know her and marry her after M. Martin died. They never really told me much about it, and there was a great deal more to the story that I didn’t know.

  “I loved my mother,” I said tearfully. “She was a saint! My mother was a saint.”

  * * *

  When all of them had gone and I was at last alone and free to sob, I tossed down the remainder of the Scotch from the hair-tonic bottle. It did little good. More might have done better.

  A saint … Yes. She was, really. My mother had been a saint. But how little I knew!

  I would rather have been on my own cot, with my roommates, in the dormitory. But that choice was not open to me. Bereaved boys were condemned to the VIP suite.

  I undressed. All my life I have slept nude, except in those dreary pajama days in dormitories.

  I lay down.

  Knock, knock. A knock so quiet and discreet I decided to answer it.

  It was Brad. I never did know Brad’s last name, though I could have learned it easily enough from the school catalog. He was a master—which is to say an instructor without academic standing, which he could not have attained in a boarding school—in history and political science. His ambition, I knew, was to achieve academic status in a college, any college—to be, in time, a professor.

  Fat chance!

  He was what he thought a boarding-school academic should be: tweedy, toady, and chummy.

  He was also a fairy, as we then called them—something the naively straight Dr. Billings did not suspect.

  Brad was nervous. He glanced up and down the hall before he entered my room.

  Brad was a handsome blond guy. If I saw him today I’d write him off in an instant. Not because he was a fag. Because he was a professional failure.

  He was wearing a robe and slippers and pajamas. He was the proctor on my floor in the dorm.

  As a proctor he was entitled to administer minor punishment—meaning he could paddle us. Which he did, often. He was proud of the fraternity paddle he had brought from college. I remember it well. It bore the Greek letters—

  Δϒ

  —of which he was, for some unfathomable reason, proud.

  Anyway, he loved to use it, and he never used it on anything but a bare ass.

  He’d take us to his room, order us to take down our pants and underpants, and have us grasp our knees with our hands. With our cheeks in the air and our balls and pricks in view, he would walk around us and lecture us on the advantages of upright conduct and the penalties that awaited the unrighteous. Three or four whacks followed. He never hit hard. We would dutifully sob and whimper. Then we had to stand and face him with hangdog expressions, with our clothes around our ankles, and promise to be better boys in future.

  Not one of us above the age of ten failed to understand the true meaning of these sessions. That he did it to boys as young as eight told us something.

  “My poor boy!” he whispered hoarsely as soon as he was inside the VIP suite and I had closed the door.

  I knew what was coming. The only question for me was would I resist it?

  “I brought you something,” he said. “You must never tell anyone about it.”

  From the pocket of his robe he took a flask of brandy. He screwed off the cap, and I took the first swig of brandy I had ever tasted. I think he was surprised. In the past I’d swigged Scotch and bourbon and gin, and the brandy did not make me choke or turn red in the face.

  “Feel better?” he asked.

  I surprised him again. I tipped back the flask and slugged down about half of what he’d brought.

  Well … what then? What to be expected?

  As I said, he was tweedy, toady, and chummy. He explained to me he was going to do something for me because he was my friend and wanted to comfort me. He was bigger than I was and led me rather firmly to my bed. He shoved down my pajama pants, shoved me back on the bed, and took my half-erect dick into his mouth.

  I was fourteen. His educated tongue ran around and around my eager glans, he sucked, and he needed only minutes to bring me to raging spasms of ejaculation. I filled his mouth, apparently, because my come ran down his chin.

  Oh, more ignorant than that. He wiped his chin on his pajama shirt and said, “Now you do it for me, Len. That’s how it goes. Two guys. One does it for one, then the other does it—I mean, that’s the way it goes: total friendship, one man for another.”

  “Forget that,” I interrupted.

  “You can’t say that to me! I’ve already done it for you. You can’t refuse me!”

  “The hell I can’t. How do you think Dr. Billings would—?”

  “He wouldn’t believe you! You little piece of shit, you think you can—?”

  “My father will be here tomorrow or the next day,” I said. “You want to argue it out with Jerry Cooper?”

  He ran the back of his hand over his mouth, wiping off more of my come; or maybe not, maybe he imagined it was there. His eyes bugged. He shook his head.

  “You don’t need me to make you come, Brad,” I said. “You get it off pounding some poor kid’s bare ass. Well … you can forget that wi
th me. Never again. I may want you to suck me off once in a while, now that I know you do it. When I want you, I’ll let you know. But don’t expect me to take your cock in my mouth.”

  I got away with it. I didn’t know what my father would have said or done. Neither did Brad. But he would take no chances.

  That’s the way it is, always. Some have got guts. Most don’t.

  3

  JERRY

  When Uncle Harry handed me the cashier’s check for two million dollars, he was a happy man. He figured he’d fucked me. Again.

  It was nothing personal. Uncle Harry fucked everybody. Everybody he did business with. People he worked for, people who worked for him especially; Uncle Harry fucked them all. He might have been a bigger man if he hadn’t been so blatant about it.

  That I was family gave him more satisfaction, not less.

  To start with, he fucked me out of what my father had left me. He even fucked me out of the life insurance. When my Aunt Lila died, Uncle Harry married my girl—whom he’d been fucking in the other sense for some time—and encouraged her to screw me out of the little bit of money I’d let her deposit into her account for me.

  He fucked the Kastenbergs, Fat Rita and her brother, out of their seltzer-water bottling business. In the process he fucked me out of a little money I’d invested with them.

  Hey, I was no innocent, always getting fucked. My father had been a numbers runner, and Uncle Harry ran a numbers store and a bookie besides. I was a hustler from the word go. What else could I be? I worked for Harry. I fucked him a little. He fucked me big-time.

  While I was away in the army, first in Detroit, then in Paris, he got himself affiliated with the Carlino family. He was not a Sicilian, though, and to the Honored Society that fucked him. He was a condemned small-timer.

  I’m a veteran, I was in the war, but I never saw or heard a shot fired in anger. In Paris in ’44 and ’45 I cooperated with a hustler colonel in a small-time racket that made both of us good money. It was then that I met Paul Renard, who introduced me to the great love of my life: the beautiful, then-seventeen-year-old Giselle. She was a nude dancer, but she was not a hooker, not a bar girl. It seems odd to say, maybe, but a nude dancer can remain entirely innocent.