The Insiders

Well, one childish gesture deserved another! Damn that frigid bitch and her cowardly boyfriend. From all

of Francie's accounts, David sounded like an overbearing, selfish hypocrite. A latent Puritan who wanted to screw every cunt in sight but despised the women who let him have them. According to Francie, Eve Mason was crazy for David—she pursued him endlessly and shamelessly, allowing herself to be used and humiliated. Also according to Francie, David would never marry Eve, because she was too cheap, too easy, too available. And yet tonight—no, heck, it had been last night—the stupid broad had kept fighting. Not just him, but all the others as well. Struggling even when she could see there was no point in it, and that of course was what had provoked and excited them into hurting her as much as they had. Not just the others, but him, too—he had felt what was almost hate for her, a need to crush her, to force her into submitting. He'd really lost his cool, and she wasn't worth it. In fact, she wasn't worth the time wasted in thinking about her, goddam her, anyhow! He'd put her out of his mind just like all the others— the women he'd taken and used and discarded.

Brant drove home through the thinning night, grimacing as he imagined facing the mess in there. Well, the hell with it! Good old Jamison would be there in— he glanced at his watch—about three hours from now, to take care of everything. All he had to do now was shut himself up in his bedroom, shower, and then get some sleep.

He let himself into the house, picking his way through the littered rooms, and took his clothes off as he went, dropping them carelessly for Jamison to find. He walked up the sweetly curving staircase that the country's leading architect had designed and into his bedroom. He thought he could smell Eve Mason's perfume on his body and grimaced again. Well, a shower would fix that. He poured himself a drink at the small bar he kept in his room and swallowed it down straight before he stepped under the scalding needles of his shower. Hot first—then a burst of cold, and the warmed towels from the rack. He tossed them into a hamper and walked over to his bed, fiddling impatiently with the dials until he had the music just the way he liked it, coming softly at him from all directions through the concealed speakers—soothing him, holding him in the center of sound. He lit a cigarette and lay back on the pillows, not bothering to pull the covers over himself.

Damn Eve Mason, the stupid bitch! Why did she have to linger in his mind? His mind was, after all, Syl's province. Lovely, golden, corrupt Syl, with her soft hands and wet mouth and gurgling laugh—his "teacher," he used to call her. Syl, who had been his teacher and his love and his mistress—Syl, who also happened to bfe his aunt. Goddam! He crushed the cigarette out and lit another. By now he had realized that he wasn't going to get any sleep until he had wrestled with his demons, an expression his analyst had used. This was something else the good doctor had taught him. If something was on his mind, he must get it out into the open, examine it, think about it, instead of pushing it away into the depths of his subconscious. Once he had thought something out or had made a decision of some kind, he could always relax again. Once he had decided on a certain course of action, he never looked back. It was the only way to survive, to stay in control. He thought about the way

he'd had to wrestle with the car earlier, to pull it out of the skid. The challenge had excited him. Any challenge did, even the challenge of wrestling with his own thoughts—and particularly certain memories.

His eyes narrowed against the cigarette smoke, Brant stared up at the raftered ceiling. No mirrors here. No mirrors anywhere in his room. And no one else had shared it with him, ever. The game room was for his women of the moment and his friends' women and their orgies. For playing. This room was his alone, and no one else entered it except Jamison.

He turned restlessly on his pillow, smelling Eve Mason's perfume again, and was tempted with a spurt of anger to fling it away from him. Of course, he'd brought her in here. He didn't know why he'd done it— he'd never brought another woman in here (except Syl, and she was in his mind only)—but after the doctor had left, and the last stragglers, she'd looked so pale and lifeless—as if she were really dead and not just drugged. It took some people that way, Jack had reassured him, after he'd given her the shot. It was just a sedative; she'd wake up on her own and be just fine. Still, after everyone had gone, he hadn't wanted to stay there in that damned room any longer, and he couldn't very well leave her there by herself, so he'd carried her in here, noticing grimly that bruises were starting to show all over her ivory-tinted body, and feeling the soft silkiness of her hair against his arm—the only thing she had in common with Syl, the texture of her hair.

He turned out all the lights and stared unseeingly into the darkness while he wrestled with his demons.

The money. Always, he had known about the money. It set him apart, forced him to build from within himself, for himself. The money belonged, at first, to his grandfather. And then that enormous, fabulous, written-about fortune had been left to him—all of it—carefully skirting his jet-set, indolent parents. Willed to three-year-old Brant Newcomb, II—the senior Brant being his grandfather—a small, bewildered child growing up surrounded by old people and silence. He remembered the silence most of all. For a long time, he hadn't dared to break that silence. If he cried, or even if he laughed, he was quickly picked up and carried away by his nurse, who would whisper to him that his grandfather was old and did not like noise. After a while, he had not been bewildered any longer, and they had not needed to remind him to be quiet.

His parents? They had sufficient money, as much as they needed for the duration of their lifetimes. His gay, flapper mother had dutifully given birth to a son, who was promptly and with secret relief handed over to the forbidding Newcomb in-laws (the old man had been the one who had really wanted a child from them, anyway), setting Fay and her darling Dickie free at last to do as they pleased. They visited occasionally—short, strained visits that ended with relief on both sides.

Fay Newcomb thought her son a pale, cold, and reserved little brat who had no real feelings, or warmth. And Richard, her husband, almost disliked the boy himself, resenting somehow in his dull, vaguely thoughtless, and pleasure-seeking soul, his son's self-containment and cold withdrawal from any bluff overtures. Well, Richard would think, Father has trained him well. Better than he has been able to do with me. And having produced an heir, Richard and Fay were at last free— and in command of all the money they needed for as long as they lived. No more stern lectures and strict allowance invariably overspent; no more painful interviews with a father who could not quite understand, nor hide his disappointment, how any son of his could turn out to be such a cloddish, plebeian individual. And above all, no more staring up at his fragile, golden-haired mother's portrait, which hung on the wall of his father's study to remind him constantly that it was he, Richard Carlson Newcomb, all ten pounds of him, tearing through those frail, thin tissues, who had been the cause of her death.

The boy, Brant, was fortunately considered to be like his grandmother; the boy, Brant, was to get all the family fortune; the will had been drawn up, it was all settled. Brant Newcomb, Sr., while he kept many mistresses, never remarried—they said he had worshiped his young bride, and now his grandson, who looked so much like her, became the reason for his existence.

Fay had one sister, much younger than she—as blond and curvaceous as Fay was brown-haired and fashionably thin. Sylvia was sent to a convent school, her flapper sister held up to her constantly as a bad example, until she ran away often enough to get expelled. After the last expulsion from her third school, and a quickly hushed-up episode concerning a boy who had given her a ride, Sylvia went to live with Fay and was married at seventeen to one of Richard's friends. She divorced him a few years later to marry again, this time a French movie producer who put her on exhibition in some of his movies. Sylvia did well enough with her lush good looks and what little talent she had, but divorced him at length to go to live with an Italian movie star who was regretfully but permanently married to his childhood sweetheart.

Sylvia, blond, voluptuous, and beautiful, was fond of her sister, and because she could not have children of her own (a botched-up abortion had taken care of that), she paid special attention to her nephew and seemed, indeed, to love him more than his own mother did. Sylvia visited the child much more often than his parents ever bothered to do, and would send him small gifts and brightly colored postcards from all over the world. Brant's grandfather did not actually approve of Sylvia, but he was shrewd enough to realize that her love for the boy was genuine, and so he let them alone.

Sylvia was the only young and beautiful thing in Brant's existence, the only person he let himself care about. When he was old enough to be sent to a private school and didn't see her for some years, her letters were the only bright spots in his otherwise strictly regimented life. He was studying hard, as his grandfather wanted him to do, and she was back to acting now, and somehow their vacations never seemed to come at the same time. Sylvia was traveling a lot—her letters and cards bore strange and different postmarks every time she wrote. But she did write—long letters in her large and sprawling handwriting, describing places she had seen and people she had met. Brant saved every one of them.

Far ahead of his contemporaries because of his private tutors and high IQ, Brant was ready for college before he was fifteen. He studied for his degree with the same concentration and lack of enthusiasm as he had done everything else that his grandfather had planned for him to do. It was something to be done and put out of the way. And then, when Brant was eighteen and almost ready to graduate, his grandfather died.

Richard and Fay didn't fly down for the funeral; they were cruising on some Greek millionaire's yacht and didn't see why they had to leave such charming, interesting people for a funeral. The old man was dead, wasn't he, and his will no mystery. Why be hypocrites? Why pretend? But Sylvia, hearing about it, flew over from Switzerland, where she had been vacationing.

She found Brant, her little nephew, a man already— in appearance, at least. On the surface the same air of coldness that was almost a withdrawal, but with a kind of arrogance added now, and a blazing, Greek god kind of beauty and purity of feature that took her breath away. Brant took after his dead grandmother, as everyone was swift to say, but Sylvia saw, too, with a kind of joy, that he resembled her also. They had the same thickly lashed eyes, the same finely chiseled lips. They could be brother and sister, she thought, and was determined that she would not let him shut her out, as he did the others.

"Brant— Oh, Brant, I'm so glad to see you again!"

She avoided his formally outstretched hand and kissed him warmly on the lips; her familiar perfume enveloped him and made him a boy again. He held her close, enjoying the strange and unusual feeling of a soft and melting body against his—the unfamiliar closeness to another human being.

"Syl!"

He had always called her that. Starting with "Silly" when he was very young and she was still a giggling but gently affectionate teenager who always had time for him, in spite of the thirteen-year difference in their ages.

"I'm happy to see you, too," he said. And then, diffidently, "Will you stay?"

She was the person

he asked to stay on after the funeral, in the big house with all its guest rooms and its staff of impeccably trained servants. Everyone else went back to town, shaking their heads in disapproval and talking in shocked whispers about the lack of manners and feeling displayed by the younger Newcomb. But neither Brant nor Sylvia cared a whit for their opinions.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SHE STAYED ON. They rode together, talked for hours, and he even taught her to shoot, laughing at the way she winced each time she pulled the trigger of the rifle. He talked to her and confided in her as he had never been able to do with anyone else. He thought afterward that their closeness made what happened later inevitable.

Sylvia had been at the house ten days. She grew restless after a while and wanted to go out. But out where? Why, she said, anywhere, it didn't matter. Did he enjoy dancing? Then he could take her to a discotheque. She had heard there was one in town. Did he mind escorting her?

"Wait, wait," she told him mischievously. "I won't let you be embarrassed. I don't look as old as I really am, do I? I know, I'll dress eighteen, and you—you could easily be twenty-one. You look older than you are, do you know that, Brant? But you need to act younger, be younger. Why, sometimes you seem much older and wiser than II"