Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)

When Clete tried to call Mr. Nestor at the Bank of Boston to tell him where he was living, he was told that Nestor, too, was out of town.

“And is there a message, Señor?”

“No, thank you. I’ll call again.”

And Pelosi was unavailable. Mallín had arranged a tour of the tank farm for him, and he would be gone all day.

Clete took a stroll around the neighborhood, including a walk through the stables of the Hipódromo. The horses were magnificent, and he liked their smell. It was comforting.

But with that out of the way, he couldn’t find much else to do. Except explore Granduncle Guillermo’s playroom. It was still relatively early in the evening when he searched through an absolutely gorgeous, heavily carved desk, made from some kind of wood he didn’t recognize, and came across a locked compartment at the rear of one of the large drawers.

Feeling childishly mischievous, he looked for keys. None of the two dozen he could find fit the simple lock. So, telling himself that he knew better than what he was doing—but his father did tell him the place was his—he went downstairs and asked Señora Pellano were he could find tools.

“If anything needs fixing,” she told him patiently but firmly, “I will fix it myself; or else the houseman will do it.”

“All I need is a screwdriver,” he said. “A small one. And maybe a small knife. I’ll take care of it myself.”

She led him to a toolbox in the basement. The box held both a penknife and a screwdriver.

The locked drawer quickly yielded to the removal of the brass screws of the lock.

It contained more evidence of Granduncle Guillermo’s preoccupation with the distinguishing characteristics of the opposite gender. The drawer contained two leather-covered boxes, each containing fifty or sixty lewd and obscene photographs.

Clete had never seen anything like them (even at stag movies at his fraternity house at Tulane). They were glass transparencies, about four by five inches. Not negatives, positives. He suspected that there was probably some kind of a projector, to project them on a screen.

To judge by the appearance of the women, they had been taken a long time ago, certainly before the First World War, possibly even before the turn of the century. The women were far plumper—plusher—than currently fashionable, and wore their hair either swept up or braided, while all the men had mustaches and were pretty skinny.

Holding them up to the light, he examined every last one of them, concluding that they knew the same positions then that he was used to. The women far outnumbered the men, and it was possible to suspect that the women were more interested in other women than in the scrawny men in their drooping mustaches.

After carefully replacing the glass plates in their boxes and relocking the drawer, Clete realized that he was going to have to commit the sin of Onan. Somewhat humiliated by the process, he did so.

At least I won’t stain the sheets tonight, he thought afterward.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. He woke up from a painfully realistic dream—Princess Dorothea the Virgin was exposing her breasts to him—to find that he had soiled the sheets after all.

He took a shower, hoping that by morning the sheets would be dry and the maid would not notice, and tittering, report her finding to Señora Pellano.

Clete drank the orange juice and half the coffee, took another shower, put on a shor

t-sleeve shirt and a pair of khaki pants, and rode the elevator down to the main floor. The twelve-seat dining-room table had been set for one and laid out with enough food to feed six hungry people.

Halfway through his scrambled eggs, he heard the telephone ring, and a minute later, Señora Pellano set a telephone beside him. It looked as if it had been built by Alexander Graham Bell himself.

“It is a Señor Nestor. Are you at home, Señor Clete?”

He picked up the telephone.

“Good morning, Sir.”

Shit, I’m not supposed to call him “Sir.”

“Good morning, Clete,” Nestor said. “Jasper Nestor of the Bank of Boston here.”

“I tried to call you yesterday to tell…”

“I called the Mallín place, and they told me where to find you.”

“My father offered me this pla—”