Chapter

 52

My hands were gripping the railing of the Princess like it was my life jacket.  “I can’t apologize for things I can’t remember. Tell me.”

She turned toward me, her hair blowing past her scarf like delicate wisps of fire prodding and taunting me to step closer.

“You want to play some more, huh? I’ll play, Charlie, but I don’t particularly like this game.”

“Play anyway...for old times’sake.”

That cunning quiver of the lips I’d seen her use before said it all. She would do anything to keep a client. “Tell you. You want it all?”

“I guess I do,” I said in a straight forward way.

She moved toward the bow as I felt the boat coming to a slower speed. “Know where we are, Charlie?”

“We’re off the coast of Malibu.”

“A little beyond now. We spent a lot of time in these waters, didn’t we? Remember how we would come here and spend nights anchored offshore, sipping champagne and designing strategies for acquisitions and buyouts. You always liked a good strategy.”

“Corrupt, though. Isn’t that how you characterized it.”

“Corrupt is a kind way of putting it. Before I managed your money, you were the worst. Always afraid of a big loss at the crap tables. All those filthy, get-rich-quick rackets you tried to insure yourself with almost did you in.”

“Until you took over?”

“Until I took over. You still could manage to jet between the world’s casinos in one weekend and win or lose a million or two. Fortunately, the investments I made for you kept your profits high enough to support your habit. You realize by last year, I’d reduced your money vices down to just two?

She looked at me.

My face was blank. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I shrugged.

She smiled. “That face could fool the Pope, you know.”  She let out a laugh.  “You really like this role of Charles don’t you? You’ve got it down pat, better than any of the others. Okay, ‘Mr. Randall.’ The ‘other you’ got his vices down to casinos and the big one...babies. You’d dropped the network, so you weren’t as exposed, but you had this thing...this need to keep your finger in the pie. So, you kept your New York and Los Angeles people taking adoption applications. You were getting anywhere from fifty to a hundred and fifty thousand a baby, remember? The rich couldn’t care less about the cost. When they gave you the specs they wanted, your people faxed the particulars to either your Finland or South American ‘labs,’ you called them - you always did have a way with words - and bingo.” She adjusted her scarf and continued. “One of your salesmen once said he thought Hitler’s Aryan race perfection was nothing compared to the lengths you’d go. You liked to think you were providing jobs, a boost to the village and small-town economies, but the girls you paid to conceive with just the right studs so you could deliver the dark, the light, the blue eyed, the brown...as close to a perfect order as was possible...those girls became different people...those that managed to survive. You were something. Remember the scrapbook of photos you had of parents and the ‘matched’ children? The first-year birthday presents from Big Daddy. You sent out a photographer, gave them “free” family portraits and proclaimed yourself some kind of good guy. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’ you’d tell me. ‘I’m making people happy, making the buyers children closer to “designer” babies than they could possibly make themselves.’ No, you made your, what did you call it, Perfect Offspring” Adoption Services big business. Thank God that wasn’t one of my ideas. And… at some point… South America and Finland turned into Charlie Stevens’ test tube. You turned thousands of DNA matched women into breeding machines until they were so birth-ravaged that further conceiving was impossible...childless mothers for the rest of their lives. At least you followed my advice and instituted a pension fund.”

She took my arm and led me on a walk around the deck. “No, corrupt might be considered a compliment by some. Best thing you ever did was liquidate the baby business when the cancer hit.”

Maniac. That’s the only word that fit in my mind as she continued telling me the details of rackets used to cheat, bilk, and steal to build the Stevens fortune. Rackets she had turned legit. The more she filled my mind with “you did this and you did that” the more and more I became desperate to detach myself from the one Charlie Stevens persona.

Over the next hour, my roller coaster ride of identity pushed me further and further into confusion and despair. I kept listening, though. Hopefully, Mathews was right. The more I knew about Charlie, the fewer questions I had to run from.

I was beginning to believe his words when I realized... “Have we dropped anchor?”

“Yes,” she said, with the dream-like anticipation of a child about to see the curtain rise on her favorite fairy tale. She paused for a moment to look out at the lights along the shoreline. Up until this moment, I was convinced that whatever understanding or feelings she’d had for me before, had all but been destroyed by my persistent denial and cool response. But, as she stared out at the shore and took my hand in hers, I knew I was wrong. Lauren Sobel prided herself in always getting what she wanted. And what she wanted now, I wasn’t sure I could give.

“Charlie...would you do me a big favor?” I just turned and looked at her.

Her eyes said she wanted to believe my gaze meant yes. “I know now, without asking again, that you’ll hold to your revocation. For whatever reason, this Randall role has turned you into a different man. You’re going to resolve whatever needs resolving...alone. Right?”

She waited for a reply. Three or four seconds of thinking convinced me she was right.

I was going forward, not backwards, whatever the cost. “Yes. I think it’s better that way.”

She turned back toward the shore. As her eyes filled with the disappointment of my answer, she continued. “Take me to our spot, then. Give me the chance to wrap up everything neat. We shared a lot there. One last time... ‘for old times’ sake’?”

“I don’t know where you mean.”

She took my face in her hands. Her shaky voice was low, soft, child-like. “Charles, drop the fucking act...Let Charlie be with me one last time. You know how much the cove means to me.”

She kissed me, her mouth all but consuming every ounce of breath I had...breath I needed to form just two words... “What cove?”

She had no idea what those two words really meant to me. I’d never shared with her that first morning when I awoke in the sand to the searing reflection of the Harley’s chromium armor...the reflection that had like a laser burned a new beginning through a man’s eyelids into his brain...a man from that day forward identified inexplicably as Charles Randall, with dangerous Charlie Stevens complications.