Necessity by Brian Garfield Page B

were an item and she forgave him the white lie.)
    They danced again; he asked her where she was staying.
    It was getting late and the disco noise was starting to get to her. By then she’d fended off half a dozen young men and maybe she was just tired of it or maybe she was impressed by his hard body and his good-natured mature self-assurance and the way he didn’t come at her head-on with all guns blazing. She decided she liked him enough to give him the phone number of the cottage.
    He didn’t offer to drive her home; he didn’t make a pass or even imply one and she found this refreshing and disappointing at once. But she thought about him constantly.
    Two days later he drove up in a white Seville with his friends, a married couple he’d collected at the L.I.R.R. station—Jack and Diane Sertic; thirty-fiveish, all of them. Bert made introductions and she got in beside him, carrying her racquet and wearing her whites. The Sertics were in Ralph Lauren purple and Bert called them snobs.
    She sips the second martini and it all floods through her recollection as if it has just taken place an hour ago. She remembers how they chatted on the twenty-minute ride about the idiotic tribal rituals of the Hamptons and the lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes for which you had to pay a scandalous $18 a pound that summer.
    The road seemed to have been reserved for use by Rollses and Cadillacs, with the occasional BMW for levity. And then Bert drove them into the sinuous pebbled driveway of the eight-acre Stanford White estate he was renting. It had sixteen rooms; pillars and a porte-cochere and a fountain on the lawn that sloped down to the shore. She noted a red two-seater Mercedes sports car and an Audi sedan parked in the four-car garage.
    Jack Sertic was impressed. “What do you have to pay for it?”
    â€œForty thousand for the season.”
    â€œNot bad.”
    She tried not to gape. Bert said, “Used to belong to one of the owners of the 21 club. See the dock down there? They ran liquor in from here during Prohibition.”
    â€œNothing changes all that much, does it. Now it’s coke and Acapulco gold.” Jack Sertic grinned at Bert.
    They played two sets of mixed doubles. The Sertics were good; she and Bert were better. Enjoying the victory they went on to lunch at the beach club.
    They swam in the afternoon. A foursome of Bert’s friends came by, played a raucous game of croquet, drank planter’s punch and departed.
    She flowed with it all, in a pink silky haze: it seemed so Gatsbyesque. A little high on rum she drowsed in the shade and listened to the others talk about Studio 54 and about a thoroughbred stallion that was being syndicated for a million five and about an Arthur Ashe–Jimmy Connors match that had taken place a week ago. Bert told a rambling story about two gangs of screw-ups, one employed by the CIA and the other by the Mafia, who he swore had actually gone to open warfare several years earlier, the battleground being Port-au-Prince where rattletrap Second World War bombers piloted by CIA dipsticks had tried to bomb Papa Doc’s palace, only to have their aim thrown off by unanticipated antiaircraft fire from the palace roof.
    â€œPapa Doc made a deal with Lansky to get him ack-ack guns in return for some beachfront gambling concessions he gave Lansky. All the bombs exploded in the harbor. One of the planes got nicked. No casualties. End of war. It’s all true, you know. I got it from that skip-tracer over in Newark, what’s his name? Seale. One of the people in his office used to work for the CIA before they fired him for laughing too hard or something.”
    She was pleased but not surprised when he insisted she accompany them to dinner. Philip Quirini, who worked for Bert, drove her home and waited outside in the car while she changed; and when she got back in the car she said, “Have you worked here long?”
    â€œFour years. Or you