This Time We Love Read online

  Max shook his head. The effect of the hashish had been slow in building, but now it was fully upon him. He could neither think accurately, nor, evidently, move quickly. But deep within him he knew in desperation that he had to go into action. He had to go in and go in fast, since he had no illusions as to the ability of the former Mafia gangster to use that automatic professionally.

  But there is no way of getting up off a low couch with speed. Not the sort of speed Max needed to attempt to take the other. He had to think. Damn that drug. Damn his stupidity in taking it. Was he a kid that he had to take every dare made him? What the hell had got into him that he’d allowed Marcy to talk him into eating hashish?

  Giotto was saying softly, a strained element in his voice now, “Then if everybody is ready, we’ll shoot this last scene.”

  A sound as though of a cricket filled the room.

  Nadine Barney clipped, “Good heavens, I’ve never seen such corn.” She was resetting the watch, even as she marched briskly into the swank living room. She said to Marcy, “Miss McEvoy, you’re simply going to have to get to bed and get more sleep than you have been. You have a very stiff shooting schedule tomorrow. You’re on call from seven o’clock onward.”

  Marcy blinked at her.

  Nadine spun briskly on Filippo Giotto, who was staring at her in astonishment. She rapped, “See here, Signore Giotto, you simply must refrain from upsetting the Horatius at the Bridge performers. We’re already nearly six weeks behind schedule. And, good heavens, put away that little gun. Do you think a pistol of that caliber would even dent a man Max’s size?”

  Max had come to his feet, unsteadily. She turned to him in scorn. “And you,” she ordered. “You look drunk. Mr. King has been looking everywhere for you. We’ve got to reshoot one of those bridge scenes tomorrow, and he wants to discuss it with you. You’re holding up everything. Come with me!” She turned briskly, as though preparatory to marching to the door.

  “Hold it!” Giotto snarled. He was weaving his gun back and forth between the three of them. His former air of cold but calm malevolence had fallen away and the vicious animal brute which was his basic nature was now revealed. “Very, very clever, Miss Barney, but it doesn’t come off. It doesn’t do it, see?” He snapped the gun around to cover Max again. “Sit down, Fielding! I gotta think. I gotta think, I tell ya!”

  Marcy McEvoy had fallen back to the couch, sobbing hysterically now. The tension had built up to the point where her mind refused to accept the pressure and had retreated into at least temporary oblivion.

  Nadine’s face had paled, now that her bluff had been called. She stopped her progress toward the door, and turned. Her face was pasty, her lipstick like a scarlet slash across her face and her eyes were wide.

  Giotto’s facial muscles were working, his mouth twitching uncontrollably and his eyes were wild. Obviously, all the ramifications of the situation were going through his mind. It was no longer a matter of a husband breaking into a scene of unfaithfulness and killing the lovers while in a pitch of rage. That wouldn’t wash now that there was a witness.

  “Sit down,” he snapped again at Max. He turned his glare to Nadine and in his face was reflected the workings of his mind.

  Max shook his head for clarity. This son of a bitch was capable of knocking them all off and was rapidly working himself into a state where he would do it and attempt to control the consequences later. And suddenly, for the first time, Max realized that it was not just his own life and that of Marcia McEvoy in jeopardy but Nadine Barney’s as well.

  Nadine! Even now, the swarthy movie producer was snarling obscenities at her as though working himself into a still greater flood of rage, a rage high enough to begin shooting heedless of consequence. Nadine! Why … why, Nadine was the woman he, Max Fielding, loved.

  Giotto’s voice had gotten to the point where it was shrill, woman-like in pitch. His heavy, beringed finger whitened on the trigger.

  And Max Fielding blurred into motion.

  He dove, rolling, and hit the quick-moving Italian, who was stumbling backward in retreat, even as he swung the gun down to fire at his assailant. Max hit him with his body, below the knees, and continued to roll.

  Giotto, snarling an Italian obscenity, fell backward, giving up immediate efforts to bring his Beretti to bear, and swiping with it across Max’s temple. Max gave his head a quick shake, bearlike, unfeeling. In the practiced control of the trained wrestler he finished his roll on hands and knees and fluidly continued his motion. Both feet lashed out brutally, one catching Giotto deep in the groin, the other in the neck. The producer grunted in complete pain and his eyes rolled up. The gun, forgotten, fell from relaxing fingers. In a quick swoop of his left hand Max swept it up, almost before it had touched the floor.

  He came to his feet. Marcy was evidently unconscious, fainted away. Nadine stood, one hand to her mouth, her face still pasty with fear.

  Max stared down at the fallen Italian, and moistened his lips. For a wild moment his very instinct was to empty the automatic into his groaning opponent. The bastard had been going to shoot Nadine, hadn’t he?

  But then, as though flooding again after an ebb, the narcotic’s effects washed back over him again and he shook his head, trying to maintain the clarity of the moment previous.

  Nadine must have realized that after physically and mentally rising to the occasion, Max had fallen back into apathy. She said, weakly, “I — I — let’s go, Max. Let’s get out of here.” She took the gun from his hand, pushed it into her bag, and headed for the door.

  Max, in a semi-daze, followed her, not bothering to look back on Mr. and Mrs. Filippo Giotto.

  Chapter Ten

  BELOW, on the street, Max hesitated, trying to remember where he had parked the Porsche on winding, turning Via Archimede. Nadine said, her voice less than crisp, “Down here. That’s how I was sure you were there. I saw the car.”

  When they were seated in the little sports car she said, “Can you drive? You act drunk.”

  Max said, “I’m not drunk. I was stupid enough to let Marcy give me some hashish. I think it’s beginning to wear off some.”

  “Hashish! Max Fielding, you need somebody to watch after you.”

  Max was about to come to the same conclusion. He began to open his mouth for a suitable comment, but just then she slumped. Suddenly she seemed to cave in. The efficient Nadine Barney, with her horn-rims, her stiff business suit and white blouse, her tight hair-do, suddenly became a little girl.

  “I … I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

  “Sick?” Max said blankly.

  “Max … I almost died in there. I was so scared I …”

  He put an arm about her clumsily. “Scared? Why, you were wonderful, darling.”

  “I was scared for you,” she wailed. “I … I think I’m going to be sick, Max. Take me home.”

  He drove her back to her tiny apartment and saw her up to it. He had an element of the sheepish in him now, but the hashish was also there and its effectiveness was far from on the wane. This, of course, Nadine had no way of knowing.

  Her face was pale as she unlocked the door, but she had largely recovered from her fainting spell. Max noticed the swell of her hips as her back was toward him, and especially as she bent slightly to put the key in the door lock. He noticed and remembered the Nadine Barney body, so cleverly put together, so memorably perfect.

  She flicked on the lights of the living room and turned to him. Her eyes widened as she saw the expression on his face. She glanced down quickly and was not reassured by what she saw. “Max!” she said crisply.

  He was coming toward her. “What?” he said, deep in his throat.

  “Max, I … I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.” She took a step backward, then another, and her hands came up as though to keep him away. “I’ve — well, decided that there mustn’t be a repetition of that other night. The … the night we celebrated your new job.”

  She could retreat no further, t
he couch was behind her knees. But still he came on. His tongue moistened dry lips. “Why not?” he said, still coming.

  She put her hands ineffectually against his chest. She said, “The hashish. You’re not lucid, Max. You must get out of here. Max!”

  He said thickly, “You’re in love with me, Nadine.” His arms went around her and his lips sought hers.

  She turned her head away, and writhed. “No! I’m not. Please go, Max. You … repel me.”

  He held her with one arm, easily, and began unbuttoning the starchy blouse she wore. If a button troubled him, he simply ripped it off. “No, I don’t,” he explained in what he thought was a reasonable voice. “You love me. And I love you, Nadine. That’s the first time in my life I ever told a woman that. You came up there to Marcy’s apartment scared to death, afraid for me.”

  She was beginning to feel fear now. This wasn’t the gentle, easygoing Max she’d known. The Max who had brought her to her first culmination in love, here in this very apartment. This was a different Max, a lusting Max, a fearsome Max. She was afraid and squirmed for release.

  Her efforts were futile. Still holding her with but one arm, he sat on the couch and began to remove the balance of her clothing. Suit jacket and blouse, and then the brassiere. He paused long enough to press his mouth to a dainty breast, and then went on.

  She tried, halfheartedly, to kick him but he simply ignored her, murmuring endearments that did nothing more than frighten her still further. “Max,” she said, trying to rally her decisive firmness. “If you do this, I’ll never forgive you. I … possibly … might someday consider putting our relationship on … on its former basis. But not this way, Max. I won’t put up with rape.”

  “Not rape,” he murmured into her hair, even as he drew a stocking down her leg. “I love you.”

  “Max,” she moaned, terror growing. “Not this way. This isn’t love. Max, you scare me. Please don’t do it.” There was a mewling quality in her voice, like an animal in fear. She beat on his chest with her small hands and the terror grew.

  This was rape. Stark rape! The man was a beast in the merciless control of the narcotic. Hashish! She didn’t realize that the dosage he had taken contained man’s most powerful aphrodisiac as well.

  “Max, I’ll hate you. I’ll hate you!”

  He was stripping off his own clothes now, impatient of buttons and other impediments to speed. He stood nude before her a moment, looking on her small body from his height. And then he swooped down on her.

  “Oh, no …” she moaned and then went lax.

  Once penetration had been effected, some of the brutal urge went out of him. He moved carefully, then increasingly gently. Even as he rode her in love, he realized increasingly that though the urge of sex mastered him for the moment, his feeling for this girl, this woman, was truly love. For the first time in a sex-saturated life, Max was feeling love.

  She writhed beneath him, in protest, but then slowly, as he stroked, she felt the response well up within her. She moaned at the exquisite pain of it. Pain? No, no, never pain. The exquisite glory of it. And mounting and mounting. Her hands went behind his back and pressed him closer to her.

  She moaned, “Darling, darling, darling …” in decreasing volume until her voice fainted away into the distance, as they reached climax together.

  Afterward, they lay for a half-hour or more in silent relaxation. And then the second aspect of the hashish hit Max Fielding. For cannabis affects each man in different ways, and where it can be a stimulant to one, it can be a depressant to another, and where in one it can stimulate sensitivity, it can dull it in another.

  In this second aspect, Max began to talk, slowly, then faster and still faster, until finally his words ran together so that she could hardly follow them. He talked as a patient talks to his psychiatrist, or possibly as a Roman Catholic talks to his confessor. And all came out. Much came out that Max had always held in the lowest reaches of his mind, unrevealed even to himself.

  And Nadine lay there and listened, first in dismay at this baring of a naked soul, and then in gentle understanding and womanly compassion and desire to help the man she loved.

  He traced his early life. His love for Samuel Fielding, his father and only really close relative. He built up with words the understanding of his boy’s love for his parent. And then he sketched his father’s self-imposed slavery. His tedious, endless toil to build the Fielding Toy concern into a profitable enterprise. It was as though he were embroiled with a Frankenstein monster. The larger and more successful it became, the greater was the need to devote even longer hours, stronger efforts. One by one, unemployed family members were drawn, during the depression years, into the industry until it became such a family endeavor that for either Samuel Fielding or Uncle Fred to slow their pace meant disaster for all.

  So his father slaved during the day, and in the evening during those precious hours he could find to devote to his adoring son, he spent in his dream world of rest and travel. Dreams of the marvels of the worlds beyond the sea, of exotic foods and drink, exotic peoples and customs. And Max, caught up in the older man’s dream, dreamed with him. And one day they would do it together! London and Paris, Rome and Berlin. And Egypt and Greece, India and Siam. And never would they have to part. Father and son, doing the world! Living it up without responsibility, without care. Only the enjoyment of the best the world had to offer.

  And then an overexerted heart rebelled and Sam Fielding was no more. His dream was to go unrealized.

  Max had rebelled in his grief. His very soul screamed to take up the dream where his father had dropped it. To live the life his father had but talked about. To sample the wines, to eat the strange cuisines, to dance to a score of musics, to woo the fairest women of earth.

  Now, in his talking to Nadine, he was slowing down, the drug’s effectiveness dispersing even more quickly than it had grown. Nadine said softly, “For how many years have you been trying to realize your father’s dream, darling?”

  “Since I was a kid, since in my teens, I suppose,” Max said dully. “Yes, all my adult life. Max the playboy. Max the lush. Max the Good Time Charley.” He snorted in self-deprecation. “Max the bum.”

  She stroked his head, ran cool fingers over his eyes. “You’re no bum, Max. To the contrary, you’re one of the sweetest and most generous of guys.”

  He shook his head, wonderingly. “You know, talking it out like this has brought the complete picture to me. I’ve actually never sat down and figured out what I was really doing.”

  He turned to her, his face in surprise. “I’ve been running away from reality,” he told her. “My father was a fine man, but he wasn’t an escapist. Had he lived, he undoubtedly would have eventually found time to do some travel. And he would have loved it. But he wouldn’t have gone on a fifteen-year travel and live-it-up binge the way I have. I’ve been kidding myself, divorcing myself from the world of actuality.” His tone changed suddenly. “See here, Nadine, will you marry me?”

  “Certainly not,” she said crisply.

  He was taken aback. “You won’t? Well, why not?”

  She got up and for a moment disappeared into the bedroom. When she returned, it was with fresh clothing. Without modesty, which would have been ridiculous under the circumstances, she began to dress herself before him. And even in his present confusion, he couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of the girl.

  “Because you have none of the credentials which should be borne by a young man who comes courting,” she said, her voice brisk.

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” He was indignant.

  “I mean that a man with serious intentions doesn’t propose on the spur of the moment. He has a steady job, good prospects, possibly sufficient savings for a home or at least to buy furniture. He plans it all out, buys an engagement ring, and then proposes to her.”

  “I’d buy you an engagement ring, confound it, but we don’t have time for an engagement. We’ll make it a wedding ring, ri
ght off the bat.”

  “We most certainly will not,” she said crisply, checking to see if her stockings were straight. “I am not going to marry you, Max Fielding, while you’re on the emotional rebound. And that’s the way the ball bounces.”

  The buzzing of her tiny alarm filled the room and she stared down at her watch in distress. “Great guns, I have to take some letters to Mr. Rogers at his villa tonight.” She caught up her pocketbook and started for the door.

  “Hey!” Max roared, coming to his feet and attired in nothing but his athletic shorts.

  Even as she marched briskly for the door, she was checking through her bag. “Oh,” she said. “I forgot. What’s getting into me? Here’s the excuse I had to follow you to Miss McEvoy’s apartment.” She brought a cablegram from her pocketbook. “When I heard Charlie laughing about her getting him to make you deliver some phony script changes to her, I knew trouble was brewing. Filippo Giotto has been following her around like a half-baked divorce detective for weeks. So this cable had come for you, and I thought I’d be able to ring the bell at her place, and walk in with an excuse.” She handed it to him. “But, happily, the door was already open and I just marched in unannounced.”

  “Praise to Allah,” he muttered, taking the cable and scowling at it.

  She waited a moment as he tore it open. “Bad news, Max?” she said. Nadine Barney distrusted personal cablegrams and telegrams.

  He closed his eyes a moment in pain. “It’s Uncle Fred. He’s had a serious heart attack. Evidently similar to the one my father died of.”

  She said simply, “I’m sorry, Max. Are you very close to him?”

  He looked up. “Uncle Fred? Yes, really. We pretend to disapprove of each other, but, well, I suppose I’ve always been his ace in the hole. The one member of the Fielding clan he could finally turn the business over to.”