copper coin, in his mouth. In this mood he wanted only to be with Carol.
His uniform was wrinkled from being slept in. He put the new winter blouse on over it anyway, without changing. Outside, it was still raining.
It was about thirty-five miles in to Luxor. In the rain, peering out through the slow fan of the wipers, it would take him fifty-five minutes, driving on the old-fashioned, white-concrete highway. Alongside the concrete ran the two-lane blacktop road the government was building. Together they would make a four-lane highway for the convoys into the city’s railroad station from O’Bruyerre. Winch settled into the driving, not wanting to think, wanting not to think. About Carol. Or about Alexander.
Alexander was right, of course, with his advice. There was nothing very tricky, or even very dishonest, about the way they were all making money. They did not do anything that your average businessman, after a government contract, didn’t do. Mostly it was just knowing the right people. Knowing the right people, and passing along or picking up the right piece of information at the right moment. Occasionally, very occasionally, it might mean slipping a small chunk of money along, too, at the same time.
But mostly it was just knowing the right thing to buy. And to buy at the right time you had to have money, cash. Somebody had to own the Coca-Cola and Budweiser delivery systems that carried all the Coke and beer to all the PXs in the area. Somebody had to own the beer and soft drinks distributorships that supplied them.
T.D. Hoggenbeck had explained it all quite clearly. Buy a bar, he had said. People will always drink. Come hell or high water, depression or boom. People will drink. But before you could buy a bar you had to have that kind of money. And Jack Alexander had the means of acquiring that kind of money. That was why T.D. had sent him to Jack. Jack had the contacts, he knew the people involved. Jack was also, Winch knew, dead right about his advice.
His advice, mainly, was to put by every nickel you could get your hands on. Then when the chance came to buy into some item, you would have the cash. Parts of enough such items, and you would begin to have the kind of money that could buy a bar, or two bars, or three, and pay off the politicians under the counter to get your package-store licenses, and pay for the high-priced licenses themselves. That was all there was to it. It was easy. And, all that was just exactly what Winch was not doing.
Alexander apparently knew there was some woman involved. But he did not know who Carol was. And he wasn’t interested in finding out. He wouldn’t even ask Winch about it. As far as Alexander was concerned, it had to be some woman. What else would make Winch spend all his cash like some drunken dockside sailor. Who she was did not matter.
“You’re going to regret it,” he would say mildly, with his scarred larynx. “Now is the time to buy in. These deals will all be gone, before long.”
Winch would always shrug, and promise that the next time he would have the money. Faithfully, Alexander would come and tell him when the next deal opened. Faithfully, Winch would say he didn’t have the cash again.
“A cunt aint worth it,” Alexander said phlegmatically.
Tacitly Winch agreed. A woman wasn’t. None of them was.
“If it wasn’t for old T.D., I’d write you off,” Alexander said mirthlessly. “And let you go to hell.”
Winch could not disagree with that, either. If it were not that he felt he owed T.D. some favors, Alexander would probably do it, too. But it was T.D. who had helped him put it all together.
It was not that Winch was buying Carol fur coats and jewelry. It was not even that he cared that much for Carol, or was madly in love with her. Winch knew, now, already, how all that was going to end.
Winch did not know where all the money went. He knew he spent it. Mainly it was spent in maintaining a certain life-style. A life-style which made his affair with Carol comfortable, and easy, for both of them. A life-style which made their affair, in a word not usual to Winch because he didn’t think that way, un-dirty. Un-grubby.
And underneath that truth was another truth, which was that Winch did not really give a damn. Down deep, half