The Touch of Innocents Read Online Free Page B

she had been out of contact for more than two weeks.
    It was more than the absences. More even than the frustration of reunion when she would arrive back exhausted, emotionally drained, too tired even to cook a proper meal let alone light fires in his bed. It had hit him at the cocktail party in Georgetown the other night. As her professional success had grown, increasingly he came to feel as no more than an appendage.
    ‘Oh, you’re married to Isadora Dean. How wonderful!’ yet another breathless matron had exclaimed. Not ‘Joe Michelini, how nice to meet you and tell me all about yourself’ but ‘Mr Izzy Dean’ all over again and twenty minutes discussing her career before he could break away and grab another Scotch.
    She hadn’t even taken his name – ‘for professionalreasons’. Used to be there was a clear division of responsibilities within a family, the man as bread-winner and the woman as breadbaker, not these endless arguments about where and when they might be able to meet and who should do what and screw whom.
    It was killing his self-esteem. Now it was on the point of killing his career.
    ‘Joe, we have a problem,’ Erskine Vandel, the president of Fox Avionics, pronounced in a manner which left not a shred of doubt that it was not he, but Michelini, who had the problem. They were in the presidential suite overlooking a wind-lashed Potomac, the early bite of winter adding exaggerated emphasis to the overcast atmosphere within the room. The president was seated in considerable pomp and splendour on one side of the desk, leaving the planning director stranded in space on the other, entombed in a chair that was deliberately four inches lower. It made Michelini feel uneasy, inferior, by design.
    ‘You know that the MP-Double-A means everything to this company,’ the president continued. ‘To you, Joe. To everyone else who works here. Without it we’re about as much use as a fart in a wind tunnel.’
    Vandel had a strong anal orientation – ‘I’m a seat-of-the-pants guy,’ he would explain to new female acquaintances. ‘You get no bullshit from me. Nothing but the real thing.’ Yet behind the foul mouth there was an astute technologically based mind which had managed to build one of the most successful component supply businesses in the military aviation industry. It was scarcely his fault that the industry itself was less than half its size of Cold War days and was threatened with being permanently grounded. ‘Know how to run a successful smallbusiness?’ he would offer to any Congressman within hearing. ‘Build a successful big business, like avionics. Then let the Government piss all over it.’
    ‘So we have this problem, you see, Joe.’
    Joe didn’t, not yet.
    ‘Wilbur Burns, that half-ass who owns WCN, has got it into his mind he wants to run for President. Not one of us, Joe. He’s the sort of moralizing bastard who’ll step out of the shower just to take a piss. Intends to use his station to trail his conscience like a stuck pig trailing guts and, so’s he can establish his credentials, wants to offer up a sacrifice. Us. The MP-Double-A. You. Me. The whole show. And all the while pretending that the funds needed to develop it will pay for the dreams and votes of every mother between here and hell. Horse shit,’ the president snapped.
    Like an affectionate father he began stroking a gold-plated model of the Duster which occupied pride of place on a desk top littered with executive toys and silver-framed portraits of his three daughters. ‘Joe, how long you been with this company?’
    The voice was softer now and Michelini felt the prickle of sweat beginning to foregather on what used to be his hairline. He’d entered difficult territory and did not yet know which way to jump.
    ‘Nearly twelve years,’ he muttered.
    ‘Eleven years and eight months on Friday,’ his president stated. ‘And in all that time no one has ever had cause to question your loyalty. Done a damn fine