Spellbinder Read Online Free PDF

franchises. Because they don’t require any risk capital—not one red cent. We simply make the appeal, and see what kind of a response we get. When we’ve got enough money to start, we start. If it does well—if the money keeps coming—we expand the program. If it doesn’t go as hoped, we chop it off. And, of course—” He permitted himself a small smile. During that session, it would be the first and the last time he would smile.
    “Of course, if it does very well—much better than expected—why, then, we declare a dividend.”
    Around the table, one at a time, he looked into their faces, and saw his small smile answered.
    It was settled, then. The Council had decided.
    He reached forward, switched on the tape recorder, and asked for discussion.

Two
    L YING ON TOP OF the covers, Denise lifted a bare foot, closed one eye, sighting, and moved her big toe until it covered first her father’s face, then her brother and her mother, holding hands for the camera, stage left. From the small portable TV set her father’s voice rang with righteous fervor, evoking God the Father and Jesus the Son, proclaiming a new crusade aimed at some unsuspecting race of contented non-Christians. This time, he planned the invasion and conquest of China, his most ambitious scam to date. The faithful, rapt in their seats and ripe for the plucking, stared with mindless adoration at the man in the doubleknit suit, wired for sound, wearing a real-hair toupee and cufflinks presented to him in the Oval Office.
    As the voice faded and the music swelled and The Hour came to an end, she remembered the day he’d come home from Washington, wearing the cufflinks. He’d arrived in a chauffeured limousine. She’d been in an upstairs window when the black limousine turned into the circular driveway. She’d been gazing out across the low, odious layer of hazy yellow smog that had covered the Los Angeles basin like poison gas settling down on some vast battlefield. The year had been 1969. She’d been nineteen; her father had been in his middle fifties. Because he admired the President, and supported the Viet Nam war, her father had been summoned to Washington to pick up his reward: a presidential handclasp, a hand-lettered scroll and the cufflinks, gracefully inscribed. Because of the prestigious occasion, the satrap Council had rubberstamped her father’s decision to charter a Lear jet for the trip to Washington. He’d debated taking the whole family: the mother, the daughter, the son. But, at the appointed time for departure, the mother had been too drunk to stand. And the daughter, protesting the war, had deliberately waited until the last moment, then announced, wickedly, she remembered, that she wouldn’t go to the White House unless she could spit in the President’s face.
    So the father and son—the king and crown prince—had embarked for Washington, escorted by a handful of barons and dukes. And Sister Teresa, with her Valkyrie’s body, her sock-it-to-’em style and her beehive hairdo, towering one layer higher than usual for the occasion.
    The ceremony in the Oval Office had rated almost five minutes on the local TV newscast. But, despite the best efforts of Clifton Reynolds, her father’s flack, the item hadn’t made the network news. For that small favor, she’d been grateful.
    Flying home from Washington, Elton had ordered the pilots to circle the Grand Canyon, so he could take pictures. The delay, he’d calculated, had cost two hundred dollars.
    She lowered her foot, swung her legs over the edge of the bed and crossed the small bedroom to switch off the television set. From the kitchen came the clatter of crockery counter-pointed by the sound of cool jazz. Listening to FM , Peter was making breakfast. Eggs scrambled with green onions and sautéed chicken livers, he’d promised. His specialty.
    Wearing a shorty nightgown and bikini bottoms, she turned to the window, looking across the rooftops to her own personal patch of