Two Women Read Online Free PDF

stayed with the system: their system, your system. Same system. Everyone gets rich. And you, additionally, got protected. Wasn’t that how it ran, George: you their willing guy, all the way along the line?’
    Northcote’s face flushed redder than the previous night. ‘I didn’t have a choice!’ The voice – the anger – was cracked.
    Carver waved for their untouched meal to be taken away, waiting until it was. ‘You did a Faust on everyone, George. You sold out to the Devil …’ He sniggered a laugh. ‘How about that! You sold out to the underworld! Isn’t that how it was … how it is … you got the joys of this life, leaving those who inherit to pay your dues …?’
    Northcote shook his head against the new approach from the waiter. To Carver he said: ‘What the fuck would you have done, dirt poor, knowing you could climb the mountain, but not knowing how: which way to go? Not knowing, then, even which way you were going? You want to tell me that?’
    â€˜No, I can’t tell you that,’ admitted Carver, totally honest. ‘I’d have certainly been frightened. Tempted, too … maybe even have been eager. But mostly tempted, I guess. I don’t know.’
    â€˜So that’s how it is,’ said Northcote.
    â€˜No,’ refused Carver. ‘That’s how it was . Now is how it is . Tell me about last night.’
    â€˜I told you about last night.’
    â€˜George!’
    â€˜I won’t let them win … beat me …’
    They’d won. Made this man their own mob-backed Wall Street colossus, Carver accepted, his numbness growing into a tingling feeling of total unreality. ‘They’ve owned you, George. Owned the firm – owned all of us – from the word go!’ How could he be talking like this, in an ordinary manner – conversationally – like everyone else around him in this safe, protected, uninvadible bastion of total, privileged security!
    â€˜There’s a way,’ declared Northcote.
    â€˜What way? Which way?’
    â€˜I kept some records … the records you – no one – was ever supposed to find … I … they …’
    Carver seized the stumble. ‘Janice! What does Janice know?’ Janice Snow was Northcote’s black, permanently weight-watching but constantly failing personal assistant who averaged 190lbs when she followed the regime and ballooned way above when she didn’t, which was most of the time. She’d been with Northcote before Carver had entered the firm. It had been Janice who’d earlier insisted Northcote hadn’t arrived in the office, when he clearly had.
    â€˜Absolutely nothing: only that they’re my personal accounts.’
    â€˜How many are “they”?’ demanded Carver, determined to discover as much as he could from a man who was clearly as determined not to volunteer anything. ‘How many more companies are there than Mulder, Encomp and Innsflow?’
    â€˜None.’
    â€˜I have your word on that?’ What the fuck use was the word of a man who’d been a Mafia puppet … Yet again, Carver’s mind stopped at a conclusion he didn’t want to reach but had to, because it was the only one possible. They were talking – conversationally, quiet-voiced, how-was-the-weekend? where’s-this-year’s-vacation? – about the Mafia!
    â€˜You have my word,’ recited Northcote, in immediate reply.
    He despised this man, Carver abruptly decided. It was as much a shock as all the other revelations of the last thirty-six hours. Maybe even greater. Until now he had been in awe – in trepidation – of this lion of a man with a lion’s mane (but a bull’s shoulders) who had dominated his life and Jane’s life and so many other lives but whom he was now coming to regard as nothing more than a clay effigy – a hollow clay effigy at that