Read Online Stiletto by Harold Robbins - Free Book Online Page A

knew that she knew who he was, he had to take her with him.”
    She looked up at him suddenly. “Will you take me with you, Cesare?”
    His hand tightened in the long hair that hung down her shoulders, pulling her head back so that her face turned up toward him. “I will take you with me,” he said, placing his mouth brutally on her lips.
    He could hear her gasp of pain as his free hand took her breast. She turned her face from him and cried aloud, “Cesare! You’re hurting me!”
    He ground her face to his naked chest and moved her head slowly in a widening circle, never stopping the pressure of his hand on her breast. He heard her moan softly and a torrent began to rise inside him. The circle became wider, she was moaning steadily now as she sank slowly to her knees.
    She cried aloud at his growing strength. “Cesare! Stop, please stop! The pain, I can’t stand the pain!”
    He was smiling now. There was power inside him. And life. And death. His voice seemed to come from some distant place outside him. “It is time you learned, my dear, how exquisite the pleasure of pain can be.”
    “Don’t, Cesare, don’t!” Her body began to shiver in a wild convulsion. “I can’t stand the pain! I am dying!”
    He looked down at her and let go suddenly. She almost fell, then her hands caught his hips and she clung to him, sobbing, “Cesare, I love you! I love you!”

8
    Miami Beach is a sun town built on a sterile strip of sand along the Florida coast. Each year by an artificial insemination of capital it gives birth to a new hotel. The St. Tropez is this year’s new hotel.
    Not far from the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc, the St. Tropez rises eleven stories into the ocean sky in an architectural style vaguely reminiscent of a Picasso impression of the palace at Monte Carlo. The Floridians, who judge beauty by the amount of rental per room in season, call it the most beautiful hotel ever built. The rental per room is eighty dollars a day.
    It has a ten-foot-wide beach fronting on the ocean on which no one is ever seen except the tourists in off season. It also has a cloverleaf pool that has been proclaimed as the largest pool ever built. It is completely surrounded by four tiers of cabanas, stepped back so they resemble bleachers in a ball park and do not obstruct the sun. Each cabana is complete with private bath and telephone, card table, chairs and small refrigerator.
    By three o’clock in the afternoon each cabana has a gin game going full blast, the players generally sitting in their shorts and swim suits, shielded from the sun they waste at the going rate per diem. Around the pool on long wooden lounge chairs are the sun worshipers, their bodies glistening with oil and lotions, trying to make the most of their already overburdened pocketbooks.
    Sam Vanicola was standing at the window of the suite in the St. Tropez, looking down at the pool. He was a big man. Even when he was a punk kid running errands for Lepke in Brooklyn, he was big. He weighed over two hundred pounds then, now he weighed two-forty on his five-eleven frame.
    He gave a snort of disgust and came back into the room where three men were playing cards. He looked down at them. “This is a lot of crap!” he announced.
    Special Agent Stanley looked up at him. “We got our orders, Sam,” he said genially.
    “Orders, borders!” Vanicola snorted. “Look, it didn’t mean nuttin’ when they kept Abe Reles locked up in his hotel room in the Half Moon in Brooklyn. They got to him anyway.”
    Stanley smiled again. “How do you know, Sam? He went out the window and they said it was suicide.”
    “That’s a horse laugh!” Vanicola replied. “I knew him. That boy was pushed. He’d never jump.”
    “Besides,” Stanley persisted. “That was twenty years ago. Things are different now.”
    Vanicola laughed. “They sure are,” he said derisively. “Dinky Adams gets his on his way into court, Jake the Twister in a room with a thousand people—and you