Alex Drakos: For My Lover Read online

  “Lunch with Daddy,” she said.

  Jordan smiled. Alex became Daddy to Jordan even before he voiced interest in adopting him. “Which restaurant?” he asked. “At The Drakos? Please say it’s at the Lanarium inside The Drakos. I love their food!”

  “I’m afraid it’s not the Lanarium,” Kari said.

  “Then where?” Jordan asked.

  “Daddy’s country club.”

  A disappointing look came over Jordan’s handsome face. “Ah man,” he said as he pushed his glasses up on his small, brown face. “Not that place. Why did he pick that place? Those people don’t want us there.”

  “Maybe that’s why he picked it,” Kari said. “You know how Alex is. He figured they’d better want us there. But I know how you feel. It’s not my favorite place either.”

  “Whenever we go there with him, they’re always staring at us like we’re dirt. I don’t like to go where I’m not welcomed.”

  “That’s where Alex says we’re having lunch, so that’s where we’re having lunch.”

  “I know I always have to do what he says,” Jordan said, “but you don’t have to always do what he says. You can just say no.”

  Kari smiled. “That’s what you think.”

  “But he wouldn’t do anything to you if you said no.” Then Jordan looked at her. He knew his stepfather had a mighty temper. “Would he?”

  “It’s not that,” Kari said as she drove.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Since I was a kid myself, it’s pretty much been just you and me, kid. Yeah, I lived with Vito for all those years and all that, but it still was just you and me in the end. Now that’s changed. Alex is the head of our household. He wears the pants in our family now. For somebody like me, who’s always been the boss of us, it’s hard. But I know who I married. He’s not the kind of man who’s going to have it any other way.”

  “You mean he’s dominant and bossy?”

  “I mean he’s a man,” Kari said. “A very rich and powerful man accustomed to being the boss of everything he’s involved in. He’s not changing that because he loves us. Even when he lived in Greece and ran his father’s business, he was the man in charge.”

  “Don’t you mean,” Jordan asked, “when he ran his father’s crime syndicate?”

  Kari looked at her son with shock. The Drakos crime family had been deep undercover. There was no common knowledge about Alex’s background, just rumors and gossip that Alex managed to effectively deny for years. “What do you know about anything like that?” she asked her son. “Don’t tell me you believe those rumors?”

  “No, ma’am. I never believe rumors. But I believe Uncle Oz.”

  Oz! Kari thought. She should have known! “He told you?”

  Jordan nodded and pushed his glasses up on his face. “He told me everything about it. He said Daddy was their enforcer. Then he became the underboss and Oz became the enforcer. Then Daddy got tired of all the killing and moved to America, and then Oz became the underboss. It’s really fascinating stuff.”

  A part of Kari wanted to tell Jordan it wasn’t true, and that Oz was just telling him a pack of lies like he loved to tell all those women he messed around with. But the bigger part of her couldn’t lie to her son. He was about to become a Drakos, as soon as the paperwork went through, and he needed to know what he was going to be up against. Alex was universally known as a corporate giant, a titan of industry, but he was also a man with a past. A dangerous past. They thought to spare Jordan the details until he was older. Oz had beat them to the punch.

  They were going to have to have a little conversation with Oz when his talkative behind got back in town.

  “There’s nothing fascinating about crime,” Kari did manage to say.

  But Jordan just smiled. His mother didn’t deny what Oz had told him either. “On the one hand,” he said, “I can see Daddy as an enforcer and an underboss. When he loses his temper, man-oh-man, I can see it easily. He has that look in his big, blue eyes like he could break you in two. But on the other hand, I just can’t see it. He’s such a conservative guy! He’s a Republican for crying out loud, when we’ve been Democrats all my life. But that’s why you can never judge a book by its cover, can you Ma? He’s like James Bond or Ethan Hunt or somebody!”

  That was Kari’s fear: the fear that an impressionable kid like Jordan would glamourize something that was hardly glamourous, and it had already started. She loved Oz like a big brother, but she could just ring his thick neck!

  When they finally arrived at the swanky Apple Valley Country Club, their conversation had long since ceased. Now there was that quiet nervousness inside the car. A kind of here goes attitude change. But they both knew they had to endure it. It wasn’t their world, but it was Alex’s, and they were a major part of his world now.

  After getting out and giving the keys to the valet, Kari and Jordan walked slowly across what looked like a promenade, with massive water fountains on either side of the walkway, that led to the big, thick, entrance doors.

  Jordan, wearing a pair of khakis and a button up white cotton shirt, pulled the door open for his mother, and Kari walked through first. And although she was dressed smartly, too, in a pair of flare-legged trousers, a tucked in chiffon blouse, and a blazer, she was immediately met with derisive gazes from those waiting to be seated as if she wore rags. A part of her wanted to turn around as soon as her eyes met those gazes. Another part of her, the southside of Chicago part of her, wanted to cuss their asses out. What are you looking at, she’d ask and turn the tables on them!

  But she knew she couldn’t have either response. She was Mrs. Drakos now. She represented, not just herself, but Alex too. She wasn’t about to make a scene.

  The maître d standing behind the podium was, at first, content to ignore her and attend to the other people who were asking him questions or who had come in after them. Which just burned Kari up. She couldn’t bear it. She knew who she represented. But she also knew right was still right.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the maître d as he looked past Kari and assisted yet another lady who had just walked in. “We were here first.”

  The maître d looked at her as if a mangy dog would have been more acceptable. “You will have to wait your turn, ma’am,” he said to her.

  Kari was about to correct his ass, she was getting that heated, but another man, presumably the dining hall manager, left his post as overseer and walked over.

  “May I help you?” he asked Kari.

  “Yes, you may,” Kari responded. “We’re here to have lunch with Mr. Drakos. Could you show us to his table, please?”

  But if she thought she’d found a reasonable man in the manager, his words quickly disabused her of that notion. “Show you to his table?” he asked her.

  What was with these people? Did she say something odd? “Yes,” she said. “Could you show me and my son to Alex Drakos’s table?”

  “No, I cannot,” the manager said. “Absolutely not. This club, and specifically the dining hall, is for members only.”

  “My husband, Alex Drakos, is a member.” It was unlikely, but he might not have known who she was: she and Alex were newly married, and before they were married, she was a member of the working class, not the social elite. But he had to know who Alex was. The richest man in town? The owner of Apple Valley’s biggest hotel and only casino? The man whose hotel and casino the entire town voted to approve?

  But did those facts move the manager? Not in the least. “The dining hall is exclusively for members only,” he said again. “Anybody who is a guest of a member must be escorted in by said member. You are not a member of this club.”

  Kari wanted to go off on that fool. “So all these women I see going into that dining hall, women I know are not members either, but has husbands who are, can go on in, but I can’t? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “You need to lower your voice,” the manager said. “This is a respectable establishment.”

  Kari fro
wned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know how you people do it in the ghetto you come from,” the manager said.

  Kari couldn’t believe it. “The ghetto?”

  “The ghetto, yes. Or whatever you people call it nowadays. The hood, maybe? But wherever you come from, you don’t belong here!”

  And there it was, Kari thought. No under-his-breath sly comment. No little hint or hidden wink. She didn’t belong there. He said it loud and clear.

  “I don’t belong here?” Kari asked him. And she couldn’t help it. She got loud and she got brash. “Who the fuck are you to tell me where I belong?” she asked him.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” the manager said, as others looked frowningly at Kari too. “You just proved my point. Because here, at the Apple Valley Country Club, we do not use profane language like savages do, and you do not simply barge on in where you are not wanted because you feel like it. You, madam, will wait outside!”

  He was so rude that Kari wanted to kick his ass right then and there. The arrogance of these people! But she held her tongue. They would love for her to put on a show and talk about how she showed her true colors that day. She’d already had a weak moment and given them a sneak peek. She wasn’t giving them anymore.

  “Come on, Jordan,” she said and took a seat, not outside as the manager had ordered, but inside on one of the benches against the wall. The woman who had been sitting on that bench, a tall white woman, moved.

  Jordan shook his head. “These people are so petty,” he whispered to his mother. “We ought to just leave.”

  But Kari wasn’t about to go anywhere. That was what they wanted, too, and she wasn’t giving them that satisfaction.

  “It’s just jealousy,” Jordan said.

  “Stop ascribing motives to people,” Kari said.

  “Come on, Ma, it has to be. They hate that a woman like you, who struggled all her life and, by the way, is a woman of color, is now married to the richest man in the county. They hate it. That’s why everywhere we go they treat us like this. We’re out of place in their eyes. We shouldn’t be in the position we’re in. You should have told them what they could do with their place.”

  Kari felt exactly how Jordan felt. But she was glad she held it together. Nothing good would come of her getting in the gutter with those idiots. Besides, she had a husband now. A very powerful husband, contrary to what that manager and maître d apparently realized. She was going to let Alex sought it out.

  But when the manager realized Kari and Jordan hadn’t walked outside, as he had ordered them to do, but was still in the foyer, and sitting down no less, he hurried over. “I’m sorry, madam, but you will have to wait outside. I told you to wait outside.”

  “I’m waiting inside for my husband,” Kari said firmly.

  “Her husband, Alex Drakos,” Jordan added, just to remind those hillbillies who they were dealing with.

  But their snobbishness was second to none. The manager simply rolled his eyes, as if he couldn’t give a flip nickel who Alex was, and was about to push it further. But another group of people arrived, and his attention was diverted.

  “He’s a worker,” Jordan said to Kari. “A worker! But you’d think he and that other guy owned the place the way they’re acting. Like their boss, whoever he or she is, is going to back them up in their mess. Don’t they know that our boss is more powerful than their boss?”

  Kari smiled. That was Jordan: always joking around. But neither one of them could sustain the gaiety, as every time somebody walked in, and only white bodies were the only people walking in, they gave them that dirty look all over again. Was Alex a member of a segregated club? It wasn’t on paper, but they all were certainly acting as if that was exactly what it was in their hearts.

  But Kari and Jordan’s agony was short-lived. Because, within minutes of their arrival, Alex arrived.

  And when he walked in, everything changed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  He walked into that club in his perfectly tailored suit, looking gorgeous Kari and Jordan couldn’t help but notice, with one hand in his pants pocket and the other hand holding his always-active cell phone. He was moving fast, they also noticed, as if he assumed they’d already been seated and served.

  Alex was, in fact, heading in without stopping. He was late and hated being late for anything, but especially when his family were waiting. But then, out of his peripheral vision, he saw them.

  He frowned when he saw them sitting against the wall across the room. He should not have suspected anything. Maybe they preferred to wait for him there. But Apple Valley was a beautiful town filled with subtle, and not-so-subtle, ugly racists. Especially among the elite. He was suspicious immediately.

  Kari and Jordan were so relieved to see him that they stood up when he looked their way. But they could tell he was not a happy camper. He walked over to them with a baffled look on his face. A look that wondered if they had been forced to remain in the foyer, or was there because they preferred to be.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked them before he made it all the way up to them. The hand that held his cell phone was spread out away from his body, as if he was doubtful they were there by design. When he made it up to them, he asked them again.

  “The maître d and the man I presume is the dining hall manager said we weren’t allowed in the club without you,” Kari said.

  “They said we were ghetto,” Jordan added, “and that we don’t belong here. They treated us like trash, Daddy. With all those people staring at us too.”

  Before Alex could respond to Jordan, the manager was back, and he hurried over. “Mr. Drakos, good afternoon!” He was all smiles now.

  But Alex was not. “Why has my family not been seated?” he asked him.

  Kari could tell the manager was surprised that Alex referred to them as his family, as if the fact that they were in denial of Kari and Jordan’s position in Alex’s life meant Alex would be too. “Well, sir, as you may not be aware because you are a new member, but it’s quite common for people of different stripes to attempt to enter this establishment. We have to be very careful. Your wife--”

  “Why is she sitting out here?” Alex asked again.

  “Because, sir, I told her that the dining hall is for member’s only.”

  Alex frowned. “You don’t tell my wife anything,” he said loudly. “Who the fuck do you think you are?!”

  Everybody in the foyer, and some in the dining hall who could see it, too, were looking now.

  Alex didn’t give a fuck. “You don’t tell her anything!” he continued admonishing the manager. “Whenever she comes to this club you take her to my table, offer her a seat, and take her drink order. You don’t tell her shit! She tells you what she wants, and you do exactly as she tells you to do. If I’m a member of this club, she’s a member. And my son is too. Do I make myself clear?” He said clear with a lilt in his voice. He was just that angry.

  The manager was nodding his head. “Ye-yes, sir. Absolutely, sir. I didn’t mean to--”

  “Come on, darling,” Alex said to Kari, ignoring the manager. He was afraid if he heard another sound from that man’s mouth, he would put his fist in it. “Come on, Jordan.”

  Alex placed his hand around Kari’s waist and escorted her and Jordan into the club with all eyes on them. The manager pushed the maître d in the back, nearly causing him to stumble forward, and then ordered him to go and serve Mr. Drakos’s party. And the arrogant maître d, the man who had originally ignored Kari and Jordan when they first walked into that club, hurried to take their orders.

  Everybody in the dining hall spoke to Alex as he, Kari, and Jordan walked past their tables. But it wasn’t lost on Kari that they were speaking only to Alex. “Hello, Mr. Drakos. Good afternoon, Mr. Drakos. Nice seeing you again, Alex!” It was as if Kari and Jordan were still invisible to them.

  But Alex ignored them all as he walked by. He was still too upset by those hurtful expressions he saw on Kar
i and Jordan’s faces when he walked into that establishment. As if they were lesser than everybody else coming and going. Nobody was going to make his family feel as if they weren’t good enough, or didn’t belong, and get away with it. Not as long as he still had breath in his body.

  He refused to let the maître d pull out Kari’s chair. Alex pulled it out himself. Then he whispered in her ear as she sat down. “I’ll be back,” he said, and left the table.

  After that sorry-excuse-for-a-maître d was forced to take their drink orders, Jordan, sitting across from his mother at the table, leaned forward. “Where’s Daddy going?”

  “I don’t know,” Kari said, checking out the menu, “but I have a pretty good idea where.”

  “Where?” Jordan asked, confused.

  Kari looked at her son. “Come on, J.”

  “What?” Jordan was genuinely puzzled.

  “Is Alex the kind of man who would let somebody mistreat us, and then do nothing about it?”

  Jordan smiled. “Heck no,” he said.

  Kari looked back down at the menu. “That’s where he’s going,” she said.

  And she was right. Alex made his way across the dining hall and through a door that led to the club’s executive offices. He made his way all the way to the head office in the building: the general manager’s office.

  Not bothering to knock, he barged on in.

  “Mr. Drakos!” the GM said as he jumped to his feet. He had been sitting behind his desk checking his cell phone messages. “How can I help you, sir?”

  “Your maître d, and the man I believe to be the dining hall manager, mistreated my family in my absence.”

  “Yes, sir,” the GM said. “It was most unfortunate. I saw it all unfold on the monitors. We have monitors for every corner of this establishment, as you know.”

  But that didn’t give Alex any solace. If anything, his comments angered him further. “You saw it on the monitors and did nothing about it?” Alex asked, astounded.