Madman's Thirst (25 page)

CHAPTER 28 – THE PRINCETON CLUB

Sobok had never been to the
Princeton Club at 15 West 43
^rd
Street, a short walk from the
Peninsula Hotel. When he visited New York on his own dime, he usually stayed at
the University Club, where, as a member, he could reserve a comfortable room
for less than $200 a night, which in New York passed for a steal. He arrived a
bit early for his lunch and, after a quick tour graciously provided by one of
the Princeton Club’s staff, decided that the University was superior.

He entered the Tiger Grill exactly
at noon and spotted his host sitting at a very private table in the corner of
the room. He sat down and a waiter quickly walked over. The man opposite, who
was drinking a Manhattan straight up, looked at him.

“Do you want a drink?”

“Yes, thank you,” Sobok said,
smiling at the waiter. “Johnny Walker Blue, please, one ice cube.” The waiter
left and he said, “I’m surprised you wanted to meet in so public a place.
Although I must admit I prefer this to the back of a car, even a Rolls.”

“I was in a hurry that day. It’s no
use getting paranoid in a city as big as New York. Nobody knows who you are.
Now, tell me what went wrong. I thought you never made mistakes. And for what
I’m paying you, you’d better not make another one.”

Sobok’s expression never wavered. The
ability to mask his emotions was, of course, almost a necessity of his
profession. It also came in handy at the baccarat tables in Montenegro. But he
filed away the threat, again.

 “Nothing, except the
unpredictable. One can’t plan for that. I believe you Americans call it
Murphy’s Law. You can imagine my disbelief when Scarne crawled out of the
window and actually went around the car to rescue the damn driver! There was
virtually nothing left of the vehicle.”

The waiter appeared with his drink
and two menus. After listening to the specials, both men ordered salmon. The
waiter, who had suffered the displeasure of Sobok’s host in the past,  gently
suggested that they choose something else.

“The chef was disappointed in the
quality,” the waiter said.

They ordered steak frites instead.

“Good man,” Sobok said after the
waiter left. “Anyway, the impact on the wall was spectacular. I lost count of
how many times the car rolled over. You have to hand it to the NASCAR safety engineers. But even then he should have been incinerated. The plan was 99 percent
foolproof. There would have been no evidence after a fire. He would have been
the victim of bad luck.”

“So, what the hell happened?”

“Alas, as I subsequently learned, it
was a demo car, with little fuel in the tanks, apparently as an added safety
precaution. Just enough for a couple of twirls around the track. I understand
that many of these promotional rides are given as birthday presents. One
presumes it would be bad form to immolate dad on his special day. In any event,
I’m beginning to believe Scarne is the luckiest man on the planet.”

Sobok sipped his Scotch
appreciatively. The other man began peppering him with questions. Sobok let him
vent.

 “You should have killed him in
Florida.”

“I didn’t even know who he was.
I’m not a serial killer.”

“Do you think he will figure it
out?”

“It would not be prudent to think
he won’t. He seems very capable. And capable and lucky is a very dangerous
combination.”

“What do you suggest?”

The waiter arrived with their
food. That gave Sobok time to think. The man must be running out of options,
Sobok realized. He may be getting desperate. And that breeds sloppiness. Sobok
wasn’t afraid of many things. Sloppiness was at the top of a very short list.  

“It will be very difficult to
arrange another mishap,” Sobok said after the waiter left. “Ordinarily, I would
say that you should leave Mr. Scarne alone from now on. But if – I should say,
when – he figures out what happened in the car, then, from what I hear, he will
never let up. So he has to go. This time without worrying about the
consequences. I think your mistake from the very beginning was trying to
finesse things. You worried about the editor, and where did that get you? You
wanted an accident for Scarne. More aggravation. I find that the direct
approach is often the best. Especially with men who have many enemies. Such as
those two Italian thugs on Staten Island. The police will need a stadium to
question all the possible suspects. The same holds true for a private
investigator, especially one with a past like Mr. Scarne. I will take care of him
my way now. But he will likely be on his guard, so I want to double my fee.”

“Agreed. But there is something
else I want you to take care of first.”

“And what is that?”

“Bimm. I don’t need him any more.”

Loyalty, Sobok realized, was not
the man’s strong suit. Nor was subtlety. Telling one retainer that other
retainers are expendable is poor management. And despite what the man said,
meeting in a public venue was a lapse of judgment. Either he is losing his grip
or feeling omnipotent, dangerous traits in this business.

“I won’t keep you,” the man said.
“You have work to do.” He passed an envelope to Sobok. “Bimm is in the Bahamas.
All the information you need is in there. Get a move on.”

Sobok smiled as he added more folders
to the mental file he was building on his employer.  He left without another
word.

***

Aristotle Arachne sat alone
drinking coffee, his anger and frustration growing. The assassin was correct. He’d
tried to be too cute. The idea to kill Scarne at the track and make it look
like an accident was Arachne’s. Race tracks were dangerous places. Arachne, who
drove Formula One cars for relaxation, knew that first hand. The assassin’s use
of nitrous oxide, he had to admit, was truly inspired. It should have worked.
That damn Scarne has more lives than a cat. When I get through with him, he
thought, Scarne will wish he’d have died in that fucking car!

“Jesus, Ari, are the building
inspectors asking for bigger payoffs? You look like you want to kill someone.”

Arachne was so startled he spilled
his coffee. He looked up. It was Donald Trump. Arachne forced a laugh. Trump
was surrounded by several Middle-Eastern types. The son of a bitch always has
something going. No introductions were made and after the two rivals exchanged
a few more barbed pleasantries, Trump moved away. Then he turned.

“I haven’t been here in a while,
Ari. What’s good?”

“Try the salmon.”

Cong Bao was waiting for Arachne
outside the Princeton Club.

“Where to, sir,” he said as he
held the door of the Rolls.

“The Empire State Building.”

Only a slight narrowing of the
driver’s eyes indicated his displeasure. No stranger to hereditary feuds
himself, Arachne sympathized with him. Trump has his Arabs, but I have
something better, he thought, even if Cong Bao hates them.  The world might
eventually run out of oil. It’s not likely to ever run out of Chinese.

A few minutes later they were both
in an elevator taking them to the 84
^th
-floor office of the Hong
Kong-based Chinese Office of Foreign Projects, distaste written all over Cong
Bao’s face. Given the recent developments, Arachne had taken to having his
bodyguard close by whenever he was outside his home.  Upon exiting the
elevator, Arachne left him in the outer office of the C.O.F.P., with the terse
instruction to “be civil.”

He went into the familiar
conference room, where he knew he’d be kept waiting so that he would know his
place. He went over to a window and looked downtown, where the rebuilding
around ground zero was finally making serious headway. Good, he thought, it
will provide a distraction from my own plans. Nobody is paying any attention to
what goes on in Staten Island. Let them waste their money on a grandiose tower
that will inevitably lose money and further strap the city and Port Authority,
and which Jihadist nutcases will try to knock down. The real profits to be made
would come from underground. When the time came for him to make his move,
Arachne believed, the public would demand that his projects be approved. Nobody
would look too closely where he got his financing.

CHAPTER 29 – GREEK WAYS

Arachne’s family had made its
money in time-honored Greek ways, through shipping, and when necessary,
smuggling. His grandfather, Kratos Arachne, never reached the financial or
political status of the Onassis clan, possibly because his penchant for
violence and double-dealing alienated potential allies. Nevertheless, he left his
only son, Zoltan, a fortune estimated at $100 million, which the gambling womanizer
squandered almost as quickly as he sired his eight children.

By the time Aristotle, the
youngest, came along, there weren’t enough millions left to keep all the
children in the splendor to which the family had become accustomed. There were
enough drachmas, however, to provide him with a fine education in the United
States. Sensing early that the deregulation sweeping American markets was a
license to steal (everyone in the family said that he favored his grandfather),
the young Arachne became an American citizen and, except for one operation that
would soon prove crucial to his plans, left the shipping business behind.

After graduating with honors from
Princeton, he gravitated to Wall Street, where for the next five years he
grounded himself in “creative financing” in firms that no longer exist, mainly
because of how creative they were. He made money, but walked in the shadow of
hedge fund sharpies and derivative barons who stole money in amounts that made
him look like a three-card-monte player in Times Square. He didn’t want to be
merely rich, he wanted to be feared and respected. All his life, the reduced
circumstances of his family, which forced the Arachnes to sell off many of
their estates, grated on him, and he set out to acquire as much real estate and
property as he could. He started small, with housing projects, minor league
baseball stadiums and condo developments in the Sunbelt. As with most of his
high-flying rivals, leverage was his friend. Using his knowledge and contacts
on Wall Street, he branched out into huge shopping malls and casinos. His
holdings, on paper at least, eventually passed the $1 billion mark. But he was
still not satisfied. The Trumps and Pritzkers of his world were worth many
times that.

Then the real estate bubble burst.
Most of the big players licked their wounds and hunkered down. They were not as
highly leveraged as Arachne, who seethed at the thought that if his empire
unraveled in the current environment he’d never vault to the top.

Arachne knew he had dodged a
bullet when none of the other major news organizations had followed up on the
Shields story about how tenuous his finances were. Now they were all on to
other things. But Shields still represented a threat, since the company still
had most of the facts in its computer files. He couldn’t be sure that some
enterprising editor or reporter would not resurrect the story. Hence his
interest in Emma Shields, who he intended to become the fourth Mrs. Aristotle
Arachne.

At that very moment his lawyers
were serving papers on the third Mrs. Arachne in Palm Beach. They, and a slew
of private investigators, had assured him that a quick divorce was certain. The
carnivorous bitch, as he called her, had slept with every man she could get her
hands on, including one of the private investigators. The infidelity didn’t
bother Arachne. He was a serial adulterer himself. He just needed his freedom
immediately. So, despite an iron-clad prenup, he was prepared to give her a few
million not to even make a show of resistance.

Marrying into the Shields family
would not only presumably prevent future probes of his activities, but also
provide invaluable political leverage. It would buy him the time to pull off the
coup that would stun the financial world and make him unassailable.

But Arachne had to admit that the
less-financial aspects of seducing Emma were also attractive. His earlier wives
and mistresses – indeed, all the women he had bedded since losing his virginity
at 14 in a romp with two of his crazy girl cousins during a family vacation in
Italy – were intellectual inferiors. That is why he had produced no heirs.

His first two wives had been nice
enough women. They, at least, had seen something in him besides a fat wallet,
because they came on the scene before it had really enlarged. Both had
remarried and were apparently doing well, but must rue the fact that they
didn’t stick around for the really big payday. His third wife, the one he was
now ditching, was a horror. What had he been thinking? A very beautiful woman,
to be sure, who gave up a lucrative modeling career. The perfect body. The
Grace Kelly looks. And a sex drive that, unbelievably, rivaled his own.

At first, he couldn’t get enough
of her. She rarely wore underwear, and was not above “having a quick pump,” as
she put it, wherever they were. For Christ’s sake, they had once done it in the
bathroom at the Cardinal’s residence with 20 people sipping cocktails in the
next room! She wasn’t intimidated by his immense sexual organ. In fact, he was
sure much of its reputation was the result of her braggadocio.

But she was as greedy and
ultimately uncouth as she was sexually insatiable, and he tired of her. He was
going to pay her off and let some other fools lose themselves in her “loins of
death,” as he now called them. Three wives, three losers. From now on he would
seek his physical release with the endless supply of women, married and
otherwise, who threw themselves at him. When he married again, it would be to
Emerald Shields.

While not his equal, of course,
she was one of the smartest women he had ever met, and was beautiful to boot.
She was also incredibly sexual. He could always tell. Just dancing with her had
produced a massive erection – for him an unheard of occurrence for such casual
contact. And she had felt him. His excitement had caused her to shift her
stance slightly, with a knowing, and politely erotic, smile.

It was only a matter of time, of
course, before he slept with her. He had never failed to fuck a woman he
wanted. But the sooner the better, which is why Scarne presented more of a
problem than he had originally appeared to be. Arachne had agreed to help the
investigator because it would help cement his relationship with Emerald Shields
– and, more importantly, because by winning his trust he could keep one step
ahead of him. With all witnesses to the Pearsall brat’s murder eliminated,
Scarne’s investigation presumably had nowhere to go. That had now changed.

Emma was sleeping with Scarne.
That much was obvious. The relationship might not be going anywhere in the long
term, but Arachne knew that she had changed in recent weeks. She might not be
in love – but she was definitely in lust. Arachne knew all about the loss of
her husband to cancer and being left with a young daughter. Scarne was
apparently bringing her out of her shell. Good. Saved him the trouble.

But the sooner Scarne disappeared
from the scene now, the faster Arachne could move in on her – and her family.
If he could marry her and get her pregnant (he’d deal with her existing daughter
later), he’d be in a position to bury Trump and the rest.

The door to the room opened behind
him and Arachne turned as his financing walked into the conference room, in the
form of Henry Li.

Li, like Arachne, was Princeton-educated.
The two men had been friendly as undergraduates. Li had gone on to study
economics at Harvard and then returned to his homeland. There, his knowledge of
America assured a quick rise in a country that, although nominally Communist,
was now so profit-oriented that it regularly lectured the United States for
straying from its free- market roots. The C.O.F.P. was one of several fronts
for China’s economic imperialism, which, while still a shadow of the American
effort in that regard, was becoming a force.

“You Americans are giving
capitalism a bad name,” Li had remarked to Arachne when they had resumed
contact. “We may have to show you how it is supposed to work.”

Arachne had been delighted when Li
assumed the chairmanship of C.O.F.P., taking it as another sign that his plans
were destined to succeed. He had been casting about for a deep-pocketed
partner, but wanted to avoid any Arab entanglements. A friendly Arab nation, in
fact, an American ally, had recently tried to buy a controlling interest in an
American shipping operation and the firestorm that followed forced it to
withdraw its bid. Anything the Arabs touched after 9/11 was suspect.

The Chinese were perfect. America
was so preoccupied with terrorists and the Middle East that for many years it
ignored the fact that China financed its profligate ways and now basically
owned the country through its massive holdings of U.S. debt obligations. There
were stirrings of concern, of course, but China still held all the high cards.
The broken Federal Government and destitute municipalities would not have the
wherewithal to turn down the billions the Chinese were willing to put into
Arachne’s projects.

“How are you, Ari,” Li asked as they
shook hands. “Who is that nasty-looking man sitting in the outer office?”

“My driver.”

“He is more than a driver, I
think. He does not appear to like Chinese.”

Li was dressed in a conservative,
Western-cut suit and spoke without a discernible accent.

“He is Vietnamese,” Arachne said.
“They’ve hated China for 2,000 years. You keep invading them.”

“Barbarians,” Li said equably.
“And ingrates. You Americans might have prevailed against them had we not armed
them.”

“And as soon as the U.S. left, you
invaded them again. But, Henry, you didn’t ask to see me to discuss Asian
realpolitik.”

“Quite so. We want to know why our
program has been delayed. I thought you were going to make an announcement last
week.”

Arachne didn’t want to tell Li the
whole story. He was not worried about security. He knew the room they were in
was conscientiously swept for bugs by experts using the finest technology their
government could steal from the Americans. But the Chinese were nervous about
scandal of any kind. He didn’t want his funding to dry up just because a few people
were killed.

“There has been a complication.
Perhaps you’ve heard that my wife and I are going through a difficult time.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Ari,” Li
said automatically, not knowing where the conversation was headed.

“I have asked her for a divorce.
There is no problem, but I naturally have been a bit distracted. It’s important
that I do it as quickly as possible.”

“Of course,” Li said, still
confused. Although he knew that Western divorce laws were insane, Arachne
surely had an iron-clad prenuptial agreement. Things were much simpler in China
where a divorce could be had in less than half an hour and cost about 10 yuan –
less than $2. Moreover the male-dominated Chinese Supreme Court had assured
that men’s property was protected. In fact, the courts most-recent decision was
commonly known as “the law that makes men laugh and women cry.”  

“I have been seeing another woman.
Emma Shields. I think you’ve met her on the family yacht.”

Ah, Li thought.

“Yes.
The Emerald of the Sea
.
A beautiful vessel, with a name that has a poetic, almost Chinese grace.”

“The yacht is named after her,”
Arachne said.

“Just so. She is also beautiful.
And powerful.”

“I am going to ask her to marry
me.”

Which, Arachne reflected, was the
truth. He could almost see the light bulb go on above Li’s head.

“I see,” Li said, realizing that
Arachne would stop at nothing to make sure his dream came true. Not a bad
attribute in a partner. “That could be most advantageous. You have our best
wishes, of course, for a long and happy union.” Which, he didn’t add, would be a
first for the randy Greek. 

***

After Arachne left, Henry Li
walked down the hallway to a secure communications room, stopping only to get a
cup of coffee and a Krispy Kreme donut from the small in-house canteen on the
way. He could never fathom the U.S. fascination for Chinese food. Since his
university days he’d been devoted to American fast food. Indeed, he had been an
early advocate of McDonalds in China, pulling as many strings as he could to
help the company along. Of course, he admitted as he bit into his donut, I’m
getting a bit soft around the middle. If I didn’t smoke two packs a day, I’d
look like a sumo wrestler.

The door to the comm room hissed
behind him and he sat at a table next to one of the technicians, who in reality
was a sergeant in the Army of the Peoples Republic. The man quickly rose to get
up but Li waved him back down with a smile. The fellow was new to the office
and Li had only recently broken him of the habit of saluting. For, in addition
to his very real commercial  responsibilities, Henry Li was a colonel in the
Guóãnbù, the Ministry of State Security of the Peoples Republic of China.

The communications room was so
secure and its encryption machines so sophisticated that the Chinese Consulate
in Manhattan, as well as the Chinese delegation at the United Nations, often
used it for their really secret messages. (The Chinese knew that many of the “routine”
messages sent from the other two locations were read by the Americans, as they
were meant to be.)

Li grubbed a cigarette from the
sergeant and began to compose a report to his superiors in the M.S.S., who had
taken a particular interest in Arachne’s grandiose scheme. They were so
enamored of the project that they insisted on a requirement that would have
found favor with the most xenophobic of American politicians: China would
provide the funds, but all the work would go to American companies and unions.
Henry Li was quick to grasp the rationale, although he knew it rankled many of
his colleagues.

For the simple truth was that
American voters, egged on by politicians running for office, were becoming
incensed by the fact that a substantial portion of the billions spent on recent
infrastructure work in the U.S. had been farmed out to Chinese companies. They
blamed the Federal Government, accusing it of hypocrisy for promoting a “buy
American” program while giving the work to the Chinese. The media was awash
with pictures of smiling Chinese engineers and workers rebuilding bridges and
roads across the country, with steel and components made in China.