Seven Wonders (9 page)

Agastine laughed, the buttons straining to contain his inflated abdomen beneath the flaps of his Armani tuxedo. The Ukrainian girls continued to look bored and hungry.

“It’s your party, Ms. Saphra. You can wear whatever you’d like.”

Jendari waved her hand as if banishing such hyperbole from her presence; then she ran her fingers down the three strands of natural, uncultured pearls that hung down the front of her Neptune-blue, Versace sheath. The pearls had been harvested from the volcanic atolls of the French Polynesian islands at considerable expense; at fifty-eight, she’d never be mistaken for a mummified supermodel, but she could certainly still turn heads. Especially here among her peers, the glittering fools sipping imported champagne as they danced among the life-size models of giant squids eating sperm whales, dolphins frolicking through choppy waves, and walrus clans battling across imitation ice floes that populated the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.

Agastine wasn’t wrong, of course; the invitations for the annual charity gala at the American Museum of Natural History might have listed a dozen corporate sponsors, and the RSVP insert might have been signed by the deputy mayor himself; but everyone in the room knew who had paid for the twenty-piece orchestra situated on the mezzanine, violinists lined up like so much krill, inches from the mouth of the great blue whale. Everyone knew who had draped the exterior of the monstrous museum—twenty-seven buildings in all, containing more than thirty-two million specimens, from one-of-a-kind dinosaur fossils, to meteors the size of compact cars, to ancient artifacts so rare and delicate they would never even be photographed, let alone displayed—with sparkling velvet tangles of blue that matched the whale, and more importantly, Jendari’s dress, for all the city to see.

Last year, Jendari’s Saphra Industries had spent four million dollars on the gala, and then led the annual donations with another four million, to help reconstruct a coral reef off the Japanese coast that had been severely damaged by a pair of tanker spills the year before. This year, Saphra Industries
was adding another four million to the cause; at this pace, Jendari often thought to herself, they’d be paving half the Pacific Ocean in coral, just so a bunch of wealthy Manhattanites could eat caviar bathed in the glow spilling out of Plexiglas tanks filled with faux bioluminescent eels swimming through schools of computerized jellyfish.

Jendari had nothing against coral. In fact, she had a pair of magnificent chandeliers that had been carved out of endangered coral from the Great Barrier Reef hanging in one of her four homes in California, above a dining room table that she had never eaten off of, and probably never would. But she didn’t give tens of millions of dollars to the American Museum of Natural History every year because she was concerned about some insignificant life-form. A biological rounding error in the evolutionary equation had put mankind at the top of the food chain, and Jendari Saphra, with her billions in assets, her twenty homes in twelve countries on four continents, was at the top of the top. Her philanthropy had always served a purpose, ever since she had come into her own in her early thirties, and in this case, her millions hadn’t gone simply to prop up a species that was essentially a rock that could breathe.

“We all do what we can,” Jendari said. A waiter in white tails spun by, offering a tray of specialty cocktails. Jendari accepted a martini glass filled with something viscous and blue, while Agastine went for one of the fruitier concoctions, vodka with chunks of pineapple and lychee dodging ice cubes in an oversize highball. The girls were content sucking air through bee-stung lips. “It just so happens I
can
more than most,” she continued. “Unfortunately, that means I’m usually a slave to my cell phone, even when I’m at a party.”

She took a sip from the martini glass, noticing that a good portion of the nearby tuxedo- and designer dress–wearing crowd was watching her—some out of the corners of their eyes, some outright, over the shoulders of their dates or from where they were seated at the smattering of round hors d’oeuvre stations.

Jendari enjoyed the attention. When she’d strolled down Central Park West in the waning daylight hours before the gala began, in her Versace and pearls, the tourists in shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers had stared because they didn’t know who such an elegantly dressed, handsome woman could be; here, the wealthy one percent of the one percent stared because they did.

Most of the faces, Jendari recognized. There was Arthur Lemmon, the timber magnate. Hansel Gelter, whose consulting firm worked with nearly every big bank on Wall Street. Francis Lopeman, whose hedge fund had just narrowly survived an SEC witch hunt, with most of its eight billion dollars in assets intact. Jerry Grossberg, Alex Feinstein, and Dormac Cooper, the CEOs of the three biggest insurance giants in the country. And then, of course, the men whose names were their introductions: two Rockefellers, a pair of Bloombergs, a gaggle of Guggenheims, three Kennedys, a handful of Rothschilds, and at least one Trump.

Almost all of the invitees were couples, captained by a tuxedoed man; Jendari counted an even distribution of first wives, second wives, mistresses, and expensive accessories. Years ago, Jendari had stopped inviting a date of her own. Not because she’d ever had any trouble finding an appropriate consort, but because what she had told Agastine was true. Her business was a constant pull, especially as of late.

She wasn’t the wealthiest person in the room, or the only billionaire. But she believed her empire was unique in its scope—and had become even more unique over the past few years.
Unique in a way that will one day affect every single person in this room—and all of the tourists on the streets of this city and all the other cities around the world
.

A man on her arm would only have gotten in the way. And besides, no man, no matter how pretty, could compete with the dazzle of the Swarovski crystals on her clutch, or the pearls resting on her décolletage.

“Maybe you need a partner,” Agastine tried, oblivious to the chunk of pineapple that had now lodged itself in one of his dentures. “Someone who
could put a diamond on that lovely hand, big enough to make you forget about your cell phone for an evening.”

Jendari looked at the two Ukrainians and tried to hide the distaste from her voice. “Unfortunately, I think I’m a few decades too late to join your traveling band, Mr. Agastine. Not that I don’t appreciate the offer.”

She knew that Agastine was at least a billion dollars richer than she, but she doubted he could give her anything she didn’t already possess, except maybe some exotic venereal disease. Certainly she had enough diamonds. In fact, even tonight, despite the pearls, she was wearing one on a platinum chain, hanging down the center of her back. More than sixteen carats, a strange, smoky yellow color—and completely hidden from view. She’d worn it every year to the charity gala, and not just because she liked the way it felt against the hot, naked skin above her spine.

“I’d certainly make an exception,” Agastine started, but he was interrupted as a short, stocky man with thinning hair the same color as his ill-fitting gray suit sidled up next to one of the Ukrainians, and bowed slightly in Jendari’s direction.

“Excuse me, monsieur, madames—Ms. Saphra, if I could borrow you for a moment?”

Jendari felt no small sense of relief to see the stocky man in gray. Agastine, for his part, did not conceal his disgust at the poorly dressed interloper; the tiny metal pin affixed to the lapel of the man’s suit, identifying him as a museum employee, only made the indignity of the interruption that much worse. Agastine gave the man a look, then put an arm around each of his Ukrainian girls’ waists, and steered them toward the ice-buffet at the head of the room. When he was out of earshot, Jendari exhaled, depositing her drink onto the tray of a passing waiter.

“That’s an image that’s going to make me pray for early onset Alzheimer’s, Mr. Grange.”

Grange took her by the hand and began leading her through the crowd
of tuxedos, toward an unmarked door beneath the dorsal fin of the hanging blue whale.

“In a moment, I’m going to show you something that will make you forget all about them.”

Jendari felt the excitement rising as she let the stocky man pull her along, nodding at the guests she recognized as they ploughed forward, thankfully too fast to hear anything but the most cursory congratulations on the fabulousness of the party. She knew it looked strange, her being pulled along like a toddler in a tantrum by the only man in the room who wasn’t wearing a tux. But she had known Henry Grange a very long time, and he wasn’t the type to get this excited unnecessarily.

He reached the door, flashed a magnetic ID card against the plate by the doorframe, and then led her into an auxiliary hallway. The hallway was gloriously quiet, the noise from the gala swallowed up by the thick carpet beneath Jendari’s red-soled Louboutins and the wood-paneled walls.

Grange didn’t say a word as he continued to pull her forward. There were very few men Jendari would have let lead her along like this; but she had known Grange more than a decade, and she had never seen him this excited—which meant whatever he was about to show her was certainly going to overshadow the gala in the Hall of Ocean Life.

Two turns later, a near sprint through a pair of identical corridors, and they went through another locked door into a dimly lit exhibit hall that Jendari immediately recognized. To be fair, it would have been hard to miss the sixty-three-foot-long Indian canoe hanging from the ceiling. The canoe dated back to the nineteenth century, and had been carved from a single cedar tree. Covered in detailed aboriginal artwork, it was perhaps the most famous example of Northwest Coast Indian art, and along with the blue whale, was one of the museum’s most iconic displays. During daytime hours, the room would have been so full of civilians gawking at the intricate woodwork, it would have been impossible to stroll at any pace more than a
shuffle through the rectangular hall, let alone at a jog.

At the moment, Jendari would have happily used the canoe for kindling, if burning the damn thing would have gotten Grange to explain why he was dragging her through the desolate museum on high heels and at full speed in the middle of the night.

“Just a little farther, Ms. Saphra. I promise it will be worth it.”

They were at a near sprint again, gliding past the canoe and out through the back of the exhibit, and into the Hall of Human Origins. Jendari felt her interest perk up as they moved past the three skeletons at the front of the hall—representing seven million years of human evolution, from apelike ancestors to modern Homo erectus. Jendari had spent many hundreds of hours wandering through this exhibit, which linked modern DNA research with fossil discoveries—tracing mankind through bones and chemistry back to where it all began.

She nearly pulled Grange to a stop as they sped past Peking Man, the partial skull discovered in China in the early 1930s that had allowed scientists to recreate the face of one of the earliest known examples of
Homo erectus
from more than four hundred thousand years ago. But Grange didn’t let her pause, even as they moved from Peking Man to Lucy, the most complete skeleton of an early hominid, dating back a staggering four million years. Jendari had always felt it was fitting that the oldest skeleton of early mankind was actually the interior of a woman. Although Mitochondrial Eve—the mother of modern humanity, whose DNA lived inside each and every living person on earth—wouldn’t exist until many millions years after the primitive Lucy, Jendari liked to think that some of Lucy’s features would have carried over into the first woman, and through her, to every woman who has lived since.

But at the moment, there was no time to dwell on Lucy or Eve; Grange was moving them forward even faster as they burst from the Hall of Human Origins and bisected the circular Hall of Meteorites, dominated by the massive
Cape York Meteorite, the thirty-four ton, mostly nickel piece of an asteroid so heavy that the steel support structure beneath the space rock plunged directly into the bedrock beneath the museum itself. And then they were in the Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems.

Jendari absentmindedly fingered the pearls on her chest as Grange slowed his pace, leading her past the glass display cases teeming with brightly colored baubles from all over the world. There was a time when Jendari had been obsessed by jewels like those around her now. In her early teens, after the death of her father had left her a millionaire and the largest stockholder in one of the Middle East’s most profitable telecom companies, she had spent months aimlessly trotting the globe, buying everything and anything that turned her fancy. Even now, the dressing rooms of her various homes were cluttered with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings that would have seemed appropriate in this exhibit; maybe nothing as grand as the Star of India, the prize possession of the Hall, standing in its own room, at five hundred and sixty-three carats, the largest blue star sapphire in the world, or the Patricia Emerald, the twelve-sided, six-hundred-and-thirty-two carat gemstone—but certainly she had one of the most expensive private collections of any of her teenage peers. It wasn’t until her great-aunt, Milena Saphra, took her father’s place—not just at the head of the company but as her mentor, her mother figure, her guiding influence—that she’d realized the insignificance of such gaudy material possessions.

Since that moment, more than forty years ago, Jendari had learned that possessions, like philanthropy, needed a purpose; they had to be useful. It was the purpose, the significance, that made a thing truly beautiful.