Trump Tower (38 page)

Greg looked again at Alicia.

“Stop,” she said.

When the meeting ended, Alicia sat down to start writing her intros to the stories that were, at least preliminarily, in the running order.

Then an e-mail arrived from Greg. “Dear Little Goody Two-Shoes, where's the killer instinct? Obviously you were never a Marine.” He signed it, “Semper Fi.”

She looked across the newsroom at him. He was staring at her, grinning, as if he was imploring her one more time to do the gig.

Smiling, she wrote back, “Obviously you never won a prize in the seventh grade for selling the most boxes of mint chocolate cookies.” She signed it “Respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout. XXX”

C
ARSON HAD HOPED
to spend the rest of the day preparing for Japan, but Tony Arcarro had other ideas. “I need you to help with the BNP Paribas deal.”

That took several hours.

Then Mesumi came in gushing, “Thank you. Wow. You are the best. My doorman called to tell me about the delivery. I had him read me the note. Carson . . . thank you.”

“You're welcome. Drink it in good health.”

“The wine looks fabulous. But . . . three cases of Cel-Ray Tonic? I mean, I love it but . . . seriously, what am I supposed to do with so much?”

Carson suggested, “Hope Ethan Pearlman gets a divorce?”

Around lunchtime, he thought about going to the gym, but before he could get away, Milt McKeever called. “We hooked a fish with the twenty-five. Done at forty.”

“Really? There's someone out there who wants Shigetada shares?”

“Yeah, but I don't know who yet. I'll call you as soon as I find out.”

Carson informed Arcarro, “One of the haystacks turned up.”

“Got a name?”

“Not yet. McKeever put twenty-five in a dark pool and it got took.”

“Twenty-five.” Arcarro thought out loud. “Small potatoes. That's a bottom feeder who's looking to acquire a stake. You find out who and you'll find more shares.”

Carson asked his partner, “Be honest . . . isn't this more fun than working for a living?”

“Working for a living, yes. But we had better groupies in tennis.”

“I
'm gonna murder you . . .” he screamed over the music blaring on the fifteen speakers spread out all over the apartment.

The ocelot tore out of Ricky's bedroom.

“. . . bloody fucking cat . . .” He chased after it, racing into the living room, wearing nothing but his underpants and his ankle bracelet.

“Put that down,” screamed a young woman he'd been sleeping with.

“Come here you fucking miserable cat . . .” He was carrying a meat cleaver.

“Can you turn down that fucking music?” Shouted some guy standing in the hallway, in front of the third bedroom, wearing nothing but an undershirt.

“That fucking music,” Ricky yelled back at him, “pays the fucking bills. And who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“Gimme that.” The young woman, who was wearing nothing but a pair of Ricky's underpants, tried to grab the meat cleaver.

“I'm Hughie . . . Nessie's bloke.”

He demanded, “Who's Nessie? And where are your strides?”

Suddenly the ocelot darted out from behind one of the couches, jumped over a chair, and ran into the kitchen.

“. . . fucking gonna kill you,” Ricky screamed at the animal.

“I said I'm Nessie's bloke.”

“I heard you the first time.” Ricky stopped in the middle of the living room where couch cushions were on the floor, ripped to shreds by the ocelot's claws. “So who the fuck is Nessie?”

“The Loch Ness fucking monster,” he answered, went back into the bedroom and slammed the door shut.

“Give me that cleaver.” The young woman grabbed at it again.

Ricky went into the kitchen.

Garbage was spilled all over the floor where the animal had been looking for food.

“Come here you miserable fucking . . .”

The animal jumped onto the sink, pushing dishes from the counter and sending them crashing to the floor.

Ricky screamed, “You're gonna be stuffed and turned into a couch pillow . . .”

The woman screamed, “Ricky, give me that cleaver.”

Now the ocelot hissed at Ricky and bared its teeth, and when he stepped back, the animal darted off the counter, ran right through Ricky's legs and back into the living room.

“What's all the bloody noise?” Someone shouted. “Fuck me, it's a lion.”

Ricky came out of the kitchen to find a young guy standing there, looking very much like the first guy, and also wearing nothing but an undershirt.

He demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

“I'm Jules.”

“Yeah, well,” Ricky pointed, “your jewels are hanging kinda low.”

The woman in the underpants stared.

Jules wasn't at all fazed. “Is that a baby tiger?”

“Where did it go?” Ricky wanted to know.

“I don't know. It ran past me . . .”

That's when there was a horrific scream from Joey's bedroom. A woman yelled, “Help . . . help . . . help . . .”

“Must have gone that way,” Jules pointed toward the bedroom.

Ricky ran down the hall to Joey's bedroom, with the woman and Jules following, where they found a very chubby redhead standing nude on the bed, trembling with fright and screaming, “Help . . . help . . .”

“Oy,” Ricky demanded, “who the fuck are you?”

Now someone was ringing the doorbell.

The chubby woman kept on screaming, “Help . . . help . . . help . . .”

“And who the fuck is that?” Ricky asked the woman he'd been sleeping with.

“How should I know?” she protested.

The bell rang again.

“Bloody hell,” he said, staring at the chubby redhead.

“Ain't you gonna answer it?” Jules asked.

Ricky went to the door. “What?”

A very young woman was standing there.

Ricky had no idea who she was. “Who the fuck are you?”

The young woman stared at Ricky in his underpants, hoisting a meat cleaver, and seemed too shocked to say anything.

“Hullo?” He said to her, “Anyone home?”

Looking past him, she saw the woman wearing Ricky's underpants and nothing else, and Jules wearing an undershirt and nothing else.

Somehow she managed to say, “Joey . . . is Joey here?”

“Joey? Ah . . .” Ricky turned to ask the other two, “Anyone seen Joey?”

They said no, just as Hughie came into the living room, still wearing nothing but an undershirt. “If you can't turn the fucking music down, mate . . .”

Ricky stared at Hughie, then at Jules, then decided, “You're fucking twins.”

Hughie answered, “And you're Sherlock fucking Holmes.”

Turning back to the young woman in the doorway, Ricky said, “No, luv, sorry. Joey's not here.” Then he wondered, “Can I tell him who's been looking for him?”

Suddenly, the ocelot shot out the door and into the hallway.

The young woman screamed in fright.

“Bugger me,” Ricky yelled, then asked, “So who are you?”

She only just managed to say, “My name is Amvi.”

“W
ait till you see this,” Tony Gallicano said.

“Oh . . . hi . . . good morning.” Antonia was surprised to find her boss in this early and, instead of going into her own office, she walked straight into his. “See what?”

He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, reading a report in a thick-bound notebook. He pointed to the wide-screen television hanging on the wall of his office, then pushed the clicker. “Watch the right side of the screen . . . there in the corner.”

It was the CCTV footage of Katarina Essenbach throwing her husband out of the Tower in his underwear.

“Who is that?” Antonia stood there—her shoes in a plastic shopping bag in one hand, her coffee in the other—staring at the screen as the cameras followed the man in his underwear down the elevator, outside, and into a taxi.

“Apparently he's married to Mrs. Essenbach . . . you know . . . the woman in the Tower.”

“Sheena of the jungle?”

“The wannabe jungle lady. Not going to happen.”

Antonia remembered. “The meeting was last night.”

“Residents voted no, as we always knew they would.” He clicked off the television. “Unanimous. She never stood a chance. Pierre Belasco went to tell
her that she'd been turned down, and she gave him hell. Then she gave her husband hell.”

“Why?”

“Considering the number of husbands she's had, I suspect that's what she does?”

“No, I meant why Pierre? What's it got to do with him?”

“She claims he promised to get the residents to agree.”

“He made her a promise?”

“Of course not. She's lying. But that doesn't change the fact that she could cause trouble. That's what liars usually do.”

“That's terrible.” She made a point of telling Gallicano, “I adore Pierre, and I'm on his side one hundred percent.”

He pointed to some papers on his desk. “He was pretty upset and e-mailed his version of events late last night, right after she confronted him. The lawyers are handling it. You can read it if you want.”

“The lawyers . . .” She put her coffee on his desk and reached for the papers. “Could I read this in my office? I'll get it back to you. I'd like to change out of my running shoes . . .”

“Sure,” he said.

She reached for Belasco's report. “Sounds like Mrs. Essenbach is exactly the sort of person we need to avoid.”

“The boss can't stand her. Never liked her since the day he met her. She's a troublemaker.”

“How interesting.” Antonia smiled politely. “How very interesting.”

Gallicano went back to the file he was reading.

Antonia went to her office.

As she took off her running shoes, she read Belasco's e-mail. Then she put on her heels, saw that Gallicano was still engrossed in what he was reading, and quickly took the report down the hallway to make a photocopy. She dropped it on her desk, then returned the original to Gallicano.

“The woman sounds like a nutcase.”

He nodded, “Certainly does,” then went back to reading.

In her own office, she thought about shutting her door but decided that might look odd because no one on the floor ever closed their door. Instead, she angled her computer in such a way that no one coming into the room could see what she was looking at.

Googling “Katarina Essenbach,” she sorted through a couple of dozen links, reading all the references, especially about the woman's various marriages and the lawsuits against her plastic surgeons.

Antonia sent the links she wanted to save to her
jerseyhot1983
address, quickly changed back to her homepage, and deleted her “browser history”
files, so that nobody could see what she'd been Googling. She also deleted her sent e-mail files, in case someone looked to see where she'd been e-mailing.

She could study everything better at home tonight.

Now she wondered where else could she find out more about Mrs. Essenbach.

There was a specialist database the company used for top executive background checks, except she couldn't recall what the name of it was. It had something to do with dancing.

She knew that Tony would know, but she couldn't ask without him wondering why.

So she went back to Google and this time did searches for “background check” and “corporate intelligence” and “executive background intelligence.” But none of the links that came up sounded familiar or had anything to do with dancing.

Short of asking Tony, she thought about logging into someone's classified personnel file—she guessed that the data mining service would be referenced there—but she worried that the log-in would pop up as an unauthorized access request, and someone like Bill Riordan would start asking questions.

Bill Riordan
, she thought.

If Antonia beats around the bush with him, he'll suspect something. So why doesn't Antonia simply ask him outright?

She dialed his extension, got his voice mail and his beeper number, then dialed that. She left her number, and he rang back right away.

“Sorry to bother you but my sister phoned me . . .” She thought that sounded pretty good. “The company she works for is looking for one of those firms that does top-of-the-line background checks on senior executives. They're hiring, and she asked me if I knew of one, and I said I'd ask you who we used?”