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.)