Flawless (8 page)

B
ROGAN
O’D
ONNELL PUT
his head back and smiled contentedly as the girl beneath his desk began unzipping his fly.

His office was on the thirty-third—penthouse—floor of an all-glass block on Wall Street, with breathtaking views across the water to Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and beyond. Today the city had been transformed into a magical snowscape, an urban Narnia sparkling beneath a clear, lapis-blue January sky. Gazing out his floor-to-ceiling window, Brogan felt like the emperor of a great kingdom, surveying his lands. Life didn’t get a whole lot better than this.

“Slower,” he murmured, reaching down and entwining his fingers in the girl’s hair so he could pull her head back and forward in the rhythm that he wanted. She was one of Premiere New York’s more recent signings, a Ukrainian redhead with legs like a camel and a quirky, striking face most notable for its full, wide mouth, an oral replica of the Lincoln Tunnel. Since founding the modeling agency as a sideline business eight years ago, Brogan had consistently used it as a private brothel, taking girls for himself when he wanted to and occasionally offering them to friends and business associates who had earned his particular favor. There was always the odd girl who refused his advances. Most model bosses would have fired them, but Brogan had
learned long ago that it paid to keep one’s friends close and enemies closer, and never doled out retribution. There were plenty of new girls willing to oblige him, many of them from backgrounds of desperate poverty, like Dascha. From the skillful, enthusiastic way she was working her tongue up and down his cock now, cupping his balls in her hands as she licked and sucked, it was clear she was no novice at pleasuring her bosses, or any man who might be able to offer her some advancement.

“Oh, God that’s good,” he moaned, slowing her pace still further to try to prolong his enjoyment. Aware that he was dangerously close to coming, he tried to turn his mind to other things, like tonight’s big party at the new Tiffany store on Madison Avenue. All the great and the good of the diamond fraternity would be there—dealers, cutters, designers, independent mine owners like him, and of course the cartels. Privately, Brogan found these sorts of events rather a bore. He was always getting collared by some diamond-crazed crone or other hoping to cut a private deal, or by journalists asking tiresome questions about conditions in his mines. But he had to go tonight. One of the top De Beers executives was in town, and however successful one became in the diamond business, one could never afford to snub De Beers. Not even the great Brogan O’Donnell was above a little schmoozing.

Still, he hoped the store’s PR people would keep the worst of the journalists at bay. Recently, the whole “blood diamond” controversy seemed to have exploded into the national consciousness to a worrying degree. First there was that god-awful film, with Leo DiCaprio running around Sierra Leone with some kaffir, repenting of his sins as a smuggler. Then came a series of tiresome celebrity campaigns railing against De Beers and their chief rival, Cuypers, for knowingly allowing stones from war-torn countries onto the mass market.

The whole thing irritated him intensely. What did these people expect? There would never be an Africa without war; never.
As far as Brogan was concerned—and he considered himself well informed on the subject, having operated on the continent for more than a decade—most African blacks were little more than savages, corrupt to the core and utterly undeserving of the sympathy lavished on them by bleeding-heart Hollywood democrats. So what if they spent their diamond money on guns? Let them fuck up their own lives if they wanted to. Nobody was forcing them to do it, least of all the buyers paying vitally needed hard currency for their stones.

About two years ago things had gotten so bad that he’d decided to pull O’Donnell out of Africa altogether and focus on his Russian mines. But now these fucking parasite journalists were starting to ask questions about his safety record and workers’ rights in Siberia too! It was ridiculous. He’d even had to go on record with the BBC, defending the company’s practices in their Yakutian mines. A few months ago, no one outside the industry had ever heard of Yakutia, but now suddenly every liberal eco-worrier and their dog wanted to sponsor a miner there.

“Everything OK, Mr. O’Donnell? You want I’m doing something different?” The girl looked up from between his legs, her head cocked to one side like a curious dog. She seemed bewildered by his softening erection and could tell that something was wrong.

Brogan looked down at her and immediately felt himself hardening again. Her pink lipstick was smudged around her glorious, overwide lips, and her chin glistened with saliva and the sweat of her efforts. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more wantonly desirable.

“Get up here,” he said, smiling. “I want to fuck you.”

Pushing back his chair so she could climb out of her cramped hiding place, he helped her to her feet, then turned her around and bent her over the desk. Yanking down her True Religion jeans—she was so skinny, he didn’t even need to undo them but could pull them right off—and cheap Victoria’s Secret panties,
he drove himself into her, releasing all his pent-up anger and aggression with every thrust.

Dascha oohed and aahed obediently, but it couldn’t have been much of a pleasure ride for her; it was over so quickly. Once he’d come, he lay slumped over her for a moment, his heavyset, bulldog body pressing down on her fragile frame like a paperweight on a flower. Then he withdrew, wiping himself with a tissue from the box on the desk and pulling up his pants while she did the same.

“If you want some more, I can wait,” she said helpfully, reaching into her purse for face wipes and makeup, reapplying her lipstick as if nothing of any importance had just happened. “I don’t have any jobs this afternoon.”

Brogan smiled. “No, no, that was fine,” he said. “But I appreciate you coming by. I can tell you’re going to be a great asset to Premiere.”

Once she’d gone, his mind turned quickly back to tonight’s party. Apart from the De Beers and Cuypers guys, there were a number of other people he wanted to see. Nothing gave Brogan quite the same thrill as crushing a business rival, and there was one particular individual, one of his American competitors in Russia, whose company he’d recently had the pleasure of annihilating, who was rumored to be coming tonight. Having grown up dirt-poor himself, a fighter who’d worked hard and played dirty for every cent he’d ever made, Brogan had never let go of the ruthlessness that had made him such a rich man. The diamond business was notoriously clubby. Having no family name, no connections, and, crucially, being a gentile, had put him at a hell of a disadvantage in his early years as a trader and smuggler before he hit the big time buying up cheap, poorly managed mines in Congo and Zaire. By the time he moved into South Africa, and later Russia, he was already a wealthy man, and doors that were once locked to him had begun, slowly, grudgingly, to open. But he’d got to where he was without asking anything of anybody. If people wanted to try and paint him as the Big Bad Capitalist Wolf now, that
was their problem. In his own mind, he was the living embodiment of the American dream, and he dismissed all criticism of himself and his company as straightforward envy.

“Sir?” The voice of his secretary, the coolly efficient Rose, drifted over the intercom on his desk.

He hit speaker. “Yes. What is it?”

“It’s Mrs. O’Donnell on line one. Are you available to take the call?”

Brogan thought about it for a second. “No. Tell her I’m in a meeting, will you, and I’ll call her back in about ten minutes? I need some time to get my head together. She’s in rather a fragile state at the moment.”

“Will do,” said Rose, and the line went dead.

Walking over to the window, looking out at the snow sparkling like a billion tiny diamonds in the dazzling winter sun, he thought about his wife, Diana. He knew, or thought he knew, what this call would be about: another early miscarriage. They were on their fourth cycle of IVF—his sperm apparently preferred attacking one another to racing toward the egg, plus Diana had some sort of cysts that made the whole thing difficult on her end—and the specialist had already told them on Monday that it wasn’t looking good. Brogan himself couldn’t have cared less about children. He’d never much liked other people’s, and he already had a business empire to leave to posterity. But he knew Diana felt utterly bereft without them, and he wanted to make things right for her.

Despite his workaholism, serial infidelities, and complete lack of remorse, in his own way Brogan did love his wife. Diana was precious to him, like a rare bird that he daren’t release or even stroke for fear of damaging it in some way, but which he cherished from a distance. Born into a well-off, stable family from Connecticut, she was everything that he wasn’t: educated, gentle, secure in herself in a quiet, unassuming sort of way. Making love to her wasn’t exciting in the way that
screwing young models was exciting. It was more like sticking your scalded hand into cool water—a sort of blissful relief. Congenitally incapable of showing affection in any normal, expected ways, he tried to express his love by showering her with diamonds, real estate, and other expensive, though not necessarily romantic, gifts. When she failed to react with the hoped-for enthusiasm, he withdrew further, deepening the already vast divide between them. Having a child, he knew, would be the one sure way to bridge that divide, a gift for which she would remain slavishly and everlastingly grateful. But infertility was the one problem in his life that money alone couldn’t solve. He’d already paid top dollar for the best IVF specialists in the world, but so far nothing seemed to be working, leaving Diana increasingly desperate and Brogan feeling furious and impotent in more ways than one.

He did feel sorry for his wife. But he also hoped she wasn’t going to use this latest setback, if she was bleeding again, as an excuse to bow out of tonight’s party at Tiffany. Wives were expected at these events. He needed her there, looking stylish and making intelligent, ladylike conversation with Mrs. De Beers and Mrs. Cuypers.

If the IVF had fucked up, they could always try again.

Meanwhile, across town in Greenwich Village, Nancy and Scarlett were up in one of the guest bedrooms of Nancy’s parents’ palatial brownstone, trying on outfits for tonight.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Scarlett, standing in front of the full-length mirror in her bra and underwear. “I go to so many of these things nowadays, but I’m still never sure how to pitch it. Should I go for sober businesswoman?” She held up a severe, black Calvin Klein suit with a killer pencil skirt.

“Very ‘Angelina at the UN,’” said Nancy.

“Or wild, artistic genius?” Pulling her newest acquisition, a tiered, multicolored Marchesa gypsy skirt, out of its bag, Scarlett held it to her waist and twirled around and around.

“I’d go for the skirt,” said Nancy, looking at her friend’s flawless model figure with good-natured envy. “Everyone in New York lives in black; you’ll stand out more in color. Besides, I can’t wear my red flamenco number if you turn up dressed all CNN.”

Nancy Lorriman and Scarlett Drummond Murray had been firm friends since the age of thirteen, when Nancy had arrived at St. Clement’s Girls’ Boarding School in Inverness, shivering like a polar explorer in her lightweight American clothes and wondering if she’d landed on the set of a
Munsters
remake, and Scarlett had taken her under her wing. Physically, they were as different as different could be, with blonde, curvy Nancy standing almost a foot shorter than Scarlett, who as a teenager was as tall, pale, and skinny as an unripe stick of asparagus. But they immediately recognized one another as kindred spirits—bright, independent-minded, romantic, and, in Nancy’s case particularly, harboring a strong rebellious streak.

Nancy’s father had sent her to St. Clement’s on a whim, having seen the school advertised in the back of a magazine and developed a notion that Scotland was a land of beauty and mystery in which his daughter couldn’t fail to blossom. The fact that the school itself looked like Cinderella’s castle had been an added bonus, and besides, he was running out of options in New York, where Nancy had already been expelled from two schools and was hardly being welcomed with open arms by others.