Ringer (4 page)

Grant felt a sudden loss of blood pressure and couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t lose his balance. “OK, one more week of coffee shop. Can we leave?”

Dixie licked her lips, slowly. “Darling, they haven’t done the refugee presentation yet. Have a …
cock
tail.”

She turned and moved back toward the other guests.

Robert followed with short careful steps.

I think we need somebody very sexy for this role of Dixie. No Oscar winners.

CHAPTER

FIVE

THE SCREEN IS FILLED WITH
the picture of my jet landing at JFK, a puff of smoke from the wheels of the plane as they touch the ground.

After my meeting with Father Gomez, it was a small matter to find Robert Tyson Grant. The Web has many exposés about the sixty-five-year-old billionaire that detail his accomplishments, charitable works, and lifestyle.

Such tycoon exposés are much the same. They start by trying to impress you with a man’s wealth. Grant was worth a lot, billions. They list all the companies the tycoon owns—in this case only one, Grab-A-Lot. Then they play back some history, about the humble beginnings or the inherited fortune or family business. Robert Tyson Grant was raised by an aunt in Ohio, where as a teen he got a job in warehousing. In his twenties he started his own warehousing business, and then began an export business after that, importing from the Far East just as China began a major manufacturing boom. He flooded the U.S. market with inexpensive goods, started his own chain of stores, and the economic expansion in the States took care of the rest. He took enormous investment risks, and nothing went wrong.

Unlike Paco’s and Purity’s parents, Fate had been a loving parent to Robert Tyson Grant.

Then the exposés discuss how this person is controversial, how some people feel he is doing harm in some way. Enemies of Robert Tyson Grant were those who felt he paid his workers poorly and bled the American market of manufacturing jobs by importing so heavily from China. On the other hand, the profiles explain, Grant gave a lot of money to cancer research because his wife died from this terrible affliction. He also gave to orphans and hospitals for children. So in the end, the article leaves it up to the reader to decide if the filthy rich person we have been reading about is a good guy or a bad guy.

Ah, but Robert Tyson Grant’s exposés were different from those of other titans of industry in one important way.

Purity Grant.

As the topic of countless tabloid features for her many exploits—both with and without drugs and alcohol, both with and without the police, both with and without the various unworthy men—the exposés could not help but focus on her relationship with her father, and his inability to control his spoiled brat daughter.

On the flight to New York, I read a number of these magazine articles that I had printed out to while away the hours among the clouds. I also had some on Purity herself.

I have not fathered a child, so I could not fully appreciate the dismay Robert Tyson Grant felt over the misadventures of his stepdaughter. On the other hand, I could appreciate Purity’s body and wanton ways. I’m sure this sounds bad of me, to speculate on what it would be like to actually meet Purity Grant, and whether she would appreciate my charms. Still, I must be brutally honest: While men have many noble qualities, they are first and foremost about charming women, even speculatively, even women far too famous and exquisite for them.

And by charm I do mean
charm,
to make a woman admire you. You do not get them naked unless you charm them first. Alas, this detail escapes many men.

Under the circumstances, there was a remote chance that I might actually meet Purity, so my speculation was not entirely pathetic. I make a good first impression. I am tall, tanned, practiced, and reasonably wealthy, not a disheveled janitor freshly emerged from a boiler room. Might God grant me this little diversion as a reward for pursuing my holy mission? I looked forward to finding out just how far on my side God might be.

I departed the jet with my smart new matching black luggage on wheels, following the herd toward Customs. Mexican officials scanned my luggage and let me pass; U.S. Customs singled me out for an inspection.

The plump little Customs woman pawed through my bag. She managed not to smirk when she felt up my freezer bag of condoms. Then she fished out the gilded box containing the finger of Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra. She held it out to me.

“Please reveal the contents.”

I flashed an obliging smile, the back of my neck suddenly cool with sweat. “Of course.”

The box lid creaked open, and the agent wrinkled her nose, the hairs on her lip bristling. “What is that?”

I could only guess, but my instinct was that if I told the truth, they would confiscate the mummified finger as contraband. Permits were probably required to transport human body parts. After all, I’m sure Paco would not have put a human head in his luggage and expected to pass unmolested, so why a finger, even if it was six or seven hundred years old?

“This is a cigar.”

Her eyes met mine, looking for sincerity. “That’s a cigar?”

I nodded slowly and blinked slowly, a gesture of integrity. “Yes, a cigar.”

“Cuban?”

“Not at all. It is not even a smoking cigar.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Cigars are tobacco products.”

“Yes, of course, except this is a very old cigar, a collector’s item, not for smoking. One would sooner smoke a cigar picked off the street than this one. It is hardly really a cigar at all if it cannot be smoked. Here, smell.”

“Puh!” Her eyes crossed, and then focused on me unhappily for having made her smell something so repugnant. I feared the finger would be confiscated.

“It is the cigar of Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra, a conquistador from six hundred years ago.”

“What is the declared value?”

“Value? I have no appraisal. It is really a family heirloom and nothing more. Besides, how much could such a smelly little cigar be worth? Who would buy such a thing? It smells more like a rotting finger than a cigar, yes?”

She had a moment of indecision, but I saw part of her face relax before she waved a hand at the door to the terminal. “You can go.”

It is a beautiful thing when a bureaucrat who could make your life miserable realizes you are not worth her time.

New York. It had been a long time. You would think I would head for East Brooklyn, my old stomping ground, where I grew up. That was the last place on earth I would have gone. Brooklyn was securely part of my past, and I intended to keep it that way. No, I was going to stay in Manhattan, that shining citadel of commerce and glitz. I will tell you that although I visited Manhattan a few times when I lived in New York, I felt like a tourist when I did. Yes, even in my own city, I felt like a tourist. Manhattan was a completely different place than East Brooklyn, sophisticated and fast. I always had the feeling that I had to pretend like I knew what I was doing when I didn’t. Hailing a cab: I didn’t know if I needed to whistle or shout, and when I did I felt people look at me like I was doing it wrong. Restaurants: There was an awkward moment when I ordered tap water instead of the expensive Italian water. Sidewalks: I often felt like I was in the way, not walking fast enough, or standing in the wrong place. Revolving doors: Timing is everything.

Ah, but those apprehensive days were before the East Brooklyn caterpillar blossomed into a La Paz moth of gentry. People with money like me have special license in New York to be foreign. You get points for being exotic. So I was both excited and a little nervous about being newly exotic and back in my hometown, even if it really was my hometown only on paper.

Even I knew Manhattan hotels were mostly in midtown, in the Times Square area. If there is any place in Manhattan that makes even an exotic person nervous and out of place, it is Times Square. I do not even think I have to explain why—most people have seen this place on TV. Standing in this flickering, blinking canyon of a thousand billboards, one cannot help but feel intimidated by the prospect of having to actually read them all.

My research said nice hotels had begun to appear in many places around town, so I had reservations at a swank boutique hotel in a nice quiet neighborhood on Second Avenue in the twenties.

The lobby was exactly as it had been pictured on the Web, with frosted glass columns, plants, and free coffee service. The room was also as pictured on the Web, only much smaller. That was OK. I didn’t need a suite, even if I could afford one if I wanted to. Believe me, even though I banked a couple million just before leaving Brooklyn, it somehow did not seem like that much once I bought the hacienda in La Paz and began sinking money into fixing it up. If you throw money around at fancy hotels, next thing you know there are casinos, limos, and pricey women. Spend money like that and ill winds will blow you into desperate circumstances. I was careful with my wealth. You never know when you’re going to need it.

It was late afternoon. My plan was to go to the Grant Industries headquarters on Sixth Avenue in the Forties the next morning. You are probably wondering how I came to get an appointment with the great Robert Tyson Grant, yes? Ah. Well, I did not. I knew that if I were to try to make an appointment, a complete stranger, he would never see me. Were I Donald Trump, yes, I am sure Grant would have invited me into his palatial offices and offered me a glass of champagne and a fine cigar. I was not an idiot—I know a man like Grant only sees important people like himself. First, I would try just dropping by to see him, leave my card with a note on the back about the finger of Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra. After that, I would call and ask for an appointment. If that did not work, I would wait for him to leave his offices and intercept him on his way to his limousine.

So how would I fill the rest of the day? There was a Spanish restaurant on Twenty-third Street, El Quixote, where I felt sure I could sip a glass of Valle de Guadalupe nebbiolo.

CHAPTER

SIX

EVEN AS I WAS CHARMING
a girl named Nancy at the El Quixote bar, Robert and Dixie were on a date in Greenwich Village, a part of Manhattan that is a little more freewheeling than the Upper East Side where Grant lived. Greenwich Village was not a place where all the headwaiters and wine stewards knew him. It was not a place where men wore blazers to dinner, and women pearls. Subways were not an afterthought in Greenwich Village. “The Village” had jazz clubs, students, quaint restaurants, porn shops, and off-off-off-Broadway shows. It was a bastion of smiles, not smirks.

The birds and the bees were chirping and buzzing about Robert and Dixie’s romance. Thus they were given to youthful impulse, to the kind of abandon that would take them out of their lofty uptown circles down to where nobody knew them. To the realm of the unexpected.

Grant took Dixie to a French bistro on Waverly for dinner, and then to an Italian place on MacDougal for cappuccino and pastry. He was in gray slacks and a pullover crew with a sweater around his shoulders; she was in a festive print tiered halter dress. They were walking the streets afterward, enjoying the warm spring night and sights, when on Spring Street they passed a shop with a neon sign:
READER.

“Let’s get our palms read, Robbie!” Dixie yanked on his arm excitedly.

Robert smiled but rolled his eyes. “Come on, Dix. They’re phony as a three-dollar bill, these gypsies.”

“Poo.” She pouted playfully. “Where’s your sense of adventure? It’ll take our minds off of Purity. We were supposed to blow off some steam and relax tonight.”

“Darling, it’s a carnival act. You do not believe somebody who sits in a shop window can tell you the future, do you? If they really could tell the future, don’t you think they would work their magic on Wall Street?”

“I try to be open-minded, and so should you, you old fuddy-duddy. Relax for a change.”

“Fuddy-duddy?” He pulled her close for a kiss, but she pushed him away.

“That’s what I said:
fuddy-duddy.
Robert Tyson Grant, you are stuck in your ways.”

“Just because I do not want to pay someone money to tell us lies—”

“
Oh ho.
So it’s the money you’re worried about?” She dodged another of his attempts to kiss her.

“Come on, let’s walk up to Washington Square.”

She laughed and moved to the door of the shop. “So Robert Tyson Grant, the tycoon, is a cheap fuddy-duddy.”

“If you say so. Come on, let’s go … oh, great, here she is.”

There was a disapproving woman with dark circles under her eyes standing at the window, shaking her head at Dixie, saying something that they could not hear. The palmist was dressed in a plain olive dress, her graying hair pulled back into a bun.

She crooked a finger, beckoning them to enter her lair.

“Oh, come on, Robbie! Do something fun for a change.” Dixie pulled him into the palmist’s storefront.

“Welcome.” The palmist smiled weakly and motioned behind a curtain. “Please, come in, there is much to tell you, and little time. There is danger.”

“Danger! What danger?” Dixie looked alarmed but snuck a wink at Grant.

“Please, sit.” The palmist steadied herself on the wall, hand over her eyes. “I must feel for a better picture of what has unfolded, and what will be.”

Grant rolled his eyes. “Dix, come on, let’s go!”

The palmist grabbed his hand. “My name is Helena, and I know why that ring is so important to you.” He stared down into Helena’s pale eyes nesting under dark eyebrows:
How on earth did she know about the ring?

She did not, of course, know anything more than that the ring was the only piece of jewelry he wore, and that men only wear rings that mean something to them. It was clearly not a class ring from his college, and the design did not look new, so it must be old. When she clasped his hand she took the opportunity to inspect the ring as closely as possible. Now by the look on Grant’s face she knew the ring was very important to him indeed. This is what gypsies call a “hit”—they examine their client’s clothes, habits, face, jewelry, age, marital status. Then they make educated guesses and ask questions in the form of statements, trying to pin down something important about a subject’s life. They often do not find that something right away. The better ones do. Helena was better. This was why she had a shop on Spring Street and not on Flatbush Avenue.