Fortunately for those of us who have a conscience, delusions of invulnerability is a disease most criminals suffer from.
The most tragic thing about the career of Pablo Escobar was greed—not his personal greed; that was only to be expected. It was the greed of Colombia’s military and political leaders that permitted him to succeed. Colombia is a country of nearly forty million people and has a significant military force. Escobar kept up a reign of terror for over a decade because so many of the nation’s leaders were taking his plata.
PROPHETIC
“When Peregrine Pollen suggested that Harold Robbins might be tempted to set one of his sagas of power, sex, and money at Sotheby’s, Peter Wilson [Chairman of Sotheby’s] was enthralled.
‘Tell him we’ll give complete facilities,’ he said, ‘and all his expenses paid.’
Wilson’s flash side was fascinated by the opulent vulgarity of The Carpetbaggers.”
Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class, by Robert Lacey
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I railed against the depressing thought but it punched back. I had had it all, but now I was on the run from killers and the police, stuck in traffic as the Jersey-bound lanes of the George Washington Bridge turned into a parking lot. My gutless rental car was boxed in between a tanker truck that blew lung-blackening smoke back at me, a dangerously shaky, overloaded car carrier on one side and a Bekins moving van on the other. Another behemoth was behind me, but all I could make out was a grill the size of a wall with a silver bulldog glaring down.
Before I maneuvered out from behind the Bekins van, I saw that it had a California license plate. Jesus … what I would give to be able to crawl into the back of that van and snuggle between mattresses as it headed for the West Coast—or anywhere but here.
Behind me was Manhattan, my penthouse with a park view and a lifestyle I might never see again. A thirtysomething woman with ambition and drive, I had ten good career years out of grad school with a master’s in art history. Avoiding the safety net of academia, I had jumped with both feet into the cutthroat world where the superrich pay tens of millions for “priceless” art and antiquities.
What a wake-up call that was about human nature for a girl from backwater Ohio. That writer who said the rich were different didn’t go far enough—the superrich were way different, far out. They lived in a rarified atmosphere of privilege, but often bored and eager for stimulation. And for reinforcement of their own accomplishments. It’s hard to keep your ego swollen when you’ve never had to do anything but eat, breathe, shit, and sleep.
Buying something that no one else could possess was a way for them to flex muscles. The rarer, the more desirable. That turned the world of art into a playground—and battleground—for billionaires, an atmosphere even more ruthless than owning a champion race horse or a sports team. Money and ego have turned the quest for art into a ruthless business in which the superrich battled to possess the rarest and most beautiful objets d’art on Earth. Prices paid were stratospheric. The hundred- million-dollar mark for a painting by an artist most people would not recognize the name of had long since been surpassed.
When billionaire greed and egos collide, anything goes, at any price. And where mere money won’t do the job, drugs, sex, and murder are used.
Yes, I saw some things a woman shouldn’t see. Maybe I even did a few things a woman shouldn’t do. Hard lessons. The Greeks thought highly of the concept of pathos-mathos—gaining wisdom through suffering. I wish to hell I’d gained insights with a little less damage to my life. If I only knew then what I knew now …
I sighed and melted down a little more in the seat. I was tired, beat, soul-weary. Madison, you really know how to enjoy yourself.
Madison Dupre. That’s my name. My friends call me Maddy. But right now I had some openings on my list of friends.
* * *
LOST IN THOUGHT, gazing blankly as traffic moved, I got a blast from the bulldog truck’s horn behind me and almost jumped out of the seat. I pressed the gas, sending the cheap little import surging a few dozen feet before I had to hit the brakes again to keep from rear-ending the tanker truck in front of me. Tight-jawed, I dropped my chin to my chest and told myself to stay calm. The grating horn had scorched my frayed nerves and made my heart pound like a jackhammer.
I was usually a calm person but I hated traffic, hated big trucks, and hated to be stuck in traffic with big trucks, breathing in their stinking fumes … when I desperately had to flee the city. My life was on the line and I was getting more agitated as the traffic slugged along.
I checked my rearview mirror as that monster rig closed in again until I could see only the massive front grille. If I was in my expensive sports car, I would have flipped him the bird despite constant reminders to myself not to antagonize anyone because road rage created roadkill. Deal with it. But being hemmed in gave me the sick feeling in my stomach that I was in a prison cell. I had already briefly experienced a jail cell at the federal detention center and that was enough for a lifetime.
I turned on the radio to hear traffic reports on the threes.
“Forty-five-minute delay for the GW out to Jersey.”
I banged my hands on the steering wheel. I already knew it—hell, I was stuck in it, but hearing it made it worse. It took away hope.
Okay, think positive. Forty-five minutes wasn’t so bad. It could be worse. The bridge could be closed even longer for an accident, bridge maintenance, someone being murdered …
The sick feeling in my stomach started again. They wouldn’t try anything in front of hundreds of witnesses. I was sure of that. But not that sure. Only one thing was for certain: If they were behind me, they were stuck, too.
Get a hold of yourself, girl. My nerves were on edge, and crawling in this stop-and-go traffic didn’t help the situation; it just fueled my frustration and paranoia.
I thought about my predicament as I sat in the stalled traffic. My life was in ruins, the police were looking for me, and on the seat beside me was something “priceless” that someone wanted very badly, enough to kill for it. And here I was stuck in traffic on the world’s busiest bridge.
I had left my $85,000 XK Jaguar parked in a monthly garage, my $10,000-a-month penthouse, my designer wardrobe, and everything else I’d worked for back in the city to run from imminent danger. I hadn’t taken my Jag because I figured I’d be less noticeable in a rental car. They probably also knew where the car was garaged. At least that was my theory.
The traffic started moving. I started to zip out of my lane and in front of the moving van, but my economy rental car didn’t have enough horses. Another car zipped into the coveted space.
My mind went back to my problems. How could have I gotten myself in such a mess? I was basically an honest person, never involved in any trouble before. Now I’d gotten myself into trouble with a capital T. I had made a deal with the devil and he was coming to collect when I had only wanted to right a wrong.
Naïve, that’s what I’d been. I thought ten years of big city and bright lights had made me as tough as the crowd I ran with, but the small town in me came percolating out when I saw greed that couldn’t be satisfied with less than murder.
Another opportunity to change lanes arose and I pressed hard on the gas pedal. My Jag would have compressed me back into the seat with g-force but this car had the surge of a tortoise. The brakes of the car carrier made a horrible rusty squeal as the big rig rattled and shuddered to a stop behind me. At least the driver didn’t lay on the horn.
I rolled down the window a few inches and stuck my hand out to wave “thanks for letting me in.” When I checked my side-view mirror I saw his hand come out with his prominent third finger extended in my direction.
I didn’t seem to be able to please anyone.
* * *
OFF THE GW bridge and on my way through Newark, I was exhausted and tired of traffic and trucks. I needed to get off the road for a while, get some rest, clear my head, and figure a way out of the mess. Only
early evening, but I was too mentally drained to keep the car going.
A motel sign in the distance advertised “easy access” and “cheap hourly rates.” Hourly rates? Perfect. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what that meant. Nobody would think to look for me at an “adult” motel.
The motel was close to the freeway exit. It looked pretty much like what could be expected from the neon sign—two stories of tacky pink caked on like too much powder on a whore.
I took one look at the place and shook my head. Oh, yes, how the mighty have fallen.…
I was beginning to sound like a broken record even to myself.
Walking into the lobby confirmed that the motel was a sleazy dive for paid quickies, but I thought that a place that accommodated prostitutes and rented porn movies wouldn’t be the kind of place to look for someone who lived in the Museum Mile area with a view of Central Park.
After I paid for the room, ignoring the lecherous look from the clerk and the hint that I should “tip him” if I planned to use my room for “business purposes,” I walked past a condom machine, up the wood steps, and down the outside corridor to my room. I had the last room on the end, the one closest to the freeway. No surprise that the room reeked of cigarettes and store-bought sex. Both were popular vices.
I had asked for a second-floor room, as I always did after reading that it was a safer bet than a ground-floor motel room for a woman traveling alone. After I double-locked the door and wedged a chair under the door handle, I checked the big front sliding glass window. Unlatched, of course. I locked it.
The bedspread smelled as if it hadn’t had sex washed off in a while, so I took it off and put my long coat on top of the bed sheets to lie on it. The sheets were the one thing in the room that got periodically washed, but I still didn’t plan to use them; they rented the room by the hour, but that didn’t mean they changed the bed sheets by the hour.
For a long time I half-sat, half-lay on the bed and stared up at brown water stains on the cottage cheese ceiling, thinking how capricious life was. One minute everything in your life is fine and the next minute you’re roadkill. Life just wasn’t fair sometimes. Bad things are supposed to happen to bad people, not good people. And I was not a bad person. At least, not that bad.
I closed my eyes but couldn’t fall asleep—I had company. The sounds of their real and faked lust came through the common wall: the excited grunts of a john and the false cries of a whore. Naturally, the walls were paper thin.
The sound effects got more intense and their bed rocked against the wall with a frantic rhythm: Grunt-bang-moan … grunt-bang-moan. The woman’s moans sounded as sincere as a sermon in a whorehouse.
Please God, make them climax. I resisted the impulse to pound on the wall and yell to the woman, Goddamnit, fake your orgasm and get it over with.
My body was shaking but it wasn’t due to the vibration from the trucks that rumbled by or my neighbors’ frenetic fury. Fear and disgust made me tremble. I had really screwed up my life … or, more accurately, someone else had screwed it up for me. I had just been a willing victim.
Flickering flashes from the tacky neon motel sign in the parking lot passed through the dirty window and dusty sheers to give life to the mask on the dresser across the room.
As I stared at the mask I sensed it was staring back. The golden death mask of a Babylonian queen from three thousand years ago, it was a valuable museum piece—over $50 million valuable.
After the greatest warrior-queen of antiquity died, the mask was prepared by taking a mold of the queen’s face. Over the centuries, it had gained repute as a harbinger of misfortune to the possessor. Strangely, that drove up its value.
People attached value to evil: The Hope Diamond rests in the Smithsonian not only for its size, but because of the bad luck—and death—it brought to its possessors. Hell, Hollywood made a cottage industry out of revenging mummies after archeologist Howard Carter broke into King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s and eleven people connected with the project had died of unnatural causes within a period of five years.
The vibrant mask staring at me from the dresser also carried a legacy of murder and lust across the millenniums. I had grown to hate it.
I wasn’t sure how long I gazed at the cursed mask before I finally closed my eyes. But my sleep was interrupted by a nightmare.
I dreamed I was asleep on an iron cot in the corner of a large room that had cold, bare, gray concrete walls. My cell phone started to ring, and I fumbled around on the cot trying to find the little phone in the layers of brown Army blankets. A man suddenly appeared beside me in the darkness. I didn’t recognize him.
He bent down and said in a whisper, “You shouldn’t be in here alone.”
The irritating cell phone kept ringing. Why couldn’t I find it?
Finally, my brain registered that my cell phone was actually ringing in the room. I sat up. Coming out of a deep sleep with a sense of dread, I looked around for the stranger, but I was alone. The dream seemed so real.
I got up and checked the door and the window.
My cell phone started ringing again. I followed the sound to my handbag on the table. As I fumbled with the handbag, the phone fell on the floor and bounced under the bed. I got down on my hand and knees in the dark to retrieve it. By the time I got the phone in hand and flipped it open, the ringing had stopped and the face plate registered 1 MISSED CALL.
I hesitated to check my voice mail, wondering if it was a trick to trace my location. Curiosity got the better of me. I went ahead and accessed it. The message was simple. A man’s voice said, “Maddy, it’s me. I’ll catch you later.”
I recognized the voice. It raised the short hairs on my soul.
I hit the repeat key to listen to it again—and again.
I couldn’t understand how he had called me.
He was dead.
FORGE BOOKS BY HAROLD ROBBINS
The Betrayers (with Junius Podrug)
Blood Royal (with Junius Podrug)
The Carpetbaggers
The Devil to Pay (with Junius Podrug)
Heat of Passion
The Looters (with Junius Podrug)
Never Enough
Never Leave Me
The Predators
The Secret
Sin City
“Robbins’s dialogue is moving.… His people have the warmth of life.”
—The New york Times
“Robbins has the ability to hold his readers absorbed.”
—Chicago Tribune
“His characters are compelling, his dialogue is dramatic, and his style is simple and straightforward.”
—Los Angeles Times
“International settings … steamy sex scenes.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Betrayers
“Robbins’s literary legacy remains very much alive, and his thousands of fans should experience a pleasant sense of déjà vu as they race through this latest installment.”
—Publishers Weekly on Heat of Passion
“Robbins’s sixth posthumous novel finds new cowriter Podrug outwriting the hormonal ghost.… Podrug’s strong, crisp style excels.”
—Kirkus Reviews on The Betrayers
“Robbins fans will not be disappointed in this latest book.”
—Booklist on The Betrayers
“Splendid pulp … stunningly well-written.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Heat of Passion
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE DEVIL TO PAY
Copyright © 2006 by Jann Robbins
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5008-4
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5008-4
First Edition: September 2006
First Mass Market Edition: September 2007
eISBN 9781466833746
First eBook edition: November 2012
The Devil to Pay Page 30