“Hmmm,” Jack Starr said, chewing pensively. “Smells fishy.”
“It does, right?”
“Yes, but—” Jack stopped. He looked at the ceiling, his legs dangling in the air as the desk supported his fat executive ass. “It’s strange. Your new girlfriend looks so much like a girlfriend I had in my thirties. I noticed that as soon as I saw her. Maybe... maybe that’s why I followed her. Really took me down memory lane.”
“Do you think so?”
Jack gave me a puzzled look.
“Of course I think so. Why would you doubt that? You were like seven when I dated that woman.”
“Oh, it’s only that... she looks a bit like Rhonda, too, I guess.”
Jack burst out in a hearty laugh.
“What? She looks nothing like Rhonda. You’re losing it, champ.” Then he softened his tone. “Ace, it’s been years. You’ve been fucking bitch after bitch nonstop, and never, not even once, did you care about any of those women. I’m sure you never looked at a woman like you looked at that Russian girl last night. Not even Rhonda, for sure. So won’t you take the risk? What happened to good old Ace?”
If he were any other person, I’d have smacked him unconscious and fired him while he was sleeping on the floor. But Jack Starr was my right hand, and for good reason. Besides being my friend, I completely trusted his judgement, and in my experience, he was almost always right.
He was certainly right this time. He had seen through my cocky attitude and noticed that the foreigner had left me in awe. It was not the time for being in awe, with a war coming all across the United States, but there it was: I had fallen under the spell of her big dark eyes.
I knew I should just forget her. But I just couldn’t.
“Also, you were the one who mentioned Little Vegas to her,” Jack continued. “What were you thinking? You really slipped up, man.”
She made me slip up. She, and her eyes. Too dangerous.
“I did,” I admitted. “And I need to point out that it was Harlan who tried to tell me that I was fucking up. You just sat there smiling like a moron. And then, while Harlan took care of the cheater and cleaned up the mess, you compounded my slip up by going for her, and now she’s gonna come here. She must be finding the flowers and the card right now as we speak. What am I going to tell her, Jack?”
He looked at me with something that looked a bit like pity, grabbed a third almond-stuffed olive, started chewing it, and spoke again.
“And now you’ll be insecure around a woman. I truly have heard everything.”
He jumped down to the floor and walked away. I threw an olive at him, but he was quicker and it smashed on the closed door.
Fucking asshole.
6. THE NOTE
VAN
I slept all night and morning and then a bit more. I woke up with a terrible headache and a fuzzy recollection of the previous day. I had cried, I had drunk a lot, and I had walked into some kind of secret gambling operation; I had met this dangerous guy who I had found immediately alluring. But I couldn’t even remember his face at first. What I remembered of him was his air of strength and self-assuredness, his aura of raw power and dominion over anything that came close to him, but his physical characteristics were just a blur in my memory.
I walked into the kitchen and made myself a really late lunch. I dropped an egg and burnt the bacon, but the lunch survived. I sat down to eat and I was chewing on the first bite when I saw the flowers.
Someone had left them on the window sill, with what looked like an ordinary business card attached to the bouquet. On the inside of the closed window in my fucking apartment. I jumped up and ran to the door to check the lock. It was intact, locked, and I still had the keys. I grabbed a knife and roamed about the apartment, alarmed. I checked every corner of every room, but I found nobody hiding in the shadows. I was alone. And yet, somehow, somebody had broken into the apartment and left those flowers.
I went to the living room and stood there for a while, in confusion, while my lunch was getting cold. One or two minutes passed until I realized I hadn’t even read the card attached to the flowers.
I don’t like flowers. I liked them when I was younger, but not anymore. There is only one flower in the world I like, and it’s fake. A cheap plastic thing that Misha bought one night in St Petersburg.
Earlier that day, he had stabbed a guy for a couple of rubles. Or maybe they were euros or dollars; I don’t know. It was not his intention to stab the guy, according to Misha; he shouldn’t have resisted. They were all alone in the middle of an empty square, white cold vapor coming out of their mouths in the chilly air as they exchanged a handful of sharp words. There was nothing he could do except hand out his money, but the idiot just had to fight, Misha said. The guy had lived, but apparently he had never come back to the neighborhood.
I went mad. I screamed at him so much that I think I left him temporarily deaf. I pushed him, I cried, and I screamed some more. That was not the life I wanted to live, I told him. I locked myself in the bathroom and stayed there for hours, until he left the house.
I had never blown up that way in front of him. I had always suffered in silence, trying to understand and accept. There was no way out for him, I thought; he’s a good kid trapped in a life that pushes him to the bad side. But I found it harder and harder to keep silent, and that day I yelled at him for the first time since we were little kids. It was an anniversary of Mother’s death; maybe that was the reason I was so sad, feeling the disappointment and despair biting my skin like wild dogs in the cold.
That night, Misha came home with a gift for me, to make peace: a fake rose trapped in a glass tube, cheesy as hell but strangely beautiful in its corniness. I didn’t want to take it at first, but I ended up putting it above the tiny bedside table where I kept my books. Some months later, when he went to jail for the first time, I fell into the habit of sleeping with that glass tube clutched in my arms, its cold surface getting progressively warmer in contact with my body. Outside, though, life was getting progressively colder.
Something —the sound of a horn out in the street, I think— brought me back to the present. I grabbed the card apprehensively. It was not a printed business card, just a blank card where someone had scribbled an address in Tribeca. There was no other contact information, not even a word stating the reason for sending the flowers (or more accurately, for breaking into my fucking apartment and leaving the damn flowers in the window sill), but I was certain that Ace Hart had something to do with it. It was such a bold, jerky move, that it must be somehow related to him, even if he hadn’t been there himself.
What to do? I couldn’t go to the police, or they would probably send me back to Russia, seeing as to how I lacked a marriage certificate or a job that would justify my stay. I was unsettled, even scared. But at the same time, I had to admit this was exciting. The biggest bad boy in town turning out to be my secret admirer? A mysterious invitation wrapped in a bouquet? The thrill of blood tempered by the sweetness of romance? You could sign me up anytime.
It had been just one day since my broken heart had sent me to Theo’s building to make a drunken scene before a complete stranger. And now I was ready (eager, even) to meet this other stranger who seemed to be a rich asshole of an even higher order.
What was wrong with me?
7. THE BOSS
VAN
The following day
I had never been to Tribeca before, so it’s only natural that I hadn’t realized what the address in the card meant. When I got to the place, I found myself in front of a modernist mansion. A high wall separated it from its surroundings, blocking the view to the lower floors, but the whole thing was huge and the upper stories could be seen from outside in all their magnificence. The building was a structure of steel, glass and concrete, with touches of green here and there, where trees and plants rested on terraces and balconies. The penthouse had a transparent roof and blue linings that suggested that there was a swimming pool up there. Clear glass
elevators were visible along the high walls.
I could see the rest when the big automatic door started hissing and sliding to let me enter the property. I hadn’t called yet, but evidently, someone was watching through the surveillance system and had decided that I was allowed inside. The lower level was the entrance and was mostly dedicated to the garage, where seven or eight luxury cars waited patiently for the hands that would drive them. A smooth cobblestone road prolonged the grey tones of the building and marked the way to the main door. I walked along it as I looked around, looking for someone who was in charge of admitting me, but I saw no one.
“Hello,” I said out loud, almost feeling physically the gaze of the multiple cameras on every inch of my body. The door opened on its own when I set foot on the doorstep, and soon I found myself inside a luxurious but minimalist living room, breathing a scent of citrus and flowers.
I stood there for a while, waiting for something to happen, admiring the austere lines that shaped up the room. A raised section of the floor with a short grey wall separated it from the rest of the house, making up for the absence of doors. A big couch rested against a glass wall; behind it, an artificial waterfall rained down continuously over a tiny rocky landscape.
There was another sound besides the muffled song of the water. A faint, metallic, continuous clacking. I wandered around, trying to locate the source of the sound, and crossed the raised section of the floor to go in search for it. I went through a corridor opening to an interior garden; then went up some stairs. The sound was louder and louder, and I could now identify what it was: gym equipment. Ace Hart was working out.
When I got to the second floor and located the big glass cage that housed the gym, I saw him immediately. There was no way I could have missed him among the dozens of training machines of all sizes and shapes. He was lifting himself up in the power rack, with his back turned to me. I don’t know for how long I stood there speechless, hypnotized by the regular motion of his muscular body, pulling itself up again and again.
“Hello,” I said when I found my voice again. It came out weakly, and I almost drooled.
He let himself go of the bar and landed on the floor with a soft thump. He turned to me feigning surprise. His naked torso was completely covered in sweat.
“Oh, hi,” he said, grabbing his towel to wipe his face. “It’s good you’re here.”
“I’m glad that you think so,” I said, regaining my composure. “Why am I here exactly?”
“Because you’re Russian,” he lied. Maybe. “I could use your help. I pay well.”
“So, if I get it right, you recruit your personnel by meeting young women by chance in a pub, breaking into their apartments and waiting for them to come to you? What a streamlined hiring process.”
“Oh, don’t be like that. I don’t know about young women. I’m seeing you right there,” he fired back.
“Hey! I’m thirty-two,” I protested, crossing my arms. “How old are you? Fifty?”
“Try thirty-nine,” he said, crossing his massive arms in front of his chest, mocking my gesture. “You walked out on me the other night. I just wanted to know you better. For starters.” He turned around and walked through the gym. I followed him to the chest press, and watched him load the thing with what looked like too much weight for any human being. He sat down on the machine and started pushing the handles. His muscles moved back and forth like pistons in a mechanism for some kind of huge ship or something like that.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said. “What do you want to know?”
“Why did you come to the States?”
I considered lying, but, for some reason, I decided to tell him the truth. Maybe because there was an aura of honesty to him, even when he lied. He may be enigmatic, he may be brutal, but behind his piercing blue eyes I perceived a transparent soul.
That, or I was just being stupid as usual, and giving bad boys much more credit than they deserved.
“I was sold.”
The words came out easily, which surprised me. It was hard for me to talk about this. But now, to him, I felt I could talk without shame. Perhaps because I already knew one of his secrets, having broken into his game of cards and blood.
“Sold?” he repeated, arching his brow, but he kept doing repetitions. “Who sold you?”
“I sold myself, I think. I came here as a mail-order bride. Have you ever met one?”
“Never,” he said. “How fascinating. And where is your American husband? Jack said you live alone in that tiny apartment.”
“Easy, mister big house. I never got married in the end. It happens, I guess.”
He rolled his eyes. “I don’t think it happens to mail-order brides. It’s kind of the point, after all. Getting married. Is it not?”
“I don’t know whether it happens to other brides or not. It happened to me, that’s all you need to know.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” he recoiled. “Are you staying?”
What a good question. The law was against me. I was still single, and my work visa was no longer valid since I had stopped working for Theo. My American dream could meet a sudden end on my first brush with any kind of authority. But even discounting that, did I want to stay? Just two days before, I was ready to leave the country and go crying all the way back to Russia. But now...
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think? Should I stay?”
“Oh, definitely,” he replied. “I guess I’ll keep you around.”
“I guess I’ll keep you around”? Is that how you charm women? I found it hard to believe that he could be so cocky. For a second, my fascination for the man gave way to plain hatred.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why did you want to see me again?”
“Because you’re Russian,” he repeated, “and I need someone with good knowledge of Russian. Sometimes we need to check things. Properties. Real estate. Yachts. Bank certificates. Inheritances.”
It was such a lame excuse that I would have laughed out loud if I hadn’t been so intrigued. I decided I’d let it pass for the time being.
“But what’s it all about? I mean what do you do and what is Little Vegas exactly?”
Ace sighed.
“Little Vegas” —he explained— “is a business. A really huge business, happening all around the United States. Very, very big, and also very, very illegal. I happen to be in charge.” The machine made a whirring and clacking sound as his arms moved the load repeatedly. Sweat ran down his face and covered his chest and abs, but he didn’t even flinch once. “It’s basically a decentralized gambling operation. Powerful people gather together in a small pub in Chicago, a storehouse in Atlanta, a coffee shop in Portland, a basement in Long Island... and they play. Only they don’t bet a hundred dollars, they bet a hundred million, or more commonly, entire companies, buildings, ships, planes, political nominations, and intellectual property rights. Anything that makes you rich, you can lose at our tables. That’s the thrill. A brutal thing, I say. As you can guess, we call it Little Vegas ironically.”
It was hard for me to determine if he was joking. He looked serious enough, and he also looked proud, which meant it was probably all true. But there was a fantastic aura to what he was telling me. The idea of a bunch of people who owned the world betting it all on a small pub and punching each other in the face whenever they found a cheater was almost surreal. And yet...
“Is this something you aren’t supposed to tell anyone, ever?” I asked with a half-smile. I couldn’t help it. I was trying to detach myself from the strong impression that his enormous chest, his strong biceps and his rock-hard abs were causing in me. His scent filled the air around him, a manly scent of sweat and power. Anything would sound true for me enveloped in such a seductive scent, I thought with my last reserves of impartiality. “But it’s all so... impossible,” I objected. “I mean there’s so much paperwork going into selling a company or a building. I dated a guy who...”
“I know,” he said, and stopped exerci
sing for a minute, waiting to initiate the next series of repetitions.
“You... you know?”
“We dug up a bit about you, sorry. I wanted to make sure that you weren’t a bait sent by some rich Russian tycoon to lure me into danger. You have to admit that the way you appeared in that pub the other night was highly suspicious.”
“So you know about Theo?”
“Know about Theo?” he laughed, and resumed his pushing and pulling in the chest press. “I made Theo Lambert. He once came to play at one of my tables, and I snatched a shopping mall from him. He became obsessed with the idea of winning and losing everything at the poker table and adopted the playing cards theme for himself. I hear he named every floor in his building after a particular card in the deck. He loves the theme, but he actually sucks at poker.”
I had to laugh. I found myself entranced by this guy’s cold charm, just as a moth is lured into the electric radiance that will end up killing her in a freezing night.
“But my point stands,” I insisted, grappling at my objection with all my being to avoid getting lost in his manly aroma and his sharp clear eyes. “You can’t just give away a ship, a company or a movie in a poker game. There is paperwork. There are contracts.”
“You don’t know much about the world of powerful people,” he replied, stopping again. “All the people who play in Little Vegas can do whatever they want with their assets. They can only bet what they can actually get rid of in a couple of days. If they can’t, and we find out, they get in trouble.” There was now a metallic tint in his voice, a sharp tone of danger. “Everybody who sits at the table has given us all the necessary data to enter into a special software. Once the game is over, keys get pressed, numbers change, and the loser signs whatever they need to sign to give away their assets. Or, more usually, they just make a phone call or punch some code in their banking app. You don’t know how many Wall Street and Silicon Valley buyouts are the result of bets at Little Vegas.”
Sold: A Billionaire Bad Boy Mafia Romance Page 3