The Protégé

by Stephen Frey

  “I know how to open a champagne—”

  “Of course you do. Look,” she said, her voice turning serious, “I was kidding back at the hotel. I understand why you need protection. After our meeting at Everest, I had one of my staff back in Chicago put together a full report on what happened to you last fall. The way I see it, the guy you still have to worry about is Tom McGuire. Whitman’s just trying to stay ahead of the law. Besides, based on what I read, he doesn’t have the know-how or the guts to come after you. But McGuire’s different. He’s experienced with this stuff, and he’s vindictive.”

  The cork popped loudly as Gillette gave the bottle a third twist. “You’ve been busy,” he said, trying not to show her how impressed he was. “How did you know what I’d want for dinner?”

  “You’re in great shape, that’s obvious,” she said, brazenly giving him the once-over. “Guys in great shape eat healthy. And I spoke to Debbie this morning.”

  “You what?”

  “Hey, girls gotta stick together. You wouldn’t understand. Truth is, if I really want to be up to speed all the time with what’s going on at Everest Capital, it’s probably more important for me to have a good relationship with Debbie than you. If there’s one person who might actually know more about what’s going on at the firm than you, it’s her.” The limousine pulled up in front of the restaurant. Allison slid across the seat to the door and opened it. “Come on,” she said over her shoulder.

  Gillette liked that she didn’t wait for the driver to get the door. He followed as she climbed out, looking away as her short dress rode high on her thighs. As he stood up, she grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the restaurant.

  Then the paparazzi descended. Suddenly photographers were rushing at them from all directions and cameras were flashing everywhere. Four QS agents raced to form a wall around Gillette and Allison, then quickly ushered them into the restaurant. But not before fifty pictures had been snapped. People in the restaurant stopped and gazed as the couple came through the door, straining to see what the commotion was about.

  Allison was still hanging on Gillette’s arm. “Everyone’s looking,” she whispered. “God, this is fun.”

  Gillette turned around toward Stiles, who was behind them. “Go back out there and talk to one of those guys, will you? Find out how they knew we were coming.”

  “Right.”

  When Stiles was gone, the maître d’ led them to a secluded table in a back corner of the place.

  “You arrange this, too?” Gillette asked, sitting down.

  “Of course.” Allison looked up at the maître d’ when she was seated. “We’ll have a bottle of Veuve Clicquot,” she ordered over the music.

  The maître d’ nodded and moved off.

  “So, I’m obviously a little different than you thought,” she said after they’d relaxed into their chairs. “Not that quiet thing you met at Everest.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I do the prim and proper routine for Gordon. He goes back to my uncle and grandfather and reports on me all the time. He thinks I don’t know that. Fortunately, I’ve got him snowed, and he tells them mostly good things. They’d probably have heart attacks if they knew the truth.”

  “Your uncle and grandfather aren’t stupid, Allison. They know the truth. They’ve probably had you followed.”

  “No way. I’d know if they did.”

  “How?”

  “I pay the maids and the chauffeurs at home to tell me everything.”

  So she wasn’t beyond bribery. A rich girl who didn’t hesitate to put out money when she wanted information. He’d have to be careful about that. Maybe even have to give Debbie a raise.

  “And my grandfather and uncle are that stupid,” she continued, “which is why they have Gordon. At least they’ve got enough brains to understand how stupid they are.”

  A waiter appeared quickly with the champagne. When it was poured and he was gone, Gillette raised his glass. “Here’s to our partnership. At the very least, it’s going to be interesting.”

  She tapped her glass to his and took a long swallow. “What do you mean by ‘interesting’? Fun, or a pain in the ass?”

  “I guess we’ll find out. But I can tell you one thing: I’ve never been used like this before.”

  “Don’t give me that,” she snapped. “You’re getting five billion dollars.”

  “And you’re getting the education of a lifetime.”

  “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you? Starting to believe the press clippings.”

  “I never believe press clippings. That puts you right on the road to ruin. All I believe in is profits.”

  “Like I said before, you’re on a roll right now. But the economy’s been good the last few years. Things’ll get rougher when the GDP boards the down elevator.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  Allison sighed. “Yeah, guys like you always are. You’re Mr. Consistency, aren’t you.” She pointed at his glass.

  He’d put the glass back on the table without drinking. “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. You don’t drink alcohol. I wanted to see if you’d at least put it to your lips to try to con me.”

  Gillette rubbed his chin for a second. He wondered if there was anything she didn’t know about him. “You’ve done a lot of homework.”

  “I invested five billion dollars in your fund, Christian. Almost a quarter of my family’s net worth.” She leaned over the table, swirling the champagne around in her glass. “I love a great time, I love to go crazy every once in a while, but I’m also very careful when it comes to my family’s money.”

  “You should be.”

  “I put my grandfather and uncle down, but they’re watching this move carefully. Investing so much in Everest, I mean. They aren’t a hundred percent convinced it’s the right thing to do. I’m taking a big risk.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “I want to leave my mark on my family,” Allison explained, her expression hardening. “I want to take twenty-two billion and make it fifty, maybe even a hundred. I want to be the one they talk about at Christmas dinner a hundred years from now. The one that made us a true dynasty.” She laughed. “I want them to raise their glasses to a big oil painting of me hanging on the wall over the table.” She pointed at him. “And you’re the one who’s going to teach me how to do it.”

  Always let people talk, Gillette thought. They’ll tell you so much if you just let them go.

  “Of course,” she continued, “I’ll be wearing a dress like this in the painting, maybe even shorter. Not one of those long things. I’ll probably get the painter to make my boobs look a little bigger than they really are, too. That way I’ll drive the young boys crazy.” She put her head back and laughed loudly at her own idea.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t had the painting done yet,” Gillette said.

  “That’s a good point. I should.”

  He watched Allison pull out her Blackberry and send a message to herself. A reminder to have the portrait done. It took everything he had not to laugh himself. “Remind me how your family got so rich.” He wanted to keep her talking, hoping he’d get a few tidbits Craig West hadn’t dug up.

  “You already know all that. You told Gordon.”

  “Come on,” he pushed.

  “The railroad, real estate, then my father’s brother, the smart one, got us into the cell phone explosion. He’s dead now, unfortunately. He wasn’t a very nice man, but he was wicked smart. The only thing my generation’s done is invest in the public markets. We did okay in the late nineties with the tech boom because we got a lot of opportunities to invest in IPOs, thanks to the relationships we had with the investment banks doing the offerings. But we stayed in too long. We were actually worth almost twenty-five billion at one point in 2000. Thanks to my cousin Ricky, we lost a lot of the paper gains we’d racked up when the bottom fell out of the NASDAQ.”

  “Ricky is one of your uncles’ sons? The one
that’s on the family trust’s board now?”

  “Right.”

  “How many uncles do you have?”

  “My father had three brothers. Uncle Tad’s the one who got us into cell phones and died. Then there’s the one that’s on the board now, and there’s another one who lives on a beach in Tahiti. Literally sleeps at night in a hammock that’s tied up between two palm trees. He’s useless.”

  “And your dad, where’s he?”

  “He runs a cattle ranch in Montana. It’s what he always wanted to do. The ranch loses money every year, but the family trust makes it whole.”

  “Do you talk to him much?”

  “No. We’re different,” Allison said, her tone softening. “And don’t give me the speech about how I should talk to him all the time and count my lucky stars he’s alive,” she warned, her voice growing strong again. “I know about your father. I’m sorry about it, but my father and I can’t make it work. We’ve tried and it just doesn’t click.”

  Gillette stared back for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “How old is your cousin Ricky?”

  “Thirty-one, a year older than me. My father’s generation had eleven kids, but Ricky and I are the only ones really involved in the family business affairs. The rest of them are just leeches. Ricky was the golden child of my generation and on the board,” she continued, “until he lost that three billion. Which is why I’m on the board now. My father and the brother that lives in Tahiti screamed bloody murder until my grandfather made the switch. Now that I’m on it, I want to show everyone what I can do. I want to make it big.” She patted Gillette’s arm as she stood up. “Which is where you come in.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked, standing with her.

  “Ladies’ room.” She smiled at him. “I like your manners, standing up when a woman leaves the table. Somebody raised you right.”

  Yeah, he thought. My dad.

  Gillette watched her walk through the restaurant, watched men’s heads turn as though they were on swivels. She was attractive but moved as if she didn’t know or care, paying no attention to the stares or the elbows being jabbed. Or maybe she paid no attention because she was so used to it. If the guys in this restaurant only knew what she was worth, they wouldn’t just ogle, they’d stampede the table when she got back.

  “Excuse me.”

  Gillette glanced to his right at the voice. A young woman was waving at him while one of the security agents kept her at bay.

  “Will you sign my People magazine?” she called, waving it as the man stayed between her and Gillette. “Please.”

  Gillette nodded to the agent as Stiles sat in Allison’s chair. “What did you find out?” he asked, taking a pen from the young woman. She already had the magazine opened to the article.

  “Nice mug,” he said, pointing at Gillette’s picture on the page.

  “They must have gotten it off the Internet. I didn’t send them anything.” He signed his name along the bottom of the page, then handed the pen and the magazine back to the woman. “There you go.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Sure.”

  “She must have thought you were the rock star they put on that list,” Stiles said, nodding at the magazine. “She couldn’t have thought it was you. You aren’t that exciting.”

  Gillette grinned. “Ah, you’re just jealous. So, did you find out anything?”

  Stiles nodded. “Yeah, it took a few minutes and a hundred bucks, but the guys outside found out you two were coming here from Allison. One of them finally came clean.”

  “He said she called?” Gillette asked incredulously.

  “He said the call was anonymous, but it came from the Parker Meridien, so it had to be her. Otherwise one of the operators would have had to be listening to her phone, and I doubt that happened.”

  “How did the guy know the call came from the Parker?”

  “Caller ID.”

  Gillette spotted Allison coming back from the ladies’ room. “Thanks.”

  Stiles saw her, too, and stood up. “Have fun.”

  “Did you miss me?” Allison asked as Gillette held out her chair.

  “Sure.” He noticed that she was sniffing as he sat back down. “You okay?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re sniffing. You okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. It’s allergies. Happens every fall.”

  Gillette watched her closely. Please, he thought, please tell me I didn’t partner with a woman who has this problem. “Why did you call the paparazzi on us?”

  She put a hand on her chest. “What?”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Come on.”

  She squinted at him for a moment, then smiled and shrugged. “I thought it would be fun.”

  “And I thought you didn’t want your family knowing you were such a party animal.”

  An irritated look came to her face. “First of all, they don’t read the kind of rags those pictures will show up in. Second, even if they did find out about them, I’d say the photographers were following you because of that People article. I’d tell my grandfather I was appalled at the pictures and that I’d already told you to be more low-key.”

  “Why did you call them, Allison?”

  “I told you,” she said, sniffing again. “I thought it would be fun.” She cased the restaurant, eyes darting from table to table. “How’s that pop-star girlfriend of yours? Still peddling her CDs?”

  So that was Allison’s game. She wanted Faith to see pictures of them coming into the Grill arm in arm. Deb was beginning to look awfully smart. “She’s doing fine.”

  “Where is she tonight?”

  “On the West Coast doing some publicity. She’s back tomorrow.”

  “How often do you see her? Is it an every night thing when she’s in town?”

  “Are you asking me if it’s serious?”

  “I’m just asking,” Allison replied, wiping her nose with her napkin. “I’m not trying to get personal.”

  “Well, you are.”

  Allison rolled her eyes. “Puleeease. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not asking because I want to move in on her. Gawd, it would be awful to date you. You love your work way too much. A woman would always run second to Everest. Honestly, I just want to make sure it stays that way. I want my five billion to be twenty or forty billion in a few years. And for that to happen, your pecker needs to stay right where it is. In your pants.”

  She seemed sincere, which was good news. “Everyone will be very relieved.”

  “Everyone?”

  “A lot of people at Everest think you’re after me, and, well . . .”

  “Well what?”

  “You know.”

  Allison ground her teeth together for a few moments. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s going on with that new NFL franchise you won?” she asked.

  “Going on?”

  “Like I said on the phone last night, I want Everest Eight to make that investment.”

  Gillette shook his head. “No, we’ll do it out of Seven. It has to be that way. I’ve got to be fair to my investors. The ones in Seven were in first.”

  “So do it fifty-fifty. I want a chunk of that.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I heard you.”

  Her cell phone rang, and she pulled it from her purse. “What?” she said loudly, putting her purse back on the table and pressing her hand to her ear. “What?” But the music was too loud and she still couldn’t hear. She got up and trotted through the restaurant.

  Gillette watched her until she’d moved into the restaurant foyer, then his eyes shifted to the purse she’d left on the table.

  TOM MCGUIRE sat in the Explorer, parked on a darkened side street a few blocks from the Grill. Since everything had blown up last fall, he’d taken on a new identity—which wasn’t hard if you knew
what you were doing. He had a New Jersey driver’s license, a Social Security card, and a passport—all of which made clear that he was William Cooper. He wore his hair longer now, had grown a goatee, and had put on twenty-five pounds. Even his children hadn’t recognized him at first at the park on Long Island where he’d surprised them last month—the first time he’d seen them and his wife in ten months. The feds had been watching them twenty-four/seven since last November, but he’d found out from friends inside the Bureau that the tail had been called off at the end of August—almost a month ago. The feds were still listening in on calls, but not following the family anymore. It had been wonderful to see the kids.

  Nigel Faraday’s double take on Park Avenue the other morning was still bothering him. A stupid mistake, he thought. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near there at that time of day, but he was trying to assess, trying to nail down routines. There was no need to worry, he told himself. The fat Brit probably hadn’t noticed him anyway.

  He shut his eyes as he sat in the SUV, clenching the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. He and his brother had been so close to hundreds of millions, but Gillette and Stiles had destroyed everything at the last second. Now his brother was dead, and he had the rest of his life to look forward to an assumed existence and sporadic, short visits with his family.

  McGuire took a deep breath. He’d been waiting ten months for tonight, and it was all coming together perfectly.

  “YOU READY TO GO?” Gillette asked, checking his watch. It was nine-thirty, and he wanted to get home so he could go through the Hush-Hush material Wright had given him to prepare for tomorrow morning. “I’ll give you a lift back to the Parker.”

  Allison looked at him as if he were crazy. “Are you nuts? We’re going out. We’ll start at the China Club, then figure out our plan from there. I don’t go home at nine-thirty when I’m in New York.”

  Gillette checked the front of the restaurant. Through the large windows facing Hudson Street, he thought he could see the paparazzi still waiting, which seemed strange. They’d gotten their pictures, but it looked as though they were still hanging around. He motioned to Stiles.