Game of Greed

by Charlotte Larsen

  Chapter 8

  Colombo airport is a breeze compared to the frenetic chaos, noise, and insanity of Colombo itself. Once you are inside in the air conditioning, where the temperature is just a few degrees above freezing, everything seems calm and measured. For the first time since they entered Colombo, Jo breathes naturally. Relaxed. The driver takes her single bag to the first-class counter and waits while she checks in.

  The first thing she notices after coming through security is the powerful smell of freshly roasted coffee. Whether the smell is really as overpowering as she thinks, or the intensity is due to the refinement of her sensibilities during the caffeine-free stay at the monastery, she doesn’t know. She heads straight to the coffee shop on the first floor, determined to have the strongest espresso on offer.

  Going up the escalator, she catches a glimpse of something not quite right. Without any unnecessary movements, she brings out her compact and pretends to apply lipstick, all the while checking out who is behind her. But the compact is too small, and the escalator soon comes to the top. She has no choice but to continue to the coffee shop, but at least now she’s on the lookout, not lost in some dreamy coffee fantasy.

  The coffee shop is open at the front. She sits down at a wall table in the second row, from which she can see anybody who passes or enters the coffee shop. Jo orders a triple espresso, knowing full well that this will create havoc with her meditation-induced calmness. But she wants to be alert, and she wants the coffee. Badly.

  She picks up a newspaper from the neighboring table and pretends to read, while secretly scanning the crowd inside and outside the coffee shop. Nobody seems to stand out. She relaxes. It might just be her overactive imagination and the recent image of Bhante Padman hanging from the rafters that makes her a bit paranoid. But wait, that guy checking out the ties at the shop across from the escalator. Why is he wearing sunglasses? Vain affectation or a desire to conceal the movements of his eyes? She puts on blue-tinted reading glasses that have tiny strips of concave lens at the top of each glass so that while tilting her head slightly toward the paper, she can actually pick out a face hundreds of meters away. And unless this guy has the same kind of lenses in his sunglasses, there is no way he can detect the direction of her glance from where he’s standing.

  She memorizes his features and stores the information for future reference. If he’s on the plane, she will start paying real attention. Until then, he will just have a fraction of her attention.

  The coffee is strong and bitter, and the indoor temperature really requires a sweater. She’s on her way to another mission. Business as usual.

  The man in the sunglasses is indeed on the plane, although not in first class. From the windows, she watches him boarding after her, but guesses that he will leave her alone during the flight. If they wanted to prevent her from flying, or indeed, if they wanted to harm her in any way, it would have happened by now. She reckons that he’s just a shadow whose sole task is to report her whereabouts to somebody in charge. She wonders who they are, but for the moment doesn’t really care. Experience has taught her that it is a waste of energy to anticipate information. She’ll know soon enough. She needs to alert Francis somehow that she’s being followed, so he doesn’t burn his cover if he decides to pick her up at the airport himself. But since she is under instructions not to contact him, the best plan she can think of is to ignore him if he’s there. Francis will understand the meaning of that.

  She’s in a window seat at the front of the cabin, pretty certain that there will be nobody next to her or even behind her. Whenever possible, Francis throws a ring of privacy around her. The steward hands her a glass of champagne and a small aluminum attaché case. In the case is a MacBook Air, smaller than those she’s seen before and, in a gesture typical of Francis, a bag of jelly beans and a small book of T. S. Eliot poems. She smiles. She never had a boss with a sense of humor before. It is oddly liberating.

  Francis has a way of doing and saying things that somehow puts everything into perspective, like “In a hundred years we’ll all be dead,” or Jo’s favorite, “It’s just life, baby!” whenever something bad or irritating or just inconvenient happens.

  So, here she is, on a plane with her pursuer sitting somewhere behind her, holding Eliot poems and a MacBook that likely contains some pretty potent information. Not a bad way to be.

  The flight is long but otherwise unremarkable. She decides to meditate rather than sleep, just in case the shadow gets frisky or wants more than just to follow her trail. After a few hours of uninterrupted meditation, she feels rested and clear-headed enough to open the computer. She slides her thumb across the touchpad beneath the modified keyboard. Her thumbprint is accepted. A small camera located in the top right corner of the screen also a modification scans her right retina. Satisfied, the computer allows her to access its innermost secrets.

  She spends the last part of the trip reading through the Schwartz files that Francis, or more likely, Angela, has put together for her. And the more she reads, the more concerned she becomes. As yet, they don’t know very much about his potential motives in terms of Wharton’s disappearance and, if Dhammakarati’s hint is anything to go by, the murder of the monk. It will be her job, with help from the research team, to provide the full picture. But Francis has gleaned enough information to paint a picture of an intensely ambitious and unscrupulous organization. She knew that much already, but he’s providing new and disturbing details, such as an overview of the successful completion of a number of Schwartz projects, all aimed at destroying healthy, profitable businesses. Businesses that somehow have been in the way of somebody else who had the desire and money to pull the plug on the competition. She finds this kind of dirty play to be abominable. If you can’t play fair, you shouldn’t be in the game. In any game, really.

  By the time she reaches the last entry in the file, the computer asks her whether she wants to reread or destroy. She chooses “destroy,” having memorized what she needs. She hits “enter,” and watches as horizontal lines of letters slide down the screen, Matrix style. Another Francis affectation. She puts the MacBook back in the case, closes it, and slides it under the seat in front of her. Nobody will have any use for it now.

  Jo asks the driver who is waiting for her at the airport to make a stop at Saks, where she quickly stocks up on what she needs for a few days in New York. A business suit, a couple of shirts, a cocktail dress, and shoes, all from Boss Black. Anonymous, yet sufficiently elegant. Before long, she’s checked into the Mercer hotel, right next to Francis’s home. As she expected, there is a note from him: Dinner at 8:00 p.m. Nothing more. She takes a long bath and has just enough time for a short nap before the same driver picks her up again. She’s seen nothing of the shadow, but she is certain that he or somebody else is right on her tail. The driver seems to read her mind. He catches her eyes in the rearview mirror and says, “I hope you don’t mind, Ms. Vermeer, but we may have to do a little scenic tour to discourage your fans.”

  She smiles at him. “Fine by me.”

  They follow the slow-moving traffic up through Lafayette, then take a right turn down Bond Street and abruptly swerve into a basement parking garage. A gate shuts behind them before anybody can follow. The driver stops next to a black SUV with tinted windows, from which another driver beckons her over. In a few minutes, she’s installed in a new car, with a new driver, and is heading out through another exit. Smooth operation, she notes with satisfaction. Very smooth.

  The driver seems to change directions every few minutes, and after a while, Jo gives up on trying to determine their whereabouts. Eventually, she is dropped outside the entrance to a restaurant called Daniel’s. A waiter escorts her to one of the small private dining rooms above the main dining room. Francis is sitting at a table much too big for just the two of them. She cannot help but notice that the room opens directly to the service areas. Probably not a coincidence. Francis seems to be absorbed in the menu. For a brief moment, she gets to watch him, as she r
arely does, without him knowing.

  He owes his looks and his name to a wandering English libertine who went to Denmark several generations back, and for some reason, decided to stay. And Francis does, indeed, look like an English schoolboy. Floppy, sandy hair with a ginger streak that anyone with a maternal instinct would want to run her fingers through. Lean, yet surprisingly more muscular than one would expect. She still remembers the first time she saw him naked, having expected from the look and feel of him that he was slim going on skinny. But once he was out of his sweater and jeans, his shoulders and thighs seemed to belong to another kind of man a much taller, much heavier man. Somehow, she never could justify the image of Francis’s mind with that of his naked body. He was born to think and to rule the world in custom-made suits. Somehow his physique, despite its beauty, works against him. A bodily betrayal. And yet, it is exactly the kind of body he must have in order to fool the world.

  His official image of the carefree and cynical dandy requires a body that is not too substantial. And he does wear a suit better than any other man she knows. But then again, his suits are Seville Row, or occasionally Tom Ford, so of course they hug him like a glove. And since he tends to favor a sharp, broad-shouldered cut and very slim waist, heavy silk shirts in white or pale blue, and his classic Pate Philip watch, he attracts the eye of any discerning woman.

  Jo knew he had gone to boarding school. For a Scandinavian, that is quite unusual unless one belongs to the aristocracy or the diplomatic ranks. But then, there was something odd about his father. Francis never talks about him, but from the few stray remarks he’s made about his early childhood, she’s gathered an impression of an austere, almost brutal man. Jo did some digging when she first met him, as she routinely does on anyone who interests her, but she found little. No relationship is safe to enter into before she understands the person’s background. However, with Francis, she would never know, and perhaps that’s why she never quite let her guard down with him. A man who can play both sides with such grace is worth being wary of. A modern Robin Hood in her mind. But a rather cynical version, devoid of sentimentality and romance.

  He’s still studying the menu when she walks up to him and gently places her hand on his shoulder.

  “We should have the tenderloin,” he says before looking up at her.

  “I’ve missed you too,” she answers dryly.

  She sits down, allowing the waiter to place the napkin in her lap, as always with half a mind to ask him to get his hands off her. “You’re looking distinctly non–New Yorkish,” Francis says, assessing her like a cool connoisseur.

  The remark hits her like a slap in the face. Again. She has not seen him for months, the last time being a few hours in a crowded meeting where he hardly paid her any attention. But she loves him. It’s a love that is illogical, a love that makes no sense. It’s one thing to want him he is, after all, quite an attractive man. But what is there to love? His cynicism? His arrogance? The superior intellect? Or the fact that he would always have her back if she got in real trouble? Is that enough to love a man? Is there really anything in him that is lovable or even capable of love? But she does know what it is: Francis is the source of all that is interesting in her life.

  She can’t imagine life without him. But she would hate to live with him.

  “Be glad that I made the effort to change for you,” she retorts, realizing that even though she changed into a classic black cocktail dress and black heels, like every other woman in the room, she still has the just-out-of-meditation look on her face. Which is what he’s referring to.

  He smiles. “I am glad. That you’re here.”

  He orders for both of them with an arrogance so natural to him that he doesn’t even consider whether she wants meat. Which she doesn’t. She lets it pass. There are more important matters to discuss than their complicated relationship.

  Francis puts his hand over hers. “Listen, let’s enjoy our dinner without shoptalk and then we can go to my apartment to discuss the case. I have some stuff there I want to show you.”

  She nods. “You should know that I was followed from Colombo to New York, although it seems the driver managed to shake them off on the way here. But we may need to be a bit careful.”

  “Don’t worry. I have made arrangements. Was it a nice retreat?”

  She reflects for a moment. Was it nice? “I don’t think a retreat is ever nice. At least not nice as in pleasant and relaxing. Looking into your mind is the hardest work you can do. There is a constant battle going on between the ego that wants to think as it is used to, and your discipline. But that is exactly why I do it and will keep on doing it. I am addicted to conquering my own mind. It’s the hardest opponent one can have. What’s better?” she looks at him with a barely concealed challenge in her eyes.

  “You always had a masochistic streak. Always having to go where things are hard. Why don’t you just leave the tough stuff behind you and allow someone to make your life easier?” He meets her challenge in the typical Francis way: baiting, teasing, hoping that you’ll walk straight into the trap, which he will then snap shut. And then, his task completed, he will walk away without a shred of interest while his victim is left wondering what happened.

  She knows this of him. She also knows that she will never again allow him to see her weakness, her desire for rest, for peace, for love. She took his bait a few times when they first met, and she knows full well what awaits her if she does so again. She replies with a question, knowing he will not be able to tell whether it is ironic: “Why? Are you offering, Francis?” The best way to keep him at arm’s length.

  He meets her glance with a hint of sadness in his blue eyes before throwing his head back in boisterous laughter. “Love you, baby!”

  The tenderloin is exquisite, the wine like velvet on her tongue. Yet she shakes her head when the waiter offers to fill her glass again. She’s still in retreat physique. Two glasses of wine will relax her guard and soften her mind. And she can’t afford that.

  Chapter 9

  Neither of them wants dessert, so by the time they’ve finished eating, it’s still early. Francis signs the check and ushers her to the back of the dining room, through the service door, down a flight of stairs, and into the kitchen. It is a scene of chaos, chefs yelling, kitchen hands scurrying around, pans sizzling on gas flames, steam everywhere. Hard to believe that this madness produces such excellent food. Nobody even looks at the two of them as they hurry through the vast kitchen. She follows Francis into an open, narrow elevator at the back of the kitchen. It takes them down to a basement, presumably where deliveries are brought into the restaurant. A panel van, with “Giulia’s Fruit and Veggies” painted on the side in neon colors, is waiting for them. Francis nods to the driver and opens the rear doors. They climb in and make themselves comfortable on narrow benches along the sides of the van. Out of view. In a rather improbable vehicle.

  The van brings them to the basement of Francis’s residence, where the lift takes them to the penthouse floor. She feels as if she’s traveled in a secret underground traffic system ever since she arrived in New York and reckons they have lost any tails, although it is a fair guess they are monitoring her hotel at this very moment, and that she may find them there when she returns.

  Francis takes her into the library, which is decorated in a style distinctly different from the rest of his apartment. Where clean lines, bright colors, and a modern twist on the sixties style is prominent in the main part of the apartment, entering the library is like going into an English gentleman’s club. Dark, paneled walls and built-in bookcases, heavy velvet curtains, Persian carpets, a large original and quite worn Chesterfield couch with two matching chairs facing an open fireplace, a heavy, leather-surfaced mahogany desk. A room so beautiful, so masculine, so timeless, that even Francis can hardly inhabit it. The room seems too immense even for him.

  On a spindly table in front of the fireplace is a drinks tray, from which Francis pours her a weak bourbon. She slips off h
er shoes what bliss after a day that started yesterday but is nowhere near over yet and curls up in one of the deep, comforting Chesterfield chairs. For a while they sit in silence, looking into the fire, enjoying their drinks. The world seems so far away, and she’s transported back to a time when life unfolded at a slower pace. She doesn’t want anything else right now. It is a perfect moment, and she wants it to last forever.

  But then Francis breaks it. “Tell me about Bhante Padman.”

  She sighs quietly in irritation at his impatience and habitual rush to force things along, a tendency to which she’s obviously much more vulnerable when just out of retreat. “You really should talk to Dhammakarati about that. I hardly even knew of that monk’s existence, much less of his involvement with us before I saw him hanging from the roof in the dining hall.”

  “I guess breakfast will never quite be the same again,” he jokes.

  She remains untouched, punishing him by pretending to take him literally. “I don’t think it makes a difference. They don’t have the same traumatic relation to death as we do. Keep in mind, most monks and nuns routinely meditate on the decay of the body, on death, and the end of life. Anyway, he was there, we took him down, made him ready, and had a brief ceremony for him at night. That is basically what I know.” She hesitates. “Well, Dhammakarati told me Padman was on a small job concerning Schwartz, which seemed to go well, but that he hadn’t shared any information with the team at the monastery. Did he contact you?”

  Francis doesn’t answer, but asks instead, “What do you think of the mark they made on his body?”

  “With the very little knowledge I have, I tend to agree with Dhammakarati that it’s a diversion. However, we should be looking out for similar signs where the word or concept of ‘traitor’ is being used.” She helps herself to some nuts from the table, eating them deliberately, mindfully, maddeningly slowly, knowing it will irritate him and redress the imbalance between them. She wipes her hands gently against each other, brushing off the crumbs before continuing. “Why don’t you tell me what you know of the present case? I am familiar with the way Schwartz operates and his history, but I haven’t quite understood the connection between him, a missing lawyer, and a dead monk.”