Devil You Know
Page 40
Daisy mulled this over. She had pushed Edward away when he was suitable, pushed Magnus away when he was suitable. And made a beeline, always, for those men who were guaranteed to reject her.
For a few seconds she considered therapy, then rejected it. Fuck that, Daisy thought, I’m English. I don’t go for all that hand-holding inner-child bollocks—
The phrase stopped her train of thought. Inner child. Weren’t you supposed to repeat childhood patterns over and over?
But her childhood had been mostly happy, hadn’t it? She’d had great parents who loved her. So why had she eaten herself into unpopularity, making sure, with her shyness and her weight, that the other kids at school would be mean to her, would—yeah—would reject her?
The answer came to her, so surprising and so instantly clear that Daisy, nude, felt weak-kneed and flopped down onto her bed.
She had been rejected before any of these had rejected her.
By her parents. Her first, biological parents.
*
After a sleepless night, Daisy woke and dressed. The first call she made was to her parents. Her real ones, Daisy reminded herself.
Her mother picked up on the first ring.
“Hello, Mum.”
“Hello, darling…”
“Mum, I need to ask you something.” Daisy was hesitant; was this going to be incredibly hurtful for her mother?
“Is something wrong, darling? Are you hurt? Sick?”
“No.” She must have sounded worse than she thought. “Nothing to be worried about. But look, Mum, I’m curious about the adoption. My adoption.”
There was an exhalation at the end of the phone.
“It’s nothing about you and Dad. You are my real parents, my only parents.” Daisy heard herself gabbling. “You know I love you—”
“Of course I know that, darling,” said her mother, sounding reassuringly disapproving over this unrestrained display of emotion.
“But, you know, I’m curious. I’d like to find out more about it.”
“Well, we always knew you’d ask eventually,” her mother said. “And I wish I could be more help, darling, I really do. But your adoption was one of those ones where they don’t give out any information. Confidentiality.”
Daisy persisted. “But didn’t you ask? Medical records, anything like that? Didn’t you insist?”
Mrs. Markham laughed. “Oh, darling, we’d been trying to adopt for years. You have no idea what it’s like. When they said they had a beautiful baby girl we took you, no questions asked. If you had been sick, well.” The shrug in the voice. “We’d just have looked after you. We fell in love with you the moment we saw you.”
Daisy’s eyes teared over, but she brushed them away. “Darling Mum,” she said.
“Darling you.”
“Do you remember the name of the agency?”
“Of course. I have all those details in a file upstairs. Hold on a second, my angel.”
Her mother came back a few moments later. “They were called InterAdopt, and they were in London.” She gave Daisy the phone number and an address on Tottenham Court Road. “But bear in mind it was twenty-five years ago, so they may have moved.”
“Don’t worry,” Daisy said. “I’ll find them.”
*
It proved easier said than done.
A year passed. Daisy worked on her next book, and continued her search, in between rounds of publicity, booksellers’ conferences, and the other minutiae of life as a successful author. It was very frustrating, not to be able to find much out. But phoning and writing and contacting search agencies at least kept her mind off Magnus Soren, and distracted her from her regrets.
The agency had moved out of its premises years ago. It took her six months to find that they had gone out of business, another six months to get even small snippets of information from the public records. In the meantime, Daisy licked her wounds and worked it all out on paper; she was kinder to her characters than luck had been to her.
She even dated, but that was desultory. Her dates never lasted more than four outings, at most. She found she couldn’t bear to have men touch her.
Daisy was getting obsessed with finding out about her birth parents. She believed in her heart that she had had a revelation, that she would never be able to move on unless she discovered why they had given her up. Hadn’t wanted her.
*
The Orange Blossom was published to sizzling reviews and even bigger sales than her first book. Daisy’s business manager invested her money and did well, making her returns at almost 14 percent.
She was rich, and getting richer. She even got stopped on the street a couple of times. Magazines wanted to interview her, talk shows wanted her as a guest. She was young, successful, outrageously good-looking. Daisy was coy about her love life—“What love life?”—and that just made the press more interested. She did not enjoy the attention. It took away from one of her greatest pleasures in being a writer—anonymity; being lost in her made-up world, at least until the books came out and she could see people reading them on the Tube. Now that gave her a buzz.
But this time she thought that maybe she could use it. Her search was getting nowhere. Every little piece of information led to a dead end.
Daisy made a decision. She was going to go public, and maybe that would lead to the truth.
*
“I was adopted,” Daisy said to Susie Quant.
Susie was the perky host of Sitting with Susie, a daytime chat show which had a pretty high rating. It was on Channel 4 and followed Oprah, and her publicist thought appearing on it was a coup.
“Give them something juicy,” she had said.
Daisy had decided to do just that. Susie’s heavily mascaraed eyes widened. Daisy could see her thinking, “Great TV.” “Were you really?” she purred.
Daisy looked right at the camera. “I was. The agency was called InterAdopt, and it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. If any of my readers have any news, I’d be grateful if they could contact me…”
She heard the sharp hiss in the audience, the intake of breath. Well, that should be good for a paragraph in OK!. Daisy hated bringing such private matters out in the open, but she was frustrated, and she needed help.
Who knew? Maybe this would work.
Fifty-Three
The Lincoln Town Car purred to a halt and the chauffeur got out, walked around to the back, and opened the door. He stood to attention, but noticed, out of the corner of his eye, those long, lean legs as they slid out of the luxurious buttery leather interior of the car. He always did; gams like that were hard to miss.
Rose Fiorello was wearing a chocolate-brown woolen Donna Karan dress with cream buttons and trim, long sleeves, and matching cream leather gloves. Her wonderful legs were encased in brown lambswool hose, tapering down to a pair of knee-high Jimmy Choo zip-up boots. A second later, her warm, protective cashmere coat fell about her.
His boss was as glamorous as a movie star, the driver thought. All the other guys in the service envied him this assignment and pumped him for info. A sweet little thing like that … she had to have some rich sugar daddy, no? They talked in hushed tones about Vincent Salerni, the mob boss and Ms. Fiorello’s patron. He had to be in the back of the car sometimes, right? Taking a little “tribute”? But he had, sadly, nothing to report. Fiorello was hot stuff OK, but she lived like a nun. A very rich, very busy nun. And she took no crap. He’d heard her chewing out men on the in-car phone and he was glad not to be on the other end of the line.
Rose Fiorello was, he had concluded, very beautiful, very rich, and very pissed off. Like, all the time. She had fired the last four drivers for occasionally being late—she was like that, she demanded respect. Even the slightest deviation from rispetatto and you got fired. The woman was like Genghis Khan in a cute little short skirt.
Maybe she was gay, but she never had any girlfriends in the back of that limo. As far as he could work out, the boss didn’t have time
for them. She visited her mom once a week, and that was the extent of her social life.
Not for the first time, he reflected that it was a shame.
“When will you be wanting to be picked up, Ms. Fiorello?” he asked, touching his cap deferentially.
Rose didn’t look at him. “I’m not sure, Bernie. I’ll beep you.”
“Very good, ma’am,” he said, getting back into the car.
She was staring at the building and she had that look on her face. Sometimes, Bernie thought, it seemed like the only thing Rose Fiorello cared about was goddamn buildings. Houses, apartment blocks, run-down brownstones; bricks and mortar rather than flesh and blood.
She was obsessed. He put the car into gear, thinking that she needed a good fucking. What a pity he wasn’t gonna be the one to give it to her …
*
“How many floors?” Rose asked.
The realtor was a nervous little man, somewhat rat-like. He had a pair of black-framed glasses which he kept pushing back up the bridge of his nose. He had heard of the newly legendary Rose Fiorello, and told all the sellers in the office that he was about to take her for a ride.
It wasn’t working out like that. She had an aggravating willingness to walk away from the deal. That fact was stopping him from bullying her the way he wanted to.
“Eighteen,” he said. “That’s a great size, Rose.”
“I don’t recall asking you to call me by my first name, Mr. Robinson.”
“Uhm, right. Miss Fiorello.”
“And the top six floors are nothing but a shell. It would have to be completely restored, assuming the building’s structurally sound. Which I’m not.”
“We could check that out for you.”
“No bank is gonna mortgage on this dump,” Rose said decisively. “Which means hard money. Your price is going to squeeze my profit margins.”
“Yes, but think of the opportunities … Prime Manhattan real estate…”
“Alphabet City,” Rose sneered, making it sound like it wasn’t worth living in. “Do you think this place will rent to the highest class? You got needles in the parks around here, a homeless shelter two blocks over, and graffiti on the walls.”
“There’s opportunity in East Manhattan, Miss Fiorello, with Mayor Giuliani in charge…”
“Back taxes on this place alone are almost two hundred grand just to clear the title,” Rose said.
He wavered. “Like I said, the upside is huge, ma’am.”
Rose looked up. Rust was everywhere, debris, and rats. “Let’s get out into the street before the building falls on our heads.”
She made it sound so shitty he was actually glad to follow her.
“What we have here is the potential for a large, bright apartment building with space for a garden and landscaping,” he said unconvincingly.
“What you have here, Mr. Robinson, is an unsafe abandoned structure which is being used as a flophouse and crack den, in a seedy part of Manhattan, which no bank can lend on and which has been on the market for over eighteen months, because your price is insane.”
“So you don’t want it,” he said, crumpling a little. “We have some other, better buildings.”
“I want it,” Rose said. “I never said I didn’t want it.”
“But you—”
“I don’t want it at your insane price. I’ll give you three quarters of a million, not including the taxes, which brings it to almost a full mill.”
“The price is three million dollars and that’s—”
“Unacceptable. Look, Mr. Robinson. You’ve had this dog on your books for longer than a year. What does that say to some guy looking to list his house? Benkman Martin has inventory that doesn’t shift because they can’t shift it. I know you’ve had buyers that have fallen through. And why? Because they’re not liquid. Not serious. Now, I can move fast. I have the money and you know my reputation.”
He wavered.
“In a month, you can have this thing closed, and you know what they’ll say in the office? ‘John Robinson knows how to cut his losses and move out the crap. He got rid of that dog on Avenue A the first day he showed it.’”
Robinson blinked. “How—how did you know this is my first day of showing this property?”
Rose Fiorello looked him dead in the eye and said, “I’m connected.”
She was in with Salerni. He’d heard that. Suddenly John Robinson just wanted to get back behind his nice cushy desk. And it was a dog, and it had just sat there for over a year …
“I’ll have to do a lot of talking to convince the seller.”
“Try telling him that my sources tell me City Hall’s about to file a lawsuit on his ass for owning a crack den.”
“I don’t know…”
Rose reached inside her warm cashmere coat and took out a white paper envelope. She opened it slightly to let Robinson see what was inside: a sheaf of green notes.
“Hundreds,” she said. “A hundred of them. That’s ten thousand dollars. Get me a signed contract in a week, and it’s yours.”
*
“You may be able to do something with this one,” Greg Filkes said. He slid the manila file across the mahogany desk, expectantly.
Jacob Rothstein picked it up, slid the photographs and sheets out of it, and grinned. “Good job, Filkes.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“That’ll be all for now,” he added, disappointing the junior executive, who had been hoping for a round of back-slapping congratulations from the boss’s son. But he got up and left the office quietly, closing the door. Doubtless he’d get a bonus, or something …
Everybody knew the crown prince was in deep shit because he’d brought his little girlfriend into the company and she’d stolen some data. Now he was looking to crush her, presumably to get back in Daddy’s good graces. Filkes had found his master something that would help, and he expected to be in favor with both father and son.
Because this was a little quarrel, but so what? The Rothsteins were a family, and they’d get over that. It was what every suit in the building expected.
Greg Filkes was wrong, though.
Jacob Rothstein stared at the details for twenty minutes, taking them in. Nice choice, Rose, he mused, admiring her taste. She really did have a flair for real estate and under normal circumstances he thought she would have gone far.
But these were not normal circumstances. She had Jacob Rothstein on her tail.
*
Jacob made sure everything was in order before he made his move. He hired a new lawyer, not one who was in the pocket of his family, and had him check out his legal status. He was disappointed, but not all that surprised, to find that most of his wealth wasn’t his at all; it belonged to a family trust, and without his parents’ say-so, Jacob couldn’t touch it. The Manhattan apartment and contents belonged to him, though. He had two hundred and twelve thousand in a current account, of which one hundred was last year’s bonus, and his new lawyer told him crisply he’d most likely have to pay it back.
That left him a car, an apartment, and a hundred grand, after he’d paid off the lawyer. Rothstein felt a few butterflies, but resolutely ignored them. A hundred grand wasn’t much in the Big Apple; maintenance and taxes on his place were two thousand a month just by themselves. Figure in fine wines, food, the necessity of a decent suit, parking, dry cleaning; he wasn’t even sure if it would last him three months.
And yet Jacob had had no doubts about what he was going to do.
For the last two weeks he had been quietly tying up every loose end in his department, assigning more work to his underlings, and getting his files in order for a successor. And this morning he was all done.
He picked out a thick brown padded envelope, addressed it to his apartment, and filled it with everything he had on Rose Fiorello. Then Jacob personally dropped it in the company mail-chute, and after that was done, went outside to his secretary.
“Buzz my father for me, would you please, Ella.”
“That’s right.”
“Come back soon,” she said, batting her eyelashes at him. She never saw him again.
*
“Don’t be such a spoiled brat, Jake,” his father said, angrily. “I have an eleven o’clock and I don’t need this bullshit.”
“Take the eleven o’clock, Dad. I’m not gonna change my mind.”
“Of course you are. You’re just throwing a temper tantrum.”
“No.” Jacob shook his head. He faced his father across the desk; he had not sat down, and Fred Rothstein wasn’t about to get up. “I’m outta here, Dad. I just wanted to tell you myself.”
“Is that about that skinny wop bitch? For fuck’s sake! I can get some girls that look just like her sent around to your apartment, you can bang ’em and get over this crap.”
Jacob winced. His father’s vulgarity jarred on him. “It’s nothing to do with her,” he said, not entirely truthfully.
Fred’s face darkened. “So you’re about to run off with my company secrets and hook up with her, are you? Betraying me for some piece of second-rate pussy?”
“I’d never do that. Never.” Now he was being convincing. “I would never help anybody to hurt the firm.”
“Then what is it, you goddamn idiot?”
He gritted his teeth. “Dad. I don’t like how we work here. I don’t like the fact that we have to screw tenants out of leases, instead of negotiating—”
“That’s great; my boy, the pussy-whipped liberal.”
“I don’t like the accounting, and I especially don’t like being bounced off Acquisitions.”
Fred spread his hands. “So, we’ll talk about that. Don’t be so freaking melodramatic.”
“It’s too late for that. I realized it the second you had me moved. I just don’t want to take orders anymore.” He held up a hand to forestall his father. “Yeah, I know I run the division. But I need my independence. I just don’t like answering to anybody, and I intend to run my own firm my own way.”
“Your own firm? You’re just a greenhorn, Jacob. Barely out of college…”
“Young doesn’t mean incompetent, Dad.” Jacob stepped forward and laid his formal letter of resignation on his father’s desk.