Devil You Know

by Bagshawe, Louise

  Fred Rothstein stared at his son. The freaking moron was actually serious.

  “You’ll have to give back—”

  “My bonus. I know. I already wired it back. And the cottage in the Hamptons, and that Ferrari you leased for me. I know, Dad. I know exactly what I’m worth.”

  “How?”

  “I hired a lawyer. I’ve thought this through.”

  “Open your briefcase!” Fred Rothstein screamed. “How do I know you’re not trying to sneak out of here with our documents like that wop bitch?”

  Jacob smiled inwardly and popped the lock to his briefcase. “Here.” He showed his father; the Coach red-leather case was empty apart from a gold Mont Blanc pen. “That’s mine; Grandma gave it to me, remember?”

  “You goddamn ungrateful bastard,” Fred Rothstein snarled. “Get the fuck out of my office.”

  “I’ll see you for dinner this weekend—”

  “I don’t think so,” Fred Rothstein said. “You’re banned from the house until you give up this craziness and come back to work for me.”

  “I’m never coming back to work here unless I have total voting control of the stock,” Jacob said flatly.

  Fred blinked. “You hafta be shitting me.”

  Jacob sighed. “Elegantly put, Dad. But no.”

  He left his father sitting there spluttering with rage, walked out to the executive elevator, and rode it down to the lobby.

  *

  His flat was a welcome sight, when he got home. It was going to double as an office, for the time being. He had no place else he could use.

  Jacob had set aside a small corner of his library, installing a desk, a computer and a modem. He had his subscription to MLS set up, and he had a thick sheaf of realtor files. He also had a one-page list of bank contacts.

  It was a bit of a stretch. A privileged young man, working only for Daddy’s company, suddenly deciding he wanted to strike out on his own. Easy to applaud, but not so easy to underwrite. And yet Jacob was confident.

  The stock market was soaring. It was a good time to own Fifth Avenue property outright. He didn’t want to sell—too much capital gains tax. No, the best thing would be to mortgage the property up to the hilt. The gains were the proceeds of a loan, and thus they were both tax-free and tax-deductible. Jacob had looked at some similar spaces and calculated, conservatively, that this one would fetch five million. He would take out four and keep a million in equity as a cushion. That would be the seed-money; that, he could take to a bank. They would need more than his track record as part of a huge corporation, packaged up with a cute smile.

  Jacob smiled to himself. Sure, it was a huge gamble, but he felt light, almost carefree. He sat down at the little desk that constituted the sum total of the assets of the JRoth Corporation, picked up his one-page list, and made his first phone call.

  *

  A week later Jacob Rothstein took stock. The results had been mixed. He’d got his mortgage, and that was great, but the banks seemed unimpressed.

  “You don’t really have any assets, Mr. Rothstein. Now, if you’d like to talk to an investment specialist about letting us manage your money…”

  It was the same old song everywhere.

  “Three million dollars is hardly chopped liver,” Jacob responded, struggling to keep his temper in check.

  “That’s true, but it’s also hardly enough to buy a building in Manhattan. Not on the scale you are discussing.” There would be a limp hand extended across the desk. “Please call us when we can help you with something.”

  Jacob shrugged. “I wouldn’t wait by the phone.”

  There was no getting around it, he was going to have to play it a little less safe than his instincts told him to. If he couldn’t get a construction loan or an industrial mortgage, he was going to have to acquire an asset.

  It wasn’t as though he hadn’t done it before.

  Jacob sat at his desk and looked at the other file, the Rose Fiorello one. He had intended to pursue Rose. Maybe not in quite this way, but it would serve. He found it actually kind of amusing that she was doing all his work for him. The building was a gem, if you knew the right builders, and she was in with Salerni’s mob; but he didn’t run the only crew in Brooklyn. He knew what she’d want to do; gate the entrance, put up a guard, make clean, functional apartments out of them, and wait for the neighborhood to gentrify …

  She’d be paying cash, but he knew how Rose worked. She was the queen of the low-ball sellers, and she talked them into it by moving superfast. She had her hard money guys lined up. On the other hand, he, Jacob, had four million dollars sitting in a money-market account. Rose might be able to move in a month. But he could move today.

  Jacob had a frisson of pleasure at the thought. He lifted the phone and dialed Benkman Martin.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’d like to speak to John Robinson about his property on Avenue A. It’s urgent.”

  Fifty-Four

  Rose’s day started out pretty normally.

  Her alarm woke her at 6 A.M., and she instantly swung her bare feet out of bed and walked to the kitchen, where she put on some cinnamon coffee before heading to the shower. She was a morning person, and relished every second of her alone time before work started. It was as close as she came to a personal life, unless you counted those Sunday lunches with her mother. Rose washed her hair with shampoo from Bumble and Bumble, blasted it dry with an industrial-strength dryer that took less than five minutes, and patted her face with Crème de la Mer moisturizing cream; it was two hundred dollars a pot, but it left her skin feeling as plump as a sixteen-year-old’s. Then she pulled on her big white toweling robe and sat in her kitchen, sipping coffee and watching the sun come up over lower Manhattan. It was her daily routine, and she loved it.

  Next, she took the lift to the lobby to pick up her morning papers. Rose read the Wall Street Journal and the London Financial Times, as well as The Economist weekly. She retrieved her steaming mug of fragrant coffee and shook out the Financial Times and saw her own face staring back at her.

  Rose blinked, panicked. What was this? Some exposé of her links to Salerni? The last thing she needed right now was the Feds sniffing around her. Or some Rothstein smear? Was he filing some lawsuit for the documentation she’d got away with?

  She set her mug down and picked up the paper, looking at it more closely.

  “Daisy Markham,” the caption read, “bestselling British novelist, signs copies of her latest release The Orange Blossom at Barnes & Noble yesterday.”

  Rose scrutinized the picture. Sometimes people just looked a bit like you. But no, this was her face.

  Am I going insane? she thought. She took the paper into the bathroom, folded it into a square, and held it up against her reflection in the mirror. The girl in the paper had salmon-colored skin, courtesy of the Financial Times’s pink pages, but apart from that minor detail they could have been the same person.

  This is a sick joke, Rose thought. But the image gazed back at her with a wry smile that she recognized as her own.

  Who the hell is responsible for this? And where did they get that picture of me? But of course, it wasn’t of her, she reflected, she had never sat behind a table of books, signing them. So it had to be a digital photo, enhanced until some author looked like her …

  … twin.

  Rose’s heart started to pound. She felt dizzy and sick. The paper slipped out of her hand onto the floor, and she went to the phone and dialed her mother’s number. It was way too early for her mom to be up, but Rose didn’t care. She had to speak to her now.

  The phone rang and rang and then, finally, she heard her mother’s voice, groggy from sleep.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom?”

  Her mother reacted instantly to the tone of Rose’s voice, her own tone becoming alert and panicky right away. “What is it, honey? Are you OK? Have you been in an accident?”

  “No,” she said, struggling to breathe normally. “I’m fine. Mom, I was adopt
ed, right?”

  “You know you were.”

  “In the hospital … was there another baby?”

  “What do you mean, Rose?”

  “Like a twin, a twin sister. And maybe you only took me?”

  “Rose!” Daniella Fiorello sounded shocked. “You think I would have split up sisters? And not told you about it? No, you were the only one, there were other babies, not many, but there you were and they told us you were next on the list to be adopted, and anyway, once we’d seen you and held you in our arms, Daddy and I wanted only you, darling.”

  “Oh,” Rose said. She was so confused, she had no idea what to think.

  “Why are you asking me this so early in the morning?”

  “I—I saw somebody I thought looked like me.”

  Her mother laughed that warm, rich laugh of hers, and Rose instantly felt a little better. “It must have been a trick of the light, honey; you’re so beautiful nobody could ever look like you.”

  That was her mom; so proud and maternal. Rose felt her world regaining a touch of normality. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “OK, hon. Call me if you want anything or you want to talk about it.”

  “OK,” Rose agreed, hanging up.

  She hesitated, then called Fiona, her newly hired assistant. Fiona knew enough to be up at this time of the morning. She answered her cell phone immediately.

  “Rose Fiorello’s office.”

  “This is Rose.”

  “Good morning, Miss Fiorello. Do you want to go over your schedule for the day?”

  “No. I want you to cancel today’s appointments,” Rose said.

  There was a pause. “Are you sick, Miss Fiorello?”

  “I’m fine,” Rose said shortly. “I just have something I need to take care of. See to it, please.”

  “Very well, ma’am,” Fiona said. “Have a good day.”

  Rose noticed the shock in Fiona’s voice. Was it that unusual for her to take a day off? She supposed it was … maybe her mother was right, that she worked too hard. But what other way was there to live?

  She looked at her wall clock. It was now almost 7 A.M. OK, that left two and a half hours before the nearest bookstore opened.

  Rose went to her walk-in closet. What to do with all that spare time? She supposed she’d just take extra care getting dressed today. She didn’t believe in doppelgängers; she was going to get to the bottom of this.

  *

  John Robinson moistened his lips.

  “It’s not that I’m not interested, Mr. Rothstein,” he said carefully. “It’s just that your timetable is unrealistic…”

  “I’m prepared to outbid your other offer by twenty percent,” Rothstein said. “Did she make mention of a bonus to you?”

  Greed flickered in the realtor’s eyes. “As a matter of fact—”

  “How much?” Jacob asked.

  “Ten thousand.”

  “I’ll give you thirty,” he said simply. “Everybody wins here.”

  “Except the rival bidder.”

  “Well, that’s what she gets for trying to low-ball Benkman Martin, right?” Jacob smiled at him, man to man. “She can be a little disrespectful, no? That’s no way to succeed in business.”

  “You’re right,” Robinson said, meanly. He remembered Rose Fiorello’s beauty and cold manner. Bitch. “She just lost the deal.”

  “You get me that contract by close of business today, and they get a better price and you get thirty thou. You also get the gratitude of the only son of Fred Rothstein,” Jacob said smoothly.

  He nodded eagerly. “But of course, Mr. Rothstein. Let me get on it right away.”

  *

  Rose was waiting outside the doors of Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue when the staff opened them up, impatiently tapping her feet.

  “Good morning, miss,” the staffer said as she entered the large store. “Is there anything special you were looking for?”

  “Yes. A book by a girl called Daisy Markham,” Rose said.

  “Oh, great choice. She’s taken the fiction world by storm, we can hardly keep the new one in stock. Here you go…” He picked up a glossy hardcover off the bestsellers table and handed it to Rose. “Are you a big fan? I just adored The Lemon Grove…”

  Rose was already walking away from him toward the checkout counter, but she stopped. “I’ll take one of those too.”

  “Certainly, miss,” he responded, thinking that she was a weirdo. A beautiful weirdo, in a pretty pink Chanel suit, but a weirdo all the same. Quickly he fished out a copy of the book from the paperback bestseller rack. “Anything else? We have some excellent reads in the same vein, I highly recommend the latest Jenny Colgan novel…”

  But he was talking to her departing back. Rose was already at the counter, paying with a couple of bills and walking right out while the cashier shouted at her not to forget her change.

  *

  Rose found a Starbucks, ordered a latte, and sat at a table staring at the picture on the back of the book until the latte got cold and a waitress came over to ask her if she was OK. Then she got up, left, and caught a cab back to her apartment downtown.

  There was no denying it. This girl was her double. They had to be twins. Rose also knew her mom wouldn’t lie to her. Her mind churned over the possibilities. What if the orphanage had already found a parent for the first baby, and then not told her parents there was another? But this girl was English, and her agency had been right here in New York.

  She had to find out what had happened. And she had to meet Daisy Markham. Rose wasn’t sure why she felt this way. What could a blood sister mean to her, after all? They hadn’t shared a goddamn thing, except parents who hadn’t given a shit about them. Her only family was her mother, not some rent-a-womb she’d happened to gestate in, Rose thought bitterly.

  Still. She had to see Daisy Markham. She could easily have the ultra-efficient Fiona arrange something, but for now, as she sorted out her emotions, Rose didn’t want that.

  This was something she had to deal with herself.

  Fifty-Five

  It was raining in New York. Dirty, sleety rain poured from a gray-white sky, solid cloud without even a flash of blue. A cold wind blustered through the immense stone forest of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, picking up plastic bags and Styrofoam coffee cups. It was January, and the freezing heart of winter.

  Daisy Markham didn’t care. She had been inundated by helpful suggestions from her readers. That made her feel loved and wanted, but it wasn’t all that much use. The only thing worth following up was an anonymous note telling her to look into Janus Investigators in the United States.

  She had, and now she was here.

  Daisy walked down Fifth Avenue, warmly wrapped in her Burberry coat and cashmere sweater-dress in navy blue from Donna Karan, together with her waterproof thigh-high Gucci boots. She looked great, and she felt alive and revitalized. Never mind the weather. She was in New York, and she had things to do.

  Janus was the successor to the mighty Kroll Security, the doyen of investigative companies, an outfit that made the CIA look like the Keystone Kops. However, Kroll was reputable, perhaps a little too reputable. Daisy was tired of looking.

  She wanted to find her birth parents. Now.

  *

  The offices were not really what she had imagined. She was down at Twenty-third Street, near the glorious, weird-shaped Flatiron building that looked like it had been squeezed between two giant crushers until it lay as flat as a cartoon character picking himself up from a cliff fall. Janus was housed in a low-slung office building, only forty stories high, lined with industrial carpet and ficus plants in red pots. Not much evidence of money, despite their incredible fees, but Daisy supposed that was part of the whole “discretion” thing.

  She noted that the offices all had their doors closed. Nothing was open-plan, she thought, as a secretary led her through to the meeting room. No cubicle layouts. No way, she realized, for anybody to hear anybody else’s conversation …
<
br />   “I know what you’re thinking.” Doug Berkshire, the middle-aged guy with the nice suit, thick glasses and a limp handshake who was dealing with her case, grinned, a bit smugly she thought. “The walls are all soundproofed. We take internal security very seriously here.”

  “I didn’t have to pass any security to get up to your lobby,” Daisy pointed out.

  The grin did not evaporate. “That’s because we’ve already had you checked out. Just a precaution, you understand.”

  “I want to find my birth parents,” she said, disliking him and at the same time deciding that he was the perfect man for the job.

  “Yes. So you said.” He spread his hands. “They made quite a job of covering their tracks … but nothing we can’t crack.”

  “Can you guarantee that?”

  “No guarantees. A hundred thousand dollars, fifty percent in advance. No refunds.”

  Daisy blinked. “How much?”

  Berkshire’s eyes gleamed greedily behind the glasses. “You can afford it, Ms. Markham, and that’s the price.”

  “How would you know what I can afford?”

  “You have twenty-six accounts around the world,” Berkshire said softly, “and your current cleared balance at your account in Barclays, Sloane Square, at 9 A.M. local time this morning was four hundred and fifty-nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy-two pounds and six pennies.”

  Daisy sat there for thirty seconds staring at him.

  “Actually it was eight hundred and sixty-four…”

  Berkshire shook his head. “They added the interest this morning.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Daisy said, with grudging admiration. “You’re hired.”

  *

  She was in her hotel room thirty minutes later. Daisy had chosen the Paramount; it was chic, hip, near Times Square, and possessed of New York’s best-looking bell boys.

  But it didn’t excite her. Mission accomplished with Janus, she was now wondering what to do with herself.

  Daisy caught herself staring at the phone. Don’t do it, Daisy, she told herself. Just don’t call him.

  Magnus Soren. Playboy. New billionaire, or so Forbes informed her.