Trump Tower

by Jeffrey Robinson

  “No,” David said. “You guys go get rooms. There’s got to be a hotel around the airport. Go to sleep but stick by your cell. If we’re staying, we’re staying. If not, I’ll phone. Four hours? Call it two in the morning?”

  “We’ll be fueled and ready to go.”

  “Thanks,” David said and left the plane.

  Zhadanov was waiting with a taxi. “It’s a house about thirty minutes from here.”

  The two climbed in the backseat, and the driver left the airport. There wasn’t a lot of conversation during the ride. Zhadanov tried to make small talk, but David wasn’t interested.

  The driver headed up the beach on dark, empty roads until he came to a sharp turn and stopped, almost in the middle of the road. “This is it,” he said.

  David looked around but couldn’t see anything. “Where?” There were no houselights. There was nothing.

  “Down there,” the driver pointed.

  Zhadanov opened his window and spotted a small footpath leading to the beach. “This is it, yes, this is it.”

  David decided, “I’m not getting out of the car.”

  “What do you mean? We’re here.” Zhadanov demanded, “You must get out. The house is down there at the water’s edge.”

  “I’m not going down there. You tell them to come up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He didn’t like the change of plans, and he didn’t like the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere. “What don’t you understand? Either they come up or I’m on my way back to New York.”

  “Why are you being like this? I have arranged . . .”

  “‘Cause you’re fucking with my head.” David tapped the driver on the shoulder, “We’re outta here. Back to the airport, pal.”

  “Wait, wait,” Zhadanov reached for his phone, got out of the car and dialed a number.

  David tried to listen through the open window but couldn’t tell what Zhadanov was saying.

  Zhadanov soon stuck his head inside the car. “The man himself will come up to greet you. It may take a while, but he will come to you.”

  “Two minutes,” David said and sat back to wait.

  Several minutes passed.

  He listened to the waves on the beach and all the usual night noises. “Where is he?” David asked.

  “He said he’d come up,” Zhadanov insisted. “Please . . . hang on . . .”

  Several more minutes passed.

  “What the hell is taking so long?”

  Zhadanov reassured him, “The man himself will be here . . .”

  “No, no,” David finally decided, “I’m gone. There’s something wrong about this . . .” He leaned forward to tell the driver, “Let’s go. Back to the airport.” Then he told Zhadanov, “Y’all gotta make your own way home.”

  “Wait,” Zhadanov begged, “here he is. He’s here now.”

  David looked and saw flashlight beams coming up what appeared to be a steep set of stairs. He watched as the beams got closer . . . there were three flashlights . . . getting closer, but very slowly.

  “Thank you,” Zhadanov said loudly, “Don Pepe. Thank you so much for coming to greet us.”

  The three light beams were at the top of the steps now.

  Zhadanov hugged the dark shadow of a small man.

  Getting out of the car, David cautiously came around the back to find two very large men carrying flashlights—shining their beams at him, which meant he couldn’t see them—but then he heard a voice say, “Mr. Cove, thank you very much for coming all this way.”

  David raised his hands to show everyone that the light was in his eyes, and when the men moved the beams down to his chest, he found himself standing face to face with a small man in his late seventies or early eighties.

  “This is Señor Forero,” Zhadanov said.

  “Please . . .” Forero extended his hand with a smile. “My friends call me Pepe.”

  “David.” He said, and they shook hands.

  The man had white hair, a pleasant face, with a nice smile and warm eyes. He was wearing a black silk shirt, not tucked in, and white pants. But then David noticed, he was leaning on a crutch. And when David looked down, he saw that this man only had one leg.

  Suddenly he felt terrible, having made a crippled man walk up all those stairs. “I’m sorry if I have inconvenienced you . . . I didn’t know . . .”

  Forero waved him off. “You have come a long way. It is the least I can do to greet you here. Please,” he motioned toward the steps. “I have put food on my table for you, and there is plenty to drink. I hope you will do me the honor of joining me in my home.”

  David didn’t know what he was expecting, but a nice old man with one leg wasn’t it. “Yeah . . . sure,” he said, “my pleasure.”

  Zhadanov ordered the driver to wait. “We’ll be a few hours.”

  All five men now made their way slowly down the steps to the house.

  They came into the living room, which David thought must have been seventy-five feet long and opened onto a wonderful deck. There were several couches, facing the sea—which he could hear but it was pitch-black in the night—and a huge wooden table laid out exquisitely with plates of fruit and fish and several bottles of liquor and wine.

  The two large men who’d accompanied Forero up the steps stayed back at the side of the living room, out of the way.

  Obviously bodyguards, David decided.

  Then two more men appeared. Both of them were closer to Forero’s age than David’s, and both of them shook his hand.

  “Call me Juan Felipe,” the first man said. “Very nice to meet you.”

  “And my name is Javier. Thank you for coming all this way to meet with us.”

  He shook their hands, “David,” he said to each of them, then watched as they hugged Zhadanov, showing David that they knew him.

  Forero suggested they all have something to eat first, so David took a plate of cold grouper with rice and fruit, and an Amstel beer. The others followed him, sitting on various couches with plates on their laps.

  Except for Forero. He motioned to one of the large men at the side of the living room who left and came back with a wheelchair. Forero sat in it, and the man pushed the wheelchair right in front of where David was sitting.

  That’s when David noticed the man was carrying a gun under his shirt.

  Looking around, David spotted two other men sitting on the deck in the dark, and from the outline he could tell that one of them was carrying a big, automatic weapon.

  “Tell me Señor Forero . . .” David had to know.

  “Pepe,” the man corrected him.

  “Okay . . . Pepe . . . why are you surrounded by men with guns?”

  The old man smiled, “Juan Felipe . . . Javier and I . . . we come from a country where kidnapping is a common occurrence. Unfortunately, we are forced to take such precautions.”

  “But . . . we’re not in Colombia now.”

  “Do the terrorists attack Americans only in America?” He smiled, “In my country, if they can kidnap you outside the country and force your family to pay a ransom, then they can kill you outside the country and the Colombian authorities can do nothing. It is a sad fact of life that we live with.” He pointed to his missing leg. “I know what I’m speaking about.”

  David wasn’t sure he understood. “They cut off your leg?”

  “I was kidnapped nearly ten years ago in Aruba. By the FARC. The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. You have heard of them? They are a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization. They didn’t cut my leg off, they . . .” He paused for a moment . . . “They sent a live video back to my family, demanding ransom. When my family hesitated, they shot me in the leg so badly that . . . they left me to die.”

  David asked, “And your family didn’t pay?”

  “Of course, they paid. And the FARC still left me to die.”

  “Nice guys,” David muttered.

  “Extremely,” Forero agreed. “But let’s speak of more
pleasant things. Doing business with you. Has our good friend Vasyl explained what it is we want?”

  David looked at Zhadanov—he’d found an expensive-looking bottle of gen-ever, which is Dutch gin, and was drinking it straight—then back at Forero. “He said you were looking to put some serious money through my business.”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “But . . .” David tried to say this gently, “seeing as how you’re all from Colombia . . . you know . . .”

  “Drug money,” Forero cut in. “We understand your concern.”

  “I’m not going to get involved with anything . . .” David started to say.

  And Forero finished it, “. . . like money laundering.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Forero said. “But then, look at Juan Felipe and Javier, and look at me. Do you see Pablo Escobar?”

  David forced a smile.

  “We are businessmen,” Forero went on, “who have access to large amounts of money in the United States.”

  “Drug money?” David blurted out.

  “Tax evasion,” Forero claimed. “There is a large market in brokering dollars and Colombian pesos . . . and although Juan Felipe is a travel agent by profession, and Javier is a jeweler and I am an industrialist . . . all of us from Bogota . . . we make substantial amounts of money brokering dollars and pesos.”

  David wanted to know, “How does tax evasion . . .”

  Forero smiled. “There are people who believe that football . . . soccer to you . . . is the national sport of Colombia. Those are people who don’t know my country. The national sport is tax evasion. No one looks down on anyone who cheats the government in Colombia because everybody cheats . . . especially people in the government. But the problem with tax evasion is that if you have money that should have gone to the tax department, you cannot spend it in Colombia. If you do, they will know. So the entire country wants dollars in America. They have pesos, we have dollars, and we move money back and forth. You understand?”

  David confessed, “Not exactly.”

  “If you have five million dollars in pesos,” Forero went on, “and you buy yourself a nice hacienda, the government will ask where you got the money. But if that money is not in Colombia, if it is in America, then there are all sorts of ways that you can spend it there, or enjoy it outside Colombia, or even buy things and send them back to Colombia.”

  “And you want to put that money into my business.”

  “No,” Forero said. “We want to make that money available to you to guarantee your line of credit against your trading. You never see the money. You never see us. It is bedded down in several business accounts.”

  Zhadanov piped up for the first time, “All of which comes through my attorney-client account.”

  Forero continued, “Security for your line of credit. You deal with your bankers, not us. We put up the money so that your bankers can deal with you.”

  On the surface, it sounded to David like a foolproof scheme. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  “Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? What kind of money do you need?”

  A hundred million dollars, David thought, in addition to the line of credit he was already working, that would make him and Tina major players. There wouldn’t be a cargo anywhere in the world they couldn’t buy. They could even afford to sit on a cargo for a few days if they had to before unloading it. Airplane parts. Metals. Oil. Nothing would be out of their reach.

  But then David had seen foolproof schemes before. “So what’s in it for you?”

  “Twenty-five points on your profit . . .”

  “A quarter’s a big cut.”

  “And paperwork.”

  “What kind of paperwork?”

  “To justify the twenty-five points.”

  David thought about that. “You want me to doctor up paperwork . . .”

  “No,” Forero said. “We need the paperwork from your bank to show the trading profit and our share. The principal stays in Vasyl’s client account, always in the name of a business. That secures your line of credit, while the profits that come back to us get used to buy something like farm equipment. That then is shipped back to Colombia as part of a business plan. The farm equipment or television sets or cars, whatever, gets sold in Colombia. We get our pesos back to spend, and after a lot of transactional deductions, the tax gets paid at a much, much lower rate.”

  David tried to take it all in. “So what I’m really doing is . . . facilitating income tax fraud.”

  “Please understand that you are not committing any crime, whatsoever,” Forero insisted. “To begin with, if we don’t pay our taxes in Colombia, that’s not a crime in the United States, and that has nothing to do with you. In any case, you never touch any of our money.”

  “I’m trading with it.”

  “No, you’re trading with your money and your bank’s money. Our money is never anything more than a guarantee to your bank. Not to you. Only to your bank. Please . . .” he motioned toward the table . . . “help yourself to another plate.”

  David wasn’t yet totally convinced, but the more they ate, and the more they drank, the more he realized this could make him the biggest player in the game.

  By the time the sun came up—lighting the white sand beach and the gorgeous turquoise sea and turning the sky from bright red and orange into deep blue—the deal was sounding very sweet.

  MONDAY

  20

  The first thing Antonia did when she got up on Monday morning was walk into her living room and look out the window for baseball caps.

  From her bedroom, all she could see was another apartment building, but from the living room she had a view of West Eighty-Eighth Street and, by leaning forward a bit, then craning her neck to the left, she could see the northwest corner at Broadway.

  If she saw people bundled up or carrying umbrellas, she’d have to make a six-minute dash to Eighty-Sixth Street for the six-minute subway ride to Columbus Circle. But if she spotted men in suits and women wearing dresses with running shoes wearing baseball caps, that meant it was walking weather.

  And this morning, there were plenty of baseball caps.

  She showered and dressed, put on her running shoes, stuffed her heels into a shopping bag, looked around the apartment one last time—decided no, after spending the entire weekend moving furniture around, she still didn’t like the arrangement in the living room—and headed out the door.

  Walking fast down Broadway, the way New Yorkers do, she peeled off after four blocks into Le Macaron D’Or, a tiny French pastry shop, where she bought two croissants and a cup of French roast chicory coffee to go.

  This was what she liked best about walking to work, and what she liked best about work was being in New York.

  She’d grown up in New Jersey, staring at a city that was calling to her from across the river. It was where everyone she knew aspired to be. It was where she knew she had to wind up.

  There are two types of people in New Jersey—she and her friends had convinced themselves ever since they were old enough to know where New York was—those who stay and those who leave. But her road to New York had taken her around the world. All the hotels she’d worked in, all the exotic locations she’d come to know, as far as she was concerned, it was those roads that led here.

  “It doesn’t get better than New York,” she said out loud, arriving at Columbus Circle at the same time that she finished her first croissant, “Someday . . . Antonia is going to have the Big Apple by the balls.”

  Upstairs, in her tiny second-floor office just before eight o’clock—her boss usually never wandered in until 8:30—she ran through the reports she needed to see, but stopped when she came to Pierre Belasco’s report on Carlos Vela.

  It amazed her how careful he was to avoid saying that Vela was guilty of anything.

  She checked her watch—by now it was 8:16—and knew she was cutting it close but decided there was enough time. So she left her coffee
and second croissant on her desk, stepped out of her office, looked around to see that no one else was in yet, and went into Anthony Gallicano’s office.

  The man responsible for all the Trump Organization properties in the greater New York area had a big corner room with views south past Columbus Circle, and east along Central Park South.

  Antonia had long ago cracked his code—his wife’s initials and her birthday—so now she turned on his computer and, when it was ready, typed in “MAG616.”

  It brought her straight into his inbox.

  Running down his list of unread e-mails, she saw nothing of any consequence. But there were several e-mails in the draft box. And one of them was a memo to Trump himself. The subject was “Carlos Vela.”

  The memo was very brief. “Concerning the employee in question, Carlos Vela, Belasco reports there is insufficient evidence for dismissal. The resident is adamant. Your call.”

  She didn’t know why it hadn’t been sent. Maybe Gallicano was waiting to attach something. In any case, she erased the first two letters of the word “insufficient,” then she pushed send.

  A copy appeared in the sent file, which she immediately erased. She then searched through the other e-mails in the sent file and noticed one from Gallicano to all department heads. It said that the Broadway actor, Tommy Seasons—and there were several photos attached, including some taken of him by the CCTV cameras in Trump Tower—was to be considered persona non grata throughout the group properties. Gallicano wrote, “Sightings of him should be reported immediately.”

  Also attached was a one-page Word document, written by the Tower security guy, Bill Riordan, explaining the nature of the complaint against Tommy, along with some background.

  Antonia read it and saw that Tommy Seasons had been involved with Cyndi Benson.

  “Hah!” She said out loud, forwarded the report to herself—not to her office e-mail address, but to her secret jerseyhot1983@gmail.com account—then erased that sent copy, so that Gallicano could never see she’d done it.

  Logging out of her boss’ computer, she hurried back to her office.

  A few minutes later, Gallicano walked past her open door and waved, “How come you always beat me to work?”