Trump Tower

  “Sure,” he said.

  She reached for Belasco’s report. “Sounds like Mrs. Essenbach is exactly the sort of person we need to avoid.”

  “The boss can’t stand her. Never liked her since the day he met her. She’s a troublemaker.”

  “How interesting.” Antonia smiled politely. “How very interesting.”

  Gallicano went back to the file he was reading.

  Antonia went to her office.

  As she took off her running shoes, she read Belasco’s e-mail. Then she put on her heels, saw that Gallicano was still engrossed in what he was reading, and quickly took the report down the hallway to make a photocopy. She dropped it on her desk, then returned the original to Gallicano.

  “The woman sounds like a nutcase.”

  He nodded, “Certainly does,” then went back to reading.

  In her own office, she thought about shutting her door but decided that might look odd because no one on the floor ever closed their door. Instead, she angled her computer in such a way that no one coming into the room could see what she was looking at.

  Googling “Katarina Essenbach,” she sorted through a couple of dozen links, reading all the references, especially about the woman’s various marriages and the lawsuits against her plastic surgeons.

  Antonia sent the links she wanted to save to her jerseyhot1983 address, quickly changed back to her homepage, and deleted her “browser history” files, so that nobody could see what she’d been Googling. She also deleted her sent e-mail files, in case someone looked to see where she’d been e-mailing.

  She could study everything better at home tonight.

  Now she wondered where else could she find out more about Mrs. Essenbach.

  There was a specialist database the company used for top executive background checks, except she couldn’t recall what the name of it was. It had something to do with dancing.

  She knew that Tony would know, but she couldn’t ask without him wondering why.

  So she went back to Google and this time did searches for “background check” and “corporate intelligence” and “executive background intelligence.” But none of the links that came up sounded familiar or had anything to do with dancing.

  Short of asking Tony, she thought about logging into someone’s classified personnel file—she guessed that the data mining service would be referenced there—but she worried that the log-in would pop up as an unauthorized access request, and someone like Bill Riordan would start asking questions.

  Bill Riordan, she thought.

  If Antonia beats around the bush with him, he’ll suspect something. So why doesn’t Antonia simply ask him outright?

  She dialed his extension, got his voice mail and his beeper number, then dialed that. She left her number, and he rang back right away.

  “Sorry to bother you but my sister phoned me . . .” She thought that sounded pretty good. “The company she works for is looking for one of those firms that does top-of-the-line background checks on senior executives. They’re hiring, and she asked me if I knew of one, and I said I’d ask you who we used?”

  Instead of giving her the name, he wanted to know, “Why are you asking me?”

  “Because . . . she asked me and I figured you could recommend the best one.”

  “No,” he said, “you didn’t ask for the best, you asked for the one we use.”

  Once a cop always a cop. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Why didn’t you ask Tony?”

  “‘Cause my first thought was to ask you. I mean . . . what’s the big secret?”

  “Tell your sister she can find plenty of companies that do what she wants done on the Net.”

  “Thanks a million for your help.”

  “Anytime.” He hung up.

  “Asshole,” she said out loud.

  “Anybody I know?”

  Antonia swung around to find Tony’s secretary standing in the doorway.

  “I was trying to do a favor for my sister and I asked . . .” she stopped and shook her head. “No one you know.”

  “I dropped by to say there’s no hurry on the New Jersey property amortization calculations . . .”

  She’d forgotten all about that. “I’m doing them now.”

  “He’s had to run out,” she pointed to Tony’s office, “and won’t be back for the rest of the day. So tomorrow’s fine.”

  “Okay,” Antonia said. “Thanks.”

  The woman backed away.

  “My sister . . .” Antonia called to her. “My sister asked me which background check firm we used, because her company was looking to hire someone . . . you know, a senior executive . . . and all I could remember is that there was one we used, or once used, that had a name with the word . . .”

  “You mean Thirty-Five Tango?”

  Dancing! That was it. “Ah . . .” Antonia backtracked, just in case. “I’ve been checking the Net for the word . . . detective . . . too many online detectives, Internet detectives, private detectives, public detectives.” She grinned, “Thanks, anyway.”

  The woman waved and walked away.

  Fuck you, Bill Riordan. She went to her keyboard and started to type, “www.thirty . . .” then stopped.

  She wondered if Riordan, or anyone else, could access what searches she did and what sites she visited. She knew that the company had fired employees in the past for using their office computer to pull up porn sites. And if you downloaded certain unauthorized software, even something that seemed as innocuous as a solitaire game, nasty e-mails arrived from IT noting that they’d automatically removed the software, and warning not to do it again.

  Clearing her browser history again, she put her running shoes back on, stood up, and walked out of the office.

  Outside on Columbus Circle, Antonia took her phone and did a map check for nearby Internet cafés. There was one a few blocks up Broadway, but that was too close. She didn’t want someone from the office happening by and spotting her.

  Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus was nearby, and she figured they must have a library with public access computers, but she didn’t know if she could talk her way into it.

  Then she spotted a D-Luxor Internet Café on the map at Eighth Avenue near Eighteenth Street. It was more than far enough away, so she jumped into a taxi and went there.

  The place was a hole in the wall that smelled of cigarettes and Clorox, where some fat Egyptian guy—“I’m from Luxor . . . delux . . . D-Luxor . . . get it?”—served bad coffee and stale pastries.

  There were half a dozen computers upstairs near the window, most of them occupied. But the Egyptian fellow said there were another dozen machines downstairs. And that’s where the printers were, too.

  She paid up front for one hour and went downstairs.

  The basement was damp and dingy. Not surprisingly, no one else was there. She sat down at a computer in the corner, logged on, and tried to get into the Thirty-Five Tango site by spelling out the word.

  It didn’t work. So she tried it with the number 35. Nothing. She typed the words with hyphens, then underscores, then used dot net instead of dot com, and then she tried dot org. Still nothing.

  Frustrated, she Googled, “Thirty-Five Tango.”

  The first entry explained that the name signified an MOS, which is a “military occupational specialty” for intelligence officers. And reference after reference went into detail about intelligence officers. It wasn’t until she got to the second page that she found the link, http://35tango.int.

  Typing that into the browser, a page came up asking for her user’s login and password. Obviously, she didn’t have one. But at the bottom of that page, in the lower right-hand corner, there was a little arrow and the words, “to register.” That brought her to a new-user page.

  She almost typed in her name, then stopped because she wanted to know how much this was going to cost.

  On the price page it said that a one-day pass to the site’s basic background package—which provided open so
urce information from federal, state and local databases, including complete address history, relatives and associates, previous marriages and divorces, a nationwide criminal records search, some financial information like credit bureau ratings, references to licenses and permits, and information on properties owned with sale date and prices—would set her back $275 plus tax.

  That stopped her.

  And this was the cheapest package. Others ranged from one week to one year and from five figures up to six. The corporate “Platinum Level,” which was the one she assumed the company used, not only provided unlimited searches of all the open source databases throughout the world, but included private data mining around the world. The subscription price for that was based on the number of people employed by a company and the number of people who would have access to the database. Subscriptions started at $125,000 a year.

  She had no idea if that was expensive or a bargain for a company as big as the Trump Organization, but $275 plus tax out of her pocket to find out about Katarina Essenbach . . .

  Nearly three hundred bucks to find out . . . what?

  Mrs. Essenbach isn’t worth it, she decided. But then she wondered what information all these databases had on her. Do they know about Antonia’s secret life?

  At the sign-in page, she typed her name and address and provided her credit card information.

  As if Antonia has a secret life.

  A pop-up appeared, giving her a one-day password, with a little note at the bottom as a reminder that one-day meant twenty-four hours.

  Even better. Antonia can play with this all night.

  Her first search was herself and several dozen links came up. But they merely took her to information that she assumed would be there. Driver’s license. School background. Various addresses where she’d lived. There was nothing of any particular interest, nothing she would care about if somebody else found out.

  She ran a fast search on her parents and then on her sister, and nothing there seemed terribly fascinating either. Although she was shocked to see that the three-bedroom house with the finished basement where she’d grown up, which her parents had sold ten years ago for $235,000, was today worth four times that.

  Now she typed “Katarina Essenbach” into the search form.

  This time, several dozen pages popped up, containing more than a thousand links.

  “Wow.”

  She chose one of the first links at random—addresses—and up came thirty different addresses for Katarina Essenbach, spanning as many years.

  Five were listed as “still current.” There was Trump Tower, then addresses in Las Vegas, London, Santiago and Antigua.

  Another link noted that Mrs. Essenbach was claiming Las Vegas as her legal residence, which struck Antonia as odd because she knew that the woman lived most of the year in New York.

  Now checking family links, she found loads of details about the woman’s various marriages.

  According to one of the databases, her current husband—the man in the underwear—was Julio de Garcia-Gutierrez, an exiled Chilean diplomat who’d been implicated by the Spanish government in the theft of several hundred million dollars. According to this, he’d been in cahoots with the former dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

  Holy shit, Antonia . . . this game is getting really good.

  From there she went to the links that described Essenbach’s various lawsuits. There were documents and newspaper clippings and court reports about how she’d sued her plastic surgeons for botched operations, and several other people along the way as well, mostly for bad business deals. But then Antonia found a file on how Mrs. Essenbach had sued her investment broker, and a banker, and even her veterinarian when her dog Ma Jolie died on his operating table. It cost the vet $175,000.

  Next, Antonia found newspaper clippings and court documents from Great Britain where Mrs. Essenbach had sued two newspapers for libel.

  They’d accused her of murder.

  According to the Daily Express and the Mail on Sunday, Katarina had been questioned by police in connection with the death of her last husband, Kurt Essenbach.

  The story made the British papers because, as it turned out, the late Mr. Essenbach had once been involved in a torrid and much-publicized love affair with the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret.

  In this case, the papers noted, Kurt and Katarina were honeymooning on a private yacht, sailing up the coast of Alaska, when he suddenly died. The Alaskan State Police were suspicious, but the autopsy proved inconclusive, and Katarina was allowed to leave with his body.

  The British newspapers admitted that she’s never been charged with any crime but implied she should have been.

  “Murder,” Antonia said, closing her left eye, tilting her head, and trying to sound like Inspector Columbo. “Oh . . . ah, I almost forgot . . . Mrs. Essenbach . . . excuse me for bothering you again, ma’am . . . one more thing . . . you see, ma’am, I’m curious . . . I mean, forgive me ma’am for prying . . . but after all those lawsuits and after killing your last husband . . . I’m trying to get this straight in my own mind . . . what do you think of Pierre Belasco?”

  She stared at the screen for a very long time, until a pop-up appeared saying that there were only five minutes left on her prepaid hour.

  That brought her back to the moment.

  She quickly sent all the links she still had on the screen to her jerseyhot1983 account, then logged off the 35Tango site. There would be plenty of time to go back there tonight. But before she shut down, she did a fast phone search, and when she found the number she was looking for, she entered it into her cell phone address book and left.

  Stepping out onto Eighth Avenue, she looked around to get her bearings, and realized she was a couple of blocks from Chelsea Market. That would be a very good place to meet.

  Now she took her phone and dialed that number, and when a man answered, Antonia asked, “Is Mrs. Essenbach there please.”

  36

  “This is terrible,” Belasco said as soon as he walked into the showroom. “Are you all right?”

  Desk and file drawers were emptied, with papers and files strewn everywhere. Shelves were overturned. Furniture was upended, and some of it was destroyed. Shoes and shoeboxes were scattered all over the place.

  “No.” Rebecca was standing in the middle of the room, her hands holding her face, dazed and trembling. “No, I’m not.”

  He went to her and reached for her hands.

  She quickly moved away. “What am I going to do?”

  He hesitated, embarrassed that he’d been clumsy. “You need to call the police.”

  Taking his cell phone, he dialed Bill Riordan and got voice mail.

  “Can you come to Scarpe Pietrasanta on the nineteenth floor, please, right away?” He pushed star, got back to the main menu, and this time left a numeric page.

  “My security man is on his way,” he told her. “We have cameras everywhere so I’m sure we’ll be able to figure out who did this to you. Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”

  Rebecca closed her eyes and shook her head, and the two of them stood there, like that, for a very long time not speaking.

  “What the hell . . .” Riordan appeared in the doorway.

  Belasco motioned for him to come in. “Mrs. Battelli found this when she got here this morning. We haven’t touched anything.”

  The first thing Riordan did was check the front door. “No sign of a forced entry. That means someone had a key.”

  Stepping into the showroom, and being careful where he walked, Riordan poked his head into the offices and into the tiny kitchen. Everything there was smashed and on the floor.

  “Somebody’s very angry at you,” he said to Rebecca, then took his phone and called one of his team. “Harry, we’ve got a ten-twenty-one on nineteen. Scarpe Pietrasanta. Send someone down with a video camera. I want the scene documented. Then get on our cameras and go back . . .” He stopped and asked Rebecca, “When was the last time you were h
ere?”

  Belasco answered, “She was here Friday.”

  Riordan looked at Rebecca. “Is that correct? The last time you saw the office was Friday? And everything was all right?”

  She nodded, “Yes.”

  He told Harry, “Go back to Thursday, close of business. Every elevator stop on nineteen. Check the stairwell, too. I want to identify everybody who’s been on the floor since Thursday night.” He hung up. “We’ll find him. But we need to bring in the police.”

  Rebecca shook her head, “I don’t know.”

  “You must,” Belasco said.

  “Mrs. Battelli . . .” Riordan spoke softly and slowly, “I can tell you from experience that whoever did this to you is very angry. I can tell you from experience that it was more than one person. Probably two.”

  “Please . . .” She tried to wave him off. “Maybe tomorrow . . .”

  He continued. “I can tell you from experience that nothing will be missing, unless you had cash hidden somewhere and these people found it. And that if you don’t let the police handle this . . . and we will work with them, and we will be here for you . . . but if you don’t let the police handle this, these people will be back.”

  “No . . . please . . .” she begged “I think I want to go home now.”

  “They may not come here,” Riordan wanted her to understand, “but they will strike again. They may come to your home. They may try to do you some physical harm. For your own safety . . .”

  “Rebecca,” Belasco said, “listen to him.”

  “No,” she said. “I know who did it. He won’t harm me. It’s my husband’s cousin. Johnny. All he wants is for me to give him this business.”

  Riordan was insistent. “Mrs. Battelli . . . a crime has been committed in Trump Tower. We have a responsibility to you. But we also have a responsibility to our other tenants. We need to protect you . . . and them. You say you know who did it, and whether or not you want to cooperate with the police is up to you . . . but we don’t have a choice. If you don’t want to bring the police in, that’s your decision. We have to.”

  Folding her arms across her chest, she stepped over the debris on the floor and looked into her office . . . the one that had been her husband’s.