Trump Tower

by Jeffrey Robinson

  Carson warned, “If you two can’t play nicely together . . .”

  Now Alicia told Carson, “There’s good news and there’s bad news.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “The bad news is that I have to do a ten-minute sit-down with Clinton.”

  “Some girls have all the luck,” Cyndi complained.

  “It’s a party,” Carson said.

  “It’s for Nightly.”

  “What’s the good news?” he asked.

  “The good news is that, apparently, Cameron Diaz is there. So be my guest. She’s yours while Bill is mine.”

  Now Cyndi moaned, “Some boys have all the luck.”

  41

  Antonia spent a few hours back in the office putting together the calculations Anthony Gallicano had asked for, amortizing various New Jersey properties, but the second she finished that, she hurried out the door.

  It was just after five.

  She took the subway uptown, picked up a pizza for dinner, and carried it into her apartment. She changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, turned on her printer, put the pizza box on her bed to the left, and had plenty of napkins at the ready on her right. She bolstered up her pillows behind her, carefully placed a bottle of beer between her alarm clock and the lamp on her night table, positioned her laptop, logged onto her Gmail account, and then logged onto the 35Tango site.

  Clicking on the 35Tango links she’d sent to jerseyhot1983, she printed all of them. Then she returned to the beginning of her search for information on Katarina Essenbach and started going through those files.

  By the time she’d finished two slices of pizza and the bottle of beer, she was only halfway through the fourth page of references.

  There were a dozen more go to.

  She was fascinated with what she’d discovered about the suspected murder of Mrs. Essenbach’s husband in Alaska, all of her lawsuits, and the stories she dug up on the woman’s latest husband, the fraudster from Chile. But a lot of what she was finding now duplicated what she’d already seen, and what worried her was how much deeper she would have to dig to get new material.

  Come on, Antonia, keep your eye on the prize.

  Another slice and another beer later, she was asking herself, how much more does Antonia need?

  She reminded herself, Antonia only needs to make sure that Mrs. Essenbach is motivated.

  She thought about another slice of pizza but settled for her third bottle of beer.

  She reassured herself, Antonia only needs enough to be certain that her Lady Macbeth will kill the king.

  The King.

  She thought about Belasco.

  Now she opened a fourth bottle of beer, went to the search page at 35Tango, and typed in his name.

  PIERRE BELASCO motioned to his couch and shut his office door. “Timmins doesn’t come on for a few hours, so I said, no problem, that we could do this alone.”

  “How can I help?” Forbes asked, dressed as he always seemed to be in his dark-green bomber jacket. But this time, instead of a University of West Virginia baseball hat, he was wearing one that said, Marist Basketball.

  Taking two DVDs off his desk, Belasco put the first one in the machine. “Watch this,” he said and clicked it on.

  The camera panned around Rebecca Battelli’s trashed office.

  “This is what the place looked like when she got there this morning. Riordan’s people shot it.”

  “Forced entry?”

  “No.”

  “The work of several people,” Forbes said. “How’d they get into the Tower and then upstairs?”

  “I’ll show you.” Belasco switched off that DVD and put the other one into the machine.

  It was a CCTV composite that showed the two men coming into Trump Tower, going upstairs, and then leaving.

  “So, he had a pass,” Forbes said when one of the men flashed something to the security guard and was allowed into the elevator. “No sign of forced entry into the office? That means he also had a key. This has all the markings of an inside job.”

  Belasco suggested, “Let’s start with her late husband’s cousin Johnny.”

  “Have you automatically ruled out Mrs. Battelli?”

  “What?”

  He repeated the question. “Have you automatically ruled out Mrs. Battelli? I presume she has a building pass and that she has a front door key. Probably several.”

  “You think she broke into her own showroom?”

  “No. But how about she paid someone to trash the place?”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why would she do that?”

  “Insurance?”

  “No,” he rejected the idea outright. “There’s no way.”

  “In these types of cases,” Forbes explained, “you have to look at everybody. You start with the full deck, then discard, one by one. It would help a lot if we knew what the two men took out.”

  “Took out?” he asked, “You mean, brought in.”

  “They didn’t bring in anything. They took something out.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “What would they bring in?”

  “I don’t know.” Belasco suggested, “Burglar tools?”

  “Like in the movies, a crowbar? You said there was no forced entry. Maybe if they’d have torched the place, you know, arson . . . but all they did was rip it apart. And take something out. What were they looking for?”

  “I still don’t know how you can be so sure they took something out?”

  “The raincoats.”

  Belasco thought about that for a long time. “If the cousin . . .”

  “You’re ruling out Mrs. Battelli.”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “Okay, then, for the sake of argument . . .”

  “Yes, for the sake of argument,” Belasco said. “The cousin wanted to take over the family business, said that it was his, and that Mrs. Battelli had to give it to him. So he had the place trashed because he’s angry with her. That’s what Bill Riordan said. That someone was angry with her. The police agreed. That points to the cousin.”

  Forbes shrugged, “Maybe.”

  “Who else?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the cousin. Maybe somebody she’s not telling you about. Maybe nobody.”

  “Have you met the woman? How can you possibly think Mrs. Battelli had something to do with this?”

  “For the sake of argument?”

  Belasco started shaking his head. “The woman just lost her husband. She’s vulnerable. She’s fighting to keep her sanity. There’s no way . . .”

  “Then maybe no one is angry at her.”

  “But they trashed her place.”

  “Maybe whoever did it wants you to think they’re angry. Maybe there is something else going on.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like,” Forbes said, “whatever those two men took out hidden under their raincoats.”

  “What would they take out?”

  “There are really only two things. Goods and information.”

  “You mean . . . shoe samples?”

  “That often happens to major designers when they’re about ready to announce their new collection. Someone steals samples, they counterfeit them in China and Eastern Europe, then sell the goods at street markets in the West. It’s intellectual property theft.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case here. She’s not a designer . . . she’s an importer. A wholesaler.”

  “Who’s her competition? Who does she owe money to? Who would benefit most if she went out of business?”

  “Certainly not her husband’s cousin,” Belasco said. “She goes out of business and he loses.”

  Forbes suggested, “Then what about computers? Electronic files? Cash? Checkbooks? Accounting records? Is there a secret bank account somewhere? Is there information . . . was there information . . . that could be used to blackmail someone?”

  Belasco admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “Find out what’s missing, and you�
�re a big step closer to finding out who did this.”

  “The police aren’t going to do much. I want to help this woman. My accountant is coming in to look through her books. Maybe he’ll be able to tell us something.”

  “So,” Forbes asked, “what do you want me to do?”

  Belasco answered, “Whatever the police can’t, or won’t.”

  ANTONIA ONLY needs enough to be certain that Lady Macbeth will kill the king, she repeated.

  She suddenly found herself confronted with references to more than thirty different Pierre Belascos.

  She’d had no trouble finding the links to herself, or to Katarina Essenbach, or to her parents. Now she couldn’t believe there were so many men with the same name. Next to “Pierre Belasco” she added “French,” but that didn’t do any good. She tried “France” and that didn’t do much good either. When she put in the words, “Trump Tower,” sure enough, several links came up, but they were professional links—office address, phone number, that sort of thing—and didn’t contain anything personal.

  It was obvious from the way the search terms were laid out that Belasco’s social security number would make things easier. But she didn’t have it, and even though she could get it, she worried that IT might catch her logging on from home and ask her what she was doing.

  Belasco’s New York address would help too—she knew he lived somewhere in the Village—but when she Googled him, it didn’t come up.

  Back at those business listings, she tried to find something that might work. She read each one carefully and came across the same information repeated and repeated and repeated. It was frustrating, and she was on the verge of giving up when she spotted an entry in one file that read, “(b) 1958, Crans Montana (Valais) Switz.”

  Immediately, she added “Switzerland” and “1958” to qualify her search for “Pierre Belasco,” and up came three pages of links.

  Gotcha!

  There were references to the hotels where he’d worked, a few interviews with him that were in French and Italian, and all sorts of things she hadn’t been able to find yet, like his New York address and his social security number.

  There were cross-references to hundreds of people she’d never heard of—obviously people he’d worked with—and several cross-references to people she knew, like Donald Trump and Anthony Gallicano.

  She sorted through names, looking for something that might help her find new links. And deep down on the third page of the links, she spotted the name Camille Chastain Belasco.

  It wasn’t a business link, she could tell that much, because there were some dates following that name.

  Next to it was the name Christian Chastain Belasco.

  She couldn’t figure out what it was—brother, sister, mother, father—so she went back to her original search, “Pierre Belasco” and started by adding the qualifier, “Camille Chastain.”

  That brought up a few other links, which led her to what appeared to be a photo image of a newspaper article.

  It was in French. Something about Paris. She saw the words, Hôtel de Crillon.

  Antonia could speak the language passably, having worked in France for a year, but reading French was not the same thing as passably speaking it.

  Her high-school and college Spanish was no help at all.

  What’s more, the image of the newspaper cutting was very dark.

  She tried to brighten her screen, but that didn’t work. So she pushed print, and tried to read it off the page.

  It seemed to be dated 1986.

  She knew he’d worked at the Crillon in Paris around that time, but the print was too small. She tried to print it larger, but she couldn’t get the printer to understand what she wanted to do, and after nearly fifteen minutes of fooling with it, she had to settle for the first copy that came off the machine.

  Taking the printed page over to a lamp, she squinted and saw the word femme and the word fils and then the word voiture.

  That’s when she realized what it was saying.

  Oh my God . . . Antonia. She put her hand over her mouth. Oh my God.

  In Paris in 1986, Pierre Belasco’s wife, Camille, and infant son, Christian, had been killed in a car accident.

  42

  Three hundred handpicked guests had received the beautifully printed invitation that read, “Bill Clinton cordially requests the honor of your company for cocktails and finger food on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in aid of the Clinton Foundation initiative, ‘New York Loves Haiti.’”

  Dress was “smart casual,” and the time was indicated as 6 to 9 p.m. In the corner of the invitation it said RSVP and warned “admission strictly by invitation.” Underneath that was written, “Donations Beginning at $25,000.”

  For Alicia and Carson, this created a minor problem because she couldn’t figure out if it meant twenty-five grand per couple or per person. Carson argued that because the invitation was addressed to Mr. and Mrs., it was twenty-five grand per couple. But Alicia decided that, because this was Bill, they really should err on the side of caution. She told Carson that he needed to write a check from their charity account to the Clinton Foundation for $50,000.

  He did.

  That same night, Cyndi phoned to say she’d been invited and presumed Alicia and Carson had been as well. Alicia said yes, then explained her dilemma about the donation.

  Cyndi said, “Well, if you guys are in for fifty, I’ll write a check . . . hold on . . .” She went to get her checkbook and, when she had it, she came back on the phone to say she was writing it now to the Clinton Foundation for $49,999.

  Alicia asked, “What are you talking about?”

  Cyndi reminded her, “You guys are paying fifty.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Cyndi said, “I shouldn’t have to pay as much as you because I eat less.”

  THE NEW YORK Police Department had roped off traffic along Fifth Avenue from Eighty-Fourth Street to Eightieth Street in front of the museum and set up a perimeter behind it, too. No one could get close to the building, except on foot.

  Then, before any of the guests could enter the building, they had to show their invitations, wait while their names were checked off the official list, and pass through security machines.

  Alicia, Cyndi and Carson arrived at the museum’s steps—shuttled there from the designated drop-off point at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eightieth Street in golf carts decorated with NY (Heart) Haiti signs, and escorted by musicians up and down the block, playing traditional Haitian méringue—only to find a long line waiting to go through security.

  Photographers were everywhere, snapping photos, and television news crews were all over the steps, too. They rushed to photograph Cyndi and Alicia, with Carson standing proudly in the middle, then just as quickly abandoned them when the next golf cart arrived, this time with Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.

  Behind the Smiths were Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi.

  Behind them was James Gandolfini, sharing a golf cart with Hugh Jackman and his wife.

  Steve Buscemi and his wife were near the front of the line, and so was Sienna Miller, who was deep in conversation with Barbara Walters.

  For the press, it was a feeding frenzy.

  Meagan O’Donnell spotted Alicia and wanted her to do a piece to camera, but Alicia sidestepped the interview by saying, “You don’t want me, you want Liza Minnelli,” who happened to be standing twenty yards away talking to Bette Midler.

  Jimmy Fallon and Meredith Vieira were waiting to get in, and so was the rap singer 50 Cent. Not far away Matt Lauer was talking to Charlie Rose, who was on line in front of Jerry Stiller and his wife, Anne Meara.

  Behind them was the legendary black soul singer Monserrat Madyson. And when she spotted Cyndi, Monserrat put her hands on her hips, shook her head, and called out loud enough for everybody to hear, “Honey, you are too damn beautiful. You ruin it for the rest of us. Girl . . . look at you . . . damn . . . don’t yo
u ever eat?”

  That wound up being the teaser into the Clinton party segment the next morning on Good Morning America.

  Once guests got inside the museum, police officers and museum officials guided them to elevators that took them up to the roof garden, where their names were checked a second time.

  And, for the second time, everyone had to go through security.

  But as soon as they stepped outside, five floors above the treetops, the city of New York at dusk surrounded them.

  There was Harlem beyond the park to the north, and midtown below the park to the south, the elegance of Fifth Avenue apartments staring back at them on the eastside, and the towered silhouettes of stately buildings lining Central Park to the west.

  A band was playing Haitian minijazz on the far side of the roof, while waiters and waitresses in white dinner jackets circulated everywhere, carrying drinks and platters with fifty different types of hors d’oeuvres.

  Everything was prepared right there, in a special outdoor kitchen constructed under the trellis, where a dozen toque-headed cooks moved frantically back and forth to the commands of Micelo Sydney, the Haitian-born, French-trained chef whose restaurant, Cap-Haïtien, a few blocks away on Madison Avenue, had recently won a second Michelin star.

  The air smelled of lime and grilled fish and French perfume.

  Alicia went to check on her crew for the interview, while Carson and Cyndi wound their way through the crowd and found David and Tina. They chatted until Alicia came back, and a few minutes after that, Bill Clinton—who can work a room better than anybody else on the planet—sidled up to them to say hello.

  “We watch you every night at six,” Bill told Alicia. “And Hillary thinks you’re the best.”

  “Don’t you?” Carson challenged him.

  He put his finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” and whispered, “I do.”

  Now he turned to Cyndi. “When Chelsea was growing up . . . one Christmas . . . this must have been just after we left the White House, she wanted some of your perfume. She said it’s called À Poil. Well, I knew what À Poil means, and there was no way . . .”

  “Wanna know a secret?” Cyndi leaned close to him. “Chelsea knew, too.”