Trump Tower

by Jeffrey Robinson

  Ricardo was standing in front of an open elevator and said, “Good evening.”

  The four of them got in and Ricardo closed the doors. “Fifty-two, fifty-nine, and sixty-one?” he asked, referring to Carson and Alicia’s floor, Cyndi’s floor and Roberto’s floor.

  “I’m fifty-two also,” Cyndi said.

  Alicia shot a look at her.

  When they got to that floor, Cyndi stepped out with Alicia and Carson, then turned and said good night and thank you, again, to Roberto.

  The elevator door closed.

  Carson unlocked the door and asked Cyndi, “You coming in?”

  “Nope, going home.” She kissed Alicia and Carson, “Night night,” and rang for the elevator.

  Alicia stood there staring at Cyndi. “Since when did you become a fourteen-year-old virgin?”

  She smiled, “Isn’t it fun that he’s so shy?”

  WEDNESDAY

  43

  Antonia had hardly slept.

  She’d dozed off sometime around two but was awake again at five because she wanted to keep playing on the 35Tango site before her one-day subscription expired.

  Rummaging around everything there was to find about Pierre Belasco, she began printing out all the links she’d bookmarked.

  Wife and son killed in a car accident.

  As the pages came off her printer, she kept asking herself, how does Antonia use that?

  After all the Belasco files printed, she turned to Katarina Essenbach and printed everything she could find about her various husbands, especially the one from Chile, and the mysterious death of her husband in Alaska.

  How does Antonia use that?

  By the time all those pages were printed, she had to start thinking about going to the office. But she still had the rest of the morning left on her subscription.

  Antonia needs to keep going. Antonia shouldn’t stop now.

  So she e-mailed Anthony to say she’d be working from home this morning and promised to be in around lunchtime.

  Back on the 35Tango site, she tried to think of who else to look at.

  The woman who owned the shoe company. In Antonia’s mind, Belasco had seemed protective of her. But the name Rebecca Battelli in the search box only resulted in links to clippings about her husband’s death.

  Carlos Vela. Belasco had defended him at the staff meeting. But when she put his name in the system, nothing came up.

  Who else? Come on, Antonia, who else?

  Cyndi Benson. Except for the fact that Trump Tower showed up as her address, there didn’t seem to be anything in the forty pages of links about her career that connected her on a personal basis with Belasco or Essenbach.

  But there was that little problem Pierre had solved for Cyndi.

  Belasco didn’t want Antonia to know, but Riordan’s report spelled it out.

  So now Antonia went looking for whatever she could find on Tommy Seasons.

  DAVID OPENED his eyes, saw that the sun wasn’t yet up, and moved close to Tina, who was still asleep. He reached for her and started moving his hands all over her body.

  She groaned slightly, then moved closer to him and, with her eyes still closed, reached for him, too.

  He woke her that way and afterward whispered, “Go back to sleep.”

  Then he got up and made her breakfast, which he delivered on a tray.

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked. “How guilty do you feel?”

  “Not guilty at all. I’m being nice ‘cause I love you.”

  “In case you haven’t yet figured it out . . . sex, coffee and a croissant isn’t going to change my mind about your getting involved with the Colombians.”

  His BlackBerry rang.

  “It’s going to be fine,” he promised. “Who the hell is that at this hour?”

  The caller ID flashed “RD.”

  He told his uncle, “You’re up early.”

  “Nope, up late. On my way home. Your pals in Mexico . . . give ‘em a call, will you? Let’s do that deal.”

  “I’m on it.” He hung up and looked at Tina, “RD’s looking to do a deal with some Mexicans. I guess the Colombians will have to wait.”

  “David, we don’t need them.”

  He blew her a kiss. “Not this morning, we don’t.”

  ODETTE WALKED into the residents’ lobby, already dressed for the day. She was wearing a long, sequined evening gown, with a fox-head fur collar wrapped around her neck.

  “Good morning, Madame,” Shannon said, staring incredulously at the fox-head fur collar.

  She nodded and smiled. “Is Monsieur Belasco in his office?”

  “Not yet. I don’t expect him for another few hours.”

  “Pity. Perhaps I should leave a message.”

  “Of course, Madame.” Shannon took some paper and a pen and handed it to her.

  Odette leaned on the desk and started to write, then realized that Shannon could see, so she moved a little to her right to shield the note.

  Anyway, she wrote it in French.

  “Cher Monsieur Belasco, When you have a moment, can you please tell me how I can find YouTube on my television as I wish to view the tape made of Mrs. Essenbach’s husband leaving the building the other night in his underwear. Please know that I send you my distinguished sentiments.”

  ALICIA GOT UP early to go to the gym with Carson. They worked the machines together, although she stopped running before he did, and then, sweaty and wrapped in their towels, they came back upstairs.

  She said, “Take your shower first,” and went to make coffee, but as soon as she heard the water running, she got out of her clothes and surprised him.

  “Oh, hello . . .” he said, his head soapy with shampoo.

  “Keep washing your hair,” she instructed, took a handful of bath gel and touched him.

  “Oh hello,” he said again, this time in a different tone.

  “Just a little trick that ballet dancers don’t know.”

  He let the remark pass.

  THE PHONE woke Cyndi.

  She answered it with a groggy, “Hello?”

  It was His Excellency calling from Kuwait, and he was crying. “Cyndi, help, please . . . help . . .”

  “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  He was weeping, nearly out of control. “Help me . . . please . . . I can’t . . . help . . . this is terrible . . .”

  “What’s happened? Where are you?”

  “It’s Najeeba.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “No. Najeeba. My wife. She is going to leave me.”

  That woke her up. “What? Why? What have you done to her?”

  The last thing in the world Cyndi wanted was for his wife to walk out and then him show up in New York thinking he could marry her. “You must not let her leave. Where is she now?”

  “Umayma . . . it started with Umayma but now there is Karida . . . Umayma and Karida.”

  She didn’t know where or what or who he was talking about. “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Take a drink of water. Calm down and tell me what’s happened.”

  “Umayma . . . Umayma and Karida . . . Najeeba . . . my wives.”

  “Please . . . calm down.” It took her nearly ten minutes to stop him babbling and get the story out of him.

  Najeeba was his first wife and the mother of his three children. Umayma was his second wife, but they could not have children. That suited Najeeba because it meant her children would never have to share anything with Umayma’s children. Their father’s wealth was all for them.

  Then, he said, he’d recently married his distant cousin’s daughter, Karida—it was the first Cyndi heard about that—and Karida got pregnant very quickly. Najeeba was furious because that meant Karida would move up a notch in the pecking order, which challenged her own position. At the same time, Umayma was displeased because, childless, she’d now be reduced to the role of occasional concubine.

  So Umayma had issued him an ultimatum, which was get rid of wives on
e and three or she wanted out.

  Najeeba, being wife number one, heard that, assumed he was considering it, and had, only this morning, issued an ultimatum of her own. She said, get rid of wives two and three or she’d leave.

  As Karida, being wife number three was, technically, his own cousin, the family on her side had also issued a warning, insisting that if he divorced Karida, they would petition the ruling family—which happened to be on that side of the family—to divest him of his wealth and give it to her.

  “Okay . . . okay . . . listen to me . . .” Cyndi tried to think of something. “You’ve got to make it right with all three of your wives.”

  “I can’t . . . they won’t . . .” He was crying again. “My life with them is over.”

  “No, no, no, no, no . . .” She knew she needed to think of something before he thought of rebounding from them to her. “You must make it right with all three.”

  “How? You tell me. I don’t know how. You’re a woman . . .”

  “Yes . . . well . . . women who feel they have been rejected . . . they need attention. They need love. They need . . .” Out of the blue she decided, “Roses . . .”

  “What?”

  “Roses. And Diamonds. All women who feel rejected need roses and diamonds.”

  There was a long pause. “Roses and diamonds?”

  She hoped he’d buy into this. “Is there a florist near you? And a jeweler?”

  “I don’t know . . . yes . . . maybe . . . there must be.”

  “All right. Now listen . . .” Cyndi had no idea if this would work in the Arab world and wasn’t convinced it would in the Western world either, but if he didn’t think too deeply about this, at least it sounded good. “Go buy three dozen roses. No, make it six dozen. Or twelve dozen. Buy as many roses as you can. Then go buy three very big diamond somethings . . . like a broach. Not a ring. A broach. Or a diamond necklace. Make sure they’re not the same. Three different broaches or necklaces . . . or earrings or watches . . . whatever. And they have to be the same size. Then, take one bunch of roses . . . a third of whatever you can buy . . . and deliver them to your first wife. Get down on your hands and knees and tell her that she is the love of your life and that you cannot live without her. Beg forgiveness. Give her the roses and the diamond thing and then make love to her.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said because she didn’t know, what if. “Then get the second batch of roses and the second diamond thing and take one of your little blue pills. Remember those? Go to see your third wife. Start with the first one, then go to the third one. Give her the roses and the diamond thing, get down on your hands and knees, and tell her that you will love her forever. Beg forgiveness and then make love to her.”

  “To her, too?”

  “I’m a woman, I know about these things.”

  “Najeeba . . . and then Karida . . . in that order.”

  “That’s right. In that order. Then, take another little blue pill, or maybe even two little blue pills . . . it is very important that you can perform . . . and bring the rest of the roses and the third diamond thing to your second wife, the one without the children.”

  “Umayma.”

  “Right. Get down on your hands and knees, tell her you love her the way you have never loved another woman, beg forgiveness, and spend the rest of the night making love to her.”

  “I can’t. I’ll be dead.”

  “You must,” she said, “all night. Those pills will help you. Go on, go buy as many roses as you can and three really gorgeous diamond things.”

  There was a long pause. “This will really work?”

  “It will really work,” she said, then mumbled to herself, or not. Either way, it’s better for him than sitting around crying and watching all three women walk out of his life. At least he’ll be getting laid.

  “Cyndi . . . Cyndi . . . you are such a good friend . . .”

  His Excellency hung up.

  And where are you from, Cyndi Benson? She asked herself out loud, as if she were being interviewed as a contestant on a quiz show.

  I’m originally from Taos, New Mexico.

  That’s nice, she said in her quiz show MC voice, and where do you live now?

  Now . . . I live in Bizarro World.

  She lay back, closed her eyes, and tried to go to sleep.

  In her head she envisioned His Excellency, his arms full of roses and his pockets bulging with diamonds, running away from three nagging women who were frantically shoving blue pills down his throat . . .

  But she couldn’t sleep.

  Getting up, she threw on a robe and went into the kitchen to make breakfast.

  That’s when she saw it was 5:45.

  “Yes? No?” She stared at her espresso machine, decided, “No,” and went back to bed.

  Now, when she closed her eyes she pictured the three women chasing him, except he was down on his hands and knees, and so were they . . .

  She got up again and reached for her laptop to check her e-mail.

  Seeing nothing special, she thought for a moment about last night, then Googled “Roberto Santos.” There were a couple of thousand links that came up—she wasn’t surprised that his Google search brought up more results than hers—and because the first one was his Wikipedia page, she started there.

  She read through it, ignoring the baseball statistics and how well he’d played center field for the Yankees over the past twelve years, or how he was certainly going to retire in the next year or two. According to this, he was already thirty-six. Also according to this, he grew up in Texas, a first-generation American of Nicaraguan immigrants.

  Further down, the page noted that he’d been married for ten years to his high school sweetheart. They were divorced and had two daughters whom he only saw occasionally because his wife had remarried, and she was jealously guarding custody of them.

  Then, even further down, one line jumped off the page.

  “Santo, famously, lives with his mother.”

  Cyndi read it and remembered what he’d said to Carson about her watching Alicia on television.

  She lay back on her bed and stared up at her own smoked-glass reflection in the mirror that looked down on her.

  He lives with his mother? I wonder what that means?

  After a while, she couldn’t decide, so she sat up again, took her laptop, got on the Net, did a search for “Marva Josie” and George Harrison’s song “Something” and found an album of Marva’s called Forever. She bought it on iTunes, set up a link so that Roberto could download it for his iPod, and handwrote a note to him on her own stationery.

  “Thank you, again, for last night.” She noted the iTunes link, and added, “Just ‘Something’ to make you smile.”

  She thought about signing it, “XXX, Cyndi,” but at the last minute, left off the XXX.

  Putting the note in an envelope, she addressed it to him and left it on the little table next to her front door. She’d have the concierge deliver it later.

  Right now, she decided, I’m going back to sleep.

  This time she managed it.

  44

  Zeke Gimbel’s pied-à-terre on the thirty-ninth floor of Trump Tower had originally been a two-bedroom apartment. But after he and Miriam split up, his accountant convinced him that he needed to turn the whole thing into a business expense. So Zeke broke down the wall to the second bedroom and expanded the living room into a large office.

  He bought a huge Georgian mahogany partner’s desk, installed it in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced Central Park, turned the couches toward the desk, and re-angled the dining room table that, for tax purposes, was inventoried as a conference table.

  When he took over First National Artists and moved all of his New York people into their big offices on Fifty-First Street, his accountant warned him that if he started going there to work, or even if he maintained a desk there for an occasional visit, he’d lose his home office dedu
ction.

  Around the same time, Zoey and Max tried to convince him that, since he already had an office in Manhattan, anyway, if he could rebuild the second bedroom, then they could have their own place in New York. He had to remind them that teenaged school kids in California didn’t actually need their own place in New York.

  Then Birgitta suggested that if they put the second bedroom back, she could bring her sisters over from Stockholm for regular visits. Her parents, too. And maybe even her best friends.

  Next, his mother, Hattie, began saying that it would be nice if there was room for her so that she could come to New York once in a while.

  After that, his sister called to ask if it was true that he was building a second bedroom in Trump Tower for Hattie and, if so, could she and her husband use it occasionally.

  That’s it, he decided, the office stays an office. No in-laws. No kids. No family. No friends of the family. Just me.

  And his art.

  “Whatever you put in your office,” his accountant told him when he bought the partner’s desk, “is a legitimate expense.”

  Asking himself, what would I like to own if the government is paying for it?, he started going to art auctions in New York and very quickly got hooked.

  He bought a Giacometti Walking Man for the entrance, and a Giacometti Dog, which lived on a marble pedestal next to his desk in the corner of the big room. For the wall, he bought a huge Arman accumulation of paintbrushes. For the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that he’d built facing that, he’d bought several small sculptures, including two by Elizabeth Frink, one by Henry Moore, two by Jean Arp, and a Jasper Johns “Ballantine XXX” beer can bronze.

  He bought a Rauschenberg to hang over his bed and a Lichtenstein for the wall inside the door. He bought a Jim Dine Heart for the hallway and put a Jean Dubuffet face next to it. He had a small Wesselmann nude in his bathroom and a small Robert Indiana Love pencil drawing in the guest bathroom. There was also a Jim Dine Bathrobe in his kitchen, which would otherwise be an unsuitable place for a painting, except no one ever cooked there.

  Soon out of wall space, he stashed more than two dozen other paintings in closets—including works by Frank Stella, Ed Ruscha, Larry Poons, and Cy Twombly—still wrapped the way they’d come from the auction house.