Trump Tower

by Jeffrey Robinson

  No sooner had the three of them arrived home at Trump Tower when Alicia remembered that she and Carson had, weeks ago, accepted a dinner invitation at the Park Avenue penthouse home of Fleming and Elizabeth Scranton.

  A couple they’d only recently met, the Scrantons privately owned Decorators’ Depot, a chain of 180 big-box stores around the country.

  So Alicia and Carson rushed out of their traveling clothes—“Lucky for us that we spent so much time taking baths in Paris,” she said—got into dinner-party clothes and managed to get to the Scranton’s place almost on time.

  Not surprisingly, between his jetlag from having come full circle around the world in only five days plus the late night, Carson had overslept.

  It was the wrong morning to have done that.

  “YOU GOT yourself a real problem.”

  Carson wanted to know, “Who or what or why?”

  Arcarro told him, “Omaha.”

  That woke him up.

  Instead of ordering his usual juice and bialy, Carson punched up his voice mail and listened to the message from Warring, which simply said, “He fucked us.”

  He returned the call immediately. “It’s Carson.”

  Warring demanded to know, “Where the fuck have you been?”

  “I just got back . . . last night.”

  “Yeah, well, I needed you on the phone with Japan this morning while Japan was still open. Now they’re closed.”

  Carson asked, “What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is,” Warring said angrily, “he fucked us . . . And you’re asleep at the switch.”

  “Hold on . . . Ken . . . calm down . . .”

  “Don’t ever tell me to calm down.”

  “Sorry,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Please tell me what happened.”

  “He reneged. Fucking flat-out refused to sign. Said he changed his mind. Said if we didn’t like it, we could take him to court or fuck ourselves, or both.”

  Carson pulled his keyboard closer and checked the Shigetada share price on the Tokyo Exchange. “Closed down two-thirds. Who else knows?”

  “Who knows what?”

  “That he wants us out?”

  “How do I know? Lawyers had everything set to sign the initial intent, and the fucker sends a message that the deal’s off. I try to get in touch with you because we need to do something fast . . . and I can’t find you . . .”

  “What did the lawyers say?”

  “What do you want them to say?”

  “Okay.” Carson understood that Warring was in no mood to have a conversation. “Let me find out what’s going on and where we stand and figure out what we can do.”

  “You don’t need to figure out what we can do. We need to ruin the fucker. That’s what you have to do when somebody tries to screw you. Screw them back fifteen times so they never do it again. Screw them back fifteen times worse and your reputation gets out there and the next guy thinking about it says to himself, I better leave this prick alone.”

  “I understand,” Carson said.

  “You can never let some son of a bitch get away with anything because if you do, you only invite others to try.”

  “I’m on the case,” Carson said. “I’ll call you in an hour.”

  “Yeah, and when you call . . . you better have something to say.”

  Carson hung up and screamed loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, “Shit!”

  “What?” Arcarro was standing in his doorway.

  “Shigetada went away. Refused to sign.”

  “I thought the fat lady already sang.”

  “Wrong song. And Warring is seriously pissed off.”

  “At us?”

  “At me. At Shigetada. At everybody.”

  Arcarro fell onto Carson’s couch and took up all of it. “What now?”

  “I don’t have a clue.” He checked the time. “It’s too late to get the lawyers on the phone in Tokyo. And, I don’t have any home numbers for them. I could phone Shigetada . . . I don’t know. Ken is furious. What do you think?”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask J. R. Ewing what he would do.”

  Carson smiled at the Dallas reference. “Yeah . . . J. R. Ewing’s art of the deal. Besides blackmailing somebody’s ass, J. R. would probably say that we’ve got three choices. We buy . . . we sell . . . we do nothing.”

  “Right. J. R. would look for a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a donkey, whatever. So get something on Shigetada and blackmail the shit out of him.”

  “Knowing Warring,” Carson suggested, “he wouldn’t automatically say no. But short of blackmail . . . what else you got?”

  Arcarro thought for a while. “Shift your defense. This is an away game. Go zone.”

  “You don’t score playing defense.”

  “Tie goes to the base runner. If he doesn’t score, he loses.”

  “Too many mixed sports metaphors . . . makes no sense at all. If we don’t score, either . . .”

  “You’re not following me. He can buy, he can sell, he can do nothing. So, prepare the ground for all three eventualities. If he’s buying, you’ve got to be selling high. If he’s selling, you’ve got to be buying low. If he’s doing nothing, you’ve got to kick him in the ass and make him do something.”

  “He’s suddenly not selling,” Carson said, “but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily buying. Easy enough to find out, I guess. But what happens to us if Shigetada’s doing nothing?”

  “If he’s doing nothing, maybe he’s waiting for the market to tell him what to do.”

  He looked at Arcarro. “You’re saying I should force the market?”

  “That’s step number two.”

  “And, step number one is?”

  “After all the time you’ve spent putting this deal together, you’ve got to know him and his company inside out.”

  “I do.”

  “So step number one is . . . find out what you don’t know.”

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK New York time, Carson phoned Warring to say the only thing that seemed to make any sense. “I’m working on it.”

  Warring’s mood hadn’t changed. “Don’t bullshit me.”

  Carson promised, “I’m not going to let you down.”

  Warring warned him, “I’m not going to sit around listening to bullshit for very long,” and slammed down the phone.

  CARSON CORRALLED Mesumi and one of Arcarro’s traders, a fellow named Matthew who’d been with them for four months, sat them down in the conference room with their laptops and said, “Shigetada Industries. Find me a way in.”

  “Like what?” Matthew wanted to know.

  “Like anything and everything. Go to analysts’ reports, pink sheets, Internet rumors, intel, out-tel, under-tel.” He sat down with them. “Whatever there is.” He pointed to Mesumi, “You get the Japanese pages.”

  At ten Arcarro stopped in to ask, “How goes it?”

  Carson answered, “Nothing yet.”

  At 10:30, Matthew stepped out to do a conference call that he’d set up days ago and didn’t come back for over an hour.

  By noon, they still hadn’t found anything on Shigetada Industries that Carson could use.

  “I wish we knew what we were supposed to be looking for,” Matthew said, motioning toward the printouts that were now cluttering up the conference table.

  Carson thought about calling Warring but didn’t. He was afraid of what Warring might say.

  At two, Matthew stood up and announced, “I’m getting cross-eyed. I need to take a walk.”

  Now there was only Mesumi and Carson in the conference room.

  At three, Mesumi finally decided, “Matthew’s right. Maybe if we knew what we were looking for.”

  “Anything and everything.”

  “Which is why we’ve got nothing and nothing.”

  “I can’t tell you because . . .” he admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “Not very helpful.”

  He leaned all the way back in his chair, then
swung his legs onto the table, spilling some papers onto the floor. “Fuck it.”

  Mesumi pushed her chair back from the table, stood up and stretched. “Maybe we’re looking for the wrong things.”

  “I’ll know it when I see it . . . but I can’t tell you what it is until I see it.”

  “We’re looking for a way in.”

  “And found nothing.”

  “So let’s pretend we’re already in . . .”

  He finished the sentence for her. “And look for a way out?”

  She nodded. “Thank you, Princeton.”

  “What would get us out?” He thought for a moment. “What would get us to sell?”

  “Labor unrest.”

  “None.”

  “Negative analysts reports, falling share prices . . . various ratios going the wrong way, tax problems, diminishing asset base, pending government regulations, other sellers . . .”

  “Stop.” He sat up and started fumbling through the piles of printouts on the table.

  “Other sellers?” Mesumi asked.

  “Tax problems. Ten years ago. Old man Shigetada had a tax problem.” He hunted through a pile of printouts. “Here. Just a blurb. Went to court, then quickly settled it. The old man paid out. But then look at this . . .” He fumbled through more printouts until he found what he was looking for. “This intel report shows considerably less trading in Shigetada shares right after the tax case when Junior suddenly took a prolonged vacation.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means the old man was pissed at his son because Junior was playing the market. He was doing all the trading. What’s the Japanese version of Lexis?”

  “Lexus? The car? It is Japanese.”

  “Not the car. LexisNexis. The legal database.”

  “I think . . . there must be a Japanese version of Lexis.”

  “Get on it,” he said. “Or whatever you can, and find out what happened when old man Shigetada went to court.”

  It took a while, but she found it. “Trading profits on the company’s books . . . offset by various things so that no tax was paid.”

  Carson looked at her. “And?”

  “And apparently the courts said this was private trading. Nothing to do with the business.”

  “The son?”

  “Doesn’t say. But it sure looks like that.”

  “I wonder if he’s still a player?”

  Now the two of them dove headfirst into every historical database they could find that noted short selling of Shigetada shares. There was nothing of any note after Shigetada senior’s tax problems, until three years ago, when it picked up with regularity.

  “Why three years ago?” Mesumi looked at Carson.

  “That’s when old man Shigetada died and Junior could play again.”

  “So this is what we’ve been looking for.”

  “I think so.” But he wasn’t sure so he kept looking, until he spotted some buying through Chiba, the investment bank owned by Shigetada’s cousins. “Bingo. This is him.”

  At four, Carson phoned Warring on his cell, but got voice mail. He left a message.

  At five, he phoned back, got voice mail again, and now rang Warring’s office. His secretary Stella answered. “He’s flying. I’ll get a message to him and he’ll call you when he lands.”

  At six Warring phoned. “What have you got?”

  “The way out . . . and back in.”

  “Huh?”

  “Shigetada’s a player. He got caught doing it ten years ago when his old man was running the show. He was forced to stop. But when the old man died, he got back into the game.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Historical analysis.”

  “And you’re sure it’s him?”

  “Yeah. We don’t know what name he’s using but some of the recent fooling around has been through an operation owned by his cousins. Chiba Investment Bank. It’s him.”

  “You’re betting on that with my money,” Warring said flatly.

  “With our money and my ass.”

  “As long as you put it that way . . .”

  “Normally, we both have three choices. Buy, sell, wait out the other one. What we know, pretty much for sure, is that he doesn’t want to sell. If he did, he would have.”

  “Maybe it’s a question of the price.”

  “I doubt it. Shigetada grew up in a society where honor matters. He gave his word to us. Backing out is dishonorable. He wouldn’t go there if it was only about money.”

  “So what’s he thinking?”

  “He’s thinking we were more dishonorable than him by trying to railroad him out of his daddy’s company.”

  “Not sure about the dishonorable part,” Warring said, “but he’s right about the railroading.”

  “What he doesn’t know is what you want. My guess is he’s waiting on you to take one last shot, then you bail out.”

  “So he’s gonna run up the price.”

  “No,” Carson said. “He’s going to do nothing until you hit the sell button, then he’s going to sink the price like a stone. He’s going to sell short everything he owns so that you’re selling at a loss.”

  “If it starts getting that low, why wouldn’t we become buyers again?”

  “‘Cause if you start buying the shares he’s selling short, he’ll change gears and run up the price again. He’s betting he can control the market. It’s not that liquid to begin with, and because he’s in Tokyo and you’re in no place he ever heard of called Omaha, he takes you for a schmuck.”

  “In the meantime,” Warring asked skeptically, “what are we doing?”

  “Playing the dark pools to set the trap,” Carson said. “We’ve got more than enough shares to manipulate the price. Hiding behind shells and dummy companies, we lay in wait for him to go crazy selling short. He will. He’ll be counting on you to sell into a sinking market, not realizing that we’re controlling it. A couple of big banks come in, hedge funds, too, and when it’s enough that everybody’s starting to scramble for shares to cover their short selling, we rush back in and dry up all the liquidity.”

  “So we’re going to suffocate the bastard.”

  “It’s not going to be pretty.”

  “You can pull this off?”

  “A short squeeze? Yeah, I can.”

  “Without sinking us at the same time?”

  “If we start drawing water, don’t panic.”

  “You got a good term-life policy?”

  Carson wanted to know, “What for?”

  Warring told him, “So that if we go under, Alicia can become a very rich widow.”

  72

  “It doesn’t matter where the coat was,” Riordan got into Belasco’s face. “What you have never gotten through your head is that when it comes to the security of Trump Tower and the people who live here, and the people who work here, and the people who walk through the front door because they want to see what it looks like inside . . . I’m in charge.”

  “I never said you weren’t.”

  “You have consistently undermined me and consistently gotten in the way of letting me do what I know is right.”

  “Bill . . . I have never done anything of the kind.”

  “Then why did you have that woman hire Carlos Vela?”

  “Because he was innocent. I knew it then, and you know it now. And Essenbach knew it, as well.”

  “It doesn’t matter who knew what or when. It doesn’t matter that you found the coat. Security isn’t some television courtroom drama. In the real world, everybody is presumed guilty until proven otherwise.”

  “He has been proven otherwise.”

  “When this first happened, you made a big to-do about how innocent he was. You then undermined my authority by allowing him back into the building. Your actions are all the more galling now that it turns out you secretly thought he was guilty. Believe me, you still have a lot of questions to answer to me . . .”

  “What are you talking about? I
never thought he was guilty.”

  “The hell you didn’t.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then how do you account for this?” He handed Belasco an e-mail from Anthony Gallicano to Donald Trump. “Concerning the employee in question, Carlos Vela, Belasco reports there is sufficient evidence for dismissal. The resident is adamant. Your call.”

  “I never said that.”

  “It’s right there.”

  “Anthony’s got it wrong.” Belasco reached for his phone and called Gallicano. “The Carlos Vela matter? Maintenance guy we dismissed on Mrs. Essenbach’s insistence over a vicuna coat? Do you happen to recall what I said about the evidence against him?”

  “No.”

  He reminded him, “Remember, Mrs. Essenbach was adamant. But I wasn’t so sure about the evidence.”

  “Yes. I guess I do remember that. She was adamant. That rings a bell. You said something about there being insufficient evidence against him.”

  “But Bill Riordan showed me an e-mail you sent to DJT quoting me as saying there is sufficient evidence.”

  “Not me.”

  “I have it right in front of me.”

  “I never said that. I told the boss what you told me.”

  Now he wondered, “Who else has access to your e-mail account?”

  “No one,” Gallicano said. “No one at all.”

  “Hold on.” He passed the phone to Riordan. “Something’s not right here.”

  Those two men talked until Riordan assured Gallicano, “I’ll check.” He hung up and said to Belasco, “We have back-ups of everything,” and left the office.

  REBECCA BATTELLI stepped into Belasco’s office.

  “Have you got two seconds for me?”

  He smiled. “Of course I do.”

  “We’ve been looking for those letters. The ones my husband wrote. We’ve been through almost everything. They’re gone.”

  “What’s the next step?”

  “Good morning,” Forbes said, standing in the doorway with Belasco’s suit.

  “You’re timing is perfect,” Belasco pointed to his suit. “Where did you get that?”

  “Our mutual friends.” He handed the suit to Belasco then said hello to Rebecca. “How are you getting on?”