by Tim Green
“Like some plumbing or something?”
“No,” I say. “A total renovation. I have the plans.”
“Never happen in a month.”
“You pay ten times what it usually costs. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred. People do anything if you offer them enough money. You’ll get it done.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“I’m going to have some guests,” I say, “and I want everything just right… for their homecoming.”
45
BEING A CONGRESSMAN wasn’t enough for Bob Rangle. I suspect he never felt like all the people whose backs he had to scratch ever really respected him. He wanted to be one of the ones being scratched. Now he is.
Rangle turned his connections on Capitol Hill into money on Wall Street. Hedge funds. High-risk. High-profit. Profitable enough to attract a second wife named Katie Vanderhorn. Old-money New York. Lots of invitations to all the right events. High on family name, low on family money.
Katie Vanderhorn-who still goes by her own name-has an unusual fondness for Allen’s friend and my new acquaintance Martin Debray. Debray apparently has a good relationship with Rangle as well as the missus, because it’s a phone call from Debray that lands me on the Rangles’ deck overlooking the ocean in East Hampton.
“Do you work for Rangle?” I ask Debray as I adjust my sunglasses and sit down in a large rattan chair facing the ocean surf. I can taste salt on the morning breeze and it cools my bare legs. Sea grass rustles out over the dunes under sunlight broken and scattered by the puffy white clouds. Beyond them, the sky is the palest blue. It’s pleasant here now, but the redwood decking that surrounds the pool and the cedar railings have been baked gray by a brutal summer sun.
“No,” he says with a feigned smile. “Not at all. We work together sometimes. I actually manage an equity fund for Chase and sometimes Bob will bring investors in.”
“So you’re introducing me as a professional courtesy,” I say.
“As a friend,” Debray says, sitting down across from me and crossing his legs with a smile.
“I appreciate it,” I say.
“The best business I’ve ever done was out here in the Hamptons,” he says. “You develop relationships out here, and that’s what business is all about, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s about results,” I say.
Debray is looking over my shoulder. He bumps his smile up a notch and jumps to his feet.
“Seth,” he says, taking an auburn-haired middle-aged woman by the arm, “this is Bob’s wife, Katie Vanderhorn.”
I stand and take her hand before looking into her yellow eyes.
“My pleasure,” I say. “I’ve heard so much about you, Ms. Vanderhorn.”
“I know a Cole family,” she says, “from Boston. Are you a Boston Cole?”
She has the high cheekbones of a fashion model, but the skin has been pulled back tight on her face. It’s shiny and smooth, unlike the loose wrinkles in her neck. She keeps her pointed chin in the air and her back straight. Her auburn hair is full and long and she’s dressed in a robe that hangs open to expose a fancy gold one-piece bathing suit and an impressive chest that also looks like it’s been under the surgeon’s knife.
“You wouldn’t know my family,” I say. “They were originally from Belgium. My great-great-grandfather was a minor noble who found a way to put the family money aside for four generations.”
“An unusual way to maintain a family name,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “but an interesting and effective way to produce incredible wealth.”
“Money, money,” she says. “You sound like Bob.”
“I think you’ll find I have manners too,” I say. “I hope so. People say even a sliver of reputation with you will leave me welcome anywhere in New York.”
She sniffs at this, splays her fingers, and looks down at her nails.
“Martin tells me you bought the Jets,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “I thought that if I was going to live in New York, I should own a team.”
“I happen to like tennis,” she says with a limp smile. “I understand you and Bob are talking business? I’ll let you two go then.”
“I hope you’ll join me for dinner sometime with your husband?” I say.
“I’m old-fashioned that way,” she tells me. “If Bob says we’re having dinner, then we’re having dinner.”
Then with a quick glance at Debray, she slips away and out across their private boardwalk toward the beach where someone has already set up a towering blue-and-white-striped cabana.
Debray’s eyes linger on her bare legs and a perfectly tucked bottom before he turns to see me looking at him and goes red. A voice from the direction of the house makes us both turn.
“Ah, you met my wife.”
It is Rangle, his face sharper than ever. His big dark eyes, barely separated by that pointed nose; great wealth has made him complacent. He has a little mustache and his hair has been dyed as if he tried to match his wife’s, but instead of auburn, it’s a strange swirl of orange and black. The top of his head is covered with a flap of the stuff, combed over from his right ear. The long fingers of his left hand are clutched in the right. Next to him is a dish.
“Martin,” Rangle says, “introduce your new friend to Dani, will you?”
“Of course,” Debray says, then introduces me to the young college girl who I know is Rangle’s daughter from his first marriage. She is short with dark hair and a body that’s curvy and tight.
The girl looks me up and down as she takes my hand. There is a hungry flicker in her dark eyes and a smile that shows just the tips of the small pointy teeth she inherited from her father. She slips out of her robe, throws a little arch in her back, and struts over to a deck chair. There is a small black spider tattoo poised above the crack in her bottom. She sits and begins to oil her brown stomach.
“She’s a sophomore at Penn,” Rangle says, grinning so hard in his daughter’s direction that the corners of his eyes disappear into a web of wrinkles and his teeth gleam in the sunlight. “All A’s, and boys lining up like jets over La Guardia.”
“Oh,” I say. “I thought Martin said she was going with Allen Steffano.”
Rangle’s elation fades. He looks at me with half a smile and says, “You know young girls. Engaged to one man one day and marrying another man the next…”
I feel my face get tight and I tilt my head, studying Rangle hard. For a moment, I feel more like the mouse than the cat, but that can’t be.
“Don’t get me wrong, Allen’s a good kid. But I think I’ve raised a girl who knows the importance of reputation. Allen’s father has done well, but he’s a long way from Katie’s Christmas party list.”
His good girl looks over at me, smiles, and crushes her lower lip with her teeth.
“I understand the mother is a little odd,” I say.
“A painter,” he says with a nod. “Very pretty, though. But let’s sit down and have a drink before lunch.”
“Daddy,” says the girl, using her hand as a visor against the sun, “I want a drink. Would you?”
“Of course, kitten,” Rangle says.
He asks us to sit and he hurries behind the teak bar to mix her a screwdriver, then he hurries across the deck to deliver it into her hands. His pale thin legs protrude from his khaki shorts and move with the awkward gait of an insect. The daughter rewards him with a kiss on the cheek. Debray is smiling as if this is par for the course.
When Rangle returns with bottles of Chimay Belgian Ale for the men, I swallow a mouthful before saying, “I’m pretty direct, Bob. I know you make money, and I want to invest some with you or I wouldn’t be here. I have a hundred million I want to move, but… what do you think of the Russian stock market?”
“The Russian?” Rangle says, his bony fingers clenching the beer bottle. “Do you have people there?”
“If I didn’t,” I say, “I wouldn’t want to invest in it.”
Rangle’s
beetle eyes dart to Debray and back.
“Why me?” he says, twisting his fingers.
“I need an American,” I say. “Someone with a big fund. Someone respected. Someone who isn’t afraid to use the information that’s available to him. I see you’ve done well in U.S. treasuries and I’m assuming that it’s no coincidence that Martin has an older brother who works closely with Alan Greenspan at the Fed.”
“I trade on instinct,” Rangle says with a smile, opening his arms, palms up.
“I prefer to trade on information,” I tell him without smiling back. “If you’re not interested, neither am I. Thanks for the beer.”
I take a sip and get up.
“Seth, Seth, Seth,” Rangle says, taking my arm. “Please. Sit. Don’t be so damn… Of course I’m interested. We just need to talk about it. I’m interested. We’re both interested, aren’t we, Martin?”
“Yes, we are,” says Debray.
At lunch, Katie and Dani join us and I tell them all about Andre Kaskarov, a Russian prince whose family escaped the revolution and survived by guile and ruthlessness in Belgium. The mention of royalty gets even Katie’s attention. Andre, I explain, was educated in the American embassy in Brussels from an early age. His father envisioned a new Russia where opportunity between East and West would create incredible wealth to go along with the Kaskarov family’s noble lineage, and he returned to Moscow with his family in 1991.
“A real prince?” Rangle asks, his eyes agleam.
“There are lots of them,” I say with a shrug. “A prince in Russia isn’t like the prince in England, but they’re still nobles.”
“Of course I’d love to meet him,” he says. “I think Katie would too, and Dani. We should have dinner.”
Dani forces a smile and raises her glass of chardonnay at me.
“I’ve got a lake cottage upstate,” I tell Rangle. “I understand you’re from up that way. Skaneateles, it’s called. Bill Clinton told me about it.”
“The president?”
“Former president.”
“I was in Congress during his first term,” Rangle says. “I didn’t know you were involved in politics.”
“No, just power,” I say. “Anyway, I’d like to have a small dinner there and an overnight. It’s a beautiful place. I guess you know. We’ll fly up and back on my G-V. Andre loves it there. We could mix some business.”
“With pleasure,” Rangle says, looking across the lunch table from his daughter to his wife. “My motto.”
Before the coffee comes, I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I’m directed down a long oak hallway to a small marble temple with gold fixtures. After I wash my hands, I grab the doorknob. It’s stuck and I hear a giggle through the wood. The door pushes in suddenly, and there is Dani with her pool robe open and her top off, wearing a peach thong. She closes the door behind her and drapes her hands around my neck, swaying.
“Aren’t you seeing someone?” I say.
“I’m a debutante,” she says, smirking. Her words are slurred. “We don’t have the same rules. I like to play.”
“I know someone you’ll like to play with,” I say. “I’d hate to ruin it for him.”
“You won’t ruin it,” she says. “It likes a lot of attention.”
I grip her wrist and tug her toward me, then right past. In a blink she’s standing inside the bathroom by herself, scowling and huffing. I pull the door shut and walk away.
46
THE TOP FUND-RAISER for the president of the United States joins me for breakfast at my home in New York City. We sit in the dining room overlooking the park. He’s a fiery congressman from Buffalo who speaks in bursts of words with his hands flying into the air like a fighter throwing a series of uppercuts. When he starts in on the importance of the upcoming elections and of maintaining control of both the House and the Senate, I hold up my hand.
I tell him the deal: five million dollars to the RNC for them and the ability to make recommendations on the upcoming Supreme Court nomination for me. Before he can protest, I assure him that all I want is input. I don’t care if my candidate is the ultimate selection or not, just that the president is willing to listen.
Breakfast is over. He tells me he’ll need clearance and rises from the table.
I stand too and shake his hand, then I slip a bank check out of the breast pocket of my blazer and hand it over to him. He looks at the number and a small smile creeps onto his face.
“I’ll call you,” he says.
“By the end of the day, if you don’t mind,” I say, and see him downstairs to the door. The day outside is warm and bright and the sky is pure blue above the full bloom of the trees in the park.
I look at my watch. There’s time for a workout before I see Andre, and I think it will do me good, ease some tension. I don’t want to end up choking him. By the time I get into the shower, my limbs are trembling from weight lifting, katas, and the heavy bag.
The peaceful emptiness of physical exhaustion keeps my temper from flaring at the sight of Andre’s sneer and his jutting chin. He is sitting in jeans and a T-shirt with his leg slung over the arm of a leather chair in my library. Bert stands off in the corner by the shelves of leather-bound books. His hands are clenched by his sides, his eyes half-lidded and directed at Andre.
“Pretty fucking nice setup you two clowns stumbled into,” Andre says, looking around until his eyes come to rest on me. “What happened to your face?”
I ignore him and move into the high-backed chair behind my desk. I fold my hands together and look at him until he snorts.
“So, loon-man, Bert tells me you can get me a recording deal, and the truth is, I ain’t got too many options these days, so here I am.”
In a low rumble, Bert says, “When the hawk flies, the mouse does well to stay in its hole.”
“Hey, fuck you and your grandmother,” Andre says.
I hold up my hand and Bert stops in his tracks.
“I have a job for you,” I say to Andre. “Helena goes on another tour starting in November. If you do the job, you get to open for her on tour. If you’re good, I’ll get you a two-CD deal with Virgin.”
Andre’s big dark eyes are gleaming and he says, “Whose fucking skull do I kick in?”
“It’s easier than that,” I say. “All you have to do is get a haircut, live like a prince, and be nice to some friends of mine.”
“What, some fag stuff? I don’t do that shit. What do you mean, prince?”
“No, there’s actually a girl involved. It would be very helpful if she were to become interested in you.”
“Some dog-face?”
“Believe it or not,” I say, taking an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Dani out of the top drawer of my desk and handing it over to him, “I think you’ll actually like this. But I’ll pay you.”
“So what’s the fucking catch?” he asks, glancing down at the picture and squinting his eyes at me.
“Part of the deal is that you don’t ask questions, Andre,” I say. “That should sound familiar enough to you.”
“Yeah, well you’re not Bonaparte,” he says, eyes flashing, teeth clenched tight.
“That’s right,” I say. “Look around. This is a long way from bingo. This is New York City. Big things can happen here. A record career is something I can create by snapping my fingers. Does that interest you, or do you want to go back to bingo?”
“This is some weird shit, man,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “Why me?”
“Because you’re perfect for the job,” I say, “and I know what makes you tick.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Money,” I say. “Fame. Things I can give you, and I know you’ll do a lot for them. Kill if you have to, right? I just want you to play a part. You’re Prince Andre Koskarov.”
“What the fuck…”
I explain his role. I give him some tapes to trump up an accent. I hand him a folder with his history in it. I can tell by his face that this appeals to his
creative side. His eyes glow when I push a bankbook and a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards across my desk along with the keys to a ten-room flat on Central Park West.
“Don’t have too much fun,” I say. “It’s just as easy for me to take it all back, and I want you to do your homework. I’ve hired an acting coach to work with you for a few weeks. Be good.”
“And why should you trust me? I’d sell out my own mamma.”
“I like risks,” I say. “Besides, I’ve got friends and you’ve got a warrant. Don’t forget that. Not ever.”
Andre is vicious, but he’s not dumb. I know it won’t be long before he’s ready to meet the parents. I send him on his way and pick up the phone to arrange for a significant shift in the price of an oil company that trades on the Russian market. By four-thirty, Rangle’s hedge fund is up seventy-eight million.
Also, I can’t get Bluebeard out of my mind. The sound of his voice. The feel of that razor stubble on my neck. As a favor on the side, my Russian friends agree to send someone upstate to Auburn. They have a lively heroin trade and a good man to plant enough of it in the trunk of Bluebeard’s car to put him away for fifteen years. I think that will help him see the error of his ways.
I get a call just before five. The president would be happy to hear my recommendation and give it the highest consideration as long as I understand he has to do what’s in the best interest of the country. I ask one last favor: Someone in the president’s office needs to call Judge Villay to let him know that the president is interested in my advice and that he can expect a call from me.
The influence of power on some people still amazes me. I let Villay wait three days-giving him time to whip himself into a frenzy of uncertainty and excitement-before I call. He talks to me like I’m a long-lost friend. I invite him to bring his wife to a small dinner at my lake house upstate in Skaneateles the following week, and he says he can’t wait.