The Prince of Risk
Page 21
“Screw my wheatgrass.”
Astor stared out the window glumly. How quickly they deserted the cause. At the first signs of adversity, they all fled like rats from a sinking ship. Marv had likened the firm to the Titanic. If he was right, the rats were the smart ones, and Astor was the fool rushing around the deck mustering the band to play one last waltz. He felt a blackness nipping at his heels. It wasn’t fear. It was doubt, which was more ill-defined and thus more dangerous.
On an early trip to Paris with Alex, he had visited the sculpture garden decorated with many larger-than-life artworks by Rodin. One black marble piece showed a powerful, confident man poised in reflection, his countenance gripped by a terrible uncertainty. Gripped by doubt. It wasn’t audacity that killed a trader. It was doubt. Doubt led to indecision, and only the decisive survived on the Street.
Astor played back the conversation with Longfellow and Goodchild. Their reasoning was sound. China was posturing. Some sort of political gamesmanship was occurring, but in the end Astor was right. And Magnus Lee had confirmed it.
Screw doubt.
“I know it,” said Astor aloud, banging his fist on the armrest.
“Everything okay, boss?”
“What?” Astor shook himself back to the real world. Leaning forward, he clutched his driver’s shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. “Yeah, Sully. Never better.”
Cherry Hill sat on top of a broad grassy knoll overlooking the expanse of Oyster Bay. It was an old Victorian pile built in the 1880s, when the Roosevelt family had lived nearby on Sagamore Hill. Over the years each owner had added on a room or a terrace or a porch until it resembled a sprawling hotel more than a home. The Astors had purchased it in 1950 for the then astounding sum of $175,000. Following in the tradition of their predecessors, they’d expanded the kitchen, built a sauna on the second floor, and added a gymnasium on the third for Edward, then a boy.
A paved road wound up the slope and emerged from an orchard onto an immense lawn that collared the estate and made Cherry Hill look like a frosted white decoration atop a wedding cake.
Sullivan spotted the striped tape stretched across the front door first. “We’re late,” he said. “The feds have already been by to have a look.”
Astor opened the car door before the Audi came to a halt. He was out and striding across the gravel forecourt as Sullivan hurried to join him.
“Tampering with evidence is a felony. Be careful what you touch.”
Astor stopped at the top of the front stairs. “It’s my house. I have every right to go in. Besides, who you going to tell?”
Sullivan reached his side. “Have it your way. But let me take a look first. We don’t want any surprises.”
Astor noted that the alarm system was disarmed and the door locked. He fished in his pocket for his old key. It worked like a charm. “You’re the only one who knows I’m here,” he said, ducking under the tape as he pushed the door open. “Be my guest.”
Sullivan passed beneath the tape and entered the foyer, his pistol held in front of him. “Wait here. I’m going to do a quick walk-through.”
“Knock yourself out,” said Astor.
Sullivan padded down the stairs five minutes later. “All yours. Looks like the feds took a look around and left everything here. I’d count on them being back anytime. They’ll be taking another look now that Penelope Evans is dead, too.”
From his vantage point in the orchard, the warrior monk fashioned his plan.
A car was parked in the gravel drive, a large silver SUV. The front door of the house stood open, a band of yellow-and-black tape strung across the entry. The stocky white-haired man with the florid cheeks paced back and forth on the porch. Astor must be inside.
Kill him, his brother had said.
The warrior monk revered family above all. He would not disappoint him.
Bobby Astor walked into the house and time stood still. Ten years had passed since he’d last set foot inside. The occasion had been Thanksgiving or Christmas. It had been a happy time. Katie was five or six. Alex’s career with the Bureau was starting to hum. Comstock was doing well, and his father had just sold his own firm to one of the big boys for an ungodly sum.
It was a time before their falling-out.
A time before Astor had confronted his father about the events of his childhood.
The black belt.
Three words, and they conjured up an immediate and unsettling terror that after thirty years had lost none of its ability to paralyze him.
Astor pushed away the words, pretending he did not hear them. Pretending that nothing had happened. He turned a circle on the parquet floor, studying the vaulted two-story entryway. It was more a minstrel’s gallery than a family foyer. His eye ran up the staircase, past the stodgy oil portraits of his father and his grandfather, Edward and Frederick Astor, respectively. Why was it ever the dream of first-generation immigrants to emulate the immigrants who had come before them?
Of course Astor wasn’t his family’s real name. He had discovered his true lineage when he was thirteen and home on break from prep school. Having pilfered two of his father’s Cohibas, he and a buddy were searching for matches to light them. The first place to look was his father’s desk. There, stashed away in his top drawer, was a stiff, yellowing envelope marked Private in archaic, curling script. Astor was a born snoop. He could have asked for no better invitation. He opened the envelope at once. It contained his grandfather’s immigration papers, naming him not Frederick Emile Astor but Feodor Itzhak Yastrovic of Lvov, Poland. Stunned, Astor replaced the document and fled from the room. Bobby Astor was not an itinerant Polish Jew. He was an American blueblood born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, educated at the Horace Mann School, and confirmed at All Saints Episcopal Church in Oyster Bay, New York. He never looked at the envelope again.
Astor tucked away the memory. There were other secrets within these walls, other lies that best remained concealed.
The black belt.
Astor climbed the stairs slowly. He held the piece of blue stationery with the word Cassandra99 in his hand. The stationery came from one place and one place only. The top right drawer of his father’s desk. He did not stop to admire his father’s portrait. Nor did he marvel at the Swarovski crystal chandelier made a century earlier for his Imperial Majesty, Charles I, the last Emperor of Austria. His pace quickened with each step, so that when he reached the first-floor landing and started down the hall, he was moving briskly and passed his father’s bedroom without peeking in.
Later, he told himself. There would be time after he searched the office.
Astor stopped in his tracks.
There was no later.
Edward Astor was dead. He would never have the chance to explain. He would never have an opportunity to reconcile with his only son. The time for that was gone. Astor would have to reconcile for both of them. He was done running.
He retraced his steps until he stood at the doorway to the bedroom and peered inside. The room was as he remembered it: the vast bed with the white bedspread, the maple furniture that might have served a founding father, the windows looking over the orchard and the expanse of Oyster Bay.
He stepped inside the room like a man mounting the gallows.
The black belt.
The punishments always took place here in his parents’ bedroom, and in the early evening. There was a strict protocol about them, a procedure that never varied. It began with a summons, his father’s operatic baritone trumpeting his name from upstairs.
Master Robert Frederick Astor.
Always the full name. Always uttered without a trace of malice or anger.
Come.
Astor had only vague memories of the actual crimes. Once he had played with his father’s double-edged razor blades and cut himself. When asked about the gash on his finger, he had lied and said he caught his hand in the medicine cabinet. The evidence was discovered lurking at the bottom of his parents’ toilet, where he’d tried
valiantly to flush it away. Astor was mischievous by nature. Fibbing came easily. Even then he had courted trouble. At some point, boyish dares hardened into adolescent transgressions. The sentences were never unjust.
With dread he would climb the stairs. (It was years before he’d learned to camouflage fear with arrogance, bravado, or confrontation.) Trembling, he waited at the bedroom door, palms sweating, stomach sick with anxiety.
Enter.
There stood his father, Edward Everett Astor, Wall Street supremo, chairman of the school board, pillar of society, a man of untarnished rectitude. He was not a tall man, but broad across the shoulders and barrel-chested. He wore his hair slicked back with pomade. At day’s end, a few strands hung loose and he had the rough, capable air of an accomplished seaman. He had removed his jacket and tie and stood with his white shirt unbuttoned. In his hand he gripped his black crocodile belt, folded double, and in the manner of Bligh on the Bounty, he tapped it threateningly on his thigh.
How do you plead, Master Astor?
Guilty, sir.
Astor had learned early on never to proffer excuses. Excuses were an extension of the crime and merited further beating.
The punishment is ten lashes.
Astor advanced to the bed. He lowered his trousers, then his underwear, and bent over, hands scrubbed, trimmed fingernails clutching the bedspread. A final indignity demanded that he himself signal the punishment.
Please begin, sir.
The strokes were administered crisply and with brute force. The punishment was meted out in full.
One.
Astor heard the snap of leather against flesh and jolted in his shoes. He was breathing hard, the paper in his hand crumpled into a ball. He looked around the room, half expecting to find his father still there, belt in hand. He met only his reflection in the mirror. He stared at himself, remarking on how much son resembled father.
Astor sat down on the bed. Carefully he flattened out the stationery. He felt lighter, somehow freed of a burden. The past had no claim on him. From here on out, his actions were his own. He was not assisting his father out of guilt or fear or some long-repressed need to repent for sins either real or imagined. He was helping him for another reason.
Because it was the right thing to do.
The monk circled the home to the rear. When he was sure the older man could not see him, he dashed across the lawn and mounted a short flight of stairs to the raised back porch. He peered in a window. The kitchen was as large as his childhood home. The door was locked. So were the three windows nearest him. He needed only three seconds to climb the drainpipe and hop onto the roof that skirted half the second floor. He ran to the wall and pushed his body against it. He paused, finding his center, then peeked into the window to his right. The room inside held two single beds. The door to the interior hall was closed. He tried the window and found it locked, too. The next window was locked as well. A wraparound terrace met the corner of the roof. He hopped the railing and landed on the decking. He waited again, allowing his heart to slow, his senses to come to life. He had no idea where in the house Astor might be, or if he was alone. The Audi had already been parked in front when he had arrived. It had become necessary to use other means to ascertain Astor’s whereabouts and intentions since he had destroyed his phone.
The monk peered inside the window. Astor was seated on the bed inside, his back facing him. The monk continued to watch, hoping to catch a glimpse of a second person if there was one. He placed a hand against the wall, feeling for vibrations within the home. All was quiet. This close he could sense Astor’s energy. The man was strong, aggressive. A fighter, but too arrogant and headstrong for his own good. Still, it was a powerful energy, and the monk would find pleasure in defeating a formidable adversary. He looked more closely into the room, drawn by Astor’s spirit. It was then that he observed the mirror and noted the dark triangle in the lower quadrant that was his face and hair.
A moment later Astor saw it, too, and jumped to his feet.
50
Astor broke out of his reverie, his attention caught by a flash in the mirror. Warily he walked to the window behind him. He looked outside and saw nothing. And yet he sensed something. A presence. He opened the door to the terrace, stepped outside, and walked the length of the deck, unsure what he was looking for. Below, in the gravel drive, Sully stood by the car, taking a call.
“Sully, you see anything out here?”
John Sullivan lowered the phone. “Like what?”
Astor looked to either direction. It had been a bird, he decided. Something that had landed on the railing and flown away. “Forget it.”
“Find anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t take too long. I don’t like this.”
Astor reentered the bedroom, taking in everything with an investigator’s eye. It was immaculate and showed no sign of a rushed departure. He guessed that Penelope Evans had stayed behind when his father traveled to Washington, D.C., and that she had cleaned up after him.
He walked into the bathroom. It, too, was neat and orderly. Shaving cream, aftershave, and deodorant were missing from the medicine cabinet. It had been an overnight trip. On the top shelf were prescriptions for Lipitor and Viagra. Astor smiled. Dad was getting some.
Astor entered the closet. One wall was taken up by suits. Dark gray, light gray, gray pinstripes, gray Prince de Galles, summer weight, winter weight…but gray. He turned, expecting to find the opposite wall similarly racked with clothing. Instead he found himself looking at dozens of framed photographs, laminated articles, and mementos running from floor to ceiling. It was the trophy wall Astor had never given himself. There were photos of Bobby as a preteen, playing baseball and football, and older, skiing in Colorado and the Alps, and of Bobby in high school at the beach in Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. There were plenty of more recent photographs, too, nearly all of him arm-in-arm with Alex or playing with Katie.
And then there were the articles, taken from numerous newspapers and magazines, chronicling his rise to the top. Astor smiled, seeing the front-page piece from the Wall Street Journal with the stipple-pen portrait that made him look like a leering zealot. There was even a framed invitation from his first clambake, which his father had neither attended nor acknowledged.
Everything about him.
Astor felt his throat tighten. Confusion and comprehension battled. He stared at his life in pictures, and he knew, maybe for the first time, that his father had loved him.
Astor turned away. It was too much. A distraction. Emotion merited no place today.
A dresser stood at the far end of the closet. He opened the top drawer. A polished wooden box with the word Beretta engraved on a corner sat on the jumble of socks. The name jarred him back to reality. He set the box on the dresser and flipped open the lid. A stainless steel pistol lay cradled on a bed of black velvet inside. It was a 9mm with a tapered snout and a crosshatched grip. He freed the pistol. It was heavier than he expected, and he noted that the magazine was in and the safety was on. Sully had taught him more than he ever wanted to know about firearms. He racked the slide. A copper-nosed round lay in the chamber.
Ready to fire.
Astor regarded the pistol. His father had been a fire-breathing liberal and no friend of the NRA. Imagining him with a gun was like picturing Mother Teresa brandishing an M-16. There was only one reason for him to possess any kind of weapon. Edward Astor was frightened for his life.
Astor slipped the pistol into his belt. If his father had needed a weapon, so did he. And Penelope Evans? Nothing could have protected her against an assailant so stealthy he could get within an inch of her in broad daylight without her knowing.
Astor left the bedroom. If he were to find answers, he would find them in his father’s office.
The monk leaped the railing, retreated across the roof, and slid down the drainpipe to the back porch. A check around the corner confirmed that the driver remained next to the car. Astor
called out from the second floor, asking if the driver had seen anything. The driver responded that he had not. The monk heard Astor cross the terrace, then retrace his steps and reenter the bedroom. Content in his knowledge that Astor was on the second floor and confident that he had not been seen, the monk used a penknife to jimmy a kitchen window and climbed inside the house. A block of cooking knives sat on the counter. He selected a short, slim instrument, ideal for jabbing. Despite its size, the knife had heft. He swung it back and forth, gaining a feel for it. He ran his tongue delicately across the blade and tasted blood. The knife would do.
He left the kitchen and climbed the back stairs. He emerged in a dark, narrow corridor. To his left, the stairs continued up another flight. He walked to the door and gripped the knob firmly. He turned it slowly, feeling the metal components brush against one another, begging to squeak. The knob reached its apex and he opened the door a sliver. He was standing at the rear corner of a landing running around the perimeter of the two-story foyer. Diagonally across the open foyer, the door to the bedroom where the monk had seen Astor stood ajar. The monk placed a hand on the floor. A vibration reached his fingers. One footstep. Another. Slow. Measured. The sound of a man searching intently, without hurry. He saw no shadows in the bedroom. Instinct told him to wait.
The tempo of the footsteps increased. A shadow approached the open doorway. Astor emerged from the bedroom and disappeared down the hall. The monk sprang from his hiding place and glided across the landing, using Astor’s footsteps to conceal his own. He gained the hall and peered around the corner in time to see Astor enter a room at its far end.
The monk paused. He heard a chair scoot across the floor. There was the sound of papers being examined, objects being moved from one place to another, then a soft but definite thud, indicating that Astor had sat down.
The monk advanced down the corridor with patience. He held the knife in front of him, his wrist pronated so the blade faced up, in the killing position.
The noises from within the room grew louder. The clack of a keyboard told him that Astor was at a computer. The monk slowed, allowing his victim a moment to be drawn deeper into his research. There was no risk of his stopping Older Brother’s plan. Anything Astor learned in the next few minutes, he would keep to himself forever.